River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  “Paul.” The voice in his ear was soft as feathered flight, but his heart thumped as though it had shouted.

  “Is that you?” His own voice made no sound outside his head, or he no longer had the ears to hear himself speak.

  Something was beside him in the dark. He could sense it, although he did not know how. He could feel it, a swift-hearted, tenuous presence.

  “Paul, you must come back to us. You must come back to me.”

  And as though she had never left his dreams, but had only vanished from his waking mind, he could see her now in memory, could summon up the image of her absurd but beautiful winged form, her sad eyes. She had crouched, trapped in that golden cage, while he had stood helplessly on the other side of the bars. He had left her to that terrible grinding thing, the Old Man.

  “Who are you?”

  Her presence grew a little stronger, a barely-felt vibration of impatience. “I am no one, Paul. I don’t know who I am—don’t care anymore. But I know that I need you, that you must come.”

  “Come where? You said ‘come to us.’ To whom?”

  “You ask too many questions.” It was spoken sadly, not angrily. “I do not have the answers you wish. But I know what I know. If you come to me, then we will both know.”

  “Are you Vaala? Are you the same woman I met?”

  Again the impatience. “These things are unimportant. It is so hard for me to be here, Paul—so hard! Listen! Listen, and I will tell you everything I know. There is a place, a black mountain, that reaches to the sky—that covers up the stars. You must find it. That is where all your answers are.”

  “How? How do I get there?”

  “I don’t know.” A pause. “But I might know, if you can find me.”

  Something was interfering with his concentration, a vague but insistent pain, a sense of pressure that Paul could not ignore. The dream was collapsing from its own weight. As he felt it beginning to fall away, he struggled to cling to her, that voice in the emptiness.

  “Find you? What does that mean?”

  “You must come to me . . . to us. . . .” She was growing faint now, barely a presence at all, a whisper traveling down a long corridor.

  “Don’t leave me! How do I find you?” The vague discomfort was growing sharper, commanding his attention. “Who are you?”

  From an incomprehensible distance, a murmur: “I am . . . a shattered mirror. . . .”

  He sat up, his throat tight, a pain like a knifepoint of fire in his belly. She was gone again! His link to sanity—but how could someone or something so clearly mad lead him back to reality? Or did he only dream. . . ?

  The pain grew sharper. His eyes adjusted to the darkness, to the glow of dim coals, and he saw the shapeless shadow crouched over him. Some hard, sharp thing was pressed against his stomach. Paul dropped his hand and felt the cold stone spearhead buried deep in his fur robe, a warm slickness of blood already matting the hairs. If it pressed in an inch farther, it would pierce through to his guts.

  Birdcatcher leaned close, sour meat on his breath. The spearpoint jabbed a little deeper.

  “You are my blood enemy, Riverghost. I will send you back to the Land of the Dead.”

  First:

  THE SECRET RIVER

  . . . For here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still-tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.

  —Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  CHAPTER 1

  Deep Waters

  * * *

  NETFEED/NEWS: Schoolkids Need Waiver To Avoid Helmet

  (visual: children trying on helmets)

  VO: Children in Pine Station, a suburban town in Arkansas, must either wear a safety helmet during their entire school day or their parents must sign a waiver saying they will not sue for damages should their child be injured. (visual: Edlington Gwa Choi, Pine Station School Dist. Superintendent)

  GWA CHOI: “It’s quite simple. We can’t afford the coverage any more. They make nice, comfortable helmets now—the kids will hardly even notice they’ve got them on. We’ve done tests. And if they don’t want them, that’s okay too, as long as their folks take responsibility. . . .”

  * * *

  A beetle the size of a panel truck was bumping slowly along the shoreline, the baboon beside her was singing, and Renie was dying for a cigarette.

  “And we go down,”

  !Xabbu chanted in an almost tuneless voice,

  “Down to the water.

  Ah!

  Where the fish are hiding,

  Hiding and laughing . . .”

  “What’s that?” Renie watched the beetle hunch across the uneven stones of the beach with the mindless forward drive of one of those drone robots working to tame the surfaces of Mars and the moon. “That song you’re singing.”

  “My uncle used to sing it. It helped him be patient while waiting for fish to pass over the rock dam so we could catch them.” !Xabbu scratched at his baboon pelt in a fastidious manner far more human than simian.

  “Ah.” Renie frowned. She was having trouble concentrating, and for once even !Xabbu’s stories about his childhood in the Okavango Delta did not interest her.

  If someone had told her that she would be transported to what was for all purposes a magical land, where history could be rewritten at a whim, or people could suddenly be shrunk to the size of poppy seeds, but that at least for this moment, her most pressing concern would have been the absence of cigarettes, she would have thought them mad. But it had been two harrowing days since she had smoked her last, and the momentary leisure of floating in midstream on a huge leaf that had once been a boat had finally given her a chance to notice what she was missing.

  She pushed away from the leaf’s curling edge. Better to do something, anything, than stand around obsessing like a chargehead with a fused ‘can. And it was not as though everything was under control, she reflected. In fact, from the moment they had reached Atasco’s virtual golden city, things had gone pretty damn poorly.

  Across the expanse of water, the beetle had clambered up from the beach and was disappearing into a sea of grass stems, each as tall as the palm trees back home. She walked carefully toward the center of the leaf, leaving !Xabbu to sing his quiet fish-catching song and watch the now empty beach.

  Sweet William’s stage-vampire silhouette stood at the leaf’s farthest edge, watching the opposite and more distant shoreline, but the others sat in the center with their backs against the huge center vein, a makeshift shelter of skin torn from the leaf’s outer edge draped over their heads to protect them from the strong sun.

  “How is he?” Renie asked Fredericks. The young man in quasi-medieval garb was still nursing his sick friend Orlando. Even limp in slumber, Orlando’s muscular sim body was a poor indicator of the frail child who animated it.

  “He’s breathing better, I think.” Fredericks said it with real emphasis, enough so that Renie instantly doubted him. She looked down at the curled figure, then squatted so she could touch his forehead. “That doesn’t really work,” Fredericks added, almost apologetically. “I mean, some things show up on these sims, some don’t. Body temperatures don’t seem to change much.”

  “I know. It’s just . . . reflex, I guess.” Renie sat back on her heels. “I’m sorry, but he doesn’t look good at all.” She had only so much strength, and she could not support any more hopeful untruths, even though the things Fredericks had told her about the real Orlando Gardiner tore at her heart. She made herself turn away. “And how are you, Martine. Any better?”

  The French researcher, who wore the dark-skinned, dark-haired sim of a Temilúni peasant woman, mustered a very faint smile. “It is . . . it is easier to think, perhaps. A lit
tle. The pain of all this new imput is not quite so bad for me now. But . . .” She shook her head. “I have been blind in the world for a long time, Renie. I am not used to being blind here.”

  “What you mean, ‘here’?” The warrior-robot sim belonged to a Goggleboy-type who called himself “T4b.” Renie thought he was younger than he let on, maybe even as young as Orlando and Fredericks, and his sullen tone now only deepened her suspicions. “Thought nobody come here before. What’s all that fen back at the last place if you been here?”

  “I don’t think that is what she meant . . .” began Quan Li.

  “No, I have not been here,” Martine said. “But online—plugged in. That has always been my world. But the . . . noise since I have come here, the overwhelming information . . . it makes it hard for me to hear or even think the way I am used to.” She rubbed at her temples with slow, clumsy movements. “It is like fire in my head. Like insects.”

  “We don’t need any more insects, God knows.” Renie looked up as a distant but still unbelievably large dragonfly skimmed the shoreline and started out across the river, loud as an ancient propeller plane. “Is there anything we can do, Martine?”

  “No. Perhaps I will learn to . . . to live better with it when some time has passed.”

  “So what are we going to do?” Renie said at last. “We can’t just drift with the current, literally or figuratively. We have no idea what we’re looking for, where we’re going, or if we’re even heading in the right direction. Does anyone have any ideas?” She looked briefly at Florimel, who like Martine and Quan Li wore a Temilúni sim, and wondered when this woman would make her feelings known; but Florimel remained unsettlingly silent, as she had been most of the time since their shared escape had begun. “If we just wait . . . well, Sellars said there would be people coming after us.” Renie looked around at the odd assortment of sims. “And we certainly are hard to miss.”

  “What do you suggest, dearie?” Sweet William was picking his way across the irregular surface of the leaf toward them, feathers bobbing; Renie wondered whether he wasn’t finding all that simulated black leather a bit uncomfortable in this tropical warmth. “Don’t get me wrong, all this can-do attitude is most inspiring—you must have been a Girl Guide. Should we build an outboard motor out of our fingernail clippings or something?”

  She smiled sourly. “That would be better than bobbing along waiting for someone to come and catch us. But I was hoping someone might come up with something a little more practical.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” William levered himself down beside her, his sharp knee poking her leg. Renie thought he had changed a little since they had fled Atasco’s palace, that his arrogance had softened. Even his strong northern English accent seemed a little less pronounced, as though it were as much an affectation as his death-clown sim. “So what do we do, then?” he asked. “We can’t paddle. I suppose we could swim to shore—that would give you all a laugh, watching me swim—but then what? I don’t think much of having to dodge yon overgrown buggy-wuggies.”

  “Are they big, or are we small?” asked Fredericks. “I mean, they could just be monster bugs, you know, like in that Radiation Weekend simworld.”

  Renie narrowed her eyes, watching the shoreline. A few flying shapes, smaller than the dragonflies, were hovering erratically at the water’s edge. “Well, the trees are miles high, the grains of sand on the beach are as big as your head, and we’re riding in a leaf that used to be a boat. What do you think? My guess would be ‘We small.”’

  Fredericks gave her a quick, hurt look, then returned his attention to his sleeping friend. Sweet William, too, glanced at Renie with something like surprise. “You’ve got a bit of a bite, don’t you, love?” he said, impressed.

  Renie felt shamed, but only slightly. These people were acting like this was some kind of adventure game, like everything was bound to turn out all right, that at the very worst they might earn a low score. “This isn’t going to just end with a polite ‘Game Over,’ you know,” she said, continuing the thought out loud. “I felt and saw a man die trying to break into this network. And whether what happened to the Atascos took place online or off, they’re just as dead.” She heard her voice rising and struggled to control herself. “This is not a game. My brother is dying—maybe dead. I’m sure you all have your own worries, too, so let’s get on with it.”

  There was a moment’s silence. T4b, the spike-studded robot warrior, ended it. “We ears, wo’. You talk.”

  Renie hesitated, the weight of their problems suddenly too much to bear. She didn’t know these people, didn’t have answers for them—didn’t even truly understand what questions to ask. And she was also tired of pushing these strangers forward. They were an odd group, showing little of the initiative that Sellars had ascribed to them, and of the few people she trusted in the world only !Xabbu was truly here, since Martine was strangely transformed, no longer the quiet, ultra-competent presence she had been.

  “Look,” Renie said, “I agree we don’t want to land if we can help it. Even the insects are as big as dinosaurs, and insects may not be the only animals out there. We haven’t seen any birds yet, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any, and we would make about a single bite for a seagull.”

  “So what can we do besides drift?” asked Quan Li.

  “Well, I’m not saying we can make an outboard motor, but I’m not ready to give up on paddling, or maybe even making some kind of sail. What if we pulled up more of this skin from the leaf,” she indicated the tattered awning over their heads, “and used that?”

  “You cannot have a sail without a mast,” said Florimel heavily. “Anyone knows that.”

  Renie raised an eyebrow: The silent woman apparently did know how to talk, after all. “Is that really true? Couldn’t we make something that would at least catch some wind? What are those things they use on shuttle rockets—drag chutes? Why couldn’t we make a reverse drag chute and use some of the thinner veins to tie it down?”

  “I think Renie’s ideas are very good,” said Quan Li.

  “Oh, she’s a regular Bobby Wells, all right,” Sweet William said. “But how long is it going to take us? We’ll probably starve to death first.”

  “We don’t have to eat, do we?” Renie looked around; the sim faces were suddenly serious. “I mean, don’t you all—haven’t you all arranged something? How could you go online for this long without some kind of feeding system in place?”

  “I’m getting fed on an intravenous drip, probably.” Fredericks suddenly sounded lost, miserable. “In that hospital.”

  A quick poll revealed that Sweet William’s question had been largely rhetorical. All the party claimed they had some kind of resources that would allow them to be self-sufficient. Even William parted the curtain of his fabulous glamour long enough to reveal: “I’ll probably be all right for a week or so, pals and chums, but then I’ll have to hope someone looks in on me.” But everyone was strangely reticent about their offline lives, rekindling Renie’s frustration.

  “Look, we’re in a life-or-death situation,” she said finally. “We all must have important reasons for being here. We have to trust each other.”

  “Don’t take it personal,” said William, grimacing. “I’m just not having any frigging Canterbury-let’s-all-tell-our-Tales. Nobody has a right to my life. You want my tale, you have to earn it.”

  “What is it you want to know?” demanded Florimel. Her Temilúni sim displayed resentful anger quite convincingly. “We are all some kind of cripples here, Ms. Sulaweyo. You, him, me, all of us. Why else would that Sellars man choose us—and why do you think we are all prepared for a long period online? Who else would spend so much time on the net?”

  “Speak for yourself,” spat William. “I have a life, and it doesn’t include a Save the World Fantasy Weekend. I just want to get out of here and go home.”

 
“I wasn’t prepared,” said Fredericks mournfully. “That’s why my folks have got me in a hospital. Orlando wasn’t expecting this either. We kinda came here by surprise.” He grew thoughtful. “I wonder where he is—I mean, his body?”

  Renie closed her eyes, struggling to stay calm. She wished !Xabbu would come back from the leaf’s edge, but he was still watching the shoreline slide by. “We have more important things to do than argue,” she said at last. “Fredericks, you said you tried to go offline and it was very painful.”

  The young man nodded his head. “It was horrible. Just horrible. You can’t believe how bad it was.” He shuddered and crossed his arms in front of his chest, hugging himself.

  “Could you communicate with anyone, Fredericks? Did you talk to your parents?”

  “Call me Sam, would you?”

  “Sam. Could you talk?”

  He thought about it. “I don’t think so. I mean, I was screaming, but I couldn’t really hear myself, now that I think about it. Not when I was . . . there. It hurt so bad! I don’t think I could have said a word—you just don’t know how bad it was. . . .”

  “I do know,” said Florimel, but there was little sympathy in her voice. “I went offline, too.”

  “Really? What happened?” Renie asked. “Did you find a way to do it yourself?”

  “No. I was . . . removed, just as he was.” She said it flatly. “It happened before I reached Temilún. But he is right. The pain was indescribable. Even if there were a way to do it, I would kill myself before having that pain again.”

  Renie sat back and sighed. The vast orange disk of the sun had dropped behind the forest a little while before, and now the winds were freshening. A large insectoid shape flew erratically overhead. “But how can you not find your neurocannula? I mean, maybe you can’t see it, but surely you can feel it?”