"But those children—my brother!" Renie said. "Why are they in comas?"
"Because Jongleur underestimated the Other. His own body stolen, the Other was given the whole of a fantastically complicated network to be his new body—but Jongleur and his minions did not understand the Other's ambition. More importantly, they did not understand his humanity . . . and his loneliness.
"He discovered his power could be extended through electronic communications over a distance. Part of that power was a hypnotic effect—something the Other himself probably never understood, any more than the rest of us spend much energy considering our own vision or sense of balance. You all being trapped here is a perfect example. He wanted all of you to stay in the network. He was fascinated with you, for some reason—I watched him watching you, almost following you. . . ."
"It was because of a story," Martine said in a raw voice. "About a boy in a well."
"Ah. Well, I hope you will explain that to me later." For the second time in an hour, Sellars appeared startled. "But I should finish this story first.
"The Other was interfacing with your minds directly, without you even realizing it. And at some level his wish to keep you, to hold onto you, translated into a direct plea planted in your subconscious. You could not go offline. Whether by pain or by the apparent disappearance of your neurocannular connections, you believed yourselves prevented, and it was so."
"But that Other thing truly sixed now, right?" T4b asked anxiously. "We could go now. To our caves—home, like?"
"Yes. But after I finish this explanation there is something very important I need from you—now, with you all gathered together."
"Yeah? Thinkin' about it," T4b said. "Keep talkin', you."
"So you're saying that the children like my brother were held here the same way?" Renie asked.
"No. They were never truly here, not like we are. Instead, they were . . . and are, for all I know . . . in comas simply because the Other made it happen—perhaps even by accident.
"I am guessing here, but I imagine that when the Other finally discovered how to move beyond the constraints of the Grail network, he reached out through Jongleur's own information web, then discovered Jongleur's ongoing search for suitable child-talents and infiltrated that as well, extending his powers all the way out into places like Mister J's. When the Other reached through that machinery and discovered the children on the other end—perhaps the first children he had been exposed to since the Pestalozzi Institute experiments, decades earlier—he must have been very excited. He tried to . . . examine these children, perhaps tried to communicate with them. I'm sure they resisted. You have all encountered the Other. He could not help the way he was, but that did not make him any less terrible, less frightening."
Like a huge thing in the depths of the ocean, and me swimming, helpless, Renie thought. Like a killing frost. Like Satan himself, banished and lonely. . . . "Yes," she said. "Oh, God, yes, we remember."
"Just so." Sellars nodded. "Faced with the resistance of a struggling, terrified child, my guess is that this psychologically malformed but powerful creature screamed out his own telepathic version of a command—'Be still' And so they became . . . still. But since he did not understand what he had done, he did not release them again when he was finished examining them."
"Examining them?" Florimel sounded outraged. "What does that mean, 'examining them'? What did it want?"
Sellars gave a half-shrug. "To make friends. There is no understanding this without remembering that the Other was himself essentially an abused, isolated child."
Martine moved uncomfortably, seemed about to say something, but remained silent.
"For friends?" Renie looked around at the others to see if she was the only one who didn't understand. "That's . . . I don't know. Hard to believe. It did all that to them, almost killed them . . . because it wanted to meet some new friends?"
"You misunderstand me. I did not say 'meet,' I said 'make.' He wanted to make friends—literally. I believe that the Other wanted more than anything to be with other children like himself—or like the child he imagined himself to be. He studied real children so he could duplicate them within the network—surround himself with companions to ease the solitude."
"So all those fairy-tale children like the Stone Girl and all the others we met here in the heart of the system. . . ." Renie tried to reason it out. "They're just . . . imitations? Made-up children?"
"Yes. Cobbled together from his studies of real children like your brother, combined with the Other's memories—perhaps his only happy memories—of things Martine and other children had once taught him, rhymes, stories, songs. And I suspect there were more than just the fairy-tale creatures—that other invented children either escaped the Other's private place here or were created outside the sanctuary for some reason and never brought in. They wound up scattered throughout the Grail network—not human, but not part of the system either."
"Paul Jonas called them 'orphans,' " Martine said softly, "although he did not understand what they were. His young friend Gally must have been one of them."
"Orphans," Sellars said. "An apt term—especially now. But all of them would have been based at least in part on what the Other found in the minds of real children. That is why some of them retain memories, seem to have had some kind of prior life."
"So . . . my Eirene is not on this network. . . ?" Florimel spoke slowly, as if just waking. "She has never been on this network?"
"No. And as to whether the Other's post-hypnotic suggestion will now disappear, too, I can't say." Sellars shook his head grimly. "I wish I could, Florimel. If we are very lucky, your daughter and the other Tandagore children were only comatose because the Other retained some kind of continuous, reflexive mental grip on them, perhaps even by direct contact—through hospital lines, monitoring equipment, who knows? But I simply cannot guess what might happen now. We could study for years, I think, and never fully understand the Other."
"So we don't know if they'll wake up?" Renie could not keep the bitterness out of her voice. "After all this. . . !"
"We do not." He spoke carefully. "But perhaps there is more we can do to help them. Perhaps we can use the knowledge we have gained in some kind of therapy. . . ."
"Oh, yes, therapy!" Renie bit her lip to keep from saying something that would lead her on into screaming and cursing. !Xabbu put his arm around her shoulders. She closed her eyes, suddenly sick of the place, the lights, everything.
Orlando broke the startled silence. "That still doesn't explain me. Why am I here? Maybe if you've got super-hypnosis power you can tell someone, 'Be in a coma!' or 'Feel like you're on fire if you go offline!' and it works, but you can't just tell somebody who's dying, 'Don't be dead.' Sorry, but they wouldn't even try that in a Johnny Icepick flick."
"We have not had much chance to talk, you and I," Sellars told him, "but I suspect you guess the answer already, Orlando. You have received the same kind of virtual mind as the Grail Brotherhood were expecting for themselves." He turned briefly to look at the Nemesis thing, which still seemed lost in some deep meditation. "And a body, too, like that one meant for Ricardo Klement, which was . . . borrowed, instead. But yours was constructed for you by the Other, just as he did for Paul Jonas—he may have been using some version of the Grail process on you the entire time you were in the system, letting your own brain build itself a virtual duplicate. He did follow you closely, Orlando, that I know for certain. Perhaps he felt some unspoken . . . affinity to you. To your illness, your struggle."
Orlando shook his head. "It doesn't matter. Dead is dead, and that's what I really am."
Before Sam Fredericks or anyone else could protest, they were distracted by a sudden movement from the Nemesis creature, who stood.
"The next ones are almost ready," Nemesis said. "I have a . . . feeling, I think it would be called. That I . . . desire waiting to end. Is that a feeling?"
"What's that fenpole talking about?" growled T4b. "What 'next ones'?
"
Renie, who had been present for the Klement-thing's first groping explorations of language, could not help feeling disturbed that it now seemed to think it was having feelings, too.
"What it is talking about is the last part of these long explanations," Sellars said. "The reason we are here—and my most shamed confession." He extended his thin arm to indicate the honeycomb of lights. The gleam of it was less now, as though the fires were banked, but its bizarre potentiality still set Renie's nerves twitching. Sellars seemed oddly nervous, too. "These are the Other's true children."
"What—another abomination?" Nandi from the Circle spoke lightly, but Renie heard a flash of real rage.
"But this can't be them," Sam Fredericks said indignantly. "All those teddy bears and Bubble Bunnies and things like that, the ones that didn't get killed, they were still up there like half an hour ago, up at the top of the pit. How did they get here?"
"They are not here. These are something different. Please bear with me a little longer, Sam," Sellars asked her. "Just a little longer.
"Most of you do not know my true story, but I will spare you all the details now. I have certainly talked enough already, and there is much more that must be said, and quickly."
Sellars hurried through an explanation of the PEREGRINE project and its tragic ending. Renie found herself almost overwhelmed. Is there no end to these strange stories? she wondered. How much more can we absorb?
"So there I was—the only survivor," Sellars told them.
"An embarrassing secret kept under military house arrest for decades. Because of my bizarre communications capabilities I was not allowed to use the net, but I managed to trick my captors, upgrading myself until I could easily access the world's telecommunication infrastructure without them even guessing.
"But even with all the world's data resources at my fingertips, I grew bored. As bored men will do, I sought diversion. I have always liked to grow things. So . . . I grew things.
"Because my original purpose was to be the focal point of a multibillion dollar starship, and because I was so completely filled and transfigured by micromachinery, I had been given a complement of internal antiviral programs that were, for the time, the absolute state of the art. No computer viruses were to be allowed to destroy my very expensive functions, since in space I would be far beyond repair or replacement. I was given the newest and most effective sort of self-ordering antibodies—coded creations that could adapt and grow within my information system. But as time moved on in the real world, the net's own viruses became just as adaptable, which prompted programmers to create a whole new evolutionary round of antivirals.
"It fascinated me. Like most prisoners, I had nothing but time, so I began to experiment. I had little internal storage to speak of—that is the one way I have never been able to upgrade myself suitably—so to contain my experiments I had to find and use large-scale storage sites I could reach through the net—unused memory belonging to governments, corporations, educational institutions.
"This was dangerous foolishness, of course. I realize now how bitter and disaffected I must have been. The original antivirals from my own system were considerably more powerful than even what was in use in the mainstream net twenty years later. Put into direct competition with advanced viruses, they quickly became something even more exceptional, which provoked the viruses in turn into new adaptation. And as indicated by the very fact that I had reached these locations of unused memory through the world's communication system, if something went wrong with my protective arrangement, my . . . creations . . . could find their way off, out into the world grid.
"When I was only in the initial generations, this would not have been so much of a problem. Things as complex and dangerous were already all over the net. But as I refined my experiments—my games, as I carelessly thought of them—I forced up the cycle time, so that thousands of generations were breeding every week. The things I had created fought, experimented, changed, and replicated, all within my artificial information-world. Evolution shoved them forward in paradigmatic leaps. The adaptations were sometimes quite startling.
"One day, some ten years ago now, I found that several strategic approaches—different creatures, in a sense, but all sprung from the same shared root—had developed a symbiotic relationship, become a kind of super-creature. This is one of the things that happened on the long road to animal life in the real world—we have arrangements in our own cell structure that were once completely separate organisms. I began to realize what I was risking. I had created the beginnings of something that might conceivably become another true life-form—perhaps even a rival life-form. Information-based, as opposed to the organic life which has been the standard here on Earth, but life nevertheless. My games were clearly no longer just an amusement."
"You made . . . life?" Renie asked.
Sellars shrugged. "At the time, it was highly debatable. There are some who think that anything that is not organic cannot by definition be alive. But what I had created . . . or to be accurate, what evolution in information space had created . . . fulfilled all the other criteria.
"It is possible that what I should have done then was to destroy these nascent life-forms. I had many sleepless nights, and have had many since, wondering about my choice to keep them. You will perhaps think a little better of me when you remember that the military had taken my health and my freedom away from me. I had already been a captive for something like forty years. All I had were these . . . creations of mine. They were my entertainment, my fixation—but also my posterity. I thought that if I could get them to a point where I could prove what I believed was happening, I could reveal it to the world. The government and the military would find it very difficult simply to discredit or kill someone whose experiments were being examined by scientists all over the globe.
"So I did not destroy them. Instead I searched for a more secure place to keep them, to allow them to continue their evolution where they would have almost no chance of escaping into the world information matrix. After a long search, I discovered a huge amount of unused memory in a shielded, private system—a staggeringly large system.
"It was, of course, the Grail network, although I knew nothing of that at the time. Through a variety of complicated ruses I obtained a clearance into the unfinished system, created a hidden subsystem that would siphon off memory and juggle the figures to hide that fact, and moved my experiment there—an electronic Ararat on which my ark could find safe harbor, if you'll excuse a rather ripe metaphor."
"You used the Grail Brotherhood's network to store your electronic life-forms?" Nandi from the Circle asked. He seemed more bewildered than angry. "How could you have done anything so mad?"
"What do you expect from someone who thought he could play God?" said Bonnie Mae Simpkins in disgust.
"I have given the only justification I can," Sellars said. "And I admit it is a poor one. I had no idea of what the Grail Brotherhood was or what it intended, of course—the network was not labeled "For Evil Purposes Only." And I was not entirely sane in those days. But what happened next did much to sober me.
"Because of course, when I next looked in on the progress of the experiment, I found my evolutionary hothouse empty. The creatures, if I can give that name to things without bodies, things which existed only as representative numbers in a complex mathematical model, had vanished. In fact they had been adopted, but I had no way of knowing that at the time.
"In a panic, I reconfigured my Garden, my network of information-sifting gear, to monitor for any sign that the evolving creatures had escaped into the world grid. At the same time I began to study the people who owned the immense facilities from which I had purloined the small corner in which the data-creatures had been hidden, from which they had escaped . . . or been removed. From that point on, the story I told you back in Bolivar Atasco's world is the truth. I found out what the Grail Brotherhood was doing, or at least began to suspect. I saw that the secrecy and remoteness of their network w
as meant not to protect industrial secrets, but to hide something far larger and more bizarre. Slowly, I was drawn from the search for my own lost experiment into a genuine horror at the activities of the Grail Brotherhood—always linked to my own worry of what such ruthless people might do, even by accident, with my experimental creations. You know the rest of the tale. To a large extent, you are the rest of the tale."
"And so you've brought us here to gloat?" Nandi said,. He turned and jabbed a hand at the banks of glowing, cell-spaces in the rock walls. "Because clearly these are creations. I can guess what happened. The Other found them and kept them. It nurtured them, as it nurtured the almost-children it had made for itself." He shook his head in disgust. His voice softened, but there was a hardness in it that made Renie even more uncomfortable. "It does not matter that a horrible thing behaved that way because it was itself tortured. We can understand, but not excuse—'Love the sinner but hate the sin,' I believe my Christian comrades say. And even if this abomination around us was created out of something like love—although that, I think, does not describe your part in this, Sellars—that does not make it right. These . . . creatures . . . are the thing we in the Circle felt, the great wrongness. I understand that now. You want us to wonder and applaud, but I tell you instead that they must be destroyed."
To Renie's surprise, Sellars did not argue. "Your viewpoint deserves to be heard," he said. "That is why you are here. We have a terrible choice—no, you have a terrible choice, all of you. But not me. I have forfeited my right to decide."
"What are you talking about?" demanded Bonnie Mae Simpkins. "Forfeited? Decide what?"
"Just what Mr, Paradivash was speaking of," Sellars said with a sort of restrained courtesy. "He was correct. The Other found them, took them, nurtured them here within his own secret recesses. And now the Other's children have reached what he believed—or at least sensed—was a final evolutionary fitness. So desperate was he that they should live that I think he hung on in terrible agony and fear much longer than he would have wished.