Mountain of Black Glass

  "Thank you, Ricardo. That's kind. So . . . everything is ready?" Unspoken was the knowledge that Klement more than anyone else was waiting desperately for this long-delayed moment. The black marketeer had bargained everything on a number of aggressive therapies, sacrificing any chance of long-term physical salvation, even of the macabre type that sustained Jongleur, to keep his multifold cancers out of his brain stem until he could undergo the Grail process.

  "Oh, yes. With Señor Jongleur's permission, I have created a beautiful setting—you will remember I discussed it at our meeting? It will be a tribute to this great day. We will have the proper surroundings to become gods!"

  "Ah, yes." Wells had clearly not been paying much attention at the meeting, and neither did he want to spend too much time talking about what were for all intents and purposes party decorations. "I'm sure it will be splendid, Ricardo. So, any word from the Old . . . from Jongleur?" Wells kept his voice light. "I have not had a chance to speak to him lately, with all the last-minute details to oversee."

  Klement shook his head. If he was hiding anything, he was doing a good job. "Only the invitation. I am certain he has many things on his mind, too. Señor Jongleur is a man with many, many responsibilities, many subtle thoughts."

  "He certainly is. Well, I will see you at the Ceremony, Ricardo. Vaya con Dios."

  "Thank you . . . Robert. It was kind of you to call." Nodding happily, Klement clicked off.

  Wells laughed. "Did you hear that, Daniel? 'It was kind of you to call.' From a jumped-up grave robber, yet. Oh, we are a genteel and respectable bunch, aren't we?"

  "If any of them knew anything, I sure didn't see it."

  "I didn't either." Wells frowned slightly. "Which doesn't really prove anything. I don't suppose we have much choice, though—I think we have to say yes to the Old Man's offer, even if we don't know exactly what it means."

  "Damn it, Bob, is this thing going to work?" Yacoubian's sim retained its customary tanned appearance, but his voice suggested a man going a little pale around the edges.

  "Relax, Daniel. We've done every test you can imagine—not to mention the Old Man's prisoner, the one who flew the coop on us. He went through the process, and he's doing fine as far as we can tell. A little too well, actually."

  "Speaking of 'X,' or whatever you call him, what happened to that agent of yours that was tracking him down? You said you were having problems with it."

  Wells shook his head. "I won't lie to you, Daniel. The whole thing has me puzzled. We're not receiving anything useful back from Nemesis at all. My boys and girls on the J-Team say the gear has 'gone native.' We're looking into it, but it really doesn't have anything to do with the Ceremony. Unlike the Grail Project, I'm afraid we rushed the Nemesis code a little bit, and now we're paying for it."

  "Unlike the Grail Project."

  "Don't say it like that. It's going to work. The Grail is something we've been working with a long time, and as I said, it's already tested solidly through thousands of trials. These are machines, Daniel—complicated, but still machines. We haven't added any new functionality to the system since Mr. X got processed and escaped. It works. It'll work for us,"

  "But now we've got the Old Man playing some kind of game. God, I hate that old bastard. I can't believe we let him keep control of so much of this process."

  "It was his ball, Daniel," Wells said mildly. "We had to let him make the rules for the game, at least some of them."

  "All the same, I'd happily kill him. What is it the kids say? I'd six him for shorts."

  "I think it's 'chorts,' actually. As in 'chortles.' " Wells smiled, a stretching of lips that did not change the expression in his quiet, yellowed eyes. "You are bloodthirsty, Daniel. You didn't wind up in the military by accident, did you?"

  "What's that supposed to mean?" Yacoubian sat down and smacked irritably at his pocket, then realized he still had an unlit cigar in his hand. He ignored the matches that Wells flicked into existence on the tabletop.

  "Nothing, really, Daniel. Let's not fight—we still have a great deal of discussion ahead of us if we're going to take Jongleur up on his suggestion."

  "What are we going to do?"

  Wells nodded. "What else is it the young people say? 'Smile sweet, pack heat?' We'll say 'Yes, thank you,' to the Old Man, but I think we'll have a few surprises of our own prepared, just in case."

  "Good." Yacoubian withdrew a large gold lighter from his pocket, sparked the minisolar flame, and lit his cigar. Outside the imaginary room, the sound of the hungry ocean rose.

  They were stacked up over the new airport for an hour and a half, turning in a broad, four-sided pattern that took them out across the Tasmanian Sea, then back over the heart of the metropolis. Except for the overabundance of planes waiting for landing strips, the skies were clear. Dulcie Anwin, too tense to read, watched the city as it rotated past every fifteen minutes like a miniature display in a shop window.

  She thought Sydney's famous opera house, subject of millions of postcards and calendars, looked less like the billowing sails of ships everyone always cited than it did a pile of quartered hard-boiled eggs. The little Tupperware boxes her mother had sent with her to school, filled with celery sticks or eggs—or even, when her mother was feeling exotically lazy, with leftover dim sum—were one of the few homely memories she still retained from her childhood.

  As the harbor fell away behind the wing of the plane each time, and the angle changed, the opera house for a moment took on other, less nostalgic shapes—curls of melon rind, or even the chitinous, articulated length of a crustacean.

  Like a shrimp, she thought. A prawn. Wonder if all these food thoughts are a metaphor for sex or something.

  The harbor, the bridges, she had been living with all of them for months as the view from Dread's virtual office. It was strange to realize that she was actually now seeing something so familiar for the very first time.

  That's modem life, though, isn't it? she told herself as the pilot announced that they were finally ready to land. Our lives aren't even about doing real things, most of the time. We think and talk about people we've never met, pretend to visit places we've never actually been to, discuss things that are just names as though they were as real as rocks or animals or something. Information Age? Hell, it's the Imagination Age. We're living in our own minds.

  No, she decided as the plane began its steep descent, really we're living in other people's minds.

  Dread wasn't there to meet her, but she hadn't expected him to be. She was a grown woman, after all. He was a boss, not a boyfriend, and whatever suspicions she might harbor about his request for her presence—suspicions rooted in feelings too ambivalent to be called either hopes or fears—she was not going to put herself in an awkward position by presuming anything other than Business As Usual.

  Besides, she had the feeling that her decidedly unnerving employer wasn't the type who picked anyone up at the airport.

  The new Sydney Airport, opened only a few years earlier, squatted twenty-five kilometers offshore on its own artificial atoll, linked to the mainland by a long, straight causeway standing on hundred-meter-wide fibramic pillars sunk deep in the ocean floor, their great lengths layered with pressure distributors to minimize damage from seismic instability. The causeway itself, lined with hotels, shops, restaurants, and even a few apartment buildings, had become an adjunct neighborhood of the city. As Dulcie sat on the high speed tram, watching the doors puff open at each stop—Whitlam Estates, ANZAC Plaza, Pacific Leisure Square—she wondered if with so many businesses happy to invest in these clean new causeway developments, the next city that built an offshore airport might not go twice as far off the coastline and double the commercial buy-in. Eventually, as all the Pacific Rim cities thrust farther and farther out into the ocean, the day might come when they would all meet in the middle, and someone with enough time on her hands and a high threshold of mall-boredom would be able to walk from commercial atoll to commercial atoll and cross the Pacific
on foot.

  What should have been an amusing notion, strolling from shop to shop and lobby to lobby while sharks and other deep-ocean creatures swam invisibly beneath, instead felt strange and unsettling. So this is what happens when you actually go places, she thought. Maybe there's something to be said for VR after all. . . .

  The tram reached dry land but sped onward, continuing to the old airport complex on Botany Bay, which served as the new airport's transportation hub. Dulcie spent an additional quarter hour in the taxi line, but eventually found herself in the back seat of an old-style wheeled cab heading north. The driver, a garrulous young Solomon Islander, almost immediately asked her if she would have dinner with him.

  "I need to learn more about America," he explained. "I could be your special friend in Sydney. You need something, need to go somewhere? I will drive you."

  "You are driving me," she pointed out. "And I need to go to Redfern, like I said. But that's all I need, thank you."

  He did not seem unduly disappointed, and even offered to stop and buy her an ice cream in Centennial Park. "I am happy to get it for you, and I will pay," he said. "I am not expecting sex in return."

  Amused despite herself by this completely mad young man, she nevertheless refused this offer, too.

  Her research on various travel nodes had portrayed Redfern as a district on the rise, so Dulcie was surprised and a little depressed by her first view of it; if this was rising, the low must have been very low indeed. There were a lot of Aboriginal people on the streets, but few of them had the cheerful look of the dancers and actors and small business owners in the nodes' wraparound advertising. The district had its share of restaurants and bars, but at this time of day they were mostly closed. Dulcie told herself that things might be very different after dark, with lights and music all around.

  "Oh, it's better now," the driver told her. "This used to be very bad. My cousin, he lived here, he was robbed three times. And he had nothing worth stealing!"

  The address proved to be a featureless walk-up in a largely shuttered commercial street that was less run-down than some of the others, but completely empty of pedestrians. She was not thrilled with the idea of being left by herself on the sidewalk, but Dread did not answer when she called his number from her pad, and after checking again to make sure she had the street address right, she paid the driver and asked him to wait a few minutes, willing for safety's sake to risk a misunderstanding that might lead to more social overtures.

  Dread's voice from the speaker by the gate was startlingly clear, as though he were standing right beside her. "Dulcie? Come on in." The gate tumblers shot back. She waved good-bye to the taxi driver, who smiled and blew her a kiss as she turned to walk up the damp cement stairs. The door at the top swung open through no visible agency, ominous as the beginning of a horror flick.

  She paused on the doorstep. Maybe I should have just stuck with the taxi guy. . . .

  The main room was startlingly large, an area that once might have held several tiny apartments or a small factory, and was almost completely empty. It had been painted entirely white, and a new white carpet covered the floor. The tall windows had been covered with blackout curtains, which themselves were shrouded in white bedsheets.

  Dread stood by the far wall, inspecting something that looked like a mobile execution device. As with the famous opera house, but in a far more unsettling way, Dulcie was conscious of the oddity of seeing such a familiar face for the first time. He had not misrepresented himself. He was no taller than she was, and dressed all in black.

  Dread walked toward her and to her surprise and confusion stuck out his hand. After a moment she took it. He squeezed once, firmly, then released her. "It's good to see you. Hope your flight was all right. Was that you who called a few minutes ago?"

  "Y–yes, I guess so. I wanted to make sure you were here before. . . ."

  "Sorry I didn't pick up. I've been trying to. figure out this bloody bed."

  "Bed?"

  "Yeah. Coma bed. So I can stay online for long stretches without bedsores and cramping and whatnot. All these little microfiber loops, lots of oxygen and skin massage." He smiled, a brief but dazzling display of wide white teeth. "Come give me a hand with it, then we'll get something to eat."

  He turned and strode back across the naked room. Dulcie was left trying to sort out her thoughts. He's lit up like a Christmas tree. Is he on something? But he seems to be in a good mood—that's something, I guess. She stood, hesitating. It was hard to get moving. A part of her, she realized, was hurt by the perfunctory greeting. Business As Usual, she reminded herself. Business.

  "It's a nice piece of work, that bed," he said. "Top of the line, right? Like a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow or a Trohner machine pistol."

  "So I take it you're planning to spend a lot of time online? In the Otherland network?" She smiled reflexively at the hovering waiter, but what she was really feeling was nervousness and irritation.

  "We're not done yet," Dread told the young man in a flat voice. "Piss off for a while. No, get us some coffee." He turned back to Dulcie and his lazy smile returned, but his dark eyes were frighteningly intense. "Oh, yes, I've got plans. I've just found out some very interesting things—very, very interesting. I got knocked offline, see. That was yesterday. And I used your copy of the thing," he lowered his voice a little, "the device, trying to get back on. But I ran into something. Did you know this system is run by some kind of AI? That thing they were all complaining about when they were first in Atasco's simworld?"

  "Slow down. I'm having trouble following you." Dulcie was beginning to feel the jet lag. He had done nothing but talk a blue streak since she had arrived, but his openness was the opposite of flattering—she felt sure he would have done the same with anyone halfway qualified, halfway interested, halfway trustworthy. "I don't think the system is run by an artificial intelligence," she said, "—not in the conventional sense. It's a weird neural net of some kind—or a bunch of them, distributed. I haven't been able to break into the architecture at all. But nobody does AIs anymore, they're clunky and unreliable. They certainly wouldn't be using one to run something this complex."

  He shook his head in annoyance. "Whatever. Not an AI, then, but one of those other things—an ALife system. But I'm telling you, there's something alive on the other end of that wire. Something that thinks."

  She started to argue, then stopped. "How did you get knocked offline?"

  "I got killed." He stopped, staring at the waiter, who had arrived with the coffee. The young man clinked a cup hard as he set it down, perhaps from nerves, then hurried away. Dread shrugged. "Stupid thing—an accident. I wasn't paying attention."

  "And the rest of those people?" It was odd—she missed them, missed their personalities and their odd courage, even missed the adventure of the whole thing. It had been difficult sometimes as she had inhabited the Quan Li body to remember that she was not trapped online as they were, that she could go offline at the end of the day and sleep in her own bed with no fear that a mistake in the virtual universe, a moment of bad luck or carelessness, might kill her.

  He curled his lip; his stare was feral. "I don't give a shit about them. Are you going to listen? Who's paying you anyway?" For a moment he seemed about to reach across the table and grab her throat.

  "Sorry. I'm tired."

  "There's something on the other end, that's what I'm telling you. If it's not an AI, then you pick the name—that's your job, not mine. But I know it's alive, and I know it wants to keep me out. We lost the Quan Li sim and so we've lost that access to the network."

  "Could you find out something through . . . through your employer? I mean, this is his system, after all."

  "Christ!" It was a hiss. If it had been a shout it would only have startled her, but instead it froze her into complete immobility. For a moment, her concern that he might grab her seemed laughably mild. "Have you forgotten everything? If the Old Man even guessed I might be messing around with his network, he woul
d. . . ." He sat back, his face suddenly blank, distant. "I'm beginning to wonder if I made a mistake, bringing you here."

  A part of her knew she was supposed to beg forgiveness. Another, perhaps healthier part wanted him to order her onto a plane back to New York. But something had settled into her spine, a cold inertia. "I told you," she said, speaking almost as flatly as Dread himself. "I'm tired."

  The mask softened in an instant. The teeth reappeared. "Right. I'm being pushy—I'm just excited about this. We can talk more tonight, or even tomorrow. Let's get you back so you can get a nap." He snatched the check from the table so suddenly she leaned away from the force of his movement. Within seconds he had flashed a card over the reader and was heading for the door. It took some moments before she could assemble her thoughts to get up and follow him.

  "The room's fine," she said slowly. "I just thought . . . I'd be staying in a hotel. Or something."

  He was bouncing with energy again. "No, no. Wouldn't work. I'm going to need you here all kinds of hours. Sometimes you're going to have to sleep with the monitors on. You're going to earn that high consultant's rate of yours, sweetness."

  She surveyed the room, made up in a spartan simplicity that matched the larger studio space down the hall. In a strange, almost touching gesture, he had already turned back the comforter and the top sheet. "Okay. You're the boss."

  "Oh, don't worry," he said, grinning. "You play your cards right, you're going to come out of this better than rich."

  "Great." She slumped onto the bed, unable to keep up with him anymore. Her head felt like it was stuffed full of wet laundry. Any concerns—or hopes, for that matter—that he might make a pass at her had subsided into the numbness of her jet lag. "That's great."

  "I'm not joking, Dulcie." He paused in the doorway and looked at her carefully, measuring something she could not even guess. "How would you like to live forever?" he asked her. "Seriously, I want you to think about it. How would you like to be . . . a god?"