Mountain of Black Glass Read Online Free PDF

lay curled on the packed earth of the kitchen floor. The sun had set and the cold night wind off the ocean crept through the huge, draughty house. The ash and dirt on the floor were more than offset by the welcome heat of the oven, which pulsed out at him through the stone, but even being warm when he might have been outside, chilled to the bone, was not much comfort.
    Think it through, he told himself. Somehow you knew it wouldn’t be so easy. The serving woman said, “Maybe a god has clouded her vision.” Could that be it? Some kind of spell or something? There were so many possibilities within this world, and he had so little real information—only what Nandi Paradivash had told him, with many deliberate omissions. Paul had never been much good at solving puzzles or playing games as a child, far happier just daydreaming, but now he felt like cursing his childhood self for slackness.
    No one else was going to do it for him, though.
    As Paul thought about what he had become—a thinking gamepiece, perhaps the only one, on this great Homeric Greece game board—a realization came to him, muffled and yet profound as distant thunder. I’m doing this all wrong. I’m thinking about this simworld like it’s real, even though it’s just an invention, a toy. But I need to think about the invention itself. What are the rules of how things work? How does this network actually function? Why am I Odysseus, and what’s supposed to happen to me here?
    He struggled to summon up his Greek lessons from school days. If this place, this simworld, revolved around the long journey of Homer’s Odyssey, then the king’s house on Ithaca could only come into it at the beginning of the tale, when the wanderer was about to leave, or at the end when the wanderer had returned. And as realistic as this place was—as all the simworlds he had visited were—it was still not real: perhaps every possible contingency could not be programmed in. Perhaps even the owners of the Otherland network had limits to their budgets. That meant there would have to be a finite number of responses, limited in part by what the Puppets could understand. Somehow, Paul’s appearance here had triggered several contradictory reactions in the woman currently called Penelope.
    But if he was triggering conflicting responses, why had the servingwoman Eurycleia immediately recognized him as Odysseus returned in disguise from his long exile, and then never deviated from that recognition? That was pretty much as it had been in the original, if his long-ago studies had served him properly, so why should the servant react correctly and the lady of the house not?
    Because they’re a different order of being, he realized. There aren’t just two types of people in these simulations, the real and the false—there’s at least one more, a third sort, even if I don’t yet know what it is. Gally was one of those third types. The bird-woman, Vaala or Penelope or whatever she’s really called—she must be another.
    It made sense, as far as he could think it through. The Puppets, who were completely part of the simulations, never had any doubt about who they were or what was happening around them, and apparently never left the simulations for which they had been created. In fact, Puppets like the old serving woman behaved as though they and the simulations were both completely real. They were also well-programmed; like veteran actors, they would ignore any slip-ups or uncertainties on the part of the human participants.
    At the other end of the spectrum, the true humans, the Citizens, would always know that they were inside a simulation.
    But there was apparently a third type like Gally and the bird-woman who seemed to be able to move from one simworld to another, but retained differing amounts of memory and selfunderstanding in each environment. So what were they? Impaired Citizens? Or more advanced Puppets,