by Tad Williams
"I think it is time for another rest," !Xabbu said. "We have been walking a long time now."
"And nothing is different," she said bitterly. "Is it just going to be like this forever? It could, couldn't it? Huh? Just go on forever, I mean. It's not a real place."
"I suppose." !Xabbu dropped easily into a crouch, showing no effects from the all-day march that had Sam's legs trembling with fatigue. "But it doesn't seem . . . what is the word? Likely. Logical."
"Logical." She sniffed. "That sounds like Renie."
"It does sound like her," said !Xabbu. "I miss her—always thinking, wondering, trying to make sense of every detail." He looked up at a movement nearby, something cresting the low riverside hill they had just descended. It was Jongleur, trudging after them with that grim tenacity that Sam found almost admirable. His body might be relatively young and healthy, that of a fit middle-aged man, but it was clear Jongleur himself had no recent practice in moving such a body for very long and was feeling the endless walk even more than she was.
"I still hate him," Sam said quietly. "I utterly do. But it's hard to, you know, keep it up when you see someone all the time, isn't it?"
!Xabbu did not answer. He and the older man were no longer naked since the Bushman had woven them both a sort of kilt from the long river grasses during their rest stops, and Sam had to admit it made her a little more comfortable. She thought of herself as modern and un-shockable, but it was strange enough having !Xabbu naked all the time, and herself nearly so; to have to confront the raw physical reality of Felix Jongleur for days on end had made her feel like she couldn't quite get clean.
"Not that we have days around here," she said aloud. "Not really."
!Xabbu looked at her curiously.
"Sorry. I was thinking out loud." Sam frowned. "But it's true. It doesn't get dark or light here like a normal place. There's no sun. It's more like someone gets up in the morning and switches on a big light, then turns it off again at night."
"Yes, it is strange. But why should it be anything else? It is not real, after all."
"It's real enough to kill us," said Jongleur as he stopped beside them.
"Thank you, Aardlar the Cheerful Barbarian." Sam only realized after she said it that she was quoting one of Orlando's jokes.
!Xabbu wandered a little way down the riverbank. As Jongleur caught his breath, Sam watched her small, slim friend picking his way through the reeds. He misses her so much, but he doesn't talk about it. He just wants to keep walking, walking, wants to keep looking for her. She tried to imagine what it felt like, tried to picture what she would feel if Orlando were still alive and lost somewhere in this alien landscape, but it made her too sad. At least there's a chance he might find Renie.
"We should go on," !Xabbu called. "It is hard to tell how many hours of light we have."
Jongleur rose without a word of complaint and resumed his plodding march. Sam sped up to catch !Xabbu.
"This place all looks just the same," she said. "Except that sometimes it starts to look . . . I don't know . . . transparent again. Like when we first came here." She pointed to a distant line of hills. "See? They looked okay before, but now they don't look quite real."
!Xabbu nodded his head wearily. "I can make no more sense of things than you."
"How about the other side of the river?" Sam asked, half-hoping to distract him. "Maybe Renie's over there."
"You can see as well as I can that the land is even more flat there," !Xabbu told her. "There are at least some trees and plants by the river on this side that might block her from our view until we were right beside her." His somber look deepened: Sam did not need him to say that it would be especially true if Renie were lying unconscious or dead.
A cold shudder ran down her back. She wished she could remember some of the prayers they had taught her in Sunday school, but the youth pastor had been bigger on sing-alongs than on the nuts and bolts of what to do when you and your friends were marooned in an imaginary universe.
Remembering the youth group, and a boy with braces named Holger who—much against her wishes—had tried to kiss her at the Overnight Retreat campfire ceremony, Sam walked several steps before she realized that !Xabbu had stopped. She turned, and the stunned look on his face made her think for a moment that the worst had happened, that he had seen Renie's legs protruding from beneath a bush, or her body floating facedown in the river. She whirled to follow his angle of sight, but to her relief saw only a small cluster of trees on an otherwise empty hillock of grass close by the water.
"!Xabbu. . . ?"
He dashed past her toward the trees. Sam hurried after him.
"!Xabbu, what is it?" He was touching one of the branches, drawing his fingers slowly along the bark. His silence, his strange, devastated expression brought Sam close to tears. "!Xabbu, what's wrong?"
He looked at her face, then down at her feet. She made a move toward him but he grabbed her arm with surprising strength. "Do not move, Sam."
"What? You're frightening me!"
"This tree. It is the one to which Renie tied the piece of cloth." He waved the strip of frayed white fabric that he had been carrying in his hand like a holy relic since they had discovered it.
What are you talking about we left that behind two days ago!"
"Look down, Sam." He pointed at the ground. "What do you see?"
"Footprints. So what. . . ?" And then she understood.
A trail of her own footprints led back, showing where she had just crossed the powdery soil. But there were dozens more all around, mixed in with many others, including !Xabbu's own telltale small prints, more slender even than her own—far too many to have just been made. She put her foot down in one of the older tracks. It was a perfect fit.
"Oh, my God," she said. "That's too scanny. . . ."
"Somehow," !Xabbu said, his voice as miserable as she had ever heard it, "we have come back to our starting place."
Although the swift turn into nightfall was still at least an hour away, !Xabbu had made a fire: neither he nor Sam felt much interest in going any farther. The thin, silvery flames, which usually lent a homely atmosphere to their camps, at the moment seemed merely alien.
"It doesn't make any sense," Sam said again. "We never went more than a little way from the river. Even without a sun, we couldn't be that lost . . . could we?"
"Were there not our own footprints on this ground, I still could not forget this place—I could not mistake it for another," !Xabbu said forlornly. "Not the tree where we found a sign that Renie was alive and looking for us. Where I grew up, we know trees like we do people—better, since the trees stay in one place while people die and the wind blows their footprints away." He shook his head. "I knew for a long time that the land looked very much the same, but I tried to make myself believe I was mistaken."
"But that still doesn't explain how we could get so utterly lost!" Sam said. "Especially you—it just seems wrong."
"Because you still believe that you are in a real world," said Jongleur sharply. He had been silent for almost an hour; his sudden words startled them.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Sam demanded. "We still have up and down, don't we? Left and right? We followed the river through that whole impacted network of yours. . . ."
"But this is not my network," Jongleur interrupted. "That was planned by technicians, engineers, designers-conceived by humans, for humans. Left, right, up, down—very useful if you are human. Less meaningful for the Other."
!Xabbu looked at him bleakly but said nothing.
"Are you saying that everything just . . . changes here?" Sam asked. "That there are no rules?"
Jongleur picked a twig off the ground. Despite the occasional changes in the refractory quality of the land, Sam found it frustrating to see how normal everything looked, how ordinary, in a place that could play them such a terrible trick.
"It could be that we will find a place where the 'rules,' as you call them, are almost nonexistent," the old man sai
d, rolling the long twig between his fingers. "But I suspect that there are indeed firm rules here—just not the sort we expect to find." He leaned forward and cleared a space in the dirt with his forearm, then used the twig to draw a row of small circles laid out side by side like a line of pearls. "The Grail network is set up something like this," he said. "Each circle a world." He drew a single stroke all the way from one end of the series of circles to the other—a strand on which the pearls hung. "The great river runs all through it, connecting every world to another world at each end. If you never left the river, used only those gates at either end of the simulation worlds, you would still eventually pass through every world before coming back to the beginning and starting again."
Sam studied the scrawl. "So? Why doesn't that work here? How did we lose the river?"
"I do not believe we did."
"How can that be?"
"Because there is no reason this world should be linear, as the Grail network is. We assume a river must have a source and an outflow, but even the connecting river of my network does not truly begin anywhere or end anywhere." Jongleur wiped out the string of pearls, then made a new circle, larger this time, with another squiggly circle inside it. "This place has even less reason to follow the model of a real world. I suspect what we have been doing is following the river here," he touched the wobbly circle with the end of the twig, "to here." He followed the squiggle all the way around until he reached the spot where it had started.
Sam stared. Beside her, !Xabbu was watching with more interest than he had shown in an hour. "So . . . that's all there is?" she asked. "We've seen the whole place? Just once around the bagel and we're done?" She shook her head, almost angry. "That's too woofie to be true. For one thing, if we've gone all the way around the whole world, where was Renie? And that friend of yours, Klement? They couldn't just disappear."
But maybe she could, Sam thought suddenly. Into a hole. Into a river. Lost. Lost like Orlando. . . .
"Perhaps the model is even more strange," said Jongleur. At that moment he seemed almost normal, like one of her teachers—not a chosen companion, but not an arch-villain either. And like her better teachers, he actually seemed interested in what he was talking about. Sam remembered that this was a man who, whatever his methods, had set out to solve the problem of human mortality.
Like, that Greek guy in the myths, who stole the secret of life from the gods. Orlando would remember his name.
Jongleur had wiped away his other drawings and replaced them with the largest circle yet, this one filled with half a dozen concentric wavy circles, so that the whole looked something like a watery bull's-eye. "Then consider this," he said. "Perhaps there are more worlds concealed within this world—many more, like Russian dolls. But instead of the river being the conduit between them, it is a barrier instead. So instead of following the river," he traced one of the river-rings back to his starting point, "which only brings us back to our starting point, we must instead cross over the river, into the next world." He drew a line from one ring, across the wavy river line, and into the next ring inward. "There is no need to mimic real-world geometry here. The self-elected god of this place doesn't know much about the real world, after all."
Sam stared at the bull's-eye. "Hang on—that just scans. Look out there—look!" She pointed to the far side of the river, its low hills and river meadows still glowing in the directionless light. "Like !Xabbu said, we'd have seen Renie if she was over there. And besides, if it is another world, then your operating system doesn't have much imagination, because it's just like this one!"
Jongleur's self-satisfied chuckle made Sam want to hit him. "Just because you can see it does not mean it's there, child."
"What?"
"There are many places in the Grail network where only one side of the river was built. Those who try to reach that other side find that although they can see it, they never manage to reach it—but still the illusion of two sides is maintained. If we managed to cross that river somehow, who knows where we would be? Or what we would see if we looked back at this spot. . . ?"
The twilight was upon them, and it was getting hard to see the far side anyway. Sam was too tired and depressed to stay interested in a discussion of yet another mystery. Even if Jongleur was right, even if they could make sense of it and find Renie, maybe even find the Other itself, they would still be exactly nowhere. Sam remembered the Other, its cold presence, the way it had made the cartoon Freezer a hole into complete nothingness. . . .
I wonder what Mom and Dad are doing right now? she thought suddenly. They can't be at the hospital all the time, watching me. Her loneliness was touched with something like jealousy. Maybe they're home eating dinner. Watching something on the net. Mom calling Grandma Katherine. . . .
!Xabbu was still looking at the river. "There is someone there." He sounded very calm, but Sam knew better—she had learned something about him in their days together.
"Somebody where?" She sat up, surveying the now-shadowy farther bank. "I don't see anyone."
"In the reeds at the edge of the river." He stood. "It is a human shape."
Sam could see only the faint movement of the stalks, a wavering wall of gray. "Is it . . . can you see who it is?" She tried to keep excitement out of her voice, having just realized it was just as likely to be the zombie Klement as Renie. It might even be Jecky Nibble or one of the other strange creatures from a couple of nights ago.
Something was indeed clambering out of the reeds—something very human in its shape and movements.
Her moment of hope lasted only until !Xabbu's next words, spoken in a voice so flat that Sam could only guess at the pain behind it. "It is a man." He had been poised, pulled taut like a bowstring, ready to run down the slope. Now she saw him sag, even the possibility of danger less important than the fact of loss.
The stranger raised his hands in the air. "Don't run!" he called. "I cannot stand to spend another night in the cold!"
He was limping, and the black trousers and loose white shirt he was wearing were badly torn and pink with washed-out blood. If he was faking, trying to lull them, Sam thought, he was doing a very good job of it. He staggered like a runner in the last meters of a grueling marathon and appeared to be dripping wet as well. !Xabbu watched his approach with a very strange expression on his face, but he did not seem frightened.
The stranger was of more or less ordinary size, his body older than hers, younger than Jongleur's, and very fit. Except for the bedraggled black mustache and wet hair, he was quite good-looking in what Sam thought of as a tanned, netsoap-actor sort of way, and seemed to be in the peak of life and health.
"Oh, share your fire, please," he begged as he stumbled the last few steps toward them. When none of them said anything, he threw himself down beside the flames, shivering. "Thank God. There is nothing good to make a raft here—the one I made keeps sinking. All last night I spent, wet and freezing. I saw your fire, but could not reach it. I have been following you. Ah, God, this empty, miserable place."
Sam was surprised that !Xabbu had not made the stranger welcome. She looked to him for a cue, but the small man still seemed oddly distracted. "We don't have much to give you," she said, "not even a blanket. But you can certainly get warm at our fire."
"Thank you, young lady. You are very kind." The stranger tried to smile but his teeth were chattering too briskly to hold it for more than a moment. "You do me a favor, and Azador does not forget favors."
"We should go get more wood," !Xabbu said suddenly, touching Sam's arm. "Come with me and we can carry back enough to last all night."
!Xabbu walked very close to her as he led her toward a copse of trees farther up the meadow where he had gathered the first batch of deadfall. "Do not look back," he whispered to her. "Don't you remember the name Azador?"
"It . . . it sounds familiar, now that you mention it."
"He traveled with Paul Jonas for a while. Before that, with Renie and me. The lighter—the access device—came from
him."
"Oh my God! You're dupping, aren't you?" She fought the urge to look back. "But what's he doing here?"
"Who knows? But what is important is that he doesn't know we recognize him. You see, he knows me only in the shape of a baboon."
"You don't want him to know who you are?"
"We will learn more if he thinks us all strangers. At least we will be more likely to notice if he tells lies." !Xabbu frowned. "But now that I think about it, this is a very complicated problem. From what Paul Jonas said, this man calls himself a victim of the Grail Brotherhood. If he finds out who Jongleur is. . . ." He shook his head. "And since Renie and I used our real names in front of him, you cannot call me by name. But if you call me something else, some false name, Jongleur will notice."
"This is making my head hurt," she said as they reached the trees. "Maybe we should just kill him." !Xabbu turned to her, eyes wide. "I'm joking, utterly!"
"I do not like such jokes, Sam." !Xabbu bent and began picking up branches from the ground.
"Look," she said as she filled her arms with deadfall, "it wasn't a very nice joke, okay. Seen. But if we can't use Renie's name in front of him, if we can't use your name, if we can't talk about anything that's really going on, that's going to slow us down. What's more important, fooling this guy or finding Renie?"
!Xabbu nodded slowly. "Of course you are right, Sam. Let us just see what Azador has to say for himself tonight—it is normal for us to ask him what brings him to our campfire—and then we will try to make sense of things."
"Of course you would want to know my story," Azador said expansively. The fire had warmed him; but for his swollen ankle and a certain damp-dog look to his upper lip, he seemed completely recovered. "It is full of danger and excitement—even, if I must say it, heroism. But what you really wish to know is, how is it that Azador comes to you in this godforsaken place, yes?"
Sam wanted to roll her eyes, but restrained herself. "Yes."
"Then I will tell you a secret." The handsome newcomer leaned forward, raising his eyes and looking from side to side in a children's-theater gesture of confidentiality. "Azador has been following you for a long time."
