Sea of Silver Light, Page 56

  The end of !Xabbu's torch had been spiked into the soft loam of a grassy hillside; he was sitting beside it. He did not look up at her approach, and she was just beginning to feel frightened again when he shook himself out of his reverie and turned to her.

  "Is everything all right, Sam?"

  "Yeah, chizz. I just woke up and . . . I was worried because you were gone."

  He nodded. "I am sorry. I thought you were too deeply asleep to notice." He turned back to the sky. "The stars are very strange here. There is a pattern, but I cannot hold it in my mind."

  She seated herself beside him. The grass was damp, but after the mishap in the river she scarcely noticed.

  "Will you not be cold?" he asked.

  "I'm okay."

  They sat for a while in silence, Sam fighting an urge to drive the fear away with friendly noise. At last !Xabbu cleared his throat, a sound so uncharacteristic in its uncertainty that Sam felt her skin goose pimple.

  "I . . . I did a terrible wrong to you today," he said.

  "You saved me."

  "I let you go into the river. It should have been me, but I was afraid."

  "Why should it have been you? You're as bad as Renie—you think you should do all the dangerous things before anyone else."

  "The fact is that I feared the water. I was almost killed once in the river where I grew up, when I was a child. A crocodile."

  "That's terrible!"

  He shrugged. "That does not mean I should have let you do what I could not."

  Sam hissed with exasperation. "You don't have to do everything," she said. "That's uttermost fenfen."

  "But. . . ."

  "Listen." She leaned toward him, forcing him to look at her. "You've saved my life a dozen times already. Remember the mountain? Remember how you got us off that disappearing trail? You've done more than your share, but that doesn't mean the rest of us can't, like, do our part." She raised her hand to keep him from speaking. "Orlando got killed helping us—saving me. How could I live with myself if I wasn't taking risks, too? If I just sat back like some . . . some princess-girl in an old story, and let everyone rescue me? I don't know how things are in the Okey-dongo Delta or whatever it is, but where I come from, that scans for days and days."

  !Xabbu smiled, but there was pain in it. "Renie says it is 'old-fashioned bullshit.' "

  "And she'll say it again when we find her if you don't straighten up." Now Sam was the one to smile. She prayed it would be true, against all the odds. Renie and !Xabbu deserved each other in every way. So much love, so much stubbornness. She hoped they would have the rest of their lives to argue over which of them should do the harder jobs. "Is that why you came out here? Because you felt bad you didn't go into the river and I did, and I got a cramp?"

  He shook his head. "Not only that. Something is troubling me, but I do not know what it is. Sometimes I need quiet to think." He smiled again. "Sometimes I need more than that. I thought I might dance."

  "Dance?" If he had suggested he was considering building a rocket ship she could not have been more surprised.

  "For me it is . . . like praying. Sometimes." He flicked his fingers, troubled by the inadequacy of his words. "But I am not ready. I do not feel it."

  Sam didn't know what to say. After a moment, she stood. "Do you want to be alone? Or should we go back to camp?"

  !Xabbu plucked his torch from the ground and rose lithely onto his feet. "I am troubled by something else," he said. "It is not enough simply to be silent about Jongleur's true story in front of Azador."

  Sam felt her face warm with embarrassment. "I'm sorry—that was so stupid today."

  "It is hard—unnatural—to think of such things all the time. But I think we must make it clear to Jongleur that Azador has a hatred of the Grail Brotherhood. Then I think he must keep himself quiet, if only to protect himself."

  "It's so strange," Sam said as they walked back toward the remains of the campfire. "Nothing here is real, you can't trust anything. Well, almost anything." She bumped !Xabbu, a gentle nudge of comradeship. "It's all like some kind of . . . I don't know. Like a carnival. Like a masquerade."

  "But a terrible one," he said. "Dangerous and terrible." They reached the campfire, and the sleeping forms of their two companions, without saying anything more.

  The next day was spent in what Sam felt was a clearly hopeless search for a way to cross the river. They clambered through the reed beds alongside the river, hoping to find some clue to how others had crossed—footprints, the remains of a bridge or dock—but without success. Sam was depressed, !Xabbu reserved and thoughtful. Jongleur, as usual, spoke little, lost in his private thoughts. Only Azador seemed unbowed. In fact, he talked for much of the day, chattering compulsively about his adventures in the network, his discoveries of how things worked, of secret shortcuts within simworlds and well-hidden gateways to get out of them. Some of it was clearly bragging, but Sam could not help being impressed by the depth of his knowledge. How long had this man wandered the Grail Network?

  "Where do you come from?" she asked him as they sloshed through a shallow backwater. A group of promising stones were proving to be only the cracked remains of a larger rocky shelf. "I mean, before you were here?"

  "I . . . I do not wish to talk about it," he said. He scowled, poking at the silt between his feet with a length of reed. "But I have made the best use of my time here that anyone could. I have learned things the builders of this place thought would remain forever hidden. . . ."

  Sam did not want to hear another recitation of his accomplishments. "Yeah, but you can't find a way across the river, so at the moment the rest of it doesn't count for much."

  Azador looked hurt. Sam felt bad—unlike Jongleur, he had done nothing to harm her or her friends—so she tried to think of something else to talk about.

  "But I suppose that you did a pretty good job on that raft after all." Although it had been !Xabbu's deft repairs that had made it riverworthy, she knew but did not mention. "It's not your fault that the system won't let us cross that way."

  He looked a little mollified.

  "Are you really a Gypsy?" she asked.

  His reaction was sudden and fierce. "Who told you such a foul thing?"

  It was all Sam could do not to look at !Xabbu, who was holding quiet conversation with Jongleur thirty paces away across the muddy shallows. "Nobody . . . I . . . I just thought you said you were." She was furious with herself. "Maybe I just thought it because . . . because of that mustache."

  He stroked the article in question as though it were an affronted animal he was soothing. "Gypsies, they are sneaks and thieves. Azador is an explorer. Do not misunderstand when I tell you of my adventures. I am a prisoner. I have the right to discover all I can, to take what I can from my captors."

  "I'm sorry. I just misunderstood."

  "You should be more careful." He gave her a hard stare. "This is a place where you must be cautious what you say to strangers."

  Sam silently, emphatically agreed.

  Another hour of fruitless investigation passed before she had a chance to talk to !Xabbu out of earshot of the others. He had joined her to scavenge in one last clump of reeds. Azador and Jongleur had given up, and were sitting on one of the meadowy hillocks, watching them.

  "I'm such a scanbox," she said when she had explained what happened. "I should keep my mouth shut."

  !Xabbu looked troubled. "Perhaps you blame yourself too much, as I did last night. Perhaps we have learned something, although I cannot say what. For one thing, it is very strange that he should say this now. Almost the only thing he would tell us before was that he was a Gypsy—Romany, as he called himself. He seemed very proud of it." The small man pulled aside a curtain of swaying cattails to reveal that what had looked from a distance like the remains of a wooden structure was only a tangle of tree trunks uprooted and piled by some storm. "Perhaps he is not the only one who has decided to keep his past a secret."

  "I don't know. He didn't seem sca
red or nervous, like I would if someone knew something about me they shouldn't. He just seemed . . . angry." She looked to the hillside. Jongleur and Azador were talking, or seemed to be. It made her feel uneasy. "Look at that old monster just sitting there. It's his fault we can't find anyone to ask how to cross the river!" Whether it really was Jongleur's fault or not, they had seen no other inhabitants of the simworld since the old man had frightened Jecky Nibble and his charges away from their campfire.

  "It is possible. But it may be they have all simply crossed over to someplace that is safer."

  "Maybe." Sam frowned. "What could those two be saying to each other?"

  !Xabbu looked up. "I do not know. I told the old man that Azador might become violent it he found out who Jongleur truly is. So I do not think he is telling him anything about that."

  By the time they had climbed out of the mud and started up the grassy hillside, Azador had risen and walked away from Jongleur. He stood on the hilltop, facing away from them. As they neared the crest, he suddenly turned and shouted, "Come, come here! Look at this!"

  Sam and !Xabbu hurried up the last few meters.

  "Look," said Azador. "Can you see?"

  "Oh, no!" Sam felt chilled. "They're fading out."

  The distant hills were only ghostly outlines now, streaks of sunlit reflection, milky, misty indicators of where solid hills should stand. Even parts of the meadowed plain seemed to have turned transparent as glass. Sam looked around in panic, but the river and its banks were still solid behind them, the hillock beneath their feet still reassuringly lifelike.

  "They are disappearing," Azador said. For the first time. she heard something like real fear in his voice. "What does it mean?"

  "It means we are running out of time," Jongleur said, coming up from behind them. His face was carefully expressionless, but his voice was not entirely steady. "The simulation is dying."

  !Xabbu woke her with a light touch. "I am going to be away from the camp for some time," he whispered. "I do not think I want to leave you with those two."

  Sam got sleepily to her feet and stumbled after him. The stars seemed brighter than ever, as though burning in premature mourning for the vanishing world beneath them.

  When they reached the nearest hilltop, !Xabbu sat and began tying something around his ankles, circlets made from river reeds and seedpods that rattled when they moved.

  "What are those for?" Sam asked.

  "Dancing," he said. "Please, Sam, I need quiet now."

  Rebuffed, she sat down beside him and drew her knees up under her chin. The cloak of woven leaves !Xabbu had made for her was little protection against the cold, but the night was mild. She watched him finish his preparations, then he walked a few steps away from her and stood, staring straight up at the sky and its blazing stars.

  He stood there a long time. Sam drifted into sleep again, then started awake to find him still standing in the same place, frozen like a statue. Her mind wandered, touching mournfully on the stars over her own backyard where she and her father had camped in sleeping bags, Sam secure in his silent company despite the night sounds of the garden, reassured by her mother's silhouette in the kitchen window.

  What are they doing now? They can't spend all their time with . . . with me. In some hospital. Do they do other things? Watch the net? Have dinner with friends? Even if I die here, they have to have some kind of normal life again, don't they? But it seemed wrong—unfair. But would it be worse if they never got over it?

  Oh, God, Mom, Dad, I'm so sorry. . . !

  Slowly, !Xabbu began to move, lifting one foot in the air and sawing it back and forth like an impatient horse pawing at the ground. He stepped forward, lifted the other foot and shook it, then set it down too. The rattles gave a quiet, dry hiss. Gradually he began to move in a distinctive and intricate rhythm, the steps made even more exotic by the near-silence.

  At first Sam watched him closely, trying to guess from the small man's absorbed expression what might be going on in his mind, but the dance went on too lengthily, too repetitively, to hold her attention: as he finished the first slow trip around a circle only he could see, she found her thoughts beginning to scatter again. His precise movements reminded her of a game she had once played, something on the net she had loved for about two weeks when she was young, where oddly-shaped building blocks had floated slowly through space and could be pushed together into expanding geometric structures. Like !Xabbu's dance, the blocks had revolved as if both heavy and weightless. Their intricate, multifaceted sides had kissed and stuck with just the same blend of delicacy and permanence as the lifting and setting down of each of the small man's feet, as though it were not blind brute gravity that held him to the earth but an act of careful choice.

  I wonder if Orlando ever played that game, she thought sleepily. I wonder what he would have made with it—something different, that's for sure. Something funny and sad.

  I wonder what !Xabbu would make. . . .

  And then she herself spun slowly away into another place, dreaming of dark high mountains and the lonely cries of birds.

  "Wake up, Sam." His voice seemed odd: for a moment, the dreams still muddling her, she thought it was Orlando who spoke.

  "Let me sleep, you damn scanmaster."

  "The light is coming back. We do not have the time to sleep late today, I think."

  She opened her eyes to find !Xabbu leaning over her, his face gleaming with sweat, his chest expanding and contracting as though he had just run a marathon. Nevertheless, he seemed full of energy. "Oh my God, I'm sorry. I thought you were. . . ." She rubbed her eyes. "Are you okay?"

  "I am fine, Sam. I have done much thinking. It was good to dance, to . . . to be me again."

  She let him help her up. Her feet felt cold and prickly; it took her a moment to stamp life back into them. "Did it help you think of anything?"

  He smiled. "You are like Renie in this way, too. My dance is not like a . . . what is the name? Vending machine. Put in a card, out comes an answer. But I realized why I was troubled and the answer to that may help us." He laughed—he seemed lighter than he had in days, almost buoyant. "So we will see, Sam. Now come."

  "What did you mean?" she asked as they walked back across the wet grass. It felt so real under her feet that it was hard to believe it might soon dissolve back into silvery nothingness, but the distant hills were frighteningly faint, a landscape carved in crystal. Without thinking, she hurried her steps. "When you said it was good to be you again?"

  "Always I try to understand this place, to think like the people who built it, to think like Renie and you others do. But that is not really the way I think best. And it is strange for me—like wearing clothing that does not fit well. I cannot change an entire lifetime in a matter of weeks. Sometimes I must . . . go back. Go back to my old ways."

  Sam nodded slowly. I think I know what you mean. I feel sometimes like I don't know who I am—who the real me is." Spurred by his quizzical look, she went on. "I mean, since I've been a girl again—you know, wearing this body—I don't talk the same, I don't even think the same, sort of. I start acting like . . . like a girl!"

  His smile was gentle. "Is that bad?"

  "Not always, no. But when I was just Fredericks, Orlando's shadow, another boy . . . I don't know. It was easier, somehow. I tried more things, I talked different." She laughed. "I swore more."

  "Ah. And you have put your finger on it, Sam. That was one of the things that was troubling me."

  Surprised, she tripped over a hummock and took a second to regain her footing. "You're troubled because I'm not swearing?"

  "No. But wait—we are almost there. Soon you will see what I have been thinking."

  Jongleur and Azador were sitting across the fire from each other, sullen and sleepy-eyed. The older man gave them a cold look as they approached. "So, after all your talk about necessity and danger, you find time to take a romantic walk? Very sweet!"

  Sam felt her face grow hot and would have said something
nasty, but !Xabbu touched her arm.

  "There are many ways to solve problems," the small man said evenly. "But we need a new one, or we will still be here when this world melts around us."

  Jongleur made a noise of disgust, "So it was a scouting expedition?"

  "Of a sort." !Xabbu turned to Azador, who was watching blearily, perhaps regretting the absence of coffee in this meadow beyond the world. "I need to speak to you, Mr. Azador. I have some important questions to ask."

  Something flickered behind his eyes, but he only waved his hand negligently. "Ask."

  "Tell me again how you came here—how you reached the black mountain, then found yourself in this place."

  Sam looked at !Xabbu, puzzled but trying not to show it, as Azador somewhat reluctantly reiterated the story of his arrival—following them into the maze in Demeter's temple, waking into pale nothingness to find the mountain gone.

  "But I have been thinking," !Xabbu said abruptly as Azador neared the end of his story. "Thinking that we sat a long time on the side of the black mountain, arguing and talking, after we came through from Troy. Thinking that the gate was gone by the time we began to climb the trail. So how did you step through it without us seeing you?"

  "Are you calling me a liar?" Azador half-rose, but sat down again when !Xabbu held up his hand in a calming gesture, as though the violent movement had been mostly bluff.

  "Perhaps—but perhaps not." !Xabbu moved a few steps nearer, then seated himself beside the smoking remains of the campfire. Azador slid back a little. Sam found herself staring in fascination. What did !Xabbu know, or at least guess? Azador actually looked frightened. "I believe that you did follow us through," !Xabbu said, "and it could be you are telling what you remember—but I do not think it happened that way."

  "Why are we wasting time on this trivia?" growled Jongleur.

  "If you want to cross the river before this world disappears," !Xabbu said coolly, "I suggest you close your mouth."