Sea of Silver Light o-4

by Tad Williams

  !Xabbu?

  From the other side of the universe, still, small: Renie. . . ?

  Impossible. Impossible! !Xabbu! Jesus Mercy, is that you?

  And suddenly diminishment was not a blessing but a horror. Suddenly she wanted back all she had lost even though she knew it must be too late. She was almost gone, reduced to essences and drawn apart into the cloudy impermanence of the sea of stars.

  No, she thought. He's out there, somehow. He's out there! She fought, but she scarcely felt real—there was no leverage, nothing to push against. !Xabbu! I'm drowning!

  Renie. He was faint, only a voice and barely that. Reach for me.

  Where are you?

  Beside you. Always beside you.

  And she opened herself and felt him there just as he had said, a presence as vague and dispersed as her own but right beside her, as if they were two galaxies rolling down the long night-tides of the universe to meet and pass through each other like ghosts.

  I feel you, she said. Don't leave me.

  Don't leave me, he might have echoed her, or Believe me.

  She believed. She reached for him and willed the string to unbreak.

  Touch, she said. I touch.

  I feel.

  And then they met and embraced—light-years wide but close as the ebb and flow of a single heartbeat, two matrices of naked thought drawn together in the darkness and held tight by the infinite compression of love.

  She had a body again. She knew it even with her eyes shut, because she was holding him closer than she had ever held anyone.

  "Where are we?" she finally asked. She could hear his heartbeat, fast and strong, hear his breath in his lungs. All else was silence, but she needed nothing else.

  "It does not matter," he said. "We are together."

  "Did we . . . make love?"

  "It does not matter." He sighed, then laughed. "I do not know. I think . . . we were made of love."

  She was afraid to open her eyes, she realized. She clutched him more tightly when she had not thought such a thing possible. "It doesn't matter," she agreed, "I thought I would never find you again. . . ."

  His fingers touched her face—cool, real. It startled her so that she looked in spite of herself. It really was his face, his dear face, that looked down on her in the cool evening light. There were tears in his eyes. "I . . . I would not believe it . . . could not let myself. . . ." He lowered his forehead until it touched hers. "I was swimming so long . . . in all that light. Drowning. Calling you. Coming apart. . . ."

  She was weeping. "We have bodies. We can cry. Are we . . . back? In the real world?"

  "No."

  Worried by his strange tone, Renie sat up, taking care to keep her arms around him, not trusting him or herself to stay solid. The landscape was alien but oddly familiar, gray in the dying light. For a moment she thought they had returned to the black mountaintop but the outline of a leafless tree, the fuzzy sprung shape of a bush, confused her.

  "At first I thought we were in the place where I dived in to search for you," !Xabbu said slowly.

  "Dived in. . . ? Where?"

  "The Well. But I was wrong." He pointed to the sky. "Look."

  She raised her head. The stars were bright. The moon was round and yellow, hanging fat above the horizon like a ripe fruit.

  "It is an African moon," he said. "The moon of the Kalahari."

  "But . . . but I thought you said we weren't . . . back. . . ." She leaned away from him, staring. He wore a loincloth of animal hide. A bow and a crude quiver of arrows lay on the dirt beside him. And she was also dressed in skins.

  "It's your world," she said quietly. "The Bushman simulation you took me to—God that seems like a century ago! Where we danced."

  "No." He shook his head again. He had wiped the tears from his cheeks and eyes. "No, Renie, it is something different—something . . . more."

  He stood, extending a hand to help her up. The seedpods tied around his ankles rattled as he moved.

  "But if this isn't your world. . . ?"

  "There is a fire," he said, pointing to a flicker of light that stained the desert sands red and orange. "Just beyond that rise."

  They walked across the dry pan, kicking up dust that hid their feet so that it seemed they walked across clouds. The moon touched the dunes, rocks, and thorn bushes with silver.

  The campfire was small, made of only a few crossed sticks. Other than the fire itself there was no sign of human life in all the immensity of desert night.

  Before Renie could ask again, !Xabbu pointed to a gulley that carved through the cracked earth beside the campfire, the drywash shell of some long-dead stream. "Down there," he said. "I see him. No, I feel him."

  Renie could see nothing but the jittering of shadows around the campfire, but !Xabbu's voice made her look to him. His face was solemn but there was something else in it as well, a kind of exalted fire behind the eyes that in anyone else she would have feared was hysteria.

  "What is it?" She took his hand, suddenly afraid.

  He kept her hand in his and led her down the pan, stopping beside the fire. She could not help noticing that theirs were the only footprints crossing the dust. When they looked down into the gulley, she saw that the stream that had carved it was not entirely dead: a trickle of water ran along the bottom, so narrow that if she climbed down into the hole she could dam it with one foot. Something was moving beside this streamlet—something very, very small.

  !Xabbu sat in the dust beside the shallow scrape. His rattles whispered.

  "Grandfather," he said.

  The mantis looked up at him, triangular head cocked, sawtoothed arms held high.

  "Striped Mouse. Porcupine." The calm, still voice came from everywhere and nowhere. "You have come far to see the end."

  "May we sit at your fire?"

  "You may."

  Renie began to understand. "!Xabbu," she whispered "That's not Grandfather Mantis. It's the Other. It's taken this from your mind, somehow. It appeared to me as Stephen—pretended to be my brother."

  !Xabbu only smiled and squeezed her hand. "In this place, it is Mantis," he said. "After all, whatever you call it, we have finally met the dream who is dreaming us."

  She sat down beside him, feeling limp and emotionally exhausted. All she wanted was to be with !Xabbu. And maybe he's right, she thought. Why fight it? Logic is gone. We're definitely in someone else's dream. If this was the way the Other chose to communicate—perhaps the only way it could communicate—then they might as well accept it. She had tried to force the Stephen-thing to see reality in her terms and its anger and frustration had almost killed her.

  The mantis tipped its shiny head down, then up, regarding them with tiny, protuberant eyes. "The All-Devourer will be here soon," it said. "He is coming to my campfire, too."

  "There are still things that can be done, Grandfather," said !Xabbu.

  "Wait a minute," Renie whispered. "I thought if anyone was the All-Devourer in this story, he was. It was. The Other, I mean."

  The insect appeared to have heard her. "We are at the end of things now. My fight is over. A great shadow, a hungry shadow, will swallow all I have made."

  "It does not have to be that way, Grandfather," said !Xabbu. "There are those who might help you—our friends and allies. And see! Here is your Beloved Porcupine, she of the clear thought and brave heart."

  Brave heart, maybe, Renie thought. Clear thought? Not bloody likely. Not in the middle of this cracked fairy tale. But aloud she said, "We want to help. We want to save not just our own lives, but the children's lives, too. All the children."

  A minute twitch as the mantis shook its head. "It is too late for the first children. Even now the All-Devourer has begun to eat them."

  "But you—we—can't just give up!" Renie's voice rose in spite of her best intentions. "No matter how bad it looks we still have to fight! To try!"

  Mantis seemed to shrink even smaller, drawing in on itself until it was little more than a s
pot of shadow. "No," it whispered, and for a moment its voice was as raw and miserable as a child's. "No. Too late."

  !Xabbu was squeezing her hand. Renie leaned back. However frustrating it was, she had to realize that this . . . thing, whatever had formed it, whatever shaped its thoughts and dreams, was not going to be argued into doing the right thing.

  After a long silent time !Xabbu said, "Do you not think of a world beyond this? A world where the good things can be saved, can grow again?"

  "His mouth is full of fire," Mantis whispered. "He runs like the wind. He is swallowing everything I have made. There is nothing beyond this." It was quiet for a moment, crouching, gently rubbing its forelegs together. "But it is good not to be alone, we think. It is good to be where the campfire still burns, at least for a little while. Good to hear voices."

  Renie closed her eyes. So this was what it had all come down to—trapped in the imagination of a mad machine, waiting for the end in a world built from !Xabbu's own thoughts and memories. It was an interesting way to die. Too bad she'd never get to tell anyone.

  "Come, it is too quiet," said Mantis. Its voice was very small now, like the merest brush of wind through the thorn bushes. "Porcupine, my darling daughter, you are sad. Striped Mouse, tell the story again of the feather that became the moon."

  !Xabbu looked up, a little startled. "You know that story?"

  "I know all your stories now. Tell it, please."

  And so, in a moment of calm beneath the fiery stars of an African night sky—a moment that seemed like it could last forever, although Renie knew better—!Xabbu began to recite the story of how Mantis created life from a discarded piece of shoe leather. The dying mantis crouched beside the trickling stream, listening intently to the tale of its own cleverness, and seemed to find it very interesting indeed.

  They had prepared not just a fire, but a wall of fire—an arc of papers, boxes, empty grain sacks, and other combustibles they had piled in front of one corner of the room and set alight. Behind the fiery barrier was stacked every piece of remaining furniture not bolted to the floor—desks and chairs, even the lids from the V-tanks that were not being used. Even the spaces between objects were crammed tight with thin military mattresses.

  But those things will not stop bullets, Joseph thought sadly. Stop no dogs either.

  A flicker on the monitor caught his attention. "They are moving now. Light the fire."

  "It's t–tempting," said Del Ray, not hiding his panic very well, "but I'll wait until you're back here with us. Just tell us what's happening up there."

  Joseph was feeling increasingly exposed as he watched the four mercenaries upstairs leaning over the hole, gesturing. They had already strapped on their combat gear, puffy vests, and hoods with goggles. He resented having been given monitor duty just because he had supposedly fouled up before. That—we were going to stop that truck driving away, somehow? Stop them getting those big monster dogs? But even his resentment was nothing against the skin-tightening, horrible certainty of what was to come. "They are ready," he said out loud. "I don't need to stand here no more."

  "Just tell us what they're doing," Jeremiah said.

  "Dressing up the dogs," Joseph told him.

  "What?"

  He squinted at the monitor. "No. First I think they wrapping the dogs up in blankets, but they are doing something else." Just the sight of the things made his guts watery. The huge animals were shivering with excitement, their cropped tails wagging rigidly. "They . . . they are using the blankets to do something. Maybe to carry them." He watched miserably as the men approached the pit they had dug into the floor, using attached ropes to haul the blanket, the first mutant ridgeback sitting upright in the center like a royal personage. "Oh. Oh. They are going to use the blankets to lower the dogs down through the hole."

  "Shit," said Del Ray miserably. "Time to light the fire. Come on!"

  Joseph did not need to be urged. He sprinted across the floor of the darkened lab and jumped over the wall of file papers, then clambered up over the furniture barricade, almost knocking over Del Ray as he tumbled down the far side. "Go ahead! Light it!"

  "I'm trying!" Jeremiah moaned. "We didn't have enough petrol left to get it really soaked." He flicked another of Renie's cigarettes from shaking fingers. The papers caught with a whuff of ignition. For a moment, as blue flames ran along the makeshift barrier, Joseph felt a tingle of hope.

  "Why the lights out?" he whispered. "Then we can't see to shoot them."

  "Because we've got two bullets and they've probably got thousands," Del Ray said. "Just stop arguing, Joseph, Please?"

  "Dark isn't going to fool no dogs," Joseph pointed out, but more quietly.

  Del Ray made a strange noise, a kind of groan. "I'm truly sorry, Joseph—I don't want the last thing I say to be 'shut up.' But shut up."

  Long Joseph could feel his heart getting big in his chest, big but weak, trying so hard to beat fast even though something was squeezing it badly. "I am sorry we are all here."

  "I am too," Del Ray said. "God knows, I am too."

  "Something's coming," said Jeremiah in a cracking voice. They all stared out past the flames, trying to see movement in the shadows at the other end of the laboratory.

  Joseph's chest seemed tighter and tighter. He tried to imagine his Zulu ancestors, the ones he bragged of so often, staring out from their campfire at the African darkness, tried to imagine how brave they felt even when they heard the rumbling of a lion, but he couldn't. His only weapon, a steel bar from the underside of a conference table, hung loose in his sweaty hand.

  Please, God, he thought. Don't let them hurt Renie. Make it fast.

  Joseph saw something moving at the far end of the lab—a low and silent shadow. Then he saw another. The first one looked up, swiveling its head from side to side. Two points of baleful yellow gleamed as its eyes caught and reflected the firelight.

  A loud voomp made Joseph jump. Something smashed through their little wall of fire, scattering sparks, and rolled toward their hiding place. A moment later a cloud of smoke billowed over him, filling his eyes, fouling his lungs. He waved his hands, heard Jeremiah choking and shouting, but before he could do anything more a huge dark shape plunged over the flaming barrier and landed on top of him, growling.

  He was smashed to the floor and something tore into his arm—he felt a spike of silver pain brighter than any fire. He struggled but he was being pressed down beneath something heavier than he was, something that wanted to get its teeth into his belly. A volley of explosions roared above his head but they seemed far away, meaningless. The thing had him, the beast had him. He heard one of his companions screech in frightened anger, then Del Ray's pistol cracked and spit flame by his head and the heavy burden slid off him.

  Joseph struggled up off the floor, gasping for breath. A string of stuttering shots—katokkatokkatokkatok—went off like firecrackers. More animal shapes were picking their way through the scattered remnants of the fire; he could hear men shouting, then more shots. Several human figures were pushing through the doorway into the smoke-clouded room. To Joseph's blurred eyes there seemed too many, far more than four.

  Not right! he wanted to shout but his mouth was burning, his throat constricted. Del Ray crouched trembling beside him, the pistol with its one remaining bullet in his outstretched hand. Joseph couldn't hear him fire it over the noise of the other guns, didn't even see a flash from the muzzle, but two of the dogs fell.

  Two with one shot, Joseph marveled, dazed by smoke in his lungs and in his thoughts. Just like you said. How can you do that, Del Ray?

  But before he could make sense of it another mutant dog came up out of the smoke and over the wall of desks and mattresses, striking Joseph like a thunderbolt and hurling him back onto the ground. A grunting head shoved up toward his face, dug its hot, wet muzzle into Long Joseph's throat, and took away his air.

  Paul Jonas lay at Sam's feet, twitching and moaning like a man who had received a terrible electric shock. Sa
m herself had only recovered a few moments earlier after her abrupt ejection from the Well, and now she struggled to make sense of what was happening. The weeping angel had flickered and vanished from the air above the Well. The Twins, in the form of Jack Sprat and his wife, were shrieking in wordless fury at her disappearance, snatching up screaming refugees and throwing them into the flaring pit as though that might force her to return. But none of the hapless creatures who fell into the pit came up again and the angel did not reappear.

  "Sam Fredericks!" It was Martine's voice. Sam could not see her through the stampede of terrified creatures. She tried to get a grip on Paul's arm to drag him to safety but he was slippery with sweat, writhing like a man in the grip of nightmare. Someone pushed in beside her to help her pull and together they managed to drag Jonas back from the worst of the crush, to a spot on the very edge. After the lunatic events of the last minutes Sam was only mildly surprised to discover that her helper was Felix Jongleur.

  "We must get away from this," he snapped. "I have no control over this version of Finney and Mudd. Where are your friends?"

  Sam shook her head. It seemed impossible to locate anyone in the chaos; it was all she could do to stand her ground and protect Paul from being trampled by maddened milkmaids and panicked dwarfs.

  "Fredericks!" Martine was shouting for her again, but this time Sam spotted her a dozen meters farther down the shoreline, crowded with several others along a dip in the rim that seemed only a handspan above the surface of the Well. Sam bent and grabbed Paul under the arms, straining to lift his upper body. His head lolled but his eyes were open, staring at the sky. Jongleur took his feet and they half-carried, half-dragged him toward the spot where Martine and the others huddled, temporarily out of the worst of the chaos.

  Paul Jonas' face swung toward her. For a moment his eyes appeared to focus.