Mountain of Black Glass (22 page)

She looked doubtful. “I'll try. Then what?”

“We'll signal it destroyed, or lost, or whatever. If it acts as a discrete object, it might be that it will continue to operate.”

She frowned. “If it's working now, wouldn't it just be easier to keep using it until someone notices, instead of taking the chance of turning it off for good?”

He took another deep breath. “Dulcie, this thing belongs to one of the Old Man's cronies. If somehow those Grail bastards realize someone has it, they may be able to figure out
who.
And if they figure out who, then within about ten minutes an urban combat team will come through your door with bang-hammers and you'll be gone so quickly and so thoroughly your neighbors will think you spontaneously combusted. This will happen in the real world, not in some VR network. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

“I do, yes.” This time, she was properly quiet and respectful.

“Good. Check in with me every three hours, or if you find anything interesting.” He broke the connection.

He sat back on the couch, lit himself a thin black Corriegas cigar, and thought about the time when he could hunt in RL once more. He found himself considering what it would be like when red-haired, backtalking Dulcinea Anwin was no longer useful. He could be in New York in a few hours. . . .

But even this familiar and entertaining sort of speculation could not long keep his mind off his new plans.
And when I'm a god,
he thought,
what will I hunt then? Other gods?

The idea was deliciously amusing.

P
AUL Jonas clung to a spar of his ruined boat and tried to keep his head above the surface of the violent sea. He barely knew where the sky was, let alone how to find distant Troy, and he still knew nothing of the black mountain. His enemies now included gods, and he had failed the few friends he had.

If misery were money,
he thought, trying to cough out the brine before the next wave hit,
I would be the richest man in this whole bloody imaginary universe.

The night seemed to stretch on forever, a thing not of minutes and hours but of thousands of half-breaths snatched between the battering of waves. He had neither the strength nor leisure to indulge in a review of his failures—the one thin blessing of his predicament. At best, when he found strength enough to lift his face a little higher above the waterline than usual, he slipped into microsleeps, brief moments of darkness, fragments of dream. In one, his father leaned down, giant-high as he towered over his son, and said in a tone of muted disgust,
“If you just write in any letters you want, you're not really solving the puzzle, are you?”
His father's glasses threw back the light, so that Paul could see no eyes, only fluorescent bars reflected from overhead.

In another, Paul held something shiny in his hand. When he saw it was a feather, he felt a brief moment of happiness and hope, although he had no idea why that should be, but the feather proved to be more insubstantial than a butterfly wing; even as he tried to keep his dream-hand steady, the bright blue-green thing crumbled into iridescent powder.

What have I done?
he thought as consciousness returned and waves slapped him.
Even if this place is just a simulation, why am I in it? Where's my body? Why am I being trotted through a bizarre quest I can't even understand, like some trained dog being made to act out Shakespeare?

There was no answer, of course, and even his desperate review of questions was beginning to become an exercise in horror. Perhaps there was no
because
at all, only an endless catalog of
whys.
Perhaps his suffering was just an accident.

No.
Eyes closed against the stinging salt, jounced by the waves like a highwayman's hostage tied across a horse's saddle, he reached for belief.
No, that's me floating again. I made a mistake, but I tried to do something. Better than floating, drifting. Better.

Tortured the woman,
another part of him pointed out in unanswerable rebuttal.
Made Penelope fear for her life. That's better? Maybe you should just go back to being useless again.

It was no use arguing with yourself, he learned as the night crawled along, waves splashing him over and over like some endless slapstick sketch from Hell's own music hall. Misery always knew all the weak spots. Misery always won.

Things looked a little better when the dawn came, at least in a spiritual sense: Paul had come to terms with his inner voices and achieved a sort of
détente
. He had agreed with himself that he was the scum of the universe, but had pleaded special circumstances of amnesia, terror, and confusion. No final decision would be reached, it seemed. Not yet.

How things actually looked, to his actual brine-smarting eyes, was a different story. The empty ocean stretched in all directions. His arms were so cramped that he did not think he could let go of the boat-timber now even if he wanted to, but he assumed that state of affairs wouldn't last forever. Eventually he would drop away and accept the full embrace of the waters he had spurned for so long.

He had grown quite familiar, even comfortable, with his coming death by drowning when he saw the first sign of land.

At first it appeared to be only another tiny white point on the horizon, one of a million wave crests, but it came to loom clearly and plainly even above the highest of swells, growing slowly upward toward the almost cloudless blue sky. Paul stared at it with the absorption of an idiot or an artist for most of an hour before he finally realized he was looking at the top of an island mountain.

Detaching one arm from its death grip on the spar took a long painful time, but at last he was able to start paddling.

The island grew nearer far faster than it should have, and the part of him that had not completely surrendered to the moment guessed it was the system speeding up parts of the experience to get to what its designers likely thought of as the good stuff. If that was true, Paul did not mind the dilution of reality at all, and would have been happy if there was even more of it.

He could see now that the crest of the mountain was only the highest point of a range of spiky hills above a natural harbor. The city was a proud thing, all stone battlements and white clay houses along the hillside, but the current was drawing him past the harbor and its broad causeway to another landing spot, an area of flat, pale beach and rock pools. The ocean's slow, smooth pull made him feel for the first time in a while that the designers, or others, were actually looking out for him. What he could see of the olive-clad hillsides and the distant city, the quiet peace of it all, made his eyes fill with helpless tears. He cursed himself for being soft—it had been only a day since he had left Ithaca—but could not ignore the mighty wash of relief.

The tide skimmed him safely past a large stone standing a few hundred meters off the gentle coast, and when the obstruction was gone Paul was surprised and delighted to see human forms on the nearest beach—young women by the look of them, slim and small, with masses of black hair, their pale clothes fluttering as they went through the steps of some kind of game or dance. He was just about to hail them, so as not to wash up in their midst and startle them into running away, when suddenly a cloud rolled in front of the sun and mountain, beach, and ocean all grew dark. The girls stopped their play and looked up, then a brutal crash of thunder rolled across the sky and sent them scrambling for the shelter of caves above the rock pools.

Paul had only an instant for astonishment—only a minute earlier the sky had been completely clear—then black thunderheads swept over him, turning the world a seething gray and throwing down rain that felt as hard as gravel. A wind blew up out of nowhere, battering the wave tops into froth. Paul and his spar were jerked sideways by a change in the current, sliding parallel to the beach for a moment, then away from it, and no amount of paddling or screaming his frustration at the rumbling sky made any difference as he was tugged back toward the open sea. Soon the island had vanished behind him. Beneath the thunder, like the deepest bass pedal of a church organ, he could hear the laughter of Poseidon.

 

When the storm died down he was surrounded by open sea once more. The moment of hope and its snatching away seemed so obvious in retrospect and so much in keeping with everything else that had happened to him that it was hard even to feel outrage. In any case, he had little strength left for anything but clinging to the spar, which seemed more than ever to be a mere postponement of the inevitable.

His fingers were cramping badly, and even changing position every few moments did not make the pain less. With each successive crash of cold, salty water, each rise and plummet between waves, he felt his grip growing weaker.

“Help me!”
he shouted at the sky, spitting mouthfuls of ocean. “I don't know what I've done but I'm sorry! Help me! I don't want to die!”

As his numb fingers slipped from the wood, the sea around him suddenly calmed. A figure shimmered into view, insubstantial but unmistakable, the suggestion of wings a cloud of flickering light that haloed her entire form as she hovered above the now-gentle swell. He stared, helpless, not entirely sure that he had not in fact let go, that this was not just a last confusing vision granted to a drowning man.

“Paul Jonas.”
Her voice was quiet and sad.
“I do not belong here. It . . . hurts me to be in this place. Why do you not come to us?”

“I don't know what any of this means!” he spluttered, fighting angry tears. Despite the gentling of the waves, his hands were still knotted in cramp. “Who
are
you? Who's ‘us'? How can I come to you if I don't know where you are?”

She shook her head. A shaft of sunlight pierced her, as though she were a glass vase.
“I do not know the answers to these questions, and I do not know why I do not know them. All I know is that I feel you in the darkness. All I know is that I need you, that what I am cries out to you. Ideas, words, broken visions—there is little more.”