by Tad Williams
"Tell him to turn off the window. . . ." he said urgently, as though it meant something sane and useful, then his eyes rolled up and his words fell away again into murmuring nonsense.
They made it a dozen awkward steps before something grabbed Sam's ankle and dragged her to the ground.
"Bring back the princess!" a voice hissed behind her. She tried to crawl forward but the grip on her leg was painful and strong; it flipped her on her back as though she were a rag. "We want the princess!" demanded Jack Sprat and shook something at her. It was another victim—a small, bulge-eyed man dressed in green, dangling by the neck from the monster's other hand. Jack Sprat leaned closer, blind face as grainy as old, white wood. So frightened she could not take in enough breath to scream, Sam kicked, but could not dislodge the twining fingers. The tree-tall creature yanked her into the air and dangled her upside down, then his attention wandered to the struggling, green-clad man. He squeezed the prisoner's neck in a gentle, almost experimental way, watching with interest as the little man's struggles first sped, then slowed.
"The blade!" shouted Felix Jongleur. "Give me the sword!"
Sam could only wonder why the old man had remembered the broken sword but she hadn't. She fumbled it out of her belt and let it drop to the ground. Jongleur snatched it up with such a look of triumph that for a moment Sam could only curse her own stupidity.
That's the last I'll see of him. . . . she thought, her head roaring and aching as she swung like a pendulum two meters above the ground. But Jongleur surprised her by leaping forward to hack hard at the twiggy hand pinioning her ankle. Still fascinated by the death throes of its other prisoner, Jack Sprat scarcely even seemed to notice what Jongleur had done, but his fingers popped and parted; Sam fell to the ground so hard it took her a moment to know which way was up.
"Hurry!" Jongleur shouted. "Help me with Jonas!"
Reeling, Sam climbed to her feet. They lifted Paul and stumbled to the edge of the well, shoving their way between yelping, sobbing refugees. Hands reached up from the low spot along the shoreline and helped Paul down, then Sam too was assisted over the edge and onto a narrow shelf scarcely three paces wide and a dozen paces long, the whole thing only a few meters below the rim of the pit and less distance than that above the glimmering surface of the Well. Jongleur climbed down after her and crouched beside her on the ledge, panting, ignoring startled or even hostile glances from the others.
Martine, Florimel, T4b, even Mrs. Simpkins and Nandi were already crammed along the ledge with chittering Wicked Tribe monkeys perched on several of them. The strange boy named Cho-Cho huddled beside Martine, his back against the gray earth, eyes wide with terror.
"Do we just wait here until they find us?" Bonnie Mae Simpkins demanded in a breathless whisper.
"What are those things?" said Florimel. "Where did such monsters come from?"
Nandi Paradivash looked down at where Paul lay beside Sam's feet, still locked in some miserable dream. "They are copies of the real Twins—the men who have followed Jonas through the network. Apparently there are many of these duplicate versions, all obsessed with Jongleur's daughter, but usually harmless. Dread has control of the system, even though for the moment the Other is keeping him at bay. Apparently he has found a way to mutate these copies."
"But why?" Florimel demanded. She flinched as a long, choking scream cut through the already terrible noises above them, then plucked a nervously fidgeting monkey off her forehead and deposited it back on her shoulder. "He cannot destroy the operating system this way—all he is doing is killing the children! Is he simply mad?"
"He wants us to give up," Martine said in a slow, dead voice. "He wants us to surrender, to save the children."
"But even if we did they'd never survive." Sam waved her hands, trying to get the others to listen. "He's killing the what-do-you-call-it—the operating system! They'll all die anyway!"
"Perhaps . . . perhaps Dread is being more clever than we give him credit for." Martine sounded frighteningly hollow, as if she no longer cared about anything. That scared Sam badly. "He was clearly startled and very angry to find that the Other was still resisting him, but it he destroys it completely, he loses control of the network. Maybe he is not really expecting to lure us out. Maybe by doing this terrible thing to these children the Other is protecting, he is trying to drive the operating system insane."
"But don't any of you care?" Florimel's anguished words tore through the din. "Those are our children out there! Our children! And those creatures are murdering them! My daughter Eirene—I can feel her beside me at this moment, feel her real body next to mine, I swear it! She must be terrified, her heart is beating so fast! Because whatever part of her the Other stole must also be out there—and those things will murder her!"
And who else is up there with her? Sam wondered miserably. Who else is getting crushed and eaten right next to us? Renie's brother? T4b's friend? That poor kid who called himself Senbar Flay in the Middle Country? A great, cold hopelessness folded around her. Everything was pointless now. If they had shared one goal, it was to save the children and get themselves out of the network alive. They were going to fail on both counts.
"So what do we do?" Bonnie Mae said in a cracked, urgent voice. "Let them go on slaughtering the innocents?"
"Princess!" The jiggling bulk of Jack Sprat's wife appeared atop the rim of the pit only a dozen meters away. Sam and her friends shrank back against the ledge but the shapeless face was staring out over the pulsing waters and did not see them. The groaning, belching voice no longer sounded human at all. "Come back to us, Princess—we want to eat you up!"
Her scrawny, hideous husband followed her to the edge of the crater then began to move sideways along the rim, snatching up and throttling anything it could catch. It was headed right toward their hiding place. Even if it did not know they were there it would stumble onto them in moments. "Kill until you feed us," it creaked. "Feed us."
Bonnie Mae had fallen into prayer again. Almost paralyzed with fear, Sam looked at the looming Twins for a second, then turned her head away. She, too, wanted to close her eyes—not to pray, but so that she wouldn't have to see the things that were going to kill them all. Instead she found herself staring at a spreading darkness in the Well itself, a cloudy obscurity that rippled out from a point near the shoreline, dousing the vast, pulsing lights as it grew.
It's really dying, she thought. We're all going to die in the dark. . . ! Then something else caught her attention. A prickle of smaller lights trailed up through the darkness, tiny incandescent bubbles that grew more numerous by the second.
"Look," she said softly, then realized no one could hear her. "Look!"
Something was rising from the troubled waters. The angel again? Sam wondered. The Other? Is the Other finally coming? But it did not feel that way, nothing like the immense cold presence that had filled the Freezer. It was something smaller and more human—she could even get a dim sense of its shape now, a murky silhouette swimming upward through the midst of the twinkling lights.
The thing that broke the surface of the Well and clambered up onto the rim was the size and shape of a man, the lean, muscular body gleaming with smears of phosphorescence. The lights of the Well had faded to a dull gleam—even the massive Twins had become shadowy, obscure shapes. Frosted with streaks of light, the newcomer was the brightest thing on the landscape and all eyes turned toward him. For a sinking instant Sam thought it was Ricardo Klement, but then he turned and raised his sword and his face lifted so that she could see his profile, his long black mane of hair. Her heart exploded with astonishment and joy.
The Wicked Tribe rose shrieking from Nandi's shoulders. " 'Landogarner! 'Landogarner!"
"Orlando!" Sam screamed. "Oh, my God, it's Orlando!"
The roar of both murderers and victims had fallen away, but if he heard Sam's cry the newcomer gave no sign. He turned toward the Twins and pointed his sword at them, a mixture of salute and threat. The Jack Sprat thing let out a so
bbing noise—Sam recognized only a moment later that it was an excited laugh—and lurched toward him. The lights of the Well suddenly blazed up again, returning the world to unsteady twilight.
Sam was scrambling up over the lip of their shoreline refuge when someone caught her by the leg and dragged her back down. She shouted in anger and slapped wildly at the restraining hand, certain it was Jongleur, but it was Nandi Paradivash, his face like gray marble in the light from the Well.
"Let him go," he told her. "This is his fight, I think."
"That's fenfen! I have to help him. . . !" She kicked, but Florimel had grabbed her other leg and would not let go.
"No, Sam," she growled. "The rest of us, we will only slow him down. See!"
"Yes, look," said Martine. "The Other has played his knight."
Sam had no idea what she meant and did not care—she could only tug helplessly against her friends' restraining hands. Orlando had sprung toward his huge adversary, the Thargor body moving with a speed she hadn't seen since the Middle Country simulation, his sword so quick it was all but invisible in the strange half-light from the Well. He struck three hard blows against Jack Sprat's legs before it could swipe at him for the first time, so that it was stumbling by the time its arm flailed out toward him. Even so it was a near-miss: the twiggy fingers whickered past his head so swiftly Sam knew they would have smashed it off his shoulders if Orlando had not flung himself to the ground.
Sam could not take her eyes from what was happening, even as she felt the others crowding up behind her. It was a dream, a nightmare—Orlando! Fighting for his life!
But there was something different about him, she saw now—not just his speed but even his shape. The body he wore was not the Thargor of the last days gaming in the Middle Country, the scarred, battle-hardened veteran of a hundred wars, nor even the younger version of the character he had become when they first crossed into the Grail network. This new Thargor was still muscular but lithe and lighter of foot than he had ever been in the Middle Country, as though Sam watched a version of the character she had never seen—a stripling Thargor that had existed only in Orlando's imagination.
The greater weight of the older versions might have been a useful advantage, for now the Jack Sprat creature surprised him with a backhanded blow and lifted him completely off his feet, smashing him to the earth just a few meters from the quivering form of the wife-thing. The second monster slithered forward with surprising speed then rose and folded over him like a huge, living jelly. For a heart-tripping moment Sam thought Orlando had disappeared into the immense mouth; instead the blade of his sword suddenly poked out through the side of the thing's head and it contracted away from the attack, roaring liquidly. Orlando had thrown himself to one side to avoid its killing stoop and now managed to jackknife away from a follow-up swipe by Jack Sprat, which had hurried forward to grab him while he was engaged with its blubberous companion.
The wife, its head streaming with fluids from its wound, attacked again, catching him between the two of them. Both creatures had learned their lesson and moved in on him with greater caution. He backed away, trying to lengthen the triangle, but he had the Well behind him and was running out of room.
Sam's joy had turned to helpless misery. There was no way he could beat them both. She was watching him die all over again. She hit out at the hands restraining her but her friends would not let go. "Run!" she screamed. "Run, Orlando!"
He took a last step backward. As his heel teetered on the edge of the Well he threw a quick glance back at its flickering impermanence. His measured but fearful gaze was enough to tell Sam a terrible truth: he had come out of it, but he could not go back into it and survive.
He'll break up again if he goes in, she thought wildly—he'll disappear. She did not know how she knew it but she was certain: there was not enough energy left in the Well to make him again.
Make him? But that's Orlando, it really is Orlando. . . !
The Jack Sprat creature limped toward him on its wounded legs, swinging its arms like giant brooms, trying nothing more ambitious than to force him over the rim of the pit. With no room left he did the only thing he could: he leaped forward between the flailing hands and rolled into the thing's scrawny legs like a bowling ball. A leg cracked with a dry pop and the monster tottered, giving out a whistling shriek of rage. It staggered, hobbled a step, and as it regained its balance began to reach down, but Orlando was behind it now. He chopped through the wounded leg with a two-handed stroke. As it teetered on its remaining leg he threw his weight against it and shoved it toward the Well.
Jack Sprat toppled over the edge, but managed to sink its fingers into the soft soil and cling, its long legs kicking above the roiling waters. It had even begun to pull itself back up but Orlando dodged a hammering, sideways blow from the other beast and hacked the grasping fingers into splinters. Jack Sprat slid into the pulsing depths, shrieking and whistling like a boiling lobster, then surfaced for a moment with arms thrashing before it dissolved at last into the glimmering substance of the Well.
The monstrous, gelatinous form of the wife-thing humped up behind Orlando, spluttering in fury. He had only a fraction of an instant to jump away as it smashed down like a titan fist made of putty. It oozed quickly to the side to trap him against the precipice then stretched upward again, its mouth hanging open in an idiot gape that made it look like some kind of giant, cancerous sock puppet. Before it could drop and crush him Orlando shoved the blade of his sword deep into its bulk, then struggled around to one side, dragging the blade with him, his long muscles knotting as he pulled it through the rubbery flesh even as the creature folded down on top of him.
Sam's heart stuttered and seemed to stop entirely until Orlando scrabbled back out from under the bulky thing, covered with its slime. The sound of the creature's anger went sharper in pitch, into pain and even fright. It heaved upward again but something viscous was running out of the long jagged hole across its middle. Jack Sprat's wife swayed, grew slack as a deflating balloon, then collapsed and slid over the edge in a wet, sticky glob and vanished into the Well.
Sam was already up and running, forcing her way through the stunned refugees, leaping over the dead and dying without any thought for them at all. Orlando turned away from the edge of the Well, staggered, and fell to his knees.
"Orlando!" she screamed. "Oh, dzang, Gardiner, is it really you?" She crouched and wrapped her arms around him. "Don't die, you better not die! Oh, God, I knew you couldn't be dead. You came back! Like Gandalf! You utterly came back!"
He turned his head to look at her. For a moment he seemed to be looking at a stranger and her stomach contracted. Then he smiled. It was a miserable, weary smile, but she thought it was the most wonderful thing she had seen in her whole life. "But I am dead, Frederico," he said. "I really am."
"No, you're not!" She hugged him as hard as she could. She was weeping, babbling—she didn't care, she didn't know anything, he was alive, alive! The others were running toward them but she did not want to let go, ever. "No, you're not. You're here."
After a long moment he pulled back a little. "Gandalf?" He peered at her, tried to blink away his own tears, then laughed. "Damn, you did read it. You read it but you never told me. You are such a scanmaster, Fredericks." And then he collapsed in her arms.
CHAPTER 42
Old School
NETFEED/NEWS: Poor Countries Want to Be Prisons
(visual: new facility at Totness)
VO: The governments of poor nations such as Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago are vying to house overflow prisoners from the United States and Europe, where prison populations are rising faster than facilities can be built, despite fierce domestic opposition in many of these small countries.
(visual: Vicenta Omarid, Vice-chairman, Resist!)
OMARID: "Our country is not a dumping ground for toxic waste or toxic humanity. This is a cynical exploitation by the first world nations of their own people and ours, an attempt to hide the consequenc
es of their own jail-the-poor policies by waving money under the noses of hungry nations like Trinidad and Tobago. . . ."
At first Sellars had no idea where he was. He was sunk deep in a padded seat that felt more like a womb than a chair, surrounded, comforted, connected. The great window before him was full of burning points of light and he could feel the almost silent vibration of engines—no, not just feel the vibrations, he realized, but discern the actual working of the antiproton drive, every detail of its performance as well as the ship's million other functions, all flooding into his altered nervous system. He was flying through the stars.
"It's the Sally Ride," he murmured. My ship. . . ! My beautiful ship.
But something was wrong.
How did I get here? Memories were seeping back now, a kaleidoscope of days, of fire and terror followed by years of isolation. Of a past in which this silver seed had been blasted to twisted wreckage in a hangar in South Dakota without ever having flown outside the lower thermosphere.
But the stars. . . ! There they are, bigger than life. Could it be that everything else I thought was real, the destruction of PEREGRINE, my long imprisonment, wax it all just a dream—a cold-sleep nightmare?
He wanted to believe it. He wanted to believe it so badly he could taste it. If this were real then even the nightmare of five crippled decades would soon evaporate, leaving him alone with his ship and the endless fields of starlight.
"No," he said aloud. "This isn't real. You got past my defenses. You've taken this out of my own head somehow."
For a long moment he heard nothing but the hum of the ship's engines. The stars swung past the window like flurrying snow. Then the ship spoke.
"Stay," it said. "Stay with . . . this one." He had heard the voice before, of course, during countless tests—the strangely sexless, computer-generated tones of his own starship. "This one is lonely."
Something caught at his heart. After it was destroyed in the Sand Creek disaster he had pushed the ship from his thoughts like a dead lover. Even to hear its voice after all these years was a miracle. But he was troubled by the words. Did the Grail Network operating system which had built this dream in his head really only want to talk? Sellars had fought the thing for so long that he found that almost impossible to believe, "I Know this isn't real," he said, "but why are you doing it? Why didn't you just kill me when you broke through into my mind?"
