River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  “Meaning?” Stan peered at her over the top of his old-fashioned framed lenses. Everything about Stan Chan was old-fashioned, even his name. Calliope still could not understand what parents in their right minds would name a child “Stanley” in the twenty-first century.

  “Impacted. Suctioning. Locked up. It’s a rotten case.”

  “This must be that Merapanui thing.”

  “None other. They’ve finally kicked it loose from the Real Killer investigation, but it’s not like they were doing anything with it over there. It’s already five years old, and I don’t think they did anything but look it over, run the parameters through their model, then throw it out again.”

  Her partner steepled his fingers. “Well, did you solve it already, or can I have a look at it, too?”

  “Sarcasm does not become you, Stan Chan.” She kicked the wall-screen on, then brought up a set of branching box files. The case file popped to the top of the activity log, and she spread it out on the screen. “Merapanui, Polly. Fifteen years old. Living in Kogarah when she was killed, but originally from up north. A Tiwi, I think.”

  He thought for a moment. “Melville Island—those people?”

  “Yep. Homeless since she ran away from a foster home at thirteen. Not much of an arrest record, other than vagrancy-related. A few times for shoplifting, two offensive conducts. Locked up a couple of days once for soliciting, but the case notes suggest she might actually have been innocent of that.”

  Stan raised an eyebrow.

  “I know, astonishing to contemplate.” Calliope brought up a picture. The girl in the stained shirt who stared back had a round face that seemed too large on her thin neck, frightened wide eyes, and dark, curly hair pulled to one side in a simple knot. “When she was booked.”

  “She seems pretty light-skinned for a Tiwi.”

  “I don’t think there are any full-blooded Tiwi any more. There’s damn few of us full-blooded Greeks.”

  “I thought your grandfather was Irish.”

  “We made him honorary.”

  Stan leaned back and brought his fingertips together again. “So why did it get pulled out of the dormant file by the Real Killer crew?”

  Calliope flicked her fingers and brought up the scene photos. They were not pretty. “Just be glad we can’t afford full wrap-around,” Calliope said. “Apparently the type and number of wounds—a big hunter’s knife like a Zeissing, they think—were similar in some respects to Mr. Real’s work. But it predates the first known Real murder by three years.”

  “Any other reasons they gave up on it?”

  “No similarities besides the wound patterns. All the Real victims have been whites of European descent, middle-class or upper-middle. They’ve all been killed in public places, where there was at least theoretical electronic security of some sort, but the security’s always failed in some way. Put that damn eyebrow down—of course it’s weird, but it’s not our case. This one is.”

  “Speaking of, why did you ask for this Merapanui thing in the first place? I mean, if it isn’t a prostitute getting offed by a client, it’s a crime of passion, a one-shot. If we want casual murders, we got streets full of them every day.”

  “Yeah?” Calliope raised a finger and flicked forward to another set of crime scene snaps, these from an angle that showed all of the victim’s face.

  “What’s wrong with her eyes?” Stan asked at last, rather quietly.

  “Couldn’t say, but those aren’t them. Those are stones. The killer put them in the sockets.”

  Stan Chan took the squeezers from her and enlarged the image. He stared at it for a dozen silent seconds. “Okay, so it’s not your usual assault-whoops-homicide,” he said. “But what we still have here is a five-year-old murder which had a brief moment of erroneous fame when it seemed like the perp might be an important killer who’s been splashed all over the newsnets. However, what it really is, Skouros, is some other cop’s leftovers.”

  “Succinct, and yet gloriously descriptive. I like your style, big boy. You looking for a partner?”

  Stan frowned. “I suppose it beats cleaning up after cake dealers and chargeheads.”

  “No it doesn’t. It’s a shit case. But it’s ours.”

  “My joy, Skouros, is unbounded.”

  It was never an easy choice on office days between taking the light rail or driving the underpowered e-car the department leased for her, but though urban traffic insured that driving was slower, it was also quieter.

  The auto-reader was picking its way through the case notes, making bizarre phonetic hash out of some of the Aboriginal and Asian names of the witnesses—not that there were many witnesses to anything. The murder had happened near a honeycomb beneath one of the main sections of the Great Western Highway, but if the squat had been occupied before the murder, it was empty by the time the body was discovered. The people who lived in such places knew that there was little benefit in being noticed by the police.

  As the details washed over her again, Calliope tried to push all the preconceptions from her mind and just listen to the data. It was almost impossible, of course, especially with all the distractions that came from the tangled traffic streams humping along in fits and starts beneath the bright orange sunset.

  First off, she was already thinking of the killer as “he.” But did it have to be a man? Even in her comparatively brief career, Calliope had worked homicide in Sydney long enough to know that women, too, could end another’s life, sometimes with surprising violence. But this bizarre, iron-nerved, obsessive play with the body—surely only a man would be capable of such a thing. Or was she sliding into prejudice?

  There had been a time only a few years back when some group in the United States—in the Pacific Northwest, if she remembered correctly—had claimed that since the majority of social violence was caused by men, and because there were certain genetic indicators in some males that might indicate predisposition to aggression, male children bearing those indicators should be forced to undergo gene therapy in utero. The opposition groups had shouted long and loud about the proposed law being a kind of genetic castration, a punishment for the crime of simply being male, and the whole debate had degenerated into name-calling. Calliope thought that was too bad, actually. She had seen enough of the horrifyingly casual bloodshed caused almost entirely by young males to wonder if there wasn’t something to what the bill’s proponents had to say.

  When she mentioned it to him, Stan Chan had called her a fascist lesbian man-hater. But he had said it in a nice way.

  It was certainly true that she had to avoid making assumptions without the facts, but she also needed to try to wrap her mind around the person, needed to find the perp before she could find him—or her. For now she would have to trust her instincts. It felt like man’s work, of the most twisted sort, so unless she stumbled on overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the person they were seeking would remain a him.

  But beyond the assumption of a male perp, not a lot stood out, at least in the way of unifying themes. There had been no trace of sexual assault, and even the violence-as-sex aspect seemed oddly muted. In many ways it appeared to be more ritual than rape.

  Ritual. The word had a vibration, and she had learned to trust the part of her that felt those kinds of resonance. Ritual. She would file that away.

  Other than that, there was little to go on. The murderer was not as thorough in his avoidance of physical evidence as the Real Killer, but Polly Merapanui’s death had found her effectively out-of-doors, the only shelter being the concrete overpass, an area scoured by wind so that no useful traces remained, even to the department’s hideously expensive ForVac particle-sucker. The perp had worn gloves, and if Polly had fought, she had not carried away any trace of her murderer beneath fingernails.

  If only the old superstition were true, Calliope thought, not for the f
irst time in her homicide career—if only dying eyes actually retained an image of what they last saw.

  Perhaps the killer believed that ancient superstition. Perhaps that explained the stones.

  The voice of the auto-reader droned on, emotionless as a clock. The sign indicating her exit swam into view, a distant smear above the river of taillights. Calliope edged toward the left lane. No physical evidence, a victim that most would agree was as inconsequential as a human being could be, a handful of useless witnesses (mostly itinerants and uncooperative relatives) and a truly disturbing modus operandi that had never been seen again—Stan was right. They had someone else’s bad case, with what little juice it had once possessed sucked out of it.

  But the girl, who had possessed nothing in life except life, was not entirely inconsequential. To declare that would be to declare that Calliope Skouros herself was inconsequential, for what had she chosen to do with her own days and nights except defend the resentful and avenge the unwanted?

  That’s inspiring, Skouros, she told herself, leaning on her horn as some idiot on his way home from four or five after-work beers cut her off. But it’s still a shit case.

  FREDERICKS was crouching in what would have been the prow if the leaf were a proper boat, staring out over the rapidly darkening water. The river had carried them to this point without too much violence, but Fredericks had a firm grip on the fibers of the mat anyway. Watching his friend’s head waggle from side to side with the motion of the water had begun to make Orlando feel queasy, so he was lying flat on his back, looking up at the first prickling of stars in the sky.

  “We’ve lost them all,” Fredericks said dully. This was not the first time since they had been swept away that he had made this doomful remark. Orlando ignored him, concentrating instead on convincing himself that his scanty clothes were drying, and that the air was actually warm. “Don’t you care?”

  “Of course I care. But what can we do about it? It wasn’t me who got stuck on this stupid boat.”

  Fredericks fell silent. Orlando regretted his words, but not to the point of retracting them. “Look, they know which way we’re going,” he said at last by way of apology. “If we . . . whatever you call it, go through, we’ll just wait for them on the other side. They’ll find a way to get down the river, and then we’ll all be in the next simulation together.”

  “Yeah. I guess so.” Fredericks turned to face Orlando. “Hey, Gardiner?”

  Orlando waited a few seconds for Fredericks to finish the sentence, then realized his friend wanted conversation. “Yeah?”

  “Do you . . . do you think we’re going to get killed?”

  “Not in the next few minutes, if we’re lucky.”

  “Shut up. I’m not spanking around, I mean it. What’s going to happen to us?” Fredericks scowled. “I mean . . . I don’t know, I miss my parents, kind of. I’m scared, Orlando.”

  “I am, too.”

  As the darkness thickened, the immense trees sliding past on either side became an unbroken wall of shadow, like the cliffs surrounding a deep valley.

  “Valley of the Shadow of Death,” Orlando murmured.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” He dragged himself upright. “Look, we can only do what we’re doing. If there were a simple way to get out of this, one of us would have found it already. Remember, Sellars made it hard to get here, so even if they seem like the Scanmaster Club sometimes, Renie and the others must be pretty smart. So we just have to hang on until we solve it. Pretend it’s one of the Middle Country adventures.”

  “Nothing in the Middle Country ever really hurt. And you couldn’t get killed. Not for real.”

  Orlando forced a smile. “Well, then I guess it’s about time old Thargor and Pithlit had a serious challenge.”

  Fredericks tried to return the smile, but his was even less convincing.

  “Hey, what do you look like?” Orlando asked suddenly. “In RL?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I just wondered. I mean, are you tall, short, what?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, Orlando. Ordinary-looking, I guess. Talk about something else.” Fredericks looked away.

  “Okay. You still haven’t ever told me where ‘Pithlit’ comes from. The name.”

  “I said I don’t remember.”

  “Fenfen. I don’t believe you. So tell me.”

  “I . . . well . . .” Fredericks met his eyes defiantly. “If you laugh, even a little, you’re impacted to the utmost.”

  “I won’t laugh.”

  “After a character in a book. A kid’s book. A stuffed animal, sort of, named Piglet. When I was little I couldn’t say it right, so that’s what my parents called me. When I started doing the net—well, it was sort of my nickname. Are you laughing?”

  Orlando shook his head, teeth firmly clamped. “No. Not . . .” He broke off. A noise which had been rising for many seconds was now clearly audible above the rush and roar of the water. “What’s that?”

  Fredericks stared. “Another bug. It’s hard to tell. It’s flying really low.”

  The winged thing, coming rapidly after them from upstream, had dropped so close to the river’s surface that one of its feet broke a wavelet into white foam. The insect tipped and wobbled, then seesawed up to a higher level before regaining its course. It skimmed past them at an angle, showing itself to be almost half the size of their boat, then banked steeply a long distance downstream and began to fly back toward them.

  “It’s going to attack us,” Fredericks said, fumbling for the barge pole.

  “I don’t know. It seems injured or something. Maybe sick . . .” Orlando’s attention was captured by something in the waters beneath the veering insect. “Look! It’s that blue sparkly stuff!” Fredericks stood and balanced unsteadily, intent on the low-flying bug. He raised the pole up above his head as it approached, as though to knock it out of the sky. “Jeez, are you scanned to the utmost?” Orlando dragged him down. Fredericks had to let go of the pole to keep from falling, but saved it from bouncing overboard after he had fallen to his knees. “That thing’s ten times your size.” Orlando chided him. “You hit it with that, you’ll just get knocked into the water.”

  The insect hummed closer. As it neared, already banking, Orlando crouched on all fours, ready to drop to his belly if it flew too low. The creature was some kind of tropical beetle, he saw, its rounded brown shell touched with yellow. As it swept past, Orlando saw that the forward part of the wingcase had lifted, and that something was moving there, wiggling . . .

  “. . . Waving?” he said in astonishment. “There’s a person in there!”

  “It’s Renie!” shouted Fredericks as the insect buzzed past. “I’m sure it’s her!”

  The glimmer was all around them now. The waters seemed to froth with glowing sky-blue. Upstream, the flying insect was making a wide turn, but Orlando could hardly see it. The very air was full of dancing light.

  “They found us!” Fredericks bounced up and down. “They’re flying in a bug! How can they do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Orlando shouted. The noise of the river had grown to an endless wash, and blue light was leaping from his skin. The dark shadow of the flying insect was overhead now, pacing them, and it also flew through sprays of blue tracer-fire. “We’ll ask them on the other side—”

  And then the roaring overwhelmed them, and the light filled everything, and they passed through into another place.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Hollow Man

  * * *

  NETFEED/ENTERTAINMENT: I Loved The “Papa Diabla,” Could Have Bone Without The Warm Gazpacho.

  (Restaurant review of Efulgencia’s World Choir, Oklahoma City, USA.) (visual: “Iguana con Bayas” on a serving platter)

  VO: “. . . My other major complaint wit
h EWC would not perhaps be a problem for other diners. EWC is one of the last to get on the “random restaurant” dining loop, and their use of it is aggressive—there must have been six changes of connection during our meal, which hardly leaves enough time to ask the new arrivals what restaurant they’re in, let alone what they’re eating, what they think of it, or anything else, before they’ve vanished and the next party has popped in. Now, I never enjoyed this sort of thing even when it was a novelty, but clearly EWC is looking for a younger, crunchier, scorchier type of customer than yours truly—the pop-eyed, batter-fried iguana is another giveaway. . .”

  * * *

  THE light was going fast. Renie, who had not felt confident for a single moment since the hopper had lifted into the air, began fumbling on the instrument panel for the insect-plane equivalent of headlights. Realizing how many switches she could flick which would not be in her best interest to flick, she gave up and concentrated on maneuvering the little flyer through the overwhelming, monstrous forest.

  “He still seems to be alive,” !Xabbu said from his crouch at Cullen’s side. “Since there is no blood, it is hard to tell how much damage he sustained when that creature pulled his arm off. I have knotted his coat around the wound, in any case, and he is sleeping again now.”

  Renie nodded, mostly intent on avoiding a fatal piloting error. It would be easy to mistake a shadowy tree limb for part of the greater darkness, and from the perspective of their own skewed measurements, the ground was several hundred feet below them. She had contemplated trying to fly higher, to reach a place above the treetops, but she didn’t know whether this plane could be expected to fly safely at an altitude of what would be equivalent to thousands of feet, and in any case she liked her chances of not hitting anything better down here, where the trees were mostly trunk.

  “Are you sure he said the river was in this direction?” she asked.

  “He said west. You heard him, Renie.”