River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  That was probably it, of course.

  Jeremiah slipped into the pair of old slippers he had found in one of the storage lockers—a comfort that made him feel at least a little bit at home—and walked out to the catwalk to look down at the level that contained the control panels.

  The chair was empty.

  Still very deliberately staying calm, he headed for the stairs. Long Joseph had gone to the kitchen or the toilet. Jeremiah would just watch the tanks until he got back. It was not as though there was ever much to do beyond the quite predictable work of topping up the water and other liquids on schedule, and flushing out the waste system and slotting in new filters. And what could be done anyway, short of pulling Renie and !Xabbu out of the tanks—against Renie’s express wishes—unless there were a full-scale emergency? The communication system had gone bad the first day, and had proved itself beyond Jeremiah’s skills to fix. So even if Long Joseph had wandered off, it wasn’t as though he were leaving the helm of a ship in the middle of a sea battle or something.

  All the readings were normal. Jeremiah checked them twice just to make sure. As his eye swept along the station for the second time, he noticed the faint light of the drawscreen. The stylus lay beside it, the only thing on the station not at right angles to something else, a single and minor note of disorder, but for some reason it made Jeremiah shudder as he leaned forward to read the screen.

  I CANT TAKE NO MORE, the note read, the labored handwriting black against the glow of the screen. I AM GOING TO BE WITH MY CHILD.

  Jeremiah read it two more times, trying to make sense of it as he fought the strangling sense of alarm. What did the man mean, with his child? With Renie? Did he think he could join her just by climbing into the tank? Jeremiah had to restrain the urge to throw the great lids open, to make sure the madman had not climbed into the plasmodal gel beside his unconscious daughter. There was no need for him to touch the V-tanks, he knew. The readings on Renie’s tank, on both of them, were normal—one set of vital signs in each.

  A darker meaning suddenly occurred to him. Jeremiah stood up, suddenly very afraid.

  If he thought his boy Stephen had died—if he had suffered one of his bad dreams, perhaps, or his depression had just beaten him down until the difference between comatose and corpse seemed nil. . . .

  I have to go and look for him, the mad bastard. Jesus save us! He could be anywhere in here. He could just go up to the top story of the lab and throw himself off.

  Reflexively, he looked up, but the floors above the lab were silent, and nothing moved on any of them. The great snake-tangle of cables above the V-tanks was also unchanged, although for a moment one of the cable troughs, dangling unused, looked unpleasantly like a hanged man.

  There was no body on the floor either.

  “Good God,” Jeremiah said aloud, and wiped his brow. There was no helping it: he would have to look out for him. It would take a while, but not forever—the base was sealed, after all. But he would have to leave the tanks unsupervised, and that he did not like. Perhaps because of his own apprehension, the sleepers within seemed terribly vulnerable. If something happened to them while he was chasing after that crazy fellow . . .! He could not bear the thought.

  Jeremiah went back to the station and hunted through the settings until he found the one he remembered—something Martine had demonstrated two weeks ago, which felt like years back, now. When he changed the output line, the the sound of twin heartbeats (!Xabbu’s slower, but both strong and not unduly agitated) bounced out of the public address system and filled the high laboratory chamber: bi-bom, bi-bom—bi-bom, bi-bom, slightly out of synch, with Renie’s lapping the Bushman’s by the seventh or eight beat.

  It would probably send Long Joseph absolutely mad if he heard it, make him positive something had gone wrong, but at this moment Jeremiah did not give a damn.

  “Joseph! Joseph, where are you?”

  As he searched the huge building, trudging through the deserted halls with the ping-pong of twin heartbeats echoing around him, Jeremiah could not help but remember coming back to the doctor’s house on that awful night. The lights had been out, which was normal, but even the security lights along the fence had been dark; from the moment he had turned onto the wide cul-de-sac and seen the house’s shadowy silhouette, he had been terrified. And each moment of walking through the silent corridors, calling the doctor’s name without reply, had only intensified the fear. As dreadful as it was, finding Susan Van Bleeck lying battered on the floor of the laboratory had almost been a relief—at least the horror had a shape now. It could get no worse.

  Except of course it had been worse, when he had returned to the hospital after dropping Renie off, to find orderlies around her bedside, unhooking the life support.

  And now, forced by that man’s idiocy to wander in his slippers through this cavernous place, as if reliving that dreadful night, not knowing when he might stumble on a body. . . . He was even more angry than he was frightened. If he found Joseph Sulaweyo, and the man had not killed himself, Jeremiah would give him the thrashing of his life, no matter whether the other man was bigger or not.

  The idea of giving a man a beating because he had failed to commit suicide pried loose from him a nervous and entirely involuntary gasp of laughter. It was not a pleasant sound.

  He checked the most obvious places first. Joseph’s own bed in the communal bunkroom was deserted, the tangle of blankets on the floor the only knot of disorder in an otherwise empty place. The kitchen, where the man had searched with such insane diligence for something to drink, was also empty. Jeremiah forced himself to open the pantries and the walk-in freezer, and even to look in the cabinets, despite his fear that he might pull one back to find Joseph’s corpse leering at him, mouth foaming with some horrid industrial cleaning fluid. But the kitchen too was silent and uninhabited.

  He worked his way systematically through all the living quarters and the offices, opening everything bigger than a file cabinet drawer. It took him the better part of two hours. The sound of Renie’s and !Xabbu’s heartbeats accompanied him, still quietly calm, but with just enough variation that after a while it became almost reassuring: it made him feel a little less alone.

  Bi-bom . . . bi-bom . . .

  His search of the living and working quarters finished, Jeremiah continued up to the parking lot, in case the mad fool Sulaweyo had tried to run the Ihlosi’s engine and kill himself with carbon monoxide, not realizing that he would run out of gas long before he could fill half a million cubic meters of garage, even were it not ventilated. But the car was empty, untouched since its last cleaning, as battered and useless for the moment as Jeremiah felt. He opened the door and got a pocket torch out of the glove compartment, then continued on through the garage, shining the light up into the dark spaces behind the dangling lights on the extremely small chance that Joseph might have dragged himself up into the girders somehow to hang himself.

  The garage levels were much faster to check, and all four were empty. Jeremiah stopped in the uppermost for a rest and a think, listening to the percussive echo of the heartbeats, now quadrupled and more by the stony walls. It made no sense—he had checked everywhere. Unless the man had climbed into one of the tanks. If he had drowned himself in the fluid, it would explain the lack of any extra vital signs.

  Jeremiah shuddered. The thought of Irene Sulaweyo, unaware in that viscous blackness of her father’s body floating only a few inches away . . .

  He would have to check. It was horrible, but he would have to look. He wondered if just opening the tank would be enough to pull the sleepers out of their virtual dreams. And if Joseph was not there, and the experiment were aborted for nothing . . . ?

  Troubled and still fearful, Jeremiah made his way over to the largest ventilation duct to get some air to clear his head. It worked, but not in the way he had planned.

  The ventilator
’s screen was lying on the floor.

  Jeremiah stared at it stupidly for a moment, then up to the open end of the great square tube, a dark hole into nothing. Jeremiah directed the torch beam back to the floor and saw that a handful of bolts had been set carefully in the middle of the screen.

  The duct was big enough for a man, but narrow enough that someone, if they went carefully, could use their own shoulders and legs to brace themselves as they climbed upward. If that person were very determined. Or a little mad.

  The amplified heartbeats were quieter here at the far side of the garage, away from the speaker. Jeremiah leaned his head into the duct and shouted Joseph’s name, and heard his own voice rattle away and die. He shouted again, but there was still no reply. He wriggled his head and upper body into the duct and aimed the torch upward. A few cobwebs trailed at the first juncture, tethered only at one end, as though something had squeezed past them.

  As he stared, Jeremiah thought he heard a sound breathe down the duct, a faintly musical hooting—perhaps a muffled voice trying to call out despite an injury. He strained to listen, but the sound was very quiet, and he cursed the heartbeats that had until only a few moments ago kept him such good company. He tucked the torch into his pocket and dragged himself all the way up into the duct so that he could block out the public-address noises with his own body.

  And now he could hear it, the murmuring sound. A second later he knew what it was. Somewhere far away, up and along many lengths of plasteel pipe, the wind that swept down the Drakensbergs in the early morning was blowing across the other end of the open duct.

  Long Joseph had gone to be with his child, Stephen. Not metaphorically—not by killing himself—but literally. Of course. Joseph Sulaweyo was a very literal man.

  Oh, my Lord, what will happen now? Jeremiah climbed awkwardly back out of the duct. The heartbeats of those he guarded still echoed through the cavernous garage, slow and even, as though nothing had changed.

  The bloody, bloody fool . . .!

  CHAPTER 17

  In The Works

  * * *

  NETFEED/MUSIC: Horrible Animals to Split

  (visual: clip from ‘1 Way4U2B’)

  VO: Twins Saskia and Martinus Benchlow, founding members of My Family and Other Horrible, Horrible Animals, performers of one of last decade’s biggest hits, ‘1Way4U2B’, but who had gone a while without cracking the charts, have decided to go their separate musical ways. (visual: M. B. and manager at Gimme Awards after-party-party) M. BENCHLOW: “Saskia, she’s great, but I needed to go a separate direction, less commercial. Money didn’t come into it, seen? I’m tired of flurry. I really, really love jazz, all that history. I have a trumpet, follow? I know every tune Neil Armstrong ever played. And I need to explore that. She had her own silver cloud she needed to line, but we’re still related . . .”

  * * *

  IT was hard to have an intelligent thought about the scene before her—the stranger Azador on the floor amidst a wreckage of tiktoks, the girl Emily twittering like a bird as she covered him with obviously unwanted kisses—and Renie didn’t have time to wait for such a thought to show up anyway. Corpses from New Emerald City’s dwindling army of flying monkeys and green-bearded soldiers were scattered through the corridors of the Scarecrow’s headquarters. Other defenders were dying at that very moment just a few hundred meters away, trying to hold the loading bay against rampaging tiktoks, and danger was increasing by the second. Still, she could not simply ignore what she had just heard.

  “You . . . you had sex with her?”

  Azador scowled as he wrestled free of the girl. “Perhaps. What is it to you?”

  “She’s a Puppet, isn’t she?” Although with Emily just a few meters away, as joyful as a puppy to have rediscovered her beau, it was hard to believe that.

  “Yes?” Azador climbed to his feet. “So? And what do you care about the sexual habits—or, let us be blunt, masturbatory habits—of others? Would you care to discuss your own sexual life?”

  “But . . . but she’s just a . . . a program. How could you do it? How could you take advantage of her?”

  Azador shook his head, recovering a little of his self-assurance despite the girl wrapped around his shin, kissing his knee. “You cannot have it both ways. Is she a program? Or did I take advantage of a young woman?”

  Renie turned to !Xabbu for some kind of support, but the baboon was no longer paying attention. “I hear more of those machine men coming.” He pointed across the wide, tiled floor. “From that direction.”

  “We have to go out the front way.” Azador tried without success to pull his leg free of Emily’s clinging grasp. “God damn it!” He lifted his hand.

  “If you hit her,” Renie said sharply, “I’ll kill you.”

  Azador stared at her for a long second. “Then you get this silly bitch away from me. Quickly, or we will all be killed.”

  Renie pulled the protesting Emily loose. The girl wailed, “But our baby . . .!”

  “Is never going to get born if we don’t move.” A sudden thought hit her. “What did that horrible tin man say? ‘You’ve discovered the Dorothy,’ something like that? Is that what they were talking about—this baby?”

  Azador was not interested in discussion. He was already legging it across the broad room, heading for a corridor at right angles to the one !Xabbu had warned would disgorge attackers. Renie swallowed a curse and jogged after him, with !Xabbu four-legging beside her. Emily needed no urging to follow the mustached man.

  It’s one thing to say you’d kill him, girl, Renie thought, but he’s big, and you don’t have any weapons. She berated herself for not having pilfered one of the antique rifles from the dead soldiers, although from what she’d seen at the loading bay, she doubted any of them had ammunition left.

  Azador was not making the pace easy, and Renie was still sore from the many calamities in Kunohara’s world and this twisted version of Oz. He led them on a winding route through the building, down corridors that seemed dead-ends, but which proved to have doors hidden in alcoves. Renie wondered again how he knew so much about this particular simworld. Not to mention his little trick for changing a wall into a door, she remembered.

  Who the hell is this fellow?

  The Scarecrow’s palace, an endless functionalist warren of concrete walls and linoleum floors, could have doubled for a municipal structure in Durban, or indeed anywhere in the Third World. It had clearly once been occupied, even feverishly busy—old-fashioned printouts and other papers lay scattered everywhere, making footing treacherous, and there were enough desks and chairs to seat hundreds just in the sections they traversed, although at least half of them seemed built for people of much smaller than normal size—but now the building was as empty as the Hive after the ant swarm had passed through it.

  Entropy, she told herself. Isn’t that the word? As though these things were filled up once, and then just allowed to run down, fall apart. But they had been in only three simulations so far. It was a bit early to be making judgements.

  Azador stopped in front of a wide double-door and strained against it. The doors opened a crack, but something seemed to be blocking them on the far side. Renie fell in beside him to add her strength; even Emily pushed, staring at her beloved as she did so as if he were singlehandedly parting the Red Sea. The image seemed even more appropriate a moment later when the doors suddenly crashed open and a gush of something scarlet poured through. For a moment Renie could only see it as a nightmarish wash of blood, but it was dry, and whispery, and when she scooped it in her hand she found it was . . .

  “Confetti . . . ?”

  They waded through the drifts of paper dots, then vaulted over the tumbled desks which had been piled on the far side. A banner, which dangled in their faces as they clambered over the furniture, read “We’ll Miss You, Jellia Jamb! Happy Retirement!” in huge pa
inted letters.

  “This is the reception hall.” Azador surveyed the stacks of folding tables which barred two of the room’s other three entrances. “Someone’s tried to barricade the place.”

  “Pretty pitiful job they made of it,” Renie observed.

  “Not many defenders left,” Azador pointed out. As Renie started toward the unblocked door, he shouted, “No! Do not do that!”

  Irritated, she spun. “Who are you to give me orders?”

  “It is not orders. They have pushed things in front of other doors, but not those. We are expected to go through. Perhaps there is a trap on the other side.”

  Despite her dislike of the man, she was filled with shame. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  “Let me go,” !Xabbu suggested when they reached the door. “I am light and fast.”

  Renie shook her head. “Not until we open the door. Azador, is there a way to go around this one, like the way you got us out of the cell?”

  He examined the walls in silence for a moment, then shook his head. “Not this room, no. This is not—what is the word?—snap-on code. Someone made this specially. It may have been nice at one time.”

  Renie looked at the huge, windowless, mint-green space and doubted that was so. Her eyes lit on the banner. “Hang on.” She dragged the length of heavy paper from the wall, then approached the door cautiously and looped it through the handle. After giving the ends of the banner to Azador, she took one of the folding chairs—this place really could have been a Pinetown social hall!—and approached the door from the side. She reached out with the folded chair and pushed the latch on the door handle until it clicked, then Azador yanked on the banner and the door swung open.