River of Blue Fire (36 page)

“There is more to say, but the time has gone so fast. I do not know how long I have sat here whispering under my breath, but I can feel the sun beginning to rise in this strange place. In a way, I have started over here, just as I have started this new diary, spoken into nothingness with only the faintest hope that someday I can retrieve it. Was it the English poet Keats who called himself ‘one whose name is written in water'? So. I will be Martine Desroubins, the blind witch of a new world, and I will write my name on air.

“Someone is calling me. I must go.

“
Code Delphi. End here
.”

I
T was a melodic sequence of chiming tones that spawned fractal subsequences even as the main theme repeated. The subsequences threw off subsidiary patterns of their own, creating layer after layer, until after a while the whole world became a mesh of sound so complex it was impossible to pick out one tone, let alone one sequence, from the whole. Eventually it became a single note with millions of harmonics moving in it, a streaming, shimmering, resonating F-sharp that was probably the sound of the universe beginning.

It was Dread's thinking music. Next to the chase, and the occasional adrenal boost, it was his only drug. He did not use it indiscriminately, hungrily, as a chargehead might canline a streamed pop of
2black
, but rather with the measured calm of a junkie doctor rigging up a hit of pure pharmaceutical heroin before going back to work. He had cleared the afternoon, hung a digital “Do Not Disturb” sign on his incoming lines, and now he was lying on his back in the middle of the carpet of his Cartagena office, a pillow behind his neck and a squeeze bottle of purified water at his side, listening to the chorus of the spheres.

As the single tone seemed to grow smoother and less complex—because, paradoxically, the iterations were growing exponentially, he felt himself rising up out of his body and into the empty silver space he sought. He was Dread, but he was also Johnny Wulgaru, and he was something else as well, something eerily close to the Old Man's Messenger of Death—but he was
more
. He was all those things, grown to the size of a star system . . . empty, full of blackness, and yet charged with light.

He felt the
twist
smolder up out of dormancy, a hot point at the very center of his being. Even as he floated in the silver nothingness of the music, he felt his own strength grow. He could reach out now, if he chose, and twist something far more complex and powerful than a security system. He had a glimpse of the earth lying below him, shrouded in darkness but for a spherical tracery of electronic pathways, a capillary array of tiny lights, and felt—in his silvery, music-maddened grandeur—that if he desired it, he could twist the whole world.

Somewhere, Dread felt himself laughing. It was worth laughing about. Too much, too much.

But was that how the Old Man felt? Was that what the Old Man's kind of power felt like, all the time? That the world was his, to do with as he wished? That people like Dread were just tiny spots of light, less significant than fireflies?

Even if so, Dread was not bothered. He was wrapped in his own silver smugness and did not need to envy or fear the Old Man. All would change, and very soon now.

No, he had other things to consider now, other dreams to dream. He let the single pulsing tone take him out of himself again. The twist warmed him as he returned to the cool, silvery place, the place where he could see far ahead and consider all the small things he needed to do along the way.

Dread lay on the bare office floor and listened to his thinking music.

She took an irritatingly long time to answer the call. He had already tapped in on the sim line and knew that the Otherland travelers were sleeping. What was she doing, taking another one of her showers? No wonder she was obsessed with her cat—she was practically one herself, constantly grooming. The bitch needed a little discipline . . . maybe the creative kind.

No
, he reminded himself.
Remember the silver place
. He brought up a little music—not the thinking music (he had used his week's allotment, and he was very stern with himself about such things) but a faint echo, a quiet tonal splashing like water dripping in a pool. He would not let irritation spoil things. This was the thing he had been waiting for all his life.

Although the call carried his signature code, her voice came on without visuals. “Hello?”

Silver place
, he told himself.
The big picture
. “It's me, Dulcie. What, did you just get out of the bath again?”

Dulcie Anwin's freckled face popped into view. She was indeed wearing a terrycloth robe, but her red hair was dry. “I just left the picture off when I answered the phone earlier, and forgot to turn it back on.”

“Whatever. We've got a problem with our project.”

“You mean because they've split up again?” She rolled her eyes. “If things go on this way, we'll be the only sim left. With the barbarian boys gone, we're down to four—five, counting ours.”

“That's not the problem, although I'm not very happy about it.” Dread saw a shadow move in the kitchen door behind her. “Is there someone there with you?”

Puzzled, she turned to look. “Oh, for God's sake. It's Jones. My cat. Do you honestly think I'd be having this conversation with you if someone else was here?”

“No, of course not.” He turned the splashing music up a little louder, creating an annoyance-soothing calm for himself out of which he could produce a smile. “I'm sorry, Dulcie. A lot of work on this end.”

“Too much work, is my bet. You must have been planning the . . . the project we just finished for months. When did you last take some time off?”

As if he were some poor, downtrodden middle-manager. Dread was inwardly amused. “Not for a while, but that's not what I want to talk about. We have a problem. Not only can't we bring in a third person to help drive the sim, we can't even use two people anymore.”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I guess you haven't been paying attention.” He tried to make it sound light, but he was not happy to have to point out something so obvious, especially in light of what he was going to ask her. “This Martine—the blind woman. If she is telling the truth, and I see no reason to doubt it, then she's a real danger to us.”

Dulcie, as though realizing she had been caught napping, now abruptly put on her professional face. “Go ahead.”

“She processes information in ways we don't understand. She says she senses things in the virtual environment that you and I—or the rest of the Sky God refugees—can't feel. If she hasn't noticed yet that our sim is being inhabited by two different people, it's only a matter of time until she works through that white-noise problem of hers and it becomes clear to her.”

“Ah.” Dulcie nodded, then turned and walked back toward her couch. She sat down and lifted a cup to her lips and took a sip before speaking. “But I
did
think of that.”

“You did?”

“I figured that the worst thing we could do would be to suddenly change whatever subliminal cues we're giving off.” She took another sip, then stirred whatever was in the cup with a spoon. “She might already have developed a signature for us, and just accept it as what our sim gives off. But if we change again, then she'd notice something different. That's what I thought, anyway.”

Some of Dread's early admiration for Dulcinea Anwin returned. Complete bullshit, but pretty good for something she'd thrown together on the spot. He couldn't help wondering if she'd sit there so calm and self-satisfied if she ever saw him in his true skin—was made witness to his true self, when all the masks were thrown aside. . . . He wrenched himself from the distracting line of thought. “Hmmm. I see what you mean. That makes sense, too, but I'm not sure I buy it entirely.”

He could see her decide to try to consolidate what her quick thinking had bought her. “You're the boss. What do
you
think we should do? I mean, what are our options?”

“Whatever we're going to do, we should make a quick decision. And if we don't go on with things as they are, the only other option is for one of us to take over the sim full time.”

“Full time?” She almost lost her hard-won composure. “That's . . .”

“Not a very appealing idea, I know. But we may have to do it—in fact,
you
may have to do it, since I've got so bloody much to do. But I'll think about what you said and call you back later. This evening, 2200 hours your time, right? The sim should be asleep then, or we can wander it off from the group to take a leak or something.”

Her poorly-hidden irritation amused him. “Sure. 2200 hours.”

“Thanks, Dulcie. Oh, a question. Do you know many old songs?”

“What? Old
songs
?”

“I'm just curious about something I heard. It goes . . .” He suddenly didn't want to sing to her—it would feel like he were surrendering a little of his edge to someone who was, after all, his subordinate. He chanted it instead: “. . . ‘An angel touched me, an angel touched me . . .' Like that. Over and over.”

Dulcie stared at him as though he might be engaged in some particularly devious trick. “Never heard it before. What got you so interested?”

He gave her his best smile—his
I'd be happy to give you a ride, sweetness
smile. “Nothing much. It sounded familiar, but I can't put my finger on it. 2200 hours, then.” He clicked off.

“C
ODE Delphi. Start here
.

“It was only the river. Strange how even with ears as sharp as mine, ears augmented by the best sound-carrying equipment lawsuit money could buy—which are now processing information from what is apparently the best sound-generating equipment that Grail Brotherhood money can buy—I can still be fooled by the noise of running water.

“I have been thinking about this new journal, and I realize that I have begun it on a very pessimistic note. I am hoping that someday these entries can be retrieved, but to spend so much time talking about my own history seems to assume that someone other than myself will be the one to hear these thoughts. That may be pragmatic, but it is not the right spirit. I must pretend that I will one day rescue these thoughts myself. When I do, I will want to be reminded how I felt right at this moment.

“I cannot say much about coming through into this network, because I remember so little. The security system, whatever it was, seems to me of the same character as the program that captures children, the deep-hypnosis gear which Renie described so horrifyingly from her experience in the virtual nightclub. It seems to operate at a level below the subject's consciousness, and to cause involuntary physical effects. But I remember only a sense of something angry and vicious. Clearly it is a program or neural net whose sophistication and power dwarfs the things I know about.

“But since entering the network I have gradually found my way back through the awful, battering noise, both real and metaphorical, to a kind of sanity I feared I would never find again. And I can do things I never could do before. I have passed beyond the confusion into an entirely new realm of sensory input, like Siegfried splashed by the dragon's blood. I can hear a leaf fall, the grass grow. I can smell a drop of water trembling on a leaf. I can feel the very weather in its complicated, semi-improvisational dance, and guess which direction it will step next. In a way, it is all quite seductive—like a young eagle standing on a branch and spreading its wings against the open wind for the first time, I have the sensation of limitless possibility. It will be hard to give this up again, but of course I pray that we will succeed, and that I will live to do so. I suppose at such a time I would give it all up happily, but I cannot imagine such a thing convincingly.

“In fact, it is almost impossible to imagine success. Four of our number have been pulled away from us already. We have no way of knowing where Renie and !Xabbu have gone, and my sense of them being here, in this particular place, has sharply diminished. Orlando and his young friend have been swept away down the river. I do not doubt that the boys, at least, have passed through into one of the uncountable numbers of other simulations.

“And so we are five. The four who are lost are perhaps the four I would have preferred to stay with—Renie Sulaweyo in particular, despite her prickliness, has become almost a friend, and I find that I miss her very much—but, to be fair, perhaps that is only because I do not know the other four well yet. But they are a strange group, especially in contrast to the openness of !Xabbu and Renie, and I am not entirely easy with them.

“Sweet William is the strongest presence, but I would like to believe his sour irony hides that oldest of clichés, a kind heart. Certainly when we returned to the beach and found him and T4b, there was little question that William was devastated to have seen Orlando and Fredericks taken away. He feels, to my new and as yet not completely understood sensitivities, curiously incomplete. There is a hesitancy to him at times, despite his brash manner, like someone who is afraid of discovery. I wonder what his refusal to discuss his real life hides.

“The old woman, Quan Li, appears less complex, but perhaps she only wishes it to seem that way. She is solicitous and quiet, but she has made some surprisingly good suggestions, and she is certainly stronger underneath than she pretends. Several times during the afternoon, when even tough-minded Florimel was ready to quit the search for Renie and !Xabbu, Quan Li managed to find the resources to push on, and we could only be shamed into following her. Am I reading too much into things? It is not surprising that someone from her culture and generation might feel the need to hide her abilities behind a mask of diffidence. Still . . . I do not know.