Mountain of Black Glass (85 page)

 

“It's a nice piece of work, that bed,” he said. “Top of the line, right? Like a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow or a Trohner machine pistol.”

“So I take it you're planning to spend a lot of time online? In the Otherland network?” She smiled reflexively at the hovering waiter, but what she was really feeling was nervousness and irritation.

“We're not done yet,” Dread told the young man in a flat voice. “Piss off for a while. No, get us some coffee.” He turned back to Dulcie and his lazy smile returned, but his dark eyes were frighteningly intense. “Oh, yes, I've got plans. I've just found out some very interesting things—very,
very
interesting. I got knocked offline, see. That was yesterday. And I used your copy of the thing,” he lowered his voice a little, “the
device,
trying to get back on. But I ran into something. Did you know this system is run by some kind of AI? That thing they were all complaining about when they were first in Atasco's simworld?”

“Slow down. I'm having trouble following you.” Dulcie was beginning to feel the jet lag. He had done nothing but talk a blue streak since she had arrived, but his openness was the opposite of flattering—she felt sure he would have done the same with anyone halfway qualified, halfway interested, halfway trustworthy. “I don't think the system is run by an artificial intelligence,” she said, “—not in the conventional sense. It's a weird neural net of some kind—or a bunch of them, distributed. I haven't been able to break into the architecture at all. But nobody does AIs anymore, they're clunky and unreliable. They certainly wouldn't be using one to run something this complex.”

He shook his head in annoyance. “Whatever. Not an AI, then, but one of those other things—an ALife system. But I'm telling you, there's something alive on the other end of that wire. Something that
thinks
.”

She started to argue, then stopped. “How did you get knocked offline?”

“I got killed.” He stopped, staring at the waiter, who had arrived with the coffee. The young man clinked a cup hard as he set it down, perhaps from nerves, then hurried away. Dread shrugged. “Stupid thing—an accident. I wasn't paying attention.”

“And the rest of those people?” It was odd—she missed them, missed their personalities and their odd courage, even missed the adventure of the whole thing. It had been difficult sometimes as she had inhabited the Quan Li body to remember that
she
was not trapped online as they were, that she could go offline at the end of the day and sleep in her own bed with no fear that a mistake in the virtual universe, a moment of bad luck or carelessness, might kill her.

He curled his lip; his stare was feral. “I don't give a shit about them. Are you going to listen? Who's paying you anyway?” For a moment he seemed about to reach across the table and grab her throat.

“Sorry. I'm tired.”

“There's something on the other end, that's what I'm telling you. If it's not an AI, then you pick the name—that's your job, not mine. But I know it's alive, and I know it wants to keep me out. We lost the Quan Li sim and so we've lost that access to the network.”

“Could you find out something through . . . through your employer? I mean, this is his system, after all.”

“Christ!” It was a hiss. If it had been a shout it would only have startled her, but instead it froze her into complete immobility. For a moment, her concern that he might grab her seemed laughably mild. “Have you forgotten
everything?
If the Old Man even guessed I might be messing around with his network, he would . . .” He sat back, his face suddenly blank, distant. “I'm beginning to wonder if I made a mistake, bringing you here.”

A part of her knew she was supposed to beg forgiveness. Another, perhaps healthier part wanted him to order her onto a plane back to New York. But something had settled into her spine, a cold inertia. “I told you,” she said, speaking almost as flatly as Dread himself. “I'm tired.”

The mask softened in an instant. The teeth reappeared. “Right. I'm being pushy—I'm just excited about this. We can talk more tonight, or even tomorrow. Let's get you back so you can get a nap.” He snatched the check from the table so suddenly she leaned away from the force of his movement. Within seconds he had flashed a card over the reader and was heading for the door. It took some moments before she could assemble her thoughts to get up and follow him.

 

“The room's fine,” she said slowly. “I just thought . . . I'd be staying in a hotel. Or something.”

He was bouncing with energy again. “No, no. Wouldn't work. I'm going to need you here all kinds of hours. Sometimes you're going to have to sleep with the monitors on. You're going to earn that high consultant's rate of yours, sweetness.”

She surveyed the room, made up in a spartan simplicity that matched the larger studio space down the hall. In a strange, almost touching gesture, he had already turned back the comforter and the top sheet. “Okay. You're the boss.”

“Oh, don't worry,” he said, grinning. “You play your cards right, you're going to come out of this better than rich.”

“Great.” She slumped onto the bed, unable to keep up with him anymore. Her head felt like it was stuffed full of wet laundry. Any concerns—or hopes, for that matter—that he might make a pass at her had subsided into the numbness of her jet lag. “That's great.”

“I'm not joking, Dulcie.” He paused in the doorway and looked at her carefully, measuring something she could not even guess. “How would you like to live forever?” he asked her. “Seriously, I want you to think about it. How would you like to be . . . a god?”

T
HEY had come through, but things had changed. Many things had changed.

Renie reached out to put her hand on the stone wall, as much to keep herself upright as to feel its reassuring solidity. Above the deserted garden, above the tiled paths and the empty pond, above Renie and her disoriented companions, the stars burned ferociously, as different from the dim sparks in the sky above the House as a wolf was from a lapdog. But the new stars were the least of anyone's worries.

“I'm . . . I'm a man,” Renie said. “Jesus Mercy, Martine, what happened?” She ran her hands down her body, feeling the hard muscles of the chest through her wool garment, her solid thighs, the alien
something
between her legs. Her hands pulled back as though they had a volition of their own, as though they did not want to reconnoiter this suddenly foreign territory. “Did you do this?”

“Did everyone come through?” Florimel asked. She at least looked much as she had before, bandaged and bloodied, clothed in rags, although what Renie could see of her face was different. “Are we all here?”

“God, of course. I'm sorry.” Renie began counting heads, but it was hard to believe the strangers around her were truly her companions. “!Xabbu? Is . . . is that
you
?”

The slender young Greek man laughed. “Somebody heard my request, it seems. It is . . . odd to stand with my back straight.”

“How did . . .” Renie forced herself to swallow her questions. “No, let me do this first. T4b, that's you, right?” she asked a tall youth dressed in the kind of armor usually seen in museums or portrayed on ancient pottery, the only one of them who looked ready to fight in the Trojan War. When he confirmed his identity, she looked to the small shape on the ground by his feet. Emily had kept her own face, but her hair was longer and had gained a distinct curl. Her crude smock dress had been replaced by a long white gown, but although her costume had changed, the girl herself had not, if her weeping was any indication. “What's wrong?” Renie asked.

“She's been doing this since we came here,” T4b said helplessly. “Worse than ever—just, like, crying.”

“It hurts!” Emily yelped.

“Not so loud, please.” Renie kneeled and put her face close to Emily's, trying to calm her. They seemed to have the darkened garden all to themselves, but if they were really in besieged Troy, someone shouting in one of the courtyards would not go unremarked for long.

“But it does hurt!” the girl sobbed. “Everywhere you take me, it hurts.”

“What does?”

“I don't want to be here. I don't belong here!”

Renie shrugged and stood up, leaving T4b to offer comfort. The last figure, sitting on the edge of the dry pond, also wore a pale dress. “Martine?”

She took a moment to respond, as though she had been lost in her own thoughts. “Yes, it is me, Renie.”

“What's going on? Why am I a man?”

The blind woman gave a tiny shrug. It was hard to see her face by starlight, but she seemed exhausted. “I had to make choices,” was all she said.

“Is this really Troy?”

“As far as I can tell. You can see what people are wearing, which I cannot. Do the clothes seem correct?”

Renie shot a sidelong glance at T4b's crested helmet. “I suppose so, yes.”

“It was not like the other time, going through,” Martine said slowly. “We had to find a particular simworld this time, not just open a gateway—you remember that we were trying to find a way to access the central index for the network. We had to find the actual listings for the . . . the . . .”

“Nodes?” Renie prompted.

“The individual world-nodes, yes. And when I found it at last and the gate was opening, I was suddenly given an array of choices. I suppose the Grail Brotherhood or their guests receive such a prompting each time they change simworlds, but this is the first time we have entered one through the front door, I suppose you would say. Anyway, I had to choose quickly, so I did. I was afraid to stay connected to the central system any longer than I had to—after all, our device, the lighter, was stolen from one of the Brotherhood. They may even be looking for it—I'm not sure it's safe for us to keep it near us.”

“We do not dare separate ourselves from it either,” said Florimel wearily. “It is the only victory we have won so far. Should we just bury it in a hole and trust we can get back to it again?”

“We can talk about all that later,” Renie said. “You had to make choices, you said. Are we inside Troy? Inside the city itself?”

Martine nodded. “The apparition you saw, the Lady of the Windows, said
‘You must come to find the others. You must come to Priam's Walls.'
Until we know otherwise, we must take it literally. Unless we are inside Troy, there is no guarantee we could ever reach the walls.”

Renie grimaced in frustration. “Look, Martine, I don't claim to know the Trojan War stuff very well, but I do remember one thing, which is a big damned wooden horse and a bunch of Greeks setting the whole city on fire. We're going to be slaughtered if we stay here!”

“It was a ten year war, Renie,” Martine replied. “We have no idea at what point we've arrived—or if it's even following the same pattern.”

“Martine had to make decisions very quickly,” Florimel said, chiding her, Renie knew. And Florimel was right.

“Look, I'm sorry. It's just all been kind of a shock. I mean, suddenly becoming a man—it's so strange. I have . . . a . . . a penis!”

“Many people have managed to overcome that and still lead useful lives,” Florimel pointed out.

Renie laughed despite herself. “Did you have a choice about that, too, Martine?”

“Yes, but not for very long.” The blind woman sounded as though she were about to fall asleep sitting up. “I tried to make the best decisions I could, but who knows? I will tell you my thoughts. We do not know what we are doing here, or who wants us here. Perhaps if we are lucky, it is Sellars, who has found a way to enter the system and meet us. But even if so, there is no guarantee that the walls are what he actually meant as a meeting place—it could be anywhere in this Trojan simworld, including out there on the plain or in the Greek camp.”