Sea of Silver Light o-4

by Tad Williams

  Renie forced herself to remain calm, although it reminded her unpleasantly of the grotesque patchwork creatures in the Kansas simulation—not only cruelty made monsters, it seemed. As Renie and her friend reached the fire the little creatures rose and greeted them with awkward bows. The tallest, whose shoulders were as high as Renie's waist, asked, "Are you searching?"

  "No," the Stone Girl replied. "Just walking. Are you going to the Well?"

  "Soon. But first we must find what we have lost. And we have lost everything, even our home!"

  One of the other dwarfs was staring right at Renie. "Say Dives," he said mournfully.

  "Um . . . dives," she answered after a moment, wondering whether this was a greeting ritual or some kind of test.

  "No, they're from Say Dives," the Stone Girl whispered.

  "Say Dives is gone!" the leader said, his mouth open from floating rib to floating rib in a gape of woe. "The meadows, the mountains, our beautiful caves! Gone!"

  "The Ending has t–t–taken it all by now," said the one beside Renie, choking back a sob. "When I came home from work, my house was gone—and all my wives! The cats and sacks—all gone, too!" The other dwarfs echoed his misery in a wordless chorus of moans.

  "The stepmothers came and told us we had to run away," the leader said. "The people that we meet here in the Wood say we must go to the Well. But we cannot go until we find our wives and our sacks and all our cats! There is a chance that they escaped!"

  "A man without wives and kits and cats is no man at all," another proclaimed heavily. A deep, tragic silence fell on the gathering.

  "So . . . so you people have stepmothers also?" Renie asked at last, finding herself a seat on a log near the fire, trying very hard not to stare at what to her was a pattern of ghastly deformities. The dwarfs beside her slid down to make room. She had to remind herself that however bizarre this seemed to her, these events were just as terrible to them as to any real-world refugees.

  The shy-eyed fellow beside her, his face set so low on his belly that his belt looked like it must be strangling him, offered her a cup of something that steamed. "Stone soup," he said quietly. "It's good."

  Renie's guide looked over, her face solemn with worry. "You eat . . . stones?"

  The leader shook his head. "We would never harm you, friend—we eat only unliving minerals. Besides, if you will forgive me, you look to be mostly sediment. No offense, but that is not to our taste."

  "No offense taken," the little girl said in relief.

  "Does everyone who lives in . . . in these places . . . do they all have stepmothers?" Renie asked.

  The dwarfs could not cock their heads, since they had no necks, but they bent themselves into several strange positions to indicate surprise. "Of course," said the leader. "How else would we know when danger is near? Who else would guard us when we sleep?" His lower lip drooped toward the fork of his legs. "But they can't stop the Ending."

  So the stepmothers are part of the operating system, Renie decided. A kind of monitoring subroutine—maybe a harsh one, like the wicked stepmothers in all those stories. But where do the monsters, these Ticks and Jinnears, fit in? She tried to think of a nursery rhyme with a tick in it, but the closest she could come up with was "Hickory Dickory Dock," which wasn't very close at all.

  "Where are you from?" one of the dwarfs asked Renie. She looked helplessly at the Stone Girl.

  "Where The Beans Talk," the little girl answered. "But we went to the Witching Tree, and it told us it was time to go the Well."

  It didn't tell me that, Renie thought morosely. It didn't tell me much of anything. A sudden thought led to her to ask, "Have any of you seen any others like me? A brown-skinned man and a girl with skin a little lighter?"

  The dwarfs shrugged sadly. "But the Wood is full of travelers," one said. "Perhaps your family is among them."

  Renie said nothing, struck by the idea. !Xabbu and Sam Fredericks, her family. It was true in a way, and not just in shared skin color. Few people had ever suffered greater hardships with their real families, and certainly no one had suffered anything more consistently peculiar.

  Conversation wound down quickly. The dwarfs had made a heroic effort to be good hosts, but their hearts were clearly not in it, and Renie and the Stone Girl were exhausted. They curled up on the ground to rest while the dwarfs went on talking among themselves in quiet voices full of confusion and loss. Although she had proved herself much less bothered by cold than Renie, the Stone Girl pushed herself tight against Renie's body and within moments seemed to be asleep—so much so that Renie could detect no breathing at all. She wrapped her arms around the compact little form and watched the firelight glimmering in the treetops above her head. She was wandering now in a weird, childish dream-world—a dream-world under siege. She had lost everyone and everything. Of all who had come to Sellars' summoning, only she remained. Even the operating system, the god of this small world, had admitted defeat. What was there left to do?

  I can hold this child, she thought. Even if it's just for one night, I can give her a little comfort, a sense of safety—even if it's an illusion.

  So, as the huge disk of the moon crawled down toward the horizon and Renie eased into a sleep she desperately needed, that was what she did.

  When she awoke, a diffuse glow had spread across the world, a sad gray light that did little to make things seem more hopeful. The dwarfs had gone, leaving only the embers of their fire behind. The Stone Girl was already awake, squatting by the dying fire, poking in the ashes with a stick.

  Renie yawned and stretched. Even in this sickly dawn it was good to have a blanket to wrap around herself, good to have someone to talk to. She smiled at the little girl. "It feels like I slept a long time, but I guess I didn't. So if there's a moon here, why isn't there a sun?"

  The Stone Girl gave her a quizzical look. "Sun?"

  "Never mind. I see our friends are gone."

  "A long time ago."

  "Why didn't they wait for the sun . . . I mean, for morning?"

  "They did. It's been this way since before they left." Renie now noticed for the first time that her companion was frightened. "I don't think there's going to be any more light than this."

  "Oh." Renie glanced around. It was dark, the sky a mournful, shadowy gray. "Oh. Does this . . . happen very often?"

  "That it doesn't turn into day?" The little girl shook her head. "Never."

  Jesus Mercy, Renie thought, does this mean the system's shutting down now? Is this part of the Ending everyone's so afraid of? If the operating system were a person, Renie would certainly have diagnosed severe depression at the very least. "So is the damn thing just going to give up on us?" she said aloud.

  And what if it does? If we're inside it, somehow, do we go, too? It was hard to believe that, locked as they were within the system, subject to damage and death just as in real life, she and her friends would survive a complete collapse of the network.

  And Stephen, and all the other children here, trapped, helpless. . . .

  "We have to get going." Renie struggled to her feet. "To the Well, I guess. But you'll have to lead us there."

  Her guide balanced on her haunches and looked out at the encircling forest. "We need to find a bridge," she said listlessly. "Then we can go to More Very Bush. Or maybe to Counting House. There's a king there," she added.

  Renie wasn't certain she wanted to meet this odd fairy tale's version of royalty—for all she knew, he might incline toward the Alice's Wonderland, off-with-their-heads model. "So we find a bridge." She hesitated. "Does that mean we have to find the river first?"

  The Stone Girl snorted. "Of course."

  "Give me a chance." Renie was glad to see a more normal response from her companion. "I'm just getting the hang of all this."

  What had been mysterious, twinkling fairy-paths in the night had become something less charming now—a series of winding ways through a dank, dark forest—but no less confusing. Even in the glum half-light, Renie could see
other travelers passing through the Wood, although few even made eye contact, let alone stopped to converse. Many had carts or wagons drawn by strangely unconvincing beasts of burden, horses and goats and oxen that seemed to be three-dimensional mock-ups created from children's drawings. Renie recognized a few as refugees from the storybooks of her childhood, like a trio of pigs and a nervous-looking wolf who were traveling together, having apparently made common cause, but there were far more she could not identify, some so bizarre they made the dwarfs look like net-show models. But all the travelers trudging or hurrying through the dim byways of the Wood had one thing in common, the worried expressions on their faces—at least among those that had faces. Some were openly weeping. Others staggered, blank-faced as shock victims.

  The Stone Girl stopped in a clearing to talk with the leaders of a large party, perhaps three dozen refugees in all. As the little girl shared news with a buck deer and a tiny bumblebee-man perched between his antlers, Renie found herself staring at the faces of the group they were herding, looking for Stephen.

  But he won't took like Stephen, she told herself. Which means he could be any one of these—he could be anyone we've seen today!

  Nevertheless, she walked over for a closer inspection.

  "Have any of you seen some people who look like me—with skin like mine?" she asked. Several faces, animal and human, turned to look at her in dull hopelessness. "A little boy, or even a man and a girl? They would be newcomers—people you hadn't seen before."

  "The Wood is full of strangers," said a woman carrying a hedgehog wrapped in a baby blanket. She spoke as if each word were a heavy stone that must be lifted.

  "But I mean real newcomers. From outside." She tried to remember how the others had phrased it. "From beyond the White Ocean."

  The crowd stirred, but only a little. The buck and the bee-man turned to look at her, then resumed their conversation with the Stone Girl.

  "Nobody has crossed the White Ocean in a long time," the hedgehog-mother said. "Since before the Ending began."

  "What does it matter?" asked a fish-faced man. "Who cares?"

  "I care. . . ." Renie began, but she was interrupted by a little boy with a nose as long as a finger.

  "There have so been newcomers," he said shrilly. "Stepmother told me."

  "What kind of newcomers?" Renie asked. "What did they look like?"

  "Don't know." He introduced a long finger into his finger-length nose and began to pick meditatively. "She just said they were strangers, and that strangers were dangerous, and that was why the Ending was going to take away our house."

  "Where was this? Here in the Wood?

  The boy shook his head. "Cobbler's Bench, where our house is." His finger paused. His face grew sad, struggling with the enormity of loss. "Was."

  "And where is that? Are they still there?"

  Another child, this one with the russet ears of a fox, yipped in derision. "Not nohow! The stepmothers chased them out of town!"

  Finger-nose nodded. "They got Weasel to help, 'cause Monkey's sick."

  "Renie!" The Stone Girl was beckoning to her. "We have to go."

  As they left the refugees from Cobbler's Bench behind, Renie tried to stay buoyant. So there were newcomers—someone had seen them. That had to be !Xabbu and Sam. Unless it was Martine and the others . . . Renie had assumed that because they were not on top of the black mountain when the dust settled, Paul and Martine and the rest of her companions had been dispatched somewhere else—but who was to say that this nursery-rhyme world was not that somewhere else. And if everyone was being drawn toward this place called the Well, they would surely all find each other.

  As the gray day wore on into what Renie felt must be afternoon, they found the river at last and began to pick their way along the marshy ground beside it. The dark, gurgling water lulled Renie into a dreamy routine of one-foot-after-another. Strangely, despite all the travelers they had seen in the forest, they met few along the riverside, and those were just as likely to be hurrying in the opposite direction. All wore looks of desperation. None would stop to talk.

  Renie was beginning to wonder about her companion, too. The Stone Girl, previously so steady in her walking that Renie often found herself hurrying to keep up, seemed increasingly tired and confused. Several times she stopped and stared out across the river as though looking for something, although Renie saw only empty forest there.

  At last, as the daylong twilight was just beginning to slide into something deeper and darker, the Stone Girl flopped herself down on a fallen tree. Her little shoulders were rounded, her earthen face somber.

  "I can't find the bridges," she said. "We should have got to one of them by now."

  "What bridges?"

  "The places to cross the river. It's the only way to get out of the Wood unless we go all the way back through the trees to the other river." She made a little snuffling sound. "Then we could go back to Where The Beans Talk. If it's still there."

  "The other river? There's another river?"

  "There's always another river," the Stone Girl said dolefully. "At least there used to be. Maybe that's gone now, too."

  Through careful questioning, Renie at last began to grasp that every single one of these lands—the Wood, the place Renie had met the Stone Girl, even the places she had not seen but had heard of, like More Very Bush and Say Dives—were bounded on either edge by a river. You had to cross a river to pass into the next land. The whole thing reminded her a bit of Lewis Carroll's chessboard world, where Alice found a different adventure in each square.

  Yeah, but "curiouser and curiouser" doesn't cut it here, she thought. More like "worser and worser." Aloud, she asked, "So if we don't find a bridge, are we just stuck here?"

  The Stone Girl shrugged miserably. "I don't know. Why would the Witching Tree tell us to go to the Well if we couldn't get there?"

  Because the Witching Tree, or whatever's behind it, is running down, Renie thought. Or giving up.

  It was Dread, she realized suddenly. On the hilltop, he had said something about inflicting pain on the operating system. It might have been a metaphor, but it seemed pretty obvious that there was a core of truth. Whether on purpose or not, Dread was slowly killing the thing that held the Otherland network—and most especially this part of it—together. "We can't do anything if we sit. Come on! Let's keep looking."

  "But . . . but all my family. . . !" The Stone Girl looked up at Renie imploringly. Two little trickles were running down her dirt cheeks. "They're back there, and the Ending. . . !"

  The tears shattered Renie's impatience. She dropped to her knees beside the small child made of earth and stones and put her arms around her, "I know, I know," she said helplessly. What could she say? What had she ever said to Stephen when he had been scared, or heartbroken with disappointment, except the thing that all grown-ups said to children? "Everything will be all right."

  "But it won't!" The Stone Girl sniffed angrily. "I shouldn't have gone away! Polly and Little Seed and Tip, all the baby ones, they'll be scared. What if they don't get away? The Ending will come and take them!"

  "Sssshh." Renie patted the little girl's back. "The stepmother will get them out. Isn't that what stepmothers do? Everything will be all right." It was hard not to dislike herself for making assurances she knew nothing about, but she could see little good for either of them in a long trek back across the Wood to the land of giant shoes and jackets.

  Renie's soothing seemed to help a little. The Stone Girl stood up, still snuffling loudly. "Okay. We'll look for the bridge some more."

  "Good girl."

  The light was definitely lessening now, and there had been little enough to begin with. Eager not to spend another night on this side of the river, Renie hurried to keep up with her guide, and even forged ahead in some places where the reeds and riverside vegetation grew too high for the Stone Girl to see.

  She had just relinquished the lead to the Stone Girl as they climbed up a rise between two bends of th
e river, when her companion stopped and cried out.

  "Look! A bridge!"

  Renie scrambled up after her so quickly that she slipped and had to catch herself with her hands; she was still wiping dirt and moist, too-pale grass off her blanket as she reached the little girl's side. Before them she could see an entire bend of the river valley. A large crowd had gathered on the near side of the river at the first stone of one of the most unusual bridges Renie had ever seen. It was made entirely of rectangular stone pillars stretching crookedly across the river like a linear Stonehenge. Although they were of slightly different heights, none of them seemed to be more than a meter or so from its neighbor. Renie could see how it would be possible to cross by clambering from one to the next, but the look of the thing, like a jaw full of uneven teeth, gave her a moment's sinking feeling.

  It's like the mouth on the front of Mister J's, she thought. This whole place is just a crazy-mirror, isn't it? One of those funhouse affairs, but it reflects all the things that the Other has been forced to do.

  "Why isn't anyone crossing it?" she asked.

  The Stone Girl shrugged and trotted stiffly down the rise.

  As they got closer, Renie could plainly see a continuation of the forest on the river's far side, but the middle of the bridge was swathed in mist so she could not actually make out where it touched the opposite shore. Still, that did not explain why so many travelers, a motley assortment of fairy-tale oddities that must have numbered almost a hundred, were gathered silently on the bank, looking yearningly toward the far side but not actually using the bridge.

  "Is it . . . broken or something?"

  As they reached the edge of the sullen crowd, the Stone Girl asked a woman in almost whimsically colorful medieval dress what was going on. The woman looked them up and down for a moment, paying particular attention to Renie, before answering.