Mountain of Black Glass

  Her father, who had never liked the name Salome, had acted as a fifth column, constantly "forgetting" his promise to his wife not to call Salome by that terrible, masculine name, and so Enrica Fredericks had finally given in.

  This early experience had confirmed Sam in the value of quiet noncompliance. She was known to her teachers as a good, if not deeply motivated, student, and to her friends as a quiet but surprisingly self-confident companion. Many of her schoolmates had been experimenting with sex since before the official dawn of their teenagerhood. Sam Fredericks did not know exactly what she did want in the way of romance—she had a lot of thoughts and imaginings, none of them quite clear—but she knew much better what she didn't want, and that definitely included being groped by any of the boys with whom she went to school. Drugs hadn't made much of a blip on her radar either. What Sam really wanted more than anything else, more than good grades, acceptance by her peer group, or the startling array of sensations, real and virtual, that were available to a young person of her age, was to be more or less free from the pressures of her parents and her classmates until she was grown up and could make up her mind about what she wanted out of life. She saw this watershed as coming in the distant but not impossible future, perhaps by the time she was sixteen or so.

  Meeting Orlando Gardiner had confused her in a number of ways, none of them immediately obvious to a girl as self-assured as Sam, who made friends easily even if she didn't connect deeply, who played soccer so well she had been elected team captain twice (and refused the honor both times), and who convinced teachers by the serenity of her countenance that she probably knew answers that she in fact didn't, causing them to turn and expend their vital teacher-charisma on some more needy student. Even in the world of role-playing Sam had always been a good-natured individualist, never a leader, never a follower, until Pithlit the Thief had encountered a young barbarian named Thargor in The Quirt, a seedy little tavern which was one of the nicer spots in Madrikhor's Thieves' Quarter. Thargor, already a semilegendary figure in the Middle Country, knew Pithlit by reputation as well, having heard that the slender man was unusually trustworthy for a thief, and since Thargor was in need of a lock-picking specialist on his quest to liberate some objects from a rich warrior baron, he had offered Sam's alter ego a reasonable percentage.

  The theft had gone well, once the barbarian had dealt with an unexpected trio of mastiff-headed, human-bodied sentries, and the casual partnership had rolled over into other ventures.

  A year later, Sam Fredericks had been astonished to realize that Orlando Gardiner, a boy she had never seen, had somehow become her best friend in the world, and the only person besides her parents (not counting a previous obsession with Pain Sister, one of the musician/heroines from the PsychiActress show, which despite all the allowance money she had spent on posters, holographs, and interactives, was now relegated in Sam's mind to the status of stupid kid stuff) that Sam could honestly say she loved.

  It wasn't the kind of love you saw on all the teenage shows on the net—it didn't seem to have anything to do with sex, for one thing. Even Pain Sister, for all the cartoonish nature of her presentation, had inspired a bit of a warm itch, but what Sam felt for Orlando was something much less obvious. She had wondered once or twice if it might be that kind of love, of course—the kind that led people like her parents to get married, and led people on netshows to blow up banks or drive off cliffs or shoot themselves—but it seemed like something far different. Before she had known about Orlando's condition, she had often wondered what he looked like, and had even constructed a sort of imaginary version of him in her mind—skinny, with floppy hair, old-fashioned eyeglasses, and an endearingly crooked smile—but the idea of meeting him in person had never been anything other than odd and, increasingly as time went by, uncomfortable.

  Uncomfortable, of course, because Orlando Gardiner thought Sam Fredericks was another boy.

  So as the months slipped past, and as one year of friendship became two and more, she had grown increasingly conflicted in her feelings toward him. Their rapport was deep. Their ability to joke and even insult each other without ever wondering if the other person would be offended was one of the greatest freedoms she had ever known. His sharply mocking sense of humor was an idealized version of her own, and Sam was just selfless enough not to resent that, just quick enough to appreciate it properly. She thought that, in his own way, Orlando was as sharp as the people who got paid millions of credits on the net to be clever for a living. And she was his best friend, too, the one person he all but admitted he could not do without. How could she not love him?

  At the same time, although she had not realized it, she had become increasingly committed to a friendship that would never leave the net, because to meet face-to-face was to reveal how, without intending to, she had let their relationship deepen under false pretenses. What had felt comfortable to her, being treated like another boy, being allowed that freedom to be tasteless and crude and pushy without her parents or other friends judging her, had become increasingly precious.

  She hadn't realized until the horrible moment of discovery, and the aftermath in which Orlando revealed his own secret, that the knife could cut both ways. The idea that when she had thought Orlando was opening his soul to her, so much so that she had felt stabbed with guilt at her own duplicity, he had been hiding a secret even more important than hers, was surprisingly painful.

  But the horrible wonders of the Otherland network had distracted them both, and in recent days Orlando had been even more obsessed by his own condition, that dreadful downhill slide that he clearly wanted to discuss, but which Sam could not bear to talk about. She was too smart to think reality could be changed just because she did not like it, but she was also superstitious enough to believe in some deep part of herself that she might be able to make something stay away longer by ignoring it. Despite her occasional troubles and confusions, Sam Fredericks had led a happy life in the suburbs of Charleston, West Virginia, and she was smart enough to know she was not equipped to handle something like this.

  Orlando was sleeping, his golden, muscular Achilles body stomach-down and his thin garment disarranged. He looked, she thought, like some kind of ad for men's cologne. If she was ever going to find herself excited by sharing a room with a boy, this should be the time, but all she could think about was how sick he was, how brave he was being.

  The battle had come so close during the afternoon that she could hear Trojan voices screaming insults at the Greek defenders. Achilles' Myrmidon soldiers, so desperate to fight that they trembled like leashed dogs, had given her regular reports of the progress of the attack, and although the Trojans had been pushed back at the last, no one seemed to doubt that some kind of heavenly balance remained in their favor. Several of the Myrmidons had even risked being labeled cowards—apparently a fate worse than death in this place and time—to suggest to Orlando that they should take to their boats. After all, if they weren't going to be allowed to fight, the soldiers had pointed out, why should they sit still and be slaughtered when the Trojans came over the wall tomorrow?

  Orlando, who had been fighting waves of weakness since they came to Troy, had at this point been able to do little except listen, eyes bleary and head barely upright. Much as it pained Sam to see him that way, she was even more frightened of what might happen if the soldiers were right. Even in her current sim she could not carry his Achilles body more than a few hundred meters—if the Greeks broke through, she would either have to desert Orlando or they would die together. The man Jonas had confirmed what she and Orlando had already felt in their bones: getting killed here would be the real thing.

  Paul Jonas himself had not returned to them after the day's fighting, which might mean nothing, but might just as easily mean he was one of the corpses lying in a mass grave beside the camp wall, or even one of the unlucky bodies stiffening out on the plain. Had she dared to leave Orlando, she would have been looking for Jonas even now. She was desperate for advice.
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  Sam Fredericks was not a reader, as Orlando never tired of pointing out to her, but she was not in the least bit stupid either. She could read perfectly well, but life just seemed too short to spend much time squinting at text when you could find all the stories you wanted on the net, or make your own. But Orlando's gibes had not gone entirely unfelt, and his constant harping on The Lord of the Rings had made her feel she was missing something—if nothing else, a key part of her best friend's identity. So without telling him, she had downloaded a text copy and read it. It had not been easy, and had taken her the best part of a year as she picked it up and read a little, then got bored and gave it up again for easier pursuits. Even when she had finished the monumental task—who could even dream of writing so many words about something?—she had not mentioned it to Orlando, in part because she really hadn't liked it very much, and had been mostly unmoved by the long, flowery descriptions of trees and hiking and meals. But she had believed she understood a little better what it meant to Orlando—so much of it was about losing things you loved. In fact, as she thought about it now, watching the sleeping Achilles who was also her best friend, it made even more sense.

  But one thing in particular that had stuck with her, and which she knew was as important to Orlando as anything else in the book, was what it meant to be a hero. He always talked about how the real heroes weren't like Bulk U Six in Boyz Go 2 Hell or one of those kind of things—not just people who could slaughter everyone else and make clever comments while they were doing it. Real heroes were like the characters in that man Tolkien's story, who did what they had to even if they hated it, even if it took their own lives away from them.

  Sam was frightened. She didn't know what was going to happen next, but she had little doubt that the next morning would see the Trojans coming over the wall, because the Greeks' greatest warrior, Achilles, was currently the sim of a dying teenager. All day long the messengers had come from Agamemnon, promising the Earth if only Achilles would come out and fight, reminding him how just the sight of him in his armor would fill the hearts of the Greeks with joy and those of the Trojans with terror.

  She stared now at the polished armor on its stand. In the red light of the coals, it seemed made of rubies, or lacquered in blood.

  There was a character in Lord of the Rings with her name. He had been the companion of the main hero, and when the hero had been sick, almost dying, it had been that Sam who took up the burden and went forward. It had been Sam's time, Orlando never tired of saying. Time be a hero. When it comes, he had often said, you know it. You may not want to know it, but you know it.

  She had thought he meant make-believe heroes, like his own Thargor, Scourge of the Middle Country, but she believed now he had really been talking about himself, about just getting out of bed to make it through each day. She was also beginning to suspect that way back then he had been speaking to a version of herself that hadn't arrived yet—talking to the Sam Fredericks who was sitting here tonight, huddled on a cold dirt floor in a camp on the Trojan plain, while Orlando tossed in shallow, unsatisfying sleep. And now she finally understood. It was Sam's time to be a hero.

  CHAPTER 29

  Some Roadside Attractions

  NETFEED/NEWS: "Coralsnake" Creator Claims Free Speech Rights

  (visual: Möven under arrest outside Stockholm house

  VO: Freelance gear writer Diksy Möven. creator of the "Coralsnake" virus which destroyed nodes and disrupted service all over the net last year, says he is going to argue at his trial that his arrest represents an illegal suppression of free speech.

  (visual: Attorney Olaf Rosenwald)

  ROSENWALD: "My client's position is that the net belongs to everybody—it's a free medium, like the air we breathe. UN guidelines make it clear that all citizens of the world have the right to free expression—what difference, then, between words and lines of code? My client is no more to blame for people accepting his code and then having it damage their equipment than a journalist who writes about crime is to blame for people reading that book and then committing a crime. My client happens to like expressing himself by writing complicated strings of symbols—symbols that, if improperly-used, might happen to destroy some property. . . ."

  Calliope Skouros had already been in the Yirbana Gallery for half an hour when Stan arrived, grumpy and out of sorts. "You couldn't think of a better place to meet for lunch?" He was trying to work his glasses back into place by nose-wrinkling, since his hands were shoved deep in his coat pockets. "Do you know what it's like trying to park here?"

  "You should have taken public transport," she said. "We won't need the car this afternoon."

  "We didn't need to leave the office, for that matter." he said. "We could have called out for yum cha."

  "If I eat another dumpling this week, I'll die. Besides, I had a reason for wanting to come here." She pointed to the exhibit, an array of lovingly carved wooden posts that might have been an Expressionist sculpture of a city skyline. "Know what those are?"

  "Betting you'll tell me." Stan slumped onto the bench. For a man who spent a lot of time in the gym, he hated to run anywhere.

  "Tiwi grave posts. Funeral markers."

  He squinted at the collection of unique wooden shapes. "Yeah? You looking for some kind of ritual angle? Seems to me that it was your victim Polly Merapanui who was Tiwi, not the suspected murderer."

  "But as far as we can tell, he didn't really have an Aboriginal identity of his own. Dr. Danney said he hated that stuff. His grandmother had a strong tribal heritage, but Dread himself never had a chance to connect with it directly, since his mother apparently ran away when she was quite young, and by the time our boy came along, Mom was way too busy working the corner and putting black ice in her veins to be joining any Aboriginal Cultural Revival groups."

  "Well, our late friend Polly doesn't seem like the ACR type either."

  "I know, but . . . but there might be something there. I have some ideas, I just can't make them gel." She leaned forward to read the display screen, which seemed to float a ghostly inch in front of the wall. "It says, 'Tiwi grave markers were known as pukumani, a general term which could mean sacred or taboo. They were erected above the grave, sometimes months after the actual burial, and became the centerpiece for complicated mourning ceremonies which might include several days of singing and dancing.' "

  "Sorry I missed that—things seem pretty quiet now."

  Calliope scowled. "Look, there's something going on, I'm just trying to figure it out. There has to be a reason for the woolagaoo number—the stones in the eyes. There also has to be a reason why he picked Polly Merapanui to murder. He knew her from Feverbrook Hospital. How did they wind up together in Sydney? What did she do to make him so angry?"

  "All good questions," Stan said evenly. "So what do they have to do with wooden grave posts?"

  "Probably nothing," she sighed. "I'm reaching. But it's one of the most famous Tiwi exhibits in the city—I just thought I'd have a look."

  His smile was surprisingly kind. "Maybe we should go grab some lunch—this is our break, after all. Isn't there a coffee bar or something in here?"

  Calliope was having a salad week, and even bravely avoided the feta cheese she could, with fairly clean conscience, have crumbled on top. She was determined to knock off a little weight. She still hadn't gone back to see the waitress at Bondi Baby, and was using the prospect as a dangling carrot: lose five kilos, get a new outfit, go see if the girl with the tattoo had really been giving her meaningful glances or had just forgot to put in her contact lenses.

  Stan, who was one of those nauseating people who could eat like a pig and still remain thin, had loaded his tray with not just sandwich and crisps, but two desserts.

  "I have a theory," said Calliope, mournfully prodding a section of tomato. "Just listen to it and don't tell me I'm full of shit until I finish, okay?"

  Stan Chan grinned around an excessive mouthful of sandwich. "O aheah—ire aray."

  "Ever si
nce I realized this, it's been bothering me. Our boy Johnny's real name, or at least the name on the birth records, is John Wulgaru. But his father was almost certainly this Filipino guy. . . ."

  "Uh irate."

  "The pirate, yeah. And none of his mother's long-term boyfriends were Aboriginal. And Wulgaru wasn't a last name she used, nor did it turn up anywhere in the three generations of her background I tracked down." Calliope gave up trying to spear the tomato and picked it up with her fingers. "So what does it mean? Why would she give him that name? If it was just a name that didn't mean anything, I'd say forget about it, but it's the name of a particularly creepy Aboriginal monster, a wooden doll that comes to life, and it's also the MO for how he killed Polly Merapanui, so it has to mean something."

  Stan had finally swallowed. "I'm with you so far, but everything up to 'what does it mean' is the easy part."

  "I know." She frowned. "Now we get to my theory. The woolagaroo was—what did Professor Jigalong say? 'A metaphor for how the white man's attempts to control the native people may eventually backfire on him,' something like that. Maybe that's what his mother meant him to be from the very first. Maybe she meant him to be a monster—or at least an instrument of revenge."

  "Slow down, Skouros. You already said his mother was too busy hooking and hyping to join any political groups."

  "I'm not necessarily talking about something political." She realized that her voice was getting loud; several tourists at other tables had turned to see what the argument was about. "I'm just talking about . . . I don't know, hatred. If you were an Aboriginal woman in the Cairns ghetto, maybe beaten and raped by your own father—there's suggestions of it in the social services files—and certainly beaten and raped by customers, isn't it possible you might want to strike back at the world somehow? Not everybody poor can be noble about it." She leaned closer. "The few juvenile records we've got from Johnny Dark's childhood are horrible—you've seen them. Whipped and burned, locked in closets for days, thrown out to live in the streets once when he was three years old just because he pissed off one of his mother's so-called boyfriends. Who's to say some of it wasn't intentional? That she wasn't . . . molding him. Turning him into a weapon against the world that had hurt her."