Mountain of Black Glass (103 page)

“I'm going to leave a channel open,” he said. “I don't know if it will still work after I penetrate the network, but I'll be able to talk to you at least until then.”

She nodded. Her hair hung down, curtaining her face.

“Right. Wish me luck, sweetness.”

“Of course. Good luck.”

Dread subvocalized a command and dropped into the empty surface level of his own system. He closed his eyes, centering himself, reaching out along the ganglia of the system matrix which he knew as well or better than he did his own body. He tested the new capacities, the greater speed and vastly increased memory, and found it all good. He had only a vague idea of what he might find, and what might happen when he found it; he wanted to be prepared for all contingencies.

But something was missing, he realized. The hero was going into battle with no music. Dread considered for a moment. It was dangerous to squander even a tiny amount of his resources, surely—but what about style? Wasn't it part of being a hero to waste a little energy on swagger? He summoned up his catalog—he was not going to be so foolish as to try to manipulate an invented score during an assault like this—and settled at last on an old, old friend, Beethoven's
Ninth.
Some might consider it a cliche. Fine. Let the snotty bastards step in with him and face the dragon, or if not, shut up. Better, let them step in and face Dread himself. A little music might actually help focus his resolve, and if it became a drain on either his resources or his attention, he would shut it off.

As the first portentous string figures drifted up, he called up the entry sequence on Dulcie's copy of the stolen access device. When he had first tried to reenter after being knocked out of the system, the response had been swift and savage—a bolt of hideous input like bad charge, worse than anything the Old Man had ever done to him. This time he was prepared. He had found a way to hide his point of connection while the Otherland system considered the request. Any attack would be pointless, and would pinpoint the source of resistance.

But to Dread's surprise, instead of another retaliatory stroke, the sequence keyed through and the system opened, presenting him with an initial choice of parameters—a kind of visitor's lobby for the exclusive environs of the Otherland system. Elated that Dulcie's tinkering had solved the access failure from last time, he was about to make his first set of choices when he became aware of an unusual sensation.

Something was waiting for him.

It was bizarre—it made no sense at all—but Dread's instincts were very sharp, and like the predator he was, he always trusted them. He paused to think about what he was feeling. He was in one of the preliminary levels of the Otherland system, far too distant from the VR environments to be receiving information in anything other than straightforward ways, sound and vision. Any normally sensible person would discount the sensation as an effect of his own nervousness and get on with making selections, but Dread had never been a normal person.

He hesitated, then initiated the first of the subroutines he and Dulcie had created for this incursion, this one a secondary call-up, a falsified but very realistic request from an access line other than his own. When it had connected with the preliminary level, it randomly made a selection from the presented choices. A second later it had been rubbed out of existence.

Dulcie's voice purred in his jawbone, a little interest adding color to her dulled tones.
“The secondary call-up just got sixed. Not just ended, but something blew it up completely—the line is out of service now, too.”

A security system that could set traps and then brutally dispatch what it captured. Dread smiled.
You are a clever bastard, aren't you?
It was impossible to feel that vast patient malice just behind the facade of the system and not think of it as a person— and judging by its swift, skillful viciousness, a person not that different from himself.
Neural net, ALife—whatever you are . . . I'm going to enjoy taking you down.

In her examination of the access device, Dulcie had found what she thought was an override—a priority access, just the sort of thing that members of the Grail Brotherhood would demand, especially in those days when they'd been forced to share the system with others not of their cabal. Dread brought in the tertiary call-up and gave it that priority, which seemed to work—this probe was not attacked, and within moments had opened up the outer level. The system threw up auxiliary defenses, some of which Dread and Dulcie had only been able to anticipate in the most general of ways: since their access device was a copy, it had not been regularly updated. Dread saw the probe halted by a light-swift array of queries for which it had no immediate answers. He decided it was time to get aggressive.

He routed his original call through what was now the active line, inhabiting that probe into the secondary level of the Otherland system as though it were a suit of clothing, while his peculiar ability—his
twist
—began slowly to work. The levels of complexity, the layer on layer of subroutines, were so much more Byzantine than even the Atascos' top-flight security system that for a moment he despaired, but he clung to the crack he had opened in the system and began to look around.

Dulcie was boosting him with every tool they had prepared—she even improvised a few—but although his probe was not being attacked as the first one had been, neither was it able to penetrate the next level of security. If it had been a simpler system, this might have been the point at which failure of their assault became automatic, but the Otherland system seemed able to live with the paradox of a priority code that was nevertheless incomplete. They held their beachhead, but could not move farther.

The
Ninth Symphony
had finished and begun again, a low, muscular pulse of strings just at the edge of Dread's hearing, when he finally found a weak point. He had been using his twist sparingly, conscious that unlike the rest of the arsenal he and Dulcie had assembled, it was organic and prone to fatigue; now, as he assayed another test of the Otherland system's responses, he discovered something he could only think of as a hesitancy, a space where the system which was resisting him so assiduously showed an almost imperceptible lag.

An ordinary intruder, reliant on numbers and experience, might have missed it, but Dread's odd gift was only coincidentally something that could be used against information systems: whatever genetic mystery had caused it, it was a part of him. Dread was a hunter, his talent a hunter's talent. When the system hesitated on each cycle, the split instant of delayed reaction was still far too swift to be noted by any normal animal senses—but through the twist he felt it, as a shark might smell a spoonful of blood in the water a mile distant.

He let everything slide away—Dulcie, the subroutines, his own meat body—until only the twist mattered, a pulse of energy at the farthest extension of his mind. He ignored the now constant migrainous pain, slowed his breathing, then extended his understanding out along the tendrils of his consciousness and beyond, until he himself became that point in conceptual space—until he was the twist. And he waited.

The Otherland system might seem to have put an impenetrable wall between his probe and what he sought, but it was only a wall in the same way matter appeared to be solid—a false seeming, a concession to the limits of perception. Just as solidity itself was an illusion of whirling, bonded energy, the fire wall with which the system held him at bay was an illusion of unbreachable speed. Deep within the nearly continuous flash of information, there was an all but imperceptible hitch.

Dread waited, his consciousness extended like an antenna, the potentiality of his probe waiting like a synapse poised to fire. The cycles of the resisting system sped past. Dread waited. Then, trusting an impulse too inexplicable even to be called instinct, he
twisted
hard.

It was an impossible feat, like throwing a broomstraw unscathed through the whirling blades of a propellor. He succeeded.

The system fell open before him, an astonishing array of conduits connecting an almost equally vast collection of information nodes, all open, all as accessible as if he had built them himself. The system, or at least its security apparatus, lay behind him now, evaded and neutralized. He could go anywhere, assume any form, with the same godlike ease as the Brotherhood wielded. He had as much power within the network as the Old Man himself.

He felt like a huge gray wolf who had found a valley full of fat, unshepherded sheep.

Dread paused to rest and nurse the dull red ache behind his eyes. Once again the twist had served him well. He brought the volume back up on the Beethoven, just in time for the tenderly melodic opening of the third movement.

“It worked,”
he told Dulcie.
“Can you hear me? Is the spike carrying this back out?”

She did not hear him, or did not reply, but he was not bothered. His joys had always been solitary.

Should he move immediately to find and destroy that Sulaweyo bitch and her friends, which would now be as easy as swatting flies, or should he play closer to the vest so as not to risk his long-term goal—the destruction of the Old Man and the usurpation of his power? Dread was considering all the exciting possibilities when something else, something unexpected, tugged at his imagination.

What
was
the Otherland system? Was it an ALife, or some even stranger and more revolutionary form of flexible operating system, the product of some accidental discovery in the code-mines of Telemorphix? Dread knew this was one way in which he was still not the Old Man's equal—he had power, but he lacked knowledge. Perhaps there was a way to hack the operating system itself, cause trouble for the Old Man there? If true, he might be able to remove the protections of the Old Man and his Grail Brotherhood cronies—make them just as vulnerable to real harm inside the system as Sellars' recruits were. If so, he might accomplish his goal much more quickly, not to mention save himself a great deal of risk later on.

Yeah, but—confident, cocky, lazy, dead,
he warned himself.
It's a crazy system. You don't want to let one victory go to your head, mate.

Still, if he was careful, it couldn't hurt to have a bit of a look.

He opened himself to the machineries of Otherland and began to explore. Primed by Dulcie's explanation of the likely architecture, and with her prepared reports instantly available, he pushed at this interesting structure and pulled at that one, probing deeper wherever he found resistance, brandishing his stolen access permission like the badge of a Papal Inquisitor to penetrate level after level of security. He had gained the inner circle, therefore all that had happened before was meaningless: if the security system had considered him a possible intruder earlier, that was negated now by the simple fact of his penetration—he was in, therefore he deserved to be in. Machines did not hold grudges. From his privileged position, he began to unravel the complexities of the platform, looking for the central place from which the orders were issued.

He found it at last, an unimaginably complex core that had no obvious source within the system—the nerve stem, as he guessed, by which the operating system controlled the entire network and its miraculous machinery. He had one instant in which to gloat, and then something—
something
—came down on him like an arctic wind.

Visual input, auditory input, sight and sound, both abruptly disappeared. Even his own volition seemed smothered in all-enveloping, frigid blackness. Dread flailed without connection or purchase. In a far distant place a body that had once been his, its physical responses suppressed by the telematic jack connection, struggled to scream but could not.

Something blasted into his brain, changing the blackness in a microsecond to flaring white, all-devouring light. He felt his true self slipping away, his thoughts burning, shriveling like ants in a blue-white gas flame.

It was not hiding any longer, he dimly realized, this something at the heart of the network. He had stuck his fingers into it, bruised it, mocked it, and now it had him.

And it
hated
him.

T
HE bandaged hand extended, indicating the long, low hallway and the black walls incised with carvings that glittered in the light of the dying sun. “And this is the Passage of the Way of Shu, open to the air. The procession will begin here.” The mummified figure turned, deathmask face wooden but the voice tinctured with irritation. “I am taking the time to give you a private tour, Wells,” complained Osiris, known elsewhere as Felix Jongleur. “Now, of all days, my time is very valuable. I'm sure yours is as well. You could at least pretend to be interested.”

The second mummified figure turned from the wall carvings. The yellow face of the god Ptah showed a very tiny smile. “I am sorry, Jongleur. I was just . . . thinking. But this is all very impressive—a suitable location for the Ceremony.”

Felix Jongleur made a noise of disgust. “You haven't even seen a fraction of it. This is a favor, you know. I thought you might like to walk through the Ceremony with me, to prevent surprises later on. Let me be frank. We are unlikely allies, and I want you to understand everything that will happen—we don't want to confuse things by suppositions of treachery.” He allowed himself a hard little smile of his own. “Well, except for the properly prudent amount, of course.”

“Of course.”

Jongleur floated on, his feet a hand's span above the polished silver of the floor. Wells chose to walk on the ground, a bit of homespun stubbornness that amused Jongleur mightily. “This is the Passage of Ra,” he said as they moved through the second hall, wider than the first and pillared in shining electrum. “The farthest place the sun's light will reach. And this corridor, where the images of the gods stand in shrines along the walls, is named The Hall Wherein They Rest. You will notice that your own likeness is no less flattering than any of the others, Wells. I have never been a petty man.”