River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  Renie didn’t quite know what to say. “As my friend said, this is very impressive.”

  “Thank you. But now it is perhaps time for you to talk.” He took a few steps down the stone toward them. Beneath the white robe and white baggy trousers, Kunohara was barefooted. Now that he was closer, she could see he was not a great deal taller than !Xabbu—or at least his sim was only a little larger than !Xabbu would have been in his own body. She gave up. It was too much like a problem in Einsteinian relativity. “What brings you here?” Kunohara asked. “You have come from Atasco’s simulation world, have you not?”

  He knew. Renie wondered how that could be. Then again, he had access to all the machineries of the simulation, while she and !Xabbu were no more free here than lab rats.

  “Yes,” she admitted. “Yes, we have, as a matter of fact. Something was going wrong there, so we came through. . . .”

  “A back door into my world, of course. There are several of those. And there was more than something merely going wrong, as I think you probably know. Bolivar Atasco has been killed. In real life.”

  !Xabbu’s small fingers tightened again on her arm, but something about Kunohara’s bright eyes made her think lying would be a mistake. “Yes, we knew that. Did you know Atasco?”

  “As a colleague, yes. We shared resources—programming on this level is almost incomprehensibly expensive. That is why I have a microscopic version of one of the forests in Atasco’s version of Colombia. It allowed us to share raw materials at the earliest stages, although we differed in our focus. Now, despite being representations of the same geographical area, they are completely different in effect. Bolivar Atasco’s interest was at the human scale. Mine, as you have noticed, is not.”

  Renie felt obscurely as though she were playing for time, although nothing Kunohara had done suggested any ill will. “What is it about insects that interests you so much?”

  He laughed, a strange, breathy giggle. Renie had the impression she had done something expected but still disappointing. “It is not that I am so interested in insects, it is that everyone else is so interested in humans. Atasco and his Grail Brotherhood friends are an excellent example. All that money, all that power, and their concerns still so restrictedly human.”

  Beside her, !Xabbu had gone as still as stone. “The Grail Brotherhood? You know about them?” Renie asked, then paused before deciding to push forward. “Are you a member?”

  He giggled again. “Oh, no, no. Not my cup of tea at all, as the expression goes. Nor am I interested in the opposite side of the coin, those deadly earnest folk from the Circle.”

  “The Circle?” !Xabbu almost squeaked. “What do they have to do with this?”

  Kunohara ignored him. “Always these dualisms—mechanists or spiritualists.” He extended both hands as though waiting to catch something that might fall from the air. “Always choosing one side of the coin, instead of simply choosing the coin itself. Both have so strongly rejected the other’s side that they will regret it one day.” He clapped his palms together, then extended a closed hand toward !Xabbu. It was a clear invitation. The Bushman hesitated for a moment, then reached out with a thin monkey finger and touched Kunohara’s fist. It opened to reveal two butterflies sitting on his palm, one black, one white—insects built to their human scale rather than the titan forms of the simulation. Their wings fluttered gently in the breeze.

  Renie and !Xabbu were both very quiet, watching Kunohara and his butterflies.

  “Speaking of the dualistic approach, there are a pair of ideas you might find useful,” Kunohara said, “if any of this matters to you, that is. On the mechanistic side, may I point out Dollo’s Law, beloved of the early A-life theorists, although strangely ignored by the Grail engineers. Turning to spiritual iconology, you might find the Buddhist figure Kishimo-jin of interest—and also because as a parable it suggests reasons for tentative optimism. However, Buddhists tend to think in longer terms than is strictly comfortable for the rest of us, so perhaps you won’t find it personally very soothing.” He closed his hand and then swiftly opened it again. The two butterflies had been replaced by a single gray one. Kunohara flung it upward. It beat its wings a few times, then popped out of existence.

  “What is this about?” Renie demanded. “These riddles? Why can’t you just tell us whatever it is you think we should know?”

  “Oh, no, that is not the way of true learning.” Kunohara abruptly giggled again; Renie was beginning to find it a very irritating sound. “Any Zen master worth his certificate will tell you that beggars truly cannot be choosers.”

  “Who are you? Why are you even talking to us?”

  Kunohara turned. His gaze, though still bright and steady, was opaque, as though whatever lived behind the simulated face was losing interest. “Why talk to you? Well, the precise entomological term for my interest would be ‘gadfly,’ I believe. And my simulation should tell who I am, and why I have only passing interest in the conflicts of gods.” He pointed to the teeming throng of ants below, an ocean of chewing, crawling monsters. “By the way, speaking as I was of mechanists, I believe your friends from the Hive are soon to understand the fallacy of control a little more clearly.” He brought his hand to his white-robed chest. “As for me—well, as I said, my simulation should reveal all. You see . . . I am only a little man.”

  The next moment Renie and !Xabbu were alone on the rock outcropping.

  She was the one to break the long silence. “What was that about? I mean, what did he want—could you make any sense of that?”

  “He said ‘the Circle’—spoke of them as though they were in some way like the Grail Brotherhood.” !Xabbu seemed dumbfounded, his hand clapped flat on his sloping skull.

  “So? I’ve never heard of them. Who are they?”

  !Xabbu’s monkey face was so mournful she felt she might cry just looking at him. “They are the people who sent me to school, Renie. This I told you. At least, that is what the group who paid for my schooling were named—the Circle. Could it be coincidence?”

  Renie couldn’t think anymore. Kunohara’s words rolled around in her mind, beginning to jumble together. She needed to remember. There were things he had said that she would want to consider later. All she could do in way of response to !Xabbu was shake her head.

  They were still sitting silently when the dragonfly returned and lowered its ladder.

  “This is like being in the frigging Stone Age!” Cullen raged as she and !Xabbu strapped themselves in. “I mean, just unbelievable!”

  “The system’s doing all kinds of weird things,” Lenore explained. “We can’t communicate with the Hive properly.”

  “Can’t communicate at all,” snarled Cullen. “Can’t go offline, can’t do anything.”

  “You can’t go offline either?” Renie could almost hear a distant drumbeat again, a rising signal of apprehension direct from her animal hindbrain.

  Lenore shrugged. “Yeah, you’re not the only ones, it seems. Ordinarily it wouldn’t make much difference, but the Eciton swarm has turned. It’s heading toward the Hive.”

  “Right,” said Cullen bitterly, “and if they get there without us warning anyone so they can seal it off, the damn make-believe ants will just wipe it out. Playing by Kunohara’s stupid rules, we’ll have to rebuild and reprogram almost from scratch.”

  Renie had been about to mention their encounter with the sim-world’s master, but suddenly decided not to. She gave !Xabbu a significant look, hoping he would understand and keep quiet about their experience.

  Something was definitely going on, and Renie had a distinct and depressing feeling it was a lot more complicated than these two young entomologists dreamed. The Otherland network was changing—Sellars had said something about that. It had reached some kind of critical mass. But these two only knew it as a wonderful site to do academic simulations, an excellent toy,
a kind of scientist’s theme park; they didn’t realize that the place was an ogre’s castle built with bones and blood.

  The silence stretched. The plane skimmed on, passing great curved walls of bark, shooting between leaves that stretched like vast green sails.

  “I have a question,” !Xabbu said at last. “You say that like us, you cannot leave the simulation, and that you cannot communicate with your home, the Hive.”

  “It’s not my home,” the pilot snapped. “Jesus, monkey-man, I do have a life, you know.”

  “Don’t be a grump, Cully,” Lenore said gently.

  “What I do not understand,” said !Xabbu, “is why you do not simply unplug yourself.” His small eyes stared intently at the pilot. “Why do you not do that?”

  “Because someone has to pass the message about the Eciton swarm,” Cullen said.

  “But could you not do that better from offline, if normal communication within this simulation world is not working?”

  Renie was impressed by the way the little man had thought things through; clearly, he was using the Hive people’s dilemma to explore their own problem.

  “Well,” said Cullen with sudden and surprising fury, “if you really want to know, I can’t find my goddamn jack. It’s like it isn’t even there. Something’s gone utterly, utterly scanned with the whole thing. So unless someone comes into my lab and pulls my plug, I’m going to have to wait until the system resets, or whatever locking else is wrong gets fixed.”

  Now Renie heard the fear beneath the anger, and knew her own forebodings had been all too well-founded.

  Before anyone could say anything else, something knocked the plane sideways.

  “Christ!” shouted Cullen. He dragged himself upright, fighting gravity. “Christ! We’ve lost half the instrument lights!” He struggled to pull the wheel back. The dragonfly-plane wobbled badly, stalled for a moment, then surged into life again. It leveled itself, but something was clearly very wrong. “What was that?” he demanded.

  “Bird, I think.” Lenore was leaning forward, touching lights on the control panel, of which more was now dark than illuminated. “Two of the wings are damaged, and we’re missing a leg or two as well.”

  “I can’t keep this thing up in the air,” Cullen said through gritted teeth. “Shit! That’s about a year’s worth of my salary shot to hell if this thing’s ruined.”

  “They’re not going to make you pay for it.” Lenore sounded like she was talking to a frustrated child, but she herself had an air of barely-controlled panic. “Can we make it back okay?”

  Cullen considered for a moment. “No. We could never evade another bird, and if we lose one more wing, I won’t even have a half-assed chance of landing.”

  He was worrying about losing a major chunk of programming in some weird reality-swap with Kunohara, Renie realized, but she could no longer think about the perils of Otherland in such a distanced way. They were in immediate danger of crashing to the ground, with everything the simulation could make of that—including, perhaps, the ultimate reality.

  “Land,” she said. “Don’t mess about. We’ll walk back.”

  Cullen darted a look at her, momentarily calm with a kind of amused rage. “Jesus, we really are back to the Stone Age. On foot in Bugland.” He pushed the wheel forward and started working the pedals. The dragonfly lurched downward, threatened to tip over on its nose, then leveled again and began a slow, juddering spiral toward the forest floor.

  Something dark momentarily blotted the window.

  “Cullen, the autopilot’s gone,” Lenore warned him.

  Cullen jerked the plane to one side. The bird missed them, rocketing past like a surface-to-air missile and buffeting them with the wind of its passing. Cullen fought to drag the plane upright once more, but now something was definitely wrong, and the downward spiral took on a deeper, swifter angle.

  “Brace yourselves!” he shouted. “I don’t think the tactor settings will let anything too painful happen, but—”

  He didn’t get a chance to finish. The dragonfly caught a wing on a low-hanging branch. After a grinding crunch, the plane flipped over and plummeted toward the ground. Renie had only about a second to prepare, two or three heartbeats, then something flung her against the cabin wall and her head exploded with light, which drained away a moment later into darkness.

  CHAPTER 6

  Man from the Dead Lands

  * * *

  NETFEED/PERSONALS: I’m Still Waiting . . .

  (visual: picture of advertiser, M.J. [female version])

  M.J.: “Ooh, I’m getting very cross. I’ve been waiting, but some of you fellows that I thought were big men are acting like little boys. Why aren’t you accessing my node? Are you afraid? Because if you are, you wouldn’t have a good time anyway. I’m waiting for real men, and when I find them I’m going to take their minds and bodies on a trip they’ll NEVER forget . . .”

  * * *

  THE man named Birdcatcher had pressed his stone spear so tight against Paul Jonas’ guts that the point had pierced the skin. Paul took a shallow breath and felt the pain expand like a tiny star as his stomach pressed against the spearhead. He was trapped, pinned on his back with the other man standing over him.

  “What do you want?” he asked, struggling to keep his voice quiet and calm.

  Birdcatcher had the wild look of a first-time bank robber. “If I kill you, you will go back to the Land of the Dead and leave us alone.”

  “I’m not from the Land of the Dead.”

  Birdcatcher’s brow jerked in confusion. “You said that you were.”

  “No, I didn’t. You said that when you pulled me out of the river. I just didn’t argue with you.”

  Birdcatcher squinted fiercely but did nothing, puzzling over Paul’s words but not discounting them completely. Deceit was apparently not common among the People, something that at another time Paul would have found fascinating.

  “No,” Birdcatcher said at last, slow and deliberate as a judge delivering sentence. He appeared to have reached the limit of his reasoning ability and given up. “No, you are from the Land of the Dead. I will kill you, and you will go back.”

  Paul brought up his hands to clasp the barrel of Birdcatcher’s spear and twisted it hard, but the Neandertal held it braced between his chest and arm and would not let go. Paul hung on and pushed back with all his power as Birdcatcher leaned forward to dig it in deeper. Paul thought he could feel the tissues of his belly stretching before the stone point. His arms trembled with the strain of holding it away.

  “Stop!”

  Keeping his weight on the spear, Birdcatcher turned to look for the voice. Runs Far was walking quickly toward them, hands extended as though Birdcatcher’s anger was a living thing that might suddenly attack. “Stop,” he said again. “What are you doing?”

  “He has come from the Land of the Dead,” Birdcatcher declared. “He has come for my boy child.”

  “Boy child?” Paul shook his head. “I don’t know anything about any child.”

  Others of the People had begun to wake and move toward them, a tatty horde of shadows that appeared barely human in the weak light from the coals.

  “He is a ghost,” Birdcatcher said stubbornly. “He came from the river to take my boy child.”

  Paul felt sure Runs Far would now say something wise and chieflike, but instead the other man only grunted and stepped back into the dark.

  This isn’t how it’s supposed to be, Paul thought desperately. If this were a story, I would have saved his life or something, and he’d have to help me. He pushed on the spear again, but he had no leverage. For long moments he and Birdcatcher remained locked in silent tension, but Paul knew he could not hold the sharp point away much longer.

  “Let me see the child,” he pleaded, his voice thin because he could not tak
e a deep breath. “Let me help him if I can.”

  “No.” Fear streaked the rage in his voice, but there was not an ounce of give.

  “Why is Birdcatcher trying to spill blood in our home?”

  Dark Moon’s quavering voice hit them like a splash of cold water. Birdcatcher had not flinched at Runs Far’s appearance, but now he pulled the spearpoint from Paul’s belly and took a step back. The ancient woman shuffled toward them, leaning on Runs Far’s arm. She had evidently just awakened; her wispy hair stood up in tangles like smoke.

  “Please,” Paul said to her, “I am not a ghost. I do not mean the People any harm. If you want me to go away, I will go away.” But even as he said it, he thought of the freezing darkness outside, peopled with monsters he could only dimly picture from half-forgotten books. Sabertooth tigers? Didn’t horrors like that live side by side with the cave dwellers? But what was the alternative—a fight to the death against a Stone Age savage?

  I’m not Tarzan! Helpless fury filled him. What is the point of all this? I work in a bloody museum, for Christ’s sake!

  “You say you will help the child.” Dark Moon bent over him, her eyes wide, her face mostly in shadow.

  “No.” Paul fought despair and frustration. “No, I said I will help him if I can.” He paused, still short of breath. Trying to communicate with these people was maddening, despite the common language.