River of Blue Fire (16 page)

“There!” shouted Cullen. “I can see it!”

Renie stepped up beside him. They had reached the summit of the center spine of a fallen palm frond. From this comparatively high place, lifted above the leaf mold of the forest floor, they could at last see the Hive's windows glinting from the distant hillside. “How far is that, in RL distance?” she panted. “If we were normal size? A few meters? If only . . .”

“Yeah,” Cullen said, “if only.” He began to trot down the other side of the leaf, leaving Renie to stagger forward again, still balancing Lenore.

They were crossing a relatively clear patch of ground at the base of the rise on which the Hive was situated when the first ground-level refugees from the swarm began to spill out of the vegetation behind them. A long-legged spider stilted past, tall as a house. Smaller but even less pleasant animals followed, boiling out of the jungle in a wash of agitated noise.

“We can't outrun them.” Renie staggered even as she spoke and almost fell, then lowered Lenore to the ground. A fly skimmed over their heads, making a noise like a small jet helicopter. “We have to find someplace safe. High ground.”

“Are you crazy?” Cullen demanded, then pointed at the Hive. “That's millions worth of code standing there.”

“Jesus Mercy! You don't
get
it, do you?” A part of Renie knew screaming was not good strategy, but she didn't care. “This is not about gear, this is about staying alive!”

!Xabbu had noticed their absence and was hurrying back toward them. A centipede, a shiny, sinuous thing which a moment before had been in full flight, suddenly side-wound toward him and struck, but the small man in the baboon body jumped to safety, narrowly eluding the rounded, fanged head. His baboon sim bared its fangs and dropped into defensive posture. The centipede hesitated, then turned and paddled on, its instinctive desire to hunt muted by the swarming death behind it.

“We have to climb something,” Renie shouted to !Xabbu. “We'll never make it back in time.”

“That's . . . that's irresponsible.” Cullen sounded uncertain now. Another shadow wheeled overhead, yet another antbird preying on the scurrying refugees.

“Here.” !Xabbu stood at the base of a fern, beckoning. “If we climb this plant, we can reach a place they will not go, I think.”

Renie bent and heaved Lenore up onto her shoulder. She had taken a few steps when something smacked hard against her back and knocked her off balance. As she struggled to regain her footing, Lenore thrashed in her arms, pummeling Renie's back with her fists.

“Put me down!
Put me down
!”

Renie let her slide to the ground, but took care not to let her tumble helplessly, and received a flailing fist against her ear for her trouble. “What the hell are you playing at?” she growled.

Lenore had curled up like a woodlouse. Cullen strode over. The racket of fleeing insects was growing louder, and the flood of refugees was beginning to widen, threatening the place they stood. “God damn it, Kwok, what are you doing?”

“Leave me alone.” Lenore did not look up at him. “I don't want to do this anymore.”

Cullen reached down to grab her. Her legs still did not move, but she thrashed furiously from the waist up and managed to land a hard blow on his face. Swearing, he let her drop. “You're scanned! What is this?”

“You must hurry!” !Xabbu called from a position high up the fern stem. “I can see the ants!”

“We're not going without Lenore!” Cullen looked like someone who was watching his house burn down. “I mean, I can't just leave her here.” He took the woman's arm, but she shook him off. “What's wrong with you?” he demanded.

“This is just so . . . stupid!” she wailed. “It's stupid, and it hurts! And I'm not going to do it anymore.” She opened her eyes wide, staring with an almost mad intensity. “It's not real, Cullen—none of this is real. It's a game, and I'm not going to play this stupid game anymore.” She slapped hard at his hand. He withdrew it.

“Right,” said Renie. “You deal with her if you want.” She turned and hurried across the open space toward !Xabbu and the sanctuary of the fern. A beetle veered from the leading edge of the oncoming throng and ratcheted past in front of her, creaking like a sloop in full sail. She paused, bouncing in place until it had passed, then sprinted forward.

“I can't just leave her!” Cullen shouted after Renie.

“Then don't! Stay!” Renie reached the bottom of the stalk and grabbed at the thick fibers that covered it like a pelt, scrabbling with her boots until she had pulled herself off the ground. When she reached the first place where she could stand, she turned to look back. Cullen was shouting something at Lenore—impossible to hear above the mounting din—but she had curled back into a fetal ball and was paying no attention. Again he tried to lift her, which brought her to life, gouging and elbowing. Renie shook her head and resumed climbing.

“Up here.” !Xabbu shinnied down the stalk toward her, moving as easily in his baboon form as Renie would on a broad staircase. “Put your foot on this place—yes, there. Why will that Lenore woman not come?”

“Shock, I guess—I don't know.” Renie's foot slipped and she dangled by one arm for a moment, kicking in heart-freezingly empty air, but !Xabbu reached down with both hands and clutched her wrist, giving her the courage to look for a foothold. When she had found one, and was again firmly set, she saw Cullen reach the base of the stalk and begin to climb.

The noise grew louder, rising until it was like the roar of the ocean in a narrow cove. The sky was filling with hopping and flying insects of all sizes. Some skimmed so close that their wingtips scraped the outer fronds of the fern, making the leaves dance. The horde on the ground grew even more numerous. Diving antbirds snatched some of them, but nothing slowed the exodus.

Renie and !Xabbu reached a point midway up the fern where the distance to the next jutting stem was too great for Renie to climb without exceptional difficulty, so they moved away from the central stalk and into the folded gully of a leaf. As they stepped onto it, the curling frond swayed alarmingly, bounced by the breeze rather than by the inconsequential weight of the tiny humans.

Cullen appeared behind them, talking to himself. “She'll be all right. It's just . . . she'll be pushed offline. The system's locked, anyway.”

Looking at his pale, worried face, Renie no longer felt any urge to argue with him.

They made their way across the leaf's hairy surface until they were near its outer edge and could see Lenore in her white jumpsuit curled on the ground far below, like a discarded grain of rice. Staring, Renie felt !Xabbu's hand close on her arm. She looked up to follow his pointing finer.

A short distance from them lay a small tree which had fallen some time in the past and been partly subsumed by the forest floor, so that the. gray-brown of its bark showed in only a few places through the moss and the grasses that had grown over it. From Renie's and !Xabbu's perspective, it was as tall and long as a line of hills.

The
Eciton
army had reached the top of the log, and swarmed along its summit like soldiers on a captured ridgetop. The first few scouts were even now climbing back up from their forays to the ground, and as Renie watched, the first pseudopod of ant bodies boiled down and made contact with the forest floor again. The entire log disappeared beneath a living carpet of ants; moments later, the swarm was extruding tendrils of troops out across the open space Renie and the others had just vacated.

“It's not real,” Cullen said hoarsely. “Remember that. Those are numbers, little groups of numbers. We're watching algorithms.”

Renie could only stare with horrified fascination as the ants flowed forward. One of the leading scouts approached Lenore's unmoving form and stood over her, probing with his antennae like a dog sniffing a sleeping cat, then turned and hurried back to the nearest arm of the swarm.

“The simulation kicks us out when something happens.” Cullen was almost whispering now. “That's all. It's a game, like she said. Kunohara's goddamn game.” He swallowed. “How can she just
lie
there?”

!Xabbu's grip on Renie's arm tightened as Lenore was surrounded by antenna-waggling workers.

“Use the defense spray!” Cullen shouted. The tiny figure did not respond. “Damn it, Kwok, use the
Solenopsis
spray!”

Then, suddenly, she did move, struggling to crawl away on elbows and useless legs, but it was too late.

From the corner of her eye, Renie saw Cullen flinch. “Oh, my God,” he said, “she's screaming. Oh, Christ. Why is she screaming? It's just a simulation—there's no pain function . . .” He trailed off, gape-jawed and ashen.

“She's just frightened,” Renie said. “It must be . . . it must be horrible to be down there, even if it's only a simulation.” She found herself praying that her own instincts were wrong. “That's all.”

“Oh, God, they're killing her!” Cullen leaped up and almost overbalanced. !Xabbu grabbed his jumpsuit leg, but the baboon's mass was too small to do much good. Renie grabbed the scientist's flight-suit belt and pulled him away from the edge. “We have to,” he babbled, “we can't . . .” Cullen fell silent, still staring.

Below, the worker ants had finished. Lenore's sim had been small; they did not have to call one of the large submajors to carry the pieces back to the swarm.

Cullen put his face in his hands and wept. Renie and !Xabbu watched silently as the rest of the swarm eddied past.

It took the better part of an hour before the last stragglers vanished. The flow of ants had gone on so long that Renie could not sustain either horror or fascination. She felt numbed.

“It was a shock, that's all.” Cullen had apparently recovered his self-possession. “Lenore's gone offline, of course—it was just so dreadful to watch.” He peered over the edge of the leaf at the arid field of destruction. “I hadn't expected it to be . . . to be that bad.”

“What were you shouting about?” Renie asked. “Some kind of spray?”

Cullen pulled a silvery wand from the pocket. “Chemical defense spray from
Solenopsis fugax
—robber ants. We imported it, so to speak, to give us a little protection in the field. Everyone at the Hive carries one when they're doing fieldwork.” He dropped the tube into his pocket and turned away from the rim of the leaf. “
Solenopsis
is a European ant, really, so I guess in a way it's cheating.”

Renie stared at him, momentarily speechless. Only someone living in a fantasy world—or, she supposed, someone who was a scientist to the core—could watch what had just happened to his colleague and still be talking as though the whole thing were only an experiment gone slightly sour. But there seemed no point in arguing—she could prove nothing. “We'd better get moving again,” she said instead. “The swarm must be far away by now.”

Cullen looked at her, expression blank. “Get moving where?”

“To the Hive, I suppose. See if we can salvage something so we can get out of here.”

!Xabbu looked up. “We should go back to the river.”

“I don't know what either of you are talking about,” Cullen said. “The simulation's wrecked. I don't understand you people anyway—you act like this was all real. There's no point in going anywhere. There's nowhere to
go
.”

“You're the one who doesn't understand.” She began walking toward the stem of the leaf, their route down. “In fact, there's a
lot
you don't understand, and I really don't have the time or strength to explain now, but even you must have noticed that things have gone pretty seriously wrong. So if you want to survive to see RL again, I strongly suggest you shut up and get moving.”

It was like walking across a battlefield, Renie thought, far worse than it had looked from atop the leaf. Where the
Eciton
swarm had traveled, the microjungle was absolutely empty of any living thing but plants, and only the largest of those had survived undamaged: At ground level the ants had left behind only skeletonized stems and a scattering of tiny, unrecognizable fragments of matter.

Cullen, who was leading them up the hillside toward the Hive, had been silent since Renie's explosion—more likely because he believed she was dangerously crazy, Renie suspected, than because he trusted her judgment about what was going on.

She didn't even know exactly what to believe herself. Had they really seen a woman brutally killed by giant ants, or had they only watched the playing out of a simulation, an imaginary human form dismembered by imaginary insects, with the human dropping out of the puppet body like Stephen or one of his friends when they lost a combat game?

But of course, the last time Stephen had played an online game, something had changed, and he had never come back. Who could say for certain that Lenore had made it back to RL either, or that Renie or !Xabbu or the young entomologist stalking tight-lipped in front of them would survive a similar piece of bad luck?

!Xabbu descended from a quick foray up the curling length of a creeper. “The ants have passed on. I cannot see any of them near the Hive building.”

Renie nodded. “That's one less thing to worry about. I hope we can fly one of those planes—it's a long, long walk back to the river, and even if we don't run into the ants again, I don't fancy our chances.”

!Xabbu looked thoughtful. “We know that something is wrong with this network, Renie. And now it seems that it has gone wrong for others besides just us.”

“It does seem that way.”

“But what could make this happen? Our friends could not go out of this Otherland place—could not go offline, I mean—and now these people cannot either, and they have nothing to do with our search, as far as I can see.”