Sea of Silver Light

"Not that we have days around here," she said aloud. "Not really."

!Xabbu looked at her curiously.

"Sorry. I was thinking out loud." Sam frowned. "But it's true. It doesn't get dark or light here like a normal place. There's no sun. It's more like someone gets up in the morning and switches on a big light, then turns it off again at night."

"Yes, it is strange. But why should it be anything else? It is not real, after all."

"It's real enough to kill us," said Jongleur as he stopped beside them.

"Thank you, Aardlar the Cheerful Barbarian." Sam only realized after she said it that she was quoting one of Orlando's jokes.

!Xabbu wandered a little way down the riverbank. As Jongleur caught his breath, Sam watched her small, slim friend picking his way through the reeds. He misses her so much, but he doesn't talk about it. He just wants to keep walking, walking, wants to keep looking for her. She tried to imagine what it felt like, tried to picture what she would feel if Orlando were still alive and lost somewhere in this alien landscape, but it made her too sad. At least there's a chance he might find Renie.

"We should go on," !Xabbu called. "It is hard to tell how many hours of light we have."

Jongleur rose without a word of complaint and resumed his plodding march. Sam sped up to catch !Xabbu.

"This place all looks just the same," she said. "Except that sometimes it starts to look . . . I don't know . . . transparent again. Like when we first came here." She pointed to a distant line of hills. "See? They looked okay before, but now they don't look quite real."

!Xabbu nodded his head wearily. "I can make no more sense of things than you."

"How about the other side of the river?" Sam asked, half-hoping to distract him. "Maybe Renie's over there."

"You can see as well as I can that the land is even more flat there," !Xabbu told her. "There are at least some trees and plants by the river on this side that might block her from our view until we were right beside her." His somber look deepened: Sam did not need him to say that it would be especially true if Renie were lying unconscious or dead.

A cold shudder ran down her back. She wished she could remember some of the prayers they had taught her in Sunday school, but the youth pastor had been bigger on sing-alongs than on the nuts and bolts of what to do when you and your friends were marooned in an imaginary universe.

Remembering the youth group, and a boy with braces named Holger who—much against her wishes—had tried to kiss her at the Overnight Retreat campfire ceremony, Sam walked several steps before she realized that !Xabbu had stopped. She turned, and the stu

"!Xabbu. . . ?"

He dashed past her toward the trees. Sam hurried after him.

"!Xabbu, what is it?" He was touching one of the branches, drawing his fingers slowly along the bark. His silence, his strange, devastated expression brought Sam close to tears. "!Xabbu, what's wrong?"

He looked at her face, then down at her feet. She made a move toward him but he grabbed her arm with surprising strength. "Do not move, Sam."

"What? You're frightening me!"

"This tree. It is the one to which Renie tied the piece of cloth." He waved the strip of frayed white fabric that he had been carrying in his hand like a holy relic since they had discovered it.

What are you talking about we left that behind two days ago!"

"Look down, Sam." He pointed at the ground. "What do you see?"

"Footprints. So what. . . ?" And then she understood.

A trail of her own footprints led back, showing where she had just crossed the powdery soil. But there were dozens more all around, mixed in with many others, including !Xabbu's own telltale small prints, more slender even than her own—far too many to have just been made. She put her foot down in one of the older tracks. It was a perfect fit.

"Oh, my God," she said. "That's too sca

"Somehow," !Xabbu said, his voice as miserable as she had ever heard it, "we have come back to our starting place."

Although the swift turn into nightfall was still at least an hour away, !Xabbu had made a fire: neither he nor Sam felt much interest in going any farther. The thin, silvery flames, which usually lent a homely atmosphere to their camps, at the moment seemed merely alien.

"It doesn't make any sense," Sam said again. "We never went more than a little way from the river. Even without a sun, we couldn't be that lost . . . could we?"

"Were there not our own footprints on this ground, I still could not forget this place—I could not mistake it for another," !Xabbu said forlornly. "Not the tree where we found a sign that Renie was alive and looking for us. Where I grew up, we know trees like we do people—better, since the trees stay in one place while people die and the wind blows their footprints away." He shook his head. "I knew for a long time that the land looked very much the same, but I tried to make myself believe I was mistaken."

"But that still doesn't explain how we could get so utterly lost!" Sam said. "Especially you—it just seems wrong."

"Because you still believe that you are in a real world," said Jongleur sharply. He had been silent for almost an hour; his sudden words startled them.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Sam demanded. "We still have up and down, don't we? Left and right? We followed the river through that whole impacted network of yours. . . ."

"But this is not my network," Jongleur interrupted. "That was pla

!Xabbu looked at him bleakly but said nothing.

"Are you saying that everything just . . . changes here?" Sam asked. "That there are no rules?"

Jongleur picked a twig off the ground. Despite the occasional changes in the refractory quality of the land, Sam found it frustrating to see how normal everything looked, how ordinary, in a place that could play them such a terrible trick.

"It could be that we will find a place where the 'rules,' as you call them, are almost nonexistent," the old man said, rolling the long twig between his fingers. "But I suspect that there are indeed firm rules here—just not the sort we expect to find." He leaned forward and cleared a space in the dirt with his forearm, then used the twig to draw a row of small circles laid out side by side like a line of pearls. "The Grail network is set up something like this," he said. "Each circle a world." He drew a single stroke all the way from one end of the series of circles to the other—a strand on which the pearls hung. "The great river runs all through it, co

Sam studied the scrawl. "So? Why doesn't that work here? How did we lose the river?"

"I do not believe we did."

"How can that be?"

"Because there is no reason this world should be linear, as the Grail network is. We assume a river must have a source and an outflow, but even the co