River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  !Xabbu shrugged. “If robots are the things I have seen on the net, like our friend T4b, no. It is hard to explain.”

  Renie gave up. “It doesn’t matter, I guess. Do you think we should . . .”

  !Xabbu’s small hand abruptly flicked out and lightly touched her lips. By moonlight she could see little more than his silhouette, but he was frozen in a posture of alarm and attention. A moment later she heard it: something was moving toward them, swishing through the trampled vegetation with little regard for stealth.

  Although they had no reason yet to suppose the inhabitants of this simulation to be hostile, Renie still felt her heart speed. A thin shape pushed through into a small clear space nearby, separated from them only by a single row of bent stalks. Moonlight revealed a very young Caucasian woman with wide dark eyes and a ragged short haircut, dressed in a crude smock.

  As Renie and !Xabbu watched, she dropped into a crouch, lifted the hem of her garment, and began to urinate. As she did so, she sang tunelessly to herself. When she was certain that the puddle forming was moving away rather than toward her feet, the girl reached into the breast pocket of her smock, still humming and murmuring, and pulled out something no bigger than a grape which she lifted up above her upturned face until it caught the moonlight, then inspected with the ritualistic air of someone doing something important for the hundredth or perhaps even thousandth time.

  The moon’s soft light glinted for a moment on the facets. Renie gasped—a strangled little noise, but enough to startle the young woman, who hurriedly thrust the tiny golden gem back into her pocket and looked around wildly. “Who’s there?” She stood up, but did not immediately retreat. “Who’s there? Emily?”

  Renie held her breath, trying not to make the damage any worse, but the young woman was more curious than fearful. As she scanned the surrounding vegetation, something caught her eye. She moved toward them with the caution of a cat approaching a new household appliance, then abruptly leaned forward and pulled the corn to one side, revealing Renie and the others. The girl gave a squeak of surprise and jumped back.

  “Don’t scream!” Renie said hurriedly. She scrambled up onto her knees and held her hands out placatingly. “We won’t hurt you. We’re strangers here, but we won’t hurt you.”

  The girl hesitated, poised for flight and yet with curiosity again taking the upper hand. “Why . . . why do you have that with you,” she said, jutting her chin at !Xabbu. “Is it from Forest?”

  Renie didn’t know what would be the proper thing to say, “He’s . . . he travels with me. He’s friendly.” She took a risk, since the girl did not seem to mean them immediate harm. “I don’t know what forest you’re talking about. We’re strangers here—all of us.” She pointed to Cullen, who was still lying on the ground, almost oblivious to what was going on. “Our friend has been hurt. Can you help us? We don’t want to make any trouble.”

  The girl stared at Cullen, then darted a worried glance at !Xabbu before returning to Renie. “You don’t live here? And you’re not from Forest? Not from the Works either?” She shook her head at the wonder of it all. “More strangers—that’s two times just during Darkancold!”

  Renie spread her hands. “I don’t understand any of that. We are from somewhere else entirely, I’m pretty sure. Can you help us?”

  The girl started to say something, then tilted her head. In the distance, voices were calling. “They’re looking for me.” She wrinkled her forehead, pondering. “Follow us back. Don’t let anyone else see you. You’re my secret.” A sly look stole over her face, and she suddenly looked far more a child than an adult. “Wait at the edge of the corn when we get there. I’ll come back and find you.” She took a step away down the row, then turned back to stare in gleeful fascination. “More strangers! I’ll come find you.”

  “What’s your name?” Renie asked.

  “Emily, of course.” The young woman made a clumsy mock-curtsey, then laughed, mischievous, strangely febrile.

  “But you were calling for Emily when you heard us—your friend, someone.” The voices were getting louder. Renie stepped back into the shadows and raised her whispering voice so it would carry. “Is your friend named Emily, too?

  “Of course.” Confused, the girl narrowed her eyes as she backed toward those who were searching for her. “Silly. Everyone is named Emily.”

  They did not wait long at the edge of the cornfield. Renie had scarcely had sufficient time to note the huge factory silos and jerry-built buildings, like a township on the industrial outskirts of Johannesburg, and to worry again about Cullen’s condition, when Emily’s slender shadow crept back across the open dirt toward them.

  !Xabbu reappeared at Renie’s side at just that moment, but had no time to tell her what he had seen on his brief scouting expedition before the girl reached them, talking in a quiet but nonstop babble of excitement.

  “I knew it would be a day for things to happen today, I knew it! Come on now, follow me. We had treacle pudding, see, two days in a row! And it wasn’t Crismustreat, because we had that already, just a few days ago—we always count the days in Darkancold until Crismustreat, of course, but I can’t remember how many days it’s been since.” The girl, showing little more than basic concern for stealth, led them across a vast yard littered with the angular shapes of parked machinery. She took only a short breath before continuing. “But there it was, treacle pudding again! And the happymusic wasn’t that falalala, so I knew it wasn’t Crismustreat come around again, and anyway it would have been much too early. And then we had that incoming—terrible bad, that one was—and I thought maybe that was the strange thing that was going to happen today, but it was you! Think of that!”

  Renie was able to understand very little, but knew there was probably vital information to be had. “Where did you get that thing from? That little . . . gem or jewel?”

  Emily turned and looked at her, eyes squinty with suspicion. A moment later, as if the wind had changed, she seemed to decide the newcomers were trustworthy. “My pretty thing. He gave it to me. He was my other surprise, but he was the first one. You’re the second one. And treacle pudding twice this month!”

  “Who was . . . he?”

  “The other stranger, silly. I told you. The strange henry.”

  “Henry? That was his name?”

  Their guide sighed, full of theatrical suffering. “They’re all named Henry.”

  Emily, it became clear at last, was actually Emily 22813. All the women who lived and worked in this place were called Emily—or “emily,” since it was used as a descriptive term for a woman as well. And all the men were henrys. Emily 22813 and her workmates—Renie guessed from the size of this factory farm that there must be hundreds here—spent their days planting and tending beans and corn and tomatoes.

  “Because that’s what the king wants us to do,” was Emily’s only explanation of why she and her fellows were working in what seemed to Renie to be slave-labor conditions.

  The place itself, as far as Renie could decipher, was named “Em Rell,” which she guessed was derived in some way from the name for the women: She could not come up with any other associations with the United States in general or to Kansas, a place she knew of only as being part of the farming heartland of North America.

  Em Rell, or whatever it was, seemed strangely deserted. None of Emily’s coworkers were to be seen, no sentries moved among the stationary tractors and haphazard stacks of empty crates. Unimpeded, Renie and the others passed into the glow of the orange lights that were strung on every pole and wire, and across the great yard, until Emily stopped them in front of a barn, a huge structure that dwarfed even Renie’s outsized former home, the Durban civic shelter. It looked like a jet hangar surrounded by drifts of grain dust. “There’s a place in here where you can sleep.” Emily pointed them to iron stairs which clung to one outside wall. “Up there, in the loft. No
one ever looks.”

  !Xabbu scampered up the ladder, popped in and out of the unscreened window, then swiftly descended. “It is full of equipment,” he said. “It should be a good place to hide.”

  With Emily’s help, they boosted the sagging Cullen up the steps. As they maneuvered him through the wide loading window, Emily said “I have to go now. We have a little sleep-extra tomorrow, because of the fence. If I can, I’ll come back to see you in the morning. Goodbye, strangers!”

  Renie watched the lithe form quickstep down the stairs and vanish into the shadows beside one of the long, low barracks. A side door opened and closed as Emily slid back inside. A moment later a strange, rounded shape appeared at the far end of the barracks. Renie ducked back into the windowframe, where the moonlight could not reach her, and watched the figure totter past. It made a faint whirring noise, but she could see little more of it than a pale glow of eyes before it rounded the corner of the barracks and was gone.

  The loft itself, although it stretched across only the shorter span of the barn, was longer than the street on which Renie lived in Pinetown and full of potential sleeping places. They settled in a protected niche close to the window and the stairs. !Xabbu found long burlap sacks stuffed with heavy aprons; a few of these sacks, laid out behind a pile of anonymous boxes which provided a fence between their resting place and the window, made a good bed for Cullen; the young scientist’s eyes were already closed as they dragged him onto it. They pulled out more sacks and made themselves as comfortable as they could. Renie would have loved to puzzle over the day’s happenings with !Xabbu, but sleep was tugging hard at her, so she let it drag her down.

  Emily came as promised, earlier in the morning than Renie would have preferred. As she sat listening to the young woman’s chatter, Renie decided that she understood what people meant when they said they would be willing to sell their souls: she would have traded that article away in a heartbeat for one cup of decent coffee and a couple of cigarettes.

  I should have had Jeremiah put caffeine into the dripline at decent intervals, she thought sourly. Well, next time . . .

  The cup of liquid Emily had smuggled out of the workers’ cafeteria—”brekfusdrink” she called it, apparently all one word—was gag-gingly and most definitely not coffee. It had an odd chemical taste, like unsweetened cough syrup, and even the small sip Renie took before hurriedly handing it back made her heart race. She reminded herself that the girl meant it as an act of kindness.

  After Emily had breathlessly recounted all the events of their discovery and rescue the night before, with just as much guileless enthusiasm as if Renie and !Xabbu had not experienced them firsthand, she told them she would be released from her work detail early today to see the “medical henrys”—a regular checkup that from her brief description sounded more like veterinary medicine than the sort Renie was used to—and that she would try then to slip in and visit them. Outside, the grating, scratchy recordings of what Emily called “happy-music” had begun booming from the compound’s loudspeakers. Already chafing at the idea of spending an entire day stuck in the loft and subjected to that din, Renie questioned the girl about this place to which the river had delivered them, but Emily’s vocabulary was very basic and her viewpoint narrow. Renie garnered little new information.

  “We don’t even know if Orlando and the others made it through,” Renie said crossly after the young woman had left. “We don’t know anything. We’re just flying blind.” This brought Martine to mind, and gave her such a sharp and surprising sense of regret at having lost contact—after all, she hardly even knew the French woman—that she missed part of what !Xabbu was saying.

  “. . . look for this Jonas man. And we must believe that Sellars will find us again. He is without doubt very clever.”

  “Without doubt. But what is his angle, anyway? He seems to have gone to a lot of trouble just to save the world.”

  !Xabbu frowned for a moment, puzzled, then saw the irritated joke in her words. He smiled. “Is that what all city-people would think, Renie? That someone would never do something unless for himself or herself to profit?”

  “No, of course not. But this whole thing is so strange, so complicated. I just don’t think we can afford to take anyone’s motives for granted.”

  “Just so. And perhaps Sellars is close to someone who has been harmed by the Grail Brotherhood. No person who is traveling with us has explained all the reasons they are here.”

  “Except you and me.” She took a deep breath. “Well, actually, I’m not entirely sure about you. I’m here for my brother. But you never even met him, not really.” She realized it sounded like she was questioning his motives. “You’ve done far more than any friend should have to, !Xabbu. And I am grateful. I’m sorry I’m in such a foul mood this morning.”

  He shrugged gracefully. “There is no fence around friendship, I do not think.”

  The moment hung. !Xabbu at last turned to see to Cullen, who had not yet shown any sign of waking. Renie moved to the window to wrestle her demons in silence.

  When she had arranged a few of the boxes nearby so she could look out with little chance of being seen, she settled in, chin propped on fists. Below her, the vast compound had swung into its working day. The happymusic gurgled on, so limpingly out of time it made it difficult to think clearly; Renie wondered if that were one of its purposes. No men were in sight, but herds of slow-walking women, all in near-identical smocks, were being led back and forth across the compound’s open space at regular intervals, each band under the guardianship of one of the strange mechanical men. !Xabbu had been right—they did not resemble any of the robots she had seen on the net, either the real-world industrial automata or the gleaming human duplicates on display in science fiction dramas. These seemed more like something from two centuries earlier, roly-poly little metal men with windup keys in their backs and rakish tin mustachios anchored to their permanently puzzled, infantile faces.

  The novelty value of what was going on below soon waned. The fat white sun rose higher. The loft began to grow uncomfortably warm, and the air outside turned hazy and as refractive as water. In the distance, shimmering now only because of the scorching sun, was the city whose lights they had seen the night before. It was hard to make out details, but it seemed flatter than it should for such a size, as though some plains-striding giant had topped it as offhandedly as a boy decapitating a row of dandelions. But even so, it was the only thing that gave the horizon any shape; except for a suburb-wide patch of pipes and scaffolding nestled against the city’s outskirts, apparently a gargantuan gasworks, the flatlands stretched away on all other sides, a quilt of yellow-gray dirt and green fields, devoid of verticality. It was fully as depressing as the worst squalor to be found in South Africa.

  What’s the point of all that amazing technology if you build something like this? She was doomed this morning, it seemed, to a succession of miserable thoughts.

  Renie wondered if they should head for the city, depressing as it looked. There was little to be learned on this vegetable plantation, or at least Emily did not seem capable of telling them much—surely they could get better information in the distant metropolis. The only duties they could remotely claim were to find their companions and look for Sellars’ escaped Grail prisoner, and they were doing neither at this moment, stuck in a loft which was rapidly turning into an oven.

  She scowled, bored and unhappy. She didn’t want coffee anymore. She craved a cold beer. But she would murder for a cigarette. . . .

  Despite the day’s grim and monotonous start, two things happened in the afternoon, neither of them expected.

  A little past noon, when the air seemed to have become so densely hot that inhaling it was like breathing soup, Cullen died.

  Or at least that seemed to be what had happened. !Xabbu called her over from her perch by the window, his voice more confused than alarmed. The entomolog
ist had responded very little all morning, sliding in and out of a deep doze, but now his sim was inert, curled in the same fetal position in which he had last been sleeping, but stiff as the exoskeletal corpse of a spider.

  “He’s dropped offline at last,” Renie said flatly. She wasn’t certain she believed it. The rigidness of the sim was disturbing: propped on its back, unnaturally bowed, it looked like the remains of some creature dead and dried by the roadside. Their fruitless examination over, she eased the sim back into the position in which it and the real Cullen had finally ceased working in tandem.

  !Xabbu shook his head, but said nothing. He seemed far more disturbed by the loss of Cullen than she was, and sat for a long time with one baboon hand resting on the sim’s rigid chest, singing quietly.

  Well, we don’t know, she told herself. We don’t know for sure. He could be offline now, having a cool drink and wondering about the whole strange experience. In a way, it wasn’t that different from RL, really. When you were gone, you left no certainty for those who stayed behind, only an unsatisfactory choice between blind faith or finality.

  Or he could have just lain here next to us while his real body wasted away from shock and thirst—until it killed him. He said that he was going to be stuck in his lab until someone came in, didn’t he?

  It was too much to think about just now—in fact, it was getting harder to think every moment. The oppressive heat had continued to mount, but now there was suddenly a new, stranger heaviness to the steamy air, with an electrical tingling quality—almost a sea-smell, but as if from an ocean that just happened to be boiling.

  Renie left !Xabbu still keening quietly over Cullen’s sim. As she reached the window, a curtain of shadow fell on it, as though someone had put a hand over the sun. The sky, a withering flat blue only moments before, had just turned several shades darker. A stiff wind was stirring the dust of the compound into erratic swirls.