Страница 145 из 265
"Bo
"Dread's power and his ambition are growing, but how long can mere simulations feed such an appetite? If he has Jongleur's power outside the network as well as inside—and if Jongleur is truly dead, why shouldn't Dread control his worldwide operations?—then the possibilities are quite terrifyingly vast.
"As Bo
"This question made her even more sad. She told us that although the monkey-children had wanted to follow Orlando and Fredericks through the gateway, they had been distracted by the chaos in the temple of Ra and so they had all been left behind when the gateway closed.
"Bo
"She went on to tell something of the horrors she and Nandi had experienced, largely because Dread knew they had been seen in the company of Orlando and Fredericks. This was chilling too—it was bad enough to know we were soon to be delivered to Dread, worse to know he had been actively seeking us. His vengeance, it seems, will not be offhanded.
"But the idea of Orlando's monkey-children friends would not leave my head.
"You see, I had turned a corner of sorts. I was and am still resigned to death, and to an unpleasant one at that, but I ca
"We will all die. It is what gives life its shape and even its beauty, perhaps, this fact of its brevity. So why bother to do anything except gratify oneself, faced with that? And knowing it may come literally at any moment, as we do, why not simply surrender?
"I do not know. But I know now I ca
"I told the pair from the Circle, 'I do not think the little monkeys have been captured. Dread wanted to break your spirit—he likes that even more than inflicting pain. And he truly wanted to make you tell all you knew about Renie and the rest of us. So if the guards had caught them, he would have threatened you with harming them. He would have been delighted to do it.'
" 'Maybe they escaped, then,' Bo
"Florimel remembered what Orlando and Fredericks had said about Nandi's expertise, so she asked Nandi if it was possible to open a gateway here in the prison cell. Slowly and with great pain—I think several of his ribs are broken, although that is an odd thing to consider since we are all wearing virtual bodies—he explained that he could only open a gate at a designated spot, and certainly there was no such thing in these prison rooms. As he spoke I began to think in earnest about what was possible and what was not, remembering that as much as it might seem like it, we were not actually prisoners in a temple of stone, but in the idea of a temple.
"Slowly, other ideas came to me. Nothing dramatic, nothing that would burst the doors or slay the guards, but enough to give me occupation, for which I was grateful. When Nandi had finished his explanation, I asked the others to be silent for a while. Even T4b—who in fact has been as reserved as I have ever seen him since Nandi and Bo
"This virtual universe is constructed on stories, it seems, and I suspect that in part that is my own fault. I believe I helped to feed the Other the first tales on which the system has created and defined itself, and particularly the story which appears to define its hopes, if one can say such a thing about an artificial intelligence. And in our way, we have each of us become defined as though we were characters—Renie the bold and sometimes overly stubborn hero, !Xabbu her wise companion, Paul the one buffeted by fate, a mystery to himself and others. For a long time I had thought my role was clear. I was the blind seeress—I even made a joke of it in the indicators I used to mark my journal entries for later salvage. But with !Xabbu helping me I had accomplished more than that, opening a gate where no others could have managed. In fact, the unusual senses this place gives me have allowed me many times to do what my friends could not.
"Apparently, I am a sorceress—a witch. A good witch. I hope.
"Here, within this invented world, I have powers. As I sat in the cell thinking about Nandi's struggles to make the system work, I realized that I have not fully tapped those powers. And what better time to do so than now, with Dread to arrive at any moment?
"I asked my companions for quiet, then did my best to grasp what lay beyond the walls of our small cell. When I have reached out in this way before, in the House world or the Place of the Lost, it has always been in the open, where I could read information from air currents and long echoes, even if I could not always identify them as such. My abilities seemed an extension of natural senses, so I have always thought of them as limited in the same way, but I had just realized I did not know this to be true. Thus, as my friends waited in confused, fearful silence, I opened up and tried to see, hear, feel—there really are no proper words—what lay outside.
"Exploring the ways of the system with !Xabbu, I had always felt a fundamental separation between his perceptions of it and mine, something which the symbology of the string game and its mathematical underpi
"But I—along with all the rest of us, I suppose—have been fooled by the way this network mimics reality, and have tried to make sense of the world as though it were in fact the real world. Even using the astonishing abilities I have here, I have allowed myself to hear only what could be heard, touch only what could be touched, and then cha