Time's Dark Laughter Part 3

They knew! How did they know? Could he deny it? Could he run? A dozen lightning calculations ran through Joshua's mind as Fleur continued speaking.

". . . So the question remains: are you that Human? And if so, why have you come back now?"

Josh felt on such shaky ground that he decided limited truth was the safest recourse. "It wasn't senseless vandalism at all-we were freeing our people who didn't want to be here."

There was a great murmuring among the inquisitors.

Bishop Ninjus, the Neuroman with the reptilian armor plates, blurted out, "Quark's Charm, you mean to say it was you?"

"Besides," went on Josh, emboldened a bit by the stir he had created, "what's all this about a queen? There never was a queen. That was a lie-it was just the kidnapped Human brains you wired together into your computer that you called the Queen." Josh didn't really even understand exactly what a computer was but that was how Jasmine had explained it. He was unsure now, though, for his questioners quieted down so quickly.

"Who told you this?" growled Ninjus.

"Gabriel," Josh returned. He tried to keep his voice cool, but he was getting scared again. Gabriel was the ANGEL Josh had surprised next to the Communion Room five years earlier, just after he had unplugged Rose from the cable in her head. Gabriel had said there was no queen- the new intelligence that ruled the City was simply the po-tentiation of all the captive Human brains, integrated by a computer.

He recalled now, too, that Rose had always remained rather quiet on the matter, never saying much one way or the other. Josh a.s.sumed her reticence was akin to Ollie's- a desire to forget the entire episode-until her last visit to Josh. Suddenly she had been full of the Queen this and the Queen that-as if there really were a queen, a real person, and not just a roomful of connected brains.

What had she said that night? "Josh, I need you. Come with me to the City."

"I can't. There's nothing for me there."

"I am there," she had said. "I am there waiting for you now. Come with me, come to me."

It was strange. Josh recalled thinking even then how odd she sounded, almost as if she weren't Rose at all. And then that night she had taken his helmet, and then the spells began. Josh blinked at his inquisitors.

After conferring briefly, the five stood. The Vampires still had not spoken. They walked up to Joshua and remained on either side of him, while Fleur put a metal cap on the Human's head and took measurements of some kind. Josh sat quite still, afraid almost to breathe. He thought to himself: The Word is great, the Word is One.

After thirty minutes of this, they all left, and before Josh knew what was happening, he was taken back to his cell.

Fleur and Elspeth left the meeting in low spirits. Of all the ANGELs in The City With No Name, Fleur was the most delicate. He was Neuroman, of course, and had taken pains to engineer the most elegant detail into his own construction. Willow-thin, he moved like a cool breeze in a dark place. His skin was a translucent pink, so that light from the sun or moon would glow directly through his body, casting subtle shadows off the fine network of nerves that laced his limbs like the veins of a leaf. This was Fleur.

Elspeth was quite another matter. She was the senior a.s.sociate Neuroman Genetic Engineer, Liege, et Sage-and almost disarmingly gross. Her external body parts had been built specifically out of proportion to one another-one huge hand, one stunted; asymmetric eyes and a malformed nose in a misshapen head. That is to say, she had had herself built to resemble an Accident, in order to instill fear and loathing in those she met, as well as to give them cause to underestimate her intelligence. It was a successful mask. It had served her well through many wars and intrigues, moving her, over two centuries, up and down the corridors of power. Until finally she had come to rest here-as chief adviser to the Queen of The City With No Name, directing the future of the world. In her long life, she had had few friends.

Fleur was her friend. An unlikely combination, by all accounts, yet it was so. They traded hopes, impressions, and glances just like the oldest, or youngest, lovers. And the grandest dream they shared was of the new world they were creating.

"Queen ologlu dor" Elspeth muttered as they reached their rooms. She's acquired, over the years, a patois of English mixed with Accident-partly to fill out her facade, partly because she felt it was more expressive. "Olionto rorog."

Fleur nodded his head. "Ever since the breach in secu- rity five years ago, I agree. All those Humans escaping, it unhinged her, somehow."

"Hindsight ras, okay nog norasT Elspeth spoke softly, tentative in her implications.

"She seems to've lost sight of her goals, is the problem," Fleur answered, circling the question. "Of our goals."

Elspeth held out her hand, gently touched the smoky skin of Fleur's cheek. "Tog Lomper; Fleur, we must. Nef gluaka." She turned her head and averted her eyes to express more formally her reluctance.

Fleur kissed Elspeth's hand. "No, I quite agree, my dear. It's time to speak plainly. This Human must be made to talk. I think, perhaps, Ugo's services will be invaluable in this regard."

Josh was awakened by a feeling more than a sound, as such, and looked up to find a vampire standing over him, studying him. It was one of the dark Vampires who had been present at his interrogation.

"I am Ugo," he said when he saw Josh was awake. Josh focused his eyes. Ugo was large and powerful; his hair was filthy, matted, stringy; across the left side of his face a horrible scar from an old burn pulled the skin into glossy, twisted, designs. "You can trust me," he said.

"Let me go," Josh whispered.

"I cannot," replied the Vampire with great regret. "But if you tell me what you know, I can help you."

"How?"

"First, what." Ugo's voice acquired an edge.

"Nothing," Josh shook his head. "I've told everything I-"

Before he could finish the sentence, Ugo's fangs were in his neck, sending waves of pain through his body. He was taken by such surprise that he had no time to set himself, no time to react. So he merely writhed there, pinned at the throat by Ugo's needle-teeth, as the Vampire's formidable hands roamed his wriggling body-taking pleasure, inflicting pain, teaching Josh this ancient, malignant lesson. *

Paula climbed the ladder of braided seaweed up the slimy cave wall, through an opening in the ceiling, to a still darker room. She made her way quickly to an almost invisible hole in the wall, through which she squeezed, then nimbly navigated a precarious ledge that overhung a sheer drop into eternity, and finally emerged in a long, windy tunnel.

She loved this runnel. Its ceiling was ribbed like the inside of a great animal, the wind its warm respirations. It always made her think of the story of Jonah, one of her earliest book memories; it made her feel safe. Protected, in the belly of the beast.

At its blind end was a pool of still water, which Paula dove into: she swam to the rocky bottom, pulled herself along twenty feet of curving wall, floated to the surface, and crawled ash.o.r.e to a thick rug in a cozy, well-lit cave. There were towels hanging on a rack in the stone wall. Paula took one, wrapped herself in it, walked to a door in the opposite wall, and knocked. It was opened by Candle-fire.

Candlefire was a Nine-p.r.o.ng Plugger. There were Three-p.r.o.ng, Nine-p.r.o.ng, and Twenty-seven-p.r.o.ng Plug-gers-so named, not surprisingly, for the number of p.r.o.ngs in the plugs that had once connected to the outlets in theu: heads. When they had all been in-circuit in the City, they formed a great crisscrossing network in the Communion Room.

Generally speaking, more p.r.o.ngs signified greater complexities of information being transferred along those cables. But the distinctions were, in fact, far more subtle than this, though they were distinctions only Pluggers could appreciate.

The Pluggers had then- own idiomatic nomenclature for themselves and the myriad states of consciousness, or "modes," of the plugged-in condition they had once shared and to which they now aspired. Themselves, they called Primes, Squares, or Cubes (Three, Nine, or Twenty-seven p.r.o.ngs). The four major modes they called Light, Nolight, Singularity, and Fusion. There were colors and levels to each mode; but these were concepts the Pluggers could not easily articulate to anyone who had never been plugged in. They had chosen personal names for themselves that they each felt most intuitively described the color, level, and mode at which they usually operated when plugged in. Candlefire took his name with great care, to resonate with the several discrete elements in a candle flame, the motions of these elements, their colors, their heats, their various natures, and their unity. The meaning of this in relation to Candlefire's preferred state of consciousness didn't have to be explained to any other Plugger-and it couldn't be explained to anyone who was not a Plugger.

Twenty-six Pluggers lived in the labyrinthine catacombs beneath the cliffs south of The City With No Name. They had come years before-immediately following their escape from the City-after discovering a tunnel that twisted for miles, leading from one of the sewage tunnels beneath the City, south to the catacombs they now occupied. They had remained ever since, afraid to go farther, afraid to return. For they hated the thought of going back to that imprisonment: lying side by side on their backs, motionless until the day they died, their brains plugged in to the thing that used, stored, played with, augmented, mixed, fused, and stole their thoughts. Hated the memory of that slavery. And yet it had been the peak experience of their lives.

Light, Nolight, Singularity, Fusion. These were the states Humans occupied during the plugged-in Communion: presences of such moment, they could be neither replaced nor approximated. They were ultimate states.

Eighty-three had escaped to the tunnels, freed by Josh after he had freed Rose. Some were lost on the march to the catacombs, some later left to wander on their own. Fourteen killed themselves within two years, because the prospect of ever again plugging-in to one another seemed so remote.

Now twenty-six remained, hovering near enough the City to nurture the dream that they would one day capture the castle, capture the plugs and cables, and once again enter into Communion.

Some of the Pluggers had been Scribes before they had been caught for the Queen's Great Experiment; and some of these Scribes knew of the Bookery. So three years after the escape, they made contact with the Book people and brought them into the catacombs to join forces and plot the overthrow of the City. They had been planning ever since.

It was an imperfect marriage. The Books wanted to destroy the City without quarter, though they couldn't decide the best way to do it; the Pluggers wanted desperately to preserve the network of wires that had once united them. Each group clung to its own fervor. They divided into two distinct encampments, separated by a lattice of suspicion, of tunnels and caves. Yet there were also basic bonds between the Books and the Pluggers. They were all Human.

"Please, come in," Candlefire said to Paula. She pulled the damp towel more closely around herself and entered. He closed the door behind her.

The room was large, but toasty, with two bonfires crackling on either side of an underground spring. Several people cooked at the blazes. Candlefire walked Paula to the other so she could warm herself in its breath.

In spite of their conflicting allegiances, Paula and Candlefire were friends. Paula never understood Fusion, and Candlefire would not grasp the mystical aspects of the Word; but they knew each other. They liked what they knew.

"I saw a Human kidnapped today," Paula said quietly. "He was having convulsions, and they took him to the City."

"May he reach Communion," Candlefire responded sympathetically, meshing his fingers in the Sign of the Plug.

"I knew him," she continued. "AI least, I think I did. I think he was a Scribe who came to us years ago in Ma'gas' looking for his family. He wanted our help. We asked him to join us on our crusade, instead. No, he said, he had to find his people first-his wife, his brother."

"What happened?" Candlefire's voice was quiet as a low flame.

She shrugged in the whisper of the orange fire. "We were raided. Lewis was captured and no more seen. The rest of us fled. The Scribe-Ms name was Joshua- escaped, to ... who knows what. So he could be captured and taken to the City five years later, for me to watch."

Candlefire put his arm around his friend, to warm her body and spirit, "It is our wretched lot on this Earth to be alone."

Paula smiled back a tear. "Unless we could fuse," she chided him softly.

"Except when we fuse." He nodded, gently laughing at her jibe.

She propped her head on his shoulder. He felt the shadow of her pain. She thought, It's not true, then. We are all of us islands.

He stroked her hair. "So alone, little Scribe. I'd plug you in if I could-then we could truly be with each other."

She hugged him silently, and wished it were so. We're like random words, she thought. We try to make sense of ourselves, but there is no sense, we have no definition. We try to stand together, to order ourselves into coherent sentences and meaningful wholes-but it comes out garbled. Single words we are born, and single words we die.

She whispered to him, "Nouns are we, in search of a verb."

"Sounds like poetry from one of your books," Candlefire mused.

" Tis." She nodded dreamily. It was, in the end, her last refuge. , "I don't exactly understand your poetry, but it brings me to mind of plugging. They both seek to touch." He wrapped his long arms around her. In the background, the other Pluggers cooked Eel and recalled the days of the Plug.

"Perhaps," she conceded. "I don't know, I think I've just tired of living in the shadow of that castle."

"Its shadow covers the compa.s.s," Candlefire nodded.

"It used to give us unity-we shared the darkness, we looked for the light together. Now we wander each one alone, in this eclipse that never ends, b.u.mping into one another and walking away."

"Some of us still hold hands in the darkness." He sighed, and pulled her closer.

"I used to hold hands with my brother," she reminisced. "We were orphans in Ma'gas', I was ten and he was seven. We lived in the alleys, on the run. Our days we hid, stole, and fought the smaller animals for foods. Our parents were killed by a drunken Harpie, and all we had was each other. And that's just what we did-we held hands. Sitting under the docks waiting for sundown is what I remember best- holding hands and waiting for the night to come hide us."

She paused to fix the memory, trying to hold it still, to fasten on it, to study it. Behind her, the fire cast shadows on the wall, like the ghosts of her story.

"Where's your brother now?"

"Gone. Kidnapped by pirates-Russian Lupinos. Probably dead by now, I imagine."

"But you Scribes write down the histories of your loved ones, I thought-so they never die, as long as they're read about by other Scribes. You told me this once."

Tears filled Paula's eyes. "Nathan asked me never to set down his record. He was afraid if he died and it was set down on paper, that made it final . . . but if no one ever wrote of the death, he still might figure out a way to come back-if it wasn't written down, maybe it never happened." She sighed deeply, to keep from crying. "So he's gone forever."

Candlefire took her hand in his. "Then we shall hold hands, you and I, in the hiding-night of these caves, under the shadow of the castle on the river."

The caves seemed to grow deeper around them, as if given sustenance by their despair. They held hands tightly; yet for all their nearness, they remained two, alone.

CHAPTER 4: In Which Three More Join the Search, and Share Their First Regret

BEAUTY was graced among Centaurs. He was born with the gift of balance, a sense that kept his keel even, even in the most turbulent waters. He had a fine, strong body, and a spirit deep as the ocean's cradle. He loved, and was loved.

For two years after he had rescued Rose from her bondage in the City, they lived in careless peace near Monterey. They withstood the Coming of Ice at first, then bent under it; then, like everyone else, moved south. Forest to town, river to valley, they migrated for three years, reaching finally as far south as the Saddlebacks-as far south as they dared, without actually entering the Terrarium. It was during this meandering emigration that Rose had begun to grow distant.

Beauty hadn't noticed at first. He was preoccupied with the climate, the winds; with what he sensed as an increasing unpredictability in the behavior of all the animals. He kept his eye intent on the horizon, so he didn't notice that the tiny boat in his safe harbor was starting to drift away. By the time he did notice, Rose was at sea, and shipping water fast.

She was p.r.o.ne to cry. Aimless, forceless weeping, for no apparent reason. She could never say exactly why she was crying; or, when she stopped, why she stopped. Only that it had something to do with loss.

When Beauty finally caught on that this was no pa.s.sing melancholy, he could find no way to help. He was kind with her, or stern. He was a rock. He was a beacon in the night storm, yet his light gave her no comfort: she was disconsolate.

Until she met Blackwind. He was a wild-eyed wanderer Rose and Beauty met in the North Saddlebacks, with whom they shared a cave during a two-day hail shower. A bleak little man, Beauty thought; on the edge and on the run. As it turned out, Blackwind was a Plugger.

There was almost instant recognition between Blackwind and Rose. Their shared experience hi the City had left them with a kind of radar for people of their own kind. They talked in whispers, continuously, for the two days of the storm. When it finally cleared, Blackwind stole away without a word to Beauty; and Rose was left with the bottomless stare gone from her eye.

They worked their way east for a few weeks, Beauty increasingly concerned. For where Rose had been lost, she now seemed trapped; before baffled, now morose. He caught her gazing at him with a defeated resolve.

Then one day she told him she was going to see Josh. She had to speak with their old friend. Beauty was reluctant to let her go alone at first, but she insisted; and he came to feel that, somehow, maybe Josh would be able to help where he obviously could not So she left. Atfd did not return.

Through it all, Beauty never lost his sense of balance. For every thing there was a season, Jasmine had once told him, and those words felt right with him. All things in their time. This didn't mean some things didn't upset him, or put him on guard-simply that he wasn't easily derailed or swamped.

So when Rose didn't come back on time, Beauty tracked her to Joshua's camp. He looked forward to seeing Josh as well-they had had little contact for two years, and Beauty missed his comrade sorely. It was a double shock, then, to find both Josh and Rose missing. Double, but not entirely unexpected-Beauty had had an uneasy feeling about the events all along. The feeling was confirmed when he found Joshua's note.

The note was addressed to Beauty on the outside, but directed to Ollie and Jasmine in the text. He a.s.sumed one of them had left the note for him to find, for him to follow and join them all at the pit of his greatest fear-The City With No Name.

He had suspected matters were heading in this direction; he didn't know why. Somehow, it almost seemed inevitable, as if the unfinished business there demanded resolution.

"d.a.m.ned City," he muttered to himself wearily. He rarely swore-it brought one too close to teetering. He regained his equilibrium quickly, though, and sat down to plot his course.

He would need help. The City would be much better protected against a.s.sault than it had been the first time he had violated its armor. He needed someone he could trust; he soon thought of D'Ursu Magna.

D'Ursu was an old, dear friend, a Bear-Chieftain and first lieutenant to Jarl, the Bear-King. Jari's forces were in nearby Newport, Beauty had heard-waiting for the Doge to make his move. So Beauty went to Newport.

On a crisp, cold morning in January, Beauty cantered into Newport's central square, his Dragon-rib bow slung across his shoulder. He asked after D'Ursu Magna, and was directed to the old Bear's favorite den-a place called Owl's-two steps down into the cellar of a stone building in the old section of town.

There were no windows in the place; it looked like a cave. Several Bears lolled on the dirt floor in various stages of hibernation, some of them chewing poppies, some chewing rye mold. A couple of Trolls lay, wasted, in a corner hollow, while a bat fluttered uselessly on its back near the door. From a side room, the sounds and smells of unventi-lated s.e.x bubbled thick as tar in a fetid pool.

Sitting on a log beside the connecting door was D'Ursu Magna. The great brown Bear's eyes were glazed with loveless satisfactions, his fur matted with sour sweat. Beauty walked over to him, put a hand on his Bear friend's shoulder.

"D'Ursu Magna," said the Centaur, "I came for your help. But Bear, you look like the sorriest of Bears."

D'Ursu looked up at him as if awakened from a long dream. "Beaute Centauri," he growled. "You have come to save me again. My claws bleed from clutching at this drain in this sink of contaminated refuse. Beaute Centauri, deliver me."

Beauty helped D'Ursu up and guided him out the front door. He walked the great Bear slowly to the edge of the city, sat him beside a clear pool hi a deep meadow, and gently washed him with handfuls of cold, winter-pond water. Gradually D'Ursu's eyes focused as he let the Centaur clean him. He looked around, saw where he was, and let out a long ba.s.so profundo roar to the day.