Mountain of Black Glass (114 page)

Before they could take a step, something rippled out from the great figure, a wave of distorting energy that blurred everything. For half an instant Renie thought it was the thing's sighing, earth-rattling voice again, but then she was gripped and frozen and broken into component pieces and scattered across a suddenly empty universe. She had time only to think
It's happening again
. . . and then she lost track of herself entirely.

 

There was little conscious thought this time; Renie could not even consider the nature of the fugue state until it had begun to recede, but the effect seemed to take a very long time to wear off. At last things began drifting back together, accumulating as slowly as droplets of water in zero-gravity—first bits of consciousness assembling themselves, followed by sequences of thought. Body awareness and sound grudgingly began to function, then a sense of color—the possibility of color to begin with, but not color itself—collected out of the blackness. The surrounding void began to have meaning and identifiable shape, then at last the desolate mountaintop scene reassembled itself, smearing together like footage of a melted oil painting run in achingly slow reverse.

Renie straightened from the bent-legged crouch she found herself in, and saw that several of the others had actually fallen.

“That was . . . bad, this time,” Paul Jonas muttered. They helped Martine up, but she seemed stunned and could barely walk, let alone speak.

“The breakdowns in the system are getting worse somehow,” Renie said as they forced themselves forward once more. “Longer and darker. Maybe we won't have to kill that thing. Maybe it's dying.”

Paul said nothing but his expression was bleakly dubious.

Within moments they found themselves much closer to the giant shape than they should have been, and Renie began to understand why the others had moved so quickly. Some strange effect was compressing the distance, so that with each step the landscape flowed dizzyingly past them; a journey that should have taken them hours was going to be much shorter.

As they drew nearer to the immense body, Renie had a better view of the tiny white shapes clambering over it like fleas on a sleeping dog. They were humanoid, as they had appeared from a distance, and seemed almost the same size as Renie and her friends, but even under much closer inspection they had no obvious form—faceless, almost shapeless phantoms which seemed oblivious to the presence of the human company.

Renie felt a sudden catch in her throat.
Could those somehow be . . . the children? Stephen and the others?

!Xabbu and the rest had stopped near the titan's foot. Hoping that he and the other adults had hammered some kind of sense into Orlando and T4b, Renie urged Paul on, and together they nearly lifted Martine off the ground to increase the pace.

“Look,” !Xabbu called as they approached. He pointed.

Almost a mile distant, the hand of the supine giant, which had been curled in a loose fist on the ground at its side, had begun to open.

As they watched in stunned silence, the great fingers slowly rose and separated, as if performing the finale of some aeons-long magical trick. It took minutes, but when at last the hand was spread in a monstrous star shape, nothing was revealed but the huge, empty palm.

“Is it reaching for us?” wondered Renie.

“Summoning us,” suggested !Xabbu.

“Or warning us to go away,” Florimel added quietly.

They began to walk toward it; again the distance telescoped, so that before they had taken a hundred paces it loomed above them, a massive shape that could have enfolded a stadium as though it were a teacup. Close up, the hand was even more disturbing, inconstant in outline, shimmering and blurring along its edges and across its surface so that it hurt to look at it too long or too closely.

“It's like mine,” said T4b, hoarse with wonderment. The anger had dropped from his face, replaced by pure amazement. “Like mine.” He held up the hand that had been damaged in the patchwork country. It did look something like a tiny version of the unspeakably large thing spread above them.

“What does it mean?” Fredericks asked helplessly. “It's so . . . scanny!” Even Orlando, faced with the astounding size of the thing, had lowered his sword.

“We can't just . . .” Renie began, then stopped to stare as a glow began to spread in midair at the center of the spread fingers. “Jesus Mercy.” The magic trick had been even slower than they had guessed, and it was not over yet.

At first, as golden light shimmered, she thought that a gateway was forming, but the gleam flattened and extended until it became clear that they were looking not at something, but
through
it—an irregular window forming in the naked air between the giant's fingertips and the ground: the yellow gleam was something on the far side. The hole in the air grew sharper and deeper, until Renie could clearly see a vast chamber all of beaten, reflecting gold, and the animal-headed figures who sat within it, still and majestic as statues. Beside each throne lay a huge sarcophagus, red and shiny as a gigantic drop of blood.

“Who are they?” Paul whispered.

Renie shook her head in nervous wonder. “I don't know, but I don't think they can hear us. It feels like we're looking at them through a one-way mirror.”

“I know who they are,” Orlando said wearily. “We met one of them already, in that Egypt place. That's Osiris. We're looking at the Grail Brotherhood.”

The crowned figure at the center of the golden room rose and extended long arms wrapped in white bandages, then spoke to its silent companions on their thrones.

“The hour has come.”
The voice of Osiris floated faintly to Renie and her companions as though down a long dusty corridor, a breath out of the tomb.
“Now the Ceremony begins . . .”

 

F
ELIX Jongleur paused to collect himself. The violent spasm that had passed through the system only minutes before had shaken him as well as the other masters of the Grail: he could hear the Ennead still whispering among themselves, not even bothering to shield their communications.

“Now the Ceremony begins,” he announced again. “We have all waited long for this moment. My servant will bring you your cups.”

The jackal-headed god Anubis appeared from the shadows, holding a large golden goblet in his black fingers. Jongleur forced down his irritation—this should have been Dread, acting his assigned role in the simulation, but he had dropped out of contact, forcing Jongleur to concoct this soulless Puppet version of the Messenger of Death. Jongleur comforted himself with the thought of what punishments he would inflict on his wayward servant when he found him again. “Take what he offers you,” he instructed the others. “There is one for all.” And indeed, as ibis-headed Jiun Bhao took the goblet, another appeared in Anubis' hands, which the jackal then obediently presented to the next in line, yellow-faced Ptah. When Robert Wells had received his goblet, and Anubis had moved on to Daniel Yacoubian wearing the falcon-beaked head of Horus, Wells turned and lifted his cup toward Jongleur in a mocking salute.

I suppose that is acceptable,
Jongleur thought, although he was annoyed with the American.
Barely. But I will see him suffer forever if he does anything to give our game away.

When one of the ever-multiplying goblets was in the hands of each of the Ennead, the jackal servant dutifully vanished into the shadows once more.
I suppose it's actually better Dread is not here,
Jongleur thought.
I couldn't have trusted that young fool not to do something flippantly stupid and spoil the gravity of the moment. . . .

The slightly awkward pause was broken by Sekhmet. The lionheaded goddess peered into her goblet, then said, “What is the need for this? Can we not simply push a button, or . . . or whatever people do? Why all this nonsense?”

Jongleur paused.
It is close now, so close. Be patient.
“Because we do what no one has ever done, Madame. This is a moment unlike any other in history—is it not worth a little ceremony?” He tried to smile, but the Osiris face was not really made for such things.

Ymona Dedoblanco was not so easily pacified. “It all seems strange to me. We are . . . we are to drink poison?”

“Only symbolically, my fierce Sekhmet. In reality, you have each of you chosen the methods you deem best to . . . to effect your passage. Whatever is in keeping with your other arrangements.” Meaning of course that some of the Brotherhood could not let their physical deaths be known for some time, either to help preserve their power or simply to prevent the world noticing that a surprising number of famous and powerful people had all died at the same time. “But if you are asking is the death of your physical body necessary, the answer is yes. Come, Madame—surely this has all been explained to you.”

The African president-for-life with the crocodile head was also restive. “Why can I not save my real body?”

Jongleur was losing the battle with his own anger. “I cannot believe you are asking such things at this late moment, Ambodulu. The reason is, not only will you not be able to reenter your physical body, you would effectively be creating two versions of yourself—the physical version you now are, and a separate but immortal version living inside the network. You would be creating the fiercest rival for yourself imaginable—a twin who knows all your sources of power, who has the right to all your resources.” He shook his head. “Wells, you created this system—please explain it to him. I am losing patience.”

The lemon-hued face of Ptah remained solemn, but Jongleur thought he detected a hint of amusement as Wells rose. That was the problem with Americans, Jongleur reflected sourly—they loved chaos for its own sake.

“Most of you have long understood and come to terms with this,” Wells said smoothly, “but I will explain one more time, just to insure there are no doubts. I know it's a frightening step.” He looked briefly to his falcon-headed confidant—less asking for help, Jongleur guessed, than silently requesting that the volatile Yacoubian keep his mouth shut. “The problem is that mind-transference is not truly possible . . .”

“What?” Sekhmet almost rose from her chair as she showed her fangs. “Then what are we doing here . . . ?”

“Please, show some courtesy. You were not required to study the Grail process, Ms. Dedoblanco, but I would have thought it worth your while.” Wells frowned. “I was trying to say that mind-transference of the type so often used in science-fiction entertainments is not possible. The mind isn't a thing, or even a collection of things—you can't simply make an electronic copy of everything that exists in the mind, then . . . turn it on.” He mimed the button-pushing she had suggested earlier.

“The mind is an ecology, a combination of neurochemical elements and the relationship between those elements. Some of how it works is so complex even the people who have perfected our Grail process still do not fully understand it, but they—we—have learned how to do what we need. We cannot simply move the mind from a physical location to a computer system, no matter how powerful and complex the system. Instead, we have created a mirror version—a virtual mind, as it were—for each of us, and then allowed our own brains to make it identical to the original. Once the initial matrix was created—the raw system in which an artificial mind could exist—you will remember that you were all fitted with what we call a
thalamic splitter,
an engineered biological device that creates a doubling effect of all brain activity. From then on, the process of simply using your brain began to create the duplicate here in the Grail system.

“Certain elements built into the splitter stimulated your actual physical minds to duplicate themselves into the online minds—creating mirrored storage of memories, among other things—until both versions existed in parallel. Your nonphysical duplicates have been kept effectively unconscious through this process, of course, in a sort of dreamless sleep, waiting for today. That's a gross oversimplification, but all the literature has been available to you. You can look up anything you want, any time.” Now he did smile. “It seems a bit late for it, though.

“Now the time has come to finish the process—but it is
not
a transfer. Even as we speak, even as we sit in this virtual room, you are updating the waiting online minds. But if we simply woke those online minds, you yourself would perceive no change—you would still be inside your dying, mortal bodies. Instead, an identical version of you would suddenly exist, one with every memory of yours right up until the moment it was awakened, a version of you which could live entirely in the network. But it would not stay you for long—from the moment it gained consciousness it would begin to diverge, to become something separate—a thing with your memories, anxious to lead its own life. But although it would be immortal, you—and by that I mean the you listening to me now—would still grow older and more ill, and eventually die.”

Wells leaned forward, apparently enjoying the lecturer's role, as though he spoke before a group of new Telemorphix engineers instead of the most powerful cabal on Earth. “That's why you must abandon your physical bodies. If you do, in the moment your body dies, your virtual duplicate will live. And it won't be a duplicate then—it will be the only version of you, every memory intact right up to the moment the cup touched your lips.” He looked at the circle of largely impassive beast-faces. “When you go to sleep each night, are you afraid you won't be the same person when you wake up? This won't even be like sleeping—less than a second, then you'll be alive in the network, unlimited by physicality, by age or injury or death.”