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"In part because I have been grappling with the security systems in my own particular way to allow that to happen," said Mister Sellars. "But there is something more at work. The system seems almost to have a . . . an affinity, that is the word. An affinity for children."
Christabel's mommy, who had been listening, suddenly looked down and saw that Christabel was still standing beside her in the doorway. A frightened look went across Mommy's face, the oh-my-god look Christabel hadn't seen for a while, the last time when Christabel had carefully picked up the sharp broken pieces of a wine glass that fell on the kitchen floor and brought them in both hands to show her parents.
"Go on, honey," her mother said, and almost shoved her back into the room with the terrible boy. "I'll come in and check on you in a little while. Eat your sandwich. Watch the net." She closed the door behind her. Christabel felt like crying again. Her mother usually didn't like it when she watched the net, unless it was something Mommy and Daddy had picked out that was educational.
"I'll eat it if you don't want it, weenit," the boy said behind her.
She turned and saw that he was holding her sandwich in his hand. After all the baths her mommy had been making him take even his fingernails were clean, but she could just tell that no matter how many times he went in the tub, he was still covered with invisible germs. The thought of eating her sandwich now was impossible.
"You have it," she said, and walked slowly to sit on the edge of the bed. The wallscreen wasn't very big, and the only thing on KidLink was a stupid Chinese game with people ru
The little boy finished her sandwich, and without asking ate her raisins and cookies, too. Christabel didn't even feel angry—it was strange to see someone eat like that, like they hadn't ever eaten before and didn't know if they'd ever get to do it again. She wondered how he got so hungry. She knew Mister Sellars had lots of meals in packages down in the tu
"What you staring at, mu'chita?" he said with a mouth full of cookie.
"Nothing." She turned back to the wallscreen. The Chinese people were making themselves into a big pile to reach something hanging high in the air. The pile fell down and some of the people had to be carried away with the audience cheering. Christabel wished her parents would come in and tell her it was time to go home. She didn't like what was going on any more. She sneaked a look at the boy. He was licking the plate where the sandwiches had been. That was really gross, but it bothered her in a different way, too.
"When we go home," she said suddenly, "maybe . . . maybe my mom will give you some food. You know, to take with you."
He looked at her and shook his head like she had said something stupid.
"Ain't nobody going home, chica. We on the run. No more mama-papa house for you, not ever, m'entiendes?"
She knew he was lying, knew that he was saying it to make her feel bad, but she could not stop herself from crying anyway. What was worse was that when her mommy came in and asked Christabel what was wrong, and she told her, Mommy didn't say it was a lie, didn't say they were going home right away so don't worry, didn't even yell at the terrible boy. She didn't say anything at all, just held Christabel on the bed. It should have made her feel better, but it didn't, it didn't, it didn't.
CHAPTER 8
Listening to the Nothing
NETFEED/LIFESTYLE: Virtual Memorials-Visiting the Dead
(visual: family and deceased laughing at wake)
VO: Funebripro, a company in Naples, Italy, has a
(visual: company founder Tintorino di Pozzuoli)
DI POZZUOLI: "Hey, this is a nice thing. If you lose someone, like we lost my dear grandfather, you can still keep a part of them with you. You can visit with them even after they're gone—commune, you might say. It's like having a telescope that points at heaven, right?"
Almost dying on the mountain had been bad enough. Now Sam Fredericks' exhausted sleep was invaded by the most bizarrely powerful nightmare she had ever experienced.
The bad dream seemed to go on forever, a flood of terror and solitude and confusion so real and so lengthy that at last, in some paradoxical way, even horror became as boring as a hundred-year trip in the back seat of her parents' car. The only respite from the hammering monotony of fear and loneliness were the small phantoms, swift and cautious as birds, that finally appeared to her out of the long darkness, as though she had passed some terrible pointless test and was now being rewarded. She could not see them but she could feel them all around her, each gentle and insubstantial as a shallow breath. They might almost have been fairies, wispy bits of beauty like something from one of her childhood screen stories. Spirits, perhaps. Whatever they were, she finally felt relieved and at peace. She wanted to hold them close, but they were all as fragile as a butterfly wing, as the trembling puff of a dandelion: to clutch at them was to destroy them.
When she came up at last from the endless dream, Sam Fredericks' first realization—as it had been with every awakening since it had happened—was that Orlando was dead. He was not merely dying (a familiar shadow she had learned to squint into invisibility) but dead. Gone. Not coming back, not ever—no new stories, no new memories. No more Orlando.
But this time, the terrible sadness only lasted until she opened her eyes and saw the endless silver-shot nothing that surrounded her. Surprise was turned to something worse by the look on !Xabbu's careful, devastated face as he told her that Renie was gone.
"But what happened? This so utterly, utterly, utterly scans." At least an hour seemed to have passed and nothing had changed. Sam had not been one of the visitors to the weatherless stasis Renie had named Patchwork Land; to her, the most astonishing thing about this enveloping silver-gray void was the simple fact of its persistence, limitless and unchanging. "Is Renie still back on the mountain? In fact, where's the mountain?"
"I have no answers, Fredericks," !Xabbu said.
"Sam. Call me Sam—oh, please." She had run out of strength to plan, to do. Orlando had died. In all the time she had been trapped in the network, Sam Fredericks had never allowed herself seriously to consider that there might come a time when that would happen—when she would have to go on without him. How could such a thing even be possible? But here it was, the world around her just as strange and incomprehensible as it had been when Orlando was still alive, but now there was no Orlando to push her along, to growl at her, to tell her stupid jokes because he knew that being pissed off by stupid jokes was as good a method of keeping going as being entertained by good ones, and a lot easier on the one telling the jokes.
Sam felt a congestion inside her, a painful swelling of the heart. She would never again get to tell him those obvious things in that way that drove him crazy—an obviousness of such perfection that he could never tell if she was kidding or not. The tightness inside her felt like something that needed to be born, but did not want to come out. It was astonishing to discover how much you could miss someone whose real face you'd never seen.