Mountain of Black Glass

  She nodded, but she could tell from her daddy's face that he didn't really want her here, so she didn't say anything as she climbed up onto the seat next to him.

  "Look, Major," the other man said, "we've had a chance to look each other over, and I hope I've passed the test. I can understand you wanting to get settled in, especially with this young one here—she must be tired after a day on the road. But how about I come by your motel tonight? I need to meet this Sellars face-to-face even more than you needed to see me. There's . . . there's just so much to talk about."

  "I'm with you there, Ramsey." Her father rubbed at the side of his head for a moment. "I don't mean to seem . . . suspicious, or difficult, but you can understand that things have been happening very fast the last few days."

  "For me, too," Ramsey said, and laughed. "Oh, have they ever." He reached for the check. "So if you need an evening to yourself, I'll understand. Heaven knows, I've got a lot of casework backed up. I can spend my evening in gainful employment with just my pad and a motel desk. But I can't hang around in town forever, and I really need to have a proper conversation with Sellars, face-to-face."

  "It . . . well, as far as that goes, you should brace yourself. He's a little startling to look at."

  Ramsey shrugged. "I'm not surprised. I got the feeling from the few conversations we've had that he spends a lot of time indoors."

  "About the last thirty years, yeah." Her father's short laugh had an edge to it that Christabel didn't understand.

  "Well, in any case, this whole thing scares me to death, but I'm looking forward to meeting him in the flesh, too—whatever he looks like. He must be a pretty amazing human being."

  Her father laughed again, but this time it definitely sounded unhappy. "Well, that's the really interesting part. See, he's not really a human being in any normal sense of the word. . . ." He stopped suddenly and for the first time in a couple of minutes, looked at Christabel, as if he had just remembered she was there, gently kicking her heels against the bottom of the booth. His face was just the same as the time he had complained to her mommy that it was "pretending-to-be-Santa-time again," without realizing she was sitting on the kitchen floor where he couldn't see her.

  Christabel didn't understand what he meant, and was just about to ask him when she realized that someone else was standing right behind her father. The man named Catur Ramsey was looking up at this person with his eyes narrowed. Christabel turned at the same time her father did. For a moment, it was confusing, because it was a face she knew so well that she couldn't figure out why it seemed so wrong.

  "Well, here you are," said Captain Ron. "Jesus, Mike, when you get lost, you really get lost. I've been looking all over North Carolina for you, and here you've slipped off to another state on me."

  Christabel's daddy was very pale. For a moment she thought he was going to be sick, the way her mother was that time when they had started to talk about making a brother or sister for Christabel, and then stopped talking about it. For days her face had been the gray color Christabel's father's was now.

  "Ron. What the hell are you doing here? How did you find me?"

  Captain Ron waved his hand. A few people across the aisle turned to look at the man in uniform, but then turned away again. "We've got an APB out on you, asking for help. Some of the local smokeys picked you out and passed it on."

  "What's this about?" Her daddy tried to smile. Across from him, Mr. Ramsey had gotten very quiet, but his eyes were bright. "Can't a man get away for a few days, Ron? You . . . you know we need some time off. Some kind of disaster at the base? I can't imagine why else you'd be. . . ."

  "Yeah, disaster, you could call it that," said Ron, cutting him off. Now that she looked at him, she could see that something was wrong with him, too—he had the same tight look on his face he'd had the last time he came to the house. "Seems like our old buddy General Yak is on the warpath. Seems like he wants to talk to you personally—personally, got it?—and that means all leaves are canceled and all bets are off." For a moment his face changed again, as though something was shifting behind a mask. "I'm sorry, buddy, but this is a direct order from the top of the food chain, and there ain't a thing I can do about it. I don't know what's going on, and I hope I'm still your friend, but you're going to have to come with me," He paused and fingered his mustache for a moment. "We're not going far—Yacoubian's set up a command post right in town here. Don't know if that's anything to do with, you. I hope not." For the first time he seemed to see Christabel. "Hello, Chrissy. How are you, sweetie?"

  She didn't say anything. She wanted to run away, but she knew that would be the worst thing. She could almost hear Mister Sellars' voice in her ear saying, "Secrets are scary, Christabel, but if there's a good enough reason for them, then they might be the most important thing in the world. Be careful."

  Ron turned back to her daddy. He had looked at Mr. Ramsey a few times, but it was almost like he had decided the other man wasn't there. "Let's leave your little girl with her mother and then we can get going."

  Her father shook his head. "Kaylene . . . she's off running errands. We're just waiting for her. Won't be back for an hour or so—we were going to get a little lunch."

  Ron frowned. "Well, then I guess we'll have to bring her along with us. I'll leave a number here at the restaurant for her to call, find out where to pick up your daughter."

  Even Christabel noticed that he said "pick up your daughter," not "pick up you and your daughter." She was really, really scared.

  Her father didn't move or say anything. Captain Ron nodded his head toward the front of the restaurant, and for the first time Christabel noticed that a couple of soldiers in MP helmets were standing outside the glass by the front door. "Let's just make it quick and painless, shall we, Mike?"

  "I should introduce myself," Mr. Ramsey said suddenly. "My name is Decatur Ramsey, and I'm Major Sorensen's attorney." He turned those bright eyes on Christabel's daddy, as if warning him not to say anything different. "Is this an arrest?"

  "This is military business, sir," Captain Ron said. His voice was polite, but he looked angry. "I don't think it's any of your affair. . . ."

  "Let's decide that when we have a better idea of what's going on, shall we?" said Mr. Ramsey. "If this is just a routine matter, I'm sure there won't be any problem with me coming along to wait for . . . for Mike. I can even stay with Christabel until her mother comes. But if this highly unusual procedure is of a legal nature, then I think it will be to everyone's advantage to have me along." He sat up a bit straighter. His voice had turned very hard. "Let me make it a bit clearer, Captain. You have MPs, and you are directing Major Sorensen to accompany you, even though he's on a granted leave. If this is a formal arrest, then your jurisdiction is clear, and I'll work with the system as appropriate. If this isn't a formal arrest, and you insist on taking my friend out of here against his will without letting me accompany him . . . well, I know a surprising amount of people in local law enforcement here in Virginia, and I know for a fact there's a couple of State Troopers having some coffee and pie over in the corner of the room. I'd be happy to bring them in to help discuss the legality of dragging a man out of a public restaurant without proper authorization."

  Christabel did not understand what was happening, but she knew that she wanted more than anything in the world for it to stop happening. Nothing went away, though. Her daddy and Captain Ron and Mr. Ramsey all just sat or stood where they were without saying anything for what seemed like a long time.

  When Captain Ron spoke he sounded more unhappy than mad, although there was still plenty of angry in his voice. "All righty, Mr.—what did you say your name was? Ramsey? You come on along. We'll bring the little girl, too, make it a family outing. As I said, all I know is that a very high-ranking officer wants an immediate conversation with this man on a matter of military security. So we'll all play nice. Do you want my serial number?"

  Mr. Ramsey's smile was very cold. "Oh, I don't think that's necessary, Ca
ptain. I'm sure we'll have plenty of chance to get to know each other."

  As they stood up, the two MPs came in through the door and stood, waiting. Christabel held her daddy's hand while Captain Ron went to the front counter and left a message for Mommy, then they all walked together out through the doors of Jenrette's restaurant. All the people at the tables and booths were staring now.

  Outside, a dark military van was waiting. Christabel could not help looking across the parking lot toward the service station, wondering if her mommy was watching and might come over to help, but the family van wasn't there anymore.

  Her father squeezed her hand, then helped her up into the military van. The two MPs got in with them. They were young men, the kind who waved to her when they drove past at the base, but these young men had faces like statues and did not smile or say a word. There was wire in the glass between where they sat and where Captain Ron sat in the front of the van with the driver—like Daddy and her and Mr. Ramsey had all been loaded into some kind of nasty animal cage.

  And her mommy and Mister Sellars had gone away somewhere.

  Christabel decided she was probably too brave to cry, but she wasn't completely sure.

  CHAPTER 30

  Heaven's Plaything

  NETFEED/FINANCE: Discreet Sell-Off of Krittapong Shares

  VO: Traders are taking note of what one veteran of the international markets called "a very careful sell-off" of Krittapong shares. Sources in the electronics industry suggest that Ymona Dedoblanco Krittapong, the globetrotting widow of company founder Rama Krittapong, has been quietly reducing her own large percentage of the Thailand-based consumer electronics giant, perhaps in anticipation of rumored product liability lawsuits. . . .

  It had been the most terrifying day of her life. Renie was exhausted, so tired that her bones felt heavy, but she could not sleep. The night was almost silent, but the clatter of weapons and the shrieks of wounded men still seemed to surround her. She lay with her head on !Xabbu's chest, a cloak drawn over their bare legs, and knew that she could not survive another such day of bloody madness.

  Renie also knew that when the sun came up, it would all start again.

  There had come a point in the middle of the hideous afternoon, the sun so far away in the sky that the battle seemed to be taking place on some desolate planet at the rim of the solar system, every second crawling past as though time itself had grown weary, that Renie had thought she finally understood warfare.

  It came as a single flash of insight as the battle raged around her, a sea of chaos in which spears and muscle-knotted arms and shouting faces appeared and disappeared so quickly that they might have been the temporary creations of turbulent raw matter.

  Patriotism, loyalty, duty—different words that served the same purpose. Most people would fight for friends and family, but why would a normal person consent to murder strangers on behalf of other strangers? Humans needed order; killing each other for no reason—risking being killed for no reason—was meaningless, poisonous. When chaos swept you up, you had to believe in something, however vague. Renie had suddenly realized that you had to sprinkle the fairy dust of love of country or duty over the nearer group of strangers—convince yourself that somehow they were bound to you and you to them—or else you would go mad.

  As bizarre as it was to kill or die for strangers, her own worst problem during the battle had turned out to be the exact opposite—watching her virtual Trojan comrades fall at her side and forcing herself to ignore their agonized calls for assistance. These are not real people, she told herself time after time, although every bit of sensory information screamed otherwise. If I try to help one of them, I'm risking my own life-—and thus the life of her real companions, and even of her brother and the other lost children. Still, it seemed a hollow distinction.

  One such terrible moment had come as a dying Lycian soldier, speared in the back, had come staggering toward her. The young soldier, who only minutes earlier had offered Renie a drink from his water skin, had headed straight for her through the madness of battle as though he could see no one else, the spear that had murdered him protruding through his ribs, its long shaft dragging behind him like a stiffened tail. As his strength ended, he had reached out his hands, the clutch of a drowning swimmer, a man sinking in his own blood. Renie had stepped away, afraid he would clutch at her and leave her defenseless. The look in his fast-glazing eyes had burned her so badly she thought she would never forget it.

  Is this what's coming? she had wondered in helpless horror. Is this what the future will be like? We'll make worlds where anything is possible, see real, breathing, sweating people killed before our eyes every day—even murder them ourselves—and then sit down to dinner afterward as though nothing has happened?

  What kind of future were human beings creating? How could the human mind, an organ millions of years old, sort through such mad, science-fictional riddles?

  The day had crawled on.

  Charge to the attack, hemmed and pushed by those behind. Dodge and duck, work back to the rear, keep the shield up at all times against the rain of biting arrows. Keep an eye open for !Xabbu and T4b, remember that they are the only real things in this wasteland of shouting ghosts. Duck, dodge.

  Spears had jabbed out at her from behind shields like vipers hiding among rocks. Without warning, entire sections of the battlefront had gone shoving past, so that the worst fighting was suddenly behind her instead of in front, and for all her caution she and her companions found themselves in the middle of the conflict again.

  Start over. Dodge and duck. Work back to the rear again. . . .

  And all around, death. It was not a quiet presence during the long day—not a pale-faced maiden bringing surcease from pain, not a skillful reaper with a scalpel-sharp blade. Death on the Trojan plain was a crazed beast that roared and clawed and smashed, which was everywhere at once, and which in its unending fury showed that even armored men were terribly frail things; in a moment, all that solidity could be turned into bloodmist and bubbling cries and soft, tattered flesh. . . .

  Renie sat up, trembling.

  "!Xabbu?" She could barely find her voice. "Are . . . are you awake?"

  She felt him move beside her. "I am. I cannot sleep."

  "It was so horrible. . . !" She covered her face with her hands, wishing like a small child that when she took them away everything strange around her would be gone, the too-bright stars and their dim reflections, the thousand campfires. "Jesus Mercy, I thought this post-trauma stuff wasn't supposed to hit for a few years." Her desperate laugh almost began a fit of weeping. "I keep telling myself it's not real . . . but it might as well be. People really did that to each other. People really do that to each other. . . ."

  He reached out and took her hand. "I wish that I could find something to say. It was indeed horrible."

  She shook her head. "I just don't know how I can go through that again. Oh, God, it will be light again in a few hours." She had a sudden thought. "Where is T4b?"

  "He is sleeping." !Xabbu pointed to a shadowy shape curled a couple of meters away from the fire. Relieved, Renie turned back to her friend and marveled for a moment at how quickly she had grown used to !Xabbu's new human body, a vessel which had quickly filled with !Xabbu-ness. The slender, youthful face, that of a stranger a day earlier, already helped soothe her simply by being in her line of sight.

  "Sleeping. He's got the right idea. God, maybe all those battle-games are good for something. Maybe they harden you."

  "He was frightened and upset, just as we were." !Xabbu squeezed her hand. "If he is sleeping, then perhaps he will be more alert tomorrow. We must all protect each other, as we did today."

  "We were lucky. We were damned lucky." Renie did not want to think of the chariot wheel that had almost ground !Xabbu into the dirt or the spear that had hissed over her own shoulder, a hand's span from her face. It was terrifying to remember how close she had come to losing him. She ached to take him in her arms, to build something t
ogether that would shield them even for just a little while against what had been and what was to come.

  "What . . . what's flying?" T4b sat up, a dim shape made even stranger by the black hair straggling across his face like a mourning veil. "Is it starting again?"

  "No." Renie tried to smile, but gave up. "Not yet. We've got a few hours."

  T4b brushed his hair aside. There was a gaunt intensity to his face that had appeared with the struggle atop Weeping Baron's Tower and which had not left since. "Look, why don't we just lock off and fly. Just . . . get out." He produced the smile that Renie had not been able to summon; seeing the effect, she was glad she had failed. "Yeah, yeah," he said, "it's wild funny—the guy in the Manstroid suit wants to run away. But I . . . I don't care, seen? Never thought it would be like this, me. Never would have. . . ."

  Renie wanted to offer him some comfort—fear and unhappiness almost throbbed off him—but as she leaned over to touch his arm, he shrank away. "We're all terrified, and we're doing our best not to get killed," she said. "I won't stop you from doing anything you want, Javier—this isn't the military. You didn't enlist. But I believe we're here for a purpose, and I can't run away if there's a chance to fulfill that purpose."

  Jesus Mercy, she thought. I sound like some kind of army chaplain.

  T4b was silent for a moment. Somewhere, an owl hooted, a sound so nature-documentary normal that it was only as T4b began to speak again that Renie realized it was the first noise they had heard other than their own in hours. They were on the far rim of the Trojan bivouac, and although she felt sure the feelings of dread and misery were similar all through the army of Troy, not to mention among their Greek enemies, the nearest Trojan campfire was a long stone's throw away, too far for normal conversation to drift to Renie's ears. They might almost have been alone beneath the blazing stars.