"It could be, in part," Kunohara said. "Or even a more practical reason. Because of the risk of getting lost, they are often places that people will avoid, which gives the Grail users greater privacy. But I have seen enough of the various worlds to think that too many repetitions of themes might also mean that the operating system has weighted things in that direction—that these are signs of an emergent order, if you will." He seemed quite involved and excited now, almost feverish. "In the House world, for instance, where I met most of you again. I knew its builders, and much of the artistry of the place was theirs, but the Lady of the Windows? Who also seems a manifestation of your own guardian angel, Jonas? I cannot believe that was built into the original world. No, rather I think it emerged—was brought into being by patterns in the larger system. And look at where you found another gateway in Troy, and an important one—the Temple of Demeter. In the house belonging to the mother of the death-god's bride, at the center of a maze. Both of the tropes Jonas described, in one."
Paul thought he heard now what had caught Martine's attention, a low throbbing hum, barely distinguishable above the murmur of the river. But something else now seemed foremost in Martine's mind. She sat up straighter. "That's right," she said. "You knew we had been summoned there, didn't you? When they met you in the House, Florimel said there was no maze in Troy, but you knew otherwise."
Kunohara nodded, but looked wary. "As I said, it was one of the first simulations the Brotherhood constructed." He frowned. "But how do you know what we said? You were still a prisoner. You were not there."
"Exactly." Martine's face was hard. "It is always strange when people know things who were not present to see them. And you know much about our time in Troy. Paul, did you tell Mr. Kunohara that we were in the Temple of Demeter?"
Martine's open enmity toward their host had been making him uncomfortable, and he was about to say something to set the conversation back on the right track when he realized she had a point. "Not . . . not specifically. I skipped over a lot . . . because I was in a hurry to tell him what happened to the Grail Brotherhood." He felt as though he had suddenly been set adrift once more, his destiny in the hands of others. He turned to Kunohara. "How did you know?"
It was hard to tell exactly what the man's exasperation signified: he was hard to read at the best of times. "Where else could it have been? I practically sent you there myself!"
T4b sat up straight, balling his fists. "Workin' for those Grail people, him? After all, he dupping us?"
"He could be telling the truth," Martine said, raising her hand to calm T4b. "But I wonder. I think perhaps you are not telling us all the truth, Mr. Kunohara." She blinked, distracted for a moment, but did her best to finish her thought. "You did know where we were going, as you said. I suspect that you also had an informant there in Troy and beyond—perhaps even one of our number, although that is an unpleasant thought—and that it was the communication link between you and that informant which I was able to follow back here when everything came apart on the mountain top."
The moment of tension between the two of them, which made the whole room feel hot and close, did not last. Just when it seemed Kunohara must either admit his guilt or launch an angry rebuttal, Martine jerked her head back, staring sightlessly toward the arc of the ceiling and the blanket of gray mist that obscured everything. The humming was now too loud to ignore.
"There are many shapes above us," she said, her voice twisted by surprise. "Many. . . ."
Something thumped heavily on the uppermost curve of the bubble, a dark blotch that made the mists outside swirl. Jointed legs flailed, scrabbling as though they sought to dig through the transparent surface. There were more noises of impact, a few at first, then dozens in rapid succession. Paul tried to scramble to his feet, but the urge to flight was already arrested: slow squirming shapes were all over the bubble and more were landing every moment. Kunohara clapped his hands once and the lights inside the bubble grew bright, so that for the first time they could see the things pressed against the curving roof.
By the shape of the bodies, the long armored abdomens and the blur of beating wings just above their shiny thoraxes, they might have been wasps—but if so, something had gone very wrong. Like the mutated wood lice, there seemed no limit to how many legs they had or how those limbs were arranged. As they crowded in ever-increasing numbers across the bubble, they pressed semihuman faces against the surface, distorted features stretching and squeezing even more alarmingly as they tried to force their way through the barrier.
T4b sprang up, looking for somewhere to retreat, but the wasps covered almost every centimeter of the glassy walls, the foggy sky now replaced with a firmament of plated limbs and drooling, mandibled mouths.
"It's Dread," Martine said, her voice a hopeless murmur. "Dread sent them. He knows we're here."
The weight of the wasp-things was so great now that it seemed to Paul the bubble must collapse at any moment: so many had collected already that they crawled across each other in tangled piles. Some of those caught on the bottom and being crushed to death ran barbed stingers out of their abdomens, driving them over and over into the substance of the bubble, which actually tented inward—giving, but not yet breaking.
Paul grabbed at. Kunohara. "Get them off! For God's sakes, freeze them, whatever. They're going to burst through any moment."
Their host was wild-eyed but clearly struggling for calm. "If I blast them with wind or ice, I will destabilize the house as well and destroy it or send it spinning down the river. We would all be killed."
"You and your bloody realism!" Florimel shouted. "You rich idiots and your toys!"
Kunohara ignored her. As Paul watched he began to move through a series of meaningless gestures, like nothing so much as someone practicing tai chi in a quiet park. For a moment he could not help thinking that the man had gone completely mad; then he realized that Kunohara, his mastery compromised, was running through an inventory of commands, trying to make something work.
"Nothing," Kunohara snarled, and turned in cold fury on Martine. "You, with your accusations. I thought you had doomed yourself by using that device, but you have led them here to my house and doomed me as well." He gestured; a view-window opened in midair. For a moment Paul could not make sense of the boiling, lumpy mass depicted in the window, then he saw that it was a bird's-eye view of the bubble-house, so covered now with the wasp-things that it had lost almost all suggestion of its true shape.
"Look," Kunohara said bitterly. "They are building a bridge between us and the land."
He was right. The massed wasps were extending a tangle of their own squirming bodies out across the moving surface of the river, a squad of suicide engineers giving their own lives to connect the free-floating bubble to the riverside. The wasps on the bottom of the growing pseudopod must be drowning by the hundreds, Paul thought, but more kept dropping out of the air to join them and keep the bridge growing.
But growing toward what? Paul struggled to see through the mist to the dark riverbank, alive with blowing grasses. Kunohara must have had the same thought, for he gestured again and the focus of the window changed, bringing the sandy bank into closer view. There was no grass; it was a solid line of beetle shapes, creatures as horribly distorted as the wasps, an army of thousands upon thousands of malformed crawlers waiting for the wasp-bridge to reach them, Even now, hundreds at the front of the clicking, bumping throng were forming a corresponding chain, climbing atop one another and clutching even as they drowned, struggling out to meet the wasps.