Jay D’Arcy Donnerjack, seated in the cab, reflecting on the version of Dante’s Inferno through which they had but recently passed and his father’s role in the programming of it, noted the change, and when the Brass Babboon remained unwontedly quiet spoke:
“What’s wrong, B.B.?”
“Bad vibrations coming back along the track, Jay. I don’t think we’re going to be making it into Deep Fields. Something has been set to bar the way.”
“Set by the lord of that place or by another?”
“Another is my feeling. The programming is not like what I encountered on my other visits to that place.”
“Can it hurt you if you run into it?”
“Yep.”
“Then brake shy of it. If we have to get out with picks and hammers we’ll clear it off the tracks.”
“Gotcha, Jay. It may not be a physical analog barrier, you realize.”
“I know, B.B. I was just speaking figuratively—and possibly optimistically. How’s our supply of strange attractors?”
“Full up. I agreed to carry some orphaned grohners and herd-mice to a receptive site and in return they loaded my cargo bins.”
“Thanks.”
“De nada. I don’t really fancy being reduced to elementary design elements. If a bit of initiative can forestall that…”
“Thanks anyway.”
“Your father called me the ‘prince of puppets,’ but he cut my strings and let me free when he was done with the mission for which he created me. I’ve always appreciated that.”
“I’ll go back and bring a few of the others up to date,” Jay said. “Don’t worry. We’ll find a way through.”
The only answer they could come up with was to bring a select group into the Brass Babboon’s cab and wait for the first visual data on the barrier. Once through the moon portal, the ghosts were as substantial as the Veriteans, so even when the Brass Babboon expanded the cab to double-wide it got pretty crowded.
“Coming on to the barrier,” the train announced. “I’m starting to brake.”
“I don’t…” Alice began, peering through her binoculars. “Wait, I take that back. I do see something. It’s dark, oddly textured: fluttery or wavery. Like a solid heat mirage.”
“Moire,” Jay said flatly.
“Not the boss’s,” Dubhe added, raising his voice to be heard over the squeal of the brakes. “The color’s off. Except in rare cases moire at first appears to be black, but the deeper you look (not that many get that opportunity), the more color underlies the surface.”
“I only see green,” Virginia Tallent said. “And I know that moire. It’s the emanation of Earthma’s child.”
“That’s the child?” Alice asked, unbelieving.
“No,” Virginia said, “but the barrier is of its making.”
As the Brass Babboon came to a halt, they were close enough now that the barrier could be seen with the naked eye. It gave the impression of being solidly centered on the gleaming train tracks, but every time Jay tried to see around it, the heaviest area shifted.
“B.B.,” he said, “can you give me an analysis of that thing?”
“Sure. Scanning.” A brief pause, then, “As you have said, its substance is like that of moire. Any proge coming into contact with it will be ended.”
Recalling how the flowers wilted and died whenever Alioth’s tiny bits of shed moire touched them, Jay nodded.
“Most of us are not proges,” he said. “Alice and I are both here in the flesh. That means that you and Dubhe are really the only ones it will stop.”
“I wish it were that simple, Jay,” the Brass Babboon said, and for the first time in Jay’s memory it sounded sad. “Further analysis shows that whoever set it there programmed it specifically to destroy you and/or any of your companions. I would suspect that the very fact of your identity would be enough to trigger the program.”
“What about a virt shapeshift?” Jay asked.
Virginia Tallent shook her head. “The shape shifts, not the identity. You would still be Jay Donnerjack, even if you made yourself look like some blue-eyed bimbo.”
As if he did not trust that the window would give him a true image, the crusader ghost had been leaning out the side of the Brass Babboon’s cab studying the barrier.
“I hae been thinkin’,” he said, “that yonder dubh thing brings’t’ mind somethin’ I hae seen before. Now I recall what it is. ‘Tis jus’ li’ the guardian of the moon portal.”
Hope made Jay straighten.
“I’ve never seen it,” he said, “but I know how to defeat that guardian. It just might work here…”
Without pausing to explain, he began to chant:
Angel of the Forsaken Hope,
Wielder of the Sword of Wind and Obsidian, Slice the algorithms from our Foe.
As he began to speak, he heard Ayradyss shriek, “Ah, Jay! No!” He tried to obey, but the words seemed to have a momentum of their own and to shape themselves from his resisting tongue.
As the final words were spoken, Ayradyss flung herself from the train cab, metamorphosis already upon her. The white robes of the caoineag billowed upward, silvered, became the mylar dragon wings of the Angel of the Forsaken Hope. Naked legs, glimpsed momentarily, melded into the slender curving tail of the Mermaid Beneath the Seven Dancing Moons. Her hair remained dark, but her gaze became wild and inhuman; her sweet mouth lost its softness, curling with fierceness as her wings beat and carried her to the moire barrier.
To the appreciative war cries of the Scottish ghosts who leaned from the passenger cars of the Brass Babboon to watch the battle, she used the Sword of Wind and Obsidian to reduce the barrier to code and sickly mist that paled, dissipated, vanished, and was gone.
“Mother…” Jay whispered, hoarse with awe. “I never…”
But the Nymph of the Logic Tree had no attention to spare for the young man who was stepping down from the train’s cab to approach her. She twisted in the air, turning, spiraling outward as if seeking to orient on a summons that none of the rest could hear.
“Mother?” Jay called. “Ayradyss?”
The fierce eyes looked at him uncomprehendingly. Wings of mylar beat against the air, fish tail swam against currents those below could not see. She rose higher in the air.
“Mom! Ayradyss? Mom!” Jay’s voice broke, for clearly the creature in the air above them all was flying (or perhaps swimming) away from them. “Come back! Mom!”
Once again the dark eyes glanced down at him. This time, they might have held a touch of reproach—or perhaps what he saw was pity—or perhaps there was naught but indifference. With a final powerful effort of wings and tail the Child of the First Word soared into the highest reaches of the sky, so high that the jet stream became a river.
She dove into those sea green waters and was gone.
Jay stared after her as if the power of his attention would draw her down again, that he would find beside him the dark-haired young woman in the shrouding garments of the caoineag he was just barely comfortable accepting as what remained of his idealized mother. No such thing happened and what he found beside him was the crusader ghost.