Sea of Silver Light
Read Sea of Silver Light Online
Authors: Tad Williams
Tags: #Science Fiction, #General, #Fantasy, #Fiction, #Fantasy Fiction, #Epic, #Immortality, #Otherland (Imaginary place)
OTHERLAND
Volume Four
SILVER LIGHT
Tad Williams
CONTENTS
City of Golden Shadow: Synopsis
Mountain of Black Glass: Synopsis
First: - A VOYAGE IN THE HEART
CHAPTER 1 - Strange Bedfellows
CHAPTER 4 - In Silver Dreaming
CHAPTER 5 - The Last Fish to Swallow
CHAPTER 6 - Talking to Machines
CHAPTER 11 - Yours Very Sincerely
CHAPTER 12 - The Boy in the Well
CHAPTER 17 - Breathing Problems
CHAPTER 24 - Getting out of Dodge
CHAPTER 25 - The Hidden Bridge
CHAPTER 26 - Flies and Spiders
CHAPTER 27 - The Green Steeple
CHAPTER 28 - Master of His Silence
CHAPTER 40 - The Third Head of Cerberus
CHAPTER 41 - Playing the Knight
CHAPTER 46 - Thoughts Like Smoke
An ocean of silver emptiness . . .CHAPTER 51 - Watching Cars Explode
I’m dead
, she thought, but outside the dream, the idea of death was not a soothing one.
And this is all there is. Everyone lied.
She laughed, but it sounded like something wasn’t working properly inside her.
Even the atheists lied.
“Oh, damn,” she said out loud.
My father still hasn't actually cracked any of the books-
so, no, he still hasn't noticed. I think I'm just going to
have to tell him. Maybe I should break it to him gently.
"Everyone here who hasn't had a book dedicated to
them, take three steps forward. Whoops, Dad, hang
on a second . . ."
These people saved my life. Without their help, I would never have finished these books. You may apply the appropriate punishments.
The List So Far:
Barbara Cannon, Aaron Castro, Nick Des Barres, Debra Euler, Arthur Ross Evans, Amy Fodera, Sean Fodera, Jo-Ann Goodwind, Deborah Grabien, Nic Grabien, Jed Hartmann, Tim Holman, Nick Itsou, John Jarrold, Katharine Kerr, Ulrike Killer, M. J. Kramer, Jo and Phil Knowles, Mark Kreighbaum, LES.., Bruce Lieberman, Mark McCrum, Joshua Milligan, Hans-Ulrich Möhring, Eric Neuman, Peter Stampfel, Mitch Wagner, Michael Whelan.
To which must be added another group of the brave and the good:
Melissa Brammer, Dena Chavez, Rick Cuevas, Marcia de Lima, Jim Foster.
As always, shout-outs to all my homies on the Tad Williams List-serve and the message boards of the TW Fan Page and Guthwuff.com's MS&T Interactive Thesis.
And of course, no acknowledgments would be truly acknowledgmentacious without mentioning my wonderful wife Deborah Beale, my lovely and talented agent Matt Bialer, and my brilliant and patient editors Betsy Wollheim and Sheila Gilbert. My kids Connor and Devon didn't really help much, but they sure make life more interesting (and the need to finish and sell books more acute), and Connor did type a bunch of consonants into my manuscript at random for me to use later, so I guess they belong in here as well.
Synopsis
Wet, terrified, with only the companionship of trench-mates
Finch and Mullet
to keep him sane,
Paul Jonas
seems no different than any of thousands of other foot soldiers in World War I. But when he abruptly finds himself alone on an empty battlefield except for a tree that grows up into the clouds, he begins to doubt that sanity. When he climbs the tree and discovers a castle in the clouds, a woman with wings like a bird, and her terrifying giant guardian, his insanity seems confirmed. But when he awakens back in the trenches, he finds he is clutching one of the bird-woman's feathers.
In South Africa, in the middle of the twenty-first century,
Irene "Renie" Sulaweyo
has problems of her own. Renie is an instructor of virtual engineering whose newest student,
!Xabbu
, is one of the desert Bushmen, a people to whom modern technology is very alien. At home, she is a surrogate mother to her young brother, Stephen, who is obsessed with exploring the virtual parts of the world communication network-the "net"-and Renie spends what little spare time she has holding her family together. Her widowed father
Long Joseph
only seems interested in finding his next drink.
Like most children, Stephen is entranced by the forbidden, and although Renie has already saved him once from a disturbing virtual nightclub named Mister J's, Stephen sneaks back in. By the time Renie discovers what he has done, Stephen has fallen into a coma. The doctors cannot explain it, but Renie is certain something has happened to him online.
American
Orlando Gardiner
is only a little older than Renie's brother, but he is a master of several online domains, and because of a serious medical condition, spends most of his time in the online identity of Thargor, a barbarian warrior. But when in the midst of one of his adventures Orlando is given a glimpse of a golden city unlike anything else he has ever seen on the net, he is so distracted that his Thargor character is killed. Despite this terrible loss, Orlando cannot shake his fascination with the golden city, and with the support of his software agent
Beezle Bug
and the reluctant help of his online friend
Fredericks
, he is determined to locate the golden city.
Meanwhile, on a military base in the United States, a little girl named
Christabel Sorensen
pays secret visits to her friend,
Mr. Sellars
, a strange, scarred old man. Her parents have forbidden her to see him, but she likes the old man and the stories he tells, and he seems much more pathetic than frightening. She does not know that he has very unusual plans for her.
As Renie gets to know !Xabbu the Bushman better, and to appreciate his calm good nature and his outsider's viewpoint on modern life, she comes to rely on him more and more in her quest to discover what has happened to her brother. She and !Xabbu sneak into the online nightclub, Mr. J's. The place is as bad as she feared, with guests indulging themselves in all manner of virtual unpleasantness, but nothing seems like it could have actually physically harmed her brother until they are drawn into a terrifying encounter with a virtual version of the Hindu death-goddess Kali. !Xabbu is overcome, and Renie, too, is almost overwhelmed by Kali's subliminal hypnotics, but with the help of a mysterious figure whose simulated body (his "sim") is a blank, with no features at all, she manages to get herself and !Xabbu out of Mister J's. Before she goes offline, the figure gives her some data in the form of a golden gem.