River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

With the thorn as a lever, she was able to bend back a large enough portion of the instrument panel to allow Cullen to slide free. As he stretched and rubbed his sore joints, his partner’s panicked demands began again.

  “All right, all right,” he said. “You’re really scanbound, Kwok, you know that?”

  “Let’s just try to help her.” Renie found what seemed a good fulcrum-point for the lever and began to work at pulling back the copilot’s chair.

  “Don’t waste your energy. There’s an easier way.” Cullen clambered up the floor until he located a panel door. Taking the thorn from Renie, he pried open the door and pulled out a metal box with a handle. “See? Because of Kunohara’s stupid rules, we have to have damn virtual repair kits in our damn virtual planes. Is that insane, or what?” He climbed back down the upraised floor and took a wrench from the tool kit, then removed the nuts that held the copilot seat to the floor. The crash had crumpled the dragonfly’s framework; it took several kicks before he could knock the seat off its tracks.

  A few more minutes of surprisingly hard work permitted them to pull Lenore free.

  “I . . . I still can’t move my legs,” she said in a quiet little ghost-voice. Renie liked this new tone even less.

  With help from !Xabbu’s agile feet and hands, they managed to haul her up to the hatchway and then carefully lower her three body-lengths down to the ground. The dragonfly had crashed headfirst, auguring into the forest floor like a World War I biplane; the delicate wings had fallen forward over the buried nose and its shiny, cylindrical tail pointed toward the sky.

  “I can’t walk,” Lenore murmured. “My legs won’t work.”

  “That’s shit, utterly,” Cullen snapped. “Look, in case you’ve forgotten, we were about, oh, I’d guess thirty minutes ahead of that Eciton swarm, and it’s going to raise hell at the Hive if we don’t warn them.” He paused. A more uncertain look moved swiftly across his long face. “Not to mention that we’re in front of it ourselves.”

  “Oh, my God.” Renie, immersed in the problem of getting Lenore out of the broken plane, had completely forgotten the army ants. “Oh, Jesus Mercy, they’ll eat us. Oh, God, how horrible.”

  “They won’t eat us,” said Cullen disgustedly. “They’ll just keep us from warning the Hive, and we’ll lose more money than I can imagine having to reprogram and rebuild. This is a simulation—you seem to keep forgetting.”

  Renie looked at him, then at !Xabbu, who arched his eyebrows, an odd expression of simian fatalism. She agreed; there was no point wasting time on argument. “Right, it’s a simulation. But let’s get going, okay?”

  With Renie and !Xabbu’s help, Cullen hauled Lenore into a piggyback position. “How are your legs?” he asked. “Is there pain?”

  “I can’t feel them now . . . I just can’t make them work.” Lenore closed her eyes and clung tightly to Cullen’s neck. “I don’t want to talk. I want to go home.”

  “We’re working on it,” said Renie. “But any information might . . .”

  “No.” Lenore’s surliness had become childlike. “I’m not going to talk about it anymore. This is so stupid. None of this is happening.”

  Which, Renie reflected as they began making their way through the forest of grass, was as unhelpful a comment as anything she could remember hearing recently.

  Cullen, despite carrying Lenore’s extra weight, was at first determined to lead their small party as well. Renie was reluctant to surrender control, but before she and the entomologist could battle it out, !Xabbu pointed out that he was undoubtedly best suited to go first. After Cullen had been assured that !Xabbu had long experience with hunting and tracking, and thus that it made scientific sense, he told the Bushman in which direction the Hive lay and !Xabbu got down to the business of finding a way through the ground-jungle.

  It was one of the strangest and most surreal journeys Renie had ever taken—which, considering the nature of what she had experienced in the last few months, was saying a great deal. The world from insect height was an astonishing place, full of frightening yet fascinating things. A caterpillar that she would not have looked at twice in the real world was now a shining, living psychedelic object the size of a bus. As she and the others filed carefully past it, the caterpillar moved a pace forward along the leaf it had been stripping and the step rippled through all its legs, stem to stern, like a chorus-line kick. When the long lockstep was over, the vertical jaws began working the leaf again, making a racket much like the box-cutting machine in a factory where Renie had held a summer job.

  As they hurried toward the Hive, they passed through an entire safari park worth of chitinous wonders—aphids clinging to plant stems like zero-gravity sheep grazing in an upside-down meadow, mites burrowing in decaying plants with the single-mindedness of dogs searching for buried bones, even a leafhopper that jumped away as they approached, catapulting nearly into orbit with an audible twang of exoskeletal flexing. If it had been the same proportional size to her in real life, Renie marveled, it could have leaped directly to the top of the tallest building in downtown Durban.

  At one point, !Xabbu carefully led them around a spiderweb—an incredible work of engineering when seen from this perspective, but the thought of stumbling into it gave Renie the shivers. She looked back at it nervously several times but never saw any sign of its manufacturer.

  The vegetation was fascinating, too, each plant a revelation of complexity. Even the mold, whose surface was a riot of shapes disguised in ordinary life by its tiny size, was worth marveling over. The very earth had to be looked at anew, since what seemed the flattest trail to a normal human eye could contain deep, slippery-sided pits and uncountable other obstructions to travelers of insect size.

  But despite the unceasing spectacle, the memory of what was behind them was never out of Renie’s thoughts. !Xabbu picked his way through the microjungle with great skill, finding pathways where she knew that she would have been completely stymied, but she still feared that they were not traveling fast enough. Cullen could not move easily with Lenore on his back; watching his pace grow ever slower, Renie struggled to beat down irritation and fear. Even !Xabbu’s patient expertise frustrated her, since his manner was so calm that he did not seem to be hurrying, although she knew he was.

  They halted, instinct freezing them in place, as a shadow thrown by a bird high above them momentarily eclipsed the sun.

  “I can’t go on like this,” Cullen gasped when the shadow had gone. He let Lenore slide to the ground and stood over her, sucking air. “You’re too heavy, Kwok.”

  “I’ll carry her for a little while.” Renie did not want an argument between Cullen and Lenore, or any delay at all that could be avoided. “We can’t stop. Those bloody ants will kill us, virtually or otherwise.” She bent and tried to coax Lenore to climb onto her back, but the sullen, silent entomologist was no more use than an infant. Renie swore, then grabbed her and flung her over her shoulder like a sack of meal.

  “Come on, while I can stand it,” she said, voice tight with effort.

  As they stumbled on, Renie found herself wishing, not for the last time, that the simulation were not quite so amazingly realistic. Lenore’s weight hung in exactly the same awkward way it would have in RL: just keeping the scientist balanced on her shoulder and putting one foot in front of the other was an exhausting job.

  Winged insects in flight for their lives began to hum past overhead, the first tangible evidence of the Eciton swarm. It was horribly frustrating to watch them zooming by, going in the same direction, but at ten or twenty times the human’s walking speed. Renie’s back was aching. She contemplated, then regretfully discarded, the idea of just dropping the Kwok woman on the ground and legging it as fast as she could, unencumbered. Lenore appeared to be in shock, and Renie knew that if the simulation itself was frighteningly realistic, its effects had to be treated with the same degree of serio
usness: This woman’s affliction was just as crippling as if they were fleeing for their lives in a real jungle.

  “There!” shouted Cullen. “I can see it!”

  Renie stepped up beside him. They had reached the summit of the center spine of a fallen palm frond. From this comparatively high place, lifted above the leaf mold of the forest floor, they could at last see the Hive’s windows glinting from the distant hillside. “How far is that, in RL distance?” she panted. “If we were normal size? A few meters? If only . . .”

  “Yeah,” Cullen said, “if only.” He began to trot down the other side of the leaf, leaving Renie to stagger forward again, still balancing Lenore.

  They were crossing a relatively clear patch of ground at the base of the rise on which the Hive was situated when the first ground-level refugees from the swarm began to spill out of the vegetation behind them. A long-legged spider stilted past, tall as a house. Smaller but even less pleasant animals followed, boiling out of the jungle in a wash of agitated noise.

  “We can’t outrun them.” Renie staggered even as she spoke and almost fell, then lowered Lenore to the ground. A fly skimmed over their heads, making a noise like a small jet helicopter. “We have to find someplace safe. High ground.”

  “Are you crazy?” Cullen demanded, then pointed at the Hive. “That’s millions worth of code standing there.”

  “Jesus Mercy! You don’t get it, do you?” A part of Renie knew screaming was not good strategy, but she didn’t care. “This is not about gear, this is about staying alive!”

  !Xabbu had noticed their absence and was hurrying back toward them. A centipede, a shiny, sinuous thing which a moment before had been in full flight, suddenly side-wound toward him and struck, but the small man in the baboon body jumped to safety, narrowly eluding the rounded, fanged head. His baboon sim bared its fangs and dropped into defensive posture. The centipede hesitated, then turned and paddled on, its instinctive desire to hunt muted by the swarming death behind it.

  “We have to climb something,” Renie shouted to !Xabbu. “We’ll never make it back in time.”

  “That’s . . . that’s irresponsible.” Cullen sounded uncertain now. Another shadow wheeled overhead, yet another antbird preying on the scurrying refugees.

  “Here.” !Xabbu stood at the base of a fern, beckoning. “If we climb this plant, we can reach a place they will not go, I think.”

  Renie bent and heaved Lenore up onto her shoulder. She had taken a few steps when something smacked hard against her back and knocked her off balance. As she struggled to regain her footing, Lenore thrashed in her arms, pummeling Renie’s back with her fists.

  “Put me down! Put me down!”

  Renie let her slide to the ground, but took care not to let her tumble helplessly, and received a flailing fist against her ear for her trouble. “What the hell are you playing at?” she growled.

  Lenore had curled up like a woodlouse. Cullen strode over. The racket of fleeing insects was growing louder, and the flood of refugees was beginning to widen, threatening the place they stood. “God damn it, Kwok, what are you doing?”

  “Leave me alone.” Lenore did not look up at him. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

  Cullen reached down to grab her. Her legs still did not move, but she thrashed furiously from the waist up and managed to land a hard blow on his face. Swearing, he let her drop. “You’re scanned! What is this?”

  “You must hurry!” !Xabbu called from a position high up the fern stem. “I can see the ants!”

  “We’re not going without Lenore!” Cullen looked like someone who was watching his house burn down. “I mean, I can’t just leave her here.” He took the woman’s arm, but she shook him off. “What’s wrong with you?” he demanded.

  “This is just so . . . stupid!” she wailed. “It’s stupid, and it hurts! And I’m not going to do it anymore.” She opened her eyes wide, staring with an almost mad intensity. “It’s not real, Cullen—none of this is real. It’s a game, and I’m not going to play this stupid game anymore.” She slapped hard at his hand. He withdrew it.

  “Right,” said Renie. “You deal with her if you want.” She turned and hurried across the open space toward !Xabbu and the sanctuary of the fern. A beetle veered from the leading edge of the oncoming throng and ratcheted past in front of her, creaking like a sloop in full sail. She paused, bouncing in place until it had passed, then sprinted forward.

  “I can’t just leave her!” Cullen shouted after Renie.

  “Then don’t! Stay!” Renie reached the bottom of the stalk and grabbed at the thick fibers that covered it like a pelt, scrabbling with her boots until she had pulled herself off the ground. When she reached the first place where she could stand, she turned to look back. Cullen was shouting something at Lenore—impossible to hear above the mounting din—but she had curled back into a fetal ball and was paying no attention. Again he tried to lift her, which brought her to life, gouging and elbowing. Renie shook her head and resumed climbing.

  “Up here.” !Xabbu shinnied down the stalk toward her, moving as easily in his baboon form as Renie would on a broad staircase. “Put your foot on this place—yes, there. Why will that Lenore woman not come?”

  “Shock, I guess—I don’t know.” Renie’s foot slipped and she dangled by one arm for a moment, kicking in heart-freezingly empty air, but !Xabbu reached down with both hands and clutched her wrist, giving her the courage to look for a foothold. When she had found one, and was again firmly set, she saw Cullen reach the base of the stalk and begin to climb.

  The noise grew louder, rising until it was like the roar of the ocean in a narrow cove. The sky was filling with hopping and flying insects of all sizes. Some skimmed so close that their wingtips scraped the outer fronds of the fern, making the leaves dance. The horde on the ground grew even more numerous. Diving antbirds snatched some of them, but nothing slowed the exodus.

  Renie and !Xabbu reached a point midway up the fern where the distance to the next jutting stem was too great for Renie to climb without exceptional difficulty, so they moved away from the central stalk and into the folded gully of a leaf. As they stepped onto it, the curling frond swayed alarmingly, bounced by the breeze rather than by the inconsequential weight of the tiny humans.

  Cullen appeared behind them, talking to himself. “She’ll be all right. It’s just . . . she’ll be pushed offline. The system’s locked, anyway.”

  Looking at his pale, worried face, Renie no longer felt any urge to argue with him.

  They made their way across the leaf’s hairy surface until they were near its outer edge and could see Lenore in her white jumpsuit curled on the ground far below, like a discarded grain of rice. Staring, Renie felt !Xabbu’s hand close on her arm. She looked up to follow his pointing finer.

  A short distance from them lay a small tree which had fallen some time in the past and been partly subsumed by the forest floor, so that the. gray-brown of its bark showed in only a few places through the moss and the grasses that had grown over it. From Renie’s and !Xabbu’s perspective, it was as tall and long as a line of hills.

  The Eciton army had reached the top of the log, and swarmed along its summit like soldiers on a captured ridgetop. The first few scouts were even now climbing back up from their forays to the ground, and as Renie watched, the first pseudopod of ant bodies boiled down and made contact with the forest floor again. The entire log disappeared beneath a living carpet of ants; moments later, the swarm was extruding tendrils of troops out across the open space Renie and the others had just vacated.

  “It’s not real,” Cullen said hoarsely. “Remember that. Those are numbers, little groups of numbers. We’re watching algorithms.”

  Renie could only stare with horrified fascination as the ants flowed forward. One of the leading scouts approached Lenore’s unmoving form and stood over her, probing
with his antennae like a dog sniffing a sleeping cat, then turned and hurried back to the nearest arm of the swarm.

  “The simulation kicks us out when something happens.” Cullen was almost whispering now. “That’s all. It’s a game, like she said. Kunohara’s goddamn game.” He swallowed. “How can she just lie there?”

  !Xabbu’s grip on Renie’s arm tightened as Lenore was surrounded by antenna-waggling workers.

  “Use the defense spray!” Cullen shouted. The tiny figure did not respond. “Damn it, Kwok, use the Solenopsis spray!”

  Then, suddenly, she did move, struggling to crawl away on elbows and useless legs, but it was too late.

  From the corner of her eye, Renie saw Cullen flinch. “Oh, my God,” he said, “she’s screaming. Oh, Christ. Why is she screaming? It’s just a simulation—there’s no pain function . . .” He trailed off, gape-jawed and ashen.

  “She’s just frightened,” Renie said. “It must be . . . it must be horrible to be down there, even if it’s only a simulation.” She found herself praying that her own instincts were wrong. “That’s all.”

  “Oh, God, they’re killing her!” Cullen leaped up and almost overbalanced. !Xabbu grabbed his jumpsuit leg, but the baboon’s mass was too small to do much good. Renie grabbed the scientist’s flight-suit belt and pulled him away from the edge. “We have to,” he babbled, “we can’t . . .” Cullen fell silent, still staring.

  Below, the worker ants had finished. Lenore’s sim had been small; they did not have to call one of the large submajors to carry the pieces back to the swarm.

  Cullen put his face in his hands and wept. Renie and !Xabbu watched silently as the rest of the swarm eddied past.

  It took the better part of an hour before the last stragglers vanished. The flow of ants had gone on so long that Renie could not sustain either horror or fascination. She felt numbed.

  “It was a shock, that’s all.” Cullen had apparently recovered his self-possession. “Lenore’s gone offline, of course—it was just so dreadful to watch.” He peered over the edge of the leaf at the arid field of destruction. “I hadn’t expected it to be . . . to be that bad.”