by Tad Williams
"My God," he said suddenly, "they are just copies." He sat up straight, ignoring the sharp pain across the ribs. "Eleanora—she was a real woman who lived in the Venetian simworld—she showed me her boyfriend, this Mafia fellow who had built the world for her in the first place. He was dead, but the Grail people had made a copy of him while he was still alive. I think it was an early version of the Grail process. He was real—he could answer questions—but he was also kind of an information loop, kept forgetting what had been asked, said the same things over and over. What if the Pankies and the other versions of the Twins are like that?"
"You are bleeding," Nandi said quietly.
Paul looked down. His sudden movement had opened the shallow cuts on his chest; blood was running freely, soaking through the dirty jumpsuit.
"Jonas, what are you doing?" Florimel was striding toward him. "Martine, he's bleeding again."
"She can't hear you," Nandi said. "She's at the bow of the ship."
"Help me get him cleaned up."
"I'm all right, really." But Paul did not resist as Florimel opened the front of his jumpsuit and began cursingly to fumble at the sopping strips of cloth Martine had applied.
"T4b?" she called. "Where are you? Find me something I can use to make more bandages. T4b?" There was no answer. "Damn it, Javier, where are you?"
"Javier?" asked Nandi as he helped Florimel peel Paul's jumpsuit down to his waist.
Paul was irritated—they weren't life-threatening wounds, and the idea now blazing in his head felt important. Many copies, some less perfect than others. . . .
I am a broken mirror, she had told him. A broken mirror. . . .
"You took your time, Javier," Florimel said as the boy finally approached. "Did you find some cloth?"
"Isn't any." He darted a glance at Nandi as though more fearful of him than of Florimel's anger.
"Javier . . . Javier Rogers?" Nandi asked.
"No!" said T4b harshly, then stiffened and looked down at his feet. "Yeah."
"You know each other?" Florimel looked from one to the other.
"We should," said Nandi. "It is because of the Circle that Javier is here."
Florimel turned on the youth. "Is that true?"
"Oh, fenfen," he said miserably.
The way they were all gathered around the boy, Paul thought, it was hard not to think of an inquisition. But T4b, his face damp with sweat and teenage embarrassment, did not make a very convincing martyr.
"What else have you lied to us about?" Florimel demanded.
"Didn't lie about nothing, me." T4b scowled. "Ain't duppie. Just didn't tell you, seen?"
"You don't need to justify your faith, honey," Bonnie Mae assured him.
"He kept no dangerous secrets from you," said Nandi. "We recruited many like him, promising young men and women of belief. We gave them information, some education, and we gave them equipment. This is a war we are fighting, after all, as you people should know better than anyone. Were you not recruited yourselves by someone whose motives are far less openly stated than ours?"
"Are you working for Kunohara as well?" Florimel asked T4b. Paul thought she seemed unusually upset. "Was Martine right about that too?"
"No! Don't got nothing to do with that Kuno-whatsit, me." He looked like he was about to cry. "And I never did nothing wrong to you either. Just didn't tell you . . . about the Circle."
Paul looked at Martine, but she seemed to be listening with only part of her attention. "What did you mean when you said 'men and women of belief?" he asked Nandi.
"We are a group bound together by our belief in a power greater than mere humanity," Nandi said. "I made no secret of that when you and I met."
"But Javier. . . ?"
The boy looked sullen when he realized everyone was looking at him once more. "I'm born again, me. Jesus saved me."
"There you go," said Bonnie Mae. "Don't be ashamed of the path you've chosen. 'Blessed are they who do hunger and thirst after righteousness,' as Jesus said on the mountain, 'for they shall be filled.' Nothing wrong with a hunger for righteousness." She turned to the others. "This boy has found his way through Christ. Does that offend you? What about me, then? Is there something wrong with loving God?"
"Jesus helped me give up charge," T4b said earnestly. "I was, like, lost. Then He saved me."
"He just came over to your house and showed you some new tricks?" Florimel laughed bitterly. "I am sorry, but I grew up with this nonsense. It poisoned my mother's life and it poisoned mine. Forgive my reaction, but I feel betrayed to learn that he has been serving another master all this time."
"Serving another master?" Now it was Nandi who was angry. "How? We have not spoken to Javier since he entered the network. Are your goals not ours—to save the children and bring about the destruction of this devilish operating system, this terrible immortality machine that runs on blood and souls?"
I was thinking of something important when all this happened, Paul remembered, but could not tear himself away from the looks of fury and confusion on the faces of his companions. Only Martine Desroubins seemed somewhere else, listening to sounds she alone could hear. "Martine?" he asked.
"It is close," she said. "I feel it. It is like nothing else I have experienced here—like the Cavern of the Lost, but both more and less alive. And it is very powerful." She grimaced. "Close. So close."
Paul looked up. The ship, driven by its indefatigable crew of robotic galley slaves, was rounding a bend in the wide, sluggish river. As they tilted past a scattering of rocky foothills Paul saw it, nestled by itself in a wide valley of red sand.
"Good lord," he said quietly.
"It is empty." Martine was still frowning, the lines of her face tight with pain. "But not empty. There is something deep inside it that is hot and active. It is like an oven with the door closed."
The Wicked Tribe, who had been hovering over the discussion like particularly anarchic thoughts above the heads of comic-strip characters, now descended in a yellow flutter, clustering on Paul.
"Bad place," one of them said.
"Been here," said another. "Don't want to be here again. Go away now!"
Several of them flew up and began tugging at Paul's hair. "Time to go away. Back to somewhere fun. Now!"
The argument over T4b ended as one by one the combatants saw the faint brown shape of the temple in the distance, the sandstone pillars of the massive facade standing sentry between oblongs of pitch-black shadow.
"It . . . it looks like a smile," said Florimel.
"Like a dead smile," Nandi said slowly. "Like the grin of a skull."
The temple not only looked empty, but was half-covered with drifting dunes, as though it had lain long unremembered and unvisited. Swirled by a breeze none of them could feel, clouds of sparkling gray sand helped shroud the structure so that its full size and dimensions were never quite clear.
The quiet splash of the banked oars now fell silent. As the ship glided slowly to a stop beside the dock Paul and his companions stared at the looming temple, its wind-blasted front high as an office building and as wide as several city blocks. There was no noise anywhere along the riverbank.
"Don't want to go in there," T4b said at last.
"We must," Martine said, but gently: if she had heard the argument about his secret affiliation, it did not seem to have lessened her opinion of the youth. "Dread will come looking for us—it could be any time now. He will not be tricked or defeated, not like Wells, And he will be very angry."
T4b did not say anything else, but when the others began moving toward the gangplank he went with them as though being led to execution. The Wicked Tribe hung on his and Paul's and Florimel's clothes like sleeping bats, frightened for once into good behavior.
"Not so bad this time," one of them whispered in Paul's ear, but the childish voice did not sound entirely convinced. "It more asleep. Maybe doesn't know we here."
Despite Martine's warnings, Paul could not make himself move any faster than a foot-dragging trud
ge across the sun-blasted desert. The blowing sand stung his face. The looming row of columns seemed ready to swallow him down. The very air was heavy, as though they were pushing their way through something solid and sticky. Behind him Florimel let out a strangled sigh, fighting to get breath into a fear-tightened throat.
The baking heat diminished only a little as they stepped between the Cyclopean columns and into the shade. The long wall before them was covered with what had once been intricately carved panels, but which had been worn down until they were only idiot scribbles, devoid of sense or reassurance. The only doorway was a simple black square in the middle of the massive front wall, a hole into a deeper darkness.
Martine went through first, holding her hands to her ears despite the thickly expectant silence of the place—exactly as though someone stood beside her screaming, Paul thought as he and the others followed her inside.
As his eyes grew used to the darkness of the interior, illuminated only by the light from the door, Paul saw that white-clad bodies lay everywhere, perhaps two dozen in all. Not one was moving; all appeared to have suffered in dying. He turned away in dismay from the nearest corpse, its fingers red from tearing at the unyielding stone floor, eyes rolled up as though looking for a salvation that would never arrive.
"They are not Puppets," Nandi said quietly. Paul looked at him in surprise. "They are empty sims," the dark-skinned man said. "See—they have not putrefied or even changed, only stiffened. Real people died or went offline and left their sims behind."
Martine had stopped in front of an immense doorway that stretched to the ceiling along the interior wall, its double doors covered in hammered bronze. The very size of them gave his fear an extra, sickening twist.
I don't really want to see what's on the other side. . . .
Something touched his arm and he jumped.
"Didn't lie to no one, me," T4b said quietly. Paul was amazed that in the midst of this doom-laden atmosphere the boy was still worrying about what people thought.
"I believe you, Javier."
"Sorry. Sorry . . . I tried to six you." He spoke so quietly Paul did not immediately understand him. "On the mountain, like."
"Oh! Oh, that. It's all right, really."
"But that girl, Emily, she was chizz. Had ops for her, me. Utterly did." He seemed desperate for Paul to understand. "Then when all that fen blew up. . . ."
The whole conversation was surreal. First Nandi, now this boy. When did I become the father-confessor? Or is it because they both think we probably won't be alive much longer—that soon it will be too late for apologies. . . .
"Are you all simply going to wander around until someone shows up to kill us?" Martine called, her voice ragged with pain or fear or both, startling both Paul and T4b. "Come and help me open this door!"
They hurried across the echoing room. The others gathered near the doors, whispering. Paul wanted to laugh, but the ache of fear was too great. Why bother to be quiet? Did they think the thing on the other side was really sleeping, that it wouldn't hear them? He remembered the monstrous presence he had summoned on Ithaca, the thing that had come to Orlando and Fredericks in the Freezer. Didn't they understand this place by now? The Other was always sleeping—but it was always listening, too.
Weighed down by dark foreboding that made it hard to think or even move, he let himself be pressed in beside T4b and Nandi to pull at the huge double doors. For a moment there was no movement, then the great bronzed panels swung outward with a screech like some angry primordial beast. The Wicked Tribe darted back from the opening as though the cavern beyond were full of poisonous gas or burning-hot air; Paul could not help remembering what Martine had said about an oven.
"Not go in there!" one of the monkeys shouted. "Wait out here!" They looped up into the high reaches of the antechamber and hung near the doorway leading back outside, babbling in fear and excitement.
Martine had already stepped through like a woman wading into a high wind. Paul followed her, expecting to feel something similar to what she was experiencing, but the sensation of oppressive menace was no greater outside the room than in.
The chamber was made of rough, dark stone, as though it had been hurriedly chipped from a living mountain. At the center, its exquisitely carved and polished lines in sharp contrast, lay a gigantic black stone sarcophagus.
Paul could feel the others pressing in behind him, but he was unwilling to take another step. Martine had her hands to her ears again, swaying in place as though dizzy. Paul feared she might fall, but even that could not make him move closer to the silent black box.
"He . . . he feels me. . . ." Martine said in a strangulated whisper. It echoed from the walls and came back in pieces: "Feels me . . . feels. . . ."
A light, painfully bright, flared at the side of the cavern, twenty meters from the coffin. As though in a nightmare, Paul could not move, but he felt his heart lurch inside his breast.
The light hung in the air for a moment, dripping sparks like burning magnesium, then resolved into a human-shaped blank white hole. Paul was surprised to feel a dull and somewhat anticlimatic tug of recognition. Still, neither he nor his companions were quite prepared for the high-pitched voice that echoed across the cavern.
"Man! What kind of mierda that crazy old man throw me in this time?"
The astonishing spectacle of a twitching, featureless figure swearing in Spanish was interrupted by the explosive entrance into the tomb-chamber of a cloud of yellow, finger-sized monkeys.
"Someone coming!" they squealed, "Look out! Le big chien!"
Their shrill excitation made it almost impossible to figure out what was going on. "What on earth are you children screaming about?" Bonita Mae Simpkins demanded. "Zunni, you tell me straight—the rest of you, quiet!"
"No wonder you all friends with Sellars," declared the glowing shape with a mixture of amusement and disgust, "You all loco, for true."
"Sellars?" said Florimel, startled.
"It's coming," the little monkey named Zunni explained.
"What?"
"Big black dog," she squeaked. "Coming here across the desert."
"Big, big dog," one of the other monkeys piped up. "Big like a mountain. Coming fast!"
CHAPTER 35
Rainbow's Shoe
NETFEED/NEWS: Chargeheads Getting "In the Mood"
(visual: VNS outpatients waiting for module adjustment)
VO: Vagal Nerve Stimulation, or VNS, an artificial mood-altering process prescribed by some doctors as a cure for charge addiction, may itself become another form of addictive behavior,
(visual: Dr. Karina Kawande, inset)
KAWANDE: "It was inevitable, really. Stimulating the vagus nerve to relieve stress is an acceptable substitute for dangerous street-gear only when the pulse dosage can be controlled. But any device based on code can be hacked, and there are patients now who have their VNS pulsing twenty-four hours a day. . . ."
As they walked through the crowd, face after strange face slid past Sam Fredericks like some endless nightmare—dogs, bears, opal-eyed snakes, children with wings and birds' heads, boys and girls made from wood or gingerbread or even glass. But of the thousands of creatures that surrounded the Well and its roiling lights, an entire refugee camp beneath the endless twilit skies, not a single one was familiar.
Not a single one was Renie Sulaweyo.
Sam could barely stand to look at !Xabbu, who she knew must be even more disappointed than she was. When they had left Azador with his rediscovered Gypsy family, !Xabbu had set out almost at a run to begin the search for Renie, but as the day had worn by without any sign of her the small man's steps had become slower and slower. In all their journeying, even in the most desperate of times, she could scarcely remember him looking tired. Now he moved as though almost too weary to breathe.
"We should go back now." Sam took his arm. She felt his resistance but kept her grip. "We can look some more later."
His face, when he turned to her, was hollow-eyed
, devastated. "She is not here, Sam. Not anywhere. And if this is the last place in this world. . . ."
She did not want to think about it, and she did not want !Xabbu thinking about it either. "No, we don't really know how this scanny place works. And we might have missed her, anyway—I'm getting so tired my eyes are blurring."
He sighed. "It is terrible of me to drag you on like this, Sam. We will go back and rest for a while with Azador's people."
"Chizz. Do you remember where they are?" She looked around at the ring of featureless hills. "I'm lost." Sam felt a little guilty—she had appealed to his protective instincts on purpose—but knew it was for his own good. It was funny how much !Xabbu was like Orlando, she thought. You couldn't get either of them to do much for themselves, but they would throw themselves off a building for a friend.
Orlando even got himself killed for me. . . . It was not a good thought and she pushed it away.
Making their way back through the aimless, uneasy throng seemed to take hours. Some of the other refugees had also worked hard to locate their own lost fellows—tiny exile communities from places with names like Where The Beans Talk and Cobbler's Bench had been pointed out to Sam and !Xabbu by helpful folk—but many more seemed to have simply walked as close to the Well as they could get, then stopped.
Azador's Gypsy kin had either arrived early or had staked their claim more aggressively than most. Their camp was close to the edge of the Well, the painted wagons clustered at the bottom of a bluff, as though a group of day-trippers had decided to picnic on the edge of an immense bomb crater—but no bomb crater had ever looked like this. When Sam had first seen it, she had thought that the black waters reflected the unchanging evening sky overhead and its sprinkling of faint stars. As they had drawn closer, all of them quiet and withdrawn except Azador, all troubled by their experiences crossing the covered bridge, she had discovered that the Well was a mirror of a very different kind. The stars, or whatever unstable points of light moved in its dark depths, were not static like those in the sky: they flared and died, as inconstant as foxfire. Sometimes an even greater light bloomed far below, so that for a moment all the well was full of a ruddy glow, as though a supernova had been born in the deepest expanses. Other times the points of brilliance dimmed and then disappeared entirely; for a few moments the Well became utterly black, a lightless hole gouged into the desolate earth.
