Sea of Silver Light (29 page)

Even her father had told her once, when she was battling her mother over her name,
"If you want to be Sam, be Sam—just be the best damn Sam you can."
His serious scowl had suddenly become a laugh.
"Someone ought to put that in a children's book."

Missing her father and her wide-eyed, nervously affectionate mother suddenly became a hurt at least as great as the pain of losing Orlando, and for a moment a shadow threatened to overtake her completely. Sam stared at Jongleur sitting a few meters away and could not tell if the dimness was the mist or her own teary eyes, but she knew that whatever happened, she didn't ever want to be like him, angry and frozen and alone. . . .

A movement startled her out of her thoughts. !Xabbu's small form appeared from the gray. He sat down beside her gingerly, as though he ached.

"Well?" snapped Jongleur.

!Xabbu ignored him. He took Sam's hand—she hadn't quite become used to his frequent, careful touching, but she still found it reassuring—and asked her how she was feeling.

"Better, I think." She smiled a little, realizing it was true. "Did it work?"

He wearily returned the smile. "As I often say to Renie, the skills I have are not the sort that turn on and turn off. But I think I am making sense of things, yes, perhaps a bit."

Jongleur made a quiet hissing noise. "Any other man of my generation would find it comical to see me staking my life on two Africans and, unless I miss my guess about this girl, a Creole—and we have already lost one of the Africans." He rolled his eyes. "But I have never been a bigot. If some instinct of yours will show the way out of this place, then damn you, tell us."

!Xabbu shot him a look of real dislike—one of the strongest things Sam had seen from him. "It is not 'instinct,' not in the sense you mean. Everything I know about finding my way has been learned, taught to me by my father's family. They taught me other things you do not seem to know either, like kindness and good sense." He turned his back on Jongleur, who seemed stuck between outrage and sour amusement. "I am sorry to have left you with this man, Sam, but I had to move far enough away that I could not see you, could not even hear the two of you breathing. All in this network is stranger than in the real world, and it has been hard at the best of times to make sense of things. But this place is even more difficult—until a little while ago, I would have said there was nothing at all to sense beside ourselves. It might still be true—like a starving man hoping to scent game, I might have convinced myself of what is not true."

"You think you . . . smelled something?"

"Not exactly, Sam. For a long time I just sat, trying, as I said, to forget the sounds and smells of you and . . . and this man. For some of the time, I hoped I might hear Renie calling far away." He shook his head sadly. "But after a time I gave up and just . . . opened myself. It is not mystical," he said hurriedly, peering over his shoulder at Jongleur. "Rather it is being able truly to hear, to smell, to see—the things people in the city world seldom do, because everything they need comes to them, hurries toward them as though it were shot out of a gun." His face grew solemn as he searched for words. "After a while, I began to feel something. Perhaps it is a little like Martine, how she senses things—it takes a while to understand the patterns here—but I think it is simply that I finally had the stillness and . . . what is the word? Alone-ness? I finally had a chance to hear." He squeezed Sam's hand again and stood up. "That way," he said, pointing outward into a portion of the pearly void no different than any other. "It could be that my mind is making things up, but I feel there is something there, in that direction."

"Something?" Jongleur's voice was measured, but Sam could hear his anger just under the surface. In a flare of insight, she saw how it must eat away at a man like him to have to rely on anyone at all, let alone someone he must think of as little better than a savage.

How old is he really, anyway?
Sam wondered, and almost shivered.
Maybe two hundred years? Did they still have, like, slaves when he was growing up?

"What I sense is . . . something," !Xabbu said. "There is no other word. I am not speaking that way to disturb you. It is a thickening, perhaps, or greater movement, or distant changes in what is more orderly here, or . . . something. Like the ghost of a track in sand, all the rest blown away by the wind. It might be only a shadow. But that is where I am going, and I think Sam will go with me."

"Utterly right." Besides, what was the alternative? Waiting here forever in this fog, hoping something helpful would happen? That wasn't what Orlando or Renie would have done.

Jongleur looked carefully at !Xabbu. Sam did not need any particular insight this time to read the man's mind. He was trying to decide whether !Xabbu was lying to him, or was crazy, or maybe just wrong. Sam could never feel pity for a nasty creature like Jongleur, but she could almost guess what it would be like to suspect everyone and everything. It was an ugly, miserable thing to imagine.

"Lead, then." Jongleur, even naked, conveyed the impression of a king granting a favor to a peasant. "Anything is better than this."

The third time, Renie almost didn't find her way back. It was strange to be using the shambling, brain-damaged Ricardo Klement as her lodestone, even stranger to experience a flush of pleasure and relief when she saw his seated form appear out of the nothingness.

But what if he'd moved?
she asked herself.
Even if I found him again, I wouldn't be coming back to the same spot. It might be a spot !Xabbu and Sam had already checked, and they might be looking for me in the old spot. . . .

This was all presuming that her two friends were still alive—that they hadn't simply been swallowed or drezzed somehow by the network, whatever damned part of it this was. But she couldn't afford to think about that alternative much.

She couldn't really risk wandering anymore, either. Not that it made any difference—the seamless, monotonous gray went on and on, the invisible earth or floor continued, flat as a tabletop; silence and emptiness reigned. So she would either stay put, or move and keep moving.

It would have been an exaggeration to say Klement seemed glad to see her—he lifted his head slightly at her return—but there was no question he knew she was there: his eyes followed her, and he changed his position subtly after she sat down a few meters away, as if to designate a space between them—space that in a world with anything in it at all might have held a campfire.

Renie would have given one of her arms for a campfire. She would have added another limb and perhaps even a few organs to have !Xabbu and Sam seated around that fire with her.

I shouldn't have
been thinking about how few of us there were left-—tempting fate.
Now look what's left. Me. And . . . that.

Ricardo Klement gazed back at her, so still and silent that it was like looking at a picture in a museum. The last thing you would ever imagine was that it would speak.

"What . . . are you?" Klement asked.

Renie flinched in surprise; it took her a moment to respond. "What am I?" It was hard to talk: her voice was hoarse from shouting for her lost companions. "What do you mean? I'm a woman. I'm an African woman. I'm someone you and your group of rich friends . . . hurt." There were no words to express the feelings in her about Stephen, and the helplessness of the last hours had only made it worse than usual.

Klement stared. There was something moving behind the eyes, but it was deep, deep down. "That is . . . a long name," he said at last. "It seems . . . long."

"Name?"
Jesus Mercy,
she thought,
that Ceremony scorched his brains properly, didn't it?
"That's not my name, it's what I. . . ." She stopped and took a breath. "My name. . . ?" She wasn't sure she wanted to tell him, although she had given up on anonymity long ago. There was something galling in the way this thing, whatever had gone wrong with its mind, presumed to a kind of childlike innocence. Did this increase in conviviality mean that the old Ricardo Klement was beginning to surface, or simply that the new, damaged version was becoming more comfortable with its faculties?

"My name is Renie," she said at last.

Klement did not respond, but did not take his eyes off her either, as though forming an elaborate visual picture to go with the newly-filed name.

Renie sighed. This damaged man was the least of her problems. After what seemed like half a day in the void, nothing had changed. She had shouted until her voice was a husk, she had walked dozens of small circuits, all to no result. There wasn't anything you could call land, let alone landmarks, no directed light, no sound other than that which she made herself.
But if I stay here, I'll die here. Or else Stephen's heart will finally fail and he'll die in that hospital bed, which will make what happens to me pointless.
With the endless gauzy mist before her, it was hard not to see her dear Stephen's face, but it was the bad face that came to her—the sightless eyes and ashy skin, the slack jaw propped by the respirator.
Drying up, curling. Like a fish pulled out of the water and thrown in the dirt. Dear God, please don't let that be the last Stephen that I see.

But if she couldn't accomplish anything, what good was she? It was hard to understand how a Renie lost in nothingness, with nothing to act upon, even existed. Still, what choice did she have? She had no tools, nothing but the lighter, and although she had tried several times to open a gateway, it remained as frustratingly inert as before.

"Where . . . is this . . . place?" Klement asked.

Renie cursed silently, then decided she deserved at least this small pleasure and cursed again out loud. She would have to be prepared for his occasional startling remarks, it seemed.

"I don't know. I don't know anything. Jongleur already said we weren't in the network, and this is . . . even
more
not in the network, I guess." She peered at him. "You don't understand any of this, do you?"

"That is also a long name. Names of places . . . speaking them . . . usually they are not so long."

She sighed and shook her head. She was beginning to think she liked him better when all he could say was "I am Ricardo Klement."

Renie turned her mind back to the pressing problem of being nowhere at all, and spent a silent quarter of an hour or so going back over everything that had happened since she had last been with !Xabbu and the others, but she could find nothing on which to form a theory of how they had become separated. The slippery grayness around her looked very much like the silver cloudbank they had seen girdling the mountain, but that did not explain how the mountain itself had vanished, or where her companions had gone. She had simply slept, then woke up in this different circumstance. Could the strange dream have something to do with it? She tried to remember the details, the rushing chaos, the long darkness, the heartening appearance at last of those ephemeral presences, but it already seemed vague and distant. In any case, it explained nothing.

So it was a conundrum. A sort of locked-room problem in reverse, if this had been a mystery story—not how to get into a locked room, but how to get out of total nothingness into something . . . into anything at all.

The only things she possessed were the scraps of clothing she had made from Orlando's garments and the lighter. But the lighter would not summon gateways, which would be the most obviously useful thing to do. Could it help her in some other way?

If I had a cigarette, I could light it,
she thought grumpily.

A sudden thought came to her. The pale emptiness around her, unnatural and apparently endless—could this be the White Ocean that Paul Jonas and others had spoken about? The network's children had talked of it as a mythical place, something to cross to get to a kind of promised land. Did that mean there was something on the other side of this emptiness? That was a heartening thought. But even if it were true, that still didn't give her any idea how to get there.

She pulled the lighter from between her breasts and held it up. All the studying of it that she, !Xabbu, and Martine had done while preparing to leave the House had actually taught them very little of its true capabilities—as though a group of aliens had discovered a car and, after much trial and error, learned how to turn on the headlights. Further experimentation might teach her more, might even present her with some way out of her current dilemma, but did she dare risk it? She had scoffed at Jongleur's concerns, but that had mostly been out of loathing for the man. Hearing Dread's voice purring from the lighter—whispering out of something that had been pressed against her skin moments earlier—had made her feel like insects were crawling on her. Could she actually risk announcing her presence to him by trying the communication gear built into the device? The only person she knew besides Dread who was somehow accessing the communications band was Martine, and she had not sounded as though she were in a position to help anyone else.

And what if I reached her? What would I tell her? "Martine, come find me, I'm in the middle of a bunch of gray stuff."

She lifted the lighter and turned it, reflexively trying to catch light that would never angle down in this place. She looked at the ornate "Y," the letter tangled in raised vines and leaves as though it were a statue in a forgotten garden. What had Jongleur said the bastard's name was? Yacoubian. The one who pretty much killed Orlando. She fought a roil in her guts.
I hope whatever T4b did to his head hurts him like sin. I hope it never gives him a moment's peace.

She wondered briefly if Yacoubian, too, might be listening silently to the communication band of the device, just waiting for her to reveal herself. The thought was unpleasant, but the idea of Dread sitting somewhere, waiting like a cat for one of the mice to show its whiskers, was far worse.