River of Blue Fire (48 page)

“Just a moment,” his companion called above the noisy river. They rounded a bend and Paul saw a gaping black mouth in the cliff face, swallowing the river down. He had time for only a surprised and wordless shout, then the bottom dropped out from under them again and the boat slid down a roaring flume into chilly darkness.

For long seconds he could see nothing, and could only cling to the bench, positive that they would be smashed against unforgiving stone or upended in the violent currents. The boat surged up and down, and skewed abruptly from one side to the other without warning, and none of Paul's desperate, bellowed questions were answered. The blackness was absolute, and the horrible thought began to grow that Nandi had been thrown overboard, that he was rushing into oblivion alone.

The boat left the water again, free-falling for what seemed to Paul's shrieking imagination like ten seconds, but was probably less than one, then splashed down in a great drenching spume of water. Paul clutched the rail until he could feel that the boat was at last nosing into calmer waters. The rush of the cataract began to quiet behind them.

“Sometimes it is exhilarating to wear flesh,” Nandi's voice said in the darkness. “Even virtual flesh.”

“I . . . I didn't enjoy that,” Paul replied. “Wh-where are we?”

“In caverns measureless to man, as the poem says. But wait. You will see.”

“S-see?” His teeth were chattering, and not just from fear: the summery heat outside had not penetrated here. In fact, it was terribly, terribly cold. “See h-how?”

Something made a wet, scratchy sound behind him, then light blossomed out of the void. Nandi had produced and lit a lantern, and now hung it from the boat's high, curved stern, so that it threw its creamy radiance all around.

“Oh,” said Paul. “Oh . . .”

The black river had widened again, and now extended an arrow's flight on either side of them, flat as a velvet tablecloth except for the diminishing waves from the cataract. An immense tunnel of ice surrounded the river, its ceiling fifty meters or more above their heads. But this was not just an ice cave—it was a crystalline abstraction of infinite variety.

Huge pillars like translucent candles stretched from floor to ceiling, aggregated from trickles of water frozen and refrozen over the centuries, and diamond-faceted blocks as big as houses lay piled along the bank as though by gigantic hands. Everything was covered by a net of hoarfrost—tiny, delicate traceries of white, draped like the finest spidersilk. Ice bridges stretched across the river in gleaming spans, and where the ice on the tunnel walls had cracked and fallen away, steep ice slopes now angled down to the water's edge. Even as Paul and Nandi watched, a small piece sheared loose from one of the walls ahead of them, rolled slowly down the bank, and splashed into the River Alph; only as they approached it did Paul realize that the chunk bobbing near the frozen riverbank was half as wide as the Islington house that held his flat.

“It's . . . the whole th-thing is m-magnificent,” he said.

Nandi heard the shiver in his voice. “There are blankets under the bench, I think.”

Paul found two, sumptuous things with a rich sheen, embroidered with fanciful animals playing musical instruments. He offered one to Nandi, who smiled and shook his head. “I do not much feel either cold or heat,” Nandi said. “In the place where I last lived, I became accustomed to the elements.”

“I don't remember the Kublai Khan poem,” Paul admitted. “Where do these caves go?”

“On and on. But the river itself crosses through them and empties into the sea. And long before that, we will have passed through the gateway.”

“I don't understand how any of this works.” His attention was momentarily diverted as a block of ice the size of a London hovercab fell from the ceiling and splashed noisily into the river a hundred meters ahead. A few seconds later, the ripples set their small craft rocking. “These gateways—why are they in the water?”

“It is a conceit. There are other gateways, too, of course. Most of the simulations have dozens, although they are hidden—only those who travel with the permission of the simulations' owners are given the tools to locate gateways. But the people who built this gigantic network wished to have some common thing that would tie it together, and so through every simulation, the River runs.”

“What river?”

“It is different in different places—in some it is not even a river, but part of an ocean, or a canal, or even something stranger, like a lava stream or a miles-wide flow of mercury. But always it is part of the greater River. I suppose it would be possible, given enough time—more than the lifetime of even someone like our chief enemy, though—to pass all the way down the river, crossing through every simulation, until like the famous serpent with its tail in its mouth, the river met itself again and you had returned to the place you started.”

“So there's always a gate on the river, in each simulation.” Paul, with the blanket wrapped around him, was feeling better, and each piece of information was like food to a starving man.

“Two, at the very least—one at either end of the river's passage through that simulated world.”

“But there are others, too—like that one in the Hampton Court maze that you pushed me through.”

Nandi nodded. “Yes. I had been there several days, and had seen one or two people go into the maze who never came out again—members of the Brotherhood or their employees, perhaps. So I investigated. All the gates, even the river gates, allow the privileged user to go where he or she chooses, and unlike those at either end of the river, the others do not lead through the network in any particular order. But almost all the gates have a default setting, usually into another world belonging to the same master. However, I am pleased to say, we will reach one soon which will take us out of
this
man's domains entirely.”

“How do you know all this?” The frustration was building inside him—there was so much to learn before the most important questions could even be framed.

“We of the Circle have studied these people and their works for a long time. And although I have only entered this network recently, I am not the first of my kind to come here.” Nandi spread his hands as if offering Paul something. “Men and women have died to learn the things I am telling you now.”

Almost without his knowledge, Paul's fingers had stolen to his neck. “If I'm in a simulation, though, I must be able to go offline. So why can't I find the plug? Why can't I just pull the damn thing out?”

His companion looked grave. “I do not know how you came here or why, Paul Jonas, or what keeps you here. But at the moment, I cannot leave either, and I cannot tell you the reason for that. It does not affect me—I knew I could not leave until I had accomplished what I was sent to do, in any case—but it must be affecting others. But this is part of why we have dedicated ourselves to opposing these people. I know it is a cliché of the worst sort,” he made a mocking face, “but the Grail Brotherhood have tampered with things they do not fully understand.”

A piece of the cavern wall had slid down into the river in front of them, filling the water with chunks of ice, and Nandi concentrated his energies on steering them through. Paul huddled in his blankets, fighting the vague but definite feeling that time was short—that there were things he should be asking, and that he would regret it greatly later if he didn't think of them now.

He thought of the woman, the only thing that had made sense to him in all this madness until now. Where did she fit into all this?

But should I tell this man everything, absolutely everything? What if he's really working for those Grail people himself and he's just toying with me?
He looked at Nandi's narrow, sharp features and realized he had never been able to tell anything useful about anyone by looking at them.
Or what if he's just a madman? Maybe this is a simulation, yes, but maybe all this Grail stuff is some mad conspiracy theory? How do I know that he's not a Puppet himself? Maybe this is part of the ride
.

Paul tugged the blanket closer around him. That kind of thinking did no good. A few days ago, he had been lost in a kind of fog; at least now he had the basis for rational thought, for making decisions. He could doubt anything and everything, but what Nandi Paradivash said made sense: if he, Paul Jonas, was not stark raving mad, then only some kind of simulation gave a rational framework to all that he had experienced. But simulations of this level, actually indistinguishable from reality, had to be something new. Only people with the kind of power Nandi was talking about could afford this kind of quantum leap.

“What do they want?” he asked suddenly. “These Grail people, what do they want? This kind of thing—it must cost trillions. More, whatever that would be. Quadrillions.”

“I told you, they wish to become gods.” Nandi reached out with his long-handled oar and poked away a small boulder of floating ice. “They wish to live forever in worlds of their own devising.”

“Forever? How are they going to manage that? You, me, we've both got bodies somewhere, right? You can't live without a body, no matter what your brain thinks it's doing. So what good is all this? It's just an incredibly expensive game. People like that, they don't need anything, except for more time.”

“If I knew all the answers to what you have just said, I would not have had to come here.” The ice behind them, he resumed his measured paddling.

Paul pulled the blankets aside and sat forward. “So you don't have answers? What
are
you doing here? I've told you lots of things. What can you tell me?”

Nandi was silent for a long time, his paddle dipping and emerging, over and over, its gentle slurp the only sound troubling the air of the great ice cave.

“I was a scientist,” he said at last. “A chemical engineer. Not an important one. Merely I managed a research department of a large fibraware company in Benares, which is better known as Varanasi. Have you heard of it?”

“Varanasi? It . . . it was some kind of important city in India. There was an accident there, wasn't there? Something toxic?”

“Benares was and is the holiest city of all. It has always existed, a jewel of sanctity on the banks of the Ganges. But when I was a scientist, I did not care about this. I did my job, I had friends from work and school, I roamed the streets, both the real streets of Varanasi and the virtual byways of the net. There were women and drugs, and everything else with which a young man with money can occupy mind and body. Then the accident happened.

“It occurred at a government lab, but it could just as easily have happened somewhere else. The lab was a small place by the standards of government interests, far smaller even than my own corporate facilities. So small.”

In the silence, Paul said: “So this was the accident I heard about?”

“Yes. A big, big mistake. But it was really just a small thing that happened in a small lab. A failure of containment for one viral agent. The lab worked often with such things, as we all did, and all potentially lethal viruses were engineered to be unable to replicate beyond a few cycles, enough for study but no more. But an improper procedure had been used in developing this viral agent, or the genetic manipulation itself was deliberately sabotaged, or perhaps the virus itself developed a mutant resistance to the safeguards. No one knows. A centrifuge malfunctioned. A receptacle cracked. Everyone in the lab was killed within minutes. Containment was broken because one woman from the front office survived long enough to reach the fences, within yards of a busy city street. An automatic alarm from the facility probably saved the lives of millions. As it was, two hundred thousand died in a month, most in the first few days, before a virus-killer could be engineered. The army shot thousands more as they tried to break out of quarantine.”

“God, yes, I saw that. On the newsnets. It was . . . it was terrible.” Paul was aware of the monstrous inadequacy of the response, but could think of nothing else to say.

“I lived in that quarantine. It was street by street. My mother and father lived only two blocks away—two blocks!—and I could not go to them. They died with the flesh melting from their bones and were burned in a pit with hundreds of others. For one month the block in which I lived became a jungle. People who think they are going to die within hours . . .” Nandi shook his head. There was something terrible in his eyes as they peered from the shadows cast by the lantern. “I saw terrible things. The children, who could not defend themselves . . .” He paused, seeking words; when he continued, his voice was thick and hoarse. “I cannot speak of it, even now. I myself did terrible things as well, greedy, mad things. I did them for fear, for hunger, in what I thought was self-defense. But the worst of my crimes was that I watched what others did, but did not stop them. Or at least I thought that was my worst crime.”

The light in the cavern had changed in some subtle way, bringing the other man's face into sharper focus. Paul saw that there were fissures in the ceiling ahead; a few rays of daylight stabbed down from above like searchlights, columns of bright fire dousing themselves in the River Alph's dark waters.

“I had long before rejected the religion of my parents,” Nandi abruptly continued. “I had no need of such benighted superstition—was I not a man of science, an enlightened creature of the twenty-first century? I survived the quarantine by existing in a mindless state, throwing off my intellect entirely. But when the quarantine was lifted, and I walked past the bodies stacked on the street corners, waiting for the government to come and haul them away, then my intellect returned and I began to think I might have made a very grave error in how I had built my life. As I continued through the streets, through the smoke of the burnings and the rubble of the fires and explosions—for during the chaos of the quarantine parts of the city had become something like war zones—my heart began to perceive that there was a wound in the material world that no amount of science could heal, that in fact science itself was only the helpful lie told to a dying man.