by Tad Williams
After Del Ray's explanation of Renie's request and their meeting on the Golden Mile, the younger man fell silent, staring at his beer. "These three fellows came to talk to me," he said at last. "And everything started to get very, very bad."
Joseph noted with alarm that there were only a few swallows left in his bottle. He put the cap on and put it on the floor, tucking it just out his line of sight to make it last a bit longer. "Who come talk to you? You said some Boers?"
"Two of them were Afrikaaners. One of them was a black man. The main man, the big ugly white fellow, told me that I had been asking questions that didn't concern me—that I had made some important people very unhappy. They wanted to know who Renie was, and especially why she was talking to some French woman named Martine Desroubins. . . ."
"You are joking. All this about that French woman?"
"You had better believe it's true. I told them I didn't know anything about her or any of that, that Renie was just an old friend who'd asked me a favor. I shouldn't have told them anything, but they scared me.
"They came back a little later and told me Renie wasn't living in the shelter anymore—that you'd moved. They said they needed to speak to her, that they were going to explain to her she would be better off leaving this whole thing alone. So I. . . ."
"Wait just one minute!" Long Joseph sat up and almost knocked over his squeeze bottle. Despite his rising anger, he snatched it up protectively. "You the one who tried to sell Renie out, I remember now. You traced her phone call. . . !"
"I . . . I did."
"I should knock off your head!" His words belied his secret pleasure. This proved exactly what Joseph had always believed about men like Del Ray, university-educated, fancy-suited. "You lucky you still have that gun."
"Damn it, I didn't want to! But they knew where I lived—they came to my front door! And they promised they weren't going to hurt her."
"Yeah. Believe an Afrikaaner policeman when he say that."
"These weren't police. These weren't anything like police. But they weren't just criminals either. They had to have found out about me from someone high up in UNComm, because they didn't just know I'd been talking to Renie, they knew what I had done for her, who else I'd spoken to, what files I'd accessed. And the phone-tracing gear—I came in to work one day and found someone had put it on my system. No, they weren't just some ordinary bonebreakers. They were connected."
"So you sold Renie out," said Joseph, unwilling to be lured from his moral high ground. "You made it so we had to run away."
Del Ray had lost the urge to fight back. "I made it worse for myself. They told me if I didn't find her, they'd kill my wife. And when I couldn't find her, they got me fired. Then they burned down our house."
Long Joseph nodded sagely. "They burn our house up, too. I barely pull Renie out in time."
The younger man was not even listening. "It was something about this Martine woman—they kept asking me why Renie was talking to her, whether I had hooked them up." He shook his head. "They burned my house down! If they hadn't started the dogs barking, Dolly and I would have both burned to death. It was so fast—some kind of incendiary grenades, the police said."
Long Joseph said nothing, but he was impressed. These were the kind of people you saw on the net shows. He felt more important just by dint of the fact that they were after him. He finished the wine, gave the bottle a make-sure squeeze; then, as though it were one of the grenades that had burned Del Ray Chiume out of his home, he lobbed it into the corner of the garage. Del Ray flinched at the clatter.
"Dolly left me. She went back to her family in Manguse. I've been staying at friends' places, this garage thing of my cousin's, wherever. They don't seem to be looking for me very hard right now, but I'm not stupid enough just to walk back into my old life and say, "Here I am! Come kill me!"
Long Joseph was judging whether he should stay seated and enjoy the heavy, satisfying warmth of the first bottle of Mountain Rose or try to use Del Ray's unquestionable guilt as a lever to make him get another bottle. "So why you come and grab me?" he asked. "Why you come down with your gun like some kind of Mafia man? Why not just let me see my boy?"
Del Ray snorted. "You must be crazy, old man. You weren't going to walk in and see your son without anyone noticing. You're lucky I saw you first. You should thank me—if those thugs had gotten you, you'd be in a ditch right now, covered in petrol, and they'd be holding a lit match over you, asking if you had anything else you wanted to tell them."
Joseph shuddered at the image, which was not much different than what he himself had been thinking just a short hour earlier, but he was not going to admit it in front of this suit-and-tie fellow. "So now what?"
The younger man's eyes gleamed, as though he had been asked to describe the plot of a story he had long planned to write. "I need Renie to tell these people what they need to know. If she's been talking to this Martine woman, she needs to tell them she won't do it anymore. She has to leave this woman alone! That's what they're angry about. Then everything will be fine. Then I can have some kind of life again."
Even Long Joseph, whose comprehension of the scope of Renie's troubles was vague, had a feeling that Del Ray was being overly optimistic. Not that it mattered. "It is not so easy," he said aloud. "Not so easy at all. Renie is not around here. It is much more complicated, what she and I are doing, and we cannot just change things because some Afrikaaner hoodlums come and threaten you." He looked at Del Ray's worried face and shook his head with all the grave regret of a prophet regarding the sinfulness of mankind. "After I see my boy, we will think about what to do for you."
"After. . . ? What in hell are you talking about, old man?" Del Ray sat up straight and bumped his head against a shelf. "That hospital is under quarantine! And even if it wasn't, if you walk up to that front door again those bastards are going to tear your heart out!"
Joseph was calm, certain. "Then you going to have to think of some way to get us inside, boy."
"Us? Us?
"That is right. Because I came to see my son, and if I don't get to see him somehow then I am not going to take you to Renie or that Martine woman. You spend the rest of your life hiding in a closet. So you better start thinking." He sat back, smiling the world-weary smile of a seasoned adventurer. "You can work on your idea while you go get me another bottle of wine."
CHAPTER 3
House of the Beast
NETFEED/FASHION: Couture Is Kiss of Death to Street Fashion
(visual: Goggleboys on street corner)
VO: The rush by upscale fashion houses to embrace streetwear has backlashed—at street level. Retail chains like Packrat and Cloz say that "Chutes" are dying on the shelves, and that kids now favor the trim silhouette of aerosol-delivered latex.
(visual: Betchy Barcher of Cloz in front of aerosol display)
BARCHEK: "It's taken us a few weeks to get the ship turned around, but now we've got latex everywhere. Kids want "Sprays," and that's all there is to it."
The desert evening was mild, the sands empty and still, yet Orlando Gardiner was being dragged forward by a compulsion as powerful as hurricane winds. His friend Fredericks had shown surprising strength and resourcefulness, but with the breaking of the great urn Fredericks' strength had gone, and now he too was being drawn helplessly toward the looming temple and the terrifying thing that slept inside it.
Whether or not they felt the same compulsion, the little yellow monkey-children of the Wicked Tribe clearly felt something: shrieking their dismay, they clung to Orlando like baby bats. He wore so little clothing in his Thargor guise that most of them clutched bare flesh, a living cloak of tiny pinching fingers that would have been excruciating if Orlando had not had far greater worries.
Something horrible is in that temple, and it's pulling us in. I asked that goddess for help, and all we got were these stupid monkeys. It doesn't make any sense! But nothing in Otherland ever made much sense.
Does it even matter? I'm dying, whether that
. . . thing gets us or not.
He took a grudging step forward, then another. The monkeys scrambled around to his back in a leggy, tweezering mass, keeping the width of his body between them and the temple. They were terrified of the place, which was perfectly logical, but why on earth had the goddess thought these children could help?
"Run away now, 'Landogarner!" one of them squeaked in his ear. "Big Bad Nothing live there. All the gear is crazy. Run away!"
Orlando was already working so hard to resist he did not waste time explaining that at this moment he could no more run away than he could compose an opera in Turkish. Just as he realized that the yellow microsimian had used the word "gear," reminding him that there was actual machinery behind this madness, he stumbled on something half-buried in the sand. It was a piece of the broken pot which had imprisoned the Tribe, a section with only one visible carving on its surface—a feather in a rounded rectangle.
"Walk into the darkness," the goddess Ma'at had told him. "You will see my sign." But her sign so far had brought him only miniature monkeys, a dubious boon. He forced himself to stop anyway, bracing against a pull that felt like a window had been blown out of a jet in high-atmosphere flight, then managed to scoop the ceramic fragment into his numbed fingers before surrendering to the temple once more.
"What you do with that?" the monkey nearest his head demanded. "That from the Lady."
"You . . . know her?" Orlando was exerting a tremendous amount of energy to slow himself, but that meant Fredericks had moved several paces ahead and the distance between them was widening.
"She talk to us in the dark. Tell us stories!" The monkey handover-handed up into the Thargor sim's dark hair. "You truly best turn 'round, 'Landogarner."
"Malocchio abbondanza!" shrilled another monkey fearfully. "Lady said stay away from that!"
"I'd . . . love . . . to stay away," Orlando grunted through clenched teeth. His head was hammering so badly it felt as though some artery might explode like a blocked pipe. "I . . . I can't. It's . . . pulling us toward it." He took a deep, shaky breath. All he could see of Fredericks now was his friend's back as he trudged forward, bowed and helpless. "You said . . . 'gear'. . . ?"
"Gear all crazy there," said the passenger in his hair. He suspected it was Zunni, but it was hard to think properly with all the noise in his head. "Like big what-is-a-callit—singalarity."
"Singularity?" If he had not been so close to screaming, he would have laughed. "Like a black locking hole? Is that what you mean? This is virtual, damn it!" His voice was so raggedly unpleasant that some of the monkeys fluttered free. It was bizarre to see them circling in the air—it felt so much like he was being sucked down a giant drain that he could not understand why they were not tugged straight toward the temple as well. "Ohhhh," he groaned, finding it more and more difficult to speak. "Doesn't it . . . pull you, too?"
Zunni, if that was who it was, went on as though he hadn't spoken. "Singularity? All the arrows point one way? That not right?"
"Too inside out!" another one chirped. "Not get small like that."
Orlando could not make sense of anything and no longer had the strength to care. He realized he was clutching the piece of pottery so hard his fingers had turned white.
"You go there, but you don't want to go?" The little yellow shape was too close for him to focus on it. It flittered before his eyes, fuzzily insubstantial as an angelic vision. "Then you have to go through and bounce."
"Uh-uh, Zunni," one of the others said. "Not bounce." This one's voice was so high as to be almost inaudible, the lisping tones of a child too young even for school. "Wanna go 'round. Do Gavvy Well."
"She means 'Gravity Well,' " said Zunni confidingly. "That a game, okay?"
The facade of the red stone temple now loomed above Orlando like a cliff face, impossibly tall, impossibly harsh and imposing, and still the monkeys chittered among themselves. Fredericks was right, he thought despairingly. It is like talking to breakfast cereal. . . .
"Better run fast, 'Landogarner," one of the other little creatures told him at last. "That the best thing."
"Only thing," said another. "Misteriosofabuloso. Need the best tricks."
"I can't . . . run," he gritted. "I told you. It's . . . it's got me."
Zunni rappelled down his forehead on a strand of hair and poked at his cheek. "No, run toward thing. Run fast. Think fast thoughts, maybe."
"Zunni, you a big dumb itipoti!" another monkey squealed. "That never work. Tell him just run fast."
"Think fast stuff, too," Zunni whispered, a tiny, dangling co-conspirator. "Big Bad Nothing gone all asleep—maybe he fooled."
Orlando was almost weeping with the effort of slowing his forward march. The shadowed entrance to the temple stood before him, a wide black spot in the facade like the hole left by a missing tooth. Fredericks was a pale shape several meters ahead, almost absorbed by the darkness. "I don't understand," he panted. "Run toward it? Run?"
"We help," Zunni promised. She clambered onto his shoulder, then dropped onto his back, out of sight, but he could still hear her voice. "We help you come out fast, like Gravity Well. Here—we push!"
And suddenly the entire fluttering force of the tiny simians centered itself between his shoulder blades and gave him an astonishingly hard shove. He was propelled forward in a stumbling flurry of arms and legs, struggling just to keep his feet beneath him. Everything before him swirled, as though for the first time Otherland's latency could not approximate real life, but he quickly realized it was even stranger than that: the doorway, the huge sandstone blocks of the walls, even Fredericks turning in astonished slow motion, all were abruptly flattened and stretched, rolling themselves into a tunnel down which he plummeted. Orlando snatched at Fredericks as he sped past him—through him—beyond him. . . . For a moment he felt the hard piece of feather-scribed clay clutched in one of his hands like a shield, and his friend's fingers gripping his other hand, then all sense of his physical self dropped away and he was only an eye plummeting down an endless well, an ear that heard nothing but the rushing of endless wind.
I'm inside it, was all he had time to think, then an image burst upon him, sudden and vivid, a picture that drew itself on his mind rather than his sight- Hidden within the temple, he suddenly knew beyond doubt, but also encompassing that temple somehow, like a shadow bigger than the object which cast it, was the monstrous black pyramid of his desert dream. . . .
. . . The pyramid . . . the house of the beast. . . .
Something struck him with an impact like a bomb—a great, shuddering blow, as though he were a hammer that had just smashed down against a titanic anvil, a deep reverberating tone like the sound of a world being born . . . or ending. . . .
Doom. . . !
The tunnel around him shimmied and broke apart into opalescent smears.
First step, he dimly realized, his thoughts distant as the voices of migrating birds invisible in the night sky. I've taken the first step into the temple . . . into the dark. . . .
The thunderous concussion faded. The shivering, gleaming light reformed. He was a child again, following his mother home from the well, watching the sway of her hips and the jerry can balanced on her head. Something rustled in the dry grass and he saw the red-and-brown skin of a snake snap out onto the path before him. His mother turned in fear, her eyes wide, but the snake was between them. . . .
Now he was in the back seat of a car, driving along the coast, with his parents arguing in the front and his sister beside him, grinning and jabbing him with the neck of her headless doll. He kicked at her, but she stayed out of reach, and although he cried out to his parents, they were busy with their conflict. As the car rounded a bend in the highway the sun bounced its reflection off the water, and for a moment he was dazzled by the light that silhouetted his parents' faces. . . .
His two younger brothers had crawled out of the tent. His mother was yelling, which wasn't helping her soothe the sick baby in her arms, but the bad thing was that
his mother was really frightened because it was night outside and dark and his father still wasn't back yet. He pushed out of the flap and past the nervous goats, who rang their bells and bleated. The night sky was huge and endless, running away in all directions, and the stars were fierce, and he called his brothers' names over and over. . . .
But I don't have any brothers, he thought. And those aren't my parents, are they?
Everything began happening all at once.
A shack high up in a valley between the hills, and his bicycle lying in a ditch beside the front path, the wheel rusted to the forks because he had left it there all winter, to win an argument with his father that his father didn't even know they were having. . . .
The place in the long front hallway where his mother's and older sister's pictures sat on a table, with a vase of flowers just between them, and where sometimes, on holy days, his grandmother burned a candle. . . .
Playing in the river before the rainy season returned, with nothing but mud far down the banks. His cousin and one of the other village children were wrestling, and they slipped down and for a moment they disappeared into the sludge, frightening him, but then they came up again laughing, with everything the same fecal brown except their shining eyes and teeth. . . .
They were taking down his uncle's flag now that evening had come, and he was rigidly at attention, hoping his uncle would notice how straight he was standing. . . .
Doom. . . .
Second step. The smears of light fragmented into smaller, more rigid pieces, shards of lives, thousands of bright, jagged insights like broken windows—a high mountain trail, following the horses, watching the brilliant tassel of a blanket . . . a sharp bark as his dog heard something in the next apartment, where no one was supposed to be home . . . his baby brother's crying face, fat and red and completely without understanding why it had been pushed down in the sandbox . . . a pair of new shoes set carefully on his folded communion suit. . . .
