Otherland: Mountain of Black Glass

ground, then stopped. Clutched in his trailing hand was another small hand whose owner still lay beneath the soil.

 

Increasingly aware that something was wrong, Renie kept pulling, frantic to dislodge Stephen, but now a chain of small dirty shapes lifted from the soil like the plastic pop-beads she had played with in her own childhood-a score of little children all connected hand to hand, the last still partially immured in the earth.

 

Renie could not see well-the sky was growing dark, or she had rubbed dirt into her own eyes. She made one last effort, the very hardest pull she could manage, so that for a moment it seemed she was in danger of tearing her own arms out at their roots. The last of the children came free of the soil. But this child's hand held another hand as well, only this last childish fist was the size of a small car, and the wrist loomed from the earth like a vast tree trunk. The very earth trembled as this last monstrous link in the chain, perhaps annoyed by Renie's insistent pulling, began ponderously to dig its way upward out of the dark, gelid soil toward the light of the surface.

 

"Stephen!" she screamed, "let go, boy! You must let go . . . !"

 

But his eyes remained tight shut and he continued to cling to the chain of other children, even as the earth heaved and the vast shape beneath it continued to rise. . . .

 

 

Renie sat up, gasping and shivering, to discover herself in the thin, unchanging gray light of the unfinished simworld, surrounded by the sleeping forms of her companions-!Xabbu, Florimel, Emily 22813 from the crumbling Oz simworld, and the armored silhouette of T4b stretched on the ground beside them like a fallen hood ornament. RenieÕs movement woke !Xabbu; his eyes flicked open, alert and intelligent. It was a surprise, as always, to see that gaze housed in an almost comical baboon face. As he began to rise from where he lay curled near her side, she shook her head.