River of Blue Fire

  “Don’t talk much, you.” The boy was smiling, but it looked like it hurt him. Christabel took a few steps backward. “Hey, mu’chita, not gonna do nothin’ to you. What you got in the bag?”

  “It’s n-not for you.” Christabel held it tight against her shirt. “It’s f-f-for someone else.”

  “Verdad, weenit?” The boy took a step closer, but slow, like he hardly even knew he was doing it himself. “Some food, huh? Feedin’ someone, you? I saw. I been watchin.”’

  “Watching?” She still couldn’t understand what this dirty boy was doing here. There were inside-the-fence people, and there were outside-the-fence people, and he was not an inside person.

  “Yeah, claro, I been watchin’. Ever since you got me to cut that fence, I been watchin’. Fence goes off, I climbed over. Get some good stuff, me, what I thought. But the fence go back on. Both of ‘em. Threw a stick at it, just to see, people came running—soldier boys. I go’d up a tree, but they almost saw me.”

  “You can’t get out.” She said it as she realized it. “You can’t get back over the fence, ‘cause . . .” she stopped, scared. She had almost said Mister Sellars’ name. “’Cause it’s turned on. ‘Cause it’s ‘lectric.”

  “Got that right, mu’chita. I found some food, too—they throw lotta stuff away in here, man, they locos—major scanny, seen? But they don’t throw out food always. And I’m pretty hungry, me.” He took another step nearer, and suddenly Christabel was terrified he would kill her and eat her, like in the monster stories Ophelia told at sleep-overs, grab her and then bite her with that dirty mouth and the hole where his front tooth was supposed to be. She turned and began to run.

  “Hey, weenit, come back!”

  She ran looking down at the ground flying underneath her, at her legs going up and down. It felt like something was jumping in her chest, thumping her from the inside, trying to get out. She could hear the boy’s voice coming closer, then something shoved her in the back and she was running too fast for her feet. She stumbled and fell onto the grass. The boy stood over her. Her leg was hurting from where she fell down at school, and now on the other leg, too. When her breath came back, Christabel began to cry, so scared she was hiccuping, too.

  “Crazy little bitch.” He sounded almost as unhappy as she was. “What you do that for?”

  “If you hurt m-m-me, I’ll . . . I’ll tell my daddy!”

  He laughed, but he looked angry. “Yeah? Chizz, weenit, you tell. And then I’ll tell about what you hiding out here.”

  Christabel kept hiccuping, but she stopped crying because she was now too busy being even more afraid. “H-hiding?”

  “I told you, I been watchin’. What you got? What you hiding out here? Some kinda dog or something?” He stuck out his hand. “Fen, I don’t care if it dog food. Gimme that bag.” When she did not move, he bent over and took it from her curled fingers. He didn’t pull hard, and Christabel felt more than ever like this was a bad dream. She let it go.

  “Que . . . ?” He stared at the wrappers. “This soap! What are you, play some game with me?’ With his quick, dirty fingers, he unpeeled one of the bars and held it to his nose to take a hard sniff. “Fen! Soap! Mu’chita local” He threw it down. The soap bounced away. Christabel could see it sitting on top of the grass where it stopped, like an Easter egg. She didn’t want to look at the boy, who was very angry.

  “Right,” he said after a minute, “then you gonna bring me food, bitch. Right here, every day, m’entiendes? Otherwise, you daddy gonna know you come here. Don’t know what you doin’ with that soap, but I bet you washin’ something you ain’t s’posed to have. You got me, little vata local I know where you live, you in your Mammapapa house. I see you through the window. I come through that window some night if you don’t bring me nothing to eat.”

  Anything would be better than having him yell at her. She nodded her head.

  “Chizz.” He swung his arms from side to side, so he looked like a monkey again. “And you better not forget, ‘cause Cho-Cho be un mal hombre. You hear? Don’t mess with Cho-Cho, or you wake up dead.”

  He went on saying things like that for a while. At last, Christabel figured out that Cho-Cho was him, the boy. It wasn’t a name she had ever heard. She wondered if it meant something outside the fence.

  He let her keep the rest of the soap, but even after he had climbed up into the nearest of the thick trees and scrambled away to some secret hiding place, she did not dare leave the bag for Mister Sellars. She put it back into the basket of her bicycle and rode home. Halfway there, she began to cry again. By the time she reached her street, she could hardly see the sidewalk.

  And now both her knees were skinned.

  DREAD rang off and settled back, extending his long legs. He called up the Otherland sim and opened its eyes briefly. All the others were still sleeping, and watching them brought a sympathetic heaviness to his own eyelids. He shook his head, then reached into his pocket for a stimulant tab—Adrenax, the real stuff from the South American black bazaars—and dry-swallowed it. He followed it up with a little drum music on his internal system, a counterpulse to make everything seem a little more exciting. When the rhythm was pumping at what seemed the proper level, cascading from one side of his head to the other, he returned his attention to business. He left the Otherland window open, but shut the sim’s eyes most of the way so as not to attract undue attention should any of the others wake, then leaned back in his chair to think.

  His hand stole to his t-jack; callused fingertips traced the smooth circumference of the shunt. There were so many puzzles, and so little time to spend on them. Maybe Dulcie’s idea was a good one, after all. He himself couldn’t keep spending nine or ten hours a day under simulation even if he had nothing else to do, and the Old Man certainly wouldn’t leave him alone forever.

  And what about Dulcie herself? His good opinion of her, bolstered by the unhesitating speed with which she had dispatched that idiot Celestino, had been diminished more than a little by her insistence on going back to New York. And all because of a cat—a cat! The most amazing technological advance conceivable, this Otherland network, a simulation more real than RL itself, and she was worried about leaving her cat with that pale blonde slut of a downstairs neighbor another week or two. The stupidity of it was almost enough to warrant taking Ms. Anwin off the protected species list.

  What was even more irritating was that he had just sunk many thousands of his own personal credits, stringently shielded from the Old Man’s notice, into building a new office to share with her in Cartagena, and now he had to worry instead whether her home system could competently carry this kind of bandwidth. When she had said she was going home, he had seriously considered just killing her and doing the whole Otherland surveillance by himself. But that would not have been practical, of course—not under current circumstances.

  A pleasure deferred, then.

  It was particularly galling, however, to be dependent on a woman. As a rule he never trusted anyone with more than a small piece of a job, and held all the connectors in his own hands. When you delegated, you always suffered some signal degradation. Just look at the way that pusbag of a gear man had almost blown the whole thing to bits.

  Well, Celestino was landfill now, a job even he would have trouble screwing up.

  Dread lit a thin Corriegas cigar, one of the few compensations of being stuck in South America as far as he was concerned, and contemplated his options. He had to be ready if the Old Man had another job for him; this was exactly the wrong time to show any hesitation or resistance. He also had to keep the Otherland puppet sim active, either by himself or with help from trustworthy employees. So far, Dulcie Anwin still fit that category, but bringing in someone else would just mean more management for him, more security concerns, more possible points at which something could go massively astray. . . .

  He would put that dec
ision aside for later, he decided. When Dulcie took over in four hours, and if the residual stimulants in his system would permit it, he would try to get a little sleep, and then he might be in a better frame of mind to judge something so important.

  But in the interim, he needed to get on with some of his own research. What the people caught inside the Otherland simulation network had discovered told him very little so far about the Old Man’s purposes; what they had unwittingly revealed about themselves, though, was more immediately useful. For one thing, if he decided to bring in other sim drivers to help, he could then look into trying to replace a second member of that merry little band of river travelers, in case his current infiltration got bounced from the system by the next giant fish attack or whatever.

  However, he was even more interested in knowing who these people were and why the mysterious Sellars had brought them together, and of all the travelers, the African woman and her friend were the top priority. He had the others where he could keep an eye on them, but for all he knew Renie whatever-her-name-was had been knocked offline, in which case she was now a very loose thread indeed.

  Dread notched down the intensity of the rhythm track to something more in line with careful thought, then sent a smoke ring spinning toward the low, white ceiling. The room was windowless, part of a half-untenanted office complex in the outer ring of Cartagena, but it had high-bandwidth data lines, and that was all he cared about.

  This Renie was African, that much he could have told just from her accent. But someone had said that her companion was a Bushman, and some quick reference-checking suggested that most of the remnants of that people were to be found in Botswana and South Africa. That didn’t mean that the woman couldn’t be from somewhere else, that they might not have met online, but he liked the odds that they were both from the same place.

  So, Botswana and South Africa. He didn’t know a lot else about her, but he knew that her brother was in a coma, and when cross-checked with her first name and its possible variants, that would have to narrow things down considerably.

  But he wasn’t going to do it himself. Not the grunt work. Since the job seemed likely to be in southern Africa, he would let Klekker and his associates handle it, at least until they found a hot trail. After that, he wasn’t so sure: Klekker’s men were mostly thugs, which certainly came in handy sometimes, but this was a very delicate situation. He would decide when he knew more.

  Dread sent up another smoke ring, then waved his hand, obliterating it. The adrenals had kicked in, and along with the rush of energy he felt a sort of blind, idiot ache in his groin and behind his eyes that he hadn’t felt since the night he’d taken the stewardess. It was an itch, he knew, that would become more than that soon, but he didn’t know how he could possibly find the time to hunt safely. He was right on the edge of the biggest thing ever, and for once he intended to take the Old Man’s advice and not let his private pleasures compromise his business.

  Dread grinned. The old bastard would be so proud.

  A thought occurred to him. He lowered a hand to his crotch and squeezed meditatively. It wasn’t a good time to hunt—at least not in RL. But this simulation was so realistic. . . .

  What would it feel like, to hunt in Otherland? How closely would these sims imitate life—especially in the losing of it?

  He squeezed again, then brought the drums back up inside his head until he could feel them buzzing in his cheekbones, the sound track for some ultimate jungle movie of danger and darkness. The idea, once kindled, began to burn.

  What would it feel like?

  CHAPTER 5

  The Marching Millions

  * * *

  NETFEED/NEWS: US, China At Odds Over Antarctica

  (visual: signing ceremony for Six Powers treaty)

  VO: Only months after the signing of the Zurich accord, two of the Six Powers are again squabbling over Antarctica.

  (visual: American embassy in Ellsworth)

  Chinese and American companies, both of which license space for commercial exploitation from the UN, are in a dispute over who has the rights to what is thought to be a rich vein of mineral deposits in the Wilkes Land area. Tensions rose last week when two Chinese explorers disappeared, and accusations were made by Chinese media sources that US workers had kidnapped or even murdered them . . .

  * * *

  “CAN I come in?” a voice asked in Renie’s ear.

  Two seconds later, Lenore Kwok appeared in the conference room. She wore a jaunty leather aviatrix helmet and what looked like new coveralls.

  They probably are new, Renie thought. Just switched back to default setting. Even someone who had spent as much time in simulation as she had was finding it hard to reconcile herself to this amazingly realistic new world—no, new universe, for all intents and purposes, with different rules for every piece of it.

  “I’m really sorry,” Lenore said, “but I still don’t have anybody to help you with your gear. A lot of people aren’t on the Hive today—I think it’s some kind of system problem. Things are pretty crazy. So what you’ve got is those of us who are at the end of shift, and mostly we’re all in the middle of something.” She made an appropriately sad face. “But I thought I’d give you a quick tour of the place anyway. Then, if you want, you can come along with me and Cullen to look at the Eciton burchelli bivouac. It’s spectacular major, and you’d probably like it better than sitting around here.”

  !Xabbu clambered up onto Renie’s shoulder to gain a better conversational position. “What is this thing you are going to see?”

  “Ants. Come along—you’ve never seen anything like it. By the time we get back, they should have the system problems ironed out, and someone will be able to help you.”

  Renie looked at !Xabbu, who shrugged his narrow simian shoulders. “Okay. But we really need to get out of here, and not just for your sake.”

  “I utterly understand.” Lenore nodded earnestly. “You probably have things to do at home. It must be big slow being stuck online.”

  “Yes. Big slow.”

  Lenore wiggled her fingers and the conference room disappeared, replaced instantly by a huge, domed auditorium. Only a few of the seats were filled, and tiny spots of light gleamed above a dozen or so others, but the vast room was mostly deserted. On the stage—or rather above the stage—floated the largest insect Renie had ever seen, a grasshopper the size of a jet plane.

  “. . . The exoskeleton,” a cultivated, disembodied voice was saying, “has many survival advantages. Evaporation of fluids can be reduced, a definite plus for small animals whose surface-area-to-volume ratio makes them prone to fluid loss, and the skeletal structure also provides a great deal of internal surface area for muscle attachment. . . .”

  The grasshopper continued to pivot slowly in midair, but one of its sides detached and lifted away from its body, an animated cutaway.

  “Normally this would be for the first-year students,” Lenore explained, “the lucky ones who get to come to the Hive at all. But there’s almost nobody here today, like I told you.”

  As various bits of the grasshopper drifted loose, some vanishing to provide a better view of the section they had covered, other parts were highlighted briefly, lit from within.

  “The exoskeleton itself is largely made up of cuticle, which is secreted by the epidermis directly beneath, a layer of epithelial cells which rest on a granular layer called the ‘basement membrane.”’ Various strata in the exposed armor glimmered into life and then faded. “The cuticle itself is not only extremely efficient at controlling fluid loss, it serves as protection for the animal as well. Insect cuticle has a tensile strength as great as aluminum with only half the weight. . . .”

  !Xabbu was staring solemnly up at the revolving grasshopper. “Like gods,” he murmured. “Do you remember when I said that, Renie? With these machines, people can behave as though the
y were gods.”

  “Pretty chizz, huh?” said Lenore. “I’ll show you some more of the place.”

  With another finger flick they left the auditorium. Lenore’s tour of the Hive took them to the cafeteria—although, she quickly explained, no one really ate there; it was more of a gathering place. High windows made one wall of the beautiful room entirely transparent, looking out onto a grass-fores ted hillside and the edge of a massive tree root. The difference in perspective between the human-sized objects in the room and the insect’s-eye view made Renie faintly uneasy, like staring down a very steep angle.

  Their guide whisked them through a variety of other spaces—mostly lab rooms, which were smaller versions of the auditorium, where virtual specimens and data could be manipulated in at least three dimensions and a rainbow of colors. They were also shown some “quiet spots” designed just for relaxation and deep pondering, created with the same care that might be lavished on haiku poems. There was even a museum of sorts, with small representations of various anomalies discovered in the living laboratory outside the Hive’s walls.

  “One of the most amazing things,” Lenore said, gesturing at a many-legged creature hovering in midair and lit by invisible light sources, “is that some of these aren’t like anything in the real world at all. We wonder sometimes if Kunohara’s playing games with us—Cullen’s sure of it—but our charter is predicated on an accurate simulation of a ten-thousand-meter-square cross-section of real terrain, with real life-forms, so I’m not sure I believe that. I mean, Kunohara’s pretty serious about the field himself. I can’t see him just inventing imaginary insects and throwing them into an environment he’s been so careful to maintain.”