Sea of Silver Light (45 page)

It was labeled
"Ushabti,"
a word or name Dulcie didn't recognize, but she guessed from what Dread had told her about the old man's obsessions that it might be Egyptian. It had been created three years earlier and did not seem to have been added to or changed since. She triggered a quick search through her own system, and was given the information that
ushabti
was indeed an ancient Egyptian word, signifying a kind of tomb-statue. There was more detail available, but a quick glance turned up nothing relevant. Dulcie frowned and opened the file itself.

A dark-eyed man appeared before her so swiftly that she flinched. He was perhaps in his sixties, a tiny smile on his lined face, his white hair neat. The viewpoint drew back to show that he sat behind a desk in an old-fashioned office, something that might have belonged in a nineteenth-century embassy, teak furniture and heavy drapes on the windows.

My God,
she thought.
That's Jongleur. But this file is only a few years old, and he can't have looked like that in a hundred years.

Which meant nothing in VR, of course.
What the hell difference when this was done—this is a guy who appears as some Egyptian god most of the time. . . .

The old man before her nodded his head once, then spoke, the voice public-school English with a tiny hint of something else, something more foreign, beneath.

"And so we meet, my son. Something we could never do while I was alive. I am anxious to tell you everything, and then you will understand why your life has been ordered in the way it has. But first you must tell me your name. Your true name, as it has been given to you, then we may proceed to the more prosaic forms of verifying identity."

My son?
Dulcie sat without a thought of anything to say. She had clearly triggered the first half of some kind of dual-encryption, and now Jongleur—or his recorded sim, or his ghost, or whatever the hell this was—was waiting for the other half of the key.

"I wait for your true name," the old man said, a bit more of an edge in his voice. His eyes were quite mesmerizing, Dulcie thought as she waited helplessly—"commanding" is what they would have been called in a romance, although there was little romantic about this flinty old monarch. If he had looked anything like that in real life, it was easy to understand how he had built himself an empire.

"Your true name," the pseudo-Jongleur said for the third time. A moment later he was gone. The file had closed itself.

Dulcie rubbed her hand against her forehead and felt a film of sweat. She dropped out of the system. It was definitely time to take a break.

An hour later she sat staring at the
Ushabti
file. She was unwilling to open it again, or even examine it too closely, because things like this often had a built in number of attempts they would allow before simply self-destructing.

A search of available information on Jongleur had done nothing to illuminate the mystery. Not only had his actual sons and daughters died a century ago, but according to the best sources she could find there was nothing like a direct line of succession. All of his living relatives—the oldest still generations younger than Jongleur himself—were descendants of his cousins. He was not known to be close to any of them, nor did any of them have a role in the J Corporation.

As carefully as a specialist handling an unexploded bomb, Dulcie picked the
Ushabti
file out from the midst of the estate information and moved it onto her private system, then went back to work sorting files.

Dread could hide things? Dread wanted to keep secrets from her? Well, Dulcie could keep secrets of her own.

"Lets have another one," Dread decided. "This is interesting."

He waved his hand and a dark-haired, muscular man shuffled forward into the glare of torches and fell to his knees. His linen robes showed signs of having been costly once, but they were singed and torn, and his black wig sat askew.

"What's your name?" Dread asked him.

"Seneb, O Lord."

"And what do you do?" Dread turned to the woman beside him. "Kind of funny, isn't it? Like a game show."

"I . . . I am a m–m–merchant, O Great House." He was so terrified he could hardly speak.

"Tell me . . . hmmm. What did you have for breakfast this morning?"

Seneb paused, fearful of a wrong answer. "I . . . I had nothing, Lord. I have not eaten in two days."

Dread waved a huge, pitch-black hand. "The last time you had brekkie, then, mate. What did you have?"

"Bread, Lord. And a little beer." The man wrinkled his forehead, thinking desperately. "And a duck egg! Yes, a duck egg."

"See?" Dread grinned at his female guest, his red jackal tongue lolling. It was much more entertaining to do these kinds of things with a real human audience. "Every one different." He pointed to the priest he had been interrogating only moments before beginning on the merchant. "And what do you think of this bloke, eh? Is he a good man?"

Seneb looked at the cowering priest, again unsure of the answer that was wanted. "He is a priest of Osiris, Lord. All the priests of Osiris are good men . . . are they not?"

"Well, since Osiris has stepped out for a while. . . ." Dread smirked. "I suppose we'll have to leave that question unanswered. But how about if I asked you to fight with him? To kill him if you can?"

Seneb, for all his beefy size, was trembling. That might have been in part because the jackal-headed god on the throne before him was twice human height. "If the great Lord wishes it," he said at last, "then I must do it."

Dread laughed. "See? Some of them can't wait to pitch into one of the priests. Some of the others think it's sacrilege and won't do it to save their own lives. It's bloody marvelous."

His guest looked at him uncomprehendingly.

"Don't you see?" Dread asked. "You can't predict anything here! God—no pun intended—but this is an impressive situation. They all are." He turned to Seneb. "If you kill him, I'll let you live."

Seneb stared shamefacedly at the priest, hesitating.

"What are you waiting for?"

"And . . . and my family?"

"You want to kill your family, too?" Dread barked a laugh. "Ah, I see, you want to know if I'll
spare
your family. Cheers. Why not?"

As the merchant Seneb raised his hands and lurched toward the priest, an older, frailer man who now moaned in fear. Dread shook his head in continued wonderment. It really was quite stunning. He remembered the Renie woman and others commenting on it, but with the total access he now enjoyed, the unshackled freedom to bend the network's simulated humans into any shape pain and power could contrive, it was even more clear: the individuality of these constructs was something unprecedented, each with its own little internal universe of hopes and prejudices and memories.

He could almost see why someone like Jongleur thought he could spend an eternity in this place. Not that he could imagine such a thing himself, at least not in the immediate future. Dread had nearly exhausted most of the obvious ways of enjoying himself, and although he definitely planned to take advantage of the Grail network's immortality options, he was not ready to give up the pleasures of real as opposed to virtual flesh. Not yet.

Still, there was fun to be had.

"Come on, admit it—you're rooting for one of them."

The woman beside him shut her mouth in a firm line. Dread smiled. This was much more fun than anything he could do with Dulcie, to whom he was still forced to show a friendly face. After all, there was still so much more he needed her for. He had a lot to learn about the Grail network, but now that he had confirmed the Old Man's continuing absence—Jongleur's private line had gone dead, and if he still was somewhere in the Grail system, he was as marooned as any of Dread's former companions had been—he needed her to find a way into Jongleur's personal files. He badly wanted information about the operating system, and also about things that mattered outside the small, hermetic world of the Otherland system.

With the Old Man's money and power,
Dread thought happily,
I can be a god in the real world, too. I can play these kind of tricks with real people. Industrial accidents. Biochemical releases, A few small wars when the mood strikes me. And then I'll have the Grail network to keep me alive.

Astonishing vistas had opened up. Control of the Otherland system, which had seemed like the be-all and end-all, might only be the beginning.

John Wulgaru,
he thought to himself.
Little Johnny Dread. King of the world.

The merchant Seneb fought clumsily, but the aged priest was no match. His mostly toothless mouth sagged open as the younger man seized him and cracked his head against the polished stone of the temple floor, over and over.

Dread's female guest had closed her eyes. He smiled. If she thought that would solve the problem, she might be interested to find out how easily her eyelids could be removed. He turned to his other guest, who was just beginning to groan his way back to consciousness.

"A little bored?" Dread waved his silver staff and the merchant and priest melted screaming into puddles on the marble. The crowd of watchers shrieked too. Dread was intrigued; he had expected them all to be numbed to pain and death by now. "Well, then perhaps it's time to get on with our own business."

"You can torture me as much as you want," the woman said. "Even if you really
were
the Devil, I'd have nothing for you but the back of my hand."

"Oh, come now." Dread leaned over until his great muzzle touched her cheek and his nose pressed wetly on her ear. He licked the side of her face and wondered idly what it would feel like to take her head off in one bite. Would knowing it was a real person make it different? He had tried it enough times with this simworld's virtual inhabitants. "Let's play a game . . . what was your name? Ah, right, Bonnie Mae. Let's play a game, Bonnie Mae. Every time you tell me something useful about the Circle, or about some friends of mine I know you met, that's worth an hour without pain. Play your cards right, you could have a couple of nice days' vacation here in sunny Egypt."

"I'll tell you nothing. Get thee behind me, Satan."

"Yes, well, I'm sure you'd keep your mouth shut like a good little martyr, no matter
what
I did to you, Little Red Riding Hood. At least at first. But let's not waste time." He turned and reached a massive hand toward the other prisoner. The ends of Dread's stark black fingers began to glow an incandescent red. "But how long can you stay quiet if it's your little Indian friend here that's taking the punishment?" He leered at his male captive. "Wishing you had made it out of this simulation before I took over, aren't you?" He closed his long fingers on the man's leg. Flesh sizzled and steamed. The prisoner's shrieks made even the numbed crowd moan and fall to the floor.

"No!" the woman screamed. "Stop it, you devil! Stop it!"

"But that's just the point, sweetness." Dread lifted his smoking fingers in a gesture of mock helplessness. "It's not up to me to stop it—it's up to you."

"Don't . . . don't tell him anything, Mrs. Simpkins!" Nandi Paradivash was shivering with agony, but struggling to remain upright. "I am no less bound than you. My life is nothing. My pain is nothing."

"Oh, on the contrary," said Dread. "It's quite a bit. And if she won't talk to save you, I think you will when I start on her." He grinned, displaying a line of teeth like an ivory chess set. "Because I do even better work on women."

CHAPTER 14

NETFEED/NEWS: Net Has Its Own Folklore

(visual: artist's rendering of TreeHouse node)

VO: Net historian Gwenafra Glass says that, like all new countries, the net has its own folktales, mythical beasts, and ghosts.

GLASS: "You go back to the earliest days and you hear about things like cable lice. TreeHouse is another sort of example. It's a real node, but it's been embroidered over the years into something that's mostly fantasy. And more recently we have things like the Weeper, which is a strange sobbing voice people hear sometimes in unoccupied chat nodes and unfinished VR nodes. And of course an old folktale from the twentieth century, the gremlins that used to lock up fighter airplanes, has carried over into the Glowbugs and Lightsnakes that people these days claim to have seen in VR environments, but no one ever finds in the code. . . ."

Renie looked wildly from side to side, but could see no sign of whatever had made the sound. The nearest of the ghostly shapes pursuing her was a pale smear in the twilight murk, frighteningly close, but still several dozen meters away. She took a step to steady herself and to her horror felt something clutch at her ankle. She leaped away with a muffled shriek.

"Down here," a small voice said. "You can hide!"

Something rustled near Renie's feet. "I . . . I can't see you." Wind carried the pursuing creature's liquid groan down the slope. "Where are you?"