Sea of Silver Light (18 page)

"I'm behind you, !Xabbu." Her voice was a dry croak. "Do you want me to grab your hand?"

"No, Renie." His voice was muffled against the rock. "I need it where it is for balance. But if you held my leg, I would be grateful. Let go quickly if I ask."

As her fingers closed around his ankle he leaned out farther. Renie could only watch for a moment before having to shut her eyes. The sky's strange lack of depth did not prevent vertigo.

It's just as well T4b isn't here,
she thought, the distracted thought keeping a greater terror at bay.

For a moment, as !Xabbu's muscles tensed beneath her touch and he leaned out even farther on his fingernail grip, she thought her pulse would explode in her chest. Then the naked body of Klement came wobbling around the edge of the stone and !Xabbu crouched and pulled backward, toppling onto Renie as he pulled Klement in on them both.

They all lay gasping for a while, until Renie found the strength to help !Xabbu away from the edge of the cleft, deeper into the dimple in the mountain's side. It was scarcely three meters to the place where Sam lay almost wedged into the back, but after that ribbon of trail the space seemed palatial.

Renie slept then, a brief dive beneath the surface of consciousness. When she woke, she dragged herself toward !Xabbu where he sat propped against the black stone and put her head against his chest, nudging until she found a spot in the hollow under his chin. The beat of his heart was soothing, and she realized she never wanted to let go of him.

"We're in trouble," she whispered.

He said nothing, but she could feel his attention,

"We can't go out on that trail again. There's nothing left of it."

She thought he drew breath to argue, but then she felt his head slowly nodding, the curve of his throat and jaw enfolding the line of her own skull like a cupping hand. "I think you are right."

"So what's left? We stay here until the thing dissolves out from under us?" She looked at Sam, as rigid as a catatonic, staring at her own hands. Jongleur too seemed lost in some inner world, all of them now wandering as distantly as Ricardo Klement. "What else can we do?"

"Wait. Hope." !Xabbu brought his arm up and drew her closer. His fingers rested lightly above her heart, on the upper slope of her breast. "We will be together, no matter what comes."

She burrowed even deeper against him, and realized that she wanted not just to be held, but to kiss him, weep against his face, make love to him. But not here. Not inches from slow-breathing Jongleur, not under Ricardo Klement's aquarium gaze.

And if not here, where?
she thought with a brushstroke of sad humor.
If not now, when?
For it seemed fairly certain there was nothing left. Still, bone-deep weariness and the presence of hateful strangers had turned the thought grotesque. She would content herself with childlike pleasures, with being held, with falling asleep in what for the moment was as much safety as she could imagine.

"Tell a story," she murmured instead. "We need one, !Xabbu."

She felt his head turn slowly from side to side. "I cannot think of any stories, Renie. I am so tired. My stories are gone."

It seemed the saddest thing she had ever heard. Unseeing, she touched his face as sleep came and took her again.

Even after all the unreason she had experienced, all the visions and hallucinations, she came up out of the blackest, most unknowing depths into the active force of the dream and realized immediately that this was perhaps the strangest one yet.

Usually when she dreamed, she was the active one, even if those actions were frustrated; in some of the worst she was a helpless observer, a bodiless phantom condemned to watch over a life it could no longer enjoy. But this was different. This dream came
at
her, washing over her with the force of moving water, a river of experience that had swallowed her down and was rushing her along, battering her until she felt she might drown in it.

If there had been coherent images she might have found it easier to resist the terrible flow, to feel some tiny chance of control, but the whirling chaos roared over her and through her, unstoppably. Streaks of color, snatches of incomprehensible sounds, flashes of nerve-scraping heat and cold, it went on until she felt so overwhelmed that she could only pray for some sleep deeper than this terrible active dream, anything that would blank out the sensation, stop the terrible screaming input.

Death.
The word registered only for a moment, like a headline on a gust-snagged newspaper.
Death. Calm. Quiet. Dark. Sleep.
In the uncontrolled anarchy of sensation, trapped on this brakeless thrill ride, it had a dreadful allure. But the life inside her was really very strong: when the darkness did come, it terrified her.

It was a cold, oozing dark, a clammy black static grip that, after the initial relief, was only slightly better than the surging horror it had replaced, for not only the swirl of images vanished, but most of her thoughts as well. Reality fragmented and disconnected, became a series of pointless movements that she realized were only the earlier discord stifled and slowed.

She floated in the midst of a living shadow. There was nothing but herself, surrounded by an unimaginable blackness. She could not think, not properly. She could only wait, while time or perhaps some incompetent impostor did its work.

The emptiness was aeons long. Even imagination died. Aeons long.

Then at last she felt something—a fluttering in the void, Oh, God, it was real, it was! Something distant, but actually separate from herself. No,
many
somethings, small and alive, tiny blessed warm things where before there had been nothing but cold.

She reached out eagerly, but the fluttering things darted away, frightened of her. She reached again and the presences retreated even farther. Her sorrow grew so large and painful that she was certain all that kept her coherent would burst and she would spill inside out into the darkness, disperse, collapse. She lay in cold misery.

The things returned.

This time she was careful, as careful as she could be, reaching out to them slowly, gently, feeling them in their terrible fragility. After a while they came to her without coaxing. She handled them with almost infinite caution, enfolded each one as gently as she could, a century between thoughts, a millennium between excruciatingly restrained movements. Even so, some proved too vulnerable, and with tiny cries they were no more, bursting in her grasp like bubbles as they gave up their essences. It tore at her heart.

The others flitted away, alarmed, and she was terrified, certain they would leave her forever. She called to them. Some came back. Oh, but they were delicate. Oh, but they were beautiful.

She wept, and the universe slowly convulsed.

The dream had been so deep and powerful and strange that for a long time she did not realize she had returned to consciousness. Her mind still seemed lost in lonely darkness: for almost a minute after she remembered her name, Renie did not open her eyes. At last some returning sensation in her skin and muscles pricked her and she unlidded, stared, then cried out.

Gray, swirling silver-gray. Flickers of light, the smearing of broken spectra, a fine dust of luminance . . . but nothing else. The shimmery cloudstuff that had girdled the mountain seemed to be all around her now, an ocean of silver emptiness, although she could sense something hard and horizontal beneath her. She was not bodiless—it was not a dream this time. Her hands crawled over her own flesh and to the ground on either side, a ground she could not even see. She was lost in a heavy, shining fog, everything and everyone else gone.

"!Xabbu? Sam?" She crawled a little way over the hard but curiously smooth invisibility beneath her, then remembered the edge of the crevice and stopped, fighting against complete panic.
"!Xabbu! Where are you?"

An echo had been one of the few lifelike features that the degenerating black mountainside had retained, but there was no echo now.

Renie moved forward again, exploring with nervously twitching fingers, but even after she had crawled what must have been a dozen meters she had encountered neither the stone of the cliff face nor the open space at the crevice's rim. It was as though the mountain had just melted away around her, leaving her on some inexplicable tabletop in the glimmering fog.

She crawled another dozen meters. The ground she could not see was as smooth as something glazed in a kiln, but real enough to hurt her knees. She called her companions' names over and over into absolute silence. At last, desperate, she climbed to her feet.

"!Xabbu!"
she shrieked until her throat was sore. "!Xabbu! Can you hear me?"

Nothing.

She walked a half-dozen careful paces, testing each footstep before setting it down. The ground was absolutely flat. There was nothing else—no precipice, no vertical stone slab of mountain, no sound, no light except the ubiquitous pearly gleam of the mist. Even the fog had no substance: it shimmered wetly but was not wet. There was nothing. There was Renie and nothing. Everything gone.

She sat down and clutched at her head.
I'm dead,
she thought, but outside the dream, the idea of death was not a soothing one.
And this is all there is. Everyone lied.
She laughed, but it sounded like something wasn't working properly inside her.
Even the atheists lied.
"Oh, damn," she said out loud.

A flicker of shadow caught her eye—something moving in the fog.

"!Xabbu?" Even as she spoke, she felt she shouldn't have. Hunted—they were all hunted now. Still, she could not smother the reflex entirely. "Sam?" she whispered.

The shape eased forward, resolving out of nothing like a magical apparition. She was prepared for something as bizarre as the setting; it took her a moment to recognize what it was that shared the silver void with her.

"I am . . . Ricardo," said the blank-eyed man. "Klement," he added a moment later.

CHAPTER 5

NETFEED/NEWS: Church Refuses Exorcism for "Bogeyman"

(visual: child on bed in La Palotna Hospital)

VO: The Archdiocese of Los Angeles has refused the request of a group of close to three dozen Mexican-American parents to perform an exorcism on their children, who claim to have had identical nightmares about a dark spirit they call "El Cucuy"-the bogeyman. Three of the affected children have committed suicide, and several of the others are being treated for clinical depression. Social help agents say the villain is not a demon, but the medical result of too much time spent on the net.

(visual: Cassie Montgomery, LA County Human Services)

MONTGOMERY: "We can't trace the source yet, but I don't think it's a coincidence that most of these young people are latchkey kids and heavy net users. It seems pretty clear that something they've seen or experienced online is provoking these bad dreams. The rest I chalk up to garden-variety hysteria."

What's even more important," the guide said, smiling her professional smile from behind thick goggle-style sunglasses, "is that we now have healthy breeding populations of many threatened birds—the gallinule, or marsh hen, the roseate spoonbill, the Lousiana heron, and the beautiful snowy egret, just to name a few. Now Charleroi will take us into the deep swamp. Maybe we'll see some deer, or even a bobcat!" She was good at her job: it was clear she could manifest the same energy for that line every trip, day in and day out.

Not counting the guide and the young man nominally steering the boat, whose suntanned arms bore the serpentine traces of unignited subdermals and whose facial expression also suggested that some necessary light beneath the flesh had not been switched on, there were only six passengers on this slow weekday afternoon, a red-faced British couple and their small noisy son who was cutting at the duckweed with a souvenir lightstick, a pair of young married professionals from somewhere the the middle of the country, and Olga Pirofsky.

"Please keep your hands out of the water." The guide retained her smile even as her voice hardened to something less cheerful. "This isn't an amusement park, remember—our alligators are not mechanical."

Everyone except Olga laughed dutifully, but the boy still did not stop swiping at the water until his father said, "Lay off, Gareth," and smacked him on the back of the head.

Strange, so strange,
Olga thought.
So strange, all the years and miles of my life, to wind up here.
A bank of cypress loomed ahead in the fast-dissolving morning mist, a gathering of phantoms.
Here at the end.

Three days now since she had reached the end of the journey, or perhaps since the journey itself had deserted her. Everything was stasis, pointless as the quiet little guideboat moving along its preprogrammed route across the resurrected swamp. Sleepless through the silent nights, only able to slip into unconsciousness when dawn touched the window blinds of her motel room, Olga could scarcely find the energy to eat and drink, let alone do anything more strenuous. She didn't even know what impulse had led her to buy a ticket for the tour, and nothing so far had made it worth missing the few hours of sleep she might have had in its place. She could see the object of her quest from almost anywhere in the area, after all—the black tower dominated the vicinity as thoroughly as a medieval cathedral its village and fields.