River of Blue Fire (21 page)

There had been a time only a few years back when some group in the United States—in the Pacific Northwest, if she remembered correctly—had claimed that since the majority of social violence was caused by men, and because there were certain genetic indicators in some males that might indicate predisposition to aggression, male children bearing those indicators should be forced to undergo gene therapy
in utero
. The opposition groups had shouted long and loud about the proposed law being a kind of genetic castration, a punishment for the crime of simply being male, and the whole debate had degenerated into name-calling. Calliope thought that was too bad, actually. She had seen enough of the horrifyingly casual bloodshed caused almost entirely by young males to wonder if there wasn't something to what the bill's proponents had to say.

When she mentioned it to him, Stan Chan had called her a fascist lesbian man-hater. But he had said it in a nice way.

It was certainly true that she had to avoid making assumptions without the facts, but she also needed to try to wrap her mind around the person, needed to
find
the perp before she could find him—or her. For now she would have to trust her instincts. It felt like man's work, of the most twisted sort, so unless she stumbled on overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the person they were seeking would remain a
him
.

But beyond the assumption of a male perp, not a lot stood out, at least in the way of unifying themes. There had been no trace of sexual assault, and even the violence-as-sex aspect seemed oddly muted. In many ways it appeared to be more ritual than rape.

Ritual
. The word had a vibration, and she had learned to trust the part of her that felt those kinds of resonance. Ritual. She would file that away.

Other than that, there was little to go on. The murderer was not as thorough in his avoidance of physical evidence as the Real Killer, but Polly Merapanui's death had found her effectively out-of-doors, the only shelter being the concrete overpass, an area scoured by wind so that no useful traces remained, even to the department's hideously expensive ForVac particle-sucker. The perp had worn gloves, and if Polly had fought, she had not carried away any trace of her murderer beneath fingernails.

If only the old superstition were true, Calliope thought, not for the first time in her homicide career—if only dying eyes actually retained an image of what they last saw.

Perhaps the killer believed that ancient superstition. Perhaps that explained the stones.

The voice of the auto-reader droned on, emotionless as a clock. The sign indicating her exit swam into view, a distant smear above the river of taillights. Calliope edged toward the left lane. No physical evidence, a victim that most would agree was as inconsequential as a human being could be, a handful of useless witnesses (mostly itinerants and uncooperative relatives) and a truly disturbing
modus operandi
that had never been seen again—Stan was right. They had someone else's bad case, with what little juice it had once possessed sucked out of it.

But the girl, who had possessed nothing in life
except
life, was not entirely inconsequential. To declare that would be to declare that Calliope Skouros herself was inconsequential, for what had she chosen to do with her own days and nights except defend the resentful and avenge the unwanted?

That's inspiring, Skouros
, she told herself, leaning on her horn as some idiot on his way home from four or five after-work beers cut her off.
But it's still a shit case
.

F
REDERICKS was crouching in what would have been the prow if the leaf were a proper boat, staring out over the rapidly darkening water. The river had carried them to this point without too much violence, but Fredericks had a firm grip on the fibers of the mat anyway. Watching his friend's head waggle from side to side with the motion of the water had begun to make Orlando feel queasy, so he was lying flat on his back, looking up at the first prickling of stars in the sky.

“We've lost them all,” Fredericks said dully. This was not the first time since they had been swept away that he had made this doomful remark. Orlando ignored him, concentrating instead on convincing himself that his scanty clothes were drying, and that the air was actually warm. “Don't you care?”

“Of
course
I care. But what can we do about it? It wasn't me who got stuck on this stupid boat.”

Fredericks fell silent. Orlando regretted his words, but not to the point of retracting them. “Look, they know which way we're going,” he said at last by way of apology. “If we . . . whatever you call it,
go through
, we'll just wait for them on the other side. They'll find a way to get down the river, and then we'll all be in the next simulation together.”

“Yeah. I guess so.” Fredericks turned to face Orlando. “Hey, Gardiner?”

Orlando waited a few seconds for Fredericks to finish the sentence, then realized his friend wanted conversation. “Yeah?”

“Do you . . . do you think we're going to get killed?”

“Not in the next few minutes, if we're lucky.”

“Shut up. I'm not spanking around, I mean it. What's going to happen to us?” Fredericks scowled. “I mean . . . I don't know, I miss my parents, kind of. I'm scared, Orlando.”

“I am, too.”

As the darkness thickened, the immense trees sliding past on either side became an unbroken wall of shadow, like the cliffs surrounding a deep valley.

“Valley of the Shadow of Death,” Orlando murmured.

“What?”

“Nothing.” He dragged himself upright. “Look, we can only do what we're doing. If there were a simple way to get out of this, one of us would have found it already. Remember, Sellars made it hard to get here, so even if they seem like the Scanmaster Club sometimes, Renie and the others must be pretty smart. So we just have to hang on until we solve it. Pretend it's one of the Middle Country adventures.”

“Nothing in the Middle Country ever really hurt. And you couldn't get killed. Not for real.”

Orlando forced a smile. “Well, then I guess it's about time old Thargor and Pithlit had a serious challenge.”

Fredericks tried to return the smile, but his was even less convincing.

“Hey, what do you look like?” Orlando asked suddenly. “In RL?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I just wondered. I mean, are you tall, short, what?”

“I don't want to talk about it, Orlando. Ordinary-looking, I guess. Talk about something else.” Fredericks looked away.

“Okay. You still haven't ever told me where ‘Pithlit' comes from. The name.”

“I said I don't remember.”

“
Fenfen
. I don't believe you. So tell me.”

“I . . . well . . .” Fredericks met his eyes defiantly. “If you laugh, even a little, you're impacted to the utmost.”

“I won't laugh.”

“After a character in a book. A kid's book. A stuffed animal, sort of, named Piglet. When I was little I couldn't say it right, so that's what my parents called me. When I started doing the net—well, it was sort of my nickname. Are you laughing?”

Orlando shook his head, teeth firmly clamped. “No. Not . . .” He broke off. A noise which had been rising for many seconds was now clearly audible above the rush and roar of the water. “What's that?”

Fredericks stared. “Another bug. It's hard to tell. It's flying really low.”

The winged thing, coming rapidly after them from upstream, had dropped so close to the river's surface that one of its feet broke a wavelet into white foam. The insect tipped and wobbled, then seesawed up to a higher level before regaining its course. It skimmed past them at an angle, showing itself to be almost half the size of their boat, then banked steeply a long distance downstream and began to fly back toward them.

“It's going to attack us,” Fredericks said, fumbling for the barge pole.

“I don't know. It seems injured or something. Maybe sick . . .” Orlando's attention was captured by something in the waters beneath the veering insect. “Look! It's that blue sparkly stuff!” Fredericks stood and balanced unsteadily, intent on the low-flying bug. He raised the pole up above his head as it approached, as though to knock it out of the sky. “Jeez, are you scanned to the utmost?” Orlando dragged him down. Fredericks had to let go of the pole to keep from falling, but saved it from bouncing overboard after he had fallen to his knees. “That thing's ten times your size.” Orlando chided him. “You hit it with that, you'll just get knocked into the water.”

The insect hummed closer. As it neared, already banking, Orlando crouched on all fours, ready to drop to his belly if it flew too low. The creature was some kind of tropical beetle, he saw, its rounded brown shell touched with yellow. As it swept past, Orlando saw that the forward part of the wingcase had lifted, and that something was moving there, wiggling . . .

“. . . 
Waving
?” he said in astonishment. “There's a person in there!”

“It's Renie!” shouted Fredericks as the insect buzzed past. “I'm sure it's her!”

The glimmer was all around them now. The waters seemed to froth with glowing sky-blue. Upstream, the flying insect was making a wide turn, but Orlando could hardly see it. The very air was full of dancing light.

“They found us!” Fredericks bounced up and down. “They're flying in a bug! How can they do that?”

“I don't know,” Orlando shouted. The noise of the river had grown to an endless wash, and blue light was leaping from his skin. The dark shadow of the flying insect was overhead now, pacing them, and it also flew through sprays of blue tracer-fire. “We'll ask them on the other side—”

And then the roaring overwhelmed them, and the light filled everything, and they passed through into another place.

CHAPTER 9

The Hollow Man

NETFEED/ENTERTAINMENT: I Loved The “Papa Diabla,” Could Have Bone Without The Warm Gazpacho
.

(Restaurant review of Efulgencia's World Choir, Oklahoma City, USA.) (visual: “Iguana con Bayas” on a serving platter)

VO: “. . . My other major complaint with EWC would not perhaps be a problem for other diners. EWC is one of the last to get on the “random restaurant” dining loop, and their use of it is aggressive—there must have been six changes of connection during our meal, which hardly leaves enough time to ask the new arrivals what restaurant they're in, let alone what they're eating, what they think of it, or anything else, before they've vanished and the next party has popped in. Now, I never enjoyed this sort of thing even when it was a novelty, but clearly EWC is looking for a younger, crunchier, scorchier type of customer than yours truly—the pop-eyed, batter-fried iguana is another giveaway
. . .”

T
HE light was going fast. Renie, who had not felt confident for a single moment since the hopper had lifted into the air, began fumbling on the instrument panel for the insect-plane equivalent of headlights. Realizing how many switches she could flick which would
not
be in her best interest to flick, she gave up and concentrated on maneuvering the little flyer through the overwhelming, monstrous forest.

“He still seems to be alive,” !Xabbu said from his crouch at Cullen's side. “Since there is no blood, it is hard to tell how much damage he sustained when that creature pulled his arm off. I have knotted his coat around the wound, in any case, and he is sleeping again now.”

Renie nodded, mostly intent on avoiding a fatal piloting error. It would be easy to mistake a shadowy tree limb for part of the greater darkness, and from the perspective of their own skewed measurements, the ground was several hundred feet below them. She had contemplated trying to fly higher, to reach a place above the treetops, but she didn't know whether this plane could be expected to fly safely at an altitude of what would be equivalent to thousands of feet, and in any case she liked her chances of not hitting anything better down here, where the trees were mostly trunk.

“Are you sure he said the river was in this direction?” she asked.

“He said west. You heard him, Renie.”

She nodded, and realized her teeth were locked so tight her jaw hurt. She unclenched. She had received enough glimpses of the sunset through the trees until just a little while ago that she actually felt confident that they were flying west, but she needed something to worry about, and whether they were headed in the right direction was—in total contrast to all their other difficulties—a problem of almost manageable size.

As they sped on through the evening, she gained enough confidence that she could almost enjoy the spectacle. Once they skimmed past a squirrel big as an office building, which turned a vast, liquid brown eye to watch them. Other insects, a large moth and a few mosquitos, fluttering along on errands of their own, passed the hopper without a second glance, like bored commuters pacing on a station platform. The moth was beautiful at this size, covered with a feathery gray pelt, each faceted eye a cluster of dark mirrors.

The distance between trees had grown wider, as much as a quarter-minute or more now separating each gargantuan trunk. Tendrils of mist drifted upward from the ground, twining among the branches and obscuring vision, but before Renie could add this to her catalogue of worries, the forest finally dropped away behind them. A strip of beach flashed past, then nothing lay below but gray-green water.

“The river! We're there!” She didn't dare take her hands off the wheel to clap, so she bounced in her padded seat.

“You have done well, Renie,” !Xabbu said. “Shall we look for the others?”

“We can try. I don't know that we'll find them, though. They might have got back on the boat and headed on downstream.” She tipped the hopper into a long, gradual turn. It was much less smooth in flight than the dragonfly, which had a wider wingspan, and it juddered as the wind shifted, but she had not hurried the turn, so she was able to straighten the little craft out again and head it along the river's flow. It was true that these virtual planes were made for scientists to use, not professional flyers, but she was still proud of herself.

She flew on for a few minutes, but it quickly became obvious that she would not be able to spot the others unless they were on the water or very well exposed on the beach. She was looking for a place to land, with the idea of continuing the search in full daylight, when !Xabbu sat up and pointed.

“What is that? I see a leaf, but I think I see something pale moving on it.”

Renie could not make out much more than a dark shape bobbing on the water. “Are you sure?”

“No, but I think so. Can you fly this airplane closer to the river?”

She was surprised by how quickly the little craft hopped forward when she gave it some throttle. They dipped down, almost too low, and Renie cursed as they clipped the top of one of the river swells. It took her a few moments to fight the hopper back into submission. She skimmed past the leaf, not quite so low this time.

“It is them!” !Xabbu said, excited. “Or at least some of them. But they looked frightened.”

“We must look like a real bug.”

As she began her turn, !Xabbu said, “The water is strange here. The blue lights, as we had before.”

“We should get them to the beach if we can.” Renie started back upstream. With !Xabbu's help she managed to get the door open. Air rushed in, wild as an animal, bouncing them in their harnesses. Cullen groaned from behind his straps. Renie got her hand out the window and waved as they swooped past the startled faces on the boat.

“Turn back!” she shouted into the wind.

Whether they did not hear her, or had no way to steer, the leaf-boat did not change course. The current bore it on, and by the time Renie had completed another turn upstream and was heading back toward them, they had already reached the onset of the glimmering waters.

Renie pulled the door shut. “How many of them are there?”

“I could only see two.”

She considered for only a moment. “If they can't stop, we have to go through with them. Otherwise, we might never find them again.”

“Of course,” said !Xabbu. “They are our friends.”

Renie wasn't sure she was quite ready to call their fellow refugees friends, but she understood !Xabbu's impulse. Being lost was a lonely thing even in a world that made sense. “Right. Here we go.”

They were almost level with the boat when snakes of neon-blue light began to arc along the windshield. As a flurry of sparks streamed from the wing, Renie had a frightening memory of the last Ares space mission, the one with the faulty shielding that had burned up on reentry. But this was cold fire, it seemed—foxfire, will-o'-the-wisp.

The world beyond the windshield went completely blue, then completely white. She felt a moment of still, weightless peace . . . then everything went abruptly and horribly upside down. The windows blew out and they were whirling in blackness, flipping end over end through a roaring tumult so loud that Renie could not hear her own scream.

End over end became a centrifugal blur. The roar increased, and for a few merciful instants, Renie lost consciousness. She floated back toward awareness, touched it, but did not take a firm grasp as she felt the spinning slow. The plane shuddered, then they struck down with a grinding rasp and a series of violent impacts that ended in a thump like a small explosion.

Black and cold were all around her. For long moments, she was too stunned to speak.

“Renie?”

“I'm . . . I'm here.” She struggled upright. She could see nothing but a faint gleam of stars. The shape of the plane was all wrong, somehow, but she could not think about it. Things were pressing painfully against her, and something cold was creeping up her legs. “We're in water!” she shouted.

“I have Cullen. Help me to pull him out.” !Xabbu's slender baboon fingers touched hers in the dark. She followed his arm to Cullen's clothing, then together they pulled the injured man up the sloping floor toward the opening and the wide night sky. The water was thigh-high and rising.

Renie dragged herself out through the crooked doorway, then leaned back and got a firm hold on Cullen before pulling him out into the waist-deep water. The air was strangely charged, tingly as in a storm, but the black sky seemed clear. The current tugged at her so that she had to brace herself as !Xabbu scrambled out, but the river was surprisingly shallow; Renie decided they had crashed on the edge of a sandbar or some other kind of underwater shelf. Whatever it was, the river remained shallow all the way to the shadowy bank. Stumbling, they carried Cullen onto land, then dropped into a heap.

Renie heard a creaking noise and looked back toward the plane, but could make out only a shapeless darkness protruding above the waters. The shadow lurched with the current, groaning with a sound more wooden than metallic, then slid off the bar and down into the waters.

“It's gone,” she said quietly. She was beginning to shiver. “The plane just sank.”

“But we are through into another place,” !Xabbu pointed out. “Look, the big trees are gone. The river is a true size again.”

“The others!” Renie suddenly remembered. “
Hello! Hello! Orlando? Are you out there? It's us
!”

The land all around seemed flat and empty. No answer came back except the liquid murmur of the river and a lone cricket who seemed to have been on hold until just this moment, and now began sawing determinedly at his two-note song.

Renie called again, !Xabbu joining her, but their only reply came from Cullen, who began to mumble and thrash weakly on the bank. They helped him sit up, but he did not answer their questions. In the darkness, it was hard to tell if he were truly conscious or not.

“We have to get him some help,” she said. “If this is another simulation, maybe things are different here—maybe he can get offline.” But she did not feel hopeful even as she said it, and wondered for whose benefit she was speaking. She and !Xabbu got Cullen to his feet, then guided him up the riverbank. At the top of the rise they found an open field, and in the distance, much to Renie's joy, a vast array of orange lights.

“A city! Maybe that's where Orlando and the rest have headed. Maybe they didn't know we were coming through with them.” She got an arm around Cullen. !Xabbu took the point, a few paces ahead as they stumbled through tangled growth toward the lights. He stopped to riffle in the vegetation at their feet.

“Look, this is corn.” He waved an ear in front of her face. “But all the stalks have been smashed to the ground, like an elephant or a herd of antelope have passed through here.”

“Maybe it was,” she said, trying to keep her teeth from chattering. “And you know something? As long as it wasn't giant bugs, I don't care
what
did it.” She looked around. The flat fields extended away on all sides into the darkness. “But it would be nice to know where we're supposed to be, I guess.”

!Xabbu, now a few dozen yards ahead, had stopped. “Whatever knocked this corn down has knocked over the fence as well,” he said. “See.”

Renie reached his side and let Cullen sit, which the entomologist did in swaying silence. Before them a heavy chain-link fence that looked to have been a dozen feet high now lay stretched across the broken corn like a snapped ribbon. “Well, at least we won't have to go looking for a gate.” She bent to grab a rectangular metal sign, still held to the fence by one bent bolt. When she had twisted it free, she tilted it until it caught the light of the prairie moon.

“
TRESPASSERS WILL BE EXECUTED
” it proclaimed in huge black letters. At the bottom, in smaller print, was written: “
By Orders of His Wise Majesty, the Only King of Kansas.
”

“Y
OUR turn now,” said Long Joseph. He stared out over Jeremiah's shoulder, eyes roving. “All them signs, no problem.”

Jeremiah Dako put down his book. “Signs?”

“Yeah, those what-are-they—vital signs. Still the same. Heart going fast sometime, then slow, but everything else the same. If I watch anymore, I'm going crazy.”

Despite having just been on watch for six hours, Long Joseph Sulaweyo followed Jeremiah back into the lab. As Jeremiah confirmed that all the various monitors—body temperature, respiration, filters, hydration, and nutrition—were as Long Joseph had said, Renie's father paced along the gallery, looking down on the silent V-tanks. His footsteps sent dry echoes scurrying through the cavernous room.

As Long Joseph crossed in front of him for the dozenth time, Jeremiah pulled off the headset and slapped it down on the console. “Good God, man, would you go do that somewhere else? It's bad enough I have to listen to you going pad, pad, pad around the place all night, but not here, too. Believe me, no one wishes more than I do that there was something here for you to drink.”