98.  Void

The Gates in Argentina and Bangkok were well-guarded.  Though Jayhawk 
felt she could get through, it was going to be painfully difficult.
Impatient for understanding, she went back to Seattle.  Its Gate had no
human guardians, at least.

The swarm of black flies still guarded the path that led from the dead
nodes at Cavilard toward the broken Gate.  Jayhawk teased it for a
while, but didn't succeed in luring it away from its post.  She was
quick enough to avoid it, but she would have to fight to get past,
and their previous encounter had not gone well for her.

However, rather to her surprise, the second path, leading from the Red
Tower of the security node towards the Gate, was unguarded and open.
She walked it slowly, watching for flies, feeling the increasing pull of
the Gate.  The path curved slowly and steadily upward, climbing a single
conical mountain, but more and more it felt as if she were descending,
picking her way down an increasingly steep slope.

She had tethered Anubis to Cavilard, heedless of the suspicions that it
might raise in the minds of the Turing police.  She needed her system
here for this.  That link was a comfort now, like an intangible safeline
holding her on the mountain's side.

Halfway up she dared to rise into the air for a brief instant, felt
herself drawn forward swiftly and uncontrollably.  She had hoped to be
able to control her flight, but there was nothing for her to push
against, as if space itself was streaming upward toward the Gate.
Hastily she landed, walked on with care.

Something felt wrong, painfully and increasingly wrong as she climbed.
Like the nodes behind the hedge, this place was dead, unsupported--
except, she guessed, by the power of the Gate itself.  She felt that
power as an aching in her bones, a knot in the pit of her non-existant
stomach.  Like the magic of the feathered dart that had opened her way
to the garden, it revolted her intuition, left a foul acid taste in her
mouth.  Her analysis code told her nothing about the dead nodes.  She
was left with nothing but feelings that warned her away, and a
determination to ignore them.

She was nearly crawling when she reached the top, raised her head to
peer over the edge.  The mountain was a volcano, as she had guessed, its
interior hollow.  She looked down.

Distance.  For a moment she thought she was looking at something, but so
far away that her mind refused to grasp the details.  Then it become
darkness, then not even darkness.  Terrible distance, a vista of
emptiness stretching on further than she could comprehend.  Nothing
else.  There were no sides to the gaping pit; it was not a crater but a
hole torn in the fabric of the Matrix.  This close, the nauseous
rejection was almost unbearable, but mixed with it was a strange uneasy
attraction, like the pull of a lethal fall to the suicidal.

She climbed to her feet, balancing against the inward and outward
pulls, and drew in a deep painful breath.  *All right.*  Stepped
forward--

In the instant of decision she heard voices, whether in the node or her
own mind she couldn't tell.  *His* voice.  "Consider.  Everything has a
price."

And Aliantha's as she had heard it in the garden, somewhere between
regret and amusement:  "Yes, and today's is a special one-time-only
offer.  No refunds.  No returns."

Her planned dive turned into an ungraceful fall.  Were they speaking 
to her?  Or was it memory, impressed on the node, Aliantha's initiation?

Distance opened before her, spread out to take her in.  Instinctively
she tried to fill it, as if she were possessing a system.  She wanted to
understand the Gate, master its power.  Her consciousness diffused
outward, finding no contact, no boundaries.  Too far.  The emptiness was
greater than she; she could pour out her whole mind and soul, and
nothing would be filled, it would make no difference to the void.

And she would be nothing.  She cried out, her voice inaudible even to
her, and curled into a tight ball, burying her head in a cage of her
arms and legs, trying to hold herself in.  *No!*  Her fall was still
accelerating, the distance between herself and Anubis, between herself
and *anything*, increasing faster and faster.  *No!  I deny that!  There
is no distance between me and Anubis; I am one.*

The void cared nothing for her denials, nothing at all.  Her link to
Anubis thinned, frayed, the eternal hunger of the emptiness wearing it
away.  It wore at her, a deadly thinness and coldness in the edges of
her thoughts.  She could see nothing ahead, nothing in any direction.
Behind there was a faint sense of Anubis and the world's presence, but
it was dimming rapidly.  The Gate was broken.  There was nowhere,
nowhere to go.  Nowhere all around her, drinking her in.

*There is no distance that can separate me from her.*  Her system almost
appeared to her as another person now, infinitely precious.  *We are one,
we are together, we cannot be separated!*  Something was tearing inside
her, connections breaking, leaving gaping wounds to bleed her life out
into the emptiness.  Something more precious than life.  *No!  I won't
lose her!*

In the instant of decision her headlong fall reversed.  She found
herself clinging to the thin rim of the crater, barely aware of how she
had gotten there.  The void pulled at her with contemptuous mockery.
Sick and weak, she forced her eyes from it, reached out to the
island-garden, made the transition.

Sunlight enfolded her, and the touch of restored life like sweet water,
cascading in unchecked abundance.  She threw herself down in the soft
feathers, crying in a confusion of pain and joy.  The void's
insinuations were *lies*, she and Anubis were one, here there was no
doubting that.  She was alive, and whole; every sense proclaimed it,
the gentle tickling of the feathery grass, the clean smell of water
sparkling in the pools, the sunlight's caress, the smell and taste of
living earth beneath her where she lay face-down, trembling.  She could
hear her own heartbeat, feel the feathery stems dance with her breath.
A tear trickled down, soaked into the earth.  Deeper down she could feel
it spreading among roots, blending with the garden's life.  Deeper
still, the touch of Anubis, beyond all senses and images.

She let herself fall into that, into full identification with the
system, glory of silver and sapphire and black.  Like a drop of water
into a troubled pool, her awareness spun outward in perfect, concentric
rings, met the boundaries of her being and was reflected back,
organizing and patterning all it touched, meeting in a shimmer of
harmonics at the center.  She was the pattern, processor and datastore
and telecom, mind and spirit and software.  There was no gap, no
absence, no void.  She knew herself, knew the truth that the void's lies
taught.  No divisions.  Even her initiation had not taught her so well.

*I exist in this, the reflection of consciousness to this point, the 
completion of the pattern.  Only in this.  I can no more be separated
from Anubis than the wave from the water.*

Out of those lies, had she learned what she'd intended to learn?  She
considered it for a while, realized her mistake.  The Gate was indeed
broken; it led nowhere, and she had been going nowhere.  The Paradisians
used two High Priests to set a Gate; one at the source, and one at the
destination.  She could do the same unassisted, linking Anubis to the
target system, using her link with it to forge the connection.  It was
that simple.  She felt rather foolish that she'd missed it before...
she'd been lucky to get back.

She returned to the Matrix to test her conclusions, passing from the
islands to Osiris in order to avoid her escort.  Almost at once she
realized that something was wrong.  Although her movements on the Matrix
were unhindered, something nagged at her, a vague sense of discomfort or
wrongness.  Analysis code told her nothing.  It felt like a cyberware
failure, though of course that was ridiculous.

Hastily she returned to Anubis.  Everything there was as it should be;
she flung herself into identification to see the system all at once,
whole, and could find no flaw in it.

But when she went back to the Matrix, the niggling discomfort returned.

She put distance between herself and the University system to which
Anubis was tethered.  The feeling worsened, a tension in her gut, a
vague irritation in her nerves.  She felt misplaced, or perhaps
misattached.  Across the North American grid, into the rougher network
of South America, eventually into the sparse Antarctic Matrix she went,
and every switchpoint she put behind her added a steady maddening
increase to the wrongness.

So did time, even if she stood still.

She ran tests, broke into a large machine in South Africa and brought
its full power to bear, stalling out the few users' programs ruthlessly.
She found *nothing*.  Neither her own code nor anything else she could
call up saw anything wrong with her at all.  Nor did Anubis.  Nor did
she, except for the slow, relentless increments of isolation and
wrongness and pain.

She sealed herself in the African machine, tried to use its resources to
distract her, ease her discomfort.  With some difficulty--her
concentration was lacking--she rerouted the operating system so
that the users were drawing on adjacent machines, using this one only for
trivial storage and retrieval.  The full attention of the machine, she
hoped, would comfort her.  She was resolved to stay where she was, to
wait out the swelling waves of distress and come to their end.  That was
the way to break addiction, so they'd told her while she was in the
hospital, though her bond with the Matrix had been too deep, too basic
to overcome so easily.  Or perhaps she had never waited long enough.

The wrongness crested, a continual nagging sense that something was not
linked as it should be, her channel with Anubis perhaps...crested and
held constant, not damaging, not overwhelming, just a steady wash of
pain.  Nothing she did eased it.  Nothing made it worse.  She couldn't
get a grip on it at all.

Three hours into her vigil, she looked at the small, crowded
control-center around her, CPU of the machine its users called Admin-3
at the University of South Africa, and realized that she was pulling it
more and more into a warped copy of Anubis.  The walls were bending,
shaping themselves into smooth curves; wires and beams thinning,
fraying into gossamer webwork.  The system trembled under her touch, on
the verge of some transformation which she doubted it had the power to
survive.

Hastily she restored it to what it had been, went back to Anubis.  In
the instant of trasition the pain disappeared as if it had never been.
She knew that for the lie it was.

The Void had spoken truth.  She could be one with Anubis, if place and
circumstances permitted.  But that link could be compromised--could be
broken, as the Void had begun to break it.

She remembered her conversations with Martha, how they had always ended
with the other woman's desperate flight back to her own system.  Was
that the price of power over the Gates?  For Martha it seemed that the
price had been her freedom, and in the end her soul.

--

Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner