River of Blue Fire

  She nodded, and realized her teeth were locked so tight her jaw hurt. She unclenched. She had received enough glimpses of the sunset through the trees until just a little while ago that she actually felt confident that they were flying west, but she needed something to worry about, and whether they were headed in the right direction was—in total contrast to all their other difficulties—a problem of almost manageable size.

  As they sped on through the evening, she gained enough confidence that she could almost enjoy the spectacle. Once they skimmed past a squirrel big as an office building, which turned a vast, liquid brown eye to watch them. Other insects, a large moth and a few mosquitos, fluttering along on errands of their own, passed the hopper without a second glance, like bored commuters pacing on a station platform. The moth was beautiful at this size, covered with a feathery gray pelt, each faceted eye a cluster of dark mirrors.

  The distance between trees had grown wider, as much as a quarter-minute or more now separating each gargantuan trunk. Tendrils of mist drifted upward from the ground, twining among the branches and obscuring vision, but before Renie could add this to her catalogue of worries, the forest finally dropped away behind them. A strip of beach flashed past, then nothing lay below but gray-green water.

  “The river! We’re there!” She didn’t dare take her hands off the wheel to clap, so she bounced in her padded seat.

  “You have done well, Renie,” !Xabbu said. “Shall we look for the others?”

  “We can try. I don’t know that we’ll find them, though. They might have got back on the boat and headed on downstream.” She tipped the hopper into a long, gradual turn. It was much less smooth in flight than the dragonfly, which had a wider wingspan, and it juddered as the wind shifted, but she had not hurried the turn, so she was able to straighten the little craft out again and head it along the river’s flow. It was true that these virtual planes were made for scientists to use, not professional flyers, but she was still proud of herself.

  She flew on for a few minutes, but it quickly became obvious that she would not be able to spot the others unless they were on the water or very well exposed on the beach. She was looking for a place to land, with the idea of continuing the search in full daylight, when !Xabbu sat up and pointed.

  “What is that? I see a leaf, but I think I see something pale moving on it.”

  Renie could not make out much more than a dark shape bobbing on the water. “Are you sure?”

  “No, but I think so. Can you fly this airplane closer to the river?”

  She was surprised by how quickly the little craft hopped forward when she gave it some throttle. They dipped down, almost too low, and Renie cursed as they clipped the top of one of the river swells. It took her a few moments to fight the hopper back into submission. She skimmed past the leaf, not quite so low this time.

  “It is them!” !Xabbu said, excited. “Or at least some of them. But they looked frightened.”

  “We must look like a real bug.”

  As she began her turn, !Xabbu said, “The water is strange here. The blue lights, as we had before.”

  “We should get them to the beach if we can.” Renie started back upstream. With !Xabbu’s help she managed to get the door open. Air rushed in, wild as an animal, bouncing them in their harnesses. Cullen groaned from behind his straps. Renie got her hand out the window and waved as they swooped past the startled faces on the boat.

  “Turn back!” she shouted into the wind.

  Whether they did not hear her, or had no way to steer, the leaf-boat did not change course. The current bore it on, and by the time Renie had completed another turn upstream and was heading back toward them, they had already reached the onset of the glimmering waters.

  Renie pulled the door shut. “How many of them are there?”

  “I could only see two.”

  She considered for only a moment. “If they can’t stop, we have to go through with them. Otherwise, we might never find them again.”

  “Of course,” said !Xabbu. “They are our friends.”

  Renie wasn’t sure she was quite ready to call their fellow refugees friends, but she understood !Xabbu’s impulse. Being lost was a lonely thing even in a world that made sense. “Right. Here we go.”

  They were almost level with the boat when snakes of neon-blue light began to arc along the windshield. As a flurry of sparks streamed from the wing, Renie had a frightening memory of the last Ares space mission, the one with the faulty shielding that had burned up on reentry. But this was cold fire, it seemed—foxfire, will-o’-the-wisp.

  The world beyond the windshield went completely blue, then completely white. She felt a moment of still, weightless peace . . . then everything went abruptly and horribly upside down. The windows blew out and they were whirling in blackness, flipping end over end through a roaring tumult so loud that Renie could not hear her own scream.

  End over end became a centrifugal blur. The roar increased, and for a few merciful instants, Renie lost consciousness. She floated back toward awareness, touched it, but did not take a firm grasp as she felt the spinning slow. The plane shuddered, then they struck down with a grinding rasp and a series of violent impacts that ended in a thump like a small explosion.

  Black and cold were all around her. For long moments, she was too stunned to speak.

  “Renie?”

  “I’m . . . I’m here.” She struggled upright. She could see nothing but a faint gleam of stars. The shape of the plane was all wrong, somehow, but she could not think about it. Things were pressing painfully against her, and something cold was creeping up her legs. “We’re in water!” she shouted.

  “I have Cullen. Help me to pull him out.” !Xabbu’s slender baboon fingers touched hers in the dark. She followed his arm to Cullen’s clothing, then together they pulled the injured man up the sloping floor toward the opening and the wide night sky. The water was thigh-high and rising.

  Renie dragged herself out through the crooked doorway, then leaned back and got a firm hold on Cullen before pulling him out into the waist-deep water. The air was strangely charged, tingly as in a storm, but the black sky seemed clear. The current tugged at her so that she had to brace herself as !Xabbu scrambled out, but the river was surprisingly shallow; Renie decided they had crashed on the edge of a sandbar or some other kind of underwater shelf. Whatever it was, the river remained shallow all the way to the shadowy bank. Stumbling, they carried Cullen onto land, then dropped into a heap.

  Renie heard a creaking noise and looked back toward the plane, but could make out only a shapeless darkness protruding above the waters. The shadow lurched with the current, groaning with a sound more wooden than metallic, then slid off the bar and down into the waters.

  “It’s gone,” she said quietly. She was beginning to shiver. “The plane just sank.”

  “But we are through into another place,” !Xabbu pointed out. “Look, the big trees are gone. The river is a true size again.”

  “The others!” Renie suddenly remembered. “Hello! Hello! Orlando? Are you out there? It’s us!”

  The land all around seemed flat and empty. No answer came back except the liquid murmur of the river and a lone cricket who seemed to have been on hold until just this moment, and now began sawing determinedly at his two-note song.

  Renie called again, !Xabbu joining her, but their only reply came from Cullen, who began to mumble and thrash weakly on the bank. They helped him sit up, but he did not answer their questions. In the darkness, it was hard to tell if he were truly conscious or not.

  “We have to get him some help,” she said. “If this is another simulation, maybe things are different here—maybe he can get offline.” But she did not feel hopeful even as she said it, and wondered for whose benefit she was speaking. She and !Xabbu got Cullen to his feet, then guided him up the riverbank. At the top of th
e rise they found an open field, and in the distance, much to Renie’s joy, a vast array of orange lights.

  “A city! Maybe that’s where Orlando and the rest have headed. Maybe they didn’t know we were coming through with them.” She got an arm around Cullen. !Xabbu took the point, a few paces ahead as they stumbled through tangled growth toward the lights. He stopped to riffle in the vegetation at their feet.

  “Look, this is corn.” He waved an ear in front of her face. “But all the stalks have been smashed to the ground, like an elephant or a herd of antelope have passed through here.”

  “Maybe it was,” she said, trying to keep her teeth from chattering. “And you know something? As long as it wasn’t giant bugs, I don’t care what did it.” She looked around. The flat fields extended away on all sides into the darkness. “But it would be nice to know where we’re supposed to be, I guess.”

  !Xabbu, now a few dozen yards ahead, had stopped. “Whatever knocked this corn down has knocked over the fence as well,” he said. “See.”

  Renie reached his side and let Cullen sit, which the entomologist did in swaying silence. Before them a heavy chain-link fence that looked to have been a dozen feet high now lay stretched across the broken corn like a snapped ribbon. “Well, at least we won’t have to go looking for a gate.” She bent to grab a rectangular metal sign, still held to the fence by one bent bolt. When she had twisted it free, she tilted it until it caught the light of the prairie moon.

  “TRESPASSERS WILL BE EXECUTED” it proclaimed in huge black letters. At the bottom, in smaller print, was written: “By Orders of His Wise Majesty, the Only King of Kansas.”

  “YOUR turn now,” said Long Joseph. He stared out over Jeremiah’s shoulder, eyes roving. “All them signs, no problem.”

  Jeremiah Dako put down his book. “Signs?”

  “Yeah, those what-are-they—vital signs. Still the same. Heart going fast sometime, then slow, but everything else the same. If I watch anymore, I’m going crazy.”

  Despite having just been on watch for six hours, Long Joseph Sulaweyo followed Jeremiah back into the lab. As Jeremiah confirmed that all the various monitors—body temperature, respiration, filters, hydration, and nutrition—were as Long Joseph had said, Renie’s father paced along the gallery, looking down on the silent V-tanks. His footsteps sent dry echoes scurrying through the cavernous room.

  As Long Joseph crossed in front of him for the dozenth time, Jeremiah pulled off the headset and slapped it down on the console. “Good God, man, would you go do that somewhere else? It’s bad enough I have to listen to you going pad, pad, pad around the place all night, but not here, too. Believe me, no one wishes more than I do that there was something here for you to drink.”

  Long Joseph turned, but more slowly than usual. His growl was a ghost of its former self. “What you doing, watching me sleep? Following me around at night? You come after me, try to get mannish, I’ll whip you. That’s the truth.”

  Jeremiah smiled despite himself. “Why is it that people like you always think that every homosexual you meet is dying to get you into bed? Believe me, old man, you are not my type.”

  The other glowered. “Well, that pretty damn sad for you then, because I the only one here.”

  Jeremiah laughed. “I promise I’ll let you know if you start to look good.”

  “What, something wrong with me?” He seemed genuinely insulted. “You like those little soft fellows? Pretty-boys?”

  “Oh, Joseph . . .” Jeremiah shook his head. “Just go do something. Go read a book. The selection is not very good, but there are some interesting ones.”

  “Read books? That’s like eating mielie pap—it start out bad, then it get no better.” Joseph took a deep breath and let it out slowly, overburdened by the mere thought of literature. “Thank God there is some net, that’s all I say. If we had no net, I would have to kill myself right now.”

  “You should not watch it so much. We are not supposed to use any more power than we have to—that Martine woman said it made it easier to disguise the power we were stealing if we kept it to a minimum.”

  “What are you talking about?” Long Joseph had found his outrage again. “We running those . . . those big tank things there,” he waved at the wire-festooned sarcophagi, “and all this nonsense ‘round here,” his irritated swipe took in the computers, the lights, and Jeremiah himself, “and you worrying about me getting a few drops off the net?”

  “I suppose you’re right.” Jeremiah picked up the headphones again. “Well, why don’t you go watch some, then. Let me do my tests.”

  A minute later, Long Joseph’s spare shadow fell across him again. Jeremiah waited for the other man to say something. When he did not, Jeremiah pulled off the headphones; it had been days since they had heard Renie or !Xabbu speak, in any case. “Yes? Come back for a recommendation on some reading material?”

  Long Joseph scowled. “No.” He was not looking at his companion, but rather at everything else, as though he tracked something which had both the power of flight and the wandering indirection of a goldfish.

  “Well, what is it?”

  “I don’t know.” Long Joseph leaned on the railing, still staring up into the four-story expanse overhead. When he spoke again, his voice had risen in pitch. “I am just . . . I don’t know, man. I think I am about gone crazy.”

  Jeremiah slowly put the headphones down. “What do you mean?”

  “It just . . . I don’t know. I can’t stop thinking about Renie, thinking about my boy Stephen. And how there’s nothing I can do. Just wait while all this foolishness go on.”

  “It’s not foolishness. Your daughter’s trying to help her brother. Someone killed my Doctor Van Bleeck over this. It’s not foolishness.”

  “Don’t get angry. I didn’t mean . . .” Long Joseph turned to look at Jeremiah for the first time. His eyes were red-rimmed. “But me, I doing nothing. Just sit in this place all day, every day. No sun, no air.” He raised his fingers to clutch his own throat. “Can’t breathe, hardly. And what if my Stephen needs me? Can’t do him no good in this place.”

  Jeremiah sighed. This was not the first time this had happened, although Long Joseph sounded more distressed than usual. “You know this is the best thing you can do for Renie and for Stephen. Don’t you think I’m worried, too? My mother doesn’t know where I am, I haven’t visited her for two weeks. I am her only child. But this is what we have to do, Joseph.”

  Long Joseph turned away again. “I dream about him, you know. Dreams all strange. See him in water, drowning, I can’t reach him. See him going away, up one of those escalators, don’t even see his face, but I’m going down, too many people and I can’t get after him.” His broad hands spread, then gripped the railing. The knuckles stood up like tiny hills. “He always going away. I think he is dying.”

  Jeremiah could think of nothing to say.

  Long Joseph sniffed, then straightened. “I only wanted a drink so I don’t have to think so damn much. Think about him, think about his mother—all burned up, cryin’, but her mouth wouldn’t work right, so she just made this little sound, hoo, hoo. . . .” He wiped angrily at one eye. “I don’t want to think about that no more. No more. That’s why I wanted a drink. Because it is better than killing myself.”

  Jeremiah stared intently at the displays on the console in front of him, as if to look up, to turn his gaze onto the other man, would be to risk everything. At last Long Joseph turned and walked away. Jeremiah listened to his steps receding around the gallery, slow as an old-fashioned clock striking the hour, followed by a hiss and muffled thump as the elevator door closed behind him.

  “THERE are people coming, Renie.” !Xabbu touched her hand. “More than a few. The voices I hear are women’s voices.”

  Renie held her place, breathless, but the only sound in her hear-plugs was the wind soughing throu
gh broken cornstalks. Cullen staggered to a stop beside her, as volitionless as an electronic toy separated from its controlling signal.

  “We have no idea who they are,” she said in a whisper. “Or what this place is, except that it’s some kind of imaginary United States.” She wondered if they had somehow wandered back into the Atascos’ alternate America. Would that be bad or good? They knew the place already, which would be a definite advantage, but the Grail Brotherhood would be scouring its every virtual nook and cranny looking for the people who had fled Temilún.

  Now she could hear what !Xabbu had detected almost a minute earlier—voices approaching, and the sound of many feet tramping through the devastated cornfield.

  “Get down,” she whispered, and pulled Cullen onto his knees among the shielding stalks, then eased him onto his stomach with !Xabbu’s help. She hoped the wounded entomologist had enough sense left to keep quiet.

  The sounds grew nearer. A good-sized party was passing them, perhaps headed for the damaged fence. Renie strained to hear their conversation, but caught only a few disjointed fragments that seemed to be about the merits of treacle pudding. She also heard several references to someone named Emily.

  Something rustled beside her, an almost inaudible scrape among the leaves near her head. She turned to see that !Xabbu had disappeared. Frightened, she could only lie as silently as possible while the invisible group crunched past a few meters away. Her hand rested on Cullen’s back, and she did not notice for long moments that she was rubbing in circles the same way she had done many times to soothe a frightened Stephen.

  The voices had just stopped two dozen meters away when !Xabbu appeared again beside her, popping out of the cornstalks so suddenly that she almost shouted in surprise.

  “There are a dozen women fixing the fence,” he said quietly. “And a strange thing, a mechanical man, that tells them what to do. I think they will be working there a good time, though—the section of fence they must lift is very large.”

  Renie tried to make sense of this. “A mechanical man? A robot, you mean?”