River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  “Romany?” Renie ransacked her memory. “You mean a gypsy?”

  Azador snorted and turned away. Renie cursed herself for her impatience. !Xabbu was right—they could not risk losing what he might know. It burned like fire to apologize, but she knew it had to be done. “Azador, I’m sorry—I do ask too many questions. But we are strangers here and we don’t know what to do. We don’t know all the things you know.”

  “That is the truth,” he muttered.

  “So help us! You’re right, you don’t have to tell us anything, but we need your help. This place—this Otherland network—do you know what is happening here?”

  He looked at her from the corner of his eye, then took a long drag on his cigarette. “What always happens. Rich idiots play games.”

  “But that’s not true any more. The system is . . . changing somehow.” She wondered how much she could tell him without giving away their own situation—they could not assume he had come by the gem innocently. “You heard what I said to the Scarecrow. I know you did. I’ll ask you the same question. Have you tried to go offline?”

  He turned to face her. Emily shrank back against the wall of the freight car as if something passing between them might burn her. “I heard what you said to the Scarecrow,” he said at last. “Yes, I have tried.”

  “And?”

  He shrugged and brushed his thick hair back from his face. “And it is like you said. I could not leave. But for me it is okay,” he added carelessly. “I am in no hurry.”

  “You see?” She dropped to the floor and sat cross-legged. “We need to share information.”

  Azador hesitated, then his face seemed to close, like a door shutting. “No. Not so easy. Any anyway, we cannot spend time here talking, talking. Maybe when we are through into the next place.”

  So he planned to go with them. Renie wasn’t sure how she felt about that, but perhaps Azador was keeping his secrets for that very reason, as a bargaining chip against desertion.

  “Okay.” Renie stood. “Then let’s get on the road.”

  The outer edges of the sprawling railyard gradually became more and more tangled with pipes and tanks and electrical wires, as the yard—unobtrusively at first—metamorphosed into the Works.

  The pipes which snaked through the railyard to service the rolling stock with water and fuel, and to draw off or load various fluid cargoes, now became a more prominent part of the landscape. Large pipes became larger still, and systems of ducts and conveyors were lashed together in bigger and bigger aggregations until massive bundles of pipe seemed to replace trains as the things attended, as the object of all fears and desires.

  The mottled sky, which sagged above Emerald’s railyard like a dripping blanket, was first divided into quadrants by hanging wires and the everpresent pipes, then subdivided into smaller and smaller sections as the infrastructure thickened overhead, until at last it was only a suggestion of fitful movement in the chinks between clustered ducts. Even the ground, which had been flat, heat-cracked muck in the railyard, seemed with each step they took to become something more befitting the Works, first growing a skin of rough concrete, then sweating out pools of stagnant water and rainbow-shimmering oil. The only congruity between what they had left and where they were traveling was how the sullen character of the now almost invisible skies was artificially duplicated in the cavernous Works—the thunder of the deep-gurgling pipes, the water misting down from decaying seals and faulty joints, even blue-white arcs of electricity that mimicked the lightning, spasming where the insulation had worn away from the bundled wires.

  Moving into these knotted caverns of dirty plastic cable and corrosion-roughened metal was unpleasantly like being swallowed by something. In fact, Renie reflected wearily, their entire experience in the network had been like that. The problems they thought to solve, the tragedies like Stephen’s they meant to avenge, had once seemed such clear-cut things, but instead she and the others had been drawn deeper and deeper into the games and idiosyncratic obsessions of Otherland’s builders, until it was hard to tell what was even real, let alone what was important.

  The forest of vertical cylinders and the artificial skies of horizontal tubing at least provided many places to hide, which was fortunate: as they learned within a short while of entering the Works, they were by no means its only inhabitants.

  Once underneath the tangle of pipes, they saw surprisingly few tiktoks—the large, clumsy mechanical men were perhaps not well suited for maneuvering through the sometimes cramped spaces—but they discovered that the Works was home to many other clockwork creatures, also more or less humanoid, but far smaller and shoddier. Many of these, like antique toys, seemed only a cheap tin shell over gears and springs, split vertically with their two halves held together by bent metal tabs. The crude colors with which their features and uniforms had been painted on made them seem even more unpleasantly soulless than the tiktoks.

  As they hid behind a trunk of several intertwined vertical pipes, Renie watched one of the crude toys totter past their hiding place-flat eyes unmoving, mouth drawn as an emotionless line—and could not help shuddering. It was not only the things themselves that disturbed her, but the thought of what kind of person Tinman must be to have such empty, pointless subjects, virtual or not.

  There were a few humans, too, henrys and emilys, all shaven-headed and wrapped in oil-stained rags; Renie guessed they had been impressed from the Scarecrow’s population. Most of them carried heavy burdens, some laden so terribly that she could not understand how they managed to walk, but even those with nothing to carry looked only downward. They trudged through pools of dirty water and staggered around obstacles without glancing up, as though they had covered their routes so often that vision was no longer necessary.

  “Which way do we go?” Renie asked in a whisper, barely audible above the dripping of water on asphalt. They were deep in the shadow of a group of concrete columns, each as wide as a very large, very old tree. The fibrous catacombs of the Works stretched monotonously away on every side. “We need to find the river.”

  Azador frowned. “It will be . . . that way.” He pointed, but he did not sound certain.

  !Xabbu was up on his hind legs, sniffing, doglike head bobbing up and down. “I can tell nothing by my nose,” he confessed. “It is all too much the same—the worst of city smells. But the wind feels a little more cool from that direction.” He gestured, his thin hairy arm at a right angle to what Azador had just indicated.

  Renie looked at Azador’s slitted eyes and realized they had reached a crisis of leadership. She trusted !Xabbu’s instincts and training, but the gypsy, if that was truly what he was, might leave them any moment—might simply, in his irritation, decide to follow his own direction. Could they afford to let him go and give up on what he might be able to tell them? If he had demonstrated only the trick in the cell, she might have said yes, but there was the unexplained matter of Sellars’ gem as well.

  “Okay,” she said to Azador. “Take us there.” She hoped !Xabbu would understand.

  Outside, the sun had gone down, or the stormy skies had thickened to complete impenetrability, because the Works was growing dark. Beneath the arbors of pipe and twisted cable, sickly green-and-yellow lights glowed into half-life behind cracked panels, augmented by an occasional sparking flash of electricity. Groans and faint shrieks echoed through the damp corridors, ghostly with distance, as though nightfall was bringing the Works to its fullest life.

  Renie hated the place. Reminding herself that it was nothing but displayed lines of code did not do much good, since she still did not know whether she and !Xabbu could survive an online death. All she knew for certain was that she had seldom wanted to get out of a place more.

  They were in one of the few large and open spaces, a joining of several tunnels, like a catacomb constructed of wires, when the figure stepped out of the darkness immediately
in front of them.

  Renie’s heart, which had threatened for a moment to stop beating, found its rhythm again when she saw it was only one of the henrys, a stumbling, tattered figure with a metal canister slung across his shoulders. Before they could step back into the shelter of one of the cross-corridors he looked up and saw them. His eyes bulged in his pale, sparsely-bearded face. Renie stepped forward, raising a finger to her lips.

  “Don’t be frightened,” she said. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

  The man’s eyes grew even wider. He tilted back his head and swallowed, his Adam’s apple moving so violently it distended his neck, then he threw open his mouth to reveal some kind of loudspeaker jammed deep between his jaws, and Renie saw with horror that what she thought was beard were silver wires protruding through his cheeks. An earsplitting mechanical siren howled from the speaker, so loud that Renie and the others staggered back with their hands over their ears. The henry stood helplessly, vibrating from the sheer volume, as the sound whooped and screamed out of his throat.

  They could only run. All around, answering alarms began to sound, their tones a notch less urgent but still horribly loud. An emily turned the corner in front of them, saw them dashing toward her, and let out her own inhuman shriek, as raucous as the first. Moments later two of the shoddy tin men appeared a little farther down the dripping corridor, and their own warning klaxons rose to a hysterical pitch as well.

  Tracking us, locating us, Renie realized. Emily was stumbling; Renie grabbed the girl and dragged her along as she followed Azador into a side-passage. They’ll swarm to where the loudest are, until they have us surrounded.

  Another tattered human stepped into their path, too suddenly for Renie to identify it as male or female. Even as the spectral creature dropped the heavy bag it had been carrying and yawned its mouth open, Azador knocked it to the ground with his shoulder. As they rushed past, skinny arms and legs waggled helplessly in the air, and a broken siren-throat ratcheted instead of screamed.

  We’re just running, she realized. Nowhere. This will get us killed. “!Xabbu!” she shouted. “Lead us to the river!”

  Her friend did not answer, but bounded ahead of them, tail high, and began to run on all fours. He sprinted around a dividing of the ways, slowed until he was sure they were still behind him, then accelerated again.

  The alarm screams were rising on all sides now, and even though the Works-dwellers who stepped into their path did not try to stop them, or even to avoid being shoved aside, they all shrieked louder when Renie and the others pelted by, a sonic arrow pinpointing the direction of their flight. The din was maddening.

  Now there were faces coming toward them at every turning, the haunted stares of the humans, the empty, chipped grimaces of the tin creatures, even the dark bulk of a few tiktoks. Soon the very crush of metal bodies and wasted flesh would seal off the avenues of escape, one by one.

  Emily slipped in an oily puddle and stumbled again, this time pulling Renie and herself to the ground. As they struggled upright, !Xabbu hopped frantically in place, swiveling his muzzle from side to side.

  “I smell nothing, but I think it is there.” !Xabbu jutted his head toward one of the narrow ways. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment, despite the chaos all around them. He worked his fingers in the air for a moment as though trying to grasp something, then opened his eyes again. “It is there,” he said. “I feel it to be true.”

  The uneven passage was rapidly filling with tin toys, all shambling toward them like sleepwalkers. “They’ve got between us and the water,” Renie said, heart sinking.

  Azador looked at her, then at !Xabbu, then spat on the ground. “Follow,” he growled. He sprang forward and slammed into the first wave of the metal things. His rush knocked them back like bowling pins, smashing one to the ground where it split into two nutshell halves and a clutter of gears. Renie led Emily forward, trying to keep the girl behind Azador’s broad back.

  The whining shriek of dozens of mechanical throats was now louder than a jet engine. Renie felt rough, hard hands trying to close on her, and she lashed out in a blind rage, shoving and punching. For a moment Emily went down beside her, but Renie fought her way through the confusion of shapes and found the girl’s slender arm, then pulled her onto her feet. Now even Emily was flailing around her in panic, slapping at the tin creatures with open palms, her mouth contorted in a scream that Renie couldn’t hear.

  Renie staggered forward, numb and depleted, her fists and arms bloody. Yet another flat, enameled face rose before her, buzzing as it gave the alarm. She kicked its rounded midsection and tipped it over. Beyond it was nothing but Azador and darkness.

  He turned a face that was now a sheet of red toward them and beckoned with a shaking, bloody hand. The corridor ahead was empty, a trail of dimly flickering lights leading away into darkness. They had broken through.

  “Jesus Mercy,” Renie choked. “Are . . . are . . . you . . . ?” She heard a clattering noise behind them and turned. The tin things which had not been completely disabled were rocking like overturned beetles, struggling to rise, to resume the chase. Renie’s stomach tightened. “Where’s !Xabbu?”

  “Hurry!”

  Renie whirled to see the welcome baboon shape, which had appeared like a sacred spirit in the corridor ahead. “We are almost at the river!” he called.

  They hobbled after him. Within moments the claustrophobic passages opened out and the conduit columns suddenly stretched dozens of meters higher. The wide, black mass of the river lay before them. The loading dock was empty, the creatures and people who had been there, Renie felt sure, summoned to form part of the mob through which they had just fought. She could hear the survivors behind them, still bent on pursuit, howling and dragging themselves along on bent limbs.

  “Is the gateway here somewhere?” she asked, struggling to get her breath back.

  “Don’t be a fool,” Azador growled. “We will never live to find it.”

  “Then we need a boat.”

  Two large container ships lay at anchor, one with its cargo nets hanging half-unloaded, bulging with crates of people-feed and crank-case lubricant. Renie and the others ran down the dock looking for something more their size, and found it in the shape of a small river tugboat, not much more than a barge with rubber bumpers. They clambered aboard. Renie found a barge pole and used it to unhook the tie line, then Azador got the engine started and they chugged slowly out onto the dark river.

  Behind, a crowd of howling humans and mechanical people had reached the dock, but their dreadful voices were already growing fainter as the barge pulled for the middle of the river.

  Azador hung on the wheel, grim and silent, with hands bloodier than his face. Emily collapsed in the bow, weeping. With !Xabbu’s help, Renie got her into the cabin and onto the thin pallet which had served as the barge captain’s miserable bed.

  Even as Renie whispered soft words to the girl, words both of them could barely hear because their ears were still ringing painfully, something crackled beside them. What Renie had thought was a mirror suddenly began to radiate grainy light, then the eyeless face of the Tinman appeared on the screen.

  “So,” it said cheerfully, “you outsiders are all still alive—and the special one, the wee mother-to-be? Lovely, lovely. Little bundle of joy unharmed, too? Excellent! Then I believe my line is supposed to be: ‘Surrender the Dorothy!”’ The gate in its mouth clacked up and down as the Tinman vented its horrible, buzzing laugh. “Good, yes? But of course I hope you won’t really surrender, and spoil the fun. . . .”

  Renie snatched up the barge pole and hammered the screen into shards and powder, then sank to the floor, exhausted and fighting back tears.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Veils of Illusion

  * * *

  NETFEED/BIOGRAPHY: “The Man in the Shadows”

  (v
isual: slow-motion footage of Anford speaking at convention)

  VO: Rex Anford, sometimes referred to as the “Commander-in-Absentia” or “The Gray Man,” is the subject of this biography, which traces his rise from small-town obscurity through his emergence in the new Industrial Senate as a representative for ANVAC, General Equipment, and other low-profile, bigmoney corporations, and to his eventual election as President of the United States. The controversial issue of his health is discussed, and experts analyze file footage in an attempt to diagnose what, if any, medical problems he might have . . .

  * * *

  Aswirl of colors grew out of the blinding golden light—black, ember-red, and at the last a deep neon blue just shading toward ultraviolet that seemed to enter him like a vibration—then Paul was through, still tangled in the grasp of the man who had kidnapped him. He struggled to protect himself, then realized that his opponent was not fighting, but only holding him passively. He set his hands against the man’s chest and shoved. The thin, dark-skinned man stumbled backward, then threw out his arms and regained his balance.

  The level ground beneath the stranger’s heels extended only another few yards behind him before dropping away down a steep, grassy slope. Far below, a river threaded its way through the narrow canyon, foaming through descending cataracts until it wound out of sight. But Paul did not stop to admire the stunning view of water and hills and tangled trees, the skies so sunny the world almost sparkled. His attention was focused on the interloper who had stolen him from the England of the Martian invasion—a distorted version of his home, but still the closest he had found to what he had lost.

  “Now,” the stranger began, smiling, “Of course I owe you an apol . . .” His eyes widened and he took a startled step backward as Paul sprang toward him.

  Paul did not hit the stranger squarely, but he wrapped his arms around him and together they tumbled down the slope in a single rolling knot. For all Paul knew, they might bounce from some precipice and plunge to the distant valley floor, but he did not care. Chased and mistreated for unfathomable reasons, he finally had his hands on one of his tormentors and would take the man down with him, even if neither of them survived.