Otherland-4-SeaofSilverLight

The priest with the dull eyes set the ivory box down on the stone beside Paul. One corner pressed into his skin as the priest opened it and began carefully to remove a collection of bronze knives and other objects not so immediately classifiable.

"Here is the malefactor, O gods,"

Userhotep chanted,

"The one whose mouth is closed against you as a

    door is shut."

Paul tried desperately to concentrate on the drone of the priest's voice, the flickering lamplight as it splashed and ebbed along the ceiling, even the smirking god-mask of Robert Wells—anything but what was going to happen.

As the dead-eyed man bent toward him, a polished crescent of bronze shining in his fingers like a tiny moon, Paul tensed his muscles, then jerked his torso to one side, stretching the ropes until they creaked. The knife made only a shallow cut, which nevertheless left a stripe of agony along his rib cage. Paul's breast heaved with the effort but he had bought himself only a few seconds. Userhotep shot him a look of contempt, then prepared to cut again.

"It's really rather pointless, Mr. Jonas," said Robert Wells. "All this struggling. Why don't you just be a good sport?"

Staring at the hateful yellow face, Paul felt his mouth fill with acid rage and despair. Something burned into his side like a white-hot flame and a scream forced its way out of him like an animal fleeing its lair.

"The sooner you relax and stop fighting, the sooner we can break down that hypnotic block." Wells' voice floated to him from what seemed a great distance. "Then the pain will stop."

"You bastard," Paul sobbed. The shadows in the room seemed to be coming alive. Something was moving behind Wells, a widening angle of black.

The kheri-heb priest suddenly dropped his knife. Even before it clinked on the stone floor the torturer had staggered back from the butcher block, waving at his face. He was being swarmed by something Paul could not quite see, a moving cloud of pale shapes.

"Master," the priest shrieked, "save me!"

But something had grabbed Wells, too: Paul could just see him from the corner of his eye, a tall, bandaged figure struggling with something small and hairy that gripped his leg like a dog. Wells was cursing in shock and pain, flailing at his attacker. Then other shapes poured into the room. People shouted. The torches fluttered so that the shadows, which moments earlier had been so still, began to leap along the walls. Everything seemed to expand and waver.

Now Wells was wrestling with a dark-haired figure almost his own size. As they rolled on the floor together a flash of electrical light turned the world blue for a painful instant. Paul strained his head upward from the stone, trying to blink away the effects of the explosive glare.

What's happening. . . ? was all he had time to think, then Userhotep rose up beside him, still screaming, another knife in his hand and his face acrawl with squirming shapes. The priest fell across the altar, smashing Paul's head back against the stone and filling his head with blackness.

His limbs, now free, were on fire, and his heart felt like a motor working on bad fuel. His head felt worse. Somebody was under each of his arms, holding him up.

"My God, he's all wet—he's bleeding. . . !"

Paul recognized Martine's voice with a rush of gratitude. He tried to open his eyes but they were full of something salty that burned. "Shallow. . . ." he gasped, struggling unsuccessfully to support his own weight with his legs. The returning circulation felt like a swarm of murderously stinging ants. "Shallow cuts. They only . . . started. . . ."

"Don't talk," ordered Florimel from his other side. "Save your strength. We'll help you, but we have to get moving."

"I never thought I would see the yellow-faced one like this." This was a voice Paul did not know, deep and hoarse; it came from somewhere close to the ground, as though its owner were kneeling. "Look at him wiggle like a worm on a hot rock." The laugh was gleeful. "That is a powerful spell you hold in your hand, fellow."

"Just want out, me," Paul heard T4b say. The boy sounded as breathless as if he had just run a marathon. "Before that sayee lo killer come looking for us."

"Should we finish him off?" Florimel asked, and for a moment, in his pain and confused exhaustion, Paul thought his friends were planning to put him out of his misery.

"Look, look!" a tiny, high-pitched voice said almost inside his ear. "All blood! You fall down, mister? Look like zoomflier ripscrape, huh?"

"What the hell is going on?" Paul moaned. "What happened?"

"You speak lightly of finishing off Ptah," said the hoarse voice, going on as if Paul had not spoken, "but I must tell you that to kill a god changes the shape of heaven—especially one so important as the Lord of the White Walls."

"Wells is not our enemy," Martine said. "The real monster is coming—he might be here at any moment."

The voice by Paul's knees snorted. "If your enemy is our new lord and master Anubis," he said, "then you don't need any other enemies. If he catches us he will crush you—and me, too—like dust beneath his black heels."

Paul had at last managed to blink his eyes clear. The figure before him was not kneeling. It was a dwarf of some kind, with a great tangle of beard and a shockingly ugly face which widened in a grin as he saw Paul looking at him.

"Your friend can see again," he said, then bowed. "No need to thank Bes for saving you and your companions. There is little work for a household god in a land where all the households have been smashed into ruin." The dwarf laughed. He seemed to laugh a lot, but Paul could not help noticing that he didn't seem very happy. "However, I suppose all my work could be called little work."

Paul shook his head, dazed. A yellow monkey the length of his finger was hovering just before him now. A moment later a half dozen more joined the formation. "Nobody tells us where 'Landogarner is," the tiny ape complained. "You know? And Freddicks?"

Robert Wells lay on the stone floor a few feet away, writhing as though in the grip of a seizure, clutching at his bandaged head. The priest Userhotep was crumpled against the far wall in a spreading dark pool that reflected torchlight.

"What's going on?" Paul asked again, helplessly.

"We'll tell you later." Martine reached up from under his arm and patted his face. Her hand lingered there for a moment, cool and reassuring. "You're safe now."

"As safe as the rest of us, anyway," said Florimel darkly. "Here are your clothes."

"Leave Wells," Martine said. "It's time to go. I don't know exactly how far it is to the gateway."

"Gateway. . . ?" Paul's head felt as though it were sloshingly full of black paint or dirty oil, something sticky that kept fouling the connections. There were two other people in the room, he saw, the prisoners who had been brought in just before Paul had been dragged out. When Nandi Paradivash saw him looking, he limped over.

"I am glad you are alive, Paul Jonas." Patches of Nandi's skin had been scraped raw on his face and arms, and he had gruesome, hand-shaped burns on his legs. He seemed shriveled, a shadow of his earlier brave and resourceful self. "I will never forgive myself for betraying you." Paul shrugged, unsure of what to say. Nandi seemed to want some kind of absolution, but at the moment Paul could not make much sense of such an abstract idea. "Mrs. Simpkins and I. . . ." Nandi gestured awkwardly to the woman, "we were . . . prisoners of the man called Dread for many days."

"We'll talk about it later." The Simpkins woman sounded rational and calm, but her shadowed eyes did not meet Paul's, and her hands drooped like they were boneless.

"Can you walk if we help you, Paul?" Martine asked, "We have to hurry and it will be hard to carry you. We distracted the guards, but they'll be back."

Bes chuckled and trotted to the door, then pulled it open. Paul could hear distant shouts in the corridor. "It is impressive how much distraction you can cause when you give a torch to a troop of flying monkeys."

A yellow cloud of simians exploded into the air and out into the hallway.

"Burn burn burn!" they squealed, whirling like a dust devil. "Burn all pretty!"

"Big fuego!"

"Ruling Tribe!"

T4b lurched after them. He was holding one of his hands as though it hurt. Paul could not help noticing that the hand was glowing.

Supported by Martine and Florimel, Paul staggered out of the cell. He had to step over one of Wells' legs, which jerked and twitched as though electrified.

The sun overhead was a vast white disk, the air outside Abydos-That-Was so dry and hot Paul could almost feel it sucking the moisture out of his lungs. Ruined, fire-blackened buildings stood on all sides of the great temple, some still bleeding dark smoke into the sky. Dread appeared to have thrown a party here much like the one in Dodge City.

Paul needed to lean a little on Florimel, but he had regained enough strength that Martine could let go of him and walk down the stone pier that jutted out from the back of the temple into the flat brown water of a wide canal. The monkeys hovered around her for a moment, then darted forward to inspect the immense golden barge waiting at the end of the pier like a floating hotel. Martine stopped halfway down the span and turned slowly from side to side.

"It's not here." Her voice was tight with growing panic. "The gateway—I can feel it, but it's not here."

"What does that mean?" Florimel demanded. "It's invisible?"

"No, it's simply not here. I could sense it out here when we were inside. I can still feel it, very strongly, but. . . ." She turned until she was facing away from the temple, looking down the river valley to the south. "My God," she said slowly. "It's . . . it's far away. But it's so strong! That's why I thought it was just here, at the edge of the temple." She turned to Bes, who watched her with the serene calm of someone who saw and even made miracles himself every day. "What's out there?"

"Sand," he growled. "Scorpions. More sand. It's closer to the point to talk about what isn't out there—water, shade, things like that." He tugged at his curly beard. "That way lies the Red Desert."

"But what's out there? What am I sensing? Something big, powerful—an opening." She frowned; Paul guessed she was searching for a way to explain that the dwarf would understand. "Some . . . some very big and dark magic."

Bes only shook his head. "You don't want to go there, woman."

"Damn it, we have to!" Martine came back up the pier toward him. "Just tell us. We will make our own choices."

The bearded god stared at her for a moment, then shook his head again. "When the little apes found me, I came to help you because I regretted how I had left these two—he gestured toward Nandi and Mrs. Simpkins, "—at an evil time in the temple of Ra, Now you want to go somewhere even worse? I am not the most noble of gods, woman, but neither do I wish to send good people to their ruin."

"Just tell us what is out there!" snapped Martine.

Mrs. Simpkins stepped forward; her uselessly dangling hands made her look like a begging dog. "We need to know, Bes," she said. "After that, it's up to us, not you."

He looked at her angrily. "The Temple of Set," he said at last. "The house of the Lost One. That is what you sense out there in the desert. It is a hole into the underworld, a place that even great Osiris entered like a mortal man being dragged alive into his own tomb. And if you go there you will be lost forever."

Martine stared toward him, an unreadable expression on her sightless face. Nandi and T4b limped back from the end of the pier where they had been examining the vast barge.

"Like, all these black guys with oars in there," T4b reported. He still cradled his glowing hand as though it hurt him. "Just sitting, staring at nothing. Locking scanned."

"Go, then," Bes said to Martine. "Just step onto the boat and say where you wish to go. The boat will take you. You will be there sooner than you wish."

"We have to do it," she said quietly.

"Then you go without Bes." The little god turned in disgust and began to walk back toward the temple. "May the seven Hathors give you a merciful ending."

Mrs. Simpkins turned to call after him. "Thank you for helping us! God bless you!"

Bes made a gesture, half-fare well, half-dismissal. The monkeys wheeled around his head for a moment, then fluttered back toward Paul and the others.

"Is it just me," Florimel asked heavily, "or is someone always telling us that we are going to hate the place we are going even worse than where we are?"

Even in the hot Egyptian air, Paul was shivering. "Well, they've been right every time," he said.

"Code Delphi. Start here.

"We have been incredibly lucky. No, I have been incredibly lucky. My desperate attempt to find help roused the Wicked Tribe, and the children themselves located the little god Bes, friend of our fellow prisoners Nandi Paradivash and Bonita Mae Simpkins. That in itself was a great stroke of fortune—the tiny Tribe children could never have lifted the bolt on our cell door themselves, but Bes is far more powerful than his stature would suggest. He is a god, after all.

"And against all my dark certainties, we have rescued Paul Jonas as well, injured and traumatized, but still alive, still sane. Even now, his skin washed clean of blood, his many wounds bandaged to the best of my ability, he is sleeping beside my feet. Nandi and Bonnie Mae have also survived torture, although there is a shadow across them both. The virtual galley slaves are rowing the barge of Osiris upstream, like an engine that does not care who is driving—upstream toward the Temple of Set.

"I did not need Bes to tell me how dangerous our journey is. Orlando and Fredericks were drawn to this temple once, sucked in like leaves into a whirlpool, and Orlando said they barely survived it. Still, I cannot help feeling at least a little optimistic, foolish as that is. We are still alive, when good sense proclaims we should not be. And we have escaped from under the very nose of Dread, at least for a moment. Something inside me dances like a child let out into the garden after a long boring day inside. I am alive! There is nothing more important than that. It is all I have. For the moment, it is enough.

"But as I sense Paul lying near me—so deep in exhausted, trembling sleep that he resembles Robert Wells after Javier jabbed that strange, glowing hand of his into the back of Wells' head, dropping someone who was a great god in this Egyptian simworld straight to the floor like a slaughtered bullock—I cannot help wondering what it all means. Is it only luck that we are again rescued? We are inside an operating system that has been fed with the idea of stories, so perhaps the thread of coincidence and strange chance is not so unbelievable. Perhaps T4b having been damaged in just the way that would save us makes a kind of sense—perhaps it was part of the story of the network. But that does not explain every odd stroke of fortune that has affected us. I came into this network by my own choice, trying to help Renie Sulaweyo find her brother, absolutely unaware that it might have anything to do with that long-ago day I lost my sight. How could such an extreme coincidence be?

"Unless there is more to this idea of story than anyone understands.

"After all, is it not the way we humans shape the universe, shape time itself? Do we not take the raw stuff of chaos and impose a beginning, middle, and end on it, like the simplest and most profound of folktales, to reflect the shapes of our own tiny lives? And if the physicists are right, that the physical world changes as it is observed, and we are its only known observers, then might we not be bending the entire chaotic universe, the eternal, ever-active Now, to fit that familiar form?

"If so, the universe, from the finest quantum dust to the widest vacuum spaces, does indeed have a shape. It begins 'Once upon a time. . . .'

"And if it is true, then only we humans, poor, naked semi-apes crouching in the thin light of our single star, marooned on the rim of a minor galaxy, can determine whether there will be a 'Happily ever after'?

"It makes my head hurt to think of it. It is a possibility too large and strange to contain for long, especially when we are still in such danger.

"The ship of Osiris breasts the sluggish river current, rocking beneath me, the timbers creaking, the oars beating an inhumanly steady rhythm. We are heading up the Nile to the darkest place in this world, maybe in any of these worlds. I am very tired. I think I will try to sleep for a little while.

"Code Delphi. End here."

Dread floated in the white spaces of his bone-sparse Outback castle. The yip of a dingo sounded through the archway, offering a weird but compelling counterpoint to the piano melody shivering in the air. Dread muted the light, pushing the arid landscape into twilight so he could better see the abstract which Dulcie Anwin had prepared for him.

He frowned, annoyed by having to pay attention when he would rather have drifted and daydreamed. The abstract was an expanding treasure box of charts, three-dimensional graphs, and lists of assets—a neat summation of the hugely various holdings controlled by Felix Jongleur. A forest of markers sprang from each point, containing information about access and connection, and for a little while he entertained himself with contemplating how each subcorporation, holding company, and business asset could be used as an instrument of pain.

He listened with pleasure to the lonely, atonal lurch of the piano. I can make a true symphony out of it, he thought. An economic collapse here, a plague there, so that even the rich ones cop it sweet. War, famine—all the bloody horsemen of the Apocalypse, one after the other. Like World War Three, but in slow motion. Which will make it easier to enjoy.

Of course, I'll have to play it carefully—make sure it doesn't get too far out of hand. After all, I don't want anything happening to me, now do I?

But before the real fun could begin he had to get the last details dealt with. It was one thing to be able to access Felix Jongleur's high-level information, another to implement the kind of wild art projects Dread was now envisioning. Surely at some point Jongleur's absence would officially become Jongleur's death, and his various boards of directors and successor-designates would step in, sending armies of accountants and data analysts ahead of them. Before that happened, Dread knew he would have to firm up his own controls, transferring the assets and connections he needed into his own hands.

Did he need Dulcie for that? No. She had lived out her usefulness. In fact, she knew far too much. Another day or so while she helped him handle the various transfers of power, then her trip to Australia would end. He had decided that he could combine the need for an unsuspicious resolution with a little pleasure for himself, after all. Who would be surprised if an American tourist were to be found robbed and murdered in one of the seamier parts of Sydney?

The piano was joined again, not by a wild dog this time, but by the quiet beeping of an urgent message. Dread considered ignoring it, but knew it might be from Dulcie. Since they had such a short time left together, he wanted to keep her working. A good manager didn't waste an asset.

To his surprise, the call was on a line he hadn't yet used. The head that filled the view-window was shaved bald, the robes streaked gray and black with soot.

"O Lord of All!" the priest said, stuttering in his haste and panic. "Woe is come upon us, O Great House. Your servants are full of despair—all the Black Land is in terror!"

Dread frowned. It was one of the Old Man's virtual priests. The call had been routed directly to him through Jongleur's connection to the Grail network, just as though the servitor were calling from the real world instead of an imaginary Egypt.

"What do you want?"

"O blessed Anubis, master of the final journey, there is fire in great Abydos! Many priests are dead, many more lie burned and dying!"

Which was a pretty funny thing to call him about, Dread reflected, since he had been torturing and murdering priests himself in the temple complex of Abydos-That-Was not twenty-four hours ago. "So?"

The ash-smeared face went paler still. The man's mouth worked without noise for a moment. "And the prisoners of the great god have escaped."

"What?" He narrowed his eyes. "You let those two idiots from the Circle get away? Both of them?"

The priest swallowed. When he spoke, it was almost a whisper. "All of them. All of the great god's prisoners."

"What are you talking about?" He heard his voice rise to an angry howl, as though he truly were the god the priest must be seeing. "Don't move!"

With a flick of thought, he threw himself into Egypt.

Wells cowered on the floor of the cell, his mummy wrappings smeared with dirt, his banana-yellow face tight with fear and resentment as he stared up at the huge, jackal-headed figure of Anubis.

"How was I to know?" Wells was slurring his words as though something had damaged his brain. "It was just some kid—he must have been the same one who got Yacoubian. He just . . . stuck his hand in me. I was paralyzed—almost felt like I was thrown offline, except I was still locked inside this virtual body."

"What the hell are you babbling about?" Dread whirled and struck Wells hard across the side of the head, knocking the bandaged god to the floor. "I'll give you paralyzed, you whining poof. The priests said my prisoners escaped—all my prisoners. I had two little god-botherers I was hanging onto, but they weren't going anywhere. Almost dead, they were. So what are the priests talking about?"

"They just . . . showed up here," Wells said quickly. "The ones I came to Kunohara's world with. They showed up here and I was holding them for you."

"Kunohara's world. . . ?" Dread stared at the cowering figure. "Are you telling me. . . ?"

Wells climbed to his feet. "But Paul Jonas was with them, see?"

"Who the bloody hell is that?" The name was slightly familiar, but any memory was washed away in a hot red fury that made him feel as though he might burst into flame.

"Someone Jongleur was searching for!" Wells seemed to feel he had redeemed himself with this information; he clambered back onto his feet. "The Old Man turned the network upside down trying to find him, but we never knew why—we didn't even know his name. Jonas has some kind of post-hypnotic block on his memory, so I thought a little session with one of the kheri-heb priests might loosen it up. . . ."

"Shut up!" Dread roared. "I don't give a shit about this Jonas. Who was here? What prisoners? Who escaped?"

Wells flinched back, blinking. "I told you, the . . . the ones from Kunohara's world. You remember, don't you? You sent all those mutant bugs after them. The boy with the strange hand. The woman with the bandaged head. The blind woman. . . ."

"You . . . you had Martine here. . . ?" Dread could hardly speak. His hands were shaking. "You had Martine Desroubins and her friends here and you didn't tell me?"

Wells took a step backward. He tried to stand taller. "I would have told you. I would have! But I can make some decisions on my own, you know. I ran one of the largest companies in the world—and now I'm a god, too!"

Dread was on him so fast that Robert Wells did not even have time to squeak. The jackal-god's huge hand closed around the other's throat, then he lifted his victim up until his bandaged feet dangled helplessly a meter above the ground.

"Which way did they go?"

Wells shook his head violently, eyes bulging.

"Right. I'll find out myself." He pulled Wells closer still, until he could have closed his jaws on Ptah's hairless head and cracked it like a walnut. "You goddamned Yanks think you know everything. Well, here's some information for you, mate. You may be a god now . . . but around here, I'm God Almighty."

His captive struggled in terror, but only for a moment. Dread's hand shot out, swift as a cobra's strike, and plunged into Robert Wells' gaping mouth, then his fingers curved upward, poking through the skull as though it were an eggshell as he set his grip. With the smaller god secured, he took his other hand from Wells' throat and pulled the yellow lips hideously wide, stretching them back like a latex mask until the face disappeared. Then, with a terrible twisting motion of his long arm, Dread yanked Ptah's entire skeleton out of his body and let it drop to the floor. A puppet of bone and sinew twitched like a landed fish beside the empty, rubbery folds of its own flesh. The eyes, still trapped in the orbits of the naked skull, rolled wildly even as their intelligence began to fade.

"So you're a god, eh?" Dread spat beside the slick, shiny bones. "Then heal that.'"

His mood ever so slightly improved, Anubis went in search of his prisoners.

He could think better now. The oppressive cloud that had darkened and confused his thoughts was beginning to disperse, as if baked away by the glaring Egyptian sun, but despite the improvement, Paul found himself not just uninterested in thinking but actively unwilling to try. The memory of his own helplessness was a shame and a terror.

Upon waking he had dragged himself into the shade of the boat's gilded deck awning. They seemed to have left the canal and moved out onto the Nile itself: on either side of the wide brown river stretched kilometers of empty sand. The rugged mountains, ocher-gray and indistinct in the distance, only underscored the flat, featureless desert.

Whether he wanted them or not, scraps of memory fluttered through his head—Ava, the chirping of the birds, Mudd's triumphant, subhuman face as he found them embracing.

I kissed her. Did I love her? Why can't I feel it? If you love someone, surely you can't forget that.

But it was all too dark, too heavy with misery. He didn't want to know any more—surely one of them had somehow betrayed the other. Nothing else would explain his revulsion at the idea of uncovering additional memories.

He was distracted, and was grateful for it, by Nandi Paradivash lowering himself carefully down beside him. "I see you are awake." He spoke far more slowly than Paul remembered from their first meeting. In fact, this Nandi seemed quite different from the mercurial character with whom he had sailed through Xanadu—hard and dry, as though some crucial petrifaction had occurred. "I am glad to see you again, Paul Jonas."

"And I'm glad to see you. I never got the chance to thank you for saving me."

"From the Khan's men?" Nandi showed him the phantom of a smile. "They actually caught me, but I escaped. It is much like an adventure game, this life, eh? But all too dangerous, both to the body and the soul."

"Nothing around you is true, but the things you see can hurt you or kill you," Paul quoted. "That was the message I was given—I think I told you. And you did save me, in the most important way. You told me what was really going on. Then I didn't have to be afraid I was losing my mind."

Nandi slowly eased himself into a lotus position, being careful with his burned legs. The scarred flesh brought back Paul's own last hours in the temple so strongly that for a moment he thought he might be sick.

Nandi did not seem to notice: his eyes were on the riverbank. "God will protect us from evil men. They will live to see their works cast down." He turned to Paul. "And their works have been cast down, haven't they? I have been told of what happened to the Grail Brotherhood's ceremony of immortality."

"Yes. But somehow it still doesn't feel like we're winning."

After they had sat in silence for a little while, Paul suddenly said, "You know, you were right. About the Pankies."

Nandi frowned. "Who?"

"That English couple. The man and woman who were with me when you and I first met. You told me they weren't what they seemed." He related the strange happenings in the catacombs beneath Venice, when for a moment the Twins and the Pankies had confronted each other as though looking into a mirror, and how Sefton and Undine Pankie had turned away and vanished. "But that still doesn't explain them," he said.

"Early versions, perhaps," Nandi offered. "A release that was superseded by a later, improved product. But someone forgot to delete the original version."

"But there have been others, too," Paul said, remembering Kunohara's world. "I met a pair who were insects, but they didn't care about me either. They were obsessed with something they called the Little Queen," A memory prickled him. "And the Pankies were looking for their imaginary daughter."

"A common thread in both versions, no doubt," Nandi said. "Martine told me you know the originals."

Paul was taken aback at the thought that people were discussing his ugly secrets, his imperfectly remembered life—it was his life, after all, wasn't it?

But it's everyone's mystery, he reminded himself. Everyone here is in terrible danger.

"Yes, I suppose I do, but I don't remember everything even now." It was there again, a shadow at the edge of his thoughts, a dim perception of something he did not want to know better. "But why should there be different versions doing different things? Why are some of them after me, hunting me, and others don't care?" Again the Venetian catacombs loomed in his memory, the mirrored pairs facing each other as he and poor Gally and the woman Eleanora watched.

"Perhaps they're simply programmed differently." Nandi didn't seem to see much purpose in speculating, but Paul was trying to remember something else, something Eleanora had told him, or showed him. . . .

"My God," he said suddenly, "they are just copies." He sat up straight, ignoring the sharp pain across the ribs. "Eleanora—she was a real woman who lived in the Venetian simworld—she showed me her boyfriend, this Mafia fellow who had built the world for her in the first place. He was dead, but the Grail people had made a copy of him while he was still alive. I think it was an early version of the Grail process. He was real—he could answer questions—but he was also kind of an information loop, kept forgetting what had been asked, said the same things over and over. What if the Pankies and the other versions of the Twins are like that?"

"You are bleeding," Nandi said quietly.

Paul looked down. His sudden movement had opened the shallow cuts on his chest; blood was running freely, soaking through the dirty jumpsuit.

"Jonas, what are you doing?" Florimel was striding toward him. "Martine, he's bleeding again."

"She can't hear you," Nandi said. "She's at the bow of the ship."

"Help me get him cleaned up."

"I'm all right, really." But Paul did not resist as Florimel opened the front of his jumpsuit and began cursingly to fumble at the sopping strips of cloth Martine had applied.

"T4b?" she called. "Where are you? Find me something I can use to make more bandages. T4b?" There was no answer. "Damn it, Javier, where are you?"

"Javier?" asked Nandi as he helped Florimel peel Paul's jumpsuit down to his waist.

Paul was irritated—they weren't life-threatening wounds, and the idea now blazing in his head felt important. Many copies, some less perfect than others. . . .

I am a broken mirror, she had told him. A broken mirror. . . .

"You took your time, Javier," Florimel said as the boy finally approached. "Did you find some cloth?"

"Isn't any." He darted a glance at Nandi as though more fearful of him than of Florimel's anger.

"Javier . . . Javier Rogers?" Nandi asked.

"No!" said T4b harshly, then stiffened and looked down at his feet. "Yeah."

"You know each other?" Florimel looked from one to the other.

"We should," said Nandi. "It is because of the Circle that Javier is here."

Florimel turned on the youth. "Is that true?"

"Oh, fenfen," he said miserably.

The way they were all gathered around the boy, Paul thought, it was hard not to think of an inquisition. But T4b, his face damp with sweat and teenage embarrassment, did not make a very convincing martyr.

"What else have you lied to us about?" Florimel demanded.

"Didn't lie about nothing, me." T4b scowled. "Ain't duppie. Just didn't tell you, seen?"

"You don't need to justify your faith, honey," Bonnie Mae assured him.

"He kept no dangerous secrets from you," said Nandi. "We recruited many like him, promising young men and women of belief. We gave them information, some education, and we gave them equipment. This is a war we are fighting, after all, as you people should know better than anyone. Were you not recruited yourselves by someone whose motives are far less openly stated than ours?"

"Are you working for Kunohara as well?" Florimel asked T4b. Paul thought she seemed unusually upset. "Was Martine right about that too?"

"No! Don't got nothing to do with that Kuno-whatsit, me." He looked like he was about to cry. "And I never did nothing wrong to you either. Just didn't tell you . . . about the Circle."

Paul looked at Martine, but she seemed to be listening with only part of her attention. "What did you mean when you said 'men and women of belief?" he asked Nandi.

"We are a group bound together by our belief in a power greater than mere humanity," Nandi said. "I made no secret of that when you and I met."

"But Javier. . . ?"

The boy looked sullen when he realized everyone was looking at him once more. "I'm born again, me. Jesus saved me."

"There you go," said Bonnie Mae. "Don't be ashamed of the path you've chosen. 'Blessed are they who do hunger and thirst after righteousness,' as Jesus said on the mountain, 'for they shall be filled.' Nothing wrong with a hunger for righteousness." She turned to the others. "This boy has found his way through Christ. Does that offend you? What about me, then? Is there something wrong with loving God?"

"Jesus helped me give up charge," T4b said earnestly. "I was, like, lost. Then He saved me."

"He just came over to your house and showed you some new tricks?" Florimel laughed bitterly. "I am sorry, but I grew up with this nonsense. It poisoned my mother's life and it poisoned mine. Forgive my reaction, but I feel betrayed to learn that he has been serving another master all this time."

"Serving another master?" Now it was Nandi who was angry. "How? We have not spoken to Javier since he entered the network. Are your goals not ours—to save the children and bring about the destruction of this devilish operating system, this terrible immortality machine that runs on blood and souls?"

I was thinking of something important when all this happened, Paul remembered, but could not tear himself away from the looks of fury and confusion on the faces of his companions. Only Martine Desroubins seemed somewhere else, listening to sounds she alone could hear. "Martine?" he asked.

"It is close," she said. "I feel it. It is like nothing else I have experienced here—like the Cavern of the Lost, but both more and less alive. And it is very powerful." She grimaced. "Close. So close."

Paul looked up. The ship, driven by its indefatigable crew of robotic galley slaves, was rounding a bend in the wide, sluggish river. As they tilted past a scattering of rocky foothills Paul saw it, nestled by itself in a wide valley of red sand.

"Good lord," he said quietly.

"It is empty." Martine was still frowning, the lines of her face tight with pain. "But not empty. There is something deep inside it that is hot and active. It is like an oven with the door closed."

The Wicked Tribe, who had been hovering over the discussion like particularly anarchic thoughts above the heads of comic-strip characters, now descended in a yellow flutter, clustering on Paul.

"Bad place," one of them said.

"Been here," said another. "Don't want to be here again. Go away now!"

Several of them flew up and began tugging at Paul's hair. "Time to go away. Back to somewhere fun. Now!"

The argument over T4b ended as one by one the combatants saw the faint brown shape of the temple in the distance, the sandstone pillars of the massive facade standing sentry between oblongs of pitch-black shadow.

"It . . . it looks like a smile," said Florimel.

"Like a dead smile," Nandi said slowly. "Like the grin of a skull."

The temple not only looked empty, but was half-covered with drifting dunes, as though it had lain long unremembered and unvisited. Swirled by a breeze none of them could feel, clouds of sparkling gray sand helped shroud the structure so that its full size and dimensions were never quite clear.

The quiet splash of the banked oars now fell silent. As the ship glided slowly to a stop beside the dock Paul and his companions stared at the looming temple, its wind-blasted front high as an office building and as wide as several city blocks. There was no noise anywhere along the riverbank.

"Don't want to go in there," T4b said at last.

"We must," Martine said, but gently: if she had heard the argument about his secret affiliation, it did not seem to have lessened her opinion of the youth. "Dread will come looking for us—it could be any time now. He will not be tricked or defeated, not like Wells, And he will be very angry."

T4b did not say anything else, but when the others began moving toward the gangplank he went with them as though being led to execution. The Wicked Tribe hung on his and Paul's and Florimel's clothes like sleeping bats, frightened for once into good behavior.

"Not so bad this time," one of them whispered in Paul's ear, but the childish voice did not sound entirely convinced. "It more asleep. Maybe doesn't know we here."

Despite Martine's warnings, Paul could not make himself move any faster than a foot-dragging trudge across the sun-blasted desert. The blowing sand stung his face. The looming row of columns seemed ready to swallow him down. The very air was heavy, as though they were pushing their way through something solid and sticky. Behind him Florimel let out a strangled sigh, fighting to get breath into a fear-tightened throat.

The baking heat diminished only a little as they stepped between the Cyclopean columns and into the shade. The long wall before them was covered with what had once been intricately carved panels, but which had been worn down until they were only idiot scribbles, devoid of sense or reassurance. The only doorway was a simple black square in the middle of the massive front wall, a hole into a deeper darkness.

Martine went through first, holding her hands to her ears despite the thickly expectant silence of the place—exactly as though someone stood beside her screaming, Paul thought as he and the others followed her inside.

As his eyes grew used to the darkness of the interior, illuminated only by the light from the door, Paul saw that white-clad bodies lay everywhere, perhaps two dozen in all. Not one was moving; all appeared to have suffered in dying. He turned away in dismay from the nearest corpse, its fingers red from tearing at the unyielding stone floor, eyes rolled up as though looking for a salvation that would never arrive.

"They are not Puppets," Nandi said quietly. Paul looked at him in surprise. "They are empty sims," the dark-skinned man said. "See—they have not putrefied or even changed, only stiffened. Real people died or went offline and left their sims behind."

Martine had stopped in front of an immense doorway that stretched to the ceiling along the interior wall, its double doors covered in hammered bronze. The very size of them gave his fear an extra, sickening twist.

I don't really want to see what's on the other side. . . .

Something touched his arm and he jumped.

"Didn't lie to no one, me," T4b said quietly. Paul was amazed that in the midst of this doom-laden atmosphere the boy was still worrying about what people thought.

"I believe you, Javier."

"Sorry. Sorry . . . I tried to six you." He spoke so quietly Paul did not immediately understand him. "On the mountain, like."

"Oh! Oh, that. It's all right, really."

"But that girl, Emily, she was chizz. Had ops for her, me. Utterly did." He seemed desperate for Paul to understand. "Then when all that fen blew up. . . ."

The whole conversation was surreal. First Nandi, now this boy. When did I become the father-confessor? Or is it because they both think we probably won't be alive much longer—that soon it will be too late for apologies. . . .

"Are you all simply going to wander around until someone shows up to kill us?" Martine called, her voice ragged with pain or fear or both, startling both Paul and T4b. "Come and help me open this door!"

They hurried across the echoing room. The others gathered near the doors, whispering. Paul wanted to laugh, but the ache of fear was too great. Why bother to be quiet? Did they think the thing on the other side was really sleeping, that it wouldn't hear them? He remembered the monstrous presence he had summoned on Ithaca, the thing that had come to Orlando and Fredericks in the Freezer. Didn't they understand this place by now? The Other was always sleeping—but it was always listening, too.

Weighed down by dark foreboding that made it hard to think or even move, he let himself be pressed in beside T4b and Nandi to pull at the huge double doors. For a moment there was no movement, then the great bronzed panels swung outward with a screech like some angry primordial beast. The Wicked Tribe darted back from the opening as though the cavern beyond were full of poisonous gas or burning-hot air; Paul could not help remembering what Martine had said about an oven.

"Not go in there!" one of the monkeys shouted. "Wait out here!" They looped up into the high reaches of the antechamber and hung near the doorway leading back outside, babbling in fear and excitement.

Martine had already stepped through like a woman wading into a high wind. Paul followed her, expecting to feel something similar to what she was experiencing, but the sensation of oppressive menace was no greater outside the room than in.

The chamber was made of rough, dark stone, as though it had been hurriedly chipped from a living mountain. At the center, its exquisitely carved and polished lines in sharp contrast, lay a gigantic black stone sarcophagus.

Paul could feel the others pressing in behind him, but he was unwilling to take another step. Martine had her hands to her ears again, swaying in place as though dizzy. Paul feared she might fall, but even that could not make him move closer to the silent black box.

"He . . . he feels me. . . ." Martine said in a strangulated whisper. It echoed from the walls and came back in pieces: "Feels me . . . feels. . . ."

A light, painfully bright, flared at the side of the cavern, twenty meters from the coffin. As though in a nightmare, Paul could not move, but he felt his heart lurch inside his breast.

The light hung in the air for a moment, dripping sparks like burning magnesium, then resolved into a human-shaped blank white hole. Paul was surprised to feel a dull and somewhat anticlimatic tug of recognition. Still, neither he nor his companions were quite prepared for the high-pitched voice that echoed across the cavern.

"Man! What kind of mierda that crazy old man throw me in this time?"

The astonishing spectacle of a twitching, featureless figure swearing in Spanish was interrupted by the explosive entrance into the tomb-chamber of a cloud of yellow, finger-sized monkeys.

"Someone coming!" they squealed, "Look out! Le big chien!"

Their shrill excitation made it almost impossible to figure out what was going on. "What on earth are you children screaming about?" Bonita Mae Simpkins demanded. "Zunni, you tell me straight—the rest of you, quiet!"

"No wonder you all friends with Sellars," declared the glowing shape with a mixture of amusement and disgust, "You all loco, for true."

"Sellars?" said Florimel, startled.

"It's coming," the little monkey named Zunni explained.

"What?"

"Big black dog," she squeaked. "Coming here across the desert."

"Big, big dog," one of the other monkeys piped up. "Big like a mountain. Coming fast!"

CHAPTER 34Desert Smile

CHAPTER 34
Desert Smile