Sea of Silver Light (123 page)

But even if I'm not really dead, I might as well be,
he thought.
Niles isn't shifting heaven and earth to find me, that's certain. He's given that "remember good old Paul Jonas?" speech a long time ago now.
"How long?" he asked.

Jongleur looked at him in confused irritation. "What?"

"How long have I been in your damned system? How long since you killed your daughter and as good as killed me?"

"Two years."

Paul struggled up onto his feet, legs weak, knees trembling. He could not sit across from the murderer any longer. Two years. Two years obliterated and his life ruined, for nothing. For a failed, insane project. Because he had gone to a particular school. It was the bleakest joke imaginable. He stumbled away from the fire, toward the Well. He wanted to weep but he couldn't.

Orlando was stirring, even fighting a little. Reluctantly, Sam let go of him and sat up. "Is he okay?"

"He is just awakening, I think," said Florimel.

Over T4b's shoulder, Sam saw Paul Jonas abruptly stand and stagger away across the camp, heading toward the pit. Remembering !Xabbu, she was torn between fear for Paul and an absolute unwillingness to leave Orlando, but Martine was already rising to her feet.

"I will go with Paul," she said. "I can wait to speak to Orlando."

Orlando's eyelids flickered, then opened. He looked at the faces leaning over him. "I had the most amazing dream," he said after a few seconds. "You were in it—and you, and you, and you!" His lips trembled. "That's kind of a joke." He burst into tears.

Sam wrapped her arms around the weeping barbarian. "It's okay. We're here. I'm here. You're okay."

Florimel cleared her throat and stood. "There are many injured all around. I will see if I can be of any help." None of the others had risen. Florimel looked sternly at T4b. "Javier, I am still upset that you lied to us, but I will be closer to forgiving you if you come and help me."

"But, want to check out Orlando, me. . . ." he began, then the look on Florimel's face sank in. "Yeah, seen, coming." He stood, then reached back down to pat Orlando. "Lockin' miracle, you got. Praise God, seen?"

"Nandi, Mrs. Simpkins, perhaps you could help me, too?" asked Florimel. "And Azador—surely some of your people are in need of attention as well."

"All right, I don't need to have a house fall on me," said Bonita Mae Simpkins. She too leaned down to touch Orlando before she got up. "Javier's right, boy—it's a miracle you're back with us. We'll leave you young ones alone for a little while. Sure you got lots to talk about."

Sam made a face at their retreating backs. "You'd think we were in love or something."

Orlando smiled wearily. "Yeah, you'd think." His eyes and cheeks were still wet. He rubbed at his face with the back of his hand. "This is so embarrassing—Thargor never cries."

Sam's heart was pierced again. "Oh, Orlando, I missed you so much. I never thought I'd see you again." Now she was crying, too. She angrily dabbed at her eyes with the tattered sleeve of her Gypsy shirt. "Damn, this is so stupid. You're going to start thinking of me as a girl."

"But you are a girl, Frederico," he said gently. "This may be the first time I've ever seen you look like one, but you're definitely a girl."

"Not to you! Not to you, Gardiner! You treat me like a person!"

He sighed. "I recognized your voice when I first . . . came back. I saw you trying to come and help me against those things. I could have killed you myself. What were you thinking?"

"I wasn't going to sit there and watch you get murdered, you impacted idiot! I already thought you were dead once."

"I was dead, I
am
dead."

"Don't talk
fenfen
."

"It's not." He reached for her hand. "Listen, Sam. This is important—really important. Whatever else happens, you have got to understand this. I don't want to see you get hurt anymore."

Something about his tone touched her, made her heart flutter. It wasn't love, certainly not the kind the kids at school and on the net talked about, but something wider, deeper, and more strange. "What do you mean?"

"I died, Sam. I know I did. I felt it. I was fighting with that thing, that Grail bastard with the bird's head. . . ." He paused. "Whatever happened there, anyway?"

"You killed it," she said proudly. "T4b stuck his hand into its head—that glowing hand, do you remember? And then you stabbed it right in the heart with your sword, and it fell on you. . . ." She suddenly remembered. "Oh, your sword. . . !"

Orlando waved the interruption away. "It's right here in my hand. Listen, Sam, I was fighting with that bird-thing and everything in me was . . . shutting down. I could feel it. And afterward I was gone—utterly gone! I was somewhere else, and . . . and I can't even explain. Then it was black, and then I was swimming up through the lights here and I knew I had to kill those two things, and . . . and. . . ." He frowned and tried to sit up but Sam gently pushed him back down. "And I don't even know, really. But I know one thing. The other Orlando, the one with progeria, the one with a mom and a dad and a body . . . he's gone."

"What are you talking about?"

"Remember what they were saying at that Grail Brotherhood ceremony? About how you had to leave your body behind to live on the net? Well, I think that's what happened to me. I don't know how, but . . . but I was dying, Sam! And now I'm not. I can tell."

"But that's good, Orlando—that's wonderful!"

He shook his head. "I'm a ghost, Sam. My body—that Orlando—is dead, I can never go back."

"Go back. . . ?" It was beginning to sink in now, cold, inescapable. "You can't. . . ?"

"I can't go back to the real world. Even if we survive all this, even if all the rest of you make it back . . . I can't go with you." He looked at her for a long moment, his eyes wide, almost fevered. Then his expression softened. "Damn, Fredericks, you're crying again." He reached out and caught a tear on her cheek, holding it up to sparkle in the firelight. "Don't do that."

"What are . . . what are we going to do?" she said, breath hitching quietly as she did her best not to sob.

"Try not to get killed. Or try not to get killed again, in my case." He pulled himself up into a sitting position. "Now tell me what happened after I died."

It caught her by surprise. She squeaked with laughter in spite of herself but it also left her feeling frighteningly hollow. "Damn you, Gardiner, don't do that to me."

He smiled. "Sorry. Some things don't change, I guess."

She caught up to him at the edge of the shoreline. Without saying a word she slipped her arm through his. He started a little at the unexpected contact but did not pull away. It was nice to be touched, he realized, and with that also realized that he was planning to live.

"I wasn't going to jump in," he said.

"I didn't think so," she told him. "But it would have been messy if you fell in by accident."

He turned and she pivoted neatly beside him. They moved along the shore.

"Tell me," she said. "Did it all come back this time?"

"More than I wanted," he said.

As he described his returned memories—his returned life, in fact—and Jongleur's bizarre explanations, he found himself feeling more than ever ashamed at his own timidity, at the way he had let the events of his former life carry him along with little resistance to such a terrible conclusion.

". . . And Ava—she was so young!" His hands were clenched into such tight fists that he knew Martine could feel the tremors in his arm. "How could I. . . ?"

"How could you what?" He was surprised to hear anger in her voice. "Offer her comfort? Do your best to help her in the middle of a bizarre, frightening, inexplicable situation? Did you try to seduce her?"

"No!"

"Did you take advantage of her ignorance—her sheltered innocence. . . ?"

"No, of course not. Not on purpose. But just by going along with it—just by continuing to be her teacher even when I knew the whole thing was somehow rotten. . . ."

"Paul." She tightened her grip on his arm. "Someone . . . a friend . . . told me something once. He was speaking of me, but he might have been speaking of you. 'You never avoid an opportunity to stare directly at the wrong things,' is what he said." She made a noise that might have been a laugh. Paul found himself wondering for the first time what the real Martine looked like and was saddened that her blindness made her image bland and unremarkable. "It was an even wittier epigram originally, of course," she said. "Because of the bit about staring."

"He sounds cruel."

"I thought so at the time, and I valued him for it—I was very cynical in my student days. But I think now he just did not yet have the strength to be gentle." She smiled. "We may all be in our last hours, Paul Jonas. Do you really want to spend them trying to remember the many things you may have done wrong?"

"I suppose not."

They walked for a while in silence beside the dimly pulsing Well.

"It's hard," he said. "I've been thinking all along that somehow I'd find her . . . save her. Or perhaps that she'd save me."

"You are speaking of . . . Ava?" she asked him carefully.

He nodded. "But there is no Ava. Not really. Avialle Jongleur is dead, and all that's left are fragments. Held together by the Other, I suppose, but she's not quite real. Like trying to reassemble a puzzle without having all the right pieces. In its way, the Other must have loved her more than anyone else did—certainly more than her so-called father did. More than I did. She was its angel."

Martine did not reply.

"There's something else," he said after a moment. "Jongleur told me that as far as he knows, my body's still alive."

"Do you think he is lying?"

"No. But I don't think it's my body anymore."

Martine paused, "What do you mean, Paul?"

"I've been thinking—during the few moments something hasn't been actively trying to kill us, that is." He made the effort to smile. "Those very few moments. And I believe I know what happened when Sellars got me out of that World War One simulation. See, as long as the Grail people had my body, they also had my mind. Sellars—and Ava—could only talk to me when I was dreaming. But somehow, I escaped the simulation."

"And you think. . . ."

"I think that I've been through the Grail Brotherhood's ceremony—that my consciousness has been split off somehow, the way they planned to do for themselves. Perhaps it was an accident—I don't know why they would have made a virtual mind for me like they did for all the Grail people. But I think it did happen, and Sellars somehow brought that virtual mind to life. And that second, virtual Paul Jonas . . . is me."

She said nothing, but clutched his arm more tightly.

"So all the things I left behind, the simple, silly things that have kept me going here when I wanted to lie down and die, my flat, my mediocre job, my entire old life . . . they don't belong to me. They belong to the real Paul. The one whose body is in a lab somewhere. Even if that body dies, I can never have them. . . ."

He fell silent for a while. It hurt too much to talk. They walked on along the desolate shoreline.

"What is that line from T. S. Eliot?" he said when he trusted himself to speak. "Something about, 'I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling on the floors of silent seas. . . .' "

She turned her sightless face toward him. "Are you criticizing yourself again?"

"Actually, I was talking about the landscape." He stopped. "It does seem like the kind of place to wait for the end of the world, doesn't it?"

"I am tired of waiting for the end of the world," she said, but her head was cocked at a strange angle.

"Well, I don't think we have a lot of choice," he began. "Dread is still waiting just outside, and even if Orlando took care of the Twins I don't think he's up to dealing with what Dread's become. . . ."

"I suspect you are right. The Other has played its knight and it has bought some time, but nothing else."

"Its. . . ?"

"Its knight. Do you remember the story of the boy in the well? One of his would-be saviors was a knight. I suspect the Other had Orlando picked out for that role from the beginning." She frowned and raised her hand. "Quiet for a moment, please. Stand still."

"What is it?" Paul asked after a short silence.

"The waters are receding." She pointed. "Can you see it?"

"Whatever it is, it's not visible to me." But he wondered if in fact the lights were not already a little dimmer.

"I can feel the whole thing failing," she said distractedly. "Like an engine that has run too long. The end is coming very fast now I think."

"What can we do?"

She listened silently for long moments. "Nothing, I fear. Go back to the others and wait with them." She turned toward him. "But first I must ask you something. Will you hold me, Paul Jonas? Just for a short while? It has been a long time for me. I would not . . . would not like to die . . . without touching someone first."

He put his arms around her, full of conflicted thoughts. She was small, at least in this incarnation; her head fit just beneath his chin, her cheek against his chest. He wondered what her heightened senses would make of the quickness of his heartbeat.

"Perhaps in another world," she said, the words muffled against him. "In another time. . . ."

Then they just held each other and did not speak. At last they let go and went back side by side across the gray dust, toward the fire where their friends were waiting.