by Tad Williams
It wasn't much of a plan, she knew, but it was the best she'd been able to come up with.
The pad would stay hidden in the room, of course; with two weeks' stay already paid for, it would likely go unnoticed longer here than in the car, which might be found in a couple of days. And so she would be able to keep sending entries to it for rerouting until . . . until whatever happened. So at least Mr. Ramsey would know what had happened to her. Perhaps that would be useful to him with the other things he was doing, trying to help those poor children.
She knew she should make a last circuit of the room, but the thought of Catur Ramsey would not leave her so easily. She flipped open the pad and looked at his last three messages, all of them blinking, tagged "urgent," practically screaming for attention. She knew that it would only make her feel worse to access them, that all his arguments would make good sense but would change nothing. She was terrible at arguing—Aleksandr had teased her with it, made her agree to ridiculous things, then laughed and refused to take advantage. "You are like water, Olga," he would say. "Always, you give way."
But what if there was something else Ramsey wanted to tell her? What if he needed some other kind of permission from her to sell the house? What if the people who had taken Misha had forgotten the veterinarian's name and couldn't get him his medicine?
She knew she was stalling, fearful of the journey in front of her, but now the worry wouldn't go away. Had that been the meaning of the dream, of dear Aleksandr so fretful outside the door, wanting to leave but unable to go?
She made a last circuit of the room, then picked up the pad. She had decided to leave it in the closet, down at the bottom under the extra blankets. There would be no one in the room, so no reason to put in fresh blankets; the motel's underpaid cleaning crew would be unlikely to go searching for extra work.
Olga slid the pad into the back of the closet, then went to the desk and wrote a note on the quaint, old-fashioned note paper—the one thing about the place that had separated it from the dozen or so others in which she had stayed during this trip. Under the "Bayou Suites" heading, she wrote, "I will be hack for this pad. If it must be taken out of the room, please leave it in the motel office, or contact C. Ramsey, atty.," then added his address and signed her name.
She was all the way back to the closet when the thought of little Misha jumped up at her again. What if something had happened? If he did not get his medicine, he would start having those terrible seizures again. She had told them over and over, his new owners, but who knew how much attention people might be paying?
Poor little thing! I gave him away to strangers. Left him behind.
Her eyes swelling with tears again, Olga swore quietly to herself, then sat down on the bed with the pad across her lap and began opening messages.
CHAPTER 18
Making a Witch
NETFEED/NEWS: Mystery Still Surrounds General's Death
(visual: Yacoubian meeting President Anford)
VO: The death of Brigadier General Daniel Yacoubian in a Virginia hotel suite has spawned a surprisingly virulent set of rumors, strangest of which is an assertion by one of the general's bodyguards, Edward Pilger, that he believes Yacoubian was involved in some kind of coup against the American government. Journalist Ekaterina Slocomb, who produced a short documentary on the general for Beltway, an upmarket tabnode, finds that idea hard to swallow.
(visual: Ekaterina Slocomb in studio)
SLOCOMB: "It just doesn't make sense. Yacoubian was friends with a lot of powerful people. Why would he or any of them want to overthrow a government that they already more or less own? Yacoubian was not an ideologue—if anything, he was a kind of ultimate pragmatist. . . ."
One of these days, Renie thought, something that happens to me in this network is going to make sense. But not yet, obviously. A little creature made of mud who called herself the Stone Girl was stumping along determinedly beside her, on either side of the dark, empty street the giant shoes that housed the local inhabitants were shut up tight against the night and its dangers, and this entire world had grown out of silvery nothing right in front of Renie's eyes.
"I still don't understand why you're coming with me," she told the child. "Aren't you supposed to stay at home? You're already in trouble for my sake."
The Stone Girl's face was as shadowy as the street. "Because . . . because . . . I don't know. Because things are going wrong and no one will listen to me. The stepmother never listens." She wiped defiantly at the dark spots of her eyes, and Renie couldn't help wondering how a child made of earth and rock could cry. "The Ending is getting closer, and the Witching Tree isn't there anymore."
"Hang on. I thought you said that's where we were going—to this Witching Tree."
"We are. We just have to find out where it is now."
Renie chewed this over as they made their way out through the outskirts of the shoe-village. It was touching and disconcerting, both. The girl's willingness to push against the normal order of her life made Renie think of Brother Factum Quintus back in the House world—it was hard to imagine someone programming such flexible individuality into any mere simulacrum, but over and over she had seen the evidence. There was something different about this newest simulation, though—something more than the fact it seemed to have been created by the Other itself. A ragged bit of memory was still tickling her, and had been ever since she had first seen the shoe where the Stone Girl and her motley assortment of siblings lived, but it remained out of reach.
So what do I know? That this place is made up from some kind of nursery rhyme—or from lots of them, more likely. I never heard of any Stone Girl in the "Old Lady and the Shoe" rhyme. Martine said she taught the Other a song—that "angel" thing it was singing when we first saw it on the mountaintop. Maybe she taught it some stories, too.
But that still did not scratch the itch at the back of her memory.
They had reached the edge of the dark settlement. There was no moon, only a sort of dully glowing latency to the sky that left it just a shade more purple than black and gave faint shape to the shadowy world. Renie could barely make out the small person walking right next to her. She had just begun to wander what would happen if she lost her little guide when a glowing apparition stepped out in front of them, billowing and moaning.
Frightened, Renie grabbed for the Stone Girl, but her companion shook off her hand. "It's just Weeweekee," she said.
"Stop!" The thing lifted its hand. A glowing ball hung just above it, a flame with no source. "Who goes there?"
"It's me, the Stone Girl."
As they drew closer, the weird apparition blocking their path became only slightly less so—a kind of human-sized rodent in a pale, flowing outfit like a hooded wedding dress. It waved its paw and the hovering ball of fire followed its hand—an impressive display, somewhat undercut by the creature's chubby cheeks and goggling black-bead eyes.
"You should be in bed," the giant marmot, or whatever it was, declared in the voice of a tattletale child. "For it's eight o'clock."
"How can it tell?" This was the first Renie had heard any mention of exact time for longer than she could remember. "How does it know it's eight o'clock?"
"That's just his word for 'dark,'" the Stone Girl explained.
"All children should be in their beds," Weeweekee told her.
"I'm not going to bed. I'm going out to search for the Witching Tree, and she's going with me. So there."
"But . . . but . . . you can't." His voice was swiftly losing any semblance of authority—in fact, getting dangerously near a squeak. "Everyone is to be in bed. I have to rap at all the windows."
"The stepmother threw us both out," asserted the Stone Girl, which was not true, but close enough. "We can't go back."
Weeweekee was getting close to panic now. "Then you can go in somewhere else, can't you? Just . . . go to bed. There must be some other beds, even with all the people sleeping in the street."
"Not for us," the little girl said firmly. "
We are going out into the Wood."
Now the dark eyes widened with horror. "But you can't! It's eight o'clock!"
"Good night, Weeweekee." The Stone Girl took Renie's arm and led her past the creature, whose whiskers and hovering flame were both drooping.
Renie turned to look back at him. The rodent was still standing as if frozen, staring after them with misery clear in every line of his being. Even his filmy robes had lost their animation.
"Oh," said Renie, and suddenly found herself struggling not to laugh. "Oh. He's Wee Willie Winkie. In his nightgown." It came back to her in one piece, like an evocative scent—the paper Mother Goose book her grandmother had given her for her fifth birthday, the pictures bright as candy wrappers. She had been a little disappointed, wishing it were something that moved by itself like the children's stories she saw on their small netscreen, which all featured exciting toys (even though her family couldn't afford most of them) but her mother had given her a discreet push in the back and she had carefully thanked Uma' Bongela and put the book beside her bed.
Only months later, on a day when she had been home from school sick while her mother was out and her father was working, had she finally opened it. The strangeness of some of the words had confused her, but it had caught at her, too, like a window suddenly open into places she could barely imagine. . . .
"Wee Willie Winkie, running through the town
Upstairs and downstairs, in his nightgown
Rapping at the window, crying at the lock,
'Are the children all in bed? For now it's eight o'clock.' "
This recital gained her an irritated look from the Stone Girl. "His name is Weeweekee," she corrected Renie, with the air of someone dealing with the borderline competent.
It took a moment for Renie to realize that even without Weeweekee and his magical candle, she could actually see that expression on her companion's face. "It's getting lighter!"
The Stone Girl pointed to the surrounding hills. A radiant sliver had appeared along the crest—a frighteningly wide sliver. As Renie watched in mingled fascination and unease, the full moon slid up into the sky. It seemed to cover a huge portion of the heavenly firmament, a vast blue-white disk that nevertheless gave scarcely more light than the ordinary variety.
"That's . . . that's the biggest moon I've ever seen."
"You've seen more than one?"
Renie shook her head. Easier just not to talk. This was a dreamworld—probably the dream of something not even human—and wrestling too strenuously with the particulars was useless.
The Stone Girl led her out beyond the village and along the valley floor. Renie saw more dark shapes clinging to the hillsides on either side, the shuttered dwellings of another settlement, leaking light between curtains or sparking from the chimneys, but whether they were more shoes or other articles of clothing she could not tell.
"So where is this tree?" she asked after they had walked for perhaps a quarter of an hour beneath the intrusive but oddly benign moon.
"In the Wood."
"But I thought you said you went looking for it before and it wasn't there."
"It wasn't. The Wood was gone."
"Gone?" Renie pulled up. "Hold on, then where are we going? I don't want to walk all night—I want to find my friends!" The thought that she might be putting distance between herself and !Xabbu, or that worse, he might be out in this same moon-domed night just a short distance away, gave her a fierce, sudden ache. She had been trying not to think about him but it was a precarious sort of ignorance, fragile as a bubble.
The Stone Girl turned to face her, arms akimbo, stubby hands on hips. "If you want answers, you have to come and make a Witch. If you want to find the Witching Tree, you have to find the Wood."
"It . . . it moves?"
Her guide could only shake her head. "I don't understand you. I'm trying to help. Do you want to come with me or not?" There was a pleading note beneath the fierceness.
A sudden idea struck Renie. "Could you make a map? Maybe that would help me understand." She reached down and found a stick, then scratched a line in the dirt—bold, so it would show on the moonlit ground. "Okay, that's the road we just came down. See, I'll draw some shoes to be the houses. These are the hills. And here we are now. Now can you make a picture of where we're going?"
The Stone Girl looked down at the ground for a long moment, then up at Renie, squinting her pockmark eyes as though against a fierce sun. "Before I met you," she asked with a certain delicacy, "did you sort of . . . fall down? Maybe on your head?"
By the time they had reached the thick, scrubby slopes that the Stone Girl said marked the outskirts of the Wood, Renie had begun to realize how impossible the whole thing really was. There would be no map, either for this journey or any other such trip Renie might want to make. Apparently, there were no such thing as maps in this place, and for a very good reason.
It looks like there's just not much normal here-to-there proximity, she decided. I should have thought of it. The human-built simulations are made to be navigated by humans just like they were part of the real world. But why should a machine intelligence try to duplicate something like physical proximity or geographical continuity that it never uses or experiences itself?
As far as she could tell, some things like the villages did have implied maps, or at least a sort of three-dimensional organization and stability that allowed the inhabitants to find their way around their home turf, but once you left the familiar locale there were apparently no memorized routes to other places within the world, even it the inhabitants had visited those places before.
In fact, the Stone Girl had been coping bravely with what Renie now realized must seem very strange, fundamentally wrong questions. "You just . . . find the Wood," she explained again. "It's always in front of you until you walk for the right amount of time, then you look for things."
"Things like . . . what? Shapes? Trees you've seen before?"
The Stone Girl shrugged. "Just . . . things that seem like the Wood is somewhere near. Like that." She pointed to a vertical stone thrusting from the hillside undergrowth, illuminated by the huge moon.
"That rock?" The finger of pale stone was the size of a truck—certainly a fairly obvious landmark. "You've seen that before, then?"
Her guide shook her head in frustration. "No. There are lots of rocks like that. But tonight it's a close-to-the-Wood kind of rock."
Now Renie was the one reduced to headshaking. Clearly her companion had knowledge she didn't—perhaps transmitted cues that Renie could not receive, or even precoded information being translated as spontaneous recognitions. Whatever it was, Renie didn't understand it. And if it was something precoded, she would never understand it.
As the Stone Girl led her uphill through the scrub growth, Renie pulled the blanket tight around her to protect herself from scratches and tried to imagine what it felt like to live in such a world. But how can I hope to make sense of it? I can't even imagine what it feels like to grow up the way !Xabbu did, to see normal urban life as something strange, and he's a living, breathing person like me, not an artificial construct.
The sharpness of her separation from him came back, this time with a helplessness she hadn't felt before. Is it pointless anyway? she wondered. I feel so strongly for him, I'm so scared we won't make it out of this together—but what then? Even if we survive, how could we have a life together? We're so different. I don't know anything about his background, his people's lives, except the few things he's told me. What would his family think of me?
Renie's steps slowed as her spirits sagged. She forced her thoughts in a different direction.
I still don't know whether or not the people in this world—the Stone Girl, Weeweekee—are really the missing children. But it certainly seems possible. Maybe the Other brought them all here, their consciousnesses, their minds, whatever. She felt a shiver that was not caused by the cool of the night air. Their souls.
And if Stephen is here in this world, h
ow can I find him? How will I recognize him? Would he even know me?
"The Wood is just beginning." Her companion came a little way back down the slope. "This is a bad place to stop—Jinnears, and maybe some Ticks, too, they all like it here on the edges."
"Do you know. . . ." Renie could hardly think of what she wanted to ask. "Do you remember being . . . having a life before this?"
"Before what?"
"Before you lived in the shoe, with the stepmother. Do you remember anything else? Crossing a white ocean? Having a mother or a father?"
The Stone Girl was puzzled and clearly a little worried. "I remember lots of things from before the shoe. Of course I crossed the White Ocean. Who didn't?" She frowned. "But a mother? No. People talk about a mother, but nobody has one." She suddenly became very solemn; the dark holes that were her eyes grew wide. "Where you come from . . . do people have mothers?"
"Some do, yes." She thought of her own, lost so long ago. "Some lucky ones do."
"What do they look like? Are they bigger than stepmothers, or smaller?" Renie had finally struck a topic that interested her companion. "This boy who used to live in the Shoes, but then he went away, he said he remembered a mother, a real one, one that was just his." Her indignant snort was not entirely convincing. "Bragger, we called him."
Renie closed her eyes for a moment, trying to make sense of what little information she'd put together. "Do you all come here as birds? Are you all birds to begin with?"
The Stone Girl laughed loudly, a surprising sound in the evening dark. "All birds? You mean everyone, the people in the Shoes, in the Coats, the people at Bang Very Cross and Long Done Bridge? How could there be so many birds?" She leaned down and poked Renie in the arm. "Now come on. Like I said, there's usually Jinnears out." Renie realized that beginning to make some sense of this world would mean little if they were caught out-of-doors by one of those terrifying creatures. "Okay. Let's keep moving."
