by Tad Williams
"My heart sank, and I found myself praying that the new body was only another sim, and not one of my own companions who had been captured or even killed trying to find me. But as I concentrated, I discovered something very, very strange. The first corpse was still the familiar virtual cadaver of the young woman Dread had killed. The second body, though, seemed to be her twin. Everything about this second unmoving form mirrored the first-shape, dimension, position. Somehow, Dread had murdered a victim just like the other, then propped her up in identical pose while I was sleeping. But how? And why?
"Then the second corpse began to speak.
"I screamed. I should be used to the madness of this network by now, but even though I knew the first body was virtual, it was still a corpse to me, and the second was just as cold, just as still. Until it began to talk. And the voice—it might once have belonged to the original Puppet, the sad, dead young woman of the Upper Pantry Clerks, but it was being used now by someone unused to speech, a sound midway between an automated reader and a stroke victim. I cannot reproduce it. I will not try, for even to think about it makes me queasy.
" 'Help . . . is . . . needed,' the corpse said. 'Flowpatch, Reroute. Help.'
"If I made a sound in response, it must have been a moan. I was shocked, caught completely by surprise.
"It said again, 'Help is needed,' with exactly the same intonation. 'Unexpected feedback. Danger of subroutine overwhelming central directive.' It paused as a shiver or something similar passed through it. The plump arms moved in random ways, and one of the hands thumped against the twin corpse beside it. 'Help is needed.'
" 'Who . . . who are you?' I managed to ask. 'What kind of help do you need?'
"The head rotated toward me, as though it had not known where I was until I spoke. 'Speech is secondary functionality. Subroutines are confused. Nemesis Two needs clarification, or reroute of. . . .' It then spewed out a string of numbers and designations that must have been programming code, but they were mixed up with other lumps of barely comprehensible noise that didn't sound like any gear-scripts I have ever encountered. 'Nemesis One has been made nonfunctional by operating system problem,' it said slowly. 'No contact, X abort threshold X cycles. Nemesis Three still operant, but has closed on the greater anomaly, no contact, X abort threshold X cycles. For White Ocean read Sea of Silver Light. Strong pull. Nemesis Three operant, but must be considered nonfunctional.' Despite the strange, mechanical voice, there was something in its words that suggested a kind of devastation, like the deceptively ordinary speech of someone who has survived a terrible disaster. 'Nemesis Two caught in expanding subroutine loop. Cannot prosecute X Paul Jonas X search. Help is needed.'
"I took a breath. Whatever it was, it did not seem like it meant to harm me, and the name 'Paul Jonas' had set me tingling. Sellars had spoken of a man named Jonas—was this something Sellars had created to find him? Or something of the Grail's? Whatever it was, it was clearly having problems. 'Is . . . is Nemesis Two—is that you?' I asked.
"It tried to stand, or at least that's what I think it did, but the attempt did not work. The copied corpse flopped onto the floor of the small room, face-first. One of the jerking hands touched me and I quickly pulled my legs away from it. I could not help it.
" 'Cannot detach,' it said. 'Nemesis Two cannot detach from observation. Anomaly is folded here. Not X Paul Jonas X . . . but not NOT X Paul Jonas X. Nemesis Two cannot detach.' It lay, hapless as a beached whale. I swear that its inhuman voice was plaintive. 'Help is needed.'
"Before I could say anything else, it vanished. One moment it was there, thrashing slowly, then the next it simply was not, and I was alone with the original corpse sim once more.
"Whatever it may be, I feel as though I have been visited by a restless spirit. If it is some program meant to find the man Jonas, then Otherland itself has been too much for it, as I am beginning to feel it is for all of us. Like a trained laboratory rat whose pleasure button suddenly begins to dole out electrical shocks, the thing seems to be throwing itself at something it cannot understand and is helpless to avoid.
"I hear noises—Dread is returning. Perhaps this will be the time I can no longer keep him interested. I am not sure I care. I am so tired of being frightened. . . .
"Code Delphi. End here."
"Could you be wrong?" Florimel asked Brother Factum Quintus. The group was sitting in a dispirited huddle on the stair landing. "Could the monster be keeping our friend somewhere other than the Spire Forest? Perhaps the piece of plaster was a false clue?"
Renie spoke up before the monk could answer. "Why would there be such a thing? The murderer didn't know we were coming, and he couldn't have known we would be able to find someone like Factum Quintus to tell us so much from that one little piece."
After eliminating all the hallways whose undisturbed dust suggested that they had not been traversed by anyone for a long time, the company had begun to force one tower door after another, eliminating every possible hiding place before moving to the next structure. The remoteness of the Spire Forest, which according to Factum Quintus had been deserted for decades except for bandits and a few runaways and eccentrics, had left them with a less daunting task than it had seemed at first, but although they had mustered up their courage to force open door after door, each time with weapons ready and hearts thumping, through the whole of the morning and afternoon they had found nothing but empty rooms. The one or two which had shown any hint of recent occupation had still clearly been deserted for years.
"I am sorry we have not found your friend." Factum Quintus spoke a little stiffly; the long day's work had clearly worn him out. "But that does not change what the ballflower fragment tells me. They were not in the Campanile of Six Pigs, so they must be somewhere here. Or at least the hiding place must be here—whether this person you seek is still using it, who can say?"
That was too depressing a thought for Renie to entertain. The only hope they had was that the Quan Li thing had not bothered to move its lair since taking Martine. "They HAVE to be here. They have to be. Besides, if they're not, then where in hell is !Xabbu?"
"Maybe he had an accident," Emily said. "Fell or something."
"Shut up, Emily," Florimel said. "We don't need suggestions like that."
"Just trying to help, her," muttered T4b.
Renie resisted an impulse to put her hands over her ears. There must be something they were missing, something obvious. . . . "Wait!" she said suddenly. "How do we know he hasn't found some way to move ABOVE the floor—on ropes or something?"
The others looked interested, but Factum Quintus frowned. "Hmmm. It is an ingenious idea, but think back on those halls we eliminated from our search—there were no ropes remaining behind, and the walls themselves were dusty, too. Surely it would be hard for someone to swing or climb above the ground, carrying your friend's . . . carrying your friend, then remove these ropes after himself without leaving a trace. Besides, as you said, would this person really anticipate determined pursuit? More likely he would simply have hidden himself close to the hallways that are traveled, so as not to be tracked by bandits or other predatory searchers."
Renie thought back on the ancient hallways, thick with the silt of ages, silent and ghostly, and of the dozens of empty, uninhabited towers they had so fearfully explored. Another idea suddenly seized her. "Hang on," she said, "maybe we're the ones who are going over the top."
"What does that mean?" Florimel could not muster the energy to sound very interested.
"Because he has plaster from a tower window ornament in his cuff, we've been assuming that our man is living in one of the tower rooms. But maybe he just uses one for, what do you call it, surveillance? Maybe he's actually tucked in somewhere a couple of floors lower, where there are more exits." As soon as she said it, she felt certain she was right.
"So . . . so we have to look through all the buildings again?" Florimel scowled, but she was thinking. "All the floors we didn't bother to check?"
"No.
" Brother Factum Quintus stood up, the light of engagement bright in his fishy eyes. "No, if you are right, he would be using one of the towers with a good view all around for his observation post—perhaps to watch out for bandits, or for searchers from the House below. I would guess Weeping Baron's Tower."
"Which one is that?" Renie was gathering up her weapons, her table-leg club and curtain-rod spear.
"Do you remember the round tower? We saw that someone had been in the topmost chamber, I thought perhaps even recently, but since there was no sign of anyone actually staying there, we went back down again."
"I remember it, yes."
"A few floors down there was a landing—we climbed right past it, following the tracks on the stairs. The windows were broken out, and it was covered with leaves."
Renie could not forget. Factum Quintus' expression of sorrow and disgust at the state of the building had been almost comical. "But there weren't any doors off that landing, were there?"
"No," said Florimel, who had risen to her feet as well, "but there were tapestries—I remember, because they were discolored by the water that came in through the windows."
"Right. We're going. God, I hope we're not too late." As T4b helped her to her feet, Emily 22813 wailed, "But I thought we were resting!"
Renie stopped them on the floor before the landing. "Emily," she whispered, "you and Factum Quintus at the back, because you're not carrying any weapons. Just try to stay out of harm's way."
"Quietly now," Florimel added. "He may have both !Xabbu and Martine. We don't want to frighten him into harming them."
Weeping Baron's Tower—in an uncharacteristically discreet mood, the monk had refused to explain its name, saying that it was too unpleasant a story for just now—was clearly one of the later additions to the House, its much-repaired stone facade only a skin over a skeleton of heavy timbers. The wood of the stairs and the landing was even less impressive, and years of weather through the shattered windows had also taken their toll. Some of the steps gave alarmingly; before they had climbed even a dozen, one of them let out a squeak that although barely audible, grated on Renie's nerves like a sudden scream.
Worried that the boards of the landing might be similarly noisy. Renie waved the others to stay behind at the top of the stairs, then continued with as much stealth as she could muster, gently lifting the sodden tapestries one by one. She found nothing but mossy wooden walls beneath any of them until she reached the last tapestry by the window. As she twitched up the corner, the light of the setting sun revealed a door sunk into a recess in the wall.
Heart pounding, Renie motioned for T4b and Florimel, lifting the tapestry a little farther so they could see what she had found. When her two companions were standing beside her, Florimel round-eyed with nerves, the teenager inscrutable behind his helmet, Renie tapped T4b on the arm. She and Florimel grabbed the edges of the tapestry and tore it away from the wall. It dropped like a wet corpse into Renie's arms. T4b hiked his robe up above his gleaming silver-blue armored legs with the delicacy of a dowager going wading, then kicked the door off its hinges and stepped inside.
The clatter dropped into silence. Everything beyond was shadow.
"I think it's. . . ." T4b began, then a gout of flame and noise erupted from the darkness.
Knocked to her knees, half-smothered in the heavy tapestry, Renie thought a bomb had gone off until she saw T4b stagger away from the door with his chest on fire, his robe and armor melted into a smoking hole in his midsection. The teenager jittered backward, flailing at himself with his hands, then slipped and tumbled down the stairs, missing Emily, but carrying Factum Quintus down with him in a flailing black snowball.
Before Renie could even struggle to her feet another explosion knocked Florimel backward into the landing rail. She dropped limply and did not move, a doll with its stuffing gone.
Ears ringing, her head as cloudy as if she had sunk into deep water, Renie at last kicked free from the tapestry, but she had only crawled a few meters back toward the stairs when she felt something step on her leg. She rolled over to see the Quan Li thing standing above her, the familiar face contorted as though by demonic possession, stretched in a gleeful smile. It held a flintlock pistol in each hand, one of them still dribbling smoke.
"I wish I'd been able to find more than one of those old blunderbusses," it said. "Good choice for Bang-Bang the Metal Boy, though, wasn't it? As good as a shotgun. But these little black powder guns aren't bad either." It glanced at the smoking pistol, then smirked and tossed it over the landing. Renie heard it clatter downward, tumbling, falling. "One shot apiece. A bit Stone Age . . . but then, if I'm going to treat myself to some extended play with one of you, I only need one more shot anyway." It glanced at Emily, cowering in shock at the top of the stairs, then turned the familiar, terrifying grin back onto Renie.
"Yeah, I think I'll keep the little one," it said, and lowered the pistol toward Renie's face.
CHAPTER 22
An Unexpected Bath
NETFEED/INTERACTIVES: GCN, Hr. 7.0 (Eu, NAm)—"Spasm!"
(visual: Pelly being airlifted from building roof)
VO: Pelly (Bettie Donovan) and Fooba (Fuschia Chang) think they have found the missing children, but the sinister Mr. B (Herschel Reiner) has a surprise waiting for them—a heart-attack ray! 2 supporting, 63 background open, previous medical interactive pref'd for hospital strand. Flak to: GCN. SPSM. CAST
It was windy, and the Lollipop Family kept blowing over in the middle of their tea party. Christabel didn't feel very much like playing, but her mommy had told her to go out and play, so she was sitting on the ground next to the fence in the front yard, under the big tree. She had put a rock on top of the table so it wouldn't tip, but she couldn't do anything about how every time Mother Lollipop reached for the tea she lost her balance.
They were really indoor toys. It was stupid to play with them out in the yard.
Everything was all wrong, that was the problem. Christabel had been so happy that the Storybook Sunglasses hadn't killed her daddy when he put them on, and even happier that after that he hadn't yelled at her anymore about the secret with Mister Sellars. She had been certain that now everything would be all right. Things would go back to the way they were before—Mister Sellars would come up out of his hiding place in the ground and go back to his house, and Christabel would visit him, and the terrible Cho-Cho boy would go away, and everything would be good again. She had been certain.
But instead, things had just got more wrong. At first, Daddy hardly came out of the study at all, coming home straight from work every evening and locking himself in. Sometimes she even heard him talking to someone, and she wondered if it was Mister Sellars, but her daddy wouldn't say what he was doing and her mommy just seemed scared and unhappy all the time and told her to go play.
The worst thing was the fights that her mommy and daddy had. Every night they had an argument, but it wasn't even like other arguments. They did everything really quiet. When Christabel stood beside the door of the study or her parents' room when they thought she was asleep, she could hardly hear a word they were saying. At first she thought they were trying to hide the fighting from her, which was scary. That was what Antonina Jakes' parents had done, then one day her mother had just left the base and taken Antonina away with her. Even on the day her mother came and took her out of school, Antonina had said, "My parents don't never fight," because someone had teased her about Divorce.
So at first, that was what had scared Christabel. Divorce. That word that sounded like someone slamming a door. When your mommy and daddy didn't live together, and you had to go away with one of them.
But when she had finally made herself brave enough to ask, her mother had been very surprised and said, "No, no, Christabel! No! We're not fighting! Your daddy's worried, that's all. I'm worried, too." But she wouldn't tell Christabel what she was worried about, except that Christabel knew it had something to do with the Storybook Sunglasses and Mister Sellars' secret, so
whatever it was, it was Christabel's fault.
When her parents went on with their whispenng-but-scared arguments, Christabel had another idea. Her parents were afraid someone would hear them, but maybe it wasn't Christabel they were hiding from. The arguments were a secret, but who were they trying to keep the secret from?
In her mind Christabel saw something from a kid's show on the net, a story about the North Wind, a frightening, angry face that appeared in the sky. Something like that was all around, maybe, listening, trying to catch her parents talking out loud. Something as thin and slippery as the air, as dark as a rain cloud. Something that could listen at every window.
Whatever the problem was, nothing was right any more. Christabel wished she'd never met stupid old crippled Mister Sellars.
Last night had been the worst. For the first time in days the arguing had gotten loud. Her mom had been crying, her dad shouting in a kind of scratchy way. They were both so unhappy that she wanted to run in from the hall and beg them to stop, but she knew they would just be angry at her for listening. This morning, when Christabel had come down for breakfast, her daddy had been out in the garage and her mommy had looked very sad, her eyes red and puffy-outy and her voice very quiet. Christabel had hardly been able to eat her cereal.
Something was wrong, more wrong than ever, and she didn't know what to do.
Christabel had finally switched off Mother Lollipop, because if she didn't keep trying to pick up the teapot at least she wouldn't fall over, when she heard a noise behind her. She turned around, expecting to see the dirty-faced boy with the broken tooth, but it was only her father's friend Captain Ron looking different than usual. He was wearing his uniform, but she was used to that—she hardly ever saw him in anything else. It took a moment before she could figure out that what was different was the look on his face. He seemed very serious, scowly and cold.
