by Tad Williams
"Can you hear Sam Fredericks?" Martine said, still laughing. "She. . . ."
Something knocked Martine to the ground. Sam shouted and stood up. Orlando, still sore and weary, took a full two seconds to struggle to his feet beside her. Azador stood over Martine, the lighter in his hand and a hugely triumphant grin on his face.
"I have it back!" he shouted. "I have it back!"
The voice seemed to come out of nowhere.
"Renie," it said, "can you hear me? It's Martine. Renie, are you there?"
She had fallen into a sort of half-drowse, exhaustion having finally overwhelmed everything else, and for a long moment she could not even remember where she was.
"!Xabbu, what's going on?" She stared at the dry pan, the thorn bushes and the brightly starred sky, trying to imagine where Martine could be. Could you dream inside a dream?"
"Can you hear me, Renie?" Martine asked again.
"It is in your kaross." !Xabbu pointed at the antelope-hide garment she wore. Renie fumbled out the device. It was still a lighter, just as it had always been, although it now seemed the most unlikely object in an entire, unlikely world. She pressed hot points in sequence, praying she had remembered the right order. "Martine? Martine, is that you?"
"Renie! Oh, what a blessing to hear you. Where are you?"
She looked at !Xabbu, then down at the small shape of Grandfather Mantis crouched at the bottom of the gulley beside the trickling stream. It lay on its side now, legs drawn up. It must still be breathing, she thought distractedly, or all this would be gone.
But do gods breathe? she wondered an instant later.
"I'm . . . I don't really know. Inside the operating system, I guess. But that's only the beginning of how bizarre this all is. !Xabbu is with me. . . ."
"Can you hear Sam Fredericks?" Martine sounded absolutely joyful. Renie felt tears spring to her eyes. "She. . . ."
Abruptly, the transmission stopped.
"Martine?" Renie asked after a moment. "Martine, are you still there?" She turned to !Xabbu. "It just . . . cut off."
The mantis stirred. She could hear its words in her head but they were desperately soft, "You should not . . . should not have spoken. The All-Devourer will follow your words now. It will come straight here."
"Did you cut us off?" Renie crawled to her feet, aware as she did so of the absurdity of standing up to shout at a dying insect. "Those are our friends!"
"Too late. Too late for them." It was only a whisper, faint and distant. "All we had left . . . was a little time. And now it is gone."
"Martine!" Renie shouted at the lighter. "Martine, talk to me!" But when the device finally spoke again it was not Martine's voice she heard.
Azador backed away from the blind woman, who was already struggling up onto her knees, apparently not badly hurt. "Mine!" he said feverishly. "They thought they could take it from me—my gold! But Azador does not forget!"
Orlando snarled and raised his sword, but before he could take a step toward the thief someone shouted, "Nobody move!"
With a nightmarish, underwater feeling, Sam turned to see that Felix Jongleur had snatched up the boy Cho-Cho, who struggled like a scalded cat until Jongleur laid the broken blade of Orlando's old sword against the child's throat.
"I am not bluffing," said Jongleur. "Unless you wish to see your only connection to this man Sellars killed before your eyes you will sit down and stay seated." He turned a baleful stare on Orlando. "Especially you."
Azador moved toward Jongleur, the lighter in his cupped hands, a look of reverence on his face. "Look—is it not beautiful? You were right, my friend. You said the blind woman would have it and you were right!"
Jongleur smiled. "You have been very patient. Will you let me see it?"
Azador stopped, his joy suddenly turned to suspicion. "You cannot touch it."
"I do not want to touch it," Jongleur said. "I only wanted to look, to make sure they had not tricked you—you heard what they said about a copy."
"It is no copy!" Azador said indignantly. "I would know! This is mine!"
"Of course," said Jongleur.
Cho-Cho suddenly wrenched free of the old man's grip and dashed away across the Gypsy encampment. Azador turned to watch the boy go, and as he did, Jongleur grabbed Azador and set the broken blade against his neck then dragged it across his throat. Already gurgling blood, the Gypsy turned toward his supposed ally in amazement and tried to strike at him, but Jongleur grabbed his arm. Azador sagged and fell to the ground. Jongleur stood over him, holding the lighter in his red-smeared hand.
"Bastard!" shouted Paul Jonas. Orlando said nothing but was already moving toward the bald man.
Jongleur held up the lighter. "Careful. I could easily throw it into the Well from here, couldn't I? Then you have lost your friend Renie."
Orlando stopped short, breathing like a mastiff on a choke chain, his whole face disfigured by fury,
"I knew it!" Sam darted a look at Azador. The Gypsy's blood had made a blackish puddle on the shadowy ground beneath him. His dying eyes were still wide in astonishment. "I knew it!" she screamed at the old man. "You liar! You murderer!"
Jongleur laughed. "Liar? Yes, certainly. Murderer? Perhaps, but not if you mean him." He poked Azador with the toe of his Gypsy boot. "He is not even a person. He is another copy, just like the Twins. Just like my Avialle."
"Copy?" asked Paul haltingly.
"Yes—a copy of me," Jongleur said. "A rather poor and incomplete one from early in the process, given a home here by our rogue operating system. Perhaps it was taken while I was sleeping, I cannot remember. It certainly seems to have been dominated by a parade of my boyhood fantasies. That ridiculous Gypsy camp, the kind that only ever existed in Victorian fiction—I recognized it immediately." He smirked. "When I was a child I used to pretend that I came from such a place, not from my so-boring home and my so-boring parents."
"What do you think you have accomplished, Jongleur?" demanded Martine Desroubins, her face still smeared with dirt from Azador's assault. "This is a standoff. We will not let you escape with the lighter."
"Ah, but you cannot stop me." He showed his teeth in a predatory grin. "I have been waiting very patiently for this. Now I am going home to pull the plug on you and my ex-employee and my entire recalcitrant system. Be grateful—there should be no pain. I imagine your hearts will simply stop." Jongleur held the lighter up. "Priority Override," he said. "Tears of Ra."
An instant later he was gone, vanished entirely from the dead lands beside the Well.
CHAPTER 44
Stolen Voices
NETFEED/NEWS: Arizona—The Voucher Society?
(visual: Thornley in front of state capital building)
VO: Arizona's first Libertarian governor, Durwood Thornley, is proposing to extend the school voucher system to a whole variety of taxpayer opt-outs, and his critics are not very happy about it. Thornley's proposed system would allow a variety of ways to reroute taxes for services that the individual taxpayer does not want to support. As an example, Thornley's staffers suggest that people without cars could redeem their roadbuilding vouchers for repair work on patios and sidewalks, or taxpayers without pets could use animal control vouchers to pay for extermination of unwanted house and yard pests. . . .
For a moment he feared that the override had not worked—that somehow the system had managed to undo its own basic programming—but the moment of darkness dissolved into the familiar depthless gray of his own system. He could feel his body again—not the robust physicality of the false form but his actual dying body, floating in its tank, maintained only by the careful attention of countless expensive machines. But for all the horror of returning to his true condition, it was still a wonderful feeling.
Felix Jongleur was home.
And now to trigger the Apep Sequence. There was no question the Other had to be destroyed, especially if Dread had it in his control. It was a shame to lose the millions of hours of work that had gone into it but this par
ticular operating system had long since proved his worst fears to be underestimations.
It would be a shame if the Grail network itself should suffer too much damage, though. It was not the people trapped in it that worried Jongleur—he had not a single qualm about killing Paul Jonas and the rest, especially since as far as he was concerned Jonas had been on borrowed time for two years—but he did not know how well the network would survive being shut down. Even with a backup operating system in place there would doubtless be huge losses in detail and responsiveness, since the system had been geared to the unique and astonishing capacities of the system known as the Other. And beside Jonas and his friends, anyone else still in the network, and thus still hooked into the Other's peculiar matrix, would doubtless die as well. He could not even be sure that the ghost-versions of Avialle would survive, although as code they should remain in memory when the network was revived.
He wished now that his own attempts to find and develop another operating system had borne fruit, or even that there had been time to work with Robert Wells to produce a proper alternative system of a more conventional sort, but it was too late for regrets. This was a war—a war for his own network, which had demanded ludicrous quantities of money, sweat, and blood—and in war there would always be casualties.
The most worrisome thing, of course, was his own safety. He had already been reluctant to commit himself permanently to a virtual body, so how could he trust one of the lesser systems designed by Wells' Telemorphix engineers—more reliable than his own perhaps, but far less sophisticated?
But if Avialle's copies can survive a system shutdown, he thought, then my waiting virtual body should survive the changeover as well. And if I must risk completing the Grail process, even without entirely trusting the new system—well, I have never been afraid of risk. The events of the past days had been unforeseen; he had come close to despair but he had remained strong. To survive and conquer now he would have to remain smarter and more aggressive than those around him, just as he always did.
It had not been easy to stay patient-and meek with Jonas and the others, especially when he had known that one of the access devices was again within his easy reach, being carried by the woman Martine. But a single access device had never been of any use to him, or he could have taken Renie Sulaweyo's by force days earlier. He had feared he might somehow have to find his own way into the heart of the system, but luckily that coarse Sulaweyo woman had stumbled into it on her own. Jongleur had only needed to wait until contact was opened between the two devices so he could risk everything on one gamble, praying that when his override command reached Renie Sulaweyo's end of the communication circuit inside the Other, it would force the system's compliance.
Of course, risk was one thing, foolish risk another: he had prepared for the moment carefully, pretending to help the clownish Azador, quietly urging the pseudo-Gypsy to take back what he stupidly thought was his, so that if the first attempt to steal it should fail, Jongleur himself would still be free to try again.
In fact, he found it a bit disconcerting to discover how easily he could trick and manipulate another version of himself—even a flawed version. It almost wounded his pride.
But that was a small detail. Everything had worked just as he had planned. He had waited, gambled, and won.
And now it is time. Time to play the endgame.
He ordered initialization of the Apep processes, setting in motion the complicated preparations so that he would be able to trigger it as soon as possible and be done with his rebellious operating system, then he rose out of the empty gray system-space into the reality of his great house.
Which, to his definite surprise, seemed to be completely empty.
What is going on here? The building's systems were alive with conflicting alarms—a fire alarm from the underground floors and a secondary alarm warning of a toxic release event from the island's offshore power plant. He brought up his camera-eyes and began to flick through the employee levels. It was Sunday, so of course the building would not be full, but the halls and offices were uniformly deserted. Jongleur put out a priority message to security but no one answered. He brought up the view of the building's security station, two floors below him. It was empty.
Impossible. Something was very wrong. He sent out an even higher priority message to the island's private military base, but all its lines were engaged. Someone had turned off his connection to the base surveillance cameras as well. He flicked to one of the low-orbit satellites and focused in until he could see movement—a great flurry of movement, in fact, like an ant army on the march. His troops were boarding a line of company ferries. Being evacuated.
Jongleur could sense the machineries of his heart trying to race, then the equipment compensating. He felt the cool placidity of countervailing chemicals flushing through his system. He found the override controls and turned down the tranquilizing flow: something terrible had happened, was happening right now, and he did not want to be lulled.
The basement, he thought. That first. He brought up the displays. The bottom of the building was indeed full of smoke—it had clouded the underground floors and leaked all the way up to the atrium lobby—but he could see no sign of flames. He checked the timing on the alarms. Almost two hours since the fire was first detected. Jongleur could make no sense of it. A smoldering fire that was mostly smoke could certainly last that long, but was it enough of a threat to abandon the building completely, let alone the whole island? Where were the fire crews? He asked for a quick analysis of the building's air system and found no unusual readings, no surprise toxins.
What in hell is going on?
The reactor incident might have been the answer but the records showed that those alarms had not even been triggered until half an hour after the fire began, although they were almost certainly the reason behind the mass evacuation of the base. It made no sense, though—the power plant was on a tiny offshore island, separate from the main island with its base and tower. Jongleur had wanted a small reactor under his personal control to make sure the narrowcast of the Grail network's operating system always had a source of backup power, but he had not been fool enough to put it next to the corporate offices—next to the place where his own helpless body was kept.
He brought up a bank of readouts from the power station but they were muddled and inconclusive. An alarm had definitely been sent out and the facility abandoned but he could get no clear picture of what had happened. The visual evidence gave no clues: the reactor itself seemed in perfectly normal condition, and a closer inspection of the reactor management data showed that it was shut down, temperatures normal, and in fact appeared to have been shut down well before its own alarm warnings went out, as though the technicians had responded to some completely separate order, securing the reactor and raising the containment shields before evacuating in an orderly fashion.
So if the fire was a minor one and the reactor wasn't in danger, why was everybody leaving?
Could it be one of my enemies? Has Wells also escaped offline? But why would he risk destroying the entire network, risk his own massive investment, just to strike at me?
Dread. It came to him like a winter's chill—for a moment he even saw his former employee's face blur into the terrifying features of Mr. Jingo, his childhood nightmare. This must be his work. Not content with stealing my network, that street thug, that petty murderer, has attacked my home, using my own operating system. But what could he possibly think he can accomplish, even if the entire island is deserted? Doesn't he know I have several different sources of available power—that I have enough resources available to survive in my tank for months if necessary?
The more he thought about it the more puzzling it was. For the moment all thought of triggering the Apep Sequence was pushed aside by the mystery before him.
Jolted by a sudden fear, he made a quick surveillance of the hangar-sized room that contained the Grail machinery, checking to make sure all was still functioning properly. On the cam
eras he could see that the huge space was empty of technicians, the banks of processors and switchers untended but still doing what they should.
So what is John Dread up to? Is he just testing my defenses? Or is it something less rational—he always had a childish mind. Perhaps this is some million-credit equivalent of a prank call to his old employer. Perhaps he doesn't even know whether I'm dead or still online.
Feeling much better, certain now that there was no true immediate danger within the building, Jongleur went back to the preparations for the Apep Sequence, but an anomaly in the program's readings brought him up short. It seemed an obvious fallacy. Somehow, he decided, in the riot of false information throughout the island, of alarms and alerts, even the crucial Grail network data had been corrupted. According to what was before him, the Apep program had already been triggered, which could not be right. The time recorded for the event was close to two hours ago. But he himself had only just begun initialization a few minutes earlier.
It must be an error, he thought. It must. The most obvious evidence was that the trajectories were completely nonsensical. Then a flicker on one of his surveillance screens took his attention away from even as important a matter as the fate of his rogue operating system.
Someone was moving. Someone was still in the building.
As he enlarged the picture, pushing the other camera views into the background, he saw the camera designation. A burst of terror went through him. The intruder was here—on the same floor as his own tank! For a hallucinatory moment he could feel himself plunged back into childhood—the smell of the airing cupboard, the starched towels and sheets pressed all around him, stifling him as he hid from Halsall and the other older boys. He could almost hear them.
"Jingle? Jingle-Jangle? Come out, Frenchie. We're going to debag you, you little sod."
With a little noiseless whimper he pushed the memory away. How? How could anyone get into my sanctuary?
