River of Blue Fire (62 page)

“Twins? What twins?” Renie kept her voice polite—she had made too many mistakes with Azador already.

“They are two men who are found many places in this network. Perhaps they are masters, or pets of the masters. But they move in many simulations, and always they turn them into shit.” He gestured at the jungle, which more and more resembled the claustrophobic strangle of the Works, except here trees and vines doubled for the industrial clutter. “I have seen them before, and what they do. When they catch any of us travelers, they do not simply throw us out of the network. If they can, they keep us connected and they torture us.” He spat over the side. “I do not know who they truly are, but they are demons.”

“And they're . . . twins?” Renie was fascinated. Another one of Otherland's doors had opened.

Azador rolled his eyes. “That is a joke, because they always go around together. And because one is fat, one is thin, no matter where they go or who they become. But they are the Twins, and you can always tell them.”

“You don't know if they're real people or not?” Renie had the feeling that Azador hadn't realized yet he was actually communicating—for the second time that day!—and that time to get answers was therefore short. “But how can they be, if they're in more than one simworld?”

The gypsy shook his head. “I do not know. All I know is that they are many places and they are always, always bastards. Here they have become Tinman and Lion.”

So some of the owners of this universe were people like Kunohara, Renie thought, content with their own backyards. But others didn't stay in their own simulations, and even vandalized their neighbors' domains. Were they at war with each other, these Grail Brotherhood people? That would make sense—trust the rich to try to screw each other out of something that was big enough for all of them. It would be pleasant to leave them to it, except that one enemy in charge of everything wouldn't make things any easier than a lot of enemies, as far as Renie was concerned. Also, she and !Xabbu would still be unarmed pedestrians in the middle of a war zone.

“Can you tell us anything else about these twins, or the others who own this network?” she asked.

Azador shrugged. “It is too hot to talk, and I am tired of thinking of those people. I am Romany—we go where we want, we do not care whose land we cross.” He reached into the coat lying at his feet, muscles rippling, and rooted in the pocket for a cigarette.

He was right about the heat—the sun was at full noon, and the trees no longer shaded the river. Renie worried briefly about Emily, still sleeping in the windowless cabin, then caught herself. The girl was a Puppet, wasn't she? And this was her simulation, after all. Perhaps Azador was right—perhaps she was taking these mechanical people, these bits of code, too seriously.

The thought drew out another, something she had forgotten, or from which she had been distracted. “Azador, how are you so certain Emily is a Puppet?”

He looked surprised, but pretended not to have understood. “What?”

“I asked you before, but you never answered me. You said it didn't matter what you did, because she was a Puppet. How do you know?”

“Why does it make any difference?” he growled. His disdain was not entirely convincing. Renie felt sure for the first time that he was not merely angry at being questioned, he was actively hiding something.

“I'm just curious,” she said, as levelly and calmly as she could. “I'm ignorant about these things. I haven't been here as long as you, haven't seen as many things as you have.”

“I am not a child, to be made to talk by this sort of trick,” Azadci snapped. “And if you want to be the boss and stand in the sun, asking questions, then you can be the captain of the bloody boat, too.” He gave up his search through the coat pocket, left the wheel spinning, and stalked away up the deck.

Before Renie could say anything more, !Xabbu waved urgently for her attention. “Something is wrong,” he said, and sprang from the rail down to the deck.

Renie paused. The heat haze shimmering between the tree branches began to thicken, forming pictures in midair in the crooks of branches, a thousand reflections of the same thing. The image that appeared in all of them was much clearer this time, a massive stub of a yellow head with a shaggy, dirt-clotted mane and piggy eyes almost lost in deep, horizontal wrinkles. The jowls drooped around a mouth crammed with huge, broken teeth, which now yawned open. A growling voice blared and stuttered like a bad radio transmission. Renie could only make out a few words— “. . . Outsiders . . . Forest . . . terrible fate . . .” Like something in an unvisited museum, the dreadful face chewed on for a few moments, babbling and groaning, then faded, leaving dark spaces between the branches once more.

“Sounds like the alert is going out about us,” Renie said grimly. “I think that's what it was saying, anyway. It's hard to tell—this whole place seems like it's falling apart.” Or the two different worlds, Forest and the Works, were growing into one blighted whole. Emerald would soon be absorbed, too—she could see how the ruined buildings, fields, and dust that had once been Scarecrow's domain, the last besieged outpost of a lovely children's tale, would now become another analogue of the larger machine, perpetually dying but still full of malevolent life. Was that what would happen to all of the Otherland network one day? Although the great simulation universe was the citadel of her enemies, the thought depressed and disgusted her.

“I am not sure,” !Xabbu said, peering over the railing.

“That it's falling apart? Are you joking?” Renie could still taste bile from earlier. She badly wanted a cigarette now. What was the point of abstaining? Might as well take what pleasure she could, while she could. She was about to go find Azador, but saw his coat lying in a tangle on the deck. Yes, it was rude, but the hell with the self-righteous bastard.

As she leaned down to fish in the pockets, she asked !Xabbu, “Didn't you see that transmission or whatever it was? It's like the generator for the whole simworld is running down.”

“That is not what I meant, Renie.” !Xabbu turned for a moment to survey her fumblings with his close-set brown eyes. “I am not sure that the transmission, as you called it, is what I felt coming, just a moment ago. . . .”

Renie found the cigarette packet; a moment later, her fingers closed on the hard shape of Azador's lighter. It was impressively heavy but still comfortable to hold, the silver sides covered with intricate design elements, like some family heirloom from a century or two back. When she clicked it, a tiny, white-hot ball of burning plasma appeared, floating in an invisible magnetic field above the top of the lighter. So, despite its old-fashioned look, it was meant to be a Minisolar—the kind of expensive modernist accessory that in RL was most often carried by young market bankers or successful charge dealers.

Mildly intrigued by such virtual ostentation, Renie noted the monogram inscribed on its one featureless side, an ornate
Y
. She wondered whether that was one of their companion's initials, and if so, whether Azador was a first name or a last name. Then she wondered if the lighter even belonged to him. Maybe he had “found” it somewhere in Kansas.

“What was that terrible noise?” Emily called from the doorway of the cabin. “That . . .
growling
?” The girl took a few steps toward the stern, her eyes wide but blinking rapidly against the sunlight. Her hair tousled from sleep, her bare feet and simple shift made her look more than ever like a stretched child. “It woke me up. . . .”

As Renie took the still-unlit cigarette from her mouth to answer, the sky abruptly split into component colors, blue, white, and black, and the world shuddered to a halt.

Renie found herself frozen in space, unable to move or speak. Everything she could see—sky, boat, river, Emily—had gone flat, dead, and motionless as printed images on cheap transparencies, but the transparencies all had dozens of ghost images behind them, piled one atop the other and slightly off-center, like a scatter of animation cels that had been carefully aligned and then accidentally dropped.

A second later the images heaved themselves back together, like a fumbled deck of cards run in reverse, and the universe shuddered back into motion.

As Renie stood frozen, unsure whether she herself could move and too stunned to test the possibility immediately, something flared white above the cabin, a brilliant vertical stripe of blankness that hovered above the reanimated river and jungle like an angel, a star, a rip in the wallpaper of reality. It wriggled, creating for itself arms and legs and a faceless splash of white where a head would be.

“Sellars . . . ?” she breathed, but still could not make herself move, although she could feel her body again, feel her arms dangling, her feet flat on the deck. Recognition of that strange shape, that absence of visual information, flooded through her. “Jesus Mercy,” she was shouting now, “is that Sellars, finally?”

The white form stretched out its arms as though testing the weather. Renie saw !Xabbu move up beside her, his long muzzle lifted like a dog looking at the moon. Even Emily, who had fallen to the deck in terror after the strange rupture, turned to see what Renie and !Xabbu were staring at.

The white shape spun slowly in the air as though it hung on a string, bouncing in agitation.

“
Chingate
!” it cried out. “What you doing, old man?” Renie did not recognize the voice, childishly high, hoarse and startled. “What is this
loco
place? This ain't no locking net,
viejo
.” The figure started to thrash harder, the arms and legs windmilling so that for a moment it seemed a tiny star was going supernova just above the river. “Get me outta here! Get me outta here, you
mentiroso
mother . . .”

The white shape vanished. Once, more, the sky was just the sky, the river was only the murmuring river.

“That was not Sellars,” !Xabbu said a few seconds later. In other circumstances, Renie would have laughed at the anticlimactic obviousness of it, but she was as stunned as he was. She saw the edge of Azador's bare shoulder in the prow of the boat, the rest of him blocked by the cabin, and realized she was clutching his lighter so hard it was hurting her fingers, gouging her palm.

“Hey!” he shouted, “what are you doing there?”

What am
I
doing
? she thought, boggled. The world had just been turned into origami, and he was blaming her? Brain still firing but moving almost nothing, like a car in neutral, she looked back to the empty spot where the white shape had hovered.

“If . . .” was all !Xabbu had time to say. Then everything went mad once more.

This time Renie had no stance from which to watch it happen, no separated space in which to be an observer. This time all around her and even inside of her, color, shape, sound, light, folded in on themselves. A moment of anticipatory shudder, then everything collapsed, swift as a whipcrack.

Long seconds in emptiness. Not gray, but empty. Not black, but lightless. Only time to try to remember who she was, but not time to remember why that might be important, then everything exploded, the inside-out almost instantaneously becoming the outside-in once more.

Water was in her mouth, and cool, sludgy river water was all around her, too. The boat was gone. She thrashed, trying to find the sky. She clawed her way to air with one hand strangely paralyzed, doubled in an arthritic fist. She did not know which way to turn because everywhere she moved her head, the river slapped her face. She tried to cry out, got another mouthful of water, choked.

“
Here, Renie
!”

She foundered toward !Xabbu's voice, felt a small hand grasp her arm and tug her forward, then she touched something smooth and complex and caught it with her arm, hooking her elbow until she felt secure against the two pulls of the river, sideways and down. She lifted her head far enough above the water to see Emily gasping beside her. The girl was clinging to the roots of the same tree, a dead banyan or something like it, which stood, storklike, halfway out into the water. !Xabbu was farther up the curve of the root, staring down the river.

Renie turned and saw what he saw. The boat was chugging on, already twenty or thirty meters downstream and rapidly leaving them behind. She raised her voice to shout for Azador, but saw no sign of him on the deck or at the wheel. Whether he was in the river himself and drowned, translated somewhere else entirely, or even still on the boat, it made no difference. The tug did not slow, did not turn toward the bank, but instead murmured on between the walls of Forest, ever smaller, until a curve of the river took it from their view.

CHAPTER 23

Beside Bob's Ocean

NETFEED/NEWS: New Trial For “Ignorance Abuse” Parents

(
visual: Hubbards weeping outside courthouse)

VO: A date has been set for the second child-abuse trial of Rudy and Violet Hubbard, accused by their adult daughter, Halvah Mae Warringer, of having created a “climate of ignorance” during her childhood which constituted abuse. Warringer alleges that because of her parents' prejudices and ignorance, and their “willful failures to improve,” she was exposed to racial intolerance, health-issues insensitivity, and negative body-images in a way that has adversely affected her adult life. The first trial in Springfield, Missouri, ended when the jury was unable to reach a verdict
 . . .

J
UNIPER Bay, Ontario, reminded Decatur Ramsey a lot of the towns he'd lived in growing up, as his staff sergeant father had been transferred from base to base, first with, then eventually without, his wife—Catur's mother. On first inspection, Juniper Bay had the same flatness as those long-ago towns, not just geographical, but . . . Catur stretched for the word as he stopped at an intersection where a young matron attempted to guide two young children across after the light had already turned yellow.

Spiritual
, he thought at last. A spiritual flatness. As though the inner life of the city had been pressed down. Not eradicated, just . . . flattened.

It was a bigger city than many he had known as a child, but like so many of those—railroad towns down to a trickle of freight cars on the busiest weeks, factory towns with half the employees laid off—its best days appeared to be behind it. The young people, he could guess, were leaving for more exciting places, for Toronto or New York, or even the metropolis based around D.C. where Ramsey made his own home.

A row of banners hung along the main street, flapping in the stiff breeze, advertisements for some upcoming civic celebration. Ramsey felt a small twinge of shame. It was easy for him to make judgments, a confirmed city convert in a ridiculously expensive car (a rental car too rich for his budget, but an indulgence he had allowed himself.) Was there actually anything worse about a town which had lost its upward thrust, especially when you compared it to the seething pile of conflicting agendas that made a modern city? At least people occasionally saw each other on the street here, maybe even still went to the same churches, to meetings at their kids' schools. To walk on your own feet down one of the sidewalks of the Washbar Corridor metro-plex, to linger any longer on the streets than the time necessary to dash from vehicle to door, was to proclaim yourself destitute or suicidal.

The address he had been given was in a small warren of streets behind the business district, an old neighborhood of two- and three-story wooden houses that must have been the previous century's version of an upscale young professionals' neighborhood. Now the houses and their old-fashioned yards lay beneath the sundial stripe of the elevated train track, a band of shadow that darkened a full quarter of the block. He had a brief vision of that great bar of shade rolling across the windows every day, on a schedule as predictable as those of the trains overhead, and thought he could guess why the houses, despite having such unusually large amounts of space around them,
lebensraum
which should have made them valued pieces of real estate, still had an air of seediness, of gradual but inevitable decay.

He pulled up in front of number 74. The parts of the house he could see above the high hedges seemed a little cleaner than its neighbors, or at least more recently painted. He announced himself at the gate, and although no one answered, he was buzzed in. As he walked up the long front path, he found himself impressed by the size of the property. Olga Pirofsky might only be one of twelve Uncle Jingles, but it was an incredibly popular show, after all, and he supposed even the faceless actors must be well paid. The garden had largely been left to grow wild, but was not completely untended. Here in the lee of the thick hedges, it had the feeling of a previous era, of Victorian entertainments and elaborate children's games. The house itself, although small compared to the size of the grounds, had three stories and a number of windows set at a number of angles.

Contemplating how it would feel to sit at one of those windows looking down on one's own garden, a garden you could get lost in, Ramsey wondered how much house the fierce mortgage on his two-bedroom apartment would buy in a town like this.

It took a while for anyone to answer the door, which gave him ample opportunity to examine the dried Christmas wreath hanging there, probably not just months but years out of its original season, and a pair of rubber boots standing beside the mat.

The door opened, but only a few inches. A small, bright eye peered out past the chain. “Mr. Ramsey?”

He tried to make himself look as little like a murderer as possible. “That's me, Ms. Pirofsky.”

There was a moment of further hesitation, as though she were still contemplating the possibility of a trick.
My God
, he realized as the moment stretched.
That's just what she's doing
—
she's that worried
. His small flash of irritation died. “I can show you my driver's license if you'd like. Don't you recognize my voice from our phone calls?”

The door closed, and for a moment he thought he'd made a mistake, but then the chain rattled and the door opened again, wider this time.

“Come in,” she said, her faint accent curling the edges of her words. “It's terrible to make you stand on the doorstep like a Jehovah's Witness or something.”

Olga Pirofsky was younger than he had expected from the hesitancy of her phone conversation, a fit, square-shouldered woman in her late fifties or early sixties, thick brown hair cut short and largely gone to gray. Most surprising of all was the sharp confidence of her gaze, not what he expected from someone who had been examining him from behind the chain to see if he were some kind of spyflick assassin.

“That's all right,” he said. “I'm just very, very glad you decided to meet with me. And if anything useful comes out of this, you'll have done a big favor for some very nice people.”

She waved her hand, almost dismissively. “I can't tell you how bad I've felt about all this. But I don't know what else to do.” For the first time since he had entered, a little of her self-possession slipped. She looked from side to side as though reminding herself that she was on home ground, then smiled again. “It's all been very upsetting.” She backed a few steps toward the stairs and signaled him to follow. “Let's go upstairs—I hardly use this part of the house at all.” “It's a lovely house. I was particularly impressed by the garden.”

“It's gone all to rack and ruin—is that the phrase? I used to have a tenant who lived down here on the bottom floor, and she liked to work out there, but she was transferred by her company. It's been years!” She was heading up the stairs now, and Ramsey followed. “There's a gardener who comes once a month. Sometimes I think I should get a tenant again—not for the money, but just to have someone else in the house, you know, in case of an emergency, I suppose—but I think I've become too used to living by myself. Well, except for Misha.”

They exited the staircase into what Ramsey supposed was the second floor parlor, a modest-sized room with a fireplace and a few rather spare and artistic bits of furniture. As if in mockery of the rest of the room's simplicity, the far corner was dominated by a huge device festooned with bundled cables, something halfway between a spaceship control module and an old-fashioned electric chair.

“I am babbling, yes?” She saw him looking at the chair. “It's for my work. We all of us—all the Uncle Jingles and the other characters, you know?—work from our homes.” She froze in place, then frowned and tapped herself on the forehead, the broad body language of a pantomime artist. “I forgot! Would you like some tea? Or I could do coffee.”

“Tea would be fine.”

“Just one moment, then.” She stopped in front of the inner door. “Something is going to happen now. Are you easily frightened?”

He couldn't puzzle out her expression. “Frightened?” Good God, what was this woman going to show him? Could all this secrecy and worry be justified after all?

She opened the door and a tiny, furry thing rushed out, claws scrabbling on the polished floorboards. To his shame, Ramsey flinched. As though door and mouth were somehow connected, once released the tiny, furry thing began to bark. It had the voice of a much larger animal.

“Misha is very fierce,” she said, and he realized that she had been fighting back a smile. “However, he is not as terrifying as he looks.” She slid through and the door closed behind her, leaving him alone with the small, bat-eared dog, who darted back and forth just out of Ramsey's reach, emitting loud noises of loathing and distrust.

Catur Ramsey had settled deeply into the couch as the woman told him of her trip from doctor to doctor, of the succession of unsettlingly cheerful reports which did nothing to make the headaches stop. Gaining confidence, she reported the results of her researches as well, another catalog of unhelpful findings; she was clearly trying to work up the courage to tell him something she thought important, just as clearly not quite there yet. His eyes, wandering a bit from time to time, settled on a framed picture turned face-down atop the mantelpiece, and he wondered who it might be. All good lawyers had a little bit of cop in them, a nagging busybody voice that was always asking questions. The really good lawyers, though, knew when to ignore the voice. Olga Pirofsky clearly needed to talk, and Ramsey let her.

“. . . And that's when I thought . . .” She hesitated, then leaned down to scratch the dog's head. The tiny black-and-white thing was peering out from between her ankles, glaring at Ramsey as though he might be some kind of advance agent for the canine Antichrist. “It's so hard to say—I mean, it sounds so foolish with you sitting there, and you coming all that way just to see me.”

“Please, Ms. Pirofsky. I haven't been out of that office in so long, I'm beginning to talk to the rubber plants. Even if you throw me out right now, it'll have done me good.” Which was true, he realized. “So just tell me the story in your own way.”

“I thought that it didn't make sense. That no one who had ever participated in the show—we keep that whole database, like I told you—had ever had this Tandagore's Syndrome. That just doesn't seem right. I mean, there have been millions, Mr. Ramsey. I'm not a person who works with statistics, but that doesn't seem right.”

“And . . . ?” He wasn't quite sure exactly where she was going, but he was beginning to have an idea. As she hesitated, trying to order her thoughts, Ramsey leaned forward and waggled his fingers in a peacemaking gesture at the dog. Misha's eyes sprang wide in incredulous fury, then he leaped to his feet in the space behind his mistress's ankles and began to bark as if he had been scalded.

“Oh, for goodness' sake, Misha!” She stuck her hand down the back of the sofa cushion and pulled out a small cloth-covered ball. She waved it in front of the dog's nose and then tossed it over to the far corner of the room. Misha sprang after it and chivvied it into the corner by the V-chair, then sank his teeth deep into the ball and began, growling deep in his little throat, to kill it with great thoroughness.

“That should keep him for a bit,” she said fondly. “What I'm trying to say is, does it make sense? That the statistics about
Uncle Jingle's Jungle
should be so different from the averages?”

“So are you saying you think something special the company does is preventing this from happening, this Tandagore Syndrome? But that would be a good thing, wouldn't it?”

“Not,” she said carefully, “if they were making sure nothing happened to anyone on the show because they had something to hide.” She appeared to have found her confidence at last, and stared at him with something approaching a challenge on her face.

Ramsey was perplexed. If she was right about Uncle Jingle being exempt, it was certainly interesting, although most likely it would prove to be a fluke of some sort. But it was also possible, and in fact much more likely, that she had simply accessed the wrong data, or misread some numbers. That was the great drawback of the net, as well as its glory—anybody could get hold of anything and make whatever they wanted out of it; it was a treasure trove for amateurs, cranks, and outright loonies.

But he had to admit that the woman sitting across from him didn't
seem
like a loony, or even a crank. Also, he liked her, and found himself not wanting to offend her, even if he was beginning to suspect the trip might have been a waste.

“It's a very interesting possibility, Ms. Pirofsky,” he said finally. “Obviously, I'll look into it.”