Sea of Silver Light o-4

by Tad Williams

  "That's not all," said Orlando, staring up at the opening far above, the faint stars. "The whole place is different. Scanny-different, but I can't explain why."

  Sam looked too. Hadn't the stars disappeared completely only hours before? Now they hung in the dark sky again. Orlando was right—everything was different. The pit had seemed endless, bottomless, impossibly, nightmarishly huge, even after it had devolved into something less realistic. Now, for all its size, it seemed simple, almost normal. It was just a big hole in the ground. Had everything changed? Or were they just seeing things differently. . . ?

  "Martine! Where is she?" Sam spun. The blind woman's body was stretched along the ledge, her face turned toward the pit wall, almost hidden in the shadows. Sam pulled her over. She was unconscious but breathing,

  Florimel bent down to examine her. "We have all survived, it seems."

  "All but Paul," Sam could not help pointing out. She was angry about it—such a stupid waste! "He didn't have to."

  "He felt he did," said Florimel gently. She lifted one of Martine's eyelids, frowned, then checked the other.

  "But what happened? Someone explain." Sam turned and scanned the ledge for the boy who had spoken with Sellars' voice but could not see him.

  "He just . . . disappeared," said Bonnie Mae Simpkins. "That Cho-Cho. Don't ask me, child—I don't know either."

  "The man Sellars brought him into the network," said Nandi. "If he's gone, perhaps that means Sellars is gone, too . . . or dead."

  "Who won, so?" T4b demanded. His usual truculence had been blasted away. He seemed more childlike than Sam had ever seen him. "Us?"

  "Yes, in a way," said a voice from nowhere. "Our enemies are dead or disabled. But we too have lost much."

  "Sellars?" Florimel looked up in offhand irritation, as though disturbed by a neighbor while she did some prosaic household task. Sam guessed that, like the rest of them, the German woman wasn't hitting on all cylinders. "Where are you? We are tired of tricks."

  The invisible presence laughed. Sam wondered if she had heard him do that before. It was a surprisingly nice laugh. "Where am I? Everywhere!"

  "Scanned," muttered T4b. "Lockin' scanned."

  "No," Sellars said. "It is far stranger than that. But Florimel is right—I should remember my manners and make it easier for all of us to talk." And suddenly, he appeared—a strange, shrunken creature in a wheelchair, his face crinkled like a dried fruit. The chair's wheels did not touch the ledge. In fact, it hovered several meters away from it, out over the great emptiness. "Here I am. I know I am not much to see."

  "Are we all to live, then?" demanded Florimel. "Can you help me with Martine?"

  Sellars floated forward. "She will awaken soon, I think. She is physically as well as can be expected." He shook his misshapen head. "She carried a tremendous burden—pain and horror that few could bear. She is an astonishing person."

  Martine groaned, then threw her hand over her face and rolled over, turning her spine toward them. "You are saying kind things about me," Her voice was hoarse and almost inflectionless. "I hope that means I have died."

  Sam crawled to her and awkwardly patted her hair. "Don't, Martine."

  "But it's true—you have done an amazing thing, Martine Desroubins," Sellars said. "In fact, we have all done something nearly as amazing just by surviving. And it is possible we are to be the witnesses of something more astonishing still."

  "No more puffed-up talk," said Florimel. "I am alive when I did not expect it—but I am not ready to be lulled with a speech about what we have done. Where is my daughter, Eirene? I can feel her, I think—her real body still lives, and that is good, but what of the coma?" She scowled and rose from Martine's side to face Sellars. "Her spirit must be somewhere above us—lost and terrified after all that destruction. I will climb to her now and the rest of you can spend as much time talking as you wish."

  "I am sorry, Florimel." Sam decided that "hover" was not the right word: Sellars sat rock-solid above the void, as though a hurricane could not move him an inch. "I wish I could tell you she was recovered, that even now her real body was awakening, but I cannot. There is much I simply do not know, and there are still many mysteries here. However, I can at least promise that the Eirene you love is not up there, huddling in fear on the shores of the Well, and she never was. Now, will you let me explain what I do know?"

  Florimel stared at him, then nodded once. "I will listen."

  "I will tell you some of it as we proceed," Sellars said. "There is one last thing that must be done here, and I do not trust myself to deal with it alone."

  Orlando sighed. "Do we have to kill something else?"

  "No." Sellars smiled. "And there is a happy side to this duty as well. There are friends waiting. No, not that way, Javier."

  T4b had already begun to trudge up the sloping path. "What?"

  "Down." Sellars began to drift beside the ledge, following its path into the depths. "We have to go down to the bottom."

  "Old melty wheel-knocker," T4b grumbled quietly to Sam and Orlando as they helped Martine up. The others also struggled to their feet, murmuring with pain and weariness. "Don't have to walk, him—just float like some sayee lo butterfly."

  He was silent and very still, but his chest was moving.

  "!Xabbu?" She shook him gently. "!Xabbu?" She could not, would not believe that they should have come through so much and fail now, "!Xabbu, I think . . . I think it's over."

  She looked up, still uncertain what was different. The bottom of the pit lay in a half-light, only a little of it provided by the stars far, far overhead.

  Stars. Were there stars before?

  Most of the light came from the river, if it could still be called that. Although it flickered with strange gleams, hints of blue and silver light, it had shrunk back to a tiny rivulet.

  But the mantis, the shadow-child . . . the Other . . . was gone.

  Those two children came, she remembered. They took it . . . him . . . away. Who the hell were they?

  But not just the river had changed. The quality of the light, the feel of the stone ledge beneath her, everything—the whole place had become both more and less real. The most grotesque of the exaggerations were gone, but when Renie moved her head quickly, there seemed to be an infinitesimal lag. And there was something else. . . .

  She was distracted by !Xabbu moving. His eyes were open, although he did not yet seem to see her. She put her head on his chest, felt it moving, listened to his heart.

  "Tell me you're all right. Please."

  "I . . . I am alive," he said. "That is one thing. And I seem to be alive . . . after the world has ended." He struggled to sit up. She got off him. "That is another thing," he said. "A very strange thing."

  "There's something else," she told him. "Feel your face."

  He looked at her with surprise. The surprise deepened as he felt along the side of his jaw, let his fingers move out onto his chin and up over his mouth and nose. "I . . . feel something there."

  "The mask," she said, and suddenly could not help laughing. "The mask from the V-tank. I've got one too! Which must mean we can go offline again." But even as she said it, she thought of something. "Jeremiah—Papa—can you hear us?" she called. She said it again, louder. "No. For whatever reason, we don't have communication with them yet. What if there's something wrong with the tanks?"

  !Xabbu shook his head. "I am sorry, Renie, I don't understand. I am . . . tired. Confused. I did not expect to feel all the things I have felt." He rubbed his head with his hands, a gesture of weariness so unfamiliar that Renie could only stare for a moment. She put her arms around him once more.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "Of course, you must be exhausted. I was just worrying, that's all. If we can't speak to Jeremiah and my father, we don't know that the tanks will open. There are emergency release handles inside, but. . . ." She realized she was almost as tired as !Xabbu. "But if they don't work for some reason, we'd just be stuck in there." The idea of being tra
pped inches from freedom in a pitch-black tank filled with gel, after all they had already survived, made her feel queasy.

  "Perhaps we should . . . wait." !Xabbu was having trouble keeping his eyes open. "Wait until. . . ."

  "A little while, anyway," she said, pulling him toward her. "Yes, sleep. I'll keep watch,"

  But the warm, reassuring solidity of his head on her chest quickly drew her down as well.

  She came up again slowly, her lids gummed together and so hard to open that for a panicky second she was certain they had awakened in the tanks after all. Her fog-headed thrashing woke !Xabbu, who rolled off her and thumped down onto the ledge.

  "What. . . ?" He raised himself on his elbows.

  Renie looked around at the now-familiar stone pathway, the rock wall behind them, the shadowed empty expanse beyond the ledge. "Nothing. I . . . nothing." She squinted, shook her head, looked again. The river had stopped glowing—it was now only a dark scratch at the bottom of the pit—but something else was creating a warm, pinkish-yellow light which spilled across the stones where the child-thing had crouched and waited.

  "There's something shining down there," she said.

  !Xabbu crawled forward and peered down. "It comes from a crack in the rock wall—there, to the side of the river." He sat up. "What can it be?"

  "I don't know and I don't care."

  "But perhaps it is a way out." He seemed already to be recovering some of his natural bounce; by contrast, with her adrenaline no longer flowing, Renie felt like she had been given a beating by experts. !Xabbu pointed up the path. "Look at how far it would be to climb back up."

  "Who said anything about climbing up? We're going to wait until Jeremiah or my father know we're ready to come out. And if we don't hear from them, well, I suppose at some point we'll take the risk and do it ourselves. So why the hell would we care whether there is another way out?"

  "Because it might be something else. It might be a threat. Or it might be our friends looking for us."

  "What, with flashlights?" Renie waved her hand at the idea.

  "Then you stay here and rest," he said. "I will go and look."

  "Don't you dare!"

  !Xabbu turned to her, his expression surprisingly serious. "Renie, do you truly love me? You said that you did."

  "Of course." He had startled her, scared her. Her eyes burned a little and she blinked. "Of course."

  "And I said the same to you. And it is a true thing. I would not stop you doing something you felt was important. How can we live together if you will not show that respect to me?"

  "Live together?" She felt as if whoever had beaten her up before had come back for a last sucker punch.

  "Surely we will try. Isn't that what you want?"

  "Yes. I guess so. Yes, of course, I just. . . ." She had to stop and take a breath. "I just haven't had a chance to think about it much."

  "Then you can think while I go look." He smiled as he rose, but he seemed a little distant.

  "Sit down, damn it. I didn't mean it that way." She tried to order her thoughts. "Of course, !Xabbu—of course we will live together. I couldn't be without you. I know that. I just didn't expect to have this discussion in the middle of an imaginary world."

  His smile was a little more genuine this time. "We have not had any other kind of world lately in which to discuss things."

  "Come back, please." She put out her arms. "This is important. We have never been together—not as lovers—in the real world. In some ways it may be as strange and difficult as anything we've experienced in this . . . not-real world."

  "I think you are right, Renie." He was solemn now.

  "So let's start with the basics. We seem to be stuck here, at least for now. Whatever is making that funny light doesn't seem to be going anywhere. We've been here for hours and it hasn't done anything to us. It's not getting brighter—or even dimmer for that matter."

  "These are all true things."

  "So instead of arguing about some new piece of virtual foolishness, why don't you come here and hold me?" She was worried, she realized, but she was also hungry for his touch. They had survived countless horrors. Now she wanted something better. "We have a ledge. We have time. We've got each other. Let's do something about that instead."

  He raised an eyebrow. She could almost have sworn he was embarrassed. "You city women are not shy."

  "No, we're not. How about you desert men?"

  He sat and leaned toward her, put his hand around her neck and gently pulled her toward him. She decided he wasn't that embarrassed after all.

  "We are very healthy," he said.

  She had slept again, she realized, this time from a happier sort of exhaustion. Her eyes drifted open and she made a slow inventory of her surroundings. The stone, the empty expanse, the distant sky—nothing seemed to have changed. But of course, in a way, everything had changed.

  "Do we count that as our first or our second time?" she asked.

  !Xabbu lifted his head from her breast. "Hmmm?"

  She laughed. "I like you this way. Relaxed. Is this how a hunter acts when he's had a big meal?"

  "Only a meal that good." He slid upward and kissed her jaw, her ear. "It is funny, this kissing. You do so much of it."

  "You're picking it up," she said. "So—first or second time?"

  "Do you mean before—when we found each other in . . . in the great dark?"

  She nodded, pulling at the coils of his hair with her fingers.

  "I don't know." He lifted himself above her, smiling. "But we still have another first time to go!"

  She had to think about it for a moment. "Real bodies. Jesus mercy, I'd almost forgotten. That certainly felt real."

  He looked down into the pit. "The light is still there."

  Renie rolled her eyes. "All right. I surrender. But you're not going by yourself."

  The surrender did not become immediately effective. Renie was reluctant to let him go, and would have happily made another experiment with the potentials of virtuality, but !Xabbu held her to her bargain. At last, with much protest, she allowed him to help her up onto her feet.

  "It is just so nice," she said lazily. "That's why I don't want to go anywhere. Just so nice to be . . . human for a while. Not running for our lives. Not frightened."

  He smiled and squeezed her hand. "Perhaps that is a difference between us. I am happy with you, Renie—so happy I cannot say. But I will not feel completely safe until I know what is around us. In the desert we know every bush, every spoor, every drift of sand."

  She squeezed back, then let him go. "All right. But go slowly, please, and let's be careful. I am truly exhausted—and you are partially to blame."

  "I hear you, Porcupine."

  "You know," she said as they walked down to the place where the path ended, "I think I'm beginning to like that."

  !Xabbu was staring at the rocks below the path. Either because of the change in the lights or some subtler and more profound shift of the whole environment, the climb down did not look as impossibly steep as it had before. "I think I see a way down," he said. "It will not be easy. Are you sure you would not rather wait for me?"

  "If I'm going to respect your wish to climb up and down things for no good reason," she replied calmly, "then you had better learn that I don't get left behind very well,"

  "Yes, Porcupine." He squinted down the stones. "Do you mind if I go first?"

  "Hell, no."

  It took them the better part of what Renie guessed was half an hour, but she was grateful to discover that her first impression had been right: it was not a bad climb, especially to someone who had survived the trip down the black mountain, just one that needed care. With !Xabbu beneath her, pointing out handholds and places stable enough to stop and take a short rest, they reached the bottom with no mishaps.

  The bottom of the pit was strangely smooth, more like something that had melted and cooled than like the bottom of any true canyon. Renie looked up at the stars and the circle of dark
sky far above. The distance was dizzying. She started to say something to !Xabbu about the climb back to the ledge—she was already wondering whether she could make it back without a long rest—but he held up his hand, asking for silence.

  Seen up close, the hole in the wall was more than a crack. At its narrow top the crevice stretched to four or five times her height, and the opening, aglow with peach-colored light, was wide enough to drive a car through.

  !Xabbu walked toward it with quiet care. The light seemed to roll over him like something liquid, so that all she could see was his slender silhouette. Suddenly afraid, she hurried to catch up to him.

  As they stepped through the crevice Renie found herself in a high corridor of raw stone, a gouge so full of soft radiance that at first she could see nothing. After a moment, she thought she could make out a pattern to the light, as though the walls of the corridor were full of sealed alcoves, each one holding a little core of brilliance.

  What are they? she wondered. It's like a beehive. There must be hundreds of them . . . thousands. . . .

  "I heard your speaking and your other noises," said a quiet, strange voice behind them. Renie whirled. "I thought—I questioned . . . wondered? . . . when you would come."

  Standing in the mouth of the crevice, blocking their escape, stood a tall man. Dazzled by surprise and the glow all around them, it took Renie a moment to recognize him and the malformed thing he was holding.

  It was Ricardo Klement.

  "Okay, so the Other was floating around in some kind of satellite and the Grail network data was shooting up to it and back on special lasers or something. Chizz. And then the Other flew the satellite down and crashed it, so Jongleur's blown up and dead." Sam was trying hard to sort through all the new information. "That's utterly chizz. But Dread isn't. Dead, I mean."

  "I said I don't know," Sellars told her. "I am trying to find out what happened to him, but it may take a while. . . ."

  "Right. We don't know about Dread, so that's not so chizz. But are you telling us that we saved the Other just so he could kill himself?" She shook her head. "Man, that's impacted!"