Mountain of Black Glass (4 page)

A
S she spoke, the flame of the oil lamp repeatedly drew his eye, a wriggling brightness that in such a still room might have been the only real thing in all the universe. Even her eyes, the wide dark eyes he knew so well, seemed but a detail from a dream. It was almost impossible to believe, but this was unquestionably her, at last. He had found her.

But it couldn't be this simple,
Paul Jonas thought.
Nothing else has been.

And of course, he was right.

 

At first it did seem as though a door, long closed, had finally opened—or rather, with Paul still reeling from the horror of the boy Gally's death, it seemed he had reached the final round of some particularly drawn-out and incomprehensible contest.

The wife—and, most thought, widow—of long-lost Odysseus had stalled her suitors for some while with the excuse that before considering another marriage she must finish weaving her father-in-law's shroud. Each night, when the suitors had fallen into drunken sleep, she had then secretly unpicked her day's work. Thus, when Paul had come to her in the guise of her husband, he had found her weaving. When she turned from the loom he saw that the design was one of bird shapes—bright-eyed, flare-winged, each individual feather a little miracle of colored thread— but he had not looked at it long. The mysterious creature who had come to him in so many guises and in so many dreams, who in this place wore the form of a tall, slender woman of mature years, now stood waiting for him.

“There is so much that we must talk about, my long-lost husband—so very much!”

She beckoned him to her stool. When he had lowered himself onto it, she knelt with careful grace on the stone flags at his feet. Like everyone else in this place, she smelled of wool and olive oil and woodsmoke, but she also had a scent that seemed to Paul particularly her own, a whiff of something flowery and secretive.

Oddly, she did not embrace him, did not even call back the slave-woman Eurycleia to bring wine or food for her long-lost husband, but Paul was not disappointed: he was far more interested in answers to his many questions. The lamp flame flickered, then stabilized, as though the world drew breath and held it. Everything about her called to him, spoke of a life he had lost and was desperate to regain. He wanted to clutch her to him, but something, perhaps her cool, slightly fearful gaze, prevented it. He was dizzied by events and did not know where to start.

“What . . . what is your name?”

“Why, Penelope, my lord,” she said, a wrinkle of consternation appearing between her eyebrows. “Has your trip to death's dusky kingdom robbed you even of your memories? That is sad indeed.”

Paul shook his head. He knew the name of Odysseus' wife already, but he had no interest in playing out a scenario. “But what is your
real
name? Vaala?”

The look of worry was rapidly becoming something deeper. She leaned away from him, as though from an animal that might at any moment turn violent. “Please, my lord, my husband, tell me what you wish me to say. I do not wish to anger you, for then your spirit might find no rest at all.”

“Spirit?” He reached his hand toward her but she shied away. “Do you think I'm dead? Look, I'm not—touch me.”

Even as she moved gracefully but decisively to avoid him, her expression suddenly changed, a violent alteration from fear to confusion. A moment later a deep mournfulness came over her—a look that seemed to have no relationship to the prior reactions. It was startling to see.

“I have kept you with my womanish worries long enough,” she said. “The ships strain at their anchor ropes. Bold Agamemnon and Menelaus and the others impatiently await, and you must sail across the sea to distant Troy.”

“What?” Paul could not make sense of what had just happened. One moment she had been treating him as though he were her husband's ghost, the next she was trying to hurry him off to the Trojan War, which must be long over with—otherwise, why was everyone so surprised to see him still alive? “But I have come back to you. You said you had much to tell me.”

For a moment Penelope's face froze, then thawed into yet another new and quite different expression, this one a mask of pained bravery. What she said made almost no sense at all. “Please, good beggar, although I feel certain that Odysseus my husband is dead, if you can give me any tale at all of his last days, I will see that you never go hungry again.”

It felt as though he had stepped onto what he thought was a sidewalk only to discover it was a whirling carousel. “Wait—I don't understand any of this. Don't you know me? You said that you did. I met you in the giant's castle. We met again on Mars, when you had wings. Your name was Vaala there.”

At first his sometime wife's face curdled into a look of anger, but then her expression softened. “Poor man,” she said tolerantly. “Shouldering just a few of the many indignities that tormented my resourceful husband has driven away your wits. I will have my women find a bed for you, where my cruel suitors will not make your life a misery. Perhaps in the morning you can offer me better sense.” She clapped her hands; the aged Eurycleia appeared in the doorway. “Find this old man a clean place to sleep, and give him something to eat and drink.”

“Don't do this to me!” Paul leaned forward and clutched at the hem of her long dress. She jerked away with a momentary blaze of real fury.

“You go too far! This house is full of armed men who would be only too happy to kill you in hopes of impressing me.”

He clambered to his feet, not certain what to do next. Everything seemed to have crashed down around him. “Do you really not remember me? Just a few minutes ago you did. My real name is Paul Jonas. Doesn't that mean anything to you?”

Penelope relaxed, but her formal smile was so stiff as to look painful, and for a moment Paul thought he saw something terrified fluttering behind her eyes, a trapped creature struggling for escape. The hidden thing faded; she waved him away and turned back to her tapestry.

Outside the chamber he put his hand on the old woman. “Tell me—do
you
know me?”

“Of course, my lord Odysseus, even in those rags and with your beard so gray.” She led him down the narrow stairs to the first floor.

“And how long have I been gone?”

“Twenty terrible years, my lord.”

“Then why does my wife think I am someone else? Or think I'm just now leaving for Troy?”

Eurycleia shook her head. She did not seem overly perturbed. “Perhaps her long sorrow has sickened her wits. Or perhaps some god has clouded her vision, so she cannot see you truly.”

“Or maybe I'm just doomed,” Paul muttered. “Maybe I'm just meant to wander around forever.”

The old woman clicked her tongue. “You should be careful of your words, my lord. The gods are always listening.”

 

He lay curled on the packed earth of the kitchen floor. The sun had set and the cold night wind off the ocean crept through the huge, draughty house. The ash and dirt on the floor were more than offset by the welcome heat of the oven, which pulsed out at him through the stone, but even being warm when he might have been outside, chilled to the bone, was not much comfort.

Think it through,
he told himself.
Somehow you knew it wouldn't be so easy. The serving woman said, “Maybe a god has clouded her vision.” Could that be it? Some kind of spell or something?
There were so many possibilities within this world, and he had so little real information—only what Nandi Paradivash had told him, with many deliberate omissions. Paul had never been much good at solving puzzles or playing games as a child, far happier just daydreaming, but now he felt like cursing his childhood self for slackness.

No one else was going to do it for him, though.

As Paul thought about what he had become—a thinking gamepiece, perhaps the only one, on this great Homeric Greece game board—a realization came to him, muffled and yet profound as distant thunder.
I'm doing this all wrong. I'm thinking about this simworld like it's real, even though it's just an invention, a toy. But I need to think about the invention itself. What are the rules of how things work? How does this network actually function? Why am I Odysseus, and what's supposed to happen to me here?

He struggled to summon up his Greek lessons from school days. If this place, this simworld, revolved around the long journey of Homer's Odyssey, then the king's house on Ithaca could only come into it at the beginning of the tale, when the wanderer was about to leave, or at the end when the wanderer had returned. And as realistic as this place was—as all the simworlds he had visited were—it was still not real: perhaps every possible contingency could not be programmed in. Perhaps even the owners of the Otherland network had limits to their budgets. That meant there would have to be a finite number of responses, limited in part by what the Puppets could understand. Somehow, Paul's appearance here had triggered several contradictory reactions in the woman currently called Penelope.

But if he was triggering conflicting responses, why had the servingwoman Eurycleia immediately recognized him as Odysseus returned in disguise from his long exile, and then never deviated from that recognition? That was pretty much as it had been in the original, if his long-ago studies had served him properly, so why should the servant react correctly and the lady of the house not?

Because they're a different order of being,
he realized.
There aren't just two types of people in these simulations, the real and the false—there's at least one more, a third sort, even if I don't yet know what it is. Gally was one of those third types. The bird-woman, Vaala or Penelope or whatever she's really called—she must be another.

It made sense, as far as he could think it through. The Puppets, who were completely part of the simulations, never had any doubt about who they were or what was happening around them, and apparently never left the simulations for which they had been created. In fact, Puppets like the old serving woman behaved as though they and the simulations were both completely real. They were also well-programmed; like veteran actors, they would ignore any slip-ups or uncertainties on the part of the human participants.

At the other end of the spectrum, the true humans, the Citizens, would always know that they were inside a simulation.

But there was apparently a third type like Gally and the bird-woman who seemed to be able to move from one simworld to another, but retained differing amounts of memory and selfunderstanding in each environment. So what were they? Impaired Citizens? Or more advanced Puppets, some kind of new model that were not simulation-specific?

A thought struck him then, and even the smoldering warmth from the oven could not stop his skin pimpling with sudden chill.

 

T
HE bright morning sun of Ithaca crept into almost every corner of the Wanderer's house, rousting the usurped king from his bed by the oven not long after dawn. Paul had little urge to linger, in any case—knowing the kitchen women were virtual did not much soften their harsh words about his raggedness and dirtiness.

Old Eurycleia, despite her workday already having reached full gallop as she saw to the demands of the suitors and the rest of the household, made sure that he received something to eat—she would have brought him far more than the chunk of bread and cup of heavily watered wine he accepted, but he saw no purpose in rousing envy or suspicion in the household. He found himself chewing the crusty bread with some pleasure, which made him wonder how his real body was being fed. Despite the frugal meal and his best efforts to be unobtrusive, several of the maids had already begun to whisper that they should have one or another of their favorites among Penelope's suitors drive this filthy old man out of the house. Paul did not want to fight with any of the interlopers—even assuming he had been given the strength and stamina to outduel one of those strapping warriors, he was tired and depressed and wanted no part of any more struggles. In an effort to avoid controversy entirely he took his heel of bread and went out to walk on the headlands and think.