Tad Williams - Sea of Silver Light

"Unless there are more questions. . . ." Sellars began.

"What has happened to Dread?" Martine had clearly come to the meeting in search of answers. "Reports suggest he is unconscious, in something like a Tandagore coma. Does that mean that he will wake up someday, like Renie's brother?"

"Even if he does," Sellars said, "he is in police custody in Australia, heavily guarded—a famous murderer."

"He is a devil," she said flatly. "I will believe he is harmless when he is dead. Perhaps not even then."

"As far as I can reconstruct it, he never detached from the system." Sellars was quiet but firm. "He was in close contact with the Other right to . . . to the end. You all know what it was like to be linked to the Other's mind—you perhaps most of all, Ms. Desroubins. Do you really think Dread could survive the Other's death and stay sane?"

"But what if he is alive somewhere in the network?" Martine demanded. "What if his consciousness has survived there, like Orlando's? Like Paul's did—for a while," she finished harshly.

Sellars nodded, as though accepting a reasonable punishment. "There is no evidence that such a thing happened, no trace of a virtual mind or body constructed, no smallest hint of Dread anywhere in the resurrected system or network. That is not complete proof, perhaps, but I think that what seems true here is true. His mind could not withstand the horror at the end. The doctors who examined him say he is catatonic and will stay that way." He looked around. "Now as I was saying, if there are no more questions I will take it as my cue finally to speak about the reason we are all here."

"We're all here because you asked us to be here," Renie pointed out. "Even if we had to come with street-shop gear."

Sellars briefly closed his eyes; Renie felt like an obstreperous schoolgirl, but she had thought Martine's questions entirely reasonable. "Yes," the old man said patiently. "And rather than continue to talk, when I know you've all heard too much of my voice lately, I am going to turn over those duties to Mr. Ramsey."

Catur Ramsey stood, then decided to sit down again. "Sorry," he said. "I'm a courtroom lawyer—I do my best talking on my feet—but I suppose it's a bit more appropriate to keep it informal, as befits a discussion among friends."

"A lawyer ?" asked Martine. "What in the name of God for?"

Ramsey appeared a little daunted. "I suppose that's a good question. Well, first I think I have to make one thing explicit at the very beginning. We consider you all founding members of the Otherland Preservation Trust."

Renie couldn't believe her ears. "A . . . what? A preservation. . . ?"

"The governments of southern Africa made many trusts for my people and their land." !Xabbu's voice had an uncommon edge to it. "Afterward, my people had no land."

"Just let me explain, please," said Ramsey. "No one is taking anything away from anyone. I'm involved in this because I was dragged into it, not because I wanted to be."

"You don't have to defend yourself, Mr. Ramsey," Sellars said. "Just explain what happened to you."

And so the lawyer did. It was a piece of the story Renie hadn't heard—a strange and shocking piece. It was the first time she had heard more than a brief mention of Olga Pirofsky or the little girl Christabel Sorensen.

God, this was big, she thought. It wasn't just us on the inside and my father and Del Ray and Jeremiah on the outside. And then she thought, I want to meet some of those people—the little girl and boy we saw at the end. They were real children! I want to meet everyone. After all, we're the members of a very small, special club.

And I want to see the Stone Girl again, she realized. She may not have been real, but I certainly miss her. She resolved to ask Sellars about it when she had a chance.

Ramsey's recital drew questions—many of those present were only now putting all the details together. By the time they had all lapsed into overwhelmed silence, more than half an hour had passed.

"It seems I owe you an apology, Mr. Ramsey," Martine said at last. "You have had your own difficult journey."

"Nothing like what you all went through, Ms. Desroubins. And that's not even speaking of those who didn't come through—Olga, her poor, mistreated son, your friend Paul Jonas. Compared to the rest of you, I don't have much stake in this. But that's all the more reason I'd like you to listen."

Renie said, "I think we're listening now."

"Thanks." He took a moment to compose himself. "Now, what you've heard already from Mr. Sellars is that the stored code for the network was basically intact." He gestured to the bubble-distorted view of giant trees. "As you can see, Mr. Kunohara has largely recovered his own world already. And there are other worlds waiting to be saved, too. With time, everything could be saved."

"Could be?" Martine was still asking questions, just a little more gently. "Why the conditional?"

"Because unless we take a bold step," Sellars said with some heat, "I do not want to save them." He waited until the clamor died down. "I apologize—I should not have interrupted, Mr. Ramsey. Please continue."

"The problem has a couple of parts," Ramsey explained. "The first is—who owns the network? It was built by the Grail Brotherhood, but all the guiding members are dead. They built it through various business entities, but in many cases by illegally funneling monies out of their own corporations or the countries they ruled—embezzlement for purely personal benefit." He shrugged. "The two largest pieces of technical infrastructure belonged to J Corporation and Telemorphix. J Corporation still exists, but its headquarters is a lump of rubble and molten glass in the middle of a Louisiana lake and its founder is dead. Nothing like that happened to Telemorphix, although Wells is definitely dead, too—you may have noticed they finally announced it." He took a breath. "The fact is, the squabble over ownership is going to go on for decades. Trust me—this affair is going to be worth hundreds and hundreds of millions just to the trial attorneys."

"So what are we supposed to do?" asked Bonnie Mae Simpkins, who had been largely silent. "That's just how things work, isn't it? Regular folks get it in the neck and the lawyers and big businesses make out like bandits."

"I wish I could take time to defend my profession," Ramsey said. "We're not all sharks. But there's another question—a vital one. And the person at the center of that question is right here in this room."

Sellars saved them from a search for dark corners in the cornerless bubble. "We're talking about Orlando Gardiner, of course. This network is Orlando's home now. He can't live anywhere else."

Orlando shrugged. "Nobody's going to be pulling the plug, are they? Not for a while."

"But there's even more to it," Ramsey said. "Mr, Kunohara?"

Their host leaned forward, wearing one of his odd half-smiles. "All of you—well, almost all—were with me when the information life-forms were set free. Despite the objections of some of those present, by the way, I do think that was the only rational solution. Can you imagine the political and legal struggles to determine their fate if we had left it up to the people back in the real world?" He said it as scornfully as if he owed that place no allegiance at all. "Well, I have something else to tell you. Those creatures . . . a bad word . . . those beings are gone now, released from their so-strict confinement. But the evolutionary algorithms first generated by Sellars, the processes which helped create them, were not kept in such a secure way. Remember, the Other was not a discrete entity monitoring a network from some separate location—in some ways, the network was the Other's body. Any evolutionary biologist knows that cells which prove useful in one part of an evolving organism may eventually be put to use in other parts as well. And the evolution of both the Other and the Grail network itself has been rapid and not very well understood.