Mountain of Black Glass

  For a moment, Orlando thought he was faced again with one of the monstrous gryphons of the Middle Country, but this creature was much bigger, and though it had the same leonine body, its head carried heavy-boned human features. It seated itself on its hindquarters, completely blocking the doorway, and lifted a paw the size of a truck tire. "Bes," the voice rumbled, making Orlando's bones jiggle. "You bring strangers."

  The little god walked forward until he stood just beneath the vast foreleg like a chubby nail waiting to be hammered. "Yes, Dua. How goes the siege?"

  The sphinx leaned forward to examine Orlando, Fredericks, and Bonnie Mae in turn. Although its size and deep, musky smell were terrifying, it was curiously beautiful, too: the vast features were those of a living person, but only barely—it had a strange, stony look, as though it had already become part statue. "The siege?" it growled. "Well enough, for an exercise in foolishness. But I am not here to promote wars in heaven—or to discourage them either. I am here to protect Ra's temple. And you, little Bes? Why are you here?"

  The dwarf bowed. "To bring these guests together with friends of theirs. To see what I can see. You know, this and that."

  The sphinx shook its massive head. "Of course. I should have known. I will let you pass, and the strangers, too, but they are none of them what they appear. I will hold you responsible for what they do here, little god." Dua's head swung forward like the jaws of a steam shovel, until it hung only inches from Fredericks' own pale, bug-eyed features. "Do not forget, care of this temple belongs to me and my brother Saf. We will not see it harmed either from the outside or the inside."

  Dua stepped out of the way to let them pass.

  "You have just met Tomorrow," said Bes cheerfully. "His brother Yesterday is just as friendly to visitors."

  "I bet it's not worrying about defiling the temple that's keeping those bad guys outside," Fredericks said in a shaky whisper when they had put a few bends of the corridor behind them. "It's not wanting to get turned into pastrami by that bruiser."

  "Don't underestimate Tefy and Mewat either, boys," said Bonnie Mae. "They got more than strength going for them, and even the sphinxes won't get into a tussle with them if they can help it." She shook her head. "But Dua and Saf won't let the temple be taken without a fight either. It's not going to be pretty when it comes."

  "And this is what you led us into?" Anger brought back a little of Orlando's strength. "Thanks a lot!"

  "You'll be gone before it happens," she said wearily. "It'll be the rest of us staying behind to clean up."

  Feeling a little ashamed, Orlando fell silent. Moments later, they stepped through a brightly painted archway into the first strong light they had seen since entering the tunnels hours before.

  The centerpiece of the Temple of Ra was a single beam of sunshine that knifed down from the ceiling scores of meters above, slicing through the smoky, dust-laden temple air like a searchlight through fog. Although the effect was starkly arresting, the rest of the titanic room was not in complete darkness—lamps burned in niches all along the walls, helping to illuminate the painted floor-to-ceiling scenes of Ra's heroic flight through the daytime sky on his solar barque, and his even more heroic journey through the underworld during the dark hours of night, where he battled the serpent Apep before his eventual dawn victory.

  But, of course, this was not ancient Egypt—it was the Otherland network's version of ancient Egypt. There were many things stranger and more fascinating than even such an impressive building, and Orlando had already realized that the sphinx Dua was more representative than he was exceptional. Bonita Mae Simpkins had said earlier that at night the streets of Abydos were full of monsters. Orlando decided that if she thought the people in here were normal, she had probably been living in Abydos a bit too long.

  There were ordinary Egyptians, of course, everything from children carried in their parents' arms to soldiers who seemed to have deserted from Osiris' army (many of whom had about them the faintly haunted air of people who still were not certain they'd backed the right horse.) These plain folk had spread bedrolls all around the edges of the temple's gigantic main chamber, turning the perimeter of the room into something like a campground, or one of the shantytowns Orlando was always seeing on the news. But this was a rebellion of gods as well as mortals, and those gods were strange and wonderful in their multiform designs—women with antlers growing from their curly black hair, or with the narrow heads of serpents or birds in place of normal human features. Some of the gods and goddesses were distinguishable as such only by their size or a certain golden glow to their skins, but others had gleaming thunderbolts hovering above their heads or wore curling ram's horns. Some had even taken on the full form of animals, like one large and particularly impressive cow, perhaps eight feel tall as she stood on her hind legs, with wide brown eyes of great sensitivity and understanding. Or at least that was what Orlando felt very strongly about her, even though she was over two dozen meters away and not even looking in his direction, which led him to suspect that inspiring empathy and trust might be part of her goddess-skills.

  Their former traveling companion, the wolf-headed god Upaut, sat above it all on a high-backed chair on a platform near the center of the great chamber. The wolf's face was solemn, his long muzzle resting on his hand as he listened to three young women crouching by his feet who were singing him quiet hymns. Several other gods appeared to be trying to get his attention for reasons of their own, perhaps discussions of siege strategy, but with no visible luck. Orlando's sword, which the wolf-god had hijacked, was nowhere to be seen.

  "Can you find your own way now, little mother?" Bes asked Bonnie Mae, jerking Orlando back to their present reality once more. "Or is there someone you'd like me to sniff out?"

  "No. I've seen the others," she said. "Thank you."

  "You are welcome, but you're not rid of me yet." The dwarf did a funny little step, spun, and started away. "I'm in no hurry to go home," he called over his shoulder. "Besides, there are enough people here that someone will probably be calling on me to bless a marital bed or a birth before too long. I'll come find you before I leave."

  Mrs. Simpkins led them across the tiled floor—broadly skirting Upaut's chair, Orlando noticed with some relief: he wasn't quite ready to deal with the volatile god just yet. She led them unerringly through the squatter camp along one wall of the temple, as though it were a regular part of her morning commute, directing them at last to a group of people in the shadows near the corner of the room, a knot of mortals huddled beside the cyclopean blocks of the temple wall. The Wicked Tribe, revived now by the sights and sounds of the temple, flew ahead and circled lazily in the air above the little camp.

  Bonnie Mae took Orlando and Fredericks each by an arm. "These are friends," she said. Bonnie Mae's other comrades, four in all, examined the two newcomers with weary interest. "I won't tell you their names just now," she continued, "because there are too many ears here, but I hope y'all will believe me."

  No one seemed inclined not to, or perhaps they simply did not have the strength to question. A grim anticipation hung in the air. as though they were all prisoners waiting to become martyrs—which, Orlando reflected nervously, they just might be.

  One of Mrs. Simpkins' friends, who wore the near-naked sim of a girl child, plucked at Bonnie Mae's sleeve. "Some of the godlings think the Twins won't wait any longer," she announced in a voice much older than her appearance. "The word is they'll wait until nightfall, then attack."

  "This is Kimi," Bonnie Mae told Orlando. "She's from Japan, and I'm still not quite sure what her religion is—some cult, wasn't it, dear? As far as the Twins . . . well, if that's what they're going to do, then that's what they're going to do. But it doesn't give us long to get these two out." She sighed and turned back to Orlando and Fredericks. "I should introduce you to the others." She pointed to the two sitting beside Kimi, both wearing male Egyptian sims, one old, one young and smiling cheerily. "That's Mr. Pingalap there, and that's Vasily."
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  "So all these people are in the Circle?" Orlando had a horrible feeling that, siege and political intrigue aside, this was going to be like some weird religious camp.

  Mrs. Simpkins nodded. "Yes. Mr. Pingalap is a Moslem, like Mr. Jehani was. Vasily is from Russia, and he . . . he has a very interesting background."

  "She means I was a criminal," the youth said, smiling even more brightly. "Until I realized that the Final Days were upon us—that the Christos would be coming back. I did not want to face His terrible wrath. It would be horrible to burn forever."

  Fredericks smiled weakly and moved back a step. Orlando stayed put, but made a mental note to keep distant from the Russian man—Vasily had the same feverish light in his eye as Upaut, and Orlando had learned the hard way what that meant.

  "Now, I'm afraid I don't know this last gentleman's name," Bonnie Mae went on, drawing Orlando's attention to the man at the far edge of the little camp. The stranger looked up from a piece of tile of some sort, which he had covered with black marks with the stick of charcoal he held like a pencil. His sim was older than Vasily's but younger than Mr. Pingalap's, slender and anonymous.

  "Nandi, Mrs. Simpkins," he said. "Nandi Paradivash. I have just arrived from one of the other simulations and your comrades have been kind enough to bring me up to date." He nodded kindly but briskly at Orlando and Fredericks. "Pleased to make your acquaintance. You will forgive me, but I am trying to make some calculations about the gateways."

  Something drifted down into Orlando's hair, tugging at him like cobwebs: a few members of the Wicked Tribe were looking for a place to roost. Several more dropped and clung to Fredericks' shoulders. "So now what do we do?" asked Orlando.

  Mrs. Simpkins settled herself beside the others. "At the moment, I just want to find out the news from my friends—we all haven't seen each other since this siege started. Then we'll try to figure out what y'all should do."

  "Chizz." Orlando put his back against the wall and slid to the floor, extending his long Thargor-legs. A part of him bridled slightly at the idea that all these grown-ups were going to decide between them what he should do, but at the moment he did not have the strength to be too offended. He plucked a yellow monkey that was crawling ticklingly along his neck and held it up so he could see its tiny face.

  "Which one are you?"

  "Huko. You got hairs all up in your nose, bra."

  "Thanks for the report. Can you get Zunni for me? Or what's that other one's name—Kaspar?"

  "Zunni right there." Little Huko pointed toward a spot on Orlando's own head that he couldn't see, somewhere just north of his left ear. Orlando gently moved his finger to the spot and called for her. When he felt her perch on the end of his finger, he brought her forward.

  "Zunni, I need to ask you some questions."

  Her eyes went wide. "Time to have big mister fun, 'Landogarner?"

  "Not quite yet. I want you to tell me what happened to you after . . . after the last time we were all together in my 'cot. Back in the real world—in RL? You were going to take us to someone named 'Dog,' remember?"

  "Dog! Dog!" Huko, who was hovering maddeningly close to Orlando's ear, let out a little yelp of mourning. "Dog gone!"

  "Doggie all dead, now," said Zunni. She sounded genuinely sad, the first time he had heard anything like it from any of the Wicked Tribe. "Big Bad Nothing got into him and made him scared so he went dead."

  Orlando shook his head; a couple of Tribe monkeys fell off, grabbing handholds in his hair at the last moment and swinging back and forth before his gaze. "What does that mean? What exactly is the Big Bad Nothing?"

  The children's communication skills still left something to be desired. It took the better part of an hour to piece together the Wicked Tribe's story. Fredericks came to sit cross-legged beside Orlando, which halved the amount of unwanted monkey-attention that Orlando had to endure and made questioning them easier.

  The flightiness of the Tribe, metaphoric and actual, was not the only problem. They spoke a language of their own, and despite having spent most of his own young life online, Orlando found himself unable to make sense of half the things they said. These little ones, almost every one the product of a TreeHouse family—a near-certain guarantee of eccentricity to begin with—had been moving through the interstices of the world telecommunication grid since before they could even remember. They saw the world of virtuality quite differently than Orlando did. The Tribe did not worry much about what the virtual environment was supposed to represent, since they had developed a casually dismissive response to imitation reality before they had been old enough to talk. Instead, they were much more involved with what it was. Even the Otherland network, no matter how amazingly realistic it might seem to adults, was to them just a more complex than usual assembly of markers and props and subroutines—or, as the Wicked Tribe described these workings, according to their shared experiences and disinterest in real-world labels, things that were like (other things) which were themselves like (other things), unless they were more like (those other things from that time before.)

  Orlando felt like he was trying to discuss philosophy in a foreign language when he had barely mastered, "Do you have a rest-room?"

  Still, with work he found himself getting at least a small sense of their experiences in the network, although he was certain he was missing important details that he could not recognize amidst the babble that seemed almost the stream-of-consciousness of some kind of group mind. The Tribe had gone through many of the same things he and Fredericks had, at least at first—the feeling of being pulled into a void, and of being examined, even stalked, by some large and sinister intelligence, the entity they called the Big Bad Nothing. After that, instead of waking up in a simulation as Orlando and Fredericks had found themselves in Temilún, the Tribe children had experienced a long interval of sleepy darkness. Something had tried to communicate with them, apparently in some way they either could not entirely understand or could not explain to Orlando, but they retained images of oceans to be crossed and others like themselves who were waiting for them. After a while, a more comprehensible entity had come to them—the one they called the Lady.

  The goddess Ma'at had spoken to them soothingly, like a mother would, and seemed to have promised she would do her best to help them, that they should not be frightened, but she could tell them nothing about where they were or what was happening.

  But by this point some of the younger Tribe members had been very frightened indeed. Things got worse when one of the littlest, a girl called Shameena, had begun to shriek in terrible pain. The screaming had stopped after a short time, but the little monkey had gone still and silent and she never moved again. Orlando guessed she had been pulled offline by concerned parents. Remembering Fredericks' experience, and thinking of that horror being visited on a very young child, Orlando was coldly furious.

  There was not much more to the Tribe's story. They had waited, soothed by occasional visits from the Lady, drowsing like caged animals, until Orlando and Fredericks had broken the urn and set them free. How or why they had come to be inside it was impossible to discover.

  "But how did you take us past the temple?" Orlando asked.

  "That was major, major bad," said Fredericks, shuddering. "Never anything like that again. Never. I'd rather someone pulled my plug out than ever do that again."

  Zunni made a face, clearly irritated by these older comrades' inability to understand even the simplest things. "Didn't go past, went through. Too strong to go away. Have to go at it, then through before things close again. But you went slow, slow, slow. Why you do that?"

  "I don't know," Orlando admitted. "Something happened while I was . . . in there, I guess, but I'm not sure what it was." He turned to Fredericks. "It was like children were talking to me. No, like they were inside of me. Millions of 'em."

  Fredericks frowned. "Scanny. Do you think it's the kids like Renie's brother—the ones that are in coma. . . ?"

  "Can you boys come over
and talk to us?" Bonnie Mae called. "Mr. Paradivash has some questions he'd like to ask you."

  Orlando sighed. He'd been hoping to get a little rest—every muscle was throbbing and his head felt as heavy as the stone blocks of the temple—but he and Fredericks crawled over to join the others.

  "Mrs. Simpkins has told me your story, or what she knows of it," the stranger said. "But I have some queries of my own, if you will indulge me."

  Orlando couldn't help smiling at his overly precise way of talking, but instead of being asked about their experiences with the goddess Ma'at, or their first meeting with Sellars, the man called Nandi seemed primarily interested in how they'd entered and exited each simworld they visited. Some of it was vague in Orlando's memory—it was disturbing to realize how often he'd been sick—but Fredericks helped him over the rough places.

  "What are you so interested in this stuff for?" Orlando asked at last. "Where are you from?"

  "I have been in many parts of the network," Paradivash said without a trace of bravado. "Most recently I escaped from one of Felix Jongleur's simulations, although more by luck than my own skill, it must be said." He shrugged. "I was a prisoner in Xanadu, but a sort of earthquake started an uprising among the more superstitious of Kublai Khan's guards, and since the Khan himself was not present, things got rather out of hand." He shrugged. "But this is not important. What matters is that we may have been wrong about two, perhaps even three crucial things, and we in the Circle cannot afford any more mistakes."

  The young man named Vasily stirred. "You should put your trust in God, friend. He is watching us. He is guiding us. He will make sure that His enemies are brought low."

  Nandi Paradivash smiled wearily. "That may well be, sir, but He has never yet objected to His faithful servants trying to help themselves, and it is equally certain that some who have waited for God to save them have found themselves less central to His plan than they thought they were."