River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  “His name was Aleksandr Chotilo.” She paused, then smiled, a fragile smile but not without pleasure. “I have not said his name out loud for a long time. I thought it would hurt more than it does. I will not bore you with a long story. You are a young man. You understand about love.”

  “Not that young any more, I’m afraid,” he said quietly, but nodded for her to continue.

  “We would have been married—my parents liked him, and he was of our people, the traveling life, circus life. When I told my father I was going to have a baby, he set a date very quickly. I was so happy.” She closed her eyes for a moment, slowly, as if falling asleep, then opened them and took a deep breath. “But everything went wrong. In the fifth month, the pains came—very, very bad. We were in Austria, outside Vienna. I was taken in a helicopter to the hospital, but the baby was born dead. I never saw him.” A pause, jaw clenched tight. “Then, as I was still recovering, my Aleksandr was hit by a car in the Thaliastrasse and killed instantly. He had been on his way to visit me. He was carrying flowers. My father and mother had to bring me the news. They were both crying.” With her sleeve she dabbed at her own eyes, pink around the edges but still dry. “I went mad, then. There is no other word for it. I became convinced that Aleksandr had been kidnapped—even after I saw him in his coffin, the day of the funeral, when I had to be carried out of the church. I was certain that my baby was alive, too, that a terrible mistake had been made. I lay in the hospital bed every night imagining that Aleksandr and our son were trying to find me, that they were lost in the hallways outside, wandering, calling my name. I would scream to them until the nurses sedated me.” She smiled as if to emphasize her own foolishness; Ramsey found it a very discomforting expression. “I was completely mad.”

  “I spent three years in a sanitarium—now there is a word you do not hear these days—in southern France, where Le Cirque Royal had its winter quarters. I did not speak, I barely slept. I do not remember that time now, except in little pictures, like someone else’s story, some documentary. My parents did not think I would ever be myself again, but they were wrong. Slowly, I came back. It made them happy, even though it did not make me happy. But I could not be in the circus—could not travel the places we had all been together. I went first to England, but it was too gray, too old, like Austria, the people with their quiet, sad faces. I came here. I grew old myself. My parents died, my mother just a few years ago. And everything I do, I do for the children.”

  She shrugged. The story was clearly over.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  “You deserved to know this,” she replied. “It’s only fair.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t quite understand.”

  “That I was mad. That for a long time they all thought I must stay in an institution for the rest of my life. When you are running around trying to discover things, and you are considering the things I have told you, you deserve to know that the information comes from a crazy woman who was in an institution, who has spent her entire life trying to make children happy because she let her own child die.”

  “You’re too hard on yourself. I don’t think you’re crazy—in fact, I wish most of the people I have to work with were as sane as you are.”

  She laughed. “Perhaps. But don’t say I never told you. I can see you are ready to leave. Let me just lock Misha away, then I will walk you to the door.”

  As she tried to reconcile the dog, awake again and excited, to being confined to the kitchen for a few minutes, Ramsey sidled toward the mantelpiece and the picture. When he lifted it, the black button eyes of Uncle Jingle regarded him with glee.

  “Horrible isn’t it, really,” she said as she walked back into the room. He started guiltily and almost handed it to her, a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

  “I was just . . .”

  “I don’t want to look at it anymore. Bad enough being on the inside of it. Take it if you want.”

  He tried to refuse gracefully, but somehow, after they had said their good-byes and he was navigating his way through the tree-lined streets, trying to remember the way back to the freeway, Uncle Jingle sat propped on the seat beside him, grinning like a cat that had just broken into an aviary.

  THERE was, Yacoubian noted with satisfaction, a certain unease in the air.

  “It is scandalous,” said Ymona Dedoblanco, the mouth of her leonine goddess-head twisted in annoyance, ivory fangs gleaming. “It has been weeks, and still it is not functioning properly. What if something were to happen?”

  “Happen?” Osiris turned toward her, his masked features as always unreadable. He seemed slow, though; Yacoubian thought he could sense a kind of disconnection in the Old Man. If he had been an opposing general—which, in a way he was—Yacoubian would have said this enemy no longer cared to pursue the battle. “What do you mean, ‘something were to happen’?”

  The lion-headed goddess could barely control her fury. “What do you think I mean? Don’t be foolish!”

  The lack of obvious reaction to this breach of protocol was impressive: all along the table the Egyptian beast-faces with which their host masked them were carefully neutral, as though they viewed this altercation with nothing more than polite interest, but Yacoubian knew a line had been crossed. He glanced at Wells to share this small triumph, but the technocrat’s yellow god-face was as inscrutable as all the others.

  “I mean, what if one of us died?” the lion-goddess continued. “What if there’s some kind of accident while we are all forced to stand around, cooling our heels like peasants lining up for bread?” The root of her anger was suddenly apparent. She, like most of the others, probably never left the safety of her stronghold, and had full-time, highest quality medical staff on constant call. She did not fear immoderately for her safety, or her health. Ymona Dedoblanco was furious because she was being made to wait.

  The Old Man stirred, but Yacoubian still found his manner strange. Didn’t Jongleur realize that many others in the Brotherhood were losing patience, too? The general could barely suppress his pleasure. After all he and Wells had done to unseat the old bastard, notably without success, it seemed now that all they would have to do would be to wait for the chairman to write his own dismissal.

  “My dear lady,” Osiris said, “you are making too much of a slight delay. There have been a few minor complications—not surprising when one considers that we are creating the greatest forward leap for humankind since the discovery of fire.”

  “But what are these earthquakes?” demanded Sobek, the crocodile-god.

  “Earthquakes?” said Osiris, confused. “What are you talking about?”

  “I think Mr. Ambodulu is talking about the perturbations in the system we discussed last time,” said Wells smoothly. The lemonskin features of the Memphite creator-god Ptah suited him perfectly, a tiny half-smile permanently on his lips. “The ‘spasms,’ as I call them. We have had a few more than usual recently, as we’ve been bringing the system fully online.”

  “You call it whatever you like,” said the crocodile. “All I know is that I am sitting in my palace in your network—the palace that cost me seventeen billion Swiss credits—and the whole thing goes,” even in his anger he pronounced the old British phrase with pride, “arse over tea kettle. Inside out. Colors and light and everything breaking up. You cannot tell me that is just a spasm in the system. It is more like a heart attack!”

  “We all have quite a bit invested in this project,” said Osiris coldly. “Nothing is being taken lightly. You heard Wells—Ptah, I mean. It is part of the growing pains. This is a very, very complicated mechanism.”

  Yacoubian was almost beside himself. The Old Man had called someone by their RL name instead of his own Egyptian nonsense! He was definitely losing it—there couldn’t be any question about it. The general looked around, half-expecting to see cracks in the massive granite walls, bits of
the eternal twilight seeping through chinks in the Western Palace’s roof, but of course the simworld was as it had ever been.

  That’s the thing about all this VR bullshit, though, he thought. It’s like one of those Third World armies—lots of brass and parade uniforms, and you don’t notice anything’s wrong until one day you come in and the barracks and the staff room are empty and they’ve all gone off to join the rebels in the hills.

  Except for the officers, he thought with a certain grim humor, who will be heading for the border, one step ahead of the war crimes tribunals. Like all of us will be, if this thing ever comes apart too badly. It was tempting to celebrate anything that looked like the Old Man foundering, but even a Jongleur-hater like Daniel Yacoubian knew that nothing could be allowed to threaten the Grail Project itself.

  “Actually, I’m beginning to wonder if it’s all just normal perturbations of the system,” Wells said. “There seems to be more turbulence than we expected.” He stood and opened a window full of three-dimensional representations of data, an array of colors and strange shapes in slow movement that might have been some surrealist painter’s nightmare. “You can see we’ve had a disturbing jump in system spasms during the last few months, and the trend is continuing to spike upward quite spectacularly.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Osiris in a rare, unintentionally comic remark. “This is the whole point of turbulence, is it not? That it cannot be fully anticipated? You of all people should know this, Wells—and it is your job to administer the Grail System, after all, so you should be very careful about pointing fingers.” He turned to survey the table. “The fact is, we have a network more complicated by a couple of magnitudes than anything ever created, and it is up and running, thousands of nodes, trillions upon trillions of instructions per second, and except for the occasional bout of wind, it’s working.” He waved his bandaged hand in disgust, rattling the flail he usually gripped against his chest.

  “Could it be the Circle?” Ricardo Kliment, the solar deity with the head of a dung beetle, rose to his feet, mandibles twitching. “Great Osiris, could it be those sneaking people who are doing this to our network?”

  “The Circle?” repeated Osiris, astonished. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “The true question,” Wells said quietly, but so everyone at the table could hear, “is whether these problems are connected to the operating system—which, I would like to point out, is still the exclusive province of our chairman, and which none of the rest of us, even my own company, is allowed to work with directly.”

  “But these people from the Circle,” the beetle pushed on, “they are our sworn enemies! They have wormed their way into the network—why could it not be them? They are antitechnologists, socialists and ideologues, opposed to everything we are trying to do!” He was almost yelping. Yacoubian knew that Kliment of all people had reason to agonize over the delays. The general’s intelligence told him that the organ-market privateer was in a hospital in Paraguay, his body so riddled with a particularly virulent mutant cancer that transplants and chemotherapy were no longer holding it at bay.

  “We are all of us powerful people,” said Osiris, his tone making it clear that, as everyone already knew, Kliment was perhaps the least powerful of their number. “We do not need to pretend to care about ideologies. In fact, even if these people and their Circle organization carried certified proof they were Angels of the Lord, I would still sweep them from my path. No obstacle will keep me from the Grail.

  “But the truth is, they are nothing. They are petty anarchists and God-botherers, the kind of trash you find howling on soapboxes in public parks, or handing out soiled leaflets in front of train stations. Yes, a few of them have crept into the network, but so what? Just a few days ago, I captured one sneaking across one of my domains. He is being made to talk, I promise you. But he has said nothing that gives me even a moment’s worry—he and the other scum do not even know exactly what the Grail Project is. Now, dear Khepera, please stop wasting my time.”

  Kliment sat down heavily. If a lacquer-shiny insect face could be said to wear the expression of a scolded child, his did. Everyone knew that the South American was one of Jongleur’s most ardent supporters—what could the Old Man be thinking?

  “You have not responded to me yet, Chairman,” said yellow-faced Ptah. “At a time when many in the Brotherhood are nervous about their investment, about the delays, can’t you relax your rules a little? I know I for one would feel a lot better if I could actually work with the operating system that maintains our whole network.”

  “I am sure that you would. Yes, I am certain that you would love to have it in your control,” said Osiris stiffly. He turned to the others, birds and beasts arrayed around the long table. “This man has already tried once to take control of the Brotherhood. Just a few weeks ago, you all saw the Americans make a false accusation against me—an accusation of something which proved to stem from an error in this man’s own company, a frightening breach of security!” He pushed himself back from the table, shaking his huge, bemasked head, giving every impression of a noble monarch betrayed by the thankless minions of his own court. “And yet here it is again—my fault! Everything is my fault!” He turned on Wells. “You, and your unusually quiet friend,” he darted a dead-eyed glance at Yacoubian, “have constantly questioned my devotion to the project—I, who conceived it and began it! You wish me to give up control of the operating system, and then trust you, Robert Wells, to respect my position as chairman? Ha!” He thumped a hand down on the table and several of the beast masks twitched. “You would be at my throat in a second, you treasonous cur!”

  As Wells spluttered—rather convincingly, Yacoubian thought—Jiun Bhao in his guise of ibis-headed Thoth rose to his feet. “This is not civil.” His calm tones did little to hide his distaste. “We do not speak in this way to each other. It is not civil.”

  The Old Man looked at him, a little wildly, and for a moment it seemed he might say something rude to the Chinese magnate as well, a flirtation with political suicide so breathtaking that even Yacoubian found himself staring, openmouthed. Instead, Osiris finally said: “Our god of wisdom has proved the aptness of my choice of persona for him. You are right, sir. I was uncivil.” He turned toward Wells, whose yellow smile he must have found galling, but now he was all correctness. “As our associate points out, I have been rude, and for that I apologize. However, I would like to add that you, too, have been inconsiderate in your remarks, Ptah, when you suggest that I am hiding something from my colleagues.”

  Wells bowed, a shade mockingly. Yacoubian was suddenly unsure where things were going. The old bastard wasn’t going to get away with it again, was he?

  “Just a minute,” Yacoubian said. “There are still questions to answer here. Bob says the problems in the system aren’t all because of the size of it. He says it’s the operating system. You say ‘none of your business.’ Then how do we get some goddamn answers?”

  “Ah, Horus, monarch of the skies,” said the Old Man, almost fondly. “You were silent so long, I feared we had lost you offline.”

  “Yeah, right. Just tell me how we can make sure this whole thing isn’t going to come crashing down around our ears.”

  “This is becoming tiresome,” Osiris began, then ram-headed Amon, the owner of six Swiss banks and an island “republic” off the coast of Australia, raised his hand.

  “I would like to know more about this, too,” he said. “My system tells me that there are regular breakdowns of the machinery in all my domains. We all have more than money invested here, and soon we will have everything invested in this project, including our lives. I believe we are due better information.”

  “See?” Yacoubian wanted the Old Man to squirm some more—there was no telling when he would be this vulnerable again. He turned to Wells to solicit his help. “I think we should have the whole thing out now. Start t
alking plain facts.”

  “Stop,” said Osiris, his voice tight.

  Wells, much to Yacoubian’s astonishment, said, “Yes, I think you should leave it alone, Daniel.”

  If Sekhmet the lioness heard him, she did not seem to agree. “I demand to know what is wrong,” she snarled, “and I demand to know how it is going to be fixed.” The owner of Krittapong, a technology firm only slightly less powerful than Wells’ Telemorphix, and a woman whose name was whispered in respectful horror throughout the secret slavery bureaus of Southeast Asia—she had beaten more than a few servants to death with her own hands—Dedobravo was not good at being patient. “I demand answers now!”

  “I will personally assure . . .” Osiris began, but now it was Sobek again, his crocodile snout wagging.

  “You cannot take our money and then tell us we have no rights!” he bellowed. “It is criminal!”

  “Are you insane, Ambodulu?” Osiris was visibly trembling. “What are you babbling about?”

  The entire gathering seemed about to plunge into screaming chaos when Jiun Bhao raised his hand. Gradually, the voices quieted.

  “This is not the way to do business,” Jiun said, slowly shaking his bird-head from side to side. “Most distressing. Not acceptable.” He paused and looked around. The silence held. “Comrade Chairman, several of our membership have asked for more information about these . . . what was the word? . . . these ‘spasms’ in the system. Surely you do not object to such a reasonable request?”