Distortion Offensive (22 page)

With brief acknowledgment, the library acceded to the request.

One by one, the three mutant fish creatures rose from the ground before the eyes of Kane, Grant and Bryant. They were wounded, messy things now, no longer truly alive—if they ever had been.

The one that Kane had ripped into struggled to stand, gristle and bone sagging from the ruins of its head, colorless ooze spurting from the bullet wounds in its torso. Yet still it endured.

With a long-practiced flinch of his wrist tendons, Kane called the Sin Eater back into his palm, its familiar form unfolding to just under fourteen inches of blaster in his hand. Beside Kane, Grant held his Copperhead—now reloaded—in a two-handed grip, the weapon low to his body as he eyed the stalking fish creatures.

“We killed them once,” Grant growled. “This time we'll just make sure of it, right?”

“You remember when we were Magistrates, partner?” Kane asked. “Well, I always did hate dealing with repeat offenders.”

As the words left Kane's mouth, the first of the monstrous beasts decided to make its move, and its tail-like back feet slapped against the floor as it began to charge.

“Oh, my,” Clem yelped as he saw the things in action for the first time, stunned by their speed.

“Stay behind us, Clem,” Kane ordered as he tracked the onrushing creature with the nose of his pistol.

Whatever Clem said in response was lost amid the sounds of fierce gunfire as Kane and Grant peppered the hurtling form of the undersea guardian with bullets, their shots lighting up that corner of the vast chamber amid the gloomy blue-green illuminations.

The hideous monster ran at Kane, its dead eyes glaring at him, pus oozing from both orbs where the creature was now rotting inside. His bullets having little effect, Kane watched in horror as the creature leaped from the floor, powering itself with a flick of huge legs that looked like a split tail. The thing was in the air now, its double jaw opening as it hurtled toward him, swimming through the air with continuous motions of those powerful legs. As the monster barreled at him, Kane reacted with exceptional speed, rolling to his side as the beast clamped its awful jaw around the place where his head had been, that weird keylike arrangement instead snapping closed on empty air.

Kane took that opportunity to reel off another burst from his Sin Eater at just a few feet away from the monster, and he watched in growing frustration as the beast seemingly flipped in on itself and disappeared from view once more. Even dead, these things were relentless and gifted with exceptional speed.

“Dammit, they're—” Kane never finished his sentence. Even as he uttered those words, the second of those awful, undead creatures rushed toward him like a green blur, its heavy back feet slapping loudly against the hardpacked coral floor.

Kane turned at the sound of the beast's approach, saw immediately that it was the monster with the ruined head, the one he had physically ripped apart. If ever a
creature was going to bear a grudge against him, this would be the one.

Beside Kane, just eight feet away, Grant was tangling with the third monster. This one had leaped into the air at a dead run, slamming against the nearest wall with its powerful left hind leg and using that momentum to hurtle toward the dark-skinned ex-Mag as he struggled to keep it within the firing arc of his Copperhead. As the monster powered from the wall, it turned itself over so that it came at Grant with those muscular hind legs first, kicking out as it approached like a missile.

Grant tried to sidestep, but one of the attacker's back legs crashed into his shoulder, knocking him so hard to the floor that he rolled backward over himself before he came to a stop. Grant's shoulder seized with sudden pain, and his whole chest heaved as he recovered from the impact—it had been like taking a cannonball to the body.

Still clutching the double grip of the subgun, Grant turned, scrambling across the floor and unleashing a burst of fire at the fish creature as it landed. He watched in increasing irritation as his shots were deflected from the creature's hard, armorlike scales. And then there was no more time to think; the hideous monster was charging him again.

As Kane and Grant wrestled with their relentless foes, Clem worked at one of the handy pouches he wore at his belt, pulling free a tape measure that he carried as a matter of course during diving expeditions. Coated with plastic, the tape measure was a half-inch wide and as floppy as a piece of string, much like the kind of tape measure used by a seamstress.

His hands working with urgent precision, Clem swiftly unraveled the tape measure until its full six feet
of length trailed across the floor at his feet. Then, with the urgency born of necessity, Clem took one end of the unraveled tape measure and tied it on itself, creating a loop in its length that operated on a slip knot. As he worked, six bullets drilled across the wall just to the side of him, and Clem stepped away as the coral there erupted into clouds of dust.

“These ricochets will be the death of me,” he remarked as he went into battle with the loop in his hands.

 

T
HE
A
NNUNAKI CALLED
it the cascade. Like a cardsharp fanning out the deck out in his hand, all the options of knowledge ran before Brigid's senses, whirling in place, waiting to be digested by the library user.

It was a maze, too, a minotaur's habitat, a labyrinth in pitch blackness. Brigid fell, or so it seemed, a trick perhaps played on her inner ear, losing her sense of balance. So much new had been forced upon her that she had lost all sense of direction, and whatever depth perception her eyes once had seemed to be inverted, the close and the faraway intermingling.

Down, down into the gloom.

Brigid looked around her, trying to anchor to something so that she might stop the incessant movement, the crazed unrealness of the real.

She refused to be overwhelmed. Instead, Brigid Baptiste, ex-archivist from Cobaltville, began to regiment everything she saw, to structure it and hold it and lock it in place, a million memory tricks dividing the whirl over and over. Until it started to make sense.

To Brigid, locked within the nonscape of the Ontic Library, it was a gleaming row of bookcases that stretched on forever. The floor was lined with tiles of such rich
and intricate mosaic that they seemed to contain every color of the spectrum. The whole incredible room was lit by the rays of the morning sun, giving the scene such purity that it made her just want to dance in place.

She turned, delighting in the solid world that now surrounded her, after so much whirling and madness. Here was something she understood.

She reached for a book, her left hand stretching out to pluck it from the shelf before her eyes. The book was bound in imitation leather, and it was colored the pink of a girl's blush. As Brigid's hand grasped at it, she noticed for the first time the motes of dust that danced within the beam of sunlight lighting the bookcase. Big things and little things—the fundamental nature of the real.

The book felt heavy in her hands, and Brigid flicked through the pages, seeing the solid black type there, in the way of books of yore. Though she didn't read the whole book, from what she skimmed Brigid saw that it was a story about a house with a thousand rooms, each one different and yet utterly interchangeable.

She stopped for a moment, reading the words imprinted on the page: “Namu amida butsu.”

She closed the book, its heavy leaves slamming against one another with a sound like clapping hands. A moment before she had been able to read words, and yet now there was just nonsense there. What it meant, perhaps, was that her hold on this interpretation—for that was all that it was, she realized—of the Ontic Library was slipping, that it was losing definition like a radio tuning away from a specified station.

Brigid looked up, seeing the library of books within the sunlight once more, seeing the way the light played against the towering windows, a hundred tiny panes of glass in every one.

Intrigued, Brigid paced to the end of the aisle, one foot in front of the other, heels clip-clopping on the multicolored tiles beneath her feet.

When she reached the end of the third bookcase, each one as long as a city block, she found a tidy row of desks laid out in a familiar line. It was like the Historical Division at Cobaltville, from back when she had been an archivist by trade. Each desk was neat, regimented, its paperwork filed carefully in In trays and Out trays and trays marked Pending. But there was no one around.

Brigid walked the row of desks, looking at the mish-mash of stuff that had been placed in the trays, wondering how much information was being stored here, how it could even be possible for a library to hold the foundation keystone on which all reality was constructed. If this library were to break apart, would that really spell the end of the laws of reality? And if so, would a new reality take its place, just as the Mayans had speculated with their Long Count calendar belief? Perhaps each version of reality was superseded by the next, not through cataclysm but through the destruction of its structural rules, as contained in a metaphysical library just like this one.

Strangely, as Brigid walked the seemingly endless line of empty desks, she noticed a vase made from delicate porcelain and shaped in imitation of the stem of a rose, a gracefully curved line. She picked it up, saw the picture of the dog on its surface, and her brow wrinkled in a frown. She knew this vase, it had been something in another life she had led.

The girl Abigail came back to her then, Brigid's niece from the virtual reality trap that never was—the Janus Trap. This vase had been in her apartment and it had been smashed, the visage of the dog split into three.
And in so doing, those three parts had split the dog's face into three, and that had told her something about Cerberus and the world where she had truly belonged. It had been a clue then and it was a clue once more.

“I am controlling this illusion,” Brigid whispered in realization. “I am conjuring whatever I require to comprehend it.”

Whatever the true nature of the Ontic Library, it generated in the minds of its users in a manner with which they could interface. Suddenly, Brigid began to understand how she had created this place, how its look had been designed to set her at her ease, how the towering bookshelves existed only as props in her own mind, and that anyone else who entered would see it as something else, perhaps even something utterly alien to her.

“I am standing in reality's most malleable interface with the human mind,” Brigid realized, “and I have no idea how to get it to do what I want.”

She walked farther, leaving the aisle of desks behind and pacing past another mountainous bookcase, walking its colossal length, marveling at its breathtaking majesty. Idly, wary of the power of her thoughts now, she wondered where the design for the library had been drawn from. Was it something within her? Something she had seen in her years working through the archives of the times before the Program of Unification? It was all so bright and joyful, the sun playing across immense windows that dwarfed Brigid's frame.

Her nose wrinkled then as she smelled a waft of something, drifting over from another aisle of the massive library. It was the smell of paper burning.

Brigid trotted down the bookcase aisle, turning at the junction between the towering bookshelves, following her nose, faster and faster. A moment later, she
was jogging, looking left and right as she searched for the source of the burning, her heels clattering hollowly against the colorful tiles that lined the floor. The clattering sounds of her own feet urged her to go faster, almost as though the noise was not herself but someone chasing her.

There was a noise then—a voice coming from a little way ahead of Brigid. It was the voice of a child, of that young age where it is difficult to tell if a child was male or female. And the voice said, “I know. I know. I know.” Repeated like a mantra, the words came with such regularity that it was almost like the ticking second hand of a clock, a constant sound that was relegated into the background by the very familiarity of its repetition.

Brigid turned a corner, her hand brushing against the wooden bookcase as she passed it. There, sitting before her in a clump of books, was a boy of no more than eight years, with a soup-bowl cut of brown hair, tossing books into the flames of a raging fire. He was reading them before he threw them aside, Brigid noticed, checking their title page and their index, before adding their pages to the billowing black smoke that poured from the inferno he was feeding.

Each time the child discarded a book, he would murmur that phrase once again: “I know.”

Brigid had stopped running, and she watched for a moment more as the child threw another of the heavy leather-bound tomes into the flames. Then, striding confidently forward, Brigid addressed the boy.

“What are you…?” Brigid began, but her words ceased in her suddenly dry throat as the child looked up at her.

The boy's eyes were the flowing orange of lava, and
those magma pools seemed almost to rage in accusation as they looked at Brigid.

It was Ullikummis, she realized, shaped in a way that she might understand him, but the stone god all the same.

Remarkably, the boy just looked at her, not saying a word.

“What are you doing, Ullikummis?” Brigid asked, addressing the boy by name.

“Power demands facts,” the boy replied, his voice suddenly duotonal, both that of a child and also the familiar bone-shaking rumble of the stone god.

Brigid realized with a start that the duopoly of the child's voice was cognitive dissonance in effect again, that very thing that Clem had spoken about before they had embarked on this quest. Her own knowledge seemed at odds with what she saw, and her brain was trying to meld both things together, to hold both thoughts at once. It was like trying to turn fast enough to see one's own face.

“Facts about what?” Brigid asked, taking another step closer as his latest book tumbled from the child's hands and was engulfed in a whoosh of flames.