Sea of Silver Light o-4

by Tad Williams

  The desperate hope that it was some brave technician who had elected to remain behind shattered into cold fragments as he studied the view-window. The intruder was a woman, a middle-aged woman with short hair. He had never seen her before. More astonishing still, she was wearing one of his own company's custodial uniforms.

  A cleaning woman? On this floor? On my floor? It was so ridiculous that if he had not been gripped by fear at the invasion of his privacy, full of confusion and suspicion about all that was going on outside, he might have laughed. But at the moment he did not feel at all like laughing. He stared at her face, trying to see something in it that would tell him who she was, what she wanted. She was walking slowly and looking all around, clearly uneasy and surprised, exactly as someone would be who had stumbled into the room by accident. She showed no sign of an agenda, none of the intensity of a saboteur or assassin. Jongleur breathed a little more easily but he was still frightened. How could he get her out? There were no employees available—not even his security guards. He felt rage bubbling up.

  She will hear me, he decided, and she will hear me loud. Like the bellow of an angry God. That will set her running. But before he let his voice thunder through the audio system he pulled up the room's security records, wanting to know how she had gotten in.

  It was a simple blanket priority approval, the same thing his approved team of technicians used as they moved between floors. Olga Chotilo, Custodial Worker, it read. Something about the name seemed slightly familiar. More surprisingly, there was a code listed on her security trail that he did not at first recognize. Where had she just been? A long moment passed as he tried to remember—he had not seen that code for some time.

  Upstairs, he thought, and his thoughts spasmed like dying things. She's been on the locked floor . . . the death-place . . . how could she have gotten in . . . who helped her. . . ? And at that moment he remembered why he knew the name.

  Felix Jongleur's respiration grew dizzyingly shallow. His pulse wavered, then spiked. Again the calming chemicals began to pump, a river of heart's-ease flowing into his ancient body through plastic tubes, but it was not enough to stifle the sudden, overwhelming terror, not anywhere near enough.

  The floor was as large as those beneath and above, but strangely empty. Here there was neither the cold magnificence of a thousand banked machines or the surreal tangle of an indoor forest. At the center of the huge, dark room stood only an arc of machinery, bulking high in a pool of light like a druidic ruin. In the center of the array, in a circle of marble tiles, four black pods lay in a triangular arrangement, one almost five meters square at the center, one about the same size just above it, and two smaller pods set a bit farther out.

  Not a triangle, she decided. A pyramid.

  Coffins, she thought then. They look like coffins for dead kings.

  She moved forward, her feet silent on the sable carpet. The rest of the room lights came up slowly, so that although the spotlight was still strongest on the arrangement of machines and plastic sarcophagi, she could now see the distant walls; windowless, they were covered in something as dark and unreflective as the carpeting, so that even with brighter lighting the machinery at the room's center seemed to float in starless space.

  Good God, she thought. It is like a funeral parlor. She half-expected to hear quiet organ music, but the room was silent. Even the automated warning voices did not trespass here in the tower's upper reaches.

  When she reached the center of the room she stood for long seconds staring at the silent black objects, trying to overcome a tingle of superstitious fear. The middle pod was so big that its top loomed above her head, the second large pod a bit lower, the other two positively squat by comparison. She stared at the nearest, which lay to the right of the middle pod, but the plastic was opaque and seemed to join the floor smoothly. Plastic pipes that she guessed held cabling of some kind came out of ducts along the pod's side and burrowed into the black carpet like roots.

  She passed it by and paused by the pod that topped the horizontal pyramid, the second-largest. She took a breath and reached out to it. When her fingers touched the smooth, cool plastic, a red light blinked on along the side; she jumped back, startled and afraid, but nothing else moved. Little glowing letters appeared beside the red light.

  She leaned close, but carefully, not wanting to touch the thing again.

  Project: Ushabti

  Contents: Blastocyst 1.0, 2.0, 2.1; Horus 1.0

  Warning: Cryogenic Seal—Do not Open

  or Service Without Authorization

  She stared, trying to remember what a blastocyst was. A cell of some kind—cancerous? No, something to do with pregnancy. As far as what a horus might be, she had no idea—probably another kind of cell. Olga could not even begin to guess why someone would want to keep cellular tissue in a huge tank like this.

  Are these all the same? she wondered. Some kind of freezers for medical experiments? Are they doing some kind of genetic engineering here?

  She touched one of the smaller pods. Another red light blinked on, but the characters beside it only read; Mudd, J. L. and a string of numbers. The other small sarcophagus yielded Finney, D.S.D. and more numerals. It took her long moments to work up the courage to touch the largest pod, but when she flicked it lightly with her finger, nothing happened. She waited until her hand was trembling a little less, then touched it and held the contact.

  "Ms. Pirofsky?"

  She squealed and jumped back. The voice was right in her head.

  "I'm sorry—I didn't mean to frighten you. It's me. Sellars." His voice was rough, as though he were in great pain, but it sounded like him. Olga took a stagger-step, then sat down on the carpet.

  "I thought you were in a coma. You did frighten me. It is like the mummy's tomb in here. I almost jumped out of my skin."

  "I really am sorry. But I must speak to you and I'm afraid it can't wait."

  "What is this place? What are these things?"

  Sellars waited a moment before answering. "The largest of those devices is the true home of Felix Jongleur. The man who owns J Corporation, the man who built the Grail network."

  "Home. . . ?"

  "His body is nearly dead, and has been for years. There are many, many machines connected to that life-support pod—it extends down nearly ten meters into the floor of the room."

  "He's . . . right there. . . ?" She looked at the pod, amazed and disturbed. "He can't leave it?"

  "No, he can't leave it." Sellars cleared his throat. "I have to talk to you Ms. Pirofsky."

  "Olga, please. Yes, I know I have to get out of here. But I haven't found anything yet—anything about the voices. . . ."

  "I have."

  It took a moment to sink in. "You have? What?"

  "This is difficult, Ms. . . . Olga. Please, prepare yourself, I am afraid that it will be . . . shocking to you."

  It was hard to think of anything stranger than what she had already experienced. "Just tell me."

  "You had a baby."

  This was the last thing she had expected to hear. "Yes. He died. He was born dead." It was quite amazing how the pain could still come so quickly, so powerfully. "I never saw him."

  Sellars hesitated again. When he spoke, it was almost in a rush. "You never saw him because he didn't die. He didn't die, Olga. They lied to you."

  "What?" There were no tears, only a dull anger. How could anyone say such a cruel, ridiculous thing? "What are you talking about?"

  "Your child was a rare mutation—a telepath. He was . . . is . . . a child that would never have lived under normal circumstances. The raw power of his mind was so great that despite many preparations, a doctor in the delivery room actually died of a stroke while performing the cesarean. Two nurses had seizures, too, but there were several on hand and one of them managed to deliver a huge dose of sedative to the child."

  "This is craziness! How could such a thing happen and I would not know about it?"

  "You were already sedated—you had
been told it would be a very difficult birth, a breech, do you remember? That's because there had already been evidence that the child was abnormal. Don't you remember all the tests? Surely you must have thought there was something unusual about it. The doctors and nurses were all specialists. Highly-paid specialists."

  Olga wanted to curl up and put her fingers in her ears. Her baby was dead. For over thirty years she had struggled with it, learned to live with it. "I don't understand anything you are saying."

  "The man in that pod—Felix Jongleur. He had been looking for a child with just the potential of your baby. He and his associates had connections in dozens of hospitals all over Europe, owned many of them outright. You did not choose that hospital yourself, did you?"

  "We . . . we were referred. By a doctor—but he was a kind man!"

  "Perhaps. Perhaps he didn't understand what he was doing. But the fact is, you and your baby were delivered into the hands of people who only wanted your child—your son. After testing gave some idea of what they had found, Jongleur's specialists had already begun sedating him in the womb. They were as ready for his arrival as they could be, but even so, he nearly died from the trauma of birth—too much mental energy, a kind of hyperactivity that would have killed him in minutes. At least one person present at the birth did die. But as I said, they were largely ready. He was put into a cryogenic unit and his temperature lowered drastically. They put him into something like suspended animation."

  Now the tears did come. Memories came with them—the nights she had sat awake in bed with Aleksandr sleeping beside her, convinced there was something wrong with her baby because what was inside her simply did not feel right. The other times when she would have sworn she could sense it . . . thinking inside her, the strange sensation of a little alien thing living inside her belly. But she had told herself the feelings were nothing that other mothers did not also experience and the doctors had agreed with her.

  "How could you know all this?" she demanded. "How could you know? Why did you wait until now to tell me? You are making this up—this is some crazy game, it's your conspiracy, your crazy conspiracy!"

  "No, Olga," he said sadly. "I didn't tell you because I didn't know. Until now, I had no idea how the Grail network's operating system worked, since it did not seem to function within any of the rules for even the most sophisticated neural networks. But. . . ."

  "My baby!" Olga leaped up and staggered to the pod at the top of the pyramidal arrangement. The word Cryogenic had faded but it was burned in her mind. "Is he here? Is he in here?" She scratched uselessly at the plastic. "Where is he?"

  "He is not there, Olga." Sellars sounded as though he too was fighting tears. "He is not in the building. He is not even on Earth."

  Her legs buckled. She sagged and fell to the ground, thumping her forehead against the carpet. "What are you saying?" she moaned. "I don't understand."

  "Please, Olga. Please. I'm so sorry. But I have to tell you everything. We have very little time."

  "Time? I have thought for most of my life that my baby was dead, now you tell me I have no time? Why? What are you doing?"

  "Please. Just listen." Sellars took a deep, shaky breath. "Jongleur and his technicians built the Grail system around your child. His problem . . . his gift, whatever you call it, the hypermutation that would otherwise have killed him long before he came to term—and perhaps would have killed you, too—made him ideal for the Grail's purposes. With all their work to prepare a world where they could spend eternity, they still could not create a virtual environment responsive and realistic enough, not with the best information technologies of the day. What good would it have been to them to make themselves immortal if they did not have a suitable place to spend that immortality? So Jongleur and his scientists created a massively parallel processor constructed of human brains—fetal brains, mostly—and relied on your son's native abilities to make connections between those brains that no machinery could make, to dominate and shape them into the operating system for their network.

  "But there were problems from the very beginning. The human brain is not a computer. It needs to do human things to grow. If it doesn't learn, it doesn't physically develop. Your son was a one-in-a-billion oddity, Olga, but he was still a Human child. In order to develop this incredibly powerful resource, the Grail engineers and scientists discovered that they had to teach it—had to let it come into contact with other human minds, learn to communicate, even to reason after a fashion, or it would be useless to them.

  "Paradoxically, the Grail people only exposed him to human ideas in order to make him the most efficient machine possible. They had no interest in his true humanity. And in the end, that is what killed them." There was a certain grim satisfaction in his voice.

  "So early on, in order to help him develop, they began experiments in which they brought him into contact with other children, normal children. One of the people inside the system now, a woman named Martine Desroubins, was one of those children. She knew your son only as a voice—but she knew him."

  Olga had stopped crying now. She sat against the pod staring at her hands. "I don't understand any of this. Where is he now? What have they done to him?"

  "They have used him, Olga. For thirty years, they have used him. I am sorry to tell you this—I beg you to believe that—but they have not used him kindly. He has been raised in the dark, figuratively and literally. He does not even know what he is—he acts almost without thinking, half-awake, dreaming, confused. He has the powers of a god but the understanding of an autistic child."

  "I want to go to him! I don't care what he is!"

  "I know. And I know that when you speak to him you will be kind. You will try to understand."

  "Understand what?" She was breathing hard now, squeezing her fingers into fists. A fire ax, she thought. There must be a fire ax somewhere. I will take it and I will smash this man Jongleur's black coffin to bits, drag him out into the light like a worm from its hole. . . .

  "You son is not . . . a normal human. How could he be? He speaks almost entirely through others. Somehow, he has connected to the Tandagore coma children. I do not understand that part yet, but. . . ."

  "Speaks through . . . others. . . ?"

  "Children . . . the children in your dreams. I think they are his voice, trying to talk to you."

  Olga felt her heart skip. "He . . . he knows me?"

  "Not truly. but I think he sensed something about you. Didn't you say that what first made you suspicious was that none of the affected children were viewers of your program? Your son escaped the bounds of the Grail network some time ago—he has explored much, and I suspect that he was drawn particularly to the children watching your show, as he has been drawn to other children elsewhere. What it was he sensed in you, I don't know, but he may have felt some deep affinity, some . . . similarity to himself. Wordless, uncomprehending, he immediately lost any other interest in your child viewers. Instead, he tried in his half-conscious way to . . . make contact. With you."

  She was sobbing convulsively but her eyes were dryly painful, as though she had cried so much she could never shed tears again. Those terrible headaches, the confusing voices, they hadn't been a curse at all, but. . . ." My ch–child! My baby! Trying to f–f–find me!"

  "Time is very short, Olga. We have only minutes, then things will have gone too far. I will try to bring him to you—let you speak to him yourself. Do not be too frightened."

  "I would never be frightened. . . !"

  "Wait. Wait until you have spoken to him. He was born different, but even his raw humanity has been shaped by cold, self-serving men. And now another man, even crueler, has hurt him and abused him until he has nearly given up. It may be too late. But if you can speak to him, calm him, many lives can be saved."

  "I still don't understand. Where is he?" She looked around wildly, imagining some strange, Frankensteinian form might suddenly appear from the shadows that cloaked the huge room. "I want to go to him. I don't care what he is, w
hat he looks like. Let me go to him!"

  "You must listen carefully, Olga." Sellars sounded even more strained, as though he were clinging to a high place by his fingernails. "Time is short. There is still a lot I haven't told you, crucial things. . . ."

  "Then tell me now!"

  And as she sat in the big, dark room, the only moving thing in the circle of light, he told her as kindly as possible where her son was and what he was doing. Then he left her alone so he could see to the rest of his own desperate agenda.

  Olga had thought she had no more tears left to cry. She had been wrong.

  The intruder was still talking to someone—someone Jongleur couldn't see. Immersed in protective fluids, he writhed in impotent fury. He tried to bring up the room audio but again he discovered himself blocked, the commands disabled. He knew it must be his ex-employee who had done all this, but why should that street animal go to such ridiculous lengths just to confuse him?

  Jongleur stared at the screen with the intensity of a mad thing, an old falcon who lived only to strike at anything that moved. The woman's lips were moving—what was she saying? Damn her, is she talking to Dread?

  He watched the woman begin to cry again, shuddering, pulling at her face with her hands, and his distant heart was again chilled. She knew. Somehow, she had found out. Which meant that his enemies knew as well, for who else would tell her?

  Why bring this woman into it? What does he think she can possibly accomplish?

  She was standing over his pod now—his pod, only a few short meters from the rags and tatters of his living body. He switched cameras so he could see her face, which was grotesque with rage and misery. She made a fist and struck the pod—a tiny, meaningless blow on the hardened plasteel, but Felix Jongleur suddenly felt himself suffocating, his fear twisting ever tighter. There were strangers in his home—he was violated. Pursued. Caught.

  No! I won't let it happen. A dozen possible reprisals flashed through his mind, all thwarted by the evacuations and the meddling in his system. Even his last-ditch defenses had been rendered inoperative. He could not flood the room with immobilizing gas or crippling sonics.