Mountain of Black Glass (81 page)

So who was she? Someone who knew him, obviously, unless she was simply part of the network and coded to behave as she did. But that did not explain why he felt so sure that he knew her, too. If he put aside the frankly chilling possibility that
both
of them had somehow been manipulated to remember a purely imaginary relationship—a consideration which opened speculations about his own reality Paul did not even want to touch—then it left one likely possibility: they did know each other, but it had been obliterated from his memory, and from hers as well. The obvious candidates for such tampering had to be the Grail Brotherhood. Nandi's explanations of their nature and plans had been confirmed by Azador in his lotos-trance, even if he was now resolutely refusing to discuss it further.

But that led Paul to an entirely different and unanswerable question. Why? Why would such powerful people care a jot about Robert Paul Jonas? Why, even if they did, would they keep him alive on their expensive system instead of simply pulling his plug? Did that mean that somehow his body was not in their possession? But why then on the occasions they had almost captured him hadn't they simply destroyed him? Surely in this virtual universe, where he had been warned that the dangers to him were real, the horrible Twins could simply have arranged to have a bomb dropped on him once they found him.

Clearly, there were no obvious answers.

Paul tried to summon up his last useful recollection, hoping that discovering where the obliteration of his memory began might give him some hint at what came after. Before his flight through the worlds of the network—before what he thought of as his starting place, the now-dim horrors of the First World War simulation—came . . . what? The memories before that point were from the routine of his daily life, the boring story he had lived for so long—walking out to Upper Street in the mornings, the quiet click of the electrical bus filled with English commuters busily ignoring each other, then the descent into gloriously-named Angel Station (which didn't quite live up to that, but what could?) and the morning tube ride down the wheezy Northern Line to Bankside. How many days had he started off in just that way? Thousands, probably. But how could he guess which had been the last one, the last clear stretch before the fields of recollection disappeared in silvery fog? His days had been so mundane, so similar that his friend Niles had used to tell him that he was hurrying toward middle age the way other people hurried to meet a lover or a longlost friend.

Thinking of Niles brought with it a flash of something else, something vague as a distant night sound. Niles' teasing had finally begun to sting. Shamed by his more cosmopolitan friend, Paul had begun to mourn his own not-so-distant past, the years of his youth when there had been more to look forward to than the yearly winter holiday in Greece or Italy. In his normal, ineffectual, well-that's-Paul-isn't-it style he even had begun to brood about it, secretly knowing that nothing more exciting would come of this urge to break out than a short, disastrous love affair or maybe a holiday to somewhere a little more exotic—Eastern Europe, or Borneo.

And then one day, Niles had said . . . had said . . .

Nothing. He could not remember—it was hidden beneath the silvery cloud. Whatever wisdom had issued from his friend's mouth was lost, and no matter how he tried, he could not summon it back.

 

Unable to penetrate the mists in his own head, Paul found himself returning to the mechanism of the false universe around him. If the woman, Vaala or whatever her name was—he was beginning to feel like an idiot, thinking of her always as “the bird-woman” or “the angel”—was also resident in the network, why did she appear in so many ways and so many guises, while he himself stolidly remained Paul Jonas, despite the occasional change of clothing? How could there be more than one version of her, as when Penelope and the winged incarnation had faced each other across the fire on that windswept beach in Ithaca?

Perhaps she's not a real woman at all.
The thought filled him with sudden dread.
Perhaps she really is just code, like the other people in this bloody place—a slightly more complicated sort, but basically no more human than an electric pencil sharpener.
But that would mean that other than a few travelers—“orphans,” had that been her word?—like Azador and the woman Eleanora, he was alone in this tent-show universe.

I can't believe that,
he thought. The majesty of the robin's-egg skies momentarily lost their ability to charm.
I can't afford to believe it. She knows me, and I know her. They've just taken those memories away from me, that's all.

Did her multiplicity of guises have something in common with the Pankies, the bizarre couple who looked so much like the Twins, but were not? There was something to ponder there, but he did not have enough information.

Whatever the truth, there was no questioning the sheer technical marvel created by the evil plutocrats that Nandi had described—just this spectacular journey across the ocean, more real than real, would have been top-of-the-queue news on all the tabnets. Was Azador right—was it somehow a system built on the minds of stolen children? But even if it was, how did it work? And what was going to happen when they reached Troy?

That last thought had been irritating him for days. He was in a simulation of
The Odyssey
—he was himself Odysseus!—but he had started at the end and was going backward to what should have been the beginning of his character's story, the Trojan War. Did that mean that he would reach the place and find the war had ended as it had in the epic tradition, which was what had allowed Odysseus to begin his doomed journey home? But what if someone else wanted to use the Trojan War simulation right now, one of the rich buggers who had paid for it? It seemed bizarre to think that just because Paul himself was wandering around hundreds of kilometers away pretending to be Odysseus, even the people who built the network would only be able to experience a burned and blackened wreck where the walls of Troy had once stood.

The boy Gally had told him that in the Eight Squared, the Alice-through-the-Looking-Glass simulation, all the chesspiece people strove against each other until the game ended, then everything went back to the beginning and they started again—literally, at square one. Did that mean the simulations were cyclical? Again, it raised the question of how its owners might feel if they wanted to bring a party to Pompeii to watch the eruption, for instance, only to find the ash had just fallen and it would be days or weeks until the spectacle would happen again.

Paul could not wrap his head around the logic. There might be simple rules behind the whole process that made it little more than a board game for the people who had built it, but he was not one of those people; he had none of their information and none of their power. And if he started to think about it as a game and forgot to take this world seriously, it would probably kill him.

 

As dawn broke on the morning of the third day and the sea mists began to clear, they saw the coastline.

Paul at first thought the line of gray on the horizon was simply more mist, then the overcast cleared, the sun broke free, and the rest of the sea warmed to turquoise-blue. As the raft drew closer and the sun mounted higher, gray became the pale gold of hills that edged the plain like sleeping lions. Although he knew it was only make-believe, Paul could not hold back an appreciative sigh. Even Azador grunted and stirred, sitting up straighter from his crouch beside the tiller.

As the waves rolled them toward the wide, flat beach which ran for kilometers in either direction, Paul moved to the front of the raft and kneeled there, watching one of the most storied places in all the world appear before him.

Ilium,
he recalled, schoolboy swot-work suddenly come to life and shimmering in the distance. A fake, yes, but a magnificent falsehood for all that.
Helen, whose face launched a thousand ships. Achilles and Hector and the wooden horse. Troy.

The city itself stood on a promontory just before the hills, with wide, strong walls that seemed chiseled out of the naked rock, flat as the facets of huge gems. The palace loomed above all at the city's center, its columns painted red and blue, its roofs adorned with gold, but there were many other impressive buildings as well. Troy was alive; the citadel was still unbreached. Even from this distance, Paul could see sentries moving on the walls and the thin smoke trails of domestic fires.

There were fires on the beach as well, where a river curled its way down from the plain to the all-embracing sea, where the thousand black ships of song were drawn up onto the sand, row upon row. The Greeks had surrounded their landing place with a huge enclosure built of stone and timbers, filled with countless tents and numberless inhabitants. The Greek encampment was just as much a city as was Troy, and if it had no painted columns, no glittering golden roofs, that only made its purpose more grimly clear. It was a city that existed only to bring death to the fortress on the hill.

“Why are you here?” Azador asked suddenly.

It took Paul a moment to draw his attention away from the scurrying, tiny shapes in the Greek camp, the distant twinkle of armor. “What?”

“Why are you here? You said you must come to Troy. We are here.” Azador scowled and gestured to the lacquered ships and the walls glaring white as teeth in the bright sun. “This is a war, here. What are you going to do?”

Paul could not immediately think of a reply. How could he explain, especially to this brusque gypsy, about the dream-angel and the black mountain—things that made no sense even to him?

“I'm going to have some questions answered,” he said at last, and found himself hoping painfully that it was true.

Azador shook his head in disgust. “I want nothing to do with this. These Greeks and Trojans, they are mad. All they want to do is stick a spear into you, then sing a song about it.”

“You can leave me here, then. I certainly don't expect you to endanger yourself.”

Azador frowned but did not say anything more. He might not be a representative of an ancient type, as Paul had first thought, but he was clearly of almost a different species than the chattering classes among whom Paul had spent most of his life: the man used words the way a traveler in the desert rationed his last canteen of water.

Poling hard, they managed to turn the raft aside from the beach to the mouth of the river. When they had made their way far enough against its flow that the raft would be safe from the changeable ocean, they waded to shore and drew the salt-crusted collection of logs and rope up onto the bank. The Greek encampment was still half a kilometer away. Paul untied the feather-scarf from his wrist and knotted it around his waist, then began to walk toward the forest of leaning masts.

Azador fell in beside him. “For a little while, only,” he said gruffly, not meeting Paul's eyes. “I need food and drink before I leave again.”

A moment of wondering whether Azador truly did need food, or whether it was only a habit he had carried over into the network and was reluctant to shed, was ended by the sight of two figures coming toward them from the Greek encampment. One was slender and appeared frail, the other bulked as large as a professional strongman, and for a moment Paul felt a feverish rush of terror at the idea that the Twins might already have found him again. He hesitated, but the figures trudging toward him along the sandy ground did not give him the sense of panic he had come to expect. Reluctantly, ignoring Azador's look of irritation at this stopping and starting, he moved toward them. The smaller figure raised its hand in a kind of salute.

If I really am Odysseus in this simulation,
he thought,
then the system has to fit me in somehow. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do here, but Odysseus was one of the important lads at Troy, I remember that much. I need to watch, and listen, and try not to make things awkward.

The wind changed, bringing the scents of the Greek camp down on him, the smell of animals and men at close quarters, the raw smoke of many fires.

But if these two were not the monsters who had been pursuing him, he suddenly thought, perhaps they
were
the reason that Penelope and her other incarnations had sent him here. Perhaps someone was looking for him—someone real. Perhaps someone actually wanted to help set him free from this apparently endless nightmare.

The knee-weakening thought of rescue was almost as debilitating as the thought of the Twins; Paul pushed it away and tried to concentrate. The approaching pair were easier to see now. One was a tiny old man, his beard whitely vigorous, his thin arms nutbrown where they were exposed by his flowing garment. The large man was dressed for battle, wearing a chestplate that looked like boiled leather trimmed with metal and a kind of metal skirt. He held a bronze helmet under his arm and carried a terrifyingly long spear.

You could stab something with that thing without being in the same county,
Paul thought uncomfortably. Azador's reluctance to get involved with these people's war suddenly seemed very sensible.

As the strangers drew near, Paul realized that the old man wasn't little at all: it was the warrior who was huge, well over two meters tall, with a bristling beard and a brow like a rock overhang. Paul took one look at the big man's stern face and massive neck and decided he would go a long way to avoid offending him.

“May the gods be good to you, Odysseus!” the old man called. “And may they turn their smiles on the Greeks and our venture. We have been looking for you.”

When Azador realized it was Paul being addressed, he shot him a look half of amusement, half of contempt. Paul wanted to tell him that it hadn't been
his
choice to be Odysseus, but the old man and the giant were already upon them.