by Tad Williams
"I can't tell you how strange this all is." Ramsey smiled. "Not just this place, but especially to be talking to you, Orlando." His face suddenly fell. "I'm sorry, you probably didn't need to be reminded. . . ."
"That I died? Hard to forget, especially today." He summoned a creditable smile. "But there's no reason you can't be friends with someone just because they're dead—right, Sam?"
"Stop it!" She clearly didn't enjoy Orlando's new line in humor very much.
"You make a joke, Orlando," !Xabbu said, "but we have all learned much about friendship and how wide it stretches. We have helped each other many times, as Mr. Sellars earlier said. We are . . . we are one tribe now." He looked a little embarrassed. "If that makes sense."
"It does," said Sam Fredericks quickly. "It utterly does."
"And perhaps that is a good beginning for our meeting today," said Sellers. "And helps to explain why I hope we will meet regularly here in the network, since great geographical distances separate us. For today, we should also thank Hideki Kunohara for inviting us to his new home."
Before Kunohara could do more than nod, Martine sat forward in her chair. "All well and good, but I believe we still have some unfinished business with Mr. Kunohara—specifically, an unanswered question." It was the first time she had spoken since her arrival, and the rawness of her voice seemed at odds with the spirit of reunion. "First, though, I would like to know how long you two have been working together."
"We two?" Sellars raised a hairless eyebrow. "Kunohara and I? Only in the last hours of the old network, when I had begun to understand the shape of things. But we knew each other a little."
"He . . . felt me out on the subject of investigating the Grail Brotherhood," explained Kunohara. "But I was not interested in risking their attention—make of that what you will. Sellars made an arrangement with Bolivar Atasco instead. The late Bolivar Atasco. I am satisfied with my choice."
"No one will criticize you for not being killed," Martine said dryly. "But what about that unanswered question—the one I asked you back in the earlier version of this house, just before we were attacked?"
"And that question was. . . ?"
Martine snorted. "Please, we must be done with games now. I asked if you were spying on us. You never answered."
Kunohara smiled and folded his hands. "Of course I was spying on you. Every time I turned around, there you all were, disturbing the status quo, threatening my own safety. Why would I not do my best to find out what you were doing, what effect it was having?"
Renie only imperfectly understood what had happened between Kunohara and the others—her own memories of him stopped with their strange conversation while watching the soldier-ant invasion. "You were . . . spying on us?"
"Not all along. But after our initial meeting, yes."
"How? Or to be more precise," Martine said ominously, "who? Is there one of us who has not told all the truth?"
"Do not be too quick to accuse," Sellars said. "Remember we are friends here."
Kunohara was shaking his head. "It was the man I knew as Azador. I first discovered him as he wandered through my simulation. He told me tales of what else he had seen and it became clear to me that he could travel the network almost as easily as one of the Grail Brotherhood. I did not understand then that he was a partial version of Jongleur or I would have been more cautious, but I did know he was valuable—and, fortunately for me, easy to convince. I reinforced some of his rather fuzzy notions about the wrongs the Brotherhood had done to him—things he may have picked up in a subliminal way from the Other itself, as the many fragmented versions of Avialle Jongleur also partook of the Other's thoughts—and set him out to discover things for me."
"You set him to spy on us," Martine said heavily.
"Not at first, no. I met him before I knew anything of you. I was mostly interested in finding out more about the Brotherhood's plans—as I told you once, living with them as neighbors and landlords was like trying to stay alive in the courts of the Medici. And he was in any case not that biddable a servant. I had no idea he had purloined the access device, the thing in the shape of a lighter, from General Yacoubian." He spread his hands. "So, yes, I am guilty of your accusation. Later, in my own covert travels through Jongleur's Egypt, I heard that these two," he paused to point to Orlando and Sam, "were asking about Priam's Walls."
"Then you must have talked to old Oompa-Loompa," Sam said. "I don't think we told anyone else."
Kunohara nodded. "Yes, Upaut. A very strange sort of a god, wasn't he? He was quite happy to tell me that, as he put it, when you weren't busy worshiping him you had told him of your quest."
"So you sent Azador to spy on us in Troy," Martine said.
"I tried. But the Iliad and Odyssey simworlds were misbehaving—some combination of your own presences and the Other's interest in you, I think. If Paul Jonas had not rescued him, Azador would not have lived to be there."
"You blame it on Paul?" Martine asked angrily.
Kunohara lifted a hand. "Peace, I blame no one. I have admitted my acts. I merely point out that coincidences—or things that seem like coincidences—have informed much of what we experienced."
"Unless there are more questions. . . ." Sellars began.
"What has happened to Dread?" Martine had clearly come to the meeting in search of answers. "Reports suggest he is unconscious, in something like a Tandagore coma. Does that mean that he will wake up someday, like Renie's brother?"
"Even if he does," Sellars said, "he is in police custody in Australia, heavily guarded—a famous murderer."
"He is a devil," she said flatly. "I will believe he is harmless when he is dead. Perhaps not even then."
"As far as I can reconstruct it, he never detached from the system." Sellars was quiet but firm. "He was in close contact with the Other right to . . . to the end. You all know what it was like to be linked to the Other's mind—you perhaps most of all, Ms. Desroubins. Do you really think Dread could survive the Other's death and stay sane?"
"But what if he is alive somewhere in the network?" Martine demanded. "What if his consciousness has survived there, like Orlando's? Like Paul's did—for a while," she finished harshly.
Sellars nodded, as though accepting a reasonable punishment. "There is no evidence that such a thing happened, no trace of a virtual mind or body constructed, no smallest hint of Dread anywhere in the resurrected system or network. That is not complete proof, perhaps, but I think that what seems true here is true. His mind could not withstand the horror at the end. The doctors who examined him say he is catatonic and will stay that way." He looked around. "Now as I was saying, if there are no more questions I will take it as my cue finally to speak about the reason we are all here."
"We're all here because you asked us to be here," Renie pointed out. "Even if we had to come with street-shop gear."
Sellars briefly closed his eyes; Renie felt like an obstreperous schoolgirl, but she had thought Martine's questions entirely reasonable. "Yes," the old man said patiently. "And rather than continue to talk, when I know you've all heard too much of my voice lately, I am going to turn over those duties to Mr. Ramsey."
Catur Ramsey stood, then decided to sit down again. "Sorry," he said. "I'm a courtroom lawyer—I do my best talking on my feet—but I suppose it's a bit more appropriate to keep it informal, as befits a discussion among friends."
"A lawyer?" asked Martine. "What in the name of God for?"
Ramsey appeared a little daunted. "I suppose that's a good question. Well, first I think I have to make one thing explicit at the very beginning. We consider you all founding members of the Otherland Preservation Trust."
Renie couldn't believe her ears. "A . . . what? A preservation. . . ?"
"The governments of southern Africa made many trusts for my people and their land." !Xabbu's voice had an uncommon edge to it. "Afterward, my people had no land."
"Just let me explain, please," said Ramsey. "No one is taking anything away from anyone.
I'm involved in this because I was dragged into it, not because I wanted to be."
"You don't have to defend yourself, Mr. Ramsey," Sellars said. "Just explain what happened to you."
And so the lawyer did. It was a piece of the story Renie hadn't heard—a strange and shocking piece. It was the first time she had heard more than a brief mention of Olga Pirofsky or the little girl Christabel Sorensen.
God, this was big, she thought. It wasn't just us on the inside and my father and Del Ray and Jeremiah on the outside. And then she thought, I want to meet some of those people—the little girl and boy we saw at the end. They were real children! I want to meet everyone. After all, we're the members of a very small, special club.
And I want to see the Stone Girl again, she realized. She may not have been real, but I certainly miss her. She resolved to ask Sellars about it when she had a chance.
Ramsey's recital drew questions—many of those present were only now putting all the details together. By the time they had all lapsed into overwhelmed silence, more than half an hour had passed.
"It seems I owe you an apology, Mr. Ramsey," Martine said at last. "You have had your own difficult journey."
"Nothing like what you all went through, Ms. Desroubins. And that's not even speaking of those who didn't come through—Olga, her poor, mistreated son, your friend Paul Jonas. Compared to the rest of you, I don't have much stake in this. But that's all the more reason I'd like you to listen."
Renie said, "I think we're listening now."
"Thanks." He took a moment to compose himself. "Now, what you've heard already from Mr. Sellars is that the stored code for the network was basically intact." He gestured to the bubble-distorted view of giant trees. "As you can see, Mr. Kunohara has largely recovered his own world already. And there are other worlds waiting to be saved, too. With time, everything could be saved."
"Could be?" Martine was still asking questions, just a little more gently. "Why the conditional?"
"Because unless we take a bold step," Sellars said with some heat, "I do not want to save them." He waited until the clamor died down. "I apologize—I should not have interrupted, Mr. Ramsey. Please continue."
"The problem has a couple of parts," Ramsey explained. "The first is—who owns the network? It was built by the Grail Brotherhood, but all the guiding members are dead. They built it through various business entities, but in many cases by illegally funneling monies out of their own corporations or the countries they ruled—embezzlement for purely personal benefit." He shrugged. "The two largest pieces of technical infrastructure belonged to J Corporation and Telemorphix. J Corporation still exists, but its headquarters is a lump of rubble and molten glass in the middle of a Louisiana lake and its founder is dead. Nothing like that happened to Telemorphix, although Wells is definitely dead, too—you may have noticed they finally announced it." He took a breath. "The fact is, the squabble over ownership is going to go on for decades. Trust me—this affair is going to be worth hundreds and hundreds of millions just to the trial attorneys."
"So what are we supposed to do?" asked Bonnie Mae Simpkins, who had been largely silent. "That's just how things work, isn't it? Regular folks get it in the neck and the lawyers and big businesses make out like bandits."
"I wish I could take time to defend my profession," Ramsey said. "We're not all sharks. But there's another question—a vital one. And the person at the center of that question is right here in this room."
Sellars saved them from a search for dark corners in the cornerless bubble. "We're talking about Orlando Gardiner, of course. This network is Orlando's home now. He can't live anywhere else."
Orlando shrugged. "Nobody's going to be pulling the plug, are they? Not for a while."
"But there's even more to it," Ramsey said. "Mr, Kunohara?"
Their host leaned forward, wearing one of his odd half-smiles. "All of you—well, almost all—were with me when the information life-forms were set free. Despite the objections of some of those present, by the way, I do think that was the only rational solution. Can you imagine the political and legal struggles to determine their fate if we had left it up to the people back in the real world?" He said it as scornfully as if he owed that place no allegiance at all. "Well, I have something else to tell you. Those creatures . . . a bad word . . . those beings are gone now, released from their so-strict confinement. But the evolutionary algorithms first generated by Sellars, the processes which helped create them, were not kept in such a secure way. Remember, the Other was not a discrete entity monitoring a network from some separate location—in some ways, the network was the Other's body. Any evolutionary biologist knows that cells which prove useful in one part of an evolving organism may eventually be put to use in other parts as well. And the evolution of both the Other and the Grail network itself has been rapid and not very well understood.
"For a long time I have been discovering examples here in my own simworld of unusual or even impossible mutations. The first appeared years ago, and thus had nothing to do with the more grotesque mutations forced by Dread. Initially I thought these things were just flaws in the programming, then later I put it down to Grail Brotherhood manipulations. Now I think differently. I believe that the Other put some of the same evolutionary aigontnms which helped shape its children into use in the network at large—or at least unknowingly allowed them to seep into the code."
"So there are like, too many mutants," Sam said. "Do you want Orlando to kill them? He's ho dzang at killing mutants."
Kunohara looked at her in horror. "Kill them? Don't you understand, child? This may not be the kind of evolutionary breakthrough that the information life represented—that life was hothoused, protected, even hastened toward more complex evolution—but it is still something rare and wonderful. In a sense, this entire network may almost be alive! Whether through slow change to the general matrix, the springing up of unusual forms, or even a deepening of the individuality of the virtual inhabitants, I suspect that the algorithms have already had an effect." He settled back, smiling again, clearly pleased with the prospect. "We have no idea what this network can become—all we know is that it is far more complex and vital than any mere virtual reality simulation."
"So," Martine said, "this is the crux."
"Exactly." Catur Ramsey nodded. "We all can guess both the good and bad that might come from this network. The good—a place like no other, almost a new universe for humankind to protect and explore and study. The bad—uncontrolled growth of pseudo-evolutionary information organisms. Possible contamination of the worldwide net. Who knows what else? Now, do you really, really want to put those potentialities into the hands of the same corporations that built it—and their lawyers?"
Renie broke the long, uncomfortable silence. "Since we couldn't bring ourselves to kill off the Other's children, you're obviously not going to suggest we blow up the entire network. But sending it off into space doesn't seem to fit the bill this time. So what's the alternative? You look like you have an alternative in mind,"
Sellars nodded. "We hide it."
"What?" Dumbfounded, Renie looked at !Xabbu, but to her astonishment he was smiling. She turned back to Sellars. "How in the hell can you hide it? Del Ray Chiume, just for one, has already been repeating what I told him about the network on every newsnet that can get a feed out of downtown Durban. There must be others, too—something this big won't just vanish. People are filing court cases already, for goodness' sake."
"And I am one of them," said Ramsey. "No, we can't pretend it doesn't exist."
"But what we show them won't necessarily be the real thing," Sellars explained. "Don't forget, I have a great deal of control over the network now. In fact, with enough processing power—power I'm sure the corporations and governments concerned will be happy to supply—I can reconstitute the entire network for them. But I don't even have to do that—I can just give them the code and let them do it themselves.
"However, that doesn't mean what they get will be
the network we all experienced, especially if I sanitize their version first to remove anything that was not in the Grail Brotherhood's original code—that should make sure they don't get hold of any of the Other's mutated algorithms, which didn't exist until he found my experiments. Meanwhile, the true network can exist in careful isolation on the free-floating private web I've put together, based on the TreeHouse model. There are sympathetic parties who will support us. We can keep our network entirely separate."
"Separate, yes," said Martine, "but secret?"
"If we allow very few people to enter, I think we might be able to manage it. Remember, Otherland is not really a place, it's an idea—an idea that can be moved at a moment's notice if sufficient preparations have been made."
"And who would be allowed to enter this separate, secret place?" Martine asked.
"You, of course—all of you. And selected guests of our choice. That is why we call you founding members of the Otherland Preservation Trust. If you agree, that is. If you can imagine some better alternative, please tell me."
Renie listened to the others—all except !Xabbu—as they began to talk and argue, struggling to make sense of what had been said, but she wanted a more crucial question answered. "Why did you smile?" she asked !Xabbu. "Do you think this is a good idea?"
"Of course," he said. "The big and strong cannot help but draw attention to themselves—they will always battle each other. The small and silent will hide and survive."
"But do we have a right to do that?"
He shrugged, but he was stilt smiling. "Did the shining lights—the information life-forms, as that fellow Kunohara called them—did they have a right to make the stories of my people their own? Who knows, but the world is different because of it. Who do you trust, Renie? These people, our friends . . . our tribe . . . or people who have never been here and who have not fought together to survive, as we have?"
She nodded, but she was still troubled.
