"Utterly right." Besides, what was the alternative? Waiting here forever in this fog, hoping something helpful would happen? That wasn't what Orlando or Renie would have done.
Jongleur looked carefully at !Xabbu. Sam did not need any particular insight this time to read the man's mind. He was trying to decide whether !Xabbu was lying to him, or was crazy, or maybe just wrong. Sam could never feel pity for a nasty creature like Jongleur, but she could almost guess what it would be like to suspect everyone and everything. It was an ugly, miserable thing to imagine.
"Lead, then." Jongleur, even naked, conveyed the impression of a king granting a favor to a peasant. "Anything is better than this."
The third time, Renie almost didn't find her way back. It was strange to be using the shambling, brain-damaged Ricardo Klement as her lodestone, even stranger to experience a flush of pleasure and relief when she saw his seated form appear out of the nothingness.
But what if he'd moved? she asked herself. Even if I found him again, I wouldn't be coming back to the same spot. It might be a spot !Xabbu and Sam had already checked, and they might be looking for me in the old spot. . . .
This was all presuming that her two friends were still alive—that they hadn't simply been swallowed or drezzed somehow by the network, whatever damned part of it this was. But she couldn't afford to think about that alternative much.
She couldn't really risk wandering anymore, either. Not that it made any difference—the seamless, monotonous gray went on and on, the invisible earth or floor continued, flat as a tabletop; silence and emptiness reigned. So she would either stay put, or move and keep moving.
It would have been an exaggeration to say Klement seemed glad to see her—he lifted his head slightly at her return—but there was no question he knew she was there: his eyes followed her, and he changed his position subtly after she sat down a few meters away, as if to designate a space between them—space that in a world with anything in it at all might have held a campfire.
Renie would have given one of her arms for a campfire. She would have added another limb and perhaps even a few organs to have !Xabbu and Sam seated around that fire with her.
I shouldn't have been thinking about how few of us there were left-—tempting fate. Now look what's left. Me. And . . . that.
Ricardo Klement gazed back at her, so still and silent that it was like looking at a picture in a museum. The last thing you would ever imagine was that it would speak.
"What . . . are you?" Klement asked.
Renie flinched in surprise; it took her a moment to respond. "What am I?" It was hard to talk: her voice was hoarse from shouting for her lost companions. "What do you mean? I'm a woman. I'm an African woman. I'm someone you and your group of rich friends . . . hurt." There were no words to express the feelings in her about Stephen, and the helplessness of the last hours had only made it worse than usual.
Klement stared. There was something moving behind the eyes, but it was deep, deep down. "That is . . . a long name," he said at last. "It seems . . . long."
"Name?" Jesus Mercy, she thought, that Ceremony scorched his brains properly, didn't it? "That's not my name, it's what I. . . ." She stopped and took a breath. "My name. . . ?" She wasn't sure she wanted to tell him, although she had given up on anonymity long ago. There was something galling in the way this thing, whatever had gone wrong with its mind, presumed to a kind of childlike innocence. Did this increase in conviviality mean that the old Ricardo Klement was beginning to surface, or simply that the new, damaged version was becoming more comfortable with its faculties?
"My name is Renie," she said at last.
Klement did not respond, but did not take his eyes off her either, as though forming an elaborate visual picture to go with the newly-filed name.
Renie sighed. This damaged man was the least of her problems. After what seemed like half a day in the void, nothing had changed. She had shouted until her voice was a husk, she had walked dozens of small circuits, all to no result. There wasn't anything you could call land, let alone landmarks, no directed light, no sound other than that which she made herself. But if I stay here, I'll die here. Or else Stephen's heart will finally fail and he'll die in that hospital bed, which will make what happens to me pointless. With the endless gauzy mist before her, it was hard not to see her dear Stephen's face, but it was the bad face that came to her—the sightless eyes and ashy skin, the slack jaw propped by the respirator. Drying up, curling. Like a fish pulled out of the water and thrown in the dirt. Dear God, please don't let that be the last Stephen that I see.
But if she couldn't accomplish anything, what good was she? It was hard to understand how a Renie lost in nothingness, with nothing to act upon, even existed. Still, what choice did she have? She had no tools, nothing but the lighter, and although she had tried several times to open a gateway, it remained as frustratingly inert as before.
"Where . . . is this . . . place?" Klement asked.
Renie cursed silently, then decided she deserved at least this small pleasure and cursed again out loud. She would have to be prepared for his occasional startling remarks, it seemed.
"I don't know. I don't know anything. Jongleur already said we weren't in the network, and this is . . . even more not in the network, I guess." She peered at him. "You don't understand any of this, do you?"
"That is also a long name. Names of places . . . speaking them . . . usually they are not so long."
She sighed and shook her head. She was beginning to think she liked him better when all he could say was "I am Ricardo Klement."
Renie turned her mind back to the pressing problem of being nowhere at all, and spent a silent quarter of an hour or so going back over everything that had happened since she had last been with !Xabbu and the others, but she could find nothing on which to form a theory of how they had become separated. The slippery grayness around her looked very much like the silver cloudbank they had seen girdling the mountain, but that did not explain how the mountain itself had vanished, or where her companions had gone. She had simply slept, then woke up in this different circumstance. Could the strange dream have something to do with it? She tried to remember the details, the rushing chaos, the long darkness, the heartening appearance at last of those ephemeral presences, but it already seemed vague and distant. In any case, it explained nothing.
So it was a conundrum. A sort of locked-room problem in reverse, if this had been a mystery story—not how to get into a locked room, but how to get out of total nothingness into something . . . into anything at all.
The only things she possessed were the scraps of clothing she had made from Orlando's garments and the lighter. But the lighter would not summon gateways, which would be the most obviously useful thing to do. Could it help her in some other way?
If I had a cigarette, I could light it, she thought grumpily.
A sudden thought came to her. The pale emptiness around her, unnatural and apparently endless—could this be the White Ocean that Paul Jonas and others had spoken about? The network's children had talked of it as a mythical place, something to cross to get to a kind of promised land. Did that mean there was something on the other side of this emptiness? That was a heartening thought. But even if it were true, that still didn't give her any idea how to get there.