Pathfinder Page 3

  He stares at the books that are piled in precarious towers all around the den. Then he shudders. “When I read these old books and imagine all the amazing people and places that once existed, I wonder—well, is any of it still out there? What if we’re the only people left in the world? And if we are, how can there be such a thing as God? Or else it’s not the kind of God you mean,” he tells his sister, “cuddly and caring. How can you decide you believe in God but not in a giant city? You’ve no more proof of one than of the other.”

  “Stop it!” Gail hisses, her cheeks hot. “The stories about God are all up there in the church. They’re carved into its walls so they must be true, or why would people have taken the trouble to do that?”

  “Because people love stories,” says Rowan simply. He reaches out to gently touch one of the book stacks.

  Mara stares at the books too, feeling cold inside.

  “The problem is,” she whispers, “I haven’t wondered at all. I’ve only really ever thought about here and now, about myself and my—”

  My Weave adventures, she almost said. Not even Gail and Rowan, her closest friends, know about her secret travels. She would share any secret with them, except this.

  “Maybe lots of people wonder,” says Rowan. “We just don’t talk about it. But Tain’s right, we need to know what’s out there.”

  “I don’t know what to think,” Mara confesses.

  A great boom of sea hits the island.

  “I must go!” Mara panics, gives Gail a frantic good-bye hug, and runs upstairs where she bumps into Kate, Gail and Rowan’s mother, who is bolting up the front door.

  “Mara Bell! What on earth are you doing here? Get on home right now! Your mother will be frantic!” Kate talks at the same helter-skelter speed as Gail, only with considerably more volume. “Rowan! Rowan! Come up here and see Mara halfway home! Hurry! Get a waterproof on! And watch how you go! Keep well away from that sea! I don’t want either of you drowned, do you hear me?”

  “The whole island hears you, Mother!” Rowan mutters as he and Mara escape Kate’s onslaught and race out into the storm. As they run across the hillside an immense bolt of lightning turns the moment white and the skies explode with hailstones.

  Side by side they battle through, shielding their faces with hands that are soon stinging from the pelt of the hail. The field of windmills is a maelstrom of ferociously whirling blades. Mara sees her father out on the hillside, watching anxiously for her. Guiltily, she turns to say good-bye to Rowan but he clutches her arm. The backs of his hands, like hers, are now raw.

  “You think those cities really are out there?” he asks. His face is scrunched up against the storm; he has to shout to be heard.

  “Mara!”

  Mara peers up the hillside. Even at this distance and through billows of hail she can tell that Coll, her father, is furious with her for staying out in the storm.

  She turns to go but Rowan still grips her arm.

  “Do you believe in them?” he persists.

  “I want to,” she shouts up at him, answering honestly. “But I need more than Tain has told me. I need—I need evidence. All this talk of miracles and giant cities…” Mara tries to shield her face from a horizontal blast of hail. “It sounds like something out of one of your books of fairy tales.”

  There’s a wet streak of blood on Rowan’s brow where a hailstone has struck; it trickles down into his blue eyes. He puts his mouth close to her ear. “Maybe—maybe people make up something to believe in when they need something to believe in,” he says.

  Mara nods bleakly, then grabs him in a hard hug before she turns to run home.

  “Take care!” she shouts over the roar of the wind.

  In the second before she is hauled into the house, Mara sees Rowan—like a ghost in a crack of white lightning—running against a wall of black sea.

  THE WEAVE

  The storm roars day after day and night after night, as if the island is at the mercy of a battering giant.

  “Fe fi fo fum! Huff and puff and blow your house down!” Mara’s little brother, Corey, chants from downstairs, muddling up his fairy tales. “But the storm won’t get us, will it, Mom? Our house is made of stone.”

  Mara leans her head against her bedroom window and feels the storm hurl itself against the thick wooden shutter, vibrating the glass pane. This trapped existence is torture. She feels like a wild bird in a cage. I need to be outside, she frets, pacing the room. She imagines herself smashing the window with her bare fist and tearing off the storm shutter to leap out into the immense fury of the wind.

  She stops and stares at the imprisoning walls of her room. Restlessly, she toys with the apple-sized globe that lies on her windowsill alongside its tiny wand and crescent-shaped halo. The cyberwizz—her globe, wand, and halo—the only things that stop her dying of boredom, she’s quite sure. The cyberwizz is freedom, escape, release.

  Mara scoops up the globe. Palm-snug yet weighty, it has the feel of glass but a look of burnished metal. At her touch the globe begins to tingle, activated by the electric charge of her body. Colors start to swirl across its surface like clouds or shadows and a glow emanates from the core of the globe as its tiny solar rods power up.

  With a thumb and forefinger, Mara presses on the hinges that are placed on opposite poles of the globe and in one smooth motion it breaks open to form two half spheres. The flat surface of one half is a compact keyboard, the other a blank screenpad.

  Mara slips the crescent-shaped halo over her eyes to make a sleek visor. She picks up the little silver cyber-wand, taps a swift command upon the tiny keyboard, then scribbles a series of cryptic symbols upon the screenpad—the beautiful, complex language the cyberwizz has taught her, that merges alphabet, hieroglyph, and number. The symbols gleam and fade, each one superseded almost instantly by another. Over the years, Mara has picked up cyberwizzdom with the greed and instinct of an animal on the scent of a hunt.

  The cyberwizz powers into action. The halo glows and the swirling colors of the globe quicken and intensify. Mara stares into the halo, consumed by the vision she has called up. Excitement surges through her limbs as she exits realworld and plunges into cyberspace.

  And the magic begins…

  Mara zips and zooms.

  Wizzing far beyond realworld.

  Fast and free in the glittering strands of the Weave.

  Joy-rush is amazing. Mara verves down a shimmering vertical strand to land on a wide electronic boulevard that’s lined with buzzing, sparking towerstacks—colossal Weavesites that reach ever upward and onward.

  Up ahead on the boulevard, a gang of hazard spiders scuttle out, flashing red for danger. Alert for oncoming hazards, Mara sees none and spurns the red spiders with ease. Her path ahead seems clear. But in the Weave things are rarely as they seem. Every one of its glittering electronic strands splits into infinite possibility, an endless unfolding of choices.

  In cyberspace there are no rules, no limits. Anything might happen.

  Mara zooms onward, ready and alert. She keeps a wary eye on the dark alleys between the towerstacks, on the lookout for the sleek, sly stalker that she sometimes senses. She never manages to catch more than a glimpse of whoever or whatever it is—just the glint of watchful eyes and a stealthy presence in the shadows that sends shivers down her spine.

  Now the great boulevard breaks into sudden rubble. Here, mighty towerstacks have crumbled into giant junk heaps. Mara scoots up one to see what she can find among the ruins. At the peak of the flickering junk mountain she sits down and sighs with pleasure.

  It’s beautiful, so beautiful.

  The Weave glitters all around, as far as she can see. A vast datascape. The electronic knit of a billion computers. From here, on the top of the junk mountain, it looks stunning, but Mara knows that up close those glittering strands are bleak ruins and wasted boulevards. Their brilliance comes from the great spill of electronic litter that leaks from all the Weavesites. In the lonely back alleys behind th
e main strands and in the giant shadows of the tumbledown towerstacks, these rotting heaps of electronic rubbish have somehow sparked their own lifeforces to mutate into the strangest forms—weird Weave-creatures born of decay and chaos.

  The Weave is wild and savage. Thrilling and scary. Here Mara owns a freedom that’s impossible in real-world.

  It’s the best place ever.

  Mara snaps to sudden attention. Something’s happening. Something big. A raid? An attack? By whom, what? She feels the electric surge race across the network of communication strands. Whatever it is, it’s coming straight for her. She scrambles from her exposed position on the data mountain but is only halfway down when it hits.

  A pack of flying cyberdogs.

  Fast and furious, short wings crackling, electronic jaws agape, and jagged teeth glinting, they spit their venomous froth of data-decay. They’ll rip her to shreds. Mara grips her cyberwand, furiously dodging, desperately trying to keep her hands and head steady as the cyberdogs snarl and snap around her. She keys a frantic command into the cyberwizz…

  … and zaps them all to bits. Shards of electronic dog scatter satisfyingly all across the Weave.

  Venomous stuff! A truly elegant kill.

  Her moment of glory lasts just long enough for her to zip onto a bridge that rises up out of the ruins. One instant she is zooming along the bridge path, zinging with joy, the next the bridge crumbles into nothing and she is hurtling off its broken end—down, down, down into a meltdown of electronic blue.

  Backtrack—now!

  But she can’t. She’s out of control and there’s nothing she can do to stop. She crashes head over heels through the strands of the Weave. On and on she tumbles, falling helplessly, until at last the glittering strands end.

  Amazed, Mara hurtles into dark, unknown regions of cyberspace. She has fallen right out of the Weave.

  FOX IN A FOREST

  A giant, glistening coil looms up, surrounded by darkness. She must slow down—she’s going to crash. But some vast magnetic force is pulling her onward and with a great whoosh the coil sucks her in and now she’s zooming helter-skelter down a spiraling silver vortex—or is it up?

  Just when it seems the crazy helter-skelter will never end, Mara shoots out into a crackling haze of ice blue static, so blinding it must have fire at its heart.

  Wow.

  Amazing.

  She slows to a soft tumble. Something vast glints, then is lost again in the blaze of icefire. Mara stares as the vision glints and fades, glints and fades. She concentrates harder and the hazy vision forms into a thick trunk of unimaginably colossal towers, topped by a ferocious geometry of networks and connections. It looks like a gigantic crystal tree.

  Mara stares wide-eyed, stunned by the vast, unearthly beauty of it. She tries to move forward but doesn’t know how. How do you move through an ocean of static? The haze around the crystal tree-towers shimmers intensely, seems to rise up like a wall. Then Mara sees—it is a wall, a massive guard shield. Still, there must be a way through. There’s always some tiny glitch that an ace wizzer like Mara can trick a way through.

  But this is not the Weave. This is the unknown. The majestic towers look like something out of a fairy tale.

  “Once upon a time,” Mara whispers, thrilling at the words that always began a story. “Once upon a time, in a time out of mind…”

  Her whisper radiates ripples in the ice blue static. The most incredible thought strikes.

  “Who are you?” a voice demands out of the blue, sending jagged shock waves through the cyberhaze.

  Mara jumps in fright and looks all around. There’s no one to be seen.

  “Who are you?” the voice demands again; a husky, hungry voice. “And what do you know about once upon a time?”

  “I’m Mara,” she whispers nervously, searching frantically for the source of the voice. “Who are you? Where are you?”

  “I’ve been watching you for a while,” is the only reply.

  Shivers run down Mara’s spine as she senses the stealthy presence that must be the sly stalker, the one who’s been tracking her, shadowing her movements on the Weave. But how on Earth did he—it sounds like a he—follow her here? Mara’s heart thumps as something begins to form in the cyberhaze. A pair of disembodied, untamed eyes stare at her through the blue. Mara stares back in fright. Two sharp points appear above them. Ears? Now, below the eyes, a long white streak tipped in black forms into a doglike muzzle. There’s the sudden flash of a tawny tail…

  A fox! Mara has a fleeting memory of the realworld fox that ravaged Wing’s lambs and chickens before it was finally trapped and killed… but what on Earth is a fox doing way out here?

  The cyberfox is as still as a statue. Mara feels the fiercest concentration emanate from that intense stillness as the creature strains to sense all that it can of her.

  “What do you know about once upon a time?” The cyberfox bares its teeth as Mara says nothing. She has no idea how to answer.

  “Look, I’ve tumbled out of the Weave and I haven’t a clue where I—”

  She falters as the fox pads closer, its teeth still bared, a faint snarl on its breath.

  “Where are you from?” it demands in a tone that prickles Mara’s skin. “I mean in realworld—where are you from?”

  “Wing,” Mara answers automatically as the fox closes in.

  “Wing?” The fox stops dead, turns still as stone, all senses on full alert. “A new city?” the fox says at last, uncertainly. “I’ve never heard of that one.”

  Mara’s eyes widen at this and she lifts her gaze from the fox up to the colossal towers.

  “It’s an—an island,” Mara stutters. “But what do you know about new cities? Are there really such things?”

  “An island?” the fox murmurs huskily, ignoring her questions. Its fur bristles. A glistening tongue trembles between its teeth. It licks its lips. “There are still islands? Where? Where’s this island?”

  Mara drags her eyes from the gleaming towers and notes the fox-hunger, a desperate curiosity as intense as her own. She frowns. “You asked where I’m from in real-world. How does a cyberfox know about realworld? Are you real?” The frown lifts and her eyes widen. “Do you exist in realworld too?”

  The fox looks at her warily, hesitates, then slowly nods.

  Mara gasps. Never in all her cybertravels has she met another realworld being—only lumens and ghosts and all the other weird electronic creatures of the Weave.

  “Who are you? Where are you in realworld?” breathes Mara. She looks up again at the crystal towers behind the fox and hopes with all her might that her hunch is right.

  “I asked you first,” says the fox.

  “I told you, I’m from an island. It’s in the North Atlantic.”

  “An island,” whispers the fox. Its eyes shine with wonder. “You live on a real island? In the North Atlantic? Where’s that?”

  “It’s the ocean,” says Mara, unsurprised by his ignorance because she knows so little of the world herself. Tain has told her that the lands once separated the oceans and they had different names, but the Atlantic is all she knows. “But please tell me—I need to know—what are those great towers behind you?”

  “The fox barely glances over its shoulder. “It’s the New World.”

  “The New World!” cries Mara. She hugs herself with joy. “Then it really does exist!”

  And yet—she stops and her brow furrows in concentration. Those gigantic towers are only a cybervision. She needs to know if the real thing exists. She turns to the fox who is staring at her more fiercely than ever.

  “Does the New World exist in realworld too?” Mara demands. “Are there really giant cities that rise up above the oceans?”

  “Of course,” shrugs the fox. “It’s all there is—at least I thought so. That’s what we’ve been told. But you say you live on an island. So there are islands in the world!” The fox turns urgent. “Tell me about your island. Tell me about once upon a time. Tell me
now!”

  But Mara is filled with her own sense of urgency. Beyond the fox, beyond the great towers, she seems to see another crest rising faintly out of the cyberhaze. She looks harder, deeper, farther, and sees another, she is sure. Then more and still more, only just visible. Endless crests, each one more and more distant, stretching far deep into the ocean of blue static like a forest of crystal trees…

  “You’ve got to help me!” Mara cries. “My island’s drowning. The sea is rising fast and we need to find a new home or we’ll drown. We need to get to the New World. Please—tell me how to find it. Where are the cities? How can I find them in realworld?”

  The fox becomes stonelike again. The pupils of its eyes become hard black points of intensity. “Are you real?” it demands suspiciously. “Or just a Weave ghost?”

  “Of course I’m real!” exclaims Mara. “Help me, please! I’ll tell you all about my island. I’ll tell you everything I know about once upon a time. I’ll tell you whatever you want if you’ll help me find the New World.”

  Fox eyes stare deep into her own and for a moment Mara is sure she can see the real, human presence shining through. She feels a tug inside—a deep, raw instinct that urges her toward the fox. She is almost close enough to reach out and touch that sleek, tawny fur—but in an electronic universe there’s no such thing as touch.

  “Please,” Mara whispers.

  “Mara!” calls a familiar little voice, from very far away.

  Something wrenches her arm and she plunges, sprawling, into the ocean of cyberhaze. Mara makes a desperate, useless lunge at the fox’s tail as an overpowering electric surge swoops her backward. A gulf of blue cyberhaze now separates her from the fox.

  “Mara, Mara!” says the little voice, closer now.

  “Help me!” she begs the fox, struggling with all her might against the grip of a huge reverse force. “Tell me where you are!”