Sea of Silver Light o-4

by Tad Williams

  "Jesus." Paul was dimly aware he'd already said this a few times, but could not help saying it several more. "Jesus. So the mountain. . . ?"

  "A neutral ground, perhaps?" Florimel offered.

  "Perhaps. Perhaps a spot near—if we can use such physical terms about this network—to the Other's own secret place, to the center of its 'self.' If we had been able to remain there, if Dread had not interfered, it might have spoken to us."

  Paul stiffened. "And so Renie was right. She and the others really are in the heart of the system?"

  Martine slumped back. "I do not know. But if we want to get there, we will have to find some other way, since Troy seems to be barred to us now."

  "We will think of something," Florimel said. "Great God, I had not expected to feel this way about the thing that crippled and stole my Eirene, but if what you guess is true, Martine . . . oh! It is a terrible thought." Martine sighed. "But before anything more, we need sleep. I have quite overwhelmed myself, and I did not have much strength in reserve."

  "Hang on." Paul reached out and touched her arm. He could feel it trembling with fatigue. "Sorry, but one last thing. You said something about Nandi."

  "The one Orlando met."

  "I know. I met him, too—I'm sure I told you. I think you were right. If anyone can help us puzzle out the gates, it's him."

  "But we don't know where he is," said Florimel. "Orlando and Fredericks last saw him in Egypt."

  "Then that's where we need to go. At the very least, it gives us something to aim for!" He squeezed Martine's forearm gently. "Did you notice whether it was one of the . . . available destinations? When you were looking for Troy?"

  She shook her head sadly. "Too little time. That is why I accepted this place when I couldn't find Troy—it was the default setting." She reached out and patted his hand, then turned away, searching with her fingers for a clear spot to lie down and sleep. "But we will look for it at the next gateway." She yawned. "And you are right, Paul—at least it is something."

  As she curled herself tighter in her blanket, and Florimel did the same, Paul turned to T4b.

  "Javier? You haven't said much."

  The boy still didn't have a great deal to say. He had clearly been asleep for quite a while.

  CHAPTER 13

  King Johnny

  NETFEED/NEWS: Jiun Would Not Want State Funeral, Heirs Claim

  (visual: Jiun at Asian Prosperity Zone ceremony)

  VO: The heirs of Jiun Bhao, Asia's most influential mogul, say that the state funeral planned for the businessman is inappropriate.

  (visual: nephew Jiun Tung at press conference)

  JIUN TUNG: "He was a very modest man, the embodiment of Confucian values. He would want what was due to a man of his position, nothing more."

  (visual: Jiun meeting group of farmers)

  VO: Some observers suggest that the family is being more modest than their late patriarch actually was, and that what they really object to is the state's expectation that the Jiun family pay for part of the massive ceremony. . . ."

  Calliope drummed her fingers on the countertop. She was definitely, definitely going to give up caffeine, go for the no-octane varieties. Tomorrow. Or right after that.

  Every noise from the other room seemed louder than it was. It was so strange to hear someone else in her apartment. Calliope's mother hated leaving her little house, fearful of crowds and unfamiliar places. Stan hadn't visited in months, mostly because they saw so bloody much of each other at work: even friendly partners didn't want to spend any more time in each other's company than they had to.

  Calliope had just decided to pour herself a drink of something counter-effective to coffee—although, as wired as she felt at the moment, it would probably take some kind of morphine derivative to slow her down—when the bedroom door popped open. Elisabetta, the waitress-muse, leaned in the doorway, only a yellow towel covering the completeness of her tattooed glory. She held another towel in her hand and waved it at Calliope. "I took one for my hair, too. All right?"

  Detective Sergeant Calliope Skouros could only nod. The towel-clad apparition vanished back into the steamy bedroom. God, the girl was beautiful. Maybe not in the runway-model sense, but strong and just vibrating with youth and life.

  Did I look like that once? Did I have that glow, just because of how old I was? Or rather, how old I wasn't?

  Stop it, Calliope. You're not that bloody old, you just work too hard. And you eat too much crap. Find a life, like Stan always says. Go to the gym. You've got good bones.

  As she mulled over the dubious value of good bones, something her mother had always assured her she had when a younger Calliope was feeling particularly unpretty, Elisabetta appeared again from the bedroom, a towel around her head, the rest of her now dressed in a black knit top and a pair of black 'chutes slashed with insets of glowing white.

  "These are so. . . ." She waved at the silky trousers. "I mean, I know they're utterly cutting, but they're so much more comfortable than that latex shit."

  "Cutting. . . ?" asked Calliope, knowing even as she did so that she was just confirming her own official middle-agedness.

  Elisabetta grinned. "Cutting edge. Meaning old-fashioned. It's just something this friend of mine says." She gave her hair a last rub, then ceremoniously draped the towel over the door handle. Which, Calliope reflected, for someone in her early twenties probably represented "not leaving a mess."

  "It was really nice of you to let me use your shower. It's so far back to my place, and the traffic. . . ." She bent for her bag, then straightened up. "Oh, and thanks for the drink, too."

  "No problem. I enjoyed it." Calliope considered some further affirmation but could not come up with anything that didn't sound utterly stupid in mental rehearsal. I love your company and I have weird fantasies about you all the time? I'd like to be genetically reengineered to have your babies? I drink three gallons of coffee a day just to watch you walk around dropping salads on peoples' tables, so it was quite nice to have you naked at my place, even in the next room?

  "I really want to go to this party. My friend's house-sitting, and the people told her it was okay to have it—they've got this amazing place, with walls, like a castle. And you can have fireworks every night. They're not real, they're just holograms or something, but my friend says it's wonderful." She pushed damp hair out of her eyes and looked at Calliope. "Hey, maybe you'd like to go. You want to?"

  Something squeezed at her heart a little bit. "I'd love to." Something else squeezed—her conscience? "But I can't. Not tonight. I have to meet someone." Am I closing a door? she wondered nervously. "My partner. My work partner. About work."

  Elisabetta regarded her solemnly for a moment, then returned to the task of rummaging around in her bag. But when she looked up, she wore a smile that was both amused and ever, ever so slightly shy. "Hey, do you like me?"

  Calliope carefully leaned back on her chair, just to stop herself drumming her fingers nervously on the tabletop. "Yes, Elisabetta. I do. Of course I do."

  "No, I mean do you like me?" The smile was still shy, but challenging, too. Calliope was not entirely sure she wasn't being teased or mocked in some way. "Are you . . . are you interested in me?"

  Further obfuscation was not going to work, although it was tempting. Calliope realized that after almost a decade and a half of police work, after sitting in interrogation rooms facing rapists and robbers and murderous psychopaths, she couldn't think of a thing to say. After what seemed like half an hour, but was probably three seconds, she cleared her throat.

  "Yes." That was as much as she could manage.

  "Hmmm." Elisabetta nodded, then slung her bag over her shoulder. She still seemed to be enjoying some secret joke. "I'll have to think about that." As she reached the door, she turned, her smile wide now. "Got to fly—see you later!"

  Calliope sat in her chair for a long minute after the door whooshed closed, unmoving, as stunned as if she had been hit by a car. Her heart was hammering, a
lthough nothing had really changed.

  What the hell am I supposed to do now?

  "Technically," Stan Chan said after a short silence, "this should be the portion of the conversation where you ask me, 'and how was the big meeting, Stan?' I mean, now that we've spent twenty minutes or so talking about some waitress I don't remember."

  "Oh, Jesus, Stan, I'm sorry." She stared at the bowl of cocktail crispies, then defiantly took another handful. "I really am. I haven't forgotten about it. It's just . . . I've been out of circulation a long time, what with one thing and another. I forgot how much like shooting some weird drug it is. Does she like me, should I care, what does that little thing mean. . . ? Damn, see, I'm doing it again. Tell me about what happened, please. I'm getting sick of listening to myself, anyway."

  "That's why you and I make such good partners. We agree on so many things."

  "Die, China-boy."

  "You'll never take me down, you goat-chasing lemon."

  "I'm glad we've got that straightened out."

  Stan nodded happily, then sobered. "I'm afraid that's going to be the highlight of the evening."

  "So they didn't go for it," One of the reasons she had been wasting time with waitress-trivia had been a bad feeling about Stan's meeting with the department brass.

  "Not only didn't they go for it, they pretty much made it clear that they thought a couple of garden-variety homicide dicks should keep their noses out of things they couldn't understand."

  "Meaning the Real Killer case."

  "Yep."

  "Did you ask them about the Sang-Real thing I was thinking about? The whole King Arthur and the Grail idea?"

  "Yes, and they informed me that they'd thought of it themselves a long time ago, and had beaten it into the dust. Looked up Arthurian scholars, checked the seating lists for Parzival in case the guy's a closet Wagner nut, every angle they could think of. I have to admit, it sounds like they were pretty thorough."

  "So basically, then, the answer was 'piss off.' "

  "That sums it up pretty well, Skouros. They already decided once that Merapanui wasn't anything to do with their serial killer. And the captain was there, too—did I mention that? She thinks it's a lot more likely that minor villain Buncie got his dates wrong than he saw Johnny Dread alive after his check-out certificate, and she's also beginning to wonder why we're putting so much time into this case, since it's five years old and—in your own words when they gave it to us, Skouros—'as dead as good manners' " He shrugged.

  "The captain. . . ." Calliope leaned forward, thoughts of Elisabetta's shoulders shining with water drops vanishing quickly as she realized what Stan was trying to tell her. "Oh, God. Does that mean. . . ?"

  Stan nodded. " 'Fraid so. She basically said we should wrap it up and put it away. She asked me if we'd found any actual evidence that our Johnny was still among the living, and I had to admit we hadn't."

  "But . . . damn." Calliope slumped. There wasn't any, of course, not hard evidence, not the kind you could even take to a prosecutor. She felt like she had been hit in the stomach with a club. The whole thing was a structure built on guesswork—the kind of paranoid fantasy that kept thousands of net nodes busy. But she knew it wasn't pure fantasy—that the hunches were built on something. And Stan knew it, too. "Didn't you argue?"

  "Of course I did." For a moment he showed a flash of genuine hurt. "What do you take me for, Skouros? But she pointed out that while we were devoting so much time to this five-year-old case, people were getting murdered in new and original ways all the time, and the department is understaffed as it is. It was hard to argue with her."

  "Yeah. I'm sorry, Stan. You were the one who had to listen to it." She scowled and picked a piece of ice out of her drink, rubbing it along the table so it left a trail of moisture. "It's probably just as well I wasn't there. I probably would have screamed at her."

  "Well, did you put the afternoon to some other good use? Besides inviting people over to use your shower?"

  She winced. That hurt—despite all the unpaid overtime she had put in lately, she had fretted over leaving half an hour early just to catch the end of Elisabetta's shift at Bondi Baby. "I didn't just spend the entire day trying to get laid, Chan, honestly. But if they're going to pull us off Merapanui, there's not much point talking about what I found, because it isn't much."

  "Not pull—pulled."

  "You mean . . . we're off it?"

  "We're reassigned as of 1800 hours today." Stan did not often show real emotion, but his quicksilver features turned leaden. "It's over, Calliope. Sorry, but the captain made it very clear. Merapanui goes back in the 'do not resuscitate' file and Monday morning we go back to work on the latest street-beast bashings and alley slashings." He grinned bleakly. "We would have solved it, partner. We just ran out of time."

  "Shit." Calliope was not going to cry, even in front of Stan, but the wave of frustration and anger that washed through her definitely made her eyes smart. She slammed the piece of ice down on the tabletop; it squirted from her fingers and caromed off a napkin holder onto the floor. "Shit."

  There wasn't much else to say.

  It was always strange, this sensation of intrusion. She thought of it as being somehow very male, which probably explained why most hackers and crackers were men. Burglars, too. And explorers. And rapists, of course.

  Which did not really explain where she herself fit in, but it was hard to deny the wired-up pleasure Dulcie always felt when she found her way into someone else's system.

  Her system was chewing up machine language, but it was slow going; not only did the J Corporation have all the usual state-of-the-art security gear, but the really important stuff she wanted was also buried under a tremendous amount of VR code. This made breaking into the vaults of the J Corporation even more like burglary than the usual foray: information could actually be seen as old-fashioned paper files in cabinets, the different sections of the massive system as rooms in some near-endless office building. Not that Dulcie bothered with any of these real-world imitations, but she could tell that if she wanted to, a few adjustments would set the whole thing unrolling in front of her like a game, virtual representations of gates and vault doors, steely-eyed security guards, and all kinds of things. Was it just that in fifty years of living entirely online Felix Jongleur had found time to add a human-friendly facade to everything? Or was something more complicated at work?

  Maybe he's like Dread, she thought. A bit of an illiterate when it comes to technology, but still wants to be able to access everything because he doesn't really trust anybody but himself. That would certainly make sense if the stories about his immense age were true, since Jongleur would have been an old man already by the time the Information Era had begun.

  She filed these questions about Jongleur away for possible later use, but the idea had set off a few interesting sparks. Could something like that be the key to unlock Dread's own hidden storage? Some obvious thing that a technophile like Dulcie Anwin wouldn't normally consider—something that might not even occur to her? Several days had passed since she had stumbled across her employer's hiding place, but it still nagged her thoughts.

  Not now, she told herself. There's work to do here, with Jongleur's files. And I sure don't want Dread scorched at me.

  Not only that, she realized—she wanted to impress him. Something in Dread's self-confidence and self-involvement pulled up a corresponding need in her, a need to prove herself.

  Well, even if he's the toughest, coldest son of a bitch in the world, he couldn't get into the J Corporation files by himself. But I can. And I will.

  She did, eventually, but it took almost twenty-four hours.

  As it turned out, none of the passwords or other bits of Grail network information that Dread had passed along to her proved much use at all. She was thrown back on old-fashioned methods and was glad she had come prepared. But even with the best gear that money and shady connections could provide, there was still a great deal of waiting. She left
the building several times to take walks—trips she kept short, despite her need for fresh air and sunshine, because the neighborhood made her nervous—and curled up once for a couple of hours of uneasy sleep, which was punctuated by a dream of long hospital corridors, in the dream she was searching for a little animal of some kind that had been lost, but the corridors were starkly white and empty and the search seemed endless.

  When her customized Krypton gearstripper finally gave her the hole she needed, she jumped up, clapped her hands, and whooped, riding an electrifying surge of adrenaline—but the elation did not last long. The actual truth of breaking into the J Corporation's information system was in some way worse than the grim hospital dream. At least there she had been searching for something, however hard to find; now, with the break-in accomplished, she was forced to confront the ridiculous complexity of the task before her.

  Dread, with the nonchalance of someone who didn't understand what he was asking, had told her he wanted anything of interest about the Grail network, but especially anything pertaining to the Otherland operating system. At the same time, he had made it very clear that he didn't want her examining the data too closely herself—a stricture which had made her snort loudly while listening to his original message.

  Right, she had thought. Like they're just going to label all their file material to facilitate easier industrial theft. "Don't bother to read this: trust us, it's important."

  Now that the exhilaration of cracking the system was gone, the weight of the actual task depressed her. She had no idea how she'd ever find the things Dread wanted. The amount of information that lay before her was staggering, the accumulated institutional knowledge of one of the world's larger multinational corporations. And the Grail network information might not even be included—it was an important secret, after all, wasn't it? At the very least, it certainly wasn't going to be helpfully labeled.