Sea of Silver Light o-4

by Tad Williams

  "You . . . are different," said the mechanical ship-voice. Outside the thick window, the snowflake stars continued to wheel past. "Made of light and numbers. Like this one."

  My wiring—my internal systems. Does it really think I'm the same kind of thing as it? Could it really just be looking for a . . . a kindred soul? He could not believe that was all there was—the operating system had sensed him long ago, had been studying him through each incursion as carefully as he had studied it. Why had it waited so long to contact him? Was it only that its own defenses had prevented it? Or was something else going on?

  Sellars was baffled and exhausted. The seductiveness of the dream, the granting of this fondest wish, which had turned to ashes so long ago, was making it hard to concentrate.

  "The stars," the thing said as if it sensed his thought. "You know the stars?"

  "I used to," Sellars said. "I thought I would spend my life among them."

  "Very lonely," the ship's voice said.

  That at least had been real. No mere shipspeak program could manufacture a crippled bleakness like that. "Some people don't think so," he said, almost kindly.

  "Lonely. Empty. Cold."

  Sellars was drawn to respond—it was hard to hear such childlike despair and not. say something—but as the strangeness of the experience began to wear away the illogic continued to disturb him.

  If all it wanted was to talk to me, why now? It was able to reach outside its network a long time ago—just look at the way it manifested in Mister J's, the way it's begun to explore other real-world systems. Why didn't it just contact me, instead of waiting until I was trying to enter the Grail network? In fact, even if it had to wait until I entered the network, why did it wait until this particular moment—I've been in the network many times. He tried to piece together what had happened just before the contact. We were struggling, or at least I was struggling with its security routines. Then I left it so I could go and open the data tap . . . all that information from the Grail network, that massive, overwhelming flow . . . and that was the moment it attacked me again. Pushed past my defenses.

  When I opened the data tap.

  "You, this one—we are the same," the ship-voice said suddenly. It almost sounded frightened.

  "You've been using me, haven't you?" Sellars nodded. "You clever bastard. You waited until I broke into Jongleur's system, then piggybacked in on my access. There was something there you couldn't manage on your own, wasn't there? Something expressly designed to keep you out. And you needed me alive and connected until you could get into it." With that understanding came a deeper fear. What had his adversary fought so hard and so craftily to reach? What was it doing even now, while it entertained him with recreated memories?

  And what would it do to him when it didn't need him any longer?

  "No. Lonely in the dark. Don't want to be here anymore." The mechanical voice was becoming increasingly distorted.

  "Then let me help you," Sellars begged. "You said that I am like you. Give me a chance! I want what you want—I want the children to be safe."

  "Not safe," it whispered. Even the stars were growing faint beyond the window, as though the Sally Ride was now outracing their ancient light. "Too late. Too late for the children."

  "Which children?" he asked sharply.

  "All the children."

  "What have you done?" Sellars demanded. "How did you use me? If you tell me, there might still be some way for me to help you—or at least help the children."

  "No help," it said sadly, then began to sing in a mournful, halting voice.

  "An angel touched me, an angel touched me, the river washed me. . . ."

  Sellars had never heard the words or the simple tune. "I don't understand—just tell me what you've done. Why did you keep me here? What have you done?"

  It began to sing again. This time, Sellars recognized the song.

  "Rock-a-bye, baby, in the treetop. . . ."

  And then the ship was gone, the stars were gone, everything was gone, and he fell back into the familiar confines of his Garden.

  But it was a garden no longer, or at least not the comfortable, curved space he had nurtured for so long. Now it stretched for what looked like kilometers, vaster than the grounds at Kensington or Versailles, an almost impossible riot of greenery spreading in all directions.

  It held together, Sellars realized. My Garden absorbed the Grail network information and held together. And I am still alive, too. The Other did whatever it wanted to do and then it released me. He checked to make sure his connection to the network was still open, that he still had contact with Cho-Cho, and was filled with relief to discover he did.

  So what did the operating system do? he wondered. What did it want?

  He flung himself into the acres of data, quantities of information that might take a team of specialists years to analyze properly. But there was only Sellars, and he did not have years or even months. In fact, he suspected he might only have a day or two left before things fell apart completely.

  The revelations, at least some of them, came swiftly. As he examined the most recent events concerning the Grail network, for speed's sake tracking just through what had happened since he himself had opened the data tap, then delving frantically in the Grail Brotherhood's files to confirm his suspicions, he discovered what the operating system was and what it had done.

  It was worse than he could have imagined. He did not have days. If he was lucky, he might have three hours to save his friends and countless other innocents.

  If he was insanely lucky, he might have four.

  They made themselves another camp of sorts among the ruins of Azador's Gypsy settlement. The shattered frames of the wagons loomed in the half-light like the skeletons of strange animals. Bodies of fairy-tale creatures lay everywhere, broken and dismembered. Many of the remains had been claimed and had been dragged away by friends and the Gypsies had laid out their own fallen kin at the edge of camp, covering the bodies with colorful blankets, but dozens of corpses still lay unmourned and unburied. Paul could scarcely bear to look. It was a blessing, in a way, that the Well was dying, the light fading.

  The waters were almost entirely dark, the radiance that had once danced there only a flicker now; it barely touched the cocoon of cloudy gray overhead, so that even the few campfires seemed to give out more light than the Well. The growing shadow on both sides of the barrier held one other benefit: Paul had no doubt that Dread still waited beyond the cloud-wall, but at least they didn't have to watch that man-shaped point of infinite night pacing calmly back and forth on the other side anymore.

  Out of his childhood a snatch of the Bible came to him. "Whence comest thou?" Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, "From going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in if."

  But there are two Satans in this universe, Paul thought. And one of them is in here. With us.

  He stared at Felix Jongleur who, like Paul, sat some distance from the fire and the other survivors. Jongleur stared back. Their companions seemed far more interested in Orlando, who had not yet regained consciousness. But except for having been dead—something Paul thought was usually considered a fairly serious medical problem—the boy seemed to be suffering from nothing worse than exhaustion.

  Nobody cares about me, he thought. Except the man who tried to kill me. But why should they care? They don't know what I know.

  It had all come back—not just the terrible last moments in the tower, but with it all the little missing pieces, the day-to-day boredom and routine, everything that had been hidden from him by the post-hypnotic block.

  "She's dead," he said to Jongleur. "Ava's been dead all along, hasn't she?"

  "Then your memories are unlocked." Jongleur spoke slowly. "Yes, she is dead."

  "So why was she here? Why did she keep . . . appearing to me?" He looked over at the others huddled around Orlando. They were only a few meters away but he felt so disconnected from them it could have been a Hundred times that. "Is it
something like what happened to that boy—to Orlando Gardiner?"

  Jongleur gave him a brief appraising glance. Even the firelight sparkling in his eyes did not make him look more alive. He looks like something stuffed, Paul thought. Something with glass eyes. Dead eyes.

  "I do not know," Jongleur said at last. "I do not know what the boy is, although I have my suspicions. But my Avialle, when she died . . . all that was left were copies."

  "Copies?" The word, although half-expected, chilled him.

  "From earlier versions of the Grail process. Different mind-scans made at different times. None wholly satisfactory." He frowned as though about to send back an unimpressive wine.

  "Like that Tinto from the Venetian simulation," Paul said. "I was right." Jongleur raised an eyebrow at the name but said nothing. "How did the . . . how did Ava—all those Avas—get into the system? Why did she keep appearing to me?"

  Jongleur shrugged. "After she died, when I found that all the stored copies, even those made of Finney and Mudd, had been dumped, I thought there had been some malfunction in the Grail system. It is a huge and fearfully complex enterprise, after all." His eyes narrowed. "I did not realize that the Other—the operating system—had broken the bonds of its confinement, had made its way out of the strait-jacket of the network and into my own system. Even when I . . . saw her for the first time in one of my simulations, I did not understand how one of the copies could have made its way into the Grail network." His back straightened and his jaw set; Paul thought he looked like someone trying to mask either great pain or anger. "I was visiting my Elizabethan simworld. I saw her in Southwark, near the Globe Playhouse, being pursued by two cutthroats who looked like Mudd and Finney. I caught them and immobilized them for later study but she escaped. It was then I realized that all the missing copies must have somehow been dumped into the Grail network, but I still did not suspect the operating system."

  "So . . . all the versions of the Twins are just copies?"

  It was horrible having to cajole information out of this cruel man, this murderer, but the hunger for answers was too strong.

  "No, Finney and Mudd still exist. After . . . what happened with Avialle they were punished—imprisoned, in a sense—but they still work for me. They are the ones that pursued you through the Grail network after your escape."

  "But why, damn it?" For a moment the anger came back again in a surge of heat up his spine. It was all he could do to remain seated. "Why me? Why am I so damned important?"

  "You? You are nothing. But to my Avialle you were something." The old man scowled and lowered his eyes. "The copies of her, all those ghosts—they were drawn to you. Not that I knew it at first. After Avialle was lost, I kept you imprisoned and unconscious. I still had many questions about what had happened. I implanted a neurocannula and brought you into one of my Grail network simulations so I could . . . investigate."

  "So you could torture me," Paul spat.

  Jongleur shrugged. "Call it what you will. I have almost no physical life anymore. I wanted you in my realm. But I soon noticed that you had attracted attention from . . . something. It was always fleeting, but I was able to capture traces. It was Avialle—or rather, the duplicate versions of Avialle. They were drawn to you, somehow. They could not keep away from you for long."

  "She loved me," Paul said.

  "Shut your mouth. You have no right to speak of her now."

  "It's true. And my sin was that all I could truly offer her was pity. But that's still more than you can say, isn't it?"

  Jongleur stood, pale with fury, and raised his clenched fists. "Pig. I should kill you."

  Paul rose too. "You're welcome to try. Go on—you've done everything else to me that you could."

  Paul's companions had turned as his argument with Jongleur grew louder. Azador hurried over to them. "Please, my friends, no more fighting. We have an enemy already—and he is enough for us all, eh?"

  Paul shrugged his shoulders and sat down. Azador whispered something in Jongleur's ear, then went back to the group gathered around Orlando. Jongleur stared at Paul for a long moment before lowering himself back to the ground. "You will speak no more of that," he said coldly.

  "I will speak of what I want. If you hadn't imprisoned her, treated her like something in a museum, none of this would have happened."

  "You understand nothing," Jongleur said, but the fire was gone from his voice. "Nothing."

  For a while Paul only listened to the distant hissing and popping of the fire, his companions' murmuring conversation. "So you stuck me in that simulation of the First World War," he said at last. "You staked me out. I was the bait,"

  Jongleur looked at him as if from a great distance. "I hoped to bring her close enough to capture, yes. Perhaps eventually to gather enough of the copies to reconstitute something close to the real Avialle."

  "Why? Was it anything so normal as a father's love? Or was it something less pleasant? Was it just because she was yours, and you wanted back what belonged to you?"

  The old man was rigid. "What is in my heart . . . is for no man to know."

  "Heart? You have a heart?" He expected anger, but this time Jongleur seemed too chilled and weary even to respond. "So what was it all about, then? All that madness, that bizarre museum of a house and grounds—what did you intend?"

  Jongleur did not speak for a long time. "Do you know what an ushabti is?" he said at last.

  Paul shook his head, puzzled. "I don't know the word."

  "It does not matter," Jongleur said. "In fact, all this talk is worthless. We will both be dead soon. When the system collapses everyone here will die."

  "Then if it doesn't matter, you might as well tell me the truth." Paul leaned forward. "You were going to kill me, weren't you? Ava was right about that. You were going to kill me—swat me like a fly. Weren't you?"

  Felix Jongleur looked at him for a long, calculating second, then looked down at the fire. "Yes."

  Paul sat back with a sick little feeling of triumph. "But why?"

  Jongleur shook his head. "It was a mistake—a bad idea. A failed project. It was named for the ushabti of the Egyptian tombs, the tiny statuettes that were meant to wait for the dead Pharaoh in the afterlife."

  "I'm not following you. You wanted me to work for you after you were dead?"

  Jongleur showed a wintry smile. "Not you. You give yourself too much importance, Mr. Jonas. A common problem with the people of your small island."

  Paul swallowed a retort. So the ancient Frenchman wanted to insult the Brits—let him. He had never imagined he would actually get the chance to speak to this man face-to-face. He could not waste the opportunity. "Then who? What?"

  "I began the Ushabti Project several years ago, at a time when I felt quite certain that the Grail process was going to fail. The first results on the thalamic splitter were very bad and the Grail network's operating system—the Other, as some call it—was unstable." Jongleur frowned. "I was already very, very old. If the Grail Project did not succeed, I would die. But I did not want to die."

  "Who does?"

  "Few have the resources I do. Few have the courage to flout humanity's cowardly surrender to death."

  Paul held in his impatience. "So . . . you started this . . . Ushakti Project?"

  "Ushabti. Yes. If I could not perpetuate my actual self, I would do the next best thing. Like the pharaohs, I would keep my line alive. I would save the sacred blood. I would do this by creating a version of me that would survive my death."

  "But you just said that the technology wasn't working. . . ."

  "It was not. So I came up with the best alternative I could. I could not escape death, it seemed, so I created a clone."

  A number of terrible thoughts began fizzing in Paul's head. "But that's . . . that doesn't make sense. A clone isn't you, it's just your genetics. It would grow up into a very different person, because its experiences . . . would be different. . . ."

  "I see you begin to understand. Yes, it would n
ot be me. But if I gave it an upbringing as close to my own as I could, then it would be more like me. Enough like me to appreciate what I had done. Perhaps even enough to resurrect me someday from the Grail copies we had already made, flawed as they were." Jongleur closed his eyes, remembering. "All was prepared. When he reached his maturity and spoke his true name—Hor-sa-iset, Horus the Younger—to my system, it would have served as his access code. That is the true Horus of Egyptian mythology—the Horus born from the dead body of Osiris. All of my secrets would have been his." He frowned, distracted. "If I had already conceived of the Ushabti Project when I was founding the Grail Brotherhood, I would never have given 'Horus' as a code name to that imbecile Yacoubian. . . ."

  "Hang on a bit. You . . . you were going to use a clone to recreate your own childhood?" Paul was stunned by the magnitude of the man's lunacy. "On top of a skyscraper?" A thought struck him like a stone. "Oh, my God, Ava? She was going to be. . . ."

  "The mother. My mother—or at least the mother of my ushabti. A vessel for the preservation of the blood."

  "Christ, you really are mad. Where did you get the poor girl? Was she some actress you hired to play your sainted Mama? She couldn't have been your real daughter, unless you raised her in a genetics lab too." It struck him then, sapping the strength from his body, chilling him to the bone. "Jesus. You did, didn't you? You . . . made her."

  Jongleur seemed wearily amused by Paul's astonishment. "Yes. She was another clone of me—modified so she would be female, of course, so actually quite a bit different. You need not look so shocked—the Egyptians married brother to sister. Why should I do less for my own posterity? In fact, I would have used my real mother as the source for Avialle's genetic material, but I could not bring myself to exhume her body. She had rested in the cemetery in Limoux for almost two centuries and she still does. Her bones were left undisturbed." He waved his hand dismissively. "But it made little difference, in any case. The mother was to provide no DNA, after all. She was only to be the host—to carry and bear and then raise my true son."