by Tad Williams
The company in which Orlando found himself was already fairly conspicuous, since besides the god Bes and Orlando's own massive barbarian sim, it featured Bonita Mae Simpkins, Fredericks, and a flock of tiny yellow monkeys—but Bes had chosen to lead them all boldly down the narrow streets of Abydos in the glaring sunlight.
"Shouldn't we be . . . hiding or something?" Orlando asked. Several more people leaned out of the houses to wave to Bes, who returned their greetings with the cheerful nonchalance of a returning hero. Orlando leaned closer to Mrs. Simpkins. "Going through back alleys? Instead of just utterly walking down the middle of the road?"
"Bes knows what he's doing, boy. They love him here—a lot more than they love Osiris and all his Western Palace lackeys. Besides, all the soldiers are busy surrounding the Temple of Ra, not wandering around in this part of town."
"Right. Surrounding the temple. Which is where we're going." Orlando turned to Fredericks, who at least had the good grace to share his confusion. "So because we want to avoid the soldiers, we're going where all the soldiers are. . . ?"
The woman snorted. "You have all the faith of a mud puppy, child. How do you get through life?"
For a moment, Orlando was stung. He wanted to lash out at her, to point out that she didn't have an illness like his, so she didn't have much right to be smug about how people got through their lives, but he knew she didn't really mean it that way. "Just talk to me, Mrs. Simpkins," he said heavily. "I need some answers."
She darted a quick look at him, perhaps hearing something in his tone. Her hard smile disappeared. "Call me Bonnie Mae, boy. I think it's time."
"I'm listening . . . Bonnie Mae."
Fredericks was walking close beside them, anxious to hear whatever was said. The monkeys had lost interest, and were following Bes like a fluttering yellow cape as the little god capered for the children trotting out of the houses to line the impromptu parade route.
"I told you how Mr. Al-Sayyid came to our church, didn't I? And about Pastor Winsallen, how he had us come meet the man afterward, and they explained about this Circle group of theirs?"
"Yeah," Fredericks said, "but you said something really strange about God—that they were drilling a hole in Him, or something."
She smiled. "That's what I said, because that's what they told me. More or less. And I can't really explain because I didn't completely understand it myself, but they said that people in religions all over the world had been noticing something when they prayed—or meditated I guess if they were those Eastern folk. Something was breaking through into the part of them that touched God."
"Like it was a . . . a place?" asked Orlando, mystified. The sun was beginning to tire him. They had moved into a less cheerful part of town—the natives here were poorer, and while they still greeted Bes respectfully, some covert glances were being cast at the god's followers.
"Like it was a place. Or maybe not. Anyway, it doesn't matter, boy—if it's true or if it isn't, what you or I think isn't gonna have a lot to do with it. A lot of very smart people believe it. But all I needed to know was that these Grail people were using innocent children to make some kind of immortality machine, like out of one of those science fiction things the kids rot their minds with. Doesn't take any religion at all to know that's wrong.
"So we joined the Circle, and Pastor Winsallen helped us raise some money to go stay with Mr. Al-Sayyid and his friends at one of their special training centers. We told the congregation we were going to do some missionary work with the Copts, which was true in a way. Anyway, the Circle people got us fitted up and sent us here, although I guess they didn't really send us anywhere. Hard to remember, sometimes—it feels like we're somewhere. Mr. Al-Sayyid and some of his friends like Mr. Jehani, who was a Moslem gentleman, were Egyptologists, so they had set themselves up here, but there are Circle people in lots of different Otherland worlds.
"It was pretty exciting in those first days—behind enemy lines, like something you dream about when you're a kid, but doing the Lord's true work. The Circle had the whole thing set up—the place you've been staying, that was one of our safe houses, I think you call it. We had a few, since Mr. Al-Sayyid had a good job in the palace. We had other Circle people coming through, updating us on what was going on outside—there's no way to communicate from one of these worlds to another, see, unless you're one of the so-called Grail folks."
She took a deep breath and wiped sweat from her brow—the sun was high now and the day was becoming uncomfortably hot. Orlando wondered what she looked like in real life. Her small, round, nondescript Egyptian sim fit her personality, but he of all people knew there was no judging people by what they looked like in VR.
"So there we were," she continued. "Doing research, I guess—the Circle's a big organization, and we were only foot soldiers, you might say. That's how I first heard about the woman with the feather, the one they call Ma'at here. She's in other worlds, too, as far as we can tell. Maybe she's one of the Grail folk, or maybe she's just something the engineers put in more than once—people tell me that these gear folk are big ones for jokes. But she's not the only one. Tefy and Mewat, those goons who work for Osiris? They're in lots of worlds, too. People call them the Twins because they always show up together. There are probably others as well—we never finished our research. The poop kind of hit the fan, as a matter of fact."
Bes had led them on a winding route through the town's close-quartered streets, but they had turned their backs on the river some time ago; because he was already fatigued, Orlando could not help noticing that they were now going uphill more often than not, heading toward the highlands—the gods' own turf. He would have been worried, but he had enough to do in this heat just walking and trying to pay attention to Bonnie Mae's story.
"You see, the biggest mystery of all is the Other. Do you know that name? I know you know what I'm talking about, boy, because you've had a closer look than most people. 'Set,' the Egyptians here call it, but it's got a lot of names in a lot of different simulation worlds. See, that thing is the key, somehow—at least, that's what all the big thinkers in the Circle believe. They think it's some kind of artificial intelligence, but it's also the system that operates the whole network. I won't try to explain, because you young people probably know more about this stuff than I do, but that's what they think. They guess that the Grail people may have tried to create some entirely new kind of life, y'see? And maybe that's the strange effect the people in the Circle felt—a blasphemy-wave, is what Mr. Jehani called it. He had a real nice sense of humor for an Islamic fellow. He was killed by some horrible thing with a hippopotamus head when Upaut's revolution went wrong.
"See, we made a mistake, and you young people would do well to pay attention. We made too many friends—we had to, because something changed a few weeks ago. No one could go offline anymore. So we were stuck, trying to get some answers.
"We figured any enemy of the Grail—and the Grail means Osiris here in this world, because if he's not Grail Brotherhood I don't know who is, he lives like some kind of Roman emperor up there—any enemy of them must be a friend of ours. So when your wolf-friend came along, we let ourselves get a little too familiar with him. But of course he was nutty as a bag of cashew brittle. We should never have gone near him.
"A group of our folk were meeting with him in one of our other houses when Tefy and Mewat and a mess of their devil-creatures crashed in. Mr. Jehani was killed. So was Mister Al-Sayyid, but they tore him up so badly that I don't think they even knew who they'd got. Wolfman escaped with some of his followers and a couple of other people from the Circle, but my poor Terence wasn't so lucky." She paused; Orlando expected to see tears, or hear a hitch in her voice, but when she continued, there was no sign of either. "It's just like the old Christian martyrs—my Terence knew what could happen when he came here. He put his faith in the Lord, just like I do every day. They took him to one of their cells, and I don't even want to know what happened to him. But he stayed strong. He was strong. I
f he'd given them anything more than name, rank, and serial number, I wouldn't be here today, and that safe house wouldn't have been safe for you.
"They dumped his body in one of the public squares. I couldn't go and take it, of course—didn't dare show any interest at all. It just lay there for days. Sims don't rot, but that didn't make it any belter—worse . . . worse in some ways." Here she paused again, and now Orlando could begin to grasp the kind of control Bonita Mae Simpkins exercised over herself. When she resumed, she still sounded almost normal. "And I know he's dead, dead for real. Something's changed in this place. But I knew right away. It's like waking up and knowing you're somewhere different than you should be, even before you open your eyes. I lived with that man twenty-three years. I knew that he was gone."
She walked in silence for a while. Fredericks, who had been listening avidly, turned away with a miserable expression on his face. Orlando tried to watch the monkeys swirling around Bes, hoping for a bit of distraction.
Noticing him, a pair of yellow apes peeled off from the squadron and fluttered back, squeaking. " 'Landogarner! Why you walk slow, slow, slow?"
He wanted to hush them, but Mrs. Simpkins reached up her hand and the pair lit on her finger. "Goodness, children," she said, her voice a little ragged but otherwise strong, "you do go on. Aren't your mommas and daddies missing you?"
Zunni—Orlando had recognized her voice—looked up at Bonnie Mae, her tiny eyes wide. "Don't know. We go on fun trips lotsa time. They know we always come back."
Mrs. Simpkins nodded her head. "Of course they do."
The streets were emptier here, in what Orlando was coming to realize must be the mortuary district. The few residents, tomb caretakers and their families, also recognized Bes, but their reception of him was more muted, in keeping with the environs. The streets themselves were even narrower, little more than paths between the blocky stone buildings, the undistinguished resting places of civil servants and shop owners, as though there was even less room tor the dead in Abydos than there was for the living.
But if this simulation is supposed to be the Egyptian afterlife, Orlando wondered, then who's supposed to he in the tombs? He couldn't think of an immediate answer, and was distracted by the little company turning off the street of sepulchres and into a tunnel.
As the tallest of the group, Orlando had to stoop a little to keep his head from brushing the unfinished granite ceiling, but otherwise there was no impediment. The tunnel was clean and the desert heat had baked it dry. The light became fainter as they got farther from the opening, but there was still quite enough to see, although most of the side corridors were pitch dark.
"Where are we?" he asked.
"Worker's tunnel," Bes called over his shoulder, his voice echoing faintly. "They run through the tomb and temple district like rat holes—each of these openings leads to another part of the complex."
"And we're going to get into the Temple of Ra this way?"
"If something large and unpleasant doesn't eat us first."
The little god had scored on him again: despite his weariness, Orlando was ashamed of how badly he'd let his Thargor repartee slip since he'd been in the Grail network.
As they turned into the first of what proved to be many branching corridors, Bes withdrew a lighted oil lamp from his loose but limited garments. Orlando and Fredericks had seen the cartoon Indian in the Kitchen do the same trick, and said nothing. The Wicked Tribe, who had achieved a level of Zen acceptance far beyond anything that Orlando could ever aspire to, pretended to be moths, enacting several tragicomic mock-immolations around the lamp flame.
What seemed almost an hour passed with corridor replacing corridor, each one as hot, dry, and empty but for a thin film of sand as the one before. Just as Orlando was beginning to feel certain he would never make it to the end of the journey, his breathing harsh and his legs so tired they felt rubbery, Bes led them through another entrance and stopped. He held the lamp out before him, a height only slightly above Orlando's knees, to reveal a small chamber. Most of the floor was missing, although the straight edges of the five-meter-square hole showed that this was not an accident.
"Down there," said Bes, grinning. "That's where we go. Straight down about twenty cubits, but into water. Problem is, there's no coming back that way—the walls are slick as polished amber. A protection against temple raiders and tomb thieves. So you'd better be certain you want to go."
"You mean we're supposed to . . . to jump?" asked Fredericks, who had been silent for some time.
"If you prefer, you can just sort of fall." The little god smirked. "The walls are this wide apart all the way down—that's to make sure people can't brace themselves and climb back up—so you don't have to worry much about scraping the sides."
Fredericks looked worried. "Can't you just . . . fly us down? Use your god powers or whatever?"
Bes laughed raucously. "God powers? I am a god of the hearth, patron of dung and whitewash and menstrual blood. You are the war god, aren't you—one of those deities who hurries to wherever the drums and trumpets are sounding? So why don't you fly us down?"
Orlando was too busy catching his breath. Fredericks was on his own.
"We . . . we have a flying chariot," he said at last. "That's what we have. Back home."
Mrs. Simpkins shot him a look. "They're not very important gods, Bes. Be nice to them."
The yellow monkeys, who had swooped into the hole the moment they saw it, now rose from the darkness like a cloud of burning sulphur.
"Long way down!" they whooped. "Motto grosso windy wind! Then wet wet splash splash!"
"Don't be 'fraid, 'Landogarner! Crocodiles be may pequeno baby ones!"
"Crocodiles?" said Fredericks in alarm.
"They're making that up," said Bonnie Mae, swatting at the overexcited monkeys with her hand. "Let's get going."
Bes was amused by the whole thing. "They must fight unusual wars on those small islands in the Great Green," he said to Fredericks, leering. "Face-slapping, piss-your-loincloth, girly wars. . . ."
"Hey!" Fredericks said, fluffing himself up to look bigger, not really necessary when his potential opponent was the size of a cocker spaniel.
"Stop it." Orlando was tired and had no strength to waste on such silliness. "Let's go. How far do we have to swim once we're in the water?"
Bes turned to him, still grinning. "Not far, not far. But you won't come back this way, as I said. You still interested?"
Orlando nodded wearily.
The leap, when it came, was a sort of relief—an escape from gravity, at least for a few moments. The water at the bottom was warm as blood. There was very little light. Fredericks splashed down beside him seconds later, and they floundered in place until Bes and Bonnie Mae Simpkins plunged in.
"Again!" squealed the monkeys, circling above the water.
"So," Orlando gasped some minutes later as Bes tugged him up onto a stone walkway, "if there's no way back, how are you going to get out after you take us there?"
"He's Bes, boy," said Mrs. Simpkins.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Orlando growled. The tiny man had a grip like a longshoreman; Orlando wiggled his hand to renew the circulation.
"It means that even Squinty and Bonebreaker will think twice about trying to keep me somewhere when I wish to leave." Bes shook himself like a dog, scattering water from his beard and matted hair. "They know that if they harm me or even try to hold me, they will bring the people down on them in a way that will make Upaut's little uprising look like a pleasure barge excursion."
"He's talking about Tefy and Mewat," said Bonnie Mae quietly.
Orlando nodded. He was saving his strength again. Even the few moments' hard swimming to stay afloat in the tepid water had tired him, and his muscles ached.
The little man produced another lamp from thin air, then led them through another series of corridors.
"What is he, anyway," Fredericks whispered, "—the god of hey-is-that-a-Iantem-in-your-loincloth?"<
br />
Orlando grunted with laughter, although it hurt a little.
The corridors widened. The lamp's flame began to flutter in a thin breeze.
"The Breath of Ra," Bes said, scowling for a moment before choosing a direction.
"Which is. . . ?"
"Just the air that moves through the Temple of Ra. I suspect it has something to do with all these tunnels and the different air temperatures." He grinned at Orlando's expression. "I may be a mere household god, boy, but I'm not an idiot."
Orlando found himself almost liking the ugly little man. "So what do you do? I mean, how does a household god spend his time?"
"Mostly arguing with more important gods." Bes' homely face turned serious. "For instance, when one of the Hathors determines that it is time for a child to die, the mother will plead for me to intercede. Or sometimes I am pulled into a neighborhood dispute—if a man lets his animals trample his neighbor's yard, he just might wake up and discover that I have come in the night and made his animals sick."
"Sounds kind of petty."
The dwarf's glance was shrewd. "We can't all be war gods, now can we?"
They trudged on. Orlando could no longer remember what he had felt like earlier in the morning—that wonderful, if illusory, sensation of health that had seemed to run through him instead of blood. No one else appeared to be having a good time in these hot corridors either. Even the monkeys were drooping a bit, following a more or less straight course, fanned out in a tiny "v" behind Bes like geese flying south for the winter.
At last the little house god led them up a long incline that ended in what seemed to be a solid wall of stone incised with hieroglyphs. He made them all stand back from the wall, then touched a succession of characters so swiftly that it was impossible to follow what he'd done. After a moment of stillness the wall rumbled outward in a wide arc. Something huge and terrifying and pale blue stepped through into the lamplight, filling the doorway. Shrieking, the Wicked Tribe scattered in all directions.
