River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  “Oh, Christ,” he said quietly to himself, a helpless blasphemy.

  In the end, it was not as bad as he feared. The boy led him to a staircase set below street level, at a corner of the church away from the piazza and the crowds. With a boost from Paul, Gally then clambered up the wall beside the stairs to a window, which he pried open; a few minutes later he was back at Paul’s level, appearing like a magician’s helper through a door under the stairs that Paul had not even noticed.

  Despite his acute awareness of danger, Paul still retained enough of his tourist sensibility to be disappointed by the dark interior of the basilica. Gally led him on a long and roundabout but still hurried route through the tapestried nooks and crannies of the great church. There was enough candlelight to lend a small golden gleam to the mosaics on the floors and walls, but otherwise they might have been in a warehouse or hangar where a lot of dim, oddly-shaped objects were being stored.

  At last they reached a particular archway hung with an arras. The boy signaled to him to be quiet, then poked his head through for a brisk reconnaissance. Satisfied, he signaled to Paul that it was safe.

  The shadowy chapel was a good size, but after the vast, echoing spaces outside, it seemed quite intimate. The altar, which stood beneath a monumental statue of the Madonna, was almost completely covered in flowers and votive candles. In front of the altar another robed and hooded effigy, this one slightly smaller than lifesize, was silhouetted against the flickering candleglow.

  “Hello, Signorina,” the boy called softly. The smaller statue turned to look at them; Paul jumped.

  “Gypsy!” The figure made its way down from the altar steps. When she stood before them and threw back her hood, the top of her head barely reached Paul’s breastbone. She wore her white hair knotted close at the back of her neck, and her nose was as hooked and prominent as a bird’s beak; as far as Paul could tell, she could have been anything from sixty to ninety years old. “What good wind?” she asked, which seemed to be a Venetian greeting which required no answer, for she immediately added, “Who is your friend, Gypsy?”

  Paul introduced himself, using his first name only. The woman did not return the confidence, but smiled and said: “I have done my duty by the Cardinal for the day. Let us go and drink some wine—lots of water in yours, boy—and talk.”

  Paul remembered the nickname the boy had given her, and wondered what duties the Cardinal might have required of her. As if she guessed at his confusion, she explained as they stepped through a side door in the chapel and into a narrow corridor.

  “I take care of Cardinal Zen’s chapel, you see—his memorial chapel. It is not a thing a woman would normally be allowed to do, but I have . . . well, I have certain friends, important friends. But Gypsy and his cronies all enjoy the joke of calling me Cardinal Zen’s Mistress.”

  “It is not a joke, Signorina,” the boy said, puzzled. “That is what everyone calls you.”

  She smiled. A few moments and several turnings later, she opened a door off the corridor and ushered them into a private apartment. It was surprisingly large and comfortable, the walls draped with tapestries, the high ceiling intricately painted with religious imagery; embroidered cushions almost completely hid the low couches, and roses drooped in all the vases, loose petals just beginning to accumulate on the tabletops. Oil-burning lamps filled the room with soft yellow light. To Paul it seemed a surprisingly sumptuous, distinctly feminine retreat.

  Something of his reaction must have shown in his face. Cardinal Zen’s Mistress looked at him shrewdly, then disappeared into a side room and reappeared a few moments later with wine, a jug of water, and three goblets. She had removed her hooded robe, and now wore a simple, floor-length dress of dark green velvet.

  “Is there something I can call you, Signorina?” Paul asked.

  “Yes, I suppose repeated references to the late Cardinal will become tiring, won’t they? ‘Eleanora’ will do.” She poured wine for all of them, holding true to her promise to water the boy’s severely. “Tell me your news, Gypsy,” she said when she had finished. “Of all my young friends,” she explained to Paul, “he is the most careful observer. I have not known him long, but already I rely on him for the best gossip.”

  Although the boy attempted to honor her request, after he had stumbled through a few stories about duels and surprise engagements, and rumors about the activities of a senator or two, Eleanora raised a hand to quiet him.

  “You are distracted tonight. Tell me what is wrong, boy.”

  “He . . . he knows me.” Gally gestured toward Paul. “But I don’t remember him. Well, not really. And he talks about places I don’t remember either.”

  She turned her bright, hard-eyed gaze on Paul. “Ah. Who are you, then? Why do you think you know him?”

  “I knew him from somewhere else. Not Venice. But something is wrong with his memory.” Her eyes made him a little uncomfortable. “I mean him no harm. We were friends before.”

  “Gypsy,” she said without looking away from Paul, “go into the pantry and get another bottle of wine. I want the one with an ‘S’ painted on it—the letter that looks like a snake.” She sketched it on air.

  When the boy had slipped off into one of the apartment’s other rooms, Eleanora sighed and sat back on the divan. “You are a Citizen of some kind, aren’t you?”

  Paul wasn’t certain how she was using the term. “I might be.”

  “Please.” She raised her hand. “No foolishness. You are a real person. A guest in the simulation.”

  “I’m not certain I’m a guest,” he said slowly. “But I’m not just a piece of code, if that’s what you mean.”

  “And neither am I.” Her smile was hard and short. “Nor is the boy, if you come to it, but what else he is, I am not sure. Tell me why you have followed him. Be quick—I don’t want him to hear this, and although the bottle I asked for is on the bottom of the stack, it will not take him forever to find it.”

  Paul considered the risks. He wanted to know more about the Cardinal’s so-called Mistress, but he was in no position to bargain. She could be one of what Nandi had called the Grail Brotherhood—she might even be Jongleur himself in disguise for all he knew—but he had let himself be brought here and that could not be undone. If she was the master of this simulation, she could likely do what she wished with him, whether he opened to her or not. Ultimately, no matter how many ways he looked at it, everything came down to a gamble.

  But I’m not drifting any more, he reminded himself.

  “Very well,” he said out loud. “I’m putting myself in your hands.” He told her what he had told Nandi Paradivash, but in even more abbreviated form. He was interrupted once by Gally, covered in dust, wanting Eleanor to confirm that there really was a bottle with an S on it, and that she wouldn’t settle for one of the other perfectly nice ones with blue dots or yellow Xs instead. When the boy had grumbled back to his task, Paul told her of his encounter with Nandi; he didn’t divulge the Shiva-worshiper’s name, but told her everything the man had said about the Grail and the Circle.

  “. . . If I thought the boy was in no danger, I’d leave him alone,” Paul finished. “I don’t want to cause him any more misery. But there seem to be people after me—believe me, I have no idea why—and I think if they find him instead of me, they’ll . . . they’ll . . .”

  “They’ll hurt him until he tells them everything.” Her mouth curled in disgust. “Of course they will. I know these people, or at least their type.”

  “So you believe me?”

  “I believe that everything you say could be true. As to whether it is, I must consider. Where would you take the boy if he agreed to go with you?”

  “Ithaca—or at least that’s what the man from the Circle told me. That I would find the Wanderer’s house there.” Paul swirled the lees of wine in his cup. “And, how, if I may ask, do y
ou fit into all this?”

  Before she could answer, Gally reappeared, even more dusty than before, triumphantly bearing the snake-marked bottle.

  “Let’s go up to the dome,” Eleanora suggested suddenly. “It’s a bit of a climb, but a beautiful view.”

  “But I just brought you the wine!” Gally almost stuttered with indignation.

  “Then we will take it with us and toast the Stato da Mar, my dear Gypsy. I’m sure your friend Paul will not mind carrying the bottle.”

  If there had been an inconspicuous way to drop a large bottle of wine down a stone stairwell, Paul would have happily let it go somewhere around the hundredth step. He was glad that he had at least left his sword belt behind and did not have to keep the long scabbard clear of the walls while struggling up the narrow stairs. Gally was bounding ahead, frisky as a mountain goat, and even Eleanora, who had to be twice Paul’s age, seemed to find the climb comparatively easy. For Paul, it seemed like the cross-country runs at his childhood school—he was last and struggling, and no one bothered about him.

  Right, well, it’s her world, isn’t it? he thought grimly, ducking beneath ever-lower arches that gave his two small companions no problems. She’s probably got some kind of antigravity effect or some other cheat built into her sim—if that’s what these people call them.

  At the end of a vertical journey that seemed to take hours, Paul stumbled out onto a narrow walkway to find cold air on his face, the slope of the basilica’s Ascension Dome curving outward beneath him, and all of Venice—at the moment it seemed like all of Creation—glittering at his feet.

  “There isn’t a walkway here on the real one,” Eleanora whispered to him, then giggled as she patted the waist-high railing, a superannuated schoolgirl confessing a prank. “But it’s worth the sacrifice of a tiny bit of authenticity, isn’t it? Look at that!” She pointed at the boats tethered at their mooring posts along the front of the quay. “You can see why a French ambassador once called the Grand Canal ‘the most beautiful street in the world.’ And busy, too—the sea-empire of the Republic all begins here at San Marco. Where’s that bottle?” She worked the lead seal off the neck and took a healthy swallow. “Ships going to Alexandria, Naxos, Modon, Constantinople, Cyprus, coming back from Aleppo, Damascus, and Crete. Holds full of things you can’t even imagine—spices, silks, slaves, frankincense and Spanish oranges, furs, exotic animals, metalwork, porcelain, wine—wine!” She hoisted the bottle again. “A toast to the Most Serene Republic and her Stato da Mar!”

  When she had finished, she passed it to Paul who echoed the toast, not quite sharing her enthusiasm but caught up a little despite himself. He even handed the bottle to Gally and let the boy have a short drink, most of which he coughed and sneezed back up when he got some in his nose.

  “When the blind Doge Dandolo helped to carve up Byzantium,” Eleanora said, “he took for Venice’s share ‘one quarter and half of one quarter of the Roman Empire.’ You or I wouldn’t be so stuffy in the way we put it, perhaps, but think about it! Three-eighths of the greatest empire the world has ever known, controlled by a tiny nation of merchants and seafarers.”

  “Sounds like Britain,” Paul suggested.

  “Ah, but this is Venice.” Eleanora was swaying just a bit. “We are not like Britain, not at all. We know how to dress, we know how to fall in love . . . and we know how to cook.”

  For the sake of amicable relations, Paul swallowed his few vestiges of national pride, chasing them with more wine. Eleanora fell silent as they passed the bottle back and forth, glorying in the view. Even as midnight neared, the lanterns of hundreds of boats still bobbed on the Grand Canal like embers drifting on a breeze. Beyond the canal the islands were each afire with their own Carnival lights, but past them lay only the dark sea.

  As they were trooping back down the stairwell, Eleanora paused before one of the slit-windows which offered a view into the interior of the basilica.

  “There are quite a few people down there,” she said bemusedly. “Someone in the doge’s family must be attending a mass.”

  Paul was immediately on guard. He pressed his eye against the narrow aperture, but could see nothing except a few shadowy blobs disappearing into one of the chapels. “Is that normal?”

  “Oh, yes, quite. I just hadn’t heard about it, but sometimes I don’t.”

  After half a bottle or more of good Tuscan wine (and effects of same that seemed more than simply virtual), Paul now felt emboldened to ask, “What is your position here, exactly?”

  “Later.” She nodded toward Gally, several steps ahead of them. “When he is asleep.”

  They had only been back in her apartment for a few minutes before the boy, sitting on the floor with his back against the divan, began to nod. “Come, child,” Eleanora said. “You will sleep here tonight. Go on back to the room there. Stretch out on the bed.”

  “On your bed?” Despite his fatigue, he was clearly uncomfortable with the idea. “Oh, no, Signorina. Not for a person like me.”

  She sighed. “Then you can make yourself a nest in the corner. Take some blankets from the chest.” When he had stumbled off, she turned to Paul. “I wish I had coffee to offer you. Would you like some tea?”

  “Information would suit me better. I’ve told you my story. Who are you? Are you going to turn me over to the people who built all this?”

  “I scarcely know them.” She folded her legs underneath her on the divan with impressive flexibility. “And from what I do know, I would not give even my worst enemy into their hands.” She shook her head. “But you are right—it would be more fair if I tell you something of who I am.

  “I am a Venetian, for one thing. That is more important than what century I was born. I would rather live in this Venice, even knowing it to be a beautiful sham, than any other city in the so-called real world. If I could have built this myself, with my own money, then I would have done it in an instant. But I had no money. My father was a scholar. I grew up in the Dorsoduro and waited tables for tourists, idiot tourists. Then I met an older man, and he became my lover. He was very, very rich.”

  After the pause had lasted a while, Paul decided that he was supposed to ask something. “What did he do?”

  “Ah.” Eleanora smiled. “He was a very high chieftain of the Camorra. A well-known Neapolitan criminal organization, as they call it on the newsnets. Drugs, charge, prostitution, slavery, that is what their business was and is. And Tinto was one of their leaders.”

  “He doesn’t sound like a very nice person.”

  “Do not judge me!” she said sharply, then composed herself. “We make bargains. We all do. Mine was that I stayed ignorant as long as I could. Of course, after a while, you are in too deep to change things. When Tinto joined the Grail Brotherhood, and I saw what amazing things they could make, I had him build me this place. He did—it was nothing to him, with all his riches. For himself, he repopulated Pompeii and rebuilt much of the Roman empire, and also made himself some dreadful spies-and-speedboats holiday worlds as well. But what he really wanted was to live forever—to become Jupiter Ammon on a throne of brass, I suppose. He didn’t mind making a little gift for me. He was paying a hundred times what this Venice cost to the Grail Brotherhood, helping them build their immortality machines. Crime, despite the old saying, pays very well.”

  “Immortality machines,” Paul murmured. So Nandi had been right: these people wanted to become gods. The thought sickened him faintly, but it was exciting, too. Not to mention terrifying—what had he done, anyway, that people so powerful and so mad were searching for him?

  “But that is the funny thing, do you see?” Eleanora went on. “He did everything he could to keep himself alive until the treatment was perfected—he was old when he first discovered the Brotherhood. He had organ after organ replaced, machinery added to keep his parts functioning, fluids from a dozen laboratories pump
ed through his veins, radiation therapy, engineered repair-cells, everything. He was desperate to survive until the machines worked and his investment would pay off. Then one of the other Camorra warlords bribed someone on Tinto’s medical staff to introduce a special recombinant into his system—a handmade, delayed-action, killer virus. He died choking on his own blood. His body devoured itself. I had been his mistress for fifty years, but I can’t say that I cried.”

  She rose and poured herself more wine. “So here I am, like a guest staying on in a flat whose owner has died. The bills are paid, although I do not know for how long. The Brotherhood received billions from my lover, but he can no longer use their service, so they are ahead of the game. As far as the Grail people are concerned, his relatives can squabble over the estate forever. God! His last wife, those children of his—they are like a nest of serpents.”

  Paul absorbed this information as Eleanora added a little water to her wine. “Do you know anything about a man named Jongleur—Felix Jongleur?” he asked. “He seems to have it in for me.”

  “Then you are in trouble, my friend. He is the most powerful of the lot, and a man who makes my Tinto look like a mere schoolyard bully. They say he is approaching two hundred years old.”

  “That’s what the man from the Circle said, too.” He closed his eyes, overcome for a moment by the impossibility of his predicament. “But I don’t know why he’s after me. And I can’t get out of these simulations.” He opened his eyes again. “You said that Gally—Gypsy—is a real person too, but you also said you weren’t sure about him. What did you mean?”

  The Cardinal’s Mistress sucked on her lower lip, thinking. “It is hard to explain how I know he is a Citizen. I just do. After so many years spent living in a simulation, I can nearly always tell, I think. But although I had never seen Gypsy until recently, he has fully formed memories of being here.”

  Paul frowned, thinking. “Then how can you be sure that he isn’t from here—that is, that he’s not a Puppet you just hadn’t encountered yet? Is there a list of Citizens and Puppets?”