Still light-headed with shock, Paul watched three dim shapes tumble out onto open ground. Someone clutched his hand, then another avalanche of rain swept down, sending bits of leaves whirling into the air even as everything abruptly vanished.
He was sprawled on the virtual tatami mats of the bubble-house in dark night, with bodies all around him. A moment later the lights warmed and Paul crawled toward the nearest of the groaning figures.
"What was that barking fen?" a large shape said, squelching wetly as it sat up, "And where's this?"
Considering that the last time they had been together the teenager had tried to strangle him, Paul would never have dreamed he would be so happy to see T4b, but as soon as he saw the hand with its pale glow sticking out of the baggy one-piece outfit, he felt a kind of joy. He tugged at the skinny, black-haired sim, a form quite different than the Trojan warrior Paul had met before. "Javier? That is you, isn't it? Who else is there? Where's Martine?"
"Paul Jonas?" The voice was Florimel's. "Yes, where is Martine?"
"Over here." T4b crouched beside the third figure. "Don't look good, her."
Martine Desroubins tried to speak, coughed, then succeeded. "I will survive. The transition . . . it overwhelmed me. Paul Jonas, is that truly you? Where are we? I can't make sense of it."
"Yes, it's me." He had been counting heads, but no matter how he tried, he could not make it more than three. He was terrified to ask the next question, but had to know. "Where are the others? Did that horrible thing . . . did the scorpion get them all?"
Florimel sat upright, wearing a fairly generic middle-aged woman's sim, but recognizable by her wounded eye and missing ear. "We have not seen Renie, !Xabbu, Orlando, or Fredericks since . . . since whatever happened on the black mountain."
Paul tried frantically to think of which of the companions he might have forgotten. "But who. . . ? I saw that monster catch someone. . . !"
"It was one of the Grail Brotherhood," Florimel said, "—a man named Jiun. I suppose he thought he could escape while the creature was distracted by you. He misjudged." She looked around again. "Where is this place? How did we come here?"
"Jiun Bhao?" Kunohara said from behind them. All but Paul turned in surprise. "Jiun Bhao, the scourge of Asia, eaten in my garden by a whip scorpion?" He threw back his head and laughed.
"Pretty locked-up sense of humor, you," T4b commented, but he sounded grudgingly impressed by Kunohara's hilarity, which now had their host bent double, hugging his own middle.
"So is it you we owe our gratitude, then?" Martine asked their host.
"You certainly took your time before deciding to help, Kunohara," Paul said angrily.
The man wiped his eyes. "Oh, I am sorry, but it is too sweet. Do you know how many small enterprises Jiun has gobbled himself? How many lives he has crushed in his own claws? Jiun Bhao, eaten by a scorpion, in the rain." He shook his head. "But you are unfair to me, Jonas. I would not have left you to die. I thought I could bring you all back from here, but there are grave problems with the higher levels of my system—doubtless more effects of the larger catastrophe—and I could not move you or your companions remotely. I would even have destroyed the scorpion from a distance if I could, although the creature itself is blameless, but few of my system commands are functioning. That is why I had to come in person, so you could be touching me when I transported back."
"So now we are your guests," Florimel said slowly. "Or are we prisoners?"
"No more than I am." Kunohara sketched a bow. "However, that may prove rather less freedom than any of us would wish."
"There's something I don't understand," said Paul. "Martine, I heard your voice. How were you . . . broadcasting like that?"
The blind woman held up a shiny silver object in her fatigue-trembling hand.
"The lighter!" he said. "But I thought Renie took it from you. . . ."
"It is not the same lighter," Martine said wearily. "I will explain later, if you don't mind."
Kunohara scowled at the device. "You have already done damage by making your presence known with that." He squinted at the stylized monogram. "Yacoubian—the idiot. With his cigars and his short attention span. I should have guessed."
"It would do him no good now, even if he had it," Florimel said with some satisfaction. "Not unless they smoke cigars in hell."
Kunohara frowned. "I will not ask you to give it to me—over such things a delicate alliance might founder. But if you dare to use it again and risk leading your enemy down on top or me, I will eject you from this House and send you back to the scorpion. He is doubtless thawed by now."
"We don't want to use it." Martine's words were slurred by exhaustion. "None of its other functions work now anyway, as far as I can tell. Just the communication." She yawned. "We only want to sleep."
"Very well, then." Kunohara waved his hand. "Sleep. You too, Jonas, since you were wakened by your friends' call. I am not happy with the foolish thing you people have done, but the step is taken now. I will discover what I can and wake you again soon enough."
He vanished, leaving them alone in the wide, curving room with the sounds and distorted motion of the river. T4b looked critically at the modest furnishings and the corpse of the mutated wood louse, which still hung in midair in its little box of light at one end of the room.
"Beats hiding under a leaf, maybe," he said, and stretched out on the floor mat.
"Code Delphi. Start here.
"I am hurrying to record these thoughts. God alone knows when I will have a chance again—everything seems tenuous now, tinged with catastrophe, as though this entire virtual world has tipped from its normal orbit. But I must make the effort to do things well, no matter how I feel time slipping away. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be Renie, always driven to move forward. . . .
"I believe I had recorded most of the events in Troy and atop the black mountain when we were interrupted by the scorpion. Now I will try to make some kind of sense out of how we left the mountain and what has happened since. There is little chance that I will ever recover these subvocalizations tossed out into the ether of the network, but I have always ordered my life this way, although usually with a more conventional journal, and it is a crutch I prefer not to do without.
"That is a thought, is it not? All my life, I have found my solace and my sanity in talking to machines, and through them to myself. Psychologically transparent, I suppose, and rather grim.
"Enough.
"In the final moments on the peak of the black mountain, as what we could perceive of reality fractured around us, I found myself consumed by images and feelings—powerful sensations as overwhelming as a demonic possession. I suspect now, after talking to Florimel and the others, that somehow my altered senses were perceiving the attack on the Other by Dread—to me it was a phantasm of bird shapes and shadows and the voices of screaming children, and surges of pain and horror for which there are no words. Whether or not the Other is the lonely thing I met in the controlled darkness of the Pestalozzi Institute when I was a child, and no matter what it has done to the old hacker Singh or anyone else, I feel pity for it—yes, pity, even if it is only some kind of highly evolved machine. I can think of almost nothing more pathetic than hearing it sing that old nursery rhyme, that bit of an old fairy tale. But whether it is good or bad or something less straightforward, its agonies nearly killed me.
"As the Other fought to protect itself against Dread's attack, things were happening all around me which I have had to reconstruct from the accounts of others. T4b's successful attack on one of the Grail Brotherhood—apparently an American general named Yacoubian, the true owner of our access device—will bear much considering, since somehow the strange thing that happened to our young companion's hand when we were in the patchwork simworld before the House allowed him to . . . I do not know. Disrupt Yacoubian's control over the virtual environment? Break down the protective algorithms that all the Brotherhood until recently enjoyed?