River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  “How could even a woman as self-absorbed as my mother have thought this would do anything but fill me with dread? I cried all night and for days afterward. My parents acted as though I were merely afraid of going off to summer camp or the first day of school, and told me that I was making a fuss over nothing, but even they must have realized there was something questionable about their parenting. They gave me my favorite desserts every night and went two weeks without smoking hash so they could save the money to buy me a new outfit.

  “I wore the new coat and dress on the day I traveled to the institute. Only my father went with me on the plane to Zurich—at this point my mother could not even go down to drop a parcel in the corner letter box without hours of preparation. When we landed, on a day so gray that I have never forgot its dull metallic color through all the intervening darkness, I felt sure that my father was planning to abandon me, as the father of Hansel and Gretel had left his children in the forest. The people from the Pestalozzi Institute met us in a big black car, exactly the kind of vehicle little girls are instructed never to get into. It all seemed very secretive and ominous. What little I saw of Switzerland on the trip to the institute frightened me—the buildings were strange and there was snow on the ground already, although it had been pleasantly warm in Toulouse. When we got to the complex of low buildings, surrounded by gardens that must have been cheerful in a more cheerful season, they asked my father if he wished to spend the first night with me before the experiment began. He already had his ticket back that evening, more worried about leaving my mother alone than leaving me. I cried and would not kiss him good-bye.

  “Strange, strange . . . the whole thing was strange. I asked my parents later—no, demanded that they tell me how they could send a young child away like that. They could offer no reason except that it seemed a good idea at the time. ‘Who could ever imagine this would happen, dear?’ is what my mother said. Who indeed? Perhaps someone who thought about things beyond the wallscreen and the living room.

  “Oh, it makes me so angry even now.

  “In their way, the workers at the Pestalozzi Institute were very kind. They worked with many children, and the Swiss do not love their sons and daughters less than other people do. There were several counselors on staff whose entire job was to help the subjects of research—for almost all the institute’s work was with childhood development—feel comfortable. I remember a Mrs. Fuerstner who was particularly kind. I often wonder what happened to her. She was no older than my mother, so she is probably alive today, perhaps still in Zurich. I think it is safe to say she is not working for the institute, however.

  “I was given a few days to become used to the idea of my new surroundings. I shared a dormitory-type room with many other children, most of whom spoke French, so I was not lonely in the ordinary sense of the word. We were well fed, and our keepers provided every kind of toy and game. I watched science fiction programs from the net, although they seemed curiously lifeless without my parents’ running commentary.

  “At last Mrs. Fuerstner introduced me to Doctor Beck, a golden-haired woman who I thought as pretty as a storybook princess. As the doctor explained in her sweet, patient voice about what I would be asked to do, I found it harder and harder to believe that anything bad would happen. Such a beautiful lady would never try to hurt me. And even if some mistake were made, I knew that Mrs. Fuerstner would not allow me to come to harm. You see, I had always been protected—although not in the most important ways, I later realized—and now these good people were assuring me that at least in that regard, nothing would change.

  “I was to be part of an experiment in sensory deprivation. I am still not certain exactly what the institute thought it would learn from these exercises. At the hearings, they said they had been commissioned to study baseline biological rhythms, but also to examine how environmental factors affect learning and development. What use this would be to a medical and pharmaceutical multinational like the Clinsor Group was never made clear, but the Clinsor people had a huge research budget and many interests—the Pestalozzi Institute was only one of the many beneficiaries of their largess.

  “It would be a sort of unusual holiday, Doctor Beck explained to me. I would be staying by myself in a very dark, very quiet room—like my room at home, but with its own bathroom. There would be plenty of toys and games and exercises to keep me occupied, but I would have to do them all in the dark. But I would not be alone, the doctor explained, not really, because she or Mrs. Fuerstner would always be listening over the speakers. I could call them any time and they would speak to me. It would only be for a few days, and when it was all over, I would get as much cake and ice cream as I could eat, and any toy I wanted.

  “And my parents, she did not bother to add, would get paid.

  “It seems silly to say this now, falsely significant, but as a child I had never been particularly afraid of the dark. In fact, if this were a story, I would begin my journal entry that way—’As a child, I was never afraid of the dark.’ Of course, if I had known that I would be spending the rest of my life in darkness, I might have resisted that first descent.

  “Much of the information the Pestalozzi Institute gathered from me and the other child subjects of their sensory-deprivation testing was essentially redundant. That is, it only confirmed that which had already been discovered in adult subjects, people who had been a long time underground, in caves or lightless cells. Child subjects displayed a few differences from adults—they adapted better in the long run, although they were also more likely to be adversely affected in their long-term development—but such obvious findings seem a very small result for such an expensive program. Years later, when I went back and read the company researchers’ testimony from the lawsuit, I was furious to see how little wisdom the loss of my happiness had gained.

  “At first, as Doctor Beck had said, it was very simple. I ate, played, and went about my days in the dark. I went to sleep in total darkness, and woke up in the same black nothing, often to the sound of one of the researchers’ voices. I came to rely on those voices, and even, after a while, to see those voices. They had colors, shapes—things that I cannot easily describe, just as I cannot describe to my current traveling companions how my perceptions of this artificial world differ from theirs. I was getting my first taste of the synaesthesia brought on by narrowed sensory input, I suppose.

  “The games and exercises were simple things at first, sound-identification puzzles, things that tested my time-sense and memory, physical routines to see how darkness affected my balance and general coordination. I’m sure that what I ate and drank and excreted were also being monitored.

  “It was not long until I began to lose all grasp of time. I slept when I was tired, and if the researchers did not wake me, might sleep for twelve hours or more—or, just as likely, for forty-five minutes. And, not surprisingly, I awakened from these slumbers with no sense of how long I had been away. This in itself did not trouble me—it is only with age that we learn to fear loss of control over time—but other things did. I missed my parents, ineffectual though they were, and without being able to explain it, I think I had even begun to fear I would never be returned to the light.

  “This fear proved prophetic, of course.

  “From time to time Doctor Beck let me talk to one of the other children over the audio channel of the blanked wallscreen. Some of them were in isolated darkness as I was, others were in the light. I do not know what the researchers learned—we were children, after all, and although children can play together, they are not conversationalists. But one child was different. The first time I heard his voice, it frightened me. It hummed and quacked—in my mind’s eye the sound had a hard, angular shape, like an ancient mechanical toy—and its accent was nothing I had ever heard. In retrospect I can say that the sounds came from a voice synthesizer, but at the time I created quite fearful mental pictures of what or who would have such a tongue in its
head.

  “The strange voice asked me my name, but did not offer its own. It sounded hesitant, and there were many long pauses. The whole matter seems strange to me now, and I wonder whether I might have spoken to some kind of artificial intelligence, or some autistic child whose deficits were being improved upon by technology, but at the time I remember being both fascinated and frustrated by this new playmate, who took so long to speak, and spoke so strangely when the words finally came.

  “He was alone, he said. He was in darkness, too, as I was, or at least he did not seem to be able to see—he never spoke of vision, except in half-learned metaphor. Perhaps he was blind, as I am now blind. He did not know where he was, but he wanted to come out—he said that repeatedly.

  “This new playmate was only with me a few minutes the first time, but on later occasions we spoke longer. I taught him some of the sound-only games the researchers had used on me, and I sang him songs and told him some of the nursery rhymes I knew. He was curiously slow to understand some things, and so quick with others as to be alarming—at times it seemed he was sitting with me in my pitch-black room, somehow watching everything I did.

  “On our fifth or sixth ‘visit,’ as Doctor Beck called them, he told me that I was his friend. You cannot imagine a more heart-rending admission, and it will stay with me always.

  “I have spent many days of my adult life trying to find that lost child—following the institute’s records down every fruitless alley, tracking everyone who was ever involved with the Pestalozzi experiments—but I have had no luck. Now I wonder if it was a child at all. Were we perhaps the subjects of a Turing test of some kind? The training ground for a program that might someday be able to smoothly fool adults, but at this early stage could only flounder through conversations with eight-year-olds, and not very well?

  “Whatever the case, I did not speak to him again. Because something else happened.

  “I had been in darkness for many days—over three weeks. The institute’s researchers were ready to bring my portion of the experiment to a close within another forty-eight hours. Thus, I was being given a particularly complex and thorough set of final diagnostic tests—delivered with pseudomaternal sweetness by Mrs. Fuerstner—when something went wrong.

  “Depositions from the lawsuit are unclear, because the Pestalozzi people themselves are not certain, but something went gravely wrong in the institute’s complex house system. I experienced it at first as the loss of Mrs. Fuerstner’s soft, bewitching voice in mid-sentence. The hum of the air-conditioners, which had been a constant part of the environment, suddenly stopped as well, leaving behind a silence that was actually painful to my ears. Everything was gone—everything. All the friendly sounds which had made the darkness seem something less than infinite had ended.

  “After a few minutes, I began to feel frightened. Perhaps there had been a robbery, I thought, and bad men had taken Doctor Beck and the others away. Or maybe some kind of big monster had got loose and killed them, and was now sniffing up and down the corridors, looking for me. I rushed to the thick, soundproofed door of my quarters, but of course with the system power gone, the door locks were frozen. I could not even lift up the hatch of the blackout slot where my meals were delivered. Terrified, I screamed for the doctor, for Mrs. Fuerstner, but no one came or answered. The darkness became dreadful to me in a way it had not in all the days before, a thing, thick and tangible. I felt it would take my breath, squeeze me until I choked, until I gasped in blackness itself and filled up with it, like someone drowning in a sea of ink. And still there was nothing—no noise, no voices, a silence like the tomb.

  “I know now, from depositions, that it took nearly four hours for the institute’s engineers to get the system up and running. To little Martine, the child I was, forgotten in the dark, it could have been four years.

  “Then, at the last, as my mind wandered along the brink of an abyss, ready at any moment to tumble into a disassociation more permanent and total than any mere blindness, something joined me.

  “Suddenly, and with no warning, I was no longer alone. I felt someone beside me, sharing the darkness with me, but it was not a relief to my terror. That someone, whoever or whatever it was, filled the emptiness in my apartment with the most dreadful, indescribable loneliness. Did I hear a child crying? Did I hear anything at all? I do not know. I do not know anything now, and at the time I was probably mad. But I felt something come and sit beside me, and felt it weeping bitterly in the smothering black night, a presence that was empty and cold and utterly alone, the single most terrible thing I have ever experienced. I was struck dumb and rigid with utter terror.

  “And then the lights came on.

  “Odd, the small things on which life hinges. Reaching an intersection just after the traffic light has changed, going back for a wallet and thus missing a plane, walking into the revealing glow of a street-light when a stranger is watching—small happenstances, but they can change everything. The institute’s system crash alone, massive and inexplicable as it was, should not have been enough. But one of the infrastructure subroutines had been incorrectly coded—the matter of a few misplaced digits—and the three apartments on my wing had been left out of the proper start-up procedures. Thus, when the system came up and the power went on, instead of the dull, slow-brightening glow of the transition lights, little more than a sliver of moon on a black night, our three apartments received the full thousand-watt nova of the emergency lights. The other two apartments were empty—one had not been used for weeks, the other’s resident had been taken to the institute’s infirmary a few days earlier because of chicken pox. I was the only one who saw the emergency lights come up like the blazing stare of God. Saw them for an instant, that is—the last thing I ever saw.

  “It is not physical, they tell me, all of them—more specialists than I can remember. The trauma, bad as it was, should not have been permanent. There is no discernible damage to the optic nerve, and the tests indicate that I do actually ‘see’—that the part of my brain that processes vision is still processing and responding to stimuli. But, of course, I don’t see, no matter what any test may indicate.

  “‘Hysterical blindness’ is the old term—another way of saying that I could see if I wanted to. If that is true, it is only an academic truth. If I could see by wanting to, then I would not have spent all my years in blackness—could anyone believe anything else? But that one burning instant drove all memory of how to see from my mind, blasting me into permament blackness, creating in an instant the woman I am today as surely as Saul’s new self was created on the Damascus road.

  “I have lived in darkness ever since.

  “The lawsuit was long—it took almost three years—but I remember little of it. I had been thrust into another world, as surely as if I had been enchanted by an evil fairy, and I had lost everything. It took a long time until I began to make a new world in which I could live. My parents won several million credits from Clinsor and the Pestalozzi Institute, and put almost half of it away for me. That money put me through special schools, and when I became an adult, it bought me my equipment, my home, and my privacy. In a way, it bought me my distance from my parents, too—there is nothing I need from them anymore.

  “There is more to say, but the time has gone so fast. I do not know how long I have sat here whispering under my breath, but I can feel the sun beginning to rise in this strange place. In a way, I have started over here, just as I have started this new diary, spoken into nothingness with only the faintest hope that someday I can retrieve it. Was it the English poet Keats who called himself ‘one whose name is written in water’? So. I will be Martine Desroubins, the blind witch of a new world, and I will write my name on air.

  “Someone is calling me. I must go.

  “Code Delphi. End here.”

  IT was a melodic sequence of chiming tones that spawned fractal subsequences even as the main theme repeated
. The subsequences threw off subsidiary patterns of their own, creating layer after layer, until after a while the whole world became a mesh of sound so complex it was impossible to pick out one tone, let alone one sequence, from the whole. Eventually it became a single note with millions of harmonics moving in it, a streaming, shimmering, resonating F-sharp that was probably the sound of the universe beginning.

  It was Dread’s thinking music. Next to the chase, and the occasional adrenal boost, it was his only drug. He did not use it indiscriminately, hungrily, as a chargehead might canline a streamed pop of 2black, but rather with the measured calm of a junkie doctor rigging up a hit of pure pharmaceutical heroin before going back to work. He had cleared the afternoon, hung a digital “Do Not Disturb” sign on his incoming lines, and now he was lying on his back in the middle of the carpet of his Cartagena office, a pillow behind his neck and a squeeze bottle of purified water at his side, listening to the chorus of the spheres.

  As the single tone seemed to grow smoother and less complex—because, paradoxically, the iterations were growing exponentially, he felt himself rising up out of his body and into the empty silver space he sought. He was Dread, but he was also Johnny Wulgaru, and he was something else as well, something eerily close to the Old Man’s Messenger of Death—but he was more. He was all those things, grown to the size of a star system . . . empty, full of blackness, and yet charged with light.

  He felt the twist smolder up out of dormancy, a hot point at the very center of his being. Even as he floated in the silver nothingness of the music, he felt his own strength grow. He could reach out now, if he chose, and twist something far more complex and powerful than a security system. He had a glimpse of the earth lying below him, shrouded in darkness but for a spherical tracery of electronic pathways, a capillary array of tiny lights, and felt—in his silvery, music-maddened grandeur—that if he desired it, he could twist the whole world.