by Tad Williams
She thought she should thank him for the story, although she felt again that she hadn't really understood—what was all that about some icky black fenfen getting all over the insect the story was about? And how could he be an insect but have a rainbow for a son? Also, she was puzzled why one kind of story, about making an antelope out of a sandal, had suddenly turned into another kind of story: it violated her sense of how stories were supposed to work. But she knew that these things were somehow important to !Xabbu, sort of like a religion, and she didn't want to offend anyone she liked so much.
A high-pitched voice called from the largely silent crowd. "Tell another!"
!Xabbu looked up, a little startled, but before he or Sam could make out where the request had originated, others were also asking, a growing chorus.
"A story!"
"Tell another."
"Please!"
"They want to hear more stories," !Xabbu said wonderingly.
"They're scared," said Sam. "The world is coming to an end. And they're all children, aren't they?" Looking around at the pleading, terrified faces, she felt herself fighting back tears. If Jongleur had been within reach she would have hit him, would have tried to knock him down and make him pay for what his cruel self-obsession had done to these innocents. "They have to be them," she said, as much to herself as to !Xabbu. "They have to be the stolen children."
She was arrested by a familiar face in the throng, although it took her a moment to remember where she had seen the handsome, dark-haired man before. He was a few rows back in me crowd, holding a bundle Sam couldn't quite see, watching !Xabbu with an unblinking, almost vacant stare. None of the fairy-tale children stood too near him, as though they could sense something wrong.
Sam pulled at !Xabbu's arm. "Look, it's that Grail guy—the one that disappeared when Renie disappeared!"
"Ricardo Klement? Where?"
"Over there," Sam said, but now there was only an empty space where Klement had stood. "He was there a second ago, no dupping!"
As they scanned the throng of refugees, Sam became aware of someone standing very close to her, a small child apparently made of mud. She tried to step around the tiny obstacle but the child moved with her and reached up a stubby hand to tug at Sam's Gypsy finery.
"He is not there now," !Xabbu said. "He is larger than most of these people—we would see him, I think. . . ."
"He couldn't have got away that fast," Sam said angrily. Beyond the crowd of refugees still begging for another story, the gray slope was empty for dozens of meters. "Not without us seeing him." The mud child was still trying to get her attention. "Stop pulling on me, will you?" Sam snapped.
The child let go and took a step backward. It was hard to tell from its odd face, the features little more than dents and grooves, what the creature was thinking, but it squared its shoulders in a way that clearly said it would not be chased off. "I want to talk to you," the stranger said in the voice of a little girl.
Sam sighed. "What?"
"Are you. . . . are you Renie's friends?"
Sam had been expecting a plea for another of !Xabbu's tales, and for a long moment could only stare at the child, dumbfounded. "Renie. . . ?"
!Xabbu was there in a heartbeat to kneel beside the child. "Who are you?" he asked. "Do you know Renie? Do you know where she is? Yes, we are her friends."
The girl looked at him for a moment. "I'm . . . I'm the Stone Girl." Her simple finger-stroke of a mouth writhed and she began to cry. "Don't you know where she is either?"
From the way he closed his eyes and grunted, like a man suffering a painful blow, Sam could see !Xabbu's terrible disappointment. "Maybe you'd better just tell us everything," she said to the weeping Stone Girl.
". . . And then after we ran away from the Ticks, up the hill, we crossed the bridge." The child was still sniffling a bit, but in telling the story of her travels with Renie she had found a sort of calm. "And we saw the strange man who was her friend, too, but he was just walking, and the Ticks went around him!" She was clearly impressed. "Like they didn't even care about him."
"That's so scanny!" Sam said. "That has to be what's-his-name, Klement."
!Xabbu frowned. "And then what happened? When you crossed the bridge?"
The Stone Girl chewed for a moment on a muddy finger, thinking. "We didn't really go to Jinnear Bad House, not like usual. We both went in, sort of, then right away I came out here at the Well. But Renie didn't." Her eyes squinted for a moment as she fought more tears. "Do you think she's all right?"
"We utterly hope so," Sam said, then turned to !Xabbu, "But where is she?"
The small man had a distant, disturbed look on his face. "The rest of us traveled in a similar way, I think. We came close to the Other, were weighed—judged, perhaps—and then were sent away. Those who belong in this world, like Azador and this little girl, did not even experience that much, but were simply sent straight here."
"What does that mean?"
He stood, absently patting the Stone Girl on the head, but he looked as miserable as she had ever seen him. "It might be I am wrong, but I think Renie was allowed in."
"Allowed in?" Sam was not following.
"To the Well." !Xabbu turned to look at the crater and its sea of restless light. "I think she is in the Other's innermost heart."
"Oh, no," Sam said. "God, really?"
!Xabbu's smile, for the first time in Sam's memory, was something unpleasant to look at. "Yes, God, really. The god of this place, anyway. The dying, crazy god."
Sam's pulse was rabbiting. She had all but forgotten the Stone Girl who still stood between them face puzzled and sad. "!Xabbu, what will we do?"
"What I will do is go after her." He was staring at the Well as though seeing it for the first time. Sam could not help remembering how afraid he had been just to dive into a placid river. "I . . . I will go down."
"Not without me you won't." For the moment, her fear of being left behind allowed her to ignore the terror of the unnatural Well. "I already told you what I think about all that let-me-save-the-day fenfen."
He shook his head. "You do not understand, Sam. The Other—I believe it already has rejected me once, rejected you too, all of us." His voice had gotten very quiet. "I do not believe I will reach Renie, but I have to try." He turned to her, almost pleading. "I cannot take you, Sam, when I feel sure there is no hope."
She was just about to issue an angry rebuttal when she finally realized that an irritating noise which had been in the background for several seconds was Felix Jongleur's loud, angry voice. She turned and saw the old man on open ground midway between the place where she stood with !Xabbu and the outskirts of the Gypsy camp.
". . . But I do not believe that anymore. I think your silence is insolence—or worse."
The person he was shouting at was Ricardo Klement.
!Xabbu was already hurrying down the slope. Sam took a few steps, then turned, startled by a cry of unhappiness behind her. She had forgotten the Stone Girl.
"Come on," Sam said. "Do you want me to carry you?" The Stone Girl shook her head stiffly, but reached out and took Sam's hand in a cool and surprisingly firm grip.
By the time they reached the others, !Xabbu was doing his best to ask Klement a question about Renie, but Felix Jongleur was full of cold fury and would not be interrupted. Sam could finally see the thing Klement was holding and she was shocked and disgusted. The infant shape and vestigial features made a bad combination with its muddy gray-blue color.
"So you will not even answer me?" Jongleur asked Klement. "Come, I thought you were my ally, Ricardo—I have made many sacrifices for you. Yet you disappear when we are all in need, then will not even tell me where you have gone? And I suppose you will not explain your little . . . souvenir either?"
For a moment Klement almost seemed to clutch the little baby-creature tighter, a gesture that was the first human thing Sam had seen from the man. "It . . . is mine."
"Just tell me what you have been doing," Jon
gleur demanded.
"Waiting," said Klement after a long pause.
"For what?"
"For . . . something." Klement slowly turned toward the Well, then back to Jongleur, !Xabbu, and Sam. "And now . . . I have found it."
An instant later, Ricardo Klement was gone.
Sam stared helplessly at the empty space, then turned to !Xabbu, half-believing that something must be wrong with her. Her friend looked just as surprised, but his astonishment was as nothing to Jongleur's, who looked like a man who had just seen his own furniture rise up and attack him.
"What. . . ?" he said, gaping. "How. . . ?"
Even as he spoke, the universe shifted and reality stuttered to a halt. Sam had not felt anything like it for many days, and had almost forgotten the terror of one of these hitches in time and space. Color and noise blurred into a mishmash of sensory information. Sam felt sure that the end had finally come, the crash of the system, and even tried to brace herself for a return of the hideous, bone-drilling pain she had experienced when she had once before been yanked out of the Grail Network. Instead the meaningless chaos of sight and sound abruptly knitted itself back together, as if someone had wound a key and set a clockwork mechanism moving forward again. Reality was restored. Or most of it was.
The Stone Girl was tugging at Sam's arm, but Sam could hardly see her or anything else because the light that had come back was much dimmer, as though the entire virtual universe were powered by a single spluttering, ancient generator. The shapes around her were little more than shadows, but she could hear a rising murmur of terror from the refugees crowded around the Well, a sound like wind in tall trees.
The Stone Girl tugged her arm again. "Look at the stars," the little girl said, her voice a choked whisper.
The sky was darkening from the long twilight into true night, but the stars were not getting brighter. Instead, they were fading. The evening sky was turning black and the starlight was dying, plunging all the land around the Well into deepest shadow.
CHAPTER 36
Without a Net
NETFEED/ADVERTISEMENT: ANVAC Spells "Trust"
(visual: scenes of dogs, children, and suburban houses and parks)
VO: There's a lot of silliness going around these days, but when people call our company secretive, or arrogant, or vindictive, well, that's just going too darn far. Our business is to protect people. Yes, some of our clients are world leaders in politics and business, but a lot of them are just average people like you. Good people. People who know that happiness comes from security, and security comes from ANVAC.
A lot of people have asked, "What does your name mean? Do the letters stand for something?" But you know, that's not really anyone else's business. We're a privately-held corporation, and just as you wouldn't want anyone to come into your house and read your old letters, we have a right to privacy, too. It's enough to know that what we stand for is the right of our customers to be safe, and that is what the letters A-N-V-A-C really spell is "trust'
She stood paralyzed on the platform, watching the arc of the trapeze as it sailed out toward her, paused, then swung back into the shadows at the top of the big tent. She knew that she must leap out and catch it on the next swing or else she would never reach it, would be stuck on the high platform forever. But she knew just as firmly that there was no net, and that a fall onto the sawdust-caked center ring beneath her, invisible in the glare of the spotlights, would be like an eighty-foot swan dive onto cement.
The trapeze swung toward her again and its slightly diminished arc confirmed that she would get no more chances. She tensed her muscles and felt the edge of the platform through the soles of the soft shoes, letting herself lean forward against every shrieking instinct until her balance was compromised and there was no turning back. As the bar neared the end of its swing, slowing to the moment when it would finally stop and hang in space for a fraction of a second, she leaped outward into the pillars of light, the unending dark.
Only as she touched the rung, clutched, and felt it squirt from her grasp like a bar of soap—only in that moment when she too was briefly weightless, but with all of death and eternity solidifying around her, changing her from a person into a mere proof of gravity—did Olga realize she was dreaming. The dream-audience bellowed in distorted surprise and terror, deafening her even as she fell, then she was gasping on the floor of the storeroom where she had fallen asleep, shivering and struggling to catch her breath as the air-conditioning vent above her head roared like a jet engine.
By the time she had found the water fountain and taken a long drink the trembling was beginning to subside. Some deep frequency in the air-conditioning was starting to make her feel ill, so she picked up her belongings and moved to the other side of the storeroom.
The unintended nap had done little to make her feel better. She could still feel the moment of slippage and freefall, something that even after years of working over a net, practicing with her father and his aerialists, never completely lost its terror.
Wouldn't be much of a circus unless there is a chance someone might die.
Strangely, the thought gave her a little comfort. Nothing was assured in that life or this: even a safety net was no guarantee. Jansci, the Hungarian wire-walker, a good friend of her father's, had fallen to the net during practice, caught his foot as he was bouncing up, and had somehow gone over the edge. A mere fifteen-foot fall, but it had paralyzed him.
No guarantee, even with a net.
She drank a little more water, then tried Catur Ramsey's line again, but whatever magic had once connected her through the telematic jack to the real world outside this artificial black mountain was gone. The coach was a pumpkin once more, the footmen had become mice. She would have to do it on her own.
She packed her meager belongings and headed for the service elevator.
Almost a full day of living like a rat in the walls of Felix Jongleur's house had made her cautious. When the elevator hissed open on the mezzanine floor she peered around the edge before stepping out, then shrank back into the interior until the young man at the end of the corridor had rounded the corner and disappeared. He was wearing a collarless shirt and work pants, but seemed more like a business employee in casual clothes than a custodial worker—perhaps a young manager on the way up, anxious to impress the bosses with unpaid overtime.
Even the minions of Hell don't have to dress up on weekends, she decided. I don't remember Mr. Dante mentioning that.
As she held the door open and waited a few extra moments for safety, she could not help thinking about the dozens of oh-so-ordinary employees she had seen around the building, all doing oh-so-ordinary things. In fact, she had seen no evidence that her own reasons for being here were anything but delusional. J Corporation headquarters, once she was past its forbidding black facade, held nothing she could not have found in any downtown skyscraper. Even the hardened office for the squad of security guards was not excessive if you considered that the building was also the residence of one of the world's richest men.
Any reasonable person would have to admit that the fantasies of lost children and worldwide conspiracies seemed more and more farfetched—and Olga herself was a reasonable person.
Can you be reasonable and still be insane? she wondered. That would seem to be stretching the rules a bit.
When she felt certain the hallway was empty, she made her way down the stairs from the mezzanine onto the ground floor of the vast, pyramid-roofed lobby. Although she had seen several people crossing from one elevator bank to another, at the moment it was empty—almost shockingly so, in the way only a closed public building can seem. She hurried across the black marble floor toward the main reception desk, the echo of her footsteps sounding as loud as gunfire. When she reached the desk she made a show for the hidden cameras of accidentally tipping a square vase of flowers across the countertop, so that the water and the fading irises from Friday morning splashed out onto the floor in front of the desk. Pretending she had not noticed w
hat she'd done, she hurried back up to the comparative safety of the mezzanine.
From a secure place in a copse of potted ornamental trees she waited and watched as an agonizingly slow trickle of J Corporation workers checked in through the inset security door for some weekend catch-up, or wandered across the lobby from one part of the building to the other. Several of them seemed to notice the pool of water and spilled flowers in front of the desk, but if any of them decided to notify someone about it they used their telematic jack to do so. Olga had no way of knowing for sure.
An hour went by. Somewhere between twenty and thirty employees had trekked across the lobby but the spilled vase still lay untended. The huge clock on the wall, a rectangle of gold the size of a panel truck inset with Egyptian figures and characters, showed a few minutes past eight o'clock. Saturday night, her time almost half gone, and nothing accomplished. Olga had always been a patient woman, but now she felt herself stretched like a thin cord, vibrating in every breeze, poised to snap. She had all but decided that she would have to take the risk of exposing herself on a search of the lower floors when a gangly figure shuffled out of the service elevator and across the lobby floor pushing a plastic bin on wheels, a mop resting on one shoulder like a sentry's rifle.
Relieved, Olga let out a long-held sigh of breath. She watched for a moment as the custodian gathered up the fallen irises with slow, careful movements, then lowered the mop. When she was sure she was right—who knew how many custodians actually worked here on weekends?—she hurried to the elevator and got in. A minute later it was summoned to the lobby level. She did her best to look surprised when he got in.
"Well, hello, Jerome," she said as he bumped his bin over the tiny gap between car and door. She gave him her best smile. "What are you doing up here?"
