River of Blue Fire (15 page)

No sense in wasting it. He took a deep breath and limped forward.

Strange to think that he might well owe his life to a pair of Neandertals, contemporaries of his own incredibly distant ancestors. Stranger still to think of these people—of
the
People—living their lives in something like normality until he had stumbled onto them. Who were they, really? Where was he?

Paul Jonas was still considering this when the wind shifted and the smell of death washed down the hillside onto him.

His skin tightened with the sudden thrill of fear, and every hair on his head stood on end. The stink was more than rotting flesh, it was laced with animal musk and urine and dirt and blood, too. It was despair. It was the end of the road. He twisted to look behind him, and a dark shape on the hillside behind him abruptly froze, so that for half an instant he thought his own dark-hindered eyes had fooled him, that the shape was only a rock. But then another shadow moved farther up on the slope; as it turned its head, muzzle sniffing at the shifted wind and the new smells it brought, Paul saw eyes glint yellow-green with reflected moonlight.

The wind became brisker, blowing the horrid tang past him again, and all his muscles tensed as his hindbrain sent out the most primitive of alarms. Even in the grip of mounting panic, he knew that it would do no good to run. Another heavy four-legged shape was coming slantways across the hillside. If they had not attacked him yet, these nameless beasts, it was because they weren't sure what kind of thing he was either, how dangerous he might be. But if he fled . . . Even Paul, who had seen fewer wild animals growing up than most suburban children, felt certain that would be the universal signal for
dinner is served
.

Turning then and taking a careful step forward, then another, continuing to walk despite the knowledge that those huge dark shapes were behind him and drawing closer, was perhaps the bravest thing he had ever done. He felt an absurd urge to whistle, like someone in a cartoon keeping up a brave front. He wished he
were
a cartoon, an unreal creation that could survive the most terrible damage and then pop back into shape, whole and ready for another adventure.

The wind changed direction once more, blowing into his face, and Paul fancied he could hear a deep growl of approval from the hillside as the things caught his scent again. He had only one chance, and that was to find a place where he could make some kind of stand—a cave, a tall boulder, a high tree to climb. No wonder the People made their home in holes in the mountainside. His vacations limited to sunny places with beaches, and an occasional trip to the Scottish Highlands or the Cotswolds, he had never truly understood the horrible, helpless solitude of Outside. But now he was as Outside as he could imagine being.

The snow was shallower here, and although he could now walk a little faster, the footing had grown even more treacherous, as though a sheet of ice lay beneath the snow. Paul cursed silently, but kept this legs moving. He could not afford to slip. As far as the creatures behind him were concerned. Falling Down would undoubtedly come under the same heading as Running Away.

Something moved on the right side of his field of vision. As carefully as he could, he tilted his head to look. The shadow was padding along the snowfield, pacing him, only a long stone's throw away. Its shaggy head and back were doglike, but it seemed wrong somehow, distorted. Steam drifted up from its jaws in little clouds.

The ground beneath him was almost entirely flat now, but even the stunted trees were becoming scarce. He could see nothing before him but unfigured whiteness—no stones, no shelter. He looked back over his shoulder, wondering if he could circle around and move back up the hillside to some of the rocks he'd passed earlier, but the pair of shapes crisscrossing on the slope behind him killed that idea in an instant. There were three of them, all somehow the wrong shape or size, a hunting pack.

Trying to look back while walking forward was a mistake. Paul stumbled, then skidded. For a horrible moment he thought he was going to go completely over, but a scrabbling lunge with the butt of Birdcatcher's spear kept him partially upright, although he banged one knee down on the surprisingly hard ground. It would have been terribly painful if he had not been almost frozen through; instead, he felt nothing but a new weakness in the joint. The three shapes, now close together again, stopped to observe his struggles, eyes pale gems hanging in the darkness, winking on and off behind the curtain of their smoking breath.

Even with his hand, it was hard to find purchase on the slick ground beneath the dusting of snow. As he labored to push himself up, he realized that it
was
ice, an entire sheet of ice, onto which he had fallen. The initial outrage at this further indignity was pushed aside by a burst of unexpected hope.

The river
 . . . ?

As if sensing his tiny revival of spirit and wanting to put a quick end to it, the nearest of the three shapes abruptly loped toward him, covering the distance effortlessly. It moved so much more quickly than he had expected that it was only a dozen meters away when Paul suddenly realized what was happening and raised his spear.

“
Hey! Get back
!” He waved his free arm violently, then jabbed at the dark shape with the spear, hoping that it did not recognize the sheer terror in his shrill tones.

The beast stopped, but did not retreat. It regarded him with lowered head, and a deep, pulsating growl shook the air between them. It was then, with a shock like a physical blow, that Paul realized what had seemed so very wrong about these things. The creature was some kind of hyena, but far, far too big—as tall at the shoulders as a small horse, its body broad and thick-boned. The steaming jaws were wide enough to close around his whole torso.

The beast growled again, a powerful rumble he could feel in the center of his bones. The sound jellied his legs, and Paul had to fight to remain upright. The wind brought the stench of dead meat and musk back down on him. His heart, already beating too fast, seemed to be running downhill, in danger any moment of a fatal tumble.

Cave hyena
. The name came back to him abruptly, something he had seen in a documentary, or in a natural history exhibition—as if it mattered what this horrible monster was called. Cave hyena, the stalker of the Ice Age plains, a walking death machine that no man had faced for five hundred centuries.

Paul took a shaky step backward. The hyena moved a matching pace toward him, head still low, eyes glowing will-o'-the-wisp green. Its two companions paw-crunched down the hillside and fanned out on either side with the unhurried nonchalance of contract assassins. Paul lifted the spear and waved it again. He tried to shout, but could make no sound except a choking gasp.

The river!
he thought wildly.
I'm on the river!
But what good would it do him now? He had no idea how to use it to travel from one place to another, and he knew he could no more outrun these monsters than he could saddle one of them and ride it at Ascot.

The nearest hyena growled again, then lunged forward. As the creature came toward him at a slow trot, he dropped to his knees and did his best to brace the spear against the slick ground. The thing shambled down on him, picking up speed, slower than a normal hyena, but far faster on snow than Paul was.

Perhaps it did not see the spear against Paul's tattered clothes, or perhaps it did not know what a spear was. Mouth so wide he could feel its breath like the heat from a furnace vent a full second before it reached him, the hyena drove onto the spearhead with a shock that almost tore Paul's arms from their sockets. He grunted with pain and hung onto the shaft as he felt the spear crunch through muscle and gristle. The thing let out a howl of pain and crashed into him. He was flung sideways, as though he had been hit by a car, and the spear was almost torn from his frozen grasp as the hyena stumbled past. Paul was jerked straight out onto his belly and dragged an agonizing distance across the ice before the spear worked loose from the animal's flesh.

Stunned, Paul lay on his face for a second, trying to remember which were his arms and which were his legs. He heard a noise like a pistol shot, and for a mad moment thought that, as in
Peter and the Wolf
, a huntsman had come to save him with a big gun. Then he lifted his head and saw the wounded hyena suddenly slide backward into a black hole in the white ground.

A snarl from behind spun Paul around. The other two beasts were loping forward on their thickly muscular legs. He staggered to his feet, slipping and skidding, and in hopeless despair raised the spear above his head to swipe at them. There was another explosive
pop
, then another, and the very ground beneath him shot out radiating crooked black lines, so that for a moment it seemed he stood at the center of a spiderweb. The ice shuddered and settled. He had a moment to wonder why one of his legs seemed shorter than the other, and was also suddenly even colder than it had been—or hotter, perhaps; it was hard to tell—and then the ice beneath him collapsed and the hungry black water sucked him down.

CHAPTER 7

Grandfather's Visit

NETFEED/BUSINESS: Krellor Dumps MedFX

(
visual: Krellor with Vice President Von Strassburg
)

VO: Uberto Krellor has sold his multimillion dollar MedFX medical supply company, one of the last remaining members of his Black Shield family of companies, to the Clinsor Group, which now becomes the world's largest supplier of medical equipment to clinics and hospitals. Krellor, who lost billions when the nanotechnology industry suffered customer confidence setbacks, has now sold off most of his holdings to satisfy his creditors, (visual: Krellor and Hagen at Swiss Olympic pavilion in Bucharest) But though his fortunes are down in other ways, Krellor has recently remarried his former wife Vila Hagen. Their troubled first marriage made them almost permanent fixtures in the tabnets
.

KRELLOR: “It's not a sell-off, it's a reorganization—do you understand nothing? Now please leave us alone, we are trying to enjoy our honeymoon.”

F
OR all the time they had spent in the simulation together, it was still a shock when Renie opened her eyes to find the baboon's face only inches from her own.

“Are you well?” !Xabbu stroked her arm solicitously. “We have crash-landed. Like in a film.”

Renie was not entirely sure that she
was
well: Her head hurt, the world seemed badly off-kilter, and she was having terrible problems moving her limbs. The last of those problems was solved when she managed to unhook the safety harness that was holding her against the crumpled wall of the dragonfly-plane; the second became more comprehensible when she then rolled down into the cockpit—the dragonfly was apparently standing on its nose.

“We're alive,” she decided.

“Just barely.” Beneath her, half-wedged into the wreck of the instrument panel, Cullen was struggling furiously to free himself. “I mean, just barely by the simulation's standards.
Christ!
Look at this!” He slammed the shattered panel with his fist. “Ruined.”

“Will you forget about your stupid toy plane?” Lenore was in a worse position than Cullen—the copilot's seat had crumpled forward, along with a good piece of the plane's floor, pinning her against the panel. She also sounded far more frightened than her colleague; the unsteady edge to her voice made Renie's headache worse. “Get me out.
Now
!”

“Come give me a hand,” Renie called to !Xabbu. She turned to find that he had vanished from the plane's ruined cabin. “!Xabbu?”

“Get me out of here!” demanded Lenore.

Renie hesitated. The two scientists needed help, but she was suddenly terrified that she might lose the little man, her friend, and be truly alone in this place.

“
God damn you, bitch!—you help me
!” Lenore shrieked.

Renie whirled, shocked, but the look on the woman's well-simulated face blew her anger out like a candle: Lenore Kwok was in the grip of real, twitching panic.

“We'll get you out,” Cullen said, despite still being trapped himself. “Calm down, Lenore.”

“Shut up!” She scrabbled frantically at the wreckage that restrained her.

Renie hurriedly began shifting the bits of cabin that had settled around Cullen, marveling again at the complexity and realism of the simulation. Even the broken things broke in convincing ways.

“What are you doing?” Lenore shouted.

“You've got more things on top of you than he does,” Renie explained as gently as she could. “If I can get him loose, he can help me. I don't think I can do it myself.”

“Where's that goddamn monkey?” The woman's eyes roved wildly around the cabin, as though !Xabbu might be hiding from her.

“I don't know. Just try to be calm, like Cullen said.”

“You don't understand!” Lenore was wild-eyed, breathing harshly. “I can't feel my legs! They won't move!”

“Oh, for God's sake,” said Cullen. “That's just panic, Lenore—power of suggestion. It's a simulation, and right now it's holding you in one position. Nothing's happened to your legs. Don't be stupid.”

Renie gave him a hard look. “Cullen, please shut up.”

“Here, see!” !Xabbu had appeared in the hatchway, originally a respectable opening in the belly of a simulated plane, now occupying a tower-window position several yards above them. “It is a thorn from a plant.” He dropped something down to Renie, who caught it as much in self-defense as anything else. It looked a bit like a smooth antelope horn, as long as her outstretched arm and nearly as wide, tapering to a point at one end. She tried to bend it, but could not. “This might work,” she told !Xabbu as he clambered in beside her.

With the thorn as a lever, she was able to bend back a large enough portion of the instrument panel to allow Cullen to slide free. As he stretched and rubbed his sore joints, his partner's panicked demands began again.

“All right, all right,” he said. “You're really scanbound, Kwok, you know that?”

“Let's just try to help her.” Renie found what seemed a good fulcrum-point for the lever and began to work at pulling back the copilot's chair.

“Don't waste your energy. There's an easier way.” Cullen clambered up the floor until he located a panel door. Taking the thorn from Renie, he pried open the door and pulled out a metal box with a handle. “See? Because of Kunohara's stupid rules, we have to have damn virtual repair kits in our damn virtual planes. Is that insane, or what?” He climbed back down the upraised floor and took a wrench from the tool kit, then removed the nuts that held the copilot seat to the floor. The crash had crumpled the dragonfly's framework; it took several kicks before he could knock the seat off its tracks.

A few more minutes of surprisingly hard work permitted them to pull Lenore free.

“I . . . I still can't move my legs,” she said in a quiet little ghost-voice. Renie liked this new tone even less.

With help from !Xabbu's agile feet and hands, they managed to haul her up to the hatchway and then carefully lower her three body-lengths down to the ground. The dragonfly had crashed headfirst, auguring into the forest floor like a World War I biplane; the delicate wings had fallen forward over the buried nose and its shiny, cylindrical tail pointed toward the sky.

“I can't walk,” Lenore murmured. “My legs won't work.”

“That's shit, utterly,” Cullen snapped. “Look, in case you've forgotten, we were about, oh, I'd guess thirty minutes ahead of that
Eciton
swarm, and it's going to raise hell at the Hive if we don't warn them.” He paused. A more uncertain look moved swiftly across his long face. “Not to mention that we're in front of it ourselves.”

“Oh, my God.” Renie, immersed in the problem of getting Lenore out of the broken plane, had completely forgotten the army ants. “Oh, Jesus Mercy, they'll eat us. Oh, God, how horrible.”

“They won't
eat
us,” said Cullen disgustedly. “They'll just keep us from warning the Hive, and we'll lose more money than I can imagine having to reprogram and rebuild. This
is
a simulation—you seem to keep forgetting.”

Renie looked at him, then at !Xabbu, who arched his eyebrows, an odd expression of simian fatalism. She agreed; there was no point wasting time on argument. “Right, it's a simulation. But let's get going, okay?”

With Renie and !Xabbu's help, Cullen hauled Lenore into a piggyback position. “How are your legs?” he asked. “Is there pain?”

“I can't feel them now . . . I just can't make them work.” Lenore closed her eyes and clung tightly to Cullen's neck. “I don't want to talk. I want to go home.”

“We're working on it,” said Renie. “But any information might . . .”

“No.” Lenore's surliness had become childlike. “I'm not going to talk about it anymore. This is so stupid. None of this is happening.”

Which, Renie reflected as they began making their way through the forest of grass, was as unhelpful a comment as anything she could remember hearing recently.

Cullen, despite carrying Lenore's extra weight, was at first determined to lead their small party as well. Renie was reluctant to surrender control, but before she and the entomologist could battle it out, !Xabbu pointed out that he was undoubtedly best suited to go first. After Cullen had been assured that !Xabbu had long experience with hunting and tracking, and thus that it made
scientific sense
, he told the Bushman in which direction the Hive lay and !Xabbu got down to the business of finding a way through the ground-jungle.

It was one of the strangest and most surreal journeys Renie had ever taken—which, considering the nature of what she had experienced in the last few months, was saying a great deal. The world from insect height was an astonishing place, full of frightening yet fascinating things. A caterpillar that she would not have looked at twice in the real world was now a shining, living psychedelic object the size of a bus. As she and the others filed carefully past it, the caterpillar moved a pace forward along the leaf it had been stripping and the step rippled through all its legs, stem to stern, like a chorus-line kick. When the long lockstep was over, the vertical jaws began working the leaf again, making a racket much like the box-cutting machine in a factory where Renie had held a summer job.

As they hurried toward the Hive, they passed through an entire safari park worth of chitinous wonders—aphids clinging to plant stems like zero-gravity sheep grazing in an upside-down meadow, mites burrowing in decaying plants with the single-mindedness of dogs searching for buried bones, even a leafhopper that jumped away as they approached, catapulting nearly into orbit with an audible twang of exoskeletal flexing. If it had been the same proportional size to her in real life, Renie marveled, it could have leaped directly to the top of the tallest building in downtown Durban.

At one point, !Xabbu carefully led them around a spiderweb—an incredible work of engineering when seen from this perspective, but the thought of stumbling into it gave Renie the shivers. She looked back at it nervously several times but never saw any sign of its manufacturer.

The vegetation was fascinating, too, each plant a revelation of complexity. Even the mold, whose surface was a riot of shapes disguised in ordinary life by its tiny size, was worth marveling over. The very earth had to be looked at anew, since what seemed the flattest trail to a normal human eye could contain deep, slippery-sided pits and uncountable other obstructions to travelers of insect size.

But despite the unceasing spectacle, the memory of what was behind them was never out of Renie's thoughts. !Xabbu picked his way through the microjungle with great skill, finding pathways where she knew that she would have been completely stymied, but she still feared that they were not traveling fast enough. Cullen could not move easily with Lenore on his back; watching his pace grow ever slower, Renie struggled to beat down irritation and fear. Even !Xabbu's patient expertise frustrated her, since his manner was so calm that he did not seem to be hurrying, although she knew he was.

They halted, instinct freezing them in place, as a shadow thrown by a bird high above them momentarily eclipsed the sun.

“I can't go on like this,” Cullen gasped when the shadow had gone. He let Lenore slide to the ground and stood over her, sucking air. “You're too heavy, Kwok.”

“I'll carry her for a little while.” Renie did not want an argument between Cullen and Lenore, or any delay at all that could be avoided. “We can't stop. Those bloody ants will kill us, virtually or otherwise.” She bent and tried to coax Lenore to climb onto her back, but the sullen, silent entomologist was no more use than an infant. Renie swore, then grabbed her and flung her over her shoulder like a sack of meal.

“Come on, while I can stand it,” she said, voice tight with effort.

As they stumbled on, Renie found herself wishing, not for the last time, that the simulation were not quite so amazingly realistic. Lenore's weight hung in exactly the same awkward way it would have in RL: just keeping the scientist balanced on her shoulder and putting one foot in front of the other was an exhausting job.

Winged insects in flight for their lives began to hum past overhead, the first tangible evidence of the
Eciton
swarm. It was horribly frustrating to watch them zooming by, going in the same direction, but at ten or twenty times the human's walking speed. Renie's back was aching. She contemplated, then regretfully discarded, the idea of just dropping the Kwok woman on the ground and legging it as fast as she could, unencumbered. Lenore appeared to be in shock, and Renie knew that if the simulation itself was frighteningly realistic, its effects had to be treated with the same degree of seriousness: This woman's affliction was just as crippling as if they were fleeing for their lives in a real jungle.