Mountain of Black Glass (7 page)

The smoky face turned to him.
“Paul Jonas, what have you done?”

He didn't know what to say. Everything he had planned, all he had thought might happen, was coming unstuck. The surface of the earth now seemed only a skin over some impossibly deep pit, and something moved there, something as vast and inescapable as regret.

The angel shivered, roiling the smoke. Even in this spectral form, he could clearly see the lines of the bird-woman from the giant's castle, and despite his terror, he ached for her.
“You have called out to the One who is Other,”
she said.
“He is searching for you now.”

“What are you talking about?”

Through his confusion, Paul finally realized that he had been listening for long moments to Penelope moaning in terror. She had fallen to the ground and was throwing sand on her own head, as though she would bury herself. He pulled her upright, in part wanting to help, but also furious that her recalcitrance should have brought him to this. “Look! This is her!” he shouted at the smoke angel. “You sent me to her, but she couldn't tell me where to go. I wanted her to tell me how to reach the black mountain.”

The apparition was no more willing than Penelope to meet her double's eyes: when Paul thrust his erstwhile wife toward her, the angel twitched away, a ripple passing through her entire body and deforming her wings.
“We do not . . .”
The face of smoke writhed
. “We should not . . .”

“Just make her tell me. Or
you
tell me! I can't stand this anymore!” Paul could feel a growing presence, simultaneously beneath his feet and behind his eyes, a pressure building all around that made the very air seem about to burst. “Where is your bloody black mountain?” He shoved Penelope toward the apparition again, but it was like trying to force together two repelling magnets. Penelope tore free from him with animal strength and fell to the sand, weeping.

“Tell me!” Paul shouted. He turned to the angel. “Why won't she tell me?”

The specter was beginning to dissipate.
“She has told you. She has told you what she knows in the only way she can. That is why I sent you to her. She is the one who knows what you must do next.”

Paul grabbed at her, but the angel was truly smoke: she dissolved in his clawing fingers. “What does that mean?” He turned and seized Penelope instead. He shook her, his anger threatening to overspill, the bursting tension of the night like a great dark blood clot in his head. “Where am I supposed to go?”

Penelope screamed in pain and terror. “Why do you do this to me, my husband?”

Penelope was weeping and shuddering. “To Troy! You must go to Troy! Your comrades await you there!”

Paul let go of her, staggering as though he had been struck with a great stone, the realization a searing pain in his heart.

Troy
—the only thing she had said that did not speak of the end of the story, the only answer that did not fit with the rest of the simulation. Through the cloud of confusion caused by his presence, Penelope had been telling him what he needed to know all along . . . but he hadn't listened. Instead he had brought her here, the woman he had sought for so long, and then tortured her, after promising the gods he would not harm her. He had called up something none of them dared face, when she had already told him several times what her other self could not.

Whatever he had summoned from the dark regions below, it was he himself who was the monster.

His eyes blurry with tears, Paul turned from the fire and stumbled away across the drumhead sands. He tripped on the huddled form of Eurycleia, but did not stop to find out if she was alive or dead. The thing that had frightened even the winged woman seemed very near now, achingly so, as close as his own heartbeat.

Searching for me, she said.
He tripped and fell, then wobbled to his feet again like a drunken man.
The Earthbound, they called him.
He could feel the breathing vitality of the soil beneath him. A part of him, a tiny, distant part, shrilled that it all had to be illusion, that he must remember he was in some kind of vast virtual game, but it was a pennywhistle in a hurricane. Every time his feet met the ground he felt the dark thing's presence, as alarming and painful as if he ran on a hot griddle.

A disjointed idea sent him hurrying along the beach to the fishermen's boats. He grabbed the nearest and shoved it down the slick strand, filling the air with panicky curses when it stuck, until at last it skimmed free into the shallow tide. He clambered up over the side and in.

Not touching the earth anymore.
His thoughts were like a deck of cards knocked from a table.
Big thing. Dead thing. But it can't find me now.
It was impossibly strange, whatever it was—could a mere simulation do that?

He lifted the oar in the bottom of the boat and began to drive himself out onto the wine-dark sea. He looked back, but all he could see of the beach was the dying flame of his fire. If Penelope and Eurycleia were still there, they were lost in shadow.

The waves grew higher, lifting the front of the small boat with every swell, setting it down again with a smack. Paul set aside the oar so he could get a better grip on the sides of the boat.

Troy,
he thought, clutching at prosaic things in the grip of great horror.
A black mountain. Is there a mountain near Troy . . . ?

Another swell almost knocked him overboard and he gripped the boat even more tightly. Although there were no clouds above him, nothing between him and the diamond-bright stars, the waves were lashing the little craft harder and harder. One passed beneath him and lifted the entire boat up, up, until he thought it would spin him over and dump him out. As he pivoted slowly at the top of his rise, he saw that a wave of unnatural shape was rising before him, higher than any others, a dark mass touched with luminescence at its edges—a figure ten times his own height, the ocean itself taking the form of a bearded man with a crown. For a moment he thought that the thing the angel had called Other had found him, and he gave himself up to despair.

A thunderous voice made the bones of his skull quiver.
“Wily Odysseus,”
it boomed,
“mortal man, you know that I, Poseidon, am sworn to destroy you. Yet you leave the safety of your island home and return to my domain. You are a fool. Your death is deserved.”

The great sea-king lifted his hand. The waves now rushing toward Paul's boat were like mountains. Paul felt his frail craft lifted, slowly at first, then jerked up into the air and tossed high.

He clung to the hull as he spun, and could hold no thought except,
I am a fool, it's true—a bloody, miserable fool. . . .

The ocean, when he fell from the heights and struck it again, seemed hard as stone. His boat burst into fragments and Paul was sucked down into crushing wet blackness.

“For the sake of persons of . . . different types, scientific truth should be presented in different forms, and should be regarded as equally scientific, whether it appears in the robust form and the vivid coloring of a physical illustration or in the tenuity and paleness of a symbolic expression.”

—James Clerk Maxwell, address to the Mathematics
and Physics Section, Brit. Assoc. for the
Advancement of Science, 1870.

I
T was only a hand, fingers curled, protruding from the earth like a swollen pink-and-brown flower, but she knew it was her brother's hand.

As she bent and grasped it, she felt it move slowly, sleepily beneath her fingers, and was thrilled to know he lived. She pulled.

Stephen emerged from the clinging soil bit by bit—hand and wrist first, then the rest of his arm, like the root of a stubborn plant. At last his shoulder and head burst free in a shower of dirt. His eyes were closed, his lips curled in a tight, secretive smile. In a desperate hurry now to wrest him loose completely, she pulled harder, drawing out his torso and legs as well, but somehow his other arm, hidden from her view, still anchored him to the earth.

She yanked hard but could not pull the last inches of him out into the light. She planted her feet, bent her back, then put an even greater effort into another pull. The rest of Stephen abruptly jerked free of the ground, then stopped. Clutched in his trailing hand was another small hand whose owner still lay beneath the soil.

Increasingly aware that something was wrong, Renie kept pulling, frantic to dislodge Stephen, but now a chain of small dirty shapes lifted from the soil like the plastic pop-beads she had played with in her own childhood—a score of little children all connected hand to hand, the last still partially immured in the earth.

Renie could not see well—the sky was growing dark, or she had rubbed dirt into her own eyes. She made one last effort, the very hardest pull she could manage, so that for a moment it seemed she was in danger of tearing her own arms out at their roots. The last of the children came free of the soil. But this child's hand held another hand as well, only this last childish fist was the size of a small car, and the wrist loomed from the earth like a vast tree trunk. The very earth trembled as this last monstrous link in the chain, perhaps annoyed by Renie's insistent pulling, began ponderously to dig its way upward out of the dark, gelid soil toward the light of the surface.

“Stephen!” she screamed, “let go, boy! You must let go . . . !”

But his eyes remained tight shut and he continued to cling to the chain of other children, even as the earth heaved and the vast shape beneath it continued to rise. . . .

 

Renie sat up, gasping and shivering, to discover herself in the thin, unchanging gray light of the unfinished simworld, surrounded by the sleeping forms of her companions—!Xabbu, Florimel, Emily 22813 from the crumbling Oz simworld, and the armored silhouette of T4b stretched on the ground beside them like a fallen hood ornament. Renie's movement woke !Xabbu; his eyes flicked open, alert and intelligent. It was a surprise, as always, to see that gaze housed in an almost comical baboon face. As he began to rise from where he lay curled near her side, she shook her head.

“I'm okay. Bad dream. Get some more sleep.”

He looked at her uncertainly, sensing something in the ragged tone of her voice, but after a moment shrugged a sinuous monkey-shrug and lay down again. Renie took a deep breath, then rose and walked across the hillside to where Martine sat, blind face turned to the skies like a satellite dish.

“Do you want to take a turn sleeping, Martine?” Renie asked as she sat down. “I feel like I'm going to be awake for a while.” The complete absence in the environment of wind and ambient sound made it seem as though a thunderstorm was imminent, but they had been here for what seemed several days now without any weather whatsoever, let alone a storm.

Martine turned toward her. “Are you all right?”

It was strange, but no matter how many times Renie saw her companion's bland sim face, when she turned away again she could hardly remember it. There had been plenty of similar-looking sims in Temilun whose faces were nevertheless full of life and individualism—Florimel had one, and even the false Quan Li had looked like a real person. Martine, though, seemed to have been given something out of a default file.

“Just a bad dream. About Stephen.” Renie pawed at the oddly-textured ground. “Reminding myself how little I've done for him, perhaps. But it was a strange dream, too. I've had a few like it. It's hard to explain, but I feel like . . . like I'm really
there
when they're happening.”

Martine nodded slowly. “I think I have had similar types of dreams since we have been on this network—some in which I felt I was seeing things that I have only experienced since I lost my sight. Perhaps it is to do with the change in our sensory input, or perhaps it is something even less explicable. This is a brave new world, Renie, in many ways. Very few humans have experienced such realistic input that was not actually real—very few who were not completely insane, that is.”