Paul shrugged uncomfortably. "Can't say that I do. But what are you telling me? A voice spoke to you? And said that we're safe to speak here?"
"He is a lonely ghost, if that's what he is—a little boy, I think, perhaps a foreigner. He speaks that way, very seriously, very strangely. He told me he had been watching me and he was sorry I was so lonely. He said he wanted to be my friend." She shook her head in slow wonder. "It was so odd! It was more than just a voice—it was as though he stood right by me! But although it was dark, there was enough light to see the room was empty."
Paul was more than ever convinced that something was gravely wrong, but had not the slightest idea of what to do about it. "I know you don't think it was a dream, Ava, but . . . but it must have been. I just can't believe in ghosts."
"He hid me. He told me to go out for a walk in the evening, and that he would show me how he could keep me safe from being found. And he did! I went for a walk here in the wood and soon there were maids all over the garden and tramping through the trees. Even Finney came and joined in the search—he was very angry when they finally discovered me sitting on a stone doing my sewing. 'I frequently go for walks in the late afternoon, Mr. Finney,' I told him. 'Why are you so upset?' He could not admit that whatever methods they used for spying on me had failed, of course—he merely made an excuse, something urgent that he needed to speak to me about, but it was transparently a ruse."
"But is that enough. . . ?" Paul began.
"And last night my friend showed me the rooms where you live," she said hurriedly. "I know, it is a most terrible incursion on your privacy. I apologize. They are much less grand than I had suspected, I must say. And your furniture is all very smooth and plain—nothing like what I have in my house at all."
"What do you mean, showed you?"
"The mirror through which my father speaks to me, when he bothers to do so—it has never been of any other use, but last night my friend used it to show me you, dear Mr. Jonas." She gave him a girlishly wicked little flash of her teeth. "I am grateful, for my modesty and yours, that you were fully dressed the entire time."
"You saw me?" Paul was dumbfounded. She had stumbled on some way to use the one-way wallscreen in her study to connect to the general house surveillance.
"You were watching something on the wall—a moving picture of your own. It had animals in it. You were wearing a gray robe. Drinking a glass of something—wine, perhaps?"
Paul had a dim recollection of having half-watched some kind of nature documentary. The other details were correct, too. His earlier worry was growing into something far larger and more frightening. Had someone hacked into the house system? Could it be some elaborate precursor to a kidnapping attempt? "This . . . this friend of yours . . . Did he tell you his name? Did he tell you what . . . what he wanted?"
"He has told me no name. I am not sure he remembers his name, if he had one." Her face grew solemn. "He is so lonely, Paul. So lonely!"
He was dimly aware that she was using his first name now, that some crucial barrier had been breached between them, but at this moment it seemed the smallest of his worries. "I don't like it, Ava." Another thought occurred to him. "You talk to your father? In the mirror?"
She nodded slowly, her eyes now focused on the slow-swaying branches high above. "He is such a busy man. He always says he wishes he could come to see me, it is only that there are so many demands on his time." She tried to smile. "But he speaks to me often. I'm sure that if he knew how his employees treat me, he really would be quite angry."
Paul sat back, trying to make sense of it all. He himself had only once had a face-to-face interview with Jongleur—or face-to-screen, to be more accurate—and had felt fairly sure that the dapper, sixtyish man who had quizzed him sharply about his daughter's habits and behavior was not a true image: no anti-aging technology in the world could make more than a century and a half look like that. Still, it was one thing for the man to keep up a facade for employees—but his own daughter?
"Has he ever come to see you? Ever? In person?" She shook her head, still staring at the light bleeding through the leaves.
This is too bizarre. Ghosts. A father who only appears in a mirror. What in the bloody hell am I doing in a madhouse like this?
"We have to get back," he said aloud. "I don't care if anyone can see us or not—it's too long for us to be missing, out of the house."
"Whatever they use to spy on us," she said blithely, "they will only see us having a lesson here outside, you reading and me making notes." She grinned. "My friend promised me."
"Even so." He stood up. "This is all a bit too strange for me, Ava."
"But I want to talk to you," she said, her wide-eyed face suddenly anxious again. "Truly talk. Don't leave, Paul! I . . . I am lonely, too."
Her hand, he suddenly realized, was gripping his. Helplessly, he allowed himself to be tugged back into a sitting position once more. "Talk about what, Ava? I know you're lonely—I know this is a terrible life for you, in some ways. But there's nothing I can do. I'm just an employee myself, and your father is a very powerful man." But was it true, he wondered? Were there not laws of some kind? Even a rich man's child had rights—was there not some parental responsibility to allow one's offspring to live in the century into which she had been born? It was hard to think: the noise of the stream was so insistent, the light beneath the trees so oddly diffuse, as though he labored under some kind of supernatural glamour.
What should I do? Quit and file, a lawsuit? Take it to UN Human Rights? Wasn't Finney pretty much warning me about that when he hired me? A sudden thought, like a splash of icy water—What really happened to the last tutor? They were displeased with her, they said. Very displeased.
The grip of Avialle Jongleur's pale fingers had not diminished. When his eyes met hers, he saw for the first time the true desperation, almost madness, under the girlish flightiness.
"I need you, Paul. I have no one—no one real."
"Ava, I. . . ."
"I love you, Paul. I have loved you since you first came to my house. Now we are truly alone and I can tell you. Can't you love me, too?"
"Jesus." He pulled away, shocked and almost ill with sadness. She was crying, but her face held both misery and something harder and sharper, something as fierce as anger. "Ava, don't be silly. I can't . . . we can't. You're my pupil. You're still a child!"
He turned to go. Even in his confusion he found himself stepping carefully over the ring of white, fleshy mushrooms.
"A child!" she said. "A child could not hurt for you the way I do—ache for you."
Paul hesitated, compassion battling with quiet terror. "You don't know what you're saying, Ava. You've met almost no one. You've had nothing to read but old books. It's understandable . . . but it just can't be."
"Don't go." Her voice rose to a raw pitch. "You must stay here!"
Feeling like nothing less than a traitor, he turned and walked away.
"I am not a child!" she shouted from inside the magic circle. "How can I be a child, when I have already had a child of my own. . . ?"
The long skein of memory abruptly tore and was gone. Ravaged, feeling a regret so fierce it was almost physical pain, Paul fell from the recovered past into the darkly fractured now.
The first thing he realized as he sat up, heart pounding, was that he could still hear rushing water, even though the echo of Ava's last bizarre pronouncement was completely gone. The second realization, which followed a split-instant later, was that he was sitting on the ground at the foot of an immense, impossibly huge tree.
"Oh, God!" he groaned, and for a moment hid his face in his hands, fighting the urge to weep. When he pulled his hands away the tree was still there. "Oh, God, not again!" The rough cylinder that rose beside him was as wide as an office tower, the gray bark stretching up what must have been hundreds of meters in the air before the first branches spread out from the central column. But there was something odd about the spectacle that only the massive disorien
tation of waking from the memory-dream had prevented him realizing immediately.
There was not one gigantic tree as in his first battlefield hallucination, a single magical pillar stretching up to the clouds: there were hundreds, all around him.
Blinking, he stood up, slipping a little on the loose ground.
It's real, he thought. It's all real—or at least it's no dream this time. He turned slowly, taking in the details he had not been able to absorb upon opening his eyes. It was not just the trees that were titanic. From where he stood, perched on a raised mountain of leaf fragments and loose soil, he could see that everything around him was immense—even the blades of grass were ten meters high, bellying in the breeze like narrow green sails. Farther away, through a stand of swaying flowers each as large as the rose window of a cathedral, lay an expanse of green water, the source of the pervasive rushing noise—water wide as an ocean, but rippling around huge sticks and house-size stones in a way that told him it was actually a river.
I've shrunk. What in the bloody hell is going on? He struggled for a moment, trying to regain some of the perspective lost by the surge of returning memory. Before what happened that day in the fairy ring came back to me, where was I?
On the mountaintop. With Renie and Orlando and all the rest. And with God, or the Other, or whatever that was. Then the angel came—the other Ava came—and . . . and what? He shook his head. Who's doing these things to me? What did I do to deserve this?
He looked around for his companions, wondering if any of them had wound up in this place with him, but other than the mighty river, nothing stirred unless the wind moved it. He was alone among the oversized stones and trees.
This must be the bugworld place Renie and the others told me about. His attention was suddenly drawn to a round rock only a few paces away, a near-spherical pebble about his own size, half-buried in the mulchy slope. He had glanced at it briefly in his first inspection . . . but now it was uncurling.
Startled, Paul scrambled a few steps up the slippery hill, back toward the trunk of the gigantic tree, but when he recognized the unfolding shape, a gray-brown shell in close-fitting segments, he felt a little better.
It's just a wood louse. A pillbug, as some called them—harmless, inoffensive. Though relieved, he was still uncomfortable seeing something usually found huddled in a pea-size ball under a plant pot now swollen to his own dimensions. A moment later, as the unfolded wood louse rolled over onto its belly and its dozens of legs stretched out to steady it on the uneven ground, he saw that the limbs were all different lengths, and that many of them ended in awkward hands with stumpy, disturbingly manlike fingers.
A chill ran through him as the creature reared up. Worse than the fingered hands was the front of the thing's head, a dim parody of a human face, as though parts not meant to serve such purposes had been crushed together into a mask—a brow-ridge above a dark, eyeless flatness on either side of the hint of a nose, a raggedly gaping mouth framed by tiny, atrophied mandibles.
Paul stumbled back as the thing lurched toward him, its strange arms reaching out like a crippled beggar's. So strongly did its pathetic, misformed face and halting gait speak of supplication that when it moaned "Fooood!" at him in a voice clearly not designed for human speech, he began to raise his hands in the same show of helplessness he had guiltily displayed to the itinerants of Upper Street back in London. Then a half dozen more of the creatures came rustling and squirming up out of the mulch, pushing their way to the surface to join the first in its pursuit, all crying, "Food! Foooood!" and Paul Jonas realized that the first mutation had not been begging, but ringing the family dinner bell.
First:
A VOYAGE IN THE HEART
"Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe-
Sailed on a river of crystal light
Into a sea of dew."
-Eugene Field, 1850-1895
CHAPTER 1
Strange Bedfellows
* * *
NETFEED/NEWS: Little League Hostages Freed-Angry Father Killed
(visual: body of Wilkes beside camper van)
VO: Gerald Ray Wilkes, like many Little League parents, thought his son's team was victimized by a bad call. Unlike most of them, though, Wilkes decided to take drastic action. After beating the unpaid umpire unconscious, he forced the opposing team of eleven- and twelve-year-olds into his van at gunpoint, then led authorities on a two-state chase. He was eventually stopped by a roadblock outside Tompkinsville, Kentucky, where he was shot when he refused to surrender. . . .
* * *
Renie dodged Sam's first blow and ducked the second almost as easily, but the third bounced hard off the side of her head. Renie cursed and leaned away. Sam was crying and swinging blindly, but Renie didn't want to take any chances—if the sim body was a fair representation of her real self, Sam Fredericks was a strong, athletic girl. Renie grabbed her around the waist and threw her to the strangely soapy ground, then struggled to secure the girl's arms in a clinch. She failed, and was slapped on the side of the head again. Renie was having trouble keeping her own anger in check.
"Damn it, Sam, stop! That's enough!"
She finally managed to grab one of the girl's arms and used the leverage to shove Sam's head down against the ground, then climbed atop her and pulled her other arm up behind her back. For a moment the girl bucked, trying to throw her off, then her limbs went slack and her weeping took on a deeper, more heartbroken sound.
Renie kept her weight on Sam for almost a minute, until she felt the girl's convulsive sobbing begin to gentle. Hoping the worst was over, she took the risk of letting go one of the girl's arms so she could rub the spot where Sam had hit her. Her jaw clicked as she worked it. "Jesus Mercy, girl, I think you broke my face."
Sam twisted her head back to look at Renie, eyes wide. "Oh my God, I'm so sorry!" She burst into tears again.
Renie stood up. The skimpy strips of cloth she wore had nearly been pulled off her body in the struggle, as had Sam's, and both of them were streaked with pseudo-dirt. Some people would pay a lot to see this kind of thing, Renie thought sourly. Back at Mister J's, they'd put a lot of good coding into this effect—half-naked women wrestling in the dirt. "Get up, girl," she said aloud. "We're supposed to be looking for rocks, remember?"
Sam rolled over and stared up at the odd gray sky, face wet, eyes desolate. "I won't do it, Renie! I can't do it—even if you break both my arms. He's a murderer. He killed Orlando!"
Renie silently counted to ten before speaking. "Look, Sam, I let you scream at me—I even let you hit me and I didn't smack you back, no matter how much I wanted to. Do you think this feels good?" She touched her tender jaw. "It's been difficult for all of us. But we're going with that nasty old man because we have to—and I'm not going to leave you here. End of discussion. Now, are you going to make me tie you up and carry you all the way down this damned mountain, tired as I am?" Suddenly realizing that she was indeed exhausted, she slumped down next to the girl. "Are you really going to do that to me?"
Sam looked at her solemnly, struggling for self-control. Her breath hitched; she waited until she could speak. "I'm sorry, Renie. But how can we go anywhere with . . . with. . . ?"
"I know. I hate the bastard—I'd like to throw him off the mountain myself. But we're going to have to live with Felix Jongleur until we get some answers to what's going on. What's that old saying about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer?" Renie squeezed the girl's arm. "This is a war, Sam. Not just a single battle. Putting up with that terrible man . . . well, it's like being a spy behind foreign lines or something. We have to do it because we have a bigger purpose."
Sam looked down, unable to hold Renie's gaze. "Chizz," she said after long moments, but she sounded like death. "I'll try. But I'm not going to talk to him."
"Fine." Renie clambered to her feet. "Come on. I didn't just bring you out here to talk to you alone. We still have to. . . ." She broke off as a shape mov
ed slowly around one of the broken spikes of stone which were the primary features of the barren landscape. The handsome young man who stood there said nothing, but only stared back, empty-eyed as a goldfish in a bowl.
"What the hell do you want?" Renie asked him.
The dark-haired man did not answer for a moment. "I . . . am Ricardo Klement," he said at last.
"We know." Just because he was brain-damaged didn't mean he had earned any of Renie's sympathy. Before the Ceremony went awry, he had been another one of the Grail murderers, just like Jongleur. "Go away. Leave us alone." Klement blinked slowly. "It is good . . . to be alive." After another pause he turned and disappeared among the rocks.
"This is so utterly horrible," Sam said weakly. "I . . . I don't want to be here anymore, Renie."
"Neither do I." Renie patted her shoulder. "That's why we have to keep going, find our way home. No matter how much we want to give up." She grabbed Sam's arm and squeezed again, trying to make her hear, force her to understand. "No matter how much. Now come on, girl, get on your feet—let's go find some more rocks."
!Xabbu was using the stones they had already gathered to construct a wall around Orlando's naked sim, something that looked more like a lidless coffin than a cairn. The pseudo-stones, like the rest of the environment on the black mountain, were slowly changing: with every hour that passed they looked less like the thing they were supposed to be, more like a sort of cursory 3D sketch. Orlando's Achilles sim, though, had retained its almost supernatural realism: lying in the improvised tomb, he did indeed look like a fallen demigod.