River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  “One of the men, a wiry fellow with a graying chin beard, dropped off his branch and skimmed toward us with a grace that suddenly made us all conscious of how little we knew about flying. He spread his arms at the last moment to rise before us like a butterfly, and asked in quite comprehensible English who we were.

  “‘We are travelers,’ Florimel replied, earning a disgruntled look from William for taking the initiative. I cannot help wondering if this struggle for leadership is to go on forever. I sincerely hope it does not. ‘We mean no harm,’ she said. ‘We are new to this place.’

  “The chief or headman or whatever he was seemed to find this acceptable, and a short discussion ensued. Florimel asked him if he had seen any of our companions, and described the four we had lost, but he shook his head and said no strangers had passed through the valley for at least ‘a dozen suns,’ and none at all who matched the descriptions we gave. Then he invited us to come and meet with his folk. We of course agreed.

  “Our hosts, we learned soon, were called the Middle Air People, a decorative rather than territorial description, since everything beneath the clouds and above the farthest depth of the canyons was apparently considered to be the Middle Air. In any case, this particular group of Middle Air People was one of the families of something named the Red Rock Tribe, although they were also a hunting flight. Again I had the sense of things it would take me months or years to understand properly.

  “We were offered drink and food, and while we gulped the fresh, cold water and pretended to nibble at bits of what William claimed was dried ferryman, we had a chance to study the people more closely. Their clothes were made from skins and furs, presumably from creatures they had hunted, but there were buttons and some obviously decorative stitchery, so they were not primitive.

  “When we had eaten, the entire family leaped from the tree near the waterfall and took to the air. We scrambled after them, and were quickly but discreetly shunted to a position near the children and more obviously diminished elders. It was hard to feel slighted. Even a moment watching the graceful, soaring arcs of the adult members of the family showed us how handicapped we truly were.

  “We moved in a wide spiral down into the canyon and then downstream beside the river of air, flying for what seemed the better part of an hour. At last we reached the rust-colored outcroppings that were the source of the tribe’s name, and found there a more established camp—the hometown of the entire Red Rock Tribe, complete with sleeping caves and the few belongings, such as large cooking pots, that the tribes did not carry with them during the day. I wondered at the paucity of their possessions, but after I watched one man sharpen a stone spearhead by flying swiftly downward while holding the edge of it against the rock face, so that the spearhead left a streak of stone-dust down the vertical cliff, I realized that their environment must give them much that our own ancestors had been forced to do by long, backbreaking effort.

  “There were several dozen other family groups already in camp for the night by the time our host led us in—perhaps as many as four or five hundred Middle Air folk altogether. Our family exchanged ritual greetings with many, then spent a long time gossiping with the nearest neighbors. It was something like being on one of those stony islands in the sea where many kinds of birds congregate to nest, chaotic at first inspection, but in reality very highly organized.

  “As the sun began to set behind the cliffs on our side of the valley, fires were lit on almost every promontory and families gathered to eat and talk among themselves. Our own family roosted along the trunks and thicker branches of a cluster of trees which grew perpendicular to the cliff face, like outstretched hands. This seemed to be their particular territory here in the larger campground.

  “When everyone had settled, and a fire had been lit on a wide slab of stone cradled on the forked trunk of one of the largest trees, a woman of the family sang a song about a child named ‘Two Blue Winds’ who ran away from home to become a cloud, much to his mother’s sorrow. Then a young man did a dance that the other Family members found very funny, but which I found so gracefully athletic—in my mind’s eye, I could see his information slithering and jumping like quicksilver on a tilting pane of glass—that I found myself growing tearful.

  “As the evening sky lost the last of its color, the stars gleaming now against the black, our host, who is named ‘Builds a Fire on Air,’ began a long story about a man who ate one of the tumbleweeds—the people here call it ‘Air-Spinner-Bush,’ which is an accurate if not very poetic name—and was blown away down the river. He had numerous adventures in lands that seemed to be fantasies even in this fantastic place, like the Land of Three-Headed People and the Land of Birds with Eyes on their Wings. The tumbleweed-eater even visited the uncanny Land of Sideways Cliffs—this perhaps a description of real flatlands, perhaps out of racial memory, or else simply the most preposterous geography the Family could invent. At the end he found a beautiful wife and many ‘fletches,’ a word I still do not understand but which seems to indicate wealth, but was so traumatized by the experience that he swallowed a huge stone so he would never be blown away again, and thus lived out the rest of his life on the ledges of the cliff face, unable to fly.

  “I could not tell if this was supposed to be a happy or sad ending. A little of both, perhaps.

  “We were fed again, this time with fresh meat and fruits, and we all ate enough to be sociable. It is hard to tell what effect eating has on us in this virtual environment. Obviously it has no real impact on our physical bodies, but so many of our internal systems seem influenced by whatever keeps us here that it is hard not to wonder how complete the mind-body link is. Do we receive energy when we eat here, as in some old-fashioned game where one must not let one’s reserves of strength drop too low? It is impossible to say. Sweet William has complained occasionally about missing the pleasure of eating, as has T4b in his less articulate way, but none of us has noticed any other physical penalty.

  “After the story had ended we were shown to Builds a Fire on Air’s cave, where his wives—or sisters, for all I could tell—made us comfortable.

  “My companions fell asleep fairly quickly, but I found myself wakeful, thinking of all the things I had learned about myself and the network, pondering questions I still had no answers for. It is apparent, for instance, that we will never force our way back out the way we came in against the current of the air-river, so we are more-or-less doomed to look for another gate. I wondered, and wonder still, whether this is part of the plan of Otherland—whether the river’s current is meant to carry visitors sequentially through the network.

  “This, of course, leads me to wonder how large the network is, how many simulations all together, and of course, what chance we have of finding Renie and the others if we must search the thing at random.

  “Later I had a dream, and thought I was back in the blacked-out corridors of the Pestalozzi Institute, searching for my parents while something in turn searched for me, something I did not want to find me. I woke from that in a cold sweat. When I could not immediately go back to sleep, it seemed a good time to catch up on this journal. . . .

  “There is a great deal of noise outside all of a sudden. The others in the cave are rousing themselves. I suppose I should go and see what has happened. I hear anger in some of the voices. I will have to add to this entry later.

  “Code Delphi. End here.”

  It had started in the back of his mind, a slipped rhythm of the kind that gradually takes over a track and turns the music to its own purposes, a rogue vibe hijacking the entire piece. If he had been back in Sydney, he could have hunted in his normal way, and that would have gone a long way toward scratching the itch. But instead he was stuck in Cartagena for at least another week, tidying up the last loose threads of the Sky God project, and he dared not do anything that might draw more attention.

  He had already been given cause to regret the cabin att
endant, whatever her name had been. One of the other passengers on the plane from Sydney had witnessed their chummy conversation, and when the story of her disappearance had hit the nets, the passenger had felt obligated to call the authorities. Dread had been cool as Andes snow when the police came to the door of his hotel room, but even though the cabin attendant’s body was long since disposed of, he had not liked the surprise at all.

  The police seemed to have been reassured by their conversation with the man named “Deeds,” and found nothing suspicious in either his story or his documentation. (Dread’s aliases and documents were as good as the Old Man’s money could buy, which was more than good, of course—his false passport was actually a real passport, albeit issued to an imaginary person with Dread’s face and retinal prints.)

  So nothing had come of it, but it had still been an unpleasant surprise. He was not particularly worried about the possibility of arrest–even if the Beinha Sisters could not pull the proper strings locally, the Old Man’s contacts in the Australian Department of State were so powerful that if necessary, they could probably get him released and onto a diplomatic charter flight with a murder weapon still clutched in his bloody fist. But calling for help of any kind would have led to questions he did not want to or could not afford to answer.

  The Cartagena police had ultimately taken their investigation elsewhere, but it was clear that no matter how powerful his urge, this was not a good time for Dread to slake his thirst for the hunt. Not in RL, anyway.

  He had already tried the best versions of his particular obsession that VR had to offer—MurderWorld, Duck Duck Goose, Black Mariah, among the mainstream attractions, and some simulations that were themselves illegal, floating snuff nodes that were reputed to use involuntarily-wired human subjects. But even if some of the victims were real, as rumor strongly suggested, the output itself was dim and unsatisfying. A large part of the thrill of Dread’s hunting was the feel of things—the blood-pumping, adrenaline-coursing, heightened reality that brought him the texture of a sleeve like a radar map of a new planet, the echoing, endless rasp of an indrawn breath, the flicker of desperation in the quarry’s stare, bright as neon against night, when she saw the first hint of the closing trap. The net could offer only the thinnest, most threadbare imitations.

  But the Grail Project . . .

  The idea had been forming at the back of his mind since he had stumbled onto the thing, since the moment he had realized there were hundreds, maybe thousands of lands within the network as intricate and sophisticated as the Old Man’s Egypt and far less regulated. It had forced its way into his conscious thoughts soon after, and the recent interplay with Dulcie Anwin—Dread would be the first to admit he had enjoyed taking the self-possessed bitch down a couple of pegs—had really made it throb.

  The thing was, these Otherland creatures not only behaved as though they were alive, they truly seemed to think they were. That made the whole idea even more delicious. He understood how his own Aboriginal ancestors had felt when they came across the ocean in their canoes and stepped forth onto Australia for the first time. An entire continent that had never known the tread of a human hunter! Creatures who did not know enough to fear man, to flee his stones and clubs and spears. And now Dread had found an entire world like that—no, an entire universe.

  Confident, cocky, lazy, dead, a small voice reminded him. It would be a mistake to let himself explode into some folie du grandeur—especially when the keys to the whole operation might someday be in his grasp if he only played things right. But that was a long way off—the Old Man would not easily be outwitted or outlasted. And Dread felt such a need right now. . . !

  He reopened his connection to the Otherland sim, shutting off Dulcie’s loop code and pulling the body on like a suit of clothes. He could feel the stone of the cave floor under his back, hear the breathing of the other travelers on either side of him, even and slow. He flexed his fingers, holding them up before his eyes, but he could not see them move. Very little light. That was good.

  He levered himself up off the ground and waited until he was sure he was balanced before stepping over his nearest neighbor. Between him and the mouth of the cave lay the local chieftain, whatever his name was, and several of his immediate family. They, too, seemed to be sleeping deeply, but Dread still used almost a quarter of an hour to cover the hundred yards, a journey as soundless as grass growing.

  When he reached the mouth of the cave, he remained in its shelter for long moments as he surveyed the area, trying to make certain no one from any of the other family groups was up and wandering around. The thin crescent moon had already passed beyond the looming cliffs; the campfires had all burned down, and silence hung so heavily on the place that he could hear a bird’s wings flapping far out in the darkness above the river of air. He moved quietly to the edge of the nearest promontory, then let himself drop into nothingness, counting to twenty through a heart-stopping freefall before he spread his arms and felt the air lift him.

  Chimes, he thought. I want chimes. And running water.

  The music, quiet splashing and the soft tang of metal on metal, rippled through him. He hovered for some minutes, letting the sound calm and center him, then mounted higher, back toward the roosts of the Middle Air People.

  This was an amazing place, he thought. He was glad that he hadn’t needed to share it with Dulcie for most of the day, since her next shift wouldn’t begin until dawn. It made him feel like a child, this flying, this simworld—although not like the child he’d actually been, who had never experienced a moment of pure joy. Not until the first killing. But here, now, feeling the air wash over him, he felt stripped clean of everything earthly, a perfect machine, a thing of dark light and sweet music.

  I’m a black angel, he thought, and smiled through the chimes in his head.

  He had seen her as they flew in, a pale-haired womanchild taking care of younger siblings in the boughs of one of the great trees—a mutation, perhaps, an albino, or some other kind of genetic sport. More important than her arresting looks had been her age, young enough to control but old enough to be sexually attractive. Dread had no interest in hunting actual children, and felt a faint scorn for those who did, as though they had failed some test of personal integrity. It was similar to the scorn he had felt for those who pretended to practice his own special art, but who did it only in VR, and with simulated victims—they faced no reprisal, feared no law. They would not be chased, as he always was, by the tame pack mastiffs who hunted the hunter on behalf of the common herd.

  He squeezed the chimes into something a bit more emphatic, a theme for a heroic and solitary predator. No, those pretend-killers were not really doing it right. They were broken machines, but he himself was an almost perfect device.

  His soft but dramatic searching music had been playing quite a long time when he finally located her family’s sleeping cave. He had paid close but unobtrusive attention to where everyone went as the evening had worn down, but the landmarks he had noted—the oddly-shaped outcropping, the stunted sailor’s knot of a tree that clung to the cliff face—were hard to locate in full moonless dark. But he was full of the high airiness of the hunt, and that alone had convinced him that he could not fail; that alone had kept him at his task until he found what he sought.

  She was sleeping between two smaller children, a faint shape recognizable only by the dimmest starsheen on her hair. He poised himself above her like a spider at the edge of a web, seesawing gently until he had his balance for the one permissible strike. When he was ready, his hands thrust down. One clamped around her larynx, the other dug beneath her and scooped her up, prisoning her arms even as she spasmed awake. His sim body was wiry-strong, and the grip on her throat kept her from uttering even a sound. In three steps he was out of the cave, leaving a cooling space between the two children, who slept on, oblivious.

  She struggled in his arms until he slipped his fingers to t
he carotid and pinched off the blood flow; when she had gone limp, he threw her over his shoulder and stepped out—like the rest of her people, she was inordinately light, as though her bones were mostly hollow. This led him down several distracting avenues of speculation, so that he almost missed his footing in the dark. He ran quickly to the huge outcrop he had noticed earlier, a jut of stone like a broken bridge that stretched far out over the valley, beyond the tips of even the largest horizontal trees, then paused at the base, preparing himself. This was the most difficult part, and if he had miscalculated, any number of dire things might result.

  Dread shifted the girl’s weight forward a little, then added an insistent backbeat to the ringing music in his head, preparing himself, setting the scene. The sky seemed to crouch lower, expectant, watching.

  The star, he thought. Me. The impossible chance. Backlight. Heroic silhouette. The camera in his mind saw everything, his poise, his cleverness, his courage. No stunt doubles. He alone.

  He flung himself along the length of the promontory, pumping the virtual analogues of his own hard-muscled legs until he had reached sprinter’s speed. The stone stretched before him, a dark finger pointing at an even greater darkness. It was hard to guess where the end was. Wait too long—disaster. Jump too soon—the same.

  He jumped.