River of Blue Fire (77 page)

“!Xabbu, they're going to kill us!” At Renie's words, Emily whimpered on the ground at her feet. Renie's terror was leavened for a moment by a flash of anger—could this girl do nothing except whine and cry?

“They?” !Xabbu looked up, still distant, still thinking of something else. “They are meaningless. They are shadows.” He caught sight of Lion, and his lip curled in disgust. “Not all shadows, perhaps. But still, they mean nothing.”

Lion saw the lighter and his predator's eyes narrowed. “Where did you get that?”

“!Xabbu, what is going on?” Renie demanded under her breath.

“And I misjudged other things, too.” !Xabbu reached down with his free hand and urged Emily to her feet. She resisted, but he planted his splayed toes and kept tugging until she got into a crouch. “I will explain later,” he said; then: “
Run
!”

He jerked at Emily's arm again and got her stumbling toward the river bank. Renie stared dumbfounded for a split-instant, then sprinted after them. Lion shouted no orders, but within moments she could feel the thunderous tread of the bear-creatures lumbering in pursuit.

!Xabbu led the staggering Emily all the way to the bank and out into the river shallows, until the water reached his own simian shoulders. Renie thought he was going to swim for it, but instead he turned the girl downstream and pushed her ahead of him before swinging around to look for Renie.

“Just keep going that way,” he urged. When Renie splashed past him, he swam back to the bank.

“What are you doing?”

“Keep Emily going downstream,” he called back. “Trust me!”

She thrashed to a halt and almost lost her balance. “I'm not going to let you kill yourself to save us,” she shouted. “That is old-fashioned bullshit!”

“Renie! Please trust me!” he cried from the scrub covering the bank. Already the trees were crackling a short distance away as Lion's servants crunched closer.

She hesitated for an instant. Emily had fallen down; shoved and pulled by the current, she was having trouble getting to her feet again. Renie cursed and waded after her.

They made slow, agonizing progress through the mud and high water, but Renie saw that !Xabbu's first idea at least had been good—they were still making better time than Lion and his huge creatures, who were forced to tear their way through the thick jungle foliage. She also knew that it was ultimately useless. She was gasping for breath already, and Emily would not last more than another few minutes, while their pursuers, she had no doubt, were virtually tireless. If !Xabbu hoped they would be able to wade all the way to the next transition point, which might be ten or twenty miles away, it was a brave but hopeless thought.

Lion had taken notice of their strategy. One of his bear-monsters crashed out of the undergrowth and down onto the bank, which crumbled beneath its weight and toppled the creature into the river, but it came up quickly, mossy fur streaming, eyeless vegetable head snapping spiny jaws as it set out through the shallows in dishearteningly swift pursuit. Renie dug on even faster, half-carrying Emily, who was having trouble keeping her balance, but she could hear the wallowing noises behind her growing closer, paced by the thunder of the bankside pursuit as it plowed through jungle.

Her legs had grown dangerously rubbery when she spotted a thin gray-brown arm waving from a tree branch just ahead.

“This way!” !Xabbu called. As they stumbled to the branch he grabbed at Emily and helped her up onto the bank. The creature behind them did not roar or hiss or otherwise show emotion, but it dropped forward so that it could wade on all fours, increasing its speed. The horrid vegetable head furrowed the water like a tanker's prow.

Renie and Emily staggered after !Xabbu, up the bank and through the clinging branches.

“I thought I would be able to travel more quickly through the trees than you could,” he explained as they fought their way into the jungle.

“But where are we going? We'll never outrun them.”

“Just here,” he said as he stopped to help a weeping Emily untangle herself from a vine. He was panting himself, but his voice was oddly calm. “Only a few steps more. Ah, this is it.”

They limped into a small, empty clearing covered with tumbled branches and a mulch of fallen leaves. Light arrowed down through the trees and the hanging creepers as through the window of a cathedral. The noise of pursuit was terribly close.

“But there's nothing here.” Renie looked at her friend in despair, wondering if the strain had finally driven him mad. “Nothing!”

“You are right,” he said, raising his small hand. The first of Lion's plant-bears reeled into view, smashing its way toward them through the trees. “There is truly nothing here at all . . . if you only look.”

A column of golden light flared in front of them, a tight helix curling endlessly on itself like a molten barber pole. An instant later it flattened and spread into a perfect rectangle. Renie could see nothing within the four straight sides except shifting colors, like the imprisoned rainbow of a radioactive soap bubble. !Xabbu took Emily's hand in one grip and Renie's in the other and led them toward it.

“How did you. . . ?” she began, almost beyond the point of surprise.

“Later I will tell. We must hurry now.”

Two more plant-bears had appeared behind the first, and the dimmer but no less menacing figure of their master was right behind them; Lion shouted something at the fugitives, but his words were lost in the distorted, animal roar of his voice. “We can't take Emily out of her simulation,” Renie said, frantic with the dwindling moment. “But if we leave her, they'll get her. Hurt her, take her baby.”

!Xabbu shook his head, still pulling them both along. Renie caught Emily's eye, wanting to say she was sorry, but the girl was gray with fatigue, head down and stumbling. Renie hoped that whatever the system did to a Puppet when it tried to leave the simworld, it would be quick and painless. Perhaps it would even move Emily to some other part of Kansas.

Then the glow of the gateway was all around them, a flaring plasma sunspot that gave off no heat, and Lion's rising bellow of frustration was silenced.

They tumbled to a stop on a solid something which would have been the ground in a sane universe. Instead, it was a bumpy planar surface, angled like a hillside. The land, if it could be called that, was a curious patchwork, with all manner of colors moving in sluggish animation from surface to surface, slashed with jagged veins of flat, unreflective white, like bone showing through lacerated skin. But most disturbingly of all, in many parts of this surreal environment—particularly unsettling all across the expanse of what should have been sky—there was simply
no
color. But no color, she realized before her mind revolted and she had to shut her eyes, was not black, or white, or even the gray of a lost signal. It was simply . . . no color.

“Jesus Mercy,” groaned Renie after a long moment, half-reverent, half-terrified. “Where are we, !Xabbu? And how did you make that happen?” She opened her eyes a slit, looking for her friend. What landscape she could see on the periphery of her vision was uneven, with suggestions of blocky, malformed things that might have been mountains, or trees, but trying to see them made her head hurt.

!Xabbu was lying on his side, his narrow chest barely moving. His pupils had rolled back under his eyelids.

Renie crawled to his side. The ground beneath him had visual depth, as though the baboon were stretched on a pane of glass over a cloudy sky. For a moment she had the dizzying certainty that she and he would both fall through it into nothingness, but the invisible earth was as solid as packed soil.

“!Xabbu?” He did not answer. She shook him, gently at first, but with increasing firmness. “!Xabbu, talk to me!”

Something made a noise behind her. Renie spun, ready to defend herself.

Emily 22813 was pulling herself up to a sitting position, her eyes wide.

“But . . . but how can you be here?” Renie demanded of the girl. In a day full of astonishments, this seemed one too many. “Unless . . . unless we're still in Kansas . . . but I don't think we are.” She could make sense of none of it. “Jesus Mercy, it doesn't matter. Help me with !Xabbu—I think he's hurt, or sick.”

“Who are you?” Emily sounded honestly curious. The voice was the same, but something in the intonation had changed. Her eyes narrowed in her pretty, childish face. “And what is wrong with your little monkey?”

Renie whirled to see !Xabbu's limbs stiffening in swift jerks. He was convulsing.

“Oh, my God,” she shouted. “Someone, help!”

Nothing else moved anywhere in the unfinished landscape. They were alone.

CHAPTER 28

Darkness in the Wires

NETFEED/ADVERTISEMENT: Uncle Jingle Needs YOU
!

(
visual: solar-powered Sunshine Soldiers in formation, marching.
)

S. SOLDIERS: “We don't know how you can wait

“—Uncle's deal is major great!

“Sound off! Three, Four . . .!”

(
visual: Uncle Jingle as parade leader
)

JINGLE: “Kids, this is your old Uncle Jingly-Jingle-Jangle, and I have to tell you I'm starting to whimper with woe and worry. We're having the Slaughter of Fun Month sale, and all the scorching stuff I've been showing you on Uncle Jingle's Jungle is marked way down
—
if you don't know what that means, ask your parents!
—
but there's still stuff sitting here, clogging up my shelves! Hey! Snot fair! I can't even see my wallscreen any more! So come on down to your local Jingleporium and help me get ridda some of this stuff . . .! It could all fall down and kill me
—
or worse!”

A
NNELIESE said: “
Someone is calling you
.” Her soft Virginia drawl was so familiar that for a little while it became part of Decatur Ramsey's dream. His onetime assistant joined him on the hillside, looking out over the foggy valley. Something lurked down there in the gray-shrouded hollows. Ramsey knew only that it hunted him, and that he did not much want to meet it. He wondered whether that was what Anneliese was trying to tell him, but when he turned to ask her, the fog had risen, obscuring his vision.

The dream ended quickly, collapsing into the prosaic darkness of his bedroom, and with it went Anneliese's round, serious face. But her voice remained, and told him again that someone was calling. Ramsey sat up and snapped his fingers for the time, which his system obligingly threw onto the wall in glowing blue numerals—03:45.

Anneliese's tone grew a little sterner, exhibiting that steely sweetness that ran like a freshet of cold water through generations of southern womanhood. It was strange to think that her voice was still alerting him to messages and other household information, years after she'd left his employ. He didn't even know where she was any more—married, moved to another state, dim recollection that she had sent him a birth announcement for her first child . . .

Ramsey pawed at his eyes. His face felt like an ill-fitting mask, but he was finally awake. Almost four in the morning—who the hell was it? “
Answer
.”

Anneliese's voice cut out in mid-remonstration, but nothing replaced it. Or at least Ramsey heard nothing—no voice, no hum or whispery
tick-tick
of static. But he still
felt
something, as though he stood before a window opened to the vacancy of deep space.

“Olga? Ms. Pirofsky? Is that you?”

No one spoke, but the feeling of waiting emptiness would not go away. It was as though the void itself had called him, the darkness in the wires trying to find a voice with which to speak.

“Hello? Is anyone there?”

Another hovering span of time, second stretching into second. Ramsey was sitting upright now in bed, staring into the almost total darkness above him, at the ceiling he could not see when his blackout blinds were shut, no matter the time of day or night. A knifepoint of fear touched him.

The voice, when it finally came, was an incongruous surprise. “
Ramsey, Decatur
?” A fruity, nasal Brooklynese, but oddly hesitant, as if it were puzzling out the pronunciation by phonetics. “Who is this?”

“Ramsey, Decatur?” it asked again, and then it spewed out what at first seemed a meaningless run of numbers and letters. It took long moments before his sleep-addled mind began to recognize node and message codes, addresses. His heart quickened.

“Yes, yes. This is Catur Ramsey. I left those messages. Who is this?”

A long silence. “Not authorized,” it said at last. “Whaddayou want?”

The cartoonish voice was quite difficult to take seriously, but he suspected he had very little room for error. “Please, stay connected. Is this Beezle Bug? Orlando Gardiner's agent? Can you at least confirm that?”

There was another long silence as it sorted through nesting permission hierarchies. He could almost feel its fuzzy logic overheating. “Not authorized,” it said at last, but the lack of a denial was as much admission as Ramsey needed.

“Listen to me,” he said slowly. “This is very important—important for Orlando, especially. Whatever permissions you need to talk to me, is there any way they can be obtained? If not, you're in a loop—do you understand? I want to help him, but I can't do anything if you won't cooperate. If I can't help him, he won't come back, and if he doesn't come back, he won't ever be able to give permissions for anything again.”

The cab-driver voice on the other end took on a strangely aggrieved tone. “I know what a loop is. I know lots of things, Mister. I'm good gear.” Ramsey could not help but be impressed by the responsiveness, especially for such an early generation of Pseudo-AI. Beezle
was
good gear.

“I know. So listen to me, then. Orlando Gardiner is in a coma—he is not conscious. I am an attorney for his friend Salome Fredericks—Sam, I think Orlando calls her. I want to help.”

“Fredericks,” the agent said. “He calls her ‘Fredericks.”'

Ramsey had to suppress a whoop of triumph. The thing was talking to him. There must be more flexibility in its programming than he had thought. “Right, that's right. And to help them both, I need to have information, Beezle. I need access to Orlando's files.”

“Orlando's parents tried to drezz me.” It sounded almost sulky.

“They don't understand. They can't understand why you won't let them see Orlando's files. They want to help, too.”

“Orlando told me not to let anyone see them, or change anything, or delete anything.”

“But that was before his . . . his accident, his illness. Now it's important you let me help. I promise I won't let the Gardiners turn you off—drezz you. And I'll help bring Orlando back, if it can be done.” He had a sense of Beezle now as a live thing, albeit of a strange sort. He could almost feel it out there in the darkness, a creature of legs and hard shell and skittish, fixated thoughts. He felt as though he were reeling it in from a great distance on a very, very thin line. “You can't wait for Orlando to give approval for things any more,” he added. “You have to honor the original spirit of his commands.”

God
, he thought.
If anything's going to singe its logic, that will. I don't know many humans that wouldn't have trouble with a concept like that
. And as if to prove his worries prophetic, the darkness remained alive but depressingly silent for a long time.

But when the thing spoke, it was not to announce a fuzzy logic meltdown, or to protest improper authorization. What it said startled him so that he forgot the silly voice and the strange circumstances entirely.

“I'll ask him. Back in a couple of minutes.”

Then the agent was gone. The line into the void was a broken string.

Ramsey lay back, confounded. Ask him? Who? Orlando? Had the little software agent somehow gone mad? Did gear do that? Or did it mean something else he could not understand?

He lay in the dark for a long time, his brain infested with noisy uncertainties. At last he got up and made himself a sandwich, took the milk accidentally left on the counter to warm since evening, and went to the living room to eat, look at his notes, and wait.

When Anneliese's disembodied voice announced the call, it startled him from a half-doze. His sheaf of papers—Ramsey had never shed the old-fashioned habit, learned from his father—slid to the floor with a dry splash.

“
Someone is calling you
,” Anneliese reminded him as he fumbled after his papers, sounding disappointed with his tardy response.

These things, these machines
, he thought—
what would we do without them? If all the real people disappeared, how long until some of us noticed?
More likely, but no more pleasant, what if his ex-assistant died but he did not hear of it? Her voice would still be waking him up, but from beyond the grave, as it were.

“
Answer
,” he said sharply when he had captured his notes, irritated with himself, but also full of confused apprehensions, as though he had never entirely left his earlier dream.

“It's okay—I can talk to you,” the cab-driver voice told him without preamble. “But don't think you're getting everything, ‘cause you're not.”

“Beezle, who did you just speak to?”

“Orlando.” The agent said it with calm authority.

“But he's in a coma!”

Quickly, but with what sounded suspiciously like pride, Beezle Bug explained about its midnight forays and its stolen audiences with its master. “But it only works at certain stages of his sleep cycle,” it went on. “Kinda like a carrier wave, see?”

Ramsey realized he had his first major ethical dilemma on his hands. If this was true, Orlando's parents should be told. Keeping them ignorant of a line of communication to their comatose child wouldn't only be unprofessional, but inhumanly cruel as well. But even if he could believe a chunk of code over all the doctors, the decision was still not simple. Olga Pirofsky's story had sent Catur Ramsey down some disturbing pathways in the past few days, and he was beginning to be frightened by what he had stumbled into. If his suspicions were correct, anything that punctured the general belief that Orlando Gardiner and Salome Fredericks were unreachable would put them and their families in real and terrible danger.

He weighed the problem, then decided that the middle of the night, with only two or three hours' sleep behind him, was not the time to make a decision.

“Okay, I believe you,” he said aloud. His laugh was shaky.
I'm talking to an imaginary cartoon bug
, he thought.
Who's my only contact with a witness to what may be an ongoing crime of something like genocide. Oh, and that witness is for all intents and purposes dead
. “I believe you. Millions wouldn't. So let's talk.”

And somewhere, in the darkness that was not a place, in the hours when most people were walking the farthest corridors of dream, they talked.

D
ULCIE put the loop program on, leaving the sim to sleep—or rather to counterfeit it—as she prepared for the transfer. The uninhabited body's twitches and fitful breathing mirrored her own discomfort, as though the tool had absorbed some of the feelings of its wielder.

Wielders
, she reminded herself—
plural
. The sim had two masters, after all.

In what she had told herself was the spirit of good organization (but also, she secretly knew, in an effort to keep some kind of distance between herself and her employer's invasive presence) Dulcinea Anwin had constructed a virtual office space for the Otherland Project—or “Project Dread,” as she thought of it to herself, with the pun fully intended. It was mostly snap-on gear, a standard workspace with picture windows that looked out on Dread's choice of scenery, a cold, sharp-edged version of nighttime Sydney that rather depressed her. She could have lobbied for a different view, and could certainly have replaced it with anything she wanted during her solo shifts, but as with so many other things lately, she found herself acceding bone-lessly to her employer's whims.

She reviewed her mental notes (those which could safely be shared) and spoke them aloud to update the diary file. There was more to say than usual: their puppet sim, along with the rest of the little traveling company, was in a difficult situation. The local tribespeople were upset because there had been a kidnapping, and as strangers their group was automatically suspect.

She wondered for a brief moment if there was a chance one of their number might actually be involved in the disappearance, but it seemed unlikely. They were an odd and secretive group, but it was hard to conceive of any of them as kidnappers or rapists. In fact, she had begun to feel something sneakingly like fondness for them as traveling companions. No, if anyone was capable of doing something drastic, it was her own boss—but that was impossible. Dread had rock-solid reasons for not attracting notice to their virtual persona or the company in which it traveled.

Dulcie stared at the display, the virtual city spread below her like an old-fashioned circuit map, millions of little routines flickering out their individual messages, each oblivious to the larger picture. No matter how she tried, she could not entirely dismiss the worry that Dread might have something to do with their current virtual dilemma, although she also felt certain she was just being thin-skinned. Yes, he had snapped at her, threatened her, but that didn't make him an idiot, did it? He would kill, of course he would—she had seen a dozen or more people snuffed out in the commando raid on Bolivar Atasco's island, and had herself shot someone at his orders—but those were armed soldiers and hardened criminals, and that had been war. Of a sort.