Sea of Silver Light (122 page)

Nobody cares about me,
he thought.
Except the man who tried to kill me. But why should they care? They don't know what I know.

It had all come back—not just the terrible last moments in the tower, but with it all the little missing pieces, the day-to-day boredom and routine, everything that had been hidden from him by the post-hypnotic block.

"She's dead," he said to Jongleur. "Ava's been dead all along, hasn't she?"

"Then your memories are unlocked." Jongleur spoke slowly. "Yes, she is dead."

"So why was she here? Why did she keep . . . appearing to me?" He looked over at the others huddled around Orlando. They were only a few meters away but he felt so disconnected from them it could have been a Hundred times that. "Is it something like what happened to that boy—to Orlando Gardiner?"

Jongleur gave him a brief appraising glance. Even the firelight sparkling in his eyes did not make him look more alive.
He looks like something stuffed,
Paul thought.
Something with glass eyes. Dead eyes.

"I do not know," Jongleur said at last. "I do not know what the boy is, although I have my suspicions. But my Avialle, when she died . . . all that was left were copies."

"Copies?" The word, although half-expected, chilled him.

"From earlier versions of the Grail process. Different mind-scans made at different times. None wholly satisfactory." He frowned as though about to send back an unimpressive wine.

"Like that Tinto from the Venetian simulation," Paul said. "I was right." Jongleur raised an eyebrow at the name but said nothing. "How did the . . . how did Ava—all those Avas—get into the system? Why did she keep appearing to me?"

Jongleur shrugged. "After she died, when I found that all the stored copies, even those made of Finney and Mudd, had been dumped, I thought there had been some malfunction in the Grail system. It is a huge and fearfully complex enterprise, after all." His eyes narrowed. "I did not realize that the Other—the operating system—had broken the bonds of its confinement, had made its way out of the strait-jacket of the network and into my own system. Even when I . . . saw her for the first time in one of my simulations, I did not understand how one of the copies could have made its way into the Grail network." His back straightened and his jaw set; Paul thought he looked like someone trying to mask either great pain or anger. "I was visiting my Elizabethan simworld. I saw her in Southwark, near the Globe Playhouse, being pursued by two cutthroats who looked like Mudd and Finney. I caught them and immobilized them for later study but she escaped. It was then I realized that all the missing copies must have somehow been dumped into the Grail network, but I still did not suspect the operating system."

"So . . . all the versions of the Twins are just copies?"

It was horrible having to cajole information out of this cruel man, this murderer, but the hunger for answers was too strong.

"No, Finney and Mudd still exist. After . . . what happened with Avialle they were punished—imprisoned, in a sense—but they still work for me. They are the ones that pursued you through the Grail network after your escape."

"But why, damn it?" For a moment the anger came back again in a surge of heat up his spine. It was all he could do to remain seated. "Why me? Why am I so damned important?"

"You? You are nothing. But to my Avialle you were something." The old man scowled and lowered his eyes. "The copies of her, all those ghosts—they were drawn to you. Not that I knew it at first. After Avialle was lost, I kept you imprisoned and unconscious. I still had many questions about what had happened. I implanted a neurocannula and brought you into one of my Grail network simulations so I could . . . investigate."

"So you could torture me," Paul spat.

Jongleur shrugged. "Call it what you will. I have almost no physical life anymore. I wanted you in my realm. But I soon noticed that you had attracted attention from . . . something. It was always fleeting, but I was able to capture traces. It was Avialle—or rather, the duplicate versions of Avialle. They were drawn to you, somehow. They could not keep away from you for long."

"She loved me," Paul said.

"Shut your mouth. You have no right to speak of her now."

"It's true. And my sin was that all I could truly offer her was pity. But that's still more than you can say, isn't it?"

Jongleur stood, pale with fury, and raised his clenched fists. "Pig. I should kill you."

Paul rose too. "You're welcome to try. Go on—you've done everything else to me that you could."

Paul's companions had turned as his argument with Jongleur grew louder. Azador hurried over to them. "Please, my friends, no more fighting. We have an enemy already—and he is enough for us all, eh?"

Paul shrugged his shoulders and sat down. Azador whispered something in Jongleur's ear, then went back to the group gathered around Orlando. Jongleur stared at Paul for a long moment before lowering himself back to the ground. "You will speak no more of that," he said coldly.

"I will speak of what I want. If you hadn't imprisoned her, treated her like something in a museum, none of this would have happened."

"You understand nothing," Jongleur said, but the fire was gone from his voice. "Nothing."

For a while Paul only listened to the distant hissing and popping of the fire, his companions' murmuring conversation. "So you stuck me in that simulation of the First World War," he said at last. "You staked me out. I was the bait,"

Jongleur looked at him as if from a great distance. "I hoped to bring her close enough to capture, yes. Perhaps eventually to gather enough of the copies to reconstitute something close to the real Avialle."

"Why? Was it anything so normal as a father's love? Or was it something less pleasant? Was it just because she was yours, and you wanted back what belonged to you?"

The old man was rigid. "What is in my heart . . . is for no man to know."

"Heart? You have a heart?" He expected anger, but this time Jongleur seemed too chilled and weary even to respond. "So what was it all about, then? All that madness, that bizarre museum of a house and grounds—what did you intend?"

Jongleur did not speak for a long time. "Do you know what an
ushabti
is?" he said at last.

Paul shook his head, puzzled. "I don't know the word."

"It does not matter," Jongleur said. "In fact, all this talk is worthless. We will both be dead soon. When the system collapses everyone here will die."

"Then if it doesn't matter, you might as well tell me the truth." Paul leaned forward. "You were going to kill me, weren't you? Ava was right about that. You were going to kill me—swat me like a fly. Weren't you?"

Felix Jongleur looked at him for a long, calculating second, then looked down at the fire. "Yes."

Paul sat back with a sick little feeling of triumph. "But why?"

Jongleur shook his head. "It was a mistake—a bad idea. A failed project. It was named for the
ushabti
of the Egyptian tombs, the tiny statuettes that were meant to wait for the dead Pharaoh in the afterlife."

"I'm not following you. You wanted me to work for you after you were dead?"

Jongleur showed a wintry smile. "Not you. You give yourself too much importance, Mr. Jonas. A common problem with the people of your small island."

Paul swallowed a retort. So the ancient Frenchman wanted to insult the Brits—let him. He had never imagined he would actually get the chance to speak to this man face-to-face. He could not waste the opportunity. "Then who? What?"

"I began the Ushabti Project several years ago, at a time when I felt quite certain that the Grail process was going to fail. The first results on the thalamic splitter were very bad and the Grail network's operating system—the Other, as some call it—was unstable." Jongleur frowned. "I was already very, very old. If the Grail Project did not succeed, I would die. But I did not want to die."

"Who does?"

"Few have the resources I do. Few have the courage to flout humanity's cowardly surrender to death."

Paul held in his impatience. "So . . . you started this . . . Ushakti Project?"

"
Ushabti.
Yes. If I could not perpetuate my actual self, I would do the next best thing. Like the pharaohs, I would keep my line alive. I would save the sacred blood. I would do this by creating a version of me that would survive my death."

"But you just said that the technology wasn't working. . . ."

"It was not. So I came up with the best alternative I could. I could not escape death, it seemed, so I created a clone."

A number of terrible thoughts began fizzing in Paul's head. "But that's . . . that doesn't make sense. A clone isn't you, it's just your genetics. It would grow up into a very different person, because its experiences . . . would be different. . . ."

"I see you begin to understand. Yes, it would not be me. But if I gave it an upbringing as close to my own as I could, then it would be more like me. Enough like me to appreciate what I had done. Perhaps even enough to resurrect me someday from the Grail copies we had already made, flawed as they were." Jongleur closed his eyes, remembering. "All was prepared. When he reached his maturity and spoke his true name—
Hor-sa-iset,
Horus the Younger—to my system, it would have served as his access code. That is the
true
Horus of Egyptian mythology—the Horus born from the dead body of Osiris. All of my secrets would have been his." He frowned, distracted. "If I had already conceived of the Ushabti Project when I was founding the Grail Brotherhood, I would never have given 'Horus' as a code name to that imbecile Yacoubian. . . ."

"Hang on a bit. You . . . you were going to use a clone to recreate your own childhood?" Paul was stunned by the magnitude of the man's lunacy. "On top of a skyscraper?" A thought struck him like a stone. "Oh, my God, Ava? She was going to be. . . ."

"The mother.
My
mother—or at least the mother of my
ushabti
. A vessel for the preservation of the blood."

"Christ, you really are mad. Where did you get the poor girl? Was she some actress you hired to play your sainted Mama? She couldn't have been your real daughter, unless you raised her in a genetics lab too." It struck him then, sapping the strength from his body, chilling him to the bone. "Jesus. You did, didn't you? You . . . made her."

Jongleur seemed wearily amused by Paul's astonishment. "Yes. She was another clone of me—modified so she would be female, of course, so actually quite a bit different. You need not look so shocked—the Egyptians married brother to sister. Why should I do less for my own posterity? In fact, I would have used my real mother as the source for Avialle's genetic material, but I could not bring myself to exhume her body. She had rested in the cemetery in Limoux for almost two centuries and she still does. Her bones were left undisturbed." He waved his hand dismissively. "But it made little difference, in any case. The mother was to provide no DNA, after all. She was only to be the host—to carry and bear and then raise my true son."

"God help me, it just gets worse and worse. So Ava was right—she
was
pregnant!"

"Briefly. But we had a breakthrough on the Grail Project and so I abandoned Ushabti."

"And so you took the embryo back. Then you just . . . kept Ava anyway. Kept her a prisoner."

For a moment, Jongleur's mask of disdain slipped. "I . . . I had come to care for her. My own children have been dead for years. I scarcely know their descendants."

Paul put his head in his hands. "You . . . you. . . ." He took a deep, shuddering breath. "I should just stop, but I can't help asking. What about me? What did you intend to do before Ava ruined your plans by falling in love with me?"

The cold smile returned. "She ruined nothing. I expected her to do just that. My own mother was in love with her tutor. He committed suicide. In her misery she allowed her parents to marry her off to my father but the sadness never left her—it was the thing that shaped the rest of her life. If it had not happened, she would not have been the mother I knew." His smile twisted. "It was those fools Mudd and Finney who let things get out of control. They should have left the two of you alone until we were ready to dispose of you. I had just canceled the Ushabti Project, so what did it matter, anyway?"

"It mattered to me," Paul said, shaken but angry. "It mattered to me and to Ava."

"You are not to speak further of Avialle. I am tired of your familiarity."

Paul squeezed his eyes closed for a moment, fighting the rage that would end all questions and answers. "Then just tell me this—why did you pick me out of all the poor sods in the world? Was it just random? Did you simply choose the first acceptable applicant for this little . . . honor? Or was there something particular about me?"

When he looked up, the old man's eyes were glassy and dead again. "Because you went to Cranleigh."

"What?" It was the last answer he expected. "What are you talking about—my public school?"

Jongleur's sneer was almost a sign of weakness—the first such sign from him Paul had seen. "I was sent there as a child. The English boys singled me out as a foreigner and a weakling. They tortured me."

"And because of that you chose
me
? You were going to murder me just because I went to Cranleigh?" Paul laughed despite himself, a painful, near-hysterical flutter at the top of his lungs. "Christ, I hated that place. The older boys treated me just like they treated you."
Except for Niles,
he remembered, and the thought brought another with it. "So what happened to me afterward—the
real
me. Am I dead like Ava? Did you have me killed?"

The old man had lost his fire. "No. We arranged an automobile accident, but not with your real body. That is still quite safe in one of the project's laboratories and, as far as I know, quite alive. The remains that were sent back to England were those of a vagrant. There was no need for British authorities to doubt the identification of the body."