River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  But Puppets can’t invent anything, can they? At least, Orlando didn’t think that was possible. Surely only things that were alive could make up stories. . . .

  A cool breeze was sweeping off the river and across the Kitchen, and the brisk touch of it on his face woke Orlando. Fredericks was sitting up, staring at the fire, which had burned down to a pile of coals that rippled with tiny, dying flames. Someone—Orlando at first thought it was his friend—was whispering.

  “. . . You’re going to die here . . .”

  He sat up. A face moved in the embers—the cartoon devil they had seen before in the potbellied stove. As it leered and winked, Fredericks watched it with a solemnity that made Orlando nervous.

  “You should never have come to this place,” the demon declared, chuckling unwholesomely. “It will be the end of you. . . .”

  “Fredericks?” Orlando moved forward and Shook his friend by the shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  “Orlando?” Fredericks shook his head as though he had been napping. “Yeah, everything’s chizz, I guess.”

  “You shouldn’t be listening to that fen.” Orlando poked angrily at the coals with a stick. The image deformed for a moment, then popped back into shape and laughed at him.

  “That?” Fredericks shrugged. “Problem not. It’s like watching some old flick—it just goes on and on, saying the same things. I wasn’t even paying attention.”

  The devil, as though it had heard and understood this, scowled fiercely and dissolved back into the flames with a bold hissing laugh that nevertheless sounded slightly disappointed. For some moments, the only noise was the crackle of the exorcised campfire.

  “That thing in the freezer,” Fredericks said at last. “After the Sleeping Beauty. That . . . other thing. It was real, wasn’t it?”

  Orlando did not have to ask what his friend was talking about. “Yeah. I guess so. I don’t know what it was, exactly . . .”

  “But it was real.” Fredericks rubbed his eyes. “It’s . . . it’s too far scanny, Orlando. How did we get into this? What’s going on? That thing—that was the real devil, I think. Like, locking medieval. The actual factual.”

  “I don’t know.” Orlando felt it again, but at a distance now. Something so bizarre, so total, could only be summoned up in memory as a dim copy. “It felt like it was everywhere. More like God.”

  “But, see, I never understood before.” Fredericks turned, his thin Pithlit-face almost sick with distraction. “I mean, even when I found out we were stuck here . . . even when I went offline, and it . . . burned like that . . .” Fredericks searched for the words. “I didn’t think there was anything like that thing, not anywhere, not in RL or VR or anywhere. That was evil. Like something from the Middle Country, but for real!”

  The experience had felt more complicated than that to him, but Orlando didn’t want to argue. He knew what Fredericks was talking about—a part of him, too, had continued to think of this all as some game. Now he knew to the very marrow of his bones that something existed that was more frightening than he could have ever imagined—that the fear it created was worse even than his terror of death.

  “Yeah. It was . . .” There weren’t really words. “It was the most major thing ever,” he said finally. “I thought my heart was going to explode.”

  Silence fell again, except for the fire noises and the tortoise’s penny-whistle snores.

  “I don’t think we’re going to get out of this, Orlando. Something’s gone utterly major wrong. I want to go home—I really, really do.”

  Orlando looked at his friend, doing his or her best not to cry, and suddenly, unexpectedly, felt something open up inside him. It was as though a door, long shut, its hinges gone rusty with disuse, had suddenly been kicked wide. What lay on the other side wasn’t a bright spring day, but it wasn’t darkness either. It was just . . . something else. The door had opened inside him—in his heart, he supposed—and beyond that door the rest of his life, however long or short, was waiting.

  It was all quite stunning, and for an extended moment he thought he might faint, or fall over. When he was himself again, he felt compelled to say: “I’ll get you out of this somehow. I swear, Sam—do you hear me? I promise that I’ll get you home.”

  Fredericks turned, head cocked to one side, and surveyed him. “Is that some kind of boy-girl thing, Gardiner?”

  Orlando laughed, although it hurt a little, too. “No,” he said, and it was the truth, as far as he could tell. “I don’t think so. It’s a friend thing.”

  They lay back down to sleep, side by side. By the sound of his breath, Fredericks seemed to fall away quickly, but Orlando lay for a long time looking up into the dark recesses of the Kitchen’s ceiling, wishing there were stars.

  They had only been on the river for an hour again when Strike Anywhere nosed the canoe toward shore. He clambered out with his papoose in his arms, and waved for the tortoise to follow him, but when Orlando and Fredericks began to do the same, he shook his head.

  “No. You take canoe.” He pointed downstream. “End of river that way. Very close.”

  “But what will you do?” Orlando looked from the Indian to the deceptively placid river, narrow here and meandering through a grove of bottle brushes. “Your home . . . your wife . . .”

  The chief shook his head again. “I make new canoe to go back. You take this one. Gift from me, squaw, and papoose.”

  Fredericks and Orlando thanked their benefactor. They changed positions, and Orlando took up the paddle. The tortoise, in an excess of emotion, had steamed his spectacles and was trying to rub them clear with his thumbs. Ultimately, Orlando decided, you had to treat them all as people, whether they were or not.

  “Good-bye,” he said. “It was nice to know you.”

  “Be careful, lads.” The tortoise was sniffing a bit. “If you get into difficulty, remember Simkin Soapdish, and do what’s right.”

  “Do right for your people, your tribe,” Strike Anywhere elaborated. He held up Little Spark; the baby, as ever, looked serious. “Be brave,” the chief added.

  Orlando worked the boat out into the current and they began to drift downstream. “Thank you!” he shouted.

  The tortoise had found its handkerchief and was trying to wave it and use it to wipe its glasses at the same time. “I will pray to the Shoppers for your safety,” he called, then was overcome by another wave of snuffling sobs. The Chief, no emotion visible on his broad red face, watched them until a bend of the river and a stand of bristling bottle brushes blocked their view.

  Fredericks seemed content to watch the spiky forest drift past. Orlando paddled lazily, letting the river do most of the work. He was trying to make sense out of all the different things in his head, and it wasn’t easy. Oddly, the chief’s words were stuck in his mind.

  “Do right for your people, your tribe.” That was all well and good if you were a cartoon Indian, but what the hell was Orlando’s tribe? Americans? Kids with weird medical problems? Was it his family, Conrad and Vivien, who were now so inexplicably far beyond his reach? Or his few friends, one of whom was stuck in this scan factory with him? He had no idea what the Indian’s words meant, if they meant anything, but somehow the exhortation seemed to resonate with the strange feeling of a new life begun that he had experienced the night before, although he could not yet understand why.

  He shook his head in frustration and began to paddle a little harder.

  They came upon it at the end of the forest—a wall that rose before them, high as the sky, a vast vertical field of slightly faded flowers. The wallpaper was peeling in places, and in the middle, skyscraper-high above their heads, hung a framed picture of people in straw hats boating on a river, the colors dim in the twilight. The river itself narrowed into a thin stream along the linoleum and vanished into a hole in the baseboard.

  “Wha
t’s on the other side, you think?” Fredericks asked loudly. The hole in the baseboard was closer every moment, looming now like a highway tunnel. The wall itself had begun to shimmer, as though a heat haze were rising from the Kitchen river’s surface.

  “Don’t know!” Orlando found he was shouting, too. The canoe was moving faster now, the water noises growing more clamorous by the instant, rapidly becoming a roar in his ears. “But we’re going to find out!”

  The current snatched at them and yanked them forward, sweeping them into the opening. The sudden darkness began to spark gas-ring blue.

  “We’re going too fast!” Fredericks called. Orlando, who had put down the paddle and was clutching the sides of the canoe for dear life, did not need to be told. The bursts of blue light whirled past like tracer fire out of an air warfare game. Daylight vanished, leaving only blackness spattered but not illuminated by the angry sparks. Then the nose of the canoe tipped downward, and blue fire streamed past them in a continuous, boiling cloud as they began to drop. Orlando struggled for breath.

  The splash was nowhere near as large as he expected. At the last moment, something seemed to ease their fall and slide them safely onto the river, which was horizontal again. The sparks were fading, and now they could see an irregular opening through which streamed bright, red-golden light. Orlando squinted against the glare, trying to make out what lay before them.

  Fredericks, looking back the way they had come, went goggle-eyed. “Orlando!” he cried. His voice was almost inaudible—the rush and tumble of the river had taken on an additional sound, a chorus of chanting voices that boomed and echoed, the words incomprehensible in the tumult. “Orlando!” shouted Fredericks, “Look!”

  He turned and looked over his shoulder. Fading rapidly into the darkness of the massive cavern behind them, but unmistakable, was a gigantic figure a hundred times their size. It glowed with a blue light of its own, but the river pouring out of the jar it held sparkled even brighter. The giant had the rounded breasts and hips of a woman, but wore a stiff beard on its chin, and was muscled like a man. Above the great head nodded a crown of lotus flowers. For a moment the giant seemed to see them, and the huge, black-painted eyes blinked once, but then they were swept out of the cavern into the sunlight, and there was nothing visible behind them but the red stone of a mountain and the crevice out of which the river flowed into the hazy morning.

  Orlando turned to face downriver. His pilfered pirate clothes had vanished. Their boat had changed too, becoming something wider and flatter, and their paddle was now a crude bargepole, but he barely noticed. Before them, the river threaded away through an immensity of desert. Except for mountains faint and gray-blue in the distance on either side, only a few lonely palm trees shimmering in the heat broke the plane of the horizon. The morning sun, still low, was already a blazing white disk that dominated the wide, cloudless sky.

  Sweat was already beginning to bead on the Thargor sim’s dark skin. Fredericks turned to him, the look on the thief’s face one that clearly presaged another statement of the incredibly obvious.

  “If you tell me it’s a desert,” Orlando warned him, “I’m going to have to kill you.”

  “Priam’s walls,” Orlando said, breaking a long silence. “That Sleeping Beauty said we’d find Renie and the others at ‘sunset on Priam’s walls.’ Whatever that means.”

  “It’s weird major not to be able to look something up on the net.” Fredericks leaned over the boat’s low side to trail fingers in the slow-moving water. “Not being able to get any information.”

  “Yeah. I miss Beezle.”

  They had been drifting for the better part of a day. The great red desert had remained changeless on either side, and only the occasional palm tree sliding past on the riverbank demonstrated that they were moving downstream. The long steering pole was useful when they occasionally drifted into the shallows and lodged on an invisible spit of sand, but was no use whatsoever when it came to increasing their speed. They had discovered what appeared to be a sail and two sections of a mast lying rolled in the boat’s flat bottom beneath their feet, but they were using the sailcloth as a makeshift shelter against the blazing sun, and were not in any hurry to give up its shade for the dubious benefit of sailpower, since the day was as windless as it was stiflingly hot.

  “So what is it with you and that bug, anyway?” Fredericks asked lazily. “How come you don’t have one of the newer agents?”

  “I don’t know. We get along.” Orlando frowned. “It’s not like I have so many other friends or anything.”

  Fredericks looked up quickly. “Sorry.”

  “Problem not. How about you?”

  “How about me what?” The tone was slightly suspicious.

  “Do you use a personified agent on your system? You never mentioned one.”

  “Nah.” The thief’s fingers dipped back into the water. “I think I had one, once. It was one of those Miz pSoozi things—you remember those? My father thought it was embarrassing, though. He gave me some professional daemon gear when I turned twelve and Miz pSoozi got sixed.”

  Orlando wiped sweat off his face and flicked it into the dark green waters. “What’s your dad like? You never really told me.”

  “I don’t know. Like a dad. He’s really big. And he thinks everyone should be like him and never be wrong. He always says, ‘Sam, I don’t care what you do, as long as you do it well.’ But I always wonder, I mean, what if I want to be majorly bad at something? Everybody can’t be good at things, can they?”

  “How about your mom?”

  “Nervous, kind of. She’s always worried things will go wrong.” Fredericks snatched at a shining fish, which dove beneath his grasp. “How about your parents? Are they normal or what?”

  “Mostly. They don’t like it that I’m sick. They’re not mean or anything—they try really hard. But it makes them utterly unhappy. My father hardly even talks anymore. Like he might blow up or start crying if he wasn’t careful.”

  Fredericks sat up. “Is there . . . isn’t there anything they can do?” he asked shyly. “About that disease you have?”

  Orlando shook his head. For the moment, the edge of his bitterness was gone. “No. You wouldn’t believe how many things they’ve tried already. You haven’t had fun until you’ve had cellular therapy—I couldn’t even get out of bed for about two months. Felt like one of those S&M simworlds. Like someone was shooting hot rivets into my joints.”

  “Oh, Orlando! That’s horrible.”

  He shrugged. Fredericks was staring at him, his expression suspiciously close to pity, so Orlando turned away.

  “So where do you think we are now?” Fredericks asked at last. “And what do we do?”

  Orlando thought this practical question might be a clumsy attempt to distract him, but he had enough problems dealing with his own illness without expecting everyone else to be able to do it perfectly. “Where we are, you can guess as good as I can. But we have to find this Priam’s Walls place—we need to find the others. I have to tell them what the Brotherhood is trying to do.”

  “Do you think they really can?” Fredericks asked. “Live forever? Isn’t that, like, scientifically impossible or something?”

  “Don’t tell me, tell them.” Orlando stood and pushed the boat, which had been slowing, out into a deeper part of the channel. “Fen-fen, I’m sick of water. I swear, I’d be happy if I never saw another river.”

  A faint thump and grumble of thunder rolled out of the cloudless, pale blue sky; it murmured echoingly along the sides of the distant mountains before the valley grew quiet again.

  Orlando had his stars this time, but they did not give him much joy.

  After the long sunset, during which the waters of the river had first turned a molten gold, then darkened to black as the shadow of the western mountains crept across them, they had poled to the sand
y bank and dragged the boat onto the shore, making camp in the symbolic if not actual shelter of a small stand of palms. With the sun gone the desert soon grew cold. Fredericks, wrapped in half the stiff sailcloth, had managed to fall asleep fairly quickly. Orlando had not been so lucky.

  He lay staring upward, half-convinced he could see movement in the black sky, ripples passing through the pinpoint stars as though they were sequins on the costume of a dancer engaged in some incomprehensibly langorous movement, but he was unable to concentrate, and was instead being irritated and engaged by his own body. The distractions of daylight gone, he could feel his heart beating in his chest, and it seemed to him to be beating too swiftly. He was short of breath, too, as far as he could tell between bouts of shivering when the breeze freshened.

  I don’t have that much time left, he thought, for perhaps the dozenth time since the sun had gone down. He could feel his own fragility quite distinctly, his slow-slipping grasp on health. Beneath the excitement of this strange place, these unexpected adventures, his physical self was growing ever wearier. The real me is in a hospital somewhere—and I wouldn’t be getting any stronger even if I wasn’t. I might even be in a coma by now, like Renie’s brother. And if they decide to pull my connection, like they did with Fredericks . . .