Mountain of Black Glass (113 page)

“Paul, can you go with Orlando and Fredericks while we get the rest moving?” Renie asked. Paul nodded and stood, swiveling his head to try to remove the unpleasant physical memory of T4b's fingers around his throat. The young man still watched him, dark hair sweat-curled across his forehead, his face a mask that revealed nothing.

Paul caught up with Orlando and Fredericks within moments, since Orlando's stride, though determined, was slow and awkward; he also seemed to be having trouble breathing. The others soon caught up as well, and they made their deliberate way up the curving mountain path together.

The trail was no natural feature, Paul realized, although it might have been more surprising if it had been. Instead, it was simply a crudely functional walkway etched in the side of the mountain, a spiraling vertical slice that shaved the mountain's edge and a perpendicular horizontal one on which to walk. The path was rougher than the rest of the stone, scored as though the titan blade which had carved it had a serrated edge, which was a very good thing: Paul did not want to think what it would be like to climb this precarious track if its surface had been the same glaze-smooth black volcanic stone as the mountain itself. As it was, and especially when the way narrowed, he was pathetically grateful that there was no wind: it was already hard enough just to keep Orlando and Martine to the middle of the path. Paradoxically for someone who had been so cavalier about the edge while strangling Paul, T4b seemed nervous about being in such a high place, and insisted on walking as far to the inside as possible.

As it turned out, they did not have far to go. Before an hour had passed, they made their slow way around the edge of an outcropping and found that the path now curved sharply inward toward the mountain itself, passing between the outcropping beside them and another huge peak rather than continuing along the perimeter.

Paul was glad to leave the limitless drop behind them, but it was only when they finally reached safer ground, the path now walled by stone on both sides, that he became aware of how hard his heart had been beating, and for how long.

Although the farthest heights of the mountain still stretched above them, they passed quickly between the two peaks to find more crowded beyond, a forest of high pinnacles. Although they could not see its source past the intervening spires, a soft vermilion light bathed the sides of these black peaks, as though somewhere ahead of them lay a lake of fire. Paul could not help remembering Martine's comment about a volcano, and wondered if she might have a clearer idea now about what was before them, but the blind woman was spending all her energy on dogged forward motion; it seemed cruel to make her speak.

At last the path led them up a steeply rising slope between another pair of sentinel peaks. The warm light spread widely just beyond, as though the straggling company had discovered the ultimate source of sunrise, and the next set of peaks were very distant—on the far side of the glow, Paul guessed, since their facing slopes shimmered with its radiance. Orlando and Fredericks were in the lead, and thus were the first to be able to see what lay beyond the rise; Paul saw them stop at the top of the path, frozen in silhouette against the persimmon-colored light.

“What is it?” he called, but neither of them turned. When he had struggled up the last few meters to stand beside them, he understood why.

As the others jostled in behind, most asking the same question, Paul Jonas could only stand and gape. The rest of the company pushed their way up onto the rise one by one, and one by one they fell silent, too.

In the center of the crown of peaks, in a wide shallow valley as barren as the lunar surface but large enough to hold a small city, lay a body. It was human in shape, or seemed to be, but it was oddly out of focus—at moments it seemed about to become clearly visible, but it never quite did. It lay stretched on its back, arms tight to its sides as though bound there, and seemed to be the source of the glow that illuminated the mountaintop and flickered gently beneath the black skies. The titanic figure filled the entire valley.

“Jesus Mercy,” Renie whispered at Paul's shoulder, the first one to speak in half a minute.

Tiny figures swarmed across the monstrous thing; the nearest of them, clambering across feet which were almost as tall as the surrounding peaks, seemed as oddly formless as the giant itself. They, too, had a vaguely human shape, but seemed to be wrapped in garments of fluttering white, like shrouds.

Or laboratory coats,
Paul thought, his brain snatching at minuscule details in the midst of such overwhelming madness. The only comparable thing he had ever seen swam up from childhood memory, a picture in an old book of Gulliver made prisoner by the Lilliputians, but that had possessed nothing of the blasted, ultimate strangeness of this place, this spectacle. For a moment he felt again as he had on the Ithacan beach, as the sky had folded down close around him and every molecule of the air had seemed feverishly charged.

“Oh . . . ” someone breathed—Paul dimly thought it might be Fredericks, but his mind could clutch at nothing so prosaic: the overwhelming vision that lay before him kept smashing his collecting thoughts back into pieces again. “Oh, they've killed God.”

A sigh vast as a gale wind echoed around the great bowl, most of the sound so low that they could only feel it in their bones and in the reverberation of the mountain beneath their feet. It came again, but this time the portion they could hear had a distinct rhythm to it, mournful and completely, utterly strange.

“I don't think He's dead.” Paul marveled to hear coherent words come out of his own mouth. “He's singing.”

Martine suddenly let out a muffled little gasp and sank to her knees. Florimel bent to help her, slow as someone moving in hardening ice, never taking her eyes from the immense shape that lay before them.

“God help me,” Martine murmured, her voice choked by tears. “I know that song.”

T
HEY had clearly come to the end of something, or reached some important moment, but once the shock of the nightmare vision had eased a little, Renie felt mostly frustration.

“Is this all supposed to
mean
something?” she demanded. “Martine, you said something about a song?” She looked down to where the French woman was kneeling, rocking back and forth as though overcome with grief. She spoke again, more softly. “Martine?”

“I . . . I know it. I taught it to someone, long ago. To . . . something. I think this is that something.” Her head turned listlessly from side to side, as though complete blindness had overwhelmed her again. “It is hard to explain, and the forces moving here are very confusing to me. I lost my sight in an accident, long ago. I was a child, being tested . . .”

Renie looked up, startled by movement. T4b was heading down the slope toward the immense, glowing figure. “What is he doing? Javier!”

His laugh trailed back to them, faint and cracked. “Going to go ask God some questions, seen? Got a whole
lot
of questions . . .”

“Somebody stop him,” Renie pleaded. “We don't have any idea what this is all about, and we certainly don't need a teenager with a spear starting the conversation.”

!Xabbu and Florimel had already started down the slope after him. Paul Jonas made a move to accompany them, then hesitated. “Perhaps I'm not the best person,” he said.

“Probably not.” Renie turned back to Martine. “Quick—what were you saying?”

The blind woman groaned. “Forgive me. It is hard to hear, hard to think. There are so many . . . voices in my head . . . !” She raised her hands to her temples. “I was in an experiment. Something—perhaps a neural net, some kind of artificial intelligence—was in it with me, although I thought it another child. It was strange, it thought and spoke strangely. But it was lonely, or seemed to be. I taught it some games and songs.” She smiled through what must have been great pain. “You see, I was lonely, too. That song you heard is an old song from my childhood.” She furrowed her brow, and then sang in a croaking voice:

“There is more,” she said. “It is only a . . . a children's nursery rhyme I knew, but I cannot believe it is coincidence that I should hear it again in this place.”

“So you're saying that giant out there is an AI?” Renie asked. “Is that . . . the operating system? For this whole crazy Otherland network?”

“The One who is Other,” murmured Paul Jonas, as distantly as if he also heard some old, half-remembered song.

Martine nodded, grimacing, pressing her hands harder against her skull. “The One who is Other. That is what the voice of the Lost called it.”

At the bottom of the rise T4b had shaken off Florimel and !Xabbu and continued marching toward the vast figure. Renie watched with growing despair. “He's going to ruin everything, that idiot. We're going to get ourselves killed because he's acting like an angry child.”

“But it's all about children, isn't it?” Orlando was climbing shakily to his feet, supported by Fredericks. “Right?” he said. His eyes did not quite seem to be tracking. “You came here to save the children, right?” He drew his sword out of Fredericks' belt, then gently pushed her away and began to stumble down the side of the rim, extending the blade to steady himself.

“Now what are
you
doing?” Renie demanded.

He paused to get his footing. Already he was short of breath again. “The One who is Other. I know that name, too. And that must be what I'm . . . here for.” He glowered briefly at Fredericks, who was slipping d own the dusty wash toward him, but his friend would not be turned away. “See, I was almost gone before, but I . . . but I got sent back. No, I chose to come back.” Orlando let his head droop for a moment, then lifted it. For the first time, he looked full at Renie. “But there has to be a reason. So if that's it, that's it. I don't know if I can kill the Dark Lord over there with a sword, but I can sure as hell try. If it doesn't work . . . well, maybe the rest of you will think of something.” He turned and continued down the hill.

“Orlando!” Fredericks hurried awkwardly after him.

“That's not the Dark Lord of anything,” Renie shouted. Their little group was now a scattered line along the slope. “It's a damned VR simulation! This is just another simworld!”

If he heard her, he did not slow.

“I'm not sure that it is,” said Paul Jonas; at Renie's startled glance, he hurried to add, “I'm not saying that
is
God, or Orlando's Dark Lord, but I don't think this is a normal simworld.”

He was frowning, distracted, only a little less overwhelmed than Martine. “Ava, or whatever she is, brought us here for a reason. It took an awful lot out of her, too—that's why she had to absorb Emily. I think we're in the heart of the system now, even if this—” he waved his hand, “—is all just some kind of metaphor. As far as that giant thing, I don't know if we're actually supposed to kill it, but I'm pretty sure it's the reason we're here.”

“If that's the operating system,” Renie said grimly, “then it murdered our friend Singh. It turned my brother into a vegetable, and Florimel's daughter, too. If there's a way to kill it, I think I might be on Orlando's side after all. But we'd better catch up to them before someone does something unforgivably stupid.” She turned to help Martine up. “Can you walk?”

The blind woman nodded weakly. “I believe so. But there is . . . a tremendous amount of information going in and out of this . . . place.”

“So you definitely think that's the thing that runs this network?”

Martine flapped her hand. “I do not know anything definitely, except that my head feels like it's going to explode.”

“We'd better hurry.” Renie saw that the rest of the company had already reached the bottom of the slope, and T4b, the farthest in advance, was astonishingly close to the base of a skyscraper-tall foot. She swore. “How did the others get so far ahead of us?”