River of Blue Fire (47 page)

“The people in these . . . simulations,” he asked. “They aren't real either?”

“Some of them are,” Nandi said. “This was built for rich and powerful people to use, and they and their friends can appear here like gods taking mortal forms. But most of the people, as you call them, are Puppets. Things without souls. Machinery.”

The words of Professor Bagwalter in the Martian simulation came back to him, and now Paul understood them. The man had been a participant—a Citizen—and had wanted to know if Paul was one, too. But if that was true, then maybe the bird-woman, Vaala . . . ?

“Am I the only person you have met in here who has lost his memory?”

Nandi smiled a little. The river was now just before them, submerged stones making lacy white Vs on the rough jade surface. “You are not merely that, you are the only person I have ever heard of who did not know he was in a virtual environment.” He led Paul down to a short, sandy stretch of beach. A tiny dock that seemed to have been carved from a single piece of white stone lay partially hidden by a strand of cattails. Tugged by the current, a small but elegant boat bobbed at the end of its painter like a dog waiting to be walked.

Nandi gestured Paul to the seat at the front of the boat. “Please,” he said, “I will be your steersman, as Krishna became Arjuna's charioteer. Do you know the
Bhagavad Gita
?”

“I have a copy,” Paul said. “Back home, wherever that is.” He did not add that it had been a gift from one of his more disastrous girlfriends, shortly before she had tipped over into what Paul considered religious mania. His last meeting with her had been some months afterward, when he had seen her playing a drum and chanting in the Camden Town tube station, blind behind the goggles that flooded her senses with some chargelike mantra.

“Ah, good.” Nandi smiled. He unhooked the boat's painter and guided them out onto the flowing river. “Then you will understand me when I compare you to Arjuna, a brave man—a great hero!—in need of advice and wisdom.”

“I didn't read it carefully, I'm afraid.” In fact, he hadn't read it at all, and the only thing he remembered from the entire episode was that Krishna was a god, or perhaps just God, and he thought that if this Nandi was assigning himself the role of Krishna, he was getting a bit above himself.

Listen to me
, he thought.
I sound like my grandmother
.

The landscape slid past, precious and perfect. Far down the valley, past many bends of the river, a cloud of spray lifted high above the water, crowned by a brilliant rainbow. Paul tried to remember the famous Coleridge poem, but could not get any farther than: “
In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome decree
 . . .”

“Can you talk to me now?” he asked. “The sound of the river should keep anyone from hearing us.”

Nandi steered them past one of the rocks and its white arrowhead wake. “It is more than sound we must fear. Every word you speak is translated through several kinds of virtuality engines, and that, too, leaves traces. The people we seek are the masters of this place, just as Trimurti is the master of the real world, and both rule their domains to the smallest mote of dust, the most minuscule flash of subatomic forces. That is why the error of these people is so great—they seek to make themselves gods.”

“You keep saying ‘they' or ‘these people.' Who?”

“A group of men—and some women, too—who have declared themselves the enemies of everything. They name themselves the Grail Brotherhood, misusing the old myth for their own purposes—stealing the story, it could be said. They have built this place, and they live here and disport themselves like the eldest sons and daughters of Heaven. Not all of this network is as pleasant as this—no, much of it is even worse than anything you have seen. Simulations of slavery and cruelty and sexual debauchery, they have made them all.”

“But who are you? I mean, how did you come to be involved in all this?”

Nandi eyed him for a moment, considering. “This much I can tell you. The Grail Brotherhood have touched things, harmed things, that they do not even understand. And so it is that some have come together to oppose them. We are the Circle.” He held up his hand with his fingers rounded into a ring, and peered through it with one bright, brown eye. The effect was almost comical. “Where you find us, there you will find safety, at least as much as we can give, for clearly you are an enemy of our enemy.”

“Why?” The fear that he had suppressed came rushing back. “Why should people like that care about me? I'm no one! I work in an art museum, for Christ's sake.”

The boat was picking up speed as the river narrowed, the cliffs now looming high above their heads. Shaded by a drooping willow tree, a deserted teahouse stood on a rock promontory overlooking the water like a piece of delicate jewelry left behind by a giant. It was almost too beautiful, Paul thought, fighting down his panic. For the first time, he saw how this place could be, must be, unreal.

“I do not know why you have drawn their attention,” Nandi admitted. “It is likely to do with the time you cannot remember. But those who chased you through several simulations—I cannot doubt they are agents of the greatest of the Brotherhood, since those were all his places. As is this.”

“They all belonged to one person? Mars, that Alice in Wonderland thing, all of them?”

“Wealth is not one of the things he lacks.” Nandi's smile was sour. “He has built dozens of these.”

“What is his name?”

The dark-skinned man shook his head. “Not here. When we pass through to another place, I will tell you, but there is no sense in uttering words that surely would be among the first his agents would investigate, since only those from outside the system could understand that this place
has
a human creator.” Nandi glanced up sharply at a movement on the heights above, but it was only a shepherd leading a flock of sheep across a high ridge. The man did not look down, although several of the sheep did. Paul realized it was the first person other than themselves they had seen since entering Xanadu.

“Agents,” he said aloud. “So those two . . . things following me from one simulation to another were agents? Of this Brotherhood person?” He frowned. “Do you think that couple, the Pankies, were agents, too? They didn't have anything like the same effect on me. And I spent a night sleeping next to them, but nothing happened.”

“Again, I cannot say.” Nandi spent several moments concentrating on guiding the boat between the rocks, which were growing more numerous. When a clear stretch of water was before them, he continued. “We have studied these people, but still our knowledge is small—after all, they have labored hard and spent much money to keep their works hidden. But something was wrong with those two, that man and woman. I felt the hand of my God touch me.” He said this as simply and with as much conviction as he might have explained being the first to see a parking space in front of the off-license. “If you do not trust the gods—if you do not trust God—then you have rejected yourself.”

Nandi again devoted himself to his steering. Paul sat back on the polished bench and watched the green hills and raw rock faces slip past. It was difficult to find a place even to begin thinking about all this. It would have made a fairly dubious plot in a flick, let alone being acceptable as the course for his actual and only life. But it made a horrid kind of sense, too: once you accepted a simulation this good, it answered many of his other questions.

He even felt a moment's disappointment as he realized that he had not seen the beginning of history in the Ice Age, but only someone's coded dramatization of it. Still, the People, whatever they truly were, had not only seemed real to Paul, but if they were Puppets they seemed awfully self-sufficient ones, fully engaged with their own pretend world, with their fears and triumphs and folklore. Perhaps, he reflected, even imaginary people just needed a story of their own—something that made sense out of things.

But if it had all been code, all make-believe, then what about the woman who had spoken to him through the sick Neandertal child? The winged woman who came to him in dreams? She had begged that he find her. . . .

It was too much to work out all at once.

“If these people are so powerful,” he asked, “then what are you and your friends in this Circle thing going to do? And why do you care, anyway, if a bunch of rich bastards have private orgies on their VR network?”

“If only it were that, Paul Jonas.” Nandi lifted the dripping paddle from the water so he could turn to face him. “I cannot tell you all that would answer you properly, but you must trust me when I say that I believe what they are doing threatens everything.
Everything
. And even if you doubt my belief, it is a fact that they have hurt and killed many to build this thing of theirs, this . . . theater of Maya. And they will kill many more to keep it secret as long as necessary. In fact, from what you have told me, they are trying to kill you as well—or to do something worse to you.”

The fear came back, goose-pimpling his flesh, and he had to suppress the urge to scream at the unfairness. What had he done to offend people like that? He mastered himself. “You haven't told me what you plan to do about it.”

“Nor can I,” Nandi said. “And not just for the sake of secrecy. You have enough problems, Paul. You do not need the burden of knowing what we know. It is one less thing they will work to make you confess if you are ever captured.”

“You talk like this is a war!”

Nandi did not smile this time. “It
is
a war.” After a moment's silence, he added: “But although they think themselves gods, they are merely human. They make mistakes. They have made some already, and they will make more, no matter how many forms they wear, no matter how many lives they build for themselves in this place. It is as Krishna said to Arjuna: ‘
Do not grieve for the life and death of individuals, for this is inevitable; the bodies indeed come and go, but the life that manifests in all is undying and unhurt, it neither slayeth or is slain
.' This is a central truth of the world, Paul. Krishna spoke of what you might call the soul or the essence. Now these Grail criminals, as they seek to ape the gods, they are caught in a lesser version of this same great truth, a shadow cast by its shining light. You see, they cannot shake off what they are, no matter how many times they change their skins.”

“I don't understand.”

“Look at this man, our chiefest enemy. You have been in many of his simulations, the dreamworlds that he has fashioned for himself. What do they have in common?”

Paul had thought something similar himself not long ago, and he struggled to summon the memory. “They're . . . they seem very old. The ideas, I mean.”

“Exactly.” The charioteer was pleased with his Arjuna. “That is because he is an old man, and longs for the things of his youth. Here, I will tell you something. He was born in France, this man I will not name, but was sent to a school in England during the Great War, because his family wanted him away from the fighting that tore France. He was a lonely child in that foreign country, fighting to be like the others, and thus the things of his boyhood are all those bits of Englishness he tried so hard to embrace—Lewis Carroll, H. G. Wells, the comic magazines of travel to other planets. . . .”

“Hold on.” Paul leaned forward. “Do you mean to tell me this man was alive during the Second World War?”

Nandi was amused. “I refer to the First World War, in fact.”

“But that would make him . . . That can't be. No one's that old.”

“He is.” The gentle smile vanished. “He has made the preservation of his own life an object of religious devotion, and he treasures his memories as the myths of that religion. He cannot truly share it, though—the childhood to which his virtual worlds are shrines is one that no other living human remembers. If he were not so unreservedly evil, it would almost be possible to feel sorry for the man.”

The boat abruptly dropped away beneath them for a moment, and Paul had to stop thinking in order to hold onto his seat and not be jounced overboard when the small craft smacked down into the water again.

“The river is more dangerous here, just before the caverns,” Nandi said, backing water furiously with his paddle. “We will talk more when we are in a safer place.”

“What caverns. . . ?” Paul asked, then whooped in surprise as the boat dipped again, then slid between two rocks and passed over yet another cataract.

For the next several minutes he clung with both hands to the sides of the boat as Nandi expertly steered them past obstacle after obstacle and the river sank ever deeper into the fold of the canyon. The cliff walls now rose up so steeply on either side that only a sliver of sky could be seen, and its light died a quarter of the way down the rock face.

“We will miss seeing the pleasure dome,” Nandi called over the tumult of the waters. “There is a tributary that passes by the front gates, but I assume you do not wish to linger and admire our enemy's handiwork, or meet his henchmen.”

“What?” Paul could make out only a few words.

“There!” Nandi pointed. “Can you see it?”

The mist that Paul had wondered at earlier now covered most of the river before them, billowing into the air in a sparkling cloud. Through it, at least half a kilometer ahead and partially blocked from view by the cliffs, he could see a forest of white-and-gold minarets like the battlements of the dream castle he had seen when he climbed the great tree. It was almost impossible not to admire the painstaking artistry that had gone into this place. If it was all the work of human hands, as Nandi had said, then they had been very skilled hands indeed.

“Are there people in there?” he asked. “I mean, real people?”