by Tad Williams
The Goggleboy only made a strange gulping sound. He was crouched on the far side of the pit, a spiny shape like a large cactus.
With Renie and Florimel each holding one of his thin legs, !Xabbu walked himself over the edge on his hands, headfirst into the hole. When he had reached the limit of their armspan he still could not touch Martine, who despite her measured responses was clearly miserable. Renie and Florimel brought !Xabbu up again, then with great care lowered themselves to their knees and crawled toward the hole so they could lie flat on the ground, side-by-side with their shoulders protruding beyond the rim. "We really need you, T4b!" Renie called. Her voice seemed to go straight down into the dark, flat and dead. "We need someone to hold onto us!"
A moment later a hand closed on one of her ankles and Renie sighed in relief. !Xabbu climbed over her and Florimel, then clambered down their arms as though they were vines, allowing them at the last to clasp their hands around his ankles. Even his small weight felt as though it could drag them over the edge, and Renie's voice was breathless as she asked, "Can you reach her?"
"I am not. . . ." He paused, then an instant later said, "I have her. Hold on, Martine. Take one of my hands, but do not let go with your other yet." When he spoke again, Renie could tell he had turned his head toward the surface. "But how can you two pull us out?"
With the strange, soapy earth of the place in her mouth and nose, her arms stretched until it felt as though they might tear loose at any moment, Renie was no longer merely frightened, but terrified. She and Florimel had no leverage at all, and every moment it was getting harder and harder to support !Xabbu's weight without adding Martine's as well.
"T4b!" she shouted. "Can you pull us back?" There was no response, so Renie gently moved her leg, afraid that if she kicked too hard he might let go. "Can't you pull us back?"
A small voice said, "I can't. It's already hard to hold on."
"Emily! That's you back there?" Renie had to push away her panicked fury at T4b—this was no time for it. She struggled to keep her voice firm, but she could feel her composure swiftly unraveling at the edges. "T4b, God damn it, if you don't help pull us back, Martine and !Xabbu are going to fall! Come help us!"
For a long moment nothing changed. Renie could almost feel her arms stretching like warm taffy, getting longer and thinner. She knew she could not hold any longer—something would have to give way. Then a large, painfully spiky hand closed on the back of her jumpsuit and began to pull. Renie barely had time for a gasp of relief before it turned to a hiss of anguish as Martine's full weight swung free.
For an instant her shoulders and elbows seemed full of burning rubber and she was certain she would lose her grip—as in her dream, it felt as though she were trying to pull the entire world inside out. Then the hand on her back tugged her far enough away from the rim that she could bend her knees and dig her elbows into the dirt. A few more moments and she could flex her spine and begin to apply leverage of her own.
Martine came over the top, scrambling, and actually crawled across Florimel in her desperate fight to get out of the pit. !Xabbu, who had swung to the side to let her climb out, followed a few seconds later. The four of them collapsed into a panting heap.
"Thank you. Oh, my God, thank you." Martine's voice, thickened by dirt, was little more than a choking murmur; Renie had never heard the blind woman so emotional.
"We must move away," said !Xabbu, rising on all fours. "We do not know there will not be more collapses here."
When they had stumbled and crawled back through the unfamiliar darkness to the embers of the campfire, Renie abruptly sat up. "T4b? What in hell happened to you? Why didn't you help us when I asked?"
"He's still by the hole," Emily said, more interested than disapproving. "I think he's crying."
"What?" Renie got to her feet, balance shaky. "T4b—Javier? What's going on?"
"He tried to help me. . . ." Martine said, but Renie was already walking toward the huddled shape of the warrior-robot, mindful of the pit a few steps away.
"Javier?" He did not look up, but even in the half-light she saw his shoulders stiffen. "T4b, what is it?"
He turned the scowling battle-mask toward her, but his words were those of a shocked, frightened youth. "M–my hand . . . my lockin' hand!" He raised his left arm toward her. For a moment, she thought he had sustained some terrible fracture, that it had been bent away from her at a sickening angle; it took a few moments more before she realized that his hand was simply gone, neatly removed at the base of the wrist. The battle-gauntlet ended with a kind of gray flatness like a piece of lead, but with a faint suggestion of shimmer.
"What happened?"
"He was coming to replace me on sentry duty." Martine edged toward them, giving a wide berth to the place where the ground had opened. "All of a sudden, as I was walking away, the earth just . . . disappeared in front of me. No, that's too simple, it was more like an entire area of air and land just . . . changed. Like some kind of invisible field core-sampled the whole thing." She was breathing hard, still recovering from the shock of her ordeal. T4b pulled the affected arm in close to his body and rocked back and forth as though he held an injured child. "If I hadn't been blind," Martine continued, "I think I would have just walked into it in the dark, but because I sensed something was wrong I stopped on the edge and struggled for balance. T4b pulled me aside, but I think his other hand must have crossed the plane where the ground and air were still changing, because he let out a scream. . . ."
"Yes! I heard him," Renie said, remembering the terrible cry that had woken her.
". . . And when I tried to go to him, I stumbled and rolled over the edge." Martine stopped, trying to calm herself.
Renie shook her head. They'd have to try to figure it out later. "Florimel!" she called. "You're our doctor. We need you right now!"
As with everything else in this bizarre and unique environment, T4b's injury and the unexpected nightfall followed no normal patterns.
Their Goggleboy companion had lost his hand, but as far as anyone could tell, only its virtual analogue: T4b still felt a hand at the end of his wrist (although he said it felt "sayee lo max," and described it as feeling "all electricity") even though no one else could feel it, and it did not seem to exist as far as the environment was concerned either. After the initial shock there was no pain, and the gray space at the end of his wrist where the amputation had occurred retained its faint gleam. Whatever the earth-hollowing effect had been, inspection proved that it had also removed a segment of Martine's baggy clothing as neatly as a swipe from a laser-scalpel.
Although they huddled long talking it over before they eventually went back to sleep, the darkness was still present when the last of them awakened, and Renie among others began to think that they were in for a night at least as long as the gray twilight of their first days in the place.
"And we cannot even guess how long this next part is going to last," Florimel pointed out, "because we might have missed the first six months of that gray light."
"I'm frightened!" Although she had played a surprisingly brave part in Martine's rescue, Emily had quickly reverted to her status as the group's official malcontent. "I want to go away from here now. I hate this place!"
"I don't want to seem to be taking advantage of a bad situation," Renie said, "but I think we should vote again. The dark is bad enough—we'll be out of this imitation firewood soon, and it won't be fun looking for more—but if pieces are just dropping out of the environment. . . ."
Martine nodded. "I cannot help wondering what would have happened to me if I had walked into that space before it took poor T4b's hand. Would I still exist? Would my virtual body be gone, but my mind still be trapped online somehow, a kind of ghost?" The idea seemed to trouble her deeply.
"It does no good to think of it," Florimel said. "But there is no need for argument, Renie—not as far as I am concerned. This place has won your argument for you. We must leave."
"If we can leave," Marti
ne pointed out. She seemed both smaller and less remote, as though the brush with possible oblivion had changed her. "Don't forget, it was never anything but an idea of Renie's, that we might find our way out of this place without the Grail Brotherhood's object."
Renie stared at the textured semitransparencies of the firelight. "If needing and wanting to get out will make it easier, then it definitely just got much easier."
"It is no use." !Xabbu sounded as dispirited as Renie had ever heard him. What must have been hours had passed, and he and Martine had tried everything they could imagine, even going so far as to make all the company link hands around the fire and concentrate on the idea of a golden-shining gateway—Florimel had scornfully called it a "seance"—all to no effect. "You have put your trust in me, Renie, you and the others, but I have failed you."
"Don't be silly, !Xabbu," Martine said. "No one has failed anyone."
He touched her arm with his long fingers, a gesture of appreciation for her kindness, then walked a short distance away and crouched with his back to the fire, a tiny, mournful figure.
"The problem is that there is no way for !Xabbu and me to explain to each other what we know," Martine quietly told Renie. "He and I . . . touched before, somehow, when we were all apart, but it was through the gateway the Brotherhood's object had already opened. Neither of us can use words to say what we felt, what we learned. We are like two scientists who do not have any common language—the barrier is too great to share our discoveries."
Florimel shook her head glumly. "We should sleep. In a while, if it is still dark, I will try to find more firewood."
Renie looked at T4b, who was sleeping now, exhaustion and shock having finally outworn the adrenaline; Emily also had taken refuge in unconsciousness. She tried to think of something optimistic to say but couldn't; she had not dared to consider what might happen if they could not reopen the gateway. A wave of unhappiness and fear swept through her. Even worse was the sight of her friend !Xabbu looking so defeated. She made her way across the untrustworthy ground toward him. When she reached his side she had still not thought of any useful words, so she sat beside him and took his small hand in hers.
After a long silence, !Xabbu abruptly said, "Many, many years ago there was another with my name. He was one of my people, and he was called Dream, the same as my parents named me, after the dream that is dreaming us." He paused as if Renie might respond, but she could feel nothing except a painful, heavy congestion around her heart and did not trust herself to speak.
"He was a prisoner, as my father became a prisoner," !Xabbu continued. "I know his words not because my own people remembered them, but because he came to know one of the few Europeans who studied my people's ways. One day this white scholar asked my namesake why he was so unhappy all the time, why he sat quiet, with his face in shadow. And the man called Dream told him, 'I am sitting, waiting for the moon to turn back, so that I might return to the place of my people and hear their stories.'
"At first the scholar thought Dream was speaking of going back to his family, and he asked him where they were, but Dream said, 'I am waiting for the stories that come from a distance, for a story is like the wind—it comes from far away, but we feel it. The people here do not possess my stories. They do not speak things that speak to me. I am waiting until I can turn around in my path, until the moon turns back, and I am hoping that someone on the path behind me, someone who knows my stories, will speak a story I can hear on the wind—that listening I can turn around in the path . . . and that my heart will find a way home.
"That is how I feel, Renie—as that man also named Dream felt. It came to me when I did my dance that I should not try to be something I am not, but must do as my people do, think as my people think. But it has made me lonely. This world does not seem to me a place where I can understand the stories, Renie." He slowly shook his head, dark eyes lidded.
His words pierced her. Her eyes filled with tears. "You have friends in this world," she said, stumbling a little on the words. "People who care for you very much."
He squeezed her hand. "I know. But even the friends of my heart cannot always feed the Greater Hunger."
Another long silence crept by. Renie heard Martine and Florimel speaking softly a few meters away, but the words seemed meaningless, so much did she long for something to ease the small man's sorrow. "I . . . I love you, !Xabbu," she said at last. The words seemed quite stark, hanging in the darkness. She didn't know what she meant, and was suddenly frightened of something she could not entirely identify. "You are my best and closest friend."
He rested his furry head against her shoulder. "And I love you, Renie. Even the sharpest pains of my heart are less when you and I are together."
The moment seemed difficult to Renie. He had taken it so calmly, so matter-of-factly, that she almost felt insulted, even though she herself was not sure how she had meant that fateful word. But I don't know what he means by it either, she realized. In a way, we're from so far apart, we still hardly know each other.
Feeling awkward, she let go of his hand and touched the rough thing that had been rubbing at her wrist. "What's this?"
"My string." He laughed quietly as he unknotted it. "Your string, I mean, that you gave me from your boot. A precious gift." His mood had lightened, or else out of kindness to her he pretended that it had. "Would you like to see another story told with it? I can bring it back to the fire."
"Maybe later," she said, then hoped she hadn't offended him. "I'm tired, !Xabbu. But I loved the stories you made it tell earlier."
"It can do other things, too. Oh, such a clever piece of string! I can count with it, and even do more difficult things—in some ways, the string game can be like an abacus, you know, telling many complicated ideas. . . ." He trailed off.
Renie was so absorbed in wondering what this latest, confusing interlude between the two of them might mean that she did not realize for a moment that !Xabbu was lost in thought; there was an even longer pause before she suddenly understood what it was he was considering. "Oh, !Xabbu, could you use it that way? Would it help?"
He was already moving on all fours back toward the fire, taking the easier, animal way of moving in his haste. She felt a twinge of worry at his growing facility with baboon-movement, but it was pushed away by a dangerous upwelling of hope.
"Martine," he said, "put out your hands. There, like that."
The blind woman, a little startled, allowed him to arrange her hands with palms facing each other and fingers extended. He quickly looped the string over them, then thrust his own fingers in and moved them rapidly. "This shape is called 'the sun'—the sun in the sky. Do you understand?"
Martine nodded slowly.
"And see, here is 'night.' Now, this means 'far,' and this . . . 'near.' Yes?"
Anyone else, Renie felt sure, would have asked him what the hell he was talking about, but Martine only sat quietly for a moment, her face distant and distracted, then asked him to do it again more slowly. He did, then showed her figure after figure, moving his hands through what seemed to Renie like a series of simple pictures, but she knew him well enough to know that this was only the beginning—the building blocks of the string game.
After perhaps two hours had passed, !Xabbu stopped talking. Martine had fallen silent some time earlier. Florimel and Renie took turns poking up the remains of the fire, more for their own cheer than any need of !Xabbu's or Martine's: except for occasional wiggles of her fingers when she did not understand something, or a gentle touch by !Xabbu when she had made a mistake, the two of them were now communicating entirely through the string.
Renie awoke from a light doze; dream-images of nets and fences that somehow let things out rather than kept them in were still running in her brain. She could not at first understand what caused the yellow light.
The sun came back. . . ? was the first coherent thought that crossed her mind, and then she realized what she was seeing. Heart speeding, she clambered to her feet and hurried to wake F
lorimel. Martine and !Xabbu sat facing each other on the ground, both with their eyes shut, totally still except for their fingers, which moved slowly now in the web of string, as though making only the most minute adjustments.
"Get up!" Renie shouted. "It's the gateway, the gateway!"
T4b and Emily both came clawing up from sleep, amazed and frightened. Renie did not bother to explain, just urged them to their feet; with Florimel's help she shoved them toward the shimmering rectangle of cold fire before going back for Martine and !Xabbu. For a moment she hesitated, as though getting their attention might somehow break the circuit and dismiss the glowing gate, but it could not be helped. Any escape that did not include !Xabbu and Martine was not an escape they could take. When she gently shook them, they seemed to awaken from a dream.
"Come on!" she said. "You did it! You brilliant, brilliant people!"
"Before you get too happy," Florimel growled from beside the gateway, "remember that they have opened a doorway so we can chase a murderer."
"Florimel," Renie said as she helped Martine toward the golden light, "you are absolutely right. You can be in charge of security on the other side. Now shut up." She watched as the others stepped through, disappearing one by one into the brilliant light. As Martine vanished, Renie reached down and took !Xabbu's hand.
"You did so well," she told him.
As she stepped into the gateway, she looked back at the odd country that had sheltered them, even stranger now in the glaring, flattening light. Something moved near the fire—for a moment she thought she saw a human shape, but then decided it was just the wind kicking up sparks.
But there is no wind here, she remembered, then the dazzle enfolded her.
Nemesis.2 transitioned from the unstable appearance of flame to briefly inhabit something more like the shape of the creatures who had just vanished. As the icon representing the connection-point through which they had traveled shimmered and dwindled, Nemesis.2 prepared to give up shape altogether, but it still could find no coherent response to the organisms that had just departed.
