Mountain of Black Glass

by Tad Williams

  "Actually, we'd like to look around a bit." Calliope lit up a smile of her own and was pleased to see the other woman caught off-balance. "Has the hospital changed much in the last ten years?"

  Dr. Hazen recovered quickly. "Do you mean structurally or operationally? I've only been the director for two years, and I like to think we've improved our management processes in that time."

  "I don't know what I mean, exactly." Calliope turned to look at Stan Chan, who had clearly already decided that there were no bonus points for him in getting between his partner and the director. "Let's walk and talk, shall we?"

  "Oh." Dr. Hazen smiled again, but it was reflex. "I hadn't . . . You see, I've got such a lot to do today. . . ."

  "Of course. We understand. We'll just wander around on our own, then."

  "No, I couldn't let you . . . that would be terribly rude of me." The director smoothed her gray silk pants. "Let me just have ever such a quick word with my assistant, then I'll be right with you."

  The grounds were certainly nothing to complain about; even the most stiff-legged and disoriented of the patients did not, in the airy Sydney noontime, seem anything to be frightened of, but Calliope was still having trouble shaking her Gothic mood. As Dr. Hazen pointed out this or that fixture, her tone as bright as the day, they might have been touring the grounds of some particularly Bohemian private school. Still, Calliope reminded herself, most of these young people belonged in the category of dangerous-to-somebody, even if that somebody was only their own sad selves; it was a bit difficult to fall in with the director's breeziness.

  As they passed through a long lavender courtyard surrounded by roofed walkways, Calliope found herself studying the inmates with a little more attention. After all, the murder victim Polly Merapanui had definitely been here, and every investigative cell in Detective Skouros' body suggested that the girl had met her murderer here as well.

  The hospital population, at least in this semirandom sample, seemed to contain only a few Aboriginal patients, but as she looked at the disaffected faces of all colors, at eyes tracking on any movement for lack of something better to do, Calliope could not help remembering pictures she had seen of cattle stations in the outback, portraits of the local Aboriginals who had lost their land and their culture—people with nothing left to do but stand in the dusty streets and wait for something that was never going to happen, without even an inkling of what that something might be.

  The hospital also had rather a lot of armed guards, muscular young men talking to each other more often than to the inmates. Each wore a shirt with the Feverbrook corporate logo, as though they were roadies for a touring band; each had a stun-baton holstered on his hip.

  Dr. Hazen noticed her staring. "They're hand-coded, of course."

  "Sorry. . . ?"

  "The batons. They're hand-coded, so that only the guards can use them." She smiled, but it was the tight sort that weather announcers wore when assuring viewers the hurricane wouldn't be as bad as expected, but that they should lock themselves in their cellars anyway. "We are a secure facility, Detective. We do need guards."

  "I don't doubt it for a moment." Calliope squinted against the glare off a large pastel something-or-other that might have been a cement bench or a currently waterless fountain. "What's the building over there?"

  "Our media center. Would you like to see it?"

  The center was open-plan, a large space like an old-fashioned library with plenty of individual carrels, and with wallscreens placed at intervals around the perimeter on both levels. There were attendants here, or nurses, or whatever you called someone who worked in a secure hospital, but the guards seemed to outnumber them two to one. Calliope caught herself getting angry at being part of a society that put a higher priority on housing and stifling problem kids than on curing them, but pushed it aside: she herself was a link in the chain, and how much time did she usually spend worrying after the fact about the people she had arrested, or even their victims? Not that much, really. In any case, she had something more specific to do here than mourn the ills of human culture.

  Many of the inmates were clearly linked into various media, some by remote connections, others by more old-fashioned means. They sat in chairs by themselves, some of them far from either console or wallscreen; they might have been sleeping, or thinking, but there was something about the way they shuddered, about the movement of their lips, that made Calliope ask.

  "They're doing therapy-mods, most of them," Dr. Hazen explained, and then hurried to add, "We don't give them 'cans if they don't already have them, but if they've got them already—and almost all those who come in here with charge damage do—then we might as well put the holes to some use."

  "Does it work?"

  "Sometimes." Even the director couldn't muster much of a positive tone on that one.

  Stan had wandered closer to one of the carrels to watch an Asian girl who looked about thirteen. She was clearly hooked into some kind of simulation: her hands were jerking back and forth as though she were trying to keep an angry dog away from her throat.

  "Are they online?" Calliope asked. "Like, on the net?"

  "Oh, my God, no," laughed the director nervously. "No, everything here is in-house. These are not young people who can be given free access to the outside world. For their own good, I mean. Too many dangerous influences, too many things that even healthy adults have trouble assimilating."

  Calliope nodded. "We'd better see those files now."

  The dark-skinned woman who met them on their return to the administration complex seemed almost youthful enough to be one of the hospital's inmates, but Dr. Hazen introduced her as her assistant. The young woman, who seemed to have adopted a nervous, downcast gaze as a counterpoint to her employer's crisp demeanor, murmured something to the director that Calliope could not hear.

  "Well, if that's what we have, Miriam, then that's what we have." Dr. Hazen pointed them toward her office. "There's not much, apparently."

  A quick survey of the wallscreen demonstrated the truth of this. Polly Merapanui had a reasonable file containing the minutiae of her stay—medicine and dosages, doctor's notes, a few comments about how she interacted in group therapy or how she responded to various work assignments. There were even a few words written about her "difficult" relationship with her mother. The last comments indicated she had been released to a halfway house in Sydney.

  For Johnny Wulgaru, aka Johnny Dark, aka John Dread, there was only an admission date and the date on which he was returned to a standard juvenile correctional facility.

  "What is this?" Calliope demanded. "Where's the rest?"

  "That's all there is," said the director airily. "I can't manufacture information for you, Detective Skouros. Apparently he had a fairly quiet stay here—six months and out, no disciplinary problems." She was watching Stan Chan out of the corner of her eye as he rolled through the records on either side of Wulgaru's. "Please," she said to him suddenly. "We've given you what you came for, cooperated fully—that other information has nothing to do with your case. It's private."

  Stan nodded but did not step away from the station.

  "I'm finding it hard to believe that someone with a sheet in the police system as long as your leg came in here and waltzed out half a year later without attracting any attention at all." Calliope took a breath—it would do no good to antagonize this woman. "Surely you can understand our problem with that."

  The doctor shrugged. "As I said, I can't manufacture information for you."

  "Then is there anyone here who remembers him? One of the doctors—even one of the guards?"

  The director shook her head emphatically, "There's been a complete staff turnover since this hospital was sold five years ago. To tell the truth, Lieutenant, there were some problems here before, and the new owners felt it was best to begin with a clean slate. You can do that with a private hospital—no unions." It was hard to tell whether she thought that was a good thing or not, but Calliope guessed the former. />
  Miriam leaned forward and whispered in the director's ear.

  "Surely not?" said Dr. Hazen. Her assistant nodded. "Miriam says there's one person here from that time—Sandifer, one of the gardeners." She looked a bit stone-faced. "Apparently I hired him without realizing he'd worked here a few years earlier."

  "Let's talk to him," said Calliope.

  "I'll have Miriam get him. Detective Chan, I've already asked you once—would you please get out of those people's files?"

  Calliope had been expecting a whiskery old fellow in an ocker hat, but Sandifer turned out to be a husky, fairly nice-looking man in his late thirties who wore his hair in the dramatic fashion of a decade earlier. Calliope could visualize him playing in some kind of revival band and referring to his work at the hospital as "my day job." He was reticent until Calliope managed to persuade Dr. Hazen she wanted to interview him without the director's stifling presence.

  In an unused office, Sandifer loosened up. "You working on a case?"

  "No, of course not." Calliope was already tired of Feverbrook Hospital. "We're just driving all over talking to people because we get bored hanging around the police station. Did you know a patient who was here about five years ago named John Wulgaru?"

  Sandifer stuck out his lower lip, thinking, and shook his head.

  "Johnny Dark?" Stan chimed in. "John Dread?"

  "Johnny Dread!" Sandifer barked a laugh. "Oh, yeah, I remember Johnny-boy."

  "What can you tell us about him?"

  Sandifer sat back, enjoying himself. "What can I say except that I'm glad I never met him outside. He was a doubtless psycho, tell you for free."

  "What makes you say that?"

  "His eyes, just for one thing. You know what fish eyes look like? How you can't even tell if they're alive or not unless they're moving? That was Johnny-boy. Scariest little sonofabitch I ever saw, and some of the kids that come through here are pretty lockin' scary, tell you for free."

  Calliope felt a quickening in her pulse, and only barely resisted looking at her partner. "Do you have any idea what happened to him after he left here? More importantly, do you have any idea where he is now?"

  "No, but it shouldn't be too hard to figure out."

  "Why is that?"

  Sandifer looked from her to Stan and back again, trying to figure out if he was being set up for some kind of trick. "Because he's dead, lady. He's dead."

  The voices in her head were silent now, but Olga was still having trouble pretending things were normal. It's like I've been to another world, she thought. Nothing in my old life will ever feel the same again.

  The real world still looked much as it always had, of course, and corporate headquarters, a building she had visited many times for job reviews or company functions, was no exception. It had the same high ceilings as ever, the same employees scuttling like minor priests in a great cathedral, and here in this executive's corner office, the same face on the wallscreen that she had been living with, and living behind, for so many years.

  The sound was off, but Uncle Jingle's dance filled the huge wallscreen behind the desk, Uncle moving through a silent sweep with baggy pants flapping, turn after turn so swift that even the animated birds, coded for flocking, were having trouble keeping up with him. Even with her old self almost gone, Olga Pirofsky could not help taking note of the character's skillful movements. That new girl was running him, the one in Mexico—or was it New Mexico? Wherever she was based, she was good. Roland had been right.

  I'll never be the new girl, not anywhere, not ever again, Olga thought, and although it was not a very surprising realization—she was, after all, at an age when anyone would have at least begun to think about retirement—it still brought her up short. For a moment she could almost convince herself to ignore what had happened in the night, the voices that had come to her and changed everything. For a moment she felt herself worrying about the children she had entertained for so many years, and worrying about how much she would miss them. But the children that mattered most now were inside her, and if their voices were muted for the moment, there was still no ignoring them. Everything had changed. From the outside, it might seem like just another day in the world, Uncle Jingle spinning in his same circles and a hundred professionals behind the scenes working to make it so, but Olga knew that nothing would ever be the same.

  The company vice president—Famham, Fordham, she couldn't remember the name and would have no reason to care the moment she left the office—wound up his call, snapping a brisk farewell to an invisible someone. He grinned at Olga and nodded to show her that he was finished.

  "I don't know why I'm smiling." He shook his head, bemused by his own madcap unpredictability, then rearranged his features into an imitation of concern. "We here at Obolos Entertainment are going to miss you, Olga. The show won't be the same without you, that's for sure." She was just old-fashioned enough to dislike hearing her first name in the mouth of a man almost twenty years her junior, but also old-fashioned enough not to make an issue of it, even today when she had nothing left to lose. But Olga didn't want to waste a lot of time with insincere pleasantries either—she had several things still to do, and some of them frightened her even more than accepting semipermanent medical leave from Uncle Jingle's Jungle.

  "I'll miss the place," she said, and realized it was true. "But I don't think it's good for me to do live netfeeds any more—not with this problem." She felt more than a little treacherous calling it a problem, since it was now dazzlingly clear to her it was something much greater and stranger than that, but here in the normal world it was easier to speak a language the locals could understand.

  "Of course, of course." On the screen behind Fordham or Farnham, Uncle Jingle had finished his dance and now was telling a story, with many broad hand gestures. "Needless to say, we are all wishing you a speedy recovery—not to hurry you back to work, however!" He laughed, then seemed a trifle irritated when Olga did not join him. "Well, I can't really think there's too much we need to do—these exit interviews are largely a formality, of course."

  "Of course."

  He scanned her file briefly on his shimmery desk, reiterating several facts about her medical leave package that she had already heard at several other interviews; after lobbing a few more homilies, he brought the audience to a merciful close. Olga could not help wondering what out-of-date concept this meeting served—would this once have been, in its original incarnation, a chance to pat-search the hired help as they left, to make sure no family silverware was going with them? Or did O.E. Corp. really believe its own marketing babble: "Your friends for life!"

  Olga let the sourly amusing thought slide past. Was it always this way, no matter the power of the madness or glory visited on a person—the continual resurgence of the mundane, the petty? Had Joan of Arc wondered, on those occasions when her voices temporarily fell silent, if such and such a tower was as tall as another she had seen, or whether she looked fat in her armor?

  It had happened only two nights before.

  Olga had left both the Uncle Jingle character and the show half an hour early because her head was hurting so badly. It had been a while since she had experienced one of the headaches, but this one had been terrifying in its intensity, as though her skull were a hot, thin-shelled egg out of which something was trying to force itself. Even after a double dose of painblockers she had not fallen asleep for hours, and when sleep had come she had been beset by monstrous dreams full of images that she could not now remember, but which along with the continuing pain had several times shocked her into wakefulness.

  She had awakened again sometime in that coldest, emptiest hour of the night, between three and four, but this time the pain was gone. She had found herself regarding the dark and quiet around her from an oddly dispassionate frame of mind, as though whatever had been causing the headaches had finally hatched from its egg, crawled out her ear, and vanished. She did not feel restored to her old self, however, but rather that as peace had returned,
something else had been lost.

  Without quite knowing why, she had walked across her house without switching on any lights, ignoring even the plaintive, questioning yips from Misha, and slipped into her deep station-chair. When the fiberlink was in place, she did not enter the Obolos system, or even the deeper levels of her own. She sat in darkness and felt the emptiness all around her, felt it fizzing on the other end of the fiberlink, so close it seemed that it could touch her any time it wished.

  And then it had touched her.

  The first moments had been a horrifying plunge into absence, into the empty dark, a cartwheeling fall without possibility of rescue. Fleetingly she had thought, "Dying—this is death," before giving herself up to the black pull. But it had not been death, or else the afterlife was strange beyond the dreams of anyone's religion.

  They had come to her slowly at first, the children—their lives separate and precious, each one a miracle as individual as a snowflake caught on a mittened palm. She had experienced each life—had been each child—so thoroughly that the part of her that had been Olga Pirofsky was barely present at all, a shadowy form clinging to a school fence, staring in as the little ones ran and laughed and danced at the center of everything. Then the trickle became a stream, lives washing through her so swiftly that she could no longer differentiate between them—a moment of family togetherness here, an object of intense wondering scrutiny there, each gone almost too swiftly to register.

  The stream became a flood, and Olga had felt the last shreds of her own identity blasted away as the rush of youthful lives forced its way through her, faster and faster. In the last moment the inundation was so powerful that hundreds, perhaps thousands of individual moments became a single thing, a sensation of loss and desertion so powerful that it seemed to engage the very cells of her being. The flow of lives had combined to become a single, drawn-out, silent scream of misery.