River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  “I cannot make sense of it. These are strange people. It is true that the very rich, as some American writer once said, are not like you and me.

  “With Kunohara gone, we continued along the river. As we marched, William pointed out, correctly but with mocking abrasive-ness, that Florimel had missed her chance to overpower and threaten one of the Grail Lords. She did not hit him, but to me it felt as though she wanted to.

  “The afternoon came on and slid past. I talked with Quan Li about Hong Kong and her granddaughter Jing, who is eight years old. She spoke movingly about the terrible pain Jing’s sickness has caused for the whole family—Quan Li’s son, who is a trans shipper of raw materials, has taken a year’s leave from his company so he can share time at the hospital with the child’s mother, and Quan Li fears he will never build his business up again. She herself, she said, has been driven almost mad by what has happened to her only grandchild, and her conviction that it was something related to the net was at first looked on by the family as an old person’s fear of technology, and later as a deepening and worrisome obsession.

  “I asked her how she was able to remain online for such a long time, and she confessed shyly that she had emptied her savings—another sign to her son and daughter-in-law that she was unstable—and checked into an Immersion Palace, a sort of VR vacation spa on the edge of the Central District, for an extended stay. She said with what sounded like a rueful smile that this extra time in the Otherland network must be burning up the last of her retirement income even as we were speaking.

  “William and Florimel had argued again, this time over what Kunohara had said—William called it ‘rubbish’ and was convinced it was meant to mystify us or even mislead us, that Kunohara was entertaining himself at our expense—and so neither of them was talking to anyone. I attempted to speak to T4b, about whom I feel I know less than any of the others, but he was very resistant. He did not seem angry but distant, like a soldier between one dreadful battle and the next. When I gently questioned him, he would only repeat what he had said before, that a friend of his had been affected by the same thing that had struck Renie’s brother and Quan Li’s granddaughter. When I asked him how he had found out about Atasco’s world in the first place, he was vague, even elusive. He would not even say where he lived in the real world, except that it was somewhere in America. His conversation, though frustrating, leads me to suspect that despite his inarticulate ways, he is quite clever about getting around on the net. He also seems, more than any of the rest of us, impressed with the Grail Brotherhood and the ‘strong line’ they must have to build a place like this, which I assume means money and power.

  “We were fortunate in our encounters with the local wildlife all day. We met a shorebird, an apparition large as an office tower, perched on stiltlike legs, but escaped it by dodging into a natural cave in the river-bank and waiting until it grew bored and crunched away. Later a large beetle of some kind forced us to scramble up the side of a gulley, like people caught in a narrow road when a truck wants to pass. The beetle paid us no attention, but we had so little room that I could trail my hand along its hard, pebble-grained shell as it passed, marveling again at the detail of these worlds.

  “Late in the afternoon I began to sense a change in the river. What had been a moving chaos of information, complete with water sounds so complex they might have been the work of hundreds of modern improvisational composers all working simultaneously, began to develop . . . structures. It is hard to explain more clearly than that. What had once been almost completely random began to manifest certain congruencies, certain more definite patterns, like veins of crystal embedded in ordinary rock, and I had the first intimations of a greater and more complex structure somewhere close by.

  “I told my impression to the others, but they saw no difference in the river beside us. This changed within minutes. Florimel was the first to notice the hint of something sparkling in the water, faint at first, like the bioluminescent algae churned up in a ship’s wake, but mixed evenly throughout the river. Soon the glow was impossible for the others to miss. As for me, I sensed something very strange, what I can only call a curvature of space. The openness that I had sensed before me for so long, both on the river and on either side, seemed to be coming to an end, as though we had reached a spot where what lay before us moved into two dimensions. I still could perceive what I must call a metaphorical vanishing point, the sort of thing an artist might use to give the illusion of an extra dimension, but space itself did not seem to continue beyond that point. The others told me that the riverbank and river continued on into the visible distance, although the blue glow, which was now so bright that they said it actually reflected from their features, diminished sharply after a point some few yards ahead.

  “When we reached the edge of the space I could perceive, something strange happened. One moment we were moving forward along the stony bank, single file, with Florimel in the lead. In the next step, Florimel was walking in the other direction, moving past Quan Li, who had been in line behind her.

  “My companions were astonished, and took turns following Florimel through this strange, topsy-turvy effect. There was no sense of transition, no point at which they could feel themselves turning around. It was as though they had been edited like an old fashioned videotape, between one frame and the next—going, going, going, returning.

  “I was less surprised than the rest. I had felt Florimel’s essence—her information, as it were—disappear for a split-instant before reappearing in its inverted form. Apparently only my own heightened senses were capable of perceiving the microseconds in which this haunted-house effect took shape. But it made no difference. No matter how many times we tried, at whatever speed and in whichever combinations, we could not go any farther along the riverbank. I suppose that this must be a trick of the designers to limit the need for entry and exit points. I cannot help wondering if the nonhuman Puppets might not at this point receive some prefabricated memory of what had occurred on the far side of a barrier they would never actually perceive.

  “This and other speculations, not to mention arguments, took the good part of an hour. Clearly, if we were to cross out of the simulation, it would have to be on the river itself. But just as clearly, if we were to build a boat, we would not be able to leave until well into the next day, since the sun was already setting in the west. We also had to decide whether we believed Kunohara’s assertion that the gates—apparently the ways in and out of the various simworlds—had indeed gone ‘random.’ If so, time was less of a factor, since the chances we would find Renie and Orlando and the others on the far side would be small.

  “Ultimately, we decided we could not take that risk. Florimel volunteered to lead us on foot through the shallower waters at the river’s edge. Sweet William was not happy with this, and pointed out—with some justice—that we might find the river stronger or wider on the other side of the gateway, perhaps even be swept off to drown. He pointed out that we could not even be sure that the river on the far side would be water and not sulfuric acid, cyanide, or something equally unpleasant.

  “I agreed with him and said so, but also said that if we were to have any chance at all of finding our lost companions, speed was the most important thing. I found myself impatient at the thought of another night in that place, although I did not say so. For the first time, I had begun to glimpse some of the structures beneath this new universe, as Kunohara had called it, and had felt a little of my earlier helplessness evaporate. I wanted to be moving on. I wanted to learn.

  “The other three agreed with me, and so William reluctantly made it unanimous, with the proviso that he go alongside Florimel, so that if conditions proved hostile, one could help the other.

  “We found a place where the bank dipped closest to the river’s surface—there were no gentle slopes at our size—and with the aid of a grass shoot, clambered down into the water, remaining within arm’s reach of th
e bank.

  “It was no more than knee-deep, but the current was strong, and there was also an odd sensation of liveliness to the water, as though it were full of charged, vibrating particles. Quan Li told me that the visual effect was quite spectacular—’like wading through fireworks,’ she said. It was less pleasant for me, since the energies being simulated were uncomfortably similar to the devastating input-overload I had experienced when I first came through into Otherland. I held onto Quan Li’s elbow to keep my balance as we moved toward some kind of flat surface, a rippling plane which marked an end to the simulation. William and Florimel reached it and passed through—in an instant they were simply gone, their telltale signatures erased from my perceptions. Quan Li and I stepped through after them.

  “The first thing I sensed on the far side, the perception of the very first moment, was a vast hollowing-out of space in front of me. Except for the river, which still flowed strongly beside us, I faced a tremendous emptiness where I had been surrounded by densely packaged information everywhere in Kunohara’s world. The second thing I sensed was Florimel standing on the edge of this great emptiness, with William still a step or two behind her. To my surprise, she took several steps to the side, deeper into the river, as if to get a better view. The current yanked hard at her legs. She waved her arms desperately, teetered, and then was snatched away.

  “Quan Li shouted in surprise and horror beside me. Sweet William grasped hopelessly at the spot where she had stood. I could feel Florimel’s essence being washed down the river, could sense her struggling against the pull, and thus I was astonished to hear William’s ragged voice say, ‘Look at that! She’s flying! What the hell is this about?’

  “Even as we all watched, Florimel managed to regain some control and move herself toward the edge of what I still perceived as the river, but no one else seemed able to see. She pulled herself out of the flow into what seemed nothingness to me, and immediately her progress slowed. She began to fall, slowly at first, then faster.

  “William screamed, ‘Flap your arms, Flossie!’, and what I at first thought was unbelievably cruel even from him proved good advice. When Florimel extended her arms, she pulled up, as though she had spread invisible wings. To our growing astonishment, she began banking and diving like a bird, describing great spirals in the apparently empty air before us. By the time a few minutes had passed, she had made her way back to us, and drifted on the wind just beyond where we stood, keeping herself aloft with occasional movements of her arms.

  “‘It is wonderful!’ she cried. ‘Step off! The air will hold you up!’

  “Now I perceived that what at first had seemed a great hollow space had its own sorts of information, but was far less static than the world we had just left. It required me to make a certain . . . recalibration, for lack of a better word, and a hurried discussion with the others helped me complete the picture. We stood on a promontory looking down into a vast stony valley, its bottom hidden in shadow far below. It was either twilight here, as it had been in Kunohara’s world, or early morning. In either case, only blue-gray sky showed above the peaks that lined the valley. Ahead of us down the canyon we could perceive other small shapes, but distance made them obscure, even to my senses.

  “The river had become a horizontal current of fast air, invisible to the others but not to me, a continuous slipstream running right through the canyon.

  “After a little discussion, Sweet William and I both stepped off the precipice. As Florimel had found, if we spread our arms and thought of them as wings, we could adjust ourselves to the air currents—there were many breezes less powerful than the river-of-air that were nevertheless very useful—and float or even soar. Convincing Quan Li and T4b to abandon the safety of the promontory was harder. T4b in particular seemed to think his armor, despite being no more real than the valley or the air currents, might drag him down.

  “‘Well, you should have thought of that before you dressed yourself up as a workshop bench, now shouldn’t you have done?’ William told him.

  “At last we lured the other two out onto what seemed like treacherous air, T4b consenting to hold hands with Florimel and myself until he was certain it would work. This almost proved him right in his pessimism, because with our hands and his clenched in a human chain, we could not sail the winds. We began to drop, and had to let him go. T4b plummeted another hundred meters before he spread his arms and began to flap wildly, like a farmyard hen. To his immense relief he proved as buoyant as the rest of us, and within perhaps a quarter of an hour we were all swooping and playing on the breeze like angels amid the clouds of Paradise.

  “William in particular seemed to enjoy himself. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said, ‘finally something worth building this ridiculous place for! This is brilliant!’

  “It fell to me to suggest we had better start exploring our new environment, since we didn’t know how conditions might change. There might even be ‘wind-floods,’ I said, in which the river would overflow its banks and send us all crashing down the valley, banging against outcroppings of stone. The others agreed, and we set out like very unusual migratory birds.

  “We did not have wings, invisible or otherwise, but our arms acted on the environment much as wings would have. However, we did not disrupt any larger area of information than our physical size warranted, so I concluded at last that our new environment was more a fantasy than a scientific extrapolation—even if we had been in a place of very low gravity, we would not have been able to effect such dramatic movement with the body surfaces we could present to the air currents, and would not have dropped so swiftly on those occasions when we stopped flapping our arms. This simworld did not attempt to be realistic. It was a dream of flying written large.

  “In fact, I came to appreciate what I can only call the poetry of the place, and began to agree with William that here was something worth building such an expensive network in order to have. There was more to this new world than just stone and air. Unusual trees of unexpected colors—their leaves heather-purple, bright yellow, or even pale, heathery blue—grew directly out from cracks in the canyon walls, some with trunks almost completely horizontal, others starting that way but bending at their midpoint to rise parallel to the cliff face. Some were so broad and many-branched that an entire flock of people could have rested in them—and often did, as we later learned. There were other kinds of plant life as well, flowers as big as serving platters also growing out of cracks in the stone, hollow vines anchored to the cliffs, but with long tendrils which reached to the river, swirling in the wind-currents like ocean kelp. There were even round balls of loose vegetable matter that spun through the air like tumbleweeds, having no contact with the ground at all.

  “In fact, the river of air seemed much like a normal terrestrial river, the center of many kinds of life. The floating plants, for instance, seemed most common just at the edge of the air-river—rolling along its ‘banks,’ as it were. Birds and insects of many kinds also hovered close to the strong currents, which seemed to carry a great deal of living matter in their invisible clutches, much of it apparently edible. I wished many times in those first hours that I had time to study this strange ecology properly.

  “It soon became apparent that we had arrived during the morning, for before too long the leading edge of the sun appeared above the canyon-fencing peaks. As the air warmed, more creatures were drawn to the wind-river, and soon we were surrounded by a cloud of insects and birds and even stranger creatures. Some were rodents similar to flying squirrels, but others bore no relationship to any earth animals. One strange creature in particular was very common, a hollow thing shaped like nothing so much as a long furry boat, with tiny black eyes and webbed, paddling feet. Quan Li dubbed it a ‘ferryman.’

  “We flew for hours, pacing the river. The canyon remained largely the same all along, although we passed a few waterfalls—not air, as the river was air, but actual water spilling down the cl
iff faces. There were enough holes in the canyon wall that I began to wonder what kinds of larger creatures might also share this world, and in particular if there might be some less harmless than the birds and the ferrymen. My senses had not become familiar enough with this new environment to discriminate the signature of whatever might be lurking in the caves from the chaos of flying things and whirling air currents around me. Although ultimately my senses may prove more trustworthy here than those of my companions—for instance, in my being able to ‘see’ the river where they could not—I have the disadvantage of having to learn an entirely new set of indicators. This is something I will have to prepare for if we make it into other simulations. Especially in those first hours, I was like a bat suddenly released into a tickertape parade.

  “The others, though, had only to depend on their natural senses, and once they had discovered the knack of flight, seemed to be enjoying themselves very much. William in particular was as cheerful in this new place as a small child, and it was he who named it ‘Aerodromia.’ For the moment, we had almost forgotten the serious nature of our problems, and about our lost companions. In fact, that first half-day in the new world was a bit like a holiday.

  “It was late afternoon when we met our first Aerodromic humans. They were clustered on a horizontal tree near a vast waterfall, a tribe of perhaps two dozen. Some were bathing in the water, some were filling skin bags which they wore tied to wide belts. They grew still at our approach, and if I had not been with sighted companions, I might have missed them entirely, since the waterfall was for me a scene of much information confusion.

  At Florimel’s suggestion, we moved toward them in a slow and indirect fashion, trying to demonstrate that our intentions were peaceful. The people, who I am told have dark brown skins and sharp-boned features, like the Nilo-Hamitic races of Earth, watched us carefully, staring out of the waterfall mist like a troop of solemn owls. Some of the women pulled their naked children close. Several of the men lifted short, slender spears as we approached, but seemed in no hurry to use violence. We learned later that the spears are really harpoons, each one tethered to its owner by twenty or thirty meters of cable spun from human hair, the cables themselves more valuable than the weapons. Altogether, their level of civilization seemed to be somewhere between late Stone Age and early Bronze Age, although it quickly became apparent there was no metal among these people.