Lightspeed Issue 33

by Tad Williams

  “Sort of.” It was still hard to make his parents understand about John Dread, about the terrible destruction the killer had wrought in so many of the Otherland network worlds in the brief days he had ruled over the system as a kind of evil god. “The simulation is coming back, but we’re letting things sort themselves out instead of just wiping out what’s happened and starting the cycles over, so there’s some pretty scanny stuff going on in some of them. Adaptations, almost like after a forest fire has changed an ecosystem. Very barky.” He noticed their puzzled faces. “Barky? It means funny. The weird kind of funny.”

  “You know so much about these things,” his mother said. “This complicated network. You’ve learned so much. And you’ve really worked hard to make something out of …” Vivien Fennis was about to say something like your terrible situation, but of course she was too much of an old hand for that, too smart and too kind to mess up this proud-mom moment she was giving him. “Out of your life in this new world. New universe, really. It’s still so hard to believe or even understand.”

  “You have the makings of a first-class scientific education there,” Conrad chimed in. “Even if it’s not the accredited type. Life experience has to count for something, doesn’t it? Maybe someday …”

  “This all has to stay secret, Conrad—me, the Otherland network, everything. If it ever becomes public, there will be lawsuits for decades over who owns the network. It’s worth gazillions—it’ll be torn apart by the military looking for weapons-quality code, at the very least. You know that.” Orlando tried to puncture his dad’s fantasies gently, but they did have to be punctured: Conrad came up with hopeful, impractical plans every few months, and some of them made the maroon robot body seem positively normal. “Look, the chances are that I’m not ever going to live in the real world again. I’m sorry. I wish I could have had a grown-up life here and done all the things you guys wanted for me.” He took a breath: He found himself getting angry and he didn’t want to, but why did everyone keep projecting their ridiculous expectations and ideas onto him? He more or less figured on getting it from his parents, but Sam’s lack of trust in him was still hurting. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. This is a lot better than being dead. Don’t worry about me. Like you said, the network’s a whole new universe and I’m the one who gets to explore it. I’m happy.”

  Happy or not, he was beginning to feel like he couldn’t breathe. He did his best to be cheerful as he said his goodbyes, even allowing his mother and father to give the robot-body a hug, although it was a weird and uncomfortable experience, probably even for Conrad. As he sat the mechanical form down in a chair so it wouldn’t fall over when he was no longer animating it, Orlando was finding it harder and harder to hide his ugly mood. Getting out of that horrible, whirring prison and back into the freedom of the network was like finally being allowed to take off a scratchily ill-fitting Christmas sweater after the aunt who gave it to him had finally gone home.

  He had half an hour to kill before the meeting of the Worldwalkers Society. He wandered the streets of P. G. Wodehouse’s London, thinking.

  Before Dread, this simulation world had been a shiny little confection of unadulterated good cheer, a London where the poor were content to be that way and the unguilty rich could concentrate on important things, like eating a really good breakfast and avoiding dragonish aunts (who could pop up and spoil the aforementioned breakfast, not to mention zillions of other innocent pastimes, with amazing swiftness). Now this particular London had become a much different place. Like some Socialist demagogue that even the most paranoid Tory could barely have imagined, John Dread had first enraged and then armed the city’s working class—a group in short supply in Wodehouse, but not entirely absent. A horde consisting mostly of gardeners, butlers, chauffeurs, deliverymen, maids, and cab drivers had stormed the haunts of the upper crust, besieging and attacking the rich in their mansions, Kensington flats, and clubs. Whole blocks had been put to the torch as some of Wodehouse’s wild-eyed Socialists and anarchists, rumored but scarcely ever seen, turned out to be more than merely rumor, and a few turned out to be dab hands at arson as well. There had even been some massacres, public slaughters of the class enemies—the class of the victims depending on which side was top of form at that particular moment of the struggle—although because of the happy-go-lucky nature of the Wodehouse world, even Dread’s malign influence had waned quickly once his direct supervision ended. Still, by the time Sellars and Kunohara had got round to shutting down the particulars of Dread’s intervention, some weeks after Dread himself had been dethroned, the city had descended into a sort of weird twilight state, something that combined the ruination of post-Blitz London with the freewheeling lawlessness of its earlier Elizabethan incarnation and more than a touch of the fearful shadows that had clung to the 19th century city during the Jack the Ripper crimes.

  Curzon Street was full of horses and wagons these days—very few cars had survived the Unpleasantness, as the reign of terror was referred to—and Orlando had to watch what was under his feet as he made his way to Hyde Park. The squatter camps that had appeared in the first few weeks of the upheaval had become more or less permanent settlements, and with the chill evening coming down, bonfires burned everywhere. It didn’t do to walk too obliviously through the park—desperately cold and hungry people had long ago obliterated the park squirrels and the waterfowl of the Serpentine, and chopped down most of the beautiful old trees for fuel. Many wealthy folk who supposed that now the Unpleasantness had ended they could return to riding along Rotten Row had discovered that although horsemeat might come into the park on its own hooves as in the old days, the only way it was leaving again was inside someone’s stomach.

  However, if anyone could walk heedless of personal safety in Hyde Park these days, it was Orlando Gardiner, the system’s bashful demigod, and the demigod had a lot to consider.

  Is it just me? Conrad and Vivien mean well. Why is it so hard to humor them? After all, I’m their only kid and it’s pretty obvious things aren’t going to work out the way they hoped—no graduation, no girlfriends, no marriage, no grandkids … But no matter how he thought about it, he couldn’t feel anything but resentful horror at the idea of wearing that remote body. Instead of making him feel more natural it did the opposite, made the distance between his new life and his old one more acute, as though the real world had become some kind of alien planet, a toxic environment he could only enter dressed in a clanking robot-suit. The fact that the real world had become exactly that for him, and had been that way for going on three years, didn’t matter: As long as he only visited his folks by phone he could half-pretend he was just putting in a year in Africa with the UN Service Corps or something, but now Conrad’s compulsion to fix things was going to put a serious crimp in Orlando’s hard-earned denial.

  It was the stuff with Sam, though, that really got to him. He didn’t want to be someone that never grew up, never changed no matter what he experienced. That was worse than the suit—that was like being truly dead. He would be a sort of ghost.

  A ghost in a dead universe. Nothing changing, not me, not these worlds.

  He turned back across the park toward Dover Street and the club. Crews of young toughs were gathered around rubbish-bin bonfires, singing mocking serenades to their rivals. It sounded like they might be working up to a reading, as in a “read and write,” local slang for a gangfight.

  They’re free range, he reminded himself. None of my business. Happens all the time, anyway, and I couldn’t be here to stop them all.

  He looked at the laughing young men in scarves and fingerless gloves and stolen top hats, dapper as Dickensian urchins. Some were openly sharpening knives and razors. In the simworld’s more normal operation they would be prone to no worse mischief than flinging snowballs at unsuspecting vicars and fat uncles, but even this evidence of a certain flexibility of ambition allowed by the system didn’t change Orlando’s feelings. They might have adjusted to the high level of local chaos, but the
se hooligans were still essentially the same kind of minor characters they had been in the world’s earlier incarnations. It was becoming obvious that for all Kunohara’s and Sellars’s florid early predictions, a certain depth of reality, a flare of unpredictability, had gone out of the Otherland network for good with the death of the operating system. What was left was still fabulously complex, but ultimately lifeless.

  No wonder everyone keeps asking if I’m okay. It’s not me that’s the problem, it’s this network. Nothing really changes, or if it does, it’s just like ivy growing wild in someone’s yard or something—the same kinds of changes over and over and over. It’s not an evolving universe, it’s a big, broken toy, and even if it’s more complicated than anything anyone ever made before, it’s still never going to be like living in the real world. It wasn’t so much a lack of other people that was depressing him, he realized—the sims who inhabited the various worlds were astonishingly diverse and self-actualized, their interactive programming so flexible and their canned histories so comprehensive that in most cases you could never get to know any of them well enough to see the gaps in their near-perfect mimicry of life. But Orlando knew they weren’t real, and that was a very big part of the problem. He was also the most powerful person in this pocket universe now that Sellars was gone and Hideki Kunohara was so frequently absent, which added to the imbalance between himself and his cohabitants.

  Yeah, that’s it—that’s who I am, he realized. I’m not Aragorn or the Lone Ranger, I really am Superman, like Sam said. I’m one of a kind in these worlds and I’m going to spend my life doing things for people who are lesser beings—who won’t ever seem quite real to me. And that’s a long time to do something, because I just might live forever.

  For the first time since he had been reborn into the system, his potential immortality felt more like a burden than a gift.

  The meeting was underway, but a few other latecomers were still wandering into the Bertram W. Wooster Memorial Salon—a chamber dedicated, Orlando had gathered, to a former Drones Club member who had been smothered to death by a mob of crazed railway porters during the Unpleasantness. Orlando took his Coca-Cola and sat at the back of the room. His first requests for the beverage had baffled the club’s bar staff, but the proprietor had stepped in and now a bottle of syrup and siphon of soda water was waiting for him whenever he dropped in.

  That was only on meeting nights, of course—the Wodehouse simulation was not really his kind of world in the first place, and Orlando had never been interested in joining clubs even when he was alive, but the Society was different.

  “Before we welcome tonight’s speaker,” the chairman was saying, “we have a few orders of business—messages sent by members who were not able to attend tonight, but who nevertheless have information of importance to share.” The chairman, Sir Reginald de Limoux, was a handsome man in his middle thirties, hawk-nosed, lean, and tanned in a way that proclaimed him in this world as a laborer or an adventurer. He was clearly not a laborer. “The gateway between Chrysostom’s Byzantium and Toyland is no longer safe. Toyland is still unstable, and some kind of military group has captured the shop where the portal operates and made it their headquarters. They are wooden soldiers, I am told, so unless you are a termite, it is suggested you avoid that gateway for now.” A few of the club members laughed politely. “Visitors to Toyland can still use the forest gate, which is protected by factions more sympathetic to free travel. Now, still on the subject of gateways, we have a report of a new one discovered in Benin, at an oasis just outside the city …”

  As de Limoux continued with the announcements, Orlando sipped his Coke and studied him, wondering how much of the chairman’s source personality remained. He was one of the Jongleur-shadows, based on copies that had been made of Felix Jongleur, the Otherland network’s original master, at a time when the ancient industrialist was planning to live forever within its circuits, a god ruling over many worlds. Jongleur had indeed achieved immortality of a sort (as had many of the network’s other wealthy, powerful, and largely amoral founders from the Grail Brotherhood) but not in the way he or any of them had hoped.

  Instead of serving the purpose for which they had been intended, these copies, meant to be the basis for what would be immortal information-based incarnations, had been warped and changed during the last mad days of the original operating system, then the copies had been allowed to scatter and disperse through the system. Nobody knew how many of them existed, or what they had become, since there was no foolproof way to track individual sims in the huge network. One of the reasons Orlando Gardiner, in his role as the network’s conservator, had become involved with the Worldwalkers Society was so that he could keep tabs on these various Grail Brotherhood clones, many of which seemed drawn to the club by a compulsion that might have been subconscious—their hidden psychological DNA at work.

  Orlando had been surprised at first that Kunohara and Sellars, the two men who best understood the Otherland system, had never even tried to remove these remnants of the network’s original masters, but they had pointed out to him that even if all the shadow-copies could be found and identified, they were not automatically criminal themselves, any more than the children of a thief could be assumed to be inherently dishonest, and that even the least pleasant of the Grail Brotherhood originals were no worse than many other nasty sim personalities that were original inhabitants of some of the network worlds. It had been the Grail masters’ personal wealth and power, and also their control over the network from the outside, that had made them dangerous. Inside the network these clones and imitations started over from scratch, some with admitted personality defects, which cropped up in most incarnations, but others with a surprising capacity to become decent citizens. As he watched the Society’s chairman at work, Orlando thought that this particular version of Jongleur, Sir Reginald de Limoux, seemed somewhere in the middle—sharp-tempered and obviously ambitious, but certainly no out-and-out villain.

  The other legacy granted to the Grail shadows and a few similar beings that the old operating system had created—some based on Orlando’s real friends and acquaintances, like the Englishman Paul Jonas—was that they alone of all the simulated souls on the network could travel with relative freedom between the network worlds, or even knew that there were worlds outside the simulation in which they lived. Unlike Orlando, most of these travelers did not understand what they were, or what kind of universe they lived in, but they did have a freedom of thought that set them apart from the rest of the sims. In fact, they were the closest thing to equals Orlando Gardiner had these days. Sitting around in the Drones Club bar after a Worldwalker meeting, listening to the humorous stories and impossible boasts of Society members, was the closest thing to the happiness he had once found in the adventurers’ taverns of his old Middle Country game.

  And, of course, even in their wildest stories, these walkers-of-worlds brought back gems of information that Orlando found very useful. He might be a ranger with godlike powers, but he still couldn’t stamp out every untended campfire in four hundred different worlds.

  When the chairman had finished his announcements, the featured speaker took the lectern and began to describe the findings from his most recent expedition. This gentleman seemed to have spent most of his time in Troy and Xanadu, two simworlds Orlando knew well, so he let his attention drift to other things. He became so caught up in wondering how to reconnect with Sam that he did not realize for several moments that someone who had harrumphed significantly several times behind him had given up on subtlety and was now tapping on his shoulder.

  “Mr. Roland? Someone urgently wishes to speak with you.” The tapper was the proprietor of the Drones Club, a tall, poker-faced fellow named Jeeves who, rumor suggested, had been in some kind of domestic service before the Unpleasantness, but had risen very high, very quickly during those unstable times. “Did you hear me, Mr. Roland?”

  Orlando had almost forgotten his local pseudonym. “Sorry, sorry. Someone to
see me?” Could it be Beezle again, dressed for maximum embarrassment value in a cummerbund or pith helmet? But it was only when Orlando was in Rivendell, the closest thing to a refuge he had, that the agent wasn’t allowed to contact him directly: it was hard to relax and enjoy the peaceful singing of the elves and the flickering of firelight when you were getting four or five calls an hour from a virtual bug with the raspy voice and abrupt manners of an old-school Brooklyn cabbie.

  “Yes, a visitor, sir,” said Jeeves, leaning close. “A young lady. Very attractive, if I may say so, but perhaps a bit … confused. I’ve taken the liberty of installing her in one of the unused lounges—some of the older members are less than open-minded about women in the club, even now. I do beg pardon for interrupting you—she said it couldn’t wait, and it seemed from her conversation that it might be something with which you would wish to deal … discreetly.”

  Orlando looked at the man’s somber mouth, his tall, intelligent brow. Jeeves was not supposed to know who the Worldwalkers really were—on the surface, they were only a stuffily ordinary club of travelers and adventurers who met at the Drones Club once a month—let alone have even an inkling of Orlando Gardiner’s true nature, but he had always treated Orlando with extra care and a certain glint in the eye, as though he suspected him of being more than he appeared. Orlando in turn had often wondered whether the club’s new owner weren’t a Worldwalker himself, albeit an undiscovered one. If so, he had found the perfect place to hide, right under the Society’s nose. Orlando made a mental note to do some research on this Jeeves fellow when he had some spare time.

  The Society members in the Wooster Salon had fallen into civilized but contentious discussion about a proposed new expedition. Orlando knew they would be batting it around for at least half an hour, and probably wouldn’t finish the discussion this month. Expeditions took resources, and those Worldwalkers who were independently wealthy in one simworld could seldom move valuables or tangible resources from one simulation to another. In fact, the only really certain, completely portable capital was knowledge, and that was one of the reasons most Society members valued their membership above anything except their lives. Orlando hated to miss the rest of the meeting, but nothing was going to happen here tonight he couldn’t pick up later, in the bar.