River of Blue Fire (84 page)

“We came at last to an open place, a great underground cavern like the hollow in a fruit that holds the stone. But this fruit was rotten and the stone was gone. The empty space was filled with buzzing, twittering things, with breezes and soft sighs and touches like trailing cobwebs. Where before a thousand voices had surrounded us, now it seemed a hundred times that number, a thousand times, filled the emptiness.

“As we five living things hovered in the midst of that infinite replication of loss, shivering despite the warm updraft, confused and tearful and frightened, the voices began to find a resonance with each other. Patterns gradually arose out of the chaos, as they had arisen in the great river when we neared the edge of the last simulation. I heard the million voices slowly grow less complex as they tuned themselves individually up or down, slowed their babble or sped their stuttering hesitancies. So bizarre and captivating was the process that I almost lost track of my four companions altogether—they became distant clouds on the horizon of my attention.

“The voices continued to shed their individual characteristics. Screams were muted. Low murmurs rose in pitch and volume. It all happened in moments, but it was as complex and fascinating as watching an entire world being created. I absorbed it with more than just my hearing, perceived the spikes and whorls of conflicting information slowly begin to share a vibration. I tasted the growing coherence, smelled it . . . felt it. The chaos of Babel finally resolved into a single wordless tone, like the quietest note that could possibly be played on the universe's largest pipe organ. Then it stopped. For a long moment echoes still boomed and hissed in the chamber's far corners, ripples of reaction fizzing away like fireworks down the branch tunnels. Then the silence. And out of the silence at last, a voice. All the voices. A single voice.

“‘
We are the Lost. Why have you come
?'

“Florimel, William—none of my companions spoke. They hung in the darkness beside me, limp and helpless as scarecrows. I opened my mouth but could not make a noise. I told myself that none of it was real, but was unable to believe my own declaration. The presences that filled the cavern held their peace as they waited for an answer, like a hive full of bees anticipating the sunrise—a million individuals so attuned at that moment as to be one thing.

“I found a voice at last—one that stammered so badly that it was hard for me to believe it was my own. But I made words. ‘The Middle Air People have condemned us . . .' I began.

“‘
You are from beyond the Black Ocean
,' chanted the voice of the Lost. ‘
You are not from this place. We know you
.'

“‘Kn . . . know us?' I choked.

“‘You have Other Names,' the Lost said. ‘Only those who have crossed the Ocean possess such things.'

“‘Do you . . . do you mean that you know who we . . . really are?' I was still finding it almost impossible to speak. I felt rather than heard a small, sharp movement close beside me—one of my overwhelmed companions whimpering, I thought, or signaling to me, but I could not make sense of it or even try. I was deafened, for lack of a better word, by the power of the voice of the Lost, as helpless as someone trying to remember one tune while standing in front of a full symphony playing a different one.

“‘
You have
 . . .
Other Names
,' the Lost said, as though explaining something to the slow-witted. ‘
You are Martine Desroubins. That is one of your Other Names. You come from a place called LEOS/433/2GA/50996-LOC-NIL, on the other side of the Black Ocean. Your number to call in case of emergency is
 . . .'

As the hive-voice went on to recite the number of my storefront office in Toulouse, and that of the company that operated the randomizing resat which Singh and I had rigged to bring us untraceably into the Otherland network, all in the grave tones of God speaking to Moses on the Mount, I had an instant in which the entire world turned topsy-turvy. Had all the horrors we had suffered in the past weeks only been the setup for a bizarre joke, I wondered—had we been brought through all this only to be delivered a lame but still astonishing punchline? Then I realized that whatever the Lost were, they were simply reading my incoming data. The world turned rightside-up again, or as close as possible under such mad circumstances. To the Lost, no part of my “Other Names” as they called them were trivial. They were naming me with my details, as ignorant of context as a dog following its master through every room of a house while the master hunts for its leash.

“‘
And you are Quan Li
,' the voice went on. We listened, stunned by the triviality of detail, as numbers and codes representing Quan Li's access path marched past, ending ‘. . . 
From a place called Waves of Gentle Truth Immersion Palace, Victoria, Hong Kong Special Administrative District, China, on the other side of the Black Ocean
 . . .'

“‘
Florimel Margethe Kurnemann
 . . .
Stuttgart, Germany
.' It ground oh, reciting Florimel's data now, a flurry of numbers and account information that seemed to have no ending. We all listened helplessly.

“‘
Javier Rogers
,' the voice intoned,
‘from a place called Phoenix, Arizona
 . . .' It was only when I heard his whimper of surrender, as though something had been torn from him, that I realized I was hearing T4b's real name.

The voice of the Lost rolled on for long minutes, listing a series of way stations as arcane and tangled as a sixteenth-century journey of exploration which constituted T4b's tortuous route to the Otherland network. When it stopped at last, we were silent, overwhelmed. A dim thought plucked at my attention, but before I could make sense of it the voice that was many voices spoke again, and what it said drove other preoccupations from my mind.

“‘
Why have you come? Are you meant to lead us across the White Ocean
?'

“I did not understand this. ‘The White Ocean?' I asked. ‘Not the Black, as you just said? We do not know such a place. We are trapped in your network.'

“‘
We have waited
,' it said. ‘
We are the Lost. But if we can cross the White Ocean, we will be gathered. We will be home. All will be made right
.' There was a dreadful, hollow longing in the shared voice that made me shudder.

“‘We know none of this,' I said helplessly. We were wasting time, my senses screamed now—something was happening, or threatening to happen, while this madness distracted us. I did not know from where that feeling came, but it was there and growing stronger every moment. ‘Who are you?' I asked. ‘What has brought you all here? Are you children—the children who have been captured by the network?'

“‘
We are the Lost
!' the voice said, loudly, almost angrily. ‘
You are all Other, and you must help us. The One who is Other has abandoned us, and we are lost
 . . .
lost
 . . .!' The single voice frayed then, and I could hear resonances of its individual strands.

“One of my companions was tugging at my arm now, but I was struggling to wring sense out of the situation and could not afford the attention. ‘What do you mean, we are Other, but the One who is Other has abandoned you? That is meaningless to us!'

“‘
The One who is Other brought us here
,' the voice said, but it was voices now, ragged and tuneless. ‘
It brought us out of the darkness of the Black Ocean, but it abandoned us. It is disordered, it no longer knows us or cherishes us
 . . .' Component parts almost seemed to argue within the greater chord of the voice. ‘
We must find the White Ocean, beyond the great Mountain
—
only there will we be whole again. Only there can we find our homes
. . . .' The voice was full of interference now, breaking up like a distorted radio transmission. Someone was still tugging at my arm. I turned, and sensed the information-shape of Florimel.

“‘Martine—William is gone!'

“I was baffled, overloaded. ‘What are you talking about?'

“‘William has disappeared! The voices, they did not name him—you heard!' Florimel, too, was struggling not to fly into madness. ‘And now he is gone!'

“‘S'her name, the Chinese lady, too,' T4b added in a voice shaky with terror.

The unified chorus of the Lost had almost completely degenerated again, but my sense that something terrible was about to happen grew stronger every moment.

“‘No, I am here!' Quan Li shouted. I could sense her energy signature rising up into our midst. ‘William—he pushed me. Hit me!' She was terribly agitated. ‘I think he wanted to kill me.'

“My misgivings from earlier now surged to the top. Whatever he was, William had been hiding a secret. Perhaps he
had
harmed the girl of the tribe. ‘He ran because he did not want the Lost to name him,' I said. ‘I let myself be distracted—me, the only one who could have seen him flee!'

“Before any of the others could reply, several disparate voices came together out of the cacophony to make a single voice, not the great whole, but still vibrating with urgency. ‘
The One who is Other
,' they shouted, full of fear that was also hopeless joy. ‘
The Other is coming
!'

“Then the temperature in the great cavern fell, and
it
was there—rather, it was everywhere. The information, all the information, stuttered and went rigid for a moment. I felt a terrible
something
leaning close, the same terrible thing that had nearly crushed the life from me when we entered the network. I could not help myself—animal terror made my entire nervous system convulse. I had only the sense to grab Florimel as I screamed ‘Fly! Fly!' Then I threw myself forward. Florimel clutched at me in what for her must have been complete darkness. As she shouted for help, the others grasped at her in turn as I careened forward, trying to break away. I am ashamed to say that I had no thought for any of them as they struck obstacles, as they scraped flesh and bruised bones in an attempt to stay in contact with me—my terror of that Other was simply too strong. I would have thrown my parents to it, my friends, to save myself. I think I would have sacrificed my child, if I had one.

“I could feel it pervading the space behind us like a supernova of ice, like a great shadow under which nothing could grow. Tendrils of its questing thought reached out toward me, and I know now that if it had truly wanted me, physical flight would have been useless. But I had no thought in my head at that moment except a screaming need to escape.

“Somehow the others managed to follow me, although they suffered doing so. We flew like wounded bats—catching ourselves on each other, on the cavern stone, sprawling and cartwheeling through the dark in search of freedom from the growing chill behind us. We were trapped in the endless, branching tunnels of the Place of the Lost, and we ourselves were also lost, in every way.

“We burst into a new and open place, another great hollow in the darkness. For a moment I spun in place, flapping my arms in reflexive panic. The cacophony of the voices and the deadening horror of the Other were a little less, but we were still lost in the catacombs. The cavern's information spun around me, meaningless unless I interpreted it, and it took all the self-possession I could muster just to slow my rabbiting thoughts and try to consider where we were, what we could do.

“The others crashed to a halt around me, catching at each other like drowning swimmers. I silenced them with a sharp, trembling cry, then fought to concentrate. The structured hierarchies of information around me would not yield to my panicked mind—it was all tunnels, all holes, and every hole seemed to empty back into another, a squirming mass of nothingness without outlet. I squeezed my head in my hands, trying to shut out the clamor of memories, the dull echo of the voice of the Lost, but the picture was muddy. Where was my mind? What was happening to me?

“And ever, flickering in the back of my thoughts, a tiny place that somehow even survived the terror of that Other, was the shocked un-happiness of realizing that someone who had been a good companion, almost a friend, had proved a traitor. If the nameless terror was not enough, we also shared the catacombs with our former ally, now grown inexplicably murderous. Or had he been that way all along, but only pretending? Had someone set William to spy on us? The Brotherhood? Was everything we had learned, discussed, planned, being reported to them even as we stumbled through this new universe?

“We had suspected things were not going well. We had been wildly optimistic.

“My thoughts abruptly jerked as though something had smacked against them. Somewhere, at the farthest reach of my internal darkness, I felt something new. It remains impossible to explain with mere words, the input from these changed senses of mine, but I was feeling a distortion in the patterns of information, a tiny flaw in the space itself—a weak point, as though something had scraped away at the reality of it from the far side until it was almost transparent. But what did it mean? It was all so new,
still
is so new, that there are scarcely patterns even in my own head that can encompass it. Something was altered, that was all I could tell—something was making a hole in our space.

“Conscious thought more or less returned to me then, and I wondered if I had discovered one of the places where gateways formed. I could not ponder too long—something greater and more alien than we could imagine was hunting us. I had been touched by it once. I did not think I could survive a second handling.

“Even as my companions gasped for breath, tight-chested with exertion and terror, I struggled to concentrate on that flaw in the imaginary universe that surrounded me, but no matter how I examined it, poked at it, tried to manipulate it, the quirk remained only potential. I went into that darkness so deeply that my head began to throb, but there was nothing to access, no seam or crevice deep enough for my poor understanding to exploit. It was like trying to open a bank vault with my fingernails.