River of Blue Fire (88 page)

It was so preposterous that even the logic of dreams was insulted.

The matte-black pyramid stretched so high that it had no visible apex, so wide that it was literally impossible to look in another direction. The visible slivers of night sky on either side of it, though lit only by a few faint stars, seemed almost bright blue in comparison to the pyramid's profound blackness.

He knew he could not deal with this heart-stopping thing alone, and called for the beetle who had spoken to him in other dreams, but he was afraid to raise his voice, and although he called for a long time, the creature did not answer him. But someone did.

He cannot come, your servant. I do not feel him here
. She said it as someone who carries sad news for which she feels a small responsibility.
He is in other dreams, perhaps
.

Orlando turned and found her hovering beside him, a shadow barely distinguishable from the night, the feather still clasped in her hand as though it might be some defense against the impossible black pyramid.

Can't you help me?
He turned back to the shape which spread so high and so far to either side there seemed nothing else on that side of the world.
I can't get past this thing. We're going to die here if no one helps us
.

You cannot avoid him
, she said, not unkindly.
There is no story like that. He is at the center of all of this. He must be faced
.

Is it . . . is it Osiris?

Her face, although hard to see in darkness, seemed to twist as if in pain.
No
, she said.
No, the one who wants your life is something far stranger than that. He is the Lord Set, the sleeping one who rules the Red Lands. He is the one who dreams—we are his nightmares. He dreams you, too
.

He had heard those words before, somewhere.
Who are you?
he demanded.

Ma'at, the goddess of Justice
, she said.

I mean really
.

I am a voice
, she said,—
a word. I am a moment. It does not matter
.

And suddenly it came to him.
You're the woman from the freezer. Sleeping Beauty. You talked to us before. You told us to find our friends at Priam's Walls
.

She did not speak, and now her face was entirely veiled in shadow.

But why don't you help us? You must be trapped here, like us! If we don't get around this temple and out of this desert, we'll die, and so will a lot of other people. And all the children, the lost children!

She had drifted a little way back, and when more silence followed his plea, he was sure he had lost her. He could see only an outline, a hole in the night sky, the silhouette of an angel.

Please?
He reached out a hand.
Please?

Remember, this is a dream
, she told him, but it sounded as though she were the one half-asleep.

I know you can do something
, Orlando said, and suddenly it did not matter whether this was a dream or not. Something important was within his grasp, perhaps for the last time, and he could not afford to let go.
You know things. Help us get out of here
.

There are balances you cannot understand
, she protested, her voice faint as a wind that did not move even the most powdery sand.
Things you do not know
 . . .

Please?

She bowed her head then and raised one hand, showing him her palm, ghost-pale against the darkness. He could see a star right through it.
Go forward until you see my sign
, she whispered.
I pray that I do the right thing. We are too many, and there is no single one to guide us
.

What are you talking about?
She seemed willing to help him, but he could make no sense of what she was saying. He felt the chance slipping away.
Go forward
. . . ?

Walk into the darkness
, she said.
You will see my sign
. . . .

Then she was gone, and the great pyramid shredded like smoke, and all that remained was the black sky and a single bright star.

His cheek pressed flat against the sand, his mouth half-full of grit, Orlando opened his eyes. The star and its dimmer kindred were all that remained to light the night. The moon had gone long ago. The sense of what lay just the other side of the dune was undiminished: the temple was a whirlpool, and they were already in its vortex. No matter which way they turned, they would not escape it.

Walk into the darkness
 . . .

But she couldn't have meant . . .

Walk into the darkness
 . . .

Orlando sat up, heart speeding. If he thought about it too long, even in the midst of all this other madness—this virtual universe, this imaginary Egypt, this temple with the awful vitality of a vampire's secret resting place—he would not be able to believe it. She had come to him in a dream. She had told him what to do. The fact that it was the thing he least wanted to do made it all the more critical he not waste time thinking any longer.

He shook Fredericks awake.

“What? What?”

“Come on. Follow me.” He scrambled up the side of the shallow pit and then stood. Every joint burned like fire and his breath smoldered in his lungs, but he could not afford to think about those things, either. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“Just come with me. Just . . . follow.”

Fredericks watched Orlando's first hobbling steps with astonishment all over his sleepy face, an astonishment which turned swiftly to terror. “What are you doing? That . . . that
thing's
over there.”

“That thing's everywhere.”

“Orlando! Come back!”

He ignored his friend and kept moving forward. The last thing he could afford to do was listen to sense.

“Gardiner, you're scaring me! Are you scanbarking beyond the uttermost, or what? Orlando! Come back!”

One foot in front of the other—
left, right, left
. He felt the horrible magnetic tug of the temple, and suddenly the struggle was not to limp forward, but to keep from running toward it. Something had its grip on him now, a clutch so powerful that if his legs had fallen off he would have dragged himself ahead with his arms alone. The presence opened before him like a poisonous flower calling to a small crawling thing, offering a voiceless, formless, but virtually irresistible invitation. It wanted him. It wanted his life.

“Gardiner!”

Fredericks' cry seemed quite distant. The part of Orlando's brain that was still his own felt sad; he knew that his friend was hesitating, torn between Orlando and his own safety. A moment later, he heard Fredericks' footsteps crunching through the sand behind him, and knew that his friend had made a choice. If Orlando was wrong, or the woman with the feather had been wrong, Orlando had now doomed them both.

But what had she said? “
You will see my sign
”—what did that mean? What kind of help could she give to him?

He was past the crest of the hill now, and moving swiftly downward with the clumsy articulation of a malfunctioning toy. Twice he fell and rolled, but the force that had him in its clutch did not allow him to discover whether or not he had hurt himself; it yanked him to his feet and drew him onward.

Fredericks had quit calling out, but Orlando could hear his friend's harsh, frightened breathing close behind. They stumbled and crawled off the sand hill and onto the valley floor. The temple simultaneously squatted and loomed before them, the columnar teeth smiling wide in anticipation of a coming meal. Orlando could sense that the thing that lived behind that dead grin was sleeping, or partially absent in some other way, but as though he were a flea on a dog's back feeling the first tremors of movement, he could also feel the massive presence beginning to rise toward wakefulness. He stumbled beneath the weight of that terrible sensation and fell, but the pull did not slacken. He could not even take the time to rise, but was forced to crawl forward over the uneven ground.

Some of the sand on the valley floor had been fused into hard lumps and ridges, as though some terrible heat had turned it into crude glass. Boulders and raw shards of stone were everywhere, pieces torn from the distant mountains then crumbled and dropped around the temple. The smaller fragments cut his knees and palms, and Orlando's breath now came out in a continuous moan of pain. Behind him, Fredericks was crying, too. Orlando tried to crawl on the places where the sand was still loose and granular, but his compulsion did not always allow that.

So overwhelming were the sensations that he did not notice the different surface of the object as it passed beneath his hands. The valley floor had gone blurry and black-spotted before him, so he stopped for a moment to suck air into his raw lungs, then coughed until he thought he would pass out. Wheezing, he hung his head to bring back the blood. As his vision cleared, he saw that he was kneeling on the rounded side of something buried in the sands that was not a stone.

It was a piece of pottery, he realized slowly, its exposed surface hard as brick. In the midst of the abstract diagonals which had been cut into the clay was a single pictogram, set apart from the rest of the design by a lozenge-shaped outline—a feather.

You will see my sign
 . . .

The temple was dragging at him once more, but he fought against it for the first time since leaving their refuge. As his blood surged and throbbed in his head, he scraped at the clay with his fingernails, trying to uproot it from the sand. Fredericks crawled level with him, slack-mouthed and fever-eyed.

“Help me,” Orlando gasped. “This is it!”

Fredericks stopped, but for a moment could do nothing else. Orlando dug into the sand, but could not find the edge of the clay. He scraped and scattered, but there was no place to get his fingers under his prize and pull it from the sand.

Fredericks lurched toward him and tried to help. Within moments they had uncovered a large stretch of the curving surface, but still they found no edge. The unceasing demand of the temple, which jutted so starkly above them now that it might have been a mountain, urged Orlando to crawl on his belly, to hasten forward, to ignore everything else. . . .

He groaned. Tears made his vision blur. “It's a jar or something. It must be huge!” He knew they would never be able to resist the temple's force long enough to excavate it. The woman with the feather had tried, but he was not strong enough to use her gift, whatever it was.

The clamor to go forward rose in his skull.

“I wanted to help . . .” he murmured. “I wanted to save them. . . .”

Fredericks had left his side. Orlando sensed his absence and his heart grew colder. He could not let his friend continue on alone. The gamble had been lost.

He raised his head just in time to see Fredericks stumbling back toward him, on his feet by some astonishing effort of will. He was clutching a large chunk of stone in his two hands, and as Orlando stared in stupefaction, Fredericks heaved it up over his head and brought it down onto the sigil of the Goddess of Justice.

There was no noise but the rush and roar in his head as the clay collapsed inward. For a moment Orlando and Fredericks both stared at the jagged hole, then something flickered in its dark depths. A pale cloud whirled up out of the shattered jar and spun wildly past them. It shot into the air, twirling so fast that for a moment it disappeared against the dark sky, then descended again and enveloped the two of them. Orlando flung up his hands to protect his face. When he opened his eyes, a tiny yellow monkey was clinging to his finger, inspecting him with squinting interest. A dozen other of the minute creatures had settled on his arms and on Fredericks.

“Hey, Landogarner!” the thing on his finger said, its piping voice surrealistically cheerful. “Where you go? Why you leave Wicked Tribe in that dark room for so long?”

Two more microsimians rose and hovered. “Tribe angry!” they cried. “Boring room, boring, boring!”

“But now,” the first announced smugly, blithe as a gnat hovering at Hell's doorstep, “now we have total big fun!”

This is what was supposed to save us?
Orlando thought helplessly, hopelessly.
This is the best she could do?
Rage and exhaustion beat at him like hammerblows. The last of his strength was gone, but the temple still exerted its unanswerable pull. This time, he knew, he would go to it meekly.

Perhaps sensing something, the monkey on his finger turned to look over its shoulder. When it saw the pile of grinning stones it shrieked and clapped two tiny hands over its face.

“Yick!” it said. “Why you bring us here? That not fun
at all
.”

CHAPTER 33

An Unfinished Land

NETFEED/NEWS: Cult Mass Suicide in New Guinea

(
visual: smoke victims being helped from Somare Airport
)

VO: Twenty-six members of a Papua New Guinea religious sect died after setting themselves on fire in the airport of the capitol city of Port Moresby. The sect, linked to the cargo cults which were once a mainstay of island life, doused their clothes and bodies with gasoline and set fire to themselves in the main boarding area of Port Moresby's Somare Airport. They made no announcement and left no explanation
.

(
visual: Kanijiwa in front of NU of L backdrop
)

Professor Robert Kanijiwa of Tasmania's New University of Launceston claims this mass suicide is part of a frightening trend
.

KANIJIWA: “This can't be written off as just another crazy cult—this particular sect had been around since the 18th century. There's a lot of this going on just now, and not only in our part of the world—it's like the fever at the end of the millennium a few decades ago, but without that obvious explanation. A lot of people seem to feel something strange and apocalyptic is about to happen, and I'm afraid there's going to be more of this kind of thing
 . . .
”

S
OME of the colors had no names. Bits of sky were embedded in the ground for no apparent reason. Even the presence of Emily, a Puppet who should have been left behind in the simulation for which she was built, was a puzzle that Renie could not solve. But one glimpse of her friend convulsing on the not-quite-ground made all the questions instantly meaningless.

Terrified, she pulled !Xabbu's small monkey-shape close against her chest, trying to slow the horrid jerking motions by simple pressure. She knew it was not the way to treat a seizure, but she could think of nothing better to do. When his convulsions grew so strong that he nearly wriggled from her grasp, she wrapped herself even more closely around him, as though mere stubbornness might save his life. At last his muscles slackened and his movements grew less frenetic. For long seconds she was too frightened to look at him directly, certain that his heart had stopped. Then his muzzle moved against her neck.

!Xabbu's eyes blinked and fluttered open. His gaze wandered for a moment over the mismatched sky and unfinished landscape, then stopped on her, eyes round and solemn. “Renie. It is good to see your face.”

“What is going
on
?” demanded Emily 22813 from behind her. “Why won't anyone tell me? Is the monkey sick? Where are we? Who are you?”

Renie could not have replied at that moment even if there had been answers to give. She clutched !Xabbu tightly, tears of relief running down her cheeks and pearling in his fur.

“Oh, I thought . . .” she forced the words out between shudders, “. . . I was sure you were . . .” She found she did not want to say it. “Are you all right now?”

“I . . . am tired,” he said. “Very tired.”

She let him pull himself free. He crouched beside her, his small, doglike head hanging. He was still quivering, the muscles of his legs weak, his tail tucked between his legs.

“What happened?” she asked. “How did you do that—find the gate and open it?”

“I will tell,” he said. “But I must rest for a moment.”

“Of course.” She stroked his back. “Can I do anything to help?” The relative calm seemed quite surreal. Just moments ago they had been inches from capture by Lion and his hybrid plant-creatures. Now they were . . . somewhere else. And it was a somewhere that made Lion's warped Oz seem the summit of normality.

“Do you people have anything to eat?” Emily asked, as though nothing else were happening. “I'm really hungry.”

“I'm sorry, we have nothing.” Renie wanted to be patient with her, but it was difficult. Emily had lost some of the most extreme childishness of her behavior, but still seemed to be living in a world of her own. “Later we can go and look, see what might be around.”

!Xabbu stood and stretched, then sat on the ground beside Renie and yawned, briefly displaying his impressive canines. “I am feeling a little better,” he said. “I am sorry if you were frightened.” He gave her the closest thing to an embarrassed baboon smile she had yet seen, and she wondered what her grief had shown him—what things she did not yet herself entirely understand.

“I was frightened because . . . because I thought you were dying.” Now it was spoken. She sighed. “But
everything
is so strange. How did you know about that golden light—that gateway thing? And what's she doing here?”

“Emily is not a Puppet,” !Xabbu said. “I could not tell you how I know, but I do. After I had danced, I saw things differently.”

“Are you saying she's like us? Someone trapped in the network?”

He shook his head. “I do not know. But she is not a . . . what is that word? A construct.” He rose to stand on his hind legs. “I should probably explain all that I can.” Renie could not help admiring the quickness of his recovery—a legacy of resilience from ancestors who had fought the desert for their survival every hour of every day, for thousands of generations.

“Shouldn't we get out of this place first?” she asked. “Can you open that thing again, that door? It feels so strange here. So . . .
wrong
.”

“I do not know whether I have the strength, or even the ability, to do that again,” !Xabbu said. “Let me tell you what happened.”

Renie settled herself into something resembling a comfortable position, but the texture and resistance of the ground, or what should have been ground, was disturbing in its variety. At least, she noted gratefully, they were not freezing or burning up. For all its other freakish extremes, the new simworld seemed as weatherless as a business office.

“I told you last night,” !Xabbu began, “that you needed to see with the eyes of your heart. And that was true, Renie—you are very important to all of us, even if you do not know it.”

She wanted to tell him about her own revelation but knew it was not the time. She also wanted answers to her own most immediate questions. “Go on, please.”

“But when you asked me what
I
was doing to help, I realized that you were seeing things very, very truly. Since I had come here to this network, I had lost the vision my people gave to me.

“Renie, my friend, I have been trying to see things with the eyes of a city dweller. I have ignored that which was given to me by Grandfather Mantis, all the wisdom of my own people, and I have tried too hard to be like you, like Martine, like poor Mister Singh. But I am a child in your world, the world of machines. When I try to see that way, I can only have the visions a child can have.” He nodded, gaining confidence.

“I told you a story once about the People Who Sit on Their Heels, the baboons—do you remember? How they killed one of the sons of Mantis, and then threw his eye back and forth as though it were a ball? And I told you that when I chose this body, it was because Grandfather Mantis spoke to me in a dream. But I did not understand how it all should fit together. I had lost my people's wisdom. So I danced, for that is what I do when my spirit is hungry.

“When I was in that place, the dancing-place, it came to me. The baboons were at war with Mantis, and they tossed the eye as though it were a child's toy because they did not understand how to look and see with their hearts. That eye was Mantis' own eye, through his son, and they rejected it. They were at war with that vision.

“This is what I learned, as I danced. It was given to me to wear this body, I believe, that I should have to discover and understand this truth. The baboon, he who talks and argues and always jostles with his neighbors for a share of things, does not see with the eye of Mantis—the eye of the spirit. I do not say that they are wicked, the People Who Sit on Their Heels. They have lessons of their own to teach, of friendship and family, and the strength that comes from it, of solving things using busy thoughts and clever fingers. But I had to learn my
own
lesson, Renie. As I danced, I came to understand that I must learn to see again with the eyes that were given to me, to see with the heart of my people—something I have not done since we have been in this place, in this . . . mirage.

“When the dance ended, Renie, it was as though I had walked into daylight after long weeks in deep evening. The things I could see! How can I explain it all? Often your people, the city-people, think that there is a right way and a wrong way to see. They hear old stories like the kind my people tell, old songs, and say, ‘Oh, listen to them, they are like children, those Bushmen. They think there are faces in the sky, they think that the sun makes a sound.' But there
are
faces in the sky, if you have the eyes to see them. The sun has a song, if you only have the ears. We are simply different in how we know the world, Renie, your people and mine, and I have ignored the knowing I was taught for too long.

“So when I stopped dancing, when the head-clearing magic of that was upon me, I had a feeling that nothing could be hidden from me any more. You will call it the subconscious at work—that things I had noticed but not understood became plain to me. It does not matter. I know what I know. And the first thing I knew was that something had troubled me, but with all that had happened, in my own preoccupation, I had ignored it, forgotten it.

“It was the lighter, of course, but I did not realize that until I found it in your pocket. You asked, why should Azador carry such a thing, since the letter on it was neither of his names. And Azador himself said that things made for one world could not be brought to another—that is why you were surprised to see Emily had come here with us!”

“But that still doesn't prove anything,” she pointed out. “He could have stolen it from someone in the Kansas simworld.”

!Xabbu, whose guess had already been proved right, only shrugged.

“Wait a moment,” she said. “No, it
couldn't
have come from Kansas, because it's a copy of a modern lighter—one of those stabilized-hydrogen Minisolars. And all the technology in the Kansas world was from the last century.”

“I did not know those things,” !Xabbu said. “But when I looked at it after I had danced, compared it to all the other things around us, the boat, our clothing, it felt more
real
. I can explain it no better than that, I am afraid. This is what the eyes of my heart saw. Perhaps if I say it was the difference between seeing a white squiggle of line on a rock, and seeing a painting of an antelope on a rock. The difference of . . .
content
, I think, is the word you would say . . . is very, very big. And when I held the lighter, I could see it was more even than that. Another way to say it is that it was like looking at one of my people's digging sticks. You or any other city-person would see a piece of wood, crude, sharpened at one end. To a Bushman, it would have all the meanings a gun or a sea-going ship would have for you, and would speak from its very being of all the ways it could be used, had been used, was meant to be used.” He tipped his head toward her quizzically. “Am I making sense, Renie? I am tired, and these are hard thoughts to speak.”

“I think so.” She turned to see what had happened to Emily, who was being unusually quiet. The girl, apparently as self-absorbed as ever—or perhaps, like an animal, dimly cognizant she was out of her depth—had simply curled up on the not-ground and gone to sleep. “I'm trying to understand, !Xabbu. So, you could tell that the lighter was . . . was
something
.”

“Yes. And when I handled it, touched it, I could feel that there were things waiting to happen. Certain bumps, certain faces, had a feeling of Tightness. When I stroked it or squeezed it a certain way, I could tell that its maker had intended I do just that. And then one set of the things I did suddenly opened up a gateway. I could see it, shining in the distance.”

“But
I
couldn't see anything. Not until we got there.”

“I do not think you would have been able to. That tool, that thing that looks like a cigarette lighter, belongs to one of the Grail Brotherhood, I am sure. The person who holds it can see things others cannot—can act as gods act. I do not doubt that if we could make it work properly, we would find many wonderful things we could do.”

Renie's heart quickened. This was good news—no, this was excellent news! They might be able to take their destiny back into their own grasp. She looked at the lump of shiny metal still clutched in !Xabbu's skinny fist, and for the first time in days, felt hope return.

“But I saw other things, too,” he continued. “No, not ‘saw'—that is a misleading word. Knew? Felt? I am not sure. But I could see that Lion's creatures, those sad and torn people, were nothing more than shadows, no more alive than the trees or stones or sky in that place. Lion, though, was alive as Emily is alive,” !Xabbu flicked a glance at the sleeping girl, “a real person, or at least a force—not just a part of the simulation.”