She pulled the lighter from between her breasts and held it up. All the studying of it that she, !Xabbu, and Martine had done while preparing to leave the House had actually taught them very little of its true capabilities—as though a group of aliens had discovered a car and, after much trial and error, learned how to turn on the headlights. Further experimentation might teach her more, might even present her with some way out of her current dilemma, but did she dare risk it? She had scoffed at Jongleur's concerns, but that had mostly been out of loathing for the man. Hearing Dread's voice purring from the lighter—whispering out of something that had been pressed against her skin moments earlier—had made her feel like insects were crawling on her. Could she actually risk announcing her presence to him by trying the communication gear built into the device? The only person she knew besides Dread who was somehow accessing the communications band was Martine, and she had not sounded as though she were in a position to help anyone else.
And what if I reached her? What would I tell her? "Martine, come find me, I'm in the middle of a bunch of gray stuff."
She lifted the lighter and turned it, reflexively trying to catch light that would never angle down in this place. She looked at the ornate "Y," the letter tangled in raised vines and leaves as though it were a statue in a forgotten garden. What had Jongleur said the bastard's name was? Yacoubian. The one who pretty much killed Orlando. She fought a roil in her guts. I hope whatever T4b did to his head hurts him like sin. I hope it never gives him a moment's peace.
She wondered briefly if Yacoubian, too, might be listening silently to the communication band of the device, just waiting for her to reveal herself. The thought was unpleasant, but the idea of Dread sitting somewhere, waiting like a cat for one of the mice to show its whiskers, was far worse.
Just listening to the dead air, grinning. . . .
The idea came an instant later. Renie leaped up and started to put a little distance between herself and Klement, then stopped and—out of some not quite explicable sense of loyalty—told him, "I'm just going a short distance away. I need quiet. Don't say anything, anything at all. I'll be back in just a moment."
He watched her go, incurious as a cow chewing grass.
When she was far enough away that she could still see his dim silhouette, but had created a sense of privacy for herself, she held the lighter up again. Back in the House they had discovered how to bring up the communication band, but she wasn't sure she recalled the sequence. She stared at it with a sense of dull fear, but triggered the combination of touches she remembered. When she had finished, nothing bad happened, but nothing much good happened either. The lighter remained inert and silent. The environment around her seemed unchanged.
Cautiously, holding her breath, she held it up to her ear, then held it out before her and moved it in a slow arc. She could hear nothing but more silence. She let her breath out, then listened again. When she had confirmed her result, she turned herself a few degrees to her right and began the process again.
Dowsing, she thought, amused and disgusted. If I ever have to explain this to someone, I'd better come up with something that sounds closer to engineering,
But there was more to her search than superstition or despair, and nearly halfway through her slow rotation she heard something. It was so faint that she could think of it only as a slightly noisier silence on the communication band, but she definitely thought she could hear a tiny hiss, a noise that, however minuscule, had not been there before.
She swung the lighter a little farther through the arc until the tiny sound was gone again, then continued the rest of the way around, just to be sure. When she came back to the direction she had been facing before, the sound also came back.
If she was going to risk her life on something, she wanted to be as certain as she could be. She looked back to make sure Klement was still where she had left him, a lump of almost invisible shadow perhaps fifteen meters away, then she took off her upper garment and tossed it a meter or so in front of her, in the direction which seemed to produce the noise. She closed her eyes, spun around several times to disorient herself, then began rotating slowly through a circle again, using the lighter as her compass needle. When she felt sure she could hear the soft murmur again, she opened her eyes.
The piece of pale cloth lay right in front of her.
"Right!" She was pleased with herself, but even more pleased to think she had something on which to focus once more. She tied her top on and was about to head off when she turned to look back at Klement. He had not moved He was so still, it seemed like he might never move again.
I should just leave the murdering bastard here, she thought. I'll probably curse myself later if I don't. But the idea of deserting the almost childlike Klement in the middle of this deathly nowhere suddenly seemed wrong, although she could not tell herself why.
Renie shouted, "I'm going off in this direction. I'm not corning back. If you want to follow me, you'd better do it now."
Positive that she had just done something gravely stupid, but still feeling lighter in her heart than she had for hours, she marched out in pursuit of a whisper.
Walking through the endless silver-gray, Sam decided, was in some ways worse than just sitting in it. The plodding along was bad enough—she liked sports, which had a point, but had never much cared for running and hiking, just moving her legs to be moving them—but the lack of landmarks and weather, the failure of the sourceless light to change, made it seem like some torment specifically designed to make Sam Fredericks crazy. For the first time since entering the network she really began to miss eating, not for its own sake, but to mark time passing.
No water, no food, no stopping. After what must have been the first couple of hours, it became a perpetual chant in her head, like the advertising slogan for some particularly awful vacation package. It was also a slight exaggeration, since they did take breaks to rest, in part to allow !Xabbu to pause and listen for whatever vague thing it was that was leading him onward, but the pauses were not much of an improvement on the walking. For part of each stop she was left alone with a silent Jongleur, which was a bit like being left in a room with an unfriendly dog: even when no direct threat was offered, the suggestion of it was always present. Thrown back on her own resources, Sam found it hard to pull her mind away from Orlando and her parents, both now so far out of reach that it was hard to believe her mother and father, unlike Orlando, were still alive and she might see them again someday.
Felix Jongleur marched with the stiff determination of a religious pilgrim. Sam was young and strong, and she guessed he was working hard to keep up with her, but he refused to show it; instead, he made a point of acting impatient when they stopped to let !Xabbu metaphorically sniff the breeze. In a less unpleasant man the stoicism might have been admirable, but to Sam it just made him seem even more coldly removed from normal humanity. She found herself choking back her own weary complaints so as not to show weakness in front of him.
Felix Jongleur might have been struggling to keep up with Sam, but it was clear that !Xabbu was holding himself back to avoid leaving them both behind.
After all the time she had known him in the baboon sim, she was only now starting to grow used to the change. In some ways, !Xabbu in his real body seemed even more exotic than in the form of a monkey. For all his small stature—he was both shorter and more slender than Sam, who was herself slim and only normal height—he seemed quite tireless, moving with such graceful economy that it sometimes seemed he could walk in his sleep if he needed to.