by Tad Williams
"We did not save him," Sellars said. "The Other had suffered too much, first from Jongleur and the Grail Brotherhood, then from the man called Dread. He had already decided he did not want to live. Such things . . . such things happen." There was a strange tone in the man's voice that Sam did not understand. She turned to Orlando to see if he had heard it too, but her friend was staring down at the path as though he feared stumbling. "When I first brought Cho-Cho online, while I struggled with the network's defense systems, the Other fooled me. I thought all his attention was on fighting me, but while I was busy trying to understand him and his strategy and struggling to repel his attacks, he was preparing to use me. When I accessed the data tap and was temporarily overwhelmed by the magnitude of information, he was ready.
"If he had wanted to, he could have killed me easily then—but he wanted something quite different. He reached through my connection into Felix Jongleur's central control system for the network—the one part that had been expressly shielded from him, and which included the mechanisms that kept him imprisoned. By the time I understood what was happening he had already wrenched the satellite out of orbit and begun his carefully-aimed descent. By that point there was nothing that could have saved him: gravity had already signed the warrant."
"How horrible!" Sam could hardly bear to think about it. "He must have been so unhappy!"
Martine had been walking between them like a zombie, but now she stirred. "He had . . . a little peace at the end. I felt that. I do not think I would still be here if I had not."
"You did not feel . . . everything, did you?" Sellars slowed his downward progress until he hung near her. "I hope you did not have to suffer through the very last moments."
She shook her head wearily. "He pushed me away. Before the end."
"Pushed you away?" Sellars looked at her with his sharp yellow eyes. Sam could not help wondering if it was their true color. "Was there . . . contact of some other kind? Did he say something?"
"I do not wish to speak of it," Martine said flatly.
"But if the Other is gone, why is all this still here?" asked Orlando. He too seemed troubled. "I mean, this place was all . . . a dream, wasn't it? The Grail network was kind of like his body, but this part was the inside of his mind, right? So why isn't it gone? Why isn't everything around us gone?"
"And if the network goes, you will go, too—that is what you are thinking, isn't it, Orlando Gardiner?" Sellars' voice was kind. "It's a good question. And the answer has two parts, both important. The second part I will save until we reach the bottom of this pit, for reasons of my own. But the fact is that I had prepared for this day a long time—I just never thought I would have the chance to use any of those preparations. I did not know the true nature of the Other until today, of course, but I knew it was at least quasi-sentient and dangerous. I also knew that the network might not survive without it. The physical records of the system are safe—they are stored in room after room of processors in the headquarters of the Telemorphix Corporation. Thanks to the late Robert Wells, the hard code of the network and the simulations is relatively safe."
"Wait a minute," said Florimel. "The late Robert Wells? He was alive in the network, in the Egypt symworld—if we survived, he probably did also."'
Sellars' laugh was not so pleasant this time. "He hid your capture from Dread. Dread found out." The old man glided a bit farther out from the ledge and looked down. "So the hard data was safe, but it would include nothing from here." He gestured with his thin fingers, encompassing the pit, the spiraling path. "Because this was part of the Other itself." He frowned. "Himself—I don't want to steal his humanity as others did. So when he was destroyed, this would all go too. The replacement operating system I had been able to cobble together in preparation for this day, with help from the people at TreeHouse, would contain none of it."
Sellars sighed. "Now we come to the first of my several confessions. When I freed Paul Jonas from the simulation in which Felix Jongleur had held him for so long, I did not fully understand what I was doing. I was ignorant about the actual workings of the Grail process and even more ignorant of the Other's true nature. I had no idea that it had created for Paul a version of the virtual minds the Grail Brotherhood were making for themselves. I am still not sure why it did that, although I suspect it was something to do with the fondness Avialle Jongleur felt for him and the affection the Other felt for her.
"In any case, I foolishly went ahead and released him anyway, seeking only to get his consciousness free from Jongleur's clutches so I could find out what he knew and why they held him. But he escaped not just from them, but from me as well. I did not know until later that what I had done was to free a virtual copy—that the real Paul Jonas was still unconscious in the vaults of the Telemorphix Corporation."
Martine grunted as if struck. "The real Paul Jonas. . . ." she murmured. Sam thought she sounded like a woman on the verge of tears, but Sellars didn't seem to have heard her.
"In any case, things had grown steadily worse throughout the last hours. Even before the endgame began, the Other had been struggling to run the network and also siphon resources to this private world. There were several times when the whole thing came to the brink of collapse. . . ."
"Those, like, reality hiccups," Sam said.
"But in the last moments the Other had finally surrendered to despair. It triggered its own death, wishing only to destroy the symbol of its torment and its cruel master, Felix Jongleur. The rest of the network might survive that destruction, but I knew that this secret place would not. Caught in the Other's . . . feedback loop, for lack of a better word, the coils of its powerful hypnosis, you would die when it did."
"And the children, too," added Florimel. "Was it not trying to save the children by keeping them hidden here?"
Sellars took a moment to reply. "Yes, it was trying to protect the children as well," he said at last. "So there things stood. I could salvage the network, but not the things the Other had created out of its own mind."
"Wait a minute," Orlando said slowly. "Are you saying that we're not in the network? That we've been . . . somewhere else all this time? In something's mind?"
"Where are a human being's memories?" Sellars asked. "In its mind, but where? This place exists within the larger body of the network, just as human thought exists within the brain, but we may never be able to answer either question with a definite location." He lifted his hand. "Please, let me finish. The Other had surrendered, but I had one last plan. If he would let me, I decided I would try to make a last-minute version of the kind of virtual matrix the Other had created for Paul Jonas. The Grail process is an exacting, time-consuming thing, but I hoped that I could at least generate something basic, just as the Grail process starts with the mind's simplest functions and then adds layer after layer of memory and personality. I did not need the Other, only his most basic functions. But I could not do it without his cooperation.
"In his very last moments, and thanks to another brave woman, this one a stranger to you all, he gave that cooperation to me. It was a near thing, though, and there was no guarantee we would create enough of a double that this matrix, this internal Otherland, would survive." Sellars shook his head, remembering. "There—that is half your answer, Orlando, as promised. It did survive. We are in a sort of Grail-process version of the original operating system, the Other."
"He's alive?" Sam felt as if the whole world suddenly become unstable again.
"Not alive. There was not time for that. The greater network is still operating, and this place has survived too, existing as a kind of salvaged memory. It functions, more or less. The things that are damaged should be reparable."
"Reparable?" Nandi slowed, then stopped. "This place is an abomination—a crime against Nature, built on the bodies of innocent children. We of the Circle came into this place to destroy it, not repair it."
Sellars looked at him with an unreadable expression; Sam didn't think it was just because of the strange deformiti
es of the man's face. "Your point is a good one, Mr. Paradivash. This is one of the things that must be discussed. But there could be no discussion if I had not accomplished what I did. The system would be gone and you would be beyond conversation."
Nandi stared at him angrily. "You have no right to make such a decision, Sellars—to keep this place alive at your own whim. Dozens of people from the Circle died to prevent such a thing."
"Martyrs," said Bonnie Mae quietly. "Like my husband Terence."
"But you do not know yet exactly what they were martyred for," Sellars said evenly. "So I suggest we wait to have this conversation until you do."
"We are not children, like most of your so-called volunteers." Nandi shook his head. "And we kept no secrets from our soldiers. We will not be convinced by high-minded talk, or by mystification."
"Good," replied Sellars. After a moment, he laughed wearily. "Would anyone else like to shout at me?"
"We're listening," said Sam. The conversation between Sellars and Nandi made her nervous, although she wasn't quite sure she understood the argument. Why would someone want to shut the network down, especially if it was safe now? It was huge and expensive and unlike anything else ever made. Besides, don't . . . scientists have to study it? she wondered. People like that?
"But I still don't understand," said Orlando. "Why did the Other fight so long, then just give up? If it made all this out of its own thoughts and worked so hard to keep the children safe here, why didn't it fight a little longer? And why did it make such a big deal out of the children when it was the one that stole them in the first place?"
"Some of the answer I have given you already," Sellars told him. "The Other had been tormented so long that he had finally fallen to despair." He found his smile again. "But the rest is part of your earlier question—the part I told you I wouldn't explain until we reached the bottom,"
"Jeez," Orlando said. "Then how long are we going to have to wait?"
"Enough." It was Martine. "Enough of this. This prattle." She did not look up. Her voice was ash, the remains of something burned. "You argue and you question and none of it matters. A good man is dead. Paul Jonas is dead." Now she raised her head. Sam thought there was something unusual in the way she turned her face toward Sellars. "Who brought him to life in this nightmare without his understanding or even permission? You. Will all this bring him back? No. Yet you can hardly contain yourself. You are pleased that everything has gone so well. Meanwhile we trudge down, down, down into this gray hell with no bottom. Just let us go home, Sellars. Let us crawl back to our holes and lick our wounds."
A new expression flickered across the old man's scarred face, both surprised and saddened. "I meant no disrespect to Paul Jonas, Ms. Desroubins. We still need to mourn him properly and fittingly, you are right. But I assure you. this is not a journey I bring you on lightly." He turned to the others. "And there is a bottom. But I have been properly reminded of something that the confusion of our situation made me forget. There is no need for you to . . . trudge."
"What does that mean?" asked Florimel.
"This." And suddenly, most startlingly, Sam felt herself lifted as though by a perfect agreement of air molecules, with no uneven pressure in any one spot, and swung out over the deep, dark canyon. The others hung beside her in various states of flailing startlement.
"Down!" shouted T4b, struggling wildly, "Back!"
"Before, this place did not . . . connect with the place we are going. Now it is all relatively simple, relatively . . . real." Sellars nodded. "My error was in forgetting what I could do—the ability I have gained to manipulate the network. I have made you tire yourselves unnecessarily. My apologies."
Suddenly Sam was dropping—not like a stone, but not like a feather either. T4b let out a string of very inventive street curses as he too plunged down through the darkness. Sam saw bodies on all sides of her, her companions, all dropping at the same rate. Tiny yellow monkeys tried to fly out from her hair and shoulders, but although they could hover, they could not fly back upward against the forces that pulled them all.
I'm tired of all this scannity, she thought, I just want to go home. I want to see my mom and dad. . . .
"Like the Resurrection in reverse." Florimel sounded both annoyed and nervous.
"Just hold onto your seat cushion," Orlando said cheerfully. "They always come in handy. That's why they tell you about them."
Yeah, and don't you think Orlando wishes he could go home, too? It was a painful thought.
"Save me, Jesus!" shouted T4b.
Two minutes falling, five—it was hard to tell. Despite the sensation of speed, they did not slow; when they reached the bottom they simply stopped, and found themselves standing on a smooth bed of stone. The walls stretched only above them now, an immense vista tunneling upward to the circle of night sky. But the place where they stood had a light of its own.
"Here," Sellars said, wheelchair still comfortably adrift above the ground. He led them toward a vast crack in the wall that spilled warm, pink-orange light.
"I bet we do have to kill something," Orlando whispered. He tapped his sword against the stone wall at the edge of the crevice. It rang flatly.
Sam stepped through and found herself in a great blazing chamber, a honeycomb of light. Three figures waited at the center of the vast space. Sam squinted, already hoping, but wanting to be sure.
"Renie?" she called. "!Xabbu?"
They turned in surprise as she sprinted toward them. The third figure, which was clutching something against its chest, did not move. Sellars glided up beside her, his runneled face even more surreal in the bright, almost directionless light.
"Stop, Sam," he said, an unusual note in his voice. "Wait."
She slowed. Sellars moved a little ahead of her, then paused and hovered. He seemed to pay no attention to Renie or !Xabbu, but instead addressed the third figure. "Who are you?"
Doesn't he recognize that Klement guy? Sam wondered. He knows everything else.
"Just wait," Orlando said quietly beside her. He had come up as silently as a cat. When he touched her arm she could feel the trembling strength in his big hand. "I bet that's the one we have to kill."
"He's Ricardo Klement," Renie explained to Sellars, although she looked stunned herself. "One of the Grail Brotherhood. He traveled with us for a while."
"No." The man paused a long time before shaking his head, as though he had to remember the movement. Sam could see what he was holding now, but could make no sense of the weird, semihuman bundle. "No, I am not Ricardo Klement. I wear the . . . body . . . that was meant for that one. For a length of time, at first, I think . . . thought . . . I was Ricardo Klement. Because it disorients, this body-living. It makes thinking . . . strange. But I am not that one.
"My name is Nemesis."
CHAPTER 49
The Next
NETFEED/NEWS: Middle East Unified At Last
(visual: Jews and Arabs demonstrating at Western Wall)
VO: Palestinians and Israelis, enemies for so long, have at last found common ground—in hatred of the UN's management of the Jerusalem Protectorship.
(visual: Professor Yoram Vul, Brookings Institute)
VUL: "The only thing that could bring these people together, it seems, was someone trying to stop them from killing each other. It would be ironic if it were not so sad, but now we have eleven more UN peacekeepers dead in the Hashomaim Tunnel bombing, and the most common thing you hear is, 'What do you expect—it's the Middle East!' "
Renie could only stare helplessly, first at the thing she had thought of as Ricardo Klement, then at her long-lost companions. She had never expected to see them again, yet here they were—but like Renie and !Xabbu they only stood, frozen and confused, and where there should have been rejoicing there was only more mystery. And fear, she realized. I'm frightened again, but I don't even know why.
"What . . . what's a Nemesis?" Renie asked.
"It is a machine—a piece of code." She had never he
ard Martine Desroubins sound so flatly miserable. "It was sent to find Paul Jonas, I think. I met it when I was Dread's prisoner. In all the confusion after that, I don't believe I ever told you." Martine turned to the inhuman, handsome face that the real Ricardo Klement had intended to wear for eternity. "And what do you want now?" she said bitterly. "Jonas is dead. That should make you happy—as happy as something like you can be."
"Oh, no!" Renie raised her hand to her mouth. "Not Paul."
"Yes, Paul," said Martine.
"But how did it turn into that Grail guy?" asked Sam Fredericks. "We saw him come alive . . . at that Ceremony thing."
"And what's with the ugly blue monkey?" With his feet on the ground, T4b had regained a little of his confidence.
"I saw it take another's form before," Martine said, "It imitated a corpse. One of Dread's victims. It did something similar with Klement, I imagine—perhaps it merely took Klement's empty virtual body before the Ceremony even began."
Renie could not bear to hear her friend sound so helpless. She wanted to go and put her arms around her—around all of them, Sam, Florimel, even T4b—but could not ignore the feeling in the air, a cloud of anxiety like an impending storm. She was almost afraid to move.
As she looked over the familiar and unfamiliar faces, she suddenly recognized the tall young man with the whipcord muscles.
"Oh, my God," she whispered to !Xabbu. "Isn't that . . . Orlando?"
The long-haired youth heard her, even from some distance away, and gave them a quick, light smile. "Hello, Renie. Hi, !Xabbu."
"But you were . . . dead, weren't you?"
He shrugged, "It's been a pretty interesting day."
The man in the wheelchair had not moved. He hovered a few paces from the Klement-thing, his eyes narrowed. "You are Nemesis, then. You heard what was said and I think you understood—Paul Jonas is dead. What do you want with the rest of us?"
