River of Blue Fire (63 page)

The keen look in her eyes faded, became something else. “You do think I'm crazy.”

“No. No, I don't. But my clients have a child who seems to have developed Tandagore, and they need facts and figures, not theories. I really will look into what you say.” He put his teacup down on the floor. It seemed to be time to leave. “I promise you, I take everything about this problem very seriously.”

“This child—is it a boy or girl?”

“I'm not really allowed to talk about my clients.” He heard his own stiff tone and didn't like it. “It's a girl. She's been in a coma for several weeks now. That's why we're in such a hurry—the few cases of Tandagore where there's been recovery, it's always been early in the illness.”

“The poor thing,” Her face held a deep sorrow—far deeper than what he would expect from someone hearing someone else's bad news. “That's why this frightens me so,” she murmured. “The children. They are so helpless. . . .”

“You've been working with children a long time, haven't you?”

“All my life, almost.” She rubbed her face as if to scour the sorrow away, but was not entirely successful: her eyes were wide, almost haunted. “They are all I care about. And Misha, I suppose.” She smiled faintly at the dog, which was celebrating its victory with a nap, head resting on the murdered ball.

“Do you have children of your own?” He still held his briefcase across his knees, unsure of whether to begin the move toward the door, but when he asked the question her whole bearing changed. She visibly sagged, an effect so obvious that he experienced a rush of shame, as though he had deliberately done something to frighten or shock her. “I'm sorry, that's none of my business.”

She waggled her fingers, telling him it did not matter, but her cheeks had reddened. She stared at the dog for a quarter of a minute, saying nothing. Ramsey, too, was silent, frozen on the couch by guilt and propriety.

“Can I tell something to you?” she said at last. “You do not know me. You can go if you want to. But sometimes it is good just to talk to someone.”

He nodded, feeling any control of the situation he might have had, of his schedule, of his own feelings, sucked away like sand in an ebb tide. “Of course.”

“When I was young, I traveled with a circus. My parents were both circus people, and our show,
Le Cirque Royal
traveled all over Europe and even Asia. You do know what a circus is, don't you?”

“Yes, ma'am. I mean, I've never seen one, but I know what they are. There aren't many circuses left, I don't think. Not in the US, anyway.”

“No,” she said. “There are not.” She sighed. “I do not know why I am telling you this, but I suppose you deserve to know. I was both a clown and a bareback rider, from the time I was a little girl. Much of what I do on the Uncle Jingle show are things that I learned then, from the other circus clowns and performers. Perhaps I am the last who learned these things. In any case, it was a good life, although we did not have much money. We were all together, we traveled many places, saw many things. And when a young man came to join us, a mentalist—do you know that term? Someone who reads minds, or pretends to. It is a very popular midway attraction, like a fortuneteller. I think you see them still sometimes on the net. So when this beautiful young man came to join us, I had everything I wanted.

“His name was Aleksandr Chotilo.” She paused, then smiled, a fragile smile but not without pleasure. “I have not said his name out loud for a long time. I thought it would hurt more than it does. I will not bore you with a long story. You are a young man. You understand about love.”

“Not that young any more, I'm afraid,” he said quietly, but nodded for her to continue.

“We would have been married—my parents liked him, and he was of our people, the traveling life, circus life. When I told my father I was going to have a baby, he set a date very quickly. I was so happy.” She closed her eyes for a moment, slowly, as if falling asleep, then opened them and took a deep breath. “But everything went wrong. In the fifth month, the pains came—very, very bad. We were in Austria, outside Vienna. I was taken in a helicopter to the hospital, but the baby was born dead. I never saw him.” A pause, jaw clenched tight. “Then, as I was still recovering, my Aleksandr was hit by a car in the Thaliastrasse and killed instantly. He had been on his way to visit me. He was carrying flowers. My father and mother had to bring me the news. They were both crying.” With her sleeve she dabbed at her own eyes, pink around the edges but still dry. “I went mad, then. There is no other word for it. I became convinced that Aleksandr had been kidnapped—even after I saw him in his coffin, the day of the funeral, when I had to be carried out of the church. I was certain that my baby was alive, too, that a terrible mistake had been made. I lay in the hospital bed every night imagining that Aleksandr and our son were trying to find me, that they were lost in the hallways outside, wandering, calling my name. I would scream to them until the nurses sedated me.” She smiled as if to emphasize her own foolishness; Ramsey found it a very discomforting expression. “I was completely mad.”

“I spent three years in a sanitarium—now
there
is a word you do not hear these days—in southern France, where
Le Cirque Royal
had its winter quarters. I did not speak, I barely slept. I do not remember that time now, except in little pictures, like someone else's story, some documentary. My parents did not think I would ever be myself again, but they were wrong. Slowly, I came back. It made them happy, even though it did not make
me
happy. But I could not be in the circus—could not travel the places we had all been together. I went first to England, but it was too gray, too old, like Austria, the people with their quiet, sad faces. I came here. I grew old myself. My parents died, my mother just a few years ago. And everything I do, I do for the children.”

She shrugged. The story was clearly over.

“I'm so sorry,” he said.

“You deserved to know this,” she replied. “It's only fair.”

“I'm afraid I don't quite understand.”

“That I was mad. That for a long time they all thought I must stay in an institution for the rest of my life. When you are running around trying to discover things, and you are considering the things I have told you, you deserve to know that the information comes from a crazy woman who was in an institution, who has spent her entire life trying to make children happy because she let her own child die.”

“You're too hard on yourself. I don't think you're crazy—in fact, I wish most of the people I have to work with were as sane as you are.”

She laughed. “Perhaps. But don't say I never told you. I can see you are ready to leave. Let me just lock Misha away, then I will walk you to the door.”

As she tried to reconcile the dog, awake again and excited, to being confined to the kitchen for a few minutes, Ramsey sidled toward the mantelpiece and the picture. When he lifted it, the black button eyes of Uncle Jingle regarded him with glee.

“Horrible isn't it, really,” she said as she walked back into the room. He started guiltily and almost handed it to her, a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

“I was just . . .”

“I don't want to look at it anymore. Bad enough being on the inside of it. Take it if you want.”

He tried to refuse gracefully, but somehow, after they had said their good-byes and he was navigating his way through the tree-lined streets, trying to remember the way back to the freeway, Uncle Jingle sat propped on the seat beside him, grinning like a cat that had just broken into an aviary.

T
HERE was, Yacoubian noted with satisfaction, a certain unease in the air.

“It is scandalous,” said Ymona Dedoblanco, the mouth of her leonine goddess-head twisted in annoyance, ivory fangs gleaming. “It has been weeks, and still it is not functioning properly. What if something were to happen?”

“Happen?” Osiris turned toward her, his masked features as always unreadable. He seemed slow, though; Yacoubian thought he could sense a kind of disconnection in the Old Man. If he had been an opposing general—which, in a way he was—Yacoubian would have said this enemy no longer cared to pursue the battle. “What do you mean, ‘something were to happen'?”

The lion-headed goddess could barely control her fury. “What do you think I mean? Don't be foolish!”

The lack of obvious reaction to this breach of protocol was impressive: all along the table the Egyptian beast-faces with which their host masked them were carefully neutral, as though they viewed this altercation with nothing more than polite interest, but Yacoubian knew a line had been crossed. He glanced at Wells to share this small triumph, but the technocrat's yellow god-face was as inscrutable as all the others.

“I mean, what if one of us died?” the lion-goddess continued. “What if there's some kind of accident while we are all forced to stand around, cooling our heels like peasants lining up for bread?” The root of her anger was suddenly apparent. She, like most of the others, probably never left the safety of her stronghold, and had full-time, highest quality medical staff on constant call. She did not fear immoderately for her safety, or her health. Ymona Dedoblanco was furious because she was being made to wait.

The Old Man stirred, but Yacoubian still found his manner strange. Didn't Jongleur realize that many others in the Brotherhood were losing patience, too? The general could barely suppress his pleasure. After all he and Wells had done to unseat the old bastard, notably without success, it seemed now that all they would have to do would be to wait for the chairman to write his own dismissal.

“My dear lady,” Osiris said, “you are making too much of a slight delay. There have been a few minor complications—not surprising when one considers that we are creating the greatest forward leap for humankind since the discovery of fire.”

“But what are these earthquakes?” demanded Sobek, the crocodile-god.

“Earthquakes?” said Osiris, confused. “What are you talking about?”

“I think Mr. Ambodulu is talking about the perturbations in the system we discussed last time,” said Wells smoothly. The lemonskin features of the Memphite creator-god Ptah suited him perfectly, a tiny half-smile permanently on his lips. “The ‘spasms,' as I call them. We have had a few more than usual recently, as we've been bringing the system fully online.”

“You call it whatever you like,” said the crocodile. “All I know is that I am sitting in my palace in your network—the palace that cost me seventeen billion Swiss credits—and the whole thing goes,” even in his anger he pronounced the old British phrase with pride, “arse over tea kettle. Inside out. Colors and light and everything breaking up. You cannot tell me that is just a spasm in the system. It is more like a heart attack!”

“We all have quite a bit invested in this project,” said Osiris coldly. “Nothing is being taken lightly. You heard Wells—Ptah, I mean. It is part of the growing pains. This is a very, very complicated mechanism.”

Yacoubian was almost beside himself. The Old Man had called someone by their RL name instead of his own Egyptian nonsense! He was definitely losing it—there couldn't be any question about it. The general looked around, half-expecting to see cracks in the massive granite walls, bits of the eternal twilight seeping through chinks in the Western Palace's roof, but of course the simworld was as it had ever been.

That's the thing about all this VR bullshit, though, he
thought.
It's like one of those Third World armies—lots of brass and parade uniforms, and you don't notice anything's wrong until one day you come in and the barracks and the staff room are empty and they've all gone off to join the rebels in the hills
.

Except for the officers
, he thought with a certain grim humor,
who will be heading for the border, one step ahead of the war crimes tribunals. Like all of us will be, if this thing ever comes apart too badly
. It was tempting to celebrate anything that looked like the Old Man foundering, but even a Jongleur-hater like Daniel Yacoubian knew that nothing could be allowed to threaten the Grail Project itself.

“Actually, I'm beginning to wonder if it's all just normal perturbations of the system,” Wells said. “There seems to be more turbulence than we expected.” He stood and opened a window full of three-dimensional representations of data, an array of colors and strange shapes in slow movement that might have been some surrealist painter's nightmare. “You can see we've had a disturbing jump in system spasms during the last few months, and the trend is continuing to spike upward quite spectacularly.”

“Oh, for God's sake,” said Osiris in a rare, unintentionally comic remark. “This is the whole point of turbulence, is it not? That it cannot be fully anticipated? You of all people should know this, Wells—and it is your job to administer the Grail System, after all, so you should be very careful about pointing fingers.” He turned to survey the table. “The fact is, we have a network more complicated by a couple of magnitudes than anything ever created, and it is up and running, thousands of nodes, trillions upon trillions of instructions per second, and except for the occasional bout of wind, it's working.” He waved his bandaged hand in disgust, rattling the flail he usually gripped against his chest.

“Could it be the Circle?” Ricardo Kliment, the solar deity with the head of a dung beetle, rose to his feet, mandibles twitching. “Great Osiris, could it be those sneaking people who are doing this to our network?”

“The Circle?” repeated Osiris, astonished. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“The true question,” Wells said quietly, but so everyone at the table could hear, “is whether these problems are connected to the operating system—which, I would like to point out, is still the exclusive province of our chairman, and which none of the rest of us, even my own company, is allowed to work with directly.”