River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  The man should count his lucky stars that he didn’t have to see his master face-to-real-face, Jongleur thought. The Ukrainian would take away an image of his employer as an eccentric, security-obsessed old man, instead of discovering the unpleasant truth—that their founder and leader was a monstrous thing, held together by medical pressure-wrappings, continuously submerged in life-preserving fluids. The visiting executive would never have to think about how his employer’s eyes and ears had been pierced by electrodes connected directly to the optic and auditory nerves, how his skin and even muscle grew more jelly-soft hourly, threatening to slide free at any moment from bones thin and weak as twigs.

  Jongleur’s thoughts did not linger long on the familiar horror of his own condition. Instead, his disembodied inspection flitted up through the private apartments to the lowest floors of his own inner sanctum, where it touched briefly on the quarters of his various bodyguards and technicians, on the hardware rooms where the most important machines were serviced, and on the chamber locked behind three separate pressure-doors and two guard stations where the tanks lay in their padded cradles. His own life-support tank, a capsule of black, shiny plasteel, bulked like a royal sarcophagus at the center of the room, its tentacles of bundled and multiply redundant cables stretching away on all sides. Three other tanks shared the huge circular room with his, the smaller and less central capsules that belonged to Finney and Mudd, and—close by his own resting place—that other and most significant oblong, as large and gleamingly opaque as his own.

  He did not want to look at that other tank for very long.

  Neither did he wish to carry his inspection any farther. The topmost floor, as always, remained out of bounds, even—perhaps especially—for him. The master of Lake Borgne had decided long before this day he did not ever again want to look into the suite of rooms at the top of the tower. But he had also known that if it remained available to him he would be unable to resist, that just as an aching tooth draws a probing tongue, he would torture himself if he did not do something. He had thus reprogrammed his surveillance system, and locked that part of it away behind a code he did not have. Unless he specifically asked his security manager to reprogram it—and he had fought against that temptation a thousand times—it would remain as black to him as the emptiness between stars.

  Reassured to see the rest of his fiefdom safe and secure, and not wishing to dwell any longer than necessary on what floated in the fourth tank, or what remained at the pinnacle of the tower, he called up his virtual domains and continued his inspection there, in the worlds he had created.

  On the Western Front near Ypres, the battle of Amiens raged on. The man for whom the trenches had served as a prison was gone now, but the simulacra who fought and died there went on doing so regardless, as they had before the prisoner had arrived. When this most recent version of the battle had ended, the corpses would rise from the mud again, as if in mockery of the Day of Judgment; the shattered bodies would be remade, the shrapnel drawn back together and reassembled into murderous shells, and the battle would begin once more.

  On Mars, the warrior Rax people of the High Desert had attacked the citadel of Tuktubim. The Soombar had made a temporary peace with Hurley Brummond in order to employ his fighting legion of Earthlings in the city’s defense. It all looked to be great fun.

  Old Chicago was celebrating the end of Prohibition with widespread public drunkenness, so that particular cycle was almost over. Atlantis had risen up from its recent watery grave, and was poised to begin anew. Looking Glass had already entered another cycle, red and white pieces at either side of the metaphorical chessboard.

  Jongleur flicked through his worlds, choosing vantage points at random, adjusting if the initial view did not give him the information he sought. In one, the Spanish Armada had somehow survived the windstorms in the Channel, and the Spaniards were even now making their way up the Thames to sack London with their superior forces; he promised himself he would check back, perhaps even embody himself so he could see it firsthand, since he had missed the last time this rare outcome had occurred.

  Another invasion of England, this one from H. G. Wells’ version of Mars, was winding down to its conclusion. It seemed rather depressingly slow there. He wondered whether he would have to recalibrate the simworld.

  In fact, he noticed as he moved through several more simulations, his virtual domains seemed in need of more attention than he had given them of late. Xanadu was all but deserted, the gardens of the Pleasure Dome looking particularly untended. Narnia remained under snow, as it had been for months, with no allegorical lion in sight to end the winter. That Hobbit world, constructed as a favor for a great-great grandnephew, had collapsed into total warfare, which was fine, but the technology seemed to have escalated beyond what he dimly remembered was appropriate. Machine guns and jet bombers, in particular, seemed a bit de trop.

  There were other, more subtle problems in other simulations, but they still troubled him. The Asgardians were drinking heavily rather than fighting, and although it was not uncommon to see the explosive Norse temperament turn suddenly melancholy, even Bifrost looked dusty and untended. Elsewhere, in Imperial Rome, the last of the Julio-Claudians had been usurped by a commander of the Praetorian Guard named Tigellinus, which was an interesting twist, but most of the new emperor’s facial features were missing. The leader of Rome’s nightmare visage—eyes and nose absent, only smooth skin in their place—was reproduced on all the coins and official statuary, which was unsettling enough, but what was even more bizarre was that no one in Rome seemed to have noticed anything wrong.

  Jongleur flicked through his other domains with increasing speed, and found things to concern him in nearly every one: Dodge City, Toyland, Arden, Gomorrah, and many more, all seemed oddly off-kilter, as though someone had minutely changed the essential gravity of every virtual world.

  The old man was grimly pleased that he had been startled awake by a nightmare, and that he had made this inspection as a result. These were not simply playthings, these worlds—they were the birthrights of his godhood, the fields of Paradise in which his immortality would be spent. It would not do to let things go to seed.

  It was as he flicked through one of the last of his created worlds, a comparative backwater based on a series of English comic stories from the era of his young manhood, that he saw the face that for so long he had hoped he might see, feared he might see.

  The face was visible only for a moment, in the midst of a crowd of people in formal clothing, but the image flew to his eye like an arrow. He felt his ancient heart begin to rabbit as it had when he dreamed; more faintly, he perceived his real body thrashing slowly in its restraining harness, disturbing the thick fluids that surrounded it. He stared, forgetting for a moment that he could leap through the view and into the scene, to clutch and catch, but even in that moment of hesitation, the face vanished.

  He flung himself into the simulation, snatching the first sim his system offered, but the one he had sought for so long, as if sensing his approach, had already fled the large room and dashed out the door into the crowded streets, there to disappear. He followed, but it immediately became clear there were too many people in the way, and too many avenues of escape. Pursuit was hopeless.

  Bertie Wooster, Tuppy Glossop, and the other members of the Drones Club were more than a little startled by the appearance of a seven-foot polar bear in the middle of their annual dinner dance and charity fund-raiser. Discussion of the phenomenon was intense, and calls for bar service were immediately doubled. Several of the fairer sex (and, it had to be admitted, one or two of the manly contingent) went so far as to faint. But even those who had taken in the spectacle with a jaded eye, jiggling neat Scotch not one whit on its journey mouthward as the pale intruder galloped roaring across the floor and knocked half the band flying (gravely wounding a clarinet player in the process), found themselves indescribably disturbed when the p
olar bear fell onto its knees just outside the door in Prince Albert Road and began to weep.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Invisible River

  * * *

  NETFEED/ART: Explosive Homage

  (visual: wreckage of First Philadelphia Bank)

  VO: The guerilla artist known only as “Bigger X” has claimed credit for the package-bomb which killed three and injured twenty-six at a branch of the First Philadelphia Bank last month.

  (visual: file footage—broken showroom window, floral print body-bags)

  The controversial Bigger X, who began by creating special coverings for bodies he had stolen from the morgue, then started poisoned-product scares in Florida and Toronto, has now claimed credit for three different murderous assaults. In the recorded message he sent to “artOWNartWONartNOW”, he claims his work is an homage to such pioneers of forced-involvement performances as Manky Negesco and TT Jensen . . .

  * * *

  “CODE Delphi. Start here.

  “This is Martine Desroubins. I am resuming my journal. Much has happened since my last entry, two days ago.

  “The first, and perhaps the most important thing, is that We have crossed into a new simulation. I will wait to describe this new place until I have told how we left the old one.

  “The second is that I have learned something more about this virtual universe, and every piece of new information may be critical.

  “I have reached a stage now where I can ‘read’ the physical information of our environment as well as I can decipher the signposts of the real-world net, and thus can move around here almost as easily as any of my sighted companions—in fact, in many ways my abilities seem to be blossoming far beyond theirs. Thus, I believe it to be my particular task to attempt to understand the machineries behind these worlds. As I said before, I am not optimistic about our chances of survival, let alone success, but as we improve our knowledge, our small odds at least become slightly larger.

  “So much to tell! I wish I had found time earlier to whisper some of these words into the auditing darkness.

  “Back in the last simulation, our company—now only Quan Li, T4b, Sweet William, Florimel, and myself—set out after Orlando and Fredericks. A faster pursuit would undoubtedly have been better, but it was almost evening when the river swept them away, and only fools would strike out across unknown territory in the dark—especially unknown territory where the spiders are the size of circus carousels.

  “The men—I shall call them that for simplicity’s sake—wanted to build another raft like the one which had been lost with our other two companions, but Florimel suggested strongly that whatever we might gain by traveling swiftly on the river would be lost with the time it would take to make the raft. She is clearly someone used to organizing things—in some ways she is like Renie, but without the openness, the willingness to admit fault. I sense that she is constantly frustrated by the rest of us, like someone forced to play a game with a less capable partner. But she is clever, there is no arguing that. She argued that we should follow the beach and riverbank as far as it would take us. That way, if Fredericks and Orlando had managed to get off the river themselves, or had been swept into some backwater, we would not be rushed helplessly past them.

  “Quan Li agreed with Florimel, and at risk of polarizing our party along lines of apparent gender, I cast the deciding vote in favor of this plan. So we set out along the line of the river even as the morning sun appeared above the trees on the far bank. I did not see it, of course, but I could sense it in ways far beyond merely its heat on my face—even in a simulated world, the sun is the sourcepoint of many things.

  “The first part of the journey went uneventfully, except for some bickering between Sweet William and Florimel, which Quan Li tried to discourage. Florimel said that if we did not find the two young men, we should attempt to capture a member of the Grail Brotherhood—catch one of them within a simulation—and then use force or its threat to gain information about the network, perhaps even to compel the prisoner to assist us. William thought this was asking for trouble—that it was far more likely we would not only fail, since we knew so little about their powers within the network, but that we would bring the entire Brotherhood down on our heads. Quan Li and William both seemed keen not to attract undue attention. Florimel was scornful of what she saw as timidity.

  “T4b remained silent and uninvolved throughout, seeming more interested in maneuvering his spiky armor over the pebbles and clumps of dirt which to us were major obstacles. I cannot say I blame him for staying apart.

  “Just before noon, after we had tracked the river through several broad curving turns, I found myself distracted by a strange but not entirely unfamiliar sensation. I realized I had felt that unusual vibrancy on the morning we were forced ashore by the feeding frenzy. I had been nearly mad then, overwhelmed by the new input, and so I could not immediately remember what the sensation had heralded.

  “As the tingling grew stronger, my companions began to shout that a white figure was hovering above the water just a short distance away. I could not sense anything so mundane as color, and in fact the tingling seemed to be confusing me so badly that I could barely sense the apparition at all.

  “Quan Li said, ‘It is a man! The one who led us to T4b when the fish spit him out!’ William shouted some admonition at the stranger to ‘quit acting like bleeding Jesus, for Christ’s sake’ and to come ashore. I paid only small attention to this because I was trying literally to make sense out of the bizarre input. Unlike the swirl of organized information that characterized my knowledge of my companions’ sims, the stranger was more an absence of information—like a black hole, which signals its astronomical presence by what does not come from it.

  “After our encounter with what we eventually realized was one of the Lords of Otherland, I came to believe that what I sensed, or rather did not sense, was the work of very sophisticated gear—something which negated the signs of the user’s virtual existence in much the same way that high-powered sound baffles can counteract noise by broadcasting contrasting, deadening tones. The question still remains why anyone, especially the master of a simulation as complex as the one we were in, should need such doubtlessly expensive camouflage. Perhaps these masters of virtual space do not always stay in their own kingdoms. Perhaps they wish to be able to wander through their neighbors’ gardens and harems unnoticed.

  “While I was still experiencing him as a puzzling lack of signal, the stranger briskly announced, ‘I am Kunohara. You are guests in my world. It is bad form not to introduce yourselves to a host before you walk through his lands, but perhaps you are from someplace where courtesies are unfamiliar.’

  “It was strange to me, since his voice seemed to issue from nowhere, like old-fashioned film music. To the others, the strangest thing was his position, floating half his own height above the flowing river.

  “Predictably, Quan Li hastened to apologize for any breach of courtesy. The others were silent or subdued—even William, after his initial remark, kept his insolence in check. Kunohara, who the others tell me appeared as a small Asian man, floated toward the riverbank and came to a stop before us, then lowered himself to dry land. He proceeded to make several archly cryptic remarks—enjoying his private knowledge almost as a child would. I was paying less attention to what he said than to what he was—or rather, what he seemed to be. If this was one of our enemies, one of the powers of this virtual universe, I wanted to learn as much about him as I could, but most particularly I wanted to know how he manipulated the environment, since all of Otherland’s controls were hidden from us. Perhaps he used the aspect-dampening gear just to prevent such discoveries. In any case, I gleaned very little.

  “It soon became apparent that although we knew nothing of this Kunohara, he knew something of us. He knew we had fled Atasco’s simulation—William, who had appointed himself ambassador, guardedly conf
irmed it—and alluded to companions of ours in such a way that it suggested he may have met one of our two missing groups, although he claimed to know nothing of their current whereabouts. ‘Things are shifting,’ he said, seeming to think that explained something. ‘Most of the gates are random.’ He then posed us a riddle which I shall try to remember verbatim.

  “He said, ‘The Grail and the Circle oppose each other. But both are circular—both have closed their systems, and would do the same with this new universe. But a place can be found where the two circles overlap, and in that place is wisdom.’

  “Sweet William, with a little more restraint than he usually shows, demanded to know what all this meant. I recognized the name ‘the Circle,’ but with no access to my usual information resources, could only search my own overtaxed memory, without result—and still with no result as of this moment.

  “Kunohara seemed to be enjoying his role as mysterious oracle. ‘I cannot answer what.’ he answered William. ‘I can suggest a where, however. Atop the Black Mountain you will find a place the two circles are very close to each other.’

  “Florimel spoke up, quite angry, and asked why he played games with us. Kunohara, who was still to me nothing more than a voice, laughed and said, ‘Do not games teach children how to think?’ With that he vanished.

  “A furious debate ensued, but I did not take part. I was trying both to memorize his words and to think about the voice, hoping I might find some information there the others had not. I can only believe he was what he said—the owner of the world we were in. If so, he must be privy to many of the Grail Brotherhood’s plans. He might even be one of them. But if he is one of our enemies, and he knows we oppose the Brotherhood—and if not, why bother to taunt us in such a strange way?—then the question remains . . . why did he take no action against us?