Sea of Silver Light

"Do you want to get some sleep? I'd be happy to go out and stretch my legs. . . ."

"That's not what I mean, but thank you. Have you heard back from Olga Pirofsky?"

"Not yet." Ramsey was still angry with himself. "I should never have sent that first message—you were right. She must have thought that I was going to shout at her, tell her to turn around and come back at once." He looked at Sellars. "Although I have to say I'm still not sure why I shouldn't be telling her that."

Sellars stared back at him, the yellow-eyed stare inscrutable, then shook his head, "Damnation," he said softly. "I forget that I no longer have my wheelchair." With great effort he rearranged himself so that he could face Ramsey more directly. "As I said, Mr. Ramsey, I am very tired. I do not have much time left, and all my plans and necessities won't mean anything when that time is up. As Ms. Dickinson once put it, "Because I did not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me. . . ." His head swayed on his thin neck.

"You're . . . sick?"

Sellars laughed, a dry sound like wind across the top of a pipe. "Oh, Lord, Mr. Ramsey. Look at me—I haven't been well in fifty years. But I have been better than I am at the moment, that's certain. Yes, I'm sick. I'm dying. There is the irony of all this—I'm doing the same thing the Grail Brotherhood is doing, trying to outrace a failing physical shell. But they want to preserve what burns inside them. I will accept extinguishment gratefully, if only my work is done."

Ramsey still did not feel close to understanding this strange man. "How long do you have?"

Sellars let his hands fall into his lap, where they lay like crossed twigs. "Oh, perhaps a few months if I don't exert myself—but what are the odds of that?" He showed his teeth in a lipless grin. "I am extended so far that I could work twenty-four hours every day without moving out of a chair, and now I have the added pleasure of traveling in the wheel-well of Major Sorensen's van." He held up his hand. "No, please, pity is not what I'm asking for. But there is something else you can do, Mr. Ramsey."

"What's that?"

Sellars sat quietly for what seemed to Catur Ramsey half a minute. "Perhaps," he said at last, "it would help if I explained some things first. I have not told you or the Sorensens everything there is to know about me. Are you surprised?"

"No."

"I didn't think you would be. Let me tell you one of the less interesting, but perhaps not entirely irrelevant things I haven't mentioned. Actually, Major Sorensen is likely to know this, since he has my personal history in quite excruciating detail. I'm not an American. Not by birth. I was born in Ireland—well, Northern Ireland, as that part of it was known in those days. My first language is Gaelic."

"You don't sound Irish. . . ."

"I came here to live with an aunt and uncle when I was very young. My father and mother belonged to a rather odd Catholic sect in Ulster. They both died early—that is a story in itself—and I was sent to America. But while they were alive, I was raised to be a soldier of the faith, and probably would have been one if they'd survived."

"You mean, like . . . the Irish Republican Army?"

Oh, much smaller and much less responsible. A splinter group that formed during the days when the peace process had begun in earnest, and which was never reconciled. But this is all beside the point."

"Sorry."

"No, no." Sellars nodded gently. "In this mad hash of stories we're all living, it's hard to know what is relevant, what is not. But the fact is, I was raised in a very Catholic household. And now that the end of my labors is upon me, Mr. Ramsey, I find that I want the chance to confess."

It took a few seconds for him to make sense of it. "You want to confess . . . to me?"

"After a fashion." Sellars laughed his hooting laugh again. "We have no priest in our company. As a lawyer, aren't you next in line?"

"I really don't understand."

"It's not a religious thing, Mr. Ramsey. I'm just very tired and lonely. I need someone to help me, and the first way to help will be to listen. I have been fighting this war by myself for too long. We are in desperate straits, and I no longer trust myself to make all the decisions. But you must understand the whole story."

Ramsey begged a moment, then went to get a drink of water out of the bathroom sink and splash some on his face. "You make it sound like there are some major undisclosed details here," he said when he came back. "What exactly are you getting me involved with?"

"My, you are a lawyer, aren't you? Just listen, please, then you can judge for yourself."

"Why not the major? Or Kaylene Sorensen—she's a smart woman, even if she's a bit old-fashioned."

"Because I have already put their child in danger several times, and they have Christabel with them now. They ca

Ramsey drummed his fingers on the arm of the couch. "Okay. Talk to me."

"Good." Sellars slowly lowered his body back against the chair cushions, a process so deliberate it might have been performed by museum curators moving a fragile masterpiece.

Which I suppose he is, thought Ramsey, If everything he's said is true.

"First off," Sellars a

"Which was. . . ?" Ramsey said after long seconds.

"Which was to die. Not that such a thing is difficult for me, Mr. Ramsey. On the contrary—with the nanomachinery I have acquired, and my original circuitry, I now have enough control over my own body that I could turn off the blood to my brain with a thought."

"But . . . why were you still alive, then? Before you found out about the Grail Project?"

"Because I have been balancing a scale for a long time, Mr. Ramsey. On one side is the normal urge to live, my joys and my interests, solitary and limited as they may be. On the other is the pain. Because of my many surgeries, the things that have grown into my bones and my organs, the strains on my glands . . . it hurts to be me, Mr. Ramsey. My life is very painful."

"But surely if you have such control, you could turn off the pain?"

"I did not have as much control over my own functions when I first discovered the Brotherhood as I have gained recently, but yes, even then I could probably have switched off the feelings in my hands, my skin, cut my brain off from my entire body. But then why be alive? There is little enough of the physical in my life—for so long I have lived mostly in my own mind, as prisoners often do. Should I give up the sensation of a breeze on my face? The taste of the few foods I am able to eat?"

"I . . . I think I understand."

"And in fact, the time was nearly upon me when the tradeoff was no longer going to be worth it. Then this Grail network reared its head, a problem I could not simply ignore. Still, I did not think I would be needed past the initial stages—I was planting seeds, as it were. I wanted to find a group of trustworthy people, teach them what I knew, and then be free to do as I wished. I even told them my real name, so you can imagine I was not pla