by Tad Williams
(visual: anonymated neighbor)
NEIGHBOR: "Let's put it this way—even if he did make it work, and the kid's certainly looking kind of stiff, then we wouldn't be surprised if Jacobson threw him out the window to test it. . . ."
It had been a while since Orlando had spoken for such a long time, and he was not in very good condition. By the time he had reached the part of his recent history where he and Fredericks had first entered the harbor at Temilún, he was feeling much as he had been feeling then—tired and sick.
Bonita Mae Simpkins said very little, interrupting only to get an occasional clarification on some piece of netboy slang or to grouse at him for spending too much time on details interesting only to teenagers. She had offered nothing yet of her own, but her very reticence was making Orlando feel more trusting. Whoever she was, she was certainly not trying to sweet-talk him into betraying confidences.
A flaming wick in a bowl of oil colored the room with flickering yellow light and long shadows. Outside, the imaginary Egypt had grown dark, and from time to time strange sounds drifted to them through the hot desert night. As Orlando told of the Atascos' death and the flight from their throne room, a terrible, sobbing wail from somewhere nearby made him stop and fall silent, heart beating. Fredericks, sitting on the foot of the bed, was also pale and nervous.
"Don't worry, boy," Mrs. Simpkins told him. "Before he went, Mr. Al-Sayyid made sure that this house was protected. You could say it has charms on it, but that's heathenish, and what he did's more scientific. But nothing's coming in—not tonight, anyway."
"Who's Mr. Al-Sayyid?"
"You're not done talkin' yet, and I haven't started. Keep going."
Orlando shrugged and tried to pick up the tale. He moved quickly through the escape from Temilún and their travels in the miniature world, grimacing when Fredericks insisted he explain how he had fought with a giant, homicidal millipede. It wasn't so much that Orlando was embarrassed—he had acquitted himself fairly well, he thought—but it was clearly the sort of swashbuckling detail this stern woman did not want to hear. He hurried on to their sojourn in the cartoon world, then was forced to repeat the tale of what had happened to them in the Freezer several times while Mrs. Simpkins asked a number of shrewd questions.
"So that was her, too—the feather-goddess? You're sure?"
Orlando nodded. "It . . . it feels like the same person. Looked like her, too, sort of. Who is she?"
His questioner only shook her head. "And the other thing, the thing you only felt—what your friend here called 'the actual factual Devil'? Tell me about that again."
He did, or tried to, but it was hard to put the experience into words, as difficult as describing really intense pain—something he had done enough times for people who wanted to understand but couldn't—to know it never really worked. "So, was it the devil?" he asked when he had finished, although he felt pretty sure he knew what this woman with her frequent talk of the Lord and Jesus would say.
She surprised him. "No, I don't think it was. But it may be something almost worse. I think it's a kind of devil that mortal men have made, men so full of pride they think they are God Himself."
"What do you mean?"
Again she would only shake her head. "It's too much to talk about all at once. Anyway, you're tired, boy—just look at the state of you. You need some sleep."
Orlando and Fredericks both flinched as something that was not a dog whined and barked in the street just outside the window. "I'm not going to sleep for a while," Orlando said truthfully. "Tell us where you're from. You promised."
"I did no such thing." She stared at him hard, but he had seen enough of her to know she was not angry, only considering. She turned to Fredericks. "I suppose you want to hear, too."
Orlando's friend nodded his head. "It would be nice to know something for a change."
"All right. But I don't want any questions until I'm done, and if you open your yaps before then, you can just watch me walk away." She scowled to show she meant business. "And I'm not going to say anything twice.
"My husband Terence and I belong to the Revelation Church of Christ, down in Porterville, Mississippi, and we are proud to do the Lord's work. You have to understand that first of all. We're what you might call muscular Christians—that's what our pastor says, anyway. We work hard for Jesus and we're not much on that airy-fairy nonsense like church picnics and car washes. We come to church and we sing and we pray, and sometimes we do get loud. Some people call us holy rollers, 'cause when the Lord lays His hand on one of us, we start to shout and talk about it a little."
Orlando found himself nodding, almost mesmerized by the rhythm of her voice, even though he had only the faintest idea what she was talking about. His parents had only taken him to church once, to a cousin's wedding, and didn't go much themselves except for chamber music, when one of the local places of worship was used as a concert hall.
"And we don't hold with judging people all the time either," she said in a tone that suggested Orlando might have been just about to suggest they did. "Our God is all-powerful, and He will show people the truth. What might be in their heart afterward is between them and the Lord. You understand me, you boys?"
Both Orlando and Fredericks hastened to indicate that they did.
"Now, the Lord never gifted me or Terence with children—it just wasn't His plan for us, but I'd be lyin' if I told you I never wondered or questioned why. But we both had a chance to work with plenty of 'em, Terence teaching shop at the local middle school, me working in the emergency room at the hospital in De Kalb. It's sad, but a whole lot of the children I saw were in bad shape. If you don't think you need the Lord in your heart and your life, you never saw a bunch of children been in a school bus crash start coming into the ER by twos and threes. That'll test you.
"Anyway, that's none of it to the point. What I'm trying to say is that we had plenty of things in our lives, God had already given us our work to do, and we had nieces and nephews, too, so if we wondered sometimes why the Lord never gave us our own baby to raise, we didn't wonder long. Then Mr. Al-Sayyid came to First Revelation.
"He was this little dark-colored man, and when Pastor Winsallen first brought him up to introduce him, I thought he might be collecting for one of those backward foreign countries you only hear about when they have an earthquake or something. He had a nice voice, though—very proper, like that English gentleman you see on the net in all those imitation beef commercials, you know the one? Anyway, this Mr. Al-Sayyid told us that he was a Copt. I didn't know what that was—at first, I thought he meant he was a policeman, which was kind of funny because he wasn't much higher than my shoulder and I'm not all that big. But he explained that he was from Egypt, and the Copts were a Christian religion, even if we hadn't heard of 'em. He gave a little talk about the group he belonged to, called Circle of Fellowship, which did all kinds of charitable work in poor countries, and then Pastor Winsallen collected some money, just like I figured.
"But it was afterward that we found out the whole truth. Pastor Winsallen asked Terence and me if we would stay and talk after the rest of the congregation went home, so of course we stayed. We were thinking he would ask us to put this little man up at our place, and I was in a fret because I had all my mother's things still packed in boxes in the guest room and it hadn't been aired out or anything. I suppose I was also a little worried because I'd never had a foreign person in my house and I didn't know what kind of food he'd eat or anything. But that wasn't what the pastor wanted at all."
Mrs. Simpkins paused, considering. For a moment she almost smiled, a twist of the mouth that might have been embarrassment. "That was the strangest night of my life, I can tell you. See, turned out that not only was this Mr. Al-Sayyid's group a lot bigger and more . . . unusual than he'd let on before, but Pastor Winsallen knew some of them from his days at the university and was looking to help them out. But that wasn't what was strange, no, not by a long yard. Mr. Al-Sayyid began telling his story, an
d I swear n sounded like something out of the worst kinds of science-fiction nonsense. It got dark outside, he talked so long, and I thought I was in some kind of dream, the things he said were so unbelievable. But there was Pastor Winsallen—Andy Winsallen, who I've known since he came in to have his broken leg fixed when he was thirteen—just nodding his head at all of it. He'd heard it before and he believed it, you could tell.
"You know some of what Mr. Al-Sayyid said to us, because it was said to you, too—these Grail people, and all the harm being done to innocent children—but there was more. Mr. Al-Sayyid told us that his Circle group, which was made up of people from all kinds of faiths working together, thought that the Grail folk were using children somehow to make their immortality-machines work, and that they would have to keep using more and more of them, because even though the project had only gone on for a few years, some of the children had died already, and these people planned on living forever and ever."
"Does that mean that Sellars was one of those guys, Orlando?" Fredericks asked suddenly. "One of these Circle of Fellowship or whatever they're called?"
Orlando could only shrug.
"I never heard of your Sellars before now, if that means anything," Mrs. Simpkins said. "But what was even stranger still, Mr. Al-Sayyid told us that night, was that one of the people in the Circle—the real group doesn't have any "Fellowship" in its name, that was just one of their charities—was a Russian fellow, a scientist, I guess, and he had told the other Circle folk that he thought these Grail Brotherhood people . . . that they were drilling a hole in God."
Orlando waited a moment to make sure he'd heard correctly. He glanced over at Fredericks, who looked as though he'd just been struck on the head with a good-sized rock. "Drilling a hole in. . . ? What kind of scanbark is that? I mean, no offense, but. . . ."
Bonita Mae Simpkins laughed, a quick slap of sound. "That's what I said, boy! Not quite those words, but that's pretty much exactly what I said! I was surprised Pastor Winsallen didn't call it blasphemy, but he just sat there looking serious. I don't know what that young man got up to while he was away at college, but it wasn't like any preacher-teaching I've ever heard of." She laughed again. "Mr. Al-Sayyid tried to explain it to us. He had such a nice smile! He said that even with all the differences between our faiths—he and his Coptic friends, we Revelation Baptists, the Buddhists and Moslems and whatnot, all the other kinds of religions they had in their Circle group—there was one thing we all had in common. He said we alt believed that we could get in the right state of mind, I guess, and touch God. I'm probably saying it wrong, because he was a very good speaker and I'm not, but that's more or less the size of it. We reach out for God, or the infinite, or whatever people want to call it. Well, he said, some of the people in the Circle had been feeling that something was . . . wrong. When they prayed, or meditated, or whatever it was they all did, they could feel something was different in the . . . in the place they went to, or the feeling that they got. In the Holy Spirit, we Revelation folk would say. Like if you walk into a room you know real well, you can feel sometimes if someone else's been in it?"
Orlando shook his head. "I don't think I'm getting any of this. My head hurts. Not from what you're saying," he hastened to explain. "Just because I'm sick."
The woman's smile was almost gentle this time. "Of course you are, boy. And I'm just talking and talking. There's really not much more to explain about that, anyway, because I don't truly understand what they're saying myself. But you get some sleep now, and we'll think about where we're going to go tomorrow."
"Where we're going to go?"
"I told you, this is a war zone. Those miserable creatures, Tefy and Mewat—the ones who work for Osiris—are pretty busy putting down this uprising. But after they do, I can promise you they're gonna be going house to house, rounding up whoever they want to call sympathizers, scaring everyone as bad as they can so it doesn't happen again. And you boys stick out like two real sore thumbs. Now get some sleep."
Orlando slept, but it was not very restful. He found himself floating in a black sea of troubled, feverish dreams which washed across him in waves, as though he were once again trapped in the temple. Images of various childhoods, none of them his own, followed one after the other, interspersed with cryptic visions of the black pyramid a vast and silent observer looming over everything.
Oddest of all, though, were dreams that were not of children or pyramids, but of things he could not remember seeing when either awake or dreaming—a castle surrounded by clouds, a jungle full of heavy, flowered branches, the shrieking of a bird. He even dreamed of Ma'at, the goddess of Justice, but not as she had appeared to him before, with feather and Egyptian garb: the dream-version was something kept in a cage, a winged creature that seemed more bird than human, with only feathers to cover her nakedness. The only thing the same was sadness, the deep, mourning look in her eyes.
He woke to flat morning light on the white walls. His head still hurt, but it felt a little clearer than the night before. The dreams had not completely left him: for the first moments of consciousness he was both in a bed in Egypt and pitching and rocking on rough seas. When he groaned and swung his legs off the pallet, he almost expected to feel cold water.
Bonita Mae Simpkins poked her small, black-haired head around the doorframe. "Are you sure you're ready to be up and around, boy? Do you want a pot?"
A first attempt had convinced him he was not yet ready to sit up. "A what?"
"A pot. You know, to do your business in."
Orlando shuddered. "No, thanks!" He considered for a moment. "We don't need to do that here, anyway."
"Well, some folks prefer to do things the normal way when they're having a long stay in VR, even if it doesn't make any real difference." She had put down whatever she had been doing, and now walked into the room. "Mr. Jehani—he was one of the other fellows—said it was easier on the mind if you just pretended you were still in the real world, and kept drinking, and eating, and even. . . ."
"I get it," said Orlando hurriedly. "Where's Fredericks?"
"Sleeping. He sat up half the night with you. You made a powerful fuss." She flattened her hand on his forehead, then straightened. "You were talking about Ma'at in your sleep. The goddess with the feather."
Orlando's decision to ask Mrs. Simpkins what she made of his dreams was interrupted by a cloud of small yellow flying things that whirled in through the doorway and settled on his arms and legs and on various other surfaces in the sparsely-decorated room.
"Awake! 'Landogarner awake!" Zunni cried happily, and rose from his knee to turn a little somersault in the air. "Now we set off big fun-bomb!"
"Kabooom!" shouted another monkey and pretended to explode, flinging itself into some of its companions and setting off a wrestling match that rolled down Orlando's stomach, tickling horribly.
"You get off him, you creatures," said Mrs. Simpkins irritably. "The boy is sick. Just because this is ancient Egypt doesn't mean they don't have brooms, and if you don't want me to take one to the whole lot of you, you'll go perch on that chair and mind your manners."
Watching the Wicked Tribe immediately do as they were told was one of the most astonishing things Orlando had ever seen. His fearful respect for the little round woman went up another notch.
Fredericks came in, rubbing puffy-lidded eyes as he delivered his news. "There's a bunch of people shouting outside."
"Fredericks!" called the monkeys. "Pith-pith the mighty thief! Play with us!"
"There is indeed," said Mrs. Simpkins. "If Orlando feels strong enough, we're going up to have a look."
After getting slowly to his feet, Orlando was pleased to discover he felt reasonably able. He followed her out into the hallway with Fredericks and the monkeys close behind. The house was bigger than Orlando had guessed—the hallway alone stretched almost fifteen meters—and the beautiful wall paintings of flowers and trees and a marsh full of ducks suggested it must belong to someone important.
&
nbsp; "Yes, it does," his guide said when he asked. "Or it did. To Mr. Al-Sayyid, who was an undersecretary in the palace—a royal scribe."
"I don't understand."
"Because I never finished explaining. All in due time."
She led them down the hall, through a set of family apartments, and finally to an airy, pillared room which seemed to have been the master bedroom, but showed no signs of recent habitation. A door off this room opened into a pretty walled garden with trellises of flowers and a pond; Orlando was quite surprised at how much like a modern garden it seemed. They did not linger, but followed Mrs. Simpkins as she stumped up a series of ramps that led to the roof, which was flat and surfaced with dried mud spread like plaster. An awning had been erected at one end, and cushions and stools and a neat small table made of painted wood arranged in its shade showed that this was probably a favorite spot on warm days.
Orlando noted these details in passing, but was more immediately arrested by the sight of the city itself spreading away on all sides. Beyond the gardens and walls of the villa—which was even larger than he had suspected—lay other, similar properties, surrounded by a broad belt of smaller houses on narrower streets, extending outward right to the river's edge. Even from so far away he could see naked people clambering in the mud along the river-banks, perhaps making bricks to build other villas. Although hundreds of boats and ships still plied its waters, the Nile was clearly at very low ebb and the mud flats were wide.
But the most interesting views were in the direction away from the river. In the extreme western distance, set neatly atop the spine of the mountains that ran parallel to the broad Nile, was what appeared to be a beautiful city of temples and palaces, so starkly white that it shimmered like a mirage even in the mild morning sunlight.
"Abydos," said Mrs. Simpkins. "But not like in the real Egypt. That's the home of Osiris. He's as close to an 'actual, factual devil' as I hope any of us are likely to see."
Closer, clinging to the foothills like barnacles on the upturned hull of a boat, were many more temples in many different styles; between the temple hills and Orlando's balcony viewpoint lay more of the city and its houses, box after box of pale mud brick like an overambitious display of rectangular crockery.
