by Tad Williams
"What you staring at, mu'chita?" he said with a mouth full of cookie.
"Nothing." She turned back to the wallscreen. The Chinese people were making themselves into a big pile to reach something hanging high in the air. The pile fell down and some of the people had to be carried away with the audience cheering. Christabel wished her parents would come in and tell her it was time to go home. She didn't like what was going on any more. She sneaked a look at the boy. He was licking the plate where the sandwiches had been. That was really gross, but it bothered her in a different way, too.
"When we go home," she said suddenly, "maybe . . . maybe my mom will give you some food. You know, to take with you."
He looked at her and shook his head like she had said something stupid.
"Ain't nobody going home, chica. We on the run. No more mama-papa house for you, not ever, m'entiendes?"
She knew he was lying, knew that he was saying it to make her feel bad, but she could not stop herself from crying anyway. What was worse was that when her mommy came in and asked Christabel what was wrong, and she told her, Mommy didn't say it was a lie, didn't say they were going home right away so don't worry, didn't even yell at the terrible boy. She didn't say anything at all, just held Christabel on the bed. It should have made her feel better, but it didn't, it didn't, it didn't.
CHAPTER 8
Listening to the Nothing
NETFEED/LIFESTYLE: Virtual Memorials-Visiting the Dead
(visual: family and deceased laughing at wake)
VO: Funebripro, a company in Naples, Italy, has announced the newest twist in funeral technology—a virtual memorial, where mourners can talk with their dear departed. The company says that a series of what it calls Life Copies can be made and then combined into a convincing simulation of the deceased as he or she was in life,
(visual: company founder Tintorino di Pozzuoli)
DI POZZUOLI: "Hey, this is a nice thing. If you lose someone, like we lost my dear grandfather, you can still keep a part of them with you. You can visit with them even after they're gone—commune, you might say. It's like having a telescope that points at heaven, right?"
Almost dying on the mountain had been bad enough. Now Sam Fredericks' exhausted sleep was invaded by the most bizarrely powerful nightmare she had ever experienced.
The bad dream seemed to go on forever, a flood of terror and solitude and confusion so real and so lengthy that at last, in some paradoxical way, even horror became as boring as a hundred-year trip in the back seat of her parents' car. The only respite from the hammering monotony of fear and loneliness were the small phantoms, swift and cautious as birds, that finally appeared to her out of the long darkness, as though she had passed some terrible pointless test and was now being rewarded. She could not see them but she could feel them all around her, each gentle and insubstantial as a shallow breath. They might almost have been fairies, wispy bits of beauty like something from one of her childhood screen stories. Spirits, perhaps. Whatever they were, she finally felt relieved and at peace. She wanted to hold them close, but they were all as fragile as a butterfly wing, as the trembling puff of a dandelion: to clutch at them was to destroy them.
When she came up at last from the endless dream, Sam Fredericks' first realization—as it had been with every awakening since it had happened—was that Orlando was dead. He was not merely dying (a familiar shadow she had learned to squint into invisibility) but dead. Gone. Not coming back, not ever—no new stories, no new memories. No more Orlando.
But this time, the terrible sadness only lasted until she opened her eyes and saw the endless silver-shot nothing that surrounded her. Surprise was turned to something worse by the look on !Xabbu's careful, devastated face as he told her that Renie was gone.
"But what happened? This so utterly, utterly, utterly scans." At least an hour seemed to have passed and nothing had changed. Sam had not been one of the visitors to the weatherless stasis Renie had named Patchwork Land; to her, the most astonishing thing about this enveloping silver-gray void was the simple fact of its persistence, limitless and unchanging. "Is Renie still back on the mountain? In fact, where's the mountain?"
"I have no answers, Fredericks," !Xabbu said.
"Sam. Call me Sam—oh, please." She had run out of strength to plan, to do. Orlando had died. In all the time she had been trapped in the network, Sam Fredericks had never allowed herself seriously to consider that there might come a time when that would happen—when she would have to go on without him. How could such a thing even be possible? But here it was, the world around her just as strange and incomprehensible as it had been when Orlando was still alive, but now there was no Orlando to push her along, to growl at her, to tell her stupid jokes because he knew that being pissed off by stupid jokes was as good a method of keeping going as being entertained by good ones, and a lot easier on the one telling the jokes.
Sam felt a congestion inside her, a painful swelling of the heart. She would never again get to tell him those obvious things in that way that drove him crazy—an obviousness of such perfection that he could never tell if she was kidding or not. The tightness inside her felt like something that needed to be born, but did not want to come out. It was astonishing to discover how much you could miss someone whose real face you'd never seen.
What would he say now? she wondered. Everything vanished, Renie gone, Sam trapped in the middle of literally nowhere?
"Neck-deep in fenfen and waiting for the tide to rise," that was what he'd told her once in the Middle Country, when they'd turned from stuffing their pockets full of treasure to discover a twenty-meter-long snake forcing its way in through the underground chamber's only exit.
That's where I am now, Gardino, she thought. For real this time. Wailing for the tide to rise. . . .
!Xabbu saw the tears running down her cheek and crouched beside her, then wrapped her in his slender strong arms. Just as the weeping threatened to overwhelm her, a tall shape appeared out of the mist.
"I knew she was the most reliable of you," Jongleur said disdainfully, "but I would not have thought you two would collapse so quickly in her absence. Have you no backbone at all? We must go on."
The bony-faced man was such a horror Sam could not even look at him, but !Xabbu grew tense beside her. "It is foolish to go when we have no idea where we are going," the small man said. "Did you have any better luck searching than I did?"
Jongleur hissed out breath, as though he had sprung a small leak. "No. There is nothing. If I had not taken my steps carefully and followed backward along the same track, you might never have seen me again."
"Wouldn't that be sad."
Jongleur ignored her. "That is doubtless what happened to your companion. Wandered off after we made the transition to whatever this place is, and cannot find her way back."
"Renie would not do such a thing," !Xabbu said firmly. "She is too smart for that."
Jongleur flicked his hand dismissively. "Still, she is lost, however you choose to explain it. As is Klement." His smile was wintry. "I suppose we can be fairly certain they have not eloped."
!Xabbu rose to his feet. He was a full head shorter than Jongleur, but something in his posture made the taller man step backward. "Unless you have something useful to say, you will stop talking about her. Now."
Jongleur peered down at him, annoyed but momentarily surprised. "Get hold of yourself, fellow. It was merely a remark. . . ."
"No more remarks." !Xabbu stared at Jongleur for a long moment while Sam watched them both, suddenly and uncomfortably aware that without !Xabbu she would be alone with this ancient monster. Jongleur stared back. At last, !Xabbu put his hand down and touched her arm. "He is right only in one thing, Sam. We can wait a little longer for Renie, but even if she is nearby, we might not find her. Sound does not carry well in this place. She could pass a hundred meters from us and we would not know it. At some point we must move on and hope that we find her along the way."
"We can't . . . just go without
her!"
For a moment !Xabbu's composure slipped, giving Sam a glimpse of the pain he was hiding. "If . . . something has happened to her. . . ." He stopped and darted a look at Jongleur, clearly unwilling to show such things in the man's presence. "If we cannot find her, we owe it to her to go on. Don't forget, it was her love for her brother that brought her into this place. She would want us to try to help him even without her."
He spoke with his normal calm, but such desolation lay just behind the words that Sam felt as though her own river of sorrow had met another at least as great—that if they were not both very careful, the combined waters might overflow the banks and flood the world.
The poor visibility meant that she had to stay fairly close to Jongleur while !Xabbu did his work, and it was all she could do to keep her loathing of the man in check. His proud face seemed made of stone, a chiseled monument, like Sam's own father at his stiffest and angriest, but without the redeeming sense of humor she could always tease out of him. She could not help wondering how someone with Jongleur's wealth and power could turn himself into a thing, could bend so many lives with his cruelty . . . for what? Just to keep himself alive? To enjoy centuries more of cold, unhappy power? Sam had trouble at the best of times understanding why old people would want to continue on, long past the point they could do anything that she could imagine as worth doing; someone like Jongleur, who had already lasted into a third human life span, was beyond her grasp.
Orlando had been afraid of dying, too—terrified of it, she realized now, and all those death-simulations had been meant to desensitize him to what was coming so unfairly soon. But even if he had been given the chance to escape that death, would he have done what this man had done, taken the lives of innocent others to preserve his own? She couldn't believe it. She didn't believe it. Not her Orlando, who believed in the Ring-Bearer's Quest the way those people in the Circle believed in God. Not Orlando Gardiner, who had told her that being a true hero was still the most important thing, even if no one ever found out about it. He had really believed it didn't matter what else happened, or what anyone thought about you—it only mattered what you knew about yourself.
Even her father had told her once, when she was battling her mother over her name, "If you want to be Sam, be Sam—just be the best damn Sam you can." His serious scowl had suddenly become a laugh. "Someone ought to put that in a children's book."
Missing her father and her wide-eyed, nervously affectionate mother suddenly became a hurt at least as great as the pain of losing Orlando, and for a moment a shadow threatened to overtake her completely. Sam stared at Jongleur sitting a few meters away and could not tell if the dimness was the mist or her own teary eyes, but she knew that whatever happened, she didn't ever want to be like him, angry and frozen and alone. . . .
A movement startled her out of her thoughts. !Xabbu's small form appeared from the gray. He sat down beside her gingerly, as though he ached.
"Well?" snapped Jongleur.
!Xabbu ignored him. He took Sam's hand—she hadn't quite become used to his frequent, careful touching, but she still found it reassuring—and asked her how she was feeling.
"Better, I think." She smiled a little, realizing it was true. "Did it work?"
He wearily returned the smile. "As I often say to Renie, the skills I have are not the sort that turn on and turn off. But I think I am making sense of things, yes, perhaps a bit."
Jongleur made a quiet hissing noise. "Any other man of my generation would find it comical to see me staking my life on two Africans and, unless I miss my guess about this girl, a Creole—and we have already lost one of the Africans." He rolled his eyes. "But I have never been a bigot. If some instinct of yours will show the way out of this place, then damn you, tell us."
!Xabbu shot him a look of real dislike—one of the strongest things Sam had seen from him. "It is not 'instinct,' not in the sense you mean. Everything I know about finding my way has been learned, taught to me by my father's family. They taught me other things you do not seem to know either, like kindness and good sense." He turned his back on Jongleur, who seemed stuck between outrage and sour amusement. "I am sorry to have left you with this man, Sam, but I had to move far enough away that I could not see you, could not even hear the two of you breathing. All in this network is stranger than in the real world, and it has been hard at the best of times to make sense of things. But this place is even more difficult—until a little while ago, I would have said there was nothing at all to sense beside ourselves. It might still be true—like a starving man hoping to scent game, I might have convinced myself of what is not true."
"You think you . . . smelled something?"
"Not exactly, Sam. For a long time I just sat, trying, as I said, to forget the sounds and smells of you and . . . and this man. For some of the time, I hoped I might hear Renie calling far away." He shook his head sadly. "But after a time I gave up and just . . . opened myself. It is not mystical," he said hurriedly, peering over his shoulder at Jongleur. "Rather it is being able truly to hear, to smell, to see—the things people in the city world seldom do, because everything they need comes to them, hurries toward them as though it were shot out of a gun." His face grew solemn as he searched for words. "After a while, I began to feel something. Perhaps it is a little like Martine, how she senses things—it takes a while to understand the patterns here—but I think it is simply that I finally had the stillness and . . . what is the word? Alone-ness? I finally had a chance to hear." He squeezed Sam's hand again and stood up. "That way," he said, pointing outward into a portion of the pearly void no different than any other. "It could be that my mind is making things up, but I feel there is something there, in that direction."
"Something?" Jongleur's voice was measured, but Sam could hear his anger just under the surface. In a flare of insight, she saw how it must eat away at a man like him to have to rely on anyone at all, let alone someone he must think of as little better than a savage.
How old is he really, anyway? Sam wondered, and almost shivered. Maybe two hundred years? Did they still have, like, slaves when he was growing up?
"What I sense is . . . something," !Xabbu said. "There is no other word. I am not speaking that way to disturb you. It is a thickening, perhaps, or greater movement, or distant changes in what is more orderly here, or . . . something. Like the ghost of a track in sand, all the rest blown away by the wind. It might be only a shadow. But that is where I am going, and I think Sam will go with me."
"Utterly right." Besides, what was the alternative? Waiting here forever in this fog, hoping something helpful would happen? That wasn't what Orlando or Renie would have done.
Jongleur looked carefully at !Xabbu. Sam did not need any particular insight this time to read the man's mind. He was trying to decide whether !Xabbu was lying to him, or was crazy, or maybe just wrong. Sam could never feel pity for a nasty creature like Jongleur, but she could almost guess what it would be like to suspect everyone and everything. It was an ugly, miserable thing to imagine.
"Lead, then." Jongleur, even naked, conveyed the impression of a king granting a favor to a peasant. "Anything is better than this."
The third time, Renie almost didn't find her way back. It was strange to be using the shambling, brain-damaged Ricardo Klement as her lodestone, even stranger to experience a flush of pleasure and relief when she saw his seated form appear out of the nothingness.
But what if he'd moved? she asked herself. Even if I found him again, I wouldn't be coming back to the same spot. It might be a spot !Xabbu and Sam had already checked, and they might be looking for me in the old spot. . . .
This was all presuming that her two friends were still alive—that they hadn't simply been swallowed or drezzed somehow by the network, whatever damned part of it this was. But she couldn't afford to think about that alternative much.
She couldn't really risk wandering anymore, either. Not that it made any difference—the seamless, monotonous gray went on and on, the invisi
ble earth or floor continued, flat as a tabletop; silence and emptiness reigned. So she would either stay put, or move and keep moving.
It would have been an exaggeration to say Klement seemed glad to see her—he lifted his head slightly at her return—but there was no question he knew she was there: his eyes followed her, and he changed his position subtly after she sat down a few meters away, as if to designate a space between them—space that in a world with anything in it at all might have held a campfire.
Renie would have given one of her arms for a campfire. She would have added another limb and perhaps even a few organs to have !Xabbu and Sam seated around that fire with her.
I shouldn't have been thinking about how few of us there were left-—tempting fate. Now look what's left. Me. And . . . that.
Ricardo Klement gazed back at her, so still and silent that it was like looking at a picture in a museum. The last thing you would ever imagine was that it would speak.
"What . . . are you?" Klement asked.
Renie flinched in surprise; it took her a moment to respond. "What am I?" It was hard to talk: her voice was hoarse from shouting for her lost companions. "What do you mean? I'm a woman. I'm an African woman. I'm someone you and your group of rich friends . . . hurt." There were no words to express the feelings in her about Stephen, and the helplessness of the last hours had only made it worse than usual.
Klement stared. There was something moving behind the eyes, but it was deep, deep down. "That is . . . a long name," he said at last. "It seems . . . long."
"Name?" Jesus Mercy, she thought, that Ceremony scorched his brains properly, didn't it? "That's not my name, it's what I. . . ." She stopped and took a breath. "My name. . . ?" She wasn't sure she wanted to tell him, although she had given up on anonymity long ago. There was something galling in the way this thing, whatever had gone wrong with its mind, presumed to a kind of childlike innocence. Did this increase in conviviality mean that the old Ricardo Klement was beginning to surface, or simply that the new, damaged version was becoming more comfortable with its faculties?
