Mountain of Black Glass

by Tad Williams

  (visual: Murphy coming out of church)

  When we asked if she planned a comeback, she responded with an angry laugh. And when we asked whether she regretted her apocalyptic prediction. . . .

  (visual: Murphy getting into car)

  MURPHY: "You poor fools. Come back and ask me that in a few months—if you can. "

  They had clearly come to the end of something, or reached some important moment, but once the shock of the nightmare vision had eased a little, Renie felt mostly frustration.

  "Is this all supposed to mean something?" she demanded. "Martine, you said something about a song?" She looked down to where the French woman was kneeling, rocking back and forth as though overcome with grief. She spoke again, more softly. "Martine?"

  "I . . . I know it. I taught it to someone, long ago. To . . . something. I think this is that something." Her head turned listlessly from side to side, as though complete blindness had overwhelmed her again. "It is hard to explain, and the forces moving here are very confusing to me. I lost my sight in an accident, long ago. I was a child, being tested. . . ."

  Renie looked up, startled by movement. T4b was heading down the slope toward the immense, glowing figure. "What is he doing? Javier!"

  His laugh trailed back to them, faint and cracked. "Going to go ask God some questions, seen? Got a whole lot of questions. . . ."

  "Somebody stop him," Renie pleaded. "We don't have any idea what this is all about, and we certainly don't need a teenager with a spear starting the conversation."

  !Xabbu and Florimel had already started down the slope after him. Paul Jonas made a move to accompany them, then hesitated. "Perhaps I'm not the best person," he said.

  "Probably not." Renie turned back to Martine. "Quick—what were you saying?"

  The blind woman groaned. "Forgive me. It is hard to hear, hard to think. There are so many . . . voices in my head. . . !" She raised her hands to her temples. "I was in an experiment. Something—perhaps a neural net. some kind of artificial intelligence—was in it with me, although I thought it another child. It was strange, it thought and spoke strangely. But it was lonely, or seemed to be. I taught it some games and songs." She smiled through what must have been great pain. "You see, I was lonely, too. That song you heard is an old song from my childhood." She furrowed her brow, and then sang in a croaking voice:

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

  "There is more," she said. "It is only a . . . a children's nursery rhyme I knew, but I cannot believe it is coincidence that I should hear it again in this place."

  "So you're saying that giant out there is an AI?" Renie asked. "Is that . . . the operating system? For this whole crazy Otherland network?"

  "The One who is Other," murmured Paul Jonas, as distantly as if he also heard some old, half-remembered song.

  Martine nodded, grimacing, pressing her hands harder against her skull. "The One who is Other. That is what the voice of the Lost called it."

  At the bottom of the rise T4b had shaken off Florimel and !Xabbu and continued marching toward the vast figure. Renie watched with growing despair. "He's going to ruin everything, that idiot. We're going to get ourselves killed because he's acting like an angry child."

  "But it's all about children, isn't it?" Orlando was climbing shakily to his feet, supported by Fredericks. "Right?" he said. His eyes did not quite seem to be tracking. "You came here to save the children, right?" He drew his sword out of Fredericks' belt, then gently pushed her away and began to stumble down the side of the rim, extending the blade to steady himself.

  "Now what are you doing?" Renie demanded.

  He paused to get his footing. Already he was short of breath again. "The One who is Other. I know that name, too. And that must be what I'm . . . here for." He glowered briefly at Fredericks, who was slipping down the dusty wash toward him, but his friend would not be turned away. "See, I was almost gone before, but I . . . but I got sent back. No, I chose to come back." Orlando let his head droop for a moment, then lifted it. For the first time, he looked full at Renie. "But there has to be a reason. So if that's it, that's it. I don't know if I can kill the Dark Lord over there with a sword, but I can sure as hell try. If it doesn't work . . . well, maybe the rest of you will think of something." He turned and continued down the hill.

  "Orlando!" Fredericks hurried awkwardly after him.

  "That's not the Dark Lord of anything," Renie shouted. Their little group was now a scattered line along the slope. "It's a damned VR simulation! This is just another simworld!"

  If he heard her, he did not slow.

  "I'm not sure that it is," said Paul Jonas; at Renie's startled glance, he hurried to add, "I'm not saying that is God, or Orlando's Dark Lord, but I don't think this is a normal simworld."

  He was frowning, distracted, only a little less overwhelmed than Martine. "Ava, or whatever she is, brought us here for a reason. It took an awful lot out of her, too—that's why she had to absorb Emily. I think we're in the heart of the system now, even if this—" he waved his hand, "—is all just some kind of metaphor. As far as that giant thing, I don't know if we're actually supposed to kill it, but I'm pretty sure it's the reason we're here."

  "If that's the operating system," Renie said grimly, "then it murdered our friend Singh. It turned my brother into a vegetable, and Florimel's daughter, too. If there's a way to kill it, I think I might be on Orlando's side after all. But we'd better catch up to them before someone does something unforgivably stupid." She turned to help Martine up. "Can you walk?"

  The blind woman nodded weakly. "I believe so. But there is . . . a tremendous amount of information going in and out of this . . . place."

  "So you definitely think that's the thing that runs this network?"

  Martine flapped her hand. "I do not know anything definitely, except that my head feels like it's going to explode."

  "We'd belter hurry." Renie saw that the rest of the company had already reached the bottom of the slope, and T4b, the farthest in advance, was astonishingly close to the base of a skyscraper-tall foot. She swore. "How did the others get so far ahead of us?"

  Before they could take a step, something rippled out from the great figure, a wave of distorting energy that blurred everything. For half an instant Renie thought it was the thing's sighing, earth-rattling voice again, but then she was gripped and frozen and broken into component pieces and scattered across a suddenly empty universe. She had time only to think It's happening again. . . . and then she lost track of herself entirely.

  There was little conscious thought this time; Renie could not even consider the nature of the fugue state until it had begun to recede, but the effect seemed to lake a very long time to wear off. At last things began drifting back together, accumulating as slowly as droplets of water in zero-gravity—first bits of consciousness assembling themselves, followed by sequences of thought. Body awareness and sound grudgingly began to function, then a sense of color—the possibility of color to begin with, but not color itself—collected out of the blackness. The surrounding void began to have meaning and identifiable shape, then at last the desolate mountaintop scene reassembled itself, smearing together like footage of a melted oil painting run in achingly slow reverse.

  Renie straightened from the bent-legged crouch she found herself in, and saw that several of the others had actually fallen.

  "That was . . . bad, this time," Paul Jonas muttered. They helped Martine up, but she seemed stunned and could barely walk, let alone speak.

  "The breakdowns in the system are getting worse somehow," Renie said as they forced themselves forward once more. "Longer and darker. Maybe we won't have to kill that thing. Maybe it's dying."

  Paul said nothing but his expression was bleakly dubious.

  Within moments they found themselves much closer to the giant shape than they should have been, and Renie began to understand why the others had moved so quickly. Some strange effect was compress
ing the distance, so that with each step the landscape flowed dizzyingly past them; a journey that should have taken them hours was going to be much shorter.

  As they drew nearer to the immense body, Renie had a better view of the tiny white shapes clambering over it like fleas on a sleeping dog. They were humanoid, as they had appeared from a distance, and seemed almost the same size as Renie and her friends, but even under much closer inspection they had no obvious form-faceless, almost shapeless phantoms which seemed oblivious to the presence of the human company.

  Renie felt a sudden catch in her throat. Could those somehow be . . . the children? Stephen and the others?

  !Xabbu and the rest had stopped near the titan's foot. Hoping that he and the other adults had hammered some kind of sense into Orlando and T4b, Renie urged Paul on, and together they nearly lifted Martine off the ground to increase the pace.

  "Look," !Xabbu called as they approached. He pointed.

  Almost a mile distant, the hand of the supine giant, which had been curled in a loose fist on the ground at its side, had begun to open.

  As they watched in stunned silence, the great fingers slowly rose and separated, as if performing the finale of some aeons-long magical trick. It took minutes, but when at last the hand was spread in a monstrous star shape, nothing was revealed but the huge, empty palm.

  "Is it reaching for us?" wondered Renie.

  "Summoning us," suggested !Xabbu.

  "Or warning us to go away," Florimel added quietly.

  They began to walk toward it; again the distance telescoped, so that before they had taken a hundred paces it loomed above them, a massive shape that could have enfolded a stadium as though it were a teacup. Close up, the hand was even more disturbing, inconstant in outline, shimmering and blurring along its edges and across its surface so that it hurt to look at it too long or too closely.

  "It's like mine," said T4b, hoarse with wonderment. The anger had dropped from his face, replaced by pure amazement. "Like mine." He held up the hand that had been damaged in the patchwork country. It did look something like a tiny version of the unspeakably large thing spread above them.

  "What does it mean?" Fredericks asked helplessly. "It's so . . . scanny!" Even Orlando, faced with the astounding size of the thing, had lowered his sword.

  "We can't just. . . ." Renie began, then stopped to stare as a glow began to spread in midair at the center of the spread fingers. "Jesus Mercy." The magic trick had been even slower than they had guessed, and it was not over yet.

  At first, as golden light shimmered, she thought that a gateway was forming, but the gleam flattened and extended until it became clear that they were looking not at something, but through it—an irregular window forming in the naked air between the giant's fingertips and the ground: the yellow gleam was something on the far side. The hole in the air grew sharper and deeper, until Renie could clearly see a vast chamber all of beaten, reflecting gold, and the animal-headed figures who sat within it, still and majestic as statues. Beside each throne lay a huge sarcophagus, red and shiny as a gigantic drop of blood.

  "Who are they?" Paul whispered.

  Renie shook her head in nervous wonder. "I don't know, but I don't think they can hear us. It feels like we're looking at them through a one-way mirror."

  "I know who they are," Orlando said wearily. "We met one of them already, in that Egypt place. That's Osiris. We're looking at the Grail Brotherhood."

  The crowned figure at the center of the golden room rose and extended long arms wrapped in white bandages, then spoke to its silent companions on their thrones.

  "The hour has come." The voice of Osiris floated faintly to Renie and her companions as though down a long dusty corridor, a breath out of the tomb. "Now the Ceremony begins. . . ."

  Felix Jongleur paused to collect himself. The violent spasm that had passed through the system only minutes before had shaken him as well as the other masters of the Grail: he could hear the Ennead still whispering among themselves, not even bothering to shield their communications.

  "Now the Ceremony begins," he announced again. "We have all waited long for this moment. My servant will bring you your cups."

  The jackal-headed god Anubis appeared from the shadows, holding a large golden goblet in his black fingers. Jongleur forced down his irritation—this should have been Dread, acting his assigned role in the simulation, but he had dropped out of contact, forcing Jongleur to concoct this soulless Puppet version of the Messenger of Death. Jongleur comforted himself with the thought of what punishments he would inflict on his wayward servant when he found him again. "Take what he offers you," he instructed the others. "There is one for all." And indeed, as ibis-headed Jiun Bhao took the goblet, another appeared in Anubis' hands, which the jackal then obediently presented to the next in line, yellow-faced Ptah. When Robert Wells had received his goblet, and Anubis had moved on to Daniel Yacoubian wearing the falcon-beaked head of Horus, Wells turned and lifted his cup toward Jongleur in a mocking salute.

  I suppose that is acceptable. Jongleur thought, although he was annoyed with the American. Barely. But I will see him suffer forever if he does anything to give our game away.

  When one of the ever-multiplying goblets was in the hands of each of the Ennead, the jackal servant dutifully vanished into the shadows once more. I suppose it's actually better Dread is not here. Jongleur thought. I couldn't have trusted that young fool not to do something flippantly stupid and spoil the gravity of the moment. . . .

  The slightly awkward pause was broken by Sekhmet. The lion-headed goddess peered into her goblet, then said, "What is the need for this? Can we not simply push a button, or . . . or whatever people do? Why all this nonsense?"

  Jongleur paused. It is close now, so close. Be patient. "Because we do what no one has ever done, Madame. This is a moment unlike any other in history—is it not worth a little ceremony?" He tried to smile, but the Osiris face was not really made for such things.

  Ymona Dedoblanco was not so easily pacified. "It all seems strange to me. We are . . . we are to drink poison?"

  "Only symbolically, my fierce Sekhmet. In reality, you have each of you chosen the methods you deem best to . . . to effect your passage. Whatever is in keeping with your other arrangements." Meaning of course that some of the Brotherhood could not let their physical deaths be known for some time, either to help preserve their power or simply to prevent the world noticing that a surprising number of famous and powerful people had all died at the same time. "But if you are asking is the death of your physical body necessary, the answer is yes. Come, Madame—surely this has all been explained to you."

  The African president-for-life with the crocodile head was also restive. "Why can I not save my real body?"

  Jongleur was losing the battle with his own anger. "I cannot believe you are asking such things at this late moment, Ambodulu. The reason is, not only will you not be able to reenter your physical body, you would effectively be creating two versions of yourself—the physical version you now are, and a separate but immortal version living inside the network. You would be creating the fiercest rival for yourself imaginable—a twin who knows all your sources of power, who has the right to all your resources." He shook his head. "Wells, you created this system—please explain it to him. I am losing patience."

  The lemon-hued face of Ptah remained solemn, but Jongleur thought he detected a hint of amusement as Wells rose. That was the problem with Americans, Jongleur reflected sourly—they loved chaos for its own sake.

  "Most of you have long understood and come to terms with this," Wells said smoothly, "but I will explain one more time, just to insure there are no doubts. I know it's a frightening step." He looked briefly to his falcon-headed confidant—less asking for help, Jongleur guessed, than silently requesting that the volatile Yacoubian keep his mouth shut. "The problem is that mind-transference is not truly possible. . . ."

  "What?" Sekhmet almost rose from her chair as she showed her fangs. "Then what a
re we doing here. . . ?"

  "Please, show some courtesy. You were not required to study the Grail process, Ms. Dedoblanco, but I would have thought it worth your while." Wells frowned. "I was trying to say that mind-transference of the type so often used in science-fiction entertainments is not possible. The mind isn't a thing, or even a collection of things—you can't simply make an electronic copy of everything that exists in the mind, then . . . turn it on." He mimed the button-pushing she had suggested earlier.

  "The mind is an ecology, a combination of neurochemical elements and the relationship between those elements. Some of how it works is so complex even the people who have perfected our Grail process still do not fully understand it, but they—we—have learned how to do what we need. We cannot simply move the mind from a physical location to a computer system, no matter how powerful and complex the system. Instead, we have created a mirror version—a virtual mind, as it were—for each of us, and then allowed our own brains to make it identical to the original. Once the initial matrix was created—the raw system in which an artificial mind could exist—you will remember that you were all fitted with what we call a thalamic splitter, an engineered biological device that creates a doubling effect of all brain activity. From then on, the process of simply using your brain began to create the duplicate here in the Grail system.

  "Certain elements built into the splitter stimulated your actual physical minds to duplicate themselves into the online minds—creating mirrored storage of memories, among other things—until both versions existed in parallel. Your nonphysical duplicates have been kept effectively unconscious through this process, of course, in a sort of dreamless sleep, waiting for today. That's a gross oversimplification, but all the literature has been available to you. You can look up anything you want, any time." Now he did smile. "It seems a bit late for it, though.

  "Now the time has come to finish the process—but it is not a transfer. Even as we speak, even as we sit in this virtual room, you are updating the waiting online minds. But if we simply woke those online minds, you yourself would perceive no change—you would still be inside your dying, mortal bodies. Instead, an identical version of you would suddenly exist, one with every memory of yours right up until the moment it was awakened, a version of you which could live entirely in the network. But it would not stay you for long—from the moment it gained consciousness it would begin to diverge, to become something separate—a thing with your memories, anxious to lead its own life. But although it would be immortal, you—and by that I mean the you listening to me now—would still grow older and more ill, and eventually die."