River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  Nandi again devoted himself to his steering. Paul sat back on the polished bench and watched the green hills and raw rock faces slip past. It was difficult to find a place even to begin thinking about all this. It would have made a fairly dubious plot in a flick, let alone being acceptable as the course for his actual and only life. But it made a horrid kind of sense, too: once you accepted a simulation this good, it answered many of his other questions.

  He even felt a moment’s disappointment as he realized that he had not seen the beginning of history in the Ice Age, but only someone’s coded dramatization of it. Still, the People, whatever they truly were, had not only seemed real to Paul, but if they were Puppets they seemed awfully self-sufficient ones, fully engaged with their own pretend world, with their fears and triumphs and folklore. Perhaps, he reflected, even imaginary people just needed a story of their own—something that made sense out of things.

  But if it had all been code, all make-believe, then what about the woman who had spoken to him through the sick Neandertal child? The winged woman who came to him in dreams? She had begged that he find her. . . .

  It was too much to work out all at once.

  “If these people are so powerful,” he asked, “then what are you and your friends in this Circle thing going to do? And why do you care, anyway, if a bunch of rich bastards have private orgies on their VR network?”

  “If only it were that, Paul Jonas.” Nandi lifted the dripping paddle from the water so he could turn to face him. “I cannot tell you all that would answer you properly, but you must trust me when I say that I believe what they are doing threatens everything. Everything. And even if you doubt my belief, it is a fact that they have hurt and killed many to build this thing of theirs, this . . . theater of Maya. And they will kill many more to keep it secret as long as necessary. In fact, from what you have told me, they are trying to kill you as well—or to do something worse to you.”

  The fear came back, goose-pimpling his flesh, and he had to suppress the urge to scream at the unfairness. What had he done to offend people like that? He mastered himself. “You haven’t told me what you plan to do about it.”

  “Nor can I,” Nandi said. “And not just for the sake of secrecy. You have enough problems, Paul. You do not need the burden of knowing what we know. It is one less thing they will work to make you confess if you are ever captured.”

  “You talk like this is a war!”

  Nandi did not smile this time. “It is a war.” After a moment’s silence, he added: “But although they think themselves gods, they are merely human. They make mistakes. They have made some already, and they will make more, no matter how many forms they wear, no matter how many lives they build for themselves in this place. It is as Krishna said to Arjuna: ‘Do not grieve for the life and death of individuals, for this is inevitable; the bodies indeed come and go, but the life that manifests in all is undying and unhurt, it neither slayeth or is slain.’ This is a central truth of the world, Paul. Krishna spoke of what you might call the soul or the essence. Now these Grail criminals, as they seek to ape the gods, they are caught in a lesser version of this same great truth, a shadow cast by its shining light. You see, they cannot shake off what they are, no matter how many times they change their skins.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Look at this man, our chiefest enemy. You have been in many of his simulations, the dreamworlds that he has fashioned for himself. What do they have in common?”

  Paul had thought something similar himself not long ago, and he struggled to summon the memory. “They’re . . . they seem very old. The ideas, I mean.”

  “Exactly.” The charioteer was pleased with his Arjuna. “That is because he is an old man, and longs for the things of his youth. Here, I will tell you something. He was born in France, this man I will not name, but was sent to a school in England during the Great War, because his family wanted him away from the fighting that tore France. He was a lonely child in that foreign country, fighting to be like the others, and thus the things of his boyhood are all those bits of Englishness he tried so hard to embrace—Lewis Carroll, H. G. Wells, the comic magazines of travel to other planets. . . .”

  “Hold on.” Paul leaned forward. “Do you mean to tell me this man was alive during the Second World War?”

  Nandi was amused. “I refer to the First World War, in fact.”

  “But that would make him . . . That can’t be. No one’s that old.”

  “He is.” The gentle smile vanished. “He has made the preservation of his own life an object of religious devotion, and he treasures his memories as the myths of that religion. He cannot truly share it, though—the childhood to which his virtual worlds are shrines is one that no other living human remembers. If he were not so unreservedly evil, it would almost be possible to feel sorry for the man.”

  The boat abruptly dropped away beneath them for a moment, and Paul had to stop thinking in order to hold onto his seat and not be jounced overboard when the small craft smacked down into the water again.

  “The river is more dangerous here, just before the caverns,” Nandi said, backing water furiously with his paddle. “We will talk more when we are in a safer place.”

  “What caverns. . . ?” Paul asked, then whooped in surprise as the boat dipped again, then slid between two rocks and passed over yet another cataract.

  For the next several minutes he clung with both hands to the sides of the boat as Nandi expertly steered them past obstacle after obstacle and the river sank ever deeper into the fold of the canyon. The cliff walls now rose up so steeply on either side that only a sliver of sky could be seen, and its light died a quarter of the way down the rock face.

  “We will miss seeing the pleasure dome,” Nandi called over the tumult of the waters. “There is a tributary that passes by the front gates, but I assume you do not wish to linger and admire our enemy’s handiwork, or meet his henchmen.”

  “What?” Paul could make out only a few words.

  “There!” Nandi pointed. “Can you see it?”

  The mist that Paul had wondered at earlier now covered most of the river before them, billowing into the air in a sparkling cloud. Through it, at least half a kilometer ahead and partially blocked from view by the cliffs, he could see a forest of white-and-gold minarets like the battlements of the dream castle he had seen when he climbed the great tree. It was almost impossible not to admire the painstaking artistry that had gone into this place. If it was all the work of human hands, as Nandi had said, then they had been very skilled hands indeed.

  “Are there people in there?” he asked. “I mean, real people?”

  “Just a moment,” his companion called above the noisy river. They rounded a bend and Paul saw a gaping black mouth in the cliff face, swallowing the river down. He had time for only a surprised and wordless shout, then the bottom dropped out from under them again and the boat slid down a roaring flume into chilly darkness.

  For long seconds he could see nothing, and could only cling to the bench, positive that they would be smashed against unforgiving stone or upended in the violent currents. The boat surged up and down, and skewed abruptly from one side to the other without warning, and none of Paul’s desperate, bellowed questions were answered. The blackness was absolute, and the horrible thought began to grow that Nandi had been thrown overboard, that he was rushing into oblivion alone.

  The boat left the water again, free-falling for what seemed to Paul’s shrieking imagination like ten seconds, but was probably less than one, then splashed down in a great drenching spume of water. Paul clutched the rail until he could feel that the boat was at last nosing into calmer waters. The rush of the cataract began to quiet behind them.

  “Sometimes it is exhilarating to wear flesh,” Nandi’s voice said in the darkness. “Even virtual flesh.”

  “I . . . I didn’t enjoy t
hat,” Paul replied. “Wh-where are we?”

  “In caverns measureless to man, as the poem says. But wait. You will see.”

  “S-see?” His teeth were chattering, and not just from fear: the summery heat outside had not penetrated here. In fact, it was terribly, terribly cold. “See h-how?”

  Something made a wet, scratchy sound behind him, then light blossomed out of the void. Nandi had produced and lit a lantern, and now hung it from the boat’s high, curved stern, so that it threw its creamy radiance all around.

  “Oh,” said Paul. “Oh . . .”

  The black river had widened again, and now extended an arrow’s flight on either side of them, flat as a velvet tablecloth except for the diminishing waves from the cataract. An immense tunnel of ice surrounded the river, its ceiling fifty meters or more above their heads. But this was not just an ice cave—it was a crystalline abstraction of infinite variety.

  Huge pillars like translucent candles stretched from floor to ceiling, aggregated from trickles of water frozen and refrozen over the centuries, and diamond-faceted blocks as big as houses lay piled along the bank as though by gigantic hands. Everything was covered by a net of hoarfrost—tiny, delicate traceries of white, draped like the finest spidersilk. Ice bridges stretched across the river in gleaming spans, and where the ice on the tunnel walls had cracked and fallen away, steep ice slopes now angled down to the water’s edge. Even as Paul and Nandi watched, a small piece sheared loose from one of the walls ahead of them, rolled slowly down the bank, and splashed into the River Alph; only as they approached it did Paul realize that the chunk bobbing near the frozen riverbank was half as wide as the Islington house that held his flat.

  “It’s . . . the whole th-thing is m-magnificent,” he said.

  Nandi heard the shiver in his voice. “There are blankets under the bench, I think.”

  Paul found two, sumptuous things with a rich sheen, embroidered with fanciful animals playing musical instruments. He offered one to Nandi, who smiled and shook his head. “I do not much feel either cold or heat,” Nandi said. “In the place where I last lived, I became accustomed to the elements.”

  “I don’t remember the Kublai Khan poem,” Paul admitted. “Where do these caves go?”

  “On and on. But the river itself crosses through them and empties into the sea. And long before that, we will have passed through the gateway.”

  “I don’t understand how any of this works.” His attention was momentarily diverted as a block of ice the size of a London hovercab fell from the ceiling and splashed noisily into the river a hundred meters ahead. A few seconds later, the ripples set their small craft rocking. “These gateways—why are they in the water?”

  “It is a conceit. There are other gateways, too, of course. Most of the simulations have dozens, although they are hidden—only those who travel with the permission of the simulations’ owners are given the tools to locate gateways. But the people who built this gigantic network wished to have some common thing that would tie it together, and so through every simulation, the River runs.”

  “What river?”

  “It is different in different places—in some it is not even a river, but part of an ocean, or a canal, or even something stranger, like a lava stream or a miles-wide flow of mercury. But always it is part of the greater River. I suppose it would be possible, given enough time—more than the lifetime of even someone like our chief enemy, though—to pass all the way down the river, crossing through every simulation, until like the famous serpent with its tail in its mouth, the river met itself again and you had returned to the place you started.”

  “So there’s always a gate on the river, in each simulation.” Paul, with the blanket wrapped around him, was feeling better, and each piece of information was like food to a starving man.

  “Two, at the very least—one at either end of the river’s passage through that simulated world.”

  “But there are others, too—like that one in the Hampton Court maze that you pushed me through.”

  Nandi nodded. “Yes. I had been there several days, and had seen one or two people go into the maze who never came out again—members of the Brotherhood or their employees, perhaps. So I investigated. All the gates, even the river gates, allow the privileged user to go where he or she chooses, and unlike those at either end of the river, the others do not lead through the network in any particular order. But almost all the gates have a default setting, usually into another world belonging to the same master. However, I am pleased to say, we will reach one soon which will take us out of this man’s domains entirely.”

  “How do you know all this?” The frustration was building inside him—there was so much to learn before the most important questions could even be framed.

  “We of the Circle have studied these people and their works for a long time. And although I have only entered this network recently, I am not the first of my kind to come here.” Nandi spread his hands as if offering Paul something. “Men and women have died to learn the things I am telling you now.”

  Almost without his knowledge, Paul’s fingers had stolen to his neck. “If I’m in a simulation, though, I must be able to go offline. So why can’t I find the plug? Why can’t I just pull the damn thing out?”

  His companion looked grave. “I do not know how you came here or why, Paul Jonas, or what keeps you here. But at the moment, I cannot leave either, and I cannot tell you the reason for that. It does not affect me—I knew I could not leave until I had accomplished what I was sent to do, in any case—but it must be affecting others. But this is part of why we have dedicated ourselves to opposing these people. I know it is a cliché of the worst sort,” he made a mocking face, “but the Grail Brotherhood have tampered with things they do not fully understand.”

  A piece of the cavern wall had slid down into the river in front of them, filling the water with chunks of ice, and Nandi concentrated his energies on steering them through. Paul huddled in his blankets, fighting the vague but definite feeling that time was short—that there were things he should be asking, and that he would regret it greatly later if he didn’t think of them now.

  He thought of the woman, the only thing that had made sense to him in all this madness until now. Where did she fit into all this?

  But should I tell this man everything, absolutely everything? What if he’s really working for those Grail people himself and he’s just toying with me? He looked at Nandi’s narrow, sharp features and realized he had never been able to tell anything useful about anyone by looking at them. Or what if he’s just a madman? Maybe this is a simulation, yes, but maybe all this Grail stuff is some mad conspiracy theory? How do I know that he’s not a Puppet himself? Maybe this is part of the ride.

  Paul tugged the blanket closer around him. That kind of thinking did no good. A few days ago, he had been lost in a kind of fog; at least now he had the basis for rational thought, for making decisions. He could doubt anything and everything, but what Nandi Paradivash said made sense: if he, Paul Jonas, was not stark raving mad, then only some kind of simulation gave a rational framework to all that he had experienced. But simulations of this level, actually indistinguishable from reality, had to be something new. Only people with the kind of power Nandi was talking about could afford this kind of quantum leap.

  “What do they want?” he asked suddenly. “These Grail people, what do they want? This kind of thing—it must cost trillions. More, whatever that would be. Quadrillions.”

  “I told you, they wish to become gods.” Nandi reached out with his long-handled oar and poked away a small boulder of floating ice. “They wish to live forever in worlds of their own devising.”

  “Forever? How are they going to manage that? You, me, we’ve both got bodies somewhere, right? You can’t live without a body, no matter what your brain thinks it’s doing. So what good is all this? It’s just an incred
ibly expensive game. People like that, they don’t need anything, except for more time.”

  “If I knew all the answers to what you have just said, I would not have had to come here.” The ice behind them, he resumed his measured paddling.

  Paul pulled the blankets aside and sat forward. “So you don’t have answers? What are you doing here? I’ve told you lots of things. What can you tell me?”

  Nandi was silent for a long time, his paddle dipping and emerging, over and over, its gentle slurp the only sound troubling the air of the great ice cave.

  “I was a scientist,” he said at last. “A chemical engineer. Not an important one. Merely I managed a research department of a large fibraware company in Benares, which is better known as Varanasi. Have you heard of it?”

  “Varanasi? It . . . it was some kind of important city in India. There was an accident there, wasn’t there? Something toxic?”

  “Benares was and is the holiest city of all. It has always existed, a jewel of sanctity on the banks of the Ganges. But when I was a scientist, I did not care about this. I did my job, I had friends from work and school, I roamed the streets, both the real streets of Varanasi and the virtual byways of the net. There were women and drugs, and everything else with which a young man with money can occupy mind and body. Then the accident happened.

  “It occurred at a government lab, but it could just as easily have happened somewhere else. The lab was a small place by the standards of government interests, far smaller even than my own corporate facilities. So small.”