River of Blue Fire (12 page)

“One type,” agreed Lenore. “If you're from Africa, you may have seen driver ants . . .”

Her disquisition on Renie's domestic insects was cut short as the dragonfly plane abruptly dropped like a stone, then tumbled in midair before pulling out of its dive and into a long, flat skim above the grass forest. Cullen whooped. “Damn, we're quick!”

Renie was struggling not to throw up. Even !Xabbu, despite the mask of baboon features, looked more than a little unsettled.

Lenore's naturalist lecture was kept on hold over the next few minutes by a further succession of evasive procedures. Passing through an almost continuous serious of dives, banks, and loop-the-loops to avoid birds that Renie seldom even saw before the autopilot reacted, the dragonfly seemed to travel ten times as far vertically and horizontally as it did forward. In fact, Lenore explained, they really weren't even trying to go forward; instead, they were waiting in place for the swarm to approach.

Between being rattled against !Xabbu in the passenger alcove and bouts of severe queasiness, Renie managed to wonder at how realistic these sensations of weightlessness and g-force were. It seemed hard to believe that they could be generated solely by the V-tanks in which their bodies were currently floating.

A vast feathered shadow suddenly loomed in the windshield. Another thought-swift jerk in direction, this one an unadvertised columnar rise that seemed to slam her guts down into her shoes, finally proved too much. Renie tasted vomit at the back of her mouth, then felt her stomach convulse. There were no visible results of sickness within the simulation; a moment later, except for the slowing contractions in her midsection, even Renie felt as though it had never happened.

Must be the waste hoses in my mask pumping it away
, she thought weakly.
That mask that I can't feel anymore
. Aloud, she said, “I can't take much more of this.”

“Problem not.” Cullen, body language suggesting he wasn't too thrilled with having passengers at all, reached out to the wheel and dropped the dragonfly into a sharp spiral. “It will only get worse when the swarm shows up, when we're trying to take readings
and
avoid those damn birds.”

“It's too bad,” Lenore said. “You won't have quite as close a view. But we'll try to set you down somewhere you can still see.” She pointed at the viewscreen. “Look, there's the prey wave-front! The
Eciton
are almost here.”

Hurrying through the matted foliage, dawn light winking dully on wing and carapace, came a seething rout of insects—madly-stilting beetles, skimming flies, large creatures like spiders and scorpions treading the slower, smaller prey underfoot in their hurry to escape the great enemy: Renie thought it looked like some bizarre insectoid prison break. As moments passed, and as the dragonfly spiraled down, the wave of prey insects grew denser and more chaotic. The blankly inhuman heads and jointed limbs jerking in heedless flight upset her. They looked like an army of the damned, hopelessly fleeing the trumpets of the Last Judgment.

“See those?” Lenore pointed out a group of slender-winged insects that flew above the panicked herd, but seemed far more purposeful than those below. “Those are
ithomiines
—ant butterflies, so-called. They follow the
Eciton
everywhere, just like the antbirds do—in fact, they feed on the birds' droppings.”

The dragonfly's hatch hissed open. Overcome by a little too much of Nature at her most cloacal extremes, Renie struggled down the ladder and onto the top of a mossy stone, then bent double to coax the blood back into her head. !Xabbu clambered down and stood beside her.

“Just stay fairly still,” Lenore called down through the hatchway. “The birds and others have plenty to feed on, but you don't want to call attention to yourselves unnecessarily. We'll be back to pick you up in about half an hour.”

“What if something gets us?”

“Then I guess you'll be offline sooner than we thought,” was Lenore's cheerful rejoinder. “Enjoy the show!”

“Well, thank you so much,” Renie growled, but the dragonfly wings had beat into life again, pressing her down by the force of their wind, and she doubted the woman had heard. A moment later the dragonfly leaped upward with the force of a brief and localized hurricane, then zigzagged forward over the oncoming insect stampede and disappeared into the forest.

Now that they were out in the open, Renie could hear the sounds properly, and realized that she had never thought of Nature as being noisy. In fact, she realized, most of the nature she'd seen had possessed a classical sound track and voice-over narration. Here, the twittering of the hunting birds alone was almost deafening, and with the clicking and rasping of prey in full flight, coupled with the swarms of flies that buzzed above the hurrying mass, she and !Xabbu might have been listening to some kind of bizarre factory floor working at a nightmarish level of production.

She lowered herself to a tuft of moss; when she sank in and found herself surrounded by stiff tubular stems, she realized the moss was almost as deep as she was tall. She moved to a bare section of rock and sat down.

“So what do you think?” she said to !Xabbu at last. “This must make you feel very excited about your own hopes. I mean, if they can build this, then surely you can build the place you want to.”

He squatted beside her. “I must confess that I have not been thinking about my project in the last hours. I am amazed by all this. I am amazed. I could never have dreamed such things were possible.”

“Neither could I.”

He shook his head, his tiny monkey brow crinkling. “It is a level of realism that actually frightens me, Renie. I think I know now how my ancestors and tribesmen must have felt when they saw an airplane for the first time, or the lights of a big city.”

Renie squinted into the distance. “The grass is moving. I mean
really
moving.”

!Xabbu narrowed his own deep-sunken eyes. “It is the ants. Grandfather Mantis!” he gasped, then murmured something unintelligible in his own language. “Look at them!”

Renie could have chosen to do nothing else. The leading edge of the ant swarm was pouring into the comparatively clear space before them in relentless, viscous waves like lava, smothering grass, leaves, and everything else. The ants were mostly dark brown, with reddish abdomens. Each slender insect was almost twice as long as Renie was tall, not counting the segmented antennae which seemed to move a dozen times for every other motion the ants made. But it was not as individuals that they exercised their profound, horrifying magic.

As the main body of the swarm surged into view, Renie gaped, unable to speak. The front stretched away out of sight in a line that was miles across by her perspective, and it was not a thin front. The swarming, seething mass of ants streamed back into the vegetation in such thickly clotted thousands that it seemed the entire edge of the world had grown legs and was marching toward them.

Despite the first appearance of inexorable progress, the
Eciton
did not simply march. The outriders scurried forward, then turned and hurried back to the nearest pseudopod of the writhing mass; in the meantime, others followed the path they had just blazed, and then explored farther before hurrying back themselves, until the entire living clot had moved into the area the outriders had just visited. Thus the army crawled forward like some huge amoeba, a vast seething lump that was nevertheless questingly alive down to its last particle, an army that to Renie's vastly shrunken gaze might have covered all of Durban beneath its hurrying bodies.

“Jesus Mercy,” Renie whispered. “I've never . . .” She fell back into silence.

The dragonfly appeared from out of the trees farther back in the swarm, and moved over the front of the column, darting and then hovering while its human pilots made their observations. It swerved with reflexive suddenness to avoid a brown-and-white bird, which continued in its downward plummet and snatched up a struggling cockroach instead.

Seeing the dragonfly plane made Renie feel a little less overwhelmed. It was a simulation, after all, and even if within this simulation she were no more than a tiny fleck in the path of an ant swarm, nevertheless humans had built it, and humans could bring her back out of it safely.

The ant mass had surged to within what by her terms was only a quarter of a mile from the base of the rock on which she and !Xabbu sat, but their vantage point seemed to stand outside the main thrust of the swarm's pulsing forward movement, so she was able to relax a little and even enjoy the sheer spectacle. Lenore had been right—it was an amazing show.

“They are very fast, especially when we are so small,” said a voice behind her. “The leading edges of an
Eciton burchelli
raid move at about twenty meters per hour.”

Renie jumped in shock. For half a moment, she thought that Cullen had landed the plane and that he and Lenore had snuck up on them, that she had been watching a real dragonfly instead of the Hive aircraft, but the white-robed sim standing a few paces away up the hill was clearly someone entirely new.

“They are hypnotic to watch, are they not?” the stranger asked. He smiled within the shadow of his hood.

“Who are you?”

The stranger brushed the hood back just casually enough to avoid melodrama, revealing close-cropped black hair and a heavily lined, Asian face. “I am Kunohara. But you have probably guessed that, haven't you? They do still mention my name at the Hive, I presume.” His diction was careful, his English overprecise but otherwise flawless. Renie did not think he was using any translation gear.

“They mentioned you, yes.”

“This is your world, is it not?” !Xabbu asked the newcomer. Renie could see subtle signs of her friend's nervousness, and she was not tremendously comfortable with the stranger herself. “It is very, very impressive.”

“The Hive people have certainly brought you to see one of its most spectacular manifestations,” Kunohara said. “The swarm looks full of confusion, but it is not. Do you see the spider, there?” He pointed down to the nearest edge of the boiling mass. A long-legged green spider had failed to outrun one of the pseudopods, and now was clinched in doomed combat with a trio of large-headed ants. “She has encountered the true soldiers of the
Eciton
swarm. They ‘walk point,' as the military people would put it. They only fight to defend the swarm—most prey is killed by the minor and media workers. But see what happens!”

The spider had been turned onto its back; its struggles were slowing. Even as its legs kicked feebly, a group of smaller ants rushed over it. Two of them severed its head with jaws as sharp and competent as gardener's shears; others began to bite through other parts and carry them away, back to the body of the swarm. Within moments, all that was left was the heavy, smooth abdomen and attached bits of the thorax.

“They will bring up a submajor,” said Kunohara, with as much satisfaction as if he watched the last act of a favorite opera. “See, the soldiers have already gone back to their patrol. They do not carry things, but a submajor does.”

A larger ant indeed appeared as if summoned, straddled the remaining piece of the spider, which was larger than the ant itself, and grasped the edge of the ragged thorax in its jaws. Several of the smaller ants came up to help, and together they trundled it back into the foraging mass.

“You see?” Kunohara began to walk slowly down the hill, still watching the
Eciton
swarm. “It seems to be chaotic, but only to the uninformed eye. In reality, a finite but flexible series of behaviors, when multiplied by thousands or millions of individuals, creates extreme complexity and extreme efficiency. Ants have lived for ten million generations, where we have only thousands. They are perfect, and they care nothing about us—one writer, I remember, said they were ‘pitiless and elegant.' Of course, one could possibly say the same of high-level simulations as well. But we have only begun to discover the complexity of our own artificial life.” He stopped and gave a curious smile, shy and yet not very winning. “I am lecturing again. My family always told me that I loved the sound of my own voice. Perhaps that is why I spend so much time alone now.”

Renie didn't quite know what to say. “As my friend said, this is very impressive.”

“Thank you. But now it is perhaps time
for you
to talk.” He took a few steps down the stone toward them. Beneath the white robe and white baggy trousers, Kunohara was barefooted. Now that he was closer, she could see he was not a great deal taller than !Xabbu—or at least his sim was only a little larger than !Xabbu would have been in his own body. She gave up. It was too much like a problem in Einsteinian relativity. “What brings you here?” Kunohara asked. “You have come from Atasco's simulation world, have you not?”

He knew. Renie wondered how that could be. Then again, he had access to all the machineries of the simulation, while she and !Xabbu were no more free here than lab rats.

“Yes,” she admitted. “Yes, we have, as a matter of fact. Something was going wrong there, so we came through. . . .”

“A back door into my world, of course. There are several of those. And there was more than something merely going wrong, as I think you probably know. Bolivar Atasco has been killed. In real life.”

!Xabbu's small fingers tightened again on her arm, but something about Kunohara's bright eyes made her think lying would be a mistake. “Yes, we knew that. Did you know Atasco?”

“As a colleague, yes. We shared resources—programming on this level is almost incomprehensibly expensive. That is why I have a microscopic version of one of the forests in Atasco's version of Colombia. It allowed us to share raw materials at the earliest stages, although we differed in our focus. Now, despite being representations of the same geographical area, they are completely different in effect. Bolivar Atasco's interest was at the human scale. Mine, as you have noticed, is not.”