"What. . . ?" He raised himself on his elbows.
Renie looked around at the now-familiar stone pathway, the rock wall behind them, the shadowed empty expanse beyond the ledge. "Nothing. I . . . nothing." She squinted, shook her head, looked again. The river had stopped glowing—it was now only a dark scratch at the bottom of the pit—but something else was creating a warm, pinkish-yellow light which spilled across the stones where the child-thing had crouched and waited.
"There's something shining down there," she said.
!Xabbu crawled forward and peered down. "It comes from a crack in the rock wall—there, to the side of the river." He sat up. "What can it be?"
"I don't know and I don't care."
"But perhaps it is a way out." He seemed already to be recovering some of his natural bounce; by contrast, with her adrenaline no longer flowing, Renie felt like she had been given a beating by experts. !Xabbu pointed up the path. "Look at how far it would be to climb back up."
"Who said anything about climbing up? We're going to wait until Jeremiah or my father know we're ready to come out. And if we don't hear from them, well, I suppose at some point we'll take the risk and do it ourselves. So why the hell would we care whether there is another way out?"
"Because it might be something else. It might be a threat. Or it might be our friends looking for us."
"What, with flashlights?" Renie waved her hand at the idea.
"Then you stay here and rest," he said. "I will go and look."
"Don't you dare!"
!Xabbu turned to her, his expression surprisingly serious. "Renie, do you truly love me? You said that you did."
"Of course." He had startled her, scared her. Her eyes burned a little and she blinked. "Of course."
"And I said the same to you. And it is a true thing. I would not stop you doing something you felt was important. How can we live together if you will not show that respect to me?"
"Live together?" She felt as if whoever had beaten her up before had come back for a last sucker punch.
"Surely we will try. Isn't that what you want?"
"Yes. I guess so. Yes, of course, I just. . . ." She had to stop and take a breath. "I just haven't had a chance to think about it much."
"Then you can think while I go look." He smiled as he rose, but he seemed a little distant.
"Sit down, damn it. I didn't mean it that way." She tried to order her thoughts. "Of course, !Xabbu—of course we will live together. I couldn't be without you. I know that. I just didn't expect to have this discussion in the middle of an imaginary world."
His smile was a little more genuine this time. "We have not had any other kind of world lately in which to discuss things."
"Come back, please." She put out her arms. "This is important. We have never been together—not as lovers—in the real world. In some ways it may be as strange and difficult as anything we've experienced in this . . . not-real world."
"I think you are right, Renie." He was solemn now.
"So let's start with the basics. We seem to be stuck here, at least for now. Whatever is making that funny light doesn't seem to be going anywhere. We've been here for hours and it hasn't done anything to us. It's not getting brighter—or even dimmer for that matter."
"These are all true things."
"So instead of arguing about some new piece of virtual foolishness, why don't you come here and hold me?" She was worried, she realized, but she was also hungry for his touch. They had survived countless horrors. Now she wanted something better. "We have a ledge. We have time. We've got each other. Let's do something about that instead."
He raised an eyebrow. She could almost have sworn he was embarrassed. "You city women are not shy."
"No, we're not. How about you desert men?"
He sat and leaned toward her, put his hand around her neck and gently pulled her toward him. She decided he wasn't that embarrassed after all.
"We are very healthy," he said.
She had slept again, she realized, this time from a happier sort of exhaustion. Her eyes drifted open and she made a slow inventory of her surroundings. The stone, the empty expanse, the distant sky—nothing seemed to have changed. But of course, in a way, everything had changed.
"Do we count that as our first or our second time?" she asked.
!Xabbu lifted his head from her breast. "Hmmm?"
She laughed. "I like you this way. Relaxed. Is this how a hunter acts when he's had a big meal?"
"Only a meal that good." He slid upward and kissed her jaw, her ear. "It is funny, this kissing. You do so much of it."
"You're picking it up," she said. "So—first or second time?"
"Do you mean before—when we found each other in . . . in the great dark?"
She nodded, pulling at the coils of his hair with her fingers.
"I don't know." He lifted himself above her, smiling. "But we still have another first time to go!"
She had to think about it for a moment. "Real bodies. Jesus mercy, I'd almost forgotten. That certainly felt real."
He looked down into the pit. "The light is still there."
Renie rolled her eyes. "All right. I surrender. But you're not going by yourself."
The surrender did not become immediately effective. Renie was reluctant to let him go, and would have happily made another experiment with the potentials of virtuality, but !Xabbu held her to her bargain. At last, with much protest, she allowed him to help her up onto her feet.
"It is just so nice," she said lazily. "That's why I don't want to go anywhere. Just so nice to be . . . human for a while. Not running for our lives. Not frightened."
He smiled and squeezed her hand. "Perhaps that is a difference between us. I am happy with you, Renie—so happy I cannot say. But I will not feel completely safe until I know what is around us. In the desert we know every bush, every spoor, every drift of sand."
She squeezed back, then let him go. "All right. But go slowly, please, and let's be careful. I am truly exhausted—and you are partially to blame."
"I hear you, Porcupine."
"You know," she said as they walked down to the place where the path ended, "I think I'm beginning to like that."
!Xabbu was staring at the rocks below the path. Either because of the change in the lights or some subtler and more profound shift of the whole environment, the climb down did not look as impossibly steep as it had before. "I think I see a way down," he said. "It will not be easy. Are you sure you would not rather wait for me?"
"If I'm going to respect your wish to climb up and down things for no good reason," she replied calmly, "then you had better learn that I don't get left behind very well,"
"Yes, Porcupine." He squinted down the stones. "Do you mind if I go first?"
"Hell, no."
It took them the better part of what Renie guessed was half an hour, but she was grateful to discover that her first impression had been right: it was not a bad climb, especially to someone who had survived the trip down the black mountain, just one that needed care. With !Xabbu beneath her, pointing out handholds and places stable enough to stop and take a short rest, they reached the bottom with no mishaps.
The bottom of the pit was strangely smooth, more like something that had melted and cooled than like the bottom of any true canyon. Renie looked up at the stars and the circle of dark sky far above. The distance was dizzying. She started to say something to !Xabbu about the climb back to the ledge—she was already wondering whether she could make it back without a long rest—but he held up his hand, asking for silence.
Seen up close, the hole in the wall was more than a crack. At its narrow top the crevice stretched to four or five times her height, and the opening, aglow with peach-colored light, was wide enough to drive a car through.
!Xabbu walked toward it with quiet care. The light seemed to roll over him like something liquid, so that all she could see was his slender silhouette. Suddenly afraid, she hurried to catch up to him.
As
they stepped through the crevice Renie found herself in a high corridor of raw stone, a gouge so full of soft radiance that at first she could see nothing. After a moment, she thought she could make out a pattern to the light, as though the walls of the corridor were full of sealed alcoves, each one holding a little core of brilliance.
What are they? she wondered. It's like a beehive. There must be hundreds of them . . . thousands. . . .
"I heard your speaking and your other noises," said a quiet, strange voice behind them. Renie whirled. "I thought—I questioned . . . wondered? . . . when you would come."
Standing in the mouth of the crevice, blocking their escape, stood a tall man. Dazzled by surprise and the glow all around them, it took Renie a moment to recognize him and the malformed thing he was holding.
It was Ricardo Klement.
"Okay, so the Other was floating around in some kind of satellite and the Grail network data was shooting up to it and back on special lasers or something. Chizz. And then the Other flew the satellite down and crashed it, so Jongleur's blown up and dead." Sam was trying hard to sort through all the new information. "That's utterly chizz. But Dread isn't. Dead, I mean."
"I said I don't know," Sellars told her. "I am trying to find out what happened to him, but it may take a while. . . ."
"Right. We don't know about Dread, so that's not so chizz. But are you telling us that we saved the Other just so he could kill himself?" She shook her head. "Man, that's impacted!"
"We did not save him," Sellars said. "The Other had suffered too much, first from Jongleur and the Grail Brotherhood, then from the man called Dread. He had already decided he did not want to live. Such things . . . such things happen." There was a strange tone in the man's voice that Sam did not understand. She turned to Orlando to see if he had heard it too, but her friend was staring down at the path as though he feared stumbling. "When I first brought Cho-Cho online, while I struggled with the network's defense systems, the Other fooled me. I thought all his attention was on fighting me, but while I was busy trying to understand him and his strategy and struggling to repel his attacks, he was preparing to use me. When I accessed the data tap and was temporarily overwhelmed by the magnitude of information, he was ready.
"If he had wanted to, he could have killed me easily then—but he wanted something quite different. He reached through my connection into Felix Jongleur's central control system for the network—the one part that had been expressly shielded from him, and which included the mechanisms that kept him imprisoned. By the time I understood what was happening he had already wrenched the satellite out of orbit and begun his carefully-aimed descent. By that point there was nothing that could have saved him: gravity had already signed the warrant."
"How horrible!" Sam could hardly bear to think about it. "He must have been so unhappy!"
Martine had been walking between them like a zombie, but now she stirred. "He had . . . a little peace at the end. I felt that. I do not think I would still be here if I had not."
"You did not feel . . . everything, did you?" Sellars slowed his downward progress until he hung near her. "I hope you did not have to suffer through the very last moments."
She shook her head wearily. "He pushed me away. Before the end."
"Pushed you away?" Sellars looked at her with his sharp yellow eyes. Sam could not help wondering if it was their true color. "Was there . . . contact of some other kind? Did he say something?"
"I do not wish to speak of it," Martine said flatly.
"But if the Other is gone, why is all this still here?" asked Orlando. He too seemed troubled. "I mean, this place was all . . . a dream, wasn't it? The Grail network was kind of like his body, but this part was the inside of his mind, right? So why isn't it gone? Why isn't everything around us gone?"
"And if the network goes, you will go, too—that is what you are thinking, isn't it, Orlando Gardiner?" Sellars' voice was kind. "It's a good question. And the answer has two parts, both important. The second part I will save until we reach the bottom of this pit, for reasons of my own. But the fact is that I had prepared for this day a long time—I just never thought I would have the chance to use any of those preparations. I did not know the true nature of the Other until today, of course, but I knew it was at least quasi-sentient and dangerous. I also knew that the network might not survive without it. The physical records of the system are safe—they are stored in room after room of processors in the headquarters of the Telemorphix Corporation. Thanks to the late Robert Wells, the hard code of the network and the simulations is relatively safe."
"Wait a minute," said Florimel. "The late Robert Wells? He was alive in the network, in the Egypt symworld—if we survived, he probably did also."'
Sellars' laugh was not so pleasant this time. "He hid your capture from Dread. Dread found out." The old man glided a bit farther out from the ledge and looked down. "So the hard data was safe, but it would include nothing from here." He gestured with his thin fingers, encompassing the pit, the spiraling path. "Because this was part of the Other itself." He frowned. "Himself—I don't want to steal his humanity as others did. So when he was destroyed, this would all go too. The replacement operating system I had been able to cobble together in preparation for this day, with help from the people at TreeHouse, would contain none of it."
Sellars sighed. "Now we come to the first of my several confessions. When I freed Paul Jonas from the simulation in which Felix Jongleur had held him for so long, I did not fully understand what I was doing. I was ignorant about the actual workings of the Grail process and even more ignorant of the Other's true nature. I had no idea that it had created for Paul a version of the virtual minds the Grail Brotherhood were making for themselves. I am still not sure why it did that, although I suspect it was something to do with the fondness Avialle Jongleur felt for him and the affection the Other felt for her.
"In any case, I foolishly went ahead and released him anyway, seeking only to get his consciousness free from Jongleur's clutches so I could find out what he knew and why they held him. But he escaped not just from them, but from me as well. I did not know until later that what I had done was to free a virtual copy—that the real Paul Jonas was still unconscious in the vaults of the Telemorphix Corporation."
Martine grunted as if struck. "The real Paul Jonas. . . ." she murmured. Sam thought she sounded like a woman on the verge of tears, but Sellars didn't seem to have heard her.
"In any case, things had grown steadily worse throughout the last hours. Even before the endgame began, the Other had been struggling to run the network and also siphon resources to this private world. There were several times when the whole thing came to the brink of collapse. . . ."
"Those, like, reality hiccups," Sam said.
"But in the last moments the Other had finally surrendered to despair. It triggered its own death, wishing only to destroy the symbol of its torment and its cruel master, Felix Jongleur. The rest of the network might survive that destruction, but I knew that this secret place would not. Caught in the Other's . . . feedback loop, for lack of a better word, the coils of its powerful hypnosis, you would die when it did."
"And the children, too," added Florimel. "Was it not trying to save the children by keeping them hidden here?"
Sellars took a moment to reply. "Yes, it was trying to protect the children as well," he said at last. "So there things stood. I could salvage the network, but not the things the Other had created out of its own mind."
"Wait a minute," Orlando said slowly. "Are you saying that we're not in the network? That we've been . . . somewhere else all this time? In something's mind?"
"Where are a human being's memories?" Sellars asked. "In its mind, but where? This place exists within the larger body of the network, just as human thought exists within the brain, but we may never be able to answer either question with a definite location." He lifted his hand. "Please, let me finish. The Other had surrendered, but I had one last plan. If he would let me, I decided I
would try to make a last-minute version of the kind of virtual matrix the Other had created for Paul Jonas. The Grail process is an exacting, time-consuming thing, but I hoped that I could at least generate something basic, just as the Grail process starts with the mind's simplest functions and then adds layer after layer of memory and personality. I did not need the Other, only his most basic functions. But I could not do it without his cooperation.
"In his very last moments, and thanks to another brave woman, this one a stranger to you all, he gave that cooperation to me. It was a near thing, though, and there was no guarantee we would create enough of a double that this matrix, this internal Otherland, would survive." Sellars shook his head, remembering. "There—that is half your answer, Orlando, as promised. It did survive. We are in a sort of Grail-process version of the original operating system, the Other."
"He's alive?" Sam felt as if the whole world suddenly become unstable again.
"Not alive. There was not time for that. The greater network is still operating, and this place has survived too, existing as a kind of salvaged memory. It functions, more or less. The things that are damaged should be reparable."
"Reparable?" Nandi slowed, then stopped. "This place is an abomination—a crime against Nature, built on the bodies of innocent children. We of the Circle came into this place to destroy it, not repair it."
Sellars looked at him with an unreadable expression; Sam didn't think it was just because of the strange deformities of the man's face. "Your point is a good one, Mr. Paradivash. This is one of the things that must be discussed. But there could be no discussion if I had not accomplished what I did. The system would be gone and you would be beyond conversation."
Nandi stared at him angrily. "You have no right to make such a decision, Sellars—to keep this place alive at your own whim. Dozens of people from the Circle died to prevent such a thing."
"Martyrs," said Bonnie Mae quietly. "Like my husband Terence."
"But you do not know yet exactly what they were martyred for," Sellars said evenly. "So I suggest we wait to have this conversation until you do."