by Tad Williams
"Yes." It was like watching someone turn over a card in a high-stakes game. "Yes. It was a . . . small, golden thing."
"Dzang! That's just like what Sellars sent out!" said Fredericks excitedly.
"Fredericks!" Orlando's skin went cold. He turned back, but the stranger was not leering at him, not rising in theatrical menace. Instead, he seemed even more puzzled than he had been.
"Sellars?" His confusion was plain. "Who's Sellars?"
Orlando stared at him. trying to be certain this was not a ploy. "Let's make sure we're talking about the same thing. Someone gave you a harp, or showed you a harp, and after it gave you a message, it turned into a little golden . . . what?"
The stranger showed no emotion, but he took a long moment before he answered. "A gem. Like a diamond, but made of gold, and with a kind of light inside it."
Orlando felt a wave of relief. Either the Brotherhood was going a very long way around trying to chase down Sellars' people, or the stranger himself was one, too. "A gem. That's what we found, too."
"I'm confused," Odysseus said. "Did you—how did you get one? I thought I was the only . . . I thought there was no one else like me."
"No, there are quite a few of us." A sudden, sad thought flickered. "At least there were. But for some reason you didn't make it to the golden city, so you didn't meet them, didn't meet Sellars."
"Golden city?" He shook his head in confusion. "You've mentioned the name 'Sellars' twice. Can you tell me who that is?"
Orlando considered for a moment. "Did your . . . message say anything else?"
The man they knew as Odysseus paused, then recited, " 'If you have found this, you have escaped. You were a prisoner, and you are not in the world in which you were born.' " He frowned, struggling. "That's pretty much it. I should have memorized it word for word," he apologized, "but . . . well, things have been a bit hectic."
"Was that all?"
"No. 'Nothing around you is true, but the things you see can hurt you or kill you. You will be pursued, and I can help you only in your dreams. . . .' "
"Dreams. . . ." said Orlando. The hairs on the back of his neck lifted again, this time in a kind of fearful wonderment. "In dreams. . . ?"
" 'The others I am sending will look for you on the river. They will know you if you tell them the golden harp has spoken to you.' " The stranger paused. "Does any of this tell you anything?"
"Is your name Jonas?" Orlando asked suddenly.
For a moment he thought the bearded King of Ithaca would leap through the door and disappear into the night. The stranger's eyes grew wide and bright, a deer stepping out of the brush into a hunter's flashlight beam. Then Orlando saw that they were glossy because they were filling with tears.
"My God," he said quietly. "Yes, I'm Paul Jonas. Oh my God. Have you come to get me out of here?"
"It's Jonas!" Fredericks said excitedly. "Dzang, Gardiner, we did it! This is so utterly, utterly chizz!"
But Orlando saw the hope shining in the bearded man's face, and knew that when the stranger discovered who it was who had found him, and how helpless they were themselves, he would regret this cruel moment of belief.
When the conversation slowed at last, Paul Jonas sat back on his stool. "You look tired," Jonas told him. "We've been up all night already, and we could go hours more, but we should all get some sleep."
"I am tired," Orlando said. "I'm not . . . I'm pretty sick. In real life."
Fredericks looked at him worriedly. Orlando tried to smile.
"I just can't get over this," Jonas said. "After all this time. It's all so strange, the things that have happened to you—the bugs, the cartoons." He laughed self-consciously. "I suppose some pretty odd things have happened to me, too, for that matter."
Even in the depths of his own misery, Orlando could not help feeling sorry for the man. "I couldn't do what you did," he said. "Going on like that without knowing why."
"You could and you would," Jonas replied. "Because what else does one do? But we still don't really know why, do we? About any of this. I can't get over the fact that you've met the bird-woman, too."
Orlando thought he almost sounded a little disappointed. "But we don't know her—not like you do. She just . . . I don't know, took an interest in us."
Jonas tugged at his beard, thinking. "There's so much still to try to figure out. Who is she, and why is she moving from simulation to simulation, like . . . like an angel? And the Twins. . . ."
"I think that's the scanniest part," Fredericks offered. "They're so horrible, just from the one time we met them. I utterly can't imagine what it must have been like to have them always hunting for you."
"As bad as you might guess," said Jonas darkly.
"Sellars told us that the Brotherhood were holding you prisoner." Orlando was having trouble keeping his eyes open, but there were so many things to consider he didn't want to sleep, no matter how sick he was. "That you must be a threat to them somehow. That's why we were supposed to look for you."
"Well, I wish your mysterious Mr. Sellars had told you why I was supposed to be a threat. Not only don't I feel very threatening, it would make me feel a little better about the huge hole in my memory. God, when you said my name, I . . . I thought you were going to give it all back to me. Tell me why this was happening." His face cleared. "But enough—a moment ago I called the mystery woman an angel. I was thinking about all that when I first came to this world, when I found that there could be more than one version of her in the same place—just like those people the Pankies I told you about were like the Twins, but they weren't the Twins."
"Man, those Pankies sound like my aunt and uncle from Minnesota," Fredericks said. "They were still giving me dolls when I turned fourteen. Yick."
"I've been thinking there might be as many as four different categories of people here in this network," Paul continued, ignoring Fredericks' unsolicited bit of family history. "Puppets, of course—the ones that are pure code, part of the simulations—and people like us. Or like the Grail Brotherhood, for that matter. Real people—Citizens, I think is the term." He stopped at a noise outside, clatter and conversation as new-wakened soldiers in the Myrmidon camp began to stack wood for a morning fire. "Good God," said Jonas, "it's almost dawn. But let me finish this thought. Other than Puppets and Citizens, I think there are two other types in this Otherland network, which I'm calling Angels and Orphans. The Angels are like the version of the bird-woman that came to me in dreams and here in the Odyssey world, and who was a goddess for you in Egypt—they can go from simulation to simulation, always retaining something of themselves. I guess the Twins might be that, too, unless they're really just some mad sadistic bastards working for the Brotherhood. Don't know which would be worse." He offered a grin without much humor in it. "But as for Orphans . . . I think they're like the boy I met, Gally, and like the versions of the bird-woman that I met in the Mars world, and as my character's wife here in ancient Greece. They kind of . . . take root in the simulation, somehow. Fill a space in it, perhaps in the same way that real people take on character roles, as you've done with Achilles and Patroclus, and I've done with Odysseus."
"Yeah, and who the hell is Patroclus, anyway?" Fredericks asked. "We know Achilles is the guy with the bad heel, but we've never heard of this Patroclus guy."
Orlando thought Jonas looked a little worried by the question, but was trying to hide it. "I'll tell you about that later. Let me get through this—it's slippery."
Fredericks nodded, abashed. "Chizz."
"So who would these personalities be," Jonas asked, "these Orphans, just floating around until they find a character to fill?"
Despite exhaustion, Orlando felt his interest quicken again. "The children, the ones like Renie's brother?"
"It seems possible."
"Whoo." Orlando shook his head, wonderingly. "And like those children in the Freezer, too. That would be so scantagiously weird." He considered. "But wouldn't that make your bird-lady one of them, too?"
"I suppose it's possible." Jonas seemed a little unsettled by the idea. "It doesn't quite feel true—but how can you judge anything around here?"
"Do you remember who she could be from your life? I mean, from your life before all this. . . ?"
"A little sister? A teenage girlfriend?" Paul shrugged. "No. But anything's possible."
"Jeez, there's just so much!" Orlando complained. "This whole thing—it gets weirder and weirder and weirder."
The reply from Jonas was interrupted by a rap at the door of the hut. Fredericks got up and opened it, revealing aged Phoinix, barely visible in the predawn light. The old man did not wait for formal greetings.
"Lords, I come to tell you that the Trojans are spilling out through the great Skaian Gate, a vast army of them. Already they are rushing across the plain, the wheels of their chariots roaring. Odysseus, your men of Ithaca are in confusion, not knowing where you are."
"Oh, my God," Paul said softly. His eyes darted, as though he were looking for somewhere to hide, or a convenient back door that would allow him to walk out of the simulation.
"I'm not fighting," Orlando said. "I can barely keep my eyes open—I can't even stand up yet!"
"Please, noble Achilles," Phoinix begged, "forget your quarrel with Agamemnon. The Trojans are coming down upon us, intent on putting fire to our well-benched ships so that we cannot return to our lands and our families."
"If he says he can't fight, he can't fight," Jonas told the old man brusquely. He turned to Orlando and Fredericks. "I can't just walk away from this," he said quietly. "Not without a risk of throwing the whole thing into chaos."
"You're not going to fight, are you?" Orlando was horrified by the idea they might lose Jonas so soon after having found him.
The man the Greeks called Odysseus turned to Phoinix, who was fidgeting in the doorway, torn between fear and excitement. "Go back and tell the Ithacans I'm coming. Achilles is still not well enough to fight. Hurry—there must be others who need your help. I will be right behind you."
Phoinix hesitated, then bobbed his head and hurried away.
"I'll do my damnedest not to get killed," Jonas said when the old man was gone. "Believe me, I'm not interested in having any songs made about me. But if the Trojans crush the Greeks, we'll never get into the city, if that's really where we're supposed to go, except as prisoners. If I remember the damn poem, everything was very evenly balanced, especially with Achilles not fighting. If all the troops who came with Odysseus bolt and run because I'm not there, that may skew the whole thing—the Trojans might be setting your ships on fire in a couple of hours."
Orlando watched him walk toward the door. Paul Jonas had described himself as a nobody—a museum curator, the kind of person who spent his weekends putting up shelves and reading the newspapers. But he was walking into a full-scale battle, risking his life in the hope of holding things together long enough for his questions to be answered.
Orlando could only hope he wasn't watching a very brave man going out to die.
Even though she had been in the States for more than a week, and had traversed the old Mason-Dixon line days earlier, it was only when she crossed into Georgia that Olga Pirofsky finally began to feel that she was truly in another country.
There was no obvious reason why that should be so. It was true that the eastern seaboard of the U.S. had been mostly indistinguishable from Canada—the polite fiction of North American solidarity held up far down the coast—but there was not a great deal of difference between Atlanta and any of the larger northern cities she knew, like Toronto or New York. Only the famous red clay, the odd, salmon-colored mud that showed through the greenery like slow-healing wounds, told her that the faceless, dignified suburbs were not her own, or that the cluttered squatter camps hidden off the main roads were full of Georgians rather than Pennsylvanians or even Canadians.
If there was anything that marked a real change, it was in the undertones—in the unspoken assumptions of the local broadcasters, in the slightly sullen tenor of the religious advertisements on walls and billboards and even in the bright holographic marquees, scintillatingly colorful images of Jesus, as well as more secular but equally magical figures—smiling Chicken Boy, Hungry Hill-cat, The Price-Killer—that appeared like apparitions beside the freeways at night, flashing for a few heartbeats against the dark mass of buildings before vanishing in the rearview mirror.
Have You Thanked God Today? inquired neon-red letters along the side of a barnlike structure that Olga assumed was a church. It's Time To Seek Truth read another, marching slowly around the circumference of a floating kiosk two hundred feet off the ground, like the first proclamation from an alien spacecraft.
Not all these urgent communications could be read in the dark.
In true democratic fashion, some who could afford no more than a can of spray paint posted their own messages. The Lord came Back, read one scrawling graffiti on a freeway overpass, and the Jews Killed Him again. She supposed that referred to the Keever Cult, whose leader had been shot down in Jerusalem a decade earlier in an attempt to take over the Dome of the Rock.
Olga had grown sensitive to voices, and thought she heard something in these signs and wonders that might almost be the voice of dreams. Dark dreams. Worried dreams.
It's always those who have lost, and lost something important and painful, who cling to secrets, she decided. Who believe in signs. She thought back on her own youth among the gypsies and other circus folk, their strange certainties, their constant struggle with a universe that held tight to its mystery. But these people lost their war two hundred years ago. They're rich and powerful, modem. What are they still looking for?
It seemed mourning was not always easy to put aside.
She had abandoned the train in Washington, D.C., because her own voices seemed to be growing faint. She knew that she was going in the right direction—knew it the way a sunburned woman would know the direction of the sun—but the voices had become irregular and indistinct, as though something was frightening or distracting them. The vision of the great black spike still came to her as she slept, but now it often seemed only a memory of the earlier dreams. Olga could feel the radar in her head, which at first had led her so inexorably, beginning to become confused. She needed to get out of the fast-moving metal bullet that had rushed her down from Toronto. She wanted to smell unrecycled air, to feel wind against her face. The black mountain was out there—farther south somewhere—but she needed to feel the world properly to know where exactly in the world it was.
From time to time, while driving her rented car through the thick dark greenery of upper Georgia, or while unobtrusively taking up a seat in a roadside restaurant, she could look at herself as an outsider might—a fifty-six-year-old woman who had quit her excellent job and left her home and even her country behind, rushing toward something she did not understand because voices in her head made her feel she must—and knew that if she were that outsider, she could only judge herself insane. Who else had voices in their heads, after all? Who else would be positive that the children of the world were speaking to them in dreams? Crazy people, mad people. Oddly, though, the idea did not bother her.
I'm not worried about being mad, she realized one evening, waiting for a tired waitress to remember that she hadn't taken her order yet. Not as long as I can understand that's how it is. There's still a lot of me that's Olga—still a lot of the same me.
It was strange, to live both inside herself and outside, but it was also oddly calming. Despite her intellectual understanding that what she was doing made no sense, that it was in fact a textbook demonstration of some kind of schizophrenia, it was too powerful to resist. The voices might be imagination, corruption of the brain, but they were a part of her too, just as the more measured part was, and they were the deepest and most true thing she had felt for a long time. She had to treat them with respect—to do anything else would be a form of self-obliteration, and Olga was not the suicidal type. If she had been, she would
never have found herself here, sitting in a poorly-lit restaurant waiting for a cheese sandwich, still alive decades after her beloved Aleksandr and their baby had died.
She drove out of Atlanta and through southern Georgia into Alabama, following the freeways past woods and scrubland crammed with trailers and even less permanent dwellings, or through soaring midtown metroplexes where the mirrored towers of the telemorphic barons filled the skyline, each shining structure proclaiming that even in a world where information ruled, information came from somewhere, was itself ruled from somewhere. This is that somewhere, the buildings announced on behalf of their owners. Here, among the office castles, here and in thousands more across the globe. We control the gateways. We own the very electrons. The timid and downtrodden among you can wait for Jesus if you want to, but in the meantime, we are the Earth's rulers, the masters of the invisible spaces. We shine.
Each night, Olga found herself lying in bed in one of an interchangeable array of roadside motels, the roar of trucks muted almost to silence by the override of her telematic shunt, her head full of pictures and soft voices. The children surrounded her like shy ghosts, each whispering sadly of a personal past that seemed lost, each seemingly content to recite that story over and over as part of a fragmented chorus. Like doves, they closed on her, nudging and murmuring, and each night they led her to a place where she could see the great thrusting shard of black standing against the sky.
Closer now, the murmuring throng told her. Closer.
She awoke each morning tired but peculiarly exalted. Even the occasional flaring pains in her skull, which only weeks before had filled her with constant dread, seemed almost worthwhile, just more proof she was connected to something important. For the first time in years something was happening to her, something that meant something. If the headaches had led to this, then despite the terrible pain they had not been a curse but a blessing.
