"There is no telling." !Xabbu took a deep breath. "About stories, I mean. Where they come from. Where they go. But if we do not ask for too much, then yes—I think that in our story, happiness is most possible."
And as if he had heard !Xabbu and agreed, Stephen tightened his fingers on hers.
CHAPTER 52
The Oracle Surprised
NETFEED/ADVERTISEMENT: Uncle Jingle—Down But Not Out!
(visuaclass="underline" Uncle Jingle crawling out of rubble of burned and shattered building.)
JINGLE: "Okay, I admit it looks bad for ol' Uncle J. Good thing I didn't forget to duck." (coughs) "I guess when I said I was going to blow up high prices at every Jingleporium, someone took it a bit too seriously! But now I'm asking you to help your Uncle out, kids. We have to rebuild, so I can keep making you and your friends the happiest kids alive. How can you help? Buy stuff! Buy lots and lots of stuff!"
"Code Delphi. Start here.
It is daylight outside, but here in the deeps of my mountain I cannot see it. I have been back in my body for forty-eight hours. I have taken three baths, eaten two small meals, thrown them both up, spent six or seven of those forty-eight hours weeping with terrible, agonizing muscle cramps. My body is not entirely happy that I have returned to tenancy.
"I am weak as a mouse.
"Still, I have also—with Sellars' help—recovered my journal entries. I never thought to hear them again. Unable to sleep, or even to rest comfortably, I have paced slowly back and forth across the floors of my subterranean home, listening to them.
"It is the voice of another woman. I know her, but I am not her. Already those hours, those mad worlds, seem like a dream. A terrible dream, yes, but a dream nevertheless.
"The one who spoke that journal, left that record of her thoughts and fears—that Martine was blind, but she could see things others could only imagine. The Martine who hears those entries now, who makes this new record, this Martine can see. But she is blind to all that the other Martine had and much of what she knew.
"I can see. I am more blind than ever. I . . . I cannot. . . ."
"Back now. I had to go for a little while and now I am lying down in the dark. It is still so hard to see things, so hard. My head aches with it, my new vision blurs. Someone, I cannot remember who, once told me, 'Every injury is a gift, every gift an injury.' Some cursed therapist or eye doctor, probably, but oh! It is so true, so true, now that I understand.
"The Other . . . he was the one who took my sight from me so long ago. I understand that now, understand the puzzled doctors, the unanswered questions beneath the diagnosis of hysterical blindness. I do not think he did it cruelly, or even accidentally, in the way Sellars believes he plunged children into comas, trying only to make them quiet and tractable. No, he was with me there in the darkness of the Pestalozzi Institute, with me in a way I could not understand at the time—in my ears, but also in my mind. And when the lights came on, dazzling me, hurting me so that I shrieked and shrieked, he tried to do a kind thing. He made the light go away.
"Dying, he has given it back to me.
"He touched me at the end, at least I think he did. I felt him as I had not felt him since I was a child. For a moment, a brief instant, we were children again together, both afraid of the dark. He . . . touched me as he gave himself up. He touched me, then he was gone.
"I wish I had been with him at the end, riding down the night sky in flames like a bolt of divine lightning. Perhaps then I would have gone too, dissolved in that great fiery tantrum. It would be a simple solution. I long for a simple solution, although I am far too cowardly to effect one myself.
"Listen—Martine is talking to herself again, as always. Alone. In darkness by choice, even though I can now see. Back in my world beneath the world.
"For the others, life goes on. Sellars and his friend Ramsey and Hideki Kunohara, already they are busily organizing how things will be. Renie and Florimel have loved ones to attend to—they do not need me now. What use would I be, anyway? I thought once I could help Paul Jonas. I realized, even if he did not, that there was no life for him offline. I even daydreamed that if we survived we could make a sort of life together in the network—a virtual life, but a life. The witch and the wanderer. The patron spirits of the Otherland.
"Now everything has changed. Paul is dead and I have lost the thing that made me different, made me valuable. With my sight no longer suppressed, my brain struggles to make new connections, remake old ones. The Otherland information, which I could once read like a bloodhound sniffing the wind, now means nothing to me—less than nothing, because with my new eyes I can barely see what is apparent to others.
"I have listened to my journal. I will listen to it again, I suppose, even though I no longer know the woman who spoke those words. There is little else to do. Perhaps one day I will go out into the real world and explore it with my new eyes. Perhaps that is something to live for. Perhaps.
"But for a moment I had a world for myself. I had friends—comrades. Now they have their lives back. We will talk, of course—such a bond does not disappear overnight, or even quickly—but the uncomfortable truth is that they had lives to go back to and I did not. We lived through terrifying time, in a place of unbelievable danger and terror. But I was alive there. I mattered there. Now . . . what?
"It is hard to think. It is easier to rest. It is easier to keep to familiar darkness.
"Code Delphi. End here."
Renie settled into the cushioned seat and wished she was using better gear.
All those weeks in a perfect imitation of reality just so I could feel myself being gouged, slammed, shredded. Now that there's something nicer to feel, I'm linked in from a sidewalk VR shop and I can't experience it properly.
"I thought the others told me your bubble-house was destroyed," she said to Hideki Kunohara. She gestured at the huge, round table, at the view through the hemispherical roof of the towering outsized trees and of the river like a surging ocean all around. "You rebuilt it quickly."
"Oh, this one is much bigger," he said, amused. "Since we needed a meeting place, I thought I would accommodate it in my new construction." He settled back in his chair. "I remember your friend—!Xabbu, I believe?—but I do not know your other guest."
"This is Jeremiah Dako." Renie waited while Jeremiah leaned across her and shook Kunohara's hand. "If it hadn't been for him and two others, !Xabbu and I wouldn't have survived to attend this . . . meeting."
"This is quite amazing." Jeremiah seemed stunned by the hallucinatory size of the forest. "And you were really here all the time you were in that tank, Renie? We had no idea."
"Not just here—but yes, the network is a pretty overwhelming place." She frowned slightly. "And you're not even getting a very good idea of what it can really be like. Why are we here like this? We could have arranged to use much better gear."
"You must ask your friend Sellars," Kunohara said. "He should join us any moment."
"I am here." Sellars, still in his wheelchair, appeared at one end of the large table. "Apologies—things are very, very busy. What is it they must ask me?"
"Why we couldn't use better gear," Renie said. "Our friend Del Ray Chiume would have been happy to arrange some VR rigs through his UN connections, and they'd be a lot better than what we're experiencing."
"It was not the quality of the gear I objected to," Sellars told her. "And in the future we will certainly arrange better access for you. But for various reasons I did not think it a good idea for you to be using United Nations equipment, even arranged by a friend."