Sea of Silver Light o-4

by Tad Williams

  Which doesn't mean I can't have fun with her first.

  He decided to give his employee forty-eight hours to complete her work. Then, seized by a magnanimous urge, upped it to seventy-two.

  Three days. Then some terrible thing will happen to the poor tourist girl from New York.

  It would be fun deciding how it would happen, when he could pull himself away from the pressing business of the prisoners from the Circle and a few other projects within the network. But he would leave some of it to the final moment, of course—let it be spontaneous.

  Otherwise, where was the art?

  CHAPTER 27

  The Green Steeple

  NETFEED/NEWS: Another Killing Mars Utah Peace

  (visual: wreckage of Eltrim car, Salt Lake City, Utah)

  VO: The car-bombing that ended the life of Joachim Eltrim, an attorney who worked for the mayor of Salt Lake City, also threatens to end the shaky peace established between the state of Utah and the radical Mormon separatist group known as the Deseret Covenant. The mayor's office and the Salt Lake City police say the finger of suspicion points straight at the separatists, who have denied responsibility.

  (visual: Deseret spokesman Edgar Riley)

  RILEY: "I'm not saying there aren't a lot of our people who want Eltrim and all other interfering, treacherous lawyers like him dead, I'm just saying we didn't have anything to do with it. . . ."

  The bramble-choked streets of More Very Bush were alive with pale, skittering shapes. Even seeing them from of the middle of the stone bridge, Renie felt such powerful terror and disgust wash over her that she swayed and almost tumbled into the swiftly moving river.

  "I . . . have to go there," Renie said, although everything in her screamed otherwise. "The strangers that are trapped—those might be my friends."

  The Stone Girl could only sob and hide her face behind her stubby hands.

  It was like the Jinnears on the hillside all over again—worse, because of the sheer numbers of the things. Only the knowledge that !Xabbu and the rest might be in that tower near the center of town, under siege by the ugly things swarming like giant termites, kept her standing. That and the little girl kneeling on the stone beside her, who was clearly even more frightened than she was.

  "I can't leave you here," Renie told her. "And I can't go away and leave my friends by themselves. Can you make it back across on your own?" The Stone Girl's shoulders heaved. Renie reached down to lay her hand on the girl's back. "I promise I'll wait until I see you make it to the riverbank."

  "I can't!" the Stone Girl wailed. "I said the King's Daughter words! I can't go back."

  So many incomprehensible rules! It seemed pretty obvious by now that teaching fairy tales to an AI might not be the most efficient way to program it. "But if we can't go back, we have to go on," Renie said as gently as she could, hiding her own terror for the child's sake. "We have to."

  The Stone Girl could not stop crying. Renie looked up at the darkening sky. "Come on." She tugged at the girl's arm, trying desperately to remember what she used to do when she couldn't get Stephen to move. "Just . . . just do what I do. I'm going to sing a song. You just do what I do every time I sing a verse, okay? Just watch and step when I step, okay?" God knows, it ought to be a nursery rhyme, she thought, but could not for the life of her summon anything suitable. Desperate, she snatched at the first tune that came to her mind, the theme from some Asian game show her mother had liked to watch:

  "If you are a know-it-all,"

  she chanted,

  "Come on down to Sprootie Hall. . . .

  "Yes, you can do it," she encouraged the Stone Girl. "See, just keep moving, like this." She sang slowly, emphasizing the beats, "If you are a know-it-all. . . ."

  The little girl finally looked up, face full of misery . . . and something else. She was silently begging Renie, in the way children did, to be right. To make the impossible happen. To make all the little lies true.

  Renie swallowed hard and started again.

  "If you are a know-it-all,

  Come on down to Sprootie Hall!

  Can you survive the Knowledge Kniche?

  Then you will soon be Sprootie Rich!"

  Slowly, as though she waded through air as viscous as melted caramel, the Stone Girl matched her steps to Renie's cracked, almost tuneless singing.

  "If you have a thirst for cash,

  Come on down and have a bash!

  If your brain is extra healthy,

  You will soon be Sprootie Wealthy!

  Eduformative!

  Infotacular!

  Sprootie Smart is brainiacular. . . !"

  She sang it through six more times to get them across the bridge, getting more and more quiet as they neared the last stone pier, even though the nearest of the pale things was still a hundred meters away and had shown no sign of interest. Renie scrambled down onto the grassy bank and reached up to take the Stone Girl's small, cool hands and let her swing down. It was only when the girl had landed beside her that Renie saw that the child's eyes were pinched tightly shut with fright.

  "It's okay," Renie whispered.

  The Stone Girl looked around her, clearly struggling not to cry again. "Who . . . who's Sprootie?"

  "Just some stupid . . . it doesn't matter. We should be quiet so they don't hear us."

  "Ticks don't listen. Ticks watch."

  Renie was relieved, but only for a moment. "Is there anything we can do to keep them from seeing us?"

  "Don't move."

  Renie could feel the horror of the pallid, scuttling things even more strongly now that the river was behind her, inhibiting escape. "We can't just stay here. Is there anything else that will help besides not moving?"

  "Move real, real slow."

  Renie squinted across the shadowy townscape, trying to make out the lay of the land between them and the tower which seemed to be the focus of the Ticks' attention. The streets and buildings were a uniform brambly green, as though they had all been put to service as trellises in some madcap gardening experiment, but if so, it had been a long time since there had been a tending hand: the corners and edges of the buildings were shaggy with leaves. Creepers had made their way from one high place to another, and now hung between towers and gables like great sagging spiderwebs.

  "It's getting dark," Renie said quietly. "We have to start moving."

  The Stone Girl did not reply, but stayed close as they took their first cautious steps forward. They made it up the riverbank to a low wall at the edge of town without attracting attention. As they huddled behind it, Renie found herself wishing desperately for a weapon of some kind. All she was carrying was the lighter, and the idea of trying to set a flabby-looking creature like a two-meter cuttlefish on fire with a Minisolar was a joke she couldn't much appreciate just now. A torch was a possibility, but the nearest trees were still a long trot away.

  "Are Ticks scared of anything?" she asked. The Stone Girl's look of incredulity answered her question for her, but Renie reached into the leafy vegetation covering the wall, thinking that she would at least feel a little better with a large rock in her hand. She found herself digging into the scratchy tangle tar deeper than she would have believed necessary to find a loose stone, then was even more surprised when her hand pushed through and out the other side. It was all bramble.

  "Where's the wall? Isn't there a wall under here?"

  The Stone Girl had gone an ashier shade than her normal clay color. She looked at Renie nervously. "That is the wall."

  "But . . . aren't there . . . things under all these leaves?" She had a sudden, confounding thought. "Are all those houses and whatnot just made of plants?"

  "This is More Very Bush," the little girl explained.

  "Shit." So much for sticks and stones to use as makeshift weapons. It also meant that if her friends were truly besieged in that tower building near the center of town, they had no real walls to keep the creatures out.

  In fact, what was keeping the creatures out?
<
br />   Renie took another deep breath, finding it harder than ever to make herself go forward. Something like a cloud of terror seemed to hang over the whole town—not just her obvious and justified fear of the strange Ticks, but something deeper and less explicable. She remembered the wave of panic that had seized her while she was being chased by Jinn ears.

  We're inside the operating system. Are we feeling its fear? But what would an artificial intelligence fear?

  She led the Stone Girl to a place where the wall was low and they could scramble over it easily, although not without Renie getting scratched quite a few more times. They stopped on the far side. A Tick was moving toward them, undulating across the low vegetation like something swimming along the ocean floor. Despite the Stone Girl saying that sound did not matter, Renie found her throat choked to silence.

  The Tick paused a dozen meters away. It did not have legs, but each point of its scalloped sides ended in something like a pseudopod; they rippled gently, in sequence, even when the thing wasn't moving. Dark spots swam beneath the translucent skin, as though the creature were filled with billiard balls and jelly. It was only as the dark spots one after another pressed out against the skin and then receded in turn that she remembered the Stone Girl's words: Ticks had too many eyes.

  "Jesus Mercy!" It was a strangled sound.

  Whether because it actually could not see them without movement, or because they were too far away to be worth bothering with, the Tick turned and made its way back up the main street. Several of its fellows bumped it as it passed; some even crawled over it. Renie could not tell if they were communicating through touch or were simply terribly stupid.

  "I don't want to be here," the little girl said.

  "I don't either, but we are. Just hold my hand and keep moving. Do you want me to sing the Sprootie Smart song again?"

  The Stone Girl shook her head.

  Slowly, they made their way deeper into the town, freezing in place every time one of the Ticks came near, trying to stay behind cover as much as possible. Renie found herself actually grateful for the advancing twilight: if the creatures were dependent on sight, then darkness must be her friend. Still, she definitely wanted to get away from these crawling things before full night if she possibly could.

  They reached the first of the houses, a cottage of green leaves and snaking vines. As Renie stole a look inside—even the furniture was composed of vegetation—she couldn't help whispering a question. "Who lived in this town?"

  "Bears, mostly," said the Stone Girl in a tight little voice. "And some rabbits. And a big family of hedgehogs called Tinkle or Wrinkle or something, I th–th–think. . . ." Tears seeped from her eyeholes.

  "Ssshhh. It's okay. We'll be. . . ."

  Three Ticks glided around the corner of the next house and wriggled across the bramble-choked alleyway, heading right toward them. The Stone Girl gave a little squeak of horror and sagged. Renie grabbed her, holding her upright and as still as she could with her own limbs trembling badly.

  The Ticks paused and lay pulsing gently atop the vegetative carpet, a mere half-dozen meters from the spot where Renie and the Stone Girl stood. Only their elongated shape gave them a front and a back; both ends seemed identical, but Renie had no doubts from the Ticks postures that they were facing her. They had sensed something, and now were waiting.

  One of the Ticks scuttled a little way forward toward the house. Another eased forward and slid over it, then they parted and again lay parallel. Ripples of lighter and darker color ran up and down their bodies. The eye-spots bunched at the things' front ends, three or four dark orbs visible in each creature, pressed up against the membranous skin.

  A tiny whine of panic escaped the Stone Girl and Renie could feel the child's arms go taut. Any moment now her panic would become too much and she would bolt. Renie tried to keep a tight grip, but terror was rising fast inside her, too.

  Suddenly, with a loud, swishing rattle that almost stopped Renie's heart, something leaped out of the carpet of brambles just in front of the Ticks—a blur of wild, shiny eye and gray fur—then sprang away across the dooryard heading for the open street. The Ticks flowed after it with terrifying speed, moving so quickly they barely seemed to touch the brambles. The child-sized rabbit in the tiny blue coat reached the street but had to dodge away from another Tick that reared up, its mouth a jagged rip on the underside of the head. The sudden change of direction ran the terrified fugitive right into its pursuers. The rabbit let out a single all-too-human scream of horror, then the Ticks fell on it in a squirming, fleshy mass.

  Renie pulled the Stone Girl around the side of the house, away from view of the street and the wet sounds of feeding. They were lucky; no other Ticks were waiting there. She shoved the stumbling little girl in front of her, across the alley full of knee-high vegetation and into the shelter of the house next door.

  Inside there was just enough light coming in through a small window to make out a quantity of household objects all made from living leaves and vines—chairs, a table, bowls, and even a candlestick; otherwise the little hut was empty. Renie clenched her fists in fear and frustration. She could actually see the church tower through the window, festooned with vines like a maypole, but although it was only a few dozen meters away it might as well have been a thousand. The ground between their temporary refuge and the tower was full of the pale things.

  "I'll think of something," Renie declared. "Don't give up. I'll get us out of here."

  The little Stone Girl took a deep, shaky breath. "Y–you w–w–will?"

  "I promise," Renie said firmly, even as she hugged herself to still the trembling. What else could she say?

  Three empty squeeze bottles of Mountain Rose lay on the floor in front of him like bleached bones. Long Joseph contemplated them with a feeling only a small distance from despair.

  Knew it was going to happen, he chided himself. Drink it a drop at a time, still going to finish some day. . . .

  And the hell of it was that there was absolutely nothing he could do. At the moment when he most needed a supply of the healing, warming liquid, with men that wanted to kill both him and his daughter just a short distance above him, after he had been trapped for weeks in a cement tomb under a mountain with no company but boring, disapproving Jeremiah Dako—and adding Del Ray Chiume to the mix hadn't helped much—now of all times he had nothing to drink.

  He wiped his hand roughly across his mouth. He knew he wasn't a drunk. He knew drunks, saw them all the time, men who could barely stand, men swaying outside the shebeens with old, dried piss stains on their pants and breath that smelled like paint thinner, men with eyes like ghosts' eyes. That wasn't him. But he also knew he could dearly use some comfort. It wasn't so much that he wanted a drink, not the taste, not even the little glow of satisfaction when the first few swallows made their way into the belly. But it felt like his entire body was a little loose and ill-fitting all over, his skeleton not quite sitting right in his meat, his skin the wrong size.

  Joseph grunted and stood up. What was the point, anyway? Even if Renie came back, stepped out of her electrical bathtub like that what-was-his-name, that Lazarus man from the Bible, healthy and happy and proud of her papa, they still weren't going to get out of this mountain alive. Not with four killers up there, cruel hard men determined to dig them out like an anteater on a termite nest.

  Joseph took a few stiff steps over to the bank of monitors. The men upstairs had not finished fanning out the smoke, but the atmosphere up there was much clearer. They would be getting back to work soon, chipping out the rest of the concrete floor. Then what—grenades? Flaming petrol dumped down on top of them, so they burned like rats? He counted the shapes in the murk. Yes, four. So at least they had killed one of them with Sellars' bonfire. But that would only mean the rest would be even nastier when the time came.

  Nastier? You must be joking, man. This would never have been one of those simple Pinetown shake-outs after too many beers, fists and boards and maybe a knif
e just before people started running away, not even the bad kind with the young men and their guns, that terrible noise like a stick dragged along a fence and people stopping, faces slack, knowing something bad had just happened. . . . No, this was always going to be something far worse.

  The itch was bad now, a need to move, to get out, to run as fast as he could under open sky. Maybe they could find another way out, a heating duct like he had found before. They would have to take Renie and the little man out of those bathtubs, those wired-up coffins, but surely whatever they were doing in there was not more important than their lives.

  Then do what? Run across the mountains while those men come after in their big truck all armored up like a tank?

  He smacked his hand down on the console and turned away. All he wanted was to pour something down his throat. Was that too much to ask for a man condemned to die? Even in Westville Prison they gave the poor bugger a last meal before they killed him, didn't they, a beer or a little wine?

  Joseph stood, flexing his fingers. Surely in all this big place, there must have been someone who liked a drink, who kept a bottle hid while he was on duty—just one bottle that got left behind when everyone moved out. He looked to the alcove where Jeremiah was discussing supplies with Del Ray, the glow of the light spilling out onto the cement floor that ringed the large chamber. They didn't need Joseph. They didn't even like him, a man of his hands, a man who didn't put on airs so he could work for rich Boers. If it weren't for his daughter, he would say the hell with them both and find himself an air shaft out.