by Tad Williams
A moment passed, a long moment. "Daniel. . . ?"
"Yes. Daniel, the prophet who kept his faith even in the lion's den. But don't be afraid—the lions can't hurt you anymore."
"Have . . . a name. Daniel."
"You do." It was hard to speak. No tears, only a dry numbness, something beyond pain. "I'm coming to see you now."
When she opened the door the fat man and the thin man started back, surprised but prepared for violence. She lifted her hands to show they were empty.
"I think there's something you should see," she said, then calmly walked past them toward the parlor. The two gleaming, naked men stared after her in astonishment. The fat man's hands twitched but she was already gone. They looked at each other for a moment, then turned and followed her through the parlor and out onto the front porch.
"So you've decided to do the sensible thing," the thin one began.
"Mr. Ramsey, can you have your mechanical agent friend open a window on this floor?" she asked. "Something big that I can see from the front of the house?"
"B–but, Olga. . . !" he stuttered in her ear.
"Just do it, please."
"What the hell is going on?" the fat man growled. He reached forward and closed his massive, stubby fingers around her wrist. "What kind of trick. . . ?" He broke off in surprise as, with a grinding of long-unused gears, a huge square section of the roof slid back, revealing the dark evening sky, the true sky, its sprinkling of stars dimmed by the lights of the metroplex below. All the stars but one, which was growing brighter, ever brighter on the horizon.
"Olga. . . ."
"It's all right, Mr. Ramsey. Catur. Thank you for everything. I mean that But I am not going anywhere." She turned and smiled again at the fat man and his thin companion. "So here we are, gentlemen. We have a few moments—time for you to catch your breath."
The fat man turned to the thin one. "What is she talking about?"
"My son." said Olga Pirofsky. "We're waiting for my son."
Sellars had hung in chill emptiness so long he could scarcely remember where he was, or even who he was, but he could feel the chain of suffering stretching into the distance, a fragile link with the heart of the void. The blind woman, the Bushman, the two frightened children—how much longer could they all last?
Then he felt it. Something in the darkness had touched the connection. Like a fisherman who had discovered Leviathan on his hook, Sellars braced for its anger. He faced it naked of defenses, risking all to ensure that he did not frighten it away. Even in its dying moments it could kill him easily if it wished.
No, not it, he thought. Him.
When the touch came, it was surprisingly gentle.
"Have a name." The inhuman voice held a new note. "Daniel."
"Ah," Sellars said. "Daniel. Bless you, child, that's a good name." He hesitated. They had only moments, but if he pushed too hard he might destroy the fragile connection.
The Other, however, had his own plans. "Fast. Mother . . . my mother . . . is waiting." He extracted a final promise from Sellars, then gave up the keys to the kingdom he had built for himself, had built out of himself—an exile's island in the ocean of his own fear and loneliness.
"I'll do my best to save them all," Sellars said.
A silent groan—release? Fear? "All done. All done."
"Goodbye, Daniel."
But the great cold thing was already gone.
Dread could actually feel himself bursting with radiant darkness, as though the fire inside him was devouring an entire planet, endless fuel, the food of gods. His inner music was blaringly loud, horns and crashing drums. As he soared upward, he reached out his hand to the quailing figures on the ledge, and at the same moment he plunged his thoughts, his glowing twist down along the silver thread into the heart of the system, reaching toward the dying thing that had hidden from him and resisted him so long.
All resistance was over now. He had won.
He found it at last, a tiny twitch of life at the center of things, a beaten, cowering presence. He gave it pain just to feel it shrivel like a burning leaf. His twist blazed, fueled by his glee and his anger, his triumphant, all-devouring rage.
Mine, he exulted. All mine!
He paused to examine what he had finally captured, the bit of individuality, of naked will, which was all that was left of the system's intelligent core. He could smother it now with only a thought. The system would be his mindless slave. And after that. . . ?
It shifted in his grasp, almost slipped free. Surprised, he focused his will, pinned it like a helplessly struggling insect even as it curled into itself, trying to hide again. How could it still be resisting him? After all that agony? Surely only Dread, of all the victims in the world, could find strength in suffering that way. No machine could do such a thing, only John Dread. For was he not a black angel, a power upon the Earth? A god?
He pried it open. A small voice was all that he found, a breath.
"Confident . . . cocky. . . ." it whispered. "Lazy. Dead."
It surrendered its last secrets and suddenly he knew everything. In horror he fought to disengage, to throw himself back into his body, but even as he tried to yank his glowing twist free from the heart of the system it grabbed at his mind, a dying animal sinking its teeth into its tormentor. His music stuttered, faded. He smashed it with his will, hurt it, tore it, but it hung on blindly.
Priority Message. The words blazed out before his inner eye. Struggling with all his might to pull out, he could not turn it off, could not even wonder where such a bizarre thing might come from. His superior strength was beginning to tell, but the thing still clung, determined to drag him down into its self-destruction.
Images began to flit across his consciousness. Bodies . . . women's bodies, torn and ragged, slick and wet. But why? Where? He could not be distracted—he had only seconds—but the images filled his brain, falling through him like angels shotgunned out of the sky. The trickle became a torrent, an obscene, unstoppable wash of dismemberment and death, of his own face leering out at him from a thousand mirrors, of a thousand mouths screaming, screaming until he couldn't think. He flailed, trying to find his way out trying to regain control to get out had to get out but the eyes were all looking at him now staring eyes knowing eyes mocking mouths the faces his mother's face laughing the screams the blood the silent music of death and dying and it didn't stop it didn't stop it didn't. . . .
Finney and Mudd had chased the intruder all the way up to the top floor, but Felix Jongleur could not see what was happening there—he had sealed himself off from the place a long time ago. The oldest man in the world could only writhe helplessly in his preserving fluids and wonder.
Dread. It was all Dread's fault. Jongleur had raised him up from nothing but the minion had turned on him like the dog he was. His teeth were sharp, it was true, but he was only a beast after all, a beast that Jongleur himself had almost entirely created. . . .
The cacophony of alarms seized his attention again. He tried to focus but his thoughts were scattered. He had not felt so afraid in decades—how could all this have happened? How long would it take to put it all right? He forced himself to look at the security information but it was a hopeless jumble. The new alarms seemed to be about a potential violation of his airspace. Why aren't my helicopters and jumpjets seeing to it? It was probably just another false indicator, but still, that was what he paid all those useless indolent soldiers for. . . .
Gone. They were gone, of course. Evacuated.
He stared at the blinking lights, the line that started high in the atmosphere and ended . . . here?
The Apep data was flashing beside it. In the surprise, in the horror of his privacy violated, he had forgotten about the program's weird insistence that it had already been triggered. False—the readings had to be false. It said the rockets had fired hours ago, shooting it out of orbit at thousands of miles an hour, just as they were designed to do, but the trajectory for the satellite was so clearly wrong. . . .
The trajectory. Falling, not rising.
He flicked to his perimeter cameras, but could not find one that pointed at the sky. When he finally found one that could be elevated it seemed to take forever. When it stopped at last and refocused, he saw the new and fiery bloom racing toward him along the sky.
In a sudden, horrible moment he understood everything, or at least enough. But Felix Jongleur had not survived so long by letting panic rule him, even in a situation like this. All might seem lost, but something could still be salvaged. It would only take seconds to trigger the Grail process—it had been ready since before the Ceremony. The physical Felix Jongleur might die, but hidden in the network's memory, the vast reserve of Telemorphix storage safe on the other side of the country, his immortal self could survive even this catastrophic shutdown of the system. Someday he would again be free within the electronic universe, a prisoner entirely escaped from death, possessed of knowledge that could bring all his power back to him.
Jongleur plunged himself back into his house system, opening a link to the network. A long moment of terrified waiting passed, but the Other's autonomic security routines allowed him his rightful access. He reached for the controls that would trigger the Grail process and bring his sleeping virtual double to life—a Felix Jongleur who would live forever, whatever happened to his flesh, the Felix Jongleur he would awaken into, refreshed and immortal, as though death were an afternoon nap.
The gray light faded. The darkness came.
He did not understand. He had done nothing yet. The Grail process was still coming on line, had not been activated. Why was the space around him turning black?
The darkness slowly took on shape—long, low, and sealed in secrecy. Felix Jongleur stared, dumbfounded. Somehow, without his ordering it, he had been drawn into his own Egyptian simulation—for surely that was Set's coffin. But where was the rest of the temple? Why was all in shadow?
A red line gleamed along the edge of the sarcophagus. Jongleur found himself being drawn forward. He searched desperately for the override commands, but was as helpless as in a nightmare. The line of fire became wider. The lid was opening. There was someone inside.
The man sat up, his black suit almost invisible against the shadows inside the sarcophagus. His bleached face glowed like a candle beneath his black stovepipe hat as he smiled and stretched out his pale ancient hands.
Terror gripped Felix Jongleur, squeezed him, crushed him. The staring eyes burned into his, scorched his thoughts to cinders but Jongleur could not look away. He tried to scream but his throat was locked shut, his pulse racing so swiftly that no chemical could slow it; no machine could regulate it.
"I'm coming for you." Mister Jingo's tombstone grin grew wider and wider until it seemed to swallow everything. "I've finally come. Riding the sky." He opened his mouth wide to reveal the blackness behind the teeth. The new star burned in that blackness, streaming flame, growing larger and brighter as it hurtled toward him like the headlight of an approaching train.
"Here I come, Felix," said Mister Jingo.
That smile. Jongleur's heart suffered, lurched. That empty, fiery smile. . . !
"I caught you at last."
And then, in the shadows and silence where only electrons moved, the old man finally screamed. It went rattling out into the vacancies that lay behind moments, fading but not dying, echoing on and on through that place where even Time itself did not rule.
The star sped down the sky toward her, a streak of fire like the hands of a midnight clock.
Olga did not even turn to watch the fat man and the thin one as they ran shrieking toward the elevator. The plummeting satellite was growing larger every moment; it now filled the sky beyond the opened roof like a blazing eye. She could feel her son in her mind, close as her own heartbeat. The flames were all around him now, and even though it was his own hand that had broken the bough and thrown down the cradle, his fear was terrible.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a curl of laminated paper.
"I'm here, Daniel." She stared at the hospital bracelet for a moment, then closed her eyes. "I'm here with you."
And then she could feel him, truly feel him, as though he were in her arms not just her mind—the way it should have been. She pulled him close and comforted him.
A few meters behind her, in another universe, the elevator had arrived. The door opened halfway, then stopped. The fat man and the thin man grunted and tore at each other as they both tried to force their way in. The fat one squeezed the thin one's throat. The thin man sank his teeth into the other's hand and scratched bloody runnels down his naked belly with his fingers and toes.
In a place behind her eyes, in a time out of time, Olga held her son. The light of the falling star blazed down on her, brighter by the moment. Alarms wailed from every wall, unwanted voices yammered in her ear, and the two men squealed in pain as they fought before the elevator, but she heard only one thing.
"Sshhh," she told him. "Don't cry. Mama is here."
Ramsey shouted her name, over and over, but Olga Pirofsky did not reply.
He could see her in the visual window Sellars had opened. Considering the circumstances, she looked strangely calm as she stared out at the night through the skylight Beezle had opened, but the two naked men who had chased her now seemed to be fighting to the death in front of the elevator. Things weren't exactly making sense.
He called Sellars, but got no answer there either.
"Beezle, what the hell is going on? Sellars said we had only a few minutes to get her out, but she won't come—won't even answer me. She must be out of time by now. Is security on the way yet?"
"Not security." Even for a piece of gear, Beezle sounded strange. "But something is."
A new view flashed open on Ramsey's screen. He stared at it for a stunned moment, then let the pad slide from his lap. He stumbled to the window of his room, fumbled for a helpless moment with the shade, then ripped it loose and threw it on the floor so he could see out the window.
"Oh, sweet Jesus," he murmured. "Sorensen! Get everyone down on the floor!"
He heard a clamor from the next room, thumping, Major Sorensen's voice shouting, but he could not tear his eyes from the sky. A new star shone in the Louisiana night, a star that burned more brightly than any others in the sky and which was growing larger every second.
As the streak of flame shot past overhead, smaller lines of light leaped up from the darkness in the distance, from the island in Lake Borgne.
Must be automatic defenses, he thought distractedly. Missiles. Everyone else is off the island. Almost everyone.
Oh, shit, he thought. Why, Olga?
The smaller lines leaped up toward the streaking star. Two of them swept past without contact, then faded into the endless night sky, but one struck the burning thing. Bits of fire spun away, backward and down, but the core had only been diminished, not destroyed. It swept on toward the horizon, sinking, and then Ramsey could not see it as it passed beyond the buildings and the great dark ruck of the swamps.
Silence. The night, undisturbed. Catur Ramsey let out half a breath.
A dazzling flash blanked the sky like sheet lightning. A pillar of fire climbed swirling up from the middle of the dark lake. Ramsey gaped as it boiled toward the clouds, God's own barber pole made of solid flame, rolling, billowing, its harsh light turning the city and swamp flat electric white. He threw himself backward, rolled across the couch and onto the floor just as a crash like the end of the world smashed the glass out of the hotel windows.
When he climbed to his feet half a minute later his ears were ringing painfully. He crunched through broken shards to the window and stood with the Gulf air cool and wet on his face. The pillar of living flame had shrunk a little, but still seemed tall enough to scorch the underside of Heaven.
CHAPTER 48
Unreal Bodies
NETFEED/NEWS: ANVAC Unveils The Doctor
(visual: test subjects in convulsion)
&nb
sp; VO: ANVAC Corporation today announced what it calls the new benchmark in crowd control—a product nicknamed "Doctor Fell." The heart of the device premiered at the International Security Exposition, whose official name is Mob Disruption Field Electronics Launcher (hence the nickname, MD FEL) is a device that fires a fist-sized projectile that blankets an area of several hundred square meters with a finely tuned electromagnetic field. Anyone within range who is not wearing a field inhibitor, which ANVAC supplies as part of the package, loses all body control and, frequently, consciousness as well. ANVAC claims that Doctor Fell is "a huge step forward in the control of dangerous humanity. . . ."
Sam slowly let go of Orlando's arm. The white marks her fingers had made remained for a moment on his skin, livid in the half-light.
"We're . . . still here," she said.
Orlando laughed raggedly, flopped over onto his back, arms spread across the path. "Dzang, Frederico. You haven't lost your talent for the obvious."
She stared into the pit. Only moments ago something Sam found almost impossible to distinguish from Satan himself had been rising from the pit. Now it was . . . gone.
"I mean . . . we're alive!"
"Speak for yourself." Orlando rolled over and struggled onto his feet, rubbing at the place Sam had squeezed him. Indignant at being dislodged, a small cloud of monkeys fluttered up, protesting loudly, and swept out to circle above the now-empty Well. Despite her overwhelming confusion Sam almost smiled. The real Thargor wouldn't have rubbed his arm if a dragon had bitten it off.
"Everything feels . . . different," said Florimel, who had also stood.
"Big bad thing gone," one of the monkeys fluted, sweeping back to hover before her. It paused for a moment as if listening. "Both big bad things."
