by Tad Williams
"And what were you planning to do?" it asked him. "Challenge me to a fight? Marquis of Queenbury rules?" It bent closer. An icy finger lifted Paul's chin, forced him to meet the white, blindfish gaze, the smile glinting like ice in the black fog of its face. "I'm going to eat your heart, mate. And your friends—I'm going to take them home with me and rape their souls."
Paul's quivering hands, which for a moment had risen a few inches above the ground, dropped back to the path. As the blackness closed in on him he clung desperately to a single slender point of sanity.
"No more," he gasped.
Dread leaned down until his grinning mouth was only a finger's breadth away. Paul felt sure his heart would stop. "You aren't giving up already, are you? Oh, that's very disappointing. . . ."
"No more . . . drifting!" he screamed, and pushed off from the ground. He wrapped his arms around the shadow-thing and dragged them both over the side of the ledge.
For a long moment they fell, the dark man thrashing and struggling in his arms like an immense bat. Paul could feel Dread's surprised panic, and even through his own terror something like triumph rose. Then they slowed and stopped.
They hung in midair, Paul held like an infant at the end of Dread's outstretched arm. The grinning mouth was now contorted by rage. A terrible, scalding heat ran up Paul's body, flames suddenly crackling on his limbs, his hair, even inside him, racing up his gullet to fill his mouth. He let out a smoking shriek of agony as the monster swung him high, then flung him down, flaming like a comet, to slam against the sloping wall of the pit.
The first blow was so hard it was like something else entirely, as sudden and transformative as being struck by lightning. He dimly felt himself caroming down the uneven rock wall, limp, helpless, but it seemed very far away, strangely unimportant. Everything was broken inside him.
He stopped at last. He supposed he was still burning, but the flames were only more lights flickering before his eyes, and now all the lights were growing dim.
Doesn't feel like being a copy, he thought absently. Feels . . . just like dying.
A moving darkness floated down from above and hung just before him.
"You wasted my time. Bad choice."
Paul would have laughed, but nothing worked. What an unimportant thing to say. What an unimportant thing to think. His own thoughts were like smoke, curling and rising, lighter than the air, lighter than anything that had ever been.
I wonder if there's a copy of Heaven, too. . . .
And then he didn't think anymore.
CHAPTER 47
Star Over Louisiana
NETFEED/LIFESTYLE: Can't Diet? Maybe You Can Change Your Genes. . . .
(visual: genetic engineering department laboratory, Candide Institute)
VO: The Candide Institute of Toulouse, France has announced a breakthrough in the quest for what some critics have called "junk food genes," a reversal of the usual approach for dealing with poor dietary habits in the First World.
(visual: Claudia Jappert, Candide Institute researcher)
JAPPERT: "Some people can't improve their diet, no matter how much they try. We do not make judgments, and we are certainly not in the business of punishing people for poor habits, especially when we now believe we can optimize their body instead for the kind of food they do eat. If a few genetic adjustments can make someone better able to deal with a diet weighted toward saturated fats and sugar and too much red meat, then why should they suffer needlessly from life-shortening illnesses. . . ?"
The tears were finished now. All Olga could do was wait. There was nothing left at all, inside or out, nothing but the hiss of an empty channel. She had turned her link to Sellars all the way up—in their last moments he had grown so quiet she could scarcely make out his words—and now all that it brought her was the sound of his long absence.
Maybe it's me, she thought dully. Maybe I just can't hear anymore.
Before entering the tower she had believed she had already given up everything, but in only minutes she had been made to understand how foolish that belief had been. Thirty years of believing a terrible lie, a lie on which she had built her life and to which she had reconciled as to a decrepit but familiar home. Now it was gone.
How many times did my baby cry? And nobody came to him. She could not move, could not open her eyes. Better I never knew. Nothing could be worse than this.
The link to Sellars still blew nothing into her ear but the ghosts of electrons, the phantom voices of quanta. She tried to imagine a life spent that way, a life spent listening to a void like that, not even knowing that you were human. That it should be her son—that she, of all the mothers who had ever lived, should have been singled out for such horror. . . .
The light had changed. Through the cracks between her fingers Olga saw a spill of blue, the broad black band of a moving shadow. Her heart flip-flopped, threatened to stop entirely.
Did Sellars bring him here? After all? It was only a instant's thought as she turned, a flare of panic and hope that she knew was ridiculous, but it made the immense, dripping thing shuffling toward her all the more incomprehensible.
"Heh-woh." It smiled, showing its big teeth. "Heh-woh, wih-uh way-ee."
The words came out in a gargling slur—the fat man's massive jaws did not seem to be working properly. He trailed fiberlink and medical cables like some deep-sea monster twined in kelp. The mounds of his pale skin were slick with some shiny, fluorescent grease.
Behind him, the lid of his black sarcophagus stood open. On the far side of Jongleur's huge central pod another lid was also up. Bony hands scrabbled at the rim as whoever or whatever was inside tried to climb out.
The fat man took another dragging step, raising a huge, meaty arm. Olga stumbled backward. He was slow but getting faster. Even in the somber light she could see slimy footprints on the carpet behind him like the track of a monstrous snail. "Non't wun away," he said. His speech was improving, but not much. "We've min in vose muckets a wong, wong nime. We've min missing owah vun. Vinney? Wheah ah you?"
Another figure now stood upright in the other pod—a naked man, painfully thin, but much more normal-looking. He turned and stared blearily at the fat man. "I g–g–gan't zee . . ." the thin man complained. "Where . . . my . . . glazzez. . . ?"
The fat man laughed. A smear of blue froth gleamed on his lips and chin. "Non't worry, Vinney—you ahways worry noo much. Yoo woahn neen 'em. I'll hoad her nown, you noo . . . you do . . . whatever you wanna do. . . ."
Olga turned and ran across the carpet.
She reached the elevator in moments but the door was closed. She screamed for Ramsey and his agent friend, then remembered she had turned off his line so she could listen for Sellars' return.
"Ramsey!" she said when she had activated it. "Open the elevator door!"
"It's coming," he shouted, as frightened as she was. "I sent it already. I've been screaming at you! You didn't hear me!"
The elevator hissed open. She jumped in and waved her hand over the door-closing sensor. The two men were lurching toward her across the carpet, the fat man waving his hands in the air, roaring gleefully. "Come back! Come back, little lady! We just want to have some fun!"
"This elevator will only take you down to the security station," Ramsey warned her as the door finally slid shut. "Then you'll have to change to another that descends to the lobby. At least I think so—is that right, Beezle?"
"Far as I know, but who pays attention to me?" said the cartoon voice.
Something smashed against the door of the elevator so hard Olga saw the metal doors flex inward a little.
"Up," she said. "Up!"
"What are you talking about? There's only one floor above you. You'll be trapped. . . !"
"I'm not going down. Fine, then, I will do it myself." She waved her badge and touched the up light, but the car didn't move.
"It needs a special clearance, remember?" Ramsey said. "Beezle had to work hard on that one."
"Just do it," she
begged. Another smashing blow wrinkled the door in half an inch. She could hear the fat man outside shouting unpleasant invitations. "Do it, for the love of God!"
"You got it, lady," said Beezle. The elevator began to rise.
"Even with all those trees, that crazy forest, you can't hide up there for long, Olga," Ramsey told her. "I don't get it."
"I won't need to hide very long," she said.
Sam could only stare down into the gulf as the thing with the dead eyes and gleaming teeth rose toward them. Her chest was frozen with terror, a slab of ice where her heart and guts should be. She had watched helplessly as Paul Jonas was burned and cast down. She was too frightened even to cry out.
On the ledge beside her Martine breathed in short, painful gulps like a woman giving birth. Orlando was holding the blind woman's head. Florimel, T4b, and the others were all silent with shock and helpless anguish. A whirl of tiny shadows settled on Orlando and a few made their way onto Sam.
"It coming, Freddicks," something whispered miserably. She could feel the little monkey fingers pulling at her hair, trying to find a good hold. "Gotta get out of this place!"
"Nowhere to go," she said.
Martine gasped and sat up, eyes wide but unfocused. "I feel it! The Other—it is horrible! It has no body—it is only a brain, a huge brain!"
Sam reached back and took her hand, trying not to scream as Martine squeezed her fingers until she felt the bones would crack.
Won't matter long, Sam told herself. She felt Orlando take her other hand. The grinning shadow-shape drifted up toward them like a black leaf on a warm, lazy wind.
"They did not bother to keep a body," Sellars' voice sighed from a million miles away. Cho-Cho's mouth was barely moving now. "Easier . . . just to keep . . . the brain itself." The voice grew ever more distant, a fading signal. "Engineered cells replicating . . . to replace . . . dying . . . miscalculated . . . it filled the . . . satellite."
Martine's breathing sped again, a chain of rasping grunts that did not sound like anything human. The shadow floated up.
"Bye-bye," Sam said—not to anyone, even Orlando. Perhaps to herself. "Over," she whispered. "I'm sorry."
The moon had faded to a shadow of white in the sky. Even the brilliant desert stars were all but gone. Renie held !Xabbu's head in her lap. He was barely conscious, his breathing a low, vibrating rasp like nothing she had heard. Even after he had stopped speaking aloud his hands had traced the shapes of string-figures for long minutes. Now they no longer moved.
"Don't leave me, !Xabbu. Not after all this. I don't want you to go first."
Something flickered. She looked down, blearily certain that the bottom of the pit was even farther away than it had been. Light gleamed again.
The river was beginning to glow.
The faint sparkles of light began to thicken, became streaks that sent flaring, rippling light all along the sides of the pit, but the shadowy child-shape beside the river did not move or even open its eyes. Only when the whole of the watercourse was ablaze with coruscating brilliance did the small figure stir and raise its head.
Two little children, a girl and a boy, stood in the middle of the river as though they had walked there along the surface of the water. Renie had never seen them before, or at least she did not recognize them: the light surged and leaped so brightly around them that they almost disappeared in the glare of cold fire.
The little girl held out her hand to the huddled shape.
She looked like a dream-creature, but her voice was shaky, the words those of a real and frightened child. "Come with us. It's okay. You can."
The shadow-child looked at the ones bathed in light. It did not say anything, did not even shake its head, but the river suddenly leaped higher, rose to breast-high on the two children. They did not move, but Renie could see their eyes open wide.
"No, don't be afraid," the little girl said. "We came to take you to your mommy."
"Liar!"
She turned to the boy beside her, dark-haired, solemn-eyed, his mouth locked tight against what Renie thought might be a cry of complete terror. He looked back at her and shook his head violently.
"Tell him," the little girl said. "Tell him it's okay."
The boy shook his head again.
"You have to," she said. "You . . . you're more like him." She turned back to the shadow-child. "We just want to take you to your mommy."
"Liar!" The thing writhed and shrank, became something even smaller and darker and more hidden. The river blazed up, so that for a moment it covered the children over and Renie's heart flipped in her chest. "The Devil always lies!"
The flaring light subsided. The boy and girl stood, frightened but still unmoved by the rushing, scintillating waters. They were holding hands. "Tell him," the little girl said to her companion, her whispering voice carrying up to Renie as though it were meant for her alone. "He's really scared!"
The little black-haired boy was crying now, his shoulders trembling. He looked at the girl, then at the shadow-child huddled on the river bank. "P–people," he said slowly, so quietly Renie found herself leaning forward to hear, "some people, they want to help, seen?" His breath hitched. "Some people really try to help you." He was crying so hard he could barely speak. "It's t–t–true."
The glowing river swirled and sparked. !Xabbu twisted in Renie's arms but when she looked down in fright, his face seemed a little calmer. She turned back to the pit.
The shadow-child rose and stood on the bank, then stepped into the glowing river. For a long moment the children stood facing each other in a silence that seemed the deepest communication of all, the two shining in the river's light, the other so small and murky-dark that even in the heart of such radiance no light could touch him. Then all three were gone. Renie was not sure what had happened but her eyes were blurry with tears. A moment later she felt the darkness fold in on them, taking the desert, the pit, everything. With her last thought she clutched !Xabbu tightly to her.
The end, she thought. Finally. And then, Oh, Stephen. . . !
Olga was covered with scratches and bleeding in a dozen places by the time she reached the deserted house. She pushed in, then threw the bolt on the front door. It would not take them long to get past it, but she didn't care about that either. She watched the two figures, the fat one and the thin one, stagger out of the trees at the bottom of the garden and turn to look up at the house. However long they had been in those tanks, it had been long enough to make the chase difficult for them.
I've kept in shape, she thought. Who knew it was for this?
Riding the elevator up she had felt a sudden almost horrifying sense of freedom. Her life had been a lie. She had built it all on lies. All the years she had entertained children, mourning her loss, her own child had been alive—suffering as perhaps no living creature had ever suffered. What could you do, knowing that, but shake your fist at the universe? Spit at God? It didn't matter now.
"Olga. . . ." Sellars' voice in her ear was thunderously loud but paradoxically weak. She turned down the volume. "He's coming to you. Don't be afraid."
"Not afraid," she murmured. "Not that."
When her son came at last, she did not hear him, but felt him—a tiny constellation of lights drifting up out of subterranean depths, tracking toward her across unimaginable distances. He came like a flock of birds, of shadow-shapes, a whirring and a fluttering that was all confusion and fear.
"I'm here," she said gently, so gently. "Oh, my little one, I'm here."
They were banging at the front door of the abandoned house now, trying to dislodge the bolt. Olga moved from room to room, ever deeper, until she reached the girl's bedroom. She sat on the dusty coverlet beneath the shelf of ancient, wide-eyed dolls.
"I'm here," she said again.
The voices began as something she had heard in her dreams, a chaotic whispering, a moaning, laughing chorus of children. They swelled into a noise like a river, blending, merging, until at last it was one voice—nothing
human, but one solitary voice.
"Mother. . . ?"
She could feel him now, could feel everything, even as her ears dimly registered the crunch of the front door being knocked off its hinges. A moment later she heard the glee-drunk shouting of the fat man down the halls, the sharp tones of his thin companion.
"I'm here," she whispered. "They took you from me. But I never forgot you."
"Mother." There was a sadness in it no human voice could have contained. It swam up like a blind thing from the bottom of the ocean. "Lonely."
"I know, my little one. But not for much longer."
"Yoo hoo!" The voice of the fat man was just outside the bedroom door now. The tiny latch would last only moments.
A voice crashed in on the side channel. "Olga, this is Ramsey. You have to get out now!"
She was annoyed at the interruption, but she reminded herself that Catur Ramsey was in a different world—the world of the living. Things seemed different there.
"There may be a few minutes left, time to. . . ."
"Just a moment, Mr. Ramsey. I am finishing Mr. Sellars' errand." She disconnected from him, then stood. "I'm still here," she assured the huge, lonely thing. "I won't leave. But you have to let them help you, my beautiful child. Do you feel someone reaching to you? Give him what he wants." She felt a spasm of guilt, hating to use these precious few moments of mother-love in this way, hating to manipulate a child who had known nothing else, but she had promised. She still owed a little something to the living.
"Give him. . . ?"
"He'll save what he can. Then you don't have to worry anymore."
The bedroom door shook, made splintering noises.
"Yes . . . Mother." A brief pause, then she felt him again. "Did it."
She let out a sigh. All obligations finished now. A memory, long buried, too painful, finally surfaced. "You have a name, little one, did you know that? No, of course, you could not know—but you have a name. Your father and I chose it for you. We were going to call you Daniel."
