River of Blue Fire (40 page)

“How did you do that?” she demanded.

Azador's smile was infuriatingly self-satisfied. “This is VR, Ms. Otepi—all make-believe. I just know how to make it believe something different. Now that part of the wall thinks it is no longer a wall.”

!Xabbu had sidled through, and was looking around the empty cell, an exact replica of the one they had just left. “But what good has this done us? Must we do this through every wall until we are outside?”

Azador's pleased expression did not change. He walked to the new cell's door. One tug of the handle and it slid sideways, open to the hallway. “No one bothers to lock the empty cells.”

To cover her irritation at the man's success—her first impulse had been to say “That's cheating!”, which she knew would have been a marvelously stupid remark—she slid past him and peered into the hallway. There was nothing but mint-green cement and closed doors all the way to the turning of the corridor on both sides, the monotony broken only by posters depicting the Scarecrow—a healthy, vibrant, stern Scarecrow—proclaiming “
10,000 Munchkins Dead
—
For What? Remember Oz
!” and “
Emerald Needs YOU
!”

“There's no one out there—let's go.” Renie turned to Azador. “Do you know how to get out of here?”

“There is a service bay at the back of the cells. There may be guards, but there will be fewer than at the front, where all the government offices are.”

“Then let's do it.” She took a few steps, then looked at !Xabbu. “What's wrong?”

He shook his head. “I hear something . . . smell something. I am not sure.”

A flat
boom
broke the stillness, so faint as to be almost inaudible: someone might have dropped a book on a table a few rooms away. The sound was repeated a few times, then silence fell again.

“Well, whatever it is, it's a long way away,” Renie declared. “We'd better not wait for it to get here.”

Not only the corridor before their cell, but all the corridors were empty. The sound of their hurrying footsteps—or hers and Azador's, since !Xabbu's feet made only the faintest noise—rebounded eerily from the long walls as they ran, and made Renie uneasy. “Where is everybody?”

“I told you, this place is falling apart,” said Azador. “The war has been going on for years—Scarecrow has only a few minions left. Why do you think we were the only prisoners? The others have been set free and then sent to fight in Forest, or in the Works.”

Renie did not even want to know what “the Works” was. First Atasco's realm, then the destruction of the Hive, now this. Would these simworlds simply crumble into virtual dust, like the veldt grass of !Xabbu's story? Or would something even more sinister replace them?

“Go slow,” !Xabbu said. “I hear something. And I feel something, too—it is tapping in my chest. Something is wrong here.”

“What the hell does
that
mean?” Azador demanded. “We're almost at the loading bay. We are sure as hell not just going to stop.”

“You should trust him,” Renie said. “He knows what he's talking about.”

Moving more cautiously, they rounded a corner and found themselves at a nexus of corridors. In the middle of the open area lay a tall man with a long green beard and a pair of smashed green spectacles. An antique rifle of some kind lay beside him. He was clearly dead: several things that should have been inside him had oozed out onto the floor.

Renie fought an urge to vomit. Why did people have innards in this simulation, but not in the bugworld?

Azador took a wide route around the body. “The loading bay is just another hundred meters this way,” he whispered, pointing to where the wide corridor bent sharply. “We can . . .”

A scream of pain rattled through the corridor, so fierce that Renie's knees went weak. Even Azador was clearly shaken, but the three of them went cautiously to the bend in the corridor and peered around.

On the wide loading ramp at the end of the corridor, several more men with green beards and spectacles were fighting to the death to keep an army of tiktoks at bay. The greenbeards were supported in their struggle by a few even odder creatures—skinny men with wheels for hands and feet, a teddy bear with a popgun, other soldiers that seemed to be made entirely of paper—but the defenders were clearly outgunned, and several dozen of them had been destroyed. Only one of the tiktoks had gone down, although two or three others were staggering in circles with their insides blown out, but the green-bearded soldiers appeared to have exhausted their ammunition and were now using their long rifles exclusively as clubs. Sensing imminent victory, the buzzing tiktoks were swarming closer to the defenders, like flies around a dying animal.

“Damn!” Renie was almost as irritated as she was frightened. “Games! These people and their bloody stupid war games!”

“It will not be a game if those things get us,” Azador hissed. “Turn back! We will go out another way.”

As they returned to the places where the corridors crossed, and where the first defender's body they had encountered still lay, !Xabbu reached up to tug at Renie's hand. “Why is this dead one here, when the fighting is still at the entrance?”

It took Renie a moment to understand what he was asking, and by that time they had left the green-bearded corpse behind them. Their cellmate had turned right and was sprinting up the corridor.

“Azador?” she called, but he had stopped already.

Two more corpses lay near the wall at the next corridor branch—two bodies in three pieces, since the soldier's top half had been forcibly separated from his bottom half. Beside him lay the pulped remains of one of the flying monkeys. Loud simian squawking echoed from the side-corridor, more monkeys in pain and terror.

“We do not need to go that way!” said Azador in relief. “I have remembered another route.” He started to move forward, and did not turn even when a very human, very female scream came bouncing down the passageway.

“
Emily
 . . . ?” Renie shouted at Azador's retreating back, “I think that's our friend!”

He did not turn or slow down, even when she cursed at him. !Xabbu had already started down the corridor toward Emily's voice. Renie hurried to catch up.

They had just caught sight of a battle that, although now familiar, would never be less less than bizarre—flying monkeys and mechanical men, struggling to the death—when Emily's slender form burst from the melee and came running toward them. Renie grabbed at her as she tried to run past and was almost knocked down. The girl fought like a tail-dangled cat until Renie wrapped her arms around her and squeezed as hard as she could.

“It's
me
, Emily, it's
me
, we're going to
help
you,” she said, over and over until the girl stopped struggling and finally looked at her new captors. Her already panic-widened eyes grew wider.

“You! The strangers!”

Before Renie could reply, a monkey flew past them down the corridor, but not under its own power. It smacked against one wall, flopped bonelessly, and skidded.

“We have to go,” Renie said. “Come on!” She took one of the girl's hands and !Xabbu took the other as they sprinted away from the unpleasant sounds of buzzing and claw-crunched monkeys. Azador was not in sight, but they turned in the direction he had gone. Emily, as though she had not been under tiktok attack only a few moments earlier, babbled happily.

“. . . I didn't think you'd come back—or I didn't think
I'd
come back, really. The king, he had this machine do all these funny things to me—it was worse than anything the medical henrys ever do, made me feel all goosebumpy, and you know what?”

Renie was doing her best to ignore her. “Do you hear anything?” she asked !Xabbu. “Any more of those machine men ahead of us?”

He shrugged his narrow shoulders and tugged at Emily's hand, trying to get her to move faster.

“Do you know what he said to me?” Emily went on. “It was such a surprise—I thought I was in trouble, see, and that they were going to send me to the Bad Farm. That's the place you go when they catch you trying to steal from the food barn, like this other emily I know, and she went there for just a few months, but when she came back, she looked like she was way much older. But do you know what they said to me?”

“Emily, shut up.” Renie slowed them now as they turned another corner. This one opened into a wide room with polished tile floors and shiny metal staircases leading to a mezzanine. More monkey corpses were scattered about the floor here, and also the bodies of a pair of tiktoks, which had apparently tumbled through the mezzanine handrail where it was bent like silver licorice. The windup men had smashed like expensive watches dropped onto pavement, but next to one of them, something was moving.

Emily was still prattling. “He told me that I'm going to have a little baby!”

It was Azador. A dying spasm from one of the tiktoks had fastened on his leg, and now he was struggling to pull himself free of the thing's locked grip. He looked up at their approach; his fearful expression quickly turned to one of annoyance.

“Get this thing off me,” he growled, but before he could say more, he was interrupted by a shriek from Emily so loud that Renie flinched away from her in pain.

“
Henry
!” Emily skittered across the room and leaped over one of the smashed Tiktoks, then flung herself onto Azador. Her attack thumped him back against the floor so hard that his leg jerked free of the claw, tearing his overalls and leaving red weals on his ankle. Emily climbed on him like an overstimulated puppy and he could not push her away. “Henry!” she squealed. “My pretty pretty prettiest henry! My pudding-heart lover! My special Crismustreat!” She stopped, straddling his chest, as he looked back at her in stunned surprise. “Guess what,” she demanded. “Guess what the king just told me. You and me—we made a baby!”

The high-ceilinged room fell silent in the wake of this revelation. After a moment, the dead tiktok made a clicking noise, and the claw that had held Azador's ankle ratcheted one final time, then froze again.

“This,” said Renie at last, “is really, really strange.”

CHAPTER 16

Shoppers and Sleepers

NETFEED/NEWS: Experts Debate “Slow-Time” Prisons
(visual: file footage of morgue attendant checking drawers)
VO: The UN is sponsoring a debate between civil libertarians and penologists about a controversial technique known as “slow-timing,” in which prisoners' metabolisms are slowed by cryotherapy while they are simultaneously exposed to subliminal messaging, so that a twenty year prison term would seem to pass in months
.

(visual: Telfer in front of UN)

ReMell Telfer, of the civil rights group Humanity is Watching, calls this further evidence that we have become what he terms a “people-processing society.”

TELFER: “They say they want these prisoners to return to society more quickly, but they just want more manageable prisoners and faster turnaround. Instead of trying to prevent crime, we spend our money on more and more expensive methods of punishing people—bigger prisons, more police. Now they want to take some poor jerk who's stolen someone's wallet and spend half a million of the taxpayer's credits to put him in a coma
 . . .
!”

A
NOTHER pair of the voracious tongs leaped from the water and flung itself at them, the huge jaws snapping like a bear-trap. Chief Strike Anywhere managed to dodge the attack, but the tongs smashed against the birchbark rail as they fell back into the river and Orlando and the others were rattled violently in the bottom of the canoe.

Another shudder rolled Orlando on his belly and onto the knobby hilt of the sword he thought he had lost, then a shout of pain from the Indian made him sit up. One of the pairs of salad tongs had the chief by the arm and was trying to drag him into the river; as Orlando watched in horror, the arm began to stretch like taffy. He snatched up his sword and brought it down on the tongs as hard as he could, just behind the teeth. The impact shook him from his fingers to his spine, but the tongs let go of the chief, sent Orlando an evil look, then sank back into the roiling water.

Chief Strike Anywhere rubbed his arm, which had already snapped back to its former size and shape, then turned to renew the battle. A chorus of thin voices from close by made Orlando wonder if someone might be coming to rescue them, but it was only the vegetables on the shoreline, who had disassembled their conga line to crowd along the water's edge. Most were watching the attack on the canoe in thrilled horror, although some, particularly the stewed beets, seemed to find the whole thing wildly funny, and were shouting out useless, drunken advice indiscriminately to both boaters and predatory utensils.

Something thumped them at the waterline once more and the little boat shuddered. Orlando braced himself, then raised the sword over his head. He knew that any moment now the canoe would go over, and he was determined to take at least one of the hinged, blunt-headed creatures with him. Fredericks rose beside him, trying to fit an arrow to his bowstring even as the canoe seesawed briefly on the handle of one of the attackers, then dropped back into the water.

The ruckus from the shore was suddenly pierced by a scream of anguish.

Some of the vegetables in the front row, jostled by the gawkers behind them and the dozens more hurrying out of the upturned colander to see what was happening, had been forced out into the river. A little cherry tomato was wailing piteously, floating farther and farther from the riverbank. A head of lettuce, a flower lei still looped about its widest circumference, waded out after the tomato, shrieking.

Something split the water beside the lettuce. The head was tossed up into the air, then fell back. More jaws flashed and clacked shut—even at a great distance, Orlando could hear the fibrous crunching. As lettuce leaves flew everywhere, the whole school of tongs hurried to the vicinity. Panicked, the beachfront spectators began to blunder into each other as they fled the feeding frenzy, and in the chaos several more fell into the water. Bits of tomato pulp and bleeding beet now streamed from toothy jaws. A carrot wearing a barbecue apron was lifted up out of the water and snapped in half.

Within moments the water around the canoe had grown calm, while a stone's throw away the river's edge was a froth of snapping tongs and vegetable parts. Chief Strike Anywhere picked up his paddle and turned the canoe again toward the middle of the river. “Lucky for us,” he grunted, “them like salad better.”

“That's . . . that's horrible.” Fredericks was leaning on the side of the canoe, fascinated by the murderous violence. A scum of pureed vegetables was quickly forming along the river's edge.

“It them fault,” replied Strike Anywhere coldly. “They get tongs worked up in first place. Smell of vegetables make them crazy.”

Orlando could not help feel sorry for the little cherry tomato. It had cried just like a lost child.

“No can take you to land that side,” Strike Anywhere told the tortoise later, as they floated in the slow current at midstream. A little mist lay on the river here, so that the banks were almost invisible, the cabinets only dim shapes towering on either side. “Tongs very busy there for long time.”

“I perfectly understand.” The tortoise had only recently reemerged from his shell, where he had retreated during the attack. “And I have no wish to be deposited on the other side, which is strange to me. Perhaps I will stay with you a while, if you don't mind, and then you can set me ashore later.”

Strike Anywhere grunted and began to paddle again.

“We have got to get out of here, Orlando,” Fredericks said quietly. “This all just scans too majorly. I mean, it would be bad enough just to get killed, but sixed by something out of a silverware drawer. . . ?”

Orlando smiled wearily. “If we help you find your papoose,” he called to the chief, “will you help us to leave the Kitchen? We don't belong here, and we need to find our friends.”

The chief turned, his long-nosed face shrewd in the dim bulblight from above. “No can go back up faucet,” he said. “Have to go out other end of Kitchen.”

Before he could explain further, a sound came to them across the waters, a chorus of piping voices that Orlando thought for a moment might be survivors from the terrible vegetable massacre—except these voices were raised in intricate, three-part harmony.

“
Sing we now, we rodents three
,”

Sightless all since infancy
,

Can't see, but we sing
con brio,

A blind, note-bleating fieldmouse trio
.”

A shape appeared in the fog, long and cylindrical, surmounted by three vertical figures. As it drew closer, it was revealed to be three mice in matching dark glasses, perched atop a bottle—which, with impossibly clever pink feet, they rolled beneath them like a lumberjack's log, never once losing their balance. Their arms were looped about each other's shoulders; the outside mouse on one end held a tin cup, the one at the other end a white cane.

“
And ever since our mummy birthed us

We love to clean up every surface

Just pour enough to fill this cup

And wipe those stains and spills right up
!”

“
Three little mice, we like to sing
,

But love to clean more than anything
,

And if you use us, we suspect

You'll also find we disinfect
!

A one-eyed bat could see it's true
—

Blind Mice Cleanser will work for you
!”

The tinny barbershop harmonies were so perfect and so completely silly that when the song was finished, Orlando could think of nothing to do but applaud; the tortoise did, too. Fredericks gave him an irritated look, but reluctantly joined in. Only Chief Strike Anywhere remained stoically silent. The three mice, still rolling the bottle beneath them, took a deep bow.

“Now available in Family Size!” squeaked the one holding the cane.

The word “family” may have touched a chord in the chief, or he might only have been waiting courteously for the mice to finish their song. He asked, “You seen bad men on big boat? With little papoose?”

“They could hardly have seen anything,” suggested the tortoise. “Now could they?”

“No, we don't see much,” agreed one of the mice.

“But we listen a lot,” added another.

“We may have heard this particular tot.” The third nodded gravely as he spoke.

“A big boat passed us.”

“Two hours ago.”

“They didn't seem to like our show.”

“A baby was crying.”

“We thought that was sad.”

“And jeepers!—those men sounded pretty bad.”

After a pause, the one with the cane piped up again. “They didn't smell too good, either,” it said in a conspiratorial whisper. “
Ot-nay ootay ean-clay
, if you see what we're saying.”

Strike Anywhere leaned forward. “Which way they go?”

The mice put their heads together and indulged in a great deal of quiet but animated discussion. At last they turned back, spread their arms, then began to do a chorus kick while still keeping the cleanser bottle revolving merrily beneath them—a very good trick, even Fredericks had to admit later.

“
The shores of Gitchee-Goomee

May be shady, green, and nice
,”

they sang,

“
But except saying ‘Hi!' to Hiawatha
,

The trip's not worth the price
.

The spot you seek is closer

—
You can be there in a trice!
—

Those kidnapping chaps

Have followed old maps

To the famous Box of Ice
.”

The mouse with the tin cup waved it in a circle and added, “Don't forget—it's almost spring! Time to scrub your surfaces daisy-fresh!” Then the trio danced their pink feet so fast that the bottle swung around until its nose pointed away from the canoe. As the current carried them off, Orlando noticed for the first time that not one of them had a tail.

Within moments they were lost in the mist again, but their high-pitched voices floated back for awhile longer, singing some new hymn to the glories of elbow-grease and shiny counters.

“Right, the farmer's wife. . .” Orlando murmured, as the nursery rhyme came back to him. “Poor little things.”

“What are you babbling about?” Fredericks frowned at him, then shouted, “Hey, where are we going?” as the chief began paddling with renewed and even increased vigor toward the unexplored farther shore.

“The Ice Box,” explained the tortoise. “It is near the far end of the Kitchen, and a place of many legends. In fact, stories tell that somewhere inside it lie ‘sleepers'—folk who have existed as long as the

Kitchen itself, but always in slumber, and who will dream their cold dreams until Time itself ends if they are left undisturbed. Sometimes these sleepers, without ever waking, will predict the future to anyone lucky or unlucky enough to be nearby, or answer questions that otherwise would go unaddressed.”

“Bad men no care about sleepers,” the chief said, leaning into each stroke of the paddle. “Them want gold.”

“Ah, yes.” The tortoise laid a stubby finger alongside his blunt beak and nodded. “They have heard the rumors that one of the Shoppers themselves has left a cache of golden treasure in the Ice Box. This may be merely a fairy tale—no one I know has ever seen one of the Shoppers, who are said to be godlike giants who come into the Kitchen only when night is done, when all who live here are as helplessly asleep as those in the farthest depths of the Ice Box. But whether the gold is a myth or the truth, clearly these bad men believe it to be real.”

“Help me out, Gardino,” Fredericks whispered. “What the hell is an ice box?”

“I think it's what they used to call a refrigerator.”

Fredericks looked at the unstoppable, mechanical movements of Chief Strike Anywhere as he paddled toward his lost son. “This just scans and scans, doesn't it?” he said. “And then it scans some more.”

At least another hour seemed to pass before they reached land—or floor, Orlando supposed. Clearly the size of the river bore very little relation to any kind of scale; based on the size of the sink and counter-tops they had already visited, the Kitchen would have to be a real-world room hundreds of meters wide for such a long water journey to make sense. But he knew it was no use thinking about it too much—the Kitchen, he sensed, was not supposed to be analyzed that way.

The spot the chief had chosen was a small spit of dry space near the base of a massive leg that might have belonged to a table or chair—the piece of furniture was too large to see properly in the dark. This side of the kitchen seemed darker than the other riverbank, as though they were a much greater distance from the overhead bulb.

“You stay here,” the Indian said. “Me go to look for bad men. Me come back soon, we make plan.” One of his longer speeches now finished, he carried the canoe out until the water was past his perfectly cylindrical chest, then climbed aboard with silent grace.