by Tad Williams
"It's them Ticks, dearie. Dozens of them."
"Ticks?" The Stone Girl's eyes went wide. "Where?"
"On the other side," the woman replied with a certain grim satisfaction. "Some folk already tried to cross over—it's this Ending, you know. They said they weren't feared of a few Ticks. But it's not a few, is it? One or two of the ones what went over got back to tell about it, but the rest got et."
As though whatever had animated her earthen body had suddenly ceased to work, the Stone Girl sagged to her knees. "Ticks," she said hoarsely. "They're so bad."
Renie felt herself go cold inside. "Are they worse than Jinnears?"
"They're bad," the Stone Girl would only say again.
"And some say them Ticks have some new ones still trapped over there," the woman in the colorful dress went on. "Some strange folk—not from anywhere around here."
"What?" Renie could barely resist the impulse to grab the woman by her bodice and haul her close. "What kind of strange folk?"
"Sure I don't know, dearie," the woman said, giving Renie a look that implied she had just been categorized as strange herself. "Heard it off a rabbit, I did, and they're always in a hurry. Or was it one of those squirrels. . . ?"
"On the other side, you're saying?" Renie turned to the Stone Girl. "Those might be my friends. I have to go help them."
The Stone Girl looked up at her, her dimple eyes pools of shadow, her face blank with apathy or helpless terror.
"Shit. Stay here." Renie began elbowing her way through the crowd assembled on the bank, a casting call for a surrealist painting. Most of them seemed gripped by the same mood of fear that had immobilized the Stone Girl; only a few even murmured as Renie forced her way past them.
The first stone of the bridge stretched almost Renie's height above the shallows. She found a handhold and pulled herself up, not without strain. She was tired after the long day's walk, and when she had dragged her belly up onto the rough surface of the stone's top she had to lie there for a moment until she could catch her breath. Sprawled and vulnerable, she could not help thinking of the way the bridge had looked, like a row of chewing teeth.
"Help me up," someone said.
Renie peered over the edge into the dark, upturned face of the Stone Girl.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm not going to stay here. You're my friend. And you don't know anything, either."
Terrified by the thought that !Xabbu and the others might be under attack, she only had a moment to consider. The girl was right about one thing—she knew a lot more than Renie. And with the system apparently dissolving the simworld around them, would the child be any safer waiting here, at least in the long run?
Bullshit justification, Sulaweyo. But what else was there?
"Grab my hand," she said.
When the little girl reached the top of the stone, she gestured for Renie to keep silent.
"Gray goose and gander, Waft your wings together,"
the Stone Girl intoned solemnly,
"And carry the good king's daughter
Over the one-strand river."
"You're always supposed to say it before you cross," she told Renie. Fear made her shrill. "Don't you know? It's very important."
They made their way quickly from tooth to tooth until the warning cries of those still waiting on the bank had faded. Midstream the water seemed faster, blackly turbulent as it washed between the close-set stones, the spray sharp and chilly as hail. The mist Renie had seen from the bank was all around them now, obscuring vision and making the stones slippery. She forced herself to take each step with slow care.
They were only a few stones past what she guessed was the midpoint of the river when the streams of mist thinned. Renie, crossing with a long stretch from one rocky tooth to another, was so startled that she almost lost her foothold and had to scramble to get her weight forward so she could jump to the waiting stone.
The far side of the river had changed completely.
Where before she had seen only primordial forest stretching into the distance on both sides, now she found herself confronted by a very different landscape. For a moment she thought it was some kind of formal garden, full of hedges and topiary shapes, but then the scale of the thing hit her and she realized she was looking at an entire town—a city—completely grown over by brambles and twining, crawling vines, a living green sculpture in the shape of houses and streets and church steeples.
"Is that . . . More Very Bush. . . ?"
The little Stone Girl only whimpered.
Almost the only contrast to the thousand shades of green were the many pale shapes moving over and through the bushes like maggots in a rotting carcass. Like the Jinnears, they were a sickly white, but where those things had been almost completely formless, these had the semblance of some kind of animal life. They were long and low to the ground, scalloped at the edges in what almost seemed a parody of legs, but they still moved horribly quickly, half-scuttling, half-slithering. They were also nearly her own size, and there were hundreds of them. The greatest number swarmed around the base of a green-strangled tower halfway into the town, a writhing white necklace easy to see even in the dying light, the creatures excited as ants who had discovered an unguarded wedding cake.
"Jesus Mercy," Renie said, her fear turning sharp and cold, so cold. "And those . . . are Ticks?"
The Stone Girl's voice barely rose above the noise of the river beneath them. She was weeping again, the words fracturing.
"I w–w–want m–my s–s–s–s–stepmotherr."
Third:
THE DYING HOUR
"How many miles to Babylon?
Threescore and ten.
Can I get there by candlelight?
Yes, and back again."
—Traditional
CHAPTER 23
Orientation
NETFEED/SPORTS: "Body Fascism" Litigant Killed in Practice
(visual: Note outside courtroom after victory)
VO: Edward Note, who won a court case in which he proved a local professional football team was discriminating against him based on body type when they initially refused to give him a tryout, was killed in his second day of practice with the team. Members of the Pensacola Fishery Barons BMFFL team, who are responsible to UN antidiscrimination laws because their stadium was built with revenue from local taxes, put on a public face of regret, but some team members said off the record that Note "only got what he deserved."
TEAM MEMBER (anonymated): "What did the guy weigh, a hundred twenty pounds, old school measurements? Running around with guys that weigh three or four times that? It's no wonder he got his foolish tiny ass crushed. Too bad for his kids, though."
VO: The thirty-eight-year-old Note, who declared contemporary pro sports a bastion of "body fascism," was apparently caught underneath a pile-up in practice and asphyxiated. His family is demanding an investigation of his death.
"Just a minute, Olga." The woman, a stranger of course, but acting as familiar as an old friend, handed her a cup of coffee which steamed convincingly. "I hear you're working for that J Corporation now. That must be fascinating—you hear so much about them in the news. What's it like?"
"I'm not allowed to talk about where I work," she said.
The woman smiled. "Oh, of course not—I know that! But I'm not trying to get you to tell any important secrets, am I? Just . . . what's it like? Is it really on an island?"
Surely everyone knew that. Still, Olga was unbending, "I'm sorry—I'm just not allowed to talk about where I work."
The woman frowned. "You're being really grumpy and silly about this. You must not be getting enough sleep. Are you working nights or something?"
"I'm really sorry, but I am not allowed to talk about my work."
The woman waved her hand in disgust. A moment later the room wavered and changed, so quickly that Olga felt a bit dizzy, almost sick.
They should do a better job with their transitions, she thought. If they ever got a job o
n the real net, for Obolos or someone, they'd get ripped to shreds for something like that.
She sat patiently as someone who was apparently a relative of hers asked her to bring home some extra office supplies for the kids—nothing important, just a few sticktights or hardclips for the poor, underprivileged darlings to make art projects for school. Olga sighed and began her refusals, waiting as patiently as she could through the upward spiral of recrimination, waiting for it all to end.
"Well, an excellent score," Mr. Landreaux said after she had stepped out of the hologram room. He was a small man with a shaved head and a scatter of sparkling stones embedded in his wrist—trying a little too hard to look young, Olga thought. "You really studied up, didn't you?"
She tried not to smile. A quarter of an hour's examination of the company's voluminous hiring package the night before had made it pretty clear what the general idea was. "Yes, sir," she said. "This job is very important for me." And you can't even guess how true that is, can you?
"I'm glad to hear that. It's important to me, too." The personnel officer squinted at his wallscreen. "Your references are very, very good. Fourteen years at Reichert Systems—that's a very good company." He smiled, but she saw something else glint in his mild gray eyes. "Tell me again why you left Toronto."
This is really just a junior version of the man who gave me my exit interview at Obolos, she thought, another pink soft animal with sharp teeth. Does that Jongleur fellow grow them in vats, like those space-tomatoes? Aloud, she recited the story Catur Ramsey had invented for her, and that his friends had somehow turned into accomplished informational fact. "It's my daughter Carole, sir. Since her . . . since she split up with her husband, she needs some help with the kids so she can keep her job. She works so hard." Olga shook her head. This was cake. Convincing a hundred overstimulated children to be quiet so they wouldn't scare the Boxy Ox, that was real acting. If the whole thing were not so strange and terrible, she suspected she might even be enjoying this little trick—corporate folk were such easy yet somehow satisfying targets. "So I just thought, do you know, if I were nearer. . . ."
"So you left the Great White North and came all the way down here to the Big Easy," Landreaux said cheerfully. "Well, laissez les bontemps roulez, as we say." He leaned over, mock-conspiratorial. "But not during working hours, of course."
She tried to look duly impressed by his informality. "Of course not, sir. I am a hard worker."
"I'm sure you are. Well, everything's in order, so I guess it's my pleasant job to welcome you to the J Corporation family." He extended his hand without standing, making her lean forward to shake it. "Your shift supervisor is Maria. You'll find her in Building Twelve down on the esplanade. Go see her now. Are you ready to start tonight?"
"Yes, sir. Thank you very much, sir."
He had already begun to lose interest, and was just turning back to his wallscreen when his attention snagged on the patch of white high on her neck. "You know, I was meaning to ask you," he said with deceptive lightness that did not lull her one little bit. "About that bandage on your neck. You don't have a health problem you haven't told us about, do you, Ms. Chotilo?"
Caught a little off-balance by hearing Aleksandr's last name after all these years, even though she herself had chosen it as an alias she could remember, it took her a moment to reorient. "Oh, this?" She touched the adhesive strip covering her t-jack. "I had a mole removed. That's all right, isn't it? It wasn't cancerous or anything, I . . . I just didn't like it."
He laughed and waved his hand. "Just trying to make sure nobody's signing up with us just to get our medical insurance." His face went through another little shift; the slightly ominous flicker came back. "See, we don't like to be tricked, Olga. J Corporation is a family, but a family has to protect itself. It can be an unpleasant world out there."
Out there, she guessed, meant anything more than five kilometers from the black tower. "Oh, I know, Mr. Landreaux," she assured him. "Full of bad people."
"Right you are," he said absently, his thoughts already back on the day ahead of him, the little tricks and traps and bumps of mid-level management.
Olga stood. His back was to her as she scuttled out.
As she walked across the plaza outside the corporation's orientation center, heading across the esplanade, she made a conscious effort not to look up at the black tower looming on the far side of the water. It was hard not to feel she was being watched, although it seemed like a lot of effort to expend on the newest employee of a staff of thousands. And why wouldn't a new employee look up at the tower, the corporate symbol?
Still, she just didn't want to, not until she was actually on the boat. She was beginning to feel superstitious about it, as if relaxing herself to that point would automatically draw a heavy hand to her shoulder, the corporate security people wanting to do more this time than ask a few harmless questions.
Building Twelve was a hangar built right out onto the pier. The massive hovercrafts that carried maintenance and custodial workers to and from the island lay at anchor, bumping against each other on the gentle swell. Inside the hangar was an entire complex—supply warehouses and changing rooms, currently filled with the echoing chatter of hundreds of voices, since one of the custodial shifts had just come back from the island.
Maria proved to be an immense and not particularly patient woman, her hair dyed a once-stylish polychrome silver, her black roots badly in need of a touch-up.
"Oh, Lord, another one," she said when Olga approached her. "Don't those pocket-jockeys over in Orientation know I got no time to teach anyone this week?" She gave Olga a look that suggested the new recruit would be doing the best thing for all concerned if she simply drowned herself in Lake Borgne immediately. "Esther? Where the hell are you? You take this new one, find her a uniform, tell her what to do. See if there's a badge for her on the fabricator thing. And if she gets in trouble, does something stupid, it's your ass, seen?"
Esther was a thin Hispanic woman close to Olga's own age, girlish in a tired way, with a kind, shy smile. She helped Olga find a gray two-piece uniform in the right size from a rack that would have stretched from wingtip to wingtip on a Skywalker jet, then fed her past a series of bored functionaries until Olga had secured both her badge and a locker in one of the changing rooms. The place was like a boarding school for students with bad feet and aching joints, hundreds of black and brown women, as well as a few dozen European types like Olga, with English a second language for almost all.
As she changed, listening to the women shouting jokes across the humid locker room, Olga could almost believe for a moment that this was really her life, that the years on the net had never happened.
"Hurry up, now," Esther told her. "The boat leaves in five minutes."
Olga studied her own blank face on the badge, tilting it to see her hologrammed profile. I look like an old woman, she thought. God, I am an old woman. What do I think I'm doing with all this? She picked up her backpack, popped the locker closed, and realized she would probably never see those clothes again. Maybe I should have cut out the labels, like in that mystery I saw. Of course, if she had really planned to be a woman with no past, she should probably be infiltrating a corporation that didn't already have her face and real name tucked away somewhere in its vast complex of personnel files.
She tucked the pack under her arm and fell into the swirl of gray-clad women moving toward the dock.
In this strangest month of Olga's life, the meeting with Catur Ramsey had definitely been near the top of the list. It had been odd enough to pull off the road near Slidell into the picnic area and see him sitting on a bench—the same young man who, it seemed, had been at her own door for the first time only days ago, thousands of miles away in another country. He had hugged her, which was another unusual twist. Since when did lawyers hug people? Even a nice one like Ramsey?
Then, when the big blond man had stepped out of the parked van, she had experienced a moment of sinking fear and something worse. He
had the look of a police officer, and for as long as it took him to cross the ten paces to the table she had been horribly certain that Ramsey had sold her out—for her own good, he would have deemed it, but no less a betrayal for that. But instead the man had only extended his hand, introducing himself as Major Michael Sorensen, then walked back to the car.
As if reading her mind, Ramsey had told her, "Hold on—it's going to get weirder." And when she saw the person Sorensen was lifting out of the van, Olga had to admit he had been right.
They had spent an hour talking while traffic rumbled past just on the other side of the trees, but Olga could remember little of it now. The shriveled man Sellars had spoken so quietly and carefully that at first Olga had taken offense a little, thinking she was being given the gentle treatment reserved for the pathetically unbalanced. After a while she came to realize it was just his way, and that this achingly thin man with runneled skin could not have taken a deep enough breath to speak loudly even if he had wanted to. And when she actually heard what he had to say, it kindled a spark of something like joyful relief inside her. She had not realized until then just how lonely she had become.
"I'm still not certain why you have experienced these things, Ms. Pirofsky," he had told her, "but whatever the cause, they are real. If I had all day, I could not tell you of all the strangeness I have encountered since I first began studying these matters. Whatever the source of your voices, it couldn't be a coincidence that you have been drawn to Jongleur's tower. We only wish to combine forces with you—to give you the best chance of getting answers safely, answers that we may need ourselves to put an end to a terrible, criminal conspiracy."
The conspiracy itself, at least in Sellars' hurried explanation, had quite boggled her. And other than the fact that he was some kind of military security specialist, she had never quite managed to understand the major's place in this tiny resistance movement—bizarrely, he had even mentioned a wife and children waiting at some motel. She was also still a little unsure how much Ramsey was involved, whether he had known any of these things when he had first interviewed her, but the mere fact that instead of receiving patronizing looks she was finally getting answers had made up for any residual confusion.
