River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  When he wakened from a brief nap, sweaty and with his head still throbbing, Orlando was glad to see that Upaut’s strange mood had passed. Their prisoner was poling the barge down the middle of the Nile, which had swelled here until both banks were quite far away. If the water was wider, though, the sandy face of the desert had not changed, still mile after mile of rusty sand stretching away into the distance. Only a jumble of fallen stones along the river bank broke the monotony, the vast but long-abandoned remains of some structure that Orlando did not want to ask about, for fear of provoking more of Upaut’s tedious stories.

  “Yes, as you see, the sands are spreading,” the wolf god said. “It has been a dreadful time, since Set was killed by Osiris. The season of Inundation comes, and there is not enough water to pverflow the banks and darken the fields. Going Forth comes, but in that season the ground is dry and the seeds are uncovered by hot winds. Harvest season comes, but the earth is barren. Then, when Inundation returns, Hapi’s waters remain low and sullen. The desert, the Red Lands, have grown. The Black Land itself is threatened, and even Osiris in his great house at Abydos must be fearful.”

  Orlando wondered who this Osiris was, whether he was the human master of this place, maybe even one of the Grail Brotherhood. “If the drought’s so bad, why doesn’t the Lord of the Two Lands, or whatever you called him, do something about it?”

  Upaut looked around nervously, as though watchers might be hovering overhead in the flat blue sky. All Orlando saw was a vulture, spiralling lazily in the superheated air on the far side of the river. “It is said that Set’s curse defies him. That is why he took back the Lord of the Red Land’s body, so that he could threaten Set with the loss of it, which would leave his ka floating in the final, forever darkness.” Upaut shuddered, and the great pink tongue moistened the black lips. “But the curse of Set has not abated, and all the lands suffer.”

  Fredericks had been stirring, and now sat up. He looked around and made a sour face. “Sand, sand, sand. This locks. I mean, utterly.”

  Orlando smiled. In an upside-down universe, Fredericks’ grumpiness was something to depend on.

  “I’m serious, Orlando. If something doesn’t happen, I’m going to scan out from all this sun.”

  “Perhaps,” said Upaut, who had not had the benefit of shelter or a nap and might have been a little touchy, “Ra, in his great wisdom, is trying to speak to you. You should open your heart.”

  “Ra is speaking to you,” Fredericks snapped. “He’s telling you to shut up and steer the boat.”

  Upaut gave him an inscrutable look, but fell silent.

  Orlando wiped sweat from his forehead and wondered what his real body was doing with this simworld information. I hope the doctors don’t think it’s a fever. Then they’ll just fill me full of more contrabiotics. But I suppose the extra fluids they’ll give me couldn’t hurt. It was strange to think he even had another body. He had been living in this particular Thargor-sim for so long now, his other existence had begun to seem like the pretense.

  “What if we swim a little?” he suggested to Fredericks. “It would cool us off.”

  Upaut looked at him as though he had gone completely mad. “But the favorite food of Nile crocodiles is godflesh.”

  “Ah,” said Orlando. “Then I guess we won’t swim.”

  In the night, in the dark, he did not realize at first where he was, nor even quite what he was. The blackness had taken on dim form, a shape of ancient desolation, massive columns tumbled in the sands, huge granite blocks lying scattered like dice. The stars in the night sky were unnaturally bright, and gave the uppermost faces of the stone a sheen like silver.

  “. . . I’m still trying,” a voice was saying. “Can’t you hear me? Tell me you can hear me.” The tones were familiar, and the urgency made Orlando curious, but he had to fight a great lethargy before he could move farther into the ruins. It came to him, as he floated forward between the flat or rounded faces of the intricately carved, fallen stones, that he was dreaming.

  “Boss? Just say something. I’ll pick it up.” The voice was faint, but since it was the only noise in the great emptiness of the night, he could hear it clearly, as though it whispered into his ear. “Boss?”

  An obelisk lay on its side before him, all but a portion of its uppermost face and one sharply angled edge buried in sand. A carving of a beetle drew his attention: of all the thousands of images cut into the black granite obelisk, it alone gleamed, as though animated by starlight, and it alone moved.

  “I’m running outta time.” The carving squirmed as though trying to escape its stone prison. He felt himself drawing near, his memory faintly pricked. “If you can hear me, just let me know. Please, boss!”

  “What is it?” he asked. “Who are you?”

  “It’s you! But I can’t make out what you’re saying. This talking-in-your-ear bit ain’t working—I’m going to stick a probe up against your earbone, boss. No offense meant.”

  The little gleaming scarab moved convulsively on the obelisk. When it spoke again, he could hear it much more clearly. “Say something,” it directed him.

  “Who are you?”

  “Beezle! Your agent—don’t you remember? I know, you’re pretty much asleep, boss, so this must be hard for you to grasp. Just listen, ‘cuz I don’t want you to wake up, neither. You’re dreaming, see, but that’s the only time I can reach you. There’s a certain REM frequency you hit on the way up and the way down, and it kinda works like a carrier wave. But it’s hard to figure, and sometimes there are people here in your hospital room, so then I have to lay low.” The shimmering beetle was motionless on the obelisk now, as though concentrating. “So just listen for a minute, okay? On your direction, I dumped everything off your system and hid it.”

  He was beginning to make a little sense of what the thing was saying, and although he did not think of himself as specifically Orlando Gardiner, he now knew more or less who he was and who this strange-sounding creature was. But it was hard to engage fully with what the thing was telling him. “I told you to do that?”

  “Yes, you did! Now, shut up, boss, if you don’t mind me saying it. Let me get on with what I gotta tell ya.

  “I can only reach you like this at certain times, and you’ve been sick again, so it’s been even harder. Your temperature’s really high, boss. The doctors and your family are worried. So take care of yourself, if you can, okay? I’ve checked out this Atasco guy who got sixed in Colombia, like you asked me, and I tried to get to his system, but it’s really, really weird, boss—all locked up, security everywhere, but not the kind you’d expect. Hard to explain, I’ll give you a full report if you want.” It paused for a moment; when Orlando did not speak, it hurried on. “He was a member of something called the Grail Brotherhood, according to the information I’ve searched. Lot of weird little things in the news about them right now, rumors and like that. Lot of stuff about Atasco too, ‘cuz he’s dead.

  “But I need you to tell me if I’m going down the right alleys, boss. There’s all kinds of information on the nets about TreeHouse now, too—rumors, a little hard news, everything. Some people died, some kids are in comas. Is this the kind of thing you want me to do? I can’t do anything but audit-mode right now, no touching, just research. If you want me to be more active, tell me to do it—it’s gotta be an order, boss. I can’t do anything else unless you tell me to . . .”

  Orlando tried to gather his thoughts, which were drifting like seaweed in a deep current. The ruins seemed to have shifted, edging closer, so that stone now loomed over him on every side. “Do it,” he said at last. He couldn’t remember the creature’s name. “Beetle. Do it. Everything.” He mused for a moment longer, trying to put words to the thoughts that were still swirling, still without coherence. “Come. Come and find me.” He tried to think of where he was, but could not. A place? “Egypt,” he said at last, altho
ugh he knew that did not sound right. “I am . . .” For a moment it was almost there, a word, a thought . . . another land? It slipped free and was gone. “Egypt,” he said again. “Online.”

  “I’ll do my best,” the silvery shape told him. The glow began to fade. “I’ll try to get to you . . .”

  The voice dwindled. The starlight dimmed. Orlando felt his name come back to him, clear now, but somehow unimportant. A moment later he realized he had been dreaming, and as he tore through the last gauzy veils of sleep, he struggled to remember what he had dreamed about.

  Beezle . . . he faintly remembered. In the ruins. Said he was looking for me—didn’t he?

  It was already hard to summon up the details. He opened his eyes to find the broken stones in whose circumference they had made camp still around him, but instead of the silvery starshine of his dreams, they were touched by a faint pink glow—the first light of dawn. A rustling noise nearby reminded him that the wolf god Upaut had been terribly restless during the first part of the night; his mumbling had kept Orlando from falling asleep for a long time . . .

  A shadow abruptly loomed over him, dark against the dark sky. Yellow eyes burned like lamps. Something cool and sharp touched Orlando’s throat—Thargor’s sword.

  “The greatest of all spoke to it.” Upaut’s voice, so mild and reasonable as they had made camp, had regained the triumphal tone of his self-hymn. “Spoke through you as you slept, because he knew Upaut was listening. He spoke to it . . . to . . . to me.” The wolf god uttered the personal pronoun with trembling pleasure. “Me! Upaut! And Ra spoke forth in his scarab-form, Khepera, Beetle-of-the-Morning! ‘Do everything,’ he said. ‘Come and find me,’ were his words to faithful Upaut. ‘I am Egypt,’ he said to me, me, me!”

  The wolf god did a strange dance, kicking up his long legs like a stick insect on a griddle, but kept the point of the sword near Orlando’s face.

  “My time of exile is over,” Upaut crowed. “And now I will go to Ra’s temple, and he will give back to me my birthright! My enemies will be brought low, they will rub their faces in the dust and make great lamentation. Again I shall be Khenti Amenti, He Who Rules the West!”

  The blade was waving uncomfortably close to his face; Orlando pushed himself back a few inches. Beside him, Fredericks had just awakened, and was lying beside him in wide-eyed alarm. “What about us?” Orlando asked.

  “Ah, yes.” Upaut nodded gravely. “You have served as the Mouth of Ra. I will not shame myself by injuring his messenger. You may both live.”

  Relief turned to indignation. “What about your promise?” Orlando demanded. “You swore on your godhood!”

  “I promised not to harm you. I have not. I promised to guide you. I have, if only for a short time.” Upaut turned on his heels and strutted down to the beach, the early light picking him out, slender as a lotus-stalk against the dark river. Orlando and Fredericks watched helplessly as the wolf god pushed their boat out into the shallows and climbed in. When he had poled it out into the current, he turned to look back at the bank. “If you come before me when I am again master of the West,” he shouted to them, “I will be merciful. I will grant your souls honor!”

  As the boat began to drift away, the wolf god threw back his head and began to bay out another hymn to his own godliness.

  Orlando clutched his head in his hands. “Oh, God. We’re locked, now.”

  “I told you we should have killed him.” Fredericks looked more closely at Orlando and saw his misery. “Hey, it’s not that bad.” He patted his friend’s shoulder. “We’ll just make another boat. There are palm trees and stuff like that.”

  “And cut them down with what? Chop them up how?” Orlando jerked away from Fredericks’ attempts to soothe him. “He took my sword, remember?”

  “Oh.” Fredericks fell silent for a moment. The sun was clearing the eastern mountains now, the sands beginning to burn red. “How far do you think we have to walk before we get to another whatever you call those things . . . another gate?”

  “Through a thousand miles of desert,” said Orlando bitterly. It wasn’t, he felt sure, much of an exaggeration. The shocked expression on his friend’s face didn’t make him feel the least bit better.

  CHAPTER 26

  Waiting for the Dreamtime

  * * *

  NETFEED/NEWS: “Data Terrorists” Broadcast Manifesto

  (visual: three human figures sitting on pile of toys)

  VO: At noon yesterday, GMT, a brief and bizarre manifesto broke into most commercial net channels, from a group calling itself the Dada Retrieval Collective.

  (visual: trio wearing animated Pantalona Peachpit masks)

  DRC 1: “The sea squirt is a marine animal that starts out with a rudimentary brain, but once it stops moving, affixes itself to a rock, and begins simply to filter seawater, it doesn’t need its brain anymore, so it digests it.”

  DRC 2: “We have formed the Sea Squirt Squad to commemorate, protest, and celebrate this fact. We will dedicating ourselves to the destruction of telecommunication wherever possible.”

  DRC 3: “No dupping. S3 is real. We’re going to kill the net. You’ll thank us someday.”

  * * *

  STAN Chan stuck his head around the partition. “Got something for you. Woman out at UNSW with the rather fabulous name of Victoria Jigalong. She’s supposed to be first-rate, top of the field, like that. I sent you the name and number.”

  “So why are you standing there, bouncing around like a jack-in-the-box?”

  “Because I wanted to see the shining look of gratitude on your real, live face. I’m going to get lunch—coming?”

  “No, thanks, I’m having a no-lunch day. Girl has to watch her figure, you know.”

  “And you call me old-fashioned.” He disappeared; she heard him joking with a couple of the other detectives on his way out.

  Calliope Skouros called up Stan’s memo and settled back to read through it, wondering if discipline could be relaxed enough to allow for the packet of biscuits stashed in the bottom drawer. After all, starving yourself was not the way to diet properly. On the other hand, if she wanted to keep her already broad-shouldered, wide-hipped figure in what she considered reasonable shape, she had little margin for indulgence.

  She scowled and left the biscuits where they were. It was all about “looking like a police officer,” wasn’t it? Which, if you were a man, could include a gut and a fat behind. But if you were a woman fighting for promotion, and queer to boot. . . .

  Chan’s hasty dossier on Jigalong did make her sound like a good source. She had several degrees in Aboriginal Folklore and Comparative Anthropology, and had served on more commissions than Calliope could imagine without a shudder. She also seemed to have involved herself with quite a few specifically woman-oriented causes, which seemed like it might be a good sign.

  The call to the University of New South Wales, after an endless series of facades, eventually presented her with the Anthropology Department associate. He had been offline for a few moments when the picture suddenly changed.

  Calliope’s first impression of Professor Jigalong was that she was very, very dark-skinned, almost literally black, so that until she surreptitiously adjusted the contrast of her screen, there was only a mask with unnervingly white eyes in the center of the display. The woman’s head was shaved, and she wore vast hoop earrings and a necklace of chunky stone beads.

  “What do you want, Officer?” Jigalong’s voice was smoky and deep, her entire presence quite overwhelming, even over telecom lines. All Calliope’s thoughts of appealing to sisterhood had evaporated. The woman was . . . well, witchy.

  In her best professional manner, and trying to show proper respect (for some reason she thought that might be an issue) Detective Skouros introduced herself and quickly explained that she was looking for information on the Woolagaroo and
any related myths.

  “There are many collections of myths suitable for beginners,” the professor replied, cool as a misty morning. “They are available in several media. I’ll be happy to have someone send you a list.”

  “I’ve probably seen most of them. I’m looking for something a little deeper.”

  The woman’s eyebrow rose. “May I ask why?”

  “It’s a murder investigation. I think there’s a possibility that our killer may have been influenced by Aboriginal myths.”

  “In fact, you think the murderer is probably a black man, don’t you?” The professor’s tone remained flat and unbending. “It has not occurred to you that he might be a white man imitating something he has seen or heard or read about.”

  Calliope felt a flare of irritation. “First off, Professor, I’m not positive that the killer is a he at all. But even if it is a man, I don’t care what color he is, except so far as it helps us catch him.” She was angrier than she’d realized at first. Not only didn’t this woman want to acknowledge sisterhood, she saw Calliope as just another white cop. “In fact, the most important thing here is the poor girl he killed, who happens to have been Aboriginal herself—a Tiwi—not that it makes her any more or less valuable. Or any less dead.”

  Victoria Jigalong sat silently for a moment. “I apologize for my remark.” She didn’t sound exactly sorry, but Calliope had her doubts this woman could manage such a thing. “Why do you think this has something to do with native myths?”

  Calliope explained the condition of the body, and the remark the reverend’s wife had made.

  “Mutilations of the eye are not uncommon in other countries, in other cultures,” the professor said. “Places where they have never heard of the Woolagaroo myth.”

  “I realize the Aboriginal folklore angle is only a possibility. But someone killed Polly Merapanui, and someone did that to her, so I’m going to follow up any lead I have.”