River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  Renie rocked back and forth as the force of the strike spread past her and dissipated. She stared, shocked into shutdown. He was gone. Just like that.

  The roaring of wings grew louder overhead, but Renie could not lift her eyes from the spot where T4b had been swallowed, even when the wings were so close above her that the water began to fly in stinging drops.

  “Excuse me,” someone shouted. “Do you need help?”

  Trapped in a dream that was becoming more bizarre by the second, Renie at last looked up. One of the dragonflies was hovering just a stone’s throw above her. A human face protruded from its side, peering down.

  Renie was so astonished that the next swell knocked her under. She thrashed to the surface to find the dragonfly still above her, the goggled face still staring down. “Did you hear me?” the unlikely head called. “I asked if you needed some help.”

  Renie nodded weakly, unable to summon a single word. A rope ladder with shiny aluminum rungs dropped from the insect’s stomach like the last unraveling thread in the weave of reality. Renie grabbed at the bottom of the ladder and clung; she did not have the strength to climb. A gigantic stretch of gleaming scales broke the surface near her and then slid under once more, at its crest a fin that looked as large as a cathedral window. Somebody in a jumpsuit was clambering down the ladder toward her. A strong hand clasped her wrist and helped her up into the belly of the dragonfly.

  She sat in a small padded alcove with a mylar emergency blanket wrapped around her shoulders. It was hard to tell which was making her vibrate the most, her own exhausted shivering or the mechanical dragonfly’s wings.

  “It’s strange, isn’t it?” said one of the two jumpsuited figures perched in the cockpit seats. “I mean, using an imaginary blanket to warm up your actual body. But everything here works in symbols, more or less. The blanket’s a symbol for ‘I’ve earned being warm,’ and so your neural interface gets the message.”

  She shook her head, feeling a pointless urge to correct this improbable stranger, to explain that she didn’t have anything as high-quality as a neural interface, but every time she opened her mouth, her teeth chattered. She could not turn off the film loop that kept playing in her head—three seconds of T4b splashing, then being swallowed, over and over and over.

  The bug-pilot nearest her pulled off helmet and goggles, revealing a close-cropped head of black hair, Asian eyes, and rounded feminine features. “Just hang on. We’ll fix you up back at the Hive.”

  “I think I see something,” said the other jumpsuit. The voice sounded masculine, but the features were still hidden by the goggled helmet. “I’m going to drop her down a little.”

  Renie’s stomach remained in the place they had been for several seconds after Renie and the others had plummeted back toward the river.

  “Someone hanging onto some flotsam. Looks like . . . a monkey?”

  “!Xabbu!” Renie jumped and banged her head painfully against the top of the alcove. The padding wasn’t particularly thick. “That’s my friend!”

  “Problem not,” he said. “I think we need that ladder again, Lenore.”

  “Chizz. But if this one’s a monkey, he can damn well climb up himself.”

  Within moments, !Xabbu had joined Renie in the alcove. She hugged the small, simian body tight.

  Several passes over the roiling water turned up no other survivors.

  “Too bad about your friends,” said the pilot as they headed the dragonfly away from the river and into the forest of impossibly tall trees. “Win some, lose some.” He peeled back his goggles, revealing freckled, long-jawed Caucasian features, then blithely spun the dragonfly on its side to slip between two mountainous but close-leaning trunks, forcing Renie and !Xabbu to clutch at the alcove wall. “But that’s what happens—this river is no place for beginners.”

  Renie was stunned by his callousness. Lenore’s expression was disapproving, but it seemed only the mild censure one might display to a little brother caught in the cookie jar.

  “Give her a break, Cullen. You don’t know what they were doing. It could be a real problem.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” The skinny pilot smirked, clearly unmoved. “Life’s a bitch and then some fish eat you.”

  “Who are you people?” !Xabbu asked about a half-second before Renie could begin shrieking at them.

  “The question really is . . . who are you?” Cullen flicked a glance over his shoulder, then returned his attention to the megafoliage whipping past the dragonfly’s windshield. “Don’t you know that this is private property? Believe me, there are a lot better people to put on the scorch than Kunohara.”

  “Kunohara?” Renie was having trouble keeping up. Hadn’t her companions just been killed? Didn’t that mean anything to these people, even in this virtual world? “What are you talking about?”

  “Look, you must have noticed that you’d crossed into another simulation,” said Lenore, her voice kind, her manner ever-so-slightly impatient. “This whole place belongs to Hideki Kunohara.”

  “King of the bugs,” said Cullen, and laughed. “It’s too bad your friends are going to miss it.”

  Renie struggled with her outrage, remembering Atasco and the mistakes she had made in his world. “I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”

  “Well, your friends won’t be able to get back in here—in fact, I’m not quite sure how you guys got in to begin with. Must be some kind of back door from one of the other simworlds. Not surprising, I guess—Kunohara’s got a lot of weird deals going.” He shook his head in admiration. “So your friends are going to have to meet you somewhere else. Don’t worry, though. We can get you to wherever it is, if you’ve got an address.” He banked the dragonfly sharply to avoid a low-hanging branch, then brought it neatly level with a flick of the steering controls.

  “I’m Lenore Kwok,” the woman said. “Your pilot is Cullen Geary, common asshole by day, but by night . . . well, he’s an asshole then, too.”

  “Flattery, Len-baby, flattery.” Cullen grinned contentedly.

  The sky beyond the cockpit window was now a deep mauve; the trees were rapidly becoming monstrous vertical shadows. Renie closed her eyes, trying to make sense of it all. These people seemed to think that T4b and Martine and the rest were fine, that they’d just been knocked out of the simulation. But could that be true? And even if they could survive being killed here in the simworld—which she wasn’t all that positive about, given what had happened to Singh—how would she and !Xabbu ever find them again? The whole grueling effort was already over, it seemed, with all Sellars’ work gone for nothing.

  “What is this place?” she asked. “This simulation.”

  “Ah-ah.” Cullen wagged his finger. Twilight rushed past the view-screen. “You haven’t told us who you are yet.”

  Renie and !Xabbu exchanged glances. With all their other concerns, she and her companions had not had a chance to concoct a cover story in case of a meeting like this. She decided that half-truth was the best strategy.

  “My name is . . .” she struggled to recall the earlier alias, “. . . Otepi. Irene Otepi. I was doing systems analysis for a man named Atasco.” She paused, watching their rescuers for a reaction. “Do you know him?”

  “The anthropologist?” Lenore was checking readouts on the instrument panel. If she was hiding something, she was good at it. “Heard of him. Central American, South American, something?”

  “South American,” said Cullen. “Colombian, in fact. Saw him in an interview once. What’s he like?”

  Renie hesitated. “I didn’t meet him. Something went wrong—I’m not sure what. His simworld . . . well, there was an uprising or something. We were all on a ship, and we just kept going.” Renie suspected they were wondering why she hadn’t simply dropped offline. It was a good question, and she couldn’t think of an answer other than t
he bizarre truth. “It was all pretty crazy. Then we floated through to here, I guess. The ship turned into a leaf, the leaf got tipped over, you found us.”

  !Xabbu had been watching her closely, and now spoke in his most careful English. “I am Henry Wonde,” he said. “I am Ms. Otepi’s student. How can we find our friends again?”

  Cullen turned to observe the baboon for a long moment before a looming tangle of branches jerked his gaze back to the viewscreen. “Why? Are you planning to stay online? Just go back through to this Atasco simulation or something?”

  Renie took a breath. “There’s something wrong with our own systems, I think. We can’t go offline.”

  Cullen whistled, impressed. “That’s weird.”

  “We’ll get you fixed up at the Hive,” Lenore said confidently. “Make it all better.”

  Renie was less than certain, but said nothing. The dragonfly sped on through the darkening night.

  ORLANDO had one last dream before waking, a dim and fuzzy fragment in which a faceless child sat in a cold, dark room, pleading with him to stay and play a game. There was some kind of secret involved, something that must be kept from the grown-ups, but it all streamed away like windblown smoke as he awakened. Still, even though the events of the next minutes pushed it quickly from his mind, the feeling of foreboding it left took much longer to fade.

  In the first too-bright moments after opening his eyes he thought he was paralyzed. His legs felt unattached, and seemed to move aimlessly; he had very little feeling below a tight band around his waist.

  “Orlando?”

  The voice was familiar. The feeling of being in the world was less so. He squinted and turned toward the voice.

  “You’re awake!” Fredericks’ face was very close. Orlando realized after a moment that it was his friend’s arm he felt around his waist, and that Fredericks was holding on to the edge of the leaf while they both floated chest-deep in the warm river.

  “Well, cheers and welcome to the party, sunshine.” Sweet William, looking not unlike a wet black cockatoo, was clinging to the leaf-edge a few yards away. “Does this mean he can swim now, so we don’t have to keep dragging you two back on board every few minutes?”

  “Leave him alone,” growled Fredericks. “He’s really sick.”

  “He’s right,” a woman’s voice said. “Arguing is a waste of time.”

  Orlando craned his neck—it felt boneless as taffy—to focus on the faces beyond Fredericks’ shoulder. Three female sims, the women named Quan Li, Florimel, and Martine, had clambered up to a higher part of the leaf, and were holding fast to the slope. Florimel, who had spoken, looked back at him intently. “How are you?”

  Orlando shook his head. “I’ve felt better. But I’ve felt worse, too.”

  A vibration shuddered the leaf. Orlando grabbed at Fredericks and reached for the leaf’s edge with his other hand, his heart suddenly racing. After a moment, the vibration ceased.

  “I think we scraped on a root,” Florimel said. “We are close enough to the bank that we should swim the rest of the way.”

  “I don’t think I can do it.” Orlando hated to admit weakness, but there wasn’t much he could hide from these folks, not after they’d been watching him flounder in and out of consciousness for however long it had been.

  “Don’t worry your pretty little head,” Sweet William replied. “We’ll just carry you on our backs all the way to the Emerald City, or Mordor, or wherever the hell it is we’re going. Isn’t that how it works in those stories? Buddies till the end?”

  “Oh, shut up,” offered Fredericks.

  Orlando closed his eyes and concentrated on keeping his head above water. A few minutes later the leaf shuddered again, then bumped to a halt, rocking in the gentle current.

  “We do not know how long this is going to remain snagged here,” Florimel pointed out. “Let us head for the shore now—it is not far.”

  “Everybody wants to be in charge, don’t they?” Sweet William sighed theatrically. “Well, soonest muddled, soonest mended. Let’s get on with it.” He splashed free of the leaf and swam until he was level with Fredericks.

  Orlando wondered a little dreamily what William was doing, then was abruptly jerked away from the leaf by an arm around his neck and tumbled backward into the water. He thrashed, trying to get free.

  “Stop fighting, you prat,” spluttered William. “Or I will let you swim by yourself.”

  When Orlando realized that the other was trying, in his idiosyncratic way, to help him to shore, he relaxed. William set out with a surprisingly powerful stroke. As Orlando floated backward, his chin in the crook of the death-clown’s arm, he watched the blue tropical sky overhead, wider than anything he had ever seen, and wondered if this dream was going to continue forever.

  This locks so utterly, he thought. Here I am, in a place where I could be like everyone else—better than everyone else—and I’m still sick.

  But his muscles didn’t feel as weak as they had at first, which was interesting. He made a couple of experimental kicks, just to see, and was rewarded by a wet snarl from Sweet William: “You’re knocking me off-balance. Whatever you’re doing . . . don’t do it.”

  Orlando relaxed, feeling a small pleasure at the returning responsiveness of his virtual flesh.

  A few moments later William dragged him up onto the rounded stones of the beach, then stood over him, sodden plumes draggled on his shoulders and head. “Now, just wait there, Hero Boy,” he said. “Think good thoughts. I’ve got to go back and wrestle the blind lady onto shore.”

  Orlando was more than content to lie in the warm sun and flex his fingers and toes, working up after a few minutes to arm- and leg-stretching. His lungs still hurt if he took anything but the shallowest breaths, and all his muscles ached, but he felt almost none of the slippery, disconnected dreaminess he had experienced since commandeering Atasco’s royal barge. But a bit of internal darkness remained to trouble him, a shadow he could not quite name or clearly see.

  Something happened. I had a . . . a dream? With Beezle in it? And some kind of little kid? It was troubling because it seemed meaningless, while at the same time something was whispering deep in his thoughts that it was all very meaningful indeed. Was I supposed to do something? Help someone? Another thought, slow to coalesce, but even more chilling: Was I almost dead? I went down into the dark. Was I dying?

  He opened his eyes to watch the rest of the group trudging ashore, Sweet William carrying Martine in his arms. He set her down beside Orlando with surprising tenderness. It was only as the others hunkered down in a small circle that Orlando suddenly realized that something else was wrong, too.

  “Where are the others? Where’s . . . ?” For a long moment he could not remember the names. “Where’s Renie—and her friend? And the guy in the body armor?”

  Quan Li shook her head but said nothing, looking down at the stones of the beach.

  “Gone,” said Florimel. “Perhaps drowned, perhaps washed up somewhere else.” There was a false note in her matter-of-fact speech, something that might have been pain sternly repressed. “We were all washed overboard. Those you see here were able to cling to the leaf. Your friend pulled you back and held your head above the water, which is why you are alive.”

  Orlando turned to Fredericks. “So take me to Law Net Live,” Fredericks said defiantly. “I wasn’t going to let you drown just because you’re an idiot.” Something turned in Orlando’s stomach. How many times had his friend saved his life recently?

  As it to underscore the question, Sweet William added: “In fact, my duck, just before we tipped over, you stopped breathing for a bit. Flossie here gave you mouth-to-mouth whatsit.”

  “Florimel, not Flossie.” She glowered at the bedraggled William. “Anyone would have done the same.”

  “Thank you.” Despite another debt o
f gratitude, Orlando wasn’t sure how he felt about the fierce woman, and for the first time he realized the magnitude of their loss. “Could we look for Renie and the others? I mean, what if they need help?”

  “Some of us aren’t quite as perky, because we didn’t get a free ride,” said William. “Some of us are that tired, we could lie down right here and sleep for a week.”

  Orlando looked along the riverbank; from his shrunken perspective it was a thing of huge brown arroyos and thin stretches of stony beach. The river, a vast stretch of green that seemed active as a storm-brushed sea, wound away into the distance. On the far side of the riverbank loomed the first of the forest trees, each one as vast as the world-ash of Norse legend, tall as Jack’s beanstalk. But more than just the size of things was puzzling. “It’s morning,” he said. “It was evening just a little while ago. Does the time jump around here?”

  “Hark at him.” William laughed. “Just because he had a nice nap while the rest of us did the dogpaddle all night, he thinks time went all funny.”

  Orlando felt sure that somewhere his real face was flushed pink. “Oh. Sorry.” He snatched at something to say. “So are we going to spend the night here? Do we need to make a fire or something?”

  Martine, who had been silent since William carried her ashore, abruptly sat up straight, her eyes wide. “There is something . . .!” She brought her hands to her face, rubbing so hard Orlando feared she would hurt herself even through the tactors. “No, someone . . .” Her mouth fell open and her face distorted, as though she silently screamed. She flung out a hand, pointing down the river course. “There! Someone is there!”