River of Blue Fire (51 page)

“Parley-voo, Juggles.” Patto twisted his ear. “Parley-voo, you sodding Frenchie spy.”

But instead of kicking him as they usually did, they snatched his elbows and pulled him around, facing him toward the end of the second floor landing. Toward the window.

That doesn't belong here!
he thought, and suddenly the tired old dream filled him with a surprising panic.
Not that! Not the window!

But he was being hurried toward it, his arms pinioned. The window grew larger before him, round and without any kind of grille or crossbars, backed by what his dream-self knew to be a profound blackness, a poisonous dark abyss, from which he was protected only by the thinnest sheet of glass.

He knew that he did not ever, ever, ever want to find out what was on the far side.

They can't do this to me
, he thought in terror.
They think I'm a boy, but I'm not, I'm old—I'm old! They can't
 . . .

He was shouting it in the dream, too, telling them he was too frail, but Oldfield and the others only laughed louder, then shoved him toward the window. Shrieking, he struck the hard surface, but instead of the glass breaking, it was he, ancient, dry, and brittle, who shattered into a thousand pieces.

The dreams, the truth, his memories, shattered, mixed together, and flung . . .

. . . 
Showering outward into the sunlight like a spray of water, each piece spinning like a separate planet, the cloud of iridescence a universe that had lost its equilibrium, now flying apart in high-speed entropic expansion
.

The cries echoed and echoed, as they always did, but this time they were his.

He awakened in blackness, without even the virtual lamplight of Abydos to soothe him. For a brief moment he was actually in his body and nothing else, but the horror was too much and he plunged back into his system. A blind, helpless thing, a slug wrapped in gauze and mylar, floating in a dark tank—he shuddered at the thought of having to exist as he truly was. He pulled on his machinery as though it were armor.

Once into the system, the world's oldest man did not bring up the full glories of his custom-made Egypt, but raised instead a much simpler virtual world that held nothing but dim and sourceless blue light. Jongleur basked in it, caressed by subliminal sonics, and tried to calm the great fear that gripped him.

The young could not understand the horror of being old. That was nature's way of protecting them from uselessly harmful knowledge, just as the atmosphere around the Earth created a blue sky that shielded humanity from constant exposure to the naked unconcern of the stars. Old age was failure, limitation, marginalization—and that was just the beginning. Because every moment was also a step closer to nothingness, as Death drew ever nigh.

Felix Jongleur had dreamed of a faceless, shadowy figure all through his childhood, the Death that his father had told him “waits for us all,” but it was when his parents sent him away to that ghastly school in England that he had finally learned what it looked like. One night, as he leafed through a tattered newspaper one of the upperclassmen had left behind in the dormitory cabinet, he had seen an illustration—”
an artist's rendition
,” the caption read, “
of the enigmatic Mr. Jingo
,”—and had known at once that this was the face of what hunted him through his dreams far more implacably than even the cruelest older boys had ever stalked him in the Cranleigh halls. The man in the picture was tall, wrapped in a dark cloak, and wore a tall, old-fashioned stovepipe hat. But it was his eyes, his mesmeric, staring eyes, and his cold grin which had caused young Felix's heart to race with recognition. The article, the explanation of who the artist's lurid drawing represented, had been gnawed away by rats and would thus forever remain a mystery; only the picture had survived, but that had been enough. Those eyes had watched Felix Jongleur ever since. As all the intervening decades had rolled past, he had lived under the gaze of those amused, soul-empty, terrifying eyes.

They waited. He—it—waited. Like an unhurried shark beneath a failing swimmer, Mister Jingo had no need to do anything else.

Jongleur fought now against the morbidity that sometimes grew on his isolated mind like an opportunistic parasite. It would all be easier if only one could
believe
in something outside oneself—something loving and kind, a counterweight to that hideously patient gaze. As his mother's sisters had done. Positive that Heaven waited for them—a place apparently identical to Limoux, except that good Catholic spinsters no longer had to put up with aching joints and noisy children—they had been the picture of security, even on their deathbeds. Not a one of them had left life with anything other than calm, even cheerful, acceptance.

But he knew better. He had learned the lesson first from his father's sad, tired face, then learned it again and more brutally in the jungle of English public school. Beyond the sky there was no Heaven, but only blackness and abounding space. Beyond one's own self there was nothing to trust, nothing upon which to rely. Darkness waited. It would take you when it wished, and no one would lift a finger to save you. You could scream until you thought your heart would burst, and someone would merely push a pillow over your face to muffle your cries. The pain would go on. No help would come.

And Death? Death, with his top hat and hypnotist gaze, was the greatest bully of all. If he did not take you from behind and unawares, if in some way you managed to avoid him and grow strong, he merely stood in the shadows and waited until time itself dragged you down. Then, when you were old and weak and helpless, he would stalk you as brazenly as a wolf.

And this the young, in their magnificent stupidity, could never understand. For them, death was only a cartoon wolf, something to be mocked. They did not see, could not know, what it would be like in that day when the monster became real—when straw, or wood, or even walls of brick would not save them.

Jongleur shuddered, something his attenuated nervous system reported rather than felt. His only solace was that since he himself had been old, he had watched three generations of youth inherit this dreadful realization and then go before him, dragged screaming out of their shattered houses into the night while he himself still avoided those smiling jaws. Genetic therapy, vitamin-flooding, low-dose triggerpoint radiation, all the tricks available (unless you had Jongleur's almost limitless assets and Jongleur's seminal ideas) could only delay death a little. Some, the luckier and the wealthier, had recently lived into a second decade past their first century, but they were still children compared to him. As the others all fell, as his own grandchildren and great- and great-great-grandchildren had been born, aged, then succumbed, one after the other, he alone had continued to cheat Mr. Jingo's patience.

And God or whatever willing, he would do so forever!

Felix Jongleur had faced night-terrors for more than two long human lifetimes. He knew without looking at the chronometer, without reference to any of the information he could summon with little more than a thought, that outside his fortress the last hour before dawn lay heavy on the Gulf of Mexico. The few fishing boats that he allowed in Lake Borgne, his private moat, would be loading up their nets. Police in surveillance labs in Baton Rouge would be nodding off in front of their monitors, hoping that the morning shift would remember to bring them something to eat. Fifty kilometers west of Jongleur's tower, in New Orleans, a half-dozen or more tourists would be lying in the gutters of the Vieux Carré, missing their money cards, key cards, and self-respect . . . if they were lucky. Some less fortunate might wake up drugged, with a hand gone and the wrist hastily cauterized so the thieves could avoid a murder charge (most rental car companies had abandoned palmprint-readers, but a few still held out.) And some of the gutter-flung tourists would not be lucky enough to wake up at all.

The night was almost gone.

Felix Jongleur was angry with himself. It was bad enough that he should float in and out of sleep without realizing it—he did not remember drifting off—but to wake up, heart aflutter like a frightened child, because of a few familiar and now-tiresome dreams. . . .

He would do some work, he decided. That was the only good solution, the best way to spit in the face of the man with the tall hat.

His first impulse was to return to Abydos-That-Was, to review recent information from the comfort of his god-throne, surrounded by the attentions of his priests. But the nightmare, and especially its unusual juxtaposition of elements, had unsettled him. His home suddenly did not feel secure, and although the great house that his physical body never left was more heavily defended than most military bases, he still felt the urge to have a look around, if only to assure himself that all was as it should be.

Anchored by seven subterranean floors (a hundred-plus vertical feet of fibramic cylinder, which had been literally screwed into the delta mud), Jongleur's tower reached another ten stories up from water level into the foggy air above Lake Borgne, but the great tower was only part of the vast complex that covered the artificial island. An engineered mass of rock about fifty kilometers square, the island housed only slightly more than two thousand people—a very small town by numbers alone, but more influential than most of the world's nations put together. Jongleur was only slightly less a god here than he was in his virtual Egypt: with a subvocalized word, he brought up the battery of video images that detailed every corner of his domain. All over the tower and the surrounding buildings, wallscreens became one-way windows in an instant, and words and numbers superimposed on the surveillance pictures began to fly past him like sparks.

He started on the outside and worked his way in. The east-facing perimeter cameras brought him the first hints of sunrise, a reddish glow above the Gulf, still dimmer than the tangerine lights dotting the oil rigs. The guards in two of the perimeter observation towers were playing cards, and a few were not fully in uniform, but the squadrons in all six towers were awake and alert, and Jongleur was satisfied; he would memo the commanders about keeping a watch on discipline. The rest of the defenders of his domain—the human defenders, in any case—slept in their bunks, row upon row upon row. Their quarters and parade grounds alone took up almost half the artificial island on which the tower stood.

He moved his inspection inward to the tower itself, flitting from viewpoint to wallscreened viewpoint over scores of rooms and dozens of corridors like some magical spirit that lived in mirrors. The offices were mostly empty, although a skeleton crew was in place taking overseas requests and pulling information off the nets for the morning shift to examine. A few custodial workers at the end of their shift, local men and women who had no idea how closely they had been examined before being hired, were waiting on the esplanade for the shuttle boat that would take them around to their quarters on the island's far side.

His executive staff had not come in yet, and their offices stood hushed and dark except for the glow of electronic displays. Above the executive offices were the first of the tower apartments, reserved mainly for visiting dignitaries: the few of these treasured and envied living spaces that had been fitted as permanent residences were awarded to only the very luckiest of Jongleur's entire worldwide operation.

Jongleur's remote eye discovered the bathrobed president of one of his larger Ukrainian subsidiaries sitting on one of the tower apartment balconies, looking down at the lake. Jongleur wondered if the man might be awake so early because he was jet-lagged, and then remembered he had a conference scheduled with the fellow later in the day. It would take place through intermediary screens, of course; the Ukrainian executive, one of the richest and most powerful men in his entire country, would doubtless wonder why, after coming all this way, he should not meet his own employer in person.

The man should count his lucky stars that he didn't have to see his master face-to-real-face, Jongleur thought. The Ukrainian would take away an image of his employer as an eccentric, security-obsessed old man, instead of discovering the unpleasant truth—that their founder and leader was a monstrous
thing
, held together by medical pressure-wrappings, continuously submerged in life-preserving fluids. The visiting executive would never have to think about how his employer's eyes and ears had been pierced by electrodes connected directly to the optic and auditory nerves, how his skin and even muscle grew more jelly-soft hourly, threatening to slide free at any moment from bones thin and weak as twigs.

Jongleur's thoughts did not linger long on the familiar horror of his own condition. Instead, his disembodied inspection flitted up through the private apartments to the lowest floors of his own inner sanctum, where it touched briefly on the quarters of his various bodyguards and technicians, on the hardware rooms where the most important machines were serviced, and on the chamber locked behind three separate pressure-doors and two guard stations where the tanks lay in their padded cradles. His own life-support tank, a capsule of black, shiny plasteel, bulked like a royal sarcophagus at the center of the room, its tentacles of bundled and multiply redundant cables stretching away on all sides. Three other tanks shared the huge circular room with his, the smaller and less central capsules that belonged to Finney and Mudd, and—close by his own resting place—that other and most significant oblong, as large and gleamingly opaque as his own.

He did not want to look at that other tank for very long.

Neither did he wish to carry his inspection any farther. The topmost floor, as always, remained out of bounds, even—perhaps especially—for him. The master of Lake Borgne had decided long before this day he did not ever again want to look into the suite of rooms at the top of the tower. But he had also known that if it remained available to him he would be unable to resist, that just as an aching tooth draws a probing tongue, he would torture himself if he did not do something. He had thus reprogrammed his surveillance system, and locked that part of it away behind a code he did not have. Unless he specifically asked his security manager to reprogram it—and he had fought against that temptation a thousand times—it would remain as black to him as the emptiness between stars.