River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  In the silence, Paul said: “So this was the accident I heard about?”

  “Yes. A big, big mistake. But it was really just a small thing that happened in a small lab. A failure of containment for one viral agent. The lab worked often with such things, as we all did, and all potentially lethal viruses were engineered to be unable to replicate beyond a few cycles, enough for study but no more. But an improper procedure had been used in developing this viral agent, or the genetic manipulation itself was deliberately sabotaged, or perhaps the virus itself developed a mutant resistance to the safeguards. No one knows. A centrifuge malfunctioned. A receptacle cracked. Everyone in the lab was killed within minutes. Containment was broken because one woman from the front office survived long enough to reach the fences, within yards of a busy city street. An automatic alarm from the facility probably saved the lives of millions. As it was, two hundred thousand died in a month, most in the first few days, before a virus-killer could be engineered. The army shot thousands more as they tried to break out of quarantine.”

  “God, yes, I saw that. On the newsnets. It was . . . it was terrible.” Paul was aware of the monstrous inadequacy of the response, but could think of nothing else to say.

  “I lived in that quarantine. It was street by street. My mother and father lived only two blocks away—two blocks!—and I could not go to them. They died with the flesh melting from their bones and were burned in a pit with hundreds of others. For one month the block in which I lived became a jungle. People who think they are going to die within hours . . .” Nandi shook his head. There was something terrible in his eyes as they peered from the shadows cast by the lantern. “I saw terrible things. The children, who could not defend themselves . . .” He paused, seeking words; when he continued, his voice was thick and hoarse. “I cannot speak of it, even now. I myself did terrible things as well, greedy, mad things. I did them for fear, for hunger, in what I thought was self-defense. But the worst of my crimes was that I watched what others did, but did not stop them. Or at least I thought that was my worst crime.”

  The light in the cavern had changed in some subtle way, bringing the other man’s face into sharper focus. Paul saw that there were fissures in the ceiling ahead; a few rays of daylight stabbed down from above like searchlights, columns of bright fire dousing themselves in the River Alph’s dark waters.

  “I had long before rejected the religion of my parents,” Nandi abruptly continued. “I had no need of such benighted superstition—was I not a man of science, an enlightened creature of the twenty-first century? I survived the quarantine by existing in a mindless state, throwing off my intellect entirely. But when the quarantine was lifted, and I walked past the bodies stacked on the street corners, waiting for the government to come and haul them away, then my intellect returned and I began to think I might have made a very grave error in how I had built my life. As I continued through the streets, through the smoke of the burnings and the rubble of the fires and explosions—for during the chaos of the quarantine parts of the city had become something like war zones—my heart began to perceive that there was a wound in the material world that no amount of science could heal, that in fact science itself was only the helpful lie told to a dying man.

  “Then I reached my parents’ block, and the pit where the bodies had been burned. Someone told me what had been done there, and for a while I was lost again, walking in darkness. I cast myself down into the pit and I swam there, weeping, in the ashes of the dead, the stench of their burned bones and fat in my nose, the oil and soot of their carbonized forms painting me black. And then the hand of God reached into me, and touched me.”

  Paul realized he was holding his breath. He let it out. A vapor, it hung in the air over his head, slowly turning invisible.

  “The words of old wisdom came to me then,” Nandi continued slowly.

  “The world has Maya and its veils, which is to say illusion, as its material cause—the illusion that permits souls to enact their dance of good acts and evil acts, and thus to turn the wheel of incarnation. But that is only the material cause of the world. Shiva, he who is the dance, is the first cause, that which always was and always will be. It is said: ‘Thus it is that as the First Cause—sometimes called ‘The Terror’ and ‘The Destroyer’—dances upon the darkness, demonstrating his five acts of creation, preservation, destruction, embodiment, and release, he contains in himself both the life and death of all things. So for this reason his servants dwell in the cremation ground, and the heart of his servant is like the cremation ground, wasted and desolate, where the self and its thoughts and deeds are burnt away, and nothing remains but the Dancer himself.”’

  His face seemed to have changed, to have become something hard and sharp as a stone knife. His eyes glinted with a cold light that made Paul distinctly uneasy.

  “So at that moment, as I lay in the ashes of the dead, I gave myself to Shiva—to God. And by doing it I found a science that all the works of humanity can only approximate. All that happens, happens because God wills it. All is part of the dance. So although it is my lot to combat the Grail Brotherhood, I also know that they can have no success that does not glorify Heaven. Do you understand, Paul Jonas?”

  Paul was too stunned to reply for a moment. He could not tell if he had just been told something profound or had endured the ravings of a religious maniac, a man driven mad by tragedy. “I don’t think I do,” he finally replied. “Not really.”

  “You are wondering what sort of lunatic accompanies you, are you not?” Nandi smiled a tired smile. In the growing light, he looked a little less frightening. “In the cremation pit where my parents had been burned I learned what my greatest crime had been. My sin had been that I believed that I was the measure of the universe. Years later, when I returned to another cremation ground, preparing myself in the Shivaite manner—becoming an aghori, we would say—for this task, I came to see that even those children of the quarantine, so horribly abused and murdered before my eyes, were a part of the body of God. Even their murderers were God, and thus were doing God’s work.”

  Paul’s head felt overloaded, his thoughts heavy. “I still don’t understand any of that, or if I do, I don’t agree with it. If murder is God’s work, then why are you bothering to fight against these Grail people?”

  “Because that is my task, Paul Jonas. And out of my actions, my resistance, more of God’s wishes will become visible and manifest. The Grail Brotherhood, too, are doing God’s work, as am I, although they do not believe it and doubtless think the opposite is true. And I am sure the same is so for you, too.”

  A short while earlier, miserable at the thought of being hunted, Paul had rejected the idea of his own importance. But now, hearing this man describe him as just another cog in Heaven’s implacable machinery, he found himself swinging in the other direction. Some prideful thing in him, something that he could not dislike or even separate from himself, rejected the idea. “Are they all like you, then?” he finally asked. “The people in the Circle? Are they all Shiva-worshipers?”

  For the first time, Nandi laughed. “Oh, goodness, no. Or perhaps I should say, ‘Oh, heavens, no.’ We are from all different faiths and disciplines. All we share is our knowledge of the Eternal, and the will to devote our lives to serving it.”

  Paul could not help smiling. “Ecumenicals. My grandmother always said that you folks were the biggest danger there was.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing. A bit of family humor.” Paul looked up. The ice was growing a little thinner on the cavern walls here, the air a bit warmer. He let the blanket sag and stretched his arms. “So what next? For us, I mean. Where are we going?”

  “To the next simulation,” his companion replied, still paddling tirelessly, his slender arms moving with an almost mechanical motion. “Where I will tell you the name of the man who is my enemy and, it appears, yours. And then I just go my own way.” />
  “What do you mean?”

  Nandi’s face was set hard again, locked like a door. “You cannot travel with me, Paul. I was meant to meet you, that I am certain, but we are not to travel together long. You have your own role to play, whatever that may be, and I have mine. None but one of the Circle can go where I am going. I am sorry.”

  The shock was powerful and surprisingly painful. After a vast stretch of loneliness, he had finally found someone to call a companion, if not yet a friend, and now that human connection was going to be severed immediately. “But . . . but where will I go? Am I just going to roam through these simulations forever?” He felt his eyes filling with tears and blinked angrily. “I’m so tired. I just want to go home. Please, help me. I want to go home.”

  Nandi’s expression did not soften, but he took one hand off the paddle and touched Paul’s shoulder. “You will find a way, if it is God’s will.”

  “I don’t care about God’s will! I don’t care about the Brotherhood, or your Circle, or any of this. I don’t belong here.”

  “But you do belong here. I do not know how, but I know.” Nandi squeezed his arm, then withdrew his hand.

  Paul turned, unwilling to show the other man his need any longer, and stared at the river stretching before them. The tunnel walls glowed in the distance, the ice afire with deep golden light. “Is that the gateway?” he asked.

  “No, only the sun of the outside world. But the gate is not far beyond.”

  Paul cleared his throat; then, still looking out at the dark water and the approaching daylight, said: “There’s a woman who comes to me in dreams.”

  “In dreams you have here? In this network?”

  “Yes. And I saw her in at least one of the simulations.”

  He related all that he could remember, the words spilling out, from the first dreams to the most recent. He described meeting her in the flesh in the Mars simulation. He repeated what she had told him when she had spoken through the Ice Age child. “But none of it makes sense,” he finished. “Go to the wanderer’s house and release the weaver—that could mean anything.”

  Nandi was silent for a long time, thinking. The light began to grow, throwing long stalactite shadows across the ceiling of the cave. Then, for the second time, the dark-skinned man began to laugh.

  “What’s funny?”

  “I suppose it is only that for so long we Indians envied the very Britishness that had been thrust upon us by our conquerors, but which we were never fully allowed to enjoy. Now it seems that an education at the university in Varanasi gives one a better grounding in the classics than an education in England itself.”

  “What are you talking about?” Paul tried to restrain his anger, but this was his life the man was laughing at. Pathetic though it was, and at the moment full of gaps, it was all he had.

  “I suspect you are looking for Ithaca, my friend Paul. The wanderer’s house is in Ithaca.”

  The cave mouth was before them, spilling light, turning the river’s surface into gilded foil. Paul had to squint. “Ithaca. . . ?”

  “Goodness, man, did you not read Homer? The English school system is in even greater disarray than I thought.” Nandi now appeared to be enjoying himself. He applied the paddle to the water with dispatch, slipping them through the rocks that thronged the cave’s opening and out into what at first seemed like the brightest, most blazing sun Paul had ever experienced. Moments later, as his dazzled eyes finally began to adjust, he saw the flat plane of the ocean lying dark and still in the distance, at the end of the river’s cursive track across a forested plain. He also noticed that something seemed to be wrong with the color of the water just ahead. Then the first arrow struck.

  Paul gaped in amazement as the shaft shivered to visibility in the boat’s prow, only inches from his hand. It might have been a completely new and original object for all the sense his mind could make of it. A moment later another arrow smacked into the wood next to it, then Nandi cried out behind him.

  Paul turned. A side stream, perhaps the tributary Nandi had mentioned earlier, rushed in from one side here, crossing through a forest of pines to join the Alph. Two boats were racing toward them on this smaller river, a hundred meters back but closing fast, each sped by half a dozen oarsmen. The archers standing in the prow of the leading boat wore silks whose bold, shimmering colors reflected the bright sun. One drew his bow, then released the string. An instant later something buzzed past Paul’s head.

  Nandi was slumped forward on the bench, a slender black shaft jutting from his thigh, his loose pants already sodden with blood. “It appears the Khan was in residence after all,” he said. His face had gone yellowish with the shock, but his voice was strong. “These, I think, are after me, not you.”

  Paul crouched as low as he could without actually hiding behind Nandi. The two pursuing boats had left the sidestream and now coursed down the Alph directly behind them. Several more arrows whisked past, missing only because the current was rough and all three craft were pitching. “What difference does it make who they’re after?” Paul demanded. “They’ll kill us both anyway! How far to the gateway?”

  Nandi clenched his teeth, squeezing his jaw so tight that tendons stood out on his neck and veins bulged in his forehead, then broke the arrow off just above the skin. “It is too far to reach it without being shot like rabbits. But if I am not here, I think things will go differently for you.” He crept to the edge of the boat, still holding his head low.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I knew we would part, but did not realize it would be so quickly,” Nandi replied. “The place you seek is not in the next simulation, or even close, but with luck you will find your way there. It is Ithaca you are looking for, I am almost certain.” He lurched over the side, but caught the rail with his hands and hung from the boat’s rail with his legs already in the water, tipping the small craft sideways.

  “Nandi, what are you doing?” Paul tried to drag him back, but the slender man pushed his reaching fingers away.

  “I am not committing suicide, Paul Jonas. The Khan’s soldiers will have a harder time catching me than they think. Stay in the boat. The current will take you through.” Another flurry of arrows whickered past overhead. “Your enemy’s name is Felix Jongleur—do not underestimate him!”

  He let go and threw himself backward, flinging out his arms to make a great splash. By the time he surfaced Paul was twenty yards downstream, and could only watch helplessly as Nandi Paradivash swam to shore and limped into the trees.

  The first boat backed water furiously when it reached the spot where he had disappeared, then slid to the shallows so the soldiers could leap out to pursue him, but the second boat did not slow. The archers on board, who had waited while those in the first craft tried their luck, now had a chance to demonstrate their own art; as Paul lay huddled in the bottom of the little boat arrowheads spattered against it like hailstones, splintering the wood all around him.

  He only saw a brief glimmer of blue overhead, a gleaming, shimmering azure like a cloud of uneven light, then something made the hairs on his arms stand up from his skin, sparking, and he passed out of Xanadu.

  CHAPTER 19

  A Day’s Work

  * * *

  NETFEED/NEWS: Pilker Calls for New Legislative House

  (visual: Pilker in front of Capitol Building)

  VO: The Reverend Daniel Pilker, leader of the fundamentalist Christian group Kingdom Now, is suing the United States, demanding that a fourth house of legislature be formed.

  PILKER: “We have a House of Representatives, an Industrial Senate. We have every kind of special interest group that there is making their voices heard. But where is the representation for God-fearing Americans? Until there is a Religious Senate as well, which can make and interpret laws specifically with God in mind, then a large part of the Ameri
can people will remain disenfranchised in their own country . . .”

  * * *

  THE suburbs slid past and were replaced by the hills and their towns, commuter havens side-by-side with failed developments empty as museum displays in the white morning. The mild shadows grew ever smaller as the sun climbed toward noon, as though the bright light in the sky could even evaporate darkness.

  “So, we couldn’t have done this with a call?”

  “I need to see this place, Stan. I just do. One of those things.”

  “Just explain this again—Polly Merapanui came from way up north. She was a street kid in Kogarah, got killed under a Sydney highway. So why exactly are we going to the Blue Mountains, which isn’t any of those places?”

  “Because she lived there.” Calliope pulled around a truck full of broken concrete pieces, which was moving about as fast as might be expected. “For almost a year after she moved down from Darwin. You know that—it’s in the files.”

  “Just trying to get my head wrapped around it.” He pursed his lips, watching another dust-dry town slide past the windows. “We couldn’t have made a phone call? It’s not like I’m desperate for police-related things to do on my infrequent days off, Skouros.”

  “As if you had a life. Anyway, her stepmother doesn’t have a line. No access.”

  “Quality folk.”

  “You are a snob, Stan Chan.”

  “Just trying to entertain myself on the long drive.”

  Calliope opened the window. The heat had eased a bit; a light breeze riffled the yellow grasses along the hillsides. “I just need somewhere to start, Stan. I need . . . I don’t know, a feeling, something.”

  “These people didn’t even see her during the two years before she died. And if her momma don’t got no line at the cot, then baby wasn’t even calling home, was she?”

  “You are the least convincing slang user I’ve ever heard. No, they didn’t see her, didn’t hear from her, except for one or two freeline messages to the place where her stepmother worked. But they knew her, and nobody we’ve found in Kogarah could say the same.”