"No!"
"Did you take advantage of her ignorance—her sheltered innocence. . . ?"
"No, of course not. Not on purpose. But just by going along with it—just by continuing to be her teacher even when I knew the whole thing was somehow rotten. . . ."
"Paul." She tightened her grip on his arm. "Someone . . . a friend . . . told me something once. He was speaking of me, but he might have been speaking of you. 'You never avoid an opportunity to stare directly at the wrong things,' is what he said." She made a noise that might have been a laugh. Paul found himself wondering for the first time what the real Martine looked like and was saddened that her blindness made her image bland and unremarkable. "It was an even wittier epigram originally, of course," she said. "Because of the bit about staring."
"He sounds cruel."
"I thought so at the time, and I valued him for it—I was very cynical in my student days. But I think now he just did not yet have the strength to be gentle." She smiled. "We may all be in our last hours, Paul Jonas. Do you really want to spend them trying to remember the many things you may have done wrong?"
"I suppose not."
They walked for a while in silence beside the dimly pulsing Well.
"It's hard," he said. "I've been thinking all along that somehow I'd find her . . . save her. Or perhaps that she'd save me."
"You are speaking of . . . Ava?" she asked him carefully.
He nodded. "But there is no Ava. Not really. Avialle Jongleur is dead, and all that's left are fragments. Held together by the Other, I suppose, but she's not quite real. Like trying to reassemble a puzzle without having all the right pieces. In its way, the Other must have loved her more than anyone else did—certainly more than her so-called father did. More than I did. She was its angel."
Martine did not reply.
"There's something else," he said after a moment. "Jongleur told me that as far as he knows, my body's still alive."
"Do you think he is lying?"
"No. But I don't think it's my body anymore."
Martine paused, "What do you mean, Paul?"
"I've been thinking—during the few moments something hasn't been actively trying to kill us, that is." He made the effort to smile. "Those very few moments. And I believe I know what happened when Sellars got me out of that World War One simulation. See, as long as the Grail people had my body, they also had my mind. Sellars—and Ava—could only talk to me when I was dreaming. But somehow, I escaped the simulation."
"And you think. . . ."
"I think that I've been through the Grail Brotherhood's ceremony—that my consciousness has been split off somehow, the way they planned to do for themselves. Perhaps it was an accident—I don't know why they would have made a virtual mind for me like they did for all the Grail people. But I think it did happen, and Sellars somehow brought that virtual mind to life. And that second, virtual Paul Jonas . . . is me."
She said nothing, but clutched his arm more tightly.
"So all the things I left behind, the simple, silly things that have kept me going here when I wanted to lie down and die, my flat, my mediocre job, my entire old life . . . they don't belong to me. They belong to the real Paul. The one whose body is in a lab somewhere. Even if that body dies, I can never have them. . . ."
He fell silent for a while. It hurt too much to talk. They walked on along the desolate shoreline.
"What is that line from T. S. Eliot?" he said when he trusted himself to speak. "Something about, 'I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling on the floors of silent seas. . . .' "
She turned her sightless face toward him. "Are you criticizing yourself again?"
"Actually, I was talking about the landscape." He stopped. "It does seem like the kind of place to wait for the end of the world, doesn't it?"
"I am tired of waiting for the end of the world," she said, but her head was cocked at a strange angle.
"Well, I don't think we have a lot of choice," he began. "Dread is still waiting just outside, and even if Orlando took care of the Twins I don't think he's up to dealing with what Dread's become. . . ."
"I suspect you are right. The Other has played its knight and it has bought some time, but nothing else."
"Its. . . ?"
"Its knight. Do you remember the story of the boy in the well? One of his would-be saviors was a knight. I suspect the Other had Orlando picked out for that role from the beginning." She frowned and raised her hand. "Quiet for a moment, please. Stand still."
"What is it?" Paul asked after a short silence.
"The waters are receding." She pointed. "Can you see it?"
"Whatever it is, it's not visible to me." But he wondered if in fact the lights were not already a little dimmer.
"I can feel the whole thing failing," she said distractedly. "Like an engine that has run too long. The end is coming very fast now I think."
"What can we do?"
She listened silently for long moments. "Nothing, I fear. Go back to the others and wait with them." She turned toward him. "But first I must ask you something. Will you hold me, Paul Jonas? Just for a short while? It has been a long time for me. I would not . . . would not like to die . . . without touching someone first."
He put his arms around her, full of conflicted thoughts. She was small, at least in this incarnation; her head fit just beneath his chin, her cheek against his chest. He wondered what her heightened senses would make of the quickness of his heartbeat.
"Perhaps in another world," she said, the words muffled against him. "In another time. . . ."
Then they just held each other and did not speak. At last they let go and went back side by side across the gray dust, toward the fire where their friends were waiting.
CHAPTER 43
Tears of Ra
NETFEED/ENTERTAINMENT: Porn Star Ignores Protests Over Planned Children's Interactive
(visuaclass="underline" Violet in excerpt from "Ultra Violet")
VO: Adult interactive actress Vondeen Violet says she doesn't understand the controversy over her intention to produce what she calls "educational interactives" about sex for the under-twelve crowd.
VIOLET: "Kids need to learn and they'll find it out somehow. Isn't it better they learn from a nonviolent interactive where they will participate with trained professionals like myself, instead of getting their information in the schoolyard or on the street? I mean, these things were written by a doctor, for God's sake!"
"I see it," said Catur Ramsey, "but I don't really believe it."
"I am here," Olga told him. "And I'm not sure that I believe it either."
Ramsey sat back and rubbed his tired eyes, half certain that any moment now he would wake up and the whole bizarre day would prove to have been a dream. But when he looked at the screen again the feed from Olga Pirofsky's camera ring still showed the same improbable, fish-eye view.
"It's a forest," he said. "You walk out of the elevator onto the top floor and into . . . a forest?"
"Dead," she said quietly.
"What?"
"Look." The viewpoint swung upward and now Ramsey could see that most of the branches were bare. Even the evergreens were almost all dead, with only a few clusters of brown needles remaining on the skeletal limbs. The camera ring swung down again. Ramsey could see Olga's legs wading through knee-high drifts of brown and gray leaves, squeezing up puffs of dry dust. The picture stopped moving as Olga paused to kick some of the cover aside, then the viewpoint swung across an expanse of black speckled with white,
"What is it?" Ramsey asked. "I can't make it out."