been released and allowed to age. He was now as mortal as Jack and Weezy.
'Then what is their target?' Weezy said.
The Lady waited for her to take her seat opposite Jack before speaking.
'I am.'
'Because the Internet feeds the noosphere?' Veilleur said in his rumbling voice. A broad-shouldered man with a scarred face, a gray beard, and a dominating presence-not unexpected, considering he'd been born thousands of years ago in the First Age.
The Lady nodded. 'And the noosphere feeds me.'
The noosphere again. Jack had first heard the term last summer; Weezy had bandied it around a lot back then, but not much since. He hadn't quite grasped it then, and most of what he'd learned had slipped away over the ensuing months. He'd had other things on his mind.
'Can you give me a refresher on that?'
Weezy said, 'Where are you fuzzy?'
'Around the edges… and all through the middle.'
She smiled. 'Okay. Capsule version: Back in the nineteenth century a Jesuit named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin had a theory that the growth of human numbers and interactions would create a separate consciousness called the noosphere. Turned out he was right. It's real, and it's fed by every thought, every interaction between every sentient being on the planet. It's not cyberspace, though cyberspace adds to it. Every email, every Twitter tweet, every MySpace or Facebook add or app or comment, every chat-room quip, every blog entry or comment, every text message or eBay bid-billions upon billions of interactions every hour, all between sentient beings, and all adding to the noosphere.'
'I should have been destroyed by the Fhinntmanchca,' the Lady said. 'The noosphere suffered devastating damage and, under different circumstances, would not have been able to support my existence. In fact, for a few heartbeats, I ceased to exist… was, in fact, dead. Again.'
'Again?' Weezy said.
'The first death occurred in Florida. The Fhinntmanchca caused the second. A third time and I will be gone.'
Weezy looked shocked. 'Where does it say that?'
The Lady gestured toward the Compendium. 'You will find it somewhere in your book. After the third death I will be resorbed into the noosphere.'
'And that's it?'
'I will eventually reemerge, but as a child. And in the interval, my beacon will be extinguished. That nearly happened this time, but because the Internet has made the noosphere so much stronger than the One or anyone else realized, I was able to return almost immediately, albeit without my companion.'
Yeah. Her dog… Jack kind of missed him.
'I think it was more than just the noosphere,' Veilleur said.
Weezy turned to him. 'You think the Ally stepped in?'
He shook his head. 'No. The Ally has minimal presence in this sphere. I sense that something else was involved in bringing you back. By all tradition, the Fhinntmanchca should have completely crippled the noosphere and blasted you into nothingness.'
Weezy said, 'Another player? Please don't tell me you think there's a fourth force at work here.'
Jack didn't want another player either, but…
'Fourth?'
'We've got three now.' She ticked off on her fingers. 'The Ally, the Otherness, us.'
'Us? I could see you saying the noosphere, but-'
'The noosphere is us-humanity. We created it, and it can't exist without us. It's not fighting for us, it's humanity fighting for itself.' She looked at Veilleur. 'You're not suggesting divine intervention or anything like that, are you?'
He shook his head. 'Of course not. I think the Lady herself might have had something to do with her own return.'
She frowned. 'I don't see how that is possible. I am no one. I am simply a projection, an avatar of the noosphere.'
That might be true, but Jack couldn't help thinking of the Lady as a person. She was all that stood between humanity and a takeover by the Otherness. She was a beacon, announcing to the multiverse that this place was inhabited by sentient beings. If she were snuffed out, the Ally would discard the Earth as worthless, leaving the Otherness to reshape this reality to its liking-a hell for humanity.
'No one?' Veilleur smiled. 'No, my dear, I think you are someone. I think you are more than you realize.'
She shook her head. 'I know what I am and am not. I am no one. Without a healthy noosphere, I cannot exist.'
'But the noosphere isn't healthy. You expected to be getting back to your old self by now, but that hasn't happened.'
'True. It is taking more time than I anticipated for the noosphere to heal itself. Imagine the noosphere as a mountain lake, fed by many streams. It has had a sidewall blown away and much of its water has flowed downhill-and will continue to leak away until the breach is repaired. The Internet is one of the lake's major feeder tributaries.'
Jack said, 'So the One's crew must think if they bring down the Net, they'll empty the noosphere to a point where it won't be able to sustain you.'
She nodded. 'If the Internet is cut off before the breach is healed, the noosphere will dry up… and I with it.'
'If that's really their purpose,' Weezy said, 'I don't think we have much to worry about. The Internet's infrastructure is too spread out and too redundant.'
'What about a huge EMP?' Jack said.
She blinked. 'You mean a high-altitude nuke? If they had that, they wouldn't be messing around with portable EMP generators in data centers. And even if they detonated one over the U.S., high enough to take out the whole country, there's still the rest of the world up and running.'
'Maybe they've got a bunch of nukes.'
She shook her head. 'The Kickers and Dormentalists like to tell the world that they're everywhere, but they're not. They're all over, yes, but not everywhere. They can't launch nukes all over the world to knock out the entire Net. They simply can't.'
Jack wished he could be so confident.
'Hank Thompson isn't stupid, Weezy, and he's hooked up with Drexler, who's definitely not stupid. They're all working together. And that tells me that last night's attack on that data center means something. They didn't build EMP guns and go to all that trouble for nothing. They've targeted the Internet.'
Weezy leaned back and tapped her fingers on the table. 'Maybe it's just Thompson. He could be acting on his own. You know he's got a thing against the Internet. He was very up front about that in his book.'
Jack banged a fist on the table-not too hard, just enough to vent some frustration. 'Too bad I'm not inside anymore. Might be able to pick up something. At least I was doing something then.'
But Jack had managed to make himself persona non grata at the Lodge, both with and without a beard.
'We have Eddie inside the Order.'
'But he's like a social member, with no access to the inner circles and their agenda. And besides, you aren't talking to him.'
'He called me yesterday.'
Weezy told him about Eddie's call and how he was going to 'look into' the Order's renewed search for her. The news sent bolts of alarm through Jack.
'Did you tell him not to?'
She looked offended. 'Of course I did, but he wasn't having any of it. I'm worried about him.'
'So am I. I'll give him a call and warn him off. Eddie's not cut out for that kind of stuff.'
As a kid he'd always been the loose lip of their trio, the one most likely to blow a secret.
'So… what are we going to do about this Internet plot?'
