River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  “Don’t be naive, dearie,” said William. “The information going from our fingers to our brains is no more real than what’s coming in at our eyes and ears. That’s what a neural shunt does. What have you got that’s any better?”

  “It’s not better. In fact, it’s worse.” Renie smiled in spite of herself. “My equipment is old—the kind of thing you wouldn’t be caught dead using. And because it’s simple, I can just pull it off.”

  William glowered and said, “Well, hooray for Hollywood.” Renie had no idea what he meant. “What good does that do the rest of us?”

  “I could go offline! I could get help!”

  “What makes you think you wouldn’t get the torture-chamber effect yourself?” demanded William.

  “Let her go,” growled T4b. “Let her anything. Just want out this far crash place, me.”

  “Because my interface doesn’t connect to my nervous system like yours does.” She reached up to her face, searching for the reassuring, if invisible, contours of her mask, fondled many times in past days. But this time her fingers touched nothing but skin.

  “And that brother you keep talking about,” said Florimel. “Was his nervous system connected directly to a system? I do not think so.”

  “Renie?” Quan Li asked. “You are looking unhappy. Would you like us not to talk about your poor brother?”

  “I can’t feel it anymore.” The twilit sky seemed to press down on her. She was lost and defenseless in the most alien place imaginable. “Jesus Mercy, I can’t feel my mask. It’s gone.”

  FOR a while he had been able to follow the conversation, but soon Orlando found himself sinking back down, the murmur of his companions’ voices no more intelligible than the slapping of small waves against the side of their strange craft.

  He felt weightless but still strangely heavy. He was motionless, stretched at Fredericks’ side, but at the same time he was moving somehow, slipping down through the very fabric of the leaf, the waters rising blood-warm around him. He was sinking into the deeps. And as it had been not long ago, when he had shared the raft with Fredericks, he found he did not care.

  In this vision, this trance, the water-world was all light, but a light stretched and bent and split by the water itself, so that he seemed to be passing through the heart of a vast, flawed jewel. As he sank deeper through the cloudy river, odd glimmering shapes wriggled past him, creatures whose own self-created radiance was brighter than the refracted glow of the sun. They did not seem to notice him, but went their apparently random, zigzagging ways, leaving an afterimage burned across his bemused gaze like particles mapped on their path through a bubble chamber.

  They were not fish, though. They were light—pure light.

  I’m dreaming again. The idea came to him gradually, as though he had begun to solve the central riddle of a mystery story that no longer interested him. Not drowning, dreaming.

  As he sank deeper, ever deeper, the light grew fainter and the pressure increased. He wondered if this was how death would feel when it came at last, a gentle, helpless descent. Perhaps he truly was dying this time—he was certainly finding it hard to be interested in all the living everyone else seemed intent on doing. Perhaps the end was nothing to be feared, after all. He hoped that was true, but he had watched and studied death for so long, trying to learn its every guise so that he would be prepared for it when it came, that he could not fully trust it.

  Death had been waiting for him as long as he could remember—not the far-off death of most people, a sad but necessary appointment that would have to be made one day, when life had been pursued to satisfaction and everything important had been arranged, but a very present death, as patient and persistent as a bill collector, a death that loitered outside his door every day, waiting for that one moment’s distraction that would allow it to get its bony foot across the threshold. . . .

  A shadow impinged on Orlando’s downward-drifting reverie, and his swift clench of fear at its appearance told him that, expecting it or not, he was still not resigned to death’s cold incursion. But if this was death that had come to him at last, a dark silhouette in the deepest waters, it had come in the form of . . . a lobster, or a crab, or some other many-jointed thing. In fact, the shadow seemed to be . . .

  . . . a bug?

  Orlando. Boss, I don’t know if you can hear me. I’ll keep trying, but I’m running out of time. If they catch me, I’m history.

  He could see the thing slowly waving its jointed legs, movement picked out in the faint gleam from its circle of eyestalks. He tried to speak, but could not. The water was pressing on his chest like the weight of a giant’s hand.

  Listen, boss, last time you told me “Atasco.” I think that’s what you said—it was subvocal. I’ve played it back thirty times, done every kind of analysis I could. But I don’t know what it means, boss. There was a bunch of stuff on the nets about someone named that, tons of stuff He got killed in South America. That guy? You gotta give me some more information, boss.

  Orlando felt a vague stirring of interest, but it was only a twitch beneath an immensely heavy blanket. What did this many-legged thing want of him? He was trying to drift downward in peace.

  The crab-thing crawled onto his chest. He could feel its blunted legs only very faintly, as the fairy-tale princess must have dreamily sensed the sleep-disturbing pea. He wanted to shake it off, to bring back the heavy quiet again, but the thing would not go.

  Your parents are going to turn me off, boss. They won’t turn off the household system because they’re scared to unplug you again after your vital signs dropped so bad, but they’re going to have me pulled. I had to sneak my external body into your suitcase, boss, but it’s only a matter of time until someone in this hospital notices me.

  Orlando tried to speak again. He felt inaudible sounds form and die in his throat.

  See, the only way I can resist a shutdown is if you order me to, boss. I’m just a psAI, an agent—your parents have authority unless you tell me different, but I can’t pick you up online at all. Where are you?

  The effort of resisting the downward tug was too much. Orlando felt a great lethargy sweep through him, a warm, compelling heaviness. The voice of the crab-thing was growing fainter.

  Boss, listen to me. I can’t help you if you don’t help me. You have to tell me to save myself or I can’t do it—they’ll drez me. If you tell me to, I can pull all my stuff and hide in the system somewhere, even move to another system. But you have to tell me, boss. . . .

  He wished no one ill, not even a bug. “Go ahead, then,” he murmured. “Save yourself . . .”

  The voice was gone, but something about its urgency lingered. Orlando wondered what could possibly have been so important. As he considered, he felt himself drifting ever downward. The abyss, dark and enveloping, lay waiting beneath him. The light was only a faint glimmer far above, shrinking every moment like a dying star.

  Renie’s shock and horror was such that it was hard to understand what the others were saying. The dreamlike nature of the whole experience had just taken a savage turn into an even more threatening unreality.

  “Look, love, don’t act so frigging surprised.” Sweet William hunched his bony shoulders so that, feathers aquiver, he looked more than ever like a strange jungle bird. “It’s some kind of autohynosis or something.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Quan Li. The old woman had put an arm around Renie’s shoulders when the tears, so unexpected, had suddenly begun to flow.

  I can’t feel the oxygen mask, but I can feel tears on my cheeks—naked cheeks. What’s going on here? Renie shook her head and sniffed, ashamed to have lost control in front of these near-strangers, but if she could no longer feel those physical things that connected her to RL, then she could not leave this horror story, no matter how bad it got. I’m not plugged in like the others. How can this be happeni
ng?

  “I don’t know if autohypnosis is the right word. Post-hypnotic suggestion—you know what I mean. Like what stage magicians do.”

  “But who could do such thing? And how?” demanded Florimel. “It makes no sense.” Her anger sounded like contempt, and Renie felt herself even more disgusted that she had cried in front of this woman.

  “Maybe that’s the same as the pain when I got unplugged,” Fredericks offered. “But whatever it was, it didn’t hurt imaginary. Inmaginarily. You know what I mean. It hurt majorly.”

  “See, that would make sense, too,” said William. “Something piggybacked on the carrier signal, a super-powerful subliminal. If they can mess about with our brains at all—and they must be able to mess about with people’s brains, otherwise we wouldn’t have come here looking for answers in the first place—I’ll bet they can do it without us realizing it.”

  Renie wiped her eyes and blew her nose, trying to ignore the ridiculous, impossible aspects of the exercise. A few more insects droned unsteadily past overhead, each the relative size of a small car. The bugs seemed uninterested in the tiny humans talking so urgently below—which, Renie decided, was something at least to be grateful for.

  “So what, then?” she said out loud. “I’m only imagining that I’m wiping my nose, is that what you’re saying? Just like Fredericks here only imagined that he was having electrical shocks run through his spine?”

  “Have you got a better explanation, chuck?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “How come you know so much about all this. . . ?”

  “Renie!” !Xabbu called from the leaf’s edge. “There are many more of these insects near the water’s edge, and they are moving out onto the river in a crowd. I have not seen this kind of insect before. Are they dangerous, do you think?”

  Renie squinted at one of the round-bodied creatures as it rumbled past the leaf. Although its wings were strong and shiny, the rest of it had a curiously unformed look, legs awkward, head lumpish.

  “Whatever they are, they are new-hatched,” pronounced Florimel. “They eat nothing as large as us, I am sure, if they eat at all. They are looking to mate—see how they dance!” She pointed to a pair who performed a swooping pas-de-deux less than a hundred relative yards from where she and the others sat.

  “Are you a biologist?” Renie asked. Florimel shook her head, but did not elaborate. Before Renie could decide whether to ask another question, Fredericks began waving his hands as though he had burned them.

  “Orlando isn’t breathing!”

  “What? Are you sure?” Renie scrambled toward the still form. Fredericks was kneeling beside his friend, tugging at his thick-muscled arm in an effort to wake him.

  “I’m sure, I’m sure! I just looked down and he wasn’t breathing!”

  “It’s a sim,” Sweet William said, but his voice was sharp with sudden fear. “Sims don’t need to breathe.”

  “He was breathing okay before,” said Fredericks wildly. “I watched him. His chest was moving. He was breathing, but now he isn’t!”

  Even as Renie reached Orlando’s side, she was roughly shoved out of the way by Florimel, who knelt over the bulky form and began to push with brutal force on his chest.

  “It’s a sim, damn it!” cried William. “What are you doing?”

  “If he has tactors, this will translate, at least a little,” Florimel said between clenched teeth. “Giving him air will not—or I would give you something useful to do with that open mouth.”

  “Sorry.” William waggled his long fingers helplessly. “Christ, sorry.”

  “Don’t let him die!” Fredericks bounced up and down beside her.

  “If he is in a hospital in real life, like you are,” Florimel gasped, “then they will be able to do more for him than I can. But if his heart has stopped, we may be able to keep him alive until someone reaches him.”

  !Xabbu stood on his hind legs beside Renie, one hand on her shoulder. Time seemed suspended, each second achingly long. Renie’s stomach contracted on cold nothing. It was terrible to watch Orlando’s sim, head wagging limply as Florimel pounded on its chest, but she could not turn away. One of the hatchling insects buzzed loudly past just a few yards from the leaf’s rim, and Renie bitterly wished she was of a size again to swat it.

  “The noise is getting worse,” said Martine suddenly, as though oblivious to what was happening. “The noise in my head.”

  “We can’t do anything about the bugs now,” Renie said. “You’ll just have to ignore it. This boy may be dying!”

  “No, it’s . . . it’s very loud.” Martine’s voice rose. “Ah! Oh, God, help me, it’s . . . something is . . .”

  The leaf abruptly lurched upward, as though some great fist had punched it from below. Renie and !Xabbu and the others found themselves floating in the air, weightless at the top of the sudden rise; for a brief instant, their eyes met in astonishment, then the leaf dropped back down to the surface of the river again and they scrabbled to maintain their balance.

  Before they could speak a word, a vast shining shape, big as the prow of a submarine, rose from the water beside the floating leaf. It was a fish, hallucinatory in its gigantism, water streaming from its glossy, spotted back, its flat, stupid eye wider than Renie was tall. A pink cathedral miracle of flesh and cartilage was visible for an instant down the titan gullet. As the leaf rocked violently in the foaming waves of its emergence, the mouth snapped shut like a cannon crash. The hatchling insect disappeared. The fish fell back into the fountaining river.

  The first waves had just spun the leaf around, sending Renie and the others tumbling across its uneven surface, when a monstrous dark shape leaped over them, then smashed into the river on their far side, smacking a huge spume of water far up into the air. The leaf, caught between waves, tipped up on one side. Shrieking, Renie felt herself skidding down the veined surface toward the seething water. At the last moment, the bottom end of the leaf was batted upward by another surfacing shape. Renie crunched into the leaf’s fibrous, curling edge and fell back, stunned and breathless.

  More fish were popping their heads above the water to feed on the hovering insects, so that the whole surface of the river seemed to boil. Gouts of water splashed onto the leaf, instantly filling it waist-high. Renie struggled to pull herself upright, but the leaf was rocking too boldly.

  “!Xabbu!” she screamed. She could dimly see human figures being tossed like bowling pins all around her, splashing and foundering, then being dashed to one side again, but no sign of the little man’s baboon sim. A shard of memory pierced her: !Xabbu’s terrible fear in the water at Mister J’s, his childhood terror from a crocodile attack. She tried to call for him again, but a wave running horizontally across the leaf filled her mouth and knocked her down.

  “Hold on!” someone shouted. A moment later the edge of the leaf was jerked upward again as though on a string, what had been horizontal rising in a split second to the vertical. Renie found herself hanging in midair, weightless again for a fractional instant, then she was tumbling downward into dark water. It closed on her, swallowed her, like the cold jaws of Leviathan itself.

  HE was down deep, deep as he could imagine being. There was no light. There was no noise, not even the familiar, old-neighbor sounds of his own body. The stillness was absolute.

  Orlando was waiting for something, although he did not know what. Someone was going to tell him an important fact, or something was going to change, and then everything would be clear. One thing he knew for certain, down in the depths, down in the dream of darkness, was that he himself had nothing left to do.

  He had fought so long against the weakness, against the fear, against the pain of simply being different, of feeling other people’s horror and pity like a smothering weight—fighting not to care, to smile and make a joke, to pretend that really he was just as good, just as happy, a
s everyone else. But he couldn’t fight any more. There was no strength left in him. He could not sustain the weight of another struggle against the remorseless tide, could not imagine anything that could make him care.

  And yet . . .

  And yet a small voice, something that almost did not seem a part of him, was still alive within the great stillness he had become. A part of him that still wanted, that believed things, that cared, that . . . hoped?

  No. Such a voice could only be a joke, a final terrible joke. Hope had been a meaningless word for so long, a doctor’s word, his mother’s word, his father’s brave-smile word. He had given all that up, which took more strength than any of them could ever know. Hope was a word whose purpose had nothing to do with its meaning; rather, it was a word used to keep him going, a word that wasted what little time and strength he had, disrupting the small moments of serenity with false promises. But now he had turned away, abandoned the rough current of life struggling to maintain itself. He was in deep, enveloping darkness, and he finally had the strength to look at hope squarely and dismiss it.

  But the ridiculous voice would not go away. It poked him and irritated him like an argument in the next room.

  Don’t give up, it said, adding cliché to insult. Despair is the worst thing of all.

  No, he told the voice wearily, hope without meaning is the worst thing. By far the worst thing.

  But what about the others? What about the people who need you? What about the great quest, a hero’s quest, just like something out of the Middle Country, but real and incredibly important?

  He had to give the voice credit for sheer persistence. And, if it was a part of himself, he had to admire his own capacity to play dirty.

  No, what about me? he asked it. Enough about all those other people and what they want. What about me?

  Yes, what about you? Who are you? What are you?