River of Blue Fire (7 page)

She scooped Misha from her lap and put him down on the floor. He whimpered once, then began to scratch behind his ear. She stood and began to pace, only remembering to set down her teacup when the hot liquid sloshed onto her hand.

If the circuitry was good, what was bad? Was it just her own faulty internal mechanisms after all? Was she clutching at exotic answers because she wasn't truly ready to face the unpleasant truth, no matter how stoic she thought herself?

Olga Pirofsky stopped in front of her mantelpiece to stare at a 3-D rendering of Uncle Jingle, an original sketch from the production company's design department, given to her at her tenth anniversary party. Uncle's eyes were tiny black buttons that could look as innocent as a stuffed toy's, but the toothy grin would have given Red Riding

Hood a lot to think about. Uncle Jingle had rubbery legs and huge hands, hands that could do tricks to make children gasp or laugh out loud. He was an entirely original, entirely artificial creation, famous all over the world.

As she stared at the white face, and as the radio played soft piano melodies, Olga Pirofsky realized that she'd never liked the little bastard much.

CHAPTER 3

The Hive

NETFEED/NEWS: Bukavu 5 Fears in Southern France
(visual: ambulance, police vehicles on airport runway, lights flashing)
VO: A small private airstrip outside of Marseilles in southern France has been quarantined by French and UN health officials amid rumors that it was the entry point for an entire planeload of Central African refugees sick with what is now being called Bukavu Five. An eyewitness account claiming that all the passengers were dead when the plane landed, and the pilot himself near death, has appeared as actual confirmed news on some net services, but as of now is still unconfirmed rumor. Officials of the local French prefecture will make no comment as to what caused the quarantine, or why UNMed is involved
 . . .

T
HE water was full of monsters, huge, thrashing shapes that in her old life, in the real world, Renie could have snatched up with one hand. Here, she would be less than a mouthful for any one of them.

A vast smooth side pushed past her and another great wave rippled out, spinning her wildly along the surface. In the backwaters, beyond the roil of the feeding madness, the water was strangely solid, almost viscous, and it dimpled beneath her rather than swallowing her whole.

Surface tension
, she realized, not in words but images from nature documentaries: She was too small to sink through it.

An eye as big as a door loomed near, then slid back into the murk beneath her, but the water's cohesion was broken and she began to sink. She struggled to stay upright, fighting panic.

I'm really in a tank
, she reminded herself desperately.
A V-tank on a military base! None of this is real! I've got an oxygen mask on my face—I can't drown anyway
!

But she could no longer feel the mask. Perhaps it had slipped loose, and she was dying in the sealed, coffinlike V-tank. . . .

She blew out her held breath, then sucked in air, along with far more water spray than she wanted. She had to sputter it out before she could scream.

“!Xabbu! Martine!” She threw out her arms and legs, desperately trying to keep her head above the surface as the water plunged like a giant trampoline. Just a few dozen yards away the river was seething as titan fish collided in their frenzy to reach the hovering insects. She saw no sign of the leaf or any of her fellow passengers, just tidal-wave crests and canyon troughs of river water, and the erratic movements of the hatchlings flying overhead. One of them had drawn close, and was hovering almost directly above her, the noise of its wings for a moment obscuring the first voice she had heard that was not her own.

“Hey!” someone shouted hoarsely from close by, faint but clearly terrified. “
Hey
!” Renie kicked herself as far above the river's surface as she could, and saw T4b smacking his arms against the water as he fought to keep his unwieldy robot sim afloat. She scrambled toward him, tossed and battered by the waves surging beneath her, struggling against their sideways force.

“I'm coming!” she called, but he did not seem to hear her. He began screaming again, and windmilled his arms, an explosion of activity that she knew he could not maintain for more than a few seconds. His own movements forced him down through the surface, stirring up a froth as he sank. As she increased her own effort, and finally began closing the gap, a silvery head like the front of a bullet train flashed up from the river in an explosion of spray, engulfed him, then slid back into the depths.

Renie rocked back and forth as the force of the strike spread past her and dissipated. She stared, shocked into shutdown. He was gone. Just like that.

The roaring of wings grew louder overhead, but Renie could not lift her eyes from the spot where T4b had been swallowed, even when the wings were so close above her that the water began to fly in stinging drops.

“Excuse me,” someone shouted. “Do you need help?”

Trapped in a dream that was becoming more bizarre by the second, Renie at last looked up. One of the dragonflies was hovering just a stone's throw above her. A human face protruded from its side, peering down.

Renie was so astonished that the next swell knocked her under. She thrashed to the surface to find the dragonfly still above her, the goggled face still staring down. “Did you hear me?” the unlikely head called. “I asked if you needed some help.”

Renie nodded weakly, unable to summon a single word. A rope ladder with shiny aluminum rungs dropped from the insect's stomach like the last unraveling thread in the weave of reality. Renie grabbed at the bottom of the ladder and clung; she did not have the strength to climb. A gigantic stretch of gleaming scales broke the surface near her and then slid under once more, at its crest a fin that looked as large as a cathedral window. Somebody in a jumpsuit was clambering down the ladder toward her. A strong hand clasped her wrist and helped her up into the belly of the dragonfly.

She sat in a small padded alcove with a mylar emergency blanket wrapped around her shoulders. It was hard to tell which was making her vibrate the most, her own exhausted shivering or the mechanical dragonfly's wings.

“It's strange, isn't it?” said one of the two jumpsuited figures perched in the cockpit seats. “I mean, using an imaginary blanket to warm up your actual body. But everything here works in symbols, more or less. The blanket's a symbol for ‘I've earned being warm,' and so your neural interface gets the message.”

She shook her head, feeling a pointless urge to correct this improbable stranger, to explain that she didn't have anything as high-quality as a neural interface, but every time she opened her mouth, her teeth chattered. She could not turn off the film loop that kept playing in her head—three seconds of T4b splashing, then being swallowed, over and over and over.

The bug-pilot nearest her pulled off helmet and goggles, revealing a close-cropped head of black hair, Asian eyes, and rounded feminine features. “Just hang on. We'll fix you up back at the Hive.”

“I think I see something,” said the other jumpsuit. The voice sounded masculine, but the features were still hidden by the goggled helmet. “I'm going to drop her down a little.”

Renie's stomach remained in the place they had been for several seconds after Renie and the others had plummeted back toward the river.

“Someone hanging onto some flotsam. Looks like . . . a monkey?”

“!Xabbu!” Renie jumped and banged her head painfully against the top of the alcove. The padding wasn't particularly thick. “That's my friend!”

“Problem not,” he said. “I think we need that ladder again, Lenore.”

“Chizz. But if this one's a monkey, he can damn well climb up himself.”

Within moments, !Xabbu had joined Renie in the alcove. She hugged the small, simian body tight.

Several passes over the roiling water turned up no other survivors.

“Too bad about your friends,” said the pilot as they headed the dragonfly away from the river and into the forest of impossibly tall trees. “Win some, lose some.” He peeled back his goggles, revealing freckled, long-jawed Caucasian features, then blithely spun the dragonfly on its side to slip between two mountainous but close-leaning trunks, forcing Renie and !Xabbu to clutch at the alcove wall. “But that's what happens—this river is no place for beginners.”

Renie was stunned by his callousness. Lenore's expression was disapproving, but it seemed only the mild censure one might display to a little brother caught in the cookie jar.

“Give her a break, Cullen. You don't know what they were doing. It could be a real problem.”

“Yeah, yeah.” The skinny pilot smirked, clearly unmoved. “Life's a bitch and then some fish eat you.”

“Who are you people?” !Xabbu asked about a half-second before Renie could begin shrieking at them.

“The question really is . . . who are you?” Cullen flicked a glance over his shoulder, then returned his attention to the megafoliage whipping past the dragonfly's windshield. “Don't you know that this is private property? Believe me, there are a lot better people to put on the scorch than Kunohara.”

“Kunohara?” Renie was having trouble keeping up. Hadn't her companions just been killed? Didn't that mean anything to these people, even in this virtual world? “What are you talking about?”

“Look, you must have noticed that you'd crossed into another simulation,” said Lenore, her voice kind, her manner ever-so-slightly impatient. “This whole place belongs to Hideki Kunohara.”

“King of the bugs,” said Cullen, and laughed. “It's too bad your friends are going to miss it.”

Renie struggled with her outrage, remembering Atasco and the mistakes she had made in his world. “I don't understand. What are you talking about?”

“Well, your friends won't be able to get back in here—in fact, I'm not quite sure how you guys got in to begin with. Must be some kind of back door from one of the other simworlds. Not surprising, I guess—Kunohara's got a lot of weird deals going.” He shook his head in admiration. “So your friends are going to have to meet you somewhere else. Don't worry, though. We can get you to wherever it is, if you've got an address.” He banked the dragonfly sharply to avoid a low-hanging branch, then brought it neatly level with a flick of the steering controls.

“I'm Lenore Kwok,” the woman said. “Your pilot is Cullen Geary, common asshole by day, but by night . . . well, he's an asshole then, too.”

“Flattery, Len-baby, flattery.” Cullen grinned contentedly.

The sky beyond the cockpit window was now a deep mauve; the trees were rapidly becoming monstrous vertical shadows. Renie closed her eyes, trying to make sense of it all. These people seemed to think that T4b and Martine and the rest were fine, that they'd just been knocked out of the simulation. But could that be true? And even if they could survive being killed here in the simworld—which she wasn't all that positive about, given what had happened to Singh—how would she and !Xabbu ever find them again? The whole grueling effort was already over, it seemed, with all Sellars' work gone for nothing.

“What is this place?” she asked. “This simulation.”

“Ah-ah.” Cullen wagged his finger. Twilight rushed past the view-screen. “You haven't told us who
you
are yet.”

Renie and !Xabbu exchanged glances. With all their other concerns, she and her companions had not had a chance to concoct a cover story in case of a meeting like this. She decided that half-truth was the best strategy.

“My name is . . .” she struggled to recall the earlier alias, “. . . Otepi. Irene Otepi. I was doing systems analysis for a man named Atasco.” She paused, watching their rescuers for a reaction. “Do you know him?”

“The anthropologist?” Lenore was checking readouts on the instrument panel. If she was hiding something, she was good at it. “Heard of him. Central American, South American, something?”

“South American,” said Cullen. “Colombian, in fact. Saw him in an interview once. What's he like?”

Renie hesitated. “I didn't meet him. Something went wrong—I'm not sure what. His simworld . . . well, there was an uprising or something. We were all on a ship, and we just kept going.” Renie suspected they were wondering why she hadn't simply dropped offline. It was a good question, and she couldn't think of an answer other than the bizarre truth. “It was all pretty crazy. Then we floated through to here, I guess. The ship turned into a leaf, the leaf got tipped over, you found us.”

!Xabbu had been watching her closely, and now spoke in his most careful English. “I am Henry Wonde,” he said. “I am Ms. Otepi's student. How can we find our friends again?”

Cullen turned to observe the baboon for a long moment before a looming tangle of branches jerked his gaze back to the viewscreen. “Why? Are you planning to stay online? Just go back through to this Atasco simulation or something?”

Renie took a breath. “There's something wrong with our own systems, I think. We can't go offline.”

Cullen whistled, impressed.
“That's
weird.”

“We'll get you fixed up at the Hive,” Lenore said confidently. “Make it all better.”

Renie was less than certain, but said nothing. The dragonfly sped on through the darkening night.

O
RLANDO
had one last dream before waking, a dim and fuzzy fragment in which a faceless child sat in a cold, dark room, pleading with him to stay and play a game. There was some kind of secret involved, something that must be kept from the grown-ups, but it all streamed away like windblown smoke as he awakened. Still, even though the events of the next minutes pushed it quickly from his mind, the feeling of foreboding it left took much longer to fade.

In the first too-bright moments after opening his eyes he thought he was paralyzed. His legs felt unattached, and seemed to move aimlessly; he had very little feeling below a tight band around his waist.