Sea of Silver Light (121 page)

The monstrous, gelatinous form of the wife-thing humped up behind Orlando, spluttering in fury. He had only a fraction of an instant to jump away as it smashed down like a titan fist made of putty. It oozed quickly to the side to trap him against the precipice then stretched upward again, its mouth hanging open in an idiot gape that made it look like some kind of giant, cancerous sock puppet. Before it could drop and crush him Orlando shoved the blade of his sword deep into its bulk, then struggled around to one side, dragging the blade with him, his long muscles knotting as he pulled it through the rubbery flesh even as the creature folded down on top of him.

Sam's heart stuttered and seemed to stop entirely until Orlando scrabbled back out from under the bulky thing, covered with its slime. The sound of the creature's anger went sharper in pitch, into pain and even fright. It heaved upward again but something viscous was running out of the long jagged hole across its middle. Jack Sprat's wife swayed, grew slack as a deflating balloon, then collapsed and slid over the edge in a wet, sticky glob and vanished into the Well.

Sam was already up and running, forcing her way through the stunned refugees, leaping over the dead and dying without any thought for them at all. Orlando turned away from the edge of the Well, staggered, and fell to his knees.

"Orlando!" she screamed. "Oh,
dzang
, Gardiner, is it really you?" She crouched and wrapped her arms around him. "Don't die, you better not die! Oh, God, I knew you couldn't be dead. You came back! Like Gandalf! You utterly came back!"

He turned his head to look at her. For a moment he seemed to be looking at a stranger and her stomach contracted. Then he smiled. It was a miserable, weary smile, but she thought it was the most wonderful thing she had seen in her whole life. "But I
am
dead, Frederico," he said. "I really am."

"No, you're not!" She hugged him as hard as she could. She was weeping, babbling—she didn't care, she didn't know anything, he was alive, alive! The others were running toward them but she did not want to let go, ever. "No, you're not. You're here."

After a long moment he pulled back a little. "Gandalf?" He peered at her, tried to blink away his own tears, then laughed. "Damn, you
did
read it. You read it but you never told me. You are such a scanmaster, Fredericks." And then he collapsed in her arms.

CHAPTER 42

NETFEED/NEWS: Poor Countries Want to Be Prisons

(visual: new facility at Totness)

VO: The governments of poor nations such as Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago are vying to house overflow prisoners from the United States and Europe, where prison populations are rising faster than facilities can be built, despite fierce domestic opposition in many of these small countries.

(visual: Vicenta Omarid, Vice-chairman, Resist!)

OMARID: "Our country is not a dumping ground for toxic waste or toxic humanity. This is a cynical exploitation by the first world nations of their own people and ours, an attempt to hide the consequences of their own jail-the-poor policies by waving money under the noses of hungry nations like Trinidad and Tobago. . . ."

At first Sellars had no idea where he was. He was sunk deep in a padded seat that felt more like a womb than a chair, surrounded, comforted, connected. The great window before him was full of burning points of light and he could feel the almost silent vibration of engines—no, not just feel the vibrations, he realized, but discern the actual working of the antiproton drive, every detail of its performance as well as the ship's million other functions, all flooding into his altered nervous system. He was flying through the stars.

"It's the
Sally Ride
," he murmured.
My ship. . . ! My beautiful ship.

But something was wrong.

How did I get here?
Memories were seeping back now, a kaleidoscope of days, of fire and terror followed by years of isolation. Of a past in which this silver seed had been blasted to twisted wreckage in a hangar in South Dakota without ever having flown outside the lower thermosphere.

But the stars. . . ! There they are, bigger than life. Could it be that everything else I thought was real, the destruction of PEREGRINE, my long imprisonment, wax it all just a dream—a cold-sleep nightmare?

He wanted to believe it. He wanted to believe it so badly he could taste it. If this were real then even the nightmare of five crippled decades would soon evaporate, leaving him alone with his ship and the endless fields of starlight.

"No," he said aloud. "This isn't real. You got past my defenses. You've taken this out of my own head somehow."

For a long moment he heard nothing but the hum of the ship's engines. The stars swung past the window like flurrying snow. Then the ship spoke.

"Stay," it said. "Stay with . . . this one." He had heard the voice before, of course, during countless tests—the strangely sexless, computer-generated tones of his own starship. "This one is lonely."

Something caught at his heart. After it was destroyed in the Sand Creek disaster he had pushed the ship from his thoughts like a dead lover. Even to hear its voice after all these years was a miracle. But he was troubled by the words. Did the Grail Network operating system which had built this dream in his head really only want to talk? Sellars had fought the thing for so long that he found that almost impossible to believe, "I Know this isn't real," he said, "but why are you doing it? Why didn't you just kill me when you broke through into my mind?"

"You . . . are different," said the mechanical ship-voice. Outside the thick window, the snowflake stars continued to wheel past. "Made of light and numbers. Like this one."

My wiring—my internal systems. Does it really think I'm the same kind of thing as it? Could it really just be looking for a . . . a kindred soul?
He could not believe that was all there was—the operating system had sensed him long ago, had been studying him through each incursion as carefully as he had studied it. Why had it waited so long to contact him? Was it only that its own defenses had prevented it? Or was something else going on?

Sellars was baffled and exhausted. The seductiveness of the dream, the granting of this fondest wish, which had turned to ashes so long ago, was making it hard to concentrate.

"The stars," the thing said as if it sensed his thought. "You know the stars?"

"I used to," Sellars said. "I thought I would spend my life among them."

"Very lonely," the ship's voice said.

That at least had been real. No mere shipspeak program could manufacture a crippled bleakness like that. "Some people don't think so," he said, almost kindly.

"Lonely. Empty. Cold."

Sellars was drawn to respond—it was hard to hear such childlike despair and not. say something—but as the strangeness of the experience began to wear away the illogic continued to disturb him.

If all it wanted was to talk to me, why now? It was able to reach outside its network a long time ago—just look at the way it manifested in Mister J's, the way it's begun to explore other real-world systems. Why didn't it just contact me, instead of waiting until I was trying to enter the Grail network? In fact, even if it had to wait until I entered the network, why did it wait until this particular moment—I've been in the network many times.
He tried to piece together what had happened just before the contact.
We were struggling, or at least I was struggling with its security routines. Then I left it so I could go and open the data tap . . . all that information from the Grail network, that massive, overwhelming flow . . . and that was the moment it attacked me again. Pushed past my defenses.

When I opened the data tap.

"You, this one—we are the same," the ship-voice said suddenly. It almost sounded frightened.

"You've been using me, haven't you?" Sellars nodded. "You clever bastard. You waited until I broke into Jongleur's system, then piggybacked in on my access. There was something there you couldn't manage on your own, wasn't there? Something expressly designed to keep you out. And you needed me alive and connected until you could get into it." With that understanding came a deeper fear. What had his adversary fought so hard and so craftily to reach? What was it doing even now, while it entertained him with recreated memories?

And what would it do to him when it didn't need him any longer?

"No. Lonely in the dark. Don't want to be here anymore."
The mechanical voice was becoming increasingly distorted.

"Then let me help you," Sellars begged. "You said that I am like you. Give me a chance! I want what you want—I want the children to be safe."

"Not safe,"
it whispered. Even the stars were growing faint beyond the window, as though the
Sally Ride
was now outracing their ancient light.
"Too late. Too late for the children."

"Which children?" he asked sharply.

"All the children."

"What have you done?" Sellars demanded. "How did you use me? If you tell me, there might still be some way for me to help you—or at least help the children."

"No help,"
it said sadly, then began to sing in a mournful, halting voice.

"An angel touched me, an angel touched me, the river washed me. . . ."

Sellars had never heard the words or the simple tune. "I don't understand—just tell me what you've done. Why did you keep me here?
What have you done?
"

It began to sing again. This time, Sellars recognized the song.

"Rock-a-bye, baby, in the treetop. . . ."

And then the ship was gone, the stars were gone, everything was gone, and he fell back into the familiar confines of his Garden.

But it was a garden no longer, or at least not the comfortable, curved space he had nurtured for so long. Now it stretched for what looked like kilometers, vaster than the grounds at Kensington or Versailles, an almost impossible riot of greenery spreading in all directions.

It held together,
Sellars realized.
My Garden absorbed the Grail network information and held together. And I am still alive, too. The Other did whatever it wanted to do and then it released me.
He checked to make sure his connection to the network was still open, that he still had contact with Cho-Cho, and was filled with relief to discover he did.

So what did the operating system do?
he wondered.
What did it want?

He flung himself into the acres of data, quantities of information that might take a team of specialists years to analyze properly. But there was only Sellars, and he did not have years or even months. In fact, he suspected he might only have a day or two left before things fell apart completely.

The revelations, at least some of them, came swiftly. As he examined the most recent events concerning the Grail network, for speed's sake tracking just through what had happened since he himself had opened the data tap, then delving frantically in the Grail Brotherhood's files to confirm his suspicions, he discovered what the operating system was and what it had done.

It was worse than he could have imagined. He did not have days. If he was lucky, he might have three hours to save his friends and countless other innocents.

If he was insanely lucky, he might have four.

They made themselves another camp of sorts among the ruins of Azador's Gypsy settlement. The shattered frames of the wagons loomed in the half-light like the skeletons of strange animals. Bodies of fairy-tale creatures lay everywhere, broken and dismembered. Many of the remains had been claimed and had been dragged away by friends and the Gypsies had laid out their own fallen kin at the edge of camp, covering the bodies with colorful blankets, but dozens of corpses still lay unmourned and unburied. Paul could scarcely bear to look. It was a blessing, in a way, that the Well was dying, the light fading.

The waters were almost entirely dark, the radiance that had once danced there only a flicker now; it barely touched the cocoon of cloudy gray overhead, so that even the few campfires seemed to give out more light than the Well. The growing shadow on both sides of the barrier held one other benefit: Paul had no doubt that Dread still waited beyond the cloud-wall, but at least they didn't have to watch that man-shaped point of infinite night pacing calmly back and forth on the other side anymore.

Out of his childhood a snatch of the Bible came to him.
"Whence comest thou?" Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, "From going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in if."

But there are two Satans in this universe,
Paul thought.
And one of them is in here. With us.

He stared at Felix Jongleur who, like Paul, sat some distance from the fire and the other survivors. Jongleur stared back. Their companions seemed far more interested in Orlando, who had not yet regained consciousness. But except for having been dead—something Paul thought was usually considered a fairly serious medical problem—the boy seemed to be suffering from nothing worse than exhaustion.