Mountain of Black Glass (50 page)

 

“C
ODE Delphi.
Start here.

“I cannot even whisper. These silent, subvocalized words will only be retrievable by me, yet I think I will not live to collect them. And if I do not, what will it matter? I will pass from the world like a shadow. When this creature Dread kills me and my heart stops, or however the virtual death will manifest itself in reality, no one will find my body. Even should someone search for me deep in the Black Mountains, they will never pass the security systems. My empty flesh will lie entombed forever. I thought earlier that I had much in common with the person who had built this vast house, but perhaps it is the Brotherhood's master, the one my captor says appears only in the guise of a mummified Egyptian god, who is my true soul mate. Lying for eternity in a huge sepulchre of stone—that is what my unwillingness to enter the world has gained me.

“These death thoughts will not leave me, and it is not only the presence of my murderous captor sleeping in the chair only meters away, the stolen Quan Li sim even more deceptive in the false innocence of slumber. No, death is even closer to me than that.

“What he brought back from his errand was a corpse. He trundled it through the door with all the casual good cheer of a salesman wrestling a heavy sample case into someone's living room. Perhaps because that is what he has brought me—a sample.

“It is the body of a young woman which sits propped against the wall beside me. I think it must be the girl of the Upper Pantry Clerks who Sidri said had run away, but I cannot be sure. The creature has . . . done things to the body, and for once I am thankful that my senses are not visual. The outer silhouette alone, the altered shape of the thing as it sits with splayed legs and sagging head, is enough to tell me I do not want to know any more. The only saving grace is that it
does
sag—it is apparently not the frozen sim of a murdered user, but the corpse of a purely virtual person. Still, I have only to remember the sound of Zekiel and Sidri as they talked of their doomed, overwhelming love for each other, or the pride in the voice of Epistulus Tertius as he described his Library, to wonder what would separate the horror and death-agony of one of these Puppets from that of an actual person. I am sure it would be just as terrible to witness, which is doubtless why my captor has turned a harmless Puppet with well-simulated fears and hopes into the mangled trophy he has dragged back, like a cat displaying its prey.

“ ‘Just cleaning up,' he told me as he set the thing in place and arranged the floppy limbs. He is a monster, truer to the black heart of evil than any invented ogre or dragon. The only thing that keeps hopelessness at bay is my desperation to see this creature punished. It is a slim hope, but what hope is not if the long run is taken into account? ‘Happily ever after . . .' is only true if the story stops at that moment. But real stories never do—they end in sadness and infirmity and death, every one.

“Oh, God, I am so terrified. I cannot stop talking about what I feel coming. Without laying a finger on me since I have come here, he has tormented me until I feel like rats crawl beneath my clothes. I must . . . I must find the center again. All my life since I was plunged into darkness, I have sought the center—the place where a blind person knows what is what. It is the unknown and perhaps never-ending outskirts where fear takes hold.

“He wanted to know how we had followed him to the House simulation. I did not tell him our secret, of course—he can terrify me until I weep and beg, but I cannot let him turn me traitor. Instead I said that another gateway had opened in the same place as that through which he escaped and that we all went through. I could tell from body and voice that he did not entirely believe me, but the truth is so incredible—a baboon used a piece of string to show me how to summon the portal—that I have no fears he will guess it.

“With the mute example of his victim slumped against the wall, so close I could reach out and touch her with my foot if I wished, he produced the lighter from his pocket and reminded me that I was only useful if I could help him learn its secrets. I suspect he has examined the instrument in some detail already—perhaps even received advice of some kind, because for all his predator's intelligence he does not seem particularly schooled in technical matters—and much of what he asked at first seemed meant to test me, as though he would make sure I was giving him my honest best. Its shape and energy signature was so clear to my senses that I did not even need to face in its direction to know it was the same device on which I had spent so much time in the patchwork world—a thing of mostly locked potentialities, cryptic and powerful.

“ ‘One thing seems clear,' I told him. ‘There are not many such objects on the network.'

“He leaned forward. ‘Why do you say that?'

“ ‘Because there would not be a need for them. These Grail people have built the most phenomenal virtual network that can be conceived. Surely they have direct neural connections, and their interface with the network is such that they can make things happen simply with a thought or at most a word. The Brotherhood, at least here, must be gods of a sort.'

“The monster laughed at that, and told me something of his patron, the Lord of Life and Death also known as Felix Jongleur. Contempt fueled his description, and he spoke at surprising length. I sat silently so that I did not disrupt him—it is new information, and there is much in it to consider. At last he said, ‘But you're right—I can't imagine someone like the Old Man needing something like this. So who would? Why?'

“I did my best to consider the problem—I might lie to him about how we arrived, but he had made it clear what would happen if I failed to give him answers to this question. ‘It must be one of two things,' I said. ‘It may be a guest key of some sort—an object given to a short-term visitor, if you see what I mean—or it may belong to someone who is more than a guest, but who spends little time in the network,' I explained. ‘For most of the Grail Brotherhood, all the commands would surely be second nature, like whistling for a hovercab or tying one's shoes.' Despite my terror and disgust, I think I began to become a bit excited—I am someone who craves answers, and it is hard for me not to follow a trail once I have found it. For that brief moment, it was almost as though the monster and I were partners, researchers sharing a goal. ‘This could well belong to someone who spends less time on the network than the others, but still has the right to access everything. Perhaps he or she also has many other codes and commands to remember in everyday life, and so it is simpler to keep the entire Otherland access system in one package, to be picked up online and then put away again.'

“The creature, who had told me that his master hated the name ‘Dread'—and who in doing so had thus told me his name, which we had not known—nodded slowly. ‘Either way,' he said, ‘I'm betting that even if this device gets loaned to guests, the letter on it isn't just to make it look like an old-fashioned lighter—it's a monogram of the person who had it made.' His voice was still light, but I heard the hard, uncaring tone that was never far from the surface. ‘Which should make it a lot easier to find out who it belongs to.'

“ ‘Why do you care about that?' I could not help asking. ‘I thought you wanted to know how to use it.'

“He went still then. I cannot explain what my senses show me, but it was as though he turned cold all over—a change that may have been purely my own imagination as I realized I had gone too far. It was only the fact that I was still useful that saved me then, I know.

“ ‘Because I have plans,' he said at last. ‘And they're none of your business, sweetness.' He stood up abruptly and walked to the corpse of the Upper Pantry Clerk, which had begun to slide down the wall. He put his fingers in her hair and jerked the body upright. ‘You're not paying attention,
nuba,
' he said to the cadaver—it might have been her name, or some word the system did not translate. ‘Martine is working hard to prove how clever and useful she is—you should listen.' He turned, and I could feel the grin stretching his face, hear the way it changed his voice. ‘Girls can be so foolish sometimes,' he said, and . . . and laughed.

“Horrified, my heart once more knocking at my ribs, I did my best to offer more observations about the lighter—wild speculation mostly, which in my panic I did my best to justify. At last he said, ‘Well, I suppose you've earned a little rest, my sweet Martine. You've worked hard, and in fact you've earned more than that. You've earned another day!' He eased himself into the chair where he still remains. ‘And Daddy needs some sleep, too. Don't get into any trouble.'

“Then he was gone, or at least the sim stopped moving. It is possible he has indeed gone offline to sleep or perform other tasks, or else that he simply naps inside Quan Li's body like some ghastly parasite.

“Can he have been the only one in the sim for all this time, all these weeks? It is hard to imagine he would trust another, but if not, how does he live? Where is his real, physical body?

“These questions have no answers now, and I doubt I will survive to discover the truth, but I have earned one more day—the monster still needs me. I cannot help thinking of my own body, tended by micromachines in my cavern home, separated from the rest of the world by mountain stone as surely as I am separated from it by the toils of the network. And what of the others, Renie, !Xabbu and the rest—and what of their bodies? What of their caretakers, Jeremiah and Renie's father, themselves imprisoned in a mountain just as I am, but without even the solace of having chosen it?

“It is odd to realize that I have friends. I have had coworkers and lovers—sometimes one became the other—but just as the mountain protects me, I have protected myself. Now that things have changed, it no longer matters, because they are lost to me and I to them.

“God, it seems, is fond of jokes. Or someone is, anyway.

“
Code Delphi.
End here.”

 

I
T didn't matter what he did, or where he went, or how thoroughly he pretended not to think about it. He was thinking about it. He was waiting for it.

The netfeed news flickered on the tiny instrument console screen, a ceaseless roll of disasters and near-disasters. Even isolated as he was, it was hard not to feel that things were getting worse in the world outside: the news rumbled of mounting Chinese-American tensions, and also of a feared mutation of the Bukavu 4 virus, deadlier and faster-spreading. Smaller miseries crowded in close behind, industrial disasters, terrorist attacks on incomprehensible targets, the camera-drones transmitting pictures of the latest carnage within seconds. The net throbbed with simple, everyday murders as well, with earthquakes and other natural catastrophes, even a decommissioned satellite which had failed to destruct, instead hitting a near-orbital passenger jet like a bomb as it reentered the atmosphere, incinerating seven hundred eighty-eight passengers and crew. All the commentators gravely commented how lucky it was that the plane was only half full.

Not all the netfeed was bad, of course. The media had the almost reflexive skill of self-perpetuation, knew as a bird knows it must migrate that they had to temper what would otherwise be an unremitting flow of bad news with pleasant stories—charity events, neighbors helping neighbors, criminals foiled by a quickthinking bystander with a homemade stun-baton. The net also offered dramas, sports, education, and every kind of interactive environment imaginable. All in all, even with the primitive equipment which was all he had for access, it should have been enough to keep anyone occupied.

But all Jeremiah Dako was doing was waiting for the phone to ring.

 

He knew he should have found a sledgehammer and smashed the thing off its pillar days ago, but he had worried that somehow whoever or whatever was on the other end would know that something had changed, that the sudden alteration would signal life when Jeremiah and his charges needed secrecy. He had also had a less definable fear that even if he destroyed the ancient telephone, the ring would simply move to one of the base's other receivers. In a nightmare he had seen himself destroying all the equipment in the base, even shattering the controls to the V-tanks, only to find the chilling burr of the phone still coming out of empty air.

He woke sweating. And of course, the phone had been ringing again.

It was growing hard to concentrate on his work. Two helpless people were relying on him, but Jeremiah was consumed by a sound, a mere electronic signal. If it had only settled into a regular pattern he might have been able to cope, putting himself on the opposite side of the base, out of earshot, during the appointed times, but it was as randomly cruel as a snake crushed by a wheel but still alive. There might be nothing for hours, to the point where he thought he would be granted an entire day without hearing it, then it would start ringing again a few minutes later and continue on for hours, a dying creature emptying its venom into anything that ventured near.

It was making him quite mad. Jeremiah could feel it. It had been difficult enough to keep his spirits up after Joseph's defection, with only the V-tanked living dead for company, but with books and naps—something he had never had time for in the past—and a rationed dose of net, he had been getting by. But now this endlessly, crazily persistent device was all he thought about. Even when he was most occupied, caught up by something on the net to the point that he momentarily forgot where he was, a part of him was still tensely waiting, like a battered child who knows another assault will come. Then the shattering, clanging noise would return. His heart would beat and his head would pound, and he would all but hide beneath the desk until it stopped again.