River of Blue Fire (60 page)

Renie sat up, mumbling curses. The burning white disk was almost directly overhead, only thinly hidden behind a layer of dull gray cloud—there would be no shelter anywhere on deck. Also, either the anchor had slipped and they had drifted, or the river and its banks had mutated while she slept; Renie did not know which prospect was worse. The river had narrowed dramatically, so that less than a stone's throw separated them from the banks on either side, and the polite forest of cottonwoods had at some point become an insidious mesh of vegetation—a jungle. Some of the trees stretched up a hundred feet or more, and except for the open track of the river, she could not see more than a few yards into the undergrowth in any direction.

!Xabbu was standing on his hind legs by the rail, watching the jungle edge past.

“What happened?” she asked him. “Did the anchor come loose?”

He turned and gave her one of his odd but cheering baboon smiles. “No. We have been awake for some time, and Azador is driving the boat again.”

The man under discussion was huddled over the wheel in the boat's stern, dark brows beetled and a fog of cigarette smoke drifting around him. He had thrown aside the coat. The bottom of his boiler suit was belted with a length of rope, since only a few tattered strands remained from the suit's top part. His sim was very tan and his chest and arms quite muscular. She turned away, irritated by his ridiculous good looks—it was adolescent to pick a sim like that, even if he looked like that in RL, which she firmly doubted.

“Anyway, it is good you are awake,” !Xabbu added. “The girl Emily is unhappy, but she does not want to talk to me, and Azador will not speak to her.”

Renie groaned again and levered herself to her feet, clinging to the railing for a moment while her calf muscles spasmed. She found it astonishing to contemplate her many aches and realize that what had struck her had not been metal fists and poorly-padded human bones, but a puddinglike substance merely pretending to be those things. Not that the results were any the less painful.

She limped to the cabin. The girl was sitting up on the bed, pressed into the corner of the tiny room as though afraid of small creeping things on the floor. Despite the sheen of sweat on her youthful skin, she was clutching the blanket tightly to her chest.

“Hello, Emily. Are you all right?”

The girl regarded her with wide, worried eyes. “Where's the monkey?”

“Outside. Do you want me to get him?”

“No!” Emily's rejection was almost a shriek; she regained her composure a little and laughed nervously. “No. He makes me go all funny. He's just like the Scarecrow's flymonks—all little and hairy and those pinchy fingers. How can you stand it?”

Renie thought for about two seconds of trying to explain !Xabbu's situation, then decided against it. If this girl was a Puppet, telling her anything about VR or aliases would just be confusing, or even needlessly cruel. Unless . . .

“He's not really a monkey.” Renie tried a soothing smile; it made her jaw hurt. “He's . . . he's under a spell. He's really a man—a very nice man—but someone bad turned him into a monkey.”

“Really?” Emily's eyes widened again. “Oh, that's so sad!”

“Yes.” Renie settled on the edge of the bed and tried to get comfortable, but there didn't seem to be a throbless muscle in her entire body. “Was that all that was bothering you?”

“No—yes. No.” As if exhausted by these changes of mind, Emily regarded her for a moment, then suddenly and quite spectacularly burst into tears. “What's g-going to h-h-happen?”

“To us?” Renie reached out and patted the girl's shoulder, feeling her small, birdlike bones through the thin shift. It was strange, finding herself again in the role of reassuring someone, of being a substitute mother; it also made it hard not to think about Stephen, but she didn't need any more pain today. “We've escaped from all those people who are chasing us. Don't you remember?”

“I don't mean that. What about m-me? What about the little baby in my t-tuh-tummy?”

Renie wanted to say something encouraging, but could think of nothing. What could she offer this girl, this creature coded for baby talk and helplessness? Even if she and !Xabbu escaped the simulation, it was almost certain that Emily would not transfer with them. And even if some fluke allowed it, could they afford to take her along? Go off to save the world accompanied by a pregnant, effectively half-witted child who needed constant attention? It didn't bear thinking about.

“It will be all right,” was what she came up with at last, and hated herself for saying it.

“But it won't—it won't! Because my henry doesn't love me anymore! But he did, he
did
, and he gave me the pretty thing, and we did all the lover-games, and he said I was his pudding and now everything is . . . is
bodwaste
!” The strange amalgam seemed to be the worst word she knew. Immediately after uttering it, she collapsed face-first onto the bed, wailing.

Renie, with nothing to offer except sympathy and a reassuring touch, at last coaxed the girl back to something resembling normality. “The shiny, pretty thing he gave you,” she asked when the weeping had quieted, “did he tell you where it came from?”

Emily's eyes were red-rimmed, her cheeks mottled, and her nose was running, but she was still irritatingly pretty. If Renie had retained any doubt that the creators of Kansas were men, she let it go now. “He didn't tell me anything, except that it was mine!” the girl moaned. “I didn't steal it—he gave it to me!”

“I know.” Renie thought of asking to see the gem again, but did not want to excite her further. “I know.”

When a sweaty and miserable Emily had finally slipped back into fitful sleep, Renie walked out to the stern. She felt a tug of addiction and wanted to ask for a cigarette, but she had already broken her own rule once. “She's really upset,” she reported.

Azador flicked his eyes toward the cabin for a moment. “I noticed.”

“These people may be Puppets,” Renie added, “but they certainly don't think they are. I mean, that may all be code, but it's pretty damn convincing.”

“These rich bastard
gorgios
got too much money for their own good. They hire too many programmers, try to make everything so perfect and real.”

“But you liked how real she was before, didn't you?” She heard the anger beginning to creep into her voice and turned to the rail to inspect the ever-thickening wall of jungle foliage on the near bank. There was something faintly unnatural about the vegetation, but she couldn't quite decide why that was so. She turned back to Azador. “Don't you feel sorry for her at all?”

He let his lids droop, so that he viewed the river before him through hired-assassin slits. “Do you feel sorry for your carpet when you step on it? That is not a person, it is a machine—a thing.”

“How do you know? This place—this whole network—is full of real people pretending to be characters. How do you know?”

To her surprise, Azador actually flinched. He fought to hold onto his mask of indifference, but for a moment she saw something very different in his eyes before he turned away and fumbled another cigarette into his mouth.

She was struggling to make sense of this reaction when !Xabbu's urgent call from the prow startled her just-settling thoughts into confused flight.

“
Renie! Come here. I think it is important
.”

Her friend bounced excitedly on the railing as she walked toward him. She realized with more than a little worry that his movements seemed to become more simian daily. Was he simply growing more familiar with the baboon sim, or was the constant life and perspective of a beast beginning to affect him?

“Look.” He pointed toward the shore.

Renie stared, but her mind was a jumble of confused ideas, all jostling for her attention. There was nothing obviously wrong along the riverbank. “What is it, !Xabbu?”

“Look at the trees.”

She applied herself to examining the place he indicated. There were trees, of course, in all sizes, with thick creepers drooping between branches like the survivors of a constrictors' orgy on the morning after. Nothing seemed particularly noteworthy, except for a certain regularity to the forms—which, she abruptly realized, was what had bothered her a few minutes earlier. Although both the trees and vines had the realistic look of nature, they seemed to be spaced and connected at rather mechanical intervals. In fact, there were too many right angles. . . .

“It looks arranged.” She squinted against the harsh sunlight, and as she did the shapes became more general. “It looks something like the Works. Except made out of plants.”

“Yes!” !Xabbu bounced in place. “Do you remember what the Scarecrow said? That his enemies were in the Works, and in Forest.”

“Oh, my God.” Renie shook her head, almost—but not quite—too exhausted to be afraid. “So we've just drifted right into the other fellow's kingdom? What was his name?”

“
Lion
 . . .” !Xabbu said solemnly.

A thin hissing sounded all along the riverbank, and then a ghostly image began to flicker in the right-angled spaces between several of the trees—a parade of images, duplicated from tree to tree, identical and profuse. Each apparation was little more than a reflection in a rippled pool, so faint and smoky as to be barely visible, but Renie thought she saw a hard flash of eyes and a great, pale face. The hiss turned into a crackling rush, then the images faded, an army of ghosts all put to flight at the same instant.

“What the hell was that?” Azador called from the stern, killing the engine and slowing the tugboat to a drift.

Renie was trying to decide for herself what the hell that had been when she felt !Xabbu's small hand—his ‘hairy, pinchy fingers,' as Emily had unkindly called them—close on her arm. “See there,” he said, his whisper not quite disguising his wonder and unease. “They come down to the water like a family of elands.”

Several hundred yards ahead, a small, stealthy group of human figures had appeared from the shelter of the vegetation beside the river. Not yet having seen the boat, they crept down the bank to the water's edge. Some crouched to drink as others stood on guard against attack, nervously watching the jungle behind them and the nearest parts of the river. They were pale-skinned, dirty, and naked but for the ornaments they wore, which Renie guessed were some kind of hunting trophies: several wore tails swinging at their rumps, while others sported antlers on their brows, or ears dangling down beside their faces.

Renie crouched, then waved to Azador to do the same. He squatted beside the pilot's wheel to watch as the boat drifted nearer.

The tugboat had silently covered perhaps two thirds of the distance when an antler-crowned sentry saw them. He stared gape-jawed at the boat for a moment, then made a strangled barking noise. The other naked humans leaped up in confusion, costume-tails flipping from side to side, and shoved and bumped each other in bleating fear as they retreated into the jungle.

The boat swept on, now almost level with the spot where the humans had vanished. The sentry, last of the group, stopped at the edge of shelter to watch the boat drift past, ready to fight to defend his tribesfolk's retreat. His antlers appeared to be wriggling, which Renie thought at first was a trick of the dappled sunlight where he stood, but then she saw that what she had thought were prongs of horn were actually hands, grafted onto his head at the temples. His arms ended at the wrist, knobbed in scar tissue.

The fingers of these horrid imitation antlers twitched again as she slid past, and the sentry's eyes—all dark iris, with no white at all—met hers with the hopeless, terrified stare of a damned thing scuttling across the rubbish heaps of Hell. Then he showed her his tail of stitched-on skin as he bounded away into the dark dells of Forest.

L
ONG Joseph Sulaweyo stood at the edge of the trees staring out onto the highway and felt as though he were waking up from a dream.

It had all seemed so simple in the night, with Jeremiah asleep and the high ceilings of that bloody damned Wasp's Nest place echoing back Joseph's every lonely footstep. He would go see his son. He would make sure that Stephen was still all right. Renie had said once that maybe Joseph had chased his son away, scared him into the coma or some foolishness, and although he had furiously rejected this bit of doctor nonsense, it had still sunk its hooks into him.

Stephen might even have come awake by now, he had told himself as he had rummaged together what small bits of possessions he had decided to take. How would that be if he did? How cruel? What if the boy woke up and his whole family was gone? And as Joseph had taken the last few bills from Renie's wallet—she wasn't going to need it, was she, down in that bathtub-with-wires?—it had all seemed to make a sort of magnificent sense. He would go and see the boy. He would make sure Stephen was all right.

But now, in the light of late afternoon, with bits and pieces of Drakensberg vegetation snagged in his trouser legs and fouling his hair, it seemed a different story altogether. What if Renie came out of that machine before he could get back? She would be angry—she would say he had just gone out to find something to drink, and had put them all in danger. But that wasn't true, was it? No, he had a responsibility to his son, and Renie was just his other child. She wasn't her own mother, whatever she thought sometimes. She wasn't his wife, to dog him about how to behave.

Long Joseph took a few steps out onto the hard shoulder. The night seemed to come early here: it was just a couple of hours past noon, but the sun had already dipped behind the mountain and a cold wind was sighing down the slope, strumming the trees and getting in under Joseph's thin shirt to devil his chest. He plucked the worst of the brambles off himself and wandered a little way up the road, stamping his feet to keep warm.