Sea of Silver Light o-4

by Tad Williams

  "Wait a minute, Vivien. Hold on." The weight on Ramsey's neck suddenly felt like a ton. "Somebody came to your house? And went through Orlando's files?"

  "One of them gave me his card, I think. . . ." She blinked, looked around. "It's around here somewhere . . . hold on."

  As she wandered out of range of the screen, Ramsey tried to hold down the sudden rush of panic. Don't, he warned himself. Don't do it—you'll turn into one of those professional paranoids. It could have been actual researchers, maybe from the hospital, maybe from some government task force. Tandagore's been getting press lately, some real officials may be feeling the heat. But he didn't believe it. Even if they're with the Grail, so what, man, so what? Just slow flow, man. You never even talked to Orlando Gardiner about any of this stuff—never even met the kid, except as a warm body in a coma bed. But the bug. Beezle Bug. If they ever find that gear, the Beezle program, what has it got in its memory?

  He had managed to calm himself into near-fibrillation by the time she returned.

  "I can't find it," she said. "It was just a name and a number, I think. If I find it, do you want me to send you the information?"

  "Yes, please."

  She was silent a moment. "It was a nice service. We played some songs he really liked, and some of the people from that game he played showed up. Some others from that Middle Country sent a kind of tribute that they played on the chapel wallscreen. Full of monsters and castles and things like that." She laughed, a sad little laugh, but it seemed to crack the mask: her jaw trembled, her voice hitched. "They . . . they were just kids! Like Orlando. I had been hating them, you know. Blaming them, I guess."

  "Look, Vivien, I'm not your attorney, not in any official way, but if anyone else comes around wanting to look at Orlando's files, I strongly advise you not to let them. Not unless they're the police and you're damn sure that they are who they say. Understand me?"

  She raised an eyebrow. "What's going on, Mr. Ramsey?"

  "I . . . I can't really talk. I promise I'll tell you more when I can." He tried to think—were they in any danger, Vivien and Conrad? He couldn't imagine how. The last thing these Grail folks would want to do would be to make an even bigger news story out of another Tandagore tragedy. "Just . . . just. . . ." He sighed. "I don't know. Just take care of each other. I know it doesn't mean anything right now, but there's a chance your suffering won't be completely pointless. That doesn't make anything better, and I can only guess at how terrible this is for you, but. . . ." There was really nothing else he could think of to say.

  "I'm not quite sure what you mean, Mr. Ramsey." She had retreated a little, either out of reflexive distrust of anything that might force her to engage the horror more deeply, or simply because the effort of having a human conversation had finally worn her out. "Never mind, Ms. Fennis. Vivien. We'll talk again." He let her end the conversation and disconnect. Just now, that was the only thing he could give her.

  Sellars sensed his mood and was kind enough to let Ramsey slump silently on the couch for a while, pretending to watch the wallscreen. It was a model at least twenty years off the showroom floor, a plasmacolor that stuck out from the wall a full two inches, the top of the frame speckled with dust, its screen only slightly larger than the ghastly painting of a sailboat that hung over the couch.

  "I'm suddenly remembering how much I hate motels," Ramsey said. The ice in his drink had melted, but he couldn't even sit up straight, much less walk out to the ice machine in the hall. "The bad paintings, the weird-colored furniture, the grit you find in all the corners if you look too closely. . . ."

  Sellars bobbed his head and smiled. "Ah, but you see, Mr. Ramsey, it's all a matter of perspective. I spent decades in a small house that was my prison cell. More recently, I lived for several weeks in a damp concrete tunnel under Major Sorensen's base. I find a certain pleasure in having seen several motel rooms in the last few days, even if the decor is something less than engaging."

  Ramsey swore under his breath. "Sorry. That was self-centered. . . ."

  "Please." Sellars raised a thin finger. "No apologies. I had no hope of allies, and now I find I have several. You are a volunteer for a dangerous mission—you're entitled to complain about the accommodations."

  Catur Ramsey snorted. "Yeah, and even I have to admit I've seen lots worse. Just . . . just in a kind of twisted mood. The call to Orlando's parents. . . ."

  "Bad?"

  "Very." He looked up suddenly. "Someone's been to their house—been through Orlando's files." He gave Sellars the details. While Ramsey spoke the runneled face seemed reposed and thoughtful, but the eyes were almost empty, as though already the old man were making inquiries, investigations, reaching out along his invisible web of connections.

  "I'll have to look into it further," was all he said when Ramsey finished, then he sighed. "I am very tired."

  "Do you want to get some sleep? I'd be happy to go out and stretch my legs. . . ."

  "That's not what I mean, but thank you. Have you heard back from Olga Pirofsky?"

  "Not yet." Ramsey was still angry with himself. "I should never have sent that first message—you were right. She must have thought that I was going to shout at her, tell her to turn around and come back at once." He looked at Sellars. "Although I have to say I'm still not sure why I shouldn't be telling her that."

  Sellars stared back at him, the yellow-eyed stare inscrutable, then shook his head, "Damnation," he said softly. "I forget that I no longer have my wheelchair." With great effort he rearranged himself so that he could face Ramsey more directly. "As I said, Mr. Ramsey, I am very tired. I do not have much time left, and all my plans and necessities won't mean anything when that time is up. As Ms. Dickinson once put it, "Because I did not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me. . . ." His head swayed on his thin neck.

  "You're . . . sick?"

  Sellars laughed, a dry sound like wind across the top of a pipe. "Oh, Lord, Mr. Ramsey. Look at me—I haven't been well in fifty years. But I have been better than I am at the moment, that's certain. Yes, I'm sick. I'm dying. There is the irony of all this—I'm doing the same thing the Grail Brotherhood is doing, trying to outrace a failing physical shell. But they want to preserve what burns inside them. I will accept extinguishment gratefully, if only my work is done."

  Ramsey still did not feel close to understanding this strange man. "How long do you have?"

  Sellars let his hands fall into his lap, where they lay like crossed twigs. "Oh, perhaps a few months if I don't exert myself—but what are the odds of that?" He showed his teeth in a lipless grin. "I am extended so far that I could work twenty-four hours every day without moving out of a chair, and now I have the added pleasure of traveling in the wheel-well of Major Sorensen's van." He held up his hand. "No, please, pity is not what I'm asking for. But there is something else you can do, Mr. Ramsey."

  "What's that?"

  Sellars sat quietly for what seemed to Catur Ramsey half a minute. "Perhaps," he said at last, "it would help if I explained some things first. I have not told you or the Sorensens everything there is to know about me. Are you surprised?"

  "No."

  "I didn't think you would be. Let me tell you one of the less interesting, but perhaps not entirely irrelevant things I haven't mentioned. Actually, Major Sorensen is likely to know this, since he has my personal history in quite excruciating detail. I'm not an American. Not by birth. I was born in Ireland—well, Northern Ireland, as that part of it was known in those days. My first language is Gaelic."

  "You don't sound Irish. . . ."

  "I came here to live with an aunt and uncle when I was very young. My father and mother belonged to a rather odd Catholic sect in Ulster. They both died early—that is a story in itself—and I was sent to America. But while they were alive, I was raised to be a soldier of the faith, and probably would have been one if they'd survived."

  "You mean, like . . . the Irish Republican Army?"

  Oh, much smaller and much less responsib
le. A splinter group that formed during the days when the peace process had begun in earnest, and which was never reconciled. But this is all beside the point."

  "Sorry."

  "No, no." Sellars nodded gently. "In this mad hash of stories we're all living, it's hard to know what is relevant, what is not. But the fact is, I was raised in a very Catholic household. And now that the end of my labors is upon me, Mr. Ramsey, I find that I want the chance to confess."

  It took a few seconds for him to make sense of it. "You want to confess . . . to me?"

  "After a fashion." Sellars laughed his hooting laugh again. "We have no priest in our company. As a lawyer, aren't you next in line?"

  "I really don't understand."

  "It's not a religious thing, Mr. Ramsey. I'm just very tired and lonely. I need someone to help me, and the first way to help will be to listen. I have been fighting this war by myself for too long. We are in desperate straits, and I no longer trust myself to make all the decisions. But you must understand the whole story."

  Ramsey begged a moment, then went to get a drink of water out of the bathroom sink and splash some on his face. "You make it sound like there are some major undisclosed details here," he said when he came back. "What exactly are you getting me involved with?"

  "My, you are a lawyer, aren't you? Just listen, please, then you can judge for yourself."

  "Why not the major? Or Kaylene Sorensen—she's a smart woman, even if she's a bit old-fashioned."

  "Because I have already put their child in danger several times, and they have Christabel with them now. They cannot be objective."

  Ramsey drummed his fingers on the arm of the couch. "Okay. Talk to me."

  "Good." Sellars slowly lowered his body back against the chair cushions, a process so deliberate it might have been performed by museum curators moving a fragile masterpiece.

  Which I suppose he is, thought Ramsey, If everything he's said is true.

  "First off," Sellars announced, "I did not stumble onto the Brotherhood's project—the Grail network—completely by accident." He frowned. "I will save that bit of the story for later, I think. For now, it's enough to know that as I began to realize what I had found, I watched their progress with growing alarm. And not just for altruistic reasons, Mr. Ramsey. I watched the threat of the Brotherhood with growing despair in large part because I knew it was going to delay the most important of my own projects."

  "Which was. . . ?" Ramsey said after long seconds.

  "Which was to die. Not that such a thing is difficult for me, Mr. Ramsey. On the contrary—with the nanomachinery I have acquired, and my original circuitry, I now have enough control over my own body that I could turn off the blood to my brain with a thought."

  "But . . . why were you still alive, then? Before you found out about the Grail Project?"

  "Because I have been balancing a scale for a long time, Mr. Ramsey. On one side is the normal urge to live, my joys and my interests, solitary and limited as they may be. On the other is the pain. Because of my many surgeries, the things that have grown into my bones and my organs, the strains on my glands . . . it hurts to be me, Mr. Ramsey. My life is very painful."

  "But surely if you have such control, you could turn off the pain?"

  "I did not have as much control over my own functions when I first discovered the Brotherhood as I have gained recently, but yes, even then I could probably have switched off the feelings in my hands, my skin, cut my brain off from my entire body. But then why be alive? There is little enough of the physical in my life—for so long I have lived mostly in my own mind, as prisoners often do. Should I give up the sensation of a breeze on my face? The taste of the few foods I am able to eat?"

  "I . . . I think I understand."

  "And in fact, the time was nearly upon me when the tradeoff was no longer going to be worth it. Then this Grail network reared its head, a problem I could not simply ignore. Still, I did not think I would be needed past the initial stages—I was planting seeds, as it were. I wanted to find a group of trustworthy people, teach them what I knew, and then be free to do as I wished. I even told them my real name, so you can imagine I was not planning to be around long! But things went wrong at the very beginning—the invasion of Atasco's island, the weird behavior of the operating system which prevented the people I rather dubiously call my volunteers from getting offline—and here I am, more needed than ever."

  "So what can I do? Besides listen."

  "Listening is very helpful, do not doubt it. It is an unimaginable pleasure just to be able to talk openly. But I have some very specific needs, too. I'm fighting on many fronts, Mr. Ramsey. . . ."

  "Call me Catur, please. Or even Decatur, if that's too informal."

  "Decatur. A nice name." The old man blinked slowly, summoning back his thoughts. "Many fronts. There is that group, allies of ours, who are literally under siege in South Africa. There are various plans the Brotherhood had already put into action which have to be monitored and in some cases covertly resisted. And most importantly, there is the constant struggle to find and aid those people I've already brought into the Grail network. And that's where you . . . and Ms. Pirofsky . . . come in."

  "I don't understand."

  Sellars fluted a sigh. "Perhaps when I tell you this, Mr. Ramsey, you will understand something of my frustration and weariness. I have been trying to locate and contact my volunteers within the system ever since I was first forced to abandon them in the Atascos' simulation world, but from the moment the Grail network was fully operational, I have found it impossible to get past the network's security. But I have told you a little bit about the operating system, haven't I? Its strange affinity for children? I discovered that if I bring the boy Cho-Cho online, at a certain point in the process, at a high enough level, the operating system will simply let him through. Not me, no matter how I disguise my intrusion—the operating system has always blocked me, sometimes quite painfully—but a real child will be allowed inside."

  "Well, that's good, isn't it?"

  "You do not see the whole problem, Mr. Ramsey. Decatur, excuse me. Imagine that you had a sealed box full of tiny beads, and a single thin needle you needed to push through the wall of the box so that it touched one particular bead, which could be anywhere in the container. How would you do that?"

  "I. . . ." Ramsey frowned. "I wouldn't, I guess. Is it a trick question?"

  "I wish it were. That's my problem—tracking my volunteers. Fortunately, it means that the Brotherhood hasn't been able to track them, either. The one I helped release, Paul Jonas, seems to have eluded them for quite some time."

  "But you did make contact with them a couple of times, didn't you? You said so."

  "Yes. I got Cho-Cho to the right spot. That was a little coup—I was quite proud of myself. Do you know how I did it? The operating system—this quasi-living neural network, or whatever it is—seemed to be fascinated with my volunteers. It paid special attention to them, and by carefully observing its actions, I could roughly track their whereabouts. Let me show you something."

  Sellars gestured, and the jai alai game from South America that Ramsey had been half-watching disappeared. In its place was a strange, fish-eye view of masses of green growing things.

  "That is my Garden, my place of meditation," Sellars said. "Or my tèarmunn, as I would name it in the language of my birth. Every source of knowledge I have is represented there, displayed as trees, moss, flowers, and so on. Thus, what you are looking at is not a garden at all, but the complete, up-to-the-moment picture of all my information.

  "Or rather, what you see is how it looked a week ago. Do you see those dark fungal traces sprouting up through the soil? There, and there? And a large something below the surface there? That was the operating system. A knot like that, a node of activity, showed that a great deal of the system's effort was being expended there. Often—but by no means always—it meant the system was monitoring part of my volunteer task force. As you can see, they have split into sev
eral groups."

  "So you can use a kid like Cho-Cho to get into the system. You can figure out approximately where your people are by the shape of the operating system." Ramsey squinted at the complex green shapes on the wallscreen. "So what's the problem?"

  "That was a week ago. This is now."

  The difference was striking, even to Ramsey. Sellars' garden appeared to have been hit by a killing frost—whole structures gone, others blackened and shriveled. He could not tell what any of it meant, but it was clear something devastating had happened.

  "The operating system. It's . . . gone."

  "Not gone, but vastly reduced, or perhaps withdrawn." Sellars briefly highlighted a few points in the now-barren garden. "It is now operating like a true machine, as if its advanced functions have been demolished. I can make no sense of it. Worse, there is no longer any correspondence that I can use to locate my people within the system. They are lost to me."

  "I can see why you're upset. . . ."

  "There is more. Have you noticed how quiet and sullen the boy Cho-Cho has been today? Last night, we had a very disturbing experience. Even though I could not locate any of my volunteers, I tried to get the boy online just to discover what I could about the current state of the network. We were both nearly killed."

  "What?"

  "The operating system no longer acts in its earlier manner, at least as far as allowing intrusions into the network. There are no more inexplicable exemptions for children—or for anything else. The security of the Grail network, still deadly dangerous for reasons I've never been able to understand, is now utterly seamless. Nothing gets in, nothing comes out."

  Ramsey had to sit and think about this for a while. "So the people you brought into the system are just . . . lost?"

  "At the moment, yes. Completely. It is a very helpless feeling, Decatur. And that is where you come in."