NETFEED/PERSONALS: So Sad And Lonely. . . .

(visual: picture of advertiser, M.J. [anonymated])

M.J.: "I don't care any more. There's nobody here, and I don't even want to try. It's . . . it's really lonely here. Dark. I wanted someone to call me because I'm alone and I'm sad. But nobody ever called—I guess there's no one out there listening after all. . . ."

It had been bad enough falling out of Dodge City and into Egypt, but this second transition was much harder, far more painful. When Paul's thoughts came back they seemed to swim in dark, bloody waters, like primeval fish, He opened his eyes to find a yellow face hovering just before him, grinning. Paul groaned.

"Oh, good," said the clownish, lemon-colored mask. It was perched atop a body swathed in immaculate mummy wrappings. "You're awake. I was afraid the sphinx had damaged you—but he's very gentle, in his way,"

Martine was gasping in pain beside him, as though she had not been brought any more gently to this place, a windowless gray stone room. T4b and Florimel were already awake, staring at their captor with grim faces.

"What do you want with us?" Paul could not make himself sound anything but hopeless and pathetic. His arms were tied securely behind his back, his ankles too. The four captives had been propped against the wall like unwanted parcels.

"I haven't really decided yet, to tell the truth," said the yellow-faced man. "I suppose Ptah the Artificer should know these things, but I've only really started this god business in earnest pretty recently." He giggled. "But now I'm really wondering where I've met you before. I would have recognized my old traveling companions, of course, even if you weren't still wearing the same old clothes—hello! But you. . . ." He tilted his bright face as he regarded Paul. "I have met you before, haven't I? Oh, wait, you're a friend of Kunohara's."

"Wells?" Paul was shocked, although he could now see the weird, underwater resemblance. "Robert Wells?"

The response was another pleased chortle. "Oh, yes. But my Egyptian identity is rather to the fore at the moment. Lord Anubis has been kind enough to forgive my past bad associations."

"Anubis?" Martine spoke hollowly. "You mean Dread, don't you? You mean Jongleur's pet murderer."

"Yes, I suppose that's his name. I would have found it much easier piecing these things together from the outside, but I've had to make do."

"That's an understatement," said Paul. "You've fallen pretty low, Wells, haven't you—throwing in your lot with a butchering psychopath."

"Don't waste your time, Paul." Florimel's voice was cracked, the defiance unconvincingly forced. "He is no better than Dread."

"Anyone who knows anything about business knows that sometimes you have to overlook certain foibles in your CEO if you want a take-charge kind of guy," Wells said cheerfully. "And the fact is, right now Mr. Dread holds all the stock. Which means I'm proud to be on his team."

"So . . . so you'll just stand by and let him do whatever he wants?" Paul said. "Destroy the network, rape and murder and God knows what else. . . ?"

"In a word—yes," said Wells. "But he won't destroy the network. He wants to live forever, just like anyone else. Just like me." He turned and tapped on the door. "But he'll be back very soon, our gracious Lord Anubis, so I'm sure he'll be glad to explain things to you himself,"

The heavy door swung open, revealing a trio of shaven-headed guards just outside, their muscles shining with oil. The door thumped shut behind Wells and the bolt crashed back into place.

"Dread has us!" Martine seemed to speak from some far shore of despair. "Oh, God, the monster has us!"

Exhausted and heartsick, squeezed to cramping agony by their bonds, neither Paul nor his companions felt much like talking. Something close to an hour passed before the bolt grated again and the door swung open to reveal the bizarre , yellow countenance of Robert Wells.

"Keeping yourselves amused, I hope," he said. "Singing camp songs or something? Michael row the boat ashore. . . ?" His smile—in fact, Paul thought, his entire aspect—seemed quite insane. "I've brought along some pals of yours." A pair of guards shouldered their way into the room, each holding a sagging figure. When they let go of them, the prisoners stumbled and fell to the floor. Paul did not know the small, round woman in tattered Egyptian clothes, but after a moment recognized the man's face through the blood and bruises.

"Nandi. . . ?"

The prisoner rolled reddened, swollen-lidded eyes in his direction. "I'm sorry . . . I . . . never thought. . . ."

"Ah, yes!" said Wells. "He never thought you'd actually be here, or he would have kept his mouth shut about meeting you." The yellow mask nodded. "It took a little while before I put two and two together. Then I realized it would be a bit of a coincidence for you to be a different Paul than the one this gentleman has been telling us about so eagerly."

"You monster!" Nandi Paradivash struggled to crawl toward Wells, but was kicked brutally back to the floor by the nearest guard, where he lay, sobbing and wheezing.

"Paul Jonas." Wells surveyed him with a glittering eye. "Or 'X', as I was calling you for a long time—Jongleur's mystery experiment. First I got a name to go with it, now a face." He crossed his bandaged arms over his chest. "Soon I'll have a lot more than that. You can explain everything. Not that it means much with Jongleur dead or missing in action, but still—I'm interested."

Paul could only stare defiantly. "Even if I knew . . . and I don't . . . I wouldn't tell you. It was wiped out of my memory."

"Then maybe you'll thank me." Wells smiled. "When I help you remember." He flicked his hand and the guards hurried forward and picked up Paul like a rolled carpet. He had no time to shout something brave to his companions, not even a good-bye, before they were hurrying him along a torchlit corridor. Wells' voice echoed after them.

"I'll be right there, boys. Make sure he stays tied. Oh, and sharpen everything, will you?"

"Code Delphi. Start here.

"I never expected to speak those words again.

"A few hours ago I was certain that continuing this journal in the face of all but certain death—a journal that no one but me would ever find, even if the network survives—would be complete madness. These entries spoken into air are only to remind me of what I felt and thought, in the unlikely event that I can look back on this time from some future I still cannot imagine. So when I was at my lowest points of despair, as I was then, it seemed even worse than mad—it seemed dull and pointless. I have never wanted to leave some dramatic last will and testament that no one will hear. I have never been moved by displays of hopeless bravery, and certainly was not going to bother with one of my own.

"In short, I had surrendered.

"I do not know that anything has truly changed—our chance of survival is still vanishingly small—but I have found a little unexpected hope. No, not hope. I still believe we will lose our lives without seeing the end of this. Determination? Perhaps.

"When we survived the feverish horror of the Dodge City simworld only to be captured in Egypt, and worst of all, when we discovered we were—and still are—being held for Dread himself, I fell for a while into the lowest despair. The pit. A hole into darkness. I could not speak, could barely even think except for nightmare images of that room in the House world where Dread tormented me. If someone at that moment had offered to put a bullet in my head, I would have accepted it with gratitude.

"Then everything changed again—for the worse, if such a thing were possible". Our captor, Robert Wells, who apparently has now become Dread's lieutenant, brought two more prisoners to join us and took away Paul Jonas for interrogation. My misery was such that I could scarcely move. I fear for Paul. God, how I fear for him. He has already been through so much. . . ! I am shamed that my own suffering should have left me so self-involved. I cannot even imagine what he has experienced, lost in this network with little memory of his own real history and no knowledge of what was happening to him. To have kept so sane, to be so kind and so brave. . . . It is astonishing. And it is equally astonishing that I did not truly realize how much I admired him until he was taken away.

"Even now, he could be dead. Or perhaps in terrible, terrible, pain. Which would be worse?

"This is the curse I perceived before, the burden I have evaded all my life. To like people, to . . . love people, is to make oneself a hostage to fortune.

"So it was I began my slide into the abyss. For long minutes after Paul was taken—it might have been hours for all I could have guessed—I simply could not speak. Could not think. Terror had seized my heart, frozen my thoughts, turned me into something which could not move, and had nowhere to go even if it could.

"This is just a more direct version, I realize now, of what I have done in my own real life. Frightened, I have gradually sealed myself in the rocky depths of the mountains, in the sanctuary I share only with my machines. Without realizing it, I have actively conspired in making myself something much less than a person.

"Still, in the grip of the terror I could not see these things, but only now that it has passed. I might never nave left the black panic if it had not been for the hands of my friends upon me, Florimel and T4b, who thought I was having a heart attack. I felt them and heard them as though from a long distance, and for a while I did not wish to be plugged back into my nerves and senses. Better to hide in the black pit. Better to let my overwhelming fear protect me, as blocks of ice make a home that shelters Arctic hunters from the cold.

"Then, still at a great distance from my own self, I felt another set of hands upon me, clumsy, halting hands, and heard another voice. The new woman prisoner had dragged herself over to help, ignoring her own injuries. Even in the depths of my isolation I was shamed. Here was someone who had suffered what I only feared, and yet she could find the strength to worry about me, a stranger!

"I had thought that I would never come back to sanity, that I would simply fall down into that slow-motion blackness forever. How much worse, in a way, to return and find myself being cared for by my exhausted friends and even this newcomer, her limbs still trembling with the pain of what she had endured, as though I were a tired, fretful child commanding the attention of a group of adults.

"There are times when kindness is the sharpest cut of all.

"But even my shame passed. I realized that I knew both of the new prisoners at least by name—Bonnie Mae Simpkins, who had shown such kindness to Orlando and Fredericks, and Nandi Paradivash, who had been the first to explain to Paul that he was trapped in Jongleur's simulation network. Nandi was in a state something like I had been, torn with guilt at what had happened to Paul, and also clearly the victim of agonizing treatment, but the Simpkins woman spoke for both of them. She told how in opening a gateway and sending Orlando and Fredericks through, the remaining members of the Circle had waited too long, so that their own escape was prevented by the collapse of the great Temple of Ra which followed Jongleur's appearance in his guise as Osiris, master of this simulation world. Jongleur had not stayed long, and the survivors had hidden in the ruins, hoping to find another way out of the simulation, but within days Osiris had been supplanted by Anubis and the already bad state of affairs rapidly became worse.

"Bonnie Mae Simpkins described the destruction that followed Dread's taking control of the simworld, an orgy of murder and torture at feast as grisly as that which we had seen in Dodge City. Although I thought myself numbed by this point, I was nevertheless chilled by her description of what happened here, of the public burnings, Dread's orchestrated symphonies of murder, wild jackals devouring the bodies of children in the streets while their parents were forced to watch. Chilled because I realized that even in this network where every whim could be indulged, there was no upper limit to his homicidal madness.

"Dread's power and his ambition are growing, but how long can mere simulations feed such an appetite? If he has Jongleur's power outside the network as well as inside—and if Jongleur is truly dead, why shouldn't Dread control his worldwide operations?—then the possibilities are quite terrifyingly vast.

"As Bonnie Mae spoke, I had a sudden thought, and asked, 'What about the other children? The little flying children that Orlando mentioned?' I could not remember the name they called themselves—the Wicked Group, the Nasty Club, something silly.

"This question made her even more sad. She told us that although the monkey-children had wanted to follow Orlando and Fredericks through the gateway, they had been distracted by the chaos in the temple of Ra and so they had all been left behind when the gateway closed.

"Bonnie Mae Simpkins said she had tried to keep them hidden when soldiers found her and Nandi and brought them here, but the monkey-children had flown away, pursued by some of the temple guards. She felt sure they had been captured and probably killed, since even Dread would have felt there was little information to be gathered from a group of children who had not reached school age.

"She went on to tell something of the horrors she and Nandi had experienced, largely because Dread knew they had been seen in the company of Orlando and Fredericks. This was chilling too—it was bad enough to know we were soon to be delivered to Dread, worse to know he had been actively seeking us. His vengeance, it seems, will not be offhanded.

"But the idea of Orlando's monkey-children friends would not leave my head.

"You see, I had turned a corner of sorts. I was and am still resigned to death, and to an unpleasant one at that, but I cannot bear to wait for it passively. Where this has led me, I will tell in a moment. But I listened less and less closely to Bonnie Mae Simpkins' terrible stories, because . . . because I needed to think about something else. I understand now Renie's bullheaded, chronic need to go forward—when there is nothing to be done, to want to do something anyway.

"We will all die. It is what gives life its shape and even its beauty, perhaps, this fact of its brevity. So why bother to do anything except gratify oneself, faced with that? And knowing it may come literally at any moment, as we do, why not simply surrender?

"I do not know. But I know now I cannot.

"I told the pair from the Circle, 'I do not think the little monkeys have been captured. Dread wanted to break your spirit—he likes that even more than inflicting pain. And he truly wanted to make you tell all you knew about Renie and the rest of us. So if the guards had caught them, he would have threatened you with harming them. He would have been delighted to do it.'

" 'Maybe they escaped, then,' Bonnie Mae Simpkins said. 'The Lord keep 'em safe—I sure hope they did escape, poor little creatures.' I could almost feel her calling on a few last dregs of optimism, and again was shamed by the comparison with my own earlier behavior.

"Florimel remembered what Orlando and Fredericks had said about Nandi's expertise, so she asked Nandi if it was possible to open a gateway here in the prison cell. Slowly and with great pain—I think several of his ribs are broken, although that is an odd thing to consider since we are all wearing virtual bodies—he explained that he could only open a gate at a designated spot, and certainly there was no such thing in these prison rooms. As he spoke I began to think in earnest about what was possible and what was not, remembering that as much as it might seem like it, we were not actually prisoners in a temple of stone, but in the idea of a temple.

"Slowly, other ideas came to me. Nothing dramatic, nothing that would burst the doors or slay the guards, but enough to give me occupation, for which I was grateful. When Nandi had finished his explanation, I asked the others to be silent for a while. Even T4b—who in fact has been as reserved as I have ever seen him since Nandi and Bonnie Mae Simpkins were thrown in with us—did not protest.

"This virtual universe is constructed on stories, it seems, and I suspect that in part that is my own fault. I believe I helped to feed the Other the first tales on which the system has created and defined itself, and particularly the story which appears to define its hopes, if one can say such a thing about an artificial intelligence. And in our way, we have each of us become defined as though we were characters—Renie the bold and sometimes overly stubborn hero, !Xabbu her wise companion, Paul the one buffeted by fate, a mystery to himself and others. For a long time I had thought my role was clear. I was the blind seeress—I even made a joke of it in the indicators I used to mark my journal entries for later salvage. But with !Xabbu helping me I had accomplished more than that, opening a gate where no others could have managed. In fact, the unusual senses this place gives me have allowed me many times to do what my friends could not.

"Apparently, I am a sorceress—a witch. A good witch. I hope.

"Here, within this invented world, I have powers. As I sat in the cell thinking about Nandi's struggles to make the system work, I realized that I have not fully tapped those powers. And what better time to do so than now, with Dread to arrive at any moment?

"I asked my companions for quiet, then did my best to grasp what lay beyond the walls of our small cell. When I have reached out in this way before, in the House world or the Place of the Lost, it has always been in the open, where I could read information from air currents and long echoes, even if I could not always identify them as such. My abilities seemed an extension of natural senses, so I have always thought of them as limited in the same way, but I had just realized I did not know this to be true. Thus, as my friends waited in confused, fearful silence, I opened up and tried to see, hear, feel—there really are no proper words—what lay outside.

"Exploring the ways of the system with !Xabbu, I had always felt a fundamental separation between his perceptions of it and mine, something which the symbology of the string game and its mathematical underpinnings had helped to bridge but had never fully eliminated. Now I began to think of what that separation meant—why, after all, should a young man with so little experience of the information sphere grasp things that I, with years of study plus the altered and enhanced perceptions the network granted me, could only barely understand? The reason, I have come to realize, is that I am limited by my own expectations. !Xabbu was taught by his people to absorb everything the world gives him and then, after sifting out the most important details, to act on them. But he is also clever and supremely flexible. Faced with a new world, he did not try to force it to comply with his expectations, but began all over to learn the rules, without prejudice as to where the information came from.

"But I—along with all the rest of us, I suppose—have been fooled by the way this network mimics reality, and have tried to make sense of the world as though it were in fact the real world. Even using the astonishing abilities I have here, I have allowed myself to hear only what could be heard, touch only what could be touched, and then channeled that data into something safely like the real-world model. The irony of this—that a blind woman should so desperately struggle to make a place where she is superior to her companions into something more like the real world in which she was inferior to them—is almost staggering.

"So what would !Xabbu do? Even in the midst of horror and despair, I smiled at the thought. What would !Xabbu do? He would open himself. He would let what was around him speak and he would listen without prejudice instead of trying to force the information into some orderly, preconceived scheme.

"I tried to do the same.

"The first thing I discovered was that I was still terrified despite my outward show of calm. My heart was speeding, and the sound of Paul Jonas taking a startled breath as the guards seized him was still fresh in my thoughts, as though the echo of it were immortalized within our prison cell. That thought gave me another idea, which I put aside for a moment, concentrating instead on calming and clearing my mind. I did my best, but I am far too weak to learn that kind of serenity in a matter of minutes.

"It was difficult to lose the idea of the cell walls and in fact the entire temple as a real and solid thing. I suppose that for mystics and scientists it takes a similar effort of will to perceive the physical world as only a coherence of energy. I had dim inklings of what lay beyond our prison-sound information, smells—and to me they were already more significant than they would have been for any of my companions, but I needed more than that. I had to let myself feel them as equally significant to the things happening within the cell itself, until the walls began to blur into insignificance, until the signature of the simulated obstacles was only another piece of information. I had to learn to look through the walls, not at them, to put it in the language of the seeing.

"It took a long time, but when it happened, it was quite sudden—a single twist of perception, then I could feel the information arrayed in front of me, layer upon layer, the information of the guards in the corridor outside just as significant as that of my companions in the cells. One of them was scratching his head. I laughed. It felt a bit like discovering a trick, like that childhood day when I first learned to ride a two-wheeled bicycle. I moved cautiously to expand my survey, tracing the knitted expression of the wall-information on the corridor's far side, then sliding through it, as it were, to examine other corridors and rooms.

"This ability is not by any means limitless. The farther from myself I aim my perception, and the more barriers I penetrate, the less reliable the information. A hundred meters away from our cell the signature of a person—a sim pretending to be a person, that is—was little more than a humanoid shape, identifiable mostly because of movement. Twice that distance and only movement itself was noticeable. As my attention roved, I found several clusters of human shapes and movement, any one of which might have been Paul and his captors, but they were too far away for definite identification.

"I let my perceptions travel farther outward, looking for the energy-shadow of a gateway, the thing that lingers even when the gateway itself is closed. I found one at last which seems to be just at the edge or just outside of the temple-palace, but by this time my head was pounding. I surfaced, returning to the cell and my companions, and told them what I had discovered. I asked Nandi a few questions, and his answers confirmed Orlando's description of him as an expert on the network's internal travel mechanisms. Armed with this extension of my own investigations of the gateways, I let myself reach out to find the gateway again.

"It was more difficult this time. I was weary and my head ached, but I needed to examine the gateway to make sure it was functioning. Strangely, although it seemed open and in working order, I could not access the usual gateway information. But at least it seemed like it would take us somewhere else, and right now, that is our main need.

"I barely had time to explain this to the others before exhaustion pulled me down and I slept like a dead thing. When I woke, perhaps an hour later, the tiny bit of good cheer my news had roused in the others had turned back into a miserable silence, since as long as we were trapped in a cell, even a nearby gateway might as well have been on the moon.

"Despite feeling like my skull was made of old, brittle glass, I decided to try something different. Time was running out—time is running out. I could not afford to wait until I felt better, since Dread might appear at any moment, but I did not want to raise anyone's hopes either.

"In fact, although I experienced some success with this last attempt, there is still little about which to be hopeful.

"Again I let myself open. For a moment I feared I had lost the knack, that the walls would remain solidly impenetrable, but I thought of !Xabbu and calmed myself and at last the shift came. I reached out, not in any one direction, but generally, letting my attention flow diffusely outward through the information patterns. I was looking for something less specific than the signature of a gateway, and the farther away from the cell I went exploring, the harder it was to sift through the information.

"I had nearly given up when I found something that seemed a possibility. It was a nested confusion of signatures, of small movements, on the far side of the temple. From what I could discern it was located in a sort of alcove, perhaps a niche behind a cloth hanging, which was worrisome. The second and less-formed part of my plan would be very difficult if it was.

With the location fixed in my mind I surfaced again. My head was throbbing even more painfully now, but I had only to consider what Nandi and Bonnie Mae Simpkins had endured, and what we all could still expect, to drag myself up off the floor and move toward the door of the cell, where I lay down with my face against the open space at the bottom.

" 'What are you doing?' Florimel asked worriedly. 'Are you having trouble breathing?'

" 'I need silence now more than ever!' I told her. 'Please, just be patient for me. Try not to move if you can help it.'

"I turned my ear to the crack under the door and listened. I listened in the same way I had let all my senses roam, but with a narrowing of focus. All I wanted now was sound, in any form I could perceive it. I imagined the temple as a two-dimensional maze and did my best to locate and chart the movement of air currents, following back along the track I had navigated earlier until I could detect the quiet rustle and murmur from the alcove. Describing it, I make it easier than it was, not out of false modesty—it was astoundingly difficult—but because I am running short of time to describe what happened.

"Once I had heard the excruciatingly faint sounds I sought, I began the hardest part of all. I turned my face and spoke a soft, almost silent word to the crack under the door, then followed its progress. The coherence of the wave of sound dissipated quickly, vanishing into diffused silence by the end of the corridor.

"Someone, I think it was T4b, moved behind me, and to my fiercely-straining senses it was like the roar of the ocean. It was all I could do not to scream at my companions. Instead, I tried again.

"It took me the better part of two hours, and could have taken forever if I had not had the wonderful luck that the corridors I was using were mostly deserted. It was like plotting the most complicated billiard shot in the universe, trying to move a small sequence of sound from one end of the temple to the other—bouncing off walls, caroming around corners, all dependent on nearly microscopic differences in the initial direction and on excellent guesses about the swirl of air currents. Still, for all my painstaking care, the fact that I eventually succeeded was mostly luck.

"It was easier to hear the reply, although it took some moments drifting back, No one but me could have heard it—in fact, the sound wave was so small I was not really hearing it, but reading it.

" 'Who that?' it said. 'How you know Zunni's name? How you know Wicked Tribe?'

"It was too difficult to carry on a conversation—it would have taken hours of hit and miss—and based on the stories I had been told, I did not have the highest belief in the patience of the Wicked Tribe children. I banked my entire roll on one message.

" 'We are friends of Orlando Gardiner's. We are locked in a prison cell here in the temple. They are going to hurt us. We need help right now.'

"I heard no reply back. A guard had begun to talk in the corridor outside, blasting the subtle pipeline of space and movement into crazy ripples.

"So that is that. It is a ridiculously unlikely possibility that they even heard the whole of my message, or that they can do anything about it, but it was the only plan I could devise. At least I was right in my guess that the monkey-children were still hiding in the temple. And against all odds I have told someone that we are here, that we need help. The fact that our safety is now dependent on a group of preschool children leaves us no worse off then we were, if not a great deal better.

"Still, although Bonnie Mae Simpkins was happy to hear that the children had survived, I think the rest of my companions were depressed to hear of the slim thread I had expended so much time and energy constructing, and on which our hopes now hung.

"However, I was so tired and felt so sick at that point that I was not even afraid of Dread—would not have cared if Satan himself had knocked on the cell door. I fell asleep almost immediately despite my head banging like a drum. Now I am awake again, but nothing has changed. My head still aches, a persistent throb that I fear will never leave me. Poor Paul Jonas is suffering God alone knows what kind of punishments. The rest of us still wait for death—or worse. We wait for Dread. And perhaps I have accomplished nothing—perhaps I am a failure as a witch. But at least I have done . . . something.

"If I am to die soon, that might be a little solace. A little.

"Code Delphi. End here."

He was tied and helpless, his back bent across the curved stone table so that he felt the merest touch would split open his belly. In the dim, torchlit chamber the yellow face of Ptah hovered like a sickly sun.

"Comfy?"

Paul struggled against the bonds that were already rubbing skin from his wrists and ankles. "Why are you doing this, Wells?"

"Because I want to know." He straightened up and told the guard who had tied Paul, "Go find Userhotep."

"But I don't know myself! You can't torture someone into telling something he doesn't know!"

Robert Wells shook his head in mock sadness. "Oh, but I can. This isn't the real world anymore, Jonas. This is something much more complicated—more interesting, too."

"Interesting enough to get you killed if your new master doesn't like what you're doing to me."

His captor laughed. "Oh, I'll leave plenty for him to play with, don't worry. But first we're going to try a few tricks of our own." He looked up at the sound of footsteps. "And here's the chief trickster himself."

"I live to serve you, O Lord of the White Walls." The man who spoke might have been old or young—it was hard to tell in the shadowy chamber, and was made more difficult by the fleshy smoothness of the stranger's features. He was not fat—his arms showed hints of terrifying muscle beneath the unusually pale skin—but he was rounded, almost curvaceous, and had the sexless look of a eunuch.

"Userhotep is a very special person," Wells said solemnly. "A . . . damn, what's the term? There's a little snake that talks in my ear, but it almost never shuts up and I get tired of listening. Ah, right, a kheri-heb. A special kind of priest."

"He's a torturer," Paul snapped. "And you're an arrogant criminal bastard, Wells. Does your snake-gear have an Egyptian translation for that?"

"You know it already. The term is . . . a god." Robert Wells smiled. "But Userhotep is far more skilled than any mere torturer. He's a lector priest. That means a magician. And he's going to help you tell me everything you know. And everything you don't know, too."

Userhotep moved closer, raising his hands above Paul's unprotected belly. When Paul flinched, the priest frowned slightly, but his eyes remained as empty as the glazed stare of a fish.

No, a shark, Paul thought miserably. Something that uses its teeth just because it has them.

"No need to squirm," Wells said. "The painful bit is a pretty small part of the whole operation—I just mentioned it to give your cellmates something to think about. No, Userhotep here is going to cast a spell over you, then you're going to sing like a canary."

"You've been in here too long if you think some of Jongleur's ancient Egyptian mumbo-jumbo is going to make me tell you anything." He strained against the ropes, lifting his head until he could look into Userhotep's epicene face. "You're code, did you know that? You don't even exist. You're imaginary—a bunch of numbers in a big machine!"

Wells chuckled. "He won't hear anything that doesn't fit in with the simulation, Jonas. And it's you who doesn't understand much if you think this . . . mumbo-jumbo won't affect you."

Userhotep bent. When he stood again a long bronze blade was in his hand, more like a straight razor than a dagger. Before Paul had time to react, the priest swiped it across his chest. He had made three shallow cuts before Paul felt the burning pain of the first.

"You bastard!"

Paying no attention to Paul's struggles, Userhotep lifted a jar from the floor and dipped out something black and viscous. He rubbed it across the incisions. It was all Paul could do not to scream as it burned into the raw flesh.

"I think that's probably poppy-seed paste," Wells observed. "Kind of a primitive opium to help you dream. They have a multidisciplinary approach here, you see—a little science, a little magic, a little pain. . . ."

"Here is the malefactor, O gods,"

the priest chanted,

"The one whose mouth is closed against you

    as a door is shut

Here is the one who will not tell truth

Unless you open his mouth so that his spirit

    has no shade in which to hide!

Give unto me the provenance of his tongue!

Give unto me the secrets of his heart!"

Even as he spoke the charm Userhotep sliced at Paul's skin again and again, caulking each wound with salty black paste. His fluting voice was distant, distracted, as though he were reading the minutes of an unimportant, forgotten meeting, but there was a curious intensity to the man's flat, cold eyes: as the pain mounted, they seemed to grow brighter, until the face was all Paul could see, the rest of the room falling back into shadow.

"See, it doesn't matter whether you believe or not," Wells said from somewhere behind him, the yellow Ptah-face eclipsed by the priest's round visage like the sun disappearing behind the moon. "That's one of the clever things about this network—really, you have to give old Jongleur credit, it approaches genius. . . ."

"I don't know anything!" Paul groaned, fighting uselessly against the ropes, the burning of his skin.

"Oh, but you do. And if we play the system right, perform the proper spells, you'll talk whether you want to or not—whether you think you remember or not. Surely you've noticed by now that the network operates below the conscious level? Makes everything more real? Hides things that you know must actually be there, even kills people just by convincing them they're dead? If I'd known how Jongleur managed it all, I would have pushed him out a long time ago." Wells' bad-boy giggle penetrated only slowly—Paul was having trouble understanding, his mind beset by storms of agony and confusion.

"See, the gods are waiting for you in the caverns

    of the Netherworld!

See, how they crush the heart of your silence!

See them in all their power, and know fear!

The Upreared One!

The Terrible One!

Turned Face!

He of the Coffin!

She who Combs Out!

The Cobra Speaking in Flame!"

". . . Of course, that's probably why he never let any of us know how it worked." Wells' voice was now quite distant, barely audible above the priest's chanting. Hot cramps pulled at Paul's joints, threatening to force them apart. "What was his little joke-term? Reality Enhancement Mechanism. Get it? REM, like when you dream. But damn him, you have to admit it works. Are you feeling it yet?"

Paul could not catch his breath. A black fever was creeping through him, hot and thick as the poppy paste, dark as the caverns of the priest's spell, caverns he could almost see, impossibly deep, full of watching eyes. . . .

"Now, Jonas, I think it's time for you to tell me everything you know about our friend Jongleur." The yellow face of the god returned, floating into the swirling shadows of Paul's vision. "Tell me what happened. . . ."

"Give me the force of his tongue, that I shall

    make it a whip to chastise the gods'

    enemies!"

the priest said, a triumphant note now entering the drone,

"Give me the force of his tongue, that he shall

    hide his secrets no more!

Make me master of his silence!

Make me priest of his hidden heart!

Speak now!

Speak now!

Speak now!

The gods command it. . . !"

"I . . . I don't. . . ." The priest's voice seemed like thunder in his ears, a din so great he could barely think. Images whirled past, fragments of his life in the tower, Ava's sad dark eyes, the smell of wet greenery. His own words were echoing both inside and outside his head. "I'm . . . I'm. . . ." He could see himself, could see everything, and the past tore open, ripped like flesh—painful, shriekingly painful, as the memories came tumbling out.

The darkness fell away, dropping him into something deeper still. He heard his own voice speak as if from a great distance.

"I'm . . . an orphan. . . ."