Mountain of Black Glass

  What was the Otherland system? Was it an ALife, or some even stranger and more revolutionary form of flexible operating system, the product of some accidental discovery in the code-mines of Telemorphix? Dread knew this was one way in which he was still not the Old Man's equal—he had power, but he lacked knowledge. Perhaps there was a way to hack the operating system itself, cause trouble for the Old Man there? If true, he might be able to remove the protections of the Old Man and his Grail Brotherhood cronies—make them just as vulnerable to real harm inside the system as Sellars' recruits were. If so, he might accomplish his goal much more quickly, not to mention save himself a great deal of risk later on.

  Yeah, but—confident, cocky, lazy, dead, he warned himself. It's a crazy system. You don't want to let one victory go to your head, mate.

  Still, if he was careful, it couldn't hurt to have a bit of a look.

  He opened himself to the machineries of Otherland and began to explore. Primed by Dulcie's explanation of the likely architecture, and with her prepared reports instantly available, he pushed at this interesting structure and pulled at that one, probing deeper wherever he found resistance, brandishing his stolen access permission like the badge of a Papal Inquisitor to penetrate level after level of security. He had gained the inner circle, therefore all that had happened before was meaningless: if the security system had considered him a possible intruder earlier, that was negated now by the simple fact of his penetration—he was in, therefore he deserved to be in. Machines did not hold grudges. From his privileged position, he began to unravel the complexities of the platform, looking for the central place from which the orders were issued.

  He found it at last, an unimaginably complex core that had no obvious source within the system—the nerve stem, as he guessed, by which the operating system controlled the entire network and its miraculous machinery. He had one instant in which to gloat, and then something—something—came down on him like an arctic wind.

  Visual input, auditory input, sight and sound, both abruptly disappeared. Even his own volition seemed smothered in all-enveloping, frigid blackness. Dread flailed without connection or purchase. In a far distant place a body that had once been his, its physical responses suppressed by the telematic jack connection, struggled to scream but could not.

  Something blasted into his brain, changing the blackness in a microsecond to flaring white, all-devouring light. He felt his true self slipping away, his thoughts burning, shriveling like ants in a blue-white gas flame.

  It was not hiding any longer, he dimly realized, this something at the heart of the network. He had stuck his fingers into it, bruised it, mocked it, and now it had him.

  And it hated him.

  The bandaged hand extended, indicating the long, low hallway and the black walls incised with carvings that glittered in the light of the dying sun. "And this is the Passage of the Way of Shu, open to the air. The procession will begin here." The mummified figure turned, deathmask face wooden but the voice tinctured with irritation. "I am taking the time to give you a private tour, Wells," complained Osiris, known elsewhere as Felix Jongleur. "Now, of all days, my time is very valuable. I'm sure yours is as well. YOU could at least pretend to be interested."

  The second mummified figure turned from the wall carvings. The yellow face of the god Ptah showed a very tiny smile. "I am sorry, Jongleur. I was just . . . thinking. But this is all very impressive—a suitable location for the Ceremony."

  Felix Jongleur made a noise of disgust. "You haven't even seen a fraction of it. This is a favor, you know. I thought you might like to walk through the Ceremony with me, to prevent surprises later on. Let me be frank. We are unlikely allies, and I want you to understand everything that will happen—we don't want to confuse things by suppositions of treachery." He allowed himself a hard little smile of his own. "Well, except for the properly prudent amount, of course."

  "Of course."

  Jongleur floated on, his feet a hand's span above the polished silver of the floor. Wells chose to walk on the ground, a bit of homespun stubbornness that amused Jongleur mightily. "This is the Passage of Ra," he said as they moved through the second hall, wider than the first and pillared in shining electrum. "The farthest place the sun's light will reach. And this corridor, where the images of the gods stand in shrines along the walls, is named The Hall Wherein They Rest. You will notice that your own likeness is no less flattering than any of the others, Wells. I have never been a petty man."

  "Of course not."

  Jongleur led him across the great vertical shaft known as the Hall of Hindering—Wells was forced to levitate himself briefly until he reached the far side—and up the vast ceremonial corridor simply called The Ramp, whose wall paintings glowed not just with life but with music and subtle movement, the one offense Jongleur had allowed against perfect classicism, since Ricardo Klement had begged to be allowed to make the last stage of the procession "more dramatic." Even the Lord of Life and Death had to admit the results were surprisingly subtle and tasteful—the upward-slanting corridor seemed open on both sides to a beautiful, stylized Garden of the Afterlife, where the gods disported gracefully in the shade of sycamore trees, singing and eating dates and other fruit brought to them by nubile servants.

  "You really like this stuff, don't you?" Wells said suddenly.

  Jongleur, who had forgotten where he was, lost in the dream of his own imminent conquest of the enemy he had fought so long—an enemy far older and more formidable than Robert Wells—paused for a moment, wishing to regain the measured tone with which he had begun the tour. "Yes. I do like 'this stuff,' Wells. More than that, it is as necessary to me as the blood—or what passes for blood, these days, chemicals whose names I no longer remember—which keeps my physical body alive."

  As Jongleur slid above the ramp, smooth as a maglev train, Wells found himself beginning to hurry to keep up. Faced with a choice of indignities, he chose the lesser of the two; within moments he had floated abreast of the older man. "Necessary, you said?"

  "Yes. Because the world is too small."

  A long moment's silence passed. The painted tomb scenes slid past on either side and light rippled across the two gods' faces, the butterskin yellow and the pale green that was midway between putrescence and vegetative rebirth.

  "Explain, please."

  "The world is too small for belief, Wells. You and I, we have taken the raw stuff of chaos and out of it we have built empires. Either of us wields more power than any pharaoh ever did, more than any satrap of Babylon or emperor of Rome. We have all the powers they had. We lift a finger or blink an eye and men die. At our word, navies sail, armies march, countries are conquered, even if sometimes those countries do not realize it. But we have powers the ancients did not. We drain oceans. We raise mountains where no mountain stood. We populate the sky with our own constructed stars." He paused for a moment, as though his attention had been caught by some detail in the passing display. "Soon we will do what even the greatest monarch of Egypt only hoped might happen, but did not truly believe—for if he believed, why did the great king spend so much money and time building monuments to his own immortality and badgering the gods to protect his soul? The pharaoh, methinks, doth protest too much." A bleak, wintry grin. "In a matter of hours, we will in truth become gods. Measurably, reliably, scientifically. We will live forever. Our power will never die." He nodded slowly, but did not continue.

  "Forgive me, Jongleur, but I don't quite understand. . . ." said Wells at last.

  "What? Ah. I am saying that if you do not live like a god, you will never be able truly to be a god. It requires bravery and intellect and immense resources to spit in the face of Mister . . . of Death. But I think it also requires something more. Panache, perhaps is the word. Style. To put oneself on an equal footing with the universe, and say 'I am the measure. There is no other.' Do you understand?"

  For a passage of some little time, Wells said nothing. The Ramp flowed away beneath them, having at some point i
mperceptibly transmuted into faceted diamond, so that their own shapes were multiplied beneath them a millionfold.

  "You . . . you are very eloquent," Wells said at last. "You give me much to think about."

  Jongleur inclined his massive head and crossed his arms on his chest as they rose from the end of the ramp and into the final chamber. They hovered before an immense gilded expanse, walls and floor and ceiling all polished and gleaming like the sun, although only one of Ra's vertical rays spiked down through a hole in the roof hundreds of meters above them. A wide circle of green marble chairs so magnificent that even the word "thrones" seemed insufficient stood around the pool of light at the room's center, glittering like some jeweled desk set replica of Stonehenge. On a raised platform beside each seat lay a huge and ornately decorated sarcophagus of shining, blood-colored stone.

  "This is where the Ceremony will take place," Jongleur said solemnly. "It is called the House of Gold. In the tomb of a mere pharaoh, in this spot where he at last became one with the gods, it would be a place little larger than a parlor room. I thought this more in keeping with the number and nature of our own ritual."

  The pair stood for a long time in silence, watching as the single ray of sunlight, veiled and unveiled by the passing of unseen clouds, brought as much change to the vast golden room as a stone dropped into a still pond.

  "It is . . . astonishing," Wells said at last.

  "It is meant to be so." Jongleur nodded, satisfied. "I am pleased to say that Jiun Bhao had the same reaction." He rubbed his hands together, fraying the ancient bandages between the fingers. "When the time comes, we will all raise our cups in a toast. Yours and mine—and those of the two others, of course—will not, metaphorically speaking, contain that which is given to the rest of our Brotherhood. You may drink it or not—I am sure you can prove to your own satisfaction that I have no trick up my sleeve—but if you and Yacoubian and Jiun and I are not seen doing what all the rest are doing, questions will be asked. I will make sure that in all other ways we appear to go through the same experience." He turned to the other bandaged god. "Speaking of your colleague Yacoubian, where is he? I would have thought with his suspicious nature he would have been first in line to see what I've shown you today."

  Wells did not seem bothered by the question. "Since the four of us will be completing the Ceremony later, Daniel felt that he could put some time into a pressing matter having to do with his own work—something that he wants to have wrapped up before taking the Grail. He told me this morning that he has it in hand now, and is certain that all will be resolved shortly after the Ceremony, and he will then be completely free."

  "Good." Jongleur could not say it with much conviction. "In any case, if you will excuse me now, I have some matters of my own that need tying up."

  "One last question. The rest of the Brotherhood are not trusting types, as you know. Surely some of them must have worried that you or I might do something just like this. . . ?"

  Jongleur shook his head. "There is no benefit to treachery, not really—you and I are simply waiting out the first version of the Ceremony. We could even make the case that we should do this for their own good, so that those who know the system can solve any problems that might crop up."

  "Sounds good, but I can't see someone like Ymona Dedoblanco being convinced."

  Jongleur chuckled sourly. "No, nor can I. But even the most suspicious of the Brotherhood should know they have nothing to fear. With all of us diverting huge percentages of our assets into this system, we have just managed to keep it going, and even when we become immortal ourselves, there will be much more expensive work to be done before we can truly make the system permanent and indestructible. We need the whole Brotherhood alive within the network but still in control of their resources in the outside world. Unless they are idiots, they must realize that."

  "Wealth and power don't prevent someone from being an idiot—present company excepted, of course." Wells showed a yellow smile. "I'll let you get back to your other business. You've been very generous." He made a tiny bow, only his head moving; it was not, as far as Jongleur could tell, part of the etiquette circuitry of Abydos-That-Was. "Perhaps you and I will find in the future that working together is of more benefit than working . . . at occasional cross-purposes."

  Jongleur's gesture was magisterial. "We will have plenty of time to examine all possibilities. Farewell."

  In the next moment, Ptah's sly smile and quietly penetrating eyes were gone.

  Jongleur bathed in the white nothingness of his most neutral environment, trying to regain his equilibrium. It had been terribly hard, after the horror that had been visited on him in the boudoir of Isis, to re-enter his once beloved Egyptian realm, but he could not let squeamishness stand between him and the Grail.

  He had wondered several times whether Wells had known of the treachery, might even have instituted it, and had found himself chewing over the man's words for hidden meaning the way a Taoist monk studied the ineffability of the Way, but with no success. If Wells had penetrated Jongleur's own private realms so thoroughly, all the more reason to keep him neutralized, wondering what Jongleur might intend—it was always easier to watch over an ally than an enemy. And right until the moment that he himself had tasted the Grail. Jongleur needed the American's insurance against the vagaries of the Other.

  Now it was all coming to a climax. Decades of waiting, far more than a century's worth of fear, to be faced and slain in a single night. Events could yet conspire to thwart him, but it would not be for lack of years of obsessively careful planning, not to mention a gambler's instinct that had dropped entire nations into his grasp, and which had left him the single oldest human being on Planet Earth. He let his thoughts cool, instructed the expensive medical plumbing that had long ago replaced his heart lo slow its minute pulsations. All was in place. Now he need only wait for the Ceremony. He might even sleep a little.

  One more time the sun would rise outside his huge glass tower on Lake Borgne, and one more time Felix Jongleur would wake into the burden of his ancient, ancient flesh. Then the next dawn to which he would open his eyes would be the measureless light of Eternity.

  There was nothing left in the entire deserted universe but Dread and the thing.

  Through emptiness that was all light and no light, it closed on him. Numbed, helpless, he felt it reach into him and pull him open, so that everything that made him an entity seemed to fall away before the assault. As though flicking switches, it neutralized the governors for his autonomic nervous system, and the vague notion that was his distant body began to break down: his heart started to race, his breathing to grow shallow, and the spasms of seizure took hold of him. Numbness gave way to pain as his body began to tear itself to bits—a searing agony so great that it overwhelmed the telematic buffers, as though every single nerve he had was being pulled writhing from its sheath.

  But it was the pain that saved him. Of all human creatures, few knew it better than the man who had been Johnny Wulgaru. It had been his true mother, his first teacher, at times his one constant, and thus his only real friend. From his infancy pain had shaped him, made him sharp and remorseless, kept him as quiveringly alert as a lidless eye. Pain defined him.

  And now, in the nothingness that had engulfed him, it was something familiar he could grab—a lifeline. He seized the pain even as it savaged him. As he had done through countless childhood beatings, through the pack-cruelties of bigger children in the institutions, he curled up behind pain as though it were a shield, hiding his sense of self from destruction, riding out the assault. But it would not be a long respite.

  Reduced to a tiny point of fraying consciousness, he tried desperately to understand.

  Whatever the attacking thing was, it was part of the Otherland system. The Grail Brotherhood would not build anything so important without being able to control it, so that meant somewhere there must exist the means of control.

  Hero, he thought, rallying himself, and the image brought an
eruption of fury from the center of his being. Can't do this to me. The thing battered him, ripping at the core that was his consciousness, using his treacherous meat body against him, but Dread fed on his own rage. He knew how to take a beating, knew how to protect that which was himself, the single greedy point that could never be cowed, which sustained itself against all damage by waiting to leap free and devour everything. He made himself small and hard as a collapsing star, condensed his twist to an almost infinitely narrow spike of will, and let his consciousness slide out along its length.

  The thing was all around him, but he suddenly realized the thing itself was somehow bound. He knew these must be the Brotherhood's controls, the mechanical safeguards that could keep such a complicated and responsive intelligence behind walls; if he could find them, he could use them. He reached out, his special gift piggybacked on the investigative algorithms he had triggered in his assault on the system, and let the billions of node-points that made up the system matrix flash past, knowing he had no time for conscious examination.

  The twist was all he had left. He let the complexity of the network's inner workings flash past him as he groped for the one thing he needed.

  It was no use. Somewhere his body was in full clonic contraction, his lungs frozen, his heart beating so desperately that it had lurched into stumbling arrhythmia. His brain was all but out of oxygen. The blazing, murderous point that was Dread, a single dwarf star in a vast empty universe, was about to collapse entirely.

  Then he found it. He was far gone, and his understanding of these systems was limited by his own disinterest even at the best of times—did a dancer need a degree in gravitational science?—but as he stopped the scan and probed deep into the matrix, he knew that he had located the structures which bounded and restrained the Otherland operating system. Randomly, desperately, he reached out and seized the first one he could distinguish, then twisted it.