River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  She limped to the cabin. The girl was sitting up on the bed, pressed into the corner of the tiny room as though afraid of small creeping things on the floor. Despite the sheen of sweat on her youthful skin, she was clutching the blanket tightly to her chest.

  “Hello, Emily. Are you all right?”

  The girl regarded her with wide, worried eyes. “Where’s the monkey?”

  “Outside. Do you want me to get him?”

  “No!” Emily’s rejection was almost a shriek; she regained her composure a little and laughed nervously. “No. He makes me go all funny. He’s just like the Scarecrow’s flymonks—all little and hairy and those pinchy fingers. How can you stand it?”

  Renie thought for about two seconds of trying to explain !Xabbu’s situation, then decided against it. If this girl was a Puppet, telling her anything about VR or aliases would just be confusing, or even needlessly cruel. Unless . . .

  “He’s not really a monkey.” Renie tried a soothing smile; it made her jaw hurt. “He’s . . . he’s under a spell. He’s really a man—a very nice man—but someone bad turned him into a monkey.”

  “Really?” Emily’s eyes widened again. “Oh, that’s so sad!”

  “Yes.” Renie settled on the edge of the bed and tried to get comfortable, but there didn’t seem to be a throbless muscle in her entire body. “Was that all that was bothering you?”

  “No—yes. No.” As if exhausted by these changes of mind, Emily regarded her for a moment, then suddenly and quite spectacularly burst into tears. “What’s g-going to h-h-happen?”

  “To us?” Renie reached out and patted the girl’s shoulder, feeling her small, birdlike bones through the thin shift. It was strange, finding herself again in the role of reassuring someone, of being a substitute mother; it also made it hard not to think about Stephen, but she didn’t need any more pain today. “We’ve escaped from all those people who are chasing us. Don’t you remember?”

  “I don’t mean that. What about m-me? What about the little baby in my t-tuh-tummy?”

  Renie wanted to say something encouraging, but could think of nothing. What could she offer this girl, this creature coded for baby talk and helplessness? Even if she and !Xabbu escaped the simulation, it was almost certain that Emily would not transfer with them. And even if some fluke allowed it, could they afford to take her along? Go off to save the world accompanied by a pregnant, effectively half-witted child who needed constant attention? It didn’t bear thinking about.

  “It will be all right,” was what she came up with at last, and hated herself for saying it.

  “But it won’t—it won’t! Because my henry doesn’t love me anymore! But he did, he did, and he gave me the pretty thing, and we did all the lover-games, and he said I was his pudding and now everything is . . . is bodwaste!” The strange amalgam seemed to be the worst word she knew. Immediately after uttering it, she collapsed face-first onto the bed, wailing.

  Renie, with nothing to offer except sympathy and a reassuring touch, at last coaxed the girl back to something resembling normality. “The shiny, pretty thing he gave you,” she asked when the weeping had quieted, “did he tell you where it came from?”

  Emily’s eyes were red-rimmed, her cheeks mottled, and her nose was running, but she was still irritatingly pretty. If Renie had retained any doubt that the creators of Kansas were men, she let it go now. “He didn’t tell me anything, except that it was mine!” the girl moaned. “I didn’t steal it—he gave it to me!”

  “I know.” Renie thought of asking to see the gem again, but did not want to excite her further. “I know.”

  When a sweaty and miserable Emily had finally slipped back into fitful sleep, Renie walked out to the stern. She felt a tug of addiction and wanted to ask for a cigarette, but she had already broken her own rule once. “She’s really upset,” she reported.

  Azador flicked his eyes toward the cabin for a moment. “I noticed.”

  “These people may be Puppets,” Renie added, “but they certainly don’t think they are. I mean, that may all be code, but it’s pretty damn convincing.”

  “These rich bastard gorgios got too much money for their own good. They hire too many programmers, try to make everything so perfect and real.”

  “But you liked how real she was before, didn’t you?” She heard the anger beginning to creep into her voice and turned to the rail to inspect the ever-thickening wall of jungle foliage on the near bank. There was something faintly unnatural about the vegetation, but she couldn’t quite decide why that was so. She turned back to Azador. “Don’t you feel sorry for her at all?”

  He let his lids droop, so that he viewed the river before him through hired-assassin slits. “Do you feel sorry for your carpet when you step on it? That is not a person, it is a machine—a thing.”

  “How do you know? This place—this whole network—is full of real people pretending to be characters. How do you know?”

  To her surprise, Azador actually flinched. He fought to hold onto his mask of indifference, but for a moment she saw something very different in his eyes before he turned away and fumbled another cigarette into his mouth.

  She was struggling to make sense of this reaction when !Xabbu’s urgent call from the prow startled her just-settling thoughts into confused flight.

  “Renie! Come here. I think it is important.”

  Her friend bounced excitedly on the railing as she walked toward him. She realized with more than a little worry that his movements seemed to become more simian daily. Was he simply growing more familiar with the baboon sim, or was the constant life and perspective of a beast beginning to affect him?

  “Look.” He pointed toward the shore.

  Renie stared, but her mind was a jumble of confused ideas, all jostling for her attention. There was nothing obviously wrong along the riverbank. “What is it, !Xabbu?”

  “Look at the trees.”

  She applied herself to examining the place he indicated. There were trees, of course, in all sizes, with thick creepers drooping between branches like the survivors of a constrictors’ orgy on the morning after. Nothing seemed particularly noteworthy, except for a certain regularity to the forms—which, she abruptly realized, was what had bothered her a few minutes earlier. Although both the trees and vines had the realistic look of nature, they seemed to be spaced and connected at rather mechanical intervals. In fact, there were too many right angles. . . .

  “It looks arranged.” She squinted against the harsh sunlight, and as she did the shapes became more general. “It looks something like the Works. Except made out of plants.”

  “Yes!” !Xabbu bounced in place. “Do you remember what the Scarecrow said? That his enemies were in the Works, and in Forest.”

  “Oh, my God.” Renie shook her head, almost—but not quite—too exhausted to be afraid. “So we’ve just drifted right into the other fellow’s kingdom? What was his name?”

  “Lion . . .” !Xabbu said solemnly.

  A thin hissing sounded all along the riverbank, and then a ghostly image began to flicker in the right-angled spaces between several of the trees—a parade of images, duplicated from tree to tree, identical and profuse. Each apparation was little more than a reflection in a rippled pool, so faint and smoky as to be barely visible, but Renie thought she saw a hard flash of eyes and a great, pale face. The hiss turned into a crackling rush, then the images faded, an army of ghosts all put to flight at the same instant.

  “What the hell was that?” Azador called from the stern, killing the engine and slowing the tugboat to a drift.

  Renie was trying to decide for herself what the hell that had been when she felt !Xabbu’s small hand—his ‘hairy, pinchy fingers,’ as Emily had unkindly called them—close on her arm. “See there,” he said, his whisper not quite disguising his wonder and unease. “They come down to the
water like a family of elands.”

  Several hundred yards ahead, a small, stealthy group of human figures had appeared from the shelter of the vegetation beside the river. Not yet having seen the boat, they crept down the bank to the water’s edge. Some crouched to drink as others stood on guard against attack, nervously watching the jungle behind them and the nearest parts of the river. They were pale-skinned, dirty, and naked but for the ornaments they wore, which Renie guessed were some kind of hunting trophies: several wore tails swinging at their rumps, while others sported antlers on their brows, or ears dangling down beside their faces.

  Renie crouched, then waved to Azador to do the same. He squatted beside the pilot’s wheel to watch as the boat drifted nearer.

  The tugboat had silently covered perhaps two thirds of the distance when an antler-crowned sentry saw them. He stared gape-jawed at the boat for a moment, then made a strangled barking noise. The other naked humans leaped up in confusion, costume-tails flipping from side to side, and shoved and bumped each other in bleating fear as they retreated into the jungle.

  The boat swept on, now almost level with the spot where the humans had vanished. The sentry, last of the group, stopped at the edge of shelter to watch the boat drift past, ready to fight to defend his tribesfolk’s retreat. His antlers appeared to be wriggling, which Renie thought at first was a trick of the dappled sunlight where he stood, but then she saw that what she had thought were prongs of horn were actually hands, grafted onto his head at the temples. His arms ended at the wrist, knobbed in scar tissue.

  The fingers of these horrid imitation antlers twitched again as she slid past, and the sentry’s eyes—all dark iris, with no white at all—met hers with the hopeless, terrified stare of a damned thing scuttling across the rubbish heaps of Hell. Then he showed her his tail of stitched-on skin as he bounded away into the dark dells of Forest.

  LONG Joseph Sulaweyo stood at the edge of the trees staring out onto the highway and felt as though he were waking up from a dream.

  It had all seemed so simple in the night, with Jeremiah asleep and the high ceilings of that bloody damned Wasp’s Nest place echoing back Joseph’s every lonely footstep. He would go see his son. He would make sure that Stephen was still all right. Renie had said once that maybe Joseph had chased his son away, scared him into the coma or some foolishness, and although he had furiously rejected this bit of doctor nonsense, it had still sunk its hooks into him.

  Stephen might even have come awake by now, he had told himself as he had rummaged together what small bits of possessions he had decided to take. How would that be if he did? How cruel? What if the boy woke up and his whole family was gone? And as Joseph had taken the last few bills from Renie’s wallet—she wasn’t going to need it, was she, down in that bathtub-with-wires?—it had all seemed to make a sort of magnificent sense. He would go and see the boy. He would make sure Stephen was all right.

  But now, in the light of late afternoon, with bits and pieces of Drakensberg vegetation snagged in his trouser legs and fouling his hair, it seemed a different story altogether. What if Renie came out of that machine before he could get back? She would be angry—she would say he had just gone out to find something to drink, and had put them all in danger. But that wasn’t true, was it? No, he had a responsibility to his son, and Renie was just his other child. She wasn’t her own mother, whatever she thought sometimes. She wasn’t his wife, to dog him about how to behave.

  Long Joseph took a few steps out onto the hard shoulder. The night seemed to come early here: it was just a couple of hours past noon, but the sun had already dipped behind the mountain and a cold wind was sighing down the slope, strumming the trees and getting in under Joseph’s thin shirt to devil his chest. He plucked the worst of the brambles off himself and wandered a little way up the road, stamping his feet to keep warm.

  Renie didn’t know how smart he was—she thought he was a fool, just like all children did about their fathers. But he would be down to see Stephen in Durban and back before she even knew he was gone. And what did she care, anyway? It wasn’t like she was standing around waiting for him. Renie had left him behind, just like her mother and her brother had done. They all expected him to sit around waiting. Like he didn’t have a life of his own.

  He squinted up the empty hillside road, then down the other direction, as though closer inspection might reveal a bus that he had somehow missed.

  The light was almost entirely gone. Joseph had been stamping so long and so hard that he couldn’t decide any more which was worse, the cold in his toes or the ache in his feet from thumping them on the road. Only two cars and one truck had gone by, and although all had looked at the man by the side of the high mountain road with surprise, none of them had even slowed. His breath was beginning to show now, a chalky haze that hung before his face for a moment each time before the wind snatched it away.

  He was just beginning to think about making a bed for himself somewhere in the brush, out of the chilly downdrafts, when a small truck appeared around the bend of the hill above him, headlamps surprisingly bright against the twilight. Without thinking, Joseph turned in the middle of the road and began waving his arms. For a moment it seemed the driver had not seen him in time—Long Joseph had a flashing vision of his body left broken and unnoticed in the bushes like a dead township dog—but then the lights veered toward the shoulder and the truck stopped, spurting gravel from beneath its wheels. The driver, a stocky white man in a shiny jacket, jumped out.

  “What the hell do you think you’re playing at, you crazy bastard?”

  Joseph flinched at the Afrikaaner accent, but he was too cold to be choosy. “Need a ride.”

  The driver peered at him, then looked around, clearly wondering if Long Joseph might have confederates waiting to spring out and hijack his truck, or perhaps do something worse. “Ya? Where’s your car?”

  Long Joseph had a moment of sheer panic as he realized he’d invented no story to explain being here on this lonely mountain road. That government place—he was supposed to keep it secret, wasn’t he?

  The driver, worried by his silence, took a step back toward his truck. “How did you get here, then?”

  An incident from Joseph’s youth came back suddenly, like a blessing sent special-delivery from God. “Fellow was giving me a ride,” he told the driver. “But we have a big fight. Argument, I mean, He threw me out the car.”

  “Ya?” The driver was still suspicious. “What were you arguing about?”

  “I told him that rugby football was rubbish.”

  The other man laughed suddenly, a big deep chortle. “Goddamn! Well, I think you’re full of kak too, but that’s no reason to leave someone out to freeze to death. Get in. You aren’t an escaped murderer, then?”

  Long Joseph hurried toward the car, blowing on his hands. “No. But I almost kill my brother-in-law once when he wreck my car.” It had actually been Joseph who had wrecked his sister’s husband’s car to start the fight, but it sounded better this way.

  “You’re all right, then, fellow. I almost killed mine, once, too. I still may do it.”

  The driver’s name was Antonin Haaksbergen, and although he was undeniably an Afrikaaner bastard and therefore by Sulaweyo’s Law already proved vicious and untrustworthy and a bigot, Long Joseph was forced to admit that he was not completely without redeeming features. For one thing, his small truck had a very good heater. For another thing, he didn’t ask too many questions. But perhaps the most persuasive evidence came almost immediately, as they rounded the bend and left Joseph’s hitchhiking spot behind.

  “You want a drink, fellow?”

  It was as though someone had opened a curtain and allowed sunshine to flood into a long-darkened room. “You have some wine?”

  “You’re not half-picky, are you? No, but if you’re very nice to me, I might let you have a rid illy.”

 
Joseph frowned, suddenly suspicious, wondering if he had exchanged the looming threat of one girly-man for another. “Rid illy?”

  Haaksbergen reached into a compartment behind the seat and produced a can of Red Elephant beer. He handed it over to Joseph and took out one for himself, which he opened and placed in the holder on the dashboard. “I’ve been good all trip, and now I’ve got company, so I’m entitled, eh!”

  Joseph nodded, the can already raised, the cool liquid running down his throat like rain onto parched desert hills.

  “You like my truck?” Haaksbergen inquired, taking a sip of his beer. “It’s nice, ya? The engine’s a hydrogen-burner—quite good, and cheap to run, but I suppose if one of those little gimmicks fell out or something it would all blow up and take us with it. Still, that’s life, eh . . . ?

  “Good God, fellow, are you done with that already?”

  The rest of the journey passed in a glorious, warm, liquid slide. The lights of the towns, more numerous near the bottom of the mountains, floated past the windows like tropical fish. By the time they had reached Howick, Long Joseph and Antonin (“my mother was Italian—what can you do?”) were pretty much best friends. Even Haaksbergen’s occasional remarks about “you blacks” or “your people,” or his quiet disgruntlement at Joseph drinking most of the beer, seemed part of the frank exchanges of newfound brotherhood. Deposited in front of the railway station, the late-night crowd eddying around him,, Long Joseph waved a cheerful good-bye as the truck hummed away up the main road.

  A slightly muddled thumbing-through of his cash resources made it clear he would never make it to Durban by train, and in any case he had no urge at the moment to go anywhere. He found a bench inside the station, curled up, and fell into a sleep where even the dreams were bleared, as though seen through deep water.

  He was rousted firmly but without too much unpleasantness by a private security guard a little before dawn, and when he could not produce a ticket, was herded out onto the street with the rest of the multiracial assortment of dossers and transients. He spent a part of his ready cash on a squeeze-bottle of Mountain Rose from a 24-hour liquor store, in part to kill the deeply unfamiliar feeling of having drunk too much beer the night before, in part to help him think.