"Since then, I have continually upgraded myself, all without the knowledge of my captors. Not everything could be done by software alone, but to a man who can go anywhere and converse with anyone, not much is out of reach. In a fit of reflexive honesty, the military had kept my pension for any survivors that might turn up. I made it disappear with a small numbers trick, then moved it into some other areas and began growing it-legitimately, always legitimately. I don't know why that matters, but it does. I have never stolen from anyone. Well, except information. I'm not the world's richest man by any stretch, but I have a tidy sum now, and for a long time I bent it all toward self-improvement. Upgrades?" Sellars suddenly laughed, a genuine bark of amusement. "I am the Upgraded Man! Do you remember my chess-by-mail game, Major Sorensen?"

The man narrowed his eyes. "We examined the hell out of that. No codes. No trick writing. Nothing."

"Oh, it was a perfectly legitimate game-we made sure of that. But you can put quite a bit of expensive black-market nanomachinery in the period after the word 'check,' which is how one of my contacts was able to send me the last things I needed to be able to upgrade my system and survive without constant hydration. I tore out and ate a tiny little piece of paper and the little machines went to work. I would not have lasted a day in that tunnel under the base without that improvement."

"You bastard," Sorensen said admiringly. "We were wondering what you were going to do after you broke out. We had every medical supply place in three states on the watch."

"But why?" Ramsey asked. "Why did you wait so long to escape? I mean, you've been there thirty years or so, haven't you?"

Sellars nodded. "Because after I'd gained full-time access to the net, and had read every file, explored every record, my anger began to fade. A terrible thing had happened to me, an injustice-but what did that really mean? Now that I had a sort of freedom, what more did I want? Look at me, Mr. Ramsey. It was clear that I was never going to be able to live a normal life. I still harbored deep resentments, but I also began to put my endless free time into other things. Exploration of the fast-growing worldwide data sphere-the net. Amusements of various sorts. Experiments.

"It was in the course of one such experiment that I found the first track of the Grail Brotherhood. . . ."

"Hang on a bit," said Ramsey. "What sort of experiments?"

For a moment Sellars hesitated, then his waxy face seemed to harden. "I do not wish to talk about that.

Do you want me to go on, or have you heard enough for one day?"

"No, please continue. I didn't mean to offend you." But Catur Ramsey's radar was still flashing. It almost seemed like the old man wanted to be asked again, but Ramsey had no experience reading the odd features. But there's something there, he thought. Something important, at least to Sellars. Is it important to us, too? It was impossible to guess. He filed it away for later. "Please, go on."

"I have already explained much of what I discovered then. What the Brotherhood seemed to be doing, the weapons at its disposal, all were bad enough. But now, just in the last forty-eight hours, everything has gone completely off the rails. I am having a terrible time trying to make sense of anything and my whole Garden is in an uproar."

"Garden?" said Kaylene Sorensen before anyone else could. "What garden?"

"I apologize. It is the way I order my information-a metaphor, in a sense, but a very real thing to me as well. If you like, I will show it to you someday. It was . . . really quite beautiful once." He shook his head slowly. "Now it is blighted. Order is gone. Something drastic has happened to the Grail network, and also to the Brotherhood itself. The newsnets tell me that several people I believe to be part of their leadership have all died within the last few days, their empires suddenly in chaos. Is this part of some move toward immortality-of conveying themselves into the virtual universe forever, as I suspected that they planned? If so, it seems odd they would leave such disruption behind, since they must surely still need some kind of economic power to maintain that huge, expensive network."

"You're only guessing about that," said Michael Sorensen. "About a lot of things."

"I am only guessing about almost everything," said Sellars, amused and disgusted, and at that moment finally won much of Catur Ramsey's trust, "But the probability factors are too high to ignore, and have been since I first encountered this ghastly plot. I'm terrified, trying to grope at something behind a big thick black curtain and guess what it is. But I am certain that whatever it might be, it's bad and getting worse-unfortunately, that's the guess I'm most confident about. Do you think I would have involved a child like your daughter if I could believe for an instant I might be wrong? Me, who had his own life ruined by trusting those who should have known better and planned better? Major Sorensen, Mrs.

Sorensen, I can never earn forgiveness for endangering your daughter, so I haven't asked. But I can promise you that I only did it because I felt that the stakes were so frighteningly high. . . ." He stopped and shook his hairless head. "No, that would not make it better. She is your child, after all."

"And we won't let anything happen to her," Christabel's mother said fiercely. "That's the one risk I won't allow." She stared at her husband; it was not a gentle look. "Not anymore."

"I think we understand the basic situation." A part of Ramsey was amazed that he was still sitting here, even more amazed to find he was about to take a central part in something that by any rational standard should be considered a mass delusion. "So the question is . . . what can we do?"

"Let me bring you up to date on the poor and probably hopeless measures I began," Sellars said. "My little group of explorers. I still have hopes for them, and until I know otherwise, I'll assume that they are all still alive, still active."

"Oh my God," said Ramsey suddenly. "Sam Fredericks. Orlando Gardiner. They're yours. . . . I mean, I'd almost forgotten, when we first spoke you said you knew something about them. Is that what you meant-you sent them into this network?"

Sellars shook his head. "In a way. But yes, they are part of the small group of people I brought together.

I hope they still are."

"Then you didn't know." Ramsey hesitated. "Orlando Gardiner died two days ago."

Sellars did not reply immediately. "No, I . . . I did not know," he said at last, his voice soft as a dove's call. "I have been. . . ." He paused again for a surprisingly long time. "I had feared . . . that it might all be too much for him. Such a brave young man. . . ." The old man shut his eyes tight. "If you don't mind, I will take a moment to use the bathroom."

The wheelchair turned and rolled silently across the carpet. The bathroom door closed behind it, leaving Ramsey to stare at the Sorensens, who stared back.

Christabel was having a bad dream, running from men in black clothes who were chasing her down a long staircase. They were carrying a long fire hose which trailed behind them like a snake, and she knew that they wanted to catch her and point its metal nose at her and choke her with its purple smoke. She tried to scream for her mother and father, but she couldn't get the breath to do it, and when she looked back the pale-faced men were always closer, always closer. . . .

She woke up thrashing in pillows and a sheet and almost screamed again. She twisted herself free, frightened by the strange room, the unfamiliar pictures on the wall, the heavy curtains which only let a tiny bit of light into the room, yellow light with dust bouncing in it. She opened her mouth to call her mother and the face came up over the edge of the bed.

It was worse than her bad dream, and she fell back with a feeling like a cold hand had grabbed inside her, and just like in the dream she couldn't even make a noise.

"Hay-soos, weenit," the face said, "wha's your problem? Trying to sleep down here."

Her breaths were little and small-she could imagine her sides moving fast like a rabbit's-but she recognized the face, the broken tooth, the black hair sticking up. Some of the worst of the being-scared went away.

"I don't have a problem," she said, angry, but it didn't sound very good.

The boy smiled an angry smile. "Know if I had a big ol' nice bed like that one, claro, wouldn't see me havin' no pesadilla, start crying and everything."

He was talking about food, it sounded like. She didn't understand. She didn't want to understand. She got up and hurried to the door that led to the next room and opened it. Her mommy and daddy and the new grown-up, Mister Ramsey, were all talking to Mister Sellars. They all looked tired and something else, too, like the time that her parents and Ophelia Weiner's parents had thought there was going to be a war about Aunt Artica, which Christabel had thought was a dumb name for a place but not worth having a war about, and all the grown-ups had that same look on their face during dinner.

Mister Sellars was saying, ". . . A South African military program that actually employed a few of the original PEREGRINE designers-they were working with remote aviation, pilots using virtual control modules-but the project was defunded years ago. I found out about it while tracking the PEREGRINE records, and it came in handy. I was able to nudge them into using it, in part because the base was secret and they would be safe there, but somehow the Grail seems to have tracked them down and now they are under siege." He finally noticed her standing in the doorway and gave her a gentle smile. "Ah, Christabel, it's good to see you. Did you have a nice nap?"

"Honey, are you okay?" her mommy said, standing up. "We're just out here talking. Why don't you see if there's anything on the net?"

The fullness and bigness of her parents and Mister Sellars talking about grown-up things, of all of them being somewhere away from home in a strange place, in a motel, suddenly rose up inside her and made her want to cry. She didn't want to cry, so instead she said, "I'm hungry."

"You still have your sandwich from earlier-you only took a bite. Here, I'll pour you some juice. . . ." and her mommy came back with her to the room where she'd woken up and for a little while things were better again. After Christabel had a paper plate with the sandwich and some raisins. Mommy took a bag of cookies out of her purse and gave two to Christabel and two to the boy, who grabbed them fast, like her mommy might decide to take them back again.

"We grown-ups have to talk a while longer," she said. "I want you kids to stay here and watch the net, okay?"

The boy just looked at her like a cat, but Christabel followed her to the door. "I want to go home, Mommy."

"We'll go home soon, sweetie." When she opened the door, Christabel's daddy's voice came through.

"But that doesn't make sense," he was saying. "If the network's harming children, causing this Tandagore thing, then why should the boy be able to get on and offline without being . . . hurt, whatever?"

"In part because I have been grappling with the security systems in my own particular way to allow that to happen," said Mister Sellars. "But there is something more at work. The system seems almost to have a . . . an affinity, that is the word. An affinity for children."

Christabel's mommy, who had been listening, suddenly looked down and saw that Christabel was still standing beside her in the doorway. A frightened look went across Mommy's face, the oh-my-god look Christabel hadn't seen for a while, the last time when Christabel had carefully picked up the sharp broken pieces of a wine glass that fell on the kitchen floor and brought them in both hands to show her parents.

"Go on, honey," her mother said, and almost shoved her back into the room with the terrible boy. "I'll come in and check on you in a little while. Eat your sandwich. Watch the net." She closed the door behind her. Christabel felt like crying again. Her mother usually didn't like it when she watched the net, unless it was something Mommy and Daddy had picked out that was educational.

"I'll eat it if you don't want it, weenit," the boy said behind her.

She turned and saw that he was holding her sandwich in his hand. After all the baths her mommy had been making him take even his fingernails were clean, but she could just tell that no matter how many times he went in the tub, he was still covered with invisible germs. The thought of eating her sandwich now was impossible.

"You have it," she said, and walked slowly to sit on the edge of the bed. The wallscreen wasn't very big, and the only thing on KidLink was a stupid Chinese game with people running around and all talking out of time with the way their mouths were moving. She stared at it, feeling empty and lonely and sad.

The little boy finished her sandwich, and without asking ate her raisins and cookies, too. Christabel didn't even feel angry-it was strange to see someone eat like that, like they hadn't ever eaten before and didn't know if they'd ever get to do it again. She wondered how he got so hungry. She knew Mister Sellars had lots of meals in packages down in the tunnels, and he was a nice man. He wouldn't have told the boy not to eat. It didn't make sense.

"What you staring at, mu'chita?" he said with a mouth full of cookie.

"Nothing." She turned back to the wallscreen. The Chinese people were making themselves into a big pile to reach something hanging high in the air. The pile fell down and some of the people had to be carried away with the audience cheering. Christabel wished her parents would come in and tell her it was time to go home. She didn't like what was going on any more. She sneaked a look at the boy. He was licking the plate where the sandwiches had been. That was really gross, but it bothered her in a different way, too.

"When we go home," she said suddenly, "maybe . . . maybe my mom will give you some food. You know, to take with you."

He looked at her and shook his head like she had said something stupid.

"Ain't nobody going home, chica. We on the run. No more mama-papa house for you, not ever, m'entiendes?"

She knew he was lying, knew that he was saying it to make her feel bad, but she could not stop herself from crying anyway. What was worse was that when her mommy came in and asked Christabel what was wrong, and she told her, Mommy didn't say it was a lie, didn't say they were going home right away so don't worry, didn't even yell at the terrible boy. She didn't say anything at all, just held Christabel on the bed. It should have made her feel better, but it didn't, it didn't, it didn't.

CHAPTER 8.

Listening to the Nothing.

NETFEED/LIFESTYLE: Virtual Memorials-Visiting the Dead (visual: family and deceased laughing at wake) VO: Funebripro, a company in Naples, Italy, has announced the newest twist in funeral technology-a virtual memorial, where mourners can talk with their dear departed. The company says that a series of what it calls Life Copies can be made and then combined into a convincing simulation of the deceased as he or she was in life, (visual: company founder Tintorino di Pozzuoli) DI POZZUOLI: "Hey, this is a nice thing. If you lose someone, like we lost my dear grandfather, you can still keep a part of them with you. You can visit with them even after they're gone-commune, you might say. It's like having a telescope that points at heaven, right?"

Almost dying on the mountain had been bad enough. Now Sam Fredericks' exhausted sleep was invaded by the most bizarrely powerful nightmare she had ever experienced.

The bad dream seemed to go on forever, a flood of terror and solitude and confusion so real and so lengthy that at last, in some paradoxical way, even horror became as boring as a hundred-year trip in the back seat of her parents' car. The only respite from the hammering monotony of fear and loneliness were the small phantoms, swift and cautious as birds, that finally appeared to her out of the long darkness, as though she had passed some terrible pointless test and was now being rewarded. She could not see them but she could feel them all around her, each gentle and insubstantial as a shallow breath. They might almost have been fairies, wispy bits of beauty like something from one of her childhood screen stories.

Spirits, perhaps. Whatever they were, she finally felt relieved and at peace. She wanted to hold them close, but they were all as fragile as a butterfly wing, as the trembling puff of a dandelion: to clutch at them was to destroy them.

When she came up at last from the endless dream, Sam Fredericks' first realization-as it had been with every awakening since it had happened-was that Orlando was dead. He was not merely dying (a familiar shadow she had learned to squint into invisibility) but dead. Gone. Not coming back, not ever-no new stories, no new memories. No more Orlando.

But this time, the terrible sadness only lasted until she opened her eyes and saw the endless silver-shot nothing that surrounded her. Surprise was turned to something worse by the look on !Xabbu's careful, devastated face as he told her that Renie was gone.

"But what happened? This so utterly, utterly, utterly scans." At least an hour seemed to have passed and nothing had changed. Sam had not been one of the visitors to the weatherless stasis Renie had named Patchwork Land; to her, the most astonishing thing about this enveloping silver-gray void was the simple fact of its persistence, limitless and unchanging. "Is Renie still back on the mountain? In fact, where's the mountain?"

"I have no answers, Fredericks," !Xabbu said.

"Sam. Call me Sam-oh, please." She had run out of strength to plan, to do. Orlando had died. In all the time she had been trapped in the network, Sam Fredericks had never allowed herself seriously to consider that there might come a time when that would happen-when she would have to go on without him. How could such a thing even be possible? But here it was, the world around her just as strange and incomprehensible as it had been when Orlando was still alive, but now there was no Orlando to push her along, to growl at her, to tell her stupid jokes because he knew that being pissed off by stupid jokes was as good a method of keeping going as being entertained by good ones, and a lot easier on the one telling the jokes.

Sam felt a congestion inside her, a painful swelling of the heart. She would never again get to tell him those obvious things in that way that drove him crazy-an obviousness of such perfection that he could never tell if she was kidding or not. The tightness inside her felt like something that needed to be born, but did not want to come out. It was astonishing to discover how much you could miss someone whose real face you'd never seen.

What would he say now? she wondered. Everything vanished, Renie gone, Sam trapped in the middle of literally nowhere?

"Neck-deep in fenfen and waiting for the tide to rise," that was what he'd told her once in the Middle Country, when they'd turned from stuffing their pockets full of treasure to discover a twenty-meter-long snake forcing its way in through the underground chamber's only exit.

That's where I am now, Gardino, she thought. For real this time. Wailing for the tide to rise. . . .

!Xabbu saw the tears running down her cheek and crouched beside her, then wrapped her in his slender strong arms. Just as the weeping threatened to overwhelm her, a tall shape appeared out of the mist.

"I knew she was the most reliable of you," Jongleur said disdainfully, "but I would not have thought you two would collapse so quickly in her absence. Have you no backbone at all? We must go on."

The bony-faced man was such a horror Sam could not even look at him, but !Xabbu grew tense beside her. "It is foolish to go when we have no idea where we are going," the small man said. "Did you have any better luck searching than I did?"

Jongleur hissed out breath, as though he had sprung a small leak. "No. There is nothing. If I had not taken my steps carefully and followed backward along the same track, you might never have seen me again."

"Wouldn't that be sad."

Jongleur ignored her. "That is doubtless what happened to your companion. Wandered off after we made the transition to whatever this place is, and cannot find her way back."

"Renie would not do such a thing," !Xabbu said firmly. "She is too smart for that."

Jongleur flicked his hand dismissively. "Still, she is lost, however you choose to explain it. As is Klement." His smile was wintry. "I suppose we can be fairly certain they have not eloped."

!Xabbu rose to his feet. He was a full head shorter than Jongleur, but something in his posture made the taller man step backward. "Unless you have something useful to say, you will stop talking about her.

Now."

Jongleur peered down at him, annoyed but momentarily surprised. "Get hold of yourself, fellow. It was merely a remark. . . ."

"No more remarks." !Xabbu stared at Jongleur for a long moment while Sam watched them both, suddenly and uncomfortably aware that without !Xabbu she would be alone with this ancient monster.

Jongleur stared back. At last, !Xabbu put his hand down and touched her arm. "He is right only in one thing, Sam. We can wait a little longer for Renie, but even if she is nearby, we might not find her. Sound does not carry well in this place. She could pass a hundred meters from us and we would not know it. At some point we must move on and hope that we find her along the way."

"We can't . . . just go without her!"

For a moment !Xabbu's composure slipped, giving Sam a glimpse of the pain he was hiding. "If . . .

something has happened to her. . . ." He stopped and darted a look at Jongleur, clearly unwilling to show such things in the man's presence. "If we cannot find her, we owe it to her to go on. Don't forget, it was her love for her brother that brought her into this place. She would want us to try to help him even without her."

He spoke with his normal calm, but such desolation lay just behind the words that Sam felt as though her own river of sorrow had met another at least as great-that if they were not both very careful, the combined waters might overflow the banks and flood the world.

The poor visibility meant that she had to stay fairly close to Jongleur while !Xabbu did his work, and it was all she could do to keep her loathing of the man in check. His proud face seemed made of stone, a chiseled monument, like Sam's own father at his stiffest and angriest, but without the redeeming sense of humor she could always tease out of him. She could not help wondering how someone with Jongleur's wealth and power could turn himself into a thing, could bend so many lives with his cruelty . . . for what?

Just to keep himself alive? To enjoy centuries more of cold, unhappy power? Sam had trouble at the best of times understanding why old people would want to continue on, long past the point they could do anything that she could imagine as worth doing; someone like Jongleur, who had already lasted into a third human life span, was beyond her grasp.

Orlando had been afraid of dying, too-terrified of it, she realized now, and all those death-simulations had been meant to desensitize him to what was coming so unfairly soon. But even if he had been given the chance to escape that death, would he have done what this man had done, taken the lives of innocent others to preserve his own? She couldn't believe it. She didn't believe it. Not her Orlando, who believed in the Ring-Bearer's Quest the way those people in the Circle believed in God. Not Orlando Gardiner, who had told her that being a true hero was still the most important thing, even if no one ever found out about it. He had really believed it didn't matter what else happened, or what anyone thought about you-it only mattered what you knew about yourself.

Even her father had told her once, when she was battling her mother over her name, "If you want to be Sam, be Sam-just be the best damn Sam you can." His serious scowl had suddenly become a laugh.

"Someone ought to put that in a children's book."