River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  Sellars was beginning to think that his imaginary Garden could use a few good toads.

  He had been staring at the latest version of the information for a long time without really seeing it, he realized. His body meant little to him, but it was hard to deny that the discomfort of his current situation, physical and otherwise, was having an effect on his thinking. In the past days he had found it very hard to wake up, and even after he did, it took him a long time to think clearly—to see what was needful to see. He had hoped that the luck of encountering the homeless boy might bring him some respite, but so far the Cho-Cho experiments had been notable failures.

  Sellars envied the precision of mechanical operation. Sometimes it seemed that being an organic life-form was a hindrance at best. He had slept for long hours the night before, but he was still not rested, yet the ever-changing patterns in the Garden were crying out for attention. He did his best to push back the fatigue and disappointment of the past week.

  One frustration could not be ignored, and it struck him afresh every time he entered this metaphorical place. The people within the Other-land network—those he had summoned into risk, and to whom he had spoken in the Atascos’ simulation—were almost completely hidden from him. Since they were at the center of his hopes, any representation which did not show something of their situation was hopelessly flawed. But in the last few days there had arisen a happier but no less maddening paradox: if not for the emergence of what now seemed his greatest enemy, he would have no information about them at all.

  Sellars had thought, as he had built his knowledge of the Grail Brotherhood and their insanely ambitious network over the years, that the one who would require the greatest attention and care was Jongleur. The oldest man alive was still a terrifyingly powerful and subtle enemy, but anyone that important in the real world could not help leaving indicators of his actions. A vast, bushy plant with poisonous-looking white flowers near the center of the information model stood as testament to all that Sellars knew about Jongleur. Its stems might stretch astonishingly wide, prying like thin fingers into the Garden’s farthest reaches, its roots might bulge the mossy soil in every direction, but the plant itself was at least an individual entity, available for examination and theoretically, if not practically, knowable.

  But more and more, as Sellars had fought against the resistance of the Otherland network, desperate to reach the volunteers he had deserted so suddenly, he had come to realize that the network itself, or something that had grown because of it, was his greatest and most worrisome problem. The virtual plant that represented Jongleur and his actions was comprehensible—just like a real plant, it fed itself and fought for sunlight, struggling for survival in the same way that Jongleur bent all his power in pursuit of what might currently be obscure, but were in all likelihood sensibly self-serving goals.

  But the operating system, or whatever it was that so fiercely guarded the network, the thing which had already killed several people and had almost killed Sellars himself more than once, was far less comprehensible. In his Otherland-dominated Garden, it manifested as a kind of fungus, one of those primitive organisms that in the real world could grow rapidly and invisibly beneath the earth, expanding for thousands of yards until it had become the largest of all living things. The actual phenomenon this virtual fungus represented—”the Other,” as some of the more secretive communications of the Grail Brotherhood referred to it—was clearly an intimate part of the network itself. In Sellars’ Garden model, based on all the information he had gathered about its nature and its actions, it sent saprophytic tendrils of interest everywhere, in almost incomprehensible profusion, but the fruiting bodies of its actions came to the surface in only a few places.

  But here was Sellars’ relatively happy paradox: its near-ubiquitous-ness had become a major practical boon to him.

  In the early hours of being forced out of the network after the Atasco sanctuary had been attacked, and in countless cautious experiments since, Sellars had learned that the Other, whatever it truly was, seemed to be drawn in some way to the people he had smuggled into the network. On those few occasions he had managed temporarily to fix their position (all but once too briefly to make contact of any kind) he had also discovered that position to be surrounded by a whorl of Other-related activity. It was strange—almost as though his volunteers held some kind of fascination for the network itself. If it had been the straightforward fascination that a foreign object inspired in an antibody, as would seem logical, he felt sure they would long ago have been eliminated, as the old man Singh had been, slain by a massive coronary in his South African convalescent hospital room.

  But as far as Sellars could tell, during the brief moments of investigation he had snatched between skirmishes with the Other, most of his small company still seemed to be alive within the network. Even more surprising—but his one real ray of hope—was that since this strange and protean enemy was so drawn to them, almost everything he could not discover of their position and situation from direct observation he could infer from the profusion of Other-related actions.

  In other words, he had discovered that where the Other was most active on the network, the chances were good that Sellars’ own people were nearby.

  Not all of the centers of the Other’s most frantic activity would be Renie Sulaweyo, Orlando Gardiner, and the others, but many of them clearly were. This was very good for Sellars, but he could only hope that Jongleur and the other Grail members had not noticed the anomaly.

  As the mists of his fatigue began to thin a little, Sellars saw that there had been several changes in the Garden since his last connection. Several fungal traces of the Other had broken the surface, and in one place several distinct subsets had come together overnight, localized now in an obscure and heretofore untouched section of his inside-out, green world. He wondered briefly if this new aggregation meant that some of the individual groups, who had been inexplicably separated a short time back, had found each other again. If so, that too might be a cause for hope. He also wondered if it was time to try to use the boy Cho-Cho again. He had not prepared the youth properly the last time, it was now clear—the first emergence into the network had shocked him so badly there had been no point in going forward with the experiment—but it had still been Sellars’ greatest success since the Temilún fiasco, since the boy’s description of the people he had seen had sounded very much like Irene Sulaweyo and her Bushman-baboon companion.

  Sellars put the possibility aside for later consideration. Distracting the security system and then holding and hiding an access line long enough to get the boy through was horrifyingly hard work. He wasn’t sure whether he was up to it again just yet.

  He moved his focus on the Garden in and out, looking for patterns. The Other’s latest fruiting bodies were also interesting. He could not tell yet what they symbolized, but it seemed to be moments of large expenditure of energy on the part of the network. He would run some analysis on them later, when he had finished with the larger picture.

  Sellars moved with relief from the obscurities of what was happening within the Otherland system to the section of his Garden that represented things happening outside the Grail network, in RL, where information was more reliable and easier to interpret. Just in the last days there had been a rash of deaths and other occurrences, all related in some way to Otherland, so there was much new growth on those parts of the model.

  A reasonably famous, but long-retired inventor of role-playing gear, rumored to have been given his own simulation on the Otherland network for services rendered, had been found dead of apparent heart failure; a group of children from the TreeHouse technocommune had fallen victim to Tandagore Syndrome; but most significant—and perhaps most troublesome for the Grail people—was that a dozen research scientists in almost as many different countries had all been killed within a single eight-hour period.

  The scientists had been felled by a variety
of causes from cardiac failure to brain aneurysm, but Sellars knew (although the authorities had not yet admitted it) that each of them had been logged into an entomology facility sponsored by Hideki Kunohara—a man with so many connections to Otherland that he himself had become a species of lichen within Sellars’ Garden. Kunohara’s online facility had experienced some kind of massive failure, although even the investigators’ private conversations Sellars had managed to monitor suggested they had no idea how that collapse might be linked to the scientists’ deaths.

  The various propaganda arms of the Brotherhood were already moving to isolate and confuse the investigations, and with their immense resources might very well succeed, but even the fact of the failure having happened, with such spectacularly newsworthy results, was curious. Why would the Brotherhood allow so many prominent people to die on their network? Were the Grail brethren losing control of their own system? Or were they now too powerful, too far advanced in their plan, to care?

  Each of these small botanical newcomers considered, both for itself and within the greater ecology, Sellars moved on.

  As his systems collated information from the vast legion of resources he had linked to his Garden, new plants had sprouted and begun to grow almost unnoticed, but some had recently developed such robust size that he could not ignore them.

  One represented a lawyer in Washington, affiliated to the Garden model through Salome Fredericks and Orlando, whose vegetable avatar was busy sending roots in all directions. Some of these roots had extended so fast and so far that Sellars himself was being constantly surprised by the new places he found them. This lawyer, Ramsey, was extending a search of his own through the information sphere almost as fast as Sellars could track him, and seemed to have made a large and symbiotic connection with the plant that symbolized Orlando Gardiner’s own real-world system.

  There was also mysterious activity flowering in Australian law-enforcement networks, which interacted both with the subgarden that represented the Circle—Sellars knew he had a lot of thinking to do as far as the Circle were concerned, perhaps a day’s gardening just for them alone—as well as Jongleur, and even the fungal threads of the Other. He had no idea why that would be. More questions.

  Irene Sulaweyo’s real-world plant, far more available to observation than the one which symbolized her activities inside the Otherland network, had developed some disturbing tendencies as well—stems extending at odd angles, leaves dying as the information they represented suddenly dried up. He dimly remembered that she had a dysfunctional family, and of course it had been her brother’s coma which had brought her into this in the first place. Sellars could do nothing more for her online self than he was already doing, but he hoped that her physical body was safe, and made a note to see what he could learn about her situation.

  Last, and most worrisome to him personally, was the shiny pale flower that represented little Christabel Sorensen. Until twenty-four hours ago, for all that he had put her through, despite all the risks he had brought to her, her blossom had been thriving. But he had been unable to contact her for two days, and she had not donned the access device he had given her—the replacement Storybook Sunglasses—to answer his last call; his readings suggested they seemed to be broken or decommissioned. It might be something as simple as equipment failure, he knew, but a check of military base records showed that she had not been to school yesterday, and her father had called his own office to excuse himself for the day because of what the system listed as “family problems.”

  It all worried him very much, not only for Christabel’s sake, but for his own. He had exposed himself by being so dependent on the child, although he had seen no other option at the time. It was a grave weakness in his security.

  The drooping petals of the Christabel-flower reproached him. The problem required a delicate investigation, and perhaps an equally delicate solution, but he did not have enough information yet about what had changed. He shifted his focus away.

  Sellars was tiring now. He looked only briefly to the single green shoot that represented Paul Jonas. For a while, right until the moment Sellars had succeeded in his audacious plan to free Jonas into the system, the Jonas-stem had been the center of a tangled thicket of plans and actions. But now the man was gone, lost in the system beyond any of Sellars observational capabilities, and could no longer be acted upon. But the central Paul Jonas questions remained unanswered.

  How could one man so endanger the Brotherhood that they would keep him a prisoner on the system and eradicate all proof that he had ever existed in the real world? Why would they not simply kill someone who was, for whatever reasons, such a threat to them? They had killed hundreds of others that Sellars knew of with certainty.

  He felt a headache coming on. Still too much Garden, not enough toads.

  It was all in flux, and although new patterns were forming he could not make sense of them yet. Some were cause for hope, but others filled him with despair. His spherical Garden represented the hopes and fears of billions of people, and the gamble Sellars had undertaken was a desperate one. A week from now, a month, would it still be a vigorous jungle? Or would rot have struck down all plants but the Brotherhood’s, tumbled all other stalks and stems and leaves to the ground to become mulch for the venomous blooms of Felix Jongleur and his friends?

  And what of Sellars’ own secret? The one that even his few allies did not suspect, the one that even in the event of a most improbable and miraculous victory against the Grail, could still turn the Garden into a wasteland of ash and tainted soil?

  He was only tormenting himself, he knew, and to no purpose: he did not have a moment’s extra time or strength to spend on pointless worrying. If he was anything, he was a gardener, and whether the future brought him rain or drought, sun or frost, he could only take what was given to him and do his best.

  Sellars pushed away the darkest thoughts and returned to his tasks.

  CHAPTER 30

  Death and Venice

  * * *

  NETFEED/NEWS: Chinese Say “Fax You!”

  (visual: Jiun Bhao and Zheng opening Science and Technical Campus)

  VO: Chinese Minister for Science Zheng Xiaoyu announced today that the Chinese have taken a huge leap forward in the race to perfect “teleportation” technology—the spontaneous transmission of matter, a favorite device of science fiction flicks. In a press conference during the opening ceremonies for the new Science and Technical Campus in T’ainan—formerly the National Cheng Kung University—Zheng announced that Chinese researchers were close to solving the “antiparticle symmetry problem,” and that he had no doubt matter transport, also known as teleportation, would be a reality within a generation, perhaps as early as the middle of next decade. Doctor Hannah Gannidi of Cambridge University is not so optimistic.

  (visual; Dr. Gannidi in her office.)

  GANNIDI: “They haven’t let us see much, and what we’ve seen has a lot of questions attached to it. I’m not saying they may not have made some important progress—some of Zheng’s people are really excellent—but I wouldn’t be planning to fax yourself home for the holidays just yet . . .”

  * * *

  THE masks of Comedy and Tragedy bobbed toward him through the darkened basilica, but when he most needed to move, fear seemed to have pulled the bones right out of Paul’s legs and back. The terrible pair had found him again—would they hunt him until the end of time?

  “Don’t move, Jonas,” narrow-faced Tragedy crooned. “We have lots of lovely, squeezy things planned for you.”

  “Or we might just rip you apart,” suggested Comedy.

  A third voice, a silent compulsion which brushed along his nerve endings like a chill breeze, urged him to give up—to fall where he stood and let the inevitable happen. What was the point of flight? Did he really think he could elude these two tireless pursuers forever?

  Paul clutched at the wa
ll for support. Some force that emanated from these two was poisoning him, slowing the heart within his chest. He could feel his fingers, his hands and arms and legs, all growing cold, stiff . . .

  Gally! The boy was still sleeping in the woman Eleanora’s rooms. If they captured Paul, what was to keep them from taking him as well?

  The realization sparked something at the base of his brain and sent a charge of rigidity down his spine. He staggered back another step, then found his balance and turned. For a moment he could not remember in which direction Eleanora’s apartment lay; the enervating dread that seeped from the pair behind him threatened once more to pull him down. He chose what he thought was the right direction and flung himself forward down the shadowed corridor. Within seconds the compulsion to surrender became less, but he could still feel the pair following behind him. It was terrifying and yet also strangely unreal, a nightmare of flight and pursuit.

  Why don’t they just capture me? he wondered. If they’re the masters of this network, why don’t they surround me, or turn off my sim, or something? He ran faster, risking a fall on the slippery floors. It was stupid to torment himself with unanswerable questions—better to snatch at freedom while he could.

  But they’re getting closer each time, he realized. Each time.

  Paul recognized a familiar wall hanging: he had guessed correctly. A moment later he was pounding on the apartment door, which fell open a few inches before hitting some obstruction. He heard Gally’s voice inside, a rising sound of confusion and question, so he put his shoulder down and shoved as hard as he could. The door held for a moment, then the impediment slid to one side, scraping on the flagstones, and Paul tumbled into the room. Eleanora huddled in a corner with wide-eyed Gally pulled close against her.