NETFEED/NEWS: Another Rocket Board Fatality Raises Concerns

(visual: kids practicing at Skate Sphere facility, Clissold Park, London)

VO: Another in a string of tragedies involving rocket boards has led members in Britain's House of Parliament to consider a ban on what one member called "a ridiculously dangerous vehicle." But most board users do not agree there is a problem.

(visual: Aloysius Kenneally, age sixteen, in front of Bored! store, Stoke Newington)

KENNEALLY: "It's utterly down the rug. Most all them who blowing up, they like forty-year-old bizboys, seen? Go out on a weekend, ripscrape, crash some wrinkly shopper, dovetail into a hover bus fan. Don't down the rest of us 'cause some bizboy shouldn't even be riding hammers a micro. . . ."

 

It was like a horror flick, but worse, because it was really happening.

Tiny human shapes quailed before a vast and monstrous thing—a whip scorpion, Kunohara had called it. Paul could see Martine and her miniaturized companions huddled deep in the underside folds of a great leaf that shuddered over their heads as rain thumped down like bombs. He reached out, but it was only a view-window—he could do nothing to help them. The whip scorpion took a step closer, slouching in the cradle of its towering, jointed legs. A slender feeler like a stiffened riding crop reached out toward them—slowly, almost tenderly.

"You destroyed those mutants," Paul shouted. "Why can't you save my friends?"

"The mutants did not belong here. There is nothing wrong with the scorpion." Hideki Kunohara almost sounded offended. "It is only following its nature."

"If you won't help them, then send me. At least let me go to them."

Kunohara regarded him with oblique disapproval. "You will be killed."

"I have to try."

"You scarcely know those people—you told me so yourself."

Tears started in Paul's eyes. Anger expanded like steam, threatening to blow off the top of his head. Dimly, he could hear the threadlike shrieks of Martine and the others as the monstrous scorpion levered itself nearer. "You don't understand anything. I've been lost—months, maybe years. Alone! I thought I was out of my mind. They're all I have!"

Kunohara shrugged, then raised his hand. An instant later the bubble, the view-window, and Kunohara's stolid face all vanished, replaced by a scene of terrifying strangeness.

He was somewhere on the forest floor, trunks of mountainous trees stretching up all around him into the night, so large as to be almost invisible. Rain hissed and thudded all around, drops big as rubbish bins, some even the size of small cars; when they smashed against the mulch of the forest floor, everything jumped.

Paul had a sudden and horrifying recollection of the trenches of Amiens, cowering under the impersonal destruction of the German heavy guns; lightning flashed as if to further the illusion, dazzlingly bright as a phosphorus flare. Something moved on his right with a loud leathery creak he could hear even above the thumping of raindrops; the ground shifted beneath him. Paul turned and felt his heart try to climb out of his chest.

The whip scorpion shuffled another step closer to the base of the leaf and froze, motionless except for its questing feelers. By Paul's scale it was as big as a fire engine but much higher, a low, wide body slung between a gantry of jointed legs. It had no tail that he could see, but the pincers that folded like bumpers below its head were jagged with thorny spikes that would hold prey as inescapably as a crocodile's jaws. Two bright red spots low on its head, visible as the lightning flared again, gave an impression of malevolent eyes, of something summoned from its sleep in the pits of hell and angry at having been wakened.

A stream of water rolled off one of the high leaves onto the scorpion. It hugged the ground as the torrent splashed down, waiting with cold patience for the inundation to stop. For a moment Paul could see past it, to the hollow beneath a drooping leaf the size of a ski chalet, to pale human faces reflecting like pearls in the faint moonlight. He took a few steps toward them even as the scorpion ratcheted up to its full height again.

"Martine!" His voice was swallowed in the bombardment of rain. He reached and snatched up a fibrous piece of wood as long as his arm, a tree-needle or a thorn, and flung it at the scorpion. It fell harmlessly against one of the monster's legs but the movement attracted attention. The scorpion stopped and waved one of its whips in Paul's direction. Suddenly aware of what he had done, he went rigid. The feeler, like a horn drawn out twenty meters long yet not much wider than Paul's leg, swept by only an arm's length from where he stood motionless, heart knocking in triple time.

What have I done? His thoughts were as distracted and swift as his heart. I've killed myself. I can't do anything for them, and now I've killed myself, too.

The scorpion took a rasping step toward him. The whip brushed his chest and almost knocked him over. The shadow swung above him, turning, the legs angled out on either side like a forest of leaning trees. He saw the massive pincers flex outward slowly, then snap back.

Before he could close his eyes to cloak the horror of his coming end, the scorpion suddenly wheeled to the side. A tiny human figure had burst from beneath the leaf and was stumbling away across the uneven ground. The whip scorpion moved after it with appalling speed.

The little shrieking figure staggered as the many-legged darkness covered it. The scorpion's front end dipped and the pincers snatched up its kicking prize, piercing it and smashing it into an impossible configuration before levering it up to the furious machinery of the jaws.

Paul could only stare in stupefied horror. The pursuit and kill had taken only seconds. One of his friends was dead and now the vast monster was turning, leg by leg, back toward him.

Something swept down out of the trees, a column of misty whiteness that shoved the huge creature flat against the ground. Ice began to form all across the monster's carapace and crystallize in powdery chunks on the joints of its legs.

"Seven hells, nothing works anymore!" Kunohara's voice rasped in Paul's ear, then the man himself was standing beside him. Ignoring the mammoth, rigid scorpion, Kunohara grabbed Paul's shoulder, then beckoned to the people still cowering under the leaf. "Step out," he shouted. "Come and join hands—I do not know how far my personal field extends."

Still light-headed with shock, Paul watched three dim shapes tumble out onto open ground. Someone clutched his hand, then another avalanche of rain swept down, sending bits of leaves whirling into the air even as everything abruptly vanished.

 

He was sprawled on the virtual tatami mats of the bubble-house in dark night, with bodies all around him. A moment later the lights warmed and Paul crawled toward the nearest of the groaning figures.

"What was that barking fen?" a large shape said, squelching wetly as it sat up, "And where's this?"

Considering that the last time they had been together the teenager had tried to strangle him, Paul would never have dreamed he would be so happy to see T4b, but as soon as he saw the hand with its pale glow sticking out of the baggy one-piece outfit, he felt a kind of joy. He tugged at the skinny, black-haired sim, a form quite different than the Trojan warrior Paul had met before. "Javier? That is you, isn't it? Who else is there? Where's Martine?"

"Paul Jonas?" The voice was Florimel's. "Yes, where is Martine?"

"Over here." T4b crouched beside the third figure. "Don't look good, her."

Martine Desroubins tried to speak, coughed, then succeeded. "I will survive. The transition . . . it overwhelmed me. Paul Jonas, is that truly you? Where are we? I can't make sense of it."

"Yes, it's me." He had been counting heads, but no matter how he tried, he could not make it more than three. He was terrified to ask the next question, but had to know. "Where are the others? Did that horrible thing . . . did the scorpion get them all?"

Florimel sat upright, wearing a fairly generic middle-aged woman's sim, but recognizable by her wounded eye and missing ear. "We have not seen Renie, !Xabbu, Orlando, or Fredericks since . . . since whatever happened on the black mountain."

Paul tried frantically to think of which of the companions he might have forgotten. "But who. . . ? I saw that monster catch someone. . . !"

"It was one of the Grail Brotherhood," Florimel said, "—a man named Jiun. I suppose he thought he could escape while the creature was distracted by you. He misjudged." She looked around again. "Where is this place? How did we come here?"

"Jiun Bhao?" Kunohara said from behind them. All but Paul turned in surprise. "Jiun Bhao, the scourge of Asia, eaten in my garden by a whip scorpion?" He threw back his head and laughed.

"Pretty locked-up sense of humor, you," T4b commented, but he sounded grudgingly impressed by Kunohara's hilarity, which now had their host bent double, hugging his own middle.

"So is it you we owe our gratitude, then?" Martine asked their host.

"You certainly took your time before deciding to help, Kunohara," Paul said angrily.

The man wiped his eyes. "Oh, I am sorry, but it is too sweet. Do you know how many small enterprises Jiun has gobbled himself? How many lives he has crushed in his own claws? Jiun Bhao, eaten by a scorpion, in the rain." He shook his head. "But you are unfair to me, Jonas. I would not have left you to die. I thought I could bring you all back from here, but there are grave problems with the higher levels of my system—doubtless more effects of the larger catastrophe—and I could not move you or your companions remotely. I would even have destroyed the scorpion from a distance if I could, although the creature itself is blameless, but few of my system commands are functioning. That is why I had to come in person, so you could be touching me when I transported back."

"So now we are your guests," Florimel said slowly. "Or are we prisoners?"

"No more than I am." Kunohara sketched a bow. "However, that may prove rather less freedom than any of us would wish."

"There's something I don't understand," said Paul. "Martine, I heard your voice. How were you . . . broadcasting like that?"

The blind woman held up a shiny silver object in her fatigue-trembling hand.

"The lighter!" he said. "But I thought Renie took it from you. . . ."

"It is not the same lighter," Martine said wearily. "I will explain later, if you don't mind."

Kunohara scowled at the device. "You have already done damage by making your presence known with that." He squinted at the stylized monogram. "Yacoubian—the idiot. With his cigars and his short attention span. I should have guessed."

"It would do him no good now, even if he had it," Florimel said with some satisfaction. "Not unless they smoke cigars in hell."

Kunohara frowned. "I will not ask you to give it to me—over such things a delicate alliance might founder. But if you dare to use it again and risk leading your enemy down on top or me, I will eject you from this House and send you back to the scorpion. He is doubtless thawed by now."

"We don't want to use it." Martine's words were slurred by exhaustion. "None of its other functions work now anyway, as far as I can tell. Just the communication." She yawned. "We only want to sleep."

"Very well, then." Kunohara waved his hand. "Sleep. You too, Jonas, since you were wakened by your friends' call. I am not happy with the foolish thing you people have done, but the step is taken now. I will discover what I can and wake you again soon enough."

He vanished, leaving them alone in the wide, curving room with the sounds and distorted motion of the river. T4b looked critically at the modest furnishings and the corpse of the mutated wood louse, which still hung in midair in its little box of light at one end of the room.

"Beats hiding under a leaf, maybe," he said, and stretched out on the floor mat.

 

 

"Code Delphi. Start here.

"I am hurrying to record these thoughts. God alone knows when I will have a chance again—everything seems tenuous now, tinged with catastrophe, as though this entire virtual world has tipped from its normal orbit. But I must make the effort to do things well, no matter how I feel time slipping away. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be Renie, always driven to move forward. . . .

"I believe I had recorded most of the events in Troy and atop the black mountain when we were interrupted by the scorpion. Now I will try to make some kind of sense out of how we left the mountain and what has happened since. There is little chance that I will ever recover these subvocalizations tossed out into the ether of the network, but I have always ordered my life this way, although usually with a more conventional journal, and it is a crutch I prefer not to do without.

"That is a thought, is it not? All my life, I have found my solace and my sanity in talking to machines, and through them to myself. Psychologically transparent, I suppose, and rather grim.

"Enough.

"In the final moments on the peak of the black mountain, as what we could perceive of reality fractured around us, I found myself consumed by images and feelings—powerful sensations as overwhelming as a demonic possession. I suspect now, after talking to Florimel and the others, that somehow my altered senses were perceiving the attack on the Other by Dread—to me it was a phantasm of bird shapes and shadows and the voices of screaming children, and surges of pain and horror for which there are no words. Whether or not the Other is the lonely thing I met in the controlled darkness of the Pestalozzi Institute when I was a child, and no matter what it has done to the old hacker Singh or anyone else, I feel pity for it—yes, pity, even if it is only some kind of highly evolved machine. I can think of almost nothing more pathetic than hearing it sing that old nursery rhyme, that bit of an old fairy tale. But whether it is good or bad or something less straightforward, its agonies nearly killed me.

"As the Other fought to protect itself against Dread's attack, things were happening all around me which I have had to reconstruct from the accounts of others. T4b's successful attack on one of the Grail Brotherhood—apparently an American general named Yacoubian, the true owner of our access device—will bear much considering, since somehow the strange thing that happened to our young companion's hand when we were in the patchwork simworld before the House allowed him to . . . I do not know. Disrupt Yacoubian's control over the virtual environment? Break down the protective algorithms that all the Brotherhood until recently enjoyed?

"In any case, soon after that, the Other's giant hand came down, apparently obliterating Renie, !Xabbu, Orlando, and Sam, and perhaps also Jongleur, the Grail master who wore the Osiris sim. But I am not certain I believe that, and neither is Florimel. It seems strange to think that a manifestation of the operating system would do something as crude as swat our companions like flies.

"In any case, with Florimel practically dragging me, we hurried to help T4b, who had been knocked aside by the monster and lay stunned just a few meters from the edge of the titan hand. That hand abruptly vanished—I felt the Other's presence vanish at the same time, a sudden vacuum in my head that I cannot begin to describe—leaving behind no trace of our companions, only the body of the falcon-headed Yacoubian. Florimel, who was far more composed than I was, saw something lying in Yacoubian's oversized fingers. It was another lighter, identical to the one Renie had taken with her into death or wherever she has gone—apparently Yacoubian had replaced his lost original. Even as Florimel bent and snatched it up, the world fell apart again.

"The Other was gone. I felt Paul's angel, Ava, shattered into fragments around us, each one suffering, a terrible chorus of pain almost as devastating as the Other's. The reality of the network was collapsing in some way I still cannot define, literally coming to pieces. I reached out for anything that might save me, as a drowning woman might snatch in desperation at a chunk of wood far too small to help her float.

"But what I found was indeed enough to save us from perishing in the overflow of chaos. How can I explain it? If I had a hope someone other than myself might actually hear these thoughts someday, I would perhaps try harder, but I cannot summon that belief.

"It was a . . . something. The words do not matter, since words cannot describe it—it was a ray of light, a silvery thread, a string of coherent energies. A connection of some kind between where we were and . . . somewhere else, that was all I knew for certain. The closest thing to it I have experienced was the terrifying moment in the Place of the Lost when I reached out through the nothingness to find !Xabbu on the other end. But this time there seemed to be no one on the far side of the shining filament. As all around me degenerated into meaningless information, only that bright thread remained constant, although it, too, was beginning to lose its cohesion. I snatched at it—again, there are no proper words—as I had done before with !Xabbu's extension of his personality, and I clung. I tried to fix my mind on all my companions—Renie, Florimel, Paul, all of them—tried to see their patterns in the information storm so I could pull them along with me on that slender lifeline. But the abilities I have here are not science, they are more like art, and once more the words fail me. If I knew how consistently to do the things I can sometimes do, I myself would be one of the gods of this place. In any case, I saved only a few.

"And so we came through and found ourselves dropped without warning into the stormy night of Kunohara's world, wearing our old sims from when we first entered the system, but dressed in identical coveralls with a patch reading 'The Hive' on the breast—apparently some kind of default garb here in Kunohara's world. It is too bad we were only granted the clothes and not the research installation itself. It would have been nice to have a roof and walls. Instead, we huddled under leaves for shelter from the crushing rain, prey to any monsters who might brave such weather to go hunting. And indeed, we nearly found ourselves eaten by one such creature, until Paul Jonas and Kunohara intervened. I am glad I could not see the thing. Sensing its size and power was bad enough.

"And now we are here in Kunohara's house, where after a short sleep we talked for many, many hours. I am tired again, but I must continue with this a little longer while the others are resting, because who knows when I will next have the chance to sort through my experiences? This network refutes any notion of natural inertia—if something can happen here, it almost undoubtedly will.

"When we awakened in the relative safety of this strange bubble, we explained to Paul what had happened since he was separated from us on the mountaintop. I suppose somehow I was able to drag him with us along that gleaming track. Kunohara would not talk to me about what it might have been that led us here, but I have my . . . no, I will keep things in their proper order.

"In any case, our host is a strange man. He spent the afternoon drinking some virtual liquor that he offered to us with a shrug. Only T4b accepted, but did not finish his glass. Kunohara seems fey and fatalistic—the knowledge that he is trapped here, subject to the same fears and mortal dangers the rest of us have lived with for weeks, seems to have affected him badly.

"As we explained to Paul, when Florimel, T4b, and I first found ourselves returned to Kunohara's microworld, we also discovered we had not come alone. Two of the Grail Brotherhood had been pulled through with us, no longer dressed as Egyptian gods, but given some kind of default sims—Florimel tells me both were quite generic, more like composites than actual people. She was the one who guessed they must be of the Grail, and with the help of T4b and his strange hand—after all, they had seen what it had done to their comrade Yacoubian—she convinced them to cooperate. The network's former masters had discovered that they no longer had any control over their own system, and I think they were rather shocked and disoriented.

"The less confused of the two was Robert Wells. It was incredibly strange to be huddling in the dirt beneath a monstrous leaf with one of the world's most powerful men, and just as surprising to discover his companion was a no less impressive figure, the Chinese financier Jiun Bhao. Jiun could not completely grasp what had happened, and seemed to think that Florimel, T4b, and I were there to help him get back offline, or failing that, into one of his own simulation worlds. We quickly disabused him of that idea. He spent most of the hours we were together in sullen, almost childish, silence.

"Wells was a sharper character, and quickly made it clear he had information to trade if we would help him. He did not specify what information, and I regret now that we did not take the time to barter, but we had already received frighteningly close scrutiny from a hunting centipede, and Florimel and I were more concerned with making our position defensible than trying to find out what Wells might know.

"Ahhh. Too many words, Martine. I am telling this more slowly than when we explained it to Paul and Kunohara. Soon the scorpion found us. In desperation, I tried to use the lighter, and heard the voice of that monster Dread telling us that he would be . . . how did he put it? Sending some friends to find us. Thank God we are no longer stuck in the place where I used the communicator. I do not ever want to see that . . . that. . . .

"It is hard to talk when I think of him, remember being his prisoner, his voice speaking cheerfully of so many ghastly things. Stop, Martine. Make sense of what you have, what you know and remember.

"Whether he was more frightened of Dread or the scorpion, I cannot say, but Robert Wells decided to run, and vanished behind us into the thick vegetation. Jiun waited a few moments longer to desert us, but he chose the wrong direction. I cannot say I will lose much sleep over the death of a cruel, self-serving old man like Jiun, but I wish I knew where Wells might be. It is doubtless cold-blooded to say so, but I would be. happier if I felt sure he would meet the same fate as Jiun Bhao. I could tell even in our brief hours together that Wells is frighteningly clever.

"Kunohara was highly amused by what happened to Jiun, but did not seem overly concerned about Wells being loose in his simworld. Actually, it is hard to tell what Kunohara thinks at all. Paul says he believes our host is ready to share information, but I have seen little of it, and as the day goes on, he grows more silent and strange. Despite his promise, he has still told us little we do not already know. What kind of ally is this? Only slightly better than the enemies we already have. With so many of our friends lost or dead, it is hard not to resent him and his self-pity.

"At times this Kunohara reminds me of a boy I knew in university, highly popular and very daring—he would do anything for applause. But always I heard in his voice a note of darkness. He died trying to climb the wall of a ten-story residence building and everyone said it was a terrible, sad accident, but I thought when I heard it that he was searching for that accident, and finally found it.

"Kunohara, especially with this quiet drunkenness upon him, seems to me like that boy. . . .

"The others are stirring again, and there is much to discuss. I will have to continue these thoughts later.

"Code Delphi. End here."

 

 

Paul was surprised by how much better he felt simply having Martine and the others sitting beside him. Kunohara's right—I barely know these people, he thought. But it doesn't feel like that.

"So, Mr. Kunohara." There was an edge in Martine's voice. "Now perhaps it is your turn to share a little information. After all, your life is now as much in danger as ours."

Kunohara smiled, acknowledging her point. "I have never harmed you. As I told your friends, it was a risk simply to speak to you. You have the sort of enemies someone like me tries to avoid."

"You can't avoid them anymore," Florimel said bluntly. "So talk to us. What do you know about all this?"

Kunohara sighed and folded his legs beneath him. Outside the bubble the first morning light was warming the sky from black to violet. The river was almost completely obscured by mists—they might have been floating through the clouds in a balloon. "I will tell you what I can, but it is not much. If you do not already know who I am and how I came to be here, I see no sense in explaining. I have built this place because I could, and have lived in uneasy truce with the Grail Brotherhood for a long time. I will not pretend I did not know what they were doing, or what crimes they committed, but I have done nothing wrong myself. It is not my duty to save the world."

Florimel made a low noise that might have been an angry growl, but Kunohara ignored her.

"All I wanted—all that I still want—is to be left alone. I am not particularly fond of people. It is strange now to see my quiet, private house turned into a barracks, but there is nothing to be done about it. It is hard to ignore someone who keeps appearing in one's garden, however much one might wish it."

"You said you knew what the Grail Brotherhood were doing," Martine said. "Tell us. We have had to rely on guesswork."

"I think by now you must know all that I do. They have made an immortality machine for themselves and killed to keep it secret, although it has done them little good so far. Despite all their planning they did not account for this maniac employee of Felix Jongleur's who, from what you tell me, seems to have somehow hijacked the operating system."

"But what is the system?" Florimel said. "It has a name of sorts. They call it the Other. What is it?"

"By now you probably know more about it than I do." Kunohara showed a thin smile. "Jongleur has kept it secret even from the rest of the Brotherhood. How it was constructed, what its principle of operation is, only Jongleur knows. It is as though it sprang from nowhere."

"It didn't spring from nowhere," Martine said suddenly. "I met it myself twenty-eight years ago."

Having heard her say something about this on the mountaintop, Paul was the only one who did not look at her in surprise. Martine quickly told her story. Despite her calm, dry voice, it was not hard to hear the terror of that long-ago child reverberating in her words.

Kunohara shook his head wonderingly. "So however it is constructed, Jongleur has been programming it in some way for perhaps three decades. As though teaching it to be human." He frowned, considering; his strange mood seemed to have abated, at least for the moment. "He must have gained something by both mimicking and using human consciousness as the root of his system."

"That's right!" Paul said urgently. "God, I had nearly forgotten. This man Azador—Renie and !Xabbu met him, too—he told me that the system used the brains of children, Gypsy children, and also . . . what did he call them? The unborn?" The memories were dim, distorted by his dreamlike experiences on the island of Lotos. "Why do you seem so surprised?" he asked Kunohara, who was looking at him very oddly. "We knew they were using children somehow—that's what brought most of these people here in the first place."

Kunohara realized he was staring and made a show of poking the fire. "So this is what they have constructed, then? A sort of net of linked human brains?"

"But what does 'unborn' mean?" Florimel seemed to be struggling to hold down anger. "Stillborn children? Aborted fetuses?"

"We have only hearsay from . . . from the person Jonas mentioned," Kunohara said. "But it would not surprise me if the most basic array of neural nodes were unimprinted brains of that sort, yes." He shrugged liquidly. "The South American, Klement, he made his fortune in the black market for human organs."

"Chizz that those old scanners sixed out, then," said T4b with sudden loathing. "Wish those Grail-Knockers had even more exit-pain, like."

"It is a horrible idea," scowled Florimel. "Horrible. But why would they need living children, too? Why would they need to take someone like Renie's brother, or . . . or my Eirene?"

"Matti, too," T4b said. "Just a poor little micro—didn't scuff no one."

"Hard to know," said Kunohara. "Perhaps they derive some different value from a more developed brain."

"How do they do it anyway?" Florimel demanded. "You can't just suck someone's mind out like a vampire stealing blood. This place is madness on top of madness, but it still has rules. It still exists within the real universe of physics. . . ."

"I want to ask Mr. Kunohara another question." Martine's quiet but firm voice shut Florimel off like a faucet. "You have said that we know all we need to know about you, but I'm not certain I believe that. If nothing else, there are still the riddles you set for us. Why? And what did they mean?"

Kunohara looked at her coolly. It was interesting and a little depressing, Paul thought, to see how quickly the owner of this particular world had sized up Martine as his most formidable challenge, relegating Paul and the others to bystander status. "In my own way, I tried to help. I am a meddler, I suppose, and thus not the perfect type to be a hermit, after all. You came crashing through my world as innocent as sheep and I thought it might help you to think a little about what was happening. But as I said before, I could not afford to assist you too obviously. I have remained safe both here and in the real world largely because of the indifference of Jongleur and his cabal."

"So you taunted us with riddles." Martine sat back, her face bland. "Dollo's Law and . . . what was the other? Something Japanese. Kishimo . . . something."

"Kishimo-jin." He nodded his head.

"Oh! I remembered what Dollo's Law is," Florimel said suddenly. "It took a long time to come back to me, but I remember it from university biology now. It is something about evolution not going backward—but I still can make no sense of why you should say it to us."

"Life does not retreat." Kunohara closed his eyes and took a sip of his drink. "Evolution does not go backward. Once a certain complexity has been reached, it is not undone. The parallel is that it will tend to become more complex—that life, or whatever self-replicating pattern you choose, will only grow more complicated."

"School?" T4b groaned. "School, is this? Six me now, save me pain."

Martine ignored him. "So what are you saying?"

"That the system is growing more complex than even the Brotherhood had wished. I had suspected that in some way the operating system was evolving, might perhaps be developing a consciousness," He took another sip. "It appears I was a few decades late in noticing."

"And the other little . . . riddle?" Martine's voice seemed unusually harsh to Paul. Kunohara might not be the most charming of men, but he had rescued them and given them shelter, after all.

"Kishimo-jin. A monster, an ogre—a creature out of a Buddhist fairy tale. She was a demon who devoured children, until the Buddha converted her. Then she became their special protector."

"Even with an explanation," Martine said dryly, "we are still puzzled. By a monster that devours children, you are alluding to the Other? What does this tell us?"

Kunohara smiled slightly, apparently enjoying the give and take, Paul thought that although the man might not like people, he did seem to like sparring. "Let us consider what you have told me. Yes, this system eats children, you could say. But have you failed to notice how obsessed it is with children and childhood in all forms? Have you not met, as I have in my travels through other simulations, the childlike figures who do not seem to belong in the worlds in which they are found?"

"The orphans!" Paul almost shouted. When he discovered everyone was looking at him, he cleared his throat. "Sorry. That's my name for the ones like the boy Gaily I met in two different simulations. They're not ordinary people like us—they don't know who they are outside of the simulation. When I was with Orlando and Fredericks, we wondered if they might be something to do with the children in comas."

"The Lost," Martine said quietly. "Like homeless souls, they were. Javier heard someone he knew."

"T4b," he corrected her, but his heart wasn't in it. "Heard Matti. Too far crash, that was."

"In any case, the operating system—the Other—does seem obsessed with such things, does it not?" Kunohara looked to Martine. "Children, and things of childhood. . . ."

"Like children's stories." Blind Martine could not return his gaze, but she clearly acknowledged his serve. "You spoke to the others about that. That there was some kind of . . . story-force at work. Some shaping force."

"You said a 'meme,' " Florimel said. "I have heard the word but do not know it."

"Perhaps we are looking at that meme even now," their host said. "Perhaps I have invited it into my house."

It hurt Paul to see Martine suddenly look so pale. "Don't play games with us, man," he said. "What do you mean by that?"

"A meme," Martine said faintly. "It is a word that means a kind of . . . idea-gene. It is a theory from the last century, brought up and argued many times over. Communism was such a meme, some would say. An idea that reproduced itself over and over in human consciousness, like a biological trait. Eternal life would be another—a meme that has kept itself alive admirably, over hundreds of generations . . . as witness the Grail Brotherhood and their obsession with it."

"Speed me," T4b said grumpily. "This bug-knocker saying that someone here is a Communist? I thought those were all like sixville, dinosaur-type."

"Mister Kunohara is suggesting that I, along with the others in that long-ago experiment at the Pestalozzi Institute, may have infected the Brotherhood's operating system with the idea of stories—that we have given this fast-evolving machine a notion of causality based on things like the Brothers Grimm and the fairy tales of Perrault." Martine put her fingers to her temples, pressing. "It is possible—yes, I can admit that it is possible. But what does it mean for us?"

The drink was agreeing with Kunohara for the moment—he looked sleek and satisfied. "It is hard to say, but I think the evidence is everywhere. Look at the things that come up again and again in your experience—look at the way you have been helped and prompted by this apparition which you tell me is Jongleur's daughter. Whatever she is, she is clearly tied closely to the Other, and she appears to you again and again, like a . . . what would be the word from your French tales, Ms. Desroubins? Like a fairy godmother. Or an angel, as Jonas puts it."

"But even if it's true," said Florimel, "even if the operating system is trying to make everything into a little story, the operating system isn't in charge anymore. As far as we know, whatever small independence it had under the Grail people is gone—it has been completely subverted by that murdering swine, Dread." She lifted her hand to her face. "Look at this! I have lost an ear and an eye—even if I survive to return to the real world, I might be half-blind, half-deaf. Even worse, this killer may have insured that there is no cure for my daughter. So it is meaningless to sit here talking about story this and story that. Where is Dread? How do we get to him? Where were we, in that place where the Other manifested itself? You are a landlord in this virtual universe, Kunohara. You must be able to find things out, travel, communicate." She took a deep, ragged breath; when she spoke again, her voice was quieter but no less harsh. "We asked you once before if you meant to help us, and you said you were too afraid of the Brotherhood—you would not risk your life. Well, your life is truly in danger now. So will you help us?"

What seemed to Paul like a very long time passed. A dull glow had kindled behind the mists outside: the sun was rising over Kunohara's imaginary world, although it was still hidden in fog.

"You overestimate me," Kunohara said at last. "My control of my own system is very small now—any abilities I had to manipulate the larger Grail system infrastructure disappeared a day ago, probably at the time the Other was subjugated by our mutual enemy. I still do not know what powers I have left in my own world, but I have certainly lost most of my oversight capabilities. I also cannot simply insert or remove things from the system as I normally could." He turned to Paul. "That is why I could not wipe the mutants out of the system, or even move the whip scorpion to somewhere else. I was forced to use my ability to manipulate weather, an awkward tool at best."

"So what are we to do, then?" Florimel asked, but her voice had lost its edge. "Simply give up? Sit here drinking tea and wait to die?"

"We must understand the system. Without understanding, we are indeed doomed. The Other has created, or at least influenced, the structure of the entire network, and even if this man Dread has somehow taken control over the system, the patterns must remain."

"And what patterns are those?" Martine asked. She had not spoken in a while. She seemed distracted, and tilted her head as though she listened to something the rest of them could not hear.

Kunohara drained his drink and stood up. "Stories. A quest of sorts. And other things, too. Children and childhood. Death. Resurrection."

"And labyrinths," Paul said, remembering. "I thought of that back on Ithaca. Many of the control points, the gateways, things like that—they center around mazes or places having to do with death. But I thought that was just the Brotherhood's sense of humor."

"It could be, in part," Kunohara said. "Or even a more practical reason. Because of the risk of getting lost, they are often places that people will avoid, which gives the Grail users greater privacy. But I have seen enough of the various worlds to think that too many repetitions of themes might also mean that the operating system has weighted things in that direction—that these are signs of an emergent order, if you will." He seemed quite involved and excited now, almost feverish. "In the House world, for instance, where I met most of you again. I knew its builders, and much of the artistry of the place was theirs, but the Lady of the Windows? Who also seems a manifestation of your own guardian angel, Jonas? I cannot believe that was built into the original world. No, rather I think it emerged—was brought into being by patterns in the larger system. And look at where you found another gateway in Troy, and an important one—the Temple of Demeter. In the house belonging to the mother of the death-god's bride, at the center of a maze. Both of the tropes Jonas described, in one."

Paul thought he heard now what had caught Martine's attention, a low throbbing hum, barely distinguishable above the murmur of the river. But something else now seemed foremost in Martine's mind. She sat up straighter. "That's right," she said. "You knew we had been summoned there, didn't you? When they met you in the House, Florimel said there was no maze in Troy, but you knew otherwise."

Kunohara nodded, but looked wary. "As I said, it was one of the first simulations the Brotherhood constructed." He frowned. "But how do you know what we said? You were still a prisoner. You were not there."

"Exactly." Martine's face was hard. "It is always strange when people know things who were not present to see them. And you know much about our time in Troy. Paul, did you tell Mr. Kunohara that we were in the Temple of Demeter?"

Martine's open enmity toward their host had been making him uncomfortable, and he was about to say something to set the conversation back on the right track when he realized she had a point. "Not . . . not specifically. I skipped over a lot . . . because I was in a hurry to tell him what happened to the Grail Brotherhood." He felt as though he had suddenly been set adrift once more, his destiny in the hands of others. He turned to Kunohara. "How did you know?"

It was hard to tell exactly what the man's exasperation signified: he was hard to read at the best of times. "Where else could it have been? I practically sent you there myself!"

T4b sat up straight, balling his fists. "Workin' for those Grail people, him? After all, he dupping us?"

"He could be telling the truth," Martine said, raising her hand to calm T4b. "But I wonder. I think perhaps you are not telling us all the truth, Mr. Kunohara." She blinked, distracted for a moment, but did her best to finish her thought. "You did know where we were going, as you said. I suspect that you also had an informant there in Troy and beyond—perhaps even one of our number, although that is an unpleasant thought—and that it was the communication link between you and that informant which I was able to follow back here when everything came apart on the mountain top."

The moment of tension between the two of them, which made the whole room feel hot and close, did not last. Just when it seemed Kunohara must either admit his guilt or launch an angry rebuttal, Martine jerked her head back, staring sightlessly toward the arc of the ceiling and the blanket of gray mist that obscured everything. The humming was now too loud to ignore.

"There are many shapes above us," she said, her voice twisted by surprise. "Many. . . ."

Something thumped heavily on the uppermost curve of the bubble, a dark blotch that made the mists outside swirl. Jointed legs flailed, scrabbling as though they sought to dig through the transparent surface. There were more noises of impact, a few at first, then dozens in rapid succession. Paul tried to scramble to his feet, but the urge to flight was already arrested: slow squirming shapes were all over the bubble and more were landing every moment. Kunohara clapped his hands once and the lights inside the bubble grew bright, so that for the first time they could see the things pressed against the curving roof.

By the shape of the bodies, the long armored abdomens and the blur of beating wings just above their shiny thoraxes, they might have been wasps—but if so, something had gone very wrong. Like the mutated wood lice, there seemed no limit to how many legs they had or how those limbs were arranged. As they crowded in ever-increasing numbers across the bubble, they pressed semihuman faces against the surface, distorted features stretching and squeezing even more alarmingly as they tried to force their way through the barrier.

T4b sprang up, looking for somewhere to retreat, but the wasps covered almost every centimeter of the glassy walls, the foggy sky now replaced with a firmament of plated limbs and drooling, mandibled mouths.

"It's Dread," Martine said, her voice a hopeless murmur. "Dread sent them. He knows we're here."

The weight of the wasp-things was so great now that it seemed to Paul the bubble must collapse at any moment: so many had collected already that they crawled across each other in tangled piles. Some of those caught on the bottom and being crushed to death ran barbed stingers out of their abdomens, driving them over and over into the substance of the bubble, which actually tented inward—giving, but not yet breaking.

Paul grabbed at. Kunohara. "Get them off! For God's sakes, freeze them, whatever. They're going to burst through any moment."

Their host was wild-eyed but clearly struggling for calm. "If I blast them with wind or ice, I will destabilize the house as well and destroy it or send it spinning down the river. We would all be killed."

"You and your bloody realism!" Florimel shouted. "You rich idiots and your toys!"

Kunohara ignored her. As Paul watched he began to move through a series of meaningless gestures, like nothing so much as someone practicing tai chi in a quiet park. For a moment he could not help thinking that the man had gone completely mad; then he realized that Kunohara, his mastery compromised, was running through an inventory of commands, trying to make something work.

"Nothing," Kunohara snarled, and turned in cold fury on Martine. "You, with your accusations. I thought you had doomed yourself by using that device, but you have led them here to my house and doomed me as well." He gestured; a view-window opened in midair. For a moment Paul could not make sense of the boiling, lumpy mass depicted in the window, then he saw that it was a bird's-eye view of the bubble-house, so covered now with the wasp-things that it had lost almost all suggestion of its true shape.

"Look," Kunohara said bitterly. "They are building a bridge between us and the land."

He was right. The massed wasps were extending a tangle of their own squirming bodies out across the moving surface of the river, a squad of suicide engineers giving their own lives to connect the free-floating bubble to the riverside. The wasps on the bottom of the growing pseudopod must be drowning by the hundreds, Paul thought, but more kept dropping out of the air to join them and keep the bridge growing.

But growing toward what? Paul struggled to see through the mist to the dark riverbank, alive with blowing grasses. Kunohara must have had the same thought, for he gestured again and the focus of the window changed, bringing the sandy bank into closer view. There was no grass; it was a solid line of beetle shapes, creatures as horribly distorted as the wasps, an army of thousands upon thousands of malformed crawlers waiting for the wasp-bridge to reach them, Even now, hundreds at the front of the clicking, bumping throng were forming a corresponding chain, climbing atop one another and clutching even as they drowned, struggling out to meet the wasps.

But even this horror was not the worst. On a lump of mossy stone at the river's edge stood a pair of contrasting shapes, like generals surveying the progress of a campaign. Kunohara's focus drove closer. Despite the more important threat of the wasps, who now formed a solid wall of carapace and claw all over the bubble-house, Paul could not tear his eyes from the two figures.

One was a massively bloated caterpillar, its pillowy segments the color of corpse flesh, with a face even more disturbingly humanoid than those of the mutant army, tiny porcine eyes and a mouth full of jagged teeth. Beside it teetered a cricket white as paper, rubbing its legs together in some unheard music. Its long face was as queerly personalized as the caterpillar's, except for the blank spot where eyes should have been.

"The Twins," Paul said. "Oh, God. He's sent the Twins after us."

"There is another," said Florimel. "See, riding on that beetle."

Paul stared at the pale human shape, bumping on the back of a shiny shell. "Who is it?"

Kunohara was scowling. "Robert Wells, I suspect, A pity the scorpion did not get him, too."

The tiny figure waved his arm, sending another squadron of beetles marching down to the water's edge to give their lives to the growing chain.

"The bastard is having fun." observed Kunohara.