by Tad Williams
"Call zero . . . zero . . . zero."
Calliope let her head sag until it touched the floor, which felt as soft as a feather pillow, inviting sleep. There was a police priority code she could have added but she could not think of it. It was all in the lap of the gods now—had the thing picked up her voice? Was it set to call out on vocal commands? And even if it worked, how long until they dispatched a car to answer the call?
Done everything I could, she thought. Maybe . . . just rest . . . a little.
She did not know if seconds or minutes had passed, but she surfaced from another, even deeper fog to see something moving beside her. Calliope opened her eyes wide, but that was all she could do. Even if it was Dread himself she did not believe she could move a centimeter.
It was another bloody hand. Not her own.
The woman with the face pale as paper was reaching for the pad, fingers walking slowly toward it like a red-and-white spider. Calliope could only watch in dismay as the hand crept onto the screen and began, clumsily but determinedly, to open files, to move things around.
She'll cut off the call. Calliope tried to reach out but her muscles would not respond. What if no one's picked it up yet? What the hell is this idiot woman doing?
The bloody hand slowed, touched again, paused, then slid off the screen, leaving behind a streak of translucent crimson. Through her own swiftly encroaching fog Calliope heard the woman beside her take a deep, gurgling breath.
That's it, thought Calliope. She's dead.
"Send," the woman whispered.
CHAPTER 46
Thoughts Like Smoke
* * *
NETFEED/NEWS: UN High Court to Rule on "Lifejack" Case
(visual: excerpt from Svetlana Stringer episode of Lifejack!)
VO: The UN High Court in the Hague has agreed to hear the case of Svetlana Stringer, a woman who claims the netshow Lifejack! had no right to select her for surveillance and create a documentary about her love life and family problems without her permission. Her attorneys argue that unless the High Court makes a stand, continual blurring of the lines of privacy by the media will mean that soon no one will have a right to any private life at all. Attorneys for the American network that makes Lifejack! insist that a waiver Ms. Stringer signed several years ago to allow herself to be filmed for another program-a documentary on music education made when she was a teenager-means she has given up her right to resist surveillance.
(visual: Bling Saberstrop, attorney for ICN)
SABERSTROP: "UN guidelines on privacy are just that-guidelines, not laws. We consider this to be a case where the plaintiff wants to have her cake and eat it, too-privacy only when she wants it."
* * *
He watched the dying policewoman squirming in her own blood for a few moments after he reentered the network, but then he had to close the window. It was too distracting. Too entertaining. The problem was, he wanted to do everything at once.
Like a kid in a candy shop, he thought.
He wanted to watch the cop bitch's last moments, but it was one of the things he could set aside for later. He also wanted to drive the operating system out of hiding and break its pseudo-will once and for all, make it abandon this infuriating, pointless resistance and truly yield to him. And he most definitely wanted to hunt down Martine Desroubins and the Sulaweyo woman and all the other escapees, then carry them back to his endless white house in the virtual Outback and give each a magnificently intricate, drawn-out death. The prospects were enchanting: he would imprison them, terrify them, permit a few apparent escapes, even take the place of first one, then another, so he could live each terrifying moment with them just as he had done with the woman Quan Li, playing with alternating hope and despair until they all went almost mad.
But never completely mad, of course. Because then the ending would lose its bite.
And he would record the whole thing. He would watch it over and over after the grand enterprise was complete, edit it to highlight the artistry, add music and effects—hours and hours of the greatest entertainment ever created. Perhaps someday he would even allow others to see it. It would become an object of religious significance, at least among those few people who really understood how the world worked. His name would be spoken in awed whispers long after he was dead.
But I won't be dead, will I? I won't ever die.
No wonder he was so excited. There was so much to do . . . and all eternity in which to do it.
He forced himself down, down into calm. No mistakes, he thought. Soothing music filled his head, a glissando of strings, a gentle shimmer of cymbals. First, the operating system.
He stood on the weird, lunar plane and inspected the barrier the failing system had erected between Dread and his victims. He stroked the insubstantial but unbreachable mist. Where had this thing come from? And how could he best get through it?
It was clear he had pushed the Grail operating system to the breaking point, but although he wanted it subdued and broken he did not want to destroy it completely, jeopardizing the whole network, before he had a chance to install a replacement. That might be a little more difficult now that Dulcie was sprawled gut-shot dead on the floor of the loft, but she had cracked Jongleur's house files for him first: the Old Man would have some kind of system backup in place. So the sensible thing to do would be just to wait until he could bring another system online. But what if doing so not only killed this operating system but destroyed Martine and the rest as well? And what if Jongleur was in there with them? The thought that all his enemies might be stolen right out of his grasp by a mercifully swift death was maddening.
And they're right there. . . ! He prowled along the barrier, trying to make sense of what little he could see. As he walked he let his mind wander through the network infrastructure. It was a strange problem, trying to be two places at once, very strange. Here he stood, with the powers of a god, but he could not actually find his own location in the network: he had followed Martine and the others through into this place, but the place itself did not seem to exist on any of the network's schemata.
It's a damn strange environment, whatever it is, he thought. He had even more power here than he did in other parts of the network—the inhabitants had fled screaming from him even before he did anything—but the operating system had more power here, too.
Bloody hell! The insight was sudden and overwhelming. I must be . . . inside the damn thing.
He laughed and the wall of mist rippled back from him like sensitive tissue being poked by a surgical tool. Of course I'm powerful here. It knows who delivers the pain. It's scared of me.
So if it believes in something, he realized, that something comes true here. That explained why the barrier could hold him out—it represented the system's own faith in its last-ditch defenses. But when the last shred of belief that it could resist him died. . . .
It's all make-believe, he thought. A world of ghosts, magic. Like my bloody mother's stories. It was not a thought that went well with his celebratory mood so he pushed it away.
But where is the bloody thing, then? Where is the system hiding? Dread closed his eyes as he walked along the barrier, examining his internal map of the system. The thing, the part of the operating system that thought, must be close. Again he had the strange sense of being in two places at the same time. It worried him just a little—a lifetime's dislike of exposure and a powerful urge toward control made him uncomfortable about being spread between two spheres of operation—but his pride and assurance were growing with his power and he shrugged it off. But he could not shrug off the essential puzzle.
The two things are tangled up. Until I cripple the system's brain once and for all, I'll never be able to get my hands on the ones who got away from me. But if I cripple it too badly—if I ruin it—they'll be gone, dead . . . escaped.
He could no longer see Jongleur's two monstrous agents on the other side of the barrier. Whatever they had accomplished was over now, but they clearly had not pushed the opera
ting system into surrender since the barrier still stood; neither had they delivered him Martine or any of the others. There were no more copies of the agents inside the barrier. Whatever he did next he would have to do himself.
Wouldn't have it any other way, he thought.
Already the excitement of the hunt was beginning to mount again. He cast his thoughts back into the network controls, searching for some clue to the location of the system's ultimate refuge. There had been a flurry of recent activity but none of it made sense, and as he struggled with the obscurities of network activity logs he had a brief moment of irritation over Dulcie's disloyalty. She would have been useful for this, the bitch. The escapees and the system itself remained hidden from him, both by this virtual barrier in this virtual world and in the immense, trackless confusion of the network. It was infuriating that with all his godlike power he couldn't simply find them—that he was forced to search through virtual landscapes, or listen in on virtual communicator conversations.
Communicators. . . ! He gestured and the silver lighter was in his hand. He opened the communication channel and discovered it was in use, but what he heard was nonsense—faint, unrecognizable voices babbling about strings and sunsets and something called a honey-guide. The communication line was clearly corrupted, and in his anger he considered returning to his loft and using Jongleur's access codes to pull the plug on the entire network, to kill it and then resurrect it with a different and more tractable operating system . . . but that would mean that Renie Sulaweyo and Martine and the Circle people would be granted a far too merciful release.
He stared at the lighter in fury. What use was the damned thing? A communicator that didn't communicate, full of ghost-voices.
But Dulcie Anwin had said it was something else as well. What had she called it? A V-fector. Something that would transmit not just voices, but . . . positional data.
Dread smiled.
He reopened the network's master records. The line was hot, so someone must be using it, even if the transmission itself was corrupted. He quickly found the positional information, but both sides of the current call seemed to have no origination point. Dread fought another flare of rage. Of course, if they were somehow inside the system itself there would be no conventional effector information. But this fairy-tale world had to be somewhere in the no-space of the network; just as he had chased the operating system through its interstices, he would chase the communication link until he found one end or the other.
He reached for it now, feeling with his mind, his twist coming to life like a white-hot filament. The open communication channel was a silver wire, trembling, delicate. He would run down it and find them all. He would find the system and he would hurt it until the barrier fell, and then he would take the others and they would be his, utterly his, until their last gasping breaths.
"I think I can . . . feel !Xabbu," Martine gasped. Sam was terrified by her anguished, death mask grimace. "But he's a million kilometers away—a billion! On the other side of the universe! It is too . . . too far."
Martine Desroubins staggered to her feet, clutching her head. Paul Jonas reached out to steady her but she pulled away with a violent shake.
"Do not. . . !" she begged him. "So difficult . . . so difficult . . . to hear. . . ."
"You must hold the connection open," Sellars said through the boy Cho-Cho. "I am not ready."
"Cannot. . . ." Martine bent at the waist, fingers squeezing her own skull as though she feared it would come apart. "Something terrible . . . ah! Ahhh! The Other! He is in . . . such pain!" Then her knees buckled and she fell forward onto her face.
Paul Jonas ran to her side. When he lifted her up she sagged bonelessly.
"Ready or not." It was Dread, whispering right inside Sam's head. "Here I come!" She cried out in fear.
The others had clearly heard him, too: in his shock, Paul nearly dropped Martine back to the ground. Then reality lurched and stuck in gear again. It lasted only a moment, but when the world around Sam shuddered back into life things were not the same.
It's so cold. . . ! The room-temperature universe had fallen into a deep winter chill. Something else came with the cold, a squeeze of terror that made it hard for her to breathe. She heard several of her companions cry out but she kept her eyes tight shut, every childhood instinct telling her to pull the blanket over her head and stay hidden until the nightmare went away.
But there was no blanket.
"Oh, Christ—it's gone!" Paul said. Sam could barely hear his voice over the rising sounds of terror from the fairy-tale folk scattered along the edge of the Well. Strong fingers curled around her arm and she cried out.
"Get up, Sam," said Orlando. "It's happening."
She opened her eyes. Orlando's Thargor body seemed different, wrong somehow, and it was more than just the strange light. He looked strangely incomplete, as though the top level of reality had been peeled away, leaving only its preliminary designs.
"It's really dying," he said, and she could hear the terror just beneath his words. "The whole thing's dying. Look at us."
Sam stared down at her own familiar tan arm, purple-gray in the pit's dimly smoldering light, now unreal as everything else. The path, the rock walls, her companions, all had lost some vital thing that had made them realistic, had slid back into a more basic state just as the black mountain had devolved beneath her feet during the long climb.
We're not people, she thought, looking at the smooth planes of Paul Jonas' face, at Orlando's stiff musculature. We're really puppets.
She struggled onto her feet, trying to fight back against the pressing fear. No, it's the operating system, the Other, not us. It's losing its grip. It's losing the dream. . . .
"Oh, this is so impacted," Orlando breathed. He held up his sword, not to challenge, but to block out an unwanted sight.
The barrier was dissolving.
At the edge of the encampment the net of iridescent cloud that had covered them was becoming raw mist again, shifting, dispersing. The refugees, who like everything else had lost some critical degree of definition, ran from it like misprogrammed robots, tripping and scrambling and shouting in childish terror. A dark form appeared out of the thinning fog, striding toward the Well as the remains of the barrier swirled around it like cobwebs. Fairy-tale folk caught too close to the disintegrating curtain flung themselves out of the shadow-figure's path and fell on their stomachs, rubbing their faces against the ground in helpless panic. The thing ignored them, walking through the cleared space like some horrible null-light Moses crossing the Red Sea. Fear held Sam pinned in place. Orlando swayed beside her and his sword dropped out of his hand into the dust.
"Now we finish," the thing said, and the terrible, gleeful voice in Sam's head made her want to smash her skull against something until she couldn't hear it anymore. "The end. Fade out. Roll credits."
"The Well!" Florimel wailed. Her voice seemed to come from half a world away. "It's sinking!"
Sam turned and saw that even the diminished light which had filled the Well was draining away into the heart of the world, emptying the great hole and pulling the empty black sky down on top of them like a rotting blanket. Now the only light in the world seemed to come from the eyes and grinning teeth of their enemy.
"Into the Well!" someone screamed behind her—Paul, Nandi, she could not tell. "It's the only place left to hide! Down into the Well!" But Sam could not tear her eyes. away from the walking darkness.
It's coming now.
The thing under the bed . . . the noise in the closet . . . the smiling stranger pulling up along the curb as you walk home from school. . . .
Orlando's hard hand closed on hers and jerked her to her feet. He pulled her toward the spot where Martine Desroubins had fallen onto her hands and knees at the edge of the pit. Most of their other companions were already scrambling down into darkness along some path Sam could not yet see. The blind woman looked as though she were shouting in pain. Orlando and Paul Jonas grabbed her and
lifted her.
"Where are you?" Dread's voice whispered, flicking soft as a snake's tongue in Sam's ear, "You can't hide from me. I know you all too well."
She followed Orlando and Paul onto a ledge that ran crookedly along the inner wall of the empty pit. The two of them moved swiftly, even with Martine dangling between them. As she hurried after them Sam tripped on something and fell. By the time she clambered back onto her feet they had disappeared into the shadows below. Panicked, Sam looked back, sure that the thing with the ice-cold voice must be right behind her, and saw what she had stumbled over—a human foot. The boy Cho-Cho was lying at the side of the path, almost invisible in the deepening darkness. With her insides churned to sick horror at the thought of what must be right behind her, she only wanted to run after the others.
No, he's just a micro! I can't leave him for . . . that.
She turned against the shrieking of her own nerves and fought her way back up the slope. Cho-Cho seemed asleep, unaware of the deathly thing that was hunting them. She pulled him up into her arms, surprised and staggered by the limp weight.
"What is happening?" Sellars' phantom voice sighed from the boy's open mouth. "Who are you?"
"Everything—everything's happening! It's me, Fredericks!" She tripped again and almost went down.
"Where is Martine?"
"Just . . . shut up," Sam grunted. She fought her way down the path, struggling to keep herself upright. The walls of the pit were quickly losing the last of what had made them real; they glowed now with a strange dim light, a duller version of the liquid stars. She thought she could make out the inconstant silhouettes of Orlando and Paul just a few meters ahead on the long downward spiral.
Upside down—!Xabbu, was right! Her thoughts flitted like smoke-maddened wasps. It's the mountain turned upside down. . . !
She could see nothing behind her yet but the pictures in her head were vivid enough—the empty-eyed shadow that was Dread swollen in her mind to giant size, sifting through the shrieking refugees with immense, shadowy fingers, picking them up in handfuls, examining them, then flinging them down in crackboned heaps.
