River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  All turned to follow her gesture. A short distance away stood a white-shrouded human figure of their own size, looking down at something along the river’s edge that was invisible from where they sat. Orlando struggled to get onto his feet, but was immediately struck by a wave of dizziness.

  “Orlando, don’t!” Fredericks scrambled up and took his arm. Orlando wavered and tried to take a step forward, but the weakness was too much. He swayed in place, trying to find his balance.

  Florimel was already walking swiftly toward the spot, picking her way over the uneven stones. Sweet William followed her.

  “Be careful!” called Quan Li, then moved to take Martine’s hand. The French woman’s sim still gazed sightlessly, head turning slowly from side to side like a tracking dish unable to lock onto a signal.

  As Orlando managed his first steps, inhibited more than helped by Fredericks’ insistence on propping him up, the white-cloaked form turned toward Florimel and William as though realizing for the first time that there were others present. Orlando thought he saw a glint of eyes in the shadows of the hood, then the figure vanished.

  Fredericks let out a breath. “Scanny. Did you see that? He just disappeared!”

  “It’s . . . VR,” panted Orlando. “What did you . . . expect, a . . . puff of smoke?”

  Their two companions were kneeling over something that lay in one of the shallow backwaters of the river. At first Orlando thought it was some kind of discarded machinery, but it was far too shiny to have been in the water long. When William and Florimel helped the machinery to sit up, Orlando suddenly recognized it.

  “Look who we have here!” William shouted. “It’s BangBang the Metal Boy!”

  They helped T4b out of the water as Orlando tottered forward on Fredericks’ arm; an observer might have thought that two ancient and venerable celebrities were being introduced.

  “Are you okay?” Fredericks asked the warrior robot. Florimel began checking T4b in much the same way any accident victim might be checked, flexing joints, exploring for a pulse reading. Orlando wondered how much good that would do on a sim. “I mean, wow.” Fredericks took a deep breath. “We thought you were dead!”

  “And what do we call you, anyway?” fluted William. “I forgot to ask. Is just ‘T’ acceptable, or do you prefer ‘Mr. Four Bee?”’

  T4b groaned and brought a spike-gauntleted hand up to his face. “Feel pure fenfen, me. Fish ate me.” He shook his head and one of his helmet prongs almost poked Florimel in the eye. “Puked me up, too.” He sighted. “Doing that again? Never.”

  “T‘S not much, but it’s home,” Cullen declared. Renie could see nothing but a sprinkle of dimly-glowing lights before them.

  “Hold up.” Lenore’s voice was sharp. “We got a bogey at 12:30 and closing.”

  “What is it?”

  “One of those damn quetzals, I think.” Lenore scowled, then turned to Renie and !Xabbu. “Birds.”

  “Hold tight.” Cullen dropped the dragonfly into a steep dive. “Better still, grab those belts and strap in.”

  Renie and !Xabbu fumbled their way into the crash-belts hanging in the alcove. They fell for only seconds, then slowed so swiftly that Renie felt she was being squeezed like an accordion. They were floating downward, as far as Renie could tell, when a mechanical wheeze and bang came from underneath their feet, making her and !Xabbu jump.

  “Extending the legs,” explained Lenore. As the dragonfly thumped down on something, she continued to stare at the readouts. “We’ll just wait until the damn bird gets bored. They can’t see you if you’re not moving.”

  Renie could not understand these people. They acted as though they were playing some sort of complex game. Perhaps they were. “Why do you have to do this?” she asked.

  Cullen snorted. “So it doesn’t eat us. Now there’s a real waste of time.”

  “All clear,” said Lenore. “He’s circled off. Give it another few seconds to be on the safe side, but I see nothing except empty skies.”

  Shuddering, the wings beating hard, the dragonfly lifted off again. Cullen aimed it at the lights once more, which flattened as they drew closer into a vertical wall of gleaming points. One rectangular spill of light grew larger and larger before them, until it revealed itself as a huge, square doorway that dwarfed the aircraft as they passed through. Cullen brought the dragonfly in neatly, hovered for a moment, then landed.

  “Top floor,” he said. “Mandibles, chitinous exoskeletons, and ladies’ lingerie. Everyone out.”

  Renie felt a sudden urge to smack him, but it diffused in the effort of dragging her tired body out of the crash-belt and through the hatchway behind the two dragonfly pilots. !Xabbu followed her down, climbing slowly so as not to hurry her.

  The insect-plane stood in a vast hangar whose outside door was just now sliding shut with a whine of hard-working gears. Renie thought of the military base in the Drakensbergs, and then had to remind herself that the base was real but this place was not. Like all the Otherland simulations, it was incredibly lifelike, a high-ceilinged architectural monster constructed of, or appearing to be constructed of, fibramic tie-girders, plasteel plates, and acres of fluorescent lighting. All the half-dozen sims who trotted forward to begin servicing the dragonfly had individual and very realistic faces. She wondered if any of them represented real people.

  She suddenly realized she had no idea whether even their rescuers were real.

  “Come on.” Lenore beckoned. “We’ll debrief you—that shouldn’t take long, although Angela may want a chat with you—then we’ll show you around.”

  The Hive, as Lenore kept calling it, was a huge installation built into a mound of forest earth. The mound, in comparison to the tiny humans, was even larger than the mountain containing the Wasp’s Nest base, but Renie thought the whole thing still seemed an eerie parallel to their RL situation. As they walked out of the landing bay into a long corridor, Lenore and Cullen in front arguing amiably, !Xabbu pacing on all fours beside her, she wondered again whether this was some kind of elaborate game-world.

  “What exactly do you do here?” she asked.

  “Ah, we haven’t told you, have we?” Lenore smiled. “Must seem pretty strange.”

  “Bugs,” said Cullen. “We do bugs.”

  “Speak for yourself, scanman,” said Lenore. “Me, I watch bugs.”

  !Xabbu got up on his hind legs long enough to run his fingers along the wall, feeling the texture. “Is this a game, this place?” he asked, echoing Renie’s earlier thought.

  “Serious as a heart attack,” Cullen countered. “It may be a playground for Kunohara, but to us entomologists it’s like dying and going to heaven.”

  “Now I’m really curious,” said Renie—and, surprisingly, she was. The fear for her companions’ safety had not disappeared, but Other-land had again caught her off guard.

  “Hang on a minute and we’ll give you the whole thing. Let’s just get you some visitor passes and then we can show you around properly.”

  Renie, overwhelmed by the bustling realism, had expected Lenore to lead them to some office, but instead they were still standing in the middle of the corridor, where Lenore had opened a data window in midair, when a stocky woman suddenly materialized beside them. She had an extremely serious face, well-simulated Mediterranean features, and short brown hair.

  “Don’t look so startled,” she told Renie and !Xabbu. It sounded almost like a command. “Here in the Hive we don’t have to put up with all that ‘realistic’ crap.” As they pondered this confusing statement, she turned to Lenore. “You wanted to talk to me? About these people, right?”

  “We would have checked them in before we got here, but Cully almost ran us down a bird’s throat on the way in, so it was a little distracting.”

  “You wish,” was Cully’s riposte.

  “They
wandered in from someone else’s simworld—Atasco, was it?” Lenore turned to Renie for confirmation. “And now they can’t get offline.”

  The new woman snorted. “I hope you’re getting enough water and glucose wherever you call home, sweetie, because we don’t have much time to help you right at the moment.” She turned back to the pilots. “That Eciton front has swung around, and it’s about forty feet across when it’s moving. I want you two to go and check it out again tomorrow morning.”

  “Aye-aye, Cap’n.” Cullen saluted.

  “Piss off.” She returned her attention to Renie and !Xabbu, examining the latter with eyebrows arched. “If I had the time to waste on an old joke, I’d say ‘we don’t get many baboons in here’—but I don’t have the time. I’m Angela Boniface. You two are a problem. We’ve got a very strict agreement with the leaseholder, and we’re not supposed to bring in anyone without his approval.”

  “We don’t want to be in your way,” Renie said hurriedly. “We’ll leave as soon as we can. If you can take us to the nearest . . .” she paused, unsure of the word, “border, I guess, we’ll just get out.”

  “Not that easy.” Angela Boniface squinted. “Damn. Oh, well—Kwok, see if you can find someone around here who might be able to figure out what’s gone wrong with their gear. I have to go kick Bello’s ass about something.” Before she had turned halfway around, she was gone, vanished like a stage magician.

  “Project administrator,” said Lenore by way of explanation.

  “What did she mean by ‘that realistic crap’?” asked !Xabbu. Even Renie had to smile at his inflection.

  “She meant in here we don’t have to pretend like it’s a real world,” Cullen explained, extending his long arms in a catlike stretch. “Kuno-hara doesn’t want anything disturbing the natural look of the simulation, so if we want to examine things up close, we have to interact, have to be part of the environment—but an unobtrusive part of the environment. That’s why the vehicles look like big bugs. He set up all these other incredibly irritating rules we have to follow. It’s kind of a little game he’s got going, and he enjoys making us jump through the hoops. At least that’s what I think.”

  “And when you earn your first billion or two,” Lenore pointed out, “you can build your own simulation, Cully. Then you can make the rules.”

  “Well, when I do, Rule Number One is going to be ‘No sixteen-hour days for the boss.’ I’m going to take care of some notes, then I’m outta here. Sayonara.” He flicked his fingers and disappeared.

  “There really isn’t any place to sleep,” Lenore apologized as she left them in a conference room. “I mean, no one bothers to do that here—wouldn’t make sense.” She looked around at the empty space. “Sorry it’s so bare. I can put something on the walls if you want, maybe make some more furniture.”

  Renie shook her head. “It’s all right.”

  “Well, I’ll come back to get you in a few hours. If any of the gear-heads are available before then, I’ll have them buzz you.” She evaporated, leaving Renie and !Xabbu alone.

  “What do you think?” !Xabbu had clambered onto the featureless rectangular block that served as a table. “Can we talk here?”

  “If you mean in real privacy, I doubt it.” Renie frowned. “It’s a virtual conference room—this whole thing’s just the visual interface for a multi-input, multi-output communications machine. But do I think they’re listening? Probably not.”

  “So you do not think these people are our enemies.” !Xabbu crouched on his heels, brushing at the short hair on his legs.

  “If so, they’ve gone to a lot of trouble for very small chance of reward. No, I think they’re just what they say they are—a bunch of university people and scientists working in an expensive simulation. Now the fellow who owns the place, whatever his name was, him I wouldn’t be so sure about.” She sighed and lowered herself to the floor, putting her back against the stark white wall. The jumpsuit her sim wore was only a little the worse for wear despite immersion in the river, but it was within the bounds of what would really happen. It seemed these Otherland simulations even took note of wear and tear.

  Who were these people, this Brotherhood, she wondered again. How could they build a network this realistic? Surely money alone, even in almost unimaginable amounts, was not enough to bring about this kind of performance-level jump.

  “So what do we do?” !Xabbu asked. “Have we lost the others for good?”

  “I really don’t have any answers.” Bone-tired and depressed, Renie struggled to get a grip on her thoughts. “We can wait and hope that Sellars finds us before any of those Grail people do. We can keep moving, keep looking for . . . what did Sellars say that man’s name was?”

  !Xabbu furrowed his simian brow in thought. “Jonas,” he said at last. “Sellars spoke to him in dreams. He set him free, he said.”

  “Right. Which tells us exactly nothing about where he might be. How are we supposed to find him, anyway? Follow the river? Which could go for millions of miles through virtual space, for all we know. It could be some kind of Moebius river, for God’s sake, and keep changing so that it has no end at all.”

  “You are unhappy,” !Xabbu said. “I do not think it is as bad as that. Look at this place! Remember the man Atasco’s country. There cannot be enough people in the world to construct a million such complicated things as this.”

  Renie smiled a tired smile. “You’re probably right. So that’s it, is it? Back to the river, and hope we find Martine and the rest, or this Jonas fellow. Have you ever heard the expression, ‘a needle in a haystack’?”

  !Xabbu shook his narrow head. “What is a haystack?”

  Her dreams came and went almost unnoticed, like early morning rain showers. She woke, curled on her side on the floor of the imaginary conference room, and listened to !Xabbu’s gentle breathing beside her.

  A memory floated through—only an image at first, an amalgam of sound and feeling. On cold mornings, when he was small, Stephen would crawl into her bed. He would mumble drowsy nonsense for a moment, then curl against her and within seconds drop back into deepest sleep, leaving Renie herself resignedly half-awake and waiting for the alarm.

  It was terrible, this between-state that Stephen was now in, this unresolved nothingness. At least her mother had gone for good, to be missed and mourned and occasionally blamed. Stephen was neither dead nor alive. Limbo. Nothing to be done about it.

  Nothing but this, perhaps, whatever “this” turned out to be—a hopeless search? A confused assault on incomprehensible powers? Renie could only wonder. But every moment that Stephen remained ill and that she did not make him better was a burning reproach.

  The pain summoned another memory: When he was five or six, he had come home one afternoon full of agitation, flapping his arms as though he would fly. His wide-eyed upset had been so exaggerated that at first Renie had almost laughed despite herself, until she noticed the blood on his lip and the dirt on his clothes. Some of the older children had waylaid him on his way back from school. They had tried to make him say something he didn’t want to say—one of the tired rituals of malevolent youth—and then had shoved him down in the road.

  Without even pausing to wash his split lip, Renie had dashed out of the house. The little gang of ten-year-old thugs had scattered when they saw her coming, but one of them was a step too slow. Shouting with rage, Renie had shaken that boy until he was crying harder than Stephen. When she let him go, he slumped to the ground, staring at her in mortal terror, and she had been pierced by a deep shame. That she, a grown woman and a university student, should put such terror into any child. . . . She had been horrified, and still had never quite forgiven herself. (Stephen, who had watched from the doorway, had no such compunctions. He was gleeful about the bully’s punishment, and did a little laughing dance as she returned to the house.)

  How could s
omeone set out systematically to injure children? What did these Grail people believe could be worth such monstrousness? It was beyond her comprehension. But then, these days, so many things were.

  Her contemplative mood turned sour, Renie grunted and sat up. !Xabbu made a quiet sound and rolled onto his other side.

  What could she do but go on? She had made mistakes, had done things she didn’t like to remember, but Stephen had no one else. A life, a most important life, was in her hands. If she gave up, she would never see him run again in his skittery, gangly-graceful way, never hear him chortle at the painfully stupid jokes on the net shows, or do any of the things that made him uniquely Stephen.

  Perhaps that bullying ten-year-old hadn’t deserved such angry reprisal, but he had never bothered Stephen again. Someone always had to stand up for the weak and the innocent. If she didn’t do all she could, she would spend the rest of her life beneath a shadow of failure. And then, even if Stephen died, he would always remain in limbo for her, a ghost of the most real sort—the ghost of a missed chance.

  CHAPTER 4

  In The Puppet Factory

  * * *

  NETFEED/NEWS: Mini-Elephants Not Just A Fad

  (visual: Cannon with miniature elephant “Jimson”)

  VO: Business is very good indeed for Good Things Farm these days. Owner Gloriana Cannon, shown here with young bull Jimson, breeds and sells almost a hundred of the mini-elephants sometimes affectionately known as “half-a-lumps” every year. The business, which began as another mini-pet fad a decade ago, has outlasted the experts’ best guesses.

  CANNON: “Part of it is because these little guys are so smart. They’re not just novelties, they’re real companions. But they’re also a lot more stable than some of the other genetic minis—their DNA just handles it better, or something. Stop that, Jimson. When you remember how unpredictable those little grizzlies were, all those accidents they had. And those small jungle cats that turned out so nasty . . . what was that stupid marketing name? ‘Oce-littles’ or ‘Oce-lite’, something like that . . . ?”