Sea of Silver Light (5 page)

Renie, Paul, !Xabbu, and the others fight their way across the dying city. When Paul meets Emily, a longtime companion of Renie and the others, he is stunned to recognize her as another version of the Angel. A name suddenly comes back to him—"Avialle"—and he is overwhelmed by returning memories.

Suddenly he can remember being hired by Felix Jongleur to work as a tutor in Jongleur's huge office-tower home in Louisiana. And he also recalls his first meeting with his pupil—Jongleur's daughter, Avialle Jongleur. But he can remember no more.

Despite apparently being followed by someone, they enter an abandoned temple and make their way to an altar at the center of a maze, where the Angel appears to them again and tells them they are too late—that she no longer has the strength to take them to where the Other wishes them to go. Paul offers her anything she needs, but does not expect what happens next. The Angel takes the life-force from Emily, who was only some kind of copy of herself, and then opens a gateway. When they go through, Paul and Renie and the others find themselves on a trail on the side of a bizarre and not-quite-real black mountain. They trek to the top, where they find a bound giant lying in a wide valley. The giant is in terrible pain, but is singing a song about an angel. Martine recognizes the song. It was sung to her by the mysterious child in the Pestalozzi Institute, thirty years before, on the day she lost her sight.

The suffering giant does not harm them, but opens a window through which Paul and Renie and the others can see the virtual Egyptian temple where Jongleur and the rest of the Brotherhood are beginning the Ceremony. Some Brotherhood members are still reluctant, but one of their number, a man named Ricardo Klement, undergoes the process and seems to be born satisfactorily into his new, young, virtual body. The others gleefully perform the Ceremony to kill off their physical bodies and resurrect themselves online, but although their physical selves do die, the virtual bodies remain uninhabited. Jongleur and the rest are spared because they have not undergone the Ceremony, but they are stunned and terrified. Something has gone very wrong.

Orlando, whose own physical body is also dying, can watch no more. He steps through the window and into the temple, where he confronts Jongleur and the other three Grail survivors. Sam and Renie follow to try to save him, and Renie tries to bluff Jongleur with the lighter that Yacoubian recognizes as his own stolen access device, which he has since replaced. Yacoubian, in Egyptian god-form, attacks Orlando.

The Grail system, already under a strain, now seems to begin to fall apart. The temple in Egypt and the top of the black mountain begin to merge. Simultaneously, the giant begins to writhe and bellow in pain—it is being attacked by something. A moment later, in the middle of all this chaos, it becomes clear that the attacker is Dread, who is trying to take control of the system from the Other.

Paul's Angel appears, weeping, as reality breaks down altogether. With the help of T4b, Orlando appears to kill the monstrous Yacoubian, but Orlando himself has used up his strength, and is smashed beneath Yacoubian's giant form when he falls.

The hand of the giant rises and then falls down on top of Renie, !Xabbu, Sam, Orlando, and others. They disappear. Then the reality of the top of the black mountain turns inside out again. Martine, sensitive to the network in ways the others can't quite understand, screams that the children are in pain, dying. Paul is overcome and blacks out.

Afterward, Renie wakes up to discover that she no longer wears the sim she had chosen, but seems to be in her own body again. !Xabbu has also shed his baboon form for his own real shape, as has young, female Sam Fredericks, who no longer appears to be a man. But they are not back in the real world. They are still stuck on the now-empty black mountaintop. The suffering giant has vanished. All their other companions are gone. Only Orlando Gardiner's dead body, still wearing the Achilles sim, remains.

But others are on the mountain, even if their friends are not. Felix Jongleur appears, wearing the body of a middle-aged man, accompanied by Ricardo Klement, who, although he has survived the Ceremony, appears to be brain damaged. After Dread's conquest of the operating system, Jongleur too is trapped in the network. He acknowledges that Renie and her friends have every reason to want to attack him, but suggests that they are better off making common cause. He leads them to the edge of the black mountain and points down.

They are miles high, in the middle of nothing. They cannot see the bottom of the mountain, or any ground at all, because everything below them is hidden in a strange, silver cloud. This is no part of the network he created, Jongleur assures them.

He was tossed, fragmented, part of the outward-collapsing whirl of shattered light. His own identity was gone—he was spun into pieces like a universe being born.

"You're killing him!"
his angel had cried as she herself flew apart into a million separate ghosts, each one shimmering with its own individual light—a shrieking flock of tiny rainbows. . . .

But as the world collapsed, a piece of his past returned to him. It came first as a single visionary flash—a house surrounded by gardens, the gardens themselves bounded by a wild forest. The sky was patchy with dark clouds, brilliant streaks of sunshine falling between them, the grass and leaves beaded with the recent rain. Light dazzled in the drops of water and fragmented into gleams of many colors so that the trees seemed part of a fairy-garden, a magical wood from a childhood tale. During that fraction of an instant before the memory grew wider and deeper he could imagine no more peaceful a haven.

But it was all, of course, far stranger than that.

The elevator was so swift and smooth that at times Paul Jonas could almost forget that he lived inside a great spike, that his journey to the top each morning lifted him close to a thousand feet above the Mississippi Delta. He had never much cared for tall buildings—one of the many ways he felt himself slightly out of step with his own century. Part of the appeal of the Canonbury house had been the old-fashioned scale of it—three stories, a few flights of stairs. It was a place he could actually escape from if there was a fire (or so he flattered himself). When he opened the windows of his flat and looked down into the street he could hear people talking and even see what they had in their shopping baskets. Now, except for the winds of the Gulfs hurricane season whose screaming voices could be heard even through thick fibramic, winds strong enough to make the huge tower rock gently, he might as well be living in some kind of intergalactic spaceship. At least until he reached the part of the building where he did his tutoring each day.

The elevator door glided open, revealing another portal. Paul keyed in his code and pressed his hand against the palm-reader, then waited for long seconds while the reader and other less obvious safeguards did their job. When the security door slid out of the way with a little suck of air, Paul stepped through and pushed open the secondary door, this one on metal hinges and of decidedly old-fashioned design. The smell of Ava's house washed over him, a combination of scents so evocative of another era as to be almost claustrophobic—lavender, silver polish, sheets kept in cedar chests. As he stepped into the foyer he moved in a few strides from the smooth, edgeless efficiency of the present into something that, were it not for the vibrant young woman at the heart of it, could be a museum or even a tomb.

She was not waiting for him in the parlor. Her absence startled him, an unexpected thing that made the whole strange ritual suddenly seem as mad as he had thought it to be in his first weeks on the job. He checked the glass and ormolu clock on the mantelpiece. A minute after nine, but no Ava. He wondered if she might be ill, and was surprised by the stab of worry that came with the thought.

One of the downstairs maids, capped and aproned in white, silent as a ghost, slid past the hall doorway with her arms full of folded tablecloth.

"Excuse me," he called. "Is Miss Jongleur still in bed? She's late for her lessons."

The maid looked at him, startled, as though merely by speaking he had broken some ancient tradition. She shook her head before disappearing.

After half a year, Paul still had no idea whether the household help were trained actors or simply very strange.

He knocked at her bedroom door, then knocked again, louder. When no one answered, he cautiously pushed open the unlatched door. The room, half-boudoir, half-nursery, was empty. A row of porcelain-faced dolls stared at him dumbly from the mantelpiece, glassy eyes wide beneath the long lashes.

On his way back across the parlor he caught a glimpse of himself in the framed mirror above the mantel: an unexceptional man dressed in clothes far more than a century out of date, in the middle of an over-ornamented parlor room that might have come straight out of a Tenniel illustration. Something only a hair more subtle than a shudder passed through him. For just a moment, but in a most unsettling way, he felt that he was trapped in someone else's dream.

It was bizarre, of course, even a little frightening, but he still could never quite get over how much cleverness had gone into it. From the house's front door his view across the formal garden and its maze of paths, past the hedges and over the woods beyond, was exactly what he would have expected to see surrounding the country house of a reasonably well-to-do French family of the late nineteenth century. The fact that the sky overhead was not real, that rains and morning mists came from a sophisticated sprinkler system, that the shifting of daylight into evening or the Bo Peep wandering of clouds were created by lighting and holographic illusion, almost added to the charm. But the idea that this entire house and grounds had been built on the top floor of a skyscraper largely for one person, a sealed time capsule in which the past was simulated if not actually returned, was more disturbing.

It's like something from a story,
he thought—and not for the first time, by any means.
The way they keep her up here. Like the giant's wife in that beanstalk story, or . . . who was the princess with the hair? Rapunzel?

He spent a short while exploring the garden, whose formal, old-fashioned French design was softened by what he could only think of as that woody, overgrown English influence that was almost indistinguishable from neglect. There were several places where the high hedges hid benches, and Ava had told him that sometimes she liked to bring her sewing out and work on it while she listened to the birds sing.

At least the birds are real,
he thought as he watched a few of them flitting from branch to branch above his head.

The winding paths were all empty. Paul was beginning to feel a quiet rising of panic, despite all good sense. If there was ever anyone less likely to stumble into danger than Avialle Jongleur, it was hard to imagine: she was watched by the most sophisticated surveillance equipment available and surrounded by her father's private army. But she had never simply missed a morning's session, never even been late. Her time with Paul seemed to be the highlight of her day, although he didn't flatter himself that it was due to any overwhelming qualities of his own. The poor child had precious few chances to see other human beings.

He turned off the gravel-strewn paths onto the narrow track that led into the overgrown orchard Ava called "the wood." Here the ground became as uneven as real terrain, and the plums and crab apples that ringed the garden gave way to stands of silver birch and an increasing tangle of oaks and alders, which were thick enough to hide the house when he looked back and provide at least the illusion of privacy, although Paul knew from one of Finney's very pointed lectures that the surveillance extended everywhere. Still, he could not help feeling he had crossed over some invisible line: this far from the house the trees shouldered together closely and the false sky could only be seen through chinks in the foliage far above. Even the birds kept to the highest branches. The spot seemed strangely isolated. Paul found it hard to keep his earlier folktale impressions out of his head.

He found her sitting on the grass beside the stream. She looked up at his approach, smiling her secretive smile, but said nothing.

"Ava? Are you all right?"

She nodded. "Come here. I want to show you something."

"It's time for your lessons. I worried when you weren't waiting for me at the house."

"That was very kind of you, Mr. Jonas. Please, come here." She patted the grass beside her. He saw that she was at the center of a wide ring of mushrooms—a fairy ring, as his Grammer Jonas had called them—and the sense of being in some sort of unfolding tale crept over him again. Ava's eyes were wide and full of . . . something. Excitement? Anticipation?

"You'll get your dress wet, sitting on the grass," he said as he reluctantly moved forward.

"The trees kept the rain off. It's quite dry here." She pulled her hem aside and tucked it beneath her leg, making a space for him to sit, and accidentally—or was it?—revealing a bit of the petticoat beneath, as well as a pale gleam of ankle above her shoe. He found himself struggling not to react. He had discovered the first day of lessons that Ava was a flirt, although it was hard to tell how much was genuine and how much was simply her anachronistic manners, which dictated perfect decorum on the surface, but by doing so made every exchange even more loaded. A female friend of his back in London had once spent a drunken evening telling him why Regency novels were so much sexier than anything written in the less-inhibited centuries since: "It's all about the tight focus," she had insisted.