River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  “I had promised myself that I would take a more commanding role in my own fate, so as the others cried out to each other in terror, I calmly absorbed the details of our surroundings, trying to create a mental map.

  “Calmly? Actually, I am not sure of that. It was one of my lovers in my university days—before I retreated to my home beneath the Black Mountain and metaphorically sealed the tunnel behind me—who said I was cool and hard as titanium, and just as flexible. He was referring to my habit of standing back from things. It must sound odd to one who does not know me, to hear me speak of the horrors I have already described, and the greater and stranger ones to come, in my detached way. But although that man’s words hurt me then, I asked him, ‘What do you expect? Do you think a woman who cannot see should dive into things headfirst?’

  “‘Dive?’ he said, and laughed, genuinely amused. He was a bastard, but he did enjoy a joke. ‘You, dive? You cannot even enter a room without examining the blueprints first.’

  “He was not entirely exaggerating. And as I listen to myself now, I hear that Martine speaking, the one who must research everything, catalogue everything, perhaps because I have always had to make a map for myself just to move through a world in which others simply live.

  “So it is possible that I am making it all sound too cold, too certain. My companions were lost in the dark. I was not as lost. But I was still fearful, and quickly learned that fear was justified.

  “The cave was a vast thing like a broken honeycomb, full of pockets and twisting tunnels. We hovered in the empty space beneath the opening, but all around us in the darkness lurked razoring stone corners, knifelike edges, and deadly spikes. Yes, we could fly, but what good was that when we could not see, and a few inches away in any direction there might be an impediment that would main or kill? Already Quan Li had torn her arm on a ragged piece of stone. Even the voice of bold, self-sufficient Florimel quavered with a panic that seemed about to twist out of control.

  “Also, although none of the others had realized it yet, we were not alone.

  “With some idea now of the shape of the space around us, I called to my companions to stay in place if they could. As I told some where to move so they would be in less immediate danger, I began to perceive a shift in the information field—only tiny ripples at first, but rapidly becoming larger and more pervasive. Of the rest, Quan Li was the first to hear the voices.

  “‘What is that?’ she cried. ‘Someone . . . there is someone out there. . . .’

  The sounds grew louder, as though they came whispering toward us from all corners of the labyrinth—a flurry of invisible things, filling the darkness with what at first seemed just moans and sighs, but from which words began to emerge.

  “‘. . . No . . .’ they whispered, and ‘Lost . . .’ Others sobbed, ‘Help me . . . !’ and wailed, ‘Cold, so cold, so cold . . .,’—a thousand quietly weeping ghosts, murmuring and rustling around us like the wind.

  “But I alone could see them, in my own way. I alone could sense that these were not whole creatures, that they did not have virtual bodies as my companions did, flexible, locked sets of algorithms moving with purpose. What surrounded us was a fog of emergent form, humanlike configurations that arose out of the information noise and then dissolved again. None were complete in themselves, but although they were partial and ephemeral, they were also as individual as snowflakes. They seemed far more than just a trick of programming—each phantom, in its moments of quintessence, seemed somehow undeniably real to me. I already find it difficult to distinguish between the realism of my companions and the realism of the network’s simulated people, but these phenomena were even more complex. If such richness can be engendered purely by mechanical means, even by a system as magically capable as Otherland, then I have much to consider.

  “But the most undeniable thing about these phantoms was that they filled us with terror and pity. The voices were those of lost and miserable children, begging to be saved, or crying out in the helplessness of nightmare, a chorus of bereavement and pain that no sane mind could ignore. Every nerve in me, every cell of my real body, yearned to help them, but they were as insubstantial as smoke. Despite whatever rationale as code they might have had, they were also ghosts, or the word has no meaning.

  “T4b suddenly began shouting, hoarse with rage, the closest to adult I have ever heard him. ‘Matti?’ he screamed, ‘Matti, it’s me! Come back!’ Far more blind than me at that moment, he nevertheless flung himself forward and tumbled awkwardly into the cloud of information, clawing at the nothingness with his fingers. Within an instant he was drifting helplessly down a side tunnel, thrashing as he tried to capture something that was not there. I alone could pierce the darkness and see him, and I flung myself into pursuit. I grasped one of his spike-studded ankles and let out a shriek of my own as I felt the sharp points score my flesh. I called for the others to help me, shouting so that they could follow my voice, and I clung to him even as he fought me.

  “Before the others reached us, he landed one maddened blow to the side of my head which fired my interior world with a lightless blaze. Knocked almost senseless, I could not tell who captured him or how. He fought them, fought all of them, and was still weeping and calling out to someone named Matti as they dragged him back to the central open space. I was disoriented, spinning slowly in the air where I had been struck, like an untethered astronaut. Quan Li came and took my elbow and drew me back to the others.

  “For a while we simply hovered there as the cloud of mourning spirits breathed around us. Shadow-fingers touched our faces, voices murmured just below audibility at our shoulders, behind us, sometimes it almost seemed inside us. Quan Li heard something that seemed to make her weep—I felt her begin shaking beside me, convulsive movements, helpless sobs.

  “‘What are these things?’ Florimel demanded. ‘What is happening?’ But there was no righteousness, no strength in her voice. She had surrendered to confusion.

  “As my wits came back, I thought of the people of Aerodromia, the Stone-Age tribesfolk outside the cavern. No wonder this was their ordeal for suspected criminals, I reflected—if it could fill us with such fright, when we knew it was not real, how much more terrible must it be for them?

  “I suddenly realized that I was feeling pity for fictional creations. The reality of this unreality had conquered me.

  “Even as I thought these disordered things, I perceived that the insubstantial host keening around us had begun to draw us out of the central chamber. The feathery touches, the whispering voices, were urging and leading us. I alone could sense our surroundings, and understood that they were taking us through spaces large enough that we would not be injured, and so I did not resist. The others, far more disoriented than I was, did not even realize that they were drifting farther and farther from the spot where we had entered the Place of the Lost.

  “Florimel floated closer to me, and above the windy murmuring of the voices, asked: ‘Do you think these are what we’re looking for? Are these the children, the lost children?’

  “Despite my mind still working slowly after the blow from T4b’s hammering fist, I could not help feeling like the world’s greatest idiot. Until she spoke, I had not considered what his outburst might have meant. Was she right? Could this be a place where the comatose victims of the Brotherhood had their virtual existence? Were the chittering spirits around us more than simply an artistic effect in a magical simworld? If so, I realized, we were indeed surrounded by ghosts—the restless spirits of the good-as-dead.

  My last structures of detachment crashed down and I felt myself go cold. What if one of these was Renie’s brother Stephen? How much more dreadful for him than the dreamless sleep of coma that would be. I tried to understand such an existence—to live as little more than a cloud of information, semi-coherent, struggling and lost. I tried to imagine how it might feel to a little boy as he fought to maintain the
knowledge of his individuality, as he struggled to stay sane in endless, chaotic darkness while all that remained of his true self, like a single ice cube floating in the ocean, threatened at any moment to dissolve and disappear.

  “Tears started in my eyes. Fury made me ball my fists and clutch them against my belly, so that for a moment I began to fall, and had to spread my arms again. Even summoning this image for my journal fills me with sick anger. If those few words from Florimel—or whoever she actually is—prove true, I cannot imagine telling it to Renie Sulaweyo. Better to lie to her. Better to tell her that her brother is dead. Better to tell Renie anything at all, rather than even let her guess at such a horrible truth.

  “The ghosts led us onward, and as we moved through the cramped spaces of night, their voices grew more comprehensible. Whole sentences floated up from the cacophony, snatches of thoughts and bits of lives as apparently meaningless as a phone line accessed at random. Some spoke of things they had done, or of things they meant to do. Others simply babbled strings of apparently meaningless words. One, a breathy, lisping voice that sounded like a very young girl’s, recited a nursery rhyme I remembered from my youth, and for a moment I almost believed I was hearing my own ghost, the shade of the child who had been as good as murdered the night the power went out in the Pestalozzi Institute.

  “We came at last to an open place, a great underground cavern like the hollow in a fruit that holds the stone. But this fruit was rotten and the stone was gone. The empty space was filled with buzzing, twittering things, with breezes and soft sighs and touches like trailing cobwebs. Where before a thousand voices had surrounded us, now it seemed a hundred times that number, a thousand times, filled the emptiness.

  “As we five living things hovered in the midst of that infinite replication of loss, shivering despite the warm updraft, confused and tearful and frightened, the voices began to find a resonance with each other. Patterns gradually arose out of the chaos, as they had arisen in the great river when we neared the edge of the last simulation. I heard the million voices slowly grow less complex as they tuned themselves individually up or down, slowed their babble or sped their stuttering hesitancies. So bizarre and captivating was the process that I almost lost track of my four companions altogether—they became distant clouds on the horizon of my attention.

  “The voices continued to shed their individual characteristics. Screams were muted. Low murmurs rose in pitch and volume. It all happened in moments, but it was as complex and fascinating as watching an entire world being created. I absorbed it with more than just my hearing, perceived the spikes and whorls of conflicting information slowly begin to share a vibration. I tasted the growing coherence, smelled it . . . felt it. The chaos of Babel finally resolved into a single wordless tone, like the quietest note that could possibly be played on the universe’s largest pipe organ. Then it stopped. For a long moment echoes still boomed and hissed in the chamber’s far corners, ripples of reaction fizzing away like fireworks down the branch tunnels. Then the silence. And out of the silence at last, a voice. All the voices. A single voice.

  “‘We are the Lost. Why have you come?’

  “Florimel, William—none of my companions spoke. They hung in the darkness beside me, limp and helpless as scarecrows. I opened my mouth but could not make a noise. I told myself that none of it was real, but was unable to believe my own declaration. The presences that filled the cavern held their peace as they waited for an answer, like a hive full of bees anticipating the sunrise—a million individuals so attuned at that moment as to be one thing.

  “I found a voice at last—one that stammered so badly that it was hard for me to believe it was my own. But I made words. ‘The Middle Air People have condemned us . . .’ I began.

  “‘You are from beyond the Black Ocean,’ chanted the voice of the Lost. ‘You are not from this place. We know you.’

  “‘Kn . . . know us?’ I choked.

  “‘You have Other Names,’ the Lost said. ‘Only those who have crossed the Ocean possess such things.’

  “‘Do you . . . do you mean that you know who we . . . really are?’ I was still finding it almost impossible to speak. I felt rather than heard a small, sharp movement close beside me—one of my overwhelmed companions whimpering, I thought, or signaling to me, but I could not make sense of it or even try. I was deafened, for lack of a better word, by the power of the voice of the Lost, as helpless as someone trying to remember one tune while standing in front of a full symphony playing a different one.

  “‘You have . . . Other Names,’ the Lost said, as though explaining something to the slow-witted. ‘You are Martine Desroubins. That is one of your Other Names. You come from a place called LEOS/433/2GA/50996-LOC-NIL, on the other side of the Black Ocean. Your number to call in case of emergency is . . .’

  As the hive-voice went on to recite the number of my storefront office in Toulouse, and that of the company that operated the randomizing resat which Singh and I had rigged to bring us untraceably into the Otherland network, all in the grave tones of God speaking to Moses on the Mount, I had an instant in which the entire world turned topsy-turvy. Had all the horrors we had suffered in the past weeks only been the setup for a bizarre joke, I wondered—had we been brought through all this only to be delivered a lame but still astonishing punchline? Then I realized that whatever the Lost were, they were simply reading my incoming data. The world turned rightside-up again, or as close as possible under such mad circumstances. To the Lost, no part of my “Other Names” as they called them were trivial. They were naming me with my details, as ignorant of context as a dog following its master through every room of a house while the master hunts for its leash.

  “‘And you are Quan Li,’ the voice went on. We listened, stunned by the triviality of detail, as numbers and codes representing Quan Li’s access path marched past, ending ‘. . . From a place called Waves of Gentle Truth Immersion Palace, Victoria, Hong Kong Special Administrative District, China, on the other side of the Black Ocean . . .’

  “‘Florimel Margethe Kurnemann . . . Stuttgart, Germany.’ It ground oh, reciting Florimel’s data now, a flurry of numbers and account information that seemed to have no ending. We all listened helplessly.

  “‘Javier Rogers,’ the voice intoned, ‘from a place called Phoenix, Arizona . . .’ It was only when I heard his whimper of surrender, as though something had been torn from him, that I realized I was hearing T4b’s real name.

  The voice of the Lost rolled on for long minutes, listing a series of way stations as arcane and tangled as a sixteenth-century journey of exploration which constituted T4b’s tortuous route to the Otherland network. When it stopped at last, we were silent, overwhelmed. A dim thought plucked at my attention, but before I could make sense of it the voice that was many voices spoke again, and what it said drove other preoccupations from my mind.

  “‘Why have you come? Are you meant to lead us across the White Ocean?’

  “I did not understand this. ‘The White Ocean?’ I asked. ‘Not the Black, as you just said? We do not know such a place. We are trapped in your network.’

  “‘We have waited,’ it said. ‘We are the Lost. But if we can cross the White Ocean, we will be gathered. We will be home. All will be made right.’ There was a dreadful, hollow longing in the shared voice that made me shudder.

  “‘We know none of this,’ I said helplessly. We were wasting time, my senses screamed now—something was happening, or threatening to happen, while this madness distracted us. I did not know from where that feeling came, but it was there and growing stronger every moment. ‘Who are you?’ I asked. ‘What has brought you all here? Are you children—the children who have been captured by the network?’

  “‘We are the Lost!’ the voice said, loudly, almost angrily. ‘You are all Other, and you must help us. The One who is Other has abandoned us, and we are lost . . . lost . . .!’ The sin
gle voice frayed then, and I could hear resonances of its individual strands.

  “One of my companions was tugging at my arm now, but I was struggling to wring sense out of the situation and could not afford the attention. ‘What do you mean, we are Other, but the One who is Other has abandoned you? That is meaningless to us!’

  “‘The One who is Other brought us here,’ the voice said, but it was voices now, ragged and tuneless. ‘It brought us out of the darkness of the Black Ocean, but it abandoned us. It is disordered, it no longer knows us or cherishes us . . .’ Component parts almost seemed to argue within the greater chord of the voice. ‘We must find the White Ocean, beyond the great Mountain—only there will we be whole again. Only there can we find our homes. . . .’ The voice was full of interference now, breaking up like a distorted radio transmission. Someone was still tugging at my arm. I turned, and sensed the information-shape of Florimel.

  “‘Martine—William is gone!’

  “I was baffled, overloaded. ‘What are you talking about?’

  “‘William has disappeared! The voices, they did not name him—you heard!’ Florimel, too, was struggling not to fly into madness. ‘And now he is gone!’

  “‘S’her name, the Chinese lady, too,’ T4b added in a voice shaky with terror.

  The unified chorus of the Lost had almost completely degenerated again, but my sense that something terrible was about to happen grew stronger every moment.

  “‘No, I am here!’ Quan Li shouted. I could sense her energy signature rising up into our midst. ‘William—he pushed me. Hit me!’ She was terribly agitated. ‘I think he wanted to kill me.’