Her eyes were huge, and she hung back. “What if I promise not to run?”
“I'm sorry,” he said. “Were I you, I would promise anything and run at the first opportunity. You may be more agile than I, and though you could never escape the castle, you might evade me for a time. Droam would soothe its impatience with my pain.”
She bowed her head, and he locked the collar around her neck. The dogs jumped against the gratings of their runs and implored him to take them, too. “Be good, puppies,” he said. “You can't go this time. I'll be back soon.”
They walked through the bright corridors of the castle, the leash slack between them. Sundee Gareaux looked about curiously. Few of the castle's staff were abroad so early in the evening, but they passed a party of dwarf janitors armed with mop buckets and sonic brooms, a white-bearded wizard and his youthful assistant, three trolls who stood in a dark doorway and sniggered, a red-haired witch magnificent in the glittering habit of the Dark Mystery. His prisoner studied each passerby closely.
“All dead,” she said in a marveling voice.
“In a sense. They believe themselves to be alive.” To his amazement, he felt slightly defensive.
“I'm bewildered,” she said. “But they don't seem to be enjoying their immortality; they all wear sad, bitter faces.”
“You don't see why?” The long, empty years weighed on him. “I'll explain, so you won't think us the Fortunate Folk.” It could be worse for you, Sundee Gareaux, he thought. Perhaps you'll find your own fate more acceptable if I tell you about us.
“Droam is staffed by a few more than three thousand human revenants. Is there a Picker village that big? No? Does that seem a great many people to you?” He laughed a booming laugh, and she winced. “Oh, it would be, if our halflives lasted no longer than yours. Seventy years, eighty — is that a good span for a Picker? We've been together here in Droam for seven hundred years. Can you imagine? Imagine! And consider who we are. Murderers, rapists, torturers, those who stole things so precious that they were put to death for it. Merm, for example, was a high sheriff. He enslaved young boys and girls with spurious charges, used them brutally, and when they were worn out, he buried their bodies on his prison farm. He swears they found only a fraction of his victims, and they found a thousand! Do you wonder at the evil you see in his face?”
Sundee Gareaux watched him with a mixture of pity and horror, her face white, her lips bloodless.
He continued, pushed by a passion he had thought worn away forever.
“Did you think I exaggerated my crimes? No! And I was a paragon of nobility, compared to many here in Droam: I stole only from the wealthy; I used violence only on the violent; I attacked only those who could defend themselves. I admit I was a quixotic pirate, but I did not wish to think of myself as a monster. Hah!” Had he tear ducts, he might have cried; instead he slammed his fist against the wall. The smooth marble facing shattered explosively, revealing the rough concrete beneath.
She stood at the farthest extent of the leash, hands pressed to her mouth. A chip of marble had nicked her cheek and caused a small trickle of blood.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I've become overexcited. I'll calm myself; don't be afraid.”
“Why don't you run away?” For the first time, her voice carried no undertone of hatred. “Surely there are boats.”
“Oh yes. Fairy boats drift on the River Dark, and the Elf King's funeral galley hangs in slings under his pavilion on the Quiet Shore. You don't understand. Droam knows where each of us is at all times; with a thought, it could terminate me. Or punish me terribly. And of course, we cannot preserve our personalities without Droam; without access to Droam's refresher circuits and energy nodes, we would all fade away. If I left or Droam were destroyed — in five years or ten, I'd be gone.”
“Does it know your thoughts, too?”
“No. We have that much privacy. It can speak directly to our minds; but to reply, we must direct our thoughts into a special mode. This is true only because so many direct linkages would spread Droam's intellect too thin; it might diffuse away into nothing. Though for a fact there's been some migration; some of our darkness has seeped into Droam over the years.” He sighed.
They walked on in silence. When they were nearly to the audience hall, she spoke again. “I still don't understand. Why did they fill their resort with horrors?”
“They aimed for a quality of 'dark glamour'; they succeeded, but that sort of thing went out of vogue…”
In the audience hall, she was silent until they approached the nexus pit. “What is it?” she asked.
“Droam. Its brain, in essence.” He detected a sudden tension in her body, and tightened his grip on the leash. “Restrain yourself, Sundee Gareaux. What you're considering would do no good. Look carefully; see how the force bubble diffracts the light? If you jump over the wall, the bubble will prevent you from falling onto the nexus, unless you now weigh ten times what you weighed when last I carried you. That much mass might, I think, overload the bubble.” He tugged at the leash. “Resides, if you kill Droam, I will die. You wouldn't want that on your conscience.” He meant it as a joke, but her face was full of baffled despair.
Droam's hulk waited beside the probe. “Ah,” it said. “Our guest.”
THE PROBE confirmed Droam's worst fears. Sundee Gareaux's tribe was desperate; they had no choice but to try to occupy the island. Aandred watched the deliberations of several village councils, through Sundee Gareaux's eyes. Each group of grim old men and women came to the same conclusion: settlers would be sent to the island they called Neverland, despite the terrifying legends.
Aandred learned an interesting thing about Sundee Gareaux: she was the leading tribal authority on the decaying synthetic ecologies that infested the Sea of Islands. So she had been chosen to go ashore with the first exploratory party.
…she stood on the beach, holding her husband tight, forcing back tears for his sake. “Don't worry; we'll be fine. No one's been to Neverland for eighty years or more. The monsters have probably all broken down — entropy’s on our side.” She looked down at her son, a sturdy two-year-old with flame-red hair and a truculent expression. “You'll be in more danger than I will, I think. Be careful, and keep a close eye on our own little monster.” She ruffled the fiery hair, picked the child up for a last hug. He clung to her, though ordinarily he would have struggled to escape. His father pulled him gently away, and she waded through the surf to the waiting boat. She waved, until they crossed the reef into blue water and the figures on the beach were lost in the light…
Once again Aandred found himself in the grip of some powerful alien emotion. It was so difficult to identify, without the somatic tags that living humans took for granted. Were he alive, would he feel tears on his cheeks, would he feel a great pressure in his throat, would his chest heave with suppressed sobs? He could not say, but he was almost blind with it, whatever it was. He looked down at Sundee Gareaux's pale, dreaming face, and the pressure of the unknown emotion increased to an unbearable level.
He shuddered. Droam was speaking to him. “…so I’ll leave the organization of the teams to you — this was your area of expertise, not so? We'll take the galley, knock them back one island at a time. We'll kill as many as we can, burn the fields, blow up the reefs, poison the wells. We won’t get them all, of course, but it will be many generations before they breed back enough to be dangerous.”
The situation becomes unreal, Aandred thought. He felt like a shadow; in a tragic farce. “A large undertaking,” he muttered.
“But necessary. Report your progress tomorrow; be ready to sail in three days.”