Tad Williams - Sea of Silver Light

At the far end of the chamber a silent, motionless figure sat enthroned on a dais like a statue in a pagan temple, a long silver rod clutched in its hand. The creature was larger than a man, and although its body was human-shaped, the skin was absolutely black and as glossy as Chinese lacquer. The snouted, prong-eared head was that of some doglike beast.

As she neared the dais the whispering voices dropped into silence. The dog-creature's head was lowered, eyes hooded as if in sleep, muzzle against the massive chest, and she had begun to think it really was a statue when the great yellow eyes fluttered open.

All the kneeling shapes suddenly bellowed in perfect unison: "Cheers, Dulcie!" The room thundered with echoes, covering the sound of her startled shriek. "You're looking damn nice today," they added, loud as artillery fire, toneless as a punch press.

Silence fell again as she took a staggering step to maintain her balance. The thing on the dais stood up, rising to almost ten feet, and the muzzle gashed open in a long-toothed leer. "Like it? Just my way of saying 'Welcome!' "

I wonder if you can wet yourself in VR. Aloud, she said, "That's just charming. Took a few years off my life."

"What do you want from the Lord of Life and Death—flowers? Singing and dancing? Well, that can be arranged, too." He lifted the silver rod and a fluttering snow of rose petals began to descend from the roof. With a great scraping and murmuring, the thousands of shaven-headed priests rose from their kneeling positions and began clumsily to dance. "Any particular music you'd like?"

"I don't want anything." Dulcie looked up through the flurrying petals, trying to ignore the disturbing spectacle of a thousand blank-eyed, sandaled priests doing a spastic soft-shoe. "What the hell is this place?"

"It's the Old Man's home away from home." He waved, and the priests lowered themselves to the floor once more. The last few rose petals were still drifting down. "His favorite simulation—Abydos, I think it's called. Ancient Egypt."

It was more than a little disturbing to be carrying on a conversation with a jackal-headed man almost twice her own height, like something from a game or interactive theater. "The old man—you mean your . . . employer, right? And who are you supposed to be? Sparky the Wonder Dog?"

He showed her his teeth again. "This is the sim I always wore here. Of course, I was taking orders then, and now I'm the one giving them." He lifted his voice. "Roll over! Play dead!" The priests dropped to their bellies, rotated once, then lay motionless with their knees and elbows in the air. "It's amusing, in a sort of way, especially when I think how much it would piss the old wanker off." He gestured to one of the nearest priests, who leaped to his feet and scuttled to the dais. Dulcie stared at the sim curiously. He certainly looked like a real person, right down to the gleam of sweat on his shaved head. "This is Dulcie," Dread told the priest. "You love her. She is your goddess."

"I love her," the priest intoned, although he did not look at the object of his newfound affection. "She is my goddess."

"Would you do anything for her?"

"I would, Lord."

"Then show her how much you love her. Go on."

The priest struggled to his feet—he was one of the fat, middle-aged variety, and a bit short of breath—and waddled to one of the wall niches. As Dulcie watched with growing horror, the priest snatched out the oil lamp and upended its contents over his head; in a moment he was running with flames. His white robe caught and blazed up. His round head seemed to float in a halo of fire. "I love you, my goddess," he croaked even as his features began to blacken.

"Oh my God, stop, put him out, stop!" she screamed.

Dread swung his long-muzzled face toward her in surprise, then lifted his rod. The blazing figure disappeared. All the other priests still lay on their backs like dead locusts in a field. "Christ, girl, they're only code."

"I don't care," she said. "That doesn't mean I want to see something like that."

The jackal shape vanished, leaving the real Dread, ordinary size and dressed all in loose-fitting black, standing on the top step of the throne. "Didn't mean to upset you, sweetness." He sounded more annoyed than contrite.

"I just. . . ." She shook her head. "What's going on here, anyway? You said this was the . . . Old Man's place. Where is he? What have you been doing since you got into the system?"

"Oh, this and that." His human grin was only slightly less feral. "I'll explain more later, but first I want to take you on a little tour. Just for fun."

"I don't want to watch any more burning priests, thank you."

"There's lots of things more interesting to see than that." He raised his hand in the air and the silver rod abruptly shrank to a small silver cylinder. "Let's go."

"That's the lighter!" she said. "What. . . ?" But the high hall of Abydos-That-Was and its thousand patient priests had already vanished.

It was indeed a tour. From their first stop in the streets of Imperial Rome, complete with the shouts of street vendors and the wind off the Tiber rank with the scents of human sweat and urine, Dread moved Dulcie in short order to sweltering afternoon on an African plain inhabited by strange creatures as large as elephants, but which Dulcie had never seen before, and then in quick succession through the plum-treed gardens of some clearly mythical China, to a cliffside position overlooking a waterfall a mile or more high, and at last to the white weirdness of the ultimate north, where the convulsing Aurora Borealis hung over their heads like a fireworks show stuck on extra slow speed.

"My God," she said, watching her breath hang as vapor in the air, "it's staggering! I mean, I knew there were a lot of simworlds—we saw quite a few through the Quan Li sim, but. . . ." She shivered, mostly out of reflex. Due to some wrinkle in the simworld, or to Dread's control of it, the temperature here felt no cooler than an early spring evening. "And you can just go anywhere. . . ?"

"Go anywhere, do anything." His grin was now only half a smile, the expression of the proverbial canary-catching cat. He rolled the lighter in his fingers. "I won't need this much longer. And you can do whatever you want too, if you behave yourself and keep me happy."

She felt a tingle of warning. "What does that mean, exactly. . . ?"

"Do your job. Stay out of trouble." He paused to stare at her in a way that made her squirmingly uncomfortable. It was almost as though the attempted incursions into his hidden storage had appeared on her forehead like stigmata. "You have no idea what I've got going here."

She looked out at the endless ice fields, the northern lights shimmering. "But what about your employer? Where did he go? How is it that you have access to everything. . . ?" Nearby, a piece of ice the size of a football field groaned and shifted, lifting a jagged edge above the permafrost and tipping the entire plate on which Dulcie and Dread stood. She grunted in fear, staggered, and put her hand on Dread's arm for support.

He opened his eyes wide. "You don't have to worry," he said, although he seemed to be enjoying her discomfiture. "Even if you get killed here, you'll just drop offline. We're the only people left with on-and-off access."

"What about the owners? What are they called, the Grail people?"

He shrugged. "Things have changed a bit."

"And you can control the system? You can make things happen?"

He nodded. He seemed as pleased as a child, and Dulcie realized that just like a child, he was anxious to show off. "Anything you'd like to see?"

"Have you let those other people off the network, then?"

"Other people. . . ?"

"The ones we were traveling with—Martine, T4b, Sweet William. If you can control the access to the network, you should be able to set them free. . . ." She realized suddenly that she missed them. After living with them day in and day out for weeks, she knew them better than she knew most of the people in her real life. They had been so miserable, so frightened and trapped. . . .