River of Blue Fire

  Sellars explains that he has lured them all here with the image of the golden city—the most discreet method he could devise, because their enemies, the Grail Brotherhood, are so unbelievably powerful and remorseless. Sellars explains that Atasco and his wife were once members of the Brotherhood, but quit when their questions about the network were not answered. Sellars then tells how he discovered that the secret Otherland network has a mysterious but undeniable connection to the illness of thousands of children like Renie’s brother Stephen. Before he can explain more, the sims of Atasco and his wife go rigid and Sellars’ own sim disappears.

  In the real world, Jongleur’s murderous minion Dread has begun his attack on the Atascos’ fortified Colombian island home, and after breaking through the defenses, has killed both Atascos. He then uses his strange abilities—his “twist”—to tap into their data lines, discovers Sellars’ meeting, and orders his assistant Dulcinea Anwin to take over the incoming line of one of the Atascos’ guests—the online group that includes Renie and her friends—and takes on the identity of that usurped guest, leaving Dread a mystery spy in the midst of Renie and friends.

  Sellars reappears in the Atascos’ virtual world and begs Renie and the others to flee into the network while he tries to hide their presence. They are to look for Paul Jonas, he tells them, a mysterious virtual prisoner Sellars has helped escape from the Brotherhood. Renie and company make their way onto the river and out of the Atascos’ simulation, then through an electrical blue glow into the next sim-world. Panicked and overwhelmed by too much input, Martine finally reveals her secret to Renie: she is blind.

  Their boat has become a giant leaf. Overhead, a dragonfly the size of a fighter jet skims into view.

  Back in the mountain fortress, in the real world, Jeremiah and Renie’s father Long Joseph can only watch the silent V-tanks, wonder, and wait.

  Foreword

  THERE was snow everywhere—the world was white.

  It must have been warmer in the Land of the Dead, he thought, mocking himself, mocking the senseless universe. I should never have left.

  Snow and ice and wind and blood. . . .

  The thing in the shallow pit made a terrible raw honking sound and swung its head. Antlers the size of small trees swept from side to side, gouging snow and dirt, narrowly missing one of the men who had leaned in to jab at it with his spear.

  The elk was larger than anything like it Paul had ever seen in tired old London Zoo, taller than a man at its shoulders and heavy as a prize bull. It had fought with terrifying strength for almost an hour, and the points of the huge, curling antlers were streaked with the blood of a man named Will Not Cry, but the animal’s shaggy pelt was also drenched with its own blood, as was the snow around the edge of the hole.

  It leaped again and fell back scrabbling, hooves churning the bottom of the pit to a pink froth. Spears snagged in the elk’s thick hide rattled like exotic jewelry. Runs Far, who seemed the party’s most fearless hunter, leaned in to jerk one of his spears free. He missed his first stab, dodged the swinging antlers, then smashed the stone point back in again just under the creature’s thick jaw. Arterial blood spurted ten feet, splashing Runs Far and the two hunters nearest to him, adding another layer of color to their ocher-and-black hunting paint.

  The elk heaved up the slope once more in a last desperate attempt to escape the pit, but failed to crest the rim before the spears of the hunters pushed it off balance and sent it sliding backward, awkward as a fawn.

  The freshet of blood from its throat pulsed more weakly. The buck stood on wobbly legs at the bottom of the pit, hitching as it sucked air. One leg buckled, but it struggled upright yet again, teeth bared in final exhaustion, glaring from beneath the spread of horn. The man named Birdcatcher jabbed a spear into its side, but it was clearly a superfluous gesture. The elk took a step backward, its face registering what in a human Paul would have called frustration, then fell to its knees and rolled onto its side, chest heaving.

  “Now he gives himself to us,” said Runs Far. Beneath his smeared paint, his mouth was locked in a grin of exhausted pleasure, but there was something deeper in his eyes. “Now he is ours.”

  Runs Far and another man clambered into the pit. When his companion had grabbed the antlers, holding them firm as the elk gasped and twitched, Runs Far slashed its throat with a heavy stone blade.

  In what seemed a piece of particularly cruel irony, the hunter with the strange name of Will Not Cry had suffered not just deep antlergouges across his face and head, but had lost his left eye as well. As one of the other hunters stuffed the ragged hole with snow and bound it with a strip of tanned hide, Will Not Cry murmured to himself, a singsong whisper that might have been a lament or a prayer. Runs Far crouched beside him and tried to wash some of the blood from the injured man’s face and beard with a handful of snow, but the ragged facial wounds still bled heavily. Paul was astonished by how calmly the others reacted to their companion’s terrible injuries, although all of them bore scars and disfigurations of their own.

  People die easily here, he decided, so anything less serious must seem like a victory.

  The Neandertal hunters quickly and adroitly razored the elk carcass into chunks with their flint knives and wrapped the skin, organs, and even bones in the still-smoking hide for travel. The People, as they called themselves, did not waste anything.

  As work slowed, some of the men began to watch Paul again, perhaps wondering whether the stranger they had saved from the frozen river was properly impressed by their prowess. Only the one called Birdcatcher looked at him with open distrust, but they all kept their distance. Having participated in neither the kill nor the dismemberment, Paul was feeling particularly useless, so he was grateful when Runs Far approached. The leader of the hunt had so far been the only one to speak with Paul. Now he extended a blood-smeared hand, offering the stranger a strip of the kill’s deep-red flesh. Sensible of the kindness being shown him, Paul accepted it. The meat was curiously flavorless, like chewing on a bit of blood-salted rubber.

  “Tree Horns fought hard.” Runs Far took another piece into his mouth. When he could not fit it all in, he reached up and sliced off the remainder with his stone blade, retaining it until he had finished the first mouthful. He grinned, displaying worn and scratched teeth. “We have much meat now. The People will be happy.”

  Paul nodded, unsure of what to say. He had noticed a curious thing: When the hunters spoke, it was in recognizable English, which seemed a highly unlikely thing for a group of Neandertal huntsmen to do. At the same time, there seemed a slight dissynchronization between their lips and what they said, as though he had been dropped into a well-dubbed but still imperfect foreign drama.

  In fact, it seemed as though he had been given some kind of translation implant, like the kind his old school friend Niles had received on entering the diplomatic corps. But how could that be?

  For the fifth or sixth time that day, Paul’s fingers went to his neck and the base of his skull, feeling for the neurocannula that he knew was not there, again finding only goose-pimpled skin. He had never wanted implants, had resisted the trend long after most of his friends had them, yet now it seemed that someone had given them to him without his permission—but had also managed to completely hide the physical location.

  What could do that? he wondered. And why? And more importantly, where in the bloody hell am I?

  He had been thinking and thinking, but he was no nearer to an answer. He seemed to be sliding through space and time, like something out of the more excessive kind of science fiction story. He had traveled across a boy’s-adventure Mars, he remembered, and through somebody’s cracked version of Alice’s Looking Glass. He had seen other improbable places, too—the details were fuzzy, but still too complete to be merely the residue of dreams. But how was that possible? If someone were to build sets and hire impostors to fool him this thoroughly,
it would cost millions—billions!—and try as he might, he could not find a single crack in the facades of any of these might-be actors. Neither could he imagine a reason why anyone would spend such resources on a nonentity like himself, a museum curator with no important friends and no particular prospects. No matter what the voice from the golden harp had said, this must all be real.

  Unless he had been brainwashed somehow. He could not rule that out. Some kind of experimental drug, perhaps—but why? There was still a gap in his memory where the answer might lurk, but unlike the strange journeys to imaginary landscapes, no amount of concentration could bring light to any of that particular patch of darkness.

  Runs Far still crouched at his side, his round eyes bright with curiosity beneath the bony brows. Embarrassed, confused, Paul shrugged and reached down for a handful of snow and crunched it between the crablike pincers of his crude gloves. Brainwashing would explain why he had awakened in a frozen prehistoric river and been rescued by what looked like authentic Neandertals—costuming and sets for a hallucination wouldn’t be very expensive. But it could not explain the absolutely, unarguably real and sustained presence of the world around him. It could not explain the snow in his hand, cold and granular and white. It could not explain the stranger beside him, with his unfamiliar but utterly lived-in, alien face.

  All those questions, but still no answers. Paul sighed and let the snow fall from his hand.

  “Are we going to sleep here tonight?” he asked Runs Far.

  “No. We are close to where the People live. We will be there before full dark.” The hunter leaned forward, furrowed his brow, and stared into Paul’s mouth. “You eat things, Riverghost. Do all the people from the Land of the Dead eat things?”

  Paul smiled sadly. “Only when they’re hungry.”

  Runs Far was in the lead, his stocky legs carrying him through the snow with surprising ease; like all the hunters, even the terribly wounded Will Not Cry, he moved with the instinctive grace of a wild beast. The others, although burdened now with hundreds of kilograms of elk parts, followed swiftly, so that Paul was already winded trying to keep up.

  He skidded on a fallen branch hidden by snow, and slipped, but the man beside him caught and held him unflinchingly until Paul had found his feet; the Neandertal’s hands were hard and rough as tree bark. Paul found himself confused again. It was impossible to sustain disbelief in the face of such powerful arguments. These men, although not quite the caricature cavemen he remembered from childhood flicks, were so clearly something different from himself, something wilder and simpler, that he found his skepticism diminishing—not so much fading as sliding into a kind of hibernation, to awaken when it again had a useful task to do.

  What sounded like a wolf howl came echoing down the hillside. The People ran a little faster.

  Nothing around you is true, and yet the things you see can hurt you or kill you, the golden gem, the voice from the harp, had told him. Whatever these men were, true or false seemings, they were at home in this world in a way that Paul most decidedly was not. He would have to rely on their skills. For his sanity’s sake, he might have to trust that they were exactly what they seemed to be.

  WHEN he had been a boy, when he had still been “Paulie,” and still the chattel of his eccentric father and frail mother, he had spent each Christmas with them at his paternal grandmother’s cottage in Gloucestershire, in the wooded, rolling countryside that the locals liked to call “the real England.” But it had not been real, not at all: its virtue was precisely that it symbolized something which had never completely existed, a middle-class England of gracious, countrified beauty whose tattered true nature was becoming more obvious every year.

  For Grammer Jonas, the world beyond her village had become increasingly shadowy. She could describe the complexity of a neighbor’s dispute about a fence with the sophistication of a newsnet legal analyst, but had trouble remembering who was prime minister. She had a wallscreen, of course—a small, old-fashioned one framed in baroque gold on the parlor wall, like the photo of a long-dead relative. It mostly went unused, the calls voice-only. Grammer Jonas had never completely trusted visual communication, especially the idea that she could see without being seen if she chose, and the thought that some stranger might look into her house and see her in her nightgown gave her, as she put it, “the creeps, Paulie-love, the absolute creeps.”

  Despite her distrust of the modern world, or perhaps even in part because of it, Paul had loved her fiercely, and she in turn had loved him as only a grandmother could. Every small success of his was a glowing victory, every transgression against parental authority a sign of clever independence to be encouraged rather than condemned. When, in one of his fits of unfocused rebellion, young Paul refused to help with the dishes or do some other chore (and thus forfeited his pudding) Grammer Jonas would be at the door of his prison-bedroom later in the evening to pass him a contraband sweet, in a breathless hurry to get downstairs again before his parents noticed her absence.

  The winter when he was seven, the snows came. It was England’s whitest Christmas in decades, and the tabnets competed for the most astonishing footage—St. Paul’s dome wearing a dunce cap of white, people skating on the lower Thames as they had during Elizabethan times (many died, since the ice was not thick enough to be safe.) In the early weeks, before the tabs began to trumpet “New Atlantic Storm Creates Blizzard Horror” and run daily body counts (with corpse-by-corpse footage) of people who had frozen to death sleeping rough or even waiting for trains at the smaller stations, the heavy snows brought a sense of joy to most people, and young Paul had certainly been one of them. It was his first real experience of snowballs and sleds and tree branches dropping cold surprises down the back of one’s neck, of a world with most of its colors suddenly wiped clean.

  One mild day, when the sun was out and the sky was mostly blue, he and his grandmother had gone for a walk. The most recent snowfall had covered everything, and as they walked slowly through the fields there were no signs of other humans at all except for the distant smoke from a chimney, and no footprints but the tracks of their own rubber boots, so that the vista spread before them seemed primordial, untouched.

  When at last they had reached a place between the hedgerows, where the land before them dipped down into a gentle valley, his grandmother abruptly stopped. She had spread her arms, and—in a voice he had never heard her use, hushed and yet throbbingly intense—said, “Look, Paulie, isn’t it lovely! Isn’t it perfect! It’s just like we were back at the beginning of everything. Like the whole sinful world was starting over!” Mittened fists clenched before her face like a child making a wish, she had added: “Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

  Surprised and a little frightened by the strength of her reaction, he had struggled to make her insight his own—struggled but ultimately failed. There was something beautiful about the illusion of emptiness, of possibility, but he had been a seven-year-old boy who did not feel, as his grandmother more or less did, that people had somehow ruined everything, and he was just baby enough to be made nervous by the thought of a world without familiar places and people, a world of clean, cold loneliness.

  They had stood for a long time, staring at the uninhabited winter world, and when at last they turned back—Paul secretly relieved to be walking in their own reversed footprints, following the trail of bread crumbs out of the worrisome forest of adult regrets—his grandmother had been smiling fiercely to herself, singing a song he could not quite hear.

  Paul had tried and failed to share her epiphany that day, so long ago. But now he seemed to be the one who had tumbled into the world she had wished for, a world—thousands of generations before even his grandmother’s inconceivably ancient childhood—that she could only imagine.

  Yes, if Grammer Jonas could have seen this, he thought. God, wouldn’t she have loved it. It really is the beginning—a long time before the crooked politicia
ns and the filthy shows on the net and people being so rude and vulgar, and all the foreign restaurants serving things she couldn’t pronounce. She’d think she’d gone to heaven.

  Of course, he realized, she’d have trouble getting a good cup of tea.

  The People were moving in deceptively ragged order along the edge of a hillside forest, heading down a long, snow-blanketed slope broken up by irregular limestone outcroppings. Slender tree-shadows stretched across their path like blueprints for an unbuilt staircase. The light was fading quickly, and the sky, which had been the soft gray of a dove’s breast, was turning a colder, darker color. Paul suddenly wondered for the first time not when in the world he was, but where.

  Had there been Neandertals everywhere, or just in Europe? He couldn’t remember. The little he knew of prehistoric humankind was all in fragmented, trivia-card bits—cave-painting, mammoth-hunting, stone tools laboriously flaked by hand. It was frustrating not to remember more. People in science fiction flicks always seemed to know useful things about the places time travel took them. But what if the time traveler had been only an average history student? What then?

  There were more limestone outcroppings now, great shelves that seemed to push sideways out of the ground, shadowy oblongs less luminous in the twilight than the ever-present snow. Runs Far slowed, letting the rest of the group jog past, until Paul at the end of the line had caught up with him. The bearded hunter fell into step beside him without a word, and Paul, who was quite breathless, was content to let him do so.