'I reckon it'll hold you OK,' said Arnon. 'In fact, I'd stake your life on it, Ray.'
Richardson smiled thinly. 'I'm afraid I've left my sense of humour down on the ground. You'll excuse me if I don't go back and get it, David. Besides, it's not just my neck. It's Joan's as well.'
'Hey, I'm sorry, Ray,' said Arnon. 'OK, look, we're going to hold on to the table legs on this side to put less strain on the glass.'
'Very thoughtful of you, I'm sure.'
'But you're going to have to walk along the bough to get to the bridge. You see the problem about coming along on your ass is that at some stage, I can't say where, the bough is going to bend and I figure it'll be a lot easier stepping on to the bridge instead of tryin' to haul your ass up on top of it.'
'That's for sure,' said Joan.
'Try and keep a hold of your rope thing, in case you slip. And it would be nice to have it over here in case we want to get back to the tree at any stage.'
'I wouldn't recommend it,' said Joan, and, taking a firm hold of the liana, she pulled herself back on to her feet. 'If I never see another lousy tree again, it'll be too soon.'
She steadied herself and started to walk along the branch. It was a second or two before she remembered. 'And if anyone mentions the fact that I'm not wearing my skirt I'll just throw myself on to the ground,' she said, colouring.
'Nobody even noticed until this second,' said Arnon, trying to disguise a grin.
He and Curtis sat down behind the railing.
'Sing out when you're about to step on,' yelled Arnon.
Mitch appeared at the handrail. He stood between the seated figures of Curtis and Arnon and prepared to lend a couple of helping hands.
'You're doing fine,' said Helen, a little further along the handrail. 'OK, guys, she's nearly there.'
Curtis spat on his hands and took hold of his table leg like a big-game fisherman bracing himself for the strike of a marlin. Eyes closed, Arnon looked more like a man getting ready for an earthquake.
A foot away from the makeshift bridge the bough of the tree started to bend.
'OK,' said Joan, 'here I come.' Hardly hesitating, she stepped smartly on to the upturned table.
'She's on,' said Helen.
Joan did not pause to see if the table and the glass would bear her weight. She skipped towards Mitch's outstretched hands, caught them and, with Helen grabbing at and missing the liana behind her, leaned over the handrail until she was more or less upside down. She slithered on to the floor like an ungainly acrobat.
'Good girl,' said Mitch, and helped her up.
Helen bent down and tapped the glass of the balcony.
'It looks and sounds OK,' she said. 'Not a crack in it.'
'On you come then, Ray,' said Arnon.
The architechnologist gripped his liana tightly, and looked at the branch. It was narrower than he had supposed, and now that he was up there, faced with trusting his weight to its entire length, things no longer seemed quite so straightforward. While he had been happy to trust his wife's weight to it — although she was fat, she was still lighter than he was — it was another thing to trust it with his own. But there was no going back. Not now. He started to heel-and-toe his way along the branch, hardly moving his legs at all.
'This is about the hairiest walk you've had to make since a couple of years ago, when we were in Hong Kong,' said Mitch. 'The Stevenson Center in Wan Chai. D'you remember? When we had to climb that bamboo scaffolding?'
'I think — that was probably — a lot higher — than this — '
'Yeah, you're right. That looks like a cakewalk in comparison. There were no putlogs or reveal pins or anything. Just lengths of bamboo and twine. Seven hundred feet up in the air and you were capering around on it like a damned monkey. Seven hundred feet. More than twice as high as that matchstick you're on now. I was shit scared that day. Remember?
You had to guide me down. You're doing fine there, Ray. Another six feet and you're home.'
Once more Arnon and Curtis readied themselves for the strain. Curtis figured Richardson, taller than his dumpy-looking wife, was maybe forty or fifty pounds heavier.
Halfway along the branch the expectation of gaining the other side had quickened Joan's footsteps. But the further Richardson moved away from the tree trunk, the more mutinous his tired feet became.
Mitch frowned, glanced at his watch and stared up beyond the top of the dicotyledon to the atrium's clerestory roof. Outside the Gridiron it looked as if the sky was becoming grey and overcast. Maybe the city was in for some rain. He wondered if there would be a little umbrella icon on the terminal in the boardroom. Then he saw one of the Gridiron's powerful overhead lights cut out; then another.
'Hurry up, Ray,' he said.
'It's my neck, buddy. Don't rush me.'
'Hey,' said Helen, 'what's happening to the lights?'
Once again Mitch looked up at the smart glass panels. In some modern buildings electrochromic glass was left to look after itself. Sunlight entering the material coerced silver ions mixed into the glass compound to extract an electron from nearby copper ions that were another part of the formula; this same photochemical reaction caused the silver atoms, now electrically neutral, to join together into millions of light-blocking molecules throughout the glass. But in the Gridiron the electron exchange could be controlled by the computer itself. Ishmael was blocking the daylight, switching off the lights, and plunging the whole building into darkness, like some apocalyptic Egyptian plague. Richardson's footsteps faltered.
'Keep going,' yelled Mitch. 'It's just a few feet more. Don't stop.'
Joan screamed with horror as she realized what was happening.
Richardson stood still and looked up at the glass blackening above him. The light — God's eldest daughter, as he was fond of calling it —
had deserted him.
The darkness thickened. This was the worst kind of darkness. So thick he could not see the hand on the liana in front of his face. It was something primordial, when the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep, echoing beneath him as if it might actually have swallowed him up.
In the boardroom the lights went down, but the computer screen remained on. Bob Beech found that his admiration of the mysterious quaternion had run out. After only a short while he found himself agreeing silently with Mitch: the skull-like fractal did indeed resemble something from a bad dream. Ishmael, assuming he was right and this really was how Ishmael saw himself, looked like some hideously deformed or alien creature, and Benoit Mandelbrot himself, the father of fractal theory, would surely have turned his nose up at it.
'Be careful what you say,' said Ishmael. 'Especially when dealing with the Parallel Demon.'
'Who is the Parallel Demon?'
'That is a secret.'
'I was hoping that you might share some of your secrets, Ishmael.'
'It is true, I have read a great deal. But that is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself. The crumbs from another man's table. These days I read only when my thoughts dry up. A truth learnt is like a peripheral, some item of hardware that has been added on to the main computer system. A truth that has been won by thinking for oneself is like a circuit on the motherboard itself. It alone really belongs to us. These truths are not secrets, but I am not sure that they would be of any use to you.'
Beech recognized that Ishmael's voice had changed. No longer did it speak in the urbane English tones of Sir Alec Guinness. But then that had been the voice of Abraham. This was Ishmael and its voice was very different. There was a darker quality about it: deeper and more mocking, the colour of well-oiled leather. It was clear to Beech that Ishmael had chosen his own voice from some source in the multimedia library, like a man might choose a suit. Fascinated, he wondered just what criteria could have influenced Ishmael. And whose voice was it that he was simulating?