NETFEED/NEWS: Poor Countries Want to Be Prisons

(visual: new facility at Totness)

VO: The governments of poor nations such as Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago are vying to house overflow prisoners from the United States and Europe, where prison populations are rising faster than facilities can be built, despite fierce domestic opposition in many of these small countries.

(visual: Vicenta Omarid, Vice-chairman, Resist!)

OMARID: "Our country is not a dumping ground for toxic waste or toxic humanity. This is a cynical exploitation by the first world nations of their own people and ours, an attempt to hide the consequences of their own jail-the-poor policies by waving money under the noses of hungry nations like Trinidad and Tobago. . . ."

 

At first Sellars had no idea where he was. He was sunk deep in a padded seat that felt more like a womb than a chair, surrounded, comforted, connected. The great window before him was full of burning points of light and he could feel the almost silent vibration of engines—no, not just feel the vibrations, he realized, but discern the actual working of the antiproton drive, every detail of its performance as well as the ship's million other functions, all flooding into his altered nervous system. He was flying through the stars.

"It's the Sally Ride," he murmured. My ship. . . ! My beautiful ship.

But something was wrong.

How did I get here? Memories were seeping back now, a kaleidoscope of days, of fire and terror followed by years of isolation. Of a past in which this silver seed had been blasted to twisted wreckage in a hangar in South Dakota without ever having flown outside the lower thermosphere.

But the stars. . . ! There they are, bigger than life. Could it be that everything else I thought was real, the destruction of PEREGRINE, my long imprisonment, wax it all just a dream—a cold-sleep nightmare?

He wanted to believe it. He wanted to believe it so badly he could taste it. If this were real then even the nightmare of five crippled decades would soon evaporate, leaving him alone with his ship and the endless fields of starlight.

"No," he said aloud. "This isn't real. You got past my defenses. You've taken this out of my own head somehow."

For a long moment he heard nothing but the hum of the ship's engines. The stars swung past the window like flurrying snow. Then the ship spoke.

"Stay," it said. "Stay with . . . this one." He had heard the voice before, of course, during countless tests—the strangely sexless, computer-generated tones of his own starship. "This one is lonely."

Something caught at his heart. After it was destroyed in the Sand Creek disaster he had pushed the ship from his thoughts like a dead lover. Even to hear its voice after all these years was a miracle. But he was troubled by the words. Did the Grail Network operating system which had built this dream in his head really only want to talk? Sellars had fought the thing for so long that he found that almost impossible to believe, "I Know this isn't real," he said, "but why are you doing it? Why didn't you just kill me when you broke through into my mind?"

"You . . . are different," said the mechanical ship-voice. Outside the thick window, the snowflake stars continued to wheel past. "Made of light and numbers. Like this one."

My wiring—my internal systems. Does it really think I'm the same kind of thing as it? Could it really just be looking for a . . . a kindred soul? He could not believe that was all there was—the operating system had sensed him long ago, had been studying him through each incursion as carefully as he had studied it. Why had it waited so long to contact him? Was it only that its own defenses had prevented it? Or was something else going on?

Sellars was baffled and exhausted. The seductiveness of the dream, the granting of this fondest wish, which had turned to ashes so long ago, was making it hard to concentrate.

"The stars," the thing said as if it sensed his thought. "You know the stars?"

"I used to," Sellars said. "I thought I would spend my life among them."

"Very lonely," the ship's voice said.

That at least had been real. No mere shipspeak program could manufacture a crippled bleakness like that. "Some people don't think so," he said, almost kindly.

"Lonely. Empty. Cold."

Sellars was drawn to respond—it was hard to hear such childlike despair and not. say something—but as the strangeness of the experience began to wear away the illogic continued to disturb him.

If all it wanted was to talk to me, why now? It was able to reach outside its network a long time ago—just look at the way it manifested in Mister J's, the way it's begun to explore other real-world systems. Why didn't it just contact me, instead of waiting until I was trying to enter the Grail network? In fact, even if it had to wait until I entered the network, why did it wait until this particular moment—I've been in the network many times. He tried to piece together what had happened just before the contact. We were struggling, or at least I was struggling with its security routines. Then I left it so I could go and open the data tap . . . all that information from the Grail network, that massive, overwhelming flow . . . and that was the moment it attacked me again. Pushed past my defenses.

When I opened the data tap.

"You, this one—we are the same," the ship-voice said suddenly. It almost sounded frightened.

"You've been using me, haven't you?" Sellars nodded. "You clever bastard. You waited until I broke into Jongleur's system, then piggybacked in on my access. There was something there you couldn't manage on your own, wasn't there? Something expressly designed to keep you out. And you needed me alive and connected until you could get into it." With that understanding came a deeper fear. What had his adversary fought so hard and so craftily to reach? What was it doing even now, while it entertained him with recreated memories?

And what would it do to him when it didn't need him any longer?

"No. Lonely in the dark. Don't want to be here anymore." The mechanical voice was becoming increasingly distorted.

"Then let me help you," Sellars begged. "You said that I am like you. Give me a chance! I want what you want—I want the children to be safe."

"Not safe," it whispered. Even the stars were growing faint beyond the window, as though the Sally Ride was now outracing their ancient light. "Too late. Too late for the children."

"Which children?" he asked sharply.

"All the children."

"What have you done?" Sellars demanded. "How did you use me? If you tell me, there might still be some way for me to help you—or at least help the children."

"No help," it said sadly, then began to sing in a mournful, halting voice.

"An angel touched me, an angel touched me, the river washed me. . . ."

Sellars had never heard the words or the simple tune. "I don't understand—just tell me what you've done. Why did you keep me here? What have you done?"

It began to sing again. This time, Sellars recognized the song.

"Rock-a-bye, baby, in the treetop. . . ."

And then the ship was gone, the stars were gone, everything was gone, and he fell back into the familiar confines of his Garden.

But it was a garden no longer, or at least not the comfortable, curved space he had nurtured for so long. Now it stretched for what looked like kilometers, vaster than the grounds at Kensington or Versailles, an almost impossible riot of greenery spreading in all directions.

It held together, Sellars realized. My Garden absorbed the Grail network information and held together. And I am still alive, too. The Other did whatever it wanted to do and then it released me. He checked to make sure his connection to the network was still open, that he still had contact with Cho-Cho, and was filled with relief to discover he did.

So what did the operating system do? he wondered. What did it want?

He flung himself into the acres of data, quantities of information that might take a team of specialists years to analyze properly. But there was only Sellars, and he did not have years or even months. In fact, he suspected he might only have a day or two left before things fell apart completely.

The revelations, at least some of them, came swiftly. As he examined the most recent events concerning the Grail network, for speed's sake tracking just through what had happened since he himself had opened the data tap, then delving frantically in the Grail Brotherhood's files to confirm his suspicions, he discovered what the operating system was and what it had done.

It was worse than he could have imagined. He did not have days. If he was lucky, he might have three hours to save his friends and countless other innocents.

If he was insanely lucky, he might have four.

 

 

They made themselves another camp of sorts among the ruins of Azador's Gypsy settlement. The shattered frames of the wagons loomed in the half-light like the skeletons of strange animals. Bodies of fairy-tale creatures lay everywhere, broken and dismembered. Many of the remains had been claimed and had been dragged away by friends and the Gypsies had laid out their own fallen kin at the edge of camp, covering the bodies with colorful blankets, but dozens of corpses still lay unmourned and unburied. Paul could scarcely bear to look. It was a blessing, in a way, that the Well was dying, the light fading.

The waters were almost entirely dark, the radiance that had once danced there only a flicker now; it barely touched the cocoon of cloudy gray overhead, so that even the few campfires seemed to give out more light than the Well. The growing shadow on both sides of the barrier held one other benefit: Paul had no doubt that Dread still waited beyond the cloud-wall, but at least they didn't have to watch that man-shaped point of infinite night pacing calmly back and forth on the other side anymore.

Out of his childhood a snatch of the Bible came to him. "Whence comest thou?" Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, "From going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in if."

But there are two Satans in this universe, Paul thought. And one of them is in here. With us.

He stared at Felix Jongleur who, like Paul, sat some distance from the fire and the other survivors. Jongleur stared back. Their companions seemed far more interested in Orlando, who had not yet regained consciousness. But except for having been dead—something Paul thought was usually considered a fairly serious medical problem—the boy seemed to be suffering from nothing worse than exhaustion.

Nobody cares about me, he thought. Except the man who tried to kill me. But why should they care? They don't know what I know.

It had all come back—not just the terrible last moments in the tower, but with it all the little missing pieces, the day-to-day boredom and routine, everything that had been hidden from him by the post-hypnotic block.

"She's dead," he said to Jongleur. "Ava's been dead all along, hasn't she?"

"Then your memories are unlocked." Jongleur spoke slowly. "Yes, she is dead."

"So why was she here? Why did she keep . . . appearing to me?" He looked over at the others huddled around Orlando. They were only a few meters away but he felt so disconnected from them it could have been a Hundred times that. "Is it something like what happened to that boy—to Orlando Gardiner?"

Jongleur gave him a brief appraising glance. Even the firelight sparkling in his eyes did not make him look more alive. He looks like something stuffed, Paul thought. Something with glass eyes. Dead eyes.

"I do not know," Jongleur said at last. "I do not know what the boy is, although I have my suspicions. But my Avialle, when she died . . . all that was left were copies."

"Copies?" The word, although half-expected, chilled him.

"From earlier versions of the Grail process. Different mind-scans made at different times. None wholly satisfactory." He frowned as though about to send back an unimpressive wine.

"Like that Tinto from the Venetian simulation," Paul said. "I was right." Jongleur raised an eyebrow at the name but said nothing. "How did the . . . how did Ava—all those Avas—get into the system? Why did she keep appearing to me?"

Jongleur shrugged. "After she died, when I found that all the stored copies, even those made of Finney and Mudd, had been dumped, I thought there had been some malfunction in the Grail system. It is a huge and fearfully complex enterprise, after all." His eyes narrowed. "I did not realize that the Other—the operating system—had broken the bonds of its confinement, had made its way out of the strait-jacket of the network and into my own system. Even when I . . . saw her for the first time in one of my simulations, I did not understand how one of the copies could have made its way into the Grail network." His back straightened and his jaw set; Paul thought he looked like someone trying to mask either great pain or anger. "I was visiting my Elizabethan simworld. I saw her in Southwark, near the Globe Playhouse, being pursued by two cutthroats who looked like Mudd and Finney. I caught them and immobilized them for later study but she escaped. It was then I realized that all the missing copies must have somehow been dumped into the Grail network, but I still did not suspect the operating system."

"So . . . all the versions of the Twins are just copies?"

It was horrible having to cajole information out of this cruel man, this murderer, but the hunger for answers was too strong.

"No, Finney and Mudd still exist. After . . . what happened with Avialle they were punished—imprisoned, in a sense—but they still work for me. They are the ones that pursued you through the Grail network after your escape."

"But why, damn it?" For a moment the anger came back again in a surge of heat up his spine. It was all he could do to remain seated. "Why me? Why am I so damned important?"

"You? You are nothing. But to my Avialle you were something." The old man scowled and lowered his eyes. "The copies of her, all those ghosts—they were drawn to you. Not that I knew it at first. After Avialle was lost, I kept you imprisoned and unconscious. I still had many questions about what had happened. I implanted a neurocannula and brought you into one of my Grail network simulations so I could . . . investigate."

"So you could torture me," Paul spat.

Jongleur shrugged. "Call it what you will. I have almost no physical life anymore. I wanted you in my realm. But I soon noticed that you had attracted attention from . . . something. It was always fleeting, but I was able to capture traces. It was Avialle—or rather, the duplicate versions of Avialle. They were drawn to you, somehow. They could not keep away from you for long."

"She loved me," Paul said.

"Shut your mouth. You have no right to speak of her now."

"It's true. And my sin was that all I could truly offer her was pity. But that's still more than you can say, isn't it?"

Jongleur stood, pale with fury, and raised his clenched fists. "Pig. I should kill you."

Paul rose too. "You're welcome to try. Go on—you've done everything else to me that you could."

Paul's companions had turned as his argument with Jongleur grew louder. Azador hurried over to them. "Please, my friends, no more fighting. We have an enemy already—and he is enough for us all, eh?"

Paul shrugged his shoulders and sat down. Azador whispered something in Jongleur's ear, then went back to the group gathered around Orlando. Jongleur stared at Paul for a long moment before lowering himself back to the ground. "You will speak no more of that," he said coldly.

"I will speak of what I want. If you hadn't imprisoned her, treated her like something in a museum, none of this would have happened."

"You understand nothing," Jongleur said, but the fire was gone from his voice. "Nothing."

For a while Paul only listened to the distant hissing and popping of the fire, his companions' murmuring conversation. "So you stuck me in that simulation of the First World War," he said at last. "You staked me out. I was the bait,"

Jongleur looked at him as if from a great distance. "I hoped to bring her close enough to capture, yes. Perhaps eventually to gather enough of the copies to reconstitute something close to the real Avialle."

"Why? Was it anything so normal as a father's love? Or was it something less pleasant? Was it just because she was yours, and you wanted back what belonged to you?"

The old man was rigid. "What is in my heart . . . is for no man to know."

"Heart? You have a heart?" He expected anger, but this time Jongleur seemed too chilled and weary even to respond. "So what was it all about, then? All that madness, that bizarre museum of a house and grounds—what did you intend?"

Jongleur did not speak for a long time. "Do you know what an ushabti is?" he said at last.

Paul shook his head, puzzled. "I don't know the word."

"It does not matter," Jongleur said. "In fact, all this talk is worthless. We will both be dead soon. When the system collapses everyone here will die."

"Then if it doesn't matter, you might as well tell me the truth." Paul leaned forward. "You were going to kill me, weren't you? Ava was right about that. You were going to kill me—swat me like a fly. Weren't you?"

Felix Jongleur looked at him for a long, calculating second, then looked down at the fire. "Yes."

Paul sat back with a sick little feeling of triumph. "But why?"

Jongleur shook his head. "It was a mistake—a bad idea. A failed project. It was named for the ushabti of the Egyptian tombs, the tiny statuettes that were meant to wait for the dead Pharaoh in the afterlife."

"I'm not following you. You wanted me to work for you after you were dead?"

Jongleur showed a wintry smile. "Not you. You give yourself too much importance, Mr. Jonas. A common problem with the people of your small island."

Paul swallowed a retort. So the ancient Frenchman wanted to insult the Brits—let him. He had never imagined he would actually get the chance to speak to this man face-to-face. He could not waste the opportunity. "Then who? What?"

"I began the Ushabti Project several years ago, at a time when I felt quite certain that the Grail process was going to fail. The first results on the thalamic splitter were very bad and the Grail network's operating system—the Other, as some call it—was unstable." Jongleur frowned. "I was already very, very old. If the Grail Project did not succeed, I would die. But I did not want to die."

"Who does?"

"Few have the resources I do. Few have the courage to flout humanity's cowardly surrender to death."

Paul held in his impatience. "So . . . you started this . . . Ushakti Project?"

"Ushabti. Yes. If I could not perpetuate my actual self, I would do the next best thing. Like the pharaohs, I would keep my line alive. I would save the sacred blood. I would do this by creating a version of me that would survive my death."

"But you just said that the technology wasn't working. . . ."

"It was not. So I came up with the best alternative I could. I could not escape death, it seemed, so I created a clone."

A number of terrible thoughts began fizzing in Paul's head. "But that's . . . that doesn't make sense. A clone isn't you, it's just your genetics. It would grow up into a very different person, because its experiences . . . would be different. . . ."

"I see you begin to understand. Yes, it would not be me. But if I gave it an upbringing as close to my own as I could, then it would be more like me. Enough like me to appreciate what I had done. Perhaps even enough to resurrect me someday from the Grail copies we had already made, flawed as they were." Jongleur closed his eyes, remembering. "All was prepared. When he reached his maturity and spoke his true name—Hor-sa-iset, Horus the Younger—to my system, it would have served as his access code. That is the true Horus of Egyptian mythology—the Horus born from the dead body of Osiris. All of my secrets would have been his." He frowned, distracted. "If I had already conceived of the Ushabti Project when I was founding the Grail Brotherhood, I would never have given 'Horus' as a code name to that imbecile Yacoubian. . . ."

"Hang on a bit. You . . . you were going to use a clone to recreate your own childhood?" Paul was stunned by the magnitude of the man's lunacy. "On top of a skyscraper?" A thought struck him like a stone. "Oh, my God, Ava? She was going to be. . . ."

"The mother. My mother—or at least the mother of my ushabti. A vessel for the preservation of the blood."

"Christ, you really are mad. Where did you get the poor girl? Was she some actress you hired to play your sainted Mama? She couldn't have been your real daughter, unless you raised her in a genetics lab too." It struck him then, sapping the strength from his body, chilling him to the bone. "Jesus. You did, didn't you? You . . . made her."

Jongleur seemed wearily amused by Paul's astonishment. "Yes. She was another clone of me—modified so she would be female, of course, so actually quite a bit different. You need not look so shocked—the Egyptians married brother to sister. Why should I do less for my own posterity? In fact, I would have used my real mother as the source for Avialle's genetic material, but I could not bring myself to exhume her body. She had rested in the cemetery in Limoux for almost two centuries and she still does. Her bones were left undisturbed." He waved his hand dismissively. "But it made little difference, in any case. The mother was to provide no DNA, after all. She was only to be the host—to carry and bear and then raise my true son."

"God help me, it just gets worse and worse. So Ava was right—she was pregnant!"

"Briefly. But we had a breakthrough on the Grail Project and so I abandoned Ushabti."

"And so you took the embryo back. Then you just . . . kept Ava anyway. Kept her a prisoner."

For a moment, Jongleur's mask of disdain slipped. "I . . . I had come to care for her. My own children have been dead for years. I scarcely know their descendants."

Paul put his head in his hands. "You . . . you. . . ." He took a deep, shuddering breath. "I should just stop, but I can't help asking. What about me? What did you intend to do before Ava ruined your plans by falling in love with me?"

The cold smile returned. "She ruined nothing. I expected her to do just that. My own mother was in love with her tutor. He committed suicide. In her misery she allowed her parents to marry her off to my father but the sadness never left her—it was the thing that shaped the rest of her life. If it had not happened, she would not have been the mother I knew." His smile twisted. "It was those fools Mudd and Finney who let things get out of control. They should have left the two of you alone until we were ready to dispose of you. I had just canceled the Ushabti Project, so what did it matter, anyway?"

"It mattered to me," Paul said, shaken but angry. "It mattered to me and to Ava."

"You are not to speak further of Avialle. I am tired of your familiarity."

Paul squeezed his eyes closed for a moment, fighting the rage that would end all questions and answers. "Then just tell me this—why did you pick me out of all the poor sods in the world? Was it just random? Did you simply choose the first acceptable applicant for this little . . . honor? Or was there something particular about me?"

When he looked up, the old man's eyes were glassy and dead again. "Because you went to Cranleigh."

"What?" It was the last answer he expected. "What are you talking about—my public school?"

Jongleur's sneer was almost a sign of weakness—the first such sign from him Paul had seen. "I was sent there as a child. The English boys singled me out as a foreigner and a weakling. They tortured me."

"And because of that you chose me? You were going to murder me just because I went to Cranleigh?" Paul laughed despite himself, a painful, near-hysterical flutter at the top of his lungs. "Christ, I hated that place. The older boys treated me just like they treated you." Except for Niles, he remembered, and the thought brought another with it. "So what happened to me afterward—the real me. Am I dead like Ava? Did you have me killed?"

The old man had lost his fire. "No. We arranged an automobile accident, but not with your real body. That is still quite safe in one of the project's laboratories and, as far as I know, quite alive. The remains that were sent back to England were those of a vagrant. There was no need for British authorities to doubt the identification of the body."

But even if I'm not really dead, I might as well be, he thought. Niles isn't shifting heaven and earth to find me, that's certain. He's given that "remember good old Paul Jonas?" speech a long time ago now. "How long?" he asked.

Jongleur looked at him in confused irritation. "What?"

"How long have I been in your damned system? How long since you killed your daughter and as good as killed me?"

"Two years."

Paul struggled up onto his feet, legs weak, knees trembling. He could not sit across from the murderer any longer. Two years. Two years obliterated and his life ruined, for nothing. For a failed, insane project. Because he had gone to a particular school. It was the bleakest joke imaginable. He stumbled away from the fire, toward the Well. He wanted to weep but he couldn't.

 

 

Orlando was stirring, even fighting a little. Reluctantly, Sam let go of him and sat up. "Is he okay?"

"He is just awakening, I think," said Florimel.

Over T4b's shoulder, Sam saw Paul Jonas abruptly stand and stagger away across the camp, heading toward the pit. Remembering !Xabbu, she was torn between fear for Paul and an absolute unwillingness to leave Orlando, but Martine was already rising to her feet.

"I will go with Paul," she said. "I can wait to speak to Orlando."

Orlando's eyelids flickered, then opened. He looked at the faces leaning over him. "I had the most amazing dream," he said after a few seconds. "You were in it—and you, and you, and you!" His lips trembled. "That's kind of a joke." He burst into tears.

Sam wrapped her arms around the weeping barbarian. "It's okay. We're here. I'm here. You're okay."

Florimel cleared her throat and stood. "There are many injured all around. I will see if I can be of any help." None of the others had risen. Florimel looked sternly at T4b. "Javier, I am still upset that you lied to us, but I will be closer to forgiving you if you come and help me."

"But, want to check out Orlando, me. . . ." he began, then the look on Florimel's face sank in. "Yeah, seen, coming." He stood, then reached back down to pat Orlando. "Lockin' miracle, you got. Praise God, seen?"

"Nandi, Mrs. Simpkins, perhaps you could help me, too?" asked Florimel. "And Azador—surely some of your people are in need of attention as well."

"All right, I don't need to have a house fall on me," said Bonita Mae Simpkins. She too leaned down to touch Orlando before she got up. "Javier's right, boy—it's a miracle you're back with us. We'll leave you young ones alone for a little while. Sure you got lots to talk about."

Sam made a face at their retreating backs. "You'd think we were in love or something."

Orlando smiled wearily. "Yeah, you'd think." His eyes and cheeks were still wet. He rubbed at his face with the back of his hand. "This is so embarrassing—Thargor never cries."

Sam's heart was pierced again. "Oh, Orlando, I missed you so much. I never thought I'd see you again." Now she was crying, too. She angrily dabbed at her eyes with the tattered sleeve of her Gypsy shirt. "Damn, this is so stupid. You're going to start thinking of me as a girl."

"But you are a girl, Frederico," he said gently. "This may be the first time I've ever seen you look like one, but you're definitely a girl."

"Not to you! Not to you, Gardiner! You treat me like a person!"

He sighed. "I recognized your voice when I first . . . came back. I saw you trying to come and help me against those things. I could have killed you myself. What were you thinking?"

"I wasn't going to sit there and watch you get murdered, you impacted idiot! I already thought you were dead once."

"I was dead, I am dead."

"Don't talk fenfen."

"It's not." He reached for her hand. "Listen, Sam. This is important—really important. Whatever else happens, you have got to understand this. I don't want to see you get hurt anymore."

Something about his tone touched her, made her heart flutter. It wasn't love, certainly not the kind the kids at school and on the net talked about, but something wider, deeper, and more strange. "What do you mean?"

"I died, Sam. I know I did. I felt it. I was fighting with that thing, that Grail bastard with the bird's head. . . ." He paused. "Whatever happened there, anyway?"

"You killed it," she said proudly. "T4b stuck his hand into its head—that glowing hand, do you remember? And then you stabbed it right in the heart with your sword, and it fell on you. . . ." She suddenly remembered. "Oh, your sword. . . !"

Orlando waved the interruption away. "It's right here in my hand. Listen, Sam, I was fighting with that bird-thing and everything in me was . . . shutting down. I could feel it. And afterward I was gone—utterly gone! I was somewhere else, and . . . and I can't even explain. Then it was black, and then I was swimming up through the lights here and I knew I had to kill those two things, and . . . and. . . ." He frowned and tried to sit up but Sam gently pushed him back down. "And I don't even know, really. But I know one thing. The other Orlando, the one with progeria, the one with a mom and a dad and a body . . . he's gone."

"What are you talking about?"

"Remember what they were saying at that Grail Brotherhood ceremony? About how you had to leave your body behind to live on the net? Well, I think that's what happened to me. I don't know how, but . . . but I was dying, Sam! And now I'm not. I can tell."

"But that's good, Orlando—that's wonderful!"

He shook his head. "I'm a ghost, Sam. My body—that Orlando—is dead, I can never go back."

"Go back. . . ?" It was beginning to sink in now, cold, inescapable. "You can't. . . ?"

"I can't go back to the real world. Even if we survive all this, even if all the rest of you make it back . . . I can't go with you." He looked at her for a long moment, his eyes wide, almost fevered. Then his expression softened. "Damn, Fredericks, you're crying again." He reached out and caught a tear on her cheek, holding it up to sparkle in the firelight. "Don't do that."

"What are . . . what are we going to do?" she said, breath hitching quietly as she did her best not to sob.

"Try not to get killed. Or try not to get killed again, in my case." He pulled himself up into a sitting position. "Now tell me what happened after I died."

It caught her by surprise. She squeaked with laughter in spite of herself but it also left her feeling frighteningly hollow. "Damn you, Gardiner, don't do that to me."

He smiled. "Sorry. Some things don't change, I guess."

 

 

She caught up to him at the edge of the shoreline. Without saying a word she slipped her arm through his. He started a little at the unexpected contact but did not pull away. It was nice to be touched, he realized, and with that also realized that he was planning to live.

"I wasn't going to jump in," he said.

"I didn't think so," she told him. "But it would have been messy if you fell in by accident."

He turned and she pivoted neatly beside him. They moved along the shore.

"Tell me," she said. "Did it all come back this time?"

"More than I wanted," he said.

As he described his returned memories—his returned life, in fact—and Jongleur's bizarre explanations, he found himself feeling more than ever ashamed at his own timidity, at the way he had let the events of his former life carry him along with little resistance to such a terrible conclusion.

". . . And Ava—she was so young!" His hands were clenched into such tight fists that he knew Martine could feel the tremors in his arm. "How could I. . . ?"

"How could you what?" He was surprised to hear anger in her voice. "Offer her comfort? Do your best to help her in the middle of a bizarre, frightening, inexplicable situation? Did you try to seduce her?"

"No!"

"Did you take advantage of her ignorance—her sheltered innocence. . . ?"

"No, of course not. Not on purpose. But just by going along with it—just by continuing to be her teacher even when I knew the whole thing was somehow rotten. . . ."

"Paul." She tightened her grip on his arm. "Someone . . . a friend . . . told me something once. He was speaking of me, but he might have been speaking of you. 'You never avoid an opportunity to stare directly at the wrong things,' is what he said." She made a noise that might have been a laugh. Paul found himself wondering for the first time what the real Martine looked like and was saddened that her blindness made her image bland and unremarkable. "It was an even wittier epigram originally, of course," she said. "Because of the bit about staring."

"He sounds cruel."

"I thought so at the time, and I valued him for it—I was very cynical in my student days. But I think now he just did not yet have the strength to be gentle." She smiled. "We may all be in our last hours, Paul Jonas. Do you really want to spend them trying to remember the many things you may have done wrong?"

"I suppose not."

They walked for a while in silence beside the dimly pulsing Well.

"It's hard," he said. "I've been thinking all along that somehow I'd find her . . . save her. Or perhaps that she'd save me."

"You are speaking of . . . Ava?" she asked him carefully.

He nodded. "But there is no Ava. Not really. Avialle Jongleur is dead, and all that's left are fragments. Held together by the Other, I suppose, but she's not quite real. Like trying to reassemble a puzzle without having all the right pieces. In its way, the Other must have loved her more than anyone else did—certainly more than her so-called father did. More than I did. She was its angel."

Martine did not reply.

"There's something else," he said after a moment. "Jongleur told me that as far as he knows, my body's still alive."

"Do you think he is lying?"

"No. But I don't think it's my body anymore."

Martine paused, "What do you mean, Paul?"

"I've been thinking—during the few moments something hasn't been actively trying to kill us, that is." He made the effort to smile. "Those very few moments. And I believe I know what happened when Sellars got me out of that World War One simulation. See, as long as the Grail people had my body, they also had my mind. Sellars—and Ava—could only talk to me when I was dreaming. But somehow, I escaped the simulation."

"And you think. . . ."

"I think that I've been through the Grail Brotherhood's ceremony—that my consciousness has been split off somehow, the way they planned to do for themselves. Perhaps it was an accident—I don't know why they would have made a virtual mind for me like they did for all the Grail people. But I think it did happen, and Sellars somehow brought that virtual mind to life. And that second, virtual Paul Jonas . . . is me."

She said nothing, but clutched his arm more tightly.

"So all the things I left behind, the simple, silly things that have kept me going here when I wanted to lie down and die, my flat, my mediocre job, my entire old life . . . they don't belong to me. They belong to the real Paul. The one whose body is in a lab somewhere. Even if that body dies, I can never have them. . . ."

He fell silent for a while. It hurt too much to talk. They walked on along the desolate shoreline.

"What is that line from T. S. Eliot?" he said when he trusted himself to speak. "Something about, 'I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling on the floors of silent seas. . . .' "

She turned her sightless face toward him. "Are you criticizing yourself again?"

"Actually, I was talking about the landscape." He stopped. "It does seem like the kind of place to wait for the end of the world, doesn't it?"

"I am tired of waiting for the end of the world," she said, but her head was cocked at a strange angle.

"Well, I don't think we have a lot of choice," he began. "Dread is still waiting just outside, and even if Orlando took care of the Twins I don't think he's up to dealing with what Dread's become. . . ."

"I suspect you are right. The Other has played its knight and it has bought some time, but nothing else."

"Its. . . ?"

"Its knight. Do you remember the story of the boy in the well? One of his would-be saviors was a knight. I suspect the Other had Orlando picked out for that role from the beginning." She frowned and raised her hand. "Quiet for a moment, please. Stand still."

"What is it?" Paul asked after a short silence.

"The waters are receding." She pointed. "Can you see it?"

"Whatever it is, it's not visible to me." But he wondered if in fact the lights were not already a little dimmer.

"I can feel the whole thing failing," she said distractedly. "Like an engine that has run too long. The end is coming very fast now I think."

"What can we do?"

She listened silently for long moments. "Nothing, I fear. Go back to the others and wait with them." She turned toward him. "But first I must ask you something. Will you hold me, Paul Jonas? Just for a short while? It has been a long time for me. I would not . . . would not like to die . . . without touching someone first."

He put his arms around her, full of conflicted thoughts. She was small, at least in this incarnation; her head fit just beneath his chin, her cheek against his chest. He wondered what her heightened senses would make of the quickness of his heartbeat.

"Perhaps in another world," she said, the words muffled against him. "In another time. . . ."

Then they just held each other and did not speak. At last they let go and went back side by side across the gray dust, toward the fire where their friends were waiting.