Tad Williams - Otherland 4 - Sea of Silver Light

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Sea of Silver Light
By Tad Williams
Otherland 4
Volume One Synopsis
Volume Two Synopsis
Volume Three Synopsis
Foreword
First
A VOYAGE IN THE HEART
Strange Bedfellows
Execution Sweet
Restless Natives
In Silver Dreaming
The Last Fish to Swallow
Talking to Machines
The Man from Mars
Listening to the Nothing
Hannibal's Return
The Land of Glass and Air
Second
GHOST SONGS
Yours Very Sincerely
The Boy in the Well
King Johnny
The Stone Girl
Confessional
Badlands
Breathing Problems
Making a Witch
The Bravest Man in the World
Thompson's Iron
Handling Snakes
More Very Bush
Third
THE DYING HOUR
Orientation
Getting out of Dodge
The Hidden Bridge
Flies and Spiders
The Green Steeple
Master of His Silence
Stony Limits
Climbing the Mountain
Romany Fair
Bad House
Fourth
SORROW'S CHILDREN
Weekend Hours
Desert Smile
Rainbow's Shoe
Without a Net
The Locked Room
Boy in Darkness
Broken Angel
The Third Head of Cerberus
Playing the Knight
Old School
Tears of Ra
Stolen Voices
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Send
Thoughts Like Smoke
Star Over Louisiana
Unreal Bodies
The Next
Fifth
INHERITORS
No Promises
Watching Cars Explode
The Oracle Surprised
Borrowed House
OTHERLAND: City of Golden Shadow
Synopsis
Wet, terrified, with only the companionship of trench-mates Finch and Mullet to keep him sane,
Paul Jonas seems no different than any of thousands of other foot soldiers in World War I. But
when he abruptly finds himself alone on an empty battlefield except for a tree that grows up into
the clouds, he begins to doubt that sanity. When he climbs the tree and discovers a castle in the
clouds, a woman with wings like a bird, and her terrifying giant guardian, his insanity seems
confirmed. But when he awakens back in the trenches, he finds he is clutching one of the bird-
woman's feathers.
In South Africa, in the middle of the twenty-first century, Irene "Renie" Sulaweyo has problems of
her own. Renie is an instructor of virtual engineering whose newest student, !Xabbu, is one of the
desert Bushmen, a people to whom modern technology is very alien. At home, she is a surrogate
mother to her young brother, Stephen, who is obsessed with exploring the virtual parts of the
world communication network—the "net"—and Renie spends what little spare time she has holding her
family together. Her widowed father Long Joseph only seems interested in finding his next drink.
Like most children, Stephen is entranced by the forbidden, and although Renie has already saved
him once from a disturbing virtual nightclub named Mister J's, Stephen sneaks back in. By the time
Renie discovers what he has done, Stephen has fallen into a coma. The doctors cannot explain it,
but Renie is certain something has happened to him online.
American Orlando Gardiner is only a little older than Renie's brother, but he is a master of
several online domains, and because of a serious medical condition, spends most of his time in the
online identity of Thargor, a barbarian warrior. But when in the midst of one of his adventures
Orlando is given a glimpse of a golden city unlike anything else he has ever seen on the net, he
is so distracted that his Thargor character is killed. Despite this terrible loss, Orlando cannot
shake his fascination with the golden city, and with the support of his software agent Beezle Bug
and the reluctant help of his online friend Fredericks, he is determined to locate the golden
city.
Meanwhile, on a military base in the United States, a little girl named Christabel Sorensen pays
secret visits to her friend, Mr. Sellars, a strange, scarred old man. Her parents have forbidden
her to see him, but she likes the old man and the stories he tells, and he seems much more
pathetic than frightening. She does not know that he has very unusual plans for her.
As Renie gets to know !Xabbu the Bushman better, and to appreciate his calm good nature and his
outsider's viewpoint on modern life, she comes to rely on him more and more in her quest to
discover what has happened to her brother. She and !Xabbu sneak into the online nightclub, Mr.
J's. The place is as bad as she feared, with guests indulging themselves in all manner of virtual
unpleasantness, but nothing seems like it could have actually physically harmed her brother until
they are drawn into a terrifying encounter with a virtual version of the Hindu death-goddess Kali.
!Xabbu is overcome, and Renie, too, is almost overwhelmed by Kali's subliminal hypnotics, but with
the help of a mysterious figure whose simulated body (his "sim") is a blank, with no features at
all, she manages to get herself and !Xabbu out of Mister J's. Before she goes offline, the figure
gives her some data in the form of a golden gem.
Back (apparently) in World War I, Paul Jonas escapes from his squadron and makes a run for freedom
through the dangerous no-man's-land between the lines. As rain falls and shells explode, Paul
struggles through mud and corpses, only to find he has crossed over into some nether-region,
stranger even than his castle dream—a flat, misty emptiness. A shimmering golden light appears,
and Paul is drawn to it, but before he can step into its glow, his two friends from the trenches
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appear and demand that he return with them. Weary and confused, he is about to surrender, but as
they come closer he sees that Finch and Mullet no longer appear even remotely human, and he flees
into the golden light.
In the 21st Century, the oldest and perhaps richest man in the world is named Felix Jongleur. His
physical body is all but dead, and he spends his days in a virtual Egypt he has built for himself,
where he reigns over all as Osiris, the god of Life and Death. His chief servant, both in the
virtual and real world, is a half-Aboriginal serial murderer who has named himself Dread, who
combines a taste for hunting humans with a strange extrasensory ability to manipulate electronic
circuitry that allows him to blank security cameras and otherwise avoid detection. Jongleur
discovered Dread years before, and helped to nurture the young man's power, and has made him his
chief assassin.
Jongleur/Osiris is also the leader of a group of some of the world's most powerful and wealthy
people, the Grail Brotherhood, who have built for themselves a virtual universe unlike any other,
the Grail Project, also called Otherland. (This latter name comes from an entity known as the
"Other" which has some important involvement with the Grail Project network—an artificial
intelligence or something even stranger. This powerful force is largely in the control of
Jongleur, but it is the only thing in the world that the old man fears.)
The Grail Brotherhood are arguing among themselves, upset that the mysterious Grail Project is so
slow to come to fruition. They have all invested billions in it, and waited a decade or more of
their lives. Led by the American technology baron Robert Wells, they grow restive about Jongleur's
leadership and his secrets, like the nature of the Other.
Jongleur fights off a mutiny, and orders his minion Dread to prepare a neutralization mission
against one of the Grail members who has already left the Brotherhood.
Back in South Africa, Renie and her student !Xabbu are shaken by their narrow escape from the
virtual nightclub known as Mister J's, and more certain than ever that there is some involvement
between the club and her brother's coma. But when she examines the data-object the mysterious
figure gave her, it opens into an amazingly realistic image of a golden city. Renie and !Xabbu
seek the help of Renie's former professor, Dr. Susan Van Bleeck, but she is unable to solve the
mystery of the city, or even tell for certain if it is an actual place. The doctor decides to
contact someone else she knows for help, a researcher named Martine Desroubins. But even as Renie
and the mysterious Martine make contact for the first time, Dr. Van Bleeck is attacked in her home
and savagely beaten, and all her equipment destroyed. Renie rushes to the hospital, but after
pointing Renie in the direction of a friend, Susan dies, leaving Renie both angry and terrified.
Meanwhile Orlando Gardiner, the ill teenager in America, is hot in pursuit of the golden city that
he saw while online, so much so that his friend Fredericks begins to worry about him. Orlando has
always been odd—he has a fascination with death-experience simulations that Fredericks can't
understand—but even so this seems excessive. When Orlando announces they are going to the famous
hacker-node known as TreeHouse, Fredericks' worst fears are confirmed.
TreeHouse is the last preserve of everything anarchic about the net, a place where no rules
dictate what people can do or how they must appear. But although Orlando finds TreeHouse
fascinating, and discovers some unlikely allies in the form of a group of hacker children named
the Wicked Tribe (whose virtual guise is a troop of tiny winged yellow monkeys) his attempts to
discover the origins of the golden city vision arouse suspicion, and he and Fredericks are forced
to flee.
Meanwhile Renie and !Xabbu, with the help of Martine Desroubins, have also come to TreeHouse, in
pursuit of an old, retired hacker named Singh, Susan Van Bleeck's friend. When they find him, he
tells them that he is the last of a group of specialist programmers who built the security system
for a mysterious network nicknamed "Otherland," and that his companions have been dying in
mysterious circumstances. He is the last one alive.
Renie, !Xabbu, Singh, and Martine decide they must break into the Otherland system to discover
what secret is worth the lives of Singh's comrades and children like Renie's brother.
Paul Jonas has escaped from his World War I trench only to find himself seemingly unstuck in time
and space. Largely amnesiac, he wanders into a world where a White Queen and a Red Queen are in
conflict, and finds himself pursued again by the Finch and Mullet figures. With the help of a boy
named Gally and a long-winded, egg-shaped bishop, Paul escapes them, but his pursuers murder
Gally's children friends. A huge creature called a Jabberwock provides a diversion, and Paul and
Gally dive into a river.
When they surface, the river is in a different world, a strange, almost comical version of Mars,
full of monsters and English gentleman-soldiers. Paul again meets the bird-woman from his castle
dream, now named Vaala, but this time she is the prisoner of a Martian overlord. With the help of
mad adventurer Hurley Brummond, Paul saves the woman. She recognizes Paul, too, but does not know
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why. When the Finch and Mullet figures appear again, she flees. Attempting to catch up to her,
Paul crashes a stolen flying ship, sending himself and Gally to what seems certain doom. After a
strange dream in which he is back in the cloud-castle, menaced by Finch and Mullet in their
strangest forms yet, he wakes without Gally in the midst of the Ice Age, surrounded by Neandertal
hunters.
Meanwhile in South Africa, Renie and her companions are being hunted by mysterious strangers, and
are forced to flee their home. With the help of Martine (whom they still know only as a voice)
Renie, along with !Xabbu, her father, and Dr. Van Bleeck's assistant Jeremiah, find an old,
mothballed robot-plane base in the Drakensberg Mountains. They renovate a pair of V-tanks
(virtuality immersion vats) so Renie and !Xabbu can go online for an indefinite period, and
prepare for their assault on Otherland.
Back on the army base in America, little Christabel is convinced to help the burned and crippled
Mr. Sellars with a complex plan that is only revealed as an escape attempt when he disappears from
his house, setting the whole base (including Christabel's security chief father) on alert.
Christabel has cut what seems an escape hole in the base's perimeter fence (with the help of a
homeless boy from outside), but only she knows that Mr. Sellars is actually hiding in a network of
tunnels beneath the base, free now to continue his mysterious "task."
In the abandoned facility, under the Drakensberg Mountains, Renie and her companions enter the
tanks, go online, and break into Otherland. They survive a terrifying interaction with the Other
which seems to be the network's security system, in which Singh dies of a heart attack, and find
that the network is so incredibly realistic that at first they cannot believe it is a virtual
environment. The experience is strange in many other ways. Martine has a body for the first time,
!Xabbu has been given the form of a baboon, and most importantly, they can find no way to take
themselves offline again. Renie and the others discover that they are in an artificial South
American country. When they reach the golden city at the heart of it, the city they have been
seeking so long, they are captured, and discover that they are the prisoners of Bolivar Atasco, a
man involved with the Grail Brotherhood and with the building of the Otherland network from the
start.
Back in America, Orlando's friendship with Fredericks has survived the twin revelations that
Orlando is dying of a rare premature-aging disease, and that Fredericks is in fact a girl. They
are unexpectedly linked to Renie's hacker friend Singh by the Wicked Tribe just as Singh is
opening his connection to the Grail network, and drawn through into Otherland. After their own
horrifying encounter with the Other, Orlando and Fredericks also become Atasco's prisoners. But
when they are brought to the great man, along with Renie's company and others, they find that it
is not Atasco who has gathered them, but Mr. Sellars—revealed now as the strange blank sim who
helped Renie and !Xabbu escape from Mister J's.
Sellars explains that he has lured them all here with the image of the golden city—the most
discreet method he could devise, because their enemies, the Grail Brotherhood, are so unbelievably
powerful and remorseless. Sellars explains that Atasco and his wife were once members of the
Brotherhood, but quit when their questions about the network were not answered. Sellars then tells
how he discovered that the secret Otherland network has a mysterious but undeniable connection to
the illness of thousands of children like Renie's brother Stephen. Before he can explain more, the
sims of Atasco and his wife go rigid and Sellars' own sim disappears.
In the real world, Jongleur's murderous minion Dread has begun his attack on the Atascos'
fortified Colombian island home, and after breaking through the defenses, has killed both Atascos.
He then uses his strange abilities—his "twist"—to tap into their data lines, discovers Sellars'
meeting, and orders his assistant Dulcinea Anwin to take over the incoming line of one of the
Atascos' guests—the online group that includes Renie and her friends—and takes on the identity of
that usurped guest, leaving Dread a mystery spy in the midst of Renie and friends.
Sellars reappears in the Atascos' virtual world and begs Renie and the others to flee into the
network while he tries to hide their presence. They are to look for Paul Jonas, he tells them, a
mysterious virtual prisoner Sellars has helped escape from the Brotherhood. Renie and company make
their way onto the river and out of the Atascos' simulation, then through an electrical blue glow
into the next simworld. Panicked and overwhelmed by too much input, Martine finally reveals her
secret to Renie: she is blind.
Their boat has become a giant leaf. Overhead, a dragonfly the size of a fighter jet skims into
view.
Back in the mountain fortress, in the real world, Jeremiah and Renie's father Long Joseph can only
watch the silent V-tanks, wonder, and wait.
OTHERLAND: River of Blue Fire
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Synopsis
Paul Jonas still seems to be adrift in time and space. He has recovered most of his memory, but
the last few years of his life remain a blank. He has no idea why he is being tossed from world to
world, pursued by the two creatures he first knew as Finch and Mullet, and he still does not know
the identity of the mysterious woman he keeps encountering, and who has appeared to him even in
dreams.
He has survived a near-drowning only to find himself in the Ice Age, where he has fallen in with a
tribe of Neandertals. The mystery woman appears to him in another dream, and tells him that to
reach her he must find "a black mountain that reaches to the sky."
Not all of the cave dwellers welcome the unusual stranger; one picks a quarrel that results in
Paul being abandoned in the frozen wilderness. He survives an attack by giant cave hyenas, but
falls into the icy river once more.
Others are having just as difficult and painful a time as Paul, although they are better informed.
Renie Sulaweyo originally had set out to solve the mystery of her brother Stephen's coma with her
friend and former student !Xabbu, a Bushman from the Okavango Delta. With the help of a blind
researcher named Martine Desroubins, they have found their way into Otherland, the world's biggest
and strangest virtual reality network, constructed by a cabal of powerful men and women who call
themselves The Grail Brotherhood. Summoned by the mysterious Mr. Sellars, Renie meets several
others who have been affected by the Grail Brotherhood's machinations—Orlando Gardiner, a dying
teenager, and his friend Sam Fredericks (who Orlando has only recently discovered is a girl), a
woman named Florimel, a flamboyant character who calls himself Sweet William, a Chinese
grandmother named Quan Li, and a sullen young man in futuristic armor who uses the handle T4b. But
something has trapped them within the network, and the nine companions have been forced to flee
from one virtual world to the next on a river of blue fire—a virtual path that leads through all
the Otherland simulation worlds.
The newest simworld is much like the real world, except that Renie and her companions are less
than a hundredth of their normal size. They are menaced by the local insects, as well as larger
creatures like fish and birds, and the members of the group become separated. Renie and !Xabbu are
rescued by scientists who are using the simulation to study insect life from an unusual
perspective. The scientists soon discover that, like Renie and !Xabbu, they are trapped online.
Renie and !Xabbu meet a strange man named Kunohara, who owns the bug world simulation, but claims
he is not part of the Grail Brotherhood. Kunohara poses a pair of cryptic riddles to them, then
vanishes. When a horde of (relatively gigantic) army ants attacks the research station, most of
the scientists are killed and Renie and !Xabbu barely escape from a monstrous praying mantis.
As they flee back to the river in one of the researchers' aircraft, they see Orlando and
Fredericks being swept down the river on a leaf. As they attempt to rescue them, Renie and !Xabbu
are pulled through the river gateway with them, but the two groups wind up in different
simulations.
Meanwhile, in the real world outside the network, other people are being drawn into the widening
Otherland mystery. Olga Pirofsky, the host of a children's net show, begins to suffer from
terrible headaches. She suspects that her online activities might have something to do with it,
and in the course of investigating her problem, begins to learn of the apparently net-related
illness that has struck so many children (including Renie's brother.) Olga's research also draws
the attention of a lawyer named Catur Ramsey, who is investigating the illness on behalf of the
parents both of Orlando and Fredericks, since in the real world both teenagers have been in a coma
ever since their entrance into the Otherland network.
John Wulgaru, who calls himself Dread, and whose hobbies include serial murder, has been an
effective if not one hundred percent loyal employee of the incredibly wealthy Felix Jongleur, the
man who heads the Grail Brotherhood (and who spends most of his time in his Egyptian simulation,
wearing the guise of the god Osiris.) But in the course of killing an ex-member of the Brotherhood
at Jongleur's orders, Dread has discovered the existence of the Otherland network, and has even
taken over one of the sims in Renie's marooned company. As his master Jongleur is caught up in the
final arrangements for the Otherland network—whose true purpose is still known only to the
Brotherhood—Dread busies himself with this new and fascinating puzzle. As a spy among Sellars'
recruits, Dread is now traveling through the network and trying to discover its secrets. But
unlike those in Sellars' ragtag group, Dread's life is not at risk: he can go offline whenever he
wishes. He recruits a software specialist named Dulcie Anwin to help him run the puppet sim.
Dulcie is fascinated by her boss, but unsettled by him, too, and begins to wonder if she is in
deeper than she wants to be.
Meanwhile, a bit of Dread's past has surfaced. In Australia, a detective named Calliope Skouros is
trying to solve a seemingly unexceptional murder. Some of the terrible things done to the victim's
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body are reminiscent of an Aboriginal myth-creature, the Woolagaroo. Detective Skouros becomes
convinced that there is some strange relationship between Aboriginal myths and the young woman's
death she is investigating.
Back in the Otherland network, Renie and !Xabbu find themselves in a weird, upside-down version of
the Oz story, set in the dreary Kansas of the original tale's opening. The Otherland simulations
seem to be breaking down, or at least growing increasingly chaotic. As Renie and !Xabbu try to
escape the evil of Lion and Tinman—who seem to be two more versions of Paul Jonas' Finch and
Mullet—they find a pair of unlikely allies, the young and naive Emily 22813 and a laconic gypsy
named Azador. Emily later reveals that she is pregnant, and says Azador is the father. Separated
from Azador during one of the increasingly frequent "system spasms," they escape Kansas, but to
their surprise, Emily (who they had thought was software) travels with them to the next
simulation.
Orlando and Fredericks have landed in a very strange world, a kitchen out of an ancient cartoon,
populated by creatures sprung from package labels and silverware drawers. They help a cartoon
Indian brave search for his stolen child, and after battling cartoon pirates and meeting both a
prophetic sleeping woman and an inexplicable force—entities that are really Paul Jonas' mystery
woman and the network's apparently sentient operating system, known as the Other—they escape the
Kitchen and land in a simulation that seems to be ancient Egypt.
Meanwhile, their former companions, the blind woman Martine and the rest of the Sellars' recruits,
have hiked out of the bug world to discover themselves in a simulation where the river is made not
of water but air, and where the primitive inhabitants fly on wind currents and live in caves along
vertical cliffs. Martine and the others name the place Aerodromia, and although they are nervous
about trying it at first, they soon discover that they can fly, too. A group of natives invite
them to stay in the tribal camp.
Paul Jonas has passed from the Ice Age into something much different. At first, seeing familiar
London sights, he believes he has finally found his way home, but soon comes to realize that he is
instead traveling through an England almost completely destroyed by Martian attack—it is, in fact,
the setting of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds. Paul now realizes that he is traveling not just to
worlds separate in time and space, but to some that are actually fictitious. He meets a strange
husband and wife called the Pankies, who seem to be another guise of his pursuers Finch and
Mullet, but offer him no harm. (Paul is also being pursued by a special software program called
the Nemesis device, but he is not yet aware of it.) Then, when Paul and the Pankies stop at
Hampton Court, Paul is led into the maze by a strange man and then shoved through a gateway of
glowing light at the maze's center.
On the other side Paul finds himself in the setting of Coleridge's famous poem, Xanadu, and the
man who brought him there introduces himself as Nandi Paradivash. Nandi is a member of a group
named The Circle, who are working against the Grail Brotherhood. Paul finally learns that he is
not insane, nor caught in some kind of dimensional warp, but is rather a prisoner in an incredibly
realistic simulation network. But Nandi has no idea why the Brotherhood should be interested
enough in Paul—who worked in a museum and remembers his other life as being very ordinary—to
pursue him throughout Otherland. Nandi also reveals that all the simulations through which Paul
has been traveling belong to one man—Felix Jongleur, the Grail Brotherhood's chairman. Before
Nandi can tell him more, they are forced to separate, Nandi pursued by Kublai Khan's troops, Paul
passing through another gateway into yet another simworld.
Things are no less complex and confusing in the real world. Renie's and !Xabbu's physical bodies
are in special virtual reality tanks in an abandoned South African military base, watched over by
Jeremiah Dako and Renie's father, Long Joseph Sulaweyo. Long Joseph, bored and depressed, sneaks
out of the base to go see Renie's brother Stephen, who remains comatose in a Durban hospital,
leaving Jeremiah alone inside the base. But when Joseph arrives at the hospital, he is kidnapped
at gunpoint and forced into a car.
The mysterious Mr. Sellars lives on a military base, too, but his is in America. Christabel
Sorensen is a little girl whose father is in charge of base security, and who despite her youth
has helped her friend Sellars escape the house arrest her father and others have kept him in for
years. Sellars is hiding in old tunnels under the base, his only companion the street urchin Cho-
Cho. Christabel does not like the boy at all. She worries for the feeble Mr. Sellars' safety, and
is torn by guilt for doing something she knows would make her mother and father angry. But when
her mother discovers her talking with Sellars through specially modified sunglasses, Christabel is
finally in real trouble.
Martine, Florimel, Quan Li, Sweet William, and T4b have been enjoying the flying world,
Aerodromia, but things get uncomfortable when a young girl from the tribe is kidnapped. Martine
and the rest don't know it, but the girl has been stolen, terrorized, and murdered by Dread, still
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pretending to be one of Martine's four companions. The people of Aerodromia blame the newcomers
for the disappearance, and dump them all into a labyrinth of caverns they call the Place of the
Lost, where they find themselves surrounded by mysterious, ghostly presences which Martine, with
her heightened nonvisual senses, finds particularly upsetting. The phantoms speak in unison,
telling of the "One who is Other," and how he has deserted them instead of taking them across the
"White Ocean," as promised. The voices also identify the real names of all Martine's company. The
group is fascinated and frightened, and only belatedly realizes that Sweet William has
disappeared—evidently to protect the guilty secret of his true identity. Something large and
strange—the Other—abruptly enters the darkened Place of the Lost, and Martine and the others flee
the horrifying presence. Martine searches desperately for one of the gateways that will allow them
to leave the simulation before either the Other or the renegade Sweet William catches them.
At the same time, Orlando and Fredericks discover that the Egyptian simulation is not a
straightforward historical recreation, but a mythical version. They meet a wolf-headed god named
Upaut, who tells them how he and the whole simworld have been mistreated by the chief god, Osiris.
Unfortunately, Upaut is not a very bright or stable god, and he interprets Orlando mumbling in his
sleep—the result of a dream-conversation Orlando is having with his software agent, Beezle Bug,
who can only reach him from the real world when he dreams—as a divine directive for him to try to
overthrow Osiris. Upaut steals their sword and boat, leaving Orlando and Fredericks stranded in
the desert. After many days of hiking along the Nile, they come upon a strange temple filled with
some terrible, compelling presence. They cannot escape it. In a dream, Orlando is visited by the
mystery woman also seen by Paul Jonas, and she tells them she will give them assistance, but as
the temple draws them closer and closer, they find only the Wicked Tribe, a group of very young
children they had met outside the network, who wear the sim-forms of tiny yellow flying monkeys.
Orlando is stunned that this is the help the mystery woman has brought them. The frightening
temple continues to draw them nearer.
Paul Jonas has passed from Xanadu to late 16th Century Venice, and soon stumbles into Gally, a boy
he had met in one of the earlier simulations, and who had traveled with him, but Gally does not
remember Paul. Seeking help, the boy brings him to a woman named Eleanora; although she cannot
explain Gally's missing memories, she reveals that she herself is the former real-world mistress
of an organized crime figure who built her this virtual Venice as a gift. Her lover was a member
of the Grail Brotherhood, but died too soon to benefit from the immortality machinery they are
building, and survives now only as a set of flawed life-recordings. Before Paul can learn more, he
discovers that the dreadful Finch and Mullet—the Twins, as Nandi named them—have tracked him to
Venice: he must flee again, this time with Gally. But before they can reach the gateway that will
allow them to escape, they are caught by the Twins. The Pankies also make an appearance, and for a
moment the two mirror-pairs face each other, but the Pankies quickly depart, leaving Paul alone to
fight the Twins. Gally is killed, and Paul barely escapes with his life. Still trying to fulfill
the mystery woman's summons from his Ice Age dream, he travels to a simulation of ancient Ithaca
to meet someone called "the weaver." Still shocked and saddened by Gally's death, he learns that
in this new simulation he is the famous Greek hero Odysseus, and that the weaver is the hero's
wife, Penelope—the mystery woman, again. But at least it seems he will finally get some answers.
Renie and !Xabbu and Emily find that they have escaped Kansas for something much more confusing—a
world that does not seem entirely finished, a place with no sun, moon, or weather. They have also
inadvertently taken an object from Azador that looks like an ordinary cigarette lighter, but is in
fact an access device, a sort of key to the Otherland network, stolen from one of the Grail
Brotherhood (General Daniel Yacoubian, one of Jongleur's rivals for leadership). While studying
the device in the hopes of making it work, !Xabbu manages to open a transmission channel and
discovers Martine on the other end, trapped in the Place of the Lost and desperately trying to
open a gateway. Together they manage to create a passage for Martine and her party, but when they
arrive, believing they are being pursued by a murderous Sweet William, they find that it is
William himself who has been fatally injured, and grandmotherly Quan Li who is really the murderer
Dread in virtual disguise. His secret revealed, Dread escapes with the access device, leaving
Renie and the others stranded, perhaps forever, in this disturbing place.
OTHERLAND: Mountain of Black Glass
Synopsis
Renie Sulaweyo, her Bushman friend !Xabbu, and several more of the volunteers recruited by the
strange Mr. Sellars have been reunited in the weirdest part of the Grail network they have yet
discovered—a world that seems somehow unfinished. They are stranded there because the murderer
named Dread, who was masquerading as one of their company, has taken the access device—a virtual
object that appears to be a cigarette lighter—that they have been using to travel between
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simulated worlds.
While they try to discover a way out, two of the more mysterious members of their company,
Florimel and T4b, finally explain their backgrounds. Florimel is an escapee from a German
religious cult, and has come to the network because her daughter is one of the children (like
Renie's brother Stephen) who has fallen into one of the mysterious Tandagore's Syndrome comas.
T4b, whose real name is Javier Rodgers, is a former street kid and gang member, now living with
his grandparents. A young friend of his has also fallen prey to a coma.
Renie and the others find the unfinished world in which they are marooned increasingly
uncomfortable—at one point, they see something that looks just like !Xabbu's baboon sim, but
isn't. When a huge hole suddenly opens right in the middle of the ground, almost swallowing the
blind woman Martine and somehow obliterating one of T4b's virtual hands, they decide they must
escape immediately. Martine, !Xabbu, and Renie, working together, manage to open a gateway even
without the lighter.
After they step through the gateway, following in Dread's virtual tracks, the search-and-destroy
program named Nemesis, which was put into the network to locate another fugitive, Paul Jonas,
tries to decide whether to follow them or not. It is confused—there are things happening on the
network that interfere with the original clarity of its programmed drives, anomalies that are
making it do strange, unprecedented things.
The amnesiac fugitive Paul Jonas is living out a version of the Odyssey in which he is Odysseus,
returned to his home island of Ithaca after the Trojan War. But Penelope, the wife of Odysseus
(who also appears to be yet another incarnation of the mysterious woman Paul thinks of as "the
Angel") does not seem to be playing by the same set of rules. In an effort to shake her up and get
some answers—another incarnation of the Angel has told him that the Penelope-version will tell him
how to find the "black mountain" he must reach—he performs an invocation of what he thinks is
Hades, the death god of ancient Greece. Instead, he summons the Angel herself, confronting
Penelope with a near-twin. Next, a new force answers his invocation—not Hades, but the Other, the
dark intelligence behind the Grail network. Terrified, Paul flees onto the ocean, but his boat is
destroyed.
Meanwhile, Orlando Gardiner and his friend Sam Fredericks are in a simulation of ancient Egypt—a
simworld that is the one place on the network that Felix Jongleur, the world's oldest man and
master of the Grail Brotherhood, considers his home. They have been hidden from Jongleur's
subordinates by a woman named Bonnie Mae Simpkins who is a member of a group called the Circle.
She tells them how her husband and many other Circle members have been killed trying to penetrate
the mysteries of the Grail network. Now the last few members in Egypt are besieged in a temple.
Bonnie Mae recruits the god Bes to lead her and Orlando and Fredericks there, hoping that her
Circle friends can help the two teenagers escape Egypt through an activated gateway.
People offline are just as involved in these events as those trapped on the network. Catur Ramsey,
a lawyer who works for Sam Fredericks' parents, finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into the
Otherland mystery. With the help of Orlando's software agent, a cartoon bug named Beezle, Ramsey
follows the online trail of the two comatose teenagers. A Canadian woman named Olga Pirofsky that
he contacts, who works for one of Jongleur's many companies, has also become involved. What
started for her as troubling headaches have now become dream-visitations by mysterious children.
Olga fears she might be going mad.
In North Carolina, the little girl Christabel Sorensen, who helped Sellars escape and hide under
the military base where they both live, has been caught by her security chief father, Major
Sorensen. Sellars uses the little homeless boy Cho-Cho to ask Christabel to arrange a conversation
with her parents. Sellars tells—and shows—Christabel's parents enough to convince them to help him
escape the base entirely. With Sellars hidden in the back of their van, and Cho-Cho pretending to
be Christabel's cousin, they all set out for a rendezvous with Catur Ramsey, who has also been
contacted by Sellars.
Back in the Otherland network, Renie, !Xabbu, and the others have come through their jury-rigged
gateway, following Dread's trail into a mysterious simworld known only as the House. They quickly
discover it's called that because the world is nothing but a house—an endless collection of halls
and rooms, with separate civilizations living only floors apart from each other. They are assisted
in their queries by a brotherhood of monks who maintain the House's monstrous library, but Martine
is kidnapped by Dread, and with the aid of one of the monks they set out in search of her—and the
murderer.
Someone else searching for the murderer Dread—although in the real world, not the virtual—is
Calliope Skouros, an Australian homicide detective. In the course of investigating one of Dread's
earliest killings, she begins to find out just what a strange and unpredictable killer he is.
Although Dread—also known by his birth-name, John Wulgaru—is listed as dead in police records,
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Calliope begins to suspect that he is alive.
Dread is not only alive, but has returned to Sydney, setting up operations only miles from
Detective Skouros. He has brought the American programmer Dulcie Anwin to Australia to help him
make sense of the Otherland network, whose existence he discovered while eliminating one of Felix
Jongleur's Grail Brotherhood rivals. Dulcie finds herself strangely attracted to Dread—she knows
he is a criminal, but has no idea of his true proclivities—and Dread is more than willing to use
that attraction for his own benefit. He has big plans for the network, and plans to use his
experience there as a basis for overthrowing his employer, Jongleur. He sets Dulcie up in a loft
and puts her to work.
In South Africa, Renie's father Long Joseph Sulaweyo and friend Jeremiah Dako have been guarding
her and !Xabbu while they lie helpless in the V-tanks they have used for long-term access to the
network. But Long Joseph, cut off from drink, miserable, and distracted, left the abandoned army
base to head for Durban and was kidnapped outside the hospital where his son Stephen lies
comatose. The kidnapper turns out to be Renie's ex-boyfriend Del Ray, whose own life has been
ruined by the help he gave Renie. He is desperate to find Renie so he can get a group of thugs
(whom Dread hired on behalf of Jongleur) off his back. But when Joseph and Del Ray leave the
hospital after going back to see Joseph's son, they are trailed by a mysterious black van. Then,
when they return to the army base dug deep into one of the Drakensberg mountains, they find the
thugs are there ahead of them. Joseph and Del Ray sneak into the base through the air duct Joseph
used in his escape. Inside the base, Jeremiah has been contacted by Mr. Sellars, who wants to help
them, but things do not look good. All but weaponless themselves, they are now besieged by heavily-
armed killers.
Shipwrecked Paul Jonas is bound for Troy, which means he is living out the Odyssey more or less
backward. After getting help building a raft—and other sorts of solace—from a hospitable goddess,
he puts to sea again. He survives the attack of the monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis,
then finds another survivor floating unconscious in the waves. The stranger turns out to be
Azador, a mysterious Gypsy who had traveled earlier with Renie and !Xabbu and the strange girl
Emily from the Oz simulation, and from whom Renie accidentally took the access device/lighter.
Together, Paul and Azador defeat a dangerous cyclops and land on the island of Lotos, where they
fall under the spell of the narcotic flowers. The Angel wakens Paul and helps them escape, but
only after a hallucinating Azador has told Paul that he too is being pursued by the Grail
Brotherhood, that he has escaped from their immortality machines, but many of his Gypsy kin have
not. Free of Lotos, they sail on to Troy.
In the House-world, Renie and her companions have had little luck finding the kidnapped Martine
(who is being psychologically tortured by Dread) and have themselves been captured by one of the
tribes who make the House's attic their home. To their surprise, they find Hideki Kunohara sharing
the robbers' revelries. Kunohara, one of the landlords of the Grail network, whose own giant world
of insects they had crossed earlier, seems bemused to see them, but intercedes for them with the
robbers. Paul Jonas' Angel appears to them all in a supernatural fashion, frightening away the
robbers and alarming even Kunohara, who refuses to help Renie and the others any more than he
already has, saying that he cannot risk the displeasure of the powerful Grail Brotherhood.
Renie and her companions at last find Martine, but only after !Xabbu has disappeared while
searching for her (his baboon sim a more useful form for exploring the rooftops of the House). But
Martine is not alone; Dread has prepared a trap for them. When they open the door, he shoots T4b
and Florimel, then battles with Renie across a steep rooftop. Just when it seems he has won,
!Xabbu returns, and then Florimel finds one of Dread's discarded guns. As Dread prepares to kill
Renie, Florimel shoots him. He dies—but only online, leaving the stolen virtual body behind. For
the moment Dread has been pushed out of the Grail network, and Renie and her companions are
battered but safe.
Ancient arch-mogul Felix Jongleur has been very busy preparing for the Ceremony—the moment at
which the members of the Grail Brotherhood will become immortal within the virtual worlds they
have built for themselves. He has not been spending much time in his favorite mythical-Egypt
simulation, and does not realize how far out of hand things have become there. His servants Tefy
and Mewat—the Egyptian versions of his subordinates Finney and Mudd, who have been chasing Paul
Jonas all through the network—are now forced to besiege a temple full of people resisting their
cruel reign.
Inside the besieged temple, Orlando Gardiner and Sam Fredericks meet other members of the Circle,
including Nandi Paradivash, a specialist who is trying to make sense of the network's dying
gateway system. There is something very wrong with the Grail network. Its mysterious operating
system, the Other, is acting in a peculiar fashion, and many of the simworlds seem to be falling
apart.
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Tefy and Mewat attack the temple, first bringing in a trio of rogue Egyptian gods to fight with
the temple's two sphinx-guardians, then sending in a horde of tortoise men and flying snakes to
finish the job. Orlando fights bravely, but cannot keep Sam from being captured by Tefy and Mewat.
The unpleasant pair have recognized the teenagers as real people from outside the network, and are
about to take them away to be tortured when Jongleur himself returns in the form of Osiris, chief
god of Egypt. In the chaos, Orlando and Fredericks escape through one of the gateways Nandi has
opened, out of Egypt and into Troy, where they have been urged to go by another incarnation of
Paul Jonas' Angel.
Paul has already made his way to Troy, where—as Odysseus—he fits right in with the Greeks
besieging the city. But when he is sent to the tent where the hero Achilles and his friend
Patroclus wait, unwilling to fight against the Trojans, he decides something about the two doesn't
seem to fit the simulation. After much sparring, he reveals his true name to them. Achilles and
Patroclus are in fact Orlando and Sam, who recognize the name "Jonas" from something Sellars had
told them. The meeting becomes a happy one, although Paul's spirits sag a little when he learns
the two teenagers are in just as much trouble, and are just as lost, as he is.
Renie and the others use the lighter recaptured from Dread to leave the House and go to Troy.
Unlike Orlando and Paul, when they enter the simulation they are assigned to the Trojan side in
the besieged city, aware that their friends may be outside the gates, but with no way to recognize
them. They are quickly sent on a deadly raid against the Greeks.
Paul Jonas has a dream in which the Angel appears to him again and tells him to go outside the
camp. He meets Renie and the others, They talk for a long lime, comparing stories, trying to make
sense of what they have learned. Paul decides to bring them back to the Greek settlement in the
guise of prisoners so they can be reunited with Orlando and Sam, but even as they reach the camp
the Trojans launch a frightening attack.
Caught in the middle of a fierce battle, cut off from Orlando and Sam, they can only struggle to
stay alive. In the meantime, Sam, in a misguided effort to keep up the morale of Achilles'
despairing troop and buy the sick Orlando some time to get better, dresses herself in the famous
armor of Achilles and, masquerading as their chieftain, leads Achilles' soldiers out to fight the
Trojans. The masquerade is so successful that the Trojans are driven back toward the walls of
Troy. Orlando wakes to find himself alone. When he realizes what has happened, he scavenges armor
and weapons and sets out across the plain toward the city, despite his own fast-failing health,
desperate to save his friend Sam. He discovers her about to be killed by the Trojan hero Hector,
and only barely manages to overcome him, then collapses in front of the walls.
Martine, who has been given a role as one of the Trojan royal family, is desperate to keep her
friends alive. Hearing of the fighting in front of the walls, she nearly tricks some Trojan guards
into opening the gates, but when they balk, she is forced to order T4b to kill the guard captain.
The gates are opened, and to Martine's shame the Greeks come roaring into Troy, burning, raping,
and killing. Although she and the others are all reunited, and even though the Trojans being
killed are merely programs, she feels she has done a terrible thing.
Meanwhile, the Grail Brotherhood have begun their Ceremony, although Jongleur is irritated by the
absence of his employee, Dread. Jongleur and technocrat Robert Wells explain to the concerned
Grail members that they will not truly transfer their minds directly to the network. Instead,
duplicate versions of themselves, virtual minds which have been made to copy every detail in the
original minds, will come to life online—but in order to assure that only one version of each
Brotherhood member exists, they must kill off their physical bodies. Because they are not aware
that Jongleur, Wells, the financier Jinn Bhao, and American military man Daniel Yacoubian are not
actually going through with the Ceremony this time—because they want to see how well the process
works, these four will only pretend to awaken their virtual bodies and murder their real physical
selves—the other members of the Brotherhood are at last convinced.
But Dread has other plans for the Grail network. He has decided to force his way back online, and
with the help of Dulcie Anwin and a copy he has made of the access device/lighter, he tries to
enter the system. He is resisted with terrible force by the security systems of the Other, but in
the course of their battle—Dread employing his own telekinetic talent, which he calls his
"twist"—Dread discovers that the network has mechanisms to inflict something like pain on the
Other, mechanisms which the Grail Brotherhood has used to force the intelligent operating system
to do their will. Dread uses this pain to bludgeon the Other into retreat. Victorious, Dread can
now influence and even direct the entire Grail network.
Renie, Paul, !Xabbu, and the others fight their way across the dying city. When Paul meets Emily,
a longtime companion of Renie and the others, he is stunned to recognize her as another version of
the Angel. A name suddenly comes back to him—"Avialle"—and he is overwhelmed by returning
memories.
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