Mountain of Black Glass (8 page)

Renie's smile was a sour one. “So we're all more or less having a continual schizophrenic episode.”

“In a way, yes,” Martine said thoughtfully. “The kind of thing usually reserved for madmen . . . or for prophets.”

Like !Xabbu,
Renie almost added, but was not sure what she meant. She looked back toward the rest of their comrades, and specifically to where !Xabbu lay curled, his slender tail pulled up near his muzzle. By his own standards, the Bushman was no more a mystic than he was a theoretical scientist or a philosopher: he was simply working with the laws of the universe as his people knew them.

And after all,
Renie had to admit,
who's to say they're wrong and we're right?

The silence stretched for a minute, then another. Although the strangeness of the dream still clung to her thoughts, especially the jangling terror of its last moments, she felt a kind of peace as well. “This backwater place we're in,” she said at last. “What do you think it is, really?”

Martine frowned, considering. “You mean, do I think it's what it seems to be—something the Grail people haven't finished with yet? I don't know. That seems the most likely explanation, but there are . . . sensations I get from it, things I cannot describe, that make me wonder.”

“Like what?”

“As I said, I cannot describe them. But whatever it might be, it is definitely the first place of its sort I have entered, so my speculations do not mean much. It could be that because of the system the Grail Brotherhood employs, any unfinished place would give off the kind of . . .” again she frowned, “. . . the kinds of . . . intimations of vitality this place has.” Before Renie could ask her to explain further, Martine rose. “I will take you up on your kind offer, Renie, if it still holds. The last few days have been impossibly difficult, and I find I am much wearier than I thought. Whatever else this place is, at least we are able to rest.”

“Of course, get some sleep. We still have a lot ahead of us—a lot to decide.”

“So much had to be said simply to bring each other up to date.” Martine's smile was wry. “I am certain Florimel and T4b were not entirely unhappy we did not have time for their personal histories.”

“Yes. But that's what today's for, whether they like it or not.” Renie noticed she had dug a little trench with her fingers into the strange, soapy ground. Remembering the dream, she shivered and filled it in. “They're going to have to tell us. I won't stand any more secrets like that. That might be what killed William.”

“I know, Renie. But do not be too fierce. We are allies trapped in a hostile environment and must take care of each other.”

She fought down a small twinge of impatience. “Yes, of course. But that's all the more reason we have to know who's watching our backs.”

 

T
4B and Florimel were the last to return. By the time they appeared around the curve of the hillside, trudging toward the otherwordly campfire across terrain whose surface hue shifted subtly from instant to instant like the colors on an oil slick, Renie was beginning to feel nervously suspicious about their long absence. Still, even though they were the last two maintaining a mystery about their identities, they also seemed a fairly unlikely pair of allies—a fact underscored as T4b clanked into camp and blurted out their news, clearly irritating Florimel.

“Saw some kinda animal, us,” he said. “Got no shape, seen? Just, like . . . light. But all bendy.”

At first glance, Florimel's sim appeared little different than the one Martine wore, a woman of the Atascos' Temilun simworld, with a strong nose and a dark, reddish-brown complexion not unlike the Maya; but just as two people might wear the same clothes to totally different effect, where Martine's guise gave an impression of blankness that belied her dry wit and careful empathy, Florimel's small sim seemed to have the coiled intensity of a Napoleon, and her face did not look unfinished or general in the same way Martine's did.

Just another mystery,
Renie thought wearily,
and probably not one of the important ones.

“. . . It wasn't an animal in any normal sense of the word,” Florimel was saying. “But it's the first phenomenon we've seen that wasn't obviously part of the geography. It was very fluid, but T4b is correct—it was made of light, or was only partially visible to us. It appeared almost out of nowhere and moved around as though it were looking for something. . . .”

“Then it just zanged out, like into an airhole,” T4b finished.

“A what?” Renie turned to Florimel for clarification.

“He means it just . . . well, it
did
seem to step into a hole in the air. It didn't simply vanish, it . . .” She stopped and shrugged. “Whatever happened, it is gone.”

!Xabbu had finished poking up the fire. “And what else did you see?” he asked.

“Saw too much zero, me,” said T4b, levering himself down to a seat by the campfire. The reflected flames made unusual, almost textured patterns on his armor.

“We saw a lot more of this,” Florimel elaborated, gesturing to the hillside on which they stood. “A thousand variations, but all much the same . . .”

“Don't touch me!” Emily stood up and moved away from T4b.

“Didn't. You're dupped and trans-upped,” he growled. “Trying to bring friendly, me, all it is.” If a warrior-robot could be said to sulk, he was clearly doing so.

Florimel let out a great sigh, as if to underscore what she had been forced to put up with all day. “Everywhere was like this—unfinished, disordered, silent. I do not like it, to tell you the truth.” She made a dismissive gesture. “What was perhaps interesting, though, is that we found no sign of a river or anything similar, not even a river-of-air, as we had in the last place.”

“William liked flying in that river so much,” Martine said suddenly. “He was laughing and laughing. He said it was the first thing he'd found in the whole network that made him think the money was worth spending.” Everyone fell silent for a moment. Sweet William's stiffened virtual body was only a short distance away, concealed in a sort of pit on the far side of a knoll swirling with evanescent colors. No one looked in that direction, but everyone was clearly thinking about it.

“So, no river,” Renie said. “!Xabbu and I didn't find any trace of one either. Pretty much everything else we saw was as you said—more of the same. We didn't see anything I'd call an animal, though.” She sighed.–Which means there isn't any obvious and easy way to travel through and out of this simworld.”

“There is not even a way to know which direction we should take,” Florimel added. “There is no sun, no sunrise or sunset, no directions at all. We only found our way back because I left a trail of broken . . . sticks, I suppose you would call them . . . behind us.”

Like bread crumbs,
Renie thought.
Isn't that from “Hansel and Gretel”? We're living in a bloody fairy tale—except our story, like this world, hasn't been finished yet . . . and we might not be the folks who are going to be around at Happily Ever After time.
Out loud, she said, “We had !Xabbu's nose and sense of direction, although I have to admit I was a little nervous—it all just looks the same to me.”

“Did you find food?” asked Emily. “I'm very hungry. I'm going to have a baby, you know.”

“Oddly enough,” said Florimel, saving Renie the trouble, “we realized that, yes.”

 

O
NCE she had decided to do it, Florimel appeared impatient to start. They had barely settled themselves around the fire pit before she declared, “I was born in Munich. In the early '30s, during the Lockdown. The part of the city where my mother lived was an industrial slum. We shared a small rebuilt warehouse with a dozen other families. Later, I would realize that it was not all bad—many of the families were political, some of the adults were even wanted by the police for things they had done at the beginning of the Guestworker Revolt, and I was taught a great deal about how the world truly works. Too much, perhaps.”

She looked around as though someone might want to ask a question, but Renie and the others had been waiting too long to learn something of this companion-stranger to interrupt her.

Florimel shrugged and continued at a brisk pace. “For my mother, it was definitely too much. When her man, who may or may not have been my father, was killed in what the authorities called a riot, but was truly more of an attempt to round up and incarcerate large elements of the social fringe, she fled Munich entirely and moved to the Elz Valley in the Black Forest.

“You may or may not remember the name Marius Traugott—he has been a long time dead, now. He was a teacher, a holistic healer, I suppose a mystic. He rode the wave of superstition at the end of the last century to fame, bought one of the last stands of the old forest, which had been privatized by the Reutzler government, and founded a retreat he called Harmony Camp.”

“Was that one of those, what is the name . . . ?” Renie tried to remember the news stories. “Is that the Social Harmony religion?”

Florimel shook her head. “No, not really. One of Traugott's very early disciples split from him and started the Social Harmonist Army in America, but we were nothing like them, believe me—although many people did call our Harmony Camp a religious cult. But whatever you call it, cult, commune, social experiment, it does not matter. My mother was one of the converts, and when I was just a few years old she became a member, giving away the few things she owned for a narrow bed in a bunkhouse and a seat at the foot of Doctor Traugott.

“Despite a diet made entirely of raw, living vegetables and plant material, Traugott died only a few years later at age eighty. Harmony Camp did not fold up or fall apart, though. Several of his lieutenants kept it going, and although it went through periodic shifts of philosophy, some fairly extreme—for a while when I was about twelve, people at the camp armed themselves against a feared crackdown by the government, and at one point some of the more mystical members were trying to beam messages to the stars—it remained more or less what it had been under Doctor Traugott. For me, it was simply home. We children ate together, slept together, sang together. Our parents did the same—lived communally, I mean—but the two groups were largely separate. The children were all taught together, with a rigorous stress on philosophy, health science, and religious thought. It is not entirely surprising that I became interested in medicine. What is more surprising is that when I was old enough, the Harmony Camp Foundation actually spent the money to send me to the university in Freiburg. It is less surprising if you know that the group mistrusted outside doctors and mainstream medicine, and that up until then we had only one nurse to minister to almost six hundred people.

“I will not bore you with how my years at university changed me. Meeting young people who did not call their mothers ‘Sister-in-God,' and who had grown up sleeping in a bed of their own in a room of their own was like being introduced to creatures from another planet. Not surprisingly, I came to view my upbringing differently than before I left Harmony Camp, to be more critical of what I had learned, less accepting of the truths of Doctor Marius Traugott. What may surprise you, however, is that I still returned home when my schooling was finished. Even though I had no formal doctor's degree, I had learned enough to become the chief medical authority of Harmony Camp.

“I feel I must explain this, or you will all misunderstand, as people generally do. It is true that Traugott's ideas were largely nonsense, and that many of the people drawn to his doctrines, and thus to the commune, were those without the strength or resources to compete in the great commercial struggle outside the gates. But did this mean they had no right to live? If they were foolish, or credulous, or simply tired of trying to climb up a ladder that had many times already proved too slippery for them, did that mean they were without value?

“My mother was one such, you see. She had chosen to turn her back on the politics of the street, but she did not want simply to replace that with the values of the bourgeoisie, either. What she wanted was a bed, a safe place to raise her daughter, and the company of people who did not shout at her that she was ignorant or spineless because she was frightened to go out and throw bricks at police.

“My extended Harmony Camp family were mostly kind people. They were frightened of many things, but if fear makes people hateful, it had not yet risen to a sustained pitch with them. Not then. So after university I busied myself with helping them, and although I no longer blindly accepted Harmony Camp's guiding beliefs, I had no qualms about trying to make the lives of its people better. And I did make things better—very quickly, too. I was fortunate enough to have made a friend in school whose father was an executive in a large medical supply company, and at his urging—and much to my surprise—the company donated us some excellent equipment.

“Listen to me.” She snorted. “I have already taken too long to get to the point. I started out to tell you of my life at Harmony Camp only because it explains much about me in a few words. But I also wanted you to know that my mother was taught, in part by her own experiences in Munich, in part by Doctor Traugott, to fear the modern life of instant communications and imaginary worlds—in short, the life of the net. I learned to partake freely of that life in my university days, but a part of me still feared it. It was the opposite of all we had been taught to revere, the raw, the tangible, that which
lived.
When I underwent my quiet rebellion against Marius Traugott's teachings, I undertook to face that which I feared, and I began to spend almost as much time connected to the information world as all but the most die-hard enthusiasts among my university friends. When I returned to Harmony Camp, I even had a showdown with the council, threatening to leave if they did not agree to allow me at least one line which could handle greater bandwidth than voice-only. I told them I could not be their doctor without one, which was only partially true. My blackmail worked.