River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  The thinking ended in a nap on a park bench. When he woke, the morning sun was climbing overhead and the world had become unpleasantly bright. He sat for a moment, watching people who never looked back at him as they walked past, and rubbing at the sticky ooze which had somehow collected on his chin, then decided he had better get moving. No telling when Renie might come out of that thing and go barking mad if he was still gone.

  He returned to the caged kiosk that jutted from the side of the liquor store like a machine gun turret, and passed some bills through the slot in return for another bottle of Mountain Rose, which left him with only enough money to take the bus a few kilometers—far too small a distance to be any help. He had a few swallows of wine, then with magnificent self-control closed the pressure seal, slid the bottle into his pocket, and walked with immense care back to the highway.

  His third and last ride of the day was on the back of a produce truck. Squeezed between towers of wrapped and crated greenhouse fruits, he saw Durban rise before him, a cluster of oblongs dominating the Natal coastline. Now his busfare was enough to get him wherever he might decide to go. He toyed with the idea of returning to the shelter where he and Renie had lived and finding some of his cronies, Walter or whoever else might be around, and taking them with him to the hospital, but Renie had made it clear that the shelter was no longer safe, and the last thing Long Joseph wanted to do was get in trouble and have Renie able to tell him later that he was just as stupid an old man as she had suspected he was.

  The idea that the trouble might be the sort which he wouldn’t survive long enough to be shouted at by his daughter only occurred to him later.

  He had walked back and forth between the bus stop and the front entrance of the Durban Outskirt Medical Facility perhaps a dozen times in two hours. It was only when he had actually reached the hospital that he remembered Renie saying there was some kind of quarantine, and indeed, no matter how long he watched the building, no one seemed to be going in and out except doctors and nurses. There were even guards at the door, private security men in padded black firefight suits, the kind of muscle that even the craziest drunk didn’t bother to mess with. And even though his opinionated child might think he was a drunk, Long Joseph knew that he wasn’t crazy.

  He had swallowed down perhaps half the wine, but the rest was still sloshing in the bottle in his pocket, testament to his good sense and powers of restraint. There were other people on the street in front of the hospital this evening, too, so he knew that he wasn’t being suspicious. But beyond that, he had reached a sort of blank wall in his own head, a big hard something that kept him from doing anything else. How could he see his son if there was a quarantine? And if he couldn’t see him, then what? Go back, and face that womanish Jeremiah and admit it had all been a mistake? Or worse, go back and find Renie up and asking questions, and not even be able to give her news of her brother?

  He wandered from the bus stop toward the small cluster of trees that stood on a knoll a few yards down from the medical facility’s front door. He leaned against one of them and slapped his hand gently against the squeeze-bottle while he waited for an idea to come. The wall in his head remained firm, as heavy and unyielding as the helmeted men by the entrance. One of them turned in his direction for a moment, the face shield blank as an insect’s eye, and Long Joseph stepped back into the trees.

  That would be all he needed, wouldn’t it? Have one of those weight-lifting Boer bastards notice him and decide to teach the kaffir a lesson. All the laws in the world couldn’t stop one of those private thugs before he broke your bones—that was what was wrong with the country.

  He had just found a safer spot, deep in the tree shadows, when a hand clamped on his mouth. Something hard pressed into his back, nestling against the knobs of his spine.

  The voice was a harsh whisper. “Don’t make a noise.”

  Long Joseph’s eyes bulged, and he stared at the security guards, wishing now they could see him, but he was too far away, hidden in the dark. The hard thing prodded him again.

  “There’s a car behind you. We are going to turn around and walk toward it, and you are going to get into it, and if you do anything stupid I’m going to blow your insides all over the sidewalk.”

  His knees weak, Long Joseph Sulaweyo was spun around so that he faced out the far side of the stand of trees. A dark sedan waited at the curb, obscured from the medical facility by the copse, its door open, the interior dark as a grave pit.

  “I’m taking my hand off your mouth,” the voice said. “But if you even breathe loud, you are dead.”

  He still could not see his captor, only a dark shape standing just behind his shoulder. He thought wildly of all the things he might do, all the netflick heroisms he had ever seen, kicking guns out of villains’ hands, immobilizing an attacker with a kung fu jab; he even thought for a moment of screaming and running, praying that the first shot would miss. But he knew he would do none of those things. The pressure on his spine was like the nose of some cold, ancient creature, sniffing for the kill. He was its prey, and it had caught him. A man couldn’t outrun Death, could he?

  The car door was before him. He let himself be bent double and shoved inside. Someone pulled a sack over his head.

  My children don’t deserve no stupid man like me for a father, he thought as the car jerked into motion. A second later, anger dissolved into terror. He suddenly felt very sure he would be sick, would strangle himself in the sack on his own vomit. God damn, look at this foolishness! he mourned. My poor children! I have killed them both.

  RENIE stood up slowly, fighting an urge to be sick again. When she had thrown up in the insect world, nothing had come out, and thus it might have been interesting or even instructive to consider why the Kansas simulation had provided her with a clear stream of liquid to vomit. Renie, however, did not particularly want to think about regurgitation at all. As it was, the memory of what had made her sick in the first place, those poor mutilated creatures, was still nauseatingly strong.

  “What is the problem with this place?” she moaned, wiping her chin. “Are these people completely crazy? Jesus Mercy, and I thought the Yellow Room was bad! Are they all some kind of lunatic sadists?”

  Azador restarted the engine and the tugboat began chugging down the river once more. “They were only Puppets.”

  “You would say that!” Only the overwhelming feeling of weakness and despair prevented her from starting another argument.

  “I understand what Renie means.” !Xabbu was standing upright on the boat’s rail, his balance impressive even on the gentle river current. “Are there really so many . . . what is that word, Renie? So many sadistic people that are the masters of this place?”

  “They are rich bastards,” Azador said. “They do what they like.”

  “It’s hard to believe some of this . . . ugliness.” Renie had taken a few deep breaths, and was beginning to feel normal again. “Who would want to live with it? Who would want to do it? I mean, the person behind Scarecrow might have been a bastard, but he didn’t seem that bad. But I suppose if it was all just a game to him . . .”

  “Scarecrow had nothing to do with that,” Azador said flatly. “He lost his hold on this place long ago. What you saw, those puppets torn up and sewed back together like dolls, that was done by the Twins.”

  “Twins? What twins?” Renie kept her voice polite—she had made too many mistakes with Azador already.

  “They are two men who are found many places in this network. Perhaps they are masters, or pets of the masters. But they move in many simulations, and always they turn them into shit.” He gestured at the jungle, which more and more resembled the claustrophobic strangle of the Works, except here trees and vines doubled for the industrial clutter. “I have seen them before, and what they do. When they catch any of us travelers, they do not simply throw us out of the network. If they can, they keep us c
onnected and they torture us.” He spat over the side. “I do not know who they truly are, but they are demons.”

  “And they’re . . . twins?” Renie was fascinated. Another one of Otherland’s doors had opened.

  Azador rolled his eyes. “That is a joke, because they always go around together. And because one is fat, one is thin, no matter where they go or who they become. But they are the Twins, and you can always tell them.”

  “You don’t know if they’re real people or not?” Renie had the feeling that Azador hadn’t realized yet he was actually communicating—for the second time that day!—and that time to get answers was therefore short. “But how can they be, if they’re in more than one simworld?”

  The gypsy shook his head. “I do not know. All I know is that they are many places and they are always, always bastards. Here they have become Tinman and Lion.”

  So some of the owners of this universe were people like Kunohara, Renie thought, content with their own backyards. But others didn’t stay in their own simulations, and even vandalized their neighbors’ domains. Were they at war with each other, these Grail Brotherhood people? That would make sense—trust the rich to try to screw each other out of something that was big enough for all of them. It would be pleasant to leave them to it, except that one enemy in charge of everything wouldn’t make things any easier than a lot of enemies, as far as Renie was concerned. Also, she and !Xabbu would still be unarmed pedestrians in the middle of a war zone.

  “Can you tell us anything else about these twins, or the others who own this network?” she asked.

  Azador shrugged. “It is too hot to talk, and I am tired of thinking of those people. I am Romany—we go where we want, we do not care whose land we cross.” He reached into the coat lying at his feet, muscles rippling, and rooted in the pocket for a cigarette.

  He was right about the heat—the sun was at full noon, and the trees no longer shaded the river. Renie worried briefly about Emily, still sleeping in the windowless cabin, then caught herself. The girl was a Puppet, wasn’t she? And this was her simulation, after all. Perhaps Azador was right—perhaps she was taking these mechanical people, these bits of code, too seriously.

  The thought drew out another, something she had forgotten, or from which she had been distracted. “Azador, how are you so certain Emily is a Puppet?”

  He looked surprised, but pretended not to have understood. “What?”

  “I asked you before, but you never answered me. You said it didn’t matter what you did, because she was a Puppet. How do you know?”

  “Why does it make any difference?” he growled. His disdain was not entirely convincing. Renie felt sure for the first time that he was not merely angry at being questioned, he was actively hiding something.

  “I’m just curious,” she said, as levelly and calmly as she could. “I’m ignorant about these things. I haven’t been here as long as you, haven’t seen as many things as you have.”

  “I am not a child, to be made to talk by this sort of trick,” Azadci snapped. “And if you want to be the boss and stand in the sun, asking questions, then you can be the captain of the bloody boat, too.” He gave up his search through the coat pocket, left the wheel spinning, and stalked away up the deck.

  Before Renie could say anything more, !Xabbu waved urgently for her attention. “Something is wrong,” he said, and sprang from the rail down to the deck.

  Renie paused. The heat haze shimmering between the tree branches began to thicken, forming pictures in midair in the crooks of branches, a thousand reflections of the same thing. The image that appeared in all of them was much clearer this time, a massive stub of a yellow head with a shaggy, dirt-clotted mane and piggy eyes almost lost in deep, horizontal wrinkles. The jowls drooped around a mouth crammed with huge, broken teeth, which now yawned open. A growling voice blared and stuttered like a bad radio transmission. Renie could only make out a few words— “. . . Outsiders . . . Forest . . . terrible fate . . .” Like something in an unvisited museum, the dreadful face chewed on for a few moments, babbling and groaning, then faded, leaving dark spaces between the branches once more.

  “Sounds like the alert is going out about us,” Renie said grimly. “I think that’s what it was saying, anyway. It’s hard to tell—this whole place seems like it’s falling apart.” Or the two different worlds, Forest and the Works, were growing into one blighted whole. Emerald would soon be absorbed, too—she could see how the ruined buildings, fields, and dust that had once been Scarecrow’s domain, the last besieged outpost of a lovely children’s tale, would now become another analogue of the larger machine, perpetually dying but still full of malevolent life. Was that what would happen to all of the Otherland network one day? Although the great simulation universe was the citadel of her enemies, the thought depressed and disgusted her.

  “I am not sure,” !Xabbu said, peering over the railing.

  “That it’s falling apart? Are you joking?” Renie could still taste bile from earlier. She badly wanted a cigarette now. What was the point of abstaining? Might as well take what pleasure she could, while she could. She was about to go find Azador, but saw his coat lying in a tangle on the deck. Yes, it was rude, but the hell with the self-righteous bastard.

  As she leaned down to fish in the pockets, she asked !Xabbu, “Didn’t you see that transmission or whatever it was? It’s like the generator for the whole simworld is running down.”

  “That is not what I meant, Renie.” !Xabbu turned for a moment to survey her fumblings with his close-set brown eyes. “I am not sure that the transmission, as you called it, is what I felt coming, just a moment ago. . . .”

  Renie found the cigarette packet; a moment later, her fingers closed on the hard shape of Azador’s lighter. It was impressively heavy but still comfortable to hold, the silver sides covered with intricate design elements, like some family heirloom from a century or two back. When she clicked it, a tiny, white-hot ball of burning plasma appeared, floating in an invisible magnetic field above the top of the lighter. So, despite its old-fashioned look, it was meant to be a Minisolar—the kind of expensive modernist accessory that in RL was most often carried by young market bankers or successful charge dealers.

  Mildly intrigued by such virtual ostentation, Renie noted the monogram inscribed on its one featureless side, an ornate Y. She wondered whether that was one of their companion’s initials, and if so, whether Azador was a first name or a last name. Then she wondered if the lighter even belonged to him. Maybe he had “found” it somewhere in Kansas.

  “What was that terrible noise?” Emily called from the doorway of the cabin. “That . . . growling?” The girl took a few steps toward the stern, her eyes wide but blinking rapidly against the sunlight. Her hair tousled from sleep, her bare feet and simple shift made her look more than ever like a stretched child. “It woke me up. . . .”

  As Renie took the still-unlit cigarette from her mouth to answer, the sky abruptly split into component colors, blue, white, and black, and the world shuddered to a halt.

  Renie found herself frozen in space, unable to move or speak. Everything she could see—sky, boat, river, Emily—had gone flat, dead, and motionless as printed images on cheap transparencies, but the transparencies all had dozens of ghost images behind them, piled one atop the other and slightly off-center, like a scatter of animation cels that had been carefully aligned and then accidentally dropped.

  A second later the images heaved themselves back together, like a fumbled deck of cards run in reverse, and the universe shuddered back into motion.

  As Renie stood frozen, unsure whether she herself could move and too stunned to test the possibility immediately, something flared white above the cabin, a brilliant vertical stripe of blankness that hovered above the reanimated river and jungle like an angel, a star, a rip in the wallpaper of reality. It wriggled, creating for itself arms and legs and
a faceless splash of white where a head would be.

  “Sellars . . . ?” she breathed, but still could not make herself move, although she could feel her body again, feel her arms dangling, her feet flat on the deck. Recognition of that strange shape, that absence of visual information, flooded through her. “Jesus Mercy,” she was shouting now, “is that Sellars, finally?”

  The white form stretched out its arms as though testing the weather. Renie saw !Xabbu move up beside her, his long muzzle lifted like a dog looking at the moon. Even Emily, who had fallen to the deck in terror after the strange rupture, turned to see what Renie and !Xabbu were staring at.

  The white shape spun slowly in the air as though it hung on a string, bouncing in agitation.

  “Chingate!” it cried out. “What you doing, old man?” Renie did not recognize the voice, childishly high, hoarse and startled. “What is this loco place? This ain’t no locking net, viejo.” The figure started to thrash harder, the arms and legs windmilling so that for a moment it seemed a tiny star was going supernova just above the river. “Get me outta here! Get me outta here, you mentiroso mother . . .”

  The white shape vanished. Once, more, the sky was just the sky, the river was only the murmuring river.

  “That was not Sellars,” !Xabbu said a few seconds later. In other circumstances, Renie would have laughed at the anticlimactic obviousness of it, but she was as stunned as he was. She saw the edge of Azador’s bare shoulder in the prow of the boat, the rest of him blocked by the cabin, and realized she was clutching his lighter so hard it was hurting her fingers, gouging her palm.