Mountain of Black Glass

by Tad Williams

  He had no urge to hurry back to where Del Ray and his large friend sat huddled before the shining, cartoonish display. All this blinking-lights nonsense was what had taken his son from him. What use was it? Didn't even kill someone, like fire had killed his wife, so you could bury the dead and get on. Instead, it just turned them into a machine—a machine that didn't work, but you couldn't unplug it. The fat man was excited about his toys, but the whole thing left a sour taste in Joseph's mouth that no fruity beer could take away. Renie had tried to explain this kind of foolishness to him when she was studying, had dragged him to the school lab, full of excitement, to show him how people made the things he watched on the net, but even then he had found the whole thing strange and confusing, and he hadn't liked his young daughter showing him so many things he was ignorant about. Now that it had taken Stephen—and Renie, too, for that matter—he had even less interest. It all just made him thirsty.

  "Joseph!" Del Ray's voice pulled him out of his thoughts. "Can you come over here?"

  Long Joseph realized he had been standing in the middle of the room for long minutes, looking at nothing, slack as a rag doll. What's becoming of me? he thought suddenly. Might as well be dead. Just thinking about the next drink.

  Even that realization just made him want the drink more.

  "Hey," Del Ray said as he approached, lean face carnival-painted by the lights from Elephant's display, "I thought you said this place was a big secret, this military base."

  Joseph shrugged. "That's what Renie told me."

  Elephant looked up from a luminous snake's-nest of data. "It's called 'Wasp's Nest,' not 'Beehive.' "

  "Yeah, that is right." Joseph nodded. "I remember now."

  "Well, it is a secret, but someone's been checking into it." With a gesture of Elephant's meaty hand, another squirming tangle of shapes, numbers, and words appeared in the air before him. "See? Careful, very quiet, but they've been nibbling at the edges, looking it over."

  Joseph squinted at the display, as meaningless to him as the most aggressive sorts of modern art. "That must have been that French woman, what her name, Mar-teen. She was all around, helping get it ready for Renie. And some other old man they were talking to, him, too."

  "Within the last couple of days?"

  "Don't know." He shrugged again, but he had an uncomfortable feeling in his stomach, as though the fruit-flavored beer had been a little off. "But it seem like they were all done with that a while ago. That Mar-teen, she was with Renie and the little Bushman fellow, whatever they were doing, wherever they went."

  "Well, someone has been sniffing around." Elephant sat back and folded his arms across his breasts. "Checking the communication lines, testing the links." He frowned. "Does that place have phones?"

  "I think so. Yeah, that old kind you hold up to your mouth."

  "I think someone's been trying to call." Elephant smirked as he turned to Del Ray. "I've got your maps for you, man, but I am utterly glad I'm not going anywhere near the place." He waved his arm and the bright visuals vanished so swiftly that it left a dark hole in the air where they had been. "Take it from me, there's nothing worse than pranking around with secrets that aren't quite secrets anymore."

  He felt weak and ashamed, but that had not prevented him from coming. Even he sometimes needed relief.

  He closed his eyes and felt the air wash over him, relaxing already under the ministrations of the silent slaves and their palm-frond fans. The bower of Isis was always cool, a refuge from the desert, from the noise of the palace, from the stresses of mastery. He felt a part of himself, a steely, cold part, resisting the urge to let go. It was hard to turn that part off—the habit of self-reliant command, of sharing his thoughts with nobody, was very strong, and more important than ever now in these last days—but even he could not go without forever. Still, he had waited long before returning this time.

  Even with his eyes closed he knew she had appeared, her presence like a cool hand on his brow. Her scent, already strong simply because it was her room, became even more potent, cedar and desert honey and other things more subtle.

  "My great lord." Her voice was the sounding of delicate silver bells. "You honor me." She stood in the doorway, slim as a reed in a gown of pale, moon-colored cotton, her feet bare. Her half-smile affected him as powerfully as a once-favorite song heard after years had passed. "Will you stay with me a while?"

  He nodded. "I will."

  "Then this is a happy day." She clapped her hands. A pair of slaves filtered in, quiet and swift as shadows, one bearing cups and a pitcher, the other a tray of sweetmeats. "Let me feed you, my husband," said Isis. "We will forget the world and its cares for a little while."

  "For a little while, yes." Osiris leaned back on the couch, bidding his sentry-self to be silent, and watched the goddess pour him a cupful of foaming, golden beer, her every movement an unspoken poem.

  ". . . And so I returned to find that those two imbeciles had allowed a full-scale rebellion to flower in my absence—then, in an effort to cover up their own incompetence, they had even violated the temple of Ra and slain its guardians, Dua and Saf."

  "Your anger must have been great, my husband." Her look of sympathy was perfect, containing nothing but intelligent regret for his discomfort.

  "They are spending some time in the punishment circuits," he said. She frowned the tiniest frown at the unfamiliar word, but did not allow herself to be distracted from stroking his knee. "I will have to release them soon, though. Sadly, I still need them to find the man Jonas."

  Isis shook her head, her shining pale hair swinging like a curtain. "I am sorry you must have servants who displease you, my lord. But I am even more sorrowful at the idea that others would rebel against your gracious rule."

  Osiris waved the thought away. Here in this safe place he had allowed his wife to unwrap the mummy bandages from his hands, exposing the wan, deathly fingers with their gilt nails. "None of this is what truly upsets me. There are always those who resent the powerful—those who cannot build for themselves, who are not strong enough to take what they desire but still think that they should be given a share by those who can and are. Real peasants or automata—coded simulations—they are always the same."

  A slight blankness passed over her face, but despite terms and concepts foreign to her, the warm sympathy of Isis did not flag. Her wide green eyes remained fixed on him as a flower follows the sun. She was the perfect listener, and no surprise: she had been designed that way. In her porcelain beauty he had resurrected something of his first wife Jeannette, dead for more than a century, and in her selfless solicitousness he had memorialized something of his mother as well, but those traits had only been imposed on Isis out of his own memory. She was entirely unreal, a singular piece of code, his only trustworthy confidante. She might not understand him, but she would never betray him.

  "No," he said, "I am at a crossroads and I have a terrible decision to make. The clumsiness of my servants is only an irritation, one that I have dealt with already." He allowed himself to dwell for a moment, not without pleasure, on how he had swept down upon Ra's temple on the back of the immortal bird Bennu and ended the rebellion in a single instant. Servants and rebels alike had thrown themselves on their faces, weeping at the terror of his majesty. He had felt his own power as a real and tangible thing, seen it ripple out from him like the blast pattern of an explosion. And that was what Wells and the others—even canny Jiun Bhao—did not understand. They thought his involvement with his simulations an old man's hobby, a sign of weakness, but how could you prepare to live forever in a virtual universe if you did not become part of it? And how could you rule such a universe without caring about it?

  The rest of the Grail Brotherhood, he suspected, would find eternity hanging upon them very, very heavily. . . .

  Thought of the project returned him to his worries. Isis was waiting, as still as a pool in the high mountains.

  "No," he said, "the problem is that I do not trust my own oper
ating system—the Other, that thing you know as Set."

  Her face clouded. "Dark he is. Lost and troubled."

  He could not help a tiny smile of satisfaction. Even though she was nothing but code, she spoke sometimes in a way that transcended her own narrow universe. She was a well-made machine. "Yes. Dark and troubled. But I have come to rely on it . . . on him. His power is great. But now that the time of the Ceremony is almost upon us, he is more restless than he has ever been."

  "You spoke of the Ceremony before. That is when you will come to live with me all the time?" Her face was shining, eager, and for a moment he saw something in her he had not seen before, a girlishness that came neither from Maman nor Jeannette.

  "Yes, I will come to live here for all time."

  "Then nothing must go wrong with the Ceremony," she said, shaking her head gravely.

  "But that is where the problem lies. There may be no second chance. If something does go amiss. . . ." He frowned. "And as I said, Set has been restless."

  "Is there no other magic you can use to perform the Ceremony? Must you rely on the Coffined One?"

  Osiris sighed and leaned back. The cool stone room was a place of refuge, but his problems could not be avoided forever. "One other might be able to provide the magics I need—but he is my enemy, Ptah." Ptah was known to the rest of the world as Robert Wells, but Jongleur had slipped into the soothing rhythms of Osiris now and was reluctant to break the spell.

  "That yellow-faced schemer!"

  "Yes, my dear. But he is the only one who might be able to provide an alternative system. . . ." He checked himself. "He is the only one who might have a magic powerful enough that I can do without Set."

  She slid from the couch to kneel by his feet. She took his hand in her own, her pretty face earnest. "You control dark Set, my husband, but you do not control Ptah. If you give him such power, will he not use it against you?"

  "Perhaps, but neither of us, Ptah nor myself, wishes the Ceremony to fail. It must work, for all of us—we have waited too long, worked too hard, sacrificed too much . . . and too many." He laughed sourly. "But you are right. Afterward, if I made Ptah my confidant, if I used his power to insure the Ceremony and the continued functioning of the Grail Project—what certainty would I have that he would not turn it against me?" Speaking these worries out loud was both painful and glorious—the freedom, the relief, of letting his fears be witnessed, even by a creature constructed only of code, was almost overwhelming. "Ptah hates me, but he fears me, too, not least because of the things I have kept secret. What would happen if that balance changes?"

  "You control Set, but you do not control Ptah," Isis repeated stubbornly. "Your enemy is like an asp, my lord. His yellow face hides a heart that is black and faithless."

  "It is always good to speak with you," he said. "It is far too much of a gamble to hand this weapon to Wells . . . to Ptah. He will certainly use it against me—the only question is when. If you give a man eternity, then he has much time to scheme."

  "I am glad that I have pleased you, my lord." She rested her head on his thigh.

  He stroked her hair idly, thinking of things he might do to improve his position. "Jiun Bhao will not be the only one to hang back," he said, but almost silently, forgetting for a moment that his companion could not read his mind any more than a true person could have. He turned and spoke to her directly. "I myself will wait with Jiun . . . I mean with wise Thoth . . . and I will see. If the Other proves untrustworthy—well, I will have some temporary solution in place, and Thoth and I will solve the problem together. If the others suffer because of this, or even do not survive the Ceremony. . . ." He allowed himself a wintry smile. "Then Thoth and I will salute their sacrifice."

  "You are most wise, my husband." Isis rubbed her cheek against his leg like a cat.

  With the return of confidence, Osiris felt something stirring inside him, something that he had not experienced in many long years. He let his finger follow the curve of Isis' neck and trail down to the rough softness of her dress. He had not performed the physical act for almost a century, and even with the false vigor of virtuality the urge had not survived his loss of ordinary physical capability by more than a few decades. It was odd to feel it again.

  And I'm such an old man, he thought. It scarcely seems worth it—all that sweat, all that bother, and for what?

  But although nothing in his real physical form responded but a faint electrochemical glimmer from brain to ganglia and back, he still felt that almost forgotten pressure at the back of his mind, and found himself bending to kiss heavenly Isis on the nape of her neck. She lifted shining eyes to him. "You are strong, my lord, and beautiful in your glory."

  He said nothing, but allowed her to climb back onto the couch and curl against him, her breasts pushing gently against his bandaged ribs, her perfumes a sweet cloud around him. She had her mouth against his ear, breathing, murmuring, almost silently singing. He began to forget himself in the seashell whisper of her endearments until her voice, her soft, unintelligible words, and everything else began to be subsumed by the rushing of his blood. All but the melody. . . .

  His hand, gently pinioning her wrist, suddenly tightened. She cried out, more in surprise at first than in pain. "My lord, you are hurting me!"

  "What is that song?"

  "Song?"

  "You were singing. What is it? Sing it to me so I can hear."

  Eyes wide at the raggedness of his voice, she swallowed. "I did not. . . ."

  He slapped her, rocking her head backward. "Sing!"

  She began, falteringly, tears sparkling on her cheeks.

  ". . . An angel touched me, an angel touched me, The river washed me, and now I am clean. . . ."

  She paused. "That is all I know, my lord. Why are you so angry with me?"

  "Where did you hear that?"

  Isis shook her head. "I . . . I do not know. It is only a song such as my handmaidens sing, a pretty little song. The words came into my head. . . ."

  In fury and terror he struck her again, toppling her from the couch onto the floor, but the silent slaves did not change their rhythms; the palm fronds continued to beat slowly up and down. Isis looked up at him, full of terror. He had never seen the expression on her, and it upset him almost as much as the song.

  "How could you know that?" he raged. "How could you know it? You are not even part of the Grail system—you are separated, sealed off, a dedicated environment that no one else can access. It cannot be!" He stood, towering high above her. "Who has touched you? Have you betrayed me, too? Told them all my secrets?"

  "I do not understand your words," she cried helplessly. "I am yours, my husband, only yours!"

  He fell upon her and beat her until she could not speak, but even then her silence only goaded him on. A black terror was swirling inside him, as if a door into nothingness had swung open and he was being forced through it. His childhood nemesis stood waiting for him on the other side—the inescapable Mr. Jingo, full of mocking laughter. Lost in a dreadful darkness, Jongleur thrashed her until she was a thing of rags and sagging limbs, then fled her bower for the other worlds of his manufactured universe, all of them suddenly suspect, all of them without solace.

  Silence fell in the cool stone room. The stolid slaves continued to wave their fans up and down, up and down, over the un-moving shape sprawled on the floor.

  "I didn't think your brother give you this car in a million years," Joseph said after they had dropped Gilbert off. The entire ride back from Elephant's place had been spent in argument between the two brothers. Joseph had enjoyed that so much he had not even bothered to offer his own opinion, which was that the car was an ugly old thing anyway and should be replaced by something a bit more luxurious. It was amazing that something so large and clumsy should have so little room for Joseph's long legs.

  "I gave him the down payment," Del Ray said grimly. "He owes me. And it's not like we can take a train to the Drakensberg—not that part of the mountains, anyway."
>
  "Could have rented something nice. You got cards, don't you?" Renie had taken Joseph's away from him, something which still galled, but she had given him an ultimatum—if she had to earn the money and balance the books, she wasn't going to have him buying rounds for what she called his "lazy, drunken friends."

  "No, I couldn't have rented one," Del Ray snapped. "All of my cards have been cut off. I don't know whether Dolly did it or . . . or those men who were after me. I don't have anything, damn it! Lost my job, my house. . . ." He fell silent, face set in a scowl that made him look years older. Joseph felt obscurely pleased.

  They swung out onto the N3, entering the stream of traffic without trouble. The rain clouds had rolled through and the skies were clear. Joseph saw no sign of a black van, or of any van at all: the cars in their immediate vicinity were small commuter run-abouts and a few long-haul trucks. He relaxed a little, enough to feel the urge for a drink come drifting up. He fiddled with the car's music system and found a dance hall station. After reaching a tense compromise with Del Ray about volume, he settled back.

  "So why you break up with my Renie?" he asked.

  Del Ray glanced at him but said nothing.

  "Or did she break up with you?" Joseph smirked. "You didn't have all them nice suits and such in those days."

  "And I don't have them anymore." Del Ray looked down at his wrinkled trousers, dark at the knees with dust and smeared mud. He drove in silence for a few moments more. "I broke up with her. I left her." He gave Joseph a brief look of irritation. "What do you care? You never liked me."

  Joseph nodded, still in a good mood. "No, you are right."

  Del Ray seemed about to say something unpleasant, but paused. When he spoke, it was as if he were talking to someone else, a third passenger who might actually be sympathetic. "I don't really know why we broke up. I mean, it seemed like the right thing to do. I think . . . I just . . . I was too young to have a family, get into all that."