Codex (32 page)

She wasn't making it easy on him, he thought. Was she crazy? Was it a prank? Some kind of elaborate joke? If so, he didn't get it. Could it really be from the Duchess? The Duke's people had tried to make him doubt her sanity; this could be more of the same, a forgery planted in his mailbox. But somehow he doubted it. It had a genuine feel to it.

But what did it mean? Was it supposed to be some kind of fantasy? And if so, was it supposed to be his, or hers? Was it a novel-in-progress? Some kind of coded message, designed to foil an eavesdropping reader? He tried to remember what Nick had said about steganograms. If there was a hidden meaning here, he couldn't see it. Maybe she really wasn't all there.

Or did it make a deeper kind of sense? Maybe he just wasn't looking hard enough. Something about the letter chilled him, even through the summer heat.

 

The small man in livery took away the portfolio, now stuffed full of papers, and returned a minute later driving a limousine. He opened the door for the woman, and Edward
followed her into the dark interior of the car. It was silent there, and it smelled of sweet tobacco and leather. The summer night outside was murky behind the smoked glass. The limousine slid smoothly and silently through the city, like a gondola along a Venetian canal, a dark, sheltered canal deep in the heart of San Marco. They were there together.

“What's your name?” Edward inquired politely.

“Blanche. What's yours?”

“I'm Edward. Edward Wintergreen.”

She said nothing more, just gripped his hand tightly, trembling a little in the darkness.

The driver took them swooping down through the park to the Plaza. He held the door open for them, and the mysterious Blanche led Edward out onto the carpeted sidewalk and into the foyer. He saw that she was very slender and dressed in the most glamorous and stylish clothes. She leaned on him as if it were all she could do to support herself, but at the same time she somehow hurried him along through the lobby with irresistible speed, with dark purpose, past the reception desk and the hotel bar with tinkly piano music in the background and down a plush red corridor like a throat. It was all a dream, the most wonderful, delightful, impossible dream. They entered an ornate cage elevator and the door crashed to behind them.

Instantly Blanche pressed herself against him. Her body was soft and warm and ripe, and he hungered for it. He put his arm around her, still awkwardly holding his briefcase with the other hand. His thigh slipped between her legs, and they kissed. It was heavenly.

Then the doors opened again, and she broke away and led him out into the hall.

“Now,” she called over her shoulder. “You must come to my room and help me sort these papers. They are all out of order!”

“Out of order?” Edward said stupidly. His face was flushed. What could she possibly mean?

“Please!” she said. “I must get them properly sorted!”

“But why?”

At the end of the hall she opened a door upholstered in red leather and went inside. He followed her.

Inside, the ceilings were twenty feet high, and the walls were hung with rich medieval tapestries. On one Edward could make out the woven shape of a riderless horse frozen in the agonies of battle, all rolling eyes and flared nostrils and bared white teeth. A vast, dark oriental rug spilled across the stone floor, woven with patterns that repeated themselves again and again, tinier and tinier, until they vanished altogether.

Moonlight and starlight flooded in together through high windows. The first drops of rain from the storm were just beginning to spatter against them. Now at last they were alone.

Blanche turned to Edward and took his head between both of her hands, standing on tiptoe to reach him.

“Now listen to me, Edward. The real world isn't nice like this. It's chaos, it's all out of order, just like my pages were. The whole world has been disbound, Edward, its pages scattered to the wind. It's your job to put them back in their proper order.”

She put her arms around his neck and whispered, her lips brushing against his ear:

“Now make love to me!”

T
HE NEXT DAY EDWARD
took a cab down to the Lower East Side. It let him off on the empty corner of Fifth Street and Avenue C, and he stood there for a minute looking through his pockets for the address Zeph gave him, which he had managed to misplace during the ride over. It was a Friday, midafternoon, and the sunlight was hard and white and bright, but the steel shutter was already down in front of the bodega on the corner. An amputated refrigerator door stood propped up against a parking meter. Rancid rainwater was pooled in the butter compartment.

Edward finally found the address wadded up in his back pocket. The paper it was written on was a cheap, pulpy off-white, already starting to go yellow with age. On the back was a sentence printed in bold type, all caps:

 

TO SAVE THE EARTH, FIRST HE MUST SAVE ITS FIFTEEN DUPLICATES!!!

 

A van from a bakery rattled by, and the large technicolor painted loaf on the side reminded him wistfully of the bread the peasants were eating in his wheat field painting. A gust of wind blew up and pushed the dust around in the street. It was warm out, but there was the faintest hint of a chill in the air, so faint that it almost wasn't there at all. It reminded him that summer was almost over: Tomorrow was the first day of September. Time was passing.

The building was tall and thin and made of brown brick, a turn-of-the-century tenement that leaned visibly out over the street. Alberto Hidalgo's name appeared next to the topmost doorbell. All the other slots were blank. Edward rang the doorbell and waited.

Standing on the corner, surrounded by shattered crack vials and fluttering Slim Jim wrappers and multicolored dog shit, Edward heard the inaudible but unmistakable sound of his life hitting bottom. What was he doing here? Everything about the whole situation was wrong. Was it worth the effort to come all this way downtown, all the way to the edge of the known universe, just to get help with a computer game? No, it was not. But what else did he have to do? Margaret wasn't speaking to him. The Duchess was a question mark. The codex was more lost now than it had been before they'd exhausted their only lead in Old Forge. He was cut off from everything that mattered. It was time to go to England. He'd even taken the drastic step of booking himself a flight in a few days, but he knew he couldn't get on the plane. Not yet, not without the codex. Maybe if he ran as far as he could in the opposite direction he'd run into the codex coming the other way. And why did he know that name, Alberto Hidalgo? He leaned on the buzzer, half hoping that nobody would answer.

After a minute or two Edward noticed a small video camera staring down at him through a grimy pane of glass set in the door. He waved at it, and the lock buzzed.

He pushed his way inside. The staircase was narrow and steep. The ceiling was covered with old sheets of tin stamped with a repeating floral pattern and painted pale green. It was dark and silent as he walked up, his shoes rasping dryly on the worn marble steps. Now that he was inside he saw that the security system had a home-brewed look to it, as if it had been put together from parts ordered out of different catalogs. A pair of wires ran out of the camera, a power cord and an Ethernet cable stapled together into the angle between wall and ceiling, and he followed them up the stairs. They ran all the way up to the sixth and final landing.

One of the doors on the landing stood slightly ajar.

“Come in,” said a high, androgynous voice.

He did. The apartment was cool and dim, with a dropped ceiling. The walls were white. Light filtered in through windows almost completely blocked by tall, unsteady stacks of paperback books that let in only occasional chinks of white light. The floor was covered with cheap shag carpet, pale blue and brand new–looking, littered with crumpled pieces of paper, ballpoint pens, brightly colored hardware catalogs, CD-ROMs, the colorful internal organs of several computers, and many, many empty orange bags of Jax. Alberto Hidalgo had tacked power strips along the walls, just above the floor, so there was an electrical outlet every few feet. Every single one of them was in use. Alberto himself sat at a long white IKEA desk with half a dozen monitors of various shapes and sizes lined up along it. Edward recognized him immediately.

“I know you,” Edward said.

“I know you, too,” the Artiste replied calmly.

It was the tiny man from Zeph's apartment and the LAN party. He was dressed as neatly as the room was messy, in a gray suit and a neatly knotted pink tie, like a kid dressed up for a bar mitzvah, except that his feet were bare. He was so small that they barely touched the floor.

Edward stood in the doorway, less sure than ever that he wanted to go ahead with this.

“Zeph told me you were coming,” the Artiste said. “Please sit down.”

Edward picked his way over to a broken-down velvet couch against the opposite wall, feeling like a first-time visitor to a psychiatrist's office.

“Do you have your saved game with you?”

Edward nodded. He took a disc out of his shirt pocket and handed it to him. The Artiste slipped it into a massive, squat PC that sat under his desk giving off an audible hum.

“That's quite a machine you have there,” Edward said.

“It's a KryoTech,” the Artiste replied. He seemed perfectly at ease. “They're faster than most off-the-shelf systems. It's built around a refrigeration unit that cools the microprocessor to around forty degrees below zero. Reduces the resistance in the silicon. At that temperature even a standard chip can be reliably overclocked to speeds much higher than factory spec. You don't see a lot of KryoTechs, though—they make a lot of noise, and they use a lot of power. They also weigh a ton. And they're expensive.”

The disk drive whirred as it read Edward's disc.

“Now,” he said. “Let's see where you are.”

His hands hesitated for a moment, poised over the keyboard.

The Artiste typed faster than anybody Edward had ever seen. The individual clickings and clackings of the keys merged together into a single high whine. The massive monitor screen had ten or fifteen windows open on it and after a few seconds Edward's game appeared in one of them, shrunk down to the size of a postage stamp. The Artiste grabbed a corner of the window with his mouse and dragged it open until it covered most of the screen. He studied it critically.

“Uh-huh,” he said, with precisely the manner of a radiologist examining an X-ray of a crushed spleen. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”

He spun the point of view around 360 degrees.

“Huh.”

“What?”

“Well,” he said. “This is certainly a fucked up situation you've gotten yourself into.”

A tiny, lopsided smile appeared on his face, then disappeared, then reappeared again—a secret joke. The Artiste suppressed a giggle. Edward got up and walked over to stand behind him. On the screen, large wet snowflakes sifted down out of the blank gray sky.

“What,” Edward said.

“I'm sorry.” The Artiste cleared his throat. “Do you know what's going on here? You're trapped in an Easter Egg.”

Edward shook his head. He just wanted to get this over with.

“An Easter Egg. I don't know what that is.”

The Artiste leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head.

“An Easter Egg is something that a programmer will sometimes insert into a program he or she is writing. Did you ever have an Atari 2600 when you were younger?”

Edward blinked.

“I don't remember. But you're not the first person who's asked me that question.”

“If you had, you would have played a video game called
Adventure.
”

“Okay.” Whatever.

“The object of
Adventure
was to find the Holy Grail.” The Artiste pushed himself back from his desk, so that his chair rolled a few feet across the carpet. “However, on your way to get the Holy Grail, you would pass a couple of mysterious walls with no doors. To get through them you had to find the black key, enter the black castle, and kill the red dragon with the sword. Then you went and fetched the purple bridge, brought it into the black castle, into the darkened labyrinth, and used it to enter a wall. Embedded inside the wall was an invisible magic dot.”

Edward sat down on the couch. He wasn't paying the Artiste for his time, so he might as well let him talk.

“When you brought both the invisible dot and the Holy Grail into a room at the same time, the mysterious walls would disappear, and you could enter a secret room. Inside the secret room was the name of the person who wrote
Adventure,
spelled out in multicolored flashing letters.”

“That must have been kind of a letdown, after all that work,” Edward said, just to prove he was still paying attention. Three weeks ago, he reflected, he would have found the idea of somebody seriously lecturing him about a video game completely implausible.

“It was somewhat anticlimactic,” the Artiste agreed. “But the point is, that room was an example of what programmers call an Easter Egg: a secret signature, a hidden message within the larger whole, there to be read by those who knew where to look. Most programs have them—but you have to know where to look.”