"Oh, my," said Sellars. "Is that . . . do I hear . . . Orlando Gardiner?"
Orlando grinned sourly. "Pretty scanny, huh?"
"Explanations must wait until later—if there is such a thing as later," Sellars told him. "The operating system is failing, preparing for its own destruction. I need to make direct contact with it now. That is our only hope to preserve the system long enough to get you out, and it's a very thin hope. Quick, now. I saw some trace of a contact, just minutes ago, between your group and the innermost workings of the system."
"Yes, Renie Sulaweyo is there, in the center of it. That is who we were speaking to with the access device," Florimel said heavily. "But Jongleur has taken it."
Paul waited for Sellars to say something, anything, but the voice that spoke through Cho-Cho's virtual body had gone silent. "So is that it?" Paul asked at last. "We were ready to give up before we heard your voice. Is that all you've got to give us?"
"I am thinking, damn it," Sellars snapped. "But I confess I am at a loss. I have tried everything possible on my end, but the conscious part of the operating system has isolated itself and won't respond to me."
Paul turned to Martine Desroubins, who seemed to be listening with only half her attention. "Martine, you told me how you found your way out of that other strange world—how you and !Xabbu managed to open a gateway. Could you do it again?"
"Open . . . a gateway. . . ?" The pain in her voice was palpable. She and Sellars both sounded like they were trying to carry on business while being stung to death by bees. "Renie . . . !Xabbu . . . they are . . . beyond any gateway, I think."
"But you had the communicator in your hand." Paul leaned closer, trying to keep her focused. "Can't you . . . feel it? You said when we came back from the mountain to Kunohara's world that you fell a connection, sensed it with your mind somehow—that you held on so we could follow it back. Come on, Martine, you can do things none of the rest of us can do! We have no other chance!"
"Do it," T4b said. He put out a hand and touched the blind woman's fingers. She flinched a little, startled. "Be strong. Don't want to get sixed, us—not yet!"
"But that connection to Kunohara's world was alive," Martine said weakly. "I caught it just before it faded!"
"Try," Paul urged her. "We need you. No one else can do it."
"He's right," Florimel said, but gently. "It is in your hands."
"It is not fair." Martine shook her head violently. "Already, the pain . . . I cannot . . . bear it."
Paul crawled to her side and put his arms around her. "You can," he said. "You have already done miracles. For God's sake, Martine, what's one more?"
She put her hands in front of her face. "When I did not care," she whispered hoarsely, "I did not hurt so much." She shook her head as Paul started to speak. "No. Do not bother to say it. I must have silence."
Renie stared at the lighter in baffled fury. The orange moon hung low in the sky, a mocking face. "No! I heard her—you heard her, too! She was right there!"
"I did hear her," !Xabbu said. "But I heard Jongleur's voice as well."
"What happened?" Renie could not reconcile the extremes—the joy of hearing Martine speak, the moment of exhilarating contact with their friends, then the ugly surprise of hearing Felix Jongleur's voice bark out something about a priority override. And now. . . .
"Nothing," she said, running through the sequences again. "It's dead."
!Xabbu reached out his hand. Renie passed it to him, then turned her eyes back to the minuscule form of the dying mantis. "I hope you're happy," she snarled down at it. "Our friends are gone now. If I wasn't certain it was Jongleur who did it—if I thought it was you. . . ."
Dying. The everywhere-and-nowhere voice was so faint now as to be almost inaudible. Tried to last . . . until the children . . . could be . . . saved.
"The children?" Renie asked bitterly. "You haven't saved any children. Didn't you hear? Jongleur, the man who built you—he's in charge again now."
No. The devil. Still . . . the devil. The one who hurts and hurts. . . .
"I feel something," !Xabbu said quietly.
"What?"
"I . . . I am not certain. Distant." He frowned and closed his eyes. "Like a faint spoor. Like the musk of an antelope on the wind, half a day away." His eyes opened wide. "The string game! Someone is asking about the string game!"
"What are you talking about?" Renie began, and then she remembered. "Martine! Isn't that how you and Martine. . . ?"
He closed his eyes again. "I can feel something, but it is so . . . difficult."
No. The wind-murmur of the mantis voice had become a little stronger. No, you must not open us again to . . . to. . . .
"Shut up!" Renie squirmed in anger. "Our friends are trying to call us!"
The mantis struggled up onto its bent-twig legs. The tiny eyes were filmed, dark. You will lead the devil here too soon—steal the last moments. . . .
"I think I am losing it." !Xabbu held the lighter so tightly Renie could see his knuckles bulging, pale against his brown skin. "She is so far away!"
Will not . . . must not . . . No!
"Stop it!" Renie said, then the desert began to melt around them, the dark night colors, the amber moon, even the flaring stars all smearing. "Stop!"
It was too late. The sky and the ground ran together, swirling as though someone had dipped a stick into a paint pot and begun to stir. Renie threw out her hand to seize the tiny insect but it was simultaneously growing and dwindling, dominating everything even as it receded, shrank, became a tiny spot of nothing that sped away before her.
After a long chaotic moment the world came to rest again.
"!Xabbu?" she breathed, swaying with dizziness.
"I am here, Renie." His hand touched hers, clutched, held.
They were still in the desert, !Xabbu's imaginary Kalahari, but now it was somehow also the pit in which Renie had spoken to the false Stephen. The stars, moments ago so bright, were now almost unimaginably distant, faint as the last embers of a fire. Renie and !Xabbu crouched on a rim of earth that had been the outskirt of the dry pan, but the land had stretched up above them into the walls of the pit, and the gulley and its tiny trickle of stream had dropped away far beyond their reach, half a hundred meters below their ledge. Despite the distance and the dying stars, the light had the impossible clarity of a dream. Renie saw that the shape huddled beside the stream didn't resemble a mantis any longer, but neither was it a child. It was something else entirely, something not quite definable-small, dark, and very much alone.
All will die. The breathy voice rose up like smoke. Could not . . . save the children.
A glimmering silver something lay on the rough gray stone floor of the pit, as hopelessly beyond reach as though it were on one of the stars overhead. As she watched it, it suddenly sprouted legs. Like a tiny metallic beetle, it crept away from the child-thing, limping blindly until it toppled over the edge into the river and was gone.
The lighter, Renie realized. The little flicker of hope she had felt in the desert finally went out. We've lost it. We've lost everything.
"This is the sun," !Xabbu murmured beside her. For a moment, she thought he was talking to her, but his eyes were shut, and what he said made no sense. "Yes. And now it moves lower. Fingers so, thumbs wide. There—it sets behind the hills."