River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  * * *

  DULCINEA Anwin put her hand on the palm-reader and noticed that her nails were ragged. She frowned, waiting for the door to decide to trust her. Too much to do. She must look dreadful, but at the moment, life was even wilder and more overwhelming than usual.

  The last time I went through this door, I had never killed anyone. That thought, or others much like it, had been cropping up for days. She was pretty sure she was handling it well, but she had little with which to compare it. Still, she did not feel consumed by guilt. It would have been different, she supposed, if the victim had been someone she really knew, instead of some minor Colombian gearhead Dread had hired.

  Besides, she had seen this coming for years. You couldn’t be successful in her business without coming into personal contact with violence, or at least you could not avoid it forever. Still, she had thought her first experience with murder would be watching someone else do it, not performing the act herself. She pushed the thought away again, but the memory of Antonio Celestino’s sightless eyes, both before and after the killing shot, seemed unlikely to go away soon. . . .

  The apartment door, unable to distinguish between the new Dulcie who had shot Celestino and the old Dulcie who had not, hissed open. When she had crossed the beam, the door paused exactly one point five seconds, then shut itself. Jones appeared in the bedroom doorway, stretched luxuriously, then padded across the floor toward her with no apparent haste, as though her mistress had not been gone for almost two weeks.

  Dulcie dropped her bag and leaned down to stroke the cat, who bumped her shin and then turned and sauntered away. Jones’ fluffy backside, Persian-wide but bearing the Siamese coloring of the other half of her heritage, showed no signs of unfashionable shrinkage. At least Charlie from downstairs seemed to have fed her properly.

  The wallscreen was pulsing with a faint pink light, but Dulcie ignored it. She hadn’t accessed any messages since boarding the flight in Cartagena, and she was in no hurry to do so. She felt as though she hadn’t been properly clean for days, and God knew that she would be busy enough soon.

  “Priority message,” said a soft male voice, cued by the front door opening and closing. “You have a priority message.”

  “Shit.” Dulcie flipped her hair out of her eyes and rubbed her forehead. It couldn’t be Dread again already, could it? She felt positively waxy. “Play the message.”

  Her current employer’s ugly-handsome face appeared a meter high on her wallscreen, his long hair lank and damp. He looked like someone who had been chewing khat, exalted and buzzing like a downed power line. “Dulcie, call me as soon as you get in. It’s extremely, extremely urgent.”

  “Oh, Christ. No peace.” She told the screen to return the call, then slumped onto the couch and kicked off her shoes.

  He came on almost immediately. “We’ve got a problem.”

  “Didn’t those subroutines work?” She had cobbled together a few reaction loops before leaving Dread to mind the fort in Colombia, behavior gear that would allow them to leave their puppet sim untenanted for short stretches of time, but which would keep the impostor looking occupied and alive. Nothing that would confound serious scrutiny, but enough to get through sleeping periods and the occasional distraction on the handlers’ end of things.

  “It’s all working fine. But the group’s been split up. That African woman and her monkey friend—they’re lost, maybe drowned. There was some kind of fish frenzy on the river. The boat tipped over and the rest of the group are stranded on shore.”

  Dulcie took a deep breath, fortifying her patience. Men, no matter how intelligent or powerful, sometimes couldn’t help acting like boys, so lost in their games that they forgot they were games. Women, on the other hand, remembered what was important—an occasional bath and clean hair. “But our sim is still with the rest of the group?”

  “Yes. Everyone’s together now, except those two. But they’re clearly in a dangerous situation, so we could lose them all at any time. I need to get on with researching some of the things they’ve already talked about. I can’t do it while I’m handling the sim.”

  “Could this possibly wait just another hour? I’m sure you’re tired, but I just walked through the door and I have to eat something before I faint.” Men didn’t understand baths, but they usually understood food.

  He stared for a long moment. The look on his face seemed to suggest imminent violence, or at least harsh criticism, but then he grinned instead, his teeth bright in his dark face. “Of course,” he said. “Sorry.”

  Dulcie could make little sense of the man—his odd reactions, like this one, the flares of brilliance, the childishness of his nickname, did not quite add up to make a full picture. Not being able to categorize him irritated her. “I really do need a chance . . .” she began.

  “Call me back when you’re ready.” He broke contact.

  Dulcie looked down at Jones, who had returned and was sitting patiently by her stocking-clad feet. “Hurry, hurry, hurry,” Dulcie told her. “Always hurrying.” Jones lidded her round eyes; she seemed to agree that it was no way to do things properly.

  Her curling red hair was wrapped in a towel-turban and her softest bathrobe coddled her damp but now wonderfully clean skin. She had stretched lengthwise on the couch with her feet up, a squeeze-tube of mango yogurt in her hand, and Jones resting comfortably—it was comfortable for Jones, anyway—along her thighs.

  Look at me, she thought. I’ve shot someone. There are a lot of men who couldn’t even do that. But look at me. I’m so calm. She made sure her pose reflected this impressive fortitude. “Now,” she told the wallscreen, “you may redial.”

  Dread appeared thrice life-size. He seemed a little less manic. “They’re all asleep, so it’s not such an emergency. The puppet looks great—a little snore here, a little twitch there. You do good work.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Did you get something to eat?” His dark eyes flicked along the length of her bathrobed form in a way she found both sexual and somehow dismissive. “I’d like to take this opportunity to bring you up to date.”

  “I’m fine.” She waved her yogurt tube. “Fire away.”

  Dread began where she had handed over the reins that morning, with the whole crew still floating on the river in the boat that had become a leaf, and brought her up to the present moment, with special emphasis on character continuity. “We really ought to see if we can find some agent gear that will take subvocalized notes on the fly,” he said. “Otherwise, if a lot happens, we might lose some important detail after a hand-over and blow the puppet’s cover.”

  Dulcie wondered inwardly how long he would want to keep this up, but reminded herself that with the bonus he had already credited to her account, and the salary he had promised for her share of sim-time, she could take at least a year or two off. That much freedom was worth some inconvenience.

  Another part of her wondered at how quickly Celestino had become nothing more than a number in her credit account.

  Aloud, she said: “Is there a chance we could find a third person to help with this? Even if those people sleep for eight hours a day, that’s still a full working day for both of us, seven days a week, indefinitely. I could probably find someone to help.”

  Dread went silent, his face suddenly expressionless. “You have someone you want to bring in?”

  “No, no.” Until today, he had been so ecstatically happy about the results of the Sky God project she had almost forgotten his mood swings, but now they were again in high gear. But, she told herself, at least he wasn’t boring, like most men. “No, I don’t have anyone in mind. I’m just thinking about us both going crazy from overwork. And you said there’s a lot of other stuff you have to do with . . . with that data.” She had almost said Atasco’s name: she was tired, she realized. She doubted anyone was actually tapping her lines—Dread himself had sent
her some topflight defense gear, which she was using on top of her own precautions—but it was stupid to take any unnecessary risks, and certainly the Atasco assassination had been world news for days now.

  “I’ll consider it.” For a moment, his stony look lingered. Then, as if someone had poured hot liquid into a cold cup, life came back into his features. “And there’re a few other things we need to discuss, too . . .”

  “There is someone at the door,” said the house-voice. “Someone at the door.”

  Dulcie rolled her eyes. “Intercom. Who’s there?”

  “Me—Charlie,” was the response. “So you really are back!”

  “Who is that?” Dread had gone zero-degrees again.

  “Just my downstairs neighbor.” She got up, dislodging a silent but irritated Jones. “She feeds my cat. I can call you back if you want.”

  “I’ll wait.” Dread killed his visual and the wallscreen went blank, but Dulcie had no doubt he would be listening.

  Charlie’s white-blonde hair was elaborately foiled; the strands encircled her head like the electron paths of a model atom, so that the closest kiss she could bestow landed somewhere in the air a handspan from Dulcie’s cheek. “Oh, God, Dulce, where’s your tan? What good is going to South America if you don’t get a tan?”

  “Too much work.” Charlie, Dulcie felt sure, would think a nuclear explosion had an upside—all those skin-darkening rays. “Any problems with Jonesie? She looks great.”

  “No, everything was just ‘zoonly. Your mother came by one day when I was here. She’s a chort.”

  “Yeah, she’s a chort, all right. Laugh-a-minute.” Dulcie’s feelings about Ruby O’Meara Mulhearn Epstein Anwin at their very strongest could not be called affectionate, but other people always seemed to think her mother was a wonderful character. Dulcie wondered what she was missing. “Anything else?”

  “Oh, God, you must be exhausted. I really just came up to make sure that was you I heard.” Charlie abruptly twirled, catching up her silvery tesselated skirt and exposing her long, slender legs. “Do you like this? I just bought it.”

  “It’s great. Well, thanks again for taking care of Jones.”

  “Problem not. Do you think you could feed Zig and Zag next week? I’ve got . . . I’m going out of town. You just have to give them lettuce and check their water.”

  Charlie had always maintained that she was an account executive for a cosmetics firm—a lie that Dulcie guessed was rooted in some briefly-held teenage job. Charlie thought Dulcie did not know that she was a call girl—and a fairly expensive one, too: her cartoony voice and schoolgirl figure were doubtless very appealing to a certain type of well-heeled clientele. Charlie believed her career was a complete secret, but Dulcie made it her business to find out everything she could about all her neighbors, and Dulcie was good at finding things out.

  Charlie thinks she’s so wicked. She doesn’t know that her friend upstairs is an international terrorist-for-hire. She’s been feeding the cat of a professional murderess.

  Even when shared only with herself, the joke was beginning to wear thin. In fact, she had just decided not to think about Celestino for a while, to allow the incident to find its proper place in the Dulcie Anwin scheme of things.

  When Charlie had gone posture-walking back to the elevator like an oversized, overdressed Girl Scout, Dulcie turned back to the wall-screen.

  “She’s gone.”

  Dread’s face popped up immediately, as she had known it would. Of course he was listening. He’d probably been watching, too, and thinking perverse thoughts about blonde, short-skirted Charlie. But if he had been, he made no mention of it, or gave any sign at all.

  “Right. Well, the first thing we need to decide is how much we can afford to lead this little group from within.” Dread frowned, his eyes remote. “If I thought they had any purpose at all, I’d be happy just to sit back, but they have a golden opportunity to find things out and instead they just seem to be . . . drifting.”

  “A golden opportunity to find things out for you,” Dulcie suggested. He smirked. “Of course.” His smile vanished. “You know who I work for, don’t you?”

  Dulcie wasn’t sure what she was supposed to say. “You’ve never told me . . .”

  “Come on. Don’t lower my opinion of you. You’re good at what you do, you make great money, you drive that scorching little red sports car way too fast, but you’ve never had a ticket—you get around, Dulcie. You must have a pretty good idea of who my boss is.”

  “Well, yes, I think I know.” In fact, after seeing the Otherland network from the inside, she had known the rumors about Dread working for the almost-mythical Felix Jongleur had to be true. Only Jongleur and a very few other people could afford that kind of technology.

  “Then you can guess how serious this is, what we’re doing. We’re holding back crucial information from one of the meanest, smartest, most powerful men in the world. We’re right in the Old Man’s backyard here. If he finds out, I’m a dead man. Instantly.” He fixed her with a stare even more intense than the one he had used earlier. “Don’t misunderstand this. If you sell me out, even if I don’t get to you myself before the Old Man sixes me, he won’t let you live. Not someone who’s found out as much as you have about this network of his. You won’t even be history. In twenty-four hours, there will be no evidence you ever existed.”

  Dulcie opened her mouth and then closed it. She had thought about just these possibilities, all of them, but to hear Dread say them so flatly, with such certainty, brought it home to her in a way her own musings hadn’t. Suddenly, she knew herself to be in a very high and precarious place.

  “Do you want out?”

  She shook her head, not trusting her voice at this moment.

  “Then do you have any questions before we go on?”

  Dulcie hesitated, then swallowed. “Just one. Where did your name come from?”

  He raised an eyebrow, then barked a laugh. “You mean ‘Dread’? You sure that’s all you want to ask me?”

  She nodded. When he laughed like that, his lips pulled away from the corners of his mouth like some kind of animal. Like something that grinned before it bit.

  “It was a name I gave myself when I was a kid. This guy in this place I stayed . . . well, that doesn’t matter. But he turned me on to this old music from the beginning of the century, Jamaican stuff called ‘ragga.’ ‘Dread’ is a word they used all the time.”

  “That’s all? It just seemed . . . I don’t know, kind of silly. Not really you.”

  For a moment she wondered if she’d gone too far, but his dark face flexed into amusement once more. “It has another meaning, too—something to make the Old Man crazy, him with all his King Arthur bullshit, his Grail and all that. The full version isn’t just ‘Dread,’ it’s ‘More Dread.’ Get it?”

  Dulcie shrugged. All that Middle Ages stuff had always bored her to tears in school, along with the rest of History. “Not really.”

  “Well, don’t worry your head about it. We got more serious stuff to do, sweetness.” The curled-lip laugh returned. “We are going to stir it up for the Old Man—stir it up major.”

  Recovering her composure a little, Dulcie allowed herself the indulgence of a twinge of contempt. He thought he was so bad, so scary, so dangerous. All the men in this business were either complete psychopaths, ice-blooded technicians, or action-star wannabes, full of pithy lines and menacing glances. She was quite sure Dread would prove to be the last.

  “Problem not, Pancho,” she said—Charlie’s favorite expression. “Let’s get on with it.”

  Empty-eyed, self-absorbed . . . yes, she knew his type. She was willing to bet that he went through a lot of women, but that none of the relationships lasted very long at all.

  CHRISTABEL had slipped and skinned her knee at school the day before, t
rying to show Portia how to do a special serve in foursquare. Her mother had told her to quit peeling the spray off it to look, so she waited until she was all the way down the street and around the corner before stopping her bike.

  The spray was funny, a round white place on her knee that looked like spiderwebs. She sat down on the grass and scraped at the edge of the white stuff with her fingernails until it began to come loose. Underneath, the red sore spot was beginning to turn a funny yellow color and get all gummy. She wondered if that was what happened when parts of the Minglepig fell off, like on Uncle Jingle’s Jungle last week, when all the Minglepig’s noses came off at the same time after he sneezed. She decided that if that happened it would be very, very gross.

  There were no people on the athletic field when she rode past, but she could see a few of them on the far side, wearing their army uniforms and marching back and forth, back and forth, on the dirt track. There was no music today, so the sound of her pedals was loud, sort of like music itself, going squeak-a, squeak-a.

  She rolled down street after street, hardly even looking at the signs because she knew the way now, until she came to the part of the base with the raggedy grass and the little cement houses. She parked her bike beside a tree, pushed hard with her foot until the kickstand went down, and then took the paper bag out of the bike basket that her daddy had fixed so it wouldn’t be all wobbly any more.

  “Hey, weenit. Que haces?”

  Christabel jumped and made a squeaking noise louder than the bike pedals. When she turned, someone was coming down out of the tree, and for a moment she thought it was a monkey in clothes, a scary killer monkey like that show her mother hadn’t wanted her to watch but that Christabel had promised wouldn’t give her nightmares. She wanted to scream, but it was like in a bad dream and she couldn’t do anything but watch.

  It wasn’t a monkey, it was a boy with a dirty face and a missing tooth. It was the same boy who had helped her cut the fence when she was helping Mister Sellars, except he was even dirtier and he looked smaller than before. But he was inside the fence! Inside the fence, where she was! She knew that was wrong.