by Tad Williams
He was still staring at the bottle. When he looked up at her, his expression made her a little uncomfortable. "Thank you," he said. "But you know, I don't think I drink it here. Maybe when I get out." He smiled, and again she was struck by how old he looked, bony and . . . scoured. Like rocks in a windy valley. "When you find the new place. We will have a little celebration." He handed her back the bag,
"You . . . you don't want it?"
"When I get out," he said. "Don't want to get in trouble here, do I? They might keep me longer."
She took a long time trying to fit the bottle back into the bag. When she had finished she stood for a moment, fighting the urge to walk straight out the door, to avoid confusion and difficult feelings and simply get on with things. It was only as she looked at him, at the way he was looking back at her, that she realized what she wanted to do.
She bent and kissed his cheek again, then wrapped her arms around his neck and gave him a squeeze. "I'll be back tomorrow, Papa. I promise."
He cleared his throat as she stood up. "We can do better, you and me. You know I love you, girl. You know that, right?"
She nodded. "I know that." It was hard to talk. "We'll do better."
!Xabbu was not in the waiting room for the children's wing. Renie was a little surprised—it was not like him to be late—but her brain was too full to spend much time wondering about it. She left a message for him with the receptionist, then went to see Stephen.
She found !Xabbu sleeping in a chair at the foot of the hospital bed, his head back, his hands open in his lap as though he had held and then released some flying thing. She felt ashamed. If she was tired and out of sorts, how much more exhausted must !Xabbu be, after those last hellish minutes holding open the line of communication with the Other? And now I'm going to drag him out looking for some miserable little flat. Her heart twisted in her breast.
But it will be our miserable little flat, she reminded herself. That's something, isn't it?
She gently stroked his head as she stepped past him to the side of her brother's bed. Stephen's little arms were still curled against his chest as if in mantis-prayer, his body terrifyingly bony under the thin hospital blanket, his eyes. . . .
His eyes were open.
"Stephen?" It almost came out a scream. "Stephen!"
He did not move, but she thought his eyes followed her a little as she leaned in. She took his head in her hands, terrified by his frailty. "Can you hear me? Stephen, it's me, Renie!" And all the time a voice in the back of her brain was saying, It means nothing, it's just something that happens, their eyes open, he's not there, not really. . . .
!Xabbu had begun to stir at the sound of her voice. He sat forward, but seemed still to be partly asleep. "I had a dream," he murmured. "I was the honey-guide . . . the little bird. And I was leading. . . ." His eyes finally came all the way open. "Renie? What is happening?"
But she was already at the door, shouting for a nurse.
Doctor Chandhar had taken her fingers from the pulse in Stephen's neck, but she was still holding one of his bony hands in hers. "The signs . . . are rather good," she said, the smile on her face a fine counterweight to professional caution. "There is definitely improvement, the first we've seen since he's been here."
"What does that mean?" Renie demanded. "Is he coming out of it?" She leaned in to stare at Stephen again. Surely that was a flash of recognition deep in his brown eyes—surely it was!
"I hope so, yes," the doctor said. "But he has been comatose a long time. Please listen, Ms. Sulaweyo. Do not get your hopes up too high—the odds against full recovery are very long. Even if this means he's awakening, there might still be brain damage."
"I'm here," Renie told her little brother firmly. "You can see me, can't you? You can hear me. It's time for you to come back to us, Stephen. We're all waiting for you." She straightened. "I have to tell my father."
"Not too much all at once," said Doctor Chandhar. "If your brother is truly waking up, he may be disoriented. Soft voices, careful movement."
"Right," Renie said. "Of course. I'm just . . . God, thank you, Doctor. Thank you!" She turned to !Xabbu, threw her arms around him. "His eyes are open! Really open!"
When the doctor had left to go call a specialist at one of the bigger hospitals, Renie sagged into the chair and wept. "Oh, please let it be true," she said. "Please, please." She leaned forward and reached between the bars at the side of the bed to hold Stephen's hand. !Xabbu came and stood behind her, wrapping his arms around her neck as they both looked at the shrunken shape. Stephen's eyes had closed again, but this time in what Renie felt unprovably sure was something closer to normal sleep.
"I had a dream," he said. "That I was a honey-guide bird, and that I was leading Stephen to honey. We came a long way. I could hear him behind me."
"You led him back."
"Who knows? Perhaps I felt him coming up and it touched what I was dreaming. Or perhaps it was just chance. I am not so certain of anything as I was." He laughed. "Was I certain of things once?"
"I am certain of something," she said. "I love you. We belong together. With Stephen, too. And even my father." Now she was the one to laugh. "My ridiculous father—he wants to do better. Wants to start over with me. Isn't that the most ridiculous thing you've heard?"
"I think it is a fine thing."
"It is. A fine thing. I'm just laughing because I'm tired of crying." She reached up to touch !Xabbu's hand, then pulled it against her mouth so she could kiss it. "If everything is a story, do you think we could actually have a happy ending?"
"There is no telling." !Xabbu took a deep breath. "About stories, I mean. Where they come from. Where they go. But if we do not ask for too much, then yes—I think that in our story, happiness is most possible."
And as if he had heard !Xabbu and agreed, Stephen tightened his fingers on hers.
CHAPTER 52
The Oracle Surprised
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(visual: Uncle Jingle crawling out of rubble of burned and shattered building.)
JINGLE: "Okay, I admit it looks bad for ol' Uncle J. Good thing I didn't forget to duck." (coughs) "I guess when I said I was going to blow up high prices at every Jingleporium, someone took it a bit too seriously! But now I'm asking you to help your Uncle out, kids. We have to rebuild, so I can keep making you and your friends the happiest kids alive. How can you help? Buy stuff! Buy lots and lots of stuff!"
"Code Delphi. Start here.
It is daylight outside, but here in the deeps of my mountain I cannot see it. I have been back in my body for forty-eight hours. I have taken three baths, eaten two small meals, thrown them both up, spent six or seven of those forty-eight hours weeping with terrible, agonizing muscle cramps. My body is not entirely happy that I have returned to tenancy.
"I am weak as a mouse.
"Still, I have also—with Sellars' help—recovered my journal entries. I never thought to hear them again. Unable to sleep, or even to rest comfortably, I have paced slowly back and forth across the floors of my subterranean home, listening to them.
"It is the voice of another woman. I know her, but I am not her. Already those hours, those mad worlds, seem like a dream. A terrible dream, yes, but a dream nevertheless.
"The one who spoke that journal, left that record of her thoughts and fears—that Martine was blind, but she could see things others could only imagine. The Martine who hears those entries now, who makes this new record, this Martine can see. But she is blind to all that the other Martine had and much of what she knew.
"I can see. I am more blind than ever. I . . . I cannot. . . ."
"Back now. I had to go for a little while and now I am lying down in the dark. It is still so hard to see things, so hard. My head aches with it, my new vision blurs. Someone, I cannot remember who, once told me, 'Every injury is a gift, every gift an injury.' Some cursed therapist or eye doctor, probably, but oh! It is so true, so true, now that I unders
tand.
"The Other . . . he was the one who took my sight from me so long ago. I understand that now, understand the puzzled doctors, the unanswered questions beneath the diagnosis of hysterical blindness. I do not think he did it cruelly, or even accidentally, in the way Sellars believes he plunged children into comas, trying only to make them quiet and tractable. No, he was with me there in the darkness of the Pestalozzi Institute, with me in a way I could not understand at the time—in my ears, but also in my mind. And when the lights came on, dazzling me, hurting me so that I shrieked and shrieked, he tried to do a kind thing. He made the light go away.
"Dying, he has given it back to me.
"He touched me at the end, at least I think he did. I felt him as I had not felt him since I was a child. For a moment, a brief instant, we were children again together, both afraid of the dark. He . . . touched me as he gave himself up. He touched me, then he was gone.
"I wish I had been with him at the end, riding down the night sky in flames like a bolt of divine lightning. Perhaps then I would have gone too, dissolved in that great fiery tantrum. It would be a simple solution. I long for a simple solution, although I am far too cowardly to effect one myself.
"Listen—Martine is talking to herself again, as always. Alone. In darkness by choice, even though I can now see. Back in my world beneath the world.
"For the others, life goes on. Sellars and his friend Ramsey and Hideki Kunohara, already they are busily organizing how things will be. Renie and Florimel have loved ones to attend to—they do not need me now. What use would I be, anyway? I thought once I could help Paul Jonas. I realized, even if he did not, that there was no life for him offline. I even daydreamed that if we survived we could make a sort of life together in the network—a virtual life, but a life. The witch and the wanderer. The patron spirits of the Otherland.
"Now everything has changed. Paul is dead and I have lost the thing that made me different, made me valuable. With my sight no longer suppressed, my brain struggles to make new connections, remake old ones. The Otherland information, which I could once read like a bloodhound sniffing the wind, now means nothing to me—less than nothing, because with my new eyes I can barely see what is apparent to others.
"I have listened to my journal. I will listen to it again, I suppose, even though I no longer know the woman who spoke those words. There is little else to do. Perhaps one day I will go out into the real world and explore it with my new eyes. Perhaps that is something to live for. Perhaps.
"But for a moment I had a world for myself. I had friends—comrades. Now they have their lives back. We will talk, of course—such a bond does not disappear overnight, or even quickly—but the uncomfortable truth is that they had lives to go back to and I did not. We lived through terrifying time, in a place of unbelievable danger and terror. But I was alive there. I mattered there. Now . . . what?
"It is hard to think. It is easier to rest. It is easier to keep to familiar darkness.
"Code Delphi. End here."
Renie settled into the cushioned seat and wished she was using better gear.
All those weeks in a perfect imitation of reality just so I could feel myself being gouged, slammed, shredded. Now that there's something nicer to feel, I'm linked in from a sidewalk VR shop and I can't experience it properly.
"I thought the others told me your bubble-house was destroyed," she said to Hideki Kunohara. She gestured at the huge, round table, at the view through the hemispherical roof of the towering outsized trees and of the river like a surging ocean all around. "You rebuilt it quickly."
"Oh, this one is much bigger," he said, amused. "Since we needed a meeting place, I thought I would accommodate it in my new construction." He settled back in his chair. "I remember your friend—!Xabbu, I believe?—but I do not know your other guest."
"This is Jeremiah Dako." Renie waited while Jeremiah leaned across her and shook Kunohara's hand. "If it hadn't been for him and two others, !Xabbu and I wouldn't have survived to attend this . . . meeting."
"This is quite amazing." Jeremiah seemed stunned by the hallucinatory size of the forest. "And you were really here all the time you were in that tank, Renie? We had no idea."
"Not just here—but yes, the network is a pretty overwhelming place." She frowned slightly. "And you're not even getting a very good idea of what it can really be like. Why are we here like this? We could have arranged to use much better gear."
"You must ask your friend Sellars," Kunohara said. "He should join us any moment."
"I am here." Sellars, still in his wheelchair, appeared at one end of the large table. "Apologies—things are very, very busy. What is it they must ask me?"
"Why we couldn't use better gear," Renie said. "Our friend Del Ray Chiume would have been happy to arrange some VR rigs through his UN connections, and they'd be a lot better than what we're experiencing."
"It was not the quality of the gear I objected to," Sellars told her. "And in the future we will certainly arrange better access for you. But for various reasons I did not think it a good idea for you to be using United Nations equipment, even arranged by a friend."
"What does that mean?
"I will explain when everyone is here. Ah, Mr. Dako, we meet at last—at least in person. Well, perhaps that isn't entirely accurate either. Face to face? I hope your leg is healing well."
"You . . . you're Sellars." Jeremiah seemed a bit overwhelmed. "Thank you for what you did. You saved our lives."
The old man smiled. "Most of us in this room have saved each others' lives. Your courage helped keep Renie and !Xabbu alive so they could play their own very important parts."
"It was you who called in the military, wasn't it? Tipped them off that someone had broken into the Wasp's Nest base?"
Sellars nodded. "It was the only thing left I could do to help you. I was very busy at the time. I'm glad it worked out." He lifted his head as if hearing a distant sound. "Ah. Martine is here."
A moment later Martine Desroubins appeared—or rather, an almost featureless sim popped into view in one of the chairs. Renie was startled. She had wondered whether she would actually get to see Martine's real face, even though Sellars had arranged that all the rest of them looked like themselves, but she could not help feeling that the barely-humanoid sim was a step backward.
"Hello, Martine," said !Xabbu. She only nodded.
She's hurting, Renie thought. Hurling badly. What can we do?
Renie was quickly distracted by the arrival of T4b and Florimel, who appeared only a half-minute apart. She already knew T4b's true face, although she had never seen him with his lank black hair combed and all his subdermals ignited.
"Only lit 'em halfway," he explained. "More classy, seen?" He lifted his arm to display a perfectly normal left hand. "Wish this was far shiny still, like in the network. That was crash!"
Florimel's real face was a bit of a surprise. She looked younger than the peasant sim in which she had spent so much time, perhaps only in her middle thirties, with an open, attractive, square-jawed face and a functional haircut not much longer than Renie's own. Only the black eyepatch made her someone who would provoke a second look.
"How is your eye?" Renie asked.
Florimel kissed her on both cheeks, then did the same for !Xabbu. "Not good. I'm mostly blind in this eye, although there is better news about the ear—my hearing is coming back." She turned to Sellars. "But I am grateful for the help, not just with my own injuries, but with Eirene. Hospitals are very expensive."
Reminded, Renie wanted to talk about the money, but Florimel had raised a more important issue. "How is she?"
Florimel's mouth quirked in a sad smile. "She is intermittently conscious, but she does not really see me. Not yet. I cannot stay long at this meeting. I do not like her to wake up alone." She was silent for a moment. "And your brother? I have heard the signs are good."
Renie nodded. "So far. Stephen is awake and talking—he recognized me and our father. He has a long roa
d ahead—lots of physical therapy, and there may be some other problems we don't know about yet, but it looks good, yes."
"That is truly splendid news, Renie," said Florimel.
Hideki Kunohara nodded. "Congratulations."
"Major dzang," added T4b.
"I'm sure Eirene will get better, just like Stephen," Renie said.
"She has the best doctors in Germany," Florimel replied. "I have hope."
"Which brings up a point." Renie turned to Sellars. "The money? Several million credits in an account under my name?"
He cocked his hairless head. "Do you need more?"
"No! No, I don't need more. In fact, I'm not sure I need . . . or deserve . . . any of it."
"You deserve everything," Sellars told her. "Money is a poor substitute, but it will help you keep your family together. Please, you and all the others here have been through a terrible time, in large part because I dragged you in. And I have no use for it now."
"That's not the point. . . !" she began, but was interrupted by the sudden appearance of a well-dressed man she did not recognize. Sellars introduced him as Decatur Ramsey, an American. Ramsey greeted Renie and the others as though he was meeting people he had heard about for a long time. "Sam Fredericks and Orlando Gardiner are going to be here in a moment, too," Ramsey said. "They're finishing their preparations for a . . . little project."
"We are only waiting on them," Sellars said, "and then we can begin." He shook his head. "No, I tell a lie, there is one other on her way." Even as he finished the words a small, heavyset woman appeared in the chair beside him.
"Hello." The apparent stranger had a stern if slightly unsettled look on her sharp-featured face. "I suppose I should say thank you for inviting me."
"Thank you for making the time to come, Mrs. Simpkins," Sellars replied. "Ah, and here are Orlando and Sam."
Orlando's barbarian avatar seemed flushed and nervous, Sam's more realistic sim not much less so. "We're all set, Mr. Ramsey," Orlando announced after waving to the others.
