Sea of Silver Light, Page 67

  She set her jaw, but took her daughter by the hand and pulled her away from the door. "Come on, Christabel. Let's go out and sit by the pool. I'll get you an ice cream."

  "Be careful, Mister Sellars," the little girl called, hesitating in the doorway. "And . . . and take care of Cho-Cho, okay?"

  "I promise, little Christabel." Sellars sagged a little as the girl and her mother disappeared.

  Major Sorensen was the last to leave. "I'll be in the next room," he said as he shut the door. "Holler if you need me."

  Cho-Cho had pushed himself to the far end of the couch where he waited like a trapped animal. "What you think you gonna do?"

  "Just what we have done before, Señor Izabal. Except this time, you're going to be awake. I'm going to send you through to that other place."

  "How come awake?"

  "Because I can't afford to wait until tonight. My friends might have moved again by then."

  The boy scowled. "What you want me to do?"

  "For now, just lie down."

  Cho-Cho did so, but with the kind of careful attention that suggested he expected at any moment to be hit with something. It was not hard to see the fear under the bluster.

  If people's insides were their outsider, Ramsey thought, it would be this kid, not Sellars, who was scar tissue from head to toe.

  Sellars leaned forward until he could lay a trembling hand along the boy's neck. Cho-Cho shook him off and sat up. "What you doing, loco? Touching me and all that mierda?"

  The old man signed. "Señor Izabal, I strongly suggest you lie down and shut up. I'm just making contact with that thing in your neck, your neurocannula." He turned to Ramsey. "I could actually just narrowcast to it, but it's a pretty shoddy piece of street engineering and I get less interference if I'm actually making contact."

  "Hey! Me, I racked plenty efectivo on that, old man."

  "You were robbed, sonny." Sellars laughed weakly. "No, don't get angry, I'm just teasing. It does the job well enough."

  Cho-Cho lay back along the couch. "Just don't get funny."

  Sellars made contact again. "Close your eyes, please." When the boy had done so, the old man shut his own, lifting his face blindly toward the ceiling. "Do you see the light yet, my young friend?"

  "Kind of. All gray, like."

  "Good. Now just wait. If everything goes well, in a few minutes you should find yourself inside the network, as you have before—that place you admired so much. You'll have my voice in your ear. Don't do anything until I tell you."

  Cho-Cho's mouth had fallen slackly open. His fingers, pressed into fists only moments before, uncurled.

  "Now. . . ." said Sellars, then fell silent. He was still as stone, but unlike Cho-Cho, he seemed not unconscious but vastly absorbed, as distant as a meditating holy man.

  Ramsey watched, feeling as nearly useless as he ever had. The silence continued long enough that he was just beginning to wonder if flicking on the wallscreen for some news would interfere with whatever Sellars was doing when the old man jerked upright in his chair, his hand snapping away from the boy's neck as though the skin there had burned him.

  "What is it?" Ramsey hurried to Sellars' side, but the old man did not speak. He twitched violently and his eyes opened wide then squeezed shut. A moment later he collapsed forward. If Ramsey had not wrapped his arms around the thin body, light as a bundle of sticks, Sellars would have fallen onto the floor. Ramsey pushed him back upright, but the old man only lolled in the chair, limp and silent. The boy still lay on the couch, equally slack, equally still. Ramsey tried to shake Sellars awake, then sprang to the boy, his desperation increasing with each second. The boy's head bounced on the cushions as Ramsey tried to bring him back, but lay still when Ramsey stopped.

  "They're both still breathing." Sorensen let go of Sellars' wrist and stood up. "Their pulses feel regular."

  "If this is Tandagore, that doesn't mean anything," Ramsey said bitterly. "My clients . . . their daughter has had normal pulse and respiration for months, the whole time she's been in a coma. Her friend did, too—he's dead now."

  "Jesus." Sorensen jammed his hands in his pockets—to make it less obvious how helpless he felt, Ramsey suspected. "Jee-zuss. What the hell kind of situation are we in now?"

  "The same as we were, just a bit worse." Ramsey felt so heavy he could not imagine how he would ever stand up again. "Should we take them to a hospital?"

  "I don't know. Shit." Sorensen walked across the room to sit down in the other chair. There would have been room on the couch, since the unconscious child stretched only two thirds of the length, but Ramsey was not surprised by the major's choice. "Does being in the hospital help those other Tangadore kids?"

  "Tandagore. No. Well, I suppose it keeps them from getting bedsores." A thought flickered past. "And they have to be fed with a drip. And catheterized, I guess."

  "Catheterized. . . ? Christ." Major Sorensen seemed more depressed than frightened—Catur Ramsey wished he could say the same of himself. "I'd better go tell Kay what's going on." He frowned. "I don't know how we'll be able to take them to a hospital. The kid, yeah, but we put an advisory out on Sellars from the base to every emergency room on the Eastern seaboard, because we thought he'd be having breathing problems. Shit. Breathing's about the only thing he isn't having problems with right now."

  "Don't look at me, Major. Sellars was in charge of this whole thing. I was just along for the ride."

  Sorensen regarded him with something like sympathy. "Yeah. Some ride, huh, Ramsey?"

  "Yeah. Some ride."

  When Sorensen had disappeared through the connecting door, Ramsey went looking for his pad, hoping that he had some first-aid information on Tandagore in the research he had done for the Frederickses. When he picked it up, the small device was vibrating.

  Oh, my God, he thought. It must be Olga. She's been waiting for at least an hour—she must be panicked. But what can I tell her? He fumbled the device open to take the call. I have only the most general idea of what Sellars was trying to do, and not a clue as to how he was going to go about it.

  "Olga?" he said.

  "No." The voice was Spectrally faint, perforated with dropouts. "No, Ramsey, it's me."

  He recognized it. His hackles rose. He could not help staring at the boneless, broken shape in the wheelchair. "Sellars? How. . . ?"

  "I'm not dead, Mr. Ramsey. Just . . . very busy."

  "What happened? You—your body's here. You and the boy are both. . . ."

  "I know. And I have very little time to talk. The system is collapsing—dying, I think. I don't know if I can get it to release its hold on the boy—or on me, for that matter. . . ." For a moment the transmission simply stopped—a pure slash of emptiness—then Sellars' whispery voice returned. ". . . vitally important. We have to find the operating system's data path so we can tap into it. Everything depends on that. You must help Olga Pirofsky. . . ."

  The signal failed this time for so long that Ramsey was certain he had lost him. Sellars' living body mocked him with its silence.

  ". . . And don't do anything drastic with either of us. I'll reopen the connection hourly, if I can. . . ." Sellars' voice faded again. This time, it did not return.

  Ramsey stared at the pad, now as mute as the old man and the sleeping boy.

  "No!" he said, not even aware he spoke out loud. "No, you can't—I don't know what to do! Come back, damn you! Come back!"

  Christabel could tell from the way her father was whispering to her mother that something was really wrong. She was so busy watching them talking with their heads close together that she forgot all about her ice cream until it fell off the stick and landed in a big cold blob on her foot.

  She kicked it into the bushes beside the hotel pool, then rinsed her foot clean with some water from the pool because the sun was already making it sticky between her toes. It only took a few seconds, but when she looked up, her daddy was gone again and Mommy was looking at her funny. It made Christabel's stomach go flipp
y. She ran toward her mother.

  "Christabel, never run by the pool," Mommy said, but her eyes were flicking back toward the hotel, and Christabel could tell she was hardly thinking about what she was saying.

  "What's wrong?"

  Her mother was putting things back in the big straw bag she'd carried down from the room. For a moment she didn't say anything. "I'm not sure," she said at last. "Your daddy said Mr. Sellars and Cho-Cho. . . ." She put both hands on her eyes, like she did when she got a bad headache. "They're not feeling well. I'm going to see if there's anything I can do to help. You can watch some net . . . Christabel?"

  She hadn't waited for her mother to finish. She had known all day something bad was going to happen. She wasn't running, exactly, but she was going up the stairs from the pool as fast as she could, thinking of poor Mister Sellars and his hooty voice and how tired he looked. . . .

  "Christabel!" Her mom sounded angry and scared. "Christabel! You come back here right now!"

  "Christabel, what the hell are you doing in here?" her father growled as she crashed into the room. "Where's your mother?"

  "She ran away from me, Mike," Mommy said, trying to hold on to the sunblock and other things she hadn't had time to put back in the bag. "She just. . . . Oh my God. What did you do to them?"

  "I didn't do anything to either of them," her father said.

  "Mister Ramsey, what happened?" Mommy asked.

  Christabel could not stop staring. Mister Sellars looked horrible, propped up in a chair like one of the Mexican mummies she had seen on the net, his mouth open in an "o" like he was trying to whistle, his eyes half-shut. The frighteningly blank face blurred as her own eyes filled up with tears.

  "Is he dead?"

  "No, Christabel," Mister Ramsey said. "He's not dead. In fact, I just talked to him."

  "You telling me he looks like that, and he talked to you?" said Christabel's daddy.

  "He called me."

  "What?"

  While the grown-ups spoke in quiet but excited voices, Christabel reached out and touched Mister Sellars' face. The skin that had always looked like a melted candle was harder than she would have guessed, firm as the leather on her dress shoes. It was warm, though, and when she leaned close she could hear a little noise from deep in his throat.

  "Don't die," she whispered close to his ear. "Don't die, Mister Sellars."

  It was only when she turned away from him that she noticed Cho-Cho on the couch. Her heart thumped around in her chest like it was going to fall out. "Is he sick, too?"

  The grown-ups were not listening to her. Mister Ramsey was trying to explain something to her parents, but they were interrupting him to ask questions. He looked tired and really, really worried. All the grown-ups looked that way.

  "And I can't even call her," he was saying, talking about someone Christabel didn't know. "For some reason, I can't connect with her number. She must be going crazy!"

  Staring down at Cho-Cho, Christabel thought he looked like a different kid than the one who had teased her, frightened her. His face wasn't hard when he was sleeping, not scary. He looked little. She could see the plastic thing behind his ear—his 'can, he had called it, when he bragged to her about it—and the rough skin around it that hadn't healed right.

  "Are they going to die?" she asked. When the grownups still didn't answer, she felt something get hot inside her, hot and angry and eager to come out. She shouted, "I said, are they going to die?"

  Mommy and Daddy and Mister Ramsey turned to her, surprised. She was a little surprised herself, not just because of the shouting, but because she was crying again. She felt upside-down.

  "Christabel!" her mother said. "Honey, what. . . ?"

  She stuck out her lip, trying to keep some of the crying inside. "Are they . . . are they going to die?"

  "Ssshh, honey." Her mommy came over and gently lifted the little boy up from the couch, then sat down with him on her lap. "Come here," she said, then reached out and pulled Christabel toward her, too. Christabel didn't like the way the boy looked, not just normal asleep, but floppy, and she didn't want to touch him, but she squeezed up against her mother's side and let her put an arm around her.

  "All right," Mommy said quietly. "It's going to be all right." She was stroking Christabel's hair, but when Christabel looked up, her mother was looking down at Cho-Cho and she seemed like she wanted to cry, too. "Everything will be all right."

  It was Mister Ramsey who finally answered her question. "I don't think they're going to die, Christabel. They're not really sick—it's more like they're sleeping."

  "Wake them up!"

  Mister Ramsey kneeled down beside the couch. "We can't wake them up right now," he said. "Mister Sellars has to do it, but he's very busy right now. We just have to wait."

  "Will he wake Cho-Cho up, too?" For some reason, she hoped it was true. She didn't know why. She would be happy for the boy to go away somewhere else in the world, but she didn't want him just to lie there all floppy forever, even if she wasn't around to see it. "You have to save him. He's really scared."

  "Did he tell you that?" her mommy asked.

  "Yes. No. But I could tell. I've never seen nobody so scared in my whole life."

  The grown-ups went back to talking. After a while, Christabel slid out from under Mommy's arm and went to look for something warm. She wasn't strong enough to pull the cover off either of the beds, so she got two big towels out of the bathroom and wrapped one around Mister Sellars' narrow shoulders. She draped the other one over the little boy, pulling it up like a blanket to just below his chin, so it looked like he really was just having a nap on her mother's lap.

  "Don't be scared," she whispered into his ear. She patted his arm, then leaned close again. "I'm here," she told him so quietly that even Mommy couldn't hear her. "So please don't be scared."

  "Wrapped around a fibramic core which was one of the earliest uses of this hybrid material for a high-rise office building. The convoluted shell of custom-manufactured, low-emissivity glass, the shape of which has almost as many interpretations as interpreters, has been likened to everything from an upraised finger to a mountain or a black icicle. The resemblance to a human digit has spawned more than a few wry comments over the years, including one journalist's famous assertion that having secured everything he wanted from the pliant Louisiana legislature, J Corporation founder Felix Jongleur was offering one-half of the peace sign to the rest of us—in short, folks, he's flipping us off. . . ."

  Olga paused the research file, freezing the bird's-eye view of the immense building in which she was now marooned. She was in full surround, but it was too much effort to change the viewpoint, and in any case she didn't know enough about buildings like this to be able to look for anything specific. What had Sellars said—there had to be another room with all the rest of the machinery? Without his guidance and protection, she didn't have a prayer of being able to locate it. Not without getting caught. And that was his interest, anyway, not hers. What could she learn about the voices that had drawn her here from investigating telecom equipment?

  She sighed and surfaced from the wraparound long enough to make sure she was still alone in the vast storage room, then let the file—obtained from a specialty node about skyscrapers—play on.

  "Topping out slightly under three hundred meters, not counting the radio mast and satellite arrays on the roof, the J Corporation tower has been surpassed by several newer buildings since its construction, most notably the five-hundred-meter Gulf Financial Services skyscraper, but it is still one of the tallest structures in Louisiana. Known primarily for the massive engineering work that went into creating the artificial island on which it stands—or which surrounds it, since the building's foundations go down as deep as the island's—and its spectacular ten-story Egyptian-themed atrium, the tower is also reputed to be the residence of Jongleur himself, the corporation's reclusive founder, who is said to keep an extensive penthouse complex on the top of the great black edifice, from wh
ich he can look down on Lake Borgne, the Gulf, and most of southeastern Louisiana and no doubt think about how much of it belongs to him. . . ."

  The view of the atrium had given way to a long shot across the lake, its waters turned burnt tangerine by the setting sun, with the black spike of the tower jutting above it—a view much like Olga's own first sighting of it. She closed the file and shut off the visual override, so that the storage room sprang up around her. She had kept her incoming call line open. Ramsey and Sellars had still not tried to get in touch with her.

  Olga rose to her feet, disturbed by how much she had stiffened up.

  You are old. What do you expect?

  But it was more than that. It was hard enough to admit that she was on her own—that whatever must be done she would have to do herself. The physical weariness and the ache of her muscles, overtaxed by a full day's cleaning and then uncountable stairs climbed at Sellars' direction, made it all seem even more impossible. What could she hope to accomplish, anyway?

  Animals, when they're trapped and can't do anything, after a while they just curl up. Go to sleep. She remembered reading that somewhere. That was her own best choice, it seemed certain: just stay here, wait, doze. Wait.

  Wait for what?

  Something. Because I can't do anything on my own.

  But even in her own head, even with her own self telling her such a sensible thing, that made her angry. Had she come much of the way down the continent to huddle like a rat in a hole simply because this man Sellars had been distracted? She had not even heard of him when she had made her decision to come here—she had planned to do it alone from the first.

  But what had she planned to do, exactly? Olga had to admit that she had been so daunted by the problem of getting into the heavily-guarded corporate headquarters that she had not thought much beyond that. Sellars' intervention had in that way been a blessing. Where did you go to search for missing voices, ghost children?