Mountain of Black Glass (48 page)

“I'm going to go talk to Daddy,” she said at last.

Her mother looked at her carefully, like she did when Christabel said she didn't feel good. “He may just want some quiet time, sugar.”

“I want to talk to him.” She wanted to cry, but she couldn't let it show. “I just want to talk to him, Mommy.”

So suddenly it almost startled Christabel into a squeak, her mother kneeled down and put her arms around her. “Okay, honey. Go knock on the door and ask him. You know how much we love you, don't you?”

“Sure.” Christabel did not feel very good, and hearing about how her mommy and daddy loved her made it worse. She slipped out of her mother's arms and walked down the hall to the study.

It was only because she knew that just a few minutes were left that she managed to knock on the door, because it felt like she was standing outside a dragon's cave or a haunted house. “Daddy, can I come in?”

For a second he didn't say anything. When he did, he sounded tired. “Sure, baby.”

He had poured himself a drink out of the are-you-going-to-have-one-this-early-Mike? bottle, and was sitting in his spinny chair with reports open all over the wallscreen. He looked up, and although he had started shaving again, something about his face seemed old and sad and made her heart hurt even more. “What is it? Dinner?”

Christabel took a deep breath. She tried to remember the words to a prayer, to pray that Mister Sellars had really sent her the message, that it wasn't just from the awful boy with the bad teeth, but all she could think of was
Now I lay me down to sleep,
which didn't seem right.

“Daddy, do . . . do you still have my Storybook Sunglasses?”

He turned slowly to face her. “Yes, I do, Christabel.”

“Here?”

He nodded.

“Then . . . then . . .” It was hard to talk. “Then you have to put them on. Because the man who gave them to me wants to talk to you.” She looked at the corner of the wallscreen, which said 18:29 in white numbers. “Right now.”

Daddy's eyes went wide and he started to ask something, then he looked at the time and took his keys out of his coat pocket. He unlocked the bottom drawer of the desk and took out the black plastic Storybook Sunglasses. “I'm supposed to put them on . . . ?” he asked her. His voice was very quiet, but there was something in it that really scared her, something hard and cold, like a knife under a bedsheet.

It was even worse when they were on, because she couldn't see his eyes anymore. He looked like a blind man. He looked like a bug, even, or a space alien.

“I don't know what . . .” he started to say, then stopped. For a moment, there was silence.
“Who are you?”
he said at last, his voice angry and hissing like a snake, and because he was still facing her, for a moment Christabel had the terrible idea that he was asking
her
.

After a moment he said, in a different voice, “Christabel, you'd better leave the room.”

“But, Daddy . . . !”

“You heard me. Tell your mother I'm going be a little late working on something.”

Christabel got up and moved toward the doorway. Everything was quiet for few seconds, but as she closed the door she heard her father say, “All right, then. Show me.”

 

He didn't come out.

An hour went by. Christabel's mother, who at first had been angry in a making-fun-of-it-way, began to get really angry. She went and knocked at the office door but Daddy didn't answer. “Mike?” she called, and rattled the door, but it was locked. “Christabel, what was he doing in there?”

She shook her head. She was afraid that if she said anything, she'd start crying so hard she'd never stop. She knew what had happened—the terrible boy had done something to the sunglasses. He'd killed Christabel's daddy. She lay facedown on the couch and buried her head in the pillow while her mother walked back and forth across the living room.

“This is ridiculous,” Mommy was saying. She went back to the door. “Mike! Come on, you're scaring me!” There was a terrible sound in her voice, small but getting bigger, like a piece of paper tearing at the edge that would soon rip all the way through. “Mike!”

Now Christabel did begin to cry, soaking the pillow. She didn't want to look up. She wanted it all to go away. It was all her fault. All her fault . . .

“Mike! Open this door right now, or I'm calling the MPs out!” Mommy was kicking the door now, great thumps like a giant's footsteps which only made Christabel cry harder. “Please, Mike, please—Oh, God, Mike . . . !”

Something clicked. Her mother stopped shouting and kicking. Everything was quiet.

Christabel sat up, rubbing her eyes, feeling tears and snot running down her lip. Daddy was standing in the open doorway of the study, the sunglasses in his hand. He was as pale as an egg. He looked like he had just come back from outer space, or from monster land.

“I'm . . . I'm sorry,” he said. “I've been . . .” He looked down at the sunglasses. “I've been . . . doing something.”

“Mike, what's going on?” Christabel's mother said. She sounded only a little less scared.

“I'll tell you later.” He looked at her, then at Christabel, but there was no anger or anything like it on his face. He rubbed his eyes.

“But what . . . what about dinner?” Mommy laughed, sharp and high. “The chicken is dry as a bone.”

“You know,” he said, “suddenly I'm not very hungry.”

R
enie was wrestling with an odd puzzle, one that frustrated her programmer's mind as much as it engaged it.

They were taking their leave of the Library Brothers after a brief and restless night's sleep and an early breakfast in the Brothers' Refectory. Renie could not help wondering a little at the generosity the monks had shown them—something that went beyond mere reparation for their own accidental role in Martine's disappearance. It seemed unusual that coded creations should so thoroughly attempt to do good for strangers, and Renie was wondering how such a thing could come to be.

It's not like anger or something, where you could just program a hostile reaction to any deviation from normal routine,
she thought as she clasped the abbot's hand in farewell. Brother Epistulus Tertius, standing beside him, actually looked a little teary, although Renie had no doubt he was just as happy to stay home.
I mean, it's hard enough simply to define kindness, let alone try to make it part of a response pattern on any level beyond stock phrases.

The abbot leaned toward her and said quietly, “You will take good care of Brother Factum Quintus for us, won't you? He's quite brilliant, but a little . . . childlike in some ways. We would hate for anything to happen to him.”

“We will treat him as one of us, Primoris.”

The abbot nodded and let go of her hand. The others finished up their good-byes, all of Renie's party clearly a bit mournful except for !Xabbu, who was doing his best to appear nothing more than a monkey. The kindness of the Library Brothers was one of the few examples of genuine warmth they had encountered, and it was hard to leave it behind even though Martine's need took precedence over everything. Only gawky Factum Quintus seemed distracted, humming to himself as he paced back and forth, clearly anxious to be moving.

Genuine warmth—there I go again. How can it be genuine? These people aren't really people at all—they're code.
She frowned. A neural net kept trying different strategies until it found successful ones, but how could you even make sure that kindness would
be
a successful strategy? Sometimes kindness was rewarded with treachery, just as the Quan Li thing had taken advantage of the Brothers' hospitality.

For the first time Renie had a genuine urge to get her hands on the inner workings of the Grail network, this so-called Otherland. She had presumed that what the Brotherhood had made with all its money and resources was simply a larger and more complex version of a normal simulation network—more details, more choices, more complicated “histories” for the created objects. But she was beginning to wonder if there wasn't something larger and stranger going on.

Wasn't there something in complexity theory about this kind of system?
She watched golden dust drift through a shaft of light, struggling to remember her long-ago classes.
Not just that they can go bad, like Sick Building Syndrome, but that they can evolve, too—get more and more complex and turbulent, then take a sudden leap into a different state . . . ?

“Renie?” Florimel could not entirely keep the sharpness of impatience out of her voice, but by her standards, it was a friendly inquiry. “Are you going to stand there staring at the bookshelves all morning?”

“Oh. Right. Let's get going.”

She would put it away until later, but she promised herself she would not forget.

 

The Library Market, which seemed to be a permanent fixture, was in full swing; it took them the better part of an hour to get away from the worst of the crowds. Renie could not shake the feeling that they were being watched, although she found it hard to believe that the Quan Li thing, its disguise now revealed, would risk approaching them again so soon. Still, her flesh crawled as though they were being observed by some all-seeing eye. In Martine's absence, she would have liked to discuss it with !Xabbu, but her friend was still maintaining his pose as a simple animal and there was no chance for a quiet escape down a side passage for a conversation: Factum Quintus was setting a brisk pace, despite an almost nonstop monologue about the various architectural sights and the materials and methods used to create them.

The company returned to the line of the river and followed it for no little time, through settlements both poor and prosperous. As minutes became an hour, then more, Renie began to have doubts about their guide. It seemed unlikely that the person masquerading as Quan Li would have carried her so far from the scene of the kidnapping.

Factum Quintus stopped the procession. “This must seem a long journey,” he told them, as if he had read her thoughts. “You see, it is simpler from our level to climb to the Campanile of the Six Pigs. Easier, but farther, yes. We can come back along the upper stories to the Spire Forest. So we are going to the farthest site first. The Campanile is not without interest in itself, though, so . . .”

“A friend of ours is in terrible danger.” Renie could not bear another lecture on masonry at the moment. “We don't care about what's interesting. Every hour may be critical.”

He raised a long, thin hand. “Of course. Critical. I am just apprising you of my method.” He turned with bony dignity and set out along the riverwalk again.

Florimel dropped back from where she had been walking between T4b and Emily. “I am glad you said what you did, Renie. I am relieved to know we are not just accompanying this monk on a walking tour.”

Renie shook her head. “We haven't even thought about what we'll do when we find her.
If
we find her.”

“It is bad to worry too much without information. We should wait until we see the situation.”

“You're right. It's just . . . I'm on edge. I keep thinking somebody's watching us.”

“I have the same feeling.” Florimel grinned sourly at Renie's expression. “It is not surprising, really. I think you and I are much alike—always we worry about everyone else. Always it is our responsibility to make sure others are safe.” She reached out and gave Renie a tentative pat on the arm, a strangely awkward gesture. “Perhaps that's why we have had conflict. It is hard for two people both accustomed to the same position to sort things out.”