River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  “Hey!” he shouted, “what are you doing there?”

  What am I doing? she thought, boggled. The world had just been turned into origami, and he was blaming her? Brain still firing but moving almost nothing, like a car in neutral, she looked back to the empty spot where the white shape had hovered.

  “If . . .” was all !Xabbu had time to say. Then everything went mad once more.

  This time Renie had no stance from which to watch it happen, no separated space in which to be an observer. This time all around her and even inside of her, color, shape, sound, light, folded in on themselves. A moment of anticipatory shudder, then everything collapsed, swift as a whipcrack.

  Long seconds in emptiness. Not gray, but empty. Not black, but lightless. Only time to try to remember who she was, but not time to remember why that might be important, then everything exploded, the inside-out almost instantaneously becoming the outside-in once more.

  Water was in her mouth, and cool, sludgy river water was all around her, too. The boat was gone. She thrashed, trying to find the sky. She clawed her way to air with one hand strangely paralyzed, doubled in an arthritic fist. She did not know which way to turn because everywhere she moved her head, the river slapped her face. She tried to cry out, got another mouthful of water, choked.

  “Here, Renie!”

  She foundered toward !Xabbu’s voice, felt a small hand grasp her arm and tug her forward, then she touched something smooth and complex and caught it with her arm, hooking her elbow until she felt secure against the two pulls of the river, sideways and down. She lifted her head far enough above the water to see Emily gasping beside her. The girl was clinging to the roots of the same tree, a dead banyan or something like it, which stood, storklike, halfway out into the water. !Xabbu was farther up the curve of the root, staring down the river.

  Renie turned and saw what he saw. The boat was chugging on, already twenty or thirty meters downstream and rapidly leaving them behind. She raised her voice to shout for Azador, but saw no sign of him on the deck or at the wheel. Whether he was in the river himself and drowned, translated somewhere else entirely, or even still on the boat, it made no difference. The tug did not slow, did not turn toward the bank, but instead murmured on between the walls of Forest, ever smaller, until a curve of the river took it from their view.

  CHAPTER 23

  Beside Bob’s Ocean

  * * *

  NETFEED/NEWS: New Trial For “Ignorance Abuse” Parents

  (visual: Hubbards weeping outside courthouse)

  VO: A date has been set for the second child-abuse trial of Rudy and Violet Hubbard, accused by their adult daughter, Halvah Mae Warringer, of having created a “climate of ignorance” during her childhood which constituted abuse. Warringer alleges that because of her parents’ prejudices and ignorance, and their “willful failures to improve,” she was exposed to racial intolerance, health-issues insensitivity, and negative body-images in a way that has adversely affected her adult life. The first trial in Springfield, Missouri, ended when the jury was unable to reach a verdict . . .

  * * *

  JUNIPER Bay, Ontario, reminded Decatur Ramsey a lot of the towns he’d lived in growing up, as his staff sergeant father had been transferred from base to base, first with, then eventually without, his wife—Catur’s mother. On first inspection, Juniper Bay had the same flatness as those long-ago towns, not just geographical, but . . . Catur stretched for the word as he stopped at an intersection where a young matron attempted to guide two young children across after the light had already turned yellow.

  Spiritual, he thought at last. A spiritual flatness. As though the inner life of the city had been pressed down. Not eradicated, just . . . flattened.

  It was a bigger city than many he had known as a child, but like so many of those—railroad towns down to a trickle of freight cars on the busiest weeks, factory towns with half the employees laid off—its best days appeared to be behind it. The young people, he could guess, were leaving for more exciting places, for Toronto or New York, or even the metropolis based around D.C. where Ramsey made his own home.

  A row of banners hung along the main street, flapping in the stiff breeze, advertisements for some upcoming civic celebration. Ramsey felt a small twinge of shame. It was easy for him to make judgments, a confirmed city convert in a ridiculously expensive car (a rental car too rich for his budget, but an indulgence he had allowed himself.) Was there actually anything worse about a town which had lost its upward thrust, especially when you compared it to the seething pile of conflicting agendas that made a modern city? At least people occasionally saw each other on the street here, maybe even still went to the same churches, to meetings at their kids’ schools. To walk on your own feet down one of the sidewalks of the Washbar Corridor metro-plex, to linger any longer on the streets than the time necessary to dash from vehicle to door, was to proclaim yourself destitute or suicidal.

  The address he had been given was in a small warren of streets behind the business district, an old neighborhood of two- and three-story wooden houses that must have been the previous century’s version of an upscale young professionals’ neighborhood. Now the houses and their old-fashioned yards lay beneath the sundial stripe of the elevated train track, a band of shadow that darkened a full quarter of the block. He had a brief vision of that great bar of shade rolling across the windows every day, on a schedule as predictable as those of the trains overhead, and thought he could guess why the houses, despite having such unusually large amounts of space around them, lebensraum which should have made them valued pieces of real estate, still had an air of seediness, of gradual but inevitable decay.

  He pulled up in front of number 74. The parts of the house he could see above the high hedges seemed a little cleaner than its neighbors, or at least more recently painted. He announced himself at the gate, and although no one answered, he was buzzed in. As he walked up the long front path, he found himself impressed by the size of the property. Olga Pirofsky might only be one of twelve Uncle Jingles, but it was an incredibly popular show, after all, and he supposed even the faceless actors must be well paid. The garden had largely been left to grow wild, but was not completely untended. Here in the lee of the thick hedges, it had the feeling of a previous era, of Victorian entertainments and elaborate children’s games. The house itself, although small compared to the size of the grounds, had three stories and a number of windows set at a number of angles.

  Contemplating how it would feel to sit at one of those windows looking down on one’s own garden, a garden you could get lost in, Ramsey wondered how much house the fierce mortgage on his two-bedroom apartment would buy in a town like this.

  It took a while for anyone to answer the door, which gave him ample opportunity to examine the dried Christmas wreath hanging there, probably not just months but years out of its original season, and a pair of rubber boots standing beside the mat.

  The door opened, but only a few inches. A small, bright eye peered out past the chain. “Mr. Ramsey?”

  He tried to make himself look as little like a murderer as possible. “That’s me, Ms. Pirofsky.”

  There was a moment of further hesitation, as though she were still contemplating the possibility of a trick. My God, he realized as the moment stretched. That’s just what she’s doing—she’s that worried. His small flash of irritation died. “I can show you my driver’s license if you’d like. Don’t you recognize my voice from our phone calls?”

  The door closed, and for a moment he thought he’d made a mistake, but then the chain rattled and the door opened again, wider this time.

  “Come in,” she said, her faint accent curling the edges of her words. “It’s terrible to make you stand on the doorstep like a Jehovah’s Witness or something.”

  Olga Pirofsky was younger than he had expected from the hesitancy of her phone conversation, a fit, square-should
ered woman in her late fifties or early sixties, thick brown hair cut short and largely gone to gray. Most surprising of all was the sharp confidence of her gaze, not what he expected from someone who had been examining him from behind the chain to see if he were some kind of spyflick assassin.

  “That’s all right,” he said. “I’m just very, very glad you decided to meet with me. And if anything useful comes out of this, you’ll have done a big favor for some very nice people.”

  She waved her hand, almost dismissively. “I can’t tell you how bad I’ve felt about all this. But I don’t know what else to do.” For the first time since he had entered, a little of her self-possession slipped. She looked from side to side as though reminding herself that she was on home ground, then smiled again. “It’s all been very upsetting.” She backed a few steps toward the stairs and signaled him to follow. “Let’s go upstairs—I hardly use this part of the house at all.” “It’s a lovely house. I was particularly impressed by the garden.”

  “It’s gone all to rack and ruin—is that the phrase? I used to have a tenant who lived down here on the bottom floor, and she liked to work out there, but she was transferred by her company. It’s been years!” She was heading up the stairs now, and Ramsey followed. “There’s a gardener who comes once a month. Sometimes I think I should get a tenant again—not for the money, but just to have someone else in the house, you know, in case of an emergency, I suppose—but I think I’ve become too used to living by myself. Well, except for Misha.”

  They exited the staircase into what Ramsey supposed was the second floor parlor, a modest-sized room with a fireplace and a few rather spare and artistic bits of furniture. As if in mockery of the rest of the room’s simplicity, the far corner was dominated by a huge device festooned with bundled cables, something halfway between a spaceship control module and an old-fashioned electric chair.

  “I am babbling, yes?” She saw him looking at the chair. “It’s for my work. We all of us—all the Uncle Jingles and the other characters, you know?—work from our homes.” She froze in place, then frowned and tapped herself on the forehead, the broad body language of a pantomime artist. “I forgot! Would you like some tea? Or I could do coffee.”

  “Tea would be fine.”

  “Just one moment, then.” She stopped in front of the inner door. “Something is going to happen now. Are you easily frightened?”

  He couldn’t puzzle out her expression. “Frightened?” Good God, what was this woman going to show him? Could all this secrecy and worry be justified after all?

  She opened the door and a tiny, furry thing rushed out, claws scrabbling on the polished floorboards. To his shame, Ramsey flinched. As though door and mouth were somehow connected, once released the tiny, furry thing began to bark. It had the voice of a much larger animal.

  “Misha is very fierce,” she said, and he realized that she had been fighting back a smile. “However, he is not as terrifying as he looks.” She slid through and the door closed behind her, leaving him alone with the small, bat-eared dog, who darted back and forth just out of Ramsey’s reach, emitting loud noises of loathing and distrust.

  Catur Ramsey had settled deeply into the couch as the woman told him of her trip from doctor to doctor, of the succession of unsettlingly cheerful reports which did nothing to make the headaches stop. Gaining confidence, she reported the results of her researches as well, another catalog of unhelpful findings; she was clearly trying to work up the courage to tell him something she thought important, just as clearly not quite there yet. His eyes, wandering a bit from time to time, settled on a framed picture turned face-down atop the mantelpiece, and he wondered who it might be. All good lawyers had a little bit of cop in them, a nagging busybody voice that was always asking questions. The really good lawyers, though, knew when to ignore the voice. Olga Pirofsky clearly needed to talk, and Ramsey let her.

  “. . . And that’s when I thought . . .” She hesitated, then leaned down to scratch the dog’s head. The tiny black-and-white thing was peering out from between her ankles, glaring at Ramsey as though he might be some kind of advance agent for the canine Antichrist. “It’s so hard to say—I mean, it sounds so foolish with you sitting there, and you coming all that way just to see me.”

  “Please, Ms. Pirofsky. I haven’t been out of that office in so long, I’m beginning to talk to the rubber plants. Even if you throw me out right now, it’ll have done me good.” Which was true, he realized. “So just tell me the story in your own way.”

  “I thought that it didn’t make sense. That no one who had ever participated in the show—we keep that whole database, like I told you—had ever had this Tandagore’s Syndrome. That just doesn’t seem right. I mean, there have been millions, Mr. Ramsey. I’m not a person who works with statistics, but that doesn’t seem right.”

  “And . . . ?” He wasn’t quite sure exactly where she was going, but he was beginning to have an idea. As she hesitated, trying to order her thoughts, Ramsey leaned forward and waggled his fingers in a peacemaking gesture at the dog. Misha’s eyes sprang wide in incredulous fury, then he leaped to his feet in the space behind his mistress’s ankles and began to bark as if he had been scalded.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake, Misha!” She stuck her hand down the back of the sofa cushion and pulled out a small cloth-covered ball. She waved it in front of the dog’s nose and then tossed it over to the far corner of the room. Misha sprang after it and chivvied it into the corner by the V-chair, then sank his teeth deep into the ball and began, growling deep in his little throat, to kill it with great thoroughness.

  “That should keep him for a bit,” she said fondly. “What I’m trying to say is, does it make sense? That the statistics about Uncle Jingle’s Jungle should be so different from the averages?”

  “So are you saying you think something special the company does is preventing this from happening, this Tandagore Syndrome? But that would be a good thing, wouldn’t it?”

  “Not,” she said carefully, “if they were making sure nothing happened to anyone on the show because they had something to hide.” She appeared to have found her confidence at last, and stared at him with something approaching a challenge on her face.

  Ramsey was perplexed. If she was right about Uncle Jingle being exempt, it was certainly interesting, although most likely it would prove to be a fluke of some sort. But it was also possible, and in fact much more likely, that she had simply accessed the wrong data, or misread some numbers. That was the great drawback of the net, as well as its glory—anybody could get hold of anything and make whatever they wanted out of it; it was a treasure trove for amateurs, cranks, and outright loonies.

  But he had to admit that the woman sitting across from him didn’t seem like a loony, or even a crank. Also, he liked her, and found himself not wanting to offend her, even if he was beginning to suspect the trip might have been a waste.

  “It’s a very interesting possibility, Ms. Pirofsky,” he said finally. “Obviously, I’ll look into it.”

  The keen look in her eyes faded, became something else. “You do think I’m crazy.”

  “No. No, I don’t. But my clients have a child who seems to have developed Tandagore, and they need facts and figures, not theories. I really will look into what you say.” He put his teacup down on the floor. It seemed to be time to leave. “I promise you, I take everything about this problem very seriously.”

  “This child—is it a boy or girl?”

  “I’m not really allowed to talk about my clients.” He heard his own stiff tone and didn’t like it. “It’s a girl. She’s been in a coma for several weeks now. That’s why we’re in such a hurry—the few cases of Tandagore where there’s been recovery, it’s always been early in the illness.”

  “The poor thing,” Her face held a deep sorrow—far deeper than what he would expect from someone hearing someone else’s bad news. “That�
��s why this frightens me so,” she murmured. “The children. They are so helpless. . . .”

  “You’ve been working with children a long time, haven’t you?”

  “All my life, almost.” She rubbed her face as if to scour the sorrow away, but was not entirely successful: her eyes were wide, almost haunted. “They are all I care about. And Misha, I suppose.” She smiled faintly at the dog, which was celebrating its victory with a nap, head resting on the murdered ball.

  “Do you have children of your own?” He still held his briefcase across his knees, unsure of whether to begin the move toward the door, but when he asked the question her whole bearing changed. She visibly sagged, an effect so obvious that he experienced a rush of shame, as though he had deliberately done something to frighten or shock her. “I’m sorry, that’s none of my business.”

  She waggled her fingers, telling him it did not matter, but her cheeks had reddened. She stared at the dog for a quarter of a minute, saying nothing. Ramsey, too, was silent, frozen on the couch by guilt and propriety.

  “Can I tell something to you?” she said at last. “You do not know me. You can go if you want to. But sometimes it is good just to talk to someone.”

  He nodded, feeling any control of the situation he might have had, of his schedule, of his own feelings, sucked away like sand in an ebb tide. “Of course.”

  “When I was young, I traveled with a circus. My parents were both circus people, and our show, Le Cirque Royal traveled all over Europe and even Asia. You do know what a circus is, don’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I mean, I’ve never seen one, but I know what they are. There aren’t many circuses left, I don’t think. Not in the US, anyway.”

  “No,” she said. “There are not.” She sighed. “I do not know why I am telling you this, but I suppose you deserve to know. I was both a clown and a bareback rider, from the time I was a little girl. Much of what I do on the Uncle Jingle show are things that I learned then, from the other circus clowns and performers. Perhaps I am the last who learned these things. In any case, it was a good life, although we did not have much money. We were all together, we traveled many places, saw many things. And when a young man came to join us, a mentalist—do you know that term? Someone who reads minds, or pretends to. It is a very popular midway attraction, like a fortuneteller. I think you see them still sometimes on the net. So when this beautiful young man came to join us, I had everything I wanted.