Mountain of Black Glass

  It had observed them for a number of cycles, far longer than any observation it—or its more complete parent—had spent on any other anomaly, and although it had never found the right cues, the "XpauljonasX" cues that would trigger retrieval, still there had been something in their information-signature that had arrested its interest, kept it rolling through a kind of stasis loop. To the extent that Nemesis.2 could be spoken of as having feelings—which would at best be a grotesque form of anthropomorphism—it should have felt relief that they had released it from the unsatisfying, unresolved situation. But instead, a strong draw on its hunter-killer subroutines was urging it to follow them, to stay near them and study them until it had finally decided once and for all whether to ignore them or remove them from the matrix.

  Nemesis.2 would already have followed the organisms and their strangely confusing signatures—and could at any time, since the way they had gone was as clear to it as footprints on new snow would be to a human—but this node itself was anomalous as well, and more than that, it was resonant of the greater anomaly that had so puzzled and intrigued (again, using human words to describe the needs of a sophisticated but unliving piece of code) the original Nemesis device, and which had led in part to it diminishing and multiplying itself, the better to serve multiple needs.

  Nemesis.2, or at least the original version of the program, had not been created to hesitate. That it did so now, torn between immediate pursuit of the anomalous organisms and further investigation of the anomalous location in which it found itself, was perhaps indicative of why some programmers, even those who wrote code for the prestigious Jericho Team that had created Nemesis, liked to say of the products of their imagination and labor, "Just because you can tell it what to do doesn't mean you can tell it what to do."

  Nemesis.2 analyzed, measured, and analyzed again. It considered, in its cold way. A drift of a few integers, and it decided. Because it did not think, even if it had been told that it had begun a course of action that would ripple out from this moment and change the universe forever, it could not have understood.

  Even if it could have understood, it would not have cared.

  CHAPTER 5

  Tourist in Madrikhor

  NETFEED/NEWS: Another House Collapse Blamed on Nanotech

  (visual: Chimoy family camping in front yard)

  VO: The Chimoy family of Bradford, England, are only the latest who are seeking damages against DDG, Ltd. manufacturers of Rid Carpet, a nanomachine-based carpet and furniture cleaner that they say destroyed their house.

  (visual: foundations of Chimoy house)

  In another blow to the stumbling nanotechnology industry, solicitors for the Chimoys allege that an imperfection in the Rid Carpet cleaning product allowed the dirt-eating nanomachines to continue far past the point at which they should have shut themselves off, and that the tiny eating machines went on to devour the carpet, the floor, the family cat, and most of the frame of their modest semidetached, which eventually collapsed. . . .

  Christabel had discovered that if she held open the little door where the cleaning machine came out and vacuumed up all the dirt from the floor, she could hear what Mommy and Daddy were saying in the living room downstairs.

  When she had been really little, not like now, she had been scared of the suckbot, which was her father's name for it (which always made her mother say, "Mike, that's icky.") The way it just popped out and crawled around the room on its little treads and lifter-legs, red lights blinking like eyes, had always made her think of the trapdoor spider she had seen at school. Many nights she had woken up crying after dreaming that it had come out and tried to suck the blankets off her bed. Her mother had explained many times that it was only a machine, that it only came out to clean, and that when it wasn't vacuuming, it wasn't waiting just on the other side of the little door but was at the far end of the duct downstairs, sitting on its base unit, charging.

  The idea of the little square machine sitting quietly in the dark, drinking electricity, had not made her feel any happier, but sometimes you just had to let your parents think that they'd made things better.

  Now that she was a big girl, she knew it was just a machine, and so when she had the idea of lifting the door to see if she could hear the fight her parents were having, she had hardly been scared at all. She had poked her head right into the dark place, then after a while she had even opened her eyes. Her parents' voices sounded far away and metal-y, like they were robots themselves, which she didn't like, but after she had listened for a while to what they were saying she almost completely forgot about the horrible little box.

  ". . . I don't care, Mike, she had to go back to school. It's the law!" Her mother had been shouting earlier, but now she just sounded tired.

  "Fine, then. But she's not moving a step out of this house other than that, and she gets taken there and picked up afterward."

  "Which means me, doesn't it?" Christabel's mommy sounded like she might start shouting again. "It's bad enough you're never home these days, but now I'm expected to become a jailer for our child as well. . . ."

  "I don't understand you," Daddy told her. "Don't you care? She's having some kind of . . . relationship with a grown man—you heard it yourself! Some kind of bizarre softsex thing for all we know. Our little girl!"

  "We don't know any of that, Mike. She's got those funny glasses, and I heard a voice coming out of them, saying her name. . . ."

  "And I told you, these are not the standard issue Storybook Sunglasses, Kaylene. Someone has modified them—somebody has built some kind of short-range transponder into them."

  "Go ahead and cut me off. Don't let me talk. That'll make sure you win the argument, won't it?"

  Something crashed and glass broke. Christabel was so startled and frightened that she bumped her head on the hinged door, then tried not to move in case they had heard her. Had Daddy thrown something? Jumped out a window? She saw someone do that once on the net—a big man who was being chased by police. She expected a lot more shouting, but when her father spoke he sounded quiet and sad.

  "Oh, Jesus, I'm sorry. I didn't even see it there."

  "It's just a vase, Mike." It was a little while until her mother said the next thing. "Do we have to fight about this? Of course I'm worried, too, but we can't just . . . arrest her. We don't really know for certain anything's wrong."

  "Something's wrong, all right." He didn't sound angry anymore either, just tired. Christabel had to hold her breath to hear what he was saying. "Everything's just gone to hell around here, honey, and I'm taking it out on you. I'm sorry."

  "I still can't believe it—this place is so safe, Mike. Like something out of an old book. Neighborhoods, kids playing in the streets. If we were in Raleigh-Durham or Charlotte Metro, I wouldn't ever have let her out of my sight, but . . . but here!"

  "There's a reason it's like this, Kaylene. It's a backwater—all the important action's Rim stuff, on the West Coast or the Southwest. This base would probably have been closed years ago, except that we had one old man we were supposed to keep an eye on. And he got away. On my watch, too."

  Christabel hated the way her daddy's voice sounded now, but she could not stop listening. Listening to your parents like this was like seeing a picture of someone naked, or watching a flick you knew you weren't supposed to, with blood and heads being cut off.

  "Honey, is it that bad? You never talk about your work, and I try not to bother you about it when you're home—anyway, I know it's all secret—but you've been so upset lately."

  "You have no idea. My balls, not to put it too gently, are in a vise. Look, let's say your job, your real job, not just the day-to-day bullshit, was to make sure no one robbed a certain bank. And for years not only didn't anyone rob it, nobody even parked illegally in front of it, so that everyone thought you had the easiest job in the world. And then one day, when everything seemed just like any other day, someone not only robbed the bank, they took the whole damn building. Now, if you were that bank guard,
how would you feel? And what do you think it would do to your career?"

  "Oh, God, Mike." Her mother sounded scared, but she also had that whispery sound when she wanted to kiss Daddy, but he was busy doing something and wouldn't let her. "I didn't realize it was that bad. That strange old man. . . ?"

  "That old bastard, yeah. But I can't tell you any more, honey—I really, really can't. But this stuff with Christabel is not happening at a good time, let's put it that way."

  There was a long quiet.

  "So what should we do about our little girl?"

  "I don't know." There was a clink of glass. Daddy was picking up whatever he'd broken. "But I'm scared to death, and the fact that she won't tell us anything about it makes it worse. I've never thought of her as a liar, Kaylene—never thought she would keep a secret like that."

  "It scares me too."

  "Well, that's why the house arrest. She's not going anywhere without one of us around except to school until we get to the bottom of this. In fact, I'm going to go talk to her again now."

  The last thing Christabel heard as she scrambled away from the cleaning machine's door was her mother say, "Go easy on her. Mike. She's just a little girl."

  As she lay on the bed with her eyes closed, pretending she was still taking her nap, she could hear her daddy's footsteps coming up the stairs, clump, clump, clump. Sometimes, when she was waiting for him to come up and tuck her in and kiss her good night, she felt almost like the princess in Sleeping Beauty, waiting for the handsome prince to get through all the scratchy thorns. Other times it was like being in a haunted house, hearing a monster get closer and closer.

  He opened the door quietly, then she felt him sit down on the edge of the bed. "Christabel? Wake up, honey."

  She pretended that she was mostly asleep. She could still feel her heart beating fast, as though she had run a long way. "What?"

  "You look very pink," he said, worried. "Are you coming down with something?" He laid his big hand across her head. It felt cool and hard and very, very heavy.

  "I'm okay, I guess." She sat up. She didn't want to look at him because she knew he was giving her a Serious Look.

  "Look, Christabel, honey, I want you to understand something. All of this about the Storybook Sunglasses—your mommy and I aren't angry at you because we think you're bad, we're upset because we're worried. And it makes us very unhappy when you won't tell us the truth."

  "I know, Daddy." She still didn't want to look at him, not because she was scared, but because she knew if she saw his face she would start crying.

  "So why won't you just tell us what's going on? If you have a friend your own age and you're just playing around, changing your voices or something, we won't be angry. But if it's someone grown-up—well, then we need to know about it. Do you understand?"

  She nodded. His fingers touched her chin and lifted her face until she had to look at him, his big wide face, his tired eyes, the bristly whiskers. It was the whiskers—Daddy always shaved every morning, except on Saturday, and sometimes he shaved twice in a day if he and Mommy were going out to dinner—that made her stomach swim around and her face get hot all over again.

  "Has someone touched you? Has anyone done anything to you?"

  "N–no." Christabel began to cry. "No, Daddy!"

  "Just talk to me, kiddo. Just tell me what's going on with those glasses."

  She tried to answer, but at first could only make sucking noises like the vacuum. There was snot coming out of her nose, so she tried to wipe it away with her sleeve. Her daddy pulled a tissue out of the Zoomer Zizz box and gave it to her. When she could talk, she said, "I can't tell you. It's a secret, and. . . ." She shook her head because she couldn't explain. Everything was so terrible, everything. Mister Sellars was with that bad, scary boy, and she couldn't get away even to explain to him that her parents had the sunglasses, and because she was lying she was making her mommy and daddy so sad, and her daddy looked so tired. . . . "I can't."

  For a moment, she thought he was going to get angry again like he had the first night—that he might yell or break some of her toys, the way he'd thrown Prince Pikapik against a wall and smashed up his insides so now the otter would only walk in little limping circles. But the red in his cheeks was very bright, as bright as when he and Captain Ron had too many drinks and said things about the cheerleader girls on the wallscreen that made Christabel feel funny and nervous.

  "All right." He stood up. "This isn't the Middle Ages, Christabel, or even thirty years ago—I'm not going to give you the kind of smacking my daddy used to give me when I wouldn't own up to the truth. But you will tell us where you got those, and you won't go out to play, or watch the wallscreen, or go to Seawall Center, or any of the things you like to do—we'll keep you home until high school, if we have to—until you stop playing these stupid games."

  He went out and shut the door behind him. Christabel started crying again.

  The man who stood glowering before him was so large that he blocked most of the light in a tavern room that did not have much to spare. Tattoos covered his face and most of his visible skin, and small animal bones were knotted in his bushy beard. He raised a hand like a bear's paw and set it on the table, which creaked audibly.

  "I am Grognug the Unlovable," he rumbled, "slayer of the ogre Vaxirax and several other monsters nearly as infamous. I make it my business to kill at least one man every day with my bare hands, just to stay in practice. I give preference to those who sit on my personal stool without asking." Teeth that had clearly never undergone any process as effeminate as brushing could not be said to flash; instead, they made a brief and mossy appearance. "And who are you, little man?"

  "My . . . my name is Ka–turr of Rhamzee," the other stammered, "swordsman for hire. I am . . . a stranger here, and do not know. . . ."

  "It is good to hear your name before I yank off your head," Grognug interrupted, "so that the bards will be able to add today's victim to the long list. The bards keep very close track of my career, you see, and they are sticklers for detail." Grognug's breath was expertly rendered, and explained the rest of his fatalistic soubriquet: the VR scent-effect would have convinced almost anyone that they were standing downwind from sun-warmed road-kill.

  "Heh." Ka-turr slid his stool back. "Actually, I was just leaving."

  Ten seconds later Catur Ramsey was sitting splay-legged in the shadowy street outside, laughter still echoing from the door behind him. Even he had to admit that his swift exit, ending in a pratfall, had probably been worth a chuckle or two. "Jesus!" he said. "What is it with this place? That's the third bar I've been chucked out of!"

  "First off," said the voice in his ear, "it's a tavern, not a bar. You gotta get this stuff straight, that's part of the problem. Everyone always picks on the virgins."

  "I told you I should have been something else instead of a sword fighter—a thief, or a wizard, or something. A medieval accountant, maybe. Just because I'm pretty tall and I've got this jumbo can opener hanging off my belt, everyone keeps picking fights with me."

  "Yeah, but this way if you find a fight you can't run away from, at least you got a chance of survivin' it," Beezle pointed out in his thick Brooklyn dialect. "And at the rate you're goin', you'll find one of those pretty soon. . . ."

  Ramsey picked himself up and dusted off the knees and seat of his heavy wool breeks. His sword, which he had not yet dared to draw from its scabbard, thumped against his thigh. Not only had its dangling bulk already proved a problem when running away from bar fights, it had some bizarre name which he had already forgotten.

  "What's this thing called again? Slamhanger or Hamslammer or something?"

  Beezle sighed, a disembodied Jiminy Cricket floating in Ramsey's ear. "It's called Slayhammer. It comes from the Temple of the Wailing God, in your home country of Rhamzee, beyond the borders of the Middle Country. How do you ever keep track of your legal stuff? You got a memory like a sieve, buddy."

  "I make notes. I sit at a desk and tal
k to my office system. I have paralegals. I don't usually have to crawl through the stinking gutters of the ancient city of Margarine to do my research."

  "Madrikhor. You know, if you want me to laugh at your jokes, you should turn up my conversational sensitivity a little so I'd get 'em faster."

  Ramsey scowled, but could not help being a tiny bit amused by what a complete and utter disaster this was turning out to be. "Nah. You might as well save your energy for finding me someplace new to get beat up."

  Coming here had seemed an obvious idea at first, especially when most of the initial leads, all so promising, had proved themselves to be little better than mirages, receding and then fading as he approached. Beezle had made much information available about Orlando's last few months, but trying to follow up on any of it had been surprisingly difficult. The TreeHouse people, in part because of their own tragedy—several children of network users struck down at the same time, apparently with Tandagore's Syndrome—rebuffed all of Ramsey's quiet overtures. Smelling a lawsuit, perhaps, none of the engineers at Indigo Gear would admit even talking to an Orlando Gardiner, although one of the recruiting officers admitted having given him a scholarship. Ramsey had a feeling that were it not for the possible disastrous publicity of welshing on a deal with a kid in a coma, Indigo would already have withdrawn that scholarship and wiped all records off the books.

  The last and best hope for information about Orlando's recent activities had been the Middle Country, but even here dead ends abounded. After requests to examine network records had been met with a polite but unmistakable go-slow policy, such that finding what he wanted the normal way would have taken a couple of years, he was forced to begin a search from the inside. But not only had his entry into the simworld made him feel at least as stupid as he had feared it would, it had made him feel stupid in some ways he hadn't even anticipated, as his sore tailbone now attested.