Now the tears did come. Memories came with them—the nights she had sat awake in bed with Aleksandr sleeping beside her, convinced there was something wrong with her baby because what was inside her simply did not feel right. The other times when she would have sworn she could sense it . . . thinking inside her, the strange sensation of a little alien thing living inside her belly. But she had told herself the feelings were nothing that other mothers did not also experience and the doctors had agreed with her.
"How could you know all this?" she demanded. "How could you know? Why did you wait until now to tell me? You are making this up—this is some crazy game, it's your conspiracy, your crazy conspiracy!"
"No, Olga," he said sadly. "I didn't tell you because I didn't know. Until now, I had no idea how the Grail network's operating system worked, since it did not seem to function within any of the rules for even the most sophisticated neural networks. But. . . ."
"My baby!" Olga leaped up and staggered to the pod at the top of the pyramidal arrangement. The word Cryogenic had faded but it was burned in her mind. "Is he here? Is he in here?" She scratched uselessly at the plastic. "Where is he?"
"He is not there, Olga." Sellars sounded as though he too was fighting tears. "He is not in the building. He is not even on Earth."
Her legs buckled. She sagged and fell to the ground, thumping her forehead against the carpet. "What are you saying?" she moaned. "I don't understand."
"Please, Olga. Please. I'm so sorry. But I have to tell you everything. We have very little time."
"Time? I have thought for most of my life that my baby was dead, now you tell me I have no time? Why? What are you doing?"
"Please. Just listen." Sellars took a deep, shaky breath. "Jongleur and his technicians built the Grail system around your child. His problem . . . his gift, whatever you call it, the hypermutation that would otherwise have killed him long before he came to term—and perhaps would have killed you, too—made him ideal for the Grail's purposes. With all their work to prepare a world where they could spend eternity, they still could not create a virtual environment responsive and realistic enough, not with the best information technologies of the day. What good would it have been to them to make themselves immortal if they did not have a suitable place to spend that immortality? So Jongleur and his scientists created a massively parallel processor constructed of human brains—fetal brains, mostly—and relied on your son's native abilities to make connections between those brains that no machinery could make, to dominate and shape them into the operating system for their network.
"But there were problems from the very beginning. The human brain is not a computer. It needs to do human things to grow. If it doesn't learn, it doesn't physically develop. Your son was a one-in-a-billion oddity, Olga, but he was still a Human child. In order to develop this incredibly powerful resource, the Grail engineers and scientists discovered that they had to teach it—had to let it come into contact with other human minds, learn to communicate, even to reason after a fashion, or it would be useless to them.
"Paradoxically, the Grail people only exposed him to human ideas in order to make him the most efficient machine possible. They had no interest in his true humanity. And in the end, that is what killed them." There was a certain grim satisfaction in his voice.
"So early on, in order to help him develop, they began experiments in which they brought him into contact with other children, normal children. One of the people inside the system now, a woman named Martine Desroubins, was one of those children. She knew your son only as a voice—but she knew him."
Olga had stopped crying now. She sat against the pod staring at her hands. "I don't understand any of this. Where is he now? What have they done to him?"
"They have used him, Olga. For thirty years, they have used him. I am sorry to tell you this—I beg you to believe that—but they have not used him kindly. He has been raised in the dark, figuratively and literally. He does not even know what he is—he acts almost without thinking, half-awake, dreaming, confused. He has the powers of a god but the understanding of an autistic child."
"I want to go to him! I don't care what he is!"
"I know. And I know that when you speak to him you will be kind. You will try to understand."
"Understand what?" She was breathing hard now, squeezing her fingers into fists. A fire ax, she thought. There must be a fire ax somewhere. I will take it and I will smash this man Jongleur's black coffin to bits, drag him out into the light like a worm from its hole. . . .
"You son is not . . . a normal human. How could he be? He speaks almost entirely through others. Somehow, he has connected to the Tandagore coma children. I do not understand that part yet, but. . . ."
"Speaks through . . . others. . . ?"
"Children . . . the children in your dreams. I think they are his voice, trying to talk to you."
Olga felt her heart skip. "He . . . he knows me?"
"Not truly. but I think he sensed something about you. Didn't you say that what first made you suspicious was that none of the affected children were viewers of your program? Your son escaped the bounds of the Grail network some time ago—he has explored much, and I suspect that he was drawn particularly to the children watching your show, as he has been drawn to other children elsewhere. What it was he sensed in you, I don't know, but he may have felt some deep affinity, some . . . similarity to himself. Wordless, uncomprehending, he immediately lost any other interest in your child viewers. Instead, he tried in his half-conscious way to . . . make contact. With you."
She was sobbing convulsively but her eyes were dryly painful, as though she had cried so much she could never shed tears again. Those terrible headaches, the confusing voices, they hadn't been a curse at all, but. . . ." My ch–child! My baby! Trying to f–f–find me!"
"Time is very short, Olga. We have only minutes, then things will have gone too far. I will try to bring him to you—let you speak to him yourself. Do not be too frightened."
"I would never be frightened. . . !"
"Wait. Wait until you have spoken to him. He was born different, but even his raw humanity has been shaped by cold, self-serving men. And now another man, even crueler, has hurt him and abused him until he has nearly given up. It may be too late. But if you can speak to him, calm him, many lives can be saved."
"I still don't understand. Where is he?" She looked around wildly, imagining some strange, Frankensteinian form might suddenly appear from the shadows that cloaked the huge room. "I want to go to him. I don't care what he is, what he looks like. Let me go to him!"
"You must listen carefully, Olga." Sellars sounded even more strained, as though he were clinging to a high place by his fingernails. "Time is short. There is still a lot I haven't told you, crucial things. . . ."
"Then tell me now!"
And as she sat in the big, dark room, the only moving thing in the circle of light, he told her as kindly as possible where her son was and what he was doing. Then he left her alone so he could see to the rest of his own desperate agenda.