by Tad Williams
"I don't know anything about that, Olga." He spoke mildly, but was clearly troubled. "All those floors are closed. I only been up there when the security fellows ask me to come help move something." He sat thinking with his mouth open and his milky eyes almost shut, half a sandwich in his hand, arrested on its upward journey.
Olga forced herself to take a bite of the liverwurst sandwich he had insisted she share. Since she had vetoed eating in the custodians' lunchroom, convincing him instead to join her in the storage room—she had spent so much time there it was beginning to feel like home—she had not felt it polite to turn down the sandwich, despite her extremely mixed feelings about liverwurst, "So . . . so you've been to those floors?"
"Oh, sure. Lots of times. But only up to the security office." He frowned again. "Once to the room above that where they have all these machines, because one of the bosses was angry there was mouse poop there and he wanted to show me. But I told him I didn't even clean that room, so how was I supposed to know there were mice up there?" He laughed, then embarrassedly cleaned a morsel of liverwurst from his chin. "Lena said the mice were going up in the elevator! That was really funny."
Olga tried to suppress her almost panicky interest in this second machine room. What good would it do her, in any case? She had no idea how to attach Sellars' device, or what to attach it to, and no Sellars to benefit from its use anyway. But it was in the part of the tower she wanted to visit. "So could you take me up there?"
He shook his head. "We're not supposed to. We'll get in trouble."
"But I told you, if I don't, I'll get in trouble."
"I still don't understand," he said, chewing vigorously again.
"I told you, my friend from the other shift took me up there Friday, just to show it to me. But I dropped my wallet up there, you see? By accident. And if someone finds it I will get in trouble. And I also won't have my cards for shopping and things."
"You'd get in trouble, huh?"
"Yes. They will fire me for sure. And I won't be able to help my daughter and her little girl." Olga was torn between self-loathing and increasing desperation. Nobody but a man with some serious thinking problems would buy an ill-concocted story like this. She was taking advantage of Jerome because he was credulous and eager to please—probably brain-damaged—and she felt like the lowest scum imaginable. Only by thinking of the dream-children as though the memories were a mantra, of the way they had flocked to her like frightened birds seeking shelter, their imploring, hopeless voices, could she ease the pain of what she was doing.
"Maybe . . . maybe we could just tell some of the fellows in security," Jerome said at last. "They're pretty nice guys, really. They could get it for you."
"No!" She softened her tone and tried again. "No, they would have to file a report, otherwise they'd get in trouble, see? Then the friend who took me up there would get in trouble, too. I don't want someone else to get fired because of a mistake I made."
"You're a nice person, Olga."
She winced, but tried to keep her smile. "Is there anything you can do, Jerome?"
He was clearly very distressed by the idea of breaking the rules, but she could see him thinking carefully. "I could try, but I don't know if the elevator will open. Which floor did you lose your wallet on?"
"The one with the machines."' It seemed likely to be the most sparsely occupied, and there might be a way to get to the other floors—didn't even the highest-security, most supervillainish buildings still legally have to have stairways and fire escapes? As for how to get rid of Jerome so she could investigate in peace, she would have to think of something on the fly.
Maybe you could club him unconscious when you get there, Olga, she thought sourly. Just to make the whole thing complete.
Jerome put the rest of his sandwich back in the vacuum bag and carefully sealed it. He seemed to have lost his appetite. "We can go up and see, Olga. But if it doesn't work, don't get mad at me, okay?"
"I promise." And may God forgive me for this, she thought.
Ramsey looked around the room, trying to take it all in. Even for a virtual environment, where gravity was not an issue and cubic footage was equally an illusion, it was insanely cluttered. A grisly pile of heads in transparent boxes, a collection of human and nonhuman trophies more like flash-freeze holograms than actual decapitations, dominated the multilevel space, but there was plenty of competition. Strange objects were stacked everywhere, swords and spears and complete sets of armor, gems the size of Catur Ramsey's virtual fist, huge skulls of animals that could never, thank God, have actually lived in the real world, even a banister that was a huge, immobilized snake with a head half as long as Ramsey was tall. The walls, where they could be seen between the leaning piles of memorabilia, showed two scenes whose complete disparity were the only reason Ramsey knew they were displays rather than what was supposed to be outside Orlando Gardiner's electronic home in the Inner District.
The Cretaceous swamp, where even now a mother Hadrosaur was chasing away a slender Dromeosaurus that had made a couple of halfhearted lunges toward her eggs, was a pretty obvious thing for a kid to be interested in; the other, a vast and seemingly lifeless landscape of red dust was a little less understandable.
All in all, it was a boy's room in a place with no limits, and these were the proud possessions of a boy who would never come back to claim them. Ramsey could not help thinking of the child-king Tutankhamen, his tomb stuffed with personal effects dug open and exposed to view millennia after his death. Would Orlando's room just remain on the net? He supposed the Gardiners would have to keep paying for it. But what if they did? Would someone stumble across it generations in the future and try to make sense of the mind and world of a forgotten child from the twenty-first century? It was a strange and pitiful thought, a life in all its complexity reduced to a few toys and souvenirs.
Well, maybe not a few. . . .
A hole opened in the floor and something like the head of a ragged black dust mop emerged, accompanied by a cloud of cartoon dust.
"Thanks for meeting me here," Beezle said.
"No problem. Is this. . . ." He wanted to ask if the place was special to the agent, but again found himself confused. It wasn't even like Beezle was a real artificial personality. He was a kid's toy, essentially. "Do you come here a lot?"
Beezle's goggling eyes rolled and then settled. His answer was strangely hesitant. "I know where everything is. So it's a good place. To do things."
"Right." Ramsey looked around for someplace to sit. The only obvious thing designed for human comfort was a hammock stretched in one corner.
"You want a chair?" Beezle reached down into the hole in the floor and, with a few strange sound effects, produced a chair three or four times his own size. "Si'down. I'll tell you what I found."
As Ramsey made himself comfortable, Beezle produced a small black cube, then flicked it so that it opened into a foggy three-dimensional shape that hung in the middle of the room. A moment later the fog inside dispersed, revealing a tall black object.
"That's the J Corporation building."
"Yep." Beezle tapped the transparent cube and the building opened like a paper book, revealing its interior. "This is from that guy Sellars' notes."
"You found them!
"Yep. What is this guy, anyway, a robot or something? He keeps his notes in machine language."
"He's not a robot, as far as I know, but it's a long story and I'm in a hurry. Can you put me back in touch with Olga Pirofsky?"
"You wanna see where she is?" Beezle waved a misshapen foot and a tiny red dot gleamed into view about one third of the way up the structure. "Sellars has a trace on her—she's got a badge or something, right?—and you can track it off the readers they got on all the floors. It's a weak signal, but it's enough to triangulate her."
As Ramsey watched, the red dot slowly began to move sideways. She's alive, anyway, he thought. Unless someone's carrying her. "Do Sellars' notes tell you what he planned to do? Something ab
out tapping into the building's data stream, that's all I know."
"Kind of," Beezle said, cabdriver voice suddenly distracted. "Your friend—she's moving."
"I saw. . . ." Ramsey began, then suddenly realized that the red dot had stopped its horizontal movement and was now slowly rising. "Oh, my God, what's happening? What's she doing?"
"Service elevator. She's going up."
"But the top of the building. . . ! That's where Sellars said the private quarters were, and the security guards. I have to stop her!" He had a sudden thought. "Will her badge let her in up there?"
Beezle gave as much of a shrug as a creature with no shoulders and too many legs could manage. "Not unless she's done something to change it. Let me check." After a moment's silence, he said, "Nope. She could stop on the security floor, but if she tries to get out anywhere else above the forty-fifth she's probably gonna set off all the alarms."
"Christ. Can you put me in contact with her?"
"I haven't finished looking through all this stuff yet, but I'll try." Another hole in the floor opened next to Beezle. He made a move toward it, then stopped. "You know they got a whole army base on that island? Why the heck you wanna mess with someplace like that, anyway?"
"Just hook me up!" Ramsey shouted.
Beezle took a few shambling steps and dropped into the pit. Moments later the electronic cottage resounded with the clang of something being hammered and the earsplitting voopa-voopa of a wood saw.
"Good Christ, what are you doing?"
Beezle's voice echoed as it drifted up out of the hole in the floor. "What you asked me to do, boss. You wanna let me work?"
The red light was climbing steadily up the tower. Ramsey could not bear to watch. He turned to the rusty desert that covered one whole wall. He could see now that there were small beetlelike shapes in the sand, half-buried and as motionless as fossils. He dimly remembered reading something on the net about the MBC Project on Mars, how the little robots had stopped working.
That'll teach them to trust machines, he thought bitterly, wincing as the saw started up again, accompanied by what sounded like a jackhammer, shaking the walls of the 'cot until it seemed the whole thing might fall down. A plume of dust floated up out of the hole. A dragon's skull vibrated off a shelf and shattered, a piece of the jaw coming to rest beside Ramsey's feet.
In the midst of it all, the red dot rose serenely upward.
Despite the smoothness of the silent elevator, Olga felt as though a giant had grabbed her in its fist and was lifting her up, up toward a monstrous face she didn't want to see. She suddenly knew exactly why she'd dreamed of the circus, all its performers now dead and gone—a part of her life that was equally dead. It had been just like this, the climb up the ladder to the high platform, no matter how many times she did it: part of it had been almost mechanical, hand over hand in practiced motion, and even the surface of her mind had been full of rote memorizations, all the things her father had taught her to set her mind and prepare herself for whatever might come.
"Always you must be inside your thoughts and outside your body, my dear one." She suddenly could almost see him in the elevator with her, as close as Jerome was standing, Papa with his neat, graying beard, the scar across the bridge of his nose where his own brother's heel had broken it when they were young performers. It was only one or many scars—his large hands were ribboned with them, scored by nets and tent cables and guy wires. He often claimed that on his days off, he played catch with Le Cirque Royale's knife thrower. The first time he had said it, when she was three or four, she had been terrified until he assured her it was a joke.
He smelled of pine resin, always, which he used to keep his hands dry in the ring. That and her mama's cigarettes, those foul Russian things, even after all these years the two smells always brought back her childhood in an instant. Watching her father with his big hands on Mama's shoulders, or wrapped around her waist from behind while they watched rehearsal. Mama always, always with a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, her chin lifted to keep the smoke out of her eyes. She had been ramrod straight, slender, her dancer's body hard and muscular well into her seventies, before she got sick.
"My Polish princess," Papa had called Mama. "Look at her," he had always said, half-mocking, half-proud. "She may not be royalty, but she's built like it. No rear end on her at all, hips like a boy." And then he would give Mama a playful swat on the backside, and she would hiss at him like a cat being annoyed by a child. Papa would laugh, winking at Olga and the world. Look at my good-looking wife, it meant. And look at the temper she has on her!
They were both long gone now, Mama dead from cancer, her father following not long after, as everyone knew he would. He had said it himself: "I don't want to outlive her. You and your brother, Olga, God grant you long lives. Don't take offense if I don't stick around to see the grandchildren."
But there weren't any grandchildren, of course. Olga's brother Benjamin had died not long after her parents, a freakish piece of bad luck when his appendix had ruptured while he was on a mountaineering holiday with friends from university. And long before that she had lost her own baby and her husband in the same week—her entire chance at happiness, it had seemed then and still somehow did.
So I'm the last, she thought. That line from Mama's and Papa's parents and grandparents ends with me—maybe ends today, right here in this building. For the first time in days she felt truly overwhelmed. So sad, so . . . final. All the plans those people made, the baby blankets they knitted, the money they tucked away, and it all comes down to an aging woman probably throwing her life away over a delusion.
The elevator seemed to be creeping upward as slowly as a rising tide, the little squares on the black glass panel lighting one after the other. So sad.
"Do you have a family around here?" she asked Jerome, just to hear some human noise.
"My mom." He was squinting at the blinking lights on the panel as though hypnotized. She wondered how well he could see. They climbed from 35 to 36 to 37. For a modern elevator, Olga thought it seemed cruelly slow. "She lives in Garyville," Jerome went on. "My brother lives in Houston, Texas."
"Olga? Can you hear me?" The sudden voice in her head made her jump and gasp.
"What's wrong, Olga?" Jerome asked.
"Just a headache." She put a hand to her temple. "Who is that?" she subvocalized. "Mr. Ramsey, is that you?"
"Jesus, I never thought I'd get through again. You need to get off the elevator."
She looked at the panel. 40. 41. "What are you talking about? How did you know. . . ?"
"Olga, you look really sick."
She waved her hand to show she didn't want to talk.
"Just get off the elevator!" Ramsey's obvious panic cut through her confusion. "Now! If that door opens above the forty-fifth floor, you're going to set off alarms all over the building. Security will be on you before you can blink."
The feigned headache was becoming real. "Stop the car," she told Jerome. "What floor are we on?" The blinking panel suggested it was 43. "I need to use the restroom, Jerome. Is that okay?"
"Sure." But even as he pressed the button, the car had already moved up another floor. Olga found herself holding her breath. The car slid to a stop and the door hissed open, revealing a carpeted hallway and a bizarrely festive lighting scheme. It took her a moment to see that the walls were hung with shimmering pieces of neon art. Jerome stood in the open doorway. It took Olga a moment to realize he expected her to know where the restrooms were. After all, she was an employee, wasn't she?
"I haven't been on this floor," she explained. When he had told her where to go, she asked him to wait in the elevator lobby, afraid that someone might notice an elevator stopped on one floor too long.
The restroom was empty. She sat down in the farthest stall and pulled up her feet. "Tell me what's going on," she said to Ramsey. "Where did you people go? I've been trying to call you all day."
His explanation did not make her feel any better abo
ut anything—in fact, it was hard to think of something more carefully designed to destroy what little confidence she had left. "Oh, God help us, Sellars is . . . gone? So who is this Beezle who is helping you out? Is he one of that army fellow's specialists or something?"
"It's a long story." Ramsey didn't sound very eager to tell it. "Right now, we have to figure out what we're going to do. Are you in a secure place?"
She had to laugh at that. "I am in enemy territory, Mr. Ramsey! I am about as secure as a cockroach standing in the bathtub when the light comes on. If someone doesn't smash me with a shoe, yes, I suppose I am just fine."
"I'm doing my best, Olga, honestly. You don't know how hard I've been trying to get back in touch with you since Sellars . . . since whatever happened to him." He took a deep breath. "I'm going to put Beezle on with you. He's . . . he's a little eccentric. Don't worry about it—he's very good at what he does."
"Eccentric I can live with, Mr. Ramsey."
The voice, when it came, was like that of some ancient comedian from the Television Era. "You're Olga, right? Pleased to meetcha."
"And you." She shook her head. Sitting fully-clothed on the toilet talking to an escapee from the Catskills circuit, probably twenty vertical feet or so from armed men who would be happy to kill her, or at least beat her senseless, if they knew what she was trying to do. There has to be an easier, more sensible way to commit suicide, she told herself.
"Look, if there's a bunch of machinery up there, that may be just what Sellars wants," Beezle told her after she explained what she had heard from Jerome. "We won't know until we find it, and even then we won't know anything anyway, since according to Ramsey this Sellars is kind of a sleeping partner at the moment." His snort of indignation was audible and almost funny. "But if you try to walk in there without authorization, you're lunchmeat, seen?"
He sounded a bit old to be using kiddie slang, but Olga had spent her life among showfolk who liked affecting Bohemian airs. "Seen, I suppose."
