Otherland-4-SeaofSilverLight

Almost dying on the mountain had been bad enough. Now Sam Fredericks' exhausted sleep was invaded by the most bizarrely powerful nightmare she had ever experienced.

The bad dream seemed to go on forever, a flood of terror and solitude and confusion so real and so lengthy that at last, in some paradoxical way, even horror became as boring as a hundred-year trip in the back seat of her parents' car. The only respite from the hammering monotony of fear and loneliness were the small phantoms, swift and cautious as birds, that finally appeared to her out of the long darkness, as though she had passed some terrible pointless test and was now being rewarded. She could not see them but she could feel them all around her, each gentle and insubstantial as a shallow breath. They might almost have been fairies, wispy bits of beauty like something from one of her childhood screen stories. Spirits, perhaps. Whatever they were, she finally felt relieved and at peace. She wanted to hold them close, but they were all as fragile as a butterfly wing, as the trembling puff of a dandelion: to clutch at them was to destroy them.

When she came up at last from the endless dream, Sam Fredericks' first realization—as it had been with every awakening since it had happened—was that Orlando was dead. He was not merely dying (a familiar shadow she had learned to squint into invisibility) but dead. Gone. Not coming back, not ever—no new stories, no new memories. No more Orlando.

But this time, the terrible sadness only lasted until she opened her eyes and saw the endless silver-shot nothing that surrounded her. Surprise was turned to something worse by the look on !Xabbu's careful, devastated face as he told her that Renie was gone.

"But what happened? This so utterly, utterly, utterly scans." At least an hour seemed to have passed and nothing had changed. Sam had not been one of the visitors to the weatherless stasis Renie had named Patchwork Land; to her, the most astonishing thing about this enveloping silver-gray void was the simple fact of its persistence, limitless and unchanging. "Is Renie still back on the mountain? In fact, where's the mountain?"

"I have no answers, Fredericks," !Xabbu said.

"Sam. Call me Sam—oh, please." She had run out of strength to plan, to do. Orlando had died. In all the time she had been trapped in the network, Sam Fredericks had never allowed herself seriously to consider that there might come a time when that would happen—when she would have to go on without him. How could such a thing even be possible? But here it was, the world around her just as strange and incomprehensible as it had been when Orlando was still alive, but now there was no Orlando to push her along, to growl at her, to tell her stupid jokes because he knew that being pissed off by stupid jokes was as good a method of keeping going as being entertained by good ones, and a lot easier on the one telling the jokes.

Sam felt a congestion inside her, a painful swelling of the heart. She would never again get to tell him those obvious things in that way that drove him crazy—an obviousness of such perfection that he could never tell if she was kidding or not. The tightness inside her felt like something that needed to be born, but did not want to come out. It was astonishing to discover how much you could miss someone whose real face you'd never seen.

What would he say now? she wondered. Everything vanished, Renie gone, Sam trapped in the middle of literally nowhere?

"Neck-deep in fenfen and waiting for the tide to rise," that was what he'd told her once in the Middle Country, when they'd turned from stuffing their pockets full of treasure to discover a twenty-meter-long snake forcing its way in through the underground chamber's only exit.

That's where I am now, Gardino, she thought. For real this time. Wailing for the tide to rise. . . .

!Xabbu saw the tears running down her cheek and crouched beside her, then wrapped her in his slender strong arms. Just as the weeping threatened to overwhelm her, a tall shape appeared out of the mist.

"I knew she was the most reliable of you," Jongleur said disdainfully, "but I would not have thought you two would collapse so quickly in her absence. Have you no backbone at all? We must go on."

The bony-faced man was such a horror Sam could not even look at him, but !Xabbu grew tense beside her. "It is foolish to go when we have no idea where we are going," the small man said. "Did you have any better luck searching than I did?"

Jongleur hissed out breath, as though he had sprung a small leak. "No. There is nothing. If I had not taken my steps carefully and followed backward along the same track, you might never have seen me again."

"Wouldn't that be sad."

Jongleur ignored her. "That is doubtless what happened to your companion. Wandered off after we made the transition to whatever this place is, and cannot find her way back."

"Renie would not do such a thing," !Xabbu said firmly. "She is too smart for that."

Jongleur flicked his hand dismissively. "Still, she is lost, however you choose to explain it. As is Klement." His smile was wintry. "I suppose we can be fairly certain they have not eloped."

!Xabbu rose to his feet. He was a full head shorter than Jongleur, but something in his posture made the taller man step backward. "Unless you have something useful to say, you will stop talking about her. Now."

Jongleur peered down at him, annoyed but momentarily surprised. "Get hold of yourself, fellow. It was merely a remark. . . ."

"No more remarks." !Xabbu stared at Jongleur for a long moment while Sam watched them both, suddenly and uncomfortably aware that without !Xabbu she would be alone with this ancient monster. Jongleur stared back. At last, !Xabbu put his hand down and touched her arm. "He is right only in one thing, Sam. We can wait a little longer for Renie, but even if she is nearby, we might not find her. Sound does not carry well in this place. She could pass a hundred meters from us and we would not know it. At some point we must move on and hope that we find her along the way."

"We can't . . . just go without her!"

For a moment !Xabbu's composure slipped, giving Sam a glimpse of the pain he was hiding. "If . . . something has happened to her. . . ." He stopped and darted a look at Jongleur, clearly unwilling to show such things in the man's presence. "If we cannot find her, we owe it to her to go on. Don't forget, it was her love for her brother that brought her into this place. She would want us to try to help him even without her."

He spoke with his normal calm, but such desolation lay just behind the words that Sam felt as though her own river of sorrow had met another at least as great—that if they were not both very careful, the combined waters might overflow the banks and flood the world.

The poor visibility meant that she had to stay fairly close to Jongleur while !Xabbu did his work, and it was all she could do to keep her loathing of the man in check. His proud face seemed made of stone, a chiseled monument, like Sam's own father at his stiffest and angriest, but without the redeeming sense of humor she could always tease out of him. She could not help wondering how someone with Jongleur's wealth and power could turn himself into a thing, could bend so many lives with his cruelty . . . for what? Just to keep himself alive? To enjoy centuries more of cold, unhappy power? Sam had trouble at the best of times understanding why old people would want to continue on, long past the point they could do anything that she could imagine as worth doing; someone like Jongleur, who had already lasted into a third human life span, was beyond her grasp.

Orlando had been afraid of dying, too—terrified of it, she realized now, and all those death-simulations had been meant to desensitize him to what was coming so unfairly soon. But even if he had been given the chance to escape that death, would he have done what this man had done, taken the lives of innocent others to preserve his own? She couldn't believe it. She didn't believe it. Not her Orlando, who believed in the Ring-Bearer's Quest the way those people in the Circle believed in God. Not Orlando Gardiner, who had told her that being a true hero was still the most important thing, even if no one ever found out about it. He had really believed it didn't matter what else happened, or what anyone thought about you—it only mattered what you knew about yourself.

Even her father had told her once, when she was battling her mother over her name, "If you want to be Sam, be Sam—just be the best damn Sam you can." His serious scowl had suddenly become a laugh. "Someone ought to put that in a children's book."

Missing her father and her wide-eyed, nervously affectionate mother suddenly became a hurt at least as great as the pain of losing Orlando, and for a moment a shadow threatened to overtake her completely. Sam stared at Jongleur sitting a few meters away and could not tell if the dimness was the mist or her own teary eyes, but she knew that whatever happened, she didn't ever want to be like him, angry and frozen and alone. . . .

A movement startled her out of her thoughts. !Xabbu's small form appeared from the gray. He sat down beside her gingerly, as though he ached.

"Well?" snapped Jongleur.

!Xabbu ignored him. He took Sam's hand—she hadn't quite become used to his frequent, careful touching, but she still found it reassuring—and asked her how she was feeling.

"Better, I think." She smiled a little, realizing it was true. "Did it work?"

He wearily returned the smile. "As I often say to Renie, the skills I have are not the sort that turn on and turn off. But I think I am making sense of things, yes, perhaps a bit."

Jongleur made a quiet hissing noise. "Any other man of my generation would find it comical to see me staking my life on two Africans and, unless I miss my guess about this girl, a Creole—and we have already lost one of the Africans." He rolled his eyes. "But I have never been a bigot. If some instinct of yours will show the way out of this place, then damn you, tell us."

!Xabbu shot him a look of real dislike—one of the strongest things Sam had seen from him. "It is not 'instinct,' not in the sense you mean. Everything I know about finding my way has been learned, taught to me by my father's family. They taught me other things you do not seem to know either, like kindness and good sense." He turned his back on Jongleur, who seemed stuck between outrage and sour amusement. "I am sorry to have left you with this man, Sam, but I had to move far enough away that I could not see you, could not even hear the two of you breathing. All in this network is stranger than in the real world, and it has been hard at the best of times to make sense of things. But this place is even more difficult—until a little while ago, I would have said there was nothing at all to sense beside ourselves. It might still be true—like a starving man hoping to scent game, I might have convinced myself of what is not true."

"You think you . . . smelled something?"

"Not exactly, Sam. For a long time I just sat, trying, as I said, to forget the sounds and smells of you and . . . and this man. For some of the time, I hoped I might hear Renie calling far away." He shook his head sadly. "But after a time I gave up and just . . . opened myself. It is not mystical," he said hurriedly, peering over his shoulder at Jongleur. "Rather it is being able truly to hear, to smell, to see—the things people in the city world seldom do, because everything they need comes to them, hurries toward them as though it were shot out of a gun." His face grew solemn as he searched for words. "After a while, I began to feel something. Perhaps it is a little like Martine, how she senses things—it takes a while to understand the patterns here—but I think it is simply that I finally had the stillness and . . . what is the word? Alone-ness? I finally had a chance to hear." He squeezed Sam's hand again and stood up. "That way," he said, pointing outward into a portion of the pearly void no different than any other. "It could be that my mind is making things up, but I feel there is something there, in that direction."

"Something?" Jongleur's voice was measured, but Sam could hear his anger just under the surface. In a flare of insight, she saw how it must eat away at a man like him to have to rely on anyone at all, let alone someone he must think of as little better than a savage.

How old is he really, anyway? Sam wondered, and almost shivered. Maybe two hundred years? Did they still have, like, slaves when he was growing up?

"What I sense is . . . something," !Xabbu said. "There is no other word. I am not speaking that way to disturb you. It is a thickening, perhaps, or greater movement, or distant changes in what is more orderly here, or . . . something. Like the ghost of a track in sand, all the rest blown away by the wind. It might be only a shadow. But that is where I am going, and I think Sam will go with me."

"Utterly right." Besides, what was the alternative? Waiting here forever in this fog, hoping something helpful would happen? That wasn't what Orlando or Renie would have done.

Jongleur looked carefully at !Xabbu. Sam did not need any particular insight this time to read the man's mind. He was trying to decide whether !Xabbu was lying to him, or was crazy, or maybe just wrong. Sam could never feel pity for a nasty creature like Jongleur, but she could almost guess what it would be like to suspect everyone and everything. It was an ugly, miserable thing to imagine.

"Lead, then." Jongleur, even naked, conveyed the impression of a king granting a favor to a peasant. "Anything is better than this."

The third time, Renie almost didn't find her way back. It was strange to be using the shambling, brain-damaged Ricardo Klement as her lodestone, even stranger to experience a flush of pleasure and relief when she saw his seated form appear out of the nothingness.

But what if he'd moved? she asked herself. Even if I found him again, I wouldn't be coming back to the same spot. It might be a spot !Xabbu and Sam had already checked, and they might be looking for me in the old spot. . . .

This was all presuming that her two friends were still alive—that they hadn't simply been swallowed or drezzed somehow by the network, whatever damned part of it this was. But she couldn't afford to think about that alternative much.

She couldn't really risk wandering anymore, either. Not that it made any difference—the seamless, monotonous gray went on and on, the invisible earth or floor continued, flat as a tabletop; silence and emptiness reigned. So she would either stay put, or move and keep moving.

It would have been an exaggeration to say Klement seemed glad to see her—he lifted his head slightly at her return—but there was no question he knew she was there: his eyes followed her, and he changed his position subtly after she sat down a few meters away, as if to designate a space between them—space that in a world with anything in it at all might have held a campfire.

Renie would have given one of her arms for a campfire. She would have added another limb and perhaps even a few organs to have !Xabbu and Sam seated around that fire with her.

I shouldn't have been thinking about how few of us there were left-—tempting fate. Now look what's left. Me. And . . . that.

Ricardo Klement gazed back at her, so still and silent that it was like looking at a picture in a museum. The last thing you would ever imagine was that it would speak.

"What . . . are you?" Klement asked.

Renie flinched in surprise; it took her a moment to respond. "What am I?" It was hard to talk: her voice was hoarse from shouting for her lost companions. "What do you mean? I'm a woman. I'm an African woman. I'm someone you and your group of rich friends . . . hurt." There were no words to express the feelings in her about Stephen, and the helplessness of the last hours had only made it worse than usual.

Klement stared. There was something moving behind the eyes, but it was deep, deep down. "That is . . . a long name," he said at last. "It seems . . . long."

"Name?" Jesus Mercy, she thought, that Ceremony scorched his brains properly, didn't it? "That's not my name, it's what I. . . ." She stopped and took a breath. "My name. . . ?" She wasn't sure she wanted to tell him, although she had given up on anonymity long ago. There was something galling in the way this thing, whatever had gone wrong with its mind, presumed to a kind of childlike innocence. Did this increase in conviviality mean that the old Ricardo Klement was beginning to surface, or simply that the new, damaged version was becoming more comfortable with its faculties?

"My name is Renie," she said at last.

Klement did not respond, but did not take his eyes off her either, as though forming an elaborate visual picture to go with the newly-filed name.

Renie sighed. This damaged man was the least of her problems. After what seemed like half a day in the void, nothing had changed. She had shouted until her voice was a husk, she had walked dozens of small circuits, all to no result. There wasn't anything you could call land, let alone landmarks, no directed light, no sound other than that which she made herself. But if I stay here, I'll die here. Or else Stephen's heart will finally fail and he'll die in that hospital bed, which will make what happens to me pointless. With the endless gauzy mist before her, it was hard not to see her dear Stephen's face, but it was the bad face that came to her—the sightless eyes and ashy skin, the slack jaw propped by the respirator. Drying up, curling. Like a fish pulled out of the water and thrown in the dirt. Dear God, please don't let that be the last Stephen that I see.

But if she couldn't accomplish anything, what good was she? It was hard to understand how a Renie lost in nothingness, with nothing to act upon, even existed. Still, what choice did she have? She had no tools, nothing but the lighter, and although she had tried several times to open a gateway, it remained as frustratingly inert as before.

"Where . . . is this . . . place?" Klement asked.

Renie cursed silently, then decided she deserved at least this small pleasure and cursed again out loud. She would have to be prepared for his occasional startling remarks, it seemed.

"I don't know. I don't know anything. Jongleur already said we weren't in the network, and this is . . . even more not in the network, I guess." She peered at him. "You don't understand any of this, do you?"

"That is also a long name. Names of places . . . speaking them . . . usually they are not so long."

She sighed and shook her head. She was beginning to think she liked him better when all he could say was "I am Ricardo Klement."

Renie turned her mind back to the pressing problem of being nowhere at all, and spent a silent quarter of an hour or so going back over everything that had happened since she had last been with !Xabbu and the others, but she could find nothing on which to form a theory of how they had become separated. The slippery grayness around her looked very much like the silver cloudbank they had seen girdling the mountain, but that did not explain how the mountain itself had vanished, or where her companions had gone. She had simply slept, then woke up in this different circumstance. Could the strange dream have something to do with it? She tried to remember the details, the rushing chaos, the long darkness, the heartening appearance at last of those ephemeral presences, but it already seemed vague and distant. In any case, it explained nothing.

So it was a conundrum. A sort of locked-room problem in reverse, if this had been a mystery story—not how to get into a locked room, but how to get out of total nothingness into something . . . into anything at all.

The only things she possessed were the scraps of clothing she had made from Orlando's garments and the lighter. But the lighter would not summon gateways, which would be the most obviously useful thing to do. Could it help her in some other way?

If I had a cigarette, I could light it, she thought grumpily.

A sudden thought came to her. The pale emptiness around her, unnatural and apparently endless—could this be the White Ocean that Paul Jonas and others had spoken about? The network's children had talked of it as a mythical place, something to cross to get to a kind of promised land. Did that mean there was something on the other side of this emptiness? That was a heartening thought. But even if it were true, that still didn't give her any idea how to get there.

She pulled the lighter from between her breasts and held it up. All the studying of it that she, !Xabbu, and Martine had done while preparing to leave the House had actually taught them very little of its true capabilities—as though a group of aliens had discovered a car and, after much trial and error, learned how to turn on the headlights. Further experimentation might teach her more, might even present her with some way out of her current dilemma, but did she dare risk it? She had scoffed at Jongleur's concerns, but that had mostly been out of loathing for the man. Hearing Dread's voice purring from the lighter—whispering out of something that had been pressed against her skin moments earlier—had made her feel like insects were crawling on her. Could she actually risk announcing her presence to him by trying the communication gear built into the device? The only person she knew besides Dread who was somehow accessing the communications band was Martine, and she had not sounded as though she were in a position to help anyone else.

And what if I reached her? What would I tell her? "Martine, come find me, I'm in the middle of a bunch of gray stuff."

She lifted the lighter and turned it, reflexively trying to catch light that would never angle down in this place. She looked at the ornate "Y," the letter tangled in raised vines and leaves as though it were a statue in a forgotten garden. What had Jongleur said the bastard's name was? Yacoubian. The one who pretty much killed Orlando. She fought a roil in her guts. I hope whatever T4b did to his head hurts him like sin. I hope it never gives him a moment's peace.

She wondered briefly if Yacoubian, too, might be listening silently to the communication band of the device, just waiting for her to reveal herself. The thought was unpleasant, but the idea of Dread sitting somewhere, waiting like a cat for one of the mice to show its whiskers, was far worse.

Just listening to the dead air, grinning. . . .

The idea came an instant later. Renie leaped up and started to put a little distance between herself and Klement, then stopped and—out of some not quite explicable sense of loyalty—told him, "I'm just going a short distance away. I need quiet. Don't say anything, anything at all. I'll be back in just a moment."

He watched her go, incurious as a cow chewing grass.

When she was far enough away that she could still see his dim silhouette, but had created a sense of privacy for herself, she held the lighter up again. Back in the House they had discovered how to bring up the communication band, but she wasn't sure she recalled the sequence. She stared at it with a sense of dull fear, but triggered the combination of touches she remembered. When she had finished, nothing bad happened, but nothing much good happened either. The lighter remained inert and silent. The environment around her seemed unchanged.

Cautiously, holding her breath, she held it up to her ear, then held it out before her and moved it in a slow arc. She could hear nothing but more silence. She let her breath out, then listened again. When she had confirmed her result, she turned herself a few degrees to her right and began the process again.

Dowsing, she thought, amused and disgusted. If I ever have to explain this to someone, I'd better come up with something that sounds closer to engineering,

But there was more to her search than superstition or despair, and nearly halfway through her slow rotation she heard something. It was so faint that she could think of it only as a slightly noisier silence on the communication band, but she definitely thought she could hear a tiny hiss, a noise that, however minuscule, had not been there before.

She swung the lighter a little farther through the arc until the tiny sound was gone again, then continued the rest of the way around, just to be sure. When she came back to the direction she had been facing before, the sound also came back.

If she was going to risk her life on something, she wanted to be as certain as she could be. She looked back to make sure Klement was still where she had left him, a lump of almost invisible shadow perhaps fifteen meters away, then she took off her upper garment and tossed it a meter or so in front of her, in the direction which seemed to produce the noise. She closed her eyes, spun around several times to disorient herself, then began rotating slowly through a circle again, using the lighter as her compass needle. When she felt sure she could hear the soft murmur again, she opened her eyes.

The piece of pale cloth lay right in front of her.

"Right!" She was pleased with herself, but even more pleased to think she had something on which to focus once more. She tied her top on and was about to head off when she turned to look back at Klement. He had not moved He was so still, it seemed like he might never move again.

I should just leave the murdering bastard here, she thought. I'll probably curse myself later if I don't. But the idea of deserting the almost childlike Klement in the middle of this deathly nowhere suddenly seemed wrong, although she could not tell herself why.

Renie shouted, "I'm going off in this direction. I'm not corning back. If you want to follow me, you'd better do it now."

Positive that she had just done something gravely stupid, but still feeling lighter in her heart than she had for hours, she marched out in pursuit of a whisper.

Walking through the endless silver-gray, Sam decided, was in some ways worse than just sitting in it. The plodding along was bad enough—she liked sports, which had a point, but had never much cared for running and hiking, just moving her legs to be moving them—but the lack of landmarks and weather, the failure of the sourceless light to change, made it seem like some torment specifically designed to make Sam Fredericks crazy. For the first time since entering the network she really began to miss eating, not for its own sake, but to mark time passing.

No water, no food, no stopping. After what must have been the first couple of hours, it became a perpetual chant in her head, like the advertising slogan for some particularly awful vacation package. It was also a slight exaggeration, since they did take breaks to rest, in part to allow !Xabbu to pause and listen for whatever vague thing it was that was leading him onward, but the pauses were not much of an improvement on the walking. For part of each stop she was left alone with a silent Jongleur, which was a bit like being left in a room with an unfriendly dog: even when no direct threat was offered, the suggestion of it was always present. Thrown back on her own resources, Sam found it hard to pull her mind away from Orlando and her parents, both now so far out of reach that it was hard to believe her mother and father, unlike Orlando, were still alive and she might see them again someday.

Felix Jongleur marched with the stiff determination of a religious pilgrim. Sam was young and strong, and she guessed he was working hard to keep up with her, but he refused to show it; instead, he made a point of acting impatient when they stopped to let !Xabbu metaphorically sniff the breeze. In a less unpleasant man the stoicism might have been admirable, but to Sam it just made him seem even more coldly removed from normal humanity. She found herself choking back her own weary complaints so as not to show weakness in front of him.

Felix Jongleur might have been struggling to keep up with Sam, but it was clear that !Xabbu was holding himself back to avoid leaving them both behind.

After all the time she had known him in the baboon sim, she was only now starting to grow used to the change. In some ways, !Xabbu in his real body seemed even more exotic than in the form of a monkey. For all his small stature—he was both shorter and more slender than Sam, who was herself slim and only normal height—he seemed quite tireless, moving with such graceful economy that it sometimes seemed he could walk in his sleep if he needed to.

"Where do Bushmen come from?" she asked suddenly. When !Xabbu did not immediately answer she felt a pang of worry. "Oh, is that an utterly rude question?"

His slanted eyes were so narrow the brown irises were almost invisible until something made them open wide in surprise or amusement. She could not tell which of those her second question had produced. "No, no. It is not rude, Sam. I am just trying to think of the answer." He touched his chest. "In my case, a small country called Botswana, but people with my blood are scattered throughout the southern part of Africa. Or do you mean originally?"

"I guess so, yeah." She moved closer, matching her stride to his; she did not want to include Jongleur in the conversation.

"No one knows for certain. In my school days I was told we migrated down from the northern part of the continent long, long ago—a hundred thousand years ago, perhaps. But there are other theories."

"Is that why you can walk, like, forever? Because you're a Bushman?"

He smiled. "I suppose so. I was raised in two traditions, and both made for hard lives, but my father's people—the old, old tradition, the nomadic hunters—sometimes walked and ran for days on the track of game. I am not as strong as they were, I think, but I had to harden myself when I lived with them."

"Were? You mean they're not around anymore?"

Something moved across his brown face, a shadow in this place with no shadows. "I could not find them when I looked for them again a few years ago. There were few left, in any case, and the Kalahari is harsh. It could be that there are no more people who live the old life."

"Impacted! Then you're like . . . the last of the Bushmen." Even as she said it, she realized what a terrible thing that would be.

To his credit, !Xabbu did his best to smile again. "I do not think of myself that way, Sam. I was only a visitor to the original way of life, for one thing. I lived with them just a few years. But it could be that no one else will learn the old ways as I did, that is true enough." He seemed lost for a moment. In the silence, Sam could hear Jongleur's harsh, even breathing behind them. "It is not surprising. It is a life I value, but I do not think many others would agree. If you were one of that tribe, Sam, you would find it very hard."

There was something in the way he said it that poked at Sam's heart—he seemed needy, something she had never seen in him before. Perhaps it was Renie's disappearance. "Tell me about it," she said. "Would I have to hunt lions with a spear or something?"

He laughed. "No. In the delta, where my mother's people live, they sometimes fish with spears, but in the desert the killing of large animals is done with a bow and arrow. I do not know anyone who has ever killed a lion, few who have ever seen one—they are dying out, too. No, we shoot poison arrows, then track the animal until the poison has killed it."

She thought that was a bit unfair, but didn't want to say so. "Do girls do it?"

!Xabbu shook his head. "No, at least not among my father's people. And even men only go hunting big animals from time to time. Mostly they snare smaller game. The women have other duties. If you were one of my tribe, an unmarried girl like you, you would help with the children—watch them, play games with them. . . ."

"That doesn't sound so bad. What would I wear?" She looked down at her improvised bikini, a last sad reminder of Orlando. "Something like this?"

"No, no, Sam. The sun would burn you up in a day. You would wear a kaross—a kind of dress made from the hide of an antelope with the tail still on it. And besides watching the children, you would help the other women dig for melons and roots and grubs—things I think you would not much like to eat. But nothing goes to waste in the Kalahari. We use our bows to make music as well as shoot arrows. And our thumb pianos—" he mimed the playing of a small, two-handed instrument, "—we also use as workbenches for braiding rope. Everything is used as many ways as possible. Nothing goes to waste."

She considered this for a moment. "I think that part is good. But I don't know if I'd want to eat grubs."

"And eggs from ants," he said solemnly. "We eat those too."

"Yick! You're making that up!"

"I swear I am not," he said, but he was smiling again. "Sam, I fear for that life, and I would miss ant eggs were I never to eat them again, but I know most people would not want to live in that way."

"It sounds so hard."

"It is." He nodded suddenly a little distant, a little sad. "It is."

The endless march at last found a temporary ending. Jongleur was limping, although he refused to admit he was suffering. Sam, who was footsore and exhausted herself, had to surrender her pride and suggest that it was time to stop.

She was getting frighteningly good at falling asleep without pillow or blanket—the many back-country trips Pithlit had made with Thargor had already prepared her a bit—and the invisible ground was no harder than some other places she'd slept, but even exhaustion couldn't bring her peace. The dreams of darkness and solitude returned, not quite as vivid as before, but still enough for her to wake several times, discovering on the last that !Xabbu was kneeling beside her in the pearly false dawn, a concerned look on his face.

"You cried out," he said. "You said that the birds would not come to you. . . ?"

Sam couldn't remember anything about birds—the details of the dream were already beginning to recede—but she did remember the loneliness, and how desperate she had been for companionship, some contact that might warm the long, cold dark. When she told him, !Xabbu looked at her strangely.

"That is much like the dreams I have had," he said. He turned to look at Felix Jongleur, who was coming up from his own sleep with a host of small twitches and whimpers. !Xabbu went to him and shook him awake.

"What do you want?" Jongleur snarled, but Sam thought there was something weak and frightened beneath his words.

"My friend and I have had the same dream," !Xabbu told him. "Tell us how you dreamed."

Jongleur pulled away as though burned. "I will tell you nothing. Don't touch me."

!Xabbu stared at him intently. "This could be important to us. We are all trapped in this place together."

"What is inside my head is mine alone," Jongleur said loudly. "Not yours—not anyone's!" He struggled to his feet and stood, fists clenched and face pale. Sam was suddenly reminded how strange it was that they should all wear such lifelike forms, that everything should be so much like the real world while still being completely unreal.

"Keep them, then," !Xabbu said in disgust. "Keep your secrets."

"A man without secrets is no man at all," Jongleur spat back.

"Tchi seen," said Sam. "He's scannulated. Forget him. !Xabbu. Let's get going." But she was puzzled by the change from Jongleur's normally icy expression. For a moment he had looked like a man pursued by demons.

The idea of sharing a dream was still bothering her as they walked. "How could that be?" she asked him. "I mean, it's one thing for us to see the same things, because they're all pumped into our heads by the system. But you can't pump in thoughts and dreams and fenfen like that." She frowned. "Can you?"

!Xabbu shrugged. "Since we have been in this network, there have been nothing but questions." He turned to Jongleur. "Tell us, since you will not talk of dreams, how it is that we are kept on this network against our will? You call yourself a master, a god even, but now you, too, are trapped here. How can such a thing be? With all that expensive equipment of yours, you may be little more than a mind in the wires, perhaps—but me? I am not even wearing a neurocannula, if that is the word. The system has no direct contact to my brain."

"There is always direct contact between the outside and the brain," Jongleur responded sourly. "Constantly. You of all people, with your talk of ancient tribal ways and living close to nature, should know that it has been going on since the beginning of time. We do not see unless light transmits messages to the brain, or hear without sound imposing patterns on it." He smirked. "It is happening all the time, all through life. What you mean is that there is no direct electronic contact between your brain and this network—no wires. And that is meaningless in this situation."

"I do not understand," !Xabbu said patiently. Sam had thought he was taunting the older man out of anger, but she thought now he was working toward something else. "What do you mean—are you saying there are other ways of putting thoughts in my mind?"

Jongleur rolled his eyes. "If you think I am going to reveal the secrets of my expensive operating system as part of this childish catechism, you are mistaken. But any school-child, even one from the backwaters of Africa, should be able to guess what it is that keeps us online. Have you gone offline?"

"I have," Sam said grimly. The memory was horrible.

"And what happened?" He looked at her fiercely, intently, like some grandfather from hell. "Come, tell me. What happened?"

"It . . . hurt. I mean just majorly scorching."

Jongleur rolled his eyes. "I have been forced to endure ten generations of teenage slang. That alone would be enough to discourage a lesser man from wanting to live as long as I have. Yes, it hurt. But you didn't manage to get offline by yourself, did you?"

"No," Sam said grudgingly. "Someone unplugged me. Back in RL."

"Yes, in 'real life.' How appropriate." Jongleur showed his teeth—a sort of chilly grin. "Because you couldn't find the way to do it yourself, just as I can't now. And do you think that is because, as those religious fools in the Circle believe will happen one day, we have been translated into Paradise, into incorruptible bodies, innocent of such things as neurocannulae? Do you think so?"

"No." Sam scowled at him. "Chance not."

"Then why else can't you find something you know perfectly well is there? Think, child!" He turned to !Xabbu. "Have I lost you? Can you not guess?"

The Bushman looked back at Jongleur coldly. "If we could guess, we would have already done so without your lecture, which explains nothing."

Jongleur threw his hands up in a gesture of mock-frustration. "Then I will bore you no longer. Solve the riddles yourself." He slowed until he was several paces behind them once more.

"I hate him," Sam said in whispered fury.

"Do not waste your strength, and especially do not let anger blind you to him. He is clever—I was a fool to think I could draw him out so simply. He has plans of his own, I am sure, and will not easily give anything for anyone else's benefit."

Sam fingered the length of broken sword thrust through the waist of her garment. "All the same, I hope he gives me an excuse to use this on him."

!Xabbu squeezed her arm hard. "Do nothing reckless, Sam. I tell you as a friend. Renie would tell you the same if she were here. He is a dangerous man."

"I'm dangerous too," said Sam, but in a voice so quiet even !Xabbu didn't hear.

They had stopped three times for sleep when !Xabbu finally made his discovery.

Sam and !Xabbu had experienced similar dreams each time, although never exact duplicates. Jongleur continued to make uneasy noises in his sleep, but remained silent about it when awake.

The tramping through the endless, featureless overcast had itself turned into a kind of dreary dream—faced with such unending nothing, Sam had several times slid over into hallucination. Once she saw the front doors of her school in West Virginia, as clearly as if she stood at the bottom of the steps. She even raised her hands to pull them open, braced for the noise of the echoing hallways, then found that she was reaching out toward nothingness and that !Xabbu was looking at her with concern. She also saw Orlando and her parents several times, distant but unmistakable shapes. Once she saw her grandfather trimming a hedge.

Even !Xabbu seemed oppressed by the monotony, the terrible dull pale cloudiness of everything, the continuous pointless now; even he grew increasingly silent and withdrawn. Thus, when he paused suddenly and awkwardly in the middle of one of his investigations, interrupting what had by now become a sort of boringly familiar dance of turning and listening, turning and listening, Sam thought maybe he too had been caught by a hallucination—a vision of Renie, perhaps, or some feature of his people's desert home.

"I do not believe it!" Surprisingly, he had an eager tone in his voice that had been missing for some time. "Unless I am losing my mind." He laughed. "Come, this way."

Jongleur, who had been showing little more animation than a sleepwalker, dutifully followed, setting one foot after the other as though reading it from an instruction manual. Sam hurried to catch up with !Xabbu.

"What is it?" she said. "Did you hear something?"

"I need quiet, Sam."

"Sorry." She fell back a little way. Please let him be right, she thought, watching the poised, flexible tension of his naked back. Please let him find something. I hate this gray. I hate it so much. . . .

!Xabbu abruptly stopped and crouched. The silvery void was all around him, unchanged and seemingly unchangeable. The small man grew wide-eyed, waving his fingers at nothing visible, paddling them in small circular motions at ground level, until Sam suddenly became terrified that he had lost his mind.

"What are you doing?" She almost shouted it.

"Feel, Sam, feel!" He dragged her down beside him and shoved her hand into the perfectly empty patch of nothing identical with every other cubic meter of nothing that stretched away in all directions. "There. Do you see?"

She shook her head, fearful. Jongleur had stumped up and now paused, looking down on them as though they were beggars he had discovered living in his rose garden. "I don't see anything," she moaned.

"I am sorry. I spoke badly—there is nothing to see. But maybe you can feel or hear it. . . ." He held her hands in his own and gently moved them back and forth just above the ground. "Anything?" When she shook her head, he pulled his own hands away from hers. "Try again. Concentrate."

It took long moments, but at last she felt it—the faintest, most negligible force, a weak current of skin-temperature air, perhaps, or a vibration so meager she could barely distinguish it from the tremble of her own pulse in her fingers. "What . . . what is it?"

"A river," !Xabbu said triumphantly. "I am certain it is. Or at least it will be."

CHAPTER 8Listening to the Nothing

CHAPTER 8
Listening to the Nothing