He looked down into the pit. "The light is still there."
Renie rolled her eyes. "All right. I surrender. But you're not going by yourself."
The surrender did not become immediately effective. Renie was reluctant to let him go, and would have happily made another experiment with the potentials of virtuality, but !Xabbu held her to her bargain. At last, with much protest, she allowed him to help her up onto her feet.
"It is just so nice," she said lazily. "That's why I don't want to go anywhere. Just so nice to be . . . human for a while. Not running for our lives. Not frightened."
He smiled and squeezed her hand. "Perhaps that is a difference between us. I am happy with you, Renie—so happy I cannot say. But I will not feel completely safe until I know what is around us. In the desert we know every bush, every spoor, every drift of sand."
She squeezed back, then let him go. "All right. But go slowly, please, and let's be careful. I am truly exhausted—and you are partially to blame."
"I hear you, Porcupine."
"You know," she said as they walked down to the place where the path ended, "I think I'm beginning to like that."
!Xabbu was staring at the rocks below the path. Either because of the change in the lights or some subtler and more profound shift of the whole environment, the climb down did not look as impossibly steep as it had before. "I think I see a way down," he said. "It will not be easy. Are you sure you would not rather wait for me?"
"If I'm going to respect your wish to climb up and down things for no good reason," she replied calmly, "then you had better learn that I don't get left behind very well,"
"Yes, Porcupine." He squinted down the stones. "Do you mind if I go first?"
"Hell, no."
It took them the better part of what Renie guessed was half an hour, but she was grateful to discover that her first impression had been right: it was not a bad climb, especially to someone who had survived the trip down the black mountain, just one that needed care. With !Xabbu beneath her, pointing out handholds and places stable enough to stop and take a short rest, they reached the bottom with no mishaps.
The bottom of the pit was strangely smooth, more like something that had melted and cooled than like the bottom of any true canyon. Renie looked up at the stars and the circle of dark sky far above. The distance was dizzying. She started to say something to !Xabbu about the climb back to the ledge—she was already wondering whether she could make it back without a long rest—but he held up his hand, asking for silence.
Seen up close, the hole in the wall was more than a crack. At its narrow top the crevice stretched to four or five times her height, and the opening, aglow with peach-colored light, was wide enough to drive a car through.
!Xabbu walked toward it with quiet care. The light seemed to roll over him like something liquid, so that all she could see was his slender silhouette. Suddenly afraid, she hurried to catch up to him.
As they stepped through the crevice Renie found herself in a high corridor of raw stone, a gouge so full of soft radiance that at first she could see nothing. After a moment, she thought she could make out a pattern to the light, as though the walls of the corridor were full of sealed alcoves, each one holding a little core of brilliance.
What are they? she wondered. It's like a beehive. There must be hundreds of them . . . thousands. . . .
"I heard your speaking and your other noises," said a quiet, strange voice behind them. Renie whirled. "I thought—I questioned . . . wondered? . . . when you would come."
Standing in the mouth of the crevice, blocking their escape, stood a tall man. Dazzled by surprise and the glow all around them, it took Renie a moment to recognize him and the malformed thing he was holding.
It was Ricardo Klement.
"Okay, so the Other was floating around in some kind of satellite and the Grail network data was shooting up to it and back on special lasers or something. Chizz. And then the Other flew the satellite down and crashed it, so Jongleur's blown up and dead." Sam was trying hard to sort through all the new information. "That's utterly chizz. But Dread isn't. Dead, I mean."
"I said I don't know," Sellars told her. "I am trying to find out what happened to him, but it may take a while. . . ."
"Right. We don't know about Dread, so that's not so chizz. But are you telling us that we saved the Other just so he could kill himself?" She shook her head. "Man, that's impacted!"
"We did not save him," Sellars said. "The Other had suffered too much, first from Jongleur and the Grail Brotherhood, then from the man called Dread. He had already decided he did not want to live. Such things . . . such things happen." There was a strange tone in the man's voice that Sam did not understand. She turned to Orlando to see if he had heard it too, but her friend was staring down at the path as though he feared stumbling. "When I first brought Cho-Cho online, while I struggled with the network's defense systems, the Other fooled me. I thought all his attention was on fighting me, but while I was busy trying to understand him and his strategy and struggling to repel his attacks, he was preparing to use me. When I accessed the data tap and was temporarily overwhelmed by the magnitude of information, he was ready.
"If he had wanted to, he could have killed me easily then—but he wanted something quite different. He reached through my connection into Felix Jongleur's central control system for the network—the one part that had been expressly shielded from him, and which included the mechanisms that kept him imprisoned. By the time I understood what was happening he had already wrenched the satellite out of orbit and begun his carefully-aimed descent. By that point there was nothing that could have saved him: gravity had already signed the warrant."
"How horrible!" Sam could hardly bear to think about it. "He must have been so unhappy!"
Martine had been walking between them like a zombie, but now she stirred. "He had . . . a little peace at the end. I felt that. I do not think I would still be here if I had not."
"You did not feel . . . everything, did you?" Sellars slowed his downward progress until he hung near her. "I hope you did not have to suffer through the very last moments."
She shook her head wearily. "He pushed me away. Before the end."
"Pushed you away?" Sellars looked at her with his sharp yellow eyes. Sam could not help wondering if it was their true color. "Was there . . . contact of some other kind? Did he say something?"
"I do not wish to speak of it," Martine said flatly.
"But if the Other is gone, why is all this still here?" asked Orlando. He too seemed troubled. "I mean, this place was all . . . a dream, wasn't it? The Grail network was kind of like his body, but this part was the inside of his mind, right? So why isn't it gone? Why isn't everything around us gone?"
"And if the network goes, you will go, too—that is what you are thinking, isn't it, Orlando Gardiner?" Sellars' voice was kind. "It's a good question. And the answer has two parts, both important. The second part I will save until we reach the bottom of this pit, for reasons of my own. But the fact is that I had prepared for this day a long time—I just never thought I would have the chance to use any of those preparations. I did not know the true nature of the Other until today, of course, but I knew it was at least quasi-sentient and dangerous. I also knew that the network might not survive without it. The physical records of the system are safe—they are stored in room after room of processors in the headquarters of the Telemorphix Corporation. Thanks to the late Robert Wells, the hard code of the network and the simulations is relatively safe."