Tad Williams - Sea of Silver Light

He's so guarded. One of those anal-retentive types. Probably rolls all his socks the same way. But after spending her childhood in her mother's aggressively bohemian care—most mornings young Dulcinea Anwin had not only needed to clear plates of spoiling food from the previous night's dinner party off the kitchen counter before making her own breakfast, but also had to make a circuit of the house putting out candles that had been left burning and evicting guests who had fallen asleep in strange places—she thought that a certain rigidity about order was not the worst trait a man could have.

She had finished running diagnostics on their project's house system, which, despite the rather uncommon strains Dread was putting on it at the moment, was holding up nicely, and she was busy making records of some of the events from their incursion into the Grail system for future study when she bumped across something odd.

It was a partition of sorts in Dread's own system, a boxing-off of data, but that wasn't the unusual thing about it. All systems were divided for organizational purposes, and most people who spent a lot of time working directly online were as idiosyncratic about how they arranged their system environments as they were with their RL homes. What she had seen of Dread's space was in fact so nonidiosyncratic she was almost disturbed by it: he had never bothered to change any of the settings, names, or infrastructure of the original system package, for one thing. It was a little like realizing the pictures on your manager's desk were the fake ones of smiling catalog models that had come with the frames. No, there was nothing unusual about partitioning your storage. What was interesting about this partition was that it was invisible, or supposed to be. She checked the directories, but there was no listing to correspond with the fairly extensive secured area onto which she had stumbled.

A little secret door, she thought. Why, Mr. Dread, you do have some things you want to keep private after all.

It was sort of cute, really—a boy thing, like a hidden treehouse. No girls allowed. But of course, Dread was a beginner with this stuff, and Dulcie was a very, very hard girl to hide things from.

She hesitated for a few moments—not very long at all, really—reminding herself that it was wrong, that not only did her boss have a right to his privacy, he was also a man who did a lot of dangerous things for dangerous people, people who took their security very seriously. But Dulcie (who almost always lost these arguments with herself) found the idea more a challenge than a discouragement. After all, didn't she run with a dangerous crowd herself? Hadn't she shot someone only a few weeks ago? The fact that she was having regular nightmares about it, and now wished she had invented an excuse not to do it—faulty gun, jammed door lock, epileptic seizure—didn't mean she was suddenly unfit to run with the big boys.

Besides, she thought, it will be interesting to have a peek into his mind. See what he really thinks about. Of course, it might just be his account books. Anybody this much of a neat freak might be pretty serious about hiding their double-entry stuff.

But the small bit of poking and prying she allowed herself failed even to turn up a keyhole, let alone a key. If there was something interesting on the other side of the door, she was not going to find it out so easily. With the faintly shamed feeling that had visited her as a young girl rooting through her mother's bureau drawers, she erased all records of her investigations and dropped back out of the system.

Her employer's secret compartment was still nagging at her half an hour later as she stood over his sleeping form, which lay nestled like a piece of dark jewelry in the while padding of the coma bed.

It's true—I really don't know anything about him, she thought, looking down at his heavy-lidded eyes, at the minute movement of his irises between the mesh of black lashes. Well, I know he's not the most stable person in the world. It was hard not to remember each and every one of his flashes of anger. But there's something else in him, too—something calm, something knowing. Like a big cat, or a wolf. It was hard to avoid animal analogies—Dread's compact grace somehow did not seem quite civilized.

She was watching the way his cocoa-colored skin took and softened the clinical glare of the overhead lights when Dread's eyes popped open.

"Hello, sweetness," he said, grinning. "Bit jumpy today, aren't you?"

"My God. . . !" She fought to regain her breath. "You could have warned me. You've been out of communication for almost twenty-four hours."

"Been busy," he said. "Things are hopping." His grin widened. "But now I'm going to show you a little something. Come join me."

It took her a moment to understand it was not an invitation to climb into the coma bed—an unpleasant thought even had her feelings about the man himself been less ambivalent: the low murmur of its engines and the constant slow movement of the bed surface made her think of some kind of sea creature, an oyster without a shell. "You mean . . . on the network?"

"Yes, on the network. You're a bit slow today, Anwin."

"Just a few thousand things to do, that's all, and about two hours of sleep." She tried to keep her voice light, but this teenage jocularity was making her tense. "What do I do. . . ?"

"Access the way I did, and make sure you're in full wraparound—you're going to need it. When you hit the first security barrier, your password is 'Nuba.' N-U-B-A. That's all."

"What does it mean?"

He was smiling again. "One of our abo words, sweetness. Comes from up north, Melville Island."

"What, is it insulting or something?"

"Oh, no. No." He closed his eyes as though drifting back into sleep. "Just the term they use for an unmarried woman. Which you are, right?" He chuckled, savoring something. "See you when you get there." He visibly relaxed, dropping back into the system like a swimmer sliding under the water.

It took her a long moment to realize that she was still shaking a little, startled by his sudden appearance. Like he was watching me, she thought. Just standing behind me, watching me, waiting to give me a little scare. The bastard.

She poured herself a glass of wine and drank it off in a couple of swallows before lying down on the couch with the fiberlink.

Dulcie had barely uttered the code word when the nothingness of the first system level abruptly took on color and depth. The initial dazzle was so bright that for a second she wondered if she was staring into the sun, then the huge bronze door in front of her swung open and she stepped through into darkness.

The darkness was not complete: the far end of the corridor had an unsteady glow that drew her forward. A dull murmur washed out to her, deep and slow as an ocean pawing at a stony beach. As the light grew and she began to glimpse the large chamber beyond, a shadowed space filled with tight-packed, round shapes like a field of sunken megaliths, she could not help feeling that she had stumbled into a dream. A look at her own legs and bare feet, muscular and bunioned from years of dance class, told her otherwise. Who ever saw their own feet in a dream? Her hands, too, were recognizably her own, the freckles on her long fingers visible even in the dim light.

It's a sim of . . . me, she realized, even as she stepped out into the great chamber.

The rush of muttering voices rose around her. A thousand people, maybe more, were kneeling on the floor of the massive room, their rhythmic, whispering chant rising to the distant ceiling. Oil lamps burned in niches all along the walls, making everything flicker like some visual recording from the earliest days of technology. A clear space between the huddled bodies led across the pale marble; none of the bent figures even looked up as Dulcie walked past them.