River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  Renie said a silent prayer, pulled back on the wheel, and gave the hopper all the throttle she could. It jumped, slamming !Xabbu and Cullen back against the padded cabin wall and rattling Renie in her pilot’s seat, then skimmed upward just out of reach of the mantis’ last, stabbing clutch.

  Within moments the wreckage of the Hive was far below. Renie tugged the wheel a few times, once beginning an alarming dive, then at last found what she wanted. They banked and then flew on into the towering forest, toward the setting sun.

  “That was not Grandfather Mantis,” !Xabbu said solemnly behind her. “I forgot myself—I am ashamed.”

  Renie began to shiver, and for a moment feared she might never stop. “Bugs,” she said, still shuddering. “Jesus Mercy.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Fighting Monsters

  * * *

  NETFEED/PEOPLE: “One Angry Man” Dies

  (visual: Gomez answering reporters’ questions in front of courthouse)

  VO: Nestor Gomez, who referred to himself in court as “just one angry man,” died in a hospice in Mexico City, aged 98. Already in his sixties and retired from his factory job at the time he first came to fame, Gomez was celebrated as a hero by many after he machine-gunned a car full of young men in a rest stop outside Juarez, Mexico. Re claimed that the youths had been harrassing him.

  (visual: charred wreckage of car)

  Even more controversial than the killings was an eyewitness claim that Gomez set fire to the car while some of the wounded victims were still alive. His Mexico City trial ended in a hung jury. Two subsequent trials also failed to reach a verdict. Gomez was never tried in America, even though all five victims were Americans.

  (visual: Gomez being greeted at airport in Buenos Aires)

  For years after the incident, he was a featured speaker at meetings of anti-crime groups in many countries, and the expression “to Gomez” became synonymous with violent and even excessive retribution . . .

  * * *

  “IT seems scanny,” Fredericks said, enjoying the shade of a grass stem. “I mean, I know we don’t need to eat or anything, but it just doesn’t seem like morning without breakfast.”

  Orlando, feeling vastly more comfortable than he had during the worst of the fever, shrugged. “Maybe there’s a coffee bar down the river someplace. Or a puffed rice plantation.”

  “Don’t even talk about it,” Sweet William grumbled. “No coffee, no fags—that means ciggies, just so you nice Yank boys don’t get confused—this is hell, as some Shakespeare bloke said, nor am I out of it.”

  Orlando grinned, wondering what William would think if he knew one of the Yank boys was really a girl. But for that matter, how did they know Sweet William wasn’t a girl himself? Or that Florimel wasn’t a boy?

  “So what do we do?” Quan Li asked. “Where do we go? Should we not look for the others?”

  “We can do anything that we want.” Florimel was just returning from a scouting trip up the riverbank, with T4b hissing and clanking at her side. “But we had better stay off the water for a while. The fish are feeding.”

  Even the stories the others had told him about the splashing frenzy that had sunk their leaf-boat could not dim Orlando’s good mood. He clambered to his feet, still a little weak, but better than he’d been in days, and brushed the dust from Thargor’s coarse-woven loincloth. It was funny how when you looked close enough—or got small enough—even dirt had its own dusty residue. Dirt particles so small he couldn’t even have seen them when he had been his normal size bumped together and were ground down finer still. He supposed it would go on, smaller and smaller, until you got down to the size of molecules, and even there you would find bits of micro-lint in the molecular wrinkles. Utterly scanbark, as Fredericks liked to say . . . “Do we have any idea of where Renie and her friend—Kobbu, whatever his name was—where they might be?” Orlando asked. “I mean, did anyone see them after they went in the water?”

  “They are still alive.”

  Everyone turned to look at Martine, who was huddled against the stones—grains of beach sand if Orlando and the others had been normal size—that the travelers had piled to make a windbreak for their night’s shelter. Her sim looked a little less ragged and careworn today, although Orlando wondered if he might be projecting some of his own heightened spirits. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “I . . . can just tell. I can . . . feel them, I suppose.” Martine rubbed at her face so hard it seemed to change shape, and for the first time Orlando saw what seemed like a true measure of her blindness: he didn’t think a sighted person would make a gesture that seemed so private. “There are not words for these things, but I have always used nonvisual methods to work with information, yes? You understand? That is how my system is designed. Now I am getting things I never have before, new and very strange information. But slowly—too slowly/because it is a painful process—it is starting to make some sense.” She turned toward Orlando. “You, for example. You are sounds, yes—I can hear your clothes rubbing skin, and your heart beating, and you breathing, with a little, how would you say, bubbling in your lungs from your sickness. I can smell the leather belt you are wearing, and your own person-scent, and the iron of the sword. It is rusting just a bit, by the way.”

  Orlando looked down, embarrassed. Thargor would never have let his sword go untreated after a prolonged immersion. He scooped up a handful of fine micro-sand and began rasping the blade clean.

  “But that is only part,” Martine continued. “Now I have other information coming to me, and there are not names for it. Not yet, anyway.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Quan Li worriedly. “What is coming?”

  “I mean that what I experience, I cannot put into words yet. It is as if you tried to describe color to someone blind like me.” She frowned. “No, that is not correct, because there was a time when I could see, and so I remember colors. But if you tried to describe ‘red’ or ‘green’ to someone who had never seen any colors at all—how would you do that?

  “You, Orlando, I can feel also as a set of ripples in the air, but they are not ripples, and it is not air. They are things that tell me an Orlando-shaped thing has to be somewhere nearby. And I feel this forest as . . . numbers, in a way. Little hard things, millions of them, pulsing, talking to one another. It is so hard to say.” She shook her head, pressing fingers against temples. “The whole of this network—it is for me like being in a river of information. It tosses me, and spins me, and it almost drowned me. But I am beginning to understand a little of how to swim.”

  “Ho dzang!” said Fredericks, a drawn-out exhalation. “But far scanny, too.”

  “So you’re sure that Renie and the baboon-man are still alive?” Orlando asked.

  “I can . . . yes, feel them. Faint, like a very distant sound. I do not think they are close, or perhaps I am only sensing some . . . residue.” Her face went slack in sadness. “Maybe I have spoken too soon. Perhaps they are gone, and I sense only where they once were.”

  “So you can tell us all apart with . . . what, sonar?” Florimel sounded angry, perhaps a little frightened, too. “What else do you know about us? Can you read our minds, Martine?”

  The blind woman spread her hands as if to ward off a blow. “Please! I know only what I sense, and that has no more to do with what truly goes on in your thoughts than someone who looked at your face would see, or someone who heard your voice.”

  “So calm down, Flossie,” Sweet William said, grinning.

  “My name is not ‘Flossie,”’ The look on her virtual face would have curdled milk. “It is a bad joke, if it is a joke.”

  “But who are you?” Orlando asked. “Who are any of you?” The others turned toward him. “I mean, I still don’t know who any of you are. We have to trust each other, but we don’t know anything about the people we’re supposed to trust.”
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  Now it was William’s turn to be sour. “We don’t have to do anything. I, for one, am not planning on making a career out of this lark, and I don’t care what dreary, dreadful things you all used to do with your spare time.”

  “That’s not good enough,” Orlando said. “Look, I’ll tell you the real truth. My name is Orlando Gardiner. I’m fifteen years old.”

  “Not for another three months,” said Fredericks.

  “Just a teenager? What a surprise.” William rolled his eyes.

  “Shut up. I’m trying to do something.” Orlando took a breath, getting ready. “I’m almost fifteen years old. I have progeria. It’s a disease, and it’s going to kill me pretty soon.” As when he had confessed to Fredericks, he felt a certain exhilaration, the cold splash of a long-dreaded jump from the high board. “Don’t say you’re sorry, because that’s not what’s important.” William arched an eyebrow, but remained silent; Orlando hurried on. “And I’ve spent years on the net, doing gaming, and I’m really good at it. And for some reason I stumbled onto this whole thing, and I don’t know anyone who’s sick because of it, but it’s what I’m going to do now, and . . . and it’s more important to me than anything else has ever been.”

  Finished, he felt a flush heating his real skin, and hoped that it would not call forth a twin on his virtual face. No one spoke.

  “My name’s Sam Fredericks,” his friend said at last into the uncomfortable silence. “And I’m fifteen, too—but I really am fifteen.” Fredericks smiled almost shyly at Orlando. “I’m here because Gardiner brought me here. But I’m just as trapped as if I were here to save somebody. Fenfen, I guess I am here to save somebody. Me. Us.”

  Orlando, despite the embarrassment of having his age corrected, did not point out Fredericks’ omissions. He—or she—would wear the face he wanted, as would all the others.

  “And I am Martine Desroubins,” the blind woman said. “I am a researcher. I have been blind since I was eight. An accident. I live by myself, in the Haut-Languedoc in the southern part of France, near Toulouse. I came with Renie and !Xabbu and Murat Shagar Singh, who was killed when we entered the Otherland network.” She nodded her head as if to punctuate the dry recitation. Orlando heard the empty places in what she said, but again did not question.

  “Far scanning, this.” T4b had his arms crossed across his spiky chest. “You wanna know my ID for what? You with netnews?”

  “Good God. I can speak clearer English than that,” Florimel said, “and it is not my native language.”

  “Just tell us what you’re doing here,” Orlando pleaded. “What’s your real name?”

  “Ain’t telling no names.” He glowered, insofar as a cartoonish chrome battle-mask could be made to glower. “Here for my shadow, me—my zizz.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Quan Li.

  “A friend he hangs around with,” translated Orlando, who had a young suburbanite’s fascination with Goggleboy-speak.

  “Not no friend,” T4b said indignantly. “He my shadow—we from the box together!”

  “They’re, um, sort of in the same gang,” Orlando explained to the group’s only certified grandmother. “So, T4b, what happened to your friend?”

  “Came to this scan palace to find out, didn’t I?” the robot said. “My zizzy’s in the hospital. Found him almost sixed on the floor at his cot. Thought it was charge-burn, but he was togged into like the mama-papa net.”

  Orlando was feeling increasingly ludicrous, but he soldiered gamely on with his translation. “He says his friend is in the hospital, just like Renie’s brother. At first when they found him, they thought it was charge damage, but he was connected to the regular net.”

  “In fact, isn’t ‘T4b’ a kind of charge, my dear BangBang?” asked Sweet William.

  “You ain’t dupping.” The robot’s voice took on a kind of sullen rapture. “Far tasty jolt, T4b. Go to heaven, straight. My name, my fame, see?”

  “Lord help us,” William said. “He’s a chargehead. That’s just brilliant, isn’t it?”

  T4b brandished a spiny fist. “Brilliant this, funny-boy.”

  “Oh, stop it.” The high spirits with which Orlando had begun the morning were beginning to fade, and the sun was not all the way into the sky. “Quan Li?”

  “Hasn’t everyone heard my poor story already?” She looked around, but no one spoke. “It was my granddaughter.” Quan Li fell silent for a long moment. “Jing, my pretty little kitten, my dear one. She, too, fell into . . . into a sleep, like Renie’s brother, like . . . like this man’s friend. I have tried long and hard to discover the reason.” She seemed uncomfortable to have everyone listening to her. “I live in New Kowloon, in Hong Kong,” she added. “Is that not enough to say about someone like me? I am very, very old.”

  Orlando smiled, but he doubted she could be as shy and polite as she acted—it could not have been easy to push forward until she found this place, with her whole family telling her it was pointless and foolish. “Who else?”

  “I am only doing this because the river is not yet safe,” said Florimel. “At other times, I will not be convinced to talk when there are things to do, and I do not think it is particularly important who we are.” She said the word with mocking emphasis. “You know my name. My last name is not important. I am originally from Baden-Württemberg. My home now is outside Stuttgart.”

  Orlando waited, but there was no more forthcoming. “Is that all?”

  “What else do you need to know?”

  “Why are you here?” It was Fredericks who asked this time. “And where did you learn to do those things you did to Orlando? Are you a doctor or something?”

  “I have some medical training, but I am not a doctor. It is enough to say.”

  “But why are you here?” Orlando prompted.

  “All these questions!” Florimel’s sim face drew its eyebrows together in a fierce frown. “I am here because a friend became ill. You may ask more questions, but you will get no more answers.”

  Orlando turned to the man in black. “And you?”

  “You know all you need to about me, chuck. How did BangBang, in his infinite wisdom, put it—’My name, my fame?’ Well, this is what you get—this name, this face. And just because you’ve contracted some exotic, soap-opera illness and we’re all sorry for you doesn’t get you any more than that.” The teasing edge of Sweet William’s normal tone was gone. He and Florimel both appeared ready to fight rather than to divulge more about themselves.

  “Well, it’s better than nothing, I guess. So now what do we do?” Orlando turned his gaze out to the roiling green river. “Go downstream? And if we’re going back on the river, how? Our boat, the leaf—it sank.”

  “Perhaps we should try to find Renie and her friend,” said Quan Li. “They may need our help.”

  “I hardly think that a bunch of people the size of orange pips should waste too much time wandering around searching for other tiny people who may or may not be there in the first place,” declared William. “You lot might enjoy being eaten by something, but I like my pleasures, especially the masochistic sort, more refined.”

  “We need to stay close to the river, don’t we?” Fredericks asked. “That’s how we get out of this place and into another simulation.”

  “Well, I’m all in favor of getting out of this place, as fast as frigging possible,” William said.

  “First smart thing, you.” T4b nodded vigorously. “Let’s get flyin’. Don’t want no more sayee lo fish-swallowing, me.”

  “Just like that?” demanded Orlando, outraged. His own vulnerability had made him sensitive. “We just take off, and maybe leave Renie and her friend hurt, or lost?”

  “Look, sweetness,” William growled, “first off, you are going to have to learn the difference between real life and one of your action-adventures. Fo
r all we know, they’re dead. For all we know, some horrible earwig the size of a bus may come around the corner any second and pinch all our heads off, and we’ll be dead, too. Really dead. This is not a hooray-for-elves! story.”

  “I know it’s not a story!” But even as he spoke, Orlando regretted that it wasn’t. If he were really Thargor, and this were the Middle Country, it would be time for some serious smiting. “That’s the point. We’re in trouble. Renie and her friend are in this with us. And in case you didn’t notice, there aren’t a whole lot of us to spare.”

  “I think what Orlando says makes sense,” Quan Li offered.

  Fredericks and T4b now joined the argument, although it was hard to hear what either was saying in the general din. Orlando fought an urge to stick his fingers in his ears—were any of these people grownups?

  “Stop!” Martine’s voice was hoarse. The others paused, halted as much by the evident pain beneath her words as what she was saying. “Perhaps we can find some sort of compromise. We will need a boat, as Orlando has said. Perhaps some could begin building such a boat, while others looked for our two missing friends.”

  “Dzang, yeah. I can work on a boat,” said Fredericks. “I did it when we were on the island. It worked, too, didn’t it, Orlando?”

  “Oh, sure. It stayed above water for nearly half the trip.”

  Fredericks rewarded him with a punch on the shoulder.

  “That is fine,” said Martine. “For me, I feel that I should be among those searching for the others. I would be little help with building.”

  Quan Li volunteered to accompany her, as did Florimel. After much argument, Sweet William and T4b decided to help gather material to build the boat. “After all,” William pointed out, “there’s not a lot of difference between getting eaten up while searching or getting eaten up while doing construction.”

  “We will return before the sun goes down,” Martine promised.