Sea of Silver Light (130 page)

The worm coughed. The worm coiled in shock at the agony, writhed, even cried out in a quiet bubbling gasp. When the red electrical-shock fog retreated, the worm cursed silently, bitterly, and tried to crawl forward once more.

Too bad I don't have a brain at each end. Don't worms have that? Or is that dinosaurs? Stan's nephews would know.

Since when do you care about dinosaurs, Skouros?
Stan asked her.

They're interesting,
she told him.
They died out because they were stupid. Too big. Too slow. Didn't wear their flakkies.

But they did—they wore their flakkies, even on a weekend call on their day off. They just didn't take their partners. That was the real problem. Ask Kendrick—he loves the things.

It's all right. It doesn't matter. They're all dead a long time now, right? I'll just sit on the couch . . . get a little rest.

You tired, Skouros?

Oh, yes, Stan. I'm really tired . . . really, really . . . tired. . . .

The fog cleared a little. She could see something pale before her. The moon? It was surprisingly close. But was it the right time of day?

The ghostly white shape was the woman's face, only centimeters away.
God, no. I was out there, right out. Running out of oxygen. . . .

Calliope inched forward until she could touch the pad with her fingers, feel the curved case.

Can't get it open—it's under her. . . .

She shoved weakly at the woman with her head, trying to get her to move, but although her eyes were still open, the stranger did not react.
Shit, don't tell me she's dead, please, please. . . . Dead weight. Right on top of it.
Calliope shoved her hand forward, watching it with a kind of crazed interest as it closed on the pad. She tugged, lost her grip on the slippery surface. She tried again, fighting the blood which now seemed not just on her hands and the floor and the pad, but all around her in a mist, even filling her ears so that the sound of her own heartbeat became as close and strange as the voice of the sea in a shell.

Slowly, she brought her other hand up. The ray of pain in her back grew brighter, fiercer, threatened to set her insides on fire. Her fingers closed. She pulled. It came free.

Calliope fumbled with the bloody cover until she found the place to touch. The pad sprang open, the screen astonishingly clean and bright.

No blood,
she realized.
Must be the last place like that on Earth. . . .

She could make no sense of what she saw on it, the open files, the flicker of movement in a view-window—her vision was blurring badly. She could only pray that the thing's audio pickup was switched on. She did her best to speak, coughed, wept, then tried again. Her voice, when it came out, was as quiet as the whisper of a shy child.

"Call zero . . . zero . . . zero."

Calliope let her head sag until it touched the floor, which felt as soft as a feather pillow, inviting sleep. There was a police priority code she could have added but she could not think of it. It was all in the lap of the gods now—had the thing picked up her voice? Was it set to call out on vocal commands? And even if it worked, how long until they dispatched a car to answer the call?

Done everything I could,
she thought.
Maybe . . . just rest . . . a little.

She did not know if seconds or minutes had passed, but she surfaced from another, even deeper fog to see something moving beside her. Calliope opened her eyes wide, but that was all she could do. Even if it was Dread himself she did not believe she could move a centimeter.

It was another bloody hand. Not her own.

The woman with the face pale as paper was reaching for the pad, fingers walking slowly toward it like a red-and-white spider. Calliope could only watch in dismay as the hand crept onto the screen and began, clumsily but determinedly, to open files, to move things around.

She'll cut off the call.
Calliope tried to reach out but her muscles would not respond.
What if no one's picked it up yet? What the hell is this idiot woman doing?

The bloody hand slowed, touched again, paused, then slid off the screen, leaving behind a streak of translucent crimson. Through her own swiftly encroaching fog Calliope heard the woman beside her take a deep, gurgling breath.

That's it,
thought Calliope.
She's dead.

"Send," the woman whispered.

CHAPTER 46

NETFEED/NEWS: UN High Court to Rule on "Lifejack" Case

(visual: excerpt from Svetlana Stringer episode of Lifejack!)

VO: The UN High Court in the Hague has agreed to hear the case of Svetlana Stringer, a woman who claims the netshow Lifejack! had no right to select her for surveillance and create a documentary about her love life and family problems without her permission. Her attorneys argue that unless the High Court makes a stand, continual blurring of the lines of privacy by the media will mean that soon no one will have a right to any private life at all. Attorneys for the American network that makes Lifejack! insist that a waiver Ms. Stringer signed several years ago to allow herself to be filmed for another program-a documentary on music education made when she was a teenager-means she has given up her right to resist surveillance.

(visual: Bling Saberstrop, attorney for ICN)

SABERSTROP: "UN guidelines on privacy are just that-guidelines, not laws. We consider this to be a case where the plaintiff wants to have her cake and eat it, too-privacy only when she wants it."

He watched the dying policewoman squirming in her own blood for a few moments after he reentered the network, but then he had to close the window. It was too distracting. Too entertaining. The problem was, he wanted to do everything at once.

Like a kid in a candy shop,
he thought.

He wanted to watch the cop bitch's last moments, but it was one of the things he could set aside for later. He also wanted to drive the operating system out of hiding and break its pseudo-will once and for all, make it abandon this infuriating, pointless resistance and truly yield to him. And he most definitely wanted to hunt down Martine Desroubins and the Sulaweyo woman and all the other escapees, then carry them back to his endless white house in the virtual Outback and give each a magnificently intricate, drawn-out death. The prospects were enchanting: he would imprison them, terrify them, permit a few apparent escapes, even take the place of first one, then another, so he could live each terrifying moment with them just as he had done with the woman Quan Li, playing with alternating hope and despair until they all went almost mad.

But never completely mad, of course. Because then the ending would lose its bite.

And he would record the whole thing. He would watch it over and over after the grand enterprise was complete, edit it to highlight the artistry, add music and effects—hours and hours of the greatest entertainment ever created. Perhaps someday he would even allow others to see it. It would become an object of religious significance, at least among those few people who really understood how the world worked. His name would be spoken in awed whispers long after he was dead.

But I won't be dead, will I? I won't ever die.

No wonder he was so excited. There was so much to do . . . and all eternity in which to do it.

He forced himself down, down into calm.
No mistakes,
he thought. Soothing music filled his head, a
glissando
of strings, a gentle shimmer of cymbals.
First, the operating system.

He stood on the weird, lunar plane and inspected the barrier the failing system had erected between Dread and his victims. He stroked the insubstantial but unbreachable mist. Where had this thing come from? And how could he best get through it?

It was clear he had pushed the Grail operating system to the breaking point, but although he wanted it subdued and broken he did not want to destroy it completely, jeopardizing the whole network, before he had a chance to install a replacement. That might be a little more difficult now that Dulcie was sprawled gut-shot dead on the floor of the loft, but she had cracked Jongleur's house files for him first: the Old Man would have some kind of system backup in place. So the sensible thing to do would be just to wait until he could bring another system online. But what if doing so not only killed this operating system but destroyed Martine and the rest as well? And what if Jongleur was in there with them? The thought that all his enemies might be stolen right out of his grasp by a mercifully swift death was maddening.

And they're right there. . . !
He prowled along the barrier, trying to make sense of what little he could see. As he walked he let his mind wander through the network infrastructure. It was a strange problem, trying to be two places at once, very strange. Here he stood, with the powers of a god, but he could not actually find his own location in the network: he had followed Martine and the others through into this place, but the place itself did not seem to exist on any of the network's schemata.

It's a damn strange environment, whatever it is,
he thought. He had even more power here than he did in other parts of the network—the inhabitants had fled screaming from him even before he did anything—but the operating system had more power here, too.

Bloody hell!
The insight was sudden and overwhelming.
I must be . . . inside the damn thing.

He laughed and the wall of mist rippled back from him like sensitive tissue being poked by a surgical tool.
Of course I'm powerful here. It knows who delivers the pain. It's scared of me.

So if it believes in something,
he realized,
that something comes true here.
That explained why the barrier could hold him out—it represented the system's own faith in its last-ditch defenses. But when the last shred of belief that it could resist him died. . . .

It's all make-believe,
he thought.
A world of ghosts, magic. Like my bloody mother's stories.
It was not a thought that went well with his celebratory mood so he pushed it away.

But where is the bloody thing, then? Where is the system hiding?
Dread closed his eyes as he walked along the barrier, examining his internal map of the system. The thing, the part of the operating system that thought, must be close. Again he had the strange sense of being in two places at the same time. It worried him just a little—a lifetime's dislike of exposure and a powerful urge toward control made him uncomfortable about being spread between two spheres of operation—but his pride and assurance were growing with his power and he shrugged it off. But he could not shrug off the essential puzzle.

The two things are tangled up. Until I cripple the system's brain once and for all, I'll never be able to get my hands on the ones who got away from me. But if I cripple it too badly—if I ruin it—they'll be gone, dead . . . escaped.

He could no longer see Jongleur's two monstrous agents on the other side of the barrier. Whatever they had accomplished was over now, but they clearly had not pushed the operating system into surrender since the barrier still stood; neither had they delivered him Martine or any of the others. There were no more copies of the agents inside the barrier. Whatever he did next he would have to do himself.

Wouldn't have it any other way,
he thought.

Already the excitement of the hunt was beginning to mount again. He cast his thoughts back into the network controls, searching for some clue to the location of the system's ultimate refuge. There had been a flurry of recent activity but none of it made sense, and as he struggled with the obscurities of network activity logs he had a brief moment of irritation over Dulcie's disloyalty.
She would have been useful for this, the bitch.
The escapees and the system itself remained hidden from him, both by this virtual barrier in this virtual world and in the immense, trackless confusion of the network. It was infuriating that with all his godlike power he couldn't simply find them—that he was forced to search through virtual landscapes, or listen in on virtual communicator conversations.

Communicators. . . !
He gestured and the silver lighter was in his hand. He opened the communication channel and discovered it was in use, but what he heard was nonsense—faint, unrecognizable voices babbling about strings and sunsets and something called a honey-guide. The communication line was clearly corrupted, and in his anger he considered returning to his loft and using Jongleur's access codes to pull the plug on the entire network, to kill it and then resurrect it with a different and more tractable operating system . . . but that would mean that Renie Sulaweyo and Martine and the Circle people would be granted a far too merciful release.