Sea of Silver Light

  "I'm not ready to go." A calm she had not felt in hours, perhaps days, descended on her. "I didn't come here in the first place just to put in some vampire-tap or whatever your Sellers called it. I came here because the voices told me to come. I want to know why."

  "What are you talking about?" He had gone from irritated to panicky and was swiftly moving on toward something even more extreme. "What the hell are you talking about, Olga?"

  The alarms were still going, both the distant wordless pulse and the empty female voice. "I'm going up to the top," she said. "Where this terrible man lives. Uncle Jingle's house, I guess you could call it. Uncle Jingle's lair."

  "Wow." Beezle manufactured a whistle. "You really are crazy, lady."

  "Actually, it's probably true," she said, perfectly happy now to be talking to a piece of code. "I spent a. long time in a sanitarium when I was younger. And recently—well, we all know what it means when you hear voices in your head."

  "You're hearing voices in your head right now," Beezle pointed out.

  "Yes, you are right. I'm getting used to hearing them." She turned and began to walk across the impossibly wide room toward the elevator.

  "Olga, don't!" Ramsey was desperate now. "We have to get you out of there!"

  "And I am getting quite good at ignoring them, too," she added.

  It was a little easier now, but not much. He didn't feel like he was dying quite so quickly.

  For the hundredth time, thousandth time, he had no idea, Sellars repulsed an attack and still managed to hold open his connection into the Grail network. With all the experience he had gained from this horribly protracted encounter, as well as from his earlier incursions, he was still amazed by how the thing reacted.

  He floated, bodiless, in a darkness that seemed alive with malice. Now that he had survived the original blaze of resistance the secondary attacks continued to come in waves, the timing random. Sometimes he had almost a whole minute to consider and plan, then the assaults would resume, storm following storm, and his every thought was once more focused on survival.

  He had learned from his previous connections that there was more to the system's defenses than merely the technical countermeasures, however sophisticated. It could manufacture all the traces, blowbacks, and disconnection attempts that he expected from top-of-the-line gear, attacking and defending and then counterattacking so quickly that it was like fighting war in space at light speed. But there was a purely physical side, too, perhaps the same thing responsible for the Tandagore illness: during each attack he could feel the security system reaching not just into his system but into him as well, trying somehow to manipulate his autonomic responses, to slow or speed his heart rate and respiration, to reprogram his neural circuitry.

  But Sellars was not an unsuspecting child stumbling into the jaws of a hidden monster. He had been studying the system a long time and had modified his own internal structures until most of the grosser attempts to manipulate him physically could be routed down harmless pathways, their force wasted on buffers almost as a lightning rod drew away the deadly force of electricity. Even so, as long as he was trapped online, struggling with the network's defenses, he had to remain completely disconnected from his physical self so his old, worn body would not pull itself to pieces in seizure. The security system might not be able to kill him yet, but neither could he disengage from it without losing contact with Cho-Cho, and he could not let one more innocent disappear into the darkness at the heart of the system—he had too many such sins on his conscience already. And although the operating system was clearly weakening, probably failing, he could not hope for that kind of release, since its ultimate collapse would probably also doom those who remained online. Sellars and the system remained locked together, neither able to let go, failing enemies trapped in a death dance.

  The latest wave of attacks stuttered to a halt. He hung in the blackness, trying desperately to think of a way to break the impasse. If he could only understand what he was fighting. . . ! Dark and angry as the thing seemed to him (he had struggled against such anthropomorphic characterizations for a long time, until he realized that by doing so he was underestimating the subtle unpredictability of his enemy), there was far more to the operating system than that.

  The most immediate part of it, the security programming which was trying its best to kill him, was only one head of this particular Cerberus. Another head watched him and considered him while the battle raged—even seemed, in some paradoxical way he could only feel but not define or explain, to wish him no ill. He could not help wondering whether the security system responses were something over which the operating system as a whole had almost no control, just as an ordinary human could not consciously control his own immune system. This second head, he guessed, was the part of the operating system which had achieved something like true intelligence. It must also be the part that let children like Cho-Cho into the network unharmed—for how could a mere security system know whether a human user was a child or not?—and which avidly followed his volunteers through the network.

  There was a third head, too, Sellars sensed, a silent one that was turned away from him, but what it thought about—what it dreamed?—he could only guess. In some ways the third head frightened him most of all.

  A new wave of defensive blitz began with no warning, a violent all-out burst that swept him up like a hurricane and for long minutes pushed all considerations but mere survival from his mind. Again he felt it trying to reach into his very mind. The attempt failed, but Sellars knew that if the stalemate went on long enough this damnably bizarre and clever machine was going to find a way to subvert his defenses. He began to wonder just how long he had been here in this no-place, wrestling with Cerberus.

  After he had weathered the storm and had snatched a few seconds of much-needed rest, he accessed his own system long enough to discover that almost a full day had passed since he and Cho-Cho had first contacted the network. An entire day spent fighting for his life! No wonder he was exhausted.

  In the real world it was already Sunday afternoon. He was running out of time. If the system killed him, or if he killed the system, he would fail. He needed to find some other way. His only hope was that Olga Pirofsky and Catur Ramsey could place the data tap and that the Grail network information would somehow provide answers.

  No, he told himself, not just answers, but a solution to this impossible problem.

  But he could not even afford to check in on their progress until he had weathered at least one more round of attacks by the security systems. He had stolen moments in the earliest lulls to make a few emergency calls and to find and activate vital defensive gear, but he needed far more time than that to deal with the data tap.

  The next assault came quickly enough that he was glad he'd waited. It was as violent as any of the others, but even as he fought off the multipronged attempt he thought he sensed something different this time, a slight lessening of what he could only think of as the resolve behind the attack. When he had suppressed all but the most basic of the security routines, the ones that could be safely left to his own built-in defenses, he prepared to turn his attention to what was happening in the J Corporation tower. But just before he shifted to his own system and his connections to the real world he stopped and hesitated in the darkness, troubled by something he could not name.

  That hesitation saved him. The attack that followed mere instants after the defeat of the last was the most savage so far, not just a redoubled assault on his connection but a concentrated, many-fronted attempt to break down his resistance to the more subtle and more devastating physical feedback. For long moments he could actually feel the thing reaching for him down the connection, a monster just on the other side of a splintering, flimsy door, and Sellars knew real terror. The blackness of no-visual became another kind of blackness, an endless void in which he was lost, isolated, pursued.

  He held on somehow, and when the probing, searching thing touched him at last he was even able to sen
d a jolt of resistance back down the partially opened channel. He was certain that he felt the nonphysical presence flail in pain and surprise, then the entire attack was suddenly withdrawn.

  The beast had limped back to its cave.

  His heart and respiration spiraling up to near-critical levels, his mind reeling at what he'd just felt, but desperate to take advantage of whatever time he had bought himself, Sellars left his automatic systems in place to warn him of a new attack, then slid back into his own system.

  His beloved, carefully-nurtured interface, the Poetry Garden in which he had spent so much time, tending, planting, pruning, simply being, was all but gone now. It had been replaced by a mutant tangle of activity, a sprawling chaos of data root and virtual vine in which only he could have discerned even a trace of order.

  He took a moment to issue some crucial messages and set a few small works in motion, then turned his attention to the slender black sapling that had sprung up at the edge of the sea of vegetation. Three vines had crept up its dark verticality, climbing to a surprising height. He knew what two of the creepers represented, but about the third, its livid, unnatural color and texture more like plastic piping than vegetable, he was less sure. Sorensen? It seemed odd the Garden would represent him in such a way. With foreboding, Sellars made a connection.

  Like a phantom he listened in on Catur Ramsey's conversation with Olga and although he shared Ramsey's worry about her, and even debated cutting in to echo Ramsey's warning, the larger and more pressing issue of the data tap would not allow it. He did permit himself a brief moment of amusement at the identity of the third vine. Orlando Gardiner's software agent! What an idea—but a good one. Working together, somehow they had found a way to install the data tap. Sellars found himself admiring and liking Ramsey even more, and Olga, too. He wished he had more time to get to know them both. It was unfortunate that he was probably not going to be alive long enough to do so.

  He quickly turned his attention to the data tap, accessing Beezle's captured visuals to carefully examine the linked array of knowledge engines that seemed to power the Grail network. Even without knowing their exact nature and location he had suspected what the software agent had now confirmed and had arranged with the people of TreeHouse, among other resources, to make sure he had the processing power to cope with the influx of data. He checked and then rechecked his already labored calculations. He whispered the prayer which had accompanied him at takeoff on every flight. He opened the tap.

  The Garden exploded.

  It was too much information—beyond imagining. The constraints of his Garden burst and dissolved, the models incapable of keeping up with the flow. Within a heartbeat his entire system was teetering on the brink of collapse. When that happened, he knew, everything would be lost. He would be trapped in the blackness of the Tandagore coma without even an online existence, or helpless before the next defensive cycle of the operating system. Everything would fail. Everything.

  He fought, but the Garden was dying all around him, collapsing, reduced in microseconds to random, nonrepresentational bits. Before his inner eyes the intricate matrix of greenery devolved into abstract patterns of dark and light, flashing randomly, warping and seething like a nest of stars.

  Then just as it seemed nothing worse could happen the alarm signals began. The operating system had launched another attack, trying to sever his connection to the Grail network.

  No, he realized. It's reaching for me. For me. He felt the system's probe thrust past his crumbling defenses and into his mind. He was helpless before it.

  Sellers screamed in shock and pain as it touched him, but there was no sound to be heard in that empty place of endlessly streaming data, no hope and no help—only the mindless throb of a universe being born.

  Or a universe dying.

  She didn't know how she had got back to the chair or why, but she was staring at her pad again. Only minutes had passed since she had opened her employer's locked storage but they seemed to have ground past as slowly as geological aeons. A tunnel of darkness surrounded her, narrowing her sight until all she could see was the screen, the terrible screen. On it a file called Nuba 27 was now playing. Dread was doing unspeakable things to a woman in what seemed to be a hotel room, the sunlight streaming in through the windows giving everything a stark, ghastly clarity.

  Get up, Dulcie thought. Get up. But the tunnel around her hid everything except the screen. All she could see was the horrid, bright hotel light. Get up. She wasn't even sure if she was talking to the woman strapped to the plastic-draped bed or to herself.

  A dull bonging sound intruded on her even duller thoughts. She realized she had turned off the sound on the file, a tiny mercy in an eternity of horror, because she had not been able to make herself listen anymore. The musical soundtrack had been even worse than the screaming. So if the sound on the file was turned off, what was making that noise?

  A window opened up in the corner of the pad screen. In it, a figure in an overcoat stood in a doorway. For a moment she thought it was only some elaboration of the file's horrors, a second victim perhaps, her employer about to arrange some hideous duet of grunting and screeching, then she slowly came to understand that the doorway in the view-window was the loft's seen from the security camera over the door. It took another long time and more ringing from the doorbell, before she realized it was really happening. Right now.

  Close your eyes, a voice urged her. Let it all go away. Never open them again. It's a nightmare.

  But it wasn't a nightmare. She knew it wasn't, even though at this moment she knew very little else. One of her hands was clutching an empty coffee cup so hard her fingers had cramped, although she did not remember picking it up. She looked up through the tunneled swirl of darkness and saw Dread still lying on his coma bed, a million miles away.

  The light of stars, she thought disjointedly. It takes years, it seems so cold when it gets here. But if you were close, it would burn you right up. . . .

  The doorbell rang again.

  He's going to kill me, she thought. Even if I run. Wherever I go, whatever I do. . . .

  Get up, stupid! This last voice was very faint but something in its urgency cut through the fog in her head, the disassociated murk that was her only protection against pure shrieking animal terror. She clambered to her feet and almost fell down, bracing herself against the back of the chair until her legs were shaking a little less. The chair squeaked. She jerked her head in panic to look at Dread but he still lay unmoving, a god's effigy carved in dark wood. She stumbled to the stairs and went down them like a crippled woman. The doorbell sounded again but the speaker was upstairs; here on the bottom landing it was only a distant sound, like something sinking into the ocean.

  I'll lie down here, she thought, after a while I won't even hear it.

  Instead some inner compulsion made her reach out and thumb the security lock, then open the door. From up close she could see that the figure in the doorway was shorter than she was, although more heavyset. Dark curly hair, eyes narrowed in suspicion or annoyance. A woman.

  A woman. . . . she thought. If it's a woman, I have to tell her something . . . warn her. . . . But she couldn't think. She couldn't remember. The darkness was very thick.

  "Excuse me," the stranger said after a moment, her voice deep and firm. "Sorry to bother you on a Sunday. I'm looking for someone named Hunter."

  "There's . . . no. . . ." Dulcie leaned on the doorframe for support. "There's no one here by that name." A part of her was glad. She could close the door now and walk back upstairs and pull the blackness over her like a blanket. But . . . Hunter? Why did that name sound familiar? Why did anything sound familiar, for that matter?

  "Are you sure? I'm sorry, did I wake you up?" The woman was looking at her carefully, concern and something else in her expression. "Are you feeling all right?"

  It came to her then, as if a memory from another country, even another lifetime. Hunter—that was the name on all the documents for the l
oft. She had seen it on Dread's system, thought it just a random pseudonym, but now. . . . "Oh, God," she said.

  The woman stepped forward and took her arm—gently, but with a grip that suggested she could squeeze a lot harder if she wanted to. "Do you mind if we talk? My name is Skouros—I'm a police detective. I have a few questions." Her eyes flicked across the darkness behind Dulcie. "Can you step outside?"

  Dulcie was caught, paralyzed, as if possessed by some slow seizure. "I . . . I can't. . . . He. . . ."

  "Is there someone else home?"

  It was a funny question, really—where was that place, after all? Otherland, they called it. Other. Somewhere? Nowhere? That was why Dulcie laughed. But when she heard herself it was not a good laugh. "No. he's . . . gone. . . ."

  "Let's go up, then. Is that all right with you?"

  She could only nod. I'm a ghost, she thought, trying to remember what it had been like on the other side of the darkness. It doesn't matter—summoned or banished. I can't do anything about it.

  As they went up the stairs the woman in the coat took something out of one of her pockets. For a moment Dulcie thought it was a gun, but it was only a little black-and-silver pad. The woman held it up to her mouth as though to speak into it, but Dulcie had suddenly remembered the files were still open on the screen of her own pad, open and running for anyone to see. Nuba 27. Those fingers wiggling, like something lost and drowning at the bottom of the ocean. . . . Even through the freeze she felt a rush of embarrassment, as though the scenes of horror were something of her own, something shameful, and as they reached the top of the landing she took the woman's hand.

  "They're not mine," she explained. "I didn't know. I . . . he. . . ."

  And as she turned, still clutching the woman's hand, she saw that the coma bed was empty.