by Tad Williams
After a long chaotic moment the world came to rest again.
"!Xabbu?" she breathed, swaying with dizziness.
"I am here, Renie." His hand touched hers, clutched, held.
They were still in the desert, !Xabbu's imaginary Kalahari, but now it was somehow also the pit in which Renie had spoken to the false Stephen. The stars, moments ago so bright, were now almost unimaginably distant, faint as the last embers of a fire. Renie and !Xabbu crouched on a rim of earth that had been the outskirt of the dry pan, but the land had stretched up above them into the walls of the pit, and the gulley and its tiny trickle of stream had dropped away far beyond their reach, half a hundred meters below their ledge. Despite the distance and the dying stars, the light had the impossible clarity of a dream. Renie saw that the shape huddled beside the stream didn't resemble a mantis any longer, but neither was it a child. It was something else entirely, something not quite definable-small, dark, and very much alone.
All will die. The breathy voice rose up like smoke. Could not . . . save the children.
A glimmering silver something lay on the rough gray stone floor of the pit, as hopelessly beyond reach as though it were on one of the stars overhead. As she watched it, it suddenly sprouted legs. Like a tiny metallic beetle, it crept away from the child-thing, limping blindly until it toppled over the edge into the river and was gone.
The lighter, Renie realized. The little flicker of hope she had felt in the desert finally went out. We've lost it. We've lost everything.
"This is the sun," !Xabbu murmured beside her. For a moment, she thought he was talking to her, but his eyes were shut, and what he said made no sense. "Yes. And now it moves lower. Fingers so, thumbs wide. There—it sets behind the hills."
She could not keep her eyes closed a moment longer, no matter what the risk. Already the lassitude was creeping over her, a dark fog shot with red light and tiny, bursting stars. Another moment and she would find it easier simply to give up. The gnawing ache—it was in her back, she knew, but it felt as if it went right through her body and out through her chest—was growing more distant. The pain was receding.
Calliope Skouros knew this was not a good sign.
Should have waited until Stan called back, she thought, and coughed up another bubbly spill of blood. Wish he was here. Look, Chan, I could tell him. I wore my flakkie for once. Kept the blade from going all the way through my lung and into my heart. That's why I won't be dead for at least another two or three minutes. Plenty of time.
Yeah. Plenty of time for what?
Calliope tried to roll over from her side onto her stomach. If she could crawl there might, just might, be something she could do—maybe drag herself down the steps and out the front door of the loft. Also, there would be less chance of snagging the knife on something. She knew she couldn't pull it out—the blade and the shock-absorbent gel of the flak jacket were probably the only thing keeping the wound even partially sealed. Without the knife that had almost killed her, she'd die in seconds.
It was no use. Her arms weren't strong enough to roll her onto her stomach, which meant they certainly weren't going to lift her body. All those hours in the gym and all she could do was thrash uselessly, like a fish hauled onto the deck of a boat. She might be able to pull herself a few inches but she would never make it down the stairs. She coughed and a sudden spike of agony went through her. For a long moment afterward she could only grunt and clamp her jaws against the scream that would probably open the wound fatally wide.
Something made a little sighing noise behind her. Calliope strained to lift her head, but could see nothing from her angle on the floor. Johnny Dread must be on the other side of the room—she had heard him walk across the floor and climb into what must be the strange bed in the corner and had not heard him move again. Who had made the noise?
The woman—the woman who lived with him. The one he just killed.
Calliope scrabbled herself a little to one side, pivoting slowly on the axis of her hip and sliding through a puddle of her own blood, until she could see the woman, who was also lying on her side, as though she and Calliope were a pair of very disturbing bookends. The face was deathly pale but the eyes were wide. Staring. Staring at her.
The woman who had been shot made a little mewing noise.
Yeah, me too, sister. Calliope struggled to hang onto coherence, fighting without even knowing why against the encroaching darkness in her vision, the blurriness at the edge of her thoughts. We both wanted him, even though I'm guessing your reasons were different than mine. And we both misjudged him.
The other woman's eyes opened wider. She let out another small sigh.
Like she's trying to tell me something. She's sorry? She didn't know he was home? He made her lure me in? What difference does it make?
Then she saw the corner of the woman's pad sticking out from under her chest, spattered with red as though painted by a child. She had fallen on it and her body had hidden it from Dread. The woman's eyes flicked down toward it, then up to Calliope, mutely pleading.
"I see it," Calliope tried to say, but the words came out only as bloody bubbles. It will kill me to get to it, she thought dimly. Then again, I'll die if I don't.
She tried to stretch out her arms, hoping to catch her nails in the carpet and pull herself forward, but she couldn't lift them beyond her chest without a bolt of pain that made her feel as though someone had kicked the hilt of the knife in her back. As shadows gathered before her eyes and even the fibers of the carpet seemed to slip farther and farther away until they seemed like some strange snow-covered forest seen from the window of a plane, she discovered that if she wiggled her legs she could inch forward on her side.
They never taught us this one. . . . She did her best to ignore the scalding pain that came with each movement. The carpet dragged at her like fingers. All that stuff about climbing walls, shooting at targets. They should have taught us . . . how to crawl . . . like a worm. . . .
The worm coughed. The worm coiled in shock at the agony, writhed, even cried out in a quiet bubbling gasp. When the red electrical-shock fog retreated, the worm cursed silently, bitterly, and tried to crawl forward once more.
Too bad I don't have a brain at each end. Don't worms have that? Or is that dinosaurs? Stan's nephews would know.
Since when do you care about dinosaurs, Skouros? Stan asked her.
They're interesting, she told him. They died out because they were stupid. Too big. Too slow. Didn't wear their flakkies.
But they did—they wore their flakkies, even on a weekend call on their day off. They just didn't take their partners. That was the real problem. Ask Kendrick—he loves the things.
It's all right. It doesn't matter. They're all dead a long time now, right? I'll just sit on the couch . . . get a little rest.
You tired, Skouros?
Oh, yes, Stan. I'm really tired . . . really, really . . . tired. . . .
The fog cleared a little. She could see something pale before her. The moon? It was surprisingly close. But was it the right time of day?
The ghostly white shape was the woman's face, only centimeters away. God, no. I was out there, right out. Running out of oxygen. . . .
Calliope inched forward until she could touch the pad with her fingers, feel the curved case.
Can't get it open—it's under her. . . .
She shoved weakly at the woman with her head, trying to get her to move, but although her eyes were still open, the stranger did not react. Shit, don't tell me she's dead, please, please. . . . Dead weight. Right on top of it. Calliope shoved her hand forward, watching it with a kind of crazed interest as it closed on the pad. She tugged, lost her grip on the slippery surface. She tried again, fighting the blood which now seemed not just on her hands and the floor and the pad, but all around her in a mist, even filling her ears so that the sound of her own heartbeat became as close and strange as the voice of the sea in a shell.
Slowly, she brought her other hand up. The ray
of pain in her back grew brighter, fiercer, threatened to set her insides on fire. Her fingers closed. She pulled. It came free.
Calliope fumbled with the bloody cover until she found the place to touch. The pad sprang open, the screen astonishingly clean and bright.
No blood, she realized. Must be the last place like that on Earth. . . .
She could make no sense of what she saw on it, the open files, the flicker of movement in a view-window—her vision was blurring badly. She could only pray that the thing's audio pickup was switched on. She did her best to speak, coughed, wept, then tried again. Her voice, when it came out, was as quiet as the whisper of a shy child.
"Call zero . . . zero . . . zero."
Calliope let her head sag until it touched the floor, which felt as soft as a feather pillow, inviting sleep. There was a police priority code she could have added but she could not think of it. It was all in the lap of the gods now—had the thing picked up her voice? Was it set to call out on vocal commands? And even if it worked, how long until they dispatched a car to answer the call?
Done everything I could, she thought. Maybe . . . just rest . . . a little.
She did not know if seconds or minutes had passed, but she surfaced from another, even deeper fog to see something moving beside her. Calliope opened her eyes wide, but that was all she could do. Even if it was Dread himself she did not believe she could move a centimeter.
It was another bloody hand. Not her own.
The woman with the face pale as paper was reaching for the pad, fingers walking slowly toward it like a red-and-white spider. Calliope could only watch in dismay as the hand crept onto the screen and began, clumsily but determinedly, to open files, to move things around.
She'll cut off the call. Calliope tried to reach out but her muscles would not respond. What if no one's picked it up yet? What the hell is this idiot woman doing?
The bloody hand slowed, touched again, paused, then slid off the screen, leaving behind a streak of translucent crimson. Through her own swiftly encroaching fog Calliope heard the woman beside her take a deep, gurgling breath.
That's it, thought Calliope. She's dead.
"Send," the woman whispered.
CHAPTER 46
Thoughts Like Smoke
NETFEED/NEWS: UN High Court to Rule on "Lifejack" Case
(visual: excerpt from Svetlana Stringer episode of Lifejack!)
VO: The UN High Court in the Hague has agreed to hear the case of Svetlana Stringer, a woman who claims the netshow Lifejack! had no right to select her for surveillance and create a documentary about her love life and family problems without her permission. Her attorneys argue that unless the High Court makes a stand, continual blurring of the lines of privacy by the media will mean that soon no one will have a right to any private life at all. Attorneys for the American network that makes Lifejack! insist that a waiver Ms. Stringer signed several years ago to allow herself to be filmed for another program—a documentary on music education made when she was a teenager—means she has given up her right to resist surveillance.
(visual: Bling Saberstrop, attorney for ICN)
SABERSTROP: "UN guidelines on privacy are just that—guidelines, not laws. We consider this to be a case where the plaintiff wants to have her cake and eat it, too—privacy only when she wants it."
He watched the dying policewoman squirming in her own blood for a few moments after he reentered the network, but then he had to close the window. It was too distracting. Too entertaining. The problem was, he wanted to do everything at once.
Like a kid in a candy shop, he thought.
He wanted to watch the cop bitch's last moments, but it was one of the things he could set aside for later. He also wanted to drive the operating system out of hiding and break its pseudo-will once and for all, make it abandon this infuriating, pointless resistance and truly yield to him. And he most definitely wanted to hunt down Martine Desroubins and the Sulaweyo woman and all the other escapees, then carry them back to his endless white house in the virtual Outback and give each a magnificently intricate, drawn-out death. The prospects were enchanting: he would imprison them, terrify them, permit a few apparent escapes, even take the place of first one, then another, so he could live each terrifying moment with them just as he had done with the woman Quan Li, playing with alternating hope and despair until they all went almost mad.
But never completely mad, of course. Because then the ending would lose its bite.
And he would record the whole thing. He would watch it over and over after the grand enterprise was complete, edit it to highlight the artistry, add music and effects—hours and hours of the greatest entertainment ever created. Perhaps someday he would even allow others to see it. It would become an object of religious significance, at least among those few people who really understood how the world worked. His name would be spoken in awed whispers long after he was dead.
But I won't be dead, will I? I won't ever die.
No wonder he was so excited. There was so much to do . . . and all eternity in which to do it.
He forced himself down, down into calm. No mistakes, he thought. Soothing music filled his head, a glissando of strings, a gentle shimmer of cymbals. First, the operating system.
He stood on the weird, lunar plane and inspected the barrier the failing system had erected between Dread and his victims. He stroked the insubstantial but unbreachable mist. Where had this thing come from? And how could he best get through it?
It was clear he had pushed the Grail operating system to the breaking point, but although he wanted it subdued and broken he did not want to destroy it completely, jeopardizing the whole network, before he had a chance to install a replacement. That might be a little more difficult now that Dulcie was sprawled gut-shot dead on the floor of the loft, but she had cracked Jongleur's house files for him first: the Old Man would have some kind of system backup in place. So the sensible thing to do would be just to wait until he could bring another system online. But what if doing so not only killed this operating system but destroyed Martine and the rest as well? And what if Jongleur was in there with them? The thought that all his enemies might be stolen right out of his grasp by a mercifully swift death was maddening.
And they're right there. . . ! He prowled along the barrier, trying to make sense of what little he could see. As he walked he let his mind wander through the network infrastructure. It was a strange problem, trying to be two places at once, very strange. Here he stood, with the powers of a god, but he could not actually find his own location in the network: he had followed Martine and the others through into this place, but the place itself did not seem to exist on any of the network's schemata.
It's a damn strange environment, whatever it is, he thought. He had even more power here than he did in other parts of the network—the inhabitants had fled screaming from him even before he did anything—but the operating system had more power here, too.
Bloody hell! The insight was sudden and overwhelming. I must be . . . inside the damn thing.
He laughed and the wall of mist rippled back from him like sensitive tissue being poked by a surgical tool. Of course I'm powerful here. It knows who delivers the pain. It's scared of me.
So if it believes in something, he realized, that something comes true here. That explained why the barrier could hold him out—it represented the system's own faith in its last-ditch defenses. But when the last shred of belief that it could resist him died. . . .
It's all make-believe, he thought. A world of ghosts, magic. Like my bloody mother's stories. It was not a thought that went well with his celebratory mood so he pushed it away.
But where is the bloody thing, then? Where is the system hiding? Dread closed his eyes as he walked along the barrier, examining his internal map of the system. The thing, the part of the operating system that thought, must be close. Again he had the strange sense of being in two places at the same time. It worried him just a little—a lifetime's dislike of exposur
e and a powerful urge toward control made him uncomfortable about being spread between two spheres of operation—but his pride and assurance were growing with his power and he shrugged it off. But he could not shrug off the essential puzzle.
The two things are tangled up. Until I cripple the system's brain once and for all, I'll never be able to get my hands on the ones who got away from me. But if I cripple it too badly—if I ruin it—they'll be gone, dead . . . escaped.
He could no longer see Jongleur's two monstrous agents on the other side of the barrier. Whatever they had accomplished was over now, but they clearly had not pushed the operating system into surrender since the barrier still stood; neither had they delivered him Martine or any of the others. There were no more copies of the agents inside the barrier. Whatever he did next he would have to do himself.
Wouldn't have it any other way, he thought.
Already the excitement of the hunt was beginning to mount again. He cast his thoughts back into the network controls, searching for some clue to the location of the system's ultimate refuge. There had been a flurry of recent activity but none of it made sense, and as he struggled with the obscurities of network activity logs he had a brief moment of irritation over Dulcie's disloyalty. She would have been useful for this, the bitch. The escapees and the system itself remained hidden from him, both by this virtual barrier in this virtual world and in the immense, trackless confusion of the network. It was infuriating that with all his godlike power he couldn't simply find them—that he was forced to search through virtual landscapes, or listen in on virtual communicator conversations.
Communicators. . . ! He gestured and the silver lighter was in his hand. He opened the communication channel and discovered it was in use, but what he heard was nonsense—faint, unrecognizable voices babbling about strings and sunsets and something called a honey-guide. The communication line was clearly corrupted, and in his anger he considered returning to his loft and using Jongleur's access codes to pull the plug on the entire network, to kill it and then resurrect it with a different and more tractable operating system . . . but that would mean that Renie Sulaweyo and Martine and the Circle people would be granted a far too merciful release.
