River of Blue Fire (43 page)

Jeremiah went back to the station and hunted through the settings until he found the one he remembered—something Martine had demonstrated two weeks ago, which felt like years back, now. When he changed the output line, the the sound of twin heartbeats (!Xabbu's slower, but both strong and not unduly agitated) bounced out of the public address system and filled the high laboratory chamber:
bi-bom, bi-bom
—
bi-bom, bi-bom
, slightly out of synch, with Renie's lapping the Bushman's by the seventh or eight beat.

It would probably send Long Joseph absolutely mad if he heard it, make him positive something had gone wrong, but at this moment Jeremiah did not give a damn.

“
Joseph! Joseph, where are you
?”

As he searched the huge building, trudging through the deserted halls with the ping-pong of twin heartbeats echoing around him, Jeremiah could not help but remember coming back to the doctor's house on that awful night. The lights had been out, which was normal, but even the security lights along the fence had been dark; from the moment he had turned onto the wide cul-de-sac and seen the house's shadowy silhouette, he had been terrified. And each moment of walking through the silent corridors, calling the doctor's name without reply, had only intensified the fear. As dreadful as it was, finding Susan Van Bleeck lying battered on the floor of the laboratory had almost been a relief—at least the horror had a shape now. It could get no worse.

Except of course it
had
been worse, when he had returned to the hospital after dropping Renie off, to find orderlies around her bedside, unhooking the life support.

And now, forced by that man's idiocy to wander in his slippers through
this
cavernous place, as if reliving that dreadful night, not knowing when he might stumble on a body. . . . He was even more angry than he was frightened. If he found Joseph Sulaweyo, and the man had
not
killed himself, Jeremiah would give him the thrashing of his life, no matter whether the other man was bigger or not.

The idea of giving a man a beating because he had failed to commit suicide pried loose from him a nervous and entirely involuntary gasp of laughter. It was not a pleasant sound.

He checked the most obvious places first. Joseph's own bed in the communal bunkroom was deserted, the tangle of blankets on the floor the only knot of disorder in an otherwise empty place. The kitchen, where the man had searched with such insane diligence for something to drink, was also empty. Jeremiah forced himself to open the pantries and the walk-in freezer, and even to look in the cabinets, despite his fear that he might pull one back to find Joseph's corpse leering at him, mouth foaming with some horrid industrial cleaning fluid. But the kitchen too was silent and uninhabited.

He worked his way systematically through all the living quarters and the offices, opening everything bigger than a file cabinet drawer. It took him the better part of two hours. The sound of Renie's and !Xabbu's heartbeats accompanied him, still quietly calm, but with just enough variation that after a while it became almost reassuring: it made him feel a little less alone.

Bi-bom . . . bi-bom
 . . .

His search of the living and working quarters finished, Jeremiah continued up to the parking lot, in case the mad fool Sulaweyo had tried to run the Ihlosi's engine and kill himself with carbon monoxide, not realizing that he would run out of gas long before he could fill half a million cubic meters of garage, even were it not ventilated. But the car was empty, untouched since its last cleaning, as battered and useless for the moment as Jeremiah felt. He opened the door and got a pocket torch out of the glove compartment, then continued on through the garage, shining the light up into the dark spaces behind the dangling lights on the extremely small chance that Joseph might have dragged himself up into the girders somehow to hang himself.

The garage levels were much faster to check, and all four were empty. Jeremiah stopped in the uppermost for a rest and a think, listening to the percussive echo of the heartbeats, now quadrupled and more by the stony walls. It made no sense—he had checked everywhere. Unless the man
had
climbed into one of the tanks. If he had drowned himself in the fluid, it would explain the lack of any extra vital signs.

Jeremiah shuddered. The thought of Irene Sulaweyo, unaware in that viscous blackness of her father's body floating only a few inches away . . .

He would have to check. It was horrible, but he would have to look. He wondered if just opening the tank would be enough to pull the sleepers out of their virtual dreams. And if Joseph was not there, and the experiment were aborted for nothing . . . ?

Troubled and still fearful, Jeremiah made his way over to the largest ventilation duct to get some air to clear his head. It worked, but not in the way he had planned.

The ventilator's screen was lying on the floor.

Jeremiah stared at it stupidly for a moment, then up to the open end of the great square tube, a dark hole into nothing. Jeremiah directed the torch beam back to the floor and saw that a handful of bolts had been set carefully in the middle of the screen.

The duct was big enough for a man, but narrow enough that someone, if they went carefully, could use their own shoulders and legs to brace themselves as they climbed upward. If that person were very determined. Or a little mad.

The amplified heartbeats were quieter here at the far side of the garage, away from the speaker. Jeremiah leaned his head into the duct and shouted Joseph's name, and heard his own voice rattle away and die. He shouted again, but there was still no reply. He wriggled his head and upper body into the duct and aimed the torch upward. A few cobwebs trailed at the first juncture, tethered only at one end, as though something had squeezed past them.

As he stared, Jeremiah thought he heard a sound breathe down the duct, a faintly musical hooting—perhaps a muffled voice trying to call out despite an injury. He strained to listen, but the sound was very quiet, and he cursed the heartbeats that had until only a few moments ago kept him such good company. He tucked the torch into his pocket and dragged himself all the way up into the duct so that he could block out the public-address noises with his own body.

And now he could hear it, the murmuring sound. A second later he knew what it was. Somewhere far away, up and along many lengths of plasteel pipe, the wind that swept down the Drakensbergs in the early morning was blowing across the other end of the open duct.

Long Joseph had gone to be with his child, Stephen. Not metaphorically—not by killing himself—but literally. Of course. Joseph Sulaweyo was a very literal man.

Oh, my Lord, what will happen now
? Jeremiah climbed awkwardly back out of the duct. The heartbeats of those he guarded still echoed through the cavernous garage, slow and even, as though nothing had changed.

The bloody, bloody fool
 . . .!

CHAPTER 17

In The Works

NETFEED/MUSIC: Horrible Animals to Split

(
visual: clip from ‘1 Way4U2B'
)

VO: Twins Saskia and Martinus Benchlow, founding members of My Family and Other Horrible, Horrible Animals, performers of one of last decade's biggest hits, ‘1Way4U2B', but who had gone a while without cracking the charts, have decided to go their separate musical ways. (visual: M. B. and manager at Gimme Awards after-party-party) M. BENCHLOW: “Saskia, she's great, but I needed to go a separate direction, less commercial. Money didn't come into it, seen? I'm tired of flurry. I really, really love jazz, all that history. I have a trumpet, follow? I know every tune Neil Armstrong ever played. And I need to explore that. She had her own silver cloud she needed to line, but we're still related
 . . .
”

I
T was hard to have an intelligent thought about the scene before her—the stranger Azador on the floor amidst a wreckage of tiktoks, the girl Emily twittering like a bird as she covered him with obviously unwanted kisses—and Renie didn't have time to wait for such a thought to show up anyway. Corpses from New Emerald City's dwindling army of flying monkeys and green-bearded soldiers were scattered through the corridors of the Scarecrow's headquarters. Other defenders were dying at that very moment just a few hundred meters away, trying to hold the loading bay against rampaging tiktoks, and danger was increasing by the second. Still, she could not simply ignore what she had just heard.

“You . . . you had
sex
with her?”

Azador scowled as he wrestled free of the girl. “Perhaps. What is it to you?”

“She's a Puppet, isn't she?” Although with Emily just a few meters away, as joyful as a puppy to have rediscovered her beau, it was hard to believe that.

“Yes?” Azador climbed to his feet. “So? And what do you care about the sexual habits—or, let us be blunt, masturbatory habits—of others? Would you care to discuss your own sexual life?”

“But . . . but she's just a . . . a
program
. How could you do it? How could you take advantage of her?”

Azador shook his head, recovering a little of his self-assurance despite the girl wrapped around his shin, kissing his knee. “You cannot have it both ways. Is she a program? Or did I take advantage of a young woman?”

Renie turned to !Xabbu for some kind of support, but the baboon was no longer paying attention. “I hear more of those machine men coming.” He pointed across the wide, tiled floor. “From that direction.”

“We have to go out the front way.” Azador tried without success to pull his leg free of Emily's clinging grasp. “God damn it!” He lifted his hand.

“If you hit her,” Renie said sharply, “I'll kill you.”

Azador stared at her for a long second. “Then you get this silly bitch away from me. Quickly, or we will all be killed.”

Renie pulled the protesting Emily loose. The girl wailed, “But our baby . . .!”

“Is never going to get born if we don't move.” A sudden thought hit her. “What did that horrible tin man say? ‘You've discovered the Dorothy,' something like that? Is that what they were talking about—this baby?”

Azador was not interested in discussion. He was already legging it across the broad room, heading for a corridor at right angles to the one !Xabbu had warned would disgorge attackers. Renie swallowed a curse and jogged after him, with !Xabbu four-legging beside her. Emily needed no urging to follow the mustached man.

It's one thing to say you'd kill him, girl
, Renie thought,
but he's big, and you don't have any weapons
. She berated herself for not having pilfered one of the antique rifles from the dead soldiers, although from what she'd seen at the loading bay, she doubted any of them had ammunition left.

Azador was not making the pace easy, and Renie was still sore from the many calamities in Kunohara's world and this twisted version of Oz. He led them on a winding route through the building, down corridors that seemed dead-ends, but which proved to have doors hidden in alcoves. Renie wondered again how he knew so much about this particular simworld. Not to mention his little trick for changing a wall into a door, she remembered.

Who the hell is this fellow
?

The Scarecrow's palace, an endless functionalist warren of concrete walls and linoleum floors, could have doubled for a municipal structure in Durban, or indeed anywhere in the Third World. It had clearly once been occupied, even feverishly busy—old-fashioned printouts and other papers lay scattered everywhere, making footing treacherous, and there were enough desks and chairs to seat hundreds just in the sections they traversed, although at least half of them seemed built for people of much smaller than normal size—but now the building was as empty as the Hive after the ant swarm had passed through it.

Entropy
, she told herself.
Isn't that the word? As though these things were filled up once, and then just allowed to run down, fall apart
. But they had been in only three simulations so far. It was a bit early to be making judgements.

Azador stopped in front of a wide double-door and strained against it. The doors opened a crack, but something seemed to be blocking them on the far side. Renie fell in beside him to add her strength; even Emily pushed, staring at her beloved as she did so as if he were singlehandedly parting the Red Sea. The image seemed even more appropriate a moment later when the doors suddenly crashed open and a gush of something scarlet poured through. For a moment Renie could only see it as a nightmarish wash of blood, but it was dry, and whispery, and when she scooped it in her hand she found it was . . .

“Confetti . . . ?”

They waded through the drifts of paper dots, then vaulted over the tumbled desks which had been piled on the far side. A banner, which dangled in their faces as they clambered over the furniture, read “We'll Miss You, Jellia Jamb! Happy Retirement!” in huge painted letters.

“This is the reception hall.” Azador surveyed the stacks of folding tables which barred two of the room's other three entrances. “Someone's tried to barricade the place.”

“Pretty pitiful job they made of it,” Renie observed.

“Not many defenders left,” Azador pointed out. As Renie started toward the unblocked door, he shouted, “No! Do not do that!”

Irritated, she spun. “Who are you to give me orders?”

“It is not orders. They have pushed things in front of other doors, but not those. We are expected to go through. Perhaps there is a trap on the other side.”

Despite her dislike of the man, she was filled with shame. “You're right. I'm sorry.”

“Let me go,” !Xabbu suggested when they reached the door. “I am light and fast.”

Renie shook her head. “Not until we open the door. Azador, is there a way to go around this one, like the way you got us out of the cell?”

He examined the walls in silence for a moment, then shook his head. “Not this room, no. This is not—what is the word?—snap-on code. Someone made this specially. It may have been nice at one time.”

Renie looked at the huge, windowless, mint-green space and doubted that was so. Her eyes lit on the banner. “Hang on.” She dragged the length of heavy paper from the wall, then approached the door cautiously and looped it through the handle. After giving the ends of the banner to Azador, she took one of the folding chairs—this place really could have been a Pinetown social hall!—and approached the door from the side. She reached out with the folded chair and pushed the latch on the door handle until it clicked, then Azador yanked on the banner and the door swung open.

Nothing exploded. No cloud of gas or rain of needle-sharp spikes flew out at them. !Xabbu approached the doorway cautiously, his muzzle close to the ground, head bobbing like a mongoose stalking a snake. Renie said a silent bit of childhood prayer for the little man's safety.

Seeing nothing immediately wrong, the baboon took a careful few steps forward, out of sight. Renie held her breath. An instant later, he scampered out again, fur erect along his spine. “Come quickly!”

The room was empty except for a pile of old clothes lying in the middle of the floor, festooned with coils of tubing. Renie was about to ask !Xabbu what had excited him when the bundle of old clothes lifted its flat, shriveled head. Emily squeaked and backed toward the door.

“. . . 
help
 . . .” it murmured, a tiny dry sound that faded even before it had finished.

“Jesus Mercy, it's the Scarecrow.” Renie took a few steps forward, then hesitated. Hadn't this thing wanted to kill them? But on the other hand, perhaps it could tell them how to get out of this place. Otherwise, they were reliant on Azador, and she was becoming less comfortable with that thought by the minute. “What can we do?” she asked the wrinkled thing on the floor.

A single finger rose and pointed limply toward one of the doors set in an otherwise featureless wall. She could only hope the thing still had enough brains to know which door was which.

“I hear the metal men,” !Xabbu announced. “Very loud. Close now.”

Renie snatched up the Scarecrow, trying not to trip over the spaghetti tangle of tubing. The King of Kansas twisted weakly in her grasp—a remarkably unpleasant sensation, like cradling a burlap snake.

All this kind of takes the shine off that nice Oz flick
, Renie could not help thinking.

The door opened easily; inside, a stairwell led upward. Emily, her face frozen somewhere between awe and repulsion, snatched up a stray handful of tubes and one of the Scarecrow's booted feet, which had tumbled loose during the swift collection, and followed Renie, closely trailed by Azador and !Xabbu.

Something like a boiler room waited at the top of the stairs, pipes cross-connected in a tight grid beneath the ceiling and running up and down the walls. A single chair that might have come from the cockpit of an ancient airplane sat in front of a spot on one wall where all the pipes curved around the imitation wood cabinet of the wall-screen.

Scarecrow's head fluttered. He wobbled his hand toward a pipe that ended at right angles to the rest, its protruding nozzle a little more than a meter off the floor. Scarecrow summoned all his strength to take a breath. Renie leaned close to hear his voice whispering out.

“. . . 
in chest
 . . .”

She looked at the nozzle, then at the limp twist of overalls and flannel shirt that stretched between ribbon legs and empty head. She slid his nearly empty torso onto the nozzle between two buttons of his shirt, impaling him like some medieval torture victim, then held him in place. Nothing happened. One of the Scarecrow's hands flapped toward a flywheel. When Azador turned it, a hissing sound filled the room.

The Scarecrow's torso began to swell first, then his head slowly inflated, too. His legs straightened, unrolling themselves until his overalls were tight as sausage-skin. At last the King of Kansas forced himself away from the nozzle with jointless, balloon arms, and turned stiffly to face Renie and the others. He took his finger from the hole in his chest and let some air leak out until he was a little closer to his old baggy self, then plugged the opening with some spare straw from his lost foot.

“I've got bladders like you couldn't imagine,” he said by way of explanation, his voice high-pitched and tight. “I can fill them with air in a pinch—and it's definitely Pinch City around here.” He winked, but his head was so round that the eyelid couldn't fully close. “This won't work for long, but it will last until I can make certain neither of those bastards gets to take over Emerald—unless one of them wants to pitch his pup-tent on rubble and hot ashes, that is.”

“What are you talking about?” Renie stepped forward, half-tempted to yank the straw stopper back out again. “You're going to burn the place down? What about us?”

Scarecrow waved a hand. His grin, which pulled his inflated features even tighter, actually squeaked. “Wouldn't be very generous after you saved me, would it? Fair enough, I'll let you get out first. But you'd better go now, because I've got another few minutes, tops. These Farmer John overalls don't make for a real tight pressure seal, if you know what I mean.”

“We don't know how to get out of here,” Renie said. “Is there . . . is there a crossing place? Like on the river?”

“A gateway?” The Scarecrow's scalloped smile widened. “Don't you even know what they're called? You really are out-of-towners, aren't you?”

“I know what a gateway is,” Azador said tightly. “And I know there is one here in your palace.”

“Palace!” The Scarecrow wheezed and thumped his knee with a gloved hand. A tiny puff of strawdust flew up. “That's a good one. You should have seen my ‘cot in the real Emerald City—that was a palace! This—Christ, I think it's an engineer's rendering of an old National Guard armory or something. We got it cheap when we were setting the whole thing up.”