Sea of Silver Light

  Jongleur plunged himself back into his house system, opening a link to the network. A long moment of terrified waiting passed, but the Other's autonomic security routines allowed him his rightful access. He reached for the controls that would trigger the Grail process and bring his sleeping virtual double to life—a Felix Jongleur who would live forever, whatever happened to his flesh, the Felix Jongleur he would awaken into, refreshed and immortal, as though death were an afternoon nap.

  The gray light faded. The darkness came.

  He did not understand. He had done nothing yet. The Grail process was still coming on line, had not been activated. Why was the space around him turning black?

  The darkness slowly took on shape—long, low, and sealed in secrecy. Felix Jongleur stared, dumbfounded. Somehow, without his ordering it, he had been drawn into his own Egyptian simulation—for surely that was Set's coffin. But where was the rest of the temple? Why was all in shadow?

  A red line gleamed along the edge of the sarcophagus. Jongleur found himself being drawn forward. He searched desperately for the override commands, but was as helpless as in a nightmare. The line of fire became wider. The lid was opening. There was someone inside.

  The man sat up, his black suit almost invisible against the shadows inside the sarcophagus. His bleached face glowed like a candle beneath his black stovepipe hat as he smiled and stretched out his pale ancient hands.

  Terror gripped Felix Jongleur, squeezed him, crushed him. The staring eyes burned into his, scorched his thoughts to cinders but Jongleur could not look away. He tried to scream but his throat was locked shut, his pulse racing so swiftly that no chemical could slow it; no machine could regulate it.

  "I'm coming for you." Mister Jingo's tombstone grin grew wider and wider until it seemed to swallow everything. "I've finally come. Riding the sky." He opened his mouth wide to reveal the blackness behind the teeth. The new star burned in that blackness, streaming flame, growing larger and brighter as it hurtled toward him like the headlight of an approaching train.

  "Here I come, Felix," said Mister Jingo.

  That smile. Jongleur's heart suffered, lurched. That empty, fiery smile. . . !

  "I caught you at last."

  And then, in the shadows and silence where only electrons moved, the old man finally screamed. It went rattling out into the vacancies that lay behind moments, fading but not dying, echoing on and on through that place where even Time itself did not rule.

  The star sped down the sky toward her, a streak of fire like the hands of a midnight clock.

  Olga did not even turn to watch the fat man and the thin one as they ran shrieking toward the elevator. The plummeting satellite was growing larger every moment; it now filled the sky beyond the opened roof like a blazing eye. She could feel her son in her mind, close as her own heartbeat. The flames were all around him now, and even though it was his own hand that had broken the bough and thrown down the cradle, his fear was terrible.

  She reached into her pocket and pulled out a curl of laminated paper.

  "I'm here, Daniel." She stared at the hospital bracelet for a moment, then closed her eyes. "I'm here with you."

  And then she could feel him, truly feel him, as though he were in her arms not just her mind—the way it should have been. She pulled him close and comforted him.

  A few meters behind her, in another universe, the elevator had arrived. The door opened halfway, then stopped. The fat man and the thin man grunted and tore at each other as they both tried to force their way in. The fat one squeezed the thin one's throat. The thin man sank his teeth into the other's hand and scratched bloody runnels down his naked belly with his fingers and toes.

  In a place behind her eyes, in a time out of time, Olga held her son. The light of the falling star blazed down on her, brighter by the moment. Alarms wailed from every wall, unwanted voices yammered in her ear, and the two men squealed in pain as they fought before the elevator, but she heard only one thing.

  "Sshhh," she told him. "Don't cry. Mama is here."

  Ramsey shouted her name, over and over, but Olga Pirofsky did not reply.

  He could see her in the visual window Sellars had opened. Considering the circumstances, she looked strangely calm as she stared out at the night through the skylight Beezle had opened, but the two naked men who had chased her now seemed to be fighting to the death in front of the elevator. Things weren't exactly making sense.

  He called Sellars, but got no answer there either.

  "Beezle, what the hell is going on? Sellars said we had only a few minutes to get her out, but she won't come—won't even answer me. She must be out of time by now. Is security on the way yet?"

  "Not security." Even for a piece of gear, Beezle sounded strange. "But something is."

  A new view flashed open on Ramsey's screen. He stared at it for a stunned moment, then let the pad slide from his lap. He stumbled to the window of his room, fumbled for a helpless moment with the shade, then ripped it loose and threw it on the floor so he could see out the window.

  "Oh, sweet Jesus," he murmured. "Sorensen! Get everyone down on the floor!"

  He heard a clamor from the next room, thumping, Major Sorensen's voice shouting, but he could not tear his eyes from the sky. A new star shone in the Louisiana night, a star that burned more brightly than any others in the sky and which was growing larger every second.

  As the streak of flame shot past overhead, smaller lines of light leaped up from the darkness in the distance, from the island in Lake Borgne.

  Must be automatic defenses, he thought distractedly. Missiles. Everyone else is off the island. Almost everyone.

  Oh, shit, he thought. Why, Olga?

  The smaller lines leaped up toward the streaking star. Two of them swept past without contact, then faded into the endless night sky, but one struck the burning thing. Bits of fire spun away, backward and down, but the core had only been diminished, not destroyed. It swept on toward the horizon, sinking, and then Ramsey could not see it as it passed beyond the buildings and the great dark ruck of the swamps.

  Silence. The night, undisturbed. Catur Ramsey let out half a breath.

  A dazzling flash blanked the sky like sheet lightning. A pillar of fire climbed swirling up from the middle of the dark lake. Ramsey gaped as it boiled toward the clouds, God's own barber pole made of solid flame, rolling, billowing, its harsh light turning the city and swamp flat electric white. He threw himself backward, rolled across the couch and onto the floor just as a crash like the end of the world smashed the glass out of the hotel windows.

  When he climbed to his feet half a minute later his ears were ringing painfully. He crunched through broken shards to the window and stood with the Gulf air cool and wet on his face. The pillar of living flame had shrunk a little, but still seemed tall enough to scorch the underside of Heaven.

  CHAPTER 48

  Unreal Bodies

  * * *

  NETFEED/NEWS: ANVAC Unveils The Doctor

  (visual: test subjects in convulsion)

  VO: ANVAC Corporation today announced what it calls the new benchmark in crowd control-a product nicknamed "Doctor Fell." The heart of the device premiered at the International Security Exposition, whose official name is Mob Disruption Field Electronics Launcher (hence the nickname, MD FEL) is a device that fires a fist-sized projectile that blankets an area of several hundred square meters with a finely tuned electromagnetic field. Anyone within range who is not wearing a field inhibitor, which ANVAC supplies as part of the package, loses all body control and, frequently, consciousness as well. ANVAC claims that Doctor Fell is "a huge step forward in the control of dangerous humanity. . . ."

  * * *

  Sam slowly let go of Orlando's arm. The white marks her fingers had made remained for a moment on his skin, livid in the half-light.

  "We're . . . still here," she said.

  Orlando laughed raggedly, flopped over onto his back, arms spread across the path. "Dzang, Frederico. You haven't los
t your talent for the obvious."

  She stared into the pit. Only moments ago something Sam found almost impossible to distinguish from Satan himself had been rising from the pit. Now it was . . . gone.

  "I mean . . . we're alive!"

  "Speak for yourself." Orlando rolled over and struggled onto his feet, rubbing at the place Sam had squeezed him. Indignant at being dislodged, a small cloud of monkeys fluttered up, protesting loudly, and swept out to circle above the now-empty Well. Despite her overwhelming confusion Sam almost smiled. The real Thargor wouldn't have rubbed his arm if a dragon had bitten it off.

  "Everything feels . . . different," said Florimel, who had also stood.

  "Big bad thing gone," one of the monkeys fluted, sweeping back to hover before her. It paused for a moment as if listening. "Both big bad things."

  "That's not all," said Orlando, staring up at the opening far above, the faint stars. "The whole place is different. Scanny-different, but I can't explain why."

  Sam looked too. Hadn't the stars disappeared completely only hours before? Now they hung in the dark sky again. Orlando was right—everything was different. The pit had seemed endless, bottomless, impossibly, nightmarishly huge, even after it had devolved into something less realistic. Now, for all its size, it seemed simple, almost normal. It was just a big hole in the ground. Had everything changed? Or were they just seeing things differently. . . ?

  "Martine! Where is she?" Sam spun. The blind woman's body was stretched along the ledge, her face turned toward the pit wall, almost hidden in the shadows. Sam pulled her over. She was unconscious but breathing,

  Florimel bent down to examine her. "We have all survived, it seems."

  "All but Paul," Sam could not help pointing out. She was angry about it—such a stupid waste! "He didn't have to."

  "He felt he did," said Florimel gently. She lifted one of Martine's eyelids, frowned, then checked the other.

  "But what happened? Someone explain." Sam turned and scanned the ledge for the boy who had spoken with Sellars' voice but could not see him.

  "He just . . . disappeared," said Bonnie Mae Simpkins. "That Cho-Cho. Don't ask me, child—I don't know either."

  "The man Sellars brought him into the network," said Nandi. "If he's gone, perhaps that means Sellars is gone, too . . . or dead."

  "Who won, so?" T4b demanded. His usual truculence had been blasted away. He seemed more childlike than Sam had ever seen him. "Us?"

  "Yes, in a way," said a voice from nowhere. "Our enemies are dead or disabled. But we too have lost much."

  "Sellars?" Florimel looked up in offhand irritation, as though disturbed by a neighbor while she did some prosaic household task. Sam guessed that, like the rest of them, the German woman wasn't hitting on all cylinders. "Where are you? We are tired of tricks."

  The invisible presence laughed. Sam wondered if she had heard him do that before. It was a surprisingly nice laugh. "Where am I? Everywhere!"

  "Scanned," muttered T4b. "Lockin' scanned."

  "No," Sellars said. "It is far stranger than that. But Florimel is right—I should remember my manners and make it easier for all of us to talk." And suddenly, he appeared—a strange, shrunken creature in a wheelchair, his face crinkled like a dried fruit. The chair's wheels did not touch the ledge. In fact, it hovered several meters away from it, out over the great emptiness. "Here I am. I know I am not much to see."

  "Are we all to live, then?" demanded Florimel. "Can you help me with Martine?"

  Sellars floated forward. "She will awaken soon, I think. She is physically as well as can be expected." He shook his misshapen head. "She carried a tremendous burden—pain and horror that few could bear. She is an astonishing person."

  Martine groaned, then threw her hand over her face and rolled over, turning her spine toward them. "You are saying kind things about me," Her voice was hoarse and almost inflectionless. "I hope that means I have died."

  Sam crawled to her and awkwardly patted her hair. "Don't, Martine."

  "But it's true—you have done an amazing thing, Martine Desroubins," Sellars said. "In fact, we have all done something nearly as amazing just by surviving. And it is possible we are to be the witnesses of something more astonishing still."

  "No more puffed-up talk," said Florimel. "I am alive when I did not expect it—but I am not ready to be lulled with a speech about what we have done. Where is my daughter, Eirene? I can feel her, I think—her real body still lives, and that is good, but what of the coma?" She scowled and rose from Martine's side to face Sellars. "Her spirit must be somewhere above us—lost and terrified after all that destruction. I will climb to her now and the rest of you can spend as much time talking as you wish."

  "I am sorry, Florimel." Sam decided that "hover" was not the right word: Sellars sat rock-solid above the void, as though a hurricane could not move him an inch. "I wish I could tell you she was recovered, that even now her real body was awakening, but I cannot. There is much I simply do not know, and there are still many mysteries here. However, I can at least promise that the Eirene you love is not up there, huddling in fear on the shores of the Well, and she never was. Now, will you let me explain what I do know?"

  Florimel stared at him, then nodded once. "I will listen."

  "I will tell you some of it as we proceed," Sellars said. "There is one last thing that must be done here, and I do not trust myself to deal with it alone."

  Orlando sighed. "Do we have to kill something else?"

  "No." Sellars smiled. "And there is a happy side to this duty as well. There are friends waiting. No, not that way, Javier."

  T4b had already begun to trudge up the sloping path. "What?"

  "Down." Sellars began to drift beside the ledge, following its path into the depths. "We have to go down to the bottom."

  "Old melty wheel-knocker," T4b grumbled quietly to Sam and Orlando as they helped Martine up. The others also struggled to their feet, murmuring with pain and weariness. "Don't have to walk, him—just float like some sayee lo butterfly."

  He was silent and very still, but his chest was moving.

  "!Xabbu?" She shook him gently. "!Xabbu?" She could not, would not believe that they should have come through so much and fail now, "!Xabbu, I think . . . I think it's over."

  She looked up, still uncertain what was different. The bottom of the pit lay in a half-light, only a little of it provided by the stars far, far overhead.

  Stars. Were there stars before?

  Most of the light came from the river, if it could still be called that. Although it flickered with strange gleams, hints of blue and silver light, it had shrunk back to a tiny rivulet.

  But the mantis, the shadow-child . . . the Other . . . was gone.

  Those two children came, she remembered. They took it . . . him . . . away. Who the hell were they?

  But not just the river had changed. The quality of the light, the feel of the stone ledge beneath her, everything—the whole place had become both more and less real. The most grotesque of the exaggerations were gone, but when Renie moved her head quickly, there seemed to be an infinitesimal lag. And there was something else. . . .

  She was distracted by !Xabbu moving. His eyes were open, although he did not yet seem to see her. She put her head on his chest, felt it moving, listened to his heart.

  "Tell me you're all right. Please."

  "I . . . I am alive," he said. "That is one thing. And I seem to be alive . . . after the world has ended." He struggled to sit up. She got off him. "That is another thing," he said. "A very strange thing."

  "There's something else," she told him. "Feel your face."

  He looked at her with surprise. The surprise deepened as he felt along the side of his jaw, let his fingers move out onto his chin and up over his mouth and nose. "I . . . feel something there."

  "The mask," she said, and suddenly could not help laughing. "The mask from the V-tank. I've got one too! Which must mean we can go offline again." But even as she said it, she th
ought of something. "Jeremiah—Papa—can you hear us?" she called. She said it again, louder. "No. For whatever reason, we don't have communication with them yet. What if there's something wrong with the tanks?"

  !Xabbu shook his head. "I am sorry, Renie, I don't understand. I am . . . tired. Confused. I did not expect to feel all the things I have felt." He rubbed his head with his hands, a gesture of weariness so unfamiliar that Renie could only stare for a moment. She put her arms around him once more.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "Of course, you must be exhausted. I was just worrying, that's all. If we can't speak to Jeremiah and my father, we don't know that the tanks will open. There are emergency release handles inside, but. . . ." She realized she was almost as tired as !Xabbu. "But if they don't work for some reason, we'd just be stuck in there." The idea of being trapped inches from freedom in a pitch-black tank filled with gel, after all they had already survived, made her feel queasy.

  "Perhaps we should . . . wait." !Xabbu was having trouble keeping his eyes open. "Wait until. . . ."

  "A little while, anyway," she said, pulling him toward her. "Yes, sleep. I'll keep watch,"

  But the warm, reassuring solidity of his head on her chest quickly drew her down as well.

  She came up again slowly, her lids gummed together and so hard to open that for a panicky second she was certain they had awakened in the tanks after all. Her fog-headed thrashing woke !Xabbu, who rolled off her and thumped down onto the ledge.