River of Blue Fire (83 page)

“Builds a Fire on Air and other Red Rock Tribe members I did not recognize—most of the local families seemed to be involved—came for us as sundown approached. We were taken to the base of a huge horizontal tree, on which sat a trio of the tribe's eldest men. The father of the missing girl spoke vehemently about her abduction. Her necklace, something she always wore, had been discovered near the mouth of her family's cave, which seemed to suggest that Shines Like Snow had not left of her own will. Other families said they had seen nothing and heard nothing, and spoke of how long it had been since any of the other tribes of the valley had come raiding. When Florimel demanded we be able to ask questions and speak in our own defense, she was refused. The frailest of the three elders, a man so shrunken he seemed to have not just hollow bones but hollow everything, told us courteously but firmly that since we were outsiders, nothing we said could be trusted. He also pointed out that if we were allowed to query witnesses, we might use the opportunity to put a spell on those we questioned.

“Thus our judges arrived at the foregone conclusion—we would undergo an ordeal to test our truthfulness. We would be taken, they declared with great solemnity, to something called The Place of the Lost.

“None of us liked the sound of this. I could see that under other circumstances Florimel or T4b might have been in favor of trying to fight our way out, but we were outnumbered by a hundred to one and the long day's imprisonment had weakened our resolve. We allowed ourselves to be handled, less roughly than we expected—the Middle Air folk were decent at heart, I think—and led away through the day's dying light.

“Although prisoners and guards had to walk, we nevertheless went to the place of our ordeal as a veritable aerial parade, since an army of onlookers swooped and hovered just behind us, like gulls following a garbage scow. We were forced to march for the better part of an hour, climbing at last to a hollow in the cliff face several hundred meters across—a natural bowl where Aerodromians a thousand generations or so in the future might one day attend symphony concerts. This scooped-out space, no doubt the work of some glacier, was empty but for a talus slope that carpeted most of the bottom, and one large round rock in the middle that to my senses seemed ominously like a sacrificial altar.

“I imagined our virtual bodies being tested by the Thousand Cuts or something similar, and for the first time the likelihood of torture and death truly struck me. I began to sweat, though the evening breeze was cool and pleasant. A sudden and oddly horrifying thought came to me—what if they did something to my eyes? The idea of an assault on these—the most useless organs in my body, and virtual besides—nevertheless filled me with a terror so great I writhed in the grip of my two guards, and would have fallen had they not held me up.

“Two dozen or so of the younger and stronger men glided to the ground beside the stone. They put their shoulders against it, grunting and even shouting in their exertion, until at last the stone trembled and slid a meter or two sideways to reveal a blackness beneath. One by one we were dragged to this opening and thrown in. Sweet William went first, and with surprising dignity. When it was my turn, I made myself as small as possible. When I had dropped through, I spread my arms and hovered. I had not known for certain that we would still be able to fly in the cave, but the place was full of strange updrafts—unpredictable, yet enough to keep us floating in one place if we worked at it.

Quan Li had not yet mastered the art of staying upright, and I sensed her now a short distance from me, struggling for equilibrium. Before I could say anything to ease her fears, the vast boulder slid back across the hole and we were plunged into complete darkness.

“Of course, Unknown Listener, as you must have guessed if you have heard my other journal entries, the situation was not as bad for me as it was for the rest of my companions—not at first. Darkness is my element, and the disappearance of light registered to me only as a shift in what the simulation itself was allowed to show in the visible spectrum, not in what I could actually perceive. I could sense the convoluted space of the cave around us, even track the intricate, fluted walls and spiky stalactites as whorls in the flow of information, much as someone watching a river might discern the position of hidden stones by how they deformed the river's surface.

“I had promised myself that I would take a more commanding role in my own fate, so as the others cried out to each other in terror, I calmly absorbed the details of our surroundings, trying to create a mental map.

“Calmly? Actually, I am not sure of that. It was one of my lovers in my university days—before I retreated to my home beneath the Black Mountain and metaphorically sealed the tunnel behind me—who said I was cool and hard as titanium, and just as flexible. He was referring to my habit of standing back from things. It must sound odd to one who does not know me, to hear me speak of the horrors I have already described, and the greater and stranger ones to come, in my detached way. But although that man's words hurt me then, I asked him, ‘What do you expect? Do you think a woman who cannot see should dive into things headfirst?'

“‘Dive?' he said, and laughed, genuinely amused. He was a bastard, but he did enjoy a joke. ‘You, dive? You cannot even enter a room without examining the blueprints first.'

“He was not entirely exaggerating. And as I listen to myself now, I hear that Martine speaking, the one who must research everything, catalogue everything, perhaps because I have always had to make a map for myself just to move through a world in which others simply live.

“So it is possible that I am making it all sound too cold, too certain. My companions were lost in the dark. I was not as lost. But I was still fearful, and quickly learned that fear was justified.

“The cave was a vast thing like a broken honeycomb, full of pockets and twisting tunnels. We hovered in the empty space beneath the opening, but all around us in the darkness lurked razoring stone corners, knifelike edges, and deadly spikes. Yes, we could fly, but what good was that when we could not see, and a few inches away in any direction there might be an impediment that would main or kill? Already Quan Li had torn her arm on a ragged piece of stone. Even the voice of bold, self-sufficient Florimel quavered with a panic that seemed about to twist out of control.

“Also, although none of the others had realized it yet, we were not alone.

“With some idea now of the shape of the space around us, I called to my companions to stay in place if they could. As I told some where to move so they would be in less immediate danger, I began to perceive a shift in the information field—only tiny ripples at first, but rapidly becoming larger and more pervasive. Of the rest, Quan Li was the first to hear the voices.

“‘What is that?' she cried. ‘Someone . . . there is someone out there. . . .'

The sounds grew louder, as though they came whispering toward us from all corners of the labyrinth—a flurry of invisible things, filling the darkness with what at first seemed just moans and sighs, but from which words began to emerge.

“‘. . . 
No
 . . .' they whispered, and ‘
Lost
 . . .' Others sobbed, ‘
Help me
 . . . !' and wailed, ‘
Cold, so cold, so cold
 . . .,'—a thousand quietly weeping ghosts, murmuring and rustling around us like the wind.

“But I alone could see them, in my own way. I alone could sense that these were not whole creatures, that they did not have virtual bodies as my companions did, flexible, locked sets of algorithms moving with purpose. What surrounded us was a fog of emergent form, humanlike configurations that arose out of the information noise and then dissolved again. None were complete in themselves, but although they were partial and ephemeral, they were also as individual as snowflakes. They seemed far more than just a trick of programming—each phantom, in its moments of quintessence, seemed somehow undeniably real to me. I already find it difficult to distinguish between the realism of my companions and the realism of the network's simulated people, but these phenomena were even more complex. If such richness can be engendered purely by mechanical means, even by a system as magically capable as Otherland, then I have much to consider.

“But the most undeniable thing about these phantoms was that they filled us with terror and pity. The voices were those of lost and miserable children, begging to be saved, or crying out in the helplessness of nightmare, a chorus of bereavement and pain that no sane mind could ignore. Every nerve in me, every cell of my real body, yearned to help them, but they were as insubstantial as smoke. Despite whatever rationale as code they might have had, they were also ghosts, or the word has no meaning.

“T4b suddenly began shouting, hoarse with rage, the closest to adult I have ever heard him. ‘
Matti
?' he screamed, ‘Matti, it's me! Come back!' Far more blind than me at that moment, he nevertheless flung himself forward and tumbled awkwardly into the cloud of information, clawing at the nothingness with his fingers. Within an instant he was drifting helplessly down a side tunnel, thrashing as he tried to capture something that was not there. I alone could pierce the darkness and see him, and I flung myself into pursuit. I grasped one of his spike-studded ankles and let out a shriek of my own as I felt the sharp points score my flesh. I called for the others to help me, shouting so that they could follow my voice, and I clung to him even as he fought me.

“Before the others reached us, he landed one maddened blow to the side of my head which fired my interior world with a lightless blaze. Knocked almost senseless, I could not tell who captured him or how. He fought them, fought all of them, and was still weeping and calling out to someone named Matti as they dragged him back to the central open space. I was disoriented, spinning slowly in the air where I had been struck, like an untethered astronaut. Quan Li came and took my elbow and drew me back to the others.

“For a while we simply hovered there as the cloud of mourning spirits breathed around us. Shadow-fingers touched our faces, voices murmured just below audibility at our shoulders, behind us, sometimes it almost seemed
inside
us. Quan Li heard something that seemed to make her weep—I felt her begin shaking beside me, convulsive movements, helpless sobs.

“‘What are these things?' Florimel demanded. ‘What is happening?' But there was no righteousness, no strength in her voice. She had surrendered to confusion.

“As my wits came back, I thought of the people of Aerodromia, the Stone-Age tribesfolk outside the cavern. No wonder this was their ordeal for suspected criminals, I reflected—if it could fill us with such fright, when we knew it was not real, how much more terrible must it be for them?

“I suddenly realized that I was feeling pity for fictional creations. The reality of this unreality had conquered me.

“Even as I thought these disordered things, I perceived that the insubstantial host keening around us had begun to draw us out of the central chamber. The feathery touches, the whispering voices, were urging and leading us. I alone could sense our surroundings, and understood that they were taking us through spaces large enough that we would not be injured, and so I did not resist. The others, far more disoriented than I was, did not even realize that they were drifting farther and farther from the spot where we had entered the Place of the Lost.

“Florimel floated closer to me, and above the windy murmuring of the voices, asked: ‘Do you think these are what we're looking for? Are these the children, the lost children?'

“Despite my mind still working slowly after the blow from T4b's hammering fist, I could not help feeling like the world's greatest idiot. Until she spoke, I had not considered what his outburst might have meant. Was she right? Could this be a place where the comatose victims of the Brotherhood had their virtual existence? Were the chittering spirits around us more than simply an artistic effect in a magical simworld? If so, I realized, we were indeed surrounded by ghosts—the restless spirits of the good-as-dead.

My last structures of detachment crashed down and I felt myself go cold. What if one of these was Renie's brother Stephen? How much more dreadful for him than the dreamless sleep of coma that would be. I tried to understand such an existence—to live as little more than a cloud of information, semi-coherent, struggling and lost. I tried to imagine how it might feel to a little boy as he fought to maintain the knowledge of his individuality, as he struggled to stay sane in endless, chaotic darkness while all that remained of his true self, like a single ice cube floating in the ocean, threatened at any moment to dissolve and disappear.

“Tears started in my eyes. Fury made me ball my fists and clutch them against my belly, so that for a moment I began to fall, and had to spread my arms again. Even summoning this image for my journal fills me with sick anger. If those few words from Florimel—or whoever she actually is—prove true, I cannot imagine telling it to Renie Sulaweyo. Better to lie to her. Better to tell her that her brother is dead. Better to tell Renie anything at all, rather than even let her guess at such a horrible truth.

“The ghosts led us onward, and as we moved through the cramped spaces of night, their voices grew more comprehensible. Whole sentences floated up from the cacophony, snatches of thoughts and bits of lives as apparently meaningless as a phone line accessed at random. Some spoke of things they had done, or of things they meant to do. Others simply babbled strings of apparently meaningless words. One, a breathy, lisping voice that sounded like a very young girl's, recited a nursery rhyme I remembered from my youth, and for a moment I almost believed I was hearing my own ghost, the shade of the child who had been as good as murdered the night the power went out in the Pestalozzi Institute.