Mountain of Black Glass

by Tad Williams

  If he had been the type to shudder he would have done so. Next up the line would be Yacoubian, and—although Christabel's father and his other subordinates might not know it—the entire weight of the Grail Brotherhood. The whole thing would be over in hours from the moment the deduction was made, so quickly that Sellars might not have a chance to do more than destroy himself and his records. In fact, the process might be in the chain at this very moment.

  He steadied himself by thinking of his Garden, of the virtual plants twining and tangling. Nothing was ever simple, but that was true for his opponents as well as for himself. He would have to do something, that was all, and the obvious point of attack would be Christabel's father, Major Michael Sorensen. If Sellars had possessed the strange operating system the Brotherhood used, he could just reach out and hypnotize the man when he was next online, manipulate his mind. The sunglasses could be made to disappear, the entire subject to be forgotten. Of course, first he would have to be willing to interfere with the man's mind, to risk Christabel's father's sanity and perhaps even his life.

  Sellars looked at Cho-Cho, whose grubby face was at the moment made grubbier still by the chocolate pudding smeared on his chin. Was there a difference between using innocents like Christabel—or even this child, who compared to Sellars himself was definitely an innocent—and mucking about in the mental plumbing of an adult?

  "It comes down to choices, Señor Izabal," he said aloud. "Choices, as my friend Señor Yeats would have been the first to point out. . . .

  ". . . An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress. . . .

  ". . . And coats don't get much more tattered than you and me, do they?"

  Cho-Cho stared at him, rubbing his mouth and transferring pudding freely to wrist and forearm. "Huh?"

  "A bit of poetry. I have a choice to make. If I make the wrong one, something very, very bad will happen. If I make the right one, something very bad might happen anyway. Have you ever had to make a choice like that?"

  The boy regarded him from under long lashes, an animal quietly preparing for defense or night. At last he said, "All the time I have to think, is like that—bad one way, bad the other. They always get you in the end. Siempre."

  Sellars nodded, but he felt something much like pain. "I suppose they do. Now listen carefully, my young friend, and I'll tell you what to go back and say to the little girl."

  It felt like four whole days had passed since she came home from school instead of only four hours, but all she could do was think about what the terrible boy had told her. She didn't even know for sure if Mister Sellars had really said that. What if the boy Cho-Cho was telling a lie? What if Mister Sellars was really sick, and the boy just wanted to do bad things? She saw someone on the net once saying that children like that boy didn't believe in the law, which she knew meant that they would steal and hurt people. He had pushed her down, hadn't he? Told her he was going to cut her?

  She desperately wanted to go and ask Mister Sellars, really ask him his own self, but her mother was just a few steps away from the kitchen table, and even so she kept looking over her shoulder all the time, like she thought Christabel might try to sneak away.

  She had been doing her homework, but all the thoughts had her so confused that she couldn't do her fractions right, couldn't remember which was the denumerator and which was the nominator or anything, and so she had just put in numbers and erased them, over and over.

  "How are you doing, honey?" her mom asked, using her sweet voice, but she sounded worried, like she did all the time these days.

  "Okay," Christabel told her. But she wasn't okay. She was afraid that her daddy wouldn't come home on time. She was even more afraid that if he did come home on time, something so bad might happen that nothing would ever be okay ever again.

  It didn't help that her daddy was in a bad mood when he came in, swearing because he had kicked over a watering can on the porch that shouldn't have been there. Mommy apologized, then Daddy apologized, but he still wasn't in a good mood. He barely said hello to Christabel before he went into his study and closed the door.

  Christabel looked at the clock on the wall above the sink and saw that there were only ten more minutes to go. She poured herself a glass of water but didn't drink any, and stared at the cartoons on the refrigerator, even though she'd seen them all before.

  "I'm going to go talk to Daddy," she said at last.

  Her mother looked at her carefully, like she did when Christabel said she didn't feel good. "He may just want some quiet time, sugar."

  "I want to talk to him." She wanted to cry, but she couldn't let it show. "I just want to talk to him, Mommy."

  So suddenly it almost startled Christabel into a squeak, her mother kneeled down and put her arms around her. "Okay, honey. Go knock on the door and ask him. You know how much we love you, don't you?"

  "Sure." Christabel did not feel very good, and hearing about how her mommy and daddy loved her made it worse. She slipped out of her mother's arms and walked down the hall to the study.

  It was only because she knew that just a few minutes were left that she managed to knock on the door, because it felt like she was standing outside a dragon's cave or a haunted house, "Daddy, can I come in?"

  For a second he didn't say anything. When he did, he sounded tired. "Sure, baby."

  He had poured himself a drink out of the are-you-going-to-have-one-this-early-Mike? bottle, and was sitting in his spinny chair with reports open all over the wallscreen. He looked up, and although he had started shaving again, something about his face seemed old and sad and made her heart hurt even more. "What is it? Dinner?"

  Christabel took a deep breath. She tried to remember the words to a prayer, to pray that Mister Sellars had really sent her the message, that it wasn't just from the awful boy with the bad teeth, but all she could think of was Now I lay me down to sleep, which didn't seem right.

  "Daddy, do . . . do you still have my Storybook Sunglasses?"

  He turned slowly to face her. "Yes, I do, Christabel."

  "Here?"

  He nodded.

  "Then . . . then. . . ." It was hard to talk. "Then you have to put them on. Because the man who gave them to me wants to talk to you." She looked at the corner of the wallscreen, which said 18:29 in white numbers. "Right now."

  Daddy's eyes went wide and he started to ask something, then he looked at the time and took his keys out of his coat pocket. He unlocked the bottom drawer of the desk and took out the black plastic Storybook Sunglasses. "I'm supposed to put them on. . . ?" he asked her. His voice was very quiet, but there was something in it that really scared her, something hard and cold, like a knife under a bedsheet.

  It was even worse when they were on, because she couldn't see his eyes anymore. He looked like a blind man. He looked like a bug, even, or a space alien.

  "I don't know what. . . ." he started to say, then stopped. For a moment, there was silence. "Who are you?" he said at last, his voice angry and hissing like a snake, and because he was still facing her, for a moment Christabel had the terrible idea that he was asking her.

  After a moment he said, in a different voice, "Christabel, you'd better leave the room."

  "But, Daddy. . . !"

  "You heard me. Tell your mother I'm going be a little late working on something."

  Christabel got up and moved toward the doorway. Everything was quiet for few seconds, but as she closed the door she heard her father say, "All right, then. Show me."

  He didn't come out.

  An hour went by. Christabel's mother, who at first had been angry in a making-fun-of-it-way, began to get really angry. She went and knocked at the office door but Daddy didn't answer. "Mike?" she called, and rattled the door, but it was locked. "Christabel, what was he doing in there?"

  She shook her head. She was afraid that if she said anything, she'd start crying so hard she'd never stop. Sh
e knew what had happened—the terrible boy had done something to the sunglasses. He'd killed Christabel's daddy. She lay facedown on the couch and buried her head in the pillow while her mother walked back and forth across the living room.

  "This is ridiculous," Mommy was saying. She went back to the door. "Mike! Come on, you're scaring me!" There was a terrible sound in her voice, small but getting bigger, like a piece of paper tearing at the edge that would soon rip all the way through. "Mike!"

  Now Christabel did begin to cry, soaking the pillow. She didn't want to look up. She wanted it all to go away. It was all her fault. All her fault. . . .

  "Mike! Open this door right now, or I'm calling the MPs out!" Mommy was kicking the door now, great thumps like a giant's footsteps which only made Christabel cry harder. "Please, Mike, please—Oh, God, Mike. . . !"

  Something clicked. Her mother stopped shouting and kicking. Everything was quiet.

  Christabel sat up, rubbing her eyes, feeling tears and snot running down her lip. Daddy was standing in the open doorway of the study, the sunglasses in his hand. He was as pale as an egg. He looked like he had just come back from outer space, or from monster land.

  "I'm . . . I'm sorry," he said. "I've been. . . ." He looked down at the sunglasses. "I've been . . . doing something."

  "Mike, what's going on?" Christabel's mother said. She sounded only a little less scared.

  "I'll tell you later." He looked at her, then at Christabel, but there was no anger or anything like it on his face. He rubbed his eyes.

  "But what . . . what about dinner?" Mommy laughed, sharp and high. "The chicken is dry as a bone."

  "You know," he said, "suddenly I'm not very hungry."

  CHAPTER 14

  Bandit Country

  NETFEED/ENTERTAINMENT: Treeport Sues Wiggers

  (visual: Treeport visiting children in hospital)

  VO: Clementina Treeport, often called "The Saint of St. Petersburg" for her work with Russian street children, is suing the power wig group How Can I Mourn You If You Won't Stay In Your Hole? over their use of her name and image in their release "Meat Eats Money, Children Are Cheap," which proposes that street children might be a useful substitute for expensive vat-grown meats. The lyrics to the release seem to suggest that Treeport and her Golden Mercy hospice are trafficking in children for just this purpose. Treeport has not made a public comment, but her attorney states she is, "definitely very unhappy about this."

  (visual: Cheevak, soundmaster for HCIMYIYWSIYH?, in front of release promo)

  CHEEVAK: "No, we're level with Clemmy. We think she's ho dzang on this. It's, like, tribute, seen? She's a forward thinker, we tell for true."

  Renie was wrestling with an odd puzzle, one that frustrated her programmer's mind as much as it engaged it.

  How do you engineer kindness?

  They were taking their leave of the Library Brothers after a brief and restless night's sleep and an early breakfast in the Brothers' Refectory. Renie could not help wondering a little at the generosity the monks had shown them—something that went beyond mere reparation for their own accidental role in Martine's disappearance. It seemed unusual that coded creations should so thoroughly attempt to do good for strangers, and Renie was wondering how such a thing could come to be.

  It's not like anger or something, where you could just program a hostile reaction to any deviation from normal routine, she thought as she clasped the abbot's hand in farewell. Brother Epistulus Tertius, standing beside him, actually looked a little teary, although Renie had no doubt he was just as happy to stay home. I mean, it's hard enough simply to define kindness, let alone try to make it part of a response pattern on any level beyond stock phrases.

  The abbot leaned toward her and said quietly, "You will take good care of Brother Factum Quintus for us, won't you? He's quite brilliant, but a little . . . childlike in some ways. We would hate for anything to happen to him."

  "We will treat him as one of us, Primoris."

  The abbot nodded and let go of her hand. The others finished up their good-byes, all of Renie's party clearly a bit mournful except for !Xabbu, who was doing his best to appear nothing more than a monkey. The kindness of the Library Brothers was one of the few examples of genuine warmth they had encountered, and it was hard to leave it behind even though Martine's need took precedence over everything. Only gawky Factum Quintus seemed distracted, humming to himself as he paced back and forth, clearly anxious to be moving.

  Genuine warmth—there I go again. How can it be genuine? These people aren't really people at all—they're code. She frowned. A neural net kept trying different strategies until it found successful ones, but how could you even make sure that kindness would be a successful strategy? Sometimes kindness was rewarded with treachery, just as the Quan Li thing had taken advantage of the Brothers' hospitality.

  For the first time Renie had a genuine urge to get her hands on the inner workings of the Grail network, this so-called Otherland. She had presumed that what the Brotherhood had made with all its money and resources was simply a larger and more complex version of a normal simulation network—more details, more choices, more complicated "histories" for the created objects. But she was beginning to wonder if there wasn't something larger and stranger going on.

  Wasn't there something in complexity theory about this kind of system? She watched golden dust drift through a shaft of light, struggling to remember her long-ago classes. Not just that they can go bad, like Sick Building Syndrome, but that they can evolve, too—get more and more complex and turbulent, then take a sudden leap into a different state. . . ?

  "Renie?" Florimel could not entirely keep the sharpness of impatience out of her voice, but by her standards, it was a friendly inquiry. "Are you going to stand there staring at the bookshelves all morning?"

  "Oh. Right. Let's get going."

  She would put it away until later, but she promised herself she would not forget.

  The Library Market, which seemed to be a permanent fixture, was in full swing; it took them the better part of an hour to get away from the worst of the crowds. Renie could not shake the feeling that they were being watched, although she found it hard to believe that the Quan Li thing, its disguise now revealed, would risk approaching them again so soon. Still, her flesh crawled as though they were being observed by some all-seeing eye. In Martine's absence, she would have liked to discuss it with !Xabbu, but her friend was still maintaining his pose as a simple animal and there was no chance for a quiet escape down a side passage for a conversation: Factum Quintus was setting a brisk pace, despite an almost nonstop monologue about the various architectural sights and the materials and methods used to create them.

  The company returned to the line of the river and followed it for no little time, through settlements both poor and prosperous. As minutes became an hour, then more, Renie began to have doubts about their guide. It seemed unlikely that the person masquerading as Quan Li would have carried her so far from the scene of the kidnapping.

  Factum Quintus stopped the procession. "This must seem a long journey," he told them, as if he had read her thoughts. "You see, it is simpler from our level to climb to the Campanile of the Six Pigs. Easier, but farther, yes. We can come back along the upper stories to the Spire Forest. So we are going to the farthest site first. The Campanile is not without interest in itself, though, so. . . ."

  "A friend of ours is in terrible danger." Renie could not bear another lecture on masonry at the moment. "We don't care about what's interesting. Every hour may be critical."

  He raised a long, thin hand. "Of course. Critical. I am just apprising you of my method." He turned with bony dignity and set out along the riverwalk again.

  Florimel dropped back from where she had been walking between T4b and Emily. "I am glad you said what you did, Renie. I am relieved to know we are not just accompanying this monk on a walking tour."

  Renie shook her head. "We haven't even thought about what we'll do when we find her. If
we find her."

  "It is bad to worry too much without information. We should wait until we see the situation."

  "You're right. It's just . . . I'm on edge. I keep thinking somebody's watching us."

  "I have the same feeling." Florimel grinned sourly at Renie's expression. "It is not surprising, really. I think you and I are much alike—always we worry about everyone else. Always it is our responsibility to make sure others are safe." She reached out and gave Renie a tentative pat on the arm, a strangely awkward gesture. "Perhaps that's why we have had conflict. It is hard for two people both accustomed to the same position to sort things out."

  Renie wasn't entirely sure if being told she was like Florimel was actually a compliment, but she decided to treat it as one. "You're probably right. But you've been feeling . . . that feeling, too? That we're being watched, even followed?"

  "Yes. But I have seen nothing. I regret very much that Martine is not with us. I would say that I feel blind without her, but I fear it would sound like a bad joke."

  Renie shook her head. "No, it's true."

  "I will go back now, with the young ones. I feel more comfortable when I am close to them."

  At first Renie thought the other woman meant she would be more comfortable because of T4b's size and impressive armored physique, but realized a moment later that she was talking about something quite different. "I feel the same way. Responsibility—it's tiring sometimes, isn't it?"

  Again Florimel smiled, a little softer now. "We would not know what to do without it, I think."

  A short time later Factum Quintus led them around a bend in the river and onto what seemed for a moment to be the opening of a sort of cave of polished marble, its huge, flat white floor cluttered with small buildings.