River of Blue Fire (23 page)

“Henry? That was his name?”

Their guide sighed, full of theatrical suffering. “They're
all
named Henry.”

Emily, it became clear at last, was actually Emily 22813. All the women who lived and worked in this place were called Emily—or “emily,” since it was used as a descriptive term for a woman as well. And all the men were henrys. Emily 22813 and her workmates—Renie guessed from the size of this factory farm that there must be hundreds here—spent their days planting and tending beans and corn and tomatoes.

“Because that's what the king wants us to do,” was Emily's only explanation of why she and her fellows were working in what seemed to Renie to be slave-labor conditions.

The place itself, as far as Renie could decipher, was named “Em Rell,” which she guessed was derived in some way from the name for the women: She could not come up with any other associations with the United States in general or to Kansas, a place she knew of only as being part of the farming heartland of North America.

Em Rell, or whatever it was, seemed strangely deserted. None of Emily's coworkers were to be seen, no sentries moved among the stationary tractors and haphazard stacks of empty crates. Unimpeded, Renie and the others passed into the glow of the orange lights that were strung on every pole and wire, and across the great yard, until Emily stopped them in front of a barn, a huge structure that dwarfed even Renie's outsized former home, the Durban civic shelter. It looked like a jet hangar surrounded by drifts of grain dust. “There's a place in here where you can sleep.” Emily pointed them to iron stairs which clung to one outside wall. “Up there, in the loft. No one ever looks.”

!Xabbu scampered up the ladder, popped in and out of the unscreened window, then swiftly descended. “It is full of equipment,” he said. “It should be a good place to hide.”

With Emily's help, they boosted the sagging Cullen up the steps. As they maneuvered him through the wide loading window, Emily said “I have to go now. We have a little sleep-extra tomorrow, because of the fence. If I can, I'll come back to see you in the morning. Goodbye, strangers!”

Renie watched the lithe form quickstep down the stairs and vanish into the shadows beside one of the long, low barracks. A side door opened and closed as Emily slid back inside. A moment later a strange, rounded shape appeared at the far end of the barracks. Renie ducked back into the windowframe, where the moonlight could not reach her, and watched the figure totter past. It made a faint whirring noise, but she could see little more of it than a pale glow of eyes before it rounded the corner of the barracks and was gone.

The loft itself, although it stretched across only the shorter span of the barn, was longer than the street on which Renie lived in Pinetown and full of potential sleeping places. They settled in a protected niche close to the window and the stairs. !Xabbu found long burlap sacks stuffed with heavy aprons; a few of these sacks, laid out behind a pile of anonymous boxes which provided a fence between their resting place and the window, made a good bed for Cullen; the young scientist's eyes were already closed as they dragged him onto it. They pulled out more sacks and made themselves as comfortable as they could. Renie would have loved to puzzle over the day's happenings with !Xabbu, but sleep was tugging hard at her, so she let it drag her down.

Emily came as promised, earlier in the morning than Renie would have preferred. As she sat listening to the young woman's chatter, Renie decided that she understood what people meant when they said they would be willing to sell their souls: she would have traded that article away in a heartbeat for one cup of decent coffee and a couple of cigarettes.

I should have had Jeremiah put caffeine into the dripline at decent intervals
, she thought sourly.
Well, next time
 . . .

The cup of liquid Emily had smuggled out of the workers' cafeteria—”brekfusdrink” she called it, apparently all one word—was gag-gingly and most definitely
not
coffee. It had an odd chemical taste, like unsweetened cough syrup, and even the small sip Renie took before hurriedly handing it back made her heart race. She reminded herself that the girl meant it as an act of kindness.

After Emily had breathlessly recounted all the events of their discovery and rescue the night before, with just as much guileless enthusiasm as if Renie and !Xabbu had not experienced them firsthand, she told them she would be released from her work detail early today to see the “medical henrys”—a regular checkup that from her brief description sounded more like veterinary medicine than the sort Renie was used to—and that she would try then to slip in and visit them. Outside, the grating, scratchy recordings of what Emily called “happy-music” had begun booming from the compound's loudspeakers. Already chafing at the idea of spending an entire day stuck in the loft and subjected to that din, Renie questioned the girl about this place to which the river had delivered them, but Emily's vocabulary was very basic and her viewpoint narrow. Renie garnered little new information.

“We don't even know if Orlando and the others made it through,” Renie said crossly after the young woman had left. “We don't know anything. We're just flying blind.” This brought Martine to mind, and gave her such a sharp and surprising sense of regret at having lost contact—after all, she hardly even
knew
the French woman—that she missed part of what !Xabbu was saying.

“. . . look for this Jonas man. And we must believe that Sellars will find us again. He is without doubt very clever.”

“Without doubt. But what
is
his angle, anyway? He seems to have gone to a lot of trouble just to save the world.”

!Xabbu frowned for a moment, puzzled, then saw the irritated joke in her words. He smiled. “Is that what all city-people would think, Renie? That someone would never do something unless for himself or herself to profit?”

“No, of course not. But this whole thing is so strange, so complicated. I just don't think we can afford to take anyone's motives for granted.”

“Just so. And perhaps Sellars is close to someone who has been harmed by the Grail Brotherhood. No person who is traveling with us has explained all the reasons they are here.”

“Except you and me.” She took a deep breath. “Well, actually, I'm not entirely sure about you. I'm here for my brother. But you never even met him, not really.” She realized it sounded like she was questioning his motives. “You've done far more than any friend should have to, !Xabbu. And I am grateful. I'm sorry I'm in such a foul mood this morning.”

He shrugged gracefully. “There is no fence around friendship, I do not think.”

The moment hung. !Xabbu at last turned to see to Cullen, who had not yet shown any sign of waking. Renie moved to the window to wrestle her demons in silence.

When she had arranged a few of the boxes nearby so she could look out with little chance of being seen, she settled in, chin propped on fists. Below her, the vast compound had swung into its working day. The happymusic gurgled on, so limpingly out of time it made it difficult to think clearly; Renie wondered if that were one of its purposes. No men were in sight, but herds of slow-walking women, all in near-identical smocks, were being led back and forth across the compound's open space at regular intervals, each band under the guardianship of one of the strange mechanical men. !Xabbu had been right—they did not resemble any of the robots she had seen on the net, either the real-world industrial automata or the gleaming human duplicates on display in science fiction dramas. These seemed more like something from two centuries earlier, roly-poly little metal men with windup keys in their backs and rakish tin mustachios anchored to their permanently puzzled, infantile faces.

The novelty value of what was going on below soon waned. The fat white sun rose higher. The loft began to grow uncomfortably warm, and the air outside turned hazy and as refractive as water. In the distance, shimmering now only because of the scorching sun, was the city whose lights they had seen the night before. It was hard to make out details, but it seemed flatter than it should for such a size, as though some plains-striding giant had topped it as offhandedly as a boy decapitating a row of dandelions. But even so, it was the only thing that gave the horizon any shape; except for a suburb-wide patch of pipes and scaffolding nestled against the city's outskirts, apparently a gargantuan gasworks, the flatlands stretched away on all other sides, a quilt of yellow-gray dirt and green fields, devoid of verticality. It was fully as depressing as the worst squalor to be found in South Africa.

What's the point of all that amazing technology if you build something like this
? She was doomed this morning, it seemed, to a succession of miserable thoughts.

Renie wondered if they should head for the city, depressing as it looked. There was little to be learned on this vegetable plantation, or at least Emily did not seem capable of telling them much—surely they could get better information in the distant metropolis. The only duties they could remotely claim were to find their companions and look for Sellars' escaped Grail prisoner, and they were doing neither at this moment, stuck in a loft which was rapidly turning into an oven.

She scowled, bored and unhappy. She didn't want coffee anymore. She craved a cold beer. But she would
murder
for a cigarette. . . .

Despite the day's grim and monotonous start, two things happened in the afternoon, neither of them expected.

A little past noon, when the air seemed to have become so densely hot that inhaling it was like breathing soup, Cullen died.

Or at least that seemed to be what had happened. !Xabbu called her over from her perch by the window, his voice more confused than alarmed. The entomologist had responded very little all morning, sliding in and out of a deep doze, but now his sim was inert, curled in the same fetal position in which he had last been sleeping, but stiff as the exoskeletal corpse of a spider.

“He's dropped offline at last,” Renie said flatly. She wasn't certain she believed it. The rigidness of the sim was disturbing: propped on its back, unnaturally bowed, it looked like the remains of some creature dead and dried by the roadside. Their fruitless examination over, she eased the sim back into the position in which it and the real Cullen had finally ceased working in tandem.

!Xabbu shook his head, but said nothing. He seemed far more disturbed by the loss of Cullen than she was, and sat for a long time with one baboon hand resting on the sim's rigid chest, singing quietly.

Well, we don't know
, she told herself.
We don't know for sure. He could be offline now, having a cool drink and wondering about the whole strange experience
. In a way, it wasn't that different from RL, really. When you were gone, you left no certainty for those who stayed behind, only an unsatisfactory choice between blind faith or finality.

Or he could have just lain here next to us while his real body wasted away from shock and thirst
—
until it killed him. He said that he was going to be stuck in his lab until someone came in, didn't he
?

It was too much to think about just now—in fact, it was getting harder to think every moment. The oppressive heat had continued to mount, but now there was suddenly a new, stranger heaviness to the steamy air, with an electrical tingling quality—almost a sea-smell, but as if from an ocean that just happened to be boiling.

Renie left !Xabbu still keening quietly over Cullen's sim. As she reached the window, a curtain of shadow fell on it, as though someone had put a hand over the sun. The sky, a withering flat blue only moments before, had just turned several shades darker. A stiff wind was stirring the dust of the compound into erratic swirls.

The four or five convoys of emilys down below stopped as one, and stood staring open-mouthed at the sky while their mechanical overseers whirred and ratcheted at them to move. Renie was momentarily revolted by the women's passive, bovine faces, then reminded herself that these were slaves, as many of her own people had once been. They were not to blame for what had been done to them.

Then one of the emilys suddenly shrieked “Incoming!” and broke from her flock, hurrying toward the apparent security of the barracks. At least half the others began to run also, scattering in all directions, screaming, some knocking each other down in panicked flight. Puzzled, Renie looked up.

The sky was suddenly darker, and horribly alive.

At the center of the mass of thunderheads which had sprung from nowhere and now clustered almost directly above the compound, a vast black snake of cloud began to writhe. As Renie gaped, it jerked back like a tugged string, then stretched down again for a moment until it almost touched the top of one of the silos. The wind was swiftly growing stronger; smocks drying on the long clotheslines began to whip and snap with a noise like gunshots. Some of the garments tore free of the line and flew, as though by snatched by invisible hands. The very air shifted, all within seconds, hissing at first before deepening into a roar: Renie's ears spiked with pain and then popped as the pressure changed. All around her the light turned a faint, putrid green. Wind howled even faster across the yard, bringing a horizontal blizzard of grain dust.

“Renie!” !Xabbu called from behind her, surprised and fearful, barely audible above the growing roar. “What is happening . . . ?”

Lightning shimmered along the thunderheads as the black snake contorted again, an idiot dance between earth and cloud that looked like ecstasy or pain. The word that had been at the back of Renie's head for half a minute suddenly leaped forward.

Tornado
.

The funnel of air writhed once more, then reached down, plunging earthward like the dark finger of God. One of the silos exploded.