River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  “Oh, no,” Eleanora laughed. “Nothing like that. But I was interested in him, so I have done some checking. You see, the Puppets here have evolved within this simulation. They are like real people in that way—they have parents and homes and ancestors. Midwives and priests know of their birth, even if everything is virtual. Some of what Gypsy says about his past makes sense—that is, it could be true. But other things do not hold up. At some level, he knows enough about my Venice to seem a part of it, but he has no real roots here.” She finished her wine with a single swallow. “But whatever he is, he is a good boy. He is welcome in my home.”

  “If your . . . if your lover is dead, then you must be in charge here.” A thought was beginning to form.

  “No one is in charge. Is a gamekeeper in charge of a forest, just because he kills a deer, chases away a poacher? He does not make the trees grow. He does not teach the birds to nest.”

  Paul wagged his hand impatiently. “Yes, but you must have the ability to go online and offline, just for instance. Could you send me back to . . . to whatever system has put me on in the first place?”

  She considered for a moment. “No. I could not send you back to your own system. But I could throw you out of the simulation. I have that power.”

  “Where would I go?”

  “The entry level—the platform level, as I think Tinto’s engineers called it. It is a sort of gray emptiness where you can choose different options.”

  Paul’s heart was beating very fast. “Send me there. Please. Perhaps I could find my way out from there, or at least get some real answers.”

  Eleanora looked at him closely. “Very well. But I will go with you.” She sat straighter on her divan and reached her hand up to the emerald pendant that dangled at her neck. When her fingers touched her throat, her body froze. Paul stared at the unmoving form as long seconds passed. Optimism slowly curdled into a sense of defeat.

  When nearly a minute had gone by, Eleanora twitched back to life. “It does not work.” She was clearly surprised. “You did not come with me.”

  “I noticed,” he said mournfully. “But you went there yourself?”

  “Of course.” She sat forward. “We will ask Tinto. But first let me check on the boy.” She stood and slipped through an arras into the back room, leaving Paul feeling more than a little stunned.

  “What do you mean, ask Tinto?” he said when she returned. “I thought he was dead?”

  “He is. Follow me.” She led the floundering Paul out of the apartment and back down the dark hallway, raising a finger to her lips to signal for silence. A few voices murmured from the chapel on the far side of the basilica, not-quite-comprehensible snatches of speech floating through the vast, echoing room. Paul’s sense of failure had deepened. A claustrophobic certainty that he would never escape began to rise, until he was fighting back real panic.

  Eleanora’s small, shadowy form led him back into the room in which he had first met her, Cardinal Zen’s chapel. “He is a nasty old bastard, my Tinto,” she said quietly. “That is one reason I don’t want the boy wandering in.”

  Paul tried to push the fear aside long enough to concentrate. “Please explain.”

  Her smile was sardonic. “Tinto is dead. But in his last year, they were trying to prepare him to be able to live full time on the system. Don’t ask me how—I wanted nothing to do with such ghoulishness. They made some kind of, I don’t know, copy of him. But it was flawed. The equipment was not working correctly, or they did not finish the copy. Again, don’t ask me, because I don’t know. But it is accessible through his system. I only let it . . . manifest, I suppose . . . here.” She gestured around her, indicating the chapel. “I could not bear to have it roam freely. You will see what I mean.”

  “It’s . . . is it a person?”

  “You will see.” She moved forward, then pointed to the chairs facing the altar. “Sit there. It’s better if he doesn’t notice you.”

  Paul took a seat. He expected Eleanora to do something complicated—a chant of invocation, or even something a bit more modern, like pushing some hidden buttons—but instead she only mounted the steps before the altar and said, “Tinto, I want to talk to you.”

  Something flickered atop the altar, then a quiet voice murmured words Paul could not understand. The volume abruptly rose, but he could still make no sense of what was being said.

  “Ah, I forgot.” Eleanora turned toward Paul with a strangely unstable smile. “Everything here except Tinto is running through translation software. I imagine you are not a scholar of Neapolitan dialects, are you?” She moved her hand; a moment later comprehensible English was rasping out of the flickering light atop the altar.

  “How long have I been on this table? God damn, I told you idiots I had work to do today. Get me off here or I’ll tear your balls off.”

  “Tinto.” Eleanora raised her hand again. “Tinto, can you hear me?”

  The shimmer of light above the altar grew until Paul could see the head and shoulders of the dead man who had been Eleanora’s lover. His heavy features sagged with age; his head wobbled. Beneath a nose that had obviously been broken several times was a thick, draggled mustache that, like his hair, had been dyed an unnatural black. The lower half of his virtual body was entirely hidden by the casket-shaped altar, so that he seemed a corpse that had sat up in the middle of its own funeral.

  Tinto flickered a little, his resolution poor. Paul could see the candles through his chest. “Eleanora? What are you doing here? Did Maccino call you?”

  “I just wanted to ask you some questions.” Eleanora’s slightly shaky voice suggested she was not as cold-blooded about the whole thing as she had led Paul to believe. “Can you answer some questions?”

  “Where the hell am I?” The ghost, or whatever it was, brought up two gnarled fists to rub at its eyes. For a moment it distorted, narrowing until it almost disappeared, then sprang back into its original shape. “My legs hurt. I feel like shit. These doctors—they’re useless, eh? Did Maccino call you? I told him to send you some flowers, nice roses like you like. Did he call you?”

  “Yes, Tinto. I got the flowers.” Eleanora looked away for a moment, then looked back at the altar. “Do you remember my Venice? The simulation you had built for me?”

  “I ought to. Cost enough.” He pulled at his mustache and looked around. “Where am I? Something’s . . . something’s wrong with this room.”

  “What should I do if I can’t get offline, Tinto? What if it doesn’t work, and I can’t get offline?”

  “Did those bastards screw it up?” He scowled, a toothless tiger. “I’ll have their balls. What do you mean, can’t get offline?”

  “Just tell me. What can I do?”

  “I don’t understand.” Suddenly, it seemed he might cry. His bony face wrinkled around the eyes and mouth, and he shook his head like someone trying to wake up. “Goddamn it, my legs hurt. If you can’t get out the normal way, Eleanora, you just walk out. Get to someone else’s territory, use their gear. Take the canal—you can always get to the next place along the river. Either that, or . . . let me think, Venice . . . yeah, you go to the Crusaders or the Jews.”

  “You can’t think of another way to get offline? More direct?”

  He stared, trying to focus. “Eleanora? Did you get the flowers? I’m sorry I couldn’t come see you, girl. They have me in this goddamned hospital.”

  “Yes,” she said slowly. “I got the flowers.” She took a long, deep breath, then lifted her hand. “Goodnight, Tinto.”

  The image convulsed once, then vanished.

  Eleanora turned to Paul, her jaw set, her mouth a thin line. “He always asks about the flowers. He must have been thinking about them when they made the copy.”

  “But you got them—the flowers.”

  “To tell you the ruth, I don’t remember.”
She shrugged, then turned away as if she did not want Paul to look at her any more. “Let’s go back. Sometimes he’s more useful than others—he wasn’t much help tonight, I’m afraid.”

  In the corridor, Eleanora stopped suddenly and drew Paul into the shadows at the back of the passage. Framed in the archway before them, on the far side of the basilica, a solemn-faced group of men was filing out of one of the chapels. They were dressed in heavy robes, and each wore what Paul guessed was some kind of chain of office around their necks.

  “That’s the Council of Ten!” Despite her almost inaudible whisper, she sounded very surprised. “I can’t imagine what they’re doing here in the church at this time of night.” She took his arm and drew him along the passageway. A few silent steps and they had reached another archway, this one mostly hidden by a tapestry from the basilica floor. She peered around the hanging, then beckoned Paul. “Those are the leading senators of Venice—the ones who hold the Inquisitions,” Eleanora whispered.

  Paul watched with a mounting sense of unease as the group stopped in front of the chapel door, conversing in quiet tones. His earlier panic was returning, even stronger now. How could Eleanora not know about something happening in her own simulation? His stomach knotted and his skin went cold. He suddenly felt as though he should run as fast as he could, in any direction at all.

  The last of the Ten emerged from the chapel, followed slowly by numbers Eleven and Twelve. This pair, unlike the others, were dressed simply in dark, hooded robes. One was very, very large. The other—although it was hard to tell for certain through the loose robe—seemed exceptionally thin.

  The slender one said something and the nearest senators shook their heads, but it seemed more a frightened attempt to placate than true agreement.

  “Oh God.” Paul’s knees were shaking. He gripped the railing to keep from falling. “Oh, God, they’re here.” The words were little more than a murmur—Eleanora beside him might not have heard—but to Paul in his terror they seemed to rattle and echo through the cavernous, high-shadowed room. His throbbing heart felt like a drum in his chest, announcing Here I am!

  On the basilica floor, two hooded heads turned toward him in unison, scanning the darkness like hounds sniffing for the scent of their quarry. Now he saw that they both wore Carnival masks, stark white shapes that peered out from the shadowy hoods like skulls. The thin one was masked as Tragedy, while his fat companion sported the empty grinning face of Comedy.

  His pulse pounded in his head so hard that Paul thought he might faint. He reached out a hand to the woman beside him, but felt nothing. The Cardinal’s Mistress had gone, leaving him alone.

  “Yes, we know you’re there, Jonas,” called the voice that had once belonged to Finch; the words drifted toward him like poison gas. “Oh, yes. We can smell you, and we can hear you—and now we’re going to eat you up.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Red Land, Black Land

  * * *

  NETFEED/ENTERTAINMENT: ANVAC Sues Griggs

  (visual: Griggs House, gun turrets in foreground)

  VO: Bell Nathan Griggs, creator of “Inner Spies” and “Captain Corpse” and other top-rated net programming, is being sued by ANVAC, the world’s largest security corporation. ANVAC charges that Griggs violated the security agreement by opening his Isla Irvine home to the “Cot n’ Cave” net program, thus exposing ANVAC security equipment and procedures.

  (visual: ANVAC corporate headquarters—featureless wall)

  ANVAC would make no comment on the lawsuit, but Griggs has gone into hiding, although he has made a statement to the media.

  (visual: Griggs as anonymous human figure)

  Griggs: “. . . Damn right I’m scared. These people are going to make sure I have some kind of accident. I thought it was my own house—my home. Hah! Talk about naive.”

  * * *

  THEY slept that night in a camp on the linoleum at the base of the counter. A space of greater darkness ended when the bulb high overhead began to glow again. The Kitchen, it seemed, existed only as a nighttime world. Now the bulb was alight again, and Night, which was the Kitchen’s “day,” had returned. Orlando and his companions rose.

  He and Fredericks helped to load the Chief’s canoe in depressed silence. The Indian hardly ever spoke; his child, even with burns on its head, was no less stoic. After a while, even the talkative tortoise sensed the mood of the group and gave up his attempts at conversation. Orlando was relieved. At the moment, conversation of any kind seemed like work. He was mourning, though he didn’t know why.

  It didn’t really make sense at all. He and Fredericks had helped save the Indian’s child in as neatly-constructed an adventure as any Thargor had ever had, albeit in a world that made Thargor’s Middle Country look as sensible and normal as the most sedate RL suburb. He and his friend had journeyed into the depths of the freezer, and had gained what was undoubtedly an important, if cryptic, clue to the whereabouts of their companions. His game-world instincts had all proved correct. Why then did he feel like someone he knew had died, and that it was his fault?

  Fredericks was morose, troubled by the same experiences, which was another reason not to waste strength on communication. But when they had boarded the canoe and Chief Strike Anywhere was vigorously paddling them out into the deeper, faster waters of the sink-overflow river, Orlando at last felt compelled to break the silence.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Downriver,” the Indian said.

  Orlando looked at Little Spark, strapped to his father’s back. The infant, whose features were as cartoonish as its sire’s, wore a blanket tied around its tiny red head which the chief had dipped in river water. Black scorch marks peeped out from the edges of the makeshift dressing, but the child showed no sign of discomfort, staring back at Orlando with unnervingly serious black eyes. “Downriver?” Orlando asked. “Is there something else we still have to do?”

  “Take you to end of river,” the chief explained. “You no belong here.”

  He said it so matter-of-factly, and it was so manifestly true, that Orlando was surprised to realize that it stung a little. As shattering as their experience in the freezer had been, he felt like he was happier in the world of the Kitchen, or in any of the virtual worlds they had visited, than he had ever been in RL.

  “I am not in a hurry, you see,” the tortoise offered. “The chief has promised to drop me off on his way back to the river’s source. I am not sorry to spend a little more time with you folks. Pirates, kidnapping, a great battle—we have had quite an adventure together, after all!”

  “Adventure. . . ?” Orlando couldn’t begin to explain why what the tortoise was saying seemed like such a devastating understatement, nor did he want to try. Beside him, Fredericks was staring forlornly out at the passing riverbank, at the cabinets like a row of tall bluffs. Orlando turned back to the tortoise and manufactured a smile. “Yeah, I guess we have, haven’t we?”

  By the end of the long, twilit day they had still not reached the end of the river.

  The cabinets first gave way to the soapy, frothing swamps around the base of what Orlando guessed was an old-fashioned washing machine. From the center of the river they saw huts on stilts spread out through the swamp. Some of the denizens emerged onto their porches to watch the strangers pass, but although all of them seemed to be armed with spears—they were mock-African tribesmen, as far as Orlando could tell, actually bleach bottles with embarrassingly caricatured black features and brilliant white teeth—none of them did more than wave lazily at the canoe.

  As the hours wore on, the swamps gave way to meadowlands, which seemed to be some kind of mat on the floor, grazed by scouring-pad sheep, each one a puff of pure, unsoiled white. There were a few scrubbing-brush giraffes as well, that stretched high up to polish the ceramic mugs hanging from the cup trees dotting the sisal plain.

  Orl
ando’s critical faculties had not been suspended, even if his enjoyment had taken a battering. He noted with admiration how the Kitchen idea had been stretched to cover a whole world, with ample space and plenty of things to experience, while still remaining fundamentally a kitchen. The sleight of hand concerning distances continued to intrigue him, too. He could still see the kitchen sink where they had entered the world, faint as a distant mountain in the half-light and ridiculously far away. If he and Fredericks and their companions were really an inch or so tall, as seemed true when he measured himself against the various objects and inhabitants . . . Orlando did some quick mental arithmetic and decided that by that standard, an entire Kitchen of normal proportions would only be perhaps a quarter of a mile from one side to the other. And yet they had paddled with the current for almost two full days, and hadn’t reached the end of this one yet.

  For the first time, Orlando wondered who owned the Kitchen—was it one of the Grail Brotherhood? Or were there other types of landlords in the network, ordinary rich people who rented space from the Brotherhood and then built their own worlds? It was hard to imagine the Kitchen’s creator being one of the rich monsters that Sellars had described. The simworld seemed too . . . whimsical, if that was the right word. (It was one he’d seen many times, but he wasn’t entirely positive what it meant.)

  The bulb overhead was beginning to dim. The chief found a shallow backwater along the edge of the sisal fields and they all waded to shore. Strike Anywhere then made a fire, using the odd method (considering he was himself a kitchen match) of rubbing two sticks together. Or perhaps it was not such an odd method, Orlando reflected, thinking of the cruel way the infant Little Spark had been used by the pirates.

  As they sat, watching the fire burn down from a roaring blaze to a flicker of orange flame, the tortoise recited the tale of Simkin Soap-dish, a foolish young man who, because of his purity of heart, saved a bird (apparently the Icing Sugar Fairy in disguise) from a hunter. Because of the fairy’s help, Simkin was later able to solve the deadly riddles of King Karpet and marry the monarch’s daughter, Princess Potholder. (Orlando was fairly certain those were the names, but he was still depressed, and tired now, too, and thus finding it hard to keep his attention focused.) It was apparently a familiar Kitchen folk-tale: all seemed to end happily, with evil thwarted and virtue triumphant, although some of the details seemed inexplicably strange, like the frightening Voice of the Disposal, an all-devouring monster in the sink which recited the king’s riddles. As he was sliding into sleep, Orlando wondered idly if this was a story that had been programmed in by the Kitchen’s designers, or whether the Puppets had invented it themselves.