River of Blue Fire (78 page)

As for what he had said to her . . . well, some men just liked to threaten women. She had met the type before—had even once been forced to rearrange the face of one, a drunkenly aggressive Russian mercenary, with a rock crystal ashtray. But Dread wouldn't piss in his own punchbowl, as her father had liked to say. He was far too smart for that.

But that was the problem, wasn't it? That was why she couldn't think straight about any of this. She'd never met anyone quite as smart as Dread seemed to be, or at least she hadn't met any who also had his weird animal charisma. Her earlier dismissal of him as a self-aggrandizing lowlife, a death-and-destruction fanboy, of whom she had met far too many, now seemed facile: there was something other than the normal mercenary brutalism going on behind that strange dark face, and Dulcie had to admit she was beginning to get interested.

Oh, please
, she told herself.
It's bad enough you chose to work with people like that. You don't want to get involved with one again, too. How many times do you have to make that mistake?

But of course, it was the excitement of real danger that had brought her out of her old job in international banking—through a financier boyfriend who dabbled in, but was ultimately afraid of, the actual hardcore stuff—into the world of black ops. There was still a part of her that ached to go back to her high school reunion one day and tell all those girls who used to call her “Dulcie Android” and “Gearhead” the truth about where life had taken her. “
What do I do for a living
?” she would say. “
Oh, overthrow governments, smuggle weapons and narcotics, you know, just
 . . .
stuff
. . . .” But it was a useless fantasy. Even if they believed her, they would never understand, those ex-cheerleaders and proud PTA presidents whose idea of being really bad was fudging their taxes or having a meaningless affair with the pool cleaner. They would never understand the giddy high, the no-hands, terrifying exhilaration of a big op. And she, Dulcinea Anwin—the same little Dulcie Android, with her math books and her glasses and her one-year-late crop haircut—was now a serious player.

A chime sounded. A moment later Dread appeared in the middle of the office, his sim dressed in the black shirt and pants he favored, his hair pulled into a horsetail that vanished into the color of his shirt at the back. He sketched a little bow. Dulcie could not help wondering how closely the sim's rangy but muscular frame mimicked his real-life shape. He appeared no taller than she, perhaps even a bit shorter, but could easily have corrected that on his sim if it were an issue. She liked that it wasn't.

“Asleep?” he asked. He seemed very smiley, bubbling over with happy secrets.

“Yeah. Some of them are talking, but at least one other person was sleeping, so it seemed okay to slide offline and catch up on some notes. It's been a busy day in Flying Caveman Land.”

“Ah.” He nodded, almost too gravely, as though he were getting ready to tell a joke. “Still that kidnapping thing? No change?”

“Not really. They're still being held—there's supposed to be some sort of tribal gathering or something where the crime will be discussed.” She couldn't get a fix on him today. Something was definitely up—even his sim seemed to crackle with electricity. “You seem very cheerful. Did you get some happy news?”

“Did I. . . ? No. I suppose I'm just in a good mood.” He grinned, a shark-flash of white. “You're looking very good yourself, Dulcie. Is that a real-time sim, or have you sculpted it a bit?”

She looked down at her virtual self quickly, then realized he was teasing her. “It's real-time, as you damn well know. Just plain old me.” Even the way he admired her was strange—predatorily sexual, but also somehow nonsexual at the same time, like a sultan with a hundred wives trying to decide whether to make a well-connected young noblewoman his hundred and first. Again, she was seized by conflicting impulses, the need to put distance between herself and this man countered by the mesmeric effect he had on her.

Schoolgirl crush
, she thought, half-amused, half-disgusted.
You always did like the bad boys, Anwin
.

“Well, I'm sure you have things to do,” he said abruptly, almost dismissively. “Feed your cat, whatever. And I'd better get to work.” He held up his hand to forestall her next remark. “I'll go over the notes after I check in.” He paused, thinking. “You know, you've been working really hard lately. Why don't you take twenty-four hours off? No, make it forty-eight. Paid, of course. Give you a chance to catch up with things at home. I haven't been giving you much time for that lately.”

He had wrong-footed her again—she had never met anyone who could do that so consistently. What was this about? Was he trying to get her out of the way, afraid she would bungle this business with the tribal council? Or was he genuinely being nice? It was true, she had pulled so many twelve-hour shifts lately she hadn't had time to do more than shower and sleep and review her crisis-mail in between. There were still things on the home front to be taken care of that had gone untouched since she had returned from Colombia.

“That's . . . that would be fine, yeah.” She nodded her head. “Are you sure it won't be too much for you?”

“Oh, I'll rest when I need to.” He smiled confidently, and she was struck yet again by his energy. She'd never seen him quite like this.

“Okay, then. Chizz. I'll see you. . . .”

“This time, day after tomorrow. Enjoy your days off.”

She left the virtual office, disconnected, and sat on the couch for a while, letting her confused thoughts run freely, go skittering without rhyme or reason. Jones vaulted up into her lap and butted her hand, asking to be petted.

Dulcie could not get the memory of Dread's bright, bright smile out of her head, of the energy coiled in his virtual frame. Or the look on his face the other time, when he had threatened her, his eyes dark as stones. She could not stop thinking about him.

God help me
, she thought, tugging absentmindedly at Jones' collar.
I'm either falling for him . . . or he scares me to death.

If there's even a difference
.

W
ITH Dulcie gone, the man who had once been the boy named Johnny Wulgaru cranked up his internal music—polyrhythms, mostly tuneless, but energetic as locusts feeding—and contemplated the virtual city spread beyond the windows of the imaginary office. It was so like a woman to want a
place
to do things. That was one of the ways you saw the animal in them, that deep nesting urge. Even his whore mother had liked to drape colorful scarves across the broken furniture every now and then, sweep up the ampules and the empty squeeze-bottles and “make the place nice”—which was like gilding a dog turd, but try telling that to the stupid bitch. Women didn't float, like men did. They were rooted, or they wanted to be. You didn't see many women following the road, drifting from place to place. Of course, perhaps that was because they didn't want to be with the kind of men who did.

But it was also why, since he had learned to control anger, he killed men only for money, or occasionally out of practical necessity. Because women were close to the ground, close to the machineries of life, there was a vitality in them that men lacked. Men would throw their lives away, often as not in a futile gesture, in some preprogrammed rage-loop that meant nothing, that was only Nature's way of tidying up the board. But women clung to life—they were of it completely, in it from their soiled feet to their life-extruding loins to their wary eyes. They
were
life, in some way he could not explain, and thus it was more than simply a job to hunt them and snatch it from them. It was a shout against all the world. It was a way to make the universe itself take notice.

Dread snapped his fingers and the cityscape shifted. The Sydney Opera House appeared from one side of the window and glided into the center of his view, as though the office itself were rotating. The city lights streamed past, glittering, each and every one of them a sort of star, each illuminating its own dependent worlds. But Dread was the Destroyer of Worlds.

He brought up the polyrhythms until he could feel them cascading through him like pachinko balls, rattling the bones of his head and tightening his skin. He felt good—very good indeed. He had a plan, still largely unformed, but even in its embryonic form it burned inside him and made him quiver with energy. At moments like this, he felt himself to be the only truly living thing in existence.

The hunt had been good—very, very good. The pale-haired creature in the flying world had acted just as prey should. She had wept. She had bargained. She had cursed and then wept again. She had fought until the very last moment, and then accepted his black kiss with a broken, pained grace that no male victim, real or virtual, could ever match. The memory of it all still rolled through his veins like the purest opiate, but it did not suppress the excitement of his burgeoning plans: in fact, the memory of his own mastery made the contemplation better, laying the cool hand of practical possibility across the fevered brow of ambition.

Of ambition? No, say it, tell the truth—of godhood. For this must be the way that the gods felt, all those raping, murdering, lightning-flinging, shape-changing monstrosities that used to rule the world. His mother's Aboriginal tales, the Greek myths in school books, the tattered comic books he had found in wards and children's homes, all sources agreed: the gods were powerful, and thus could take anything they wanted, do anything they chose. In no other ways were they different from humans. But where humans wished, or envied, or wanted, gods
took
and
did
.

Well, he was halfway to godhood already, wasn't he? The rest couldn't be too hard.

Dread entered the sim and lay for a while in the shared darkness, listening to his own breath, feeling the chill air creep in from the mouth of the cave. Some people were whispering close by—his companions, perhaps, or their captors. He kept his eyes closed. He was in no hurry. There was suspicion among the members of their little company now, but it was still muted. Other than that glorious hunt, he had done nothing, nor had Dulcie, to draw unnecessary attention.

But Dread was beginning to wonder if that even mattered anymore. What was the value of passing for one of these stumbling fools, when they seemed incapable of doing anything? There were countless worlds here, each exciting in a million ways, and they had explored barely any of them. Worse, they had discovered nothing useful about what the Old Man and his colleagues planned. Dread had committed himself to this horribly dangerous bit of treachery largely because he suspected it would be his best (and perhaps only) chance to send the ancient bastard down the road to painful obliteration, but nothing was coming of it.

He had been cultivating patience so carefully—somehow, at some point, he knew he must be rewarded for it. But not, it had begun to seem, if he yoked himself to these shuffling oxen. Except for the Martine woman, they seemed to have no grasp of the underlying rules of the place, could not feel its movements as he could. They had no rhythm, that was the pathetic truth—no sense of the music of being.

So what to do next? How to move closer to the prize he sensed beat at the heart of this man-made universe? Perhaps it was time to shed these losers and move on.

As he lay in the dark, pondering, one of his companions rolled over and touched his shoulder. Dread had been so far away, so wrapped in complex, exultant thoughts, that at first he could not remember who he was supposed to be, and even after his own false identity came back to him, a few more long seconds passed before he recognized who was whispering to him.

“Are you awake? I need to talk to you.” The voice was very close to his ear. “I—I heard one of us come back last night, after we all went to sleep. When that girl disappeared. And I think I know who it was.”

Dread rolled the sim body over, keeping the muscles loose and ready. “Oh, no!” He tried to sound what he hoped was the right note of whispered fear. “You mean you think . . . you think one of us . . . is a murderer?”

But inside he was laughing, laughing.

CHAPTER 29

Imaginary Gardens

NETFEED/NEWS: Parents Cannot Implant Without Court Order

(visual: Holger Pangborn and lawyer getting out of car)

VO: The US Supreme Court upheld a lower-court decision that the father and stepmother of Holger Pangborn violated his civil rights when they had the Arizona teenager implanted with a behavior-monitoring device similar to the mod-parole chips used on criminals in Russian and some other Third World countries. The senior Pangborns have said they will take the case to the human rights court of the UN
.

H. PANGBORN'S ATTY: “Not only did they literally violate his body, they did so in an appallingly dangerous, slipshod manner. The implant was performed by someone who wasn't even a doctor, someone whose license to practice medicine had been cancelled by the State of Arizona two years earlier for gross malfeasance
 . . .
”

I
N his native language, there had been words that came closer than any English phrase to explaining how Sellars thought of this place—the spot where all that he planned and did could be properly considered.

Technologists had their own terms for such things, prosaic if not downright embarrassing, on very rare occasions inspired. But whether it was called an interface, a data display, or a dream library, what had begun a century before as an attempt to conceptualize information in ways that people other than engineers could understand, starting with crude images of the most mundane business objects—file folders, in-boxes, wastebaskets—had expanded along with the power of the technology, until the ways in which information could be ordered and acted upon were as individual, even peculiar, as the people who used it. And Sellars was a peculiar individual by any standards.

As he did every day soon after waking, he closed his eyes and sank deep into himself, into the depths of his distributed system, which was hidden in the interstices of countless other systems, a series of tiny parasitic nodes feeding unobserved on the thick hide of the vast terrestrial datasphere. Sellars had learned this trick of distribution from TreeHouse and similar bandit sites, but had made it his own, carrying it to an extent that no one could have imagined a single individual could accomplish. At first the largest part of his tendrils had siphoned resources directly from his captors, the United States military. In anticipation of changing times, he had later begun to transfer linkage to scores of other networks, but there was no little satisfaction in knowing that he had engineered his escape with the tools of the very people who had held him prisoner. He had done it right under their noses, too, using access methods they had not guessed at, leaving no traces to be found by the intelligence sweepers, who routinely combed his small house on the military base for proscribed objects or other indications that he was less resigned to his fate than he seemed, or by the military surgeons, who for years had examined him in the most intimate, unpleasant ways on a frequent but unscheduled basis.

Sellars was patient in ways his opponents could not understand, and subtle beyond their best guesses. He had been playing a long game, and almost five decades of apparent resignation had lulled even the most suspicious minds. But they had missed the most fundamental fact: although he had recently completed his physical escape, and was hiding, like Conan Doyle's purloined letter, in what was nearly plain sight—just a yard or two beneath the very feet of the men who were hunting him, in the disused utility tunnels of their own base—he had escaped into the information sphere years earlier. And since the moment when he had first found his way there, springing from the trap of his crippled body and his house arrest into the freedom of the net, Sellars had never again considered himself to be a prisoner.

He sank into his system and then summoned his information like Prospero calling a trillion Ariels from a trillion cloven pines. Whether his warders had been correct, or he had—whether he had been a prisoner, or only appeared to be one—his actual departure from the little house and their immediate scrutiny had been a necessary step in his campaign, which now entered its most difficult phase. Unlike the skirmishes with his outmatched captors, his true task had been nearly hopeless from the very first, and teetered minute by minute on the brink of failure. Failure, though, was not an acceptable option: its consequences would be terrible beyond imagination.

Sellars could feel the information gathering thick and lively around him now. In the depths of his own thoughts, submersed in
on
and
off
in their potentially infinite patterns, he began to examine the most recent changes in his information model. Although he had never spoken of it to anyone, he thought of it as his Garden.

On occasions, when he had been happier and more optimistic than he was now, Sellars had even thought of it as a Poetry Garden.

His information model was a profusion, a struggle, a violent but paradoxically controlled exchange of subtleties. It had the look of a jungle, a place where things grew and fought, altered, adapted, where strategies blossomed spectacularly then failed, or bloomed and survived, or simply absorbed the moisture of informational existence and waited. “Garden” was more than just his name for it—Sellars had shaped the indicators in the form of plants, although few of them resembled anything found in a botanist's field manual. The virtual flora altered with the information they symbolized, changing shape and habit as the database relations shifted.

The Garden presented itself as a great sphere. Sellars' bodiless point-of-view floated at its center, able instantaneously to see larger patterns of growth, or to move microscope-close—near enough to count individual grains of pollen on a symbolic stamen. Once upon a time the Garden had represented the full diversity of his interests, all his pastimes and fascinations, the dreams which he could pursue unfettered only in the ether of information space. Now those other functions had shrunk to a few representative images, a bare fraction of the whole—a moss of infrastructure control functions, some vines that marked various telecommunication strategies, and here and there the fading flower of an ignored but not yet officially discontinued project.

These days a new ecology held sway in the Garden. What had started years before as a sifting of new spores, a heliotropic tug on a few of the existing data plants, had become the dominant paradigm. Just as hardier species might invade and eventually supplant a frail indigenous population, Otherland now dominated Sellars' Eden.

He had chosen this form for his model because he had always loved gardens.

During his long years as a pilot, his epic, lonely journeys, he had lived only for the times when he could tend to growing things and see them responding to his care—changing, elaborating,
becoming
. Sellars could think of no happier human metaphor for God than that of Gardener. In fact, he secretly sympathized most strongly with Him in His decision to send the angel with the flaming sword to evict the first man and woman when they proved unworthy of the home He had given them. To the extent that he indulged the metaphor, Sellars did not believe that Adam and Eve had been corrupted by knowledge, but by misunderstood knowledge: something, whether serpentine or otherwise, had led them to believe—as humans still tended to do—that they were not simply part of the Garden, but rather its owners.

He sometimes thought of his data model as a Poetry Garden because Sellars could not help bringing poetry into everything he cared about. In his long years of imprisonment he had sought it out as other prisoners sought out drugs or religious certainty, and he had used it to shape everything he made and everything he thought. He absorbed the Garden's changing states as a lover of haiku contemplated poems about rain, and listened to its soundless voice as another might feel the perfect rhythm of a descending line. As with any good poem, Sellars felt the Garden's life more than he thought about it, but as also with the best poetry, when he did choose to apply rational thought, it yielded more than he could have dreamed.

An American poet named Marianne Moore, writing about the duties of poets, had once suggested that they should present for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”—that the substance of art, as Sellars understood it, had to be leavened with the art of substance.

But now the study of Otherland had changed his Poetry Garden into something barely comprehensible—a swirl of fantastical plants which seemed almost to have no end or beginning, as though the information symbolized in the model was growing into one maddening, infinitely complex, infinitely interlinked thing. The Otherland model represented a conspiracy so intricate and yet apparently absurd that even the most eagerly delusional paranoid would take one look at it and return in disgust to normality. It threatened the entire world, and yet it made no sense.

Sellars was beginning to think that his imaginary Garden could use a few good toads.

He had been staring at the latest version of the information for a long time without really seeing it, he realized. His body meant little to him, but it was hard to deny that the discomfort of his current situation, physical and otherwise, was having an effect on his thinking. In the past days he had found it very hard to wake up, and even after he did, it took him a long time to think clearly—to
see
what was needful to see. He had hoped that the luck of encountering the homeless boy might bring him some respite, but so far the Cho-Cho experiments had been notable failures.

Sellars envied the precision of mechanical operation. Sometimes it seemed that being an organic life-form was a hindrance at best. He had slept for long hours the night before, but he was still not rested, yet the ever-changing patterns in the Garden were crying out for attention. He did his best to push back the fatigue and disappointment of the past week.

One frustration could not be ignored, and it struck him afresh every time he entered this metaphorical place. The people within the Other-land network—those he had summoned into risk, and to whom he had spoken in the Atascos' simulation—were almost completely hidden from him. Since they were at the center of his hopes, any representation which did not show something of their situation was hopelessly flawed. But in the last few days there had arisen a happier but no less maddening paradox: if not for the emergence of what now seemed his greatest enemy, he would have no information about them at all.

Sellars had thought, as he had built his knowledge of the Grail Brotherhood and their insanely ambitious network over the years, that the one who would require the greatest attention and care was Jongleur. The oldest man alive was still a terrifyingly powerful and subtle enemy, but anyone that important in the real world could not help leaving indicators of his actions. A vast, bushy plant with poisonous-looking white flowers near the center of the information model stood as testament to all that Sellars knew about Jongleur. Its stems might stretch astonishingly wide, prying like thin fingers into the Garden's farthest reaches, its roots might bulge the mossy soil in every direction, but the plant itself was at least an individual entity, available for examination and theoretically, if not practically, knowable.

But more and more, as Sellars had fought against the resistance of the Otherland network, desperate to reach the volunteers he had deserted so suddenly, he had come to realize that the network itself, or something that had grown because of it, was his greatest and most worrisome problem. The virtual plant that represented Jongleur and his actions was comprehensible—just like a real plant, it fed itself and fought for sunlight, struggling for survival in the same way that Jongleur bent all his power in pursuit of what might currently be obscure, but were in all likelihood sensibly self-serving goals.

But the operating system, or whatever it was that so fiercely guarded the network, the thing which had already killed several people and had almost killed Sellars himself more than once, was far less comprehensible. In his Otherland-dominated Garden, it manifested as a kind of fungus, one of those primitive organisms that in the real world could grow rapidly and invisibly beneath the earth, expanding for thousands of yards until it had become the largest of all living things. The actual phenomenon this virtual fungus represented—”the Other,” as some of the more secretive communications of the Grail Brotherhood referred to it—was clearly an intimate part of the network itself. In Sellars' Garden model, based on all the information he had gathered about its nature and its actions, it sent saprophytic tendrils of interest everywhere, in almost incomprehensible profusion, but the fruiting bodies of its actions came to the surface in only a few places.

But here was Sellars' relatively happy paradox: its near-ubiquitous-ness had become a major practical boon to him.

In the early hours of being forced out of the network after the Atasco sanctuary had been attacked, and in countless cautious experiments since, Sellars had learned that the Other, whatever it truly was, seemed to be drawn in some way to the people he had smuggled into the network. On those few occasions he had managed temporarily to fix their position (all but once too briefly to make contact of any kind) he had also discovered that position to be surrounded by a whorl of Other-related activity. It was strange—almost as though his volunteers held some kind of fascination for the network itself. If it had been the straightforward fascination that a foreign object inspired in an antibody, as would seem logical, he felt sure they would long ago have been eliminated, as the old man Singh had been, slain by a massive coronary in his South African convalescent hospital room.