"Just tell me. . . ." the woman began, but didn't finish. Air huffed out of her in a popping wheeze and she staggered forward, four or five steps across the loft floor, then fell down on her face. A huge knife stuck out of her back as though it had simply appeared there, a few inches of blade showing between the handle and the redness oozing out around the place where it had slashed through the overcoat. Dulcie could only stare at the woman, talking one moment, silent and motionless now. The blackness was coming back, closing in swift as wind-driven fog.
"Ah, sweetness, what have you been doing while Daddy was away?"
Dread stepped out of the shadow behind the loft door. He was wearing his white bathrobe, loosely tied. He walked past her, cat-silent on bare feet, and stood over the policewoman. Her eyes, Dulcie saw, were still open. A bubble of red spit was trembling at the corner of her mouth. Dread crouched down until he was only centimeters from the woman's face.
"I wish I had time to do you properly," he told her. "You must have worked hard to wind up at my door. But things are happening fast and I can't stop for games." He stood up, grinning, full of manic energy that lit him up like a Christmas tree. "And as for you, Dulcie, my pet, what have you been up to?" His gaze slid to her pad, still sitting on the chair, the screen flickering with violent motion, and his eyes opened just a little more—they were already as wide as someone on the downhill rush of a roller coaster. "Well, you have been a nosy little bitch, haven't you?"
Without realizing it she had been backing toward the small area of counter where she had set up the coffee makings. "I didn't . . . I don't . . . why. . . ?"
"Why? Well, that's the question, isn't it, sweetness? Why? Because I like to. Because I can."
She paused, her spine against the drawer, her fingers feeling for its handle. She had remembered what was in it. Something had finally jolted her back to life, a splash on her thoughts cold as ice water, and for the first time in an hour she could think. Oh, Jesus, keep him talking, she told herself. He's a monster, but he likes to talk.
"But why? You . . . you don't have to do it."
"Because I can get sex the legitimate way?" The smile lingered. He was high, high on something, high as the sky. "That's not what it's about. And sex—it's nothing. Not in comparison."
She was easing the drawer open, silently, slowly, afraid that her hammering pulse and trembling fingers would make her slip and pull it out too far, send it clattering to the floor. "What . . . what are you going to do to me?"
"Get rid of you. You know that I have to, love. But you've done good work for me so I'm going to make it quick. Terminations should be quick and humane, right? Isn't that what the business manuals all say? Besides, I'm very busy right now—very, very busy." He smiled; if she had not known now what was beneath the mask she would have sworn it was a true and kind thing. "And I can do without you now. I've got things under control. You should see what's going on with the network and your old friends! I hated to leave, even for a minute—things are very exciting there right now—but I believe in keeping an active relationship with my employees."
The drawer was open. She let out a little terrified sigh to mask the sound of her hand searching. There was no need to fake the terror, no need at all. He was watching her with mesmerizing intensity, his pupils big and black as the barrel of a. . . .
Gun. Where's the gun?
She swung around as quickly as she could, risking all, and pulled the drawer all the way out. It was empty.
"Looking for this?" he asked.
She turned back in time to see him pull it from the pocket of his bathrobe. The curling-iron barrel came up and pointed right between her eyes.
"I'm not an idiot, sweetness." Dread shook his head in mock-disappointment. "Oh, and you know what I said about quick. . . ?"
He let the barrel swing down from her face to her middle. Dulcie felt herself punched in the belly and flung backward even as she heard the loud, explosive crack. then she was on her side, trying to understand how so many things could stop working all at the same time. She wanted to make noise, to scream for help, but couldn't: something was crushing the air out of her, a huge fist squeezing her chest. Her hands had flown instinctively to her stomach. She looked down and saw blood welling between her fingers. When she lifted them away, it began to drip down to the floor where it formed a spreading pool. "I changed my mind," he said.
CHAPTER 41
Playing the Knight
* * *
NETFEED/NEWS: "Autostalking" Not Illegal, Court Rules
(visual: defendant Duncan's "Smiling Avenger" avatar)
VO: A UN regional court has ruled that there is nothing inherently illegal in a piece of gear that follows a user into virtual simulations and does harm to that user's simuloid unless it violates the laws pertaining to that node. Amanda Hoek, a seventeen-year-old South African schoolgirl, has been pursued online by a piece of code created by an ex-boyfriend and, in the words of her lawyer, "systematically stalked and assaulted numerous times."
(visual: Jens Verwoerd, Hoek's attorney)
VERWOERD: "This poor girl cannot use the net-vital to her schoolwork and her social life-without her online character being followed into every node by the defendant's avatar, a piece of code designed specifically to harass her. She has been insulted, attacked, and sexually assaulted numerous times, both verbally and through the tactors of the VR nodes, and yet this court seems to think this is nothing more than the horseplay of adolescents on the net. . . ."
* * *
Even as she swam and died in the glittering darkness Renie could not rid herself of the taste of fear—but it was someone else's fear.
Not someone, she thought, something. How can a thing, a machine made of code, be so frightened. . . !
The operating system had touched her and then pushed her away, had fled back into the recesses of itself, leaving her to drown in a sea of stars. It was a slow drowning—an ebbing away of consciousness, a fragmenting of the personality. She had felt something like it before when the system had been angry; then it had filled her with terror. Now she drifted, pulsing like a fading echo through the lonely lights, and knew that the operating system lived in a state of fear far worse than anything she could understand—a terror so complete and so alien that even its distant resonances could kill.
But does it make any difference? she wondered. Dying like this instead of dying from fright? She could feel herself letting go, coming apart, but it was all so gradual, so . . . unimportant. Freezing to death, they said, was a kind death. Body and mind disassociated, what had been painful chill came to seem like warmth, and at last sleep came like a friend. This must be a little like that.
But I don't want to go, she thought distantly, and even convinced herself a little. Even if it doesn't hurt. I don't want to cut the string.
Never to see Stephen again, or Martine and the others, Fredericks . . . and !Xabbu. . . . That was from his poem, wasn't it? Something about death—or was it just about string. . . ?
"There were people, some people
Who broke the string for me
And so
This place is now a sad place for me,
Because the string is broken."
She could almost hear him saying it, his soft voice, the slightly alien inflections hurrying the words at surprising moments, then slowing down to voice a single syllable like music. !Xabbu.
"The string broke for me,
And so
This place does not feel to me
As it used to feel,
Because the string is broken."
What had the unbroken string been? A life? A dream? The cord that held together the universe?
All of those things?
Now she could hear it as though he stood beside her, as he had stood through so many moments of anguish, a stalwart flame in all darknesses.
"This place feels as if it stood open before me
Empty
Because the string has broken
And
so
This place is an unhappy place
Because the string is broken."
This place is an unhappy place, she repeated to herself. Because the string is broken. Because I am alone.
This place feels as if it stood open before me, she told the darkness as she drifted and disintegrated, mere flotsam left behind in the flight of a terrified child-thing.
Empty, something whispered to her across the flashing emptiness. Because the string has broken.
For a moment she floated, bemused, trying to remember what it was that had caught her fragmenting attention. A voice. A voice?
The operating system, she thought. It's come back for me. Whatever "back" means. Whatever "me," means. . . . It was growing harder and harder to think.
Because the string has broken.
The chant wafted to her through the void, but it was not a sound, it was both more and less. It was a spattering of tight like a distant explosion in vacuum space, a tiny pulse of heat at the bottom of a frozen, sluggish ocean. It was a whisper from a dream heard on the porch of wakefulness, an idea, a scent, a muffled heartbeat. It was. . . .
!Xabbu?
From the other side of the universe, still, small: Renie. . . ?
Impossible. Impossible! !Xabbu! Jesus Mercy, is that you?
And suddenly diminishment was not a blessing but a horror. Suddenly she wanted back all she had lost even though she knew it must be too late. She was almost gone, reduced to essences and drawn apart into the cloudy impermanence of the sea of stars.
No, she thought. He's out there, somehow. He's out there! She fought, but she scarcely felt real—there was no leverage, nothing to push against. !Xabbu! I'm drowning!
Renie. He was faint, only a voice and barely that. Reach for me.
Where are you?
Beside you. Always beside you.
And she opened herself and felt him there just as he had said, a presence as vague and dispersed as her own but right beside her, as if they were two galaxies rolling down the long night-tides of the universe to meet and pass through each other like ghosts.
I feel you, she said. Don't leave me.
Don't leave me, he might have echoed her, or Believe me.
She believed. She reached for him and willed the string to unbreak.
Touch, she said. I touch.
I feel.
And then they met and embraced—light-years wide but close as the ebb and flow of a single heartbeat, two matrices of naked thought drawn together in the darkness and held tight by the infinite compression of love.
She had a body again. She knew it even with her eyes shut, because she was holding him closer than she had ever held anyone.
"Where are we?" she finally asked. She could hear his heartbeat, fast and strong, hear his breath in his lungs. All else was silence, but she needed nothing else.
"It does not matter," he said. "We are together."
"Did we . . . make love?"
"It does not matter." He sighed, then laughed. "I do not know. I think . . . we were made of love."
She was afraid to open her eyes, she realized. She clutched him more tightly when she had not thought such a thing possible. "It doesn't matter," she agreed, "I thought I would never find you again. . . ."
His fingers touched her face—cool, real. It startled her so that she looked in spite of herself. It really was his face, his dear face, that looked down on her in the cool evening light. There were tears in his eyes. "I . . . I would not believe it . . . could not let myself. . . ." He lowered his forehead until it touched hers. "I was swimming so long . . . in all that light. Drowning. Calling you. Coming apart. . . ."
She was weeping. "We have bodies. We can cry. Are we . . . back? In the real world?"
"No."
Worried by his strange tone, Renie sat up, taking care to keep her arms around him, not trusting him or herself to stay solid. The landscape was alien but oddly familiar, gray in the dying light. For a moment she thought they had returned to the black mountaintop but the outline of a leafless tree, the fuzzy sprung shape of a bush, confused her.
"At first I thought we were in the place where I dived in to search for you," !Xabbu said slowly.
"Dived in. . . ? Where?"
"The Well. But I was wrong." He pointed to the sky. "Look."
She raised her head. The stars were bright. The moon was round and yellow, hanging fat above the horizon like a ripe fruit.
"It is an African moon," he said. "The moon of the Kalahari."
"But . . . but I thought you said we weren't . . . back. . . ." She leaned away from him, staring. He wore a loincloth of animal hide. A bow and a crude quiver of arrows lay on the dirt beside him. And she was also dressed in skins.
"It's your world," she said quietly. "The Bushman simulation you took me to—God that seems like a century ago! Where we danced."
"No." He shook his head again. He had wiped the tears from his cheeks and eyes. "No, Renie, it is something different—something . . . more."
He stood, extending a hand to help her up. The seedpods tied around his ankles rattled as he moved.
"But if this isn't your world. . . ?"
"There is a fire," he said, pointing to a flicker of light that stained the desert sands red and orange. "Just beyond that rise."
They walked across the dry pan, kicking up dust that hid their feet so that it seemed they walked across clouds. The moon touched the dunes, rocks, and thorn bushes with silver.
The campfire was small, made of only a few crossed sticks. Other than the fire itself there was no sign of human life in all the immensity of desert night.
Before Renie could ask again, !Xabbu pointed to a gulley that carved through the cracked earth beside the campfire, the drywash shell of some long-dead stream. "Down there," he said. "I see him. No, I feel him."
Renie could see nothing but the jittering of shadows around the campfire, but !Xabbu's voice made her look to him. His face was solemn but there was something else in it as well, a kind of exalted fire behind the eyes that in anyone else she would have feared was hysteria.
"What is it?" She took his hand, suddenly afraid.
He kept her hand in his and led her down the pan, stopping beside the fire. She could not help noticing that theirs were the only footprints crossing the dust. When they looked down into the gulley, she saw that the stream that had carved it was not entirely dead: a trickle of water ran along the bottom, so narrow that if she climbed down into the hole she could dam it with one foot. Something was moving beside this streamlet—something very, very small.
!Xabbu sat in the dust beside the shallow scrape. His rattles whispered.
"Grandfather," he said.
The mantis looked up at him, triangular head cocked, sawtoothed arms held high.
"Striped Mouse. Porcupine." The calm, still voice came from everywhere and nowhere. "You have come far to see the end."
"May we sit at your fire?"
"You may."
Renie began to understand. "!Xabbu," she whispered "That's not Grandfather Mantis. It's the Other. It's taken this from your mind, somehow. It appeared to me as Stephen—pretended to be my brother."
!Xabbu only smiled and squeezed her hand. "In this place, it is Mantis," he said. "After all, whatever you call it, we have finally met the dream who is dreaming us."
She sat down beside him, feeling limp and emotionally exhausted. All she wanted was to be with !Xabbu. And maybe he's right, she thought. Why fight it? Logic is gone. We're definitely in someone else's dream. If this was the way the Other chose to communicate—perhaps the only way it could communicate—then they might as well accept it. She had tried to force the Stephen-thing to see reality in her terms and its anger and frustration had almost killed her.
The mantis tipped its shiny head down, then up, regarding them with tiny, protuberant eyes. "The All-Devourer will be here soon," it said. "He is coming to my campfire, too."
"There are still things that can be done, Grand
father," said !Xabbu.
"Wait a minute," Renie whispered. "I thought if anyone was the All-Devourer in this story, he was. It was. The Other, I mean."
The insect appeared to have heard her. "We are at the end of things now. My fight is over. A great shadow, a hungry shadow, will swallow all I have made."
"It does not have to be that way, Grandfather," said !Xabbu. "There are those who might help you—our friends and allies. And see! Here is your Beloved Porcupine, she of the clear thought and brave heart."
Brave heart, maybe, Renie thought. Clear thought? Not bloody likely. Not in the middle of this cracked fairy tale. But aloud she said, "We want to help. We want to save not just our own lives, but the children's lives, too. All the children."
A minute twitch as the mantis shook its head. "It is too late for the first children. Even now the All-Devourer has begun to eat them."
"But you—we—can't just give up!" Renie's voice rose in spite of her best intentions. "No matter how bad it looks we still have to fight! To try!"
Mantis seemed to shrink even smaller, drawing in on itself until it was little more than a spot of shadow. "No," it whispered, and for a moment its voice was as raw and miserable as a child's. "No. Too late."
!Xabbu was squeezing her hand. Renie leaned back. However frustrating it was, she had to realize that this . . . thing, whatever had formed it, whatever shaped its thoughts and dreams, was not going to be argued into doing the right thing.
After a long silent time !Xabbu said, "Do you not think of a world beyond this? A world where the good things can be saved, can grow again?"
"His mouth is full of fire," Mantis whispered. "He runs like the wind. He is swallowing everything I have made. There is nothing beyond this." It was quiet for a moment, crouching, gently rubbing its forelegs together. "But it is good not to be alone, we think. It is good to be where the campfire still burns, at least for a little while. Good to hear voices."
Renie closed her eyes. So this was what it had all come down to—trapped in the imagination of a mad machine, waiting for the end in a world built from !Xabbu's own thoughts and memories. It was an interesting way to die. Too bad she'd never get to tell anyone.