Mountain of Black Glass

by Tad Williams

  Packages shed, Jones purring in and out around her ankles, Dulcie made herself a drink. She was irritated with herself, both for her self-indulgent mood and for hurrying home just because Dread had ordered her to. She had just finished adding soda to the scotch when the calm voice of the wallscreen announced a phone call.

  "I'll be brief," he said when she opened the connection. Whatever he had been doing lately, whether online or in Cartagena, must be agreeing with him: he looked sleek and happy, like a well-fed panther. "First, expand for me a bit on your report."

  "The virtual object—the lighter?" She took a sip of her drink, trying to summon her thoughts. She should have gotten her notes up directly on coming through the door, but a schoolgirl rebelliousness had sent her to the scotch first. "Well, as I said, it's hard to tell without having the object in its matrix to experiment with. It's a very nice simulation of an old-fashioned lighter. . . ."

  He waved his hand dismissively, but did not lose his grin. She wondered why he seemed so speedy—from what she knew of the shared account, an account she had not used recently because he was so busy with it himself, he was in the network about sixteen hours a day or more, which must be exhausting. "I know I didn't make it easy for you," he said. "Don't waste my time with the obvious—I've got your report. Just explain what you mean by 'can't reverse without breaking the hard security.' "

  "It means I can't reverse-engineer the thing just from the copy I made."

  "You made a copy?" The snap of sudden chill was familiar now, but it didn't get any more pleasant.

  "Look, this thing of yours is hot, in more ways than one. It's a live object. I can't just bang on the buttons until something happens, especially if you don't want anyone to know you've got it."

  "Go on."

  "So I had to copy it off to my system, where I've got the tools. Not that it was easy—I had to crack about five levels of encryption just to get the low-level functions to replicate. But there are levels beyond that I couldn't copy—couldn't even access. I'm going to have to do some major work just to get to them."

  "Explain to me."

  His tone was more agreeable now. She liked that. He did need her. There was a reason her price was high, and she didn't want him to forget that reason. "This thing is at root an effector—it sends positional information out, and interprets what comes back from the matrix. That's just for the low-level functions, like moving the user through the network. Basic stuff. Actually, strictly speaking, I guess you should call it a 'v-fector,' since all the information it deals with is about a virtual space. It's not describing the user's real position, just their position within the network. Right?" She hurried on as he nodded. "But with this system, nothing is simple, and certainly not access to even the most basic kinds of information. See, we found out a long time ago that most of the network is security-banded, to keep users who aren't owners from doing anything they shouldn't. So even the positional information coming to this device from the matrix is shielded—it's like with those areas around top-secret military test grounds in the real world, where you can't buy a map anywhere for miles because they don't want people trying to figure things out from what's shown and what's not shown. To be able to get that information, I'll have to pretend I'm one of the people who's supposed to receive it—and I'm guessing that's only these Grail people. They all have passwords or some other kind of access, and I have to learn how to mimic that, especially if you want me to mess with the protocols enough to show it inactive while still keeping it active."

  "So what you're saying is that it needs more work." His expression was distracted, as though he was adding this information to a much larger whole. "You need more time."

  "Yeah." She hoped he didn't think she was just stalling. "I did manage to find a way to corrupt the telemetry, which means that even if someone tries to turn it off before then, the system won't be able to find it. I've sent you the instructions on how to do it. But after you do it, you won't be able to use the thing until we switch it back. If the telemetry is wrong, none of the other functions will work right either. For all intents and purposes, once you change those settings, you have a dud effector."

  Dread nodded. "I see."

  "Whoever this belonged to must be an idiot," Dulcie said, pleased to have reestablished her credentials. "Either that, or it's taking them a hell of a long time to realize it's missing. They could have found the device any time if they'd tried. I mean, it's a hot v-fector, for God's sake—it's just been sitting there waiting for the network to ask where it is."

  "Then maybe I should do what you said—change the telemetry. I'll think about that." He cocked his head as though listening to faint music. The smile came back, but it was a bit more natural this time, less stretched and gleeful. "I've got some other important things to discuss with you, Dulcie. I'm closing down the Cartagena office. 'Sky God' is now officially boxed, and the Old Man's got some other jobs he wants me to do."

  She was still nodding, but caught by surprise. Both relief and loss were pulling hard on her at the thought that this man would be leaving her life. She opened her mouth but for a moment could think of nothing to say. "That's . . . well, congratulations, I guess. It's been a pretty wild ride. I'll finish up my work on the v-fector and send it along. . . ."

  One of his eyebrows crept up. "I didn't say my project was finished, did I? Just that I'm closing down the Cartagena office. Oh, no, there are a lot of loose ends I still have to deal with." The grin, flashbulb-white this time. "I want you to come to Sydney."

  "Sydney? Australia?" She could have kicked herself for saying something so stupid, but he did not waste energy with the obvious put-down, waiting instead for an answer to his request—a request that suddenly seemed to her far more complicated than she could easily understand. "I mean . . . what do you want me to do? You . . . I haven't used the sim for a week or so."

  "I need your help," he said, "and not just with this device. This is a very complicated project I've begun. I want you to . . . help keep an eye on things." He laughed. "And then I can keep an eye on you, too."

  She flinched, just perceptibly, but there was none of the menace in his voice he had used when warning her to keep her mouth shut. A thought came to her, a surprising, frightening, altogether overwhelming thought.

  Maybe . . . maybe he wants to spend time with me. Personal time.

  She covered her confusion with another long, slow sip of her scotch and soda. Could that even be true? And if it was, would she be a fool to go? He fascinated her in a way no one else had—would she be a fool not to go?

  "I'll have to think about it."

  "Don't think too long," he said. "Train's pulling out." She thought she detected a slackening in his good cheer, weariness perhaps. "You'll be paid your regular contractor's rates."

  "Oh! Oh, no, that's not what I . . . I just meant it's not easy to . . . to pick up and. . . ." She bit her lip. Babbling. Chizz, Anwin, just chizz. "I just have to think about arrangements."

  "Call me tomorrow." He paused. "I've been working with another contact of mine, doing research on this lighter, but all the time I've been working with her I kept wishing it was you instead." His smile this time was odd, almost shy. "Enjoy your Friday night." His image winked off the wallscreen.

  Dulcie downed the rest of her drink in one long swallow. When Jones jumped into her lap, she scratched the cat behind the ears by reflex, but if it had been another cat entirely she would not have noticed. Outside the windows the sun vanished, the stone and cast-iron canyons of Soho darkened, and lights began to come on all over the city.

  Through the whole strange progress of the last few days, Olga Pirofsky had been almost numb. If a part of her was positive that she had found her purpose, something that would finally give the rote repetitions of work and home-life meaning, another part of her was still capable of seeing that from the outside this would all look like madness. But no one outside could feel what she had felt, experience what she had experienced. Even if this wasn't madness,
even if it was, as it seemed to be, the most important thing she could ever do, she understood now the allure of lunacy in a way she hadn't even in the sanitarium in France.

  The voices arguing inside of her scarcely touched the outside.

  She had gone on making arrangements, sending mail, informing the necessary functionaries, moving through her life with the slow caution of someone who has been badly bruised. The only time Olga had cried again was when the people came to take Misha away.

  They were a childless couple, both in management of some kind, fairly young in years by Olga's standards, but already a near-complete sketch of their own middle age. She had picked them from the three or four inquiries because the man had a kind sound to his voice, something that had reminded her inexplicably of her lost Aleksandr.

  After she had told them she was moving, they had showed the good taste not to ask too many more questions, and although Misha had been his usual suspicious self, they had seemed to like the little dog very much.'

  "He's just zoony," the woman said, using an expression Olga didn't recognize, but which seemed to mean cute. "Look at those ears! We'll give him such a good home."

  As they loaded him into the dog carrier, Misha's eyes had bulged at the horror of Olga's treachery and he had leaped against the barred door until she was terrified he would hurt himself. His new owners assured her that he would soon be happy again, eating out of his very own bowl in his new house. Misha's sharp bark was only cut off by the closing of the air seal on the car door. When the shiny machine had disappeared around the corner, Olga finally realized that tears were streaming down her face.

  She was thumbing down the pressure strip on the last of the boxes when a squeal outside brought her to the attic window. A little way down the street a compact hover-runner packed with teenagers was making dizzyingly small circles under one of the bright white streetlamps, the girls in the back seat screaming and laughing. A boy loped out of a nearby house and climbed in among them, provoking more laughter. The car straightened out, but not before an overcompensated turn took the hover-runner over a flower bed. As the car picked up speed and skimmed away, a brief but colorful display of decapitated blossoms sprayed from under the skirts into the gutter.

  Just another Friday night at the end of the world, Olga thought, but she did not know exactly what she meant, where the words had come from. It had been weeks since she had paid much attention to the news, but she didn't think things were much worse than usual—wars and murders, famine and pestilence, but nothing extraordinary or apocalyptic. Her own life might be changing, might even be winding down into some inexplicable darkness, but surely everything else would go on? Children would grow up, teenagers would misbehave, and generation after generation would march on—wasn't that the point of everything she had done with her life? Wasn't it the point of what she was doing now, the only point? The children were what mattered. Without them, mortality was a bleak pratfall with nobody laughing.

  She pushed the thought away, just as she had pushed away the desperation in little Misha's bark. It was better to be numb. If a great task had been set before her, she could not afford to feel pain. There would be much more to come, but she would square her shoulders and bear up. That was one thing Olga had learned to do, one thing she did well.

  She slid the last of the boxes into place, almost all her worldly goods stored like the effects of a dead pharaoh put aside for the afterlife—and, she thought, with about as much chance of getting used by their owner again—then closed and locked the attic.

  For a while the voices had been curiously silent.

  In the first days after she had left her job, Olga had spent most of every day in the station-chair, link in place, waiting for guidance. But whether she hovered in the lowest level of her own system, bathing in gray light like a frog half-submerged in a lily pond, or roamed through the active strata of the net, the voices still did not speak to her again. No matter what she did, the children remained absent, as though they had moved on to some other and more interesting playmate. The desertion left Olga frightened and heartsore. She even began to monitor the Uncle Jingle show again—fearful that she might somehow incur another one of the murderous headaches, but even more terrified that she had thrown away what life she had over some kind of hallucination. It was strange to see Uncle's clownish tricks and songs from her new distance, to see him as something almost sinister, a white-faced Pied Piper, but although watching the show only made clear to her how unlikely it was that she could ever go back, nothing else happened. No pain in her skull like a jagged blade, but no children either—at least none who were not part of Uncle Jingle's shrieking Krew.

  Every evening she had connected to the system and stayed there, Misha curled in her lap, until fatigue drove her to her bed. Every morning she woke up in the wake of turbulent but unremembered dreams and returned to the chair. It was only at the end of the first week of her new life that something changed.

  That night, Olga fell asleep with her fiberlink in place.

  Slipping out of the gray nothingness of the first-level system into slumber was as gentle and unnoticed as the turn to twilight, but instead of entering the blurry carnival of the freed subconscious, she found herself floating through silent, empty space, adrift in a chill, featureless void like a dark little moon. She could not help noticing that her thoughts were far too clear and complete for a dream. Then the visions began.

  At first she saw little—only a shadow within the greater shadow—but gradually it became a mountain, impossibly tall, black as the night that surrounded it, thrusting high against the stars. It frightened her, but she was drawn to it through the frozen dark, pulled toward its negative brilliance as helplessly as a moth to a tongue of flame. But as the mountain loomed ever higher, she suddenly felt the children gathering around her in an invisible flock. The deep, killing cold eased, although she knew somehow that the zero chill was only held at bay.

  Suddenly, with the fluidity of more ordinary dreaming, the mountain was no longer a mountain but something more slender—a tower of slick black glass. Dawn or some other cool light touched the sky and edged back the night, and she could see that the tower rose from water, like a castle surrounded by a moat, like something in the stories her mother had told her long ago.

  The children did not speak, but she could feel them drawing close around her, frightened but also hopeful. They wanted her to understand.

  The last thing she saw before waking up was a spark from the rising sun, a line of fire along the tower's smooth obsidian skin. But in the final moments she had also heard the children's voices again, which had eased her heart like wind in tree branches after a sweltering afternoon.

  South, they whispered to her. Go south.

  Olga surveyed her packing. Her shoulders hurt and her back throbbed from the bending, but the dampness of her blouse and the hairs sticking to the back of her neck were a pleasant indicator of things accomplished; even the aches proved that she was finally doing something.

  It was strange to see how little she needed after so many years of living with things. It was like traveling with her family again, and with Aleksandr, only the important things carried along because the road was not kind to clutter. Now she was leaving decades of her life behind, taking only two suitcases. Well, three.

  The chair had of course gone back to Obolos, but Olga had saved more than a little money over the years: beside the big bag with her clothes and the smaller one with her toiletries stood a slim little case about the size of an old-fashioned children's picture book. Inside was a top of the line Dao-Ming travel station, something the young man at the store had assured her in a faintly condescending way would allow her to do anything she could possibly want. It had taken a while to get him to produce the machine—he clearly thought she might be planning no more than a few phone calls to relatives while she vacationed, or perhaps writing an old woman's travel memoirs—but eventually money stimulated his attention. She had been firm but reticent, though she h
ad allowed herself a polite smile when he told her that Dao-Ming meant "Shining Path," as though that might be a factor in whether she bought it. There wasn't really any way to make sense of the voices, and she herself did not know why she thought she needed such a powerful station, but she had reached a place where a certain kind of faith seemed more important than any other considerations.

  With the button of the telematic jack she had also bought now in place on her neck, she could finally feel content: the children could speak to her when they wished. A channel was always available now, and every night she laid her dreams open to them. They had told her many things, some she remembered on waking, some that faded, but always they whispered for her to go south, to find the tower.

  She would trust them to help her on the way.

  A horn blared outside. Olga looked up in surprise, wondering how long she had been lost in thought. That would be the cab to take her to the Juniper Bay train station for the first part of a journey whose ultimate length and destination she could not guess.

  The driver did not get out to help her until she had dragged the luggage down to the sidewalk. While he flopped the two suitcases into the trunk, she went back to check that the door was locked, although she strongly doubted she would ever be coming back. When she got into the back seat and reminded the man of her destination, he grunted and pulled away from the curb. Olga turned and watched her house dwindling until it was obscured by a tree.

  A car was coming slowly down the road toward them. As it passed, Olga's attention was caught by its driver. A glint of streetlight through the windshield lit his somehow familiar face for just a moment. He was staring straight ahead, and it took her a moment to summon up the profile from her memory.

  Catur Ramsey. At least it had looked like him. But surely after she had told him she didn't want to talk, surely after he had left all those messages and she had not replied, he wouldn't come all the way up here?