River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  Or was it something even stranger—one of those quantum things that Muckler at the gallery was always raving about? Had the fact of Wells’ invention caused this place to come into being, a branching of reality that did not exist until the man from Bromley first set pen to paper?

  That only led to more questions, each more boggling than the last. Did every made-up story have its own universe? Or just the good ones? And who got to decide?

  And was he himself, already missing part of his past, now caught in some ever-ramifying journey, into dimensions farther and farther from his own?

  At another time he might have laughed at the idea of a multiple universe run on the basis of editing decisions, but nothing about his situation was in the least bit funny. He was lost in a mad universe, he was impossibly far from home, and he was alone.

  He slept that evening in a deserted restaurant near Cheyne Walk. It had been looted of everything remotely resembling food, but he was not feeling particularly hungry, especially when every change of wind brought the smell of putrefaction from some new quarter. In fact, he could not remember the last time he had felt truly hungry, and could but dimly remember the last time he had eaten, but the thought only raised more questions, and he was very tired of questions. He pulled drapes from the windows and wrapped himself in them against the cold from the river, then slid down into a heavy, dreamless sleep.

  As he made his way up the Thames the next day, moving faster because of a pair of oars he had salvaged from another abandoned boat, he found that he was not the only human being in this ruined London. From the river, and during the course of a few cautious landings before the sun began to set again, he saw nearly a dozen other people, but they were as wary of contact as rats: all of them either ignored his cry of greeting or actually fled on seeing him. Thinking of how everything edible had been taken from the restaurant and the shops he had explored on either side of it, he wondered if these people did not have good reason to shun other survivors. And survivors they clearly were, all of them ragged and blackened with dust and soot, so that at a distance he could not have guessed the ethnicity of any of them.

  He found an entire community at Kew the next day, several dozen people in tattered clothes, living in the royal gardens. Paul did not come ashore, but hailed them from the river and asked for news. A small deputation came down to the water’s edge and told him that the aliens—the “machine creatures” as these survivors called them, had largely moved away from London, pursuing their inscrutable aims northward, but there were still enough left behind to make life in the city a very hazardous thing. They had themselves come to Kew Gardens only a week ago from Lambeth, which had been almost completely destroyed, and had already lost a few of their party who had been caught on the open green when a tripod had appeared and stepped on them, apparently by accident. When the Kew survivors had finished trapping and eating the last of the squirrels and birds, they told Paul, they planned to move on.

  It was good to talk to other people, but there was something in the way they inspected him that made Paul uncomfortable. One of the men invited him to join them, but he only thanked them and rowed on.

  The oddest thing, he thought as he made his way up the river toward Richmond, was that his memory of War of the Worlds was that the Martians had proved susceptible to Earth diseases, and had died within a few weeks of beginning their campaign of devastation. But the survivors at Kew had said the first Martian ships had arrived in Surrey over half a year ago. Paul was curious about this variance from the Wells story, and picked up scraps of newspaper dated in the last days before the Martian invasion when he came across them, but of course there was nothing available to tell him the current date. Civilization had come to a halt on the day the Martians came.

  In fact, that was the strange thing about the whole situation. Unlike the other stops on his involuntary pilgrimage, this post-invasion England seemed to have reached a kind of stasis, as though someone had played an endgame, then left without removing the pieces from the board. If London was any example, the country, perhaps the world, was completely in the hands of the invaders. The creatures themselves had left only a token force. The tiny residue of human survivors were scrabbling just to survive. It all felt so . . . empty.

  This spawned another thought, which began to grow as the day went on, as Paul passed and called out to a handful of other scavenging humans with no result. All of the places he had been since he had somehow lost his normal life were so . . . so old. They were situations and scenarios that suggested a different era entirely—the turn of the century H. G. Wells novel, the strange Boy’s Own Paper version of Mars—another and quite different Mars than the one which had spawned these invaders, which was an interesting thought in itself—and the Looking Glass place where he had met Gally. Even his dimmest memories seemed to be of an antique and long-concluded war. And the Ice Age, that was just plain ancient. But there seemed another common element as well, something that troubled him but that he could not quite name.

  It was the fourth day, and he was just east of Twickenham, when he met them.

  He had just passed a small midstream island, and was working his way alongside an open green space on the north side of the river, a park of some kind, when he saw a man walking aimlessly back and forth on the bank. Paul thought he might be another of those whose minds had been permanently deranged by the invasion, because when he hailed him, the man looked up, then stared at him as though Paul were a ghost. A moment later the man began to leap up and down, waving his arms like a spastic flagman, shouting over and over again: “Thank goodness! Oh, heavens! Thank goodness!”

  Paul steered closer to the riverbank as the stranger ran down toward him. Caution long since having gained the upper hand over his desire to commune with living humans, Paul stayed a little way out into the water while he made a hasty examination. The middle-aged man was thin and very short, perhaps not much more than five feet in height. He wore spectacles and a small mustache of the sort a later generation would identify with German dictators. But for the ragged state of his black suit, and the tears of apparent gratitude in his eyes, he might have just walked away from his desk in a small, stuffy assurance firm.

  “Oh, thank the good Lord. Please come help me.” The man pulled a kerchief from his waistcoat pocket and used it to mop his face. It was impossible to tell what color the cloth had once been. “My sister. My poor sister has fallen down and she cannot get up. Please.”

  Paul stared at him hard. If he was a robber, he was a very unlikely-looking one. If he was the front man for a gang of thieves and murderers, they must be very patient to set bait for the infrequent river travelers. Still, it did not pay to be hasty these days. “What happened to her?”

  “She has fallen and hurt herself. Oh, please, sir, do a Christian good deed and help me. I would pay you if I could.” His smile was sickly. “If it meant anything. But we will share what we have with you.”

  The man’s sincerity was hard to doubt, and it would take a gun to equalize the difference in their sizes. He had not showed one yet, and Paul had been in range for quite some time. “All right. Let me just tie up my boat.”

  “God bless you, sir.”

  The small man bounced from foot to foot like a child waiting to use the toilet as Paul waded ashore, then made his rowboat fast. The man beckoned to him to follow, and set out up the bank toward the trees in a strange, awkward trot. Paul doubted that before the invasion the man had ever gone faster than a walk since he had been a child at school.

  As if the memory of former dignity suddenly returned with the presence of a stranger, the man in the black suit abruptly slowed and turned around. “This is so very kind of you. My name is Sefton Pankie.” Walking backward now, and in imminent danger at any moment of tripping over a root, he extended a hand.

  Paul, who had decided some time back that since he couldn’t trust his own mind, he certainly couldn’
t trust anything else he encountered, shook the man’s hand and gave a false name. “I’m . . . Peter Johnson.”

  “A pleasure, Mr. Johnson. Then if we’ve done that properly, do let us hurry.”

  Pankie led him up the hill, through a patch of the ubiquitous red Martian grass that held the hilltop like a conqueror’s flag, and down the other side into a copse of beech trees. Just when Paul was beginning to wonder again if the stranger might be leading him into some sort of ambush, the small man stopped at the edge of a deep gulley and leaned over.

  “I’m back, my dear. Are you all right? Oh, I hope that you are!”

  “Sefton?” The voice was a strong alto, and more strident than melodious. “I thought certain you had run off and left me.”

  “Never, my dear.” Pankie began to make his way down into the gulley, using tree roots for handholds, his lack of coordination again apparent. Paul saw a single figure huddled at the bottom and swung down to follow him.

  The woman wedged in a crevice at the bottom of the gulley had lodged in a difficult and embarrassing position, legs in the air, dark lacquered hair and straw hat caught in a tangle of loose branches. She was also extremely large. As Paul made his way down to where he could see her reddened, sweat-gleaming face, he guessed that she was at least Pankie’s age, if not older.

  “Oh, goodness, who is this?” she said in unfeigned horror as Paul reached the bottom of the gulley. “What must you think of me, sir? This is so dreadful, so humiliating!”

  “He’s Mr. Johnson, my dear, and he is here to help.” Pankie squatted beside her, stroking the expanse of her voluminous gray dress like the hide of a prize cow.

  “No need to be embarrassed, Ma’am.” Paul could see the problem clearly—Pankie’s sister weighed perhaps three times as much as he did. It would be hell just getting her shifted loose, let alone helping her back up the steep slope. Nevertheless, he felt sorry for the woman and her embarrassment, doubly worse because of its indelicacy—already he was beginning to absorb the Edwardian mores of this place, despite their irrelevance in the face of what the Martians had done—and bent himself to the task.

  It took almost half an hour to get the woman disentangled from the branches at the bottom of the gulley, since she shrieked with pain every time her hair was tugged, no matter how gently. When she had finally been freed, Paul and Sefton Pankie began the formidable job of helping her up the hill to safety. It was nearly dark when, all extremely disheveled, dirty, and soaked in sweat, they finally stumbled onto the level area at the top.

  The woman sank to the ground like a collapsing tent, and had to be persuaded over some minutes to sit up again. Paul built a fire with dry branches while Pankie hovered around her like a tickbird servicing a rhino, trying to clean the worst of the dirt from her with his kerchief (which Paul thought must be a record for pointless exercises.) When Paul had finished, Pankie produced some matches, clearly a treasured possession at this point. They put one into service with lip-biting caution, and by the time the sun had disappeared behind the damaged skyline on the far side of the river, the flames were climbing high into the air and spirits were generally restored.

  “I cannot thank you enough,” the woman said. Her round face was scratched and smeared with dirt, but she gave him a smile clearly intended to be winsome. “Now it may seem silly, after all that, but I believe in proper introductions. My name is Undine Pankie.” She extended a hand as though it were a dainty sweetmeat for him to savor. Paul thought she might be expecting him to kiss it, but decided that a line had to be drawn somewhere. He shook it and reintroduced himself under his hastily-assumed name.

  “Words cannot express my gratitude,” she said. “When my husband was gone so long, I feared he had been set upon by looters. You can imagine my horror, trapped and alone in that terrible, terrible place.”

  Paul frowned. “I’m sorry—your husband?” He turned to Pankie. “You said you needed help to save your sister.” He glanced back to the woman, but her look was one of perfect innocence, although there was some poorly-hidden irritation to be seen.

  “Sister? Sefton, what a curious thing to say.”

  The small man, who had been busy with a futile attempt to reorder her hair, gave an embarrassed chuckle. “Is, isn’t it? I can’t imagine what got into me. It’s this invasion thing, don’t you know. It has quite rattled my wits.”

  Paul accepted their explanation—certainly Undine Pankie showed no signs of guilt or duplicity—but he was obscurely troubled.

  Mrs. Pankie recovered herself quite rapidly after that, and spent the rest of the evening holding forth about the terror of the Martian invasion and the horrors of living rough in the park. She seemed to give these burdens about equal weight.

  Undine Pankie was a garrulous woman, and before Paul finally begged leave to lie down and sleep, she had told him more than he had ever wanted to know about life among the petit bourgeois of Shepperton, both pre- and post-invasion. Mr. Pankie, it turned out, was a chief clerk in the county surveyor’s office—a position his wife clearly deemed beneath his due. Paul could not help feeling that she thought that, with diligence and artful politicking, this might one day be remedied—which, unless the Martians reopened the surveyor’s office, he thought was unlikely. But he understood the need to cling to normality in abnormal situations, so as Mrs. P. described the perfidy of her husband’s unappreciative supervisor, he tried to look properly saddened, yet optimistic on Mr. Pankie’s behalf.

  Mrs. Pankie herself was a homemaker, and she mentioned more than once that she was not alone in thinking it the highest position a woman could or should aspire to. And, she said, she ran her house as a tight ship: even her dear Sefton, she made very clear, knew “where to toe the line.”

  Paul could not miss Mr. P.’s reflexive flinch.

  But there was one great sorrow of Undine Pankie’s life, which was that the Lord had seen fit to deny her the joy of motherhood, that most sublime of gifts a woman could give to her husband. They had a fox terrier named Dandy—and here for a moment she became muddled, as she remembered that they did not have a fox terrier, any more than they had a house, both of them having been incinerated by a sweeping blast from a Martian heat-ray that had devastated their entire block, and which the Pankies had escaped themselves only because they had been at a neighbor’s, trying to get news.

  Mrs. Pankie halted her account to weep a few tears for brave little Dandy. Paul felt the tug of the grotesque, to have seen so much ruin, and then to see this huge, soft woman crying over a dog while peering at him from the corner of her eye to make sure he saw how helplessly sentimental she was. But he, who had no home or even idea of how to reach it—how was he to judge others and their losses?

  “Dandy was just like a child to us, Mr. Johnson. He was! Wasn’t he, Sefton?”

  Mr. Pankie had started nodding even before her appeal. Paul didn’t think he had been listening very closely—he had been poking the fire and staring up at the red-washed tree limbs—but clearly the man was an old hand at recognizing the conversational cues that led up to his own expected bits.

  “We wanted nothing more in this world than a child, Mr. Johnson. But God has denied us. Still, I expect it is all for the best. We must rejoice in His wisdom, even when we do not understand His plan.”

  Later, as Paul lay waiting for sleep, with the twinned snores of the Pankies beside him—hers hoarsely deep, his flutingly high—he thought she had sounded like she might very well be a little less tolerant if she ever met God face-to-face. In fact, Undine Pankie sounded like the kind of woman who might give Him a rather unpleasant time.

  She scared Paul badly.

  It was strange, he thought the next morning as the boat floated up the Thames, how the tiniest hint of normality could push away the worst and most unfathomable horrors and fill up the day with trivia. The human mind did not want to work too long on vapors—it neede
d hard fuel, the simple simian things, catching, grasping, manipulating.

  It had been less than a day since he had met the Pankies, and already they had turned his solitary odyssey into a kind of punter’s day trip. Just this moment they were wrangling over whether Mr. Pankie could catch a fish with a thread and a safety pin. His wife was of the strong opinion that he was far too clumsy, and that such tricks should be left to “clever Mr. Johnson”—the last said with a winning smile that Paul thought had more in common with the lure of a flesh-eating plant than with a normal human facial expression.

  But the fact was, they were here, and he had been so subsumed in their relentless, small-minded normality that he had not thought about his own predicament at all. Which was both good and bad.

  When he had arisen that morning, it was with more than a little distress to find the Pankies spruced up to the limits of their meager abilities and, as they put it, “set to go.” Somehow the idea had developed, with no help from Paul, that he had offered to take them upriver, in search of something more closely resembling civilization than this park on the outskirts of Twickenham.

  Mrs. Pankie’s attempts to convince him of the benefits of company—”it will be almost like a holiday, won’t it, like a jolly children’s adventure?”—were almost enough in themselves to send him fleeing, but the couple’s need was so naked that he could not turn them down.

  But as they had made their way down the riverbank to his boat, which happily was still where he had left it, an odd thing happened. He had gone ahead to pull it all the way onto the shore—the idea of wrestling Undine through the water and trying to boost her into a rocking boat being more than he could bear—and when he turned to watch them coming down the bank, the two shapes, one massive and one small, sent a bolt of terror through him, a rush of fear so sudden and so powerful that for a moment he thought he was having a heart attack.