by Tad Williams
But what about me? Even the thought of taking responsibility for the lives of these people made him feel a little queasy. Yes, but that's shit, man, and you know it. You've been through things in the last weeks that nobody—nobody!—in the real world has experienced, let alone survived. Chased by monsters, fought in the bloody Trojan War. Why shouldn't you take the lead if it were necessary?
Because it feels like it's hard enough just being Paul Jonas, he answered himself. Because it's hard enough getting by when it feels like a big piece of my life is missing. Because I'm damned tired, that's why.
Somehow, they didn't sound like very good excuses.
Martine stirred and sat up. "I am troubled," she said. "Troubled by many things."
"And who is not?" Florimel snorted.
"This thing about Kunohara having an informant among us?" Paul asked her.
"No. There is nothing we can do about that if it is true, and I am willing to believe you all when you say you know nothing about it." But her sightless gaze seemed to pause for a moment on T4b, who shifted uncomfortably. "I am troubled by the song that the . . . the operating system, as I suppose I must call it, was singing. A song that I think I taught it to sing."
"You can call it the Other," said Florimel. "Many others seem to, and it is easier to say."
Martine waved her hand in impatience. "It does not matter. The fact is, I am troubled because it might hold answers to some of our questions, but I can remember very little about that time, those events."
Paul shrugged. "We don't know anything except what you've told us."
"And that is as much as I wish to tell. I was . . . experimented upon. I communicated remotely with what I thought was another child—a strange, even frightening child, but also somehow pitiful. I played games with it, as I assume other children in the institute did. I taught it stories, songs. I think that I taught it the song it was singing. . . ." She broke off, staring at nothing.
"And now you think this playmate of yours was an AI?" Paul finished for her. "They were . . . training the operating system to be like a human, for some reason."
T4b shook his head. "Locktacious. Those old Grail-knockers scan freely, huh?"
"Stories," Martine said quietly. "Yes, there was a story that went with the song. What was it? God, it was so long ago!"
"I do not remember the song," Florimel said. "Much that happened on that mountaintop—it was all very confusing. Frightening."
Martine raised her hands as though trying to keep her balance. The others fell silent. When she spoke Paul expected some revelation, but instead the blind woman said, "We are almost there."
"What? Where?"
"The end of this simulation. I can feel the . . . the falling-off. The ending." She swiveled her head. "I must have quiet. I wish we could land and go through slowly, but we have no way to control our movement, so I must take this as it comes. If I can get us to Troy, I will. If not, there is no telling where we may find ourselves."
They were all still for a moment, the bubble rising and falling with the movement of the river.
"Will we have a boat on the other side?" Florimel asked hoarsely.
Martine shook her head in irritation, hardly listening, intent on something none of the others could perceive.
"What do you mean?" Paul asked.
"This was not a standard craft," Florimel said. "We walked out of this simulation the first time we were here. Renie and !Xabbu used one of the entomological institute's planes, which was translated into something else on the far side of the gateway. But what is this?" She spread her arms. "It is a bubble, something that did not exist until Kunohara made it. Will it be something on the far side? Or will it just . . . disappear?"
"Jesus." Paul reached out and clutched Martine's hand. "Everybody grab on. At least that way we'll go into the water together." The blind woman did not seem to notice. Florimel took her other hand, then they both linked with T4b, who had gone pale and as silent as Martine. The water seemed to be moving faster now, the bubble jouncing through streaks of white foam. "I think we're heading toward another waterfall." Paul tried hard to keep his voice steady.
"Going all blue, like," T4b growled, trying as hard as Paul. "Sparkly."
"Hold tightly." Florimel closed her eyes. "If we do go in the water, lake a big breath. Do not struggle, do not swim until you know what is up or down."
"If we can tell," Paul said, but it was nearly a whisper. Beside him Martine had gone rigid, locked onto some incomprehensible signal.
The current was definitely moving faster now. The bubble bounced from one swift-moving eddy to another, barely dimpling the surface of the water. A lurch turned them all sideways, and for a moment Florimel and T4b rose up above Paul's head before tumbling down on top of him in a bruising pile of elbows and knees. Somehow they managed to keep their hands locked; a moment later the bubble had righted itself, leaving them sprawled on their backs once more, panting and silent.
Blue fire began to rise around them in glittering cascades. The bubble rose, fell, skimmed, and spun.
Where next? Paul thought wildly as they were flung head over heels again. Good God, where next?
A fog of blue sparks surrounded them completely. Martine grunted in pain and fell sideways into Paul's lap just as the bubble evaporated around them and black water splashed in on all sides.
"We're still alive," Paul said. He spoke the words aloud in part because he was still not entirely certain it was true. Their bubble was gone and already he missed it dearly. It had been replaced by a small boat, a crude craft that seemed like something to be poled rather than rowed, although there were no implements on board to do either. The storm that had greeted them at the gateway had swept past, but it had left them drenched and the air was frosty. Paul could already feel his wet clothes crackling with ice.
The river around them was black. The land, such of it as they could see through the mists, was all white. They were surrounded by snow.
"How is Martine?" asked Florimel.
Paul pulled her upright against him. "Shivering, but I think she's okay. Martine, can you hear me?"
T4b squinted out across the apparently polar landscape. "Don't look like that Troy place to me."
Martine groaned quietly and shook her head. "It is not. I could not find the Trojan simulation in the information at the gateway." She wrapped her arms tight around her body, still shivering. "I had to work so fast! Many of the gateways are closed—the information system for the gateway was like a building with most of its lights out."
"So where are we?" Florimel asked. "And if we can't get to Troy, what are we going to do?"
"Freeze, if we don't make a fire," Paul said through clenched teeth; he was shivering now. "Time later to worry about other things if we manage to survive. We'll have to go ashore." He wished that he felt as confident, as certain as he was trying to sound. This simworld along the river-banks reminded him of nothing so much as the Ice Age, although he hoped it wasn't so; it was impossible to forget the giant hyenas that had chased him into an icy river much like this one. He did not want to encounter any more primitive megafauna.
"There is nowhere here to make a fire, and nothing to make one with." Florimel pointed at the hummocks of snow which seemed to extend from the riverbanks all the way to the dim, fogbound mountains. "Do you see any trees? Any wood?"
"Those hills up ahead," Paul said. "Where the river turns—who knows what's behind them, or even under them? Maybe this is some kind of futuristic simworld, and there are underground houses with atomic furnaces or something. We can't just give up. We'll freeze."
"Not necessarily," Florimel said sharply. "None of us is like Renie and !Xabbu, with their real bodies suspended in liquid. Our bodies are all resting at room temperature somewhere. How can we freeze? Our nerves can be fooled into feeling cold, but that is not the same as actually being cold." Despite her words, she too was now wracked with trembling. "Psychosomatically we can be convinced perhaps to radiate more heat, as
though we had fever, but surely we cannot be forced to freeze ourselves?"
"By that logic," Martine pointed out through chattering teeth, "we could not be bitten in half by a giant scorpion, either—it would only be a tactile illusion. But none of us were very eager to test that assumption, were we?"
Florimel opened her mouth, then shut it.
"We need to find something to use as paddles, anyway," Paul said. "It will take us days to drift through at this rate."
"Only thing for sure is turning all ice," T4b grumbled. "Rest of you can jawjack about it. Want to get warm, me."
"We should huddle close," Martine said. "Whatever the somatic truth, I can perceive heat leaving your virtual bodies very quickly."
They crowded into the center of the boat. For once even T4b, not the most companionable of their number, had no complaints. The boat moved, but the current was sluggish, the black river flat as glass.
"Somebody talk," Paul said after a while, "Keep our minds off this. Martine, you said you remembered a story that went with that song the . . . the Other was singing?"
"That is just the p–problem." She was shivering so badly now she could hardly speak, "I don't re–re–remember it. It's been so long. It was just an old fairy tale. About a b–boy, a little boy who fell down a hole."
"Sing the song." Worried for her, Paul began rubbing her arms and back, trying to make some heat by friction. "Maybe that will tell us something."
Martine shook her head, but began in a low, trembling voice to sing. "An . . . an angel touched me, an angel touched me. . . ." She frowned, thinking. "A river . . . no, the river washed me and now I am clean."
Paul remembered it clearly now, the eerie sound echoing across the black mountaintop. "And you think that it's significant somehow. . . ?"
"I know that story," Florimel said abruptly. "It was one of Eirene's favorites. From the Gurnemanz collection."
"You know it from a German book?" Martine said, surprised. "But it is an old French fairy tale."
"What's that?" T4b asked.
"A f–fairy tale. . . ?" Martine was stunned despite her suffering. "You d–d–do not know what a fairy tale is? My God, what have they done to our ch–children?"
"No," said T4b disgustedly. "What's that?"
He was pointing at a mound of snow perhaps a thousand meters ahead of them, one of the outriders to the cluster of snowy hills Paul had seen earlier.
"It's a pile of snow." Paul said it a trifle rudely, but he wanted to hear what Florimel had to say about the story. A moment later he was startled and embarrassed to see the glint of something that was not snow or ice. "Good Lord, you're right, it's a tower. A tower!"
"What, think I'm blind, me?" T4b growled. A moment later he frowned and turned to Martine, "Didn't mean no slapdown."
"Understood." She frowned into the distance. "I p–per–ceive no signs of life at all. I ca–ca–can barely sense that there is anything there at all beside ice and snow. What do you see?"
"It's the top of a tower." Paul squinted. "It's . . . very narrow. Like a minaret. Decorated. But I can't see anything of what's underneath. Damn, this current is slow!"
"A minaret, yes," said Florimel.
"Maybe this is the Mars I visited before," Paul said excitedly. "That strange sort of late-Victorian adventure world. It had a lot of Moorish-looking architecture." His gaze slipped to the countless miles of deadening white spread over both sides of the river. "But what happened?"
"Dread," said Martine quietly. "The man called Dread has happened to this place, I would bet."
They were all straining to see something now, all except for Martine who had let her trembling chin sink to her chest. As they drew closer to the great mound of snow and its single protruding spire, Paul saw something on the bank beside them, a much smaller shape half-covered by white drifts. "What the hell is that?"
T4b, who was leaning so far out of the boat the little craft was tipping to one side, said, "It's one of those Tut-Tut and the Sphinx things, like—you know, that netshow for micros? That animal they ride with bumps?"
Paul, whose grasp of popular culture had been diminishing rapidly since he left boarding school, could only shake his head. "It's a sphinx?"
"He means a camel," Florimel said. If she had not been pressing her teeth together to keep them from chattering, she might have laughed. "It is a frozen camel. Did they have camels on your Mars?"
"No." Now that they were closer, he saw the boy was right again. The dead camel was on its knees at the river's edge, teeth exposed in a hideous grin, the skin stretched so tight on its neck and head that it seemed mummified, but it was definitely a camel. "We must be in Orlando's Egypt. Or something like it,"
Martine stirred. "That man c–called Nandi. If we are in Egypt, p–p–perhaps we could find him. Orlando and Fredericks said he was the Circle's special expert on the gateways. He might be able to help us reach Renie and the others."
"If he's here, gotta be a popsicle," T4b suggested.
"Ancient Egypt with minarets?" asked Florimel sourly. "In any case, I have changed my mind about trying to outlast this cold. So let us head toward that tower or none of this speculation will matter, because we, too, will be . . . popsicles."
"We'll have to paddle with our hands," Paul said. "We'll have to get there fast or we'll all get frostbite."
"We will take our hands out in turn to warm up," Martine said. "Two paddling, two warming. Now."
For a moment, as he plunged his fingers into the dark river, Paul felt nothing but clean chill, like an alcohol-swabbing before an injection. Then his skin began to burn like fire.
It was only snow and not ice they had to kick through to reach the open arched door of the building beneath the looming, white-shrouded tower, a piece of luck for which Paul was terribly grateful. Within a few moments they were standing in a decorated antechamber, painted head to ceiling in a beautiful, elaborate scarlet, black, and gold fretwork of repeating shapes. They did not stop to look, but continued forward, bending over the freezing hands they all held pressed against their bellies.
Three more doors and three more decorated chambers led them to a smaller room whose walls were lined with shelves full of leather-bound books, and the glorious discovery of a tiled fire pit and a stack of wood.
"It's damp," Paul said as he stacked logs in the fireplace with clumsy, stinging fingers. "We need something to use as kindling. Not to mention a match."
"Kindling?" Florimel pulled a book down from the shelf and began tearing out pages. It seemed somehow sacrilegious to Paul, but after a moment's consideration he decided he could live with the feeling. He looked at a page and saw that it was in English, but English rendered in a spidery print that had the feeling of Arabic script. As he crumpled pages and arranged them around the wood, he saw a pretty lacquer box tucked into an alcove in the tile on the outside of the fireplace. He opened it, then held it up. "It's flint and steel, I think, and thank God for that. I wish !Xabbu were here. Anyone else know how to use this?"
"We did not even have electricity at Harmony Camp until I was ten years old," said Florimel. "Give it to me."
Perhaps a quarter of an hour passed, the sound of clicking teeth gradually subsiding, before Paul was willing to take his hands away from the wonderful heat of the fire. After a bit of exploration he turned up a storeroom full of soft rugs which he and the others wrapped around themselves like cloaks. Warmer now and feeling almost human, he picked up one of the discarded books and opened it.
"It's definitely supposed to be Arabic—this book is dedicated to His Majesty the Caliph, Haroun al-Rashid. Hmmm. It seems to be a story about Sinbad the Sailor." Paul looked up at the shelves. "I think this is a library of the Thousand and One Arabian Nights."
"Ain't spending no thousand nights here in this popsicle pit," T4b said. "Lock that. Lock that tight."
"That's just the name of a book," Paul told him. "A famous old collection of stories." He turned to Florimel and Martine. "Which reminds me.
. . ."
"I said I could not remember the story," Martine began.
"But I said I could." Florimel pushed herself back a little way from the fire. Bundled in the stiff carpet, and with the makeshift bandage covering her eye and a large portion of the side of her head, she looked more than ever like some medieval hedge-witch.
Which is funny, Paul thought, since the witch of the group is Martine. It was an odd realization, but no less true for being odd.
"I will tell it as I remember it." The German woman scowled, exaggerating her already daunting appearance. "It is only memorized because my daughter asked to hear it—and several of that Gurnemanz collection's other stories—many, many times, so don't interrupt me or I will lose the rhythm and forget parts of it. Martine, I am sure it will be different than the version you knew, but tell me about it afterward, will you?"
Paul saw the ghost of a smile flicker on the blind woman's face. "That is fair, Florimel,"
"Good." She arranged her damp but drying robes beneath her, opened her mouth, then shut it again and glared at T4b. "And I will explain the parts you don't understand after I'm done. Do you hear me, Javier? Don't interrupt or I will throw you out into the snow."
Paul expected anger, or at least teenage indignation, but the boy seemed amused. "Chizz. Bang those squeezers. Listening, me."
"Right. Very well then, here it is as I remember it."
"Once upon a time there was a boy who was the apple of his parents' eye. They loved him so fiercely that they were frightened something would happen to him, so they got him a dog to be his companion. The dog was named Sleeps-Not, and was fierce and loyal.
"Even with the love of two parents and the mercy of God, not all accidents can be avoided. One day, while his father was out working in the fields and his mother was busy preparing the afternoon meal, the boy wandered far from the house. Sleeps-Not tried to stop him, but the boy cuffed the dog and sent him away. The dog ran back to summon the boy's mother, but before she could reach him, the boy fell down into an abandoned well.
