Mountain of Black Glass (18 page)

“Maybe later,” she said, then hoped she hadn't offended him. “I'm tired, !Xabbu. But I loved the stories you made it tell earlier.”

“It can do other things, too. Oh, such a clever piece of string! I can count with it, and even do more difficult things—in some ways, the string game can be like an abacus, you know, telling many complicated ideas . . .” He trailed off.

Renie was so absorbed in wondering what this latest, confusing interlude between the two of them might mean that she did not realize for a moment that !Xabbu was lost in thought; there was an even longer pause before she suddenly understood what it was he was considering. “Oh, !Xabbu, could you use it that way? Would it help?”

He was already moving on all fours back toward the fire, taking the easier, animal way of moving in his haste. She felt a twinge of worry at his growing facility with baboon-movement, but it was pushed away by a dangerous upwelling of hope.

“Martine,” he said, “put out your hands. There, like that.”

The blind woman, a little startled, allowed him to arrange her hands with palms facing each other and fingers extended. He quickly looped the string over them, then thrust his own fingers in and moved them rapidly. “This shape is called ‘the sun'—the sun in the sky. Do you understand?”

Martine nodded slowly.

“And see, here is ‘night.' Now, this means ‘far,' and this . . . ‘near.' Yes?”

Anyone else, Renie felt sure, would have asked him what the hell he was talking about, but Martine only sat quietly for a moment, her face distant and distracted, then asked him to do it again more slowly. He did, then showed her figure after figure, moving his hands through what seemed to Renie like a series of simple pictures, but she knew him well enough to know that this was only the beginning—the building blocks of the string game.

After perhaps two hours had passed, !Xabbu stopped talking. Martine had fallen silent some time earlier. Florimel and Renie took turns poking up the remains of the fire, more for their own cheer than any need of !Xabbu's or Martine's: except for occasional wiggles of her fingers when she did not understand something, or a gentle touch by !Xabbu when she had made a mistake, the two of them were now communicating entirely through the string.

 

Renie awoke from a light doze; dream-images of nets and fences that somehow let things out rather than kept them in were still running in her brain. She could not at first understand what caused the yellow light.

The sun came back . . . ?
was the first coherent thought that crossed her mind, and then she realized what she was seeing. Heart speeding, she clambered to her feet and hurried to wake Florimel. Martine and !Xabbu sat facing each other on the ground, both with their eyes shut, totally still except for their fingers, which moved slowly now in the web of string, as though making only the most minute adjustments.

“Get up!” Renie shouted. “It's the gateway, the gateway!”

T4b and Emily both came clawing up from sleep, amazed and frightened. Renie did not bother to explain, just urged them to their feet; with Florimel's help she shoved them toward the shimmering rectangle of cold fire before going back for Martine and !Xabbu. For a moment she hesitated, as though getting their attention might somehow break the circuit and dismiss the glowing gate, but it could not be helped. Any escape that did not include !Xabbu and Martine was not an escape they could take. When she gently shook them, they seemed to awaken from a dream.

“Come on!” she said. “You did it! You brilliant, brilliant people!”

“Before you get too happy,” Florimel growled from beside the gateway, “remember that they have opened a doorway so we can chase a murderer.”

“Florimel,” Renie said as she helped Martine toward the golden light, “you are absolutely right. You can be in charge of security on the other side. Now shut up.” She watched as the others stepped through, disappearing one by one into the brilliant light. As Martine vanished, Renie reached down and took !Xabbu's hand.

“You did so well,” she told him.

As she stepped into the gateway, she looked back at the odd country that had sheltered them, even stranger now in the glaring, flattening light. Something moved near the fire—for a moment she thought she saw a human shape, but then decided it was just the wind kicking up sparks.

But there is no wind here,
she remembered, then the dazzle enfolded her.

 

N
EMESIS.2 transitioned from the unstable appearance of flame to briefly inhabit something more like the shape of the creatures who had just vanished. As the icon representing the connectionpoint through which they had traveled shimmered and dwindled, Nemesis.2 prepared to give up shape altogether, but it still could find no coherent response to the organisms that had just departed.

It had observed them for a number of cycles, far longer than any observation it—or its more complete parent—had spent on any other anomaly, and although it had never found the right cues, the “XpauljonasX” cues that would trigger retrieval, still there had been something in their information-signature that had arrested its interest, kept it rolling through a kind of stasis loop. To the extent that Nemesis.2 could be spoken of as having feelings—which would at best be a grotesque form of anthropomorphism—it should have felt relief that they had released it from the unsatisfying, unresolved situation. But instead, a strong draw on its hunter-killer subroutines was urging it to follow them, to stay near them and study them until it had finally decided once and for all whether to ignore them or remove them from the matrix.

Nemesis.2 would already have followed the organisms and their strangely confusing signatures—and could at any time, since the way they had gone was as clear to it as footprints on new snow would be to a human—but this node itself was anomalous as well, and more than that, it was resonant of the greater anomaly that had so puzzled and intrigued (again, using human words to describe the needs of a sophisticated but unliving piece of code) the original Nemesis device, and which had led in part to it diminishing and multiplying itself, the better to serve multiple needs.

Nemesis.2, or at least the original version of the program, had not been created to hesitate. That it did so now, torn between immediate pursuit of the anomalous organisms and further investigation of the anomalous location in which it found itself, was perhaps indicative of why some programmers, even those who wrote code for the prestigious Jericho Team that had created Nemesis, liked to say of the products of their imagination and labor, “Just because you can tell it what to do doesn't mean you can tell it what to do.”

Nemesis.2 analyzed, measured, and analyzed again. It considered, in its cold way. A drift of a few integers, and it decided. Because it did not think, even if it had been told that it had begun a course of action that would ripple out from this moment and change the universe forever, it could not have understood.

Even if it could have understood, it would not have cared.

C
HRISTABEL had discovered that if she held open the little door where the cleaning machine came out and vacuumed up all the dirt from the floor, she could hear what Mommy and Daddy were saying in the living room downstairs.

When she had been really little, not like now, she had been scared of the suckbot, which was her father's name for it (which always made her mother say, “Mike, that's icky.”) The way it just popped out and crawled around the room on its little treads and lifter-legs, red lights blinking like eyes, had always made her think of the trapdoor spider she had seen at school. Many nights she had woken up crying after dreaming that it had come out and tried to suck the blankets off her bed. Her mother had explained many times that it was only a machine, that it only came out to clean, and that when it wasn't vacuuming, it wasn't waiting just on the other side of the little door but was at the far end of the duct downstairs, sitting on its base unit, charging.

The idea of the little square machine sitting quietly in the dark, drinking electricity, had not made her feel any happier, but sometimes you just had to let your parents think that they'd made things better.

Now that she was a big girl, she
knew
it was just a machine, and so when she had the idea of lifting the door to see if she could hear the fight her parents were having, she had hardly been scared at all. She had poked her head right into the dark place, then after a while she had even opened her eyes. Her parents' voices sounded far away and metal-y, like they were robots themselves, which she didn't like, but after she had listened for a while to what they were saying she almost completely forgot about the horrible little box.

“. . . I don't care, Mike, she
had
to go back to school. It's the law!” Her mother had been shouting earlier, but now she just sounded tired.

“Fine, then. But she's not moving a step out of this house other than that, and she gets taken there and picked up afterward.”

“Which means me, doesn't it?” Christabel's mommy sounded like she might start shouting again. “It's bad enough you're never home these days, but now I'm expected to become a jailer for our child as well . . .”

“I don't understand you,” Daddy told her. “Don't you
care?
She's having some kind of . . . relationship with a grown man— you heard it yourself! Some kind of bizarre softsex thing for all we know. Our little girl!”

“We don't know any of that, Mike. She's got those funny glasses, and I heard a voice coming out of them, saying her name . . .”

“And I told you, these are
not
the standard issue Storybook Sunglasses, Kaylene. Someone has modified them—somebody has built some kind of short-range transponder into them.”

“Go ahead and cut me off. Don't let me talk. That'll make sure you win the argument, won't it?”

Something crashed and glass broke. Christabel was so startled and frightened that she bumped her head on the hinged door, then tried not to move in case they had heard her. Had Daddy thrown something? Jumped out a window? She saw someone do that once on the net—a big man who was being chased by police. She expected a lot more shouting, but when her father spoke he sounded quiet and sad.

“Oh, Jesus, I'm sorry. I didn't even see it there.”

“It's just a vase, Mike.” It was a little while until her mother said the next thing. “Do we have to fight about this? Of course I'm worried, too, but we can't just . . . arrest her. We don't really know for certain anything's wrong.”

“Something's wrong, all right.” He didn't sound angry anymore either, just tired. Christabel had to hold her breath to hear what he was saying. “Everything's just gone to hell around here, honey, and I'm taking it out on you. I'm sorry.”

“I still can't believe it—this place is so
safe,
Mike. Like something out of an old book. Neighborhoods, kids playing in the streets. If we were in Raleigh-Durham or Charlotte Metro, I wouldn't ever have let her out of my sight, but . . . but
here!
”

“There's a reason it's like this, Kaylene. It's a backwater—all the important action's Rim stuff, on the West Coast or the Southwest. This base would probably have been closed years ago, except that we had one old man we were supposed to keep an eye on. And he got away. On my watch, too.”

Christabel hated the way her daddy's voice sounded now, but she could not stop listening. Listening to your parents like this was like seeing a picture of someone naked, or watching a flick you knew you weren't supposed to, with blood and heads being cut off.

“Honey, is it that bad? You never talk about your work, and I try not to bother you about it when you're home—anyway, I know it's all secret—but you've been so upset lately.”