Reality Matrix Effect (9781310151330) (36 page)

Rayna stared dumbly at the blank
screen for several seconds. It was done now—for better or worse.
Questions and doubts bombarded her in a vicious attack. She made
her way to her bed and lay down. She stared, unseeing, at the
ceiling, tormented by fuzzy-edged thoughts of Keith, of Henry
Tauber, of Althea Milgrom. Light and shadow formed abstract images
to taunt her as her mind tried to make sense of what was happening.
Was it minutes or hours that she remained in that halfway state
between wakefulness and dreaming?  She knew only that her
eyelids had grown heavy, much too heavy to keep open. And so she
surrendered to exhaustion, falling at last into a troubled
sleep.

 
She is walking along a country
road lined with wildflowers of red and yellow and orange. She has
no idea where she is, but she’s sure this is where she wants to be.
The air, crisp and cool against her bare arms, tastes fresh and
clean, conjuring up thoughts of snow-covered mountains. As if cued
by her, hexagons of icy lace begin to drift down out of a clear,
blue sky. She extends her tongue and catches a few snowflakes,
relishing the moment like a six-year-old discovering brightly
wrapped packages on Christmas morning.

I wonder why I haven’t walked here
before,
Rayna asks herself as the ground begins to whiten.
Despite the sudden drop in temperature, she feels no chill. She is
warmed by an uncanny sense of well-being.

She approaches a stand of trees. How
she loves the scent of the woods!  Passing the towering
sequoias that guard its perimeter, she makes her way, deep
into a forest wonderland.

Green!  It isn’t a color; it’s a
symphony!  There, in the shadows, it has a bluish-black cast.
Here, before her, leaves like bright emeralds. There, to her right,
foliage of pale jade. She walks onward, the thickening growth
forming a dim cavern as the sun winks at her through the treetops
above.

She comes upon a clearing. A
shimmering beam angles its way through surrounding branches to
illuminate the open ground like a divine spotlight. As she stands
within that circle of brightness, a shiver spreads through her
body. It is a shiver not only of cold but of fear, for she now
realizes that she has lost her way. She crosses the clearing, pulse
loud in her ears. Suddenly, a huge face looms up before
her.

The face hovers, disembodied, and
studies her in heart-stopping silence. It’s a familiar face. An
imposing face. Al Frederick’s face.

Rayna aims her footsteps along a path
to one side of the enormous visage, but as she nears the trees, the
face drifts into position to block her progress. She reorients
herself and starts forward again, but the face anticipates her and
moves into her way once more.

“Stop that!” she yells. “Let me
pass!”

The giant eyes grow soft and warm, and
the mouth twitches briefly into a slight smile. The features dim to
transparency, revealing a carefully prepared route leading out of
the woods. “Follow me,” the face manages to say without words. “I
will show you the way.”

Reluctantly, Rayna forces herself to
pass through the suspended image of Al Frederick and onto the path
beyond. Gradually, the trees along the way thin until she finally
emerges from the wood.

To her great surprise, she finds
herself before Keith’s building. She glances up toward his
third-floor apartment but is distracted by a most unusual
sight:  There, floating above the building on a blanket of
pastel-colored clouds, is a large, ornate palace, its turrets
piercing the firmament like skyrockets.

 
Rayna squints against the sun
and tries to study the amazing sight as passersby jostle her on the
street. “Look!” she says, pointing heavenward. “What do you make of
that?”

But the others only stare at her and
continue on their way, some with a pitying shake of the head. It is
then that she realizes that the palace above her is not alone. They
are everywhere—castles ringing the entire Earth. How she knows
this, she isn’t quite sure, but know it she does, just as certainly
as if she were gazing down upon the scene from the celestial
sphere.

And then, all at once, she is, indeed,
looking down—looking down on the very spot she just occupied—for,
gowned as a fairy-tale princess, she now stands at the castle’s
battlements. Next to her, Keith smiles in his royal finery and
waves as if to a throng of adoring subjects. Then he takes her in
his arms and kisses her.

Willingly at first, she kisses him
back. But moments later, his touch grows rough, his manner,
possessive. She pushes him away and stares, horrified, at his face.
His eyes are still blue, but not the warm, expressive blue she has
come to know so well. This is a soulless blue, hard and cold as
steel. Gone, too, are the familiar curls of his light-brown hair,
replaced by a close-cropped military haircut. And part of his right
earlobe is missing.

She gasps and turns from him, looking
about feverishly for some kind of help. The nearest castles must be
miles away, she reasons, and yet she can see the people who stand
at their ramparts as if they were only a few feet distant. To her
right, she notices, are Vince Barnard and another man she doesn’t
recognize.

Rayna’s companion—she realizes it is
no longer Keith—gestures to the next castle. Almost immediately,
soldiers rush out to grab the man with Barnard. After a struggle,
they lift the man up and fling him from the parapet to the Earth
below.

Rayna shrieks and covers her eyes. Yet
her curiosity ultimately forces her to look in sick fascination
while a body with splayed limbs plunges downward into infinity, the
form growing smaller and smaller until it becomes a tiny white dot,
stark against a background of blackness.

Looking up, she catches sight of
another castle. Althea Milgrom stands at the battlements, straight
and strong, with Derek Marsden at her side. Milgrom smiles and
waves to Rayna, who is dumfounded by the presence of the second man
in Milgrom’s castle. Keith!  She glances again at the figure
beside her, now clothed in the uniform of a Merchant Fleet
lieutenant. More confused than ever, she looks back toward Milgrom.
As she watches, a dark shadow falls upon Milgrom’s
castle.

Rayna turns to question the man next
to her, but he is gone. She is perplexed but not especially
disturbed by this development, as her missing companion has made
her increasingly uneasy. Meanwhile, the ominous shadow spreads, and
Rayna searches the sky for its source. From the corner of her eye,
she detects a movement in Barnard’s castle and swivels her head in
that direction. The lieutenant is next to Barnard now, gesturing
wildly as the shadow deepens.

“I have to stop this!” Rayna says
aloud. But what to do?  Her body begins to tremble, and she
squeezes her eyelids shut in a desperate attempt to block the tears
of frustration that she knows will come. Without warning, a
comforting arm encircles her. She opens startled eyes to find Keith
once more beside her.

“It’s up to us,” he tells her. “We
must hold back the shadow.”

“But how...?”

Keith shakes his head
sadly.

“Look!” Rayna shouts. From Milgrom’s
castle, a beacon of light cuts through the gloom. “Maybe they can
help.”

But before Keith or Rayna can act, the
shadow is on them. It is a heavy shadow, thick with power, and
where the edge of it touches Rayna’s skin, it burns with an
unnatural cold too intense to resist.

Then she sees the ship. It is an
immense, living construct that seems to grow larger as she watches,
and as it grows, the shadow grows as well. She can see right
through the massive, evil thing, and there, at the controls, stands
the lieutenant.

Rayna turns to Keith for
encouragement, but he is frozen, imprisoned by the shadow. She
looks toward Milgrom’s castle but can no longer make it out in the
darkness. Meanwhile, the part of the shadow that touches her
continues to grow denser and darker and colder by the
moment.... 

Then, once again, the huge countenance
of Al Frederick appears before her. It traverses the murky cloud,
and as the face crosses the umbra, the darkness thins and
dissipates. At last, the face passes over the ship
itself.

“Follow me,” Al Frederick’s eyes tell
her. Another oversized face appears next to his. It is a female
face—a face with large, hazel eyes and a small, straight nose. It
is Rayna’s face.

“I will show you the way,” Al
Frederick’s image says in her mind. And then the great faces merge.
An instant later, the malevolent ship shatters into a myriad of
tiny black specks, the shards flying harmlessly off into an
infinite void.

Rayna
rubbed her hands together and tried to relax. Milgrom would
definitely be here. They’d assured her of that. The director of the
Consolidated Data Network was tending to the latest CDN crisis
(there seemed to be more of those than ever lately), but she would
be here within the hour.

Rayna knew she could wait at home, of
course. The proliferation of Trans-Mat facilities made that sort of
thing easy enough nowadays. You just waited for your business
appointment at some agreed-upon coordinates, and when they were
ready for you, they’d let you know, and Trans-Mat would get you
there in seconds.

But Rayna preferred it right here in
the small lobby of the CDN’s Los Angeles-based Western
headquarters. Last night had been another rough one, as random
scenes from the previous night’s dream alternated with maddening
periods of insomnia. If she waited for Milgrom at home, she might
fall asleep—asleep and into another nightmare.

She never used to remember her dreams,
but this one was impossible to forget. She wished she could forget
it. It was so...vivid. When she considered it logically, the
content of the dream couldn’t account for its traumatic impact.
Yet, as she closed her eyes and tried to think of other things, the
shimmering image of the castles and the hungry, dark shadow haunted
her with an ominous foreboding.

Ever since she woke from the dream at
four-thirty yesterday morning, body shaking and soaked with
perspiration, she had tried to find some sense in it. That there
was sense to be found, she had no doubt. Dreams were like that.
They told you things you already knew but you didn’t know you
knew.

Maybe the ghost of my dear departed
grandfather is going to save the day in death as he did in life.
She grunted at the notion and sipped coffee from a mug emblazoned
with the CDN’s blue-and-gold emblem. At least I’ve been making good
use of my time.

She’d spent most of the last day and a
half studying Al Frederick’s papers and Alec Zorne’s book. Too bad
old Azey didn’t write more for us ordinary folk, she thought. It
was all so confusing. And yet, while the details of reality-matrix
physics made her mind shudder, something seemed to connect. She
felt, rather than understood, it.

“Miss Kingman!” 

Wheeling into the room, Althea Milgrom
greeted her warmly. “I’m so pleased you could come!  Sorry
about the delay. We have another communication from the colonies,
and I....”  She broke off and rolled her eyes in self-rebuke.
“Excuse me. I promised myself I’d shut all this out of my mind for
a while at least and simply enjoy your company.”

Rayna shook Milgrom’s extended hand.
“What’s the problem with the colonies?”

“Oh, we don’t want to talk about that,
now. Let me double-check the arrangements, and we can start the
tour.”   She began tapping some keys on a retractable
mini-terminal built into her wheelchair.

Rayna reached out and laid a hand over
the CDN director’s busy fingers. “I didn’t really come here for the
tour, Mrs. Milgrom. I have some information that may be of interest
to you.”

Milgrom’s keen eyes studied Rayna in
awkward silence. Then, the older woman led the way into a richly
paneled office, guiding her wheelchair into position behind a small
writing desk.

“Pull up a seat.”

Rayna helped herself to one of two
generously upholstered chairs across from the desk, then gestured
toward the adjacent computer facilities. “Looks like pretty
sophisticated stuff.”

“Ah, yes. My command center, I call
it. Not that I can really control the whole CDN from here. Still,
it’s more than meets the eye.” 

“Oh?”

Milgrom swept the room with an arm.
“Most of the system’s components are behind the walls—not only in
this room but in the lobby and all the other offices throughout the
building. Pseudowalls. We can’t really wall in the electronics. We
need easy access to them.”

“I’d never have guessed.”

“Unless you know what you’re looking
for, the only way to be sure where the real paneling leaves off and
the pseudowalls begin is by touch. Your hand will go right through
a pseudowall, of course. A lot of public buildings use pseudowall
technology now. You’ve probably seen it without realizing it. The
clue is the pseudowall generator tracks on the ceiling.
See?” 

Rayna’s gaze followed Milgrom’s
pointing finger, but it was several seconds before she managed to
identify the thin, recessed slits through which holographic
projectors generated the false wall images.