River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  “My misgivings from earlier now surged to the top. Whatever he was, William had been hiding a secret. Perhaps he had harmed the girl of the tribe. ‘He ran because he did not want the Lost to name him,’ I said. ‘I let myself be distracted—me, the only one who could have seen him flee!’

  “Before any of the others could reply, several disparate voices came together out of the cacophony to make a single voice, not the great whole, but still vibrating with urgency. ‘The One who is Other,’ they shouted, full of fear that was also hopeless joy. ‘The Other is coming!’

  “Then the temperature in the great cavern fell, and it was there—rather, it was everywhere. The information, all the information, stuttered and went rigid for a moment. I felt a terrible something leaning close, the same terrible thing that had nearly crushed the life from me when we entered the network. I could not help myself—animal terror made my entire nervous system convulse. I had only the sense to grab Florimel as I screamed ‘Fly! Fly!’ Then I threw myself forward. Florimel clutched at me in what for her must have been complete darkness. As she shouted for help, the others grasped at her in turn as I careened forward, trying to break away. I am ashamed to say that I had no thought for any of them as they struck obstacles, as they scraped flesh and bruised bones in an attempt to stay in contact with me—my terror of that Other was simply too strong. I would have thrown my parents to it, my friends, to save myself. I think I would have sacrificed my child, if I had one.

  “I could feel it pervading the space behind us like a supernova of ice, like a great shadow under which nothing could grow. Tendrils of its questing thought reached out toward me, and I know now that if it had truly wanted me, physical flight would have been useless. But I had no thought in my head at that moment except a screaming need to escape.

  “Somehow the others managed to follow me, although they suffered doing so. We flew like wounded bats—catching ourselves on each other, on the cavern stone, sprawling and cartwheeling through the dark in search of freedom from the growing chill behind us. We were trapped in the endless, branching tunnels of the Place of the Lost, and we ourselves were also lost, in every way.

  “We burst into a new and open place, another great hollow in the darkness. For a moment I spun in place, flapping my arms in reflexive panic. The cacophony of the voices and the deadening horror of the Other were a little less, but we were still lost in the catacombs. The cavern’s information spun around me, meaningless unless I interpreted it, and it took all the self-possession I could muster just to slow my rabbiting thoughts and try to consider where we were, what we could do.

  “The others crashed to a halt around me, catching at each other like drowning swimmers. I silenced them with a sharp, trembling cry, then fought to concentrate. The structured hierarchies of information around me would not yield to my panicked mind—it was all tunnels, all holes, and every hole seemed to empty back into another, a squirming mass of nothingness without outlet. I squeezed my head in my hands, trying to shut out the clamor of memories, the dull echo of the voice of the Lost, but the picture was muddy. Where was my mind? What was happening to me?

  “And ever, flickering in the back of my thoughts, a tiny place that somehow even survived the terror of that Other, was the shocked un-happiness of realizing that someone who had been a good companion, almost a friend, had proved a traitor. If the nameless terror was not enough, we also shared the catacombs with our former ally, now grown inexplicably murderous. Or had he been that way all along, but only pretending? Had someone set William to spy on us? The Brotherhood? Was everything we had learned, discussed, planned, being reported to them even as we stumbled through this new universe?

  “We had suspected things were not going well. We had been wildly optimistic.

  “My thoughts abruptly jerked as though something had smacked against them. Somewhere, at the farthest reach of my internal darkness, I felt something new. It remains impossible to explain with mere words, the input from these changed senses of mine, but I was feeling a distortion in the patterns of information, a tiny flaw in the space itself—a weak point, as though something had scraped away at the reality of it from the far side until it was almost transparent. But what did it mean? It was all so new, still is so new, that there are scarcely patterns even in my own head that can encompass it. Something was altered, that was all I could tell—something was making a hole in our space.

  “Conscious thought more or less returned to me then, and I wondered if I had discovered one of the places where gateways formed. I could not ponder too long—something greater and more alien than we could imagine was hunting us. I had been touched by it once. I did not think I could survive a second handling.

  “Even as my companions gasped for breath, tight-chested with exertion and terror, I struggled to concentrate on that flaw in the imaginary universe that surrounded me, but no matter how I examined it, poked at it, tried to manipulate it, the quirk remained only potential. I went into that darkness so deeply that my head began to throb, but there was nothing to access, no seam or crevice deep enough for my poor understanding to exploit. It was like trying to open a bank vault with my fingernails.

  “The pain in my head seemed like the beginnings of a stroke, and I was just about to give up when I saw something—the tiniest, tiniest flash of imagery, as though someone had projected a single microsecond of visual input onto the end of my optic nerve. Yes, I saw it—saw. The image was bizarre—a distorted, not-quite-human shape silhouetted against gray nothingness—but even in that sub-instant, it was more vivid to me than the remembered sights which compose the things I see in dreams. I have not seen that way for decades, and for a moment I believed it was a stroke, an illusion born out of collapse—that in my straining concentration I had burst a blood vessel in my brain—but I clutched at it anyway. Then I heard a voice, whisperfaint, as though a fluke of acoustics wafted it across miles of distance on a clear night. It was Renie’s voice—Renie’s voice!—and it said, ‘. . . find them? Can they. . . ?’

  “Stunned, I cried out, ‘Renie?’

  “The others must have been certain I was going mad. One of my companions pulled at my arm again. ‘Martine, someone’s out there!’ Quan Li wailed. ‘I think it’s William—I think he’s coming after us!’

  “I shook her off, desperate to maintain the contact. The silhouetted shape danced before me, but it was tenuous beyond belief, vanishing into fractal fuzziness at the edges, and the more I concentrated on it, the blurrier it became. The weird gray sky behind the moving shape was the only light piercing my inner darkness, so I reached out toward it, tunneling through the hole in the information, trying to touch whatever was on the far side. ‘Renie,’ I implored, ‘!Xabbu, if you can hear me, it’s Martine. We need your help. Can you feel me?’

  “The gray sky grew larger and more brilliant, until its pale light made the emptiness behind my eyes as bright as the moment of a camera flash. Through my ears I heard my companions shouting in alarm, but I could not listen to them. One of them screamed out that William was coming, and the warning rose to a scream, but I was utterly absorbed in reaching through that impossible pinhole, that single black speck in endless whiteness. I struggled until I thought my head would burst to make my thoughts thin enough to pass through, stitching two sides of the universe together with a thread fragile as cloudsilk, as delicate as imagination itself.

  “Something touched me then—touched the inner me. Something unfolded in the information like a budding flower opening into an entire galaxy. I reached out my real hand for my companions, to bring them through with me. The radiance grew until I could perceive nothing else.

  “But as we flung ourselves through the light, a shadow came with us . . .”

  CHAPTER 32

  Feather of Truth

  * * *

  NETFEED/PEOPLE: Barnes’ Legacy Of Scary Fun

  (visual: Barnes’ face over Fire Tunnel seq
uence from Demon Playground)

  VO: Elihu McKittrick Barnes, who died from heart failure yesterday at age 54, will be remembered by most for the high-speed, thrill-a-second gameworlds he authored, such as the bestselling Demon Playground and Crunchy, but he was also one of the world’s leading collectors of Wizard of Oz memorabilia.

  (visual: file footage—characters from W. of Oz on Yellow Brick Road)

  The 20th century film is still popular over a hundred years after its creation, and royalty and other celebrities have had memorabilia from the film in their collection. Barnes was only the most recent to own a pair of sequined shoes known as the Ruby Slippers, worn by one of the characters in the film, but he considered them to be the gem of his collection. Barnes died alone and without heirs, so it seems certain to be a while before the Ruby Slippers find a new owner.

  (visual: Daneen Brill, CEO of The Gear Lab)

  BRILL: “He lived like a programmer, he died like a programmer. It’s lucky the cleaners were handprinted for the door, or we still might not know . . .”

  * * *

  STAGGERING through the red desert, Orlando came to understand beyond any doubt why the ancient Egyptians had made the sun their lord. The white blaze of its eye saw everything, and its fiery touch was equally inescapable. The sun’s heat surrounded them, squeezed them; when they stumbled in the red dunes, it was a mighty weight on their backs which tried to prevent them from rising again. The Egyptian sun was a god, beyond question—a god to be propitiated, to be worshiped, and most especially to be feared. Every time he inhaled, Orlando could feel its avid presence lean close and send its searing breath down his throat. Every time he exhaled, he could feel the same entity sucking the moisture up from his lungs, leaving the tissues dry and cracked as old leather.

  The whole experience was curiously intimate. He and Fredericks had been singled out for extraordinary attention, and just as a victim of torture begins after a while to feel a deep, indescribable relationship with the torturer, so Orlando had come to feel a curious connection to the very elemental force that was killing him.

  After all, he realized, there was a kind of honor in being murdered by a god.

  All this wisdom came in only a half a day. With the sun still high overhead, they admitted defeat, and dragged themselves down the bank to soak in the shallowest part of the Nile, heedless of the danger from crocodiles, until their temperatures came down and something like sanity returned. Afterward they sat sharing the thin line of shadow from the area’s lone palm tree. Although the river water had evaporated from his skin seconds after he had returned to the bank, Orlando was shivering, so overheated he was beginning to feel chilly.

  “If we only had some . . . I don’t know, some shelter,” Fredericks murmured listlessly. “A tent or something.”

  “If we only had an air-conditioned jet,” Orlando said through clenched teeth, “we could fly to Cairo eating little bags of peanuts.”

  His friend gave him a hurt look. “Chizz, then. I’ll just shut up.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t feel so good.”

  Fredericks nodded miserably. “It’s just so hard to wait. I mean, it’ll be hours until it’s dark again. I just wish we could lie down.” He examined his ragged Pithlit-robes, which had lost a wide strip near the bottom to make a sort of keffiyeh for Orlando’s head. “No, all I really wish is that I had more cloth we could use for things. And your sword back to cut it with.” Fredericks frowned. “I mean, that seems more fair than wishing for a jet.”

  Orlando’s laugh hurt, like part of him had gone rusty. “Yeah, Frederico, I guess so.” He looked down at his tanned, muscular legs. If he were in his old battle-garbed Thargor sim, the one he was used to, he would at least have his skin covered.

  Yeah, in black leather, he reminded himself. That would be a treat, wouldn’t it?

  Fredericks had fallen silent beside him. The heat haze warped the monotonous red landscape and flat blue sky, as though they sat in an isolation booth made of antique glass. It was odd about the clothes, Orlando reflected. He still didn’t have any idea why he was wearing a sim of the young Thargor, rather than the mature warrior of Orlando’s later years in the Middle Country. It seemed so—arbitrary. It would have made sense if the Otherland network had disallowed Thargor entirely and replaced him with some other sim, but to find an earlier version of Thargor and substitute that instead? What the hell was that about? And how could it happen? If the Otherland people could do something as fine-detail as finding his old Thargor records, either by hacking into Orlando’s own system, or into the Middle Country, why would they bother to do so and change his sim accordingly, but then leave him loose inside the network?

  The thought was vague, and the crushing heat made it hard to think. For a moment the whole idea threatened to spin away and disintegrate, like one of the dust devils that sprang up from time to time in the sands, but Orlando fought to retain it.

  It’s as though someone’s watching us, he realized at last. Taking an interest, somehow. But is it a good interest, or a bad one? Are they trying to help . . . or are they just playing some kind of really cruel game with us? He found it quite easy to imagine the Grail Brotherhood, or his own cartoonish mental version of them, sitting around a corporate boardroom and thinking of ways to torture Orlando and his friends—a bunch of monstrous old men laughing uproariously and slapping each other on the back every time some new twist of agony made itself felt. He decided not to share this new suspicion with Fredericks.

  His friend was surveying the river, face slack with exhaustion. From where they sat in the single palm tree’s lengthening shadow, there was nothing to see between the slow-flowing Nile water and the mountains on either side except endless, uncaring sands.

  “How far do you think it is to a city?” Fredericks asked. “I mean, it can’t be that far, can it? If our real bodies are in hospitals, we’re not going to die of thirst or starve, so we just have to reach someplace with a roof.” He frowned. “I wish I’d paid more attention in the class when we did Ancient Egypt.”

  “I don’t think this has much to do with what you would have learned in school,” Orlando said grimly. “I think you could have studied for years, gone off to college and studied there, and it still wouldn’t tell you anything about how to deal with this place.”

  “Come on, Gardiner.” His friend was fighting irritation without much success. “There have to be cities! That’s what Oom-Pa-Pa the Wolf Boy said, remember? That Osiris lived in a big city.”

  “Yeah, but this isn’t historical Egypt,” Orlando pointed out. “I mean, just seeing Upaut should have made that utterly locking clear, right? This is some weird mythological Egypt, you know, gods and magic and fenfen like that—if the people who made this decided to put twenty thousand miles of desert into it, they could. A loop-program would do the job pretty well, don’t you think? It wouldn’t be anything really tricky to design—’Add one thousand miles sand. Add one thousand miles sand. Add one thousand miles sand.’ A chimp could do it.” He scowled.

  Fredericks sighed in despair and collapsed backward, then pivoted to get his head back in the single stripe of shade, where the air temperature was a minute fraction farther below the boiling point. “You’re probably right, Orlando. But if we’re going to die here, do you have to keep pointing it out to me?”

  Orlando almost laughed again. “Guess not, Frederico. As long as you’re clear on the concept.”

  “We’re doomed, right?” Fredericks rolled his eyes melodramatically, as though his friend had made the whole desert thing up just to be irritating. “Utterly?”

  Now Orlando did smile a little. “Right. Utterly.”

  “Okay, then. Doomed. Got it. Wake me up when it’s dark.” Fredericks draped his forearm across his eyes and fell silent. The brief moment of cheer had ended.

  Orlando felt himself drifting in a kind of half-sleep. The
shadow of the palm tree had expanded, somehow, so that even though the sky was still a powdery blue and the sun still blazed above, the land itself had turned dark and the tree was now only a silhouette. Something moved in the branches, a shadowy something with many legs.

  “Boss?” The fronds rustled. “Boss, you hear me?”

  He could not remember the name, but he recognized a friend. “I . . . I hear you.”

  “Okay. Don’t get your skinware in a bundle, just listen. There’s a guy who says he wants to help you. He says he’s the lawyer for Fredericks’ parents—his name is Ramsey. He wants access to your files, if we’ll let him. I told him I’d ask you.”

  Beezle. The thing was named Beezle. Orlando worried a little about Beezle’s well-being—the wind was starting to blow, riffling the fronds. But wait—how could that be? The day was hot, wasn’t it?

  Hot and without any wind at all . . . ? “I’m sorry,” he said slowly. “Fredericks. . . ?”

  “This guy says he’s the lawyer for Fredericks’ parents.” For gear, Beezle could do a good imitation of impatience. “I’ve checked him out, and there is such a guy, and he does work for Fredericks’ folks. We could swap some information, him and me, but I need your say-so. The files are all under name-security, which means no one hut me and you can see ‘em unless you spring ‘em.”

  The sky was losing its color, and even the sun was beginning to darken as a shadow spread quickly across the scalding white face of the disk. “Whatever you think is best.” Orlando was finding it difficult to follow the conversation. If something was happening to the sky, didn’t he need to wake Fredericks?

  “Look, I know you think you’re dreaming, Boss. This is really tough. If you want me to help the guy, tell me ‘Ramsey can see files.’ Just say that, unless you really don’t want me to share anything. But I’ve pretty much run outta ideas, myself This might be our last chance.”