River of Blue Fire

  * * *

  ANOTHER pair of the voracious tongs leaped from the water and flung itself at them, the huge jaws snapping like a bear-trap. Chief Strike Anywhere managed to dodge the attack, but the tongs smashed against the birchbark rail as they fell back into the river and Orlando and the others were rattled violently in the bottom of the canoe.

  Another shudder rolled Orlando on his belly and onto the knobby hilt of the sword he thought he had lost, then a shout of pain from the Indian made him sit up. One of the pairs of salad tongs had the chief by the arm and was trying to drag him into the river; as Orlando watched in horror, the arm began to stretch like taffy. He snatched up his sword and brought it down on the tongs as hard as he could, just behind the teeth. The impact shook him from his fingers to his spine, but the tongs let go of the chief, sent Orlando an evil look, then sank back into the roiling water.

  Chief Strike Anywhere rubbed his arm, which had already snapped back to its former size and shape, then turned to renew the battle. A chorus of thin voices from close by made Orlando wonder if someone might be coming to rescue them, but it was only the vegetables on the shoreline, who had disassembled their conga line to crowd along the water’s edge. Most were watching the attack on the canoe in thrilled horror, although some, particularly the stewed beets, seemed to find the whole thing wildly funny, and were shouting out useless, drunken advice indiscriminately to both boaters and predatory utensils.

  Something thumped them at the waterline once more and the little boat shuddered. Orlando braced himself, then raised the sword over his head. He knew that any moment now the canoe would go over, and he was determined to take at least one of the hinged, blunt-headed creatures with him. Fredericks rose beside him, trying to fit an arrow to his bowstring even as the canoe seesawed briefly on the handle of one of the attackers, then dropped back into the water.

  The ruckus from the shore was suddenly pierced by a scream of anguish.

  Some of the vegetables in the front row, jostled by the gawkers behind them and the dozens more hurrying out of the upturned colander to see what was happening, had been forced out into the river. A little cherry tomato was wailing piteously, floating farther and farther from the riverbank. A head of lettuce, a flower lei still looped about its widest circumference, waded out after the tomato, shrieking.

  Something split the water beside the lettuce. The head was tossed up into the air, then fell back. More jaws flashed and clacked shut—even at a great distance, Orlando could hear the fibrous crunching. As lettuce leaves flew everywhere, the whole school of tongs hurried to the vicinity. Panicked, the beachfront spectators began to blunder into each other as they fled the feeding frenzy, and in the chaos several more fell into the water. Bits of tomato pulp and bleeding beet now streamed from toothy jaws. A carrot wearing a barbecue apron was lifted up out of the water and snapped in half.

  Within moments the water around the canoe had grown calm, while a stone’s throw away the river’s edge was a froth of snapping tongs and vegetable parts. Chief Strike Anywhere picked up his paddle and turned the canoe again toward the middle of the river. “Lucky for us,” he grunted, “them like salad better.”

  “That’s . . . that’s horrible.” Fredericks was leaning on the side of the canoe, fascinated by the murderous violence. A scum of pureed vegetables was quickly forming along the river’s edge.

  “It them fault,” replied Strike Anywhere coldly. “They get tongs worked up in first place. Smell of vegetables make them crazy.”

  Orlando could not help feel sorry for the little cherry tomato. It had cried just like a lost child.

  “No can take you to land that side,” Strike Anywhere told the tortoise later, as they floated in the slow current at midstream. A little mist lay on the river here, so that the banks were almost invisible, the cabinets only dim shapes towering on either side. “Tongs very busy there for long time.”

  “I perfectly understand.” The tortoise had only recently reemerged from his shell, where he had retreated during the attack. “And I have no wish to be deposited on the other side, which is strange to me. Perhaps I will stay with you a while, if you don’t mind, and then you can set me ashore later.”

  Strike Anywhere grunted and began to paddle again.

  “We have got to get out of here, Orlando,” Fredericks said quietly. “This all just scans too majorly. I mean, it would be bad enough just to get killed, but sixed by something out of a silverware drawer. . . ?”

  Orlando smiled wearily. “If we help you find your papoose,” he called to the chief, “will you help us to leave the Kitchen? We don’t belong here, and we need to find our friends.”

  The chief turned, his long-nosed face shrewd in the dim bulblight from above. “No can go back up faucet,” he said. “Have to go out other end of Kitchen.”

  Before he could explain further, a sound came to them across the waters, a chorus of piping voices that Orlando thought for a moment might be survivors from the terrible vegetable massacre—except these voices were raised in intricate, three-part harmony.

  “Sing we now, we rodents three,”

  Sightless all since infancy,

  Can’t see, but we sing con brio,

  A blind, note-bleating fieldmouse trio.”

  A shape appeared in the fog, long and cylindrical, surmounted by three vertical figures. As it drew closer, it was revealed to be three mice in matching dark glasses, perched atop a bottle—which, with impossibly clever pink feet, they rolled beneath them like a lumberjack’s log, never once losing their balance. Their arms were looped about each other’s shoulders; the outside mouse on one end held a tin cup, the one at the other end a white cane.

  “And ever since our mummy birthed us

  We love to clean up every surface

  Just pour enough to fill this cup

  And wipe those stains and spills right up!”

  “Three little mice, we like to sing,

  But love to clean more than anything,

  And if you use us, we suspect

  You’ll also find we disinfect!

  A one-eyed bat could see it’s true—

  Blind Mice Cleanser will work for you!”

  The tinny barbershop harmonies were so perfect and so completely silly that when the song was finished, Orlando could think of nothing to do but applaud; the tortoise did, too. Fredericks gave him an irritated look, but reluctantly joined in. Only Chief Strike Anywhere remained stoically silent. The three mice, still rolling the bottle beneath them, took a deep bow.

  “Now available in Family Size!” squeaked the one holding the cane.

  The word “family” may have touched a chord in the chief, or he might only have been waiting courteously for the mice to finish their song. He asked, “You seen bad men on big boat? With little papoose?”

  “They could hardly have seen anything,” suggested the tortoise. “Now could they?”

  “No, we don’t see much,” agreed one of the mice.

  “But we listen a lot,” added another.

  “We may have heard this particular tot.” The third nodded gravely as he spoke.

  “A big boat passed us.”

  “Two hours ago.”

  “They didn’t seem to like our show.”

  “A baby was crying.”

  “We thought that was sad.”

  “And jeepers!—those men sounded pretty bad.”

  After a pause, the one with the cane piped up again. “They didn’t smell too good, either,” it said in a conspiratorial whisper. “Ot-nay ootay ean-clay, if you see what we’re saying.”

  Strike Anywhere leaned forward. “Which way they go?”

  The mice put their heads together and indulged in a great deal of quiet but animated discussion. At last they turned back, spread their arms, then began to do a chorus kick whi
le still keeping the cleanser bottle revolving merrily beneath them—a very good trick, even Fredericks had to admit later.

  “The shores of Gitchee-Goomee

  May be shady, green, and nice,”

  they sang,

  “But except saying ‘Hi!’ to Hiawatha,

  The trip’s not worth the price.

  The spot you seek is closer

  —You can be there in a trice!—

  Those kidnapping chaps

  Have followed old maps

  To the famous Box of Ice.”

  The mouse with the tin cup waved it in a circle and added, “Don’t forget—it’s almost spring! Time to scrub your surfaces daisy-fresh!” Then the trio danced their pink feet so fast that the bottle swung around until its nose pointed away from the canoe. As the current carried them off, Orlando noticed for the first time that not one of them had a tail.

  Within moments they were lost in the mist again, but their high-pitched voices floated back for awhile longer, singing some new hymn to the glories of elbow-grease and shiny counters.

  “Right, the farmer’s wife. . .” Orlando murmured, as the nursery rhyme came back to him. “Poor little things.”

  “What are you babbling about?” Fredericks frowned at him, then shouted, “Hey, where are we going?” as the chief began paddling with renewed and even increased vigor toward the unexplored farther shore.

  “The Ice Box,” explained the tortoise. “It is near the far end of the Kitchen, and a place of many legends. In fact, stories tell that somewhere inside it lie ‘sleepers’—folk who have existed as long as the

  Kitchen itself, but always in slumber, and who will dream their cold dreams until Time itself ends if they are left undisturbed. Sometimes these sleepers, without ever waking, will predict the future to anyone lucky or unlucky enough to be nearby, or answer questions that otherwise would go unaddressed.”

  “Bad men no care about sleepers,” the chief said, leaning into each stroke of the paddle. “Them want gold.”

  “Ah, yes.” The tortoise laid a stubby finger alongside his blunt beak and nodded. “They have heard the rumors that one of the Shoppers themselves has left a cache of golden treasure in the Ice Box. This may be merely a fairy tale—no one I know has ever seen one of the Shoppers, who are said to be godlike giants who come into the Kitchen only when night is done, when all who live here are as helplessly asleep as those in the farthest depths of the Ice Box. But whether the gold is a myth or the truth, clearly these bad men believe it to be real.”

  “Help me out, Gardino,” Fredericks whispered. “What the hell is an ice box?”

  “I think it’s what they used to call a refrigerator.”

  Fredericks looked at the unstoppable, mechanical movements of Chief Strike Anywhere as he paddled toward his lost son. “This just scans and scans, doesn’t it?” he said. “And then it scans some more.”

  At least another hour seemed to pass before they reached land—or floor, Orlando supposed. Clearly the size of the river bore very little relation to any kind of scale; based on the size of the sink and counter-tops they had already visited, the Kitchen would have to be a real-world room hundreds of meters wide for such a long water journey to make sense. But he knew it was no use thinking about it too much—the Kitchen, he sensed, was not supposed to be analyzed that way.

  The spot the chief had chosen was a small spit of dry space near the base of a massive leg that might have belonged to a table or chair—the piece of furniture was too large to see properly in the dark. This side of the kitchen seemed darker than the other riverbank, as though they were a much greater distance from the overhead bulb.

  “You stay here,” the Indian said. “Me go to look for bad men. Me come back soon, we make plan.” One of his longer speeches now finished, he carried the canoe out until the water was past his perfectly cylindrical chest, then climbed aboard with silent grace.

  “Well,” said the tortoise as he watched him paddle away, “I can’t pretend to be happy I’ve been caught up in all this, but I suppose we must make the best of things. Too bad we have no way of lighting a fire—it would make the waiting a little less lonely.”

  Fredericks seemed about to say something, then shook his head. Orlando realized that his friend had been about to ask a question, but had been suddenly embarrassed by the idea of talking to a cartoon. Orlando smiled. It was funny to know someone so well, and yet not to know them at all. He had known Sam Fredericks for years now—since they had both been sixth graders—and still had never seen his face.

  Her face.

  As always, the realization startled him. He looked at the familiar Pithlit-the-Thief features—the sharp chin, the large, expressive eyes—and wondered again what Fredericks really looked like. Was she pretty? Or did she look like her usual Fredericks sims, except a girl instead of a boy? And what did it matter?

  Orlando wasn’t sure it did matter. But he wasn’t sure it didn’t, either.

  “I’m hungry,” Fredericks announced. “What happens if we eat something here, Orlando? I mean, I know it doesn’t really feed us or anything. But would it feel good?”

  “I’m not sure. I guess it depends on whatever it is that’s keeping us on the system.” He tried to consider that for a moment—how the brain as well as body might be locked into a virtual interface—but he was having trouble making his thoughts stay together. “I’m too tired to think about it.”

  “Perhaps you two should sleep,” the tortoise said. “I would gladly keep watch, in case our friend comes back, or something less savory takes an interest in us.”

  Fredericks gave the tortoise a look not entirely devoid of suspicion. “Yeah?”

  Orlando settled against the broad base of the furniture leg, which was wide as a grain silo out of one of those old Western flicks and made a reasonably comfortable backrest. “Come on,” he said to Fredericks. “You can put your head on my shoulder.”

  His friend turned and stared. “What does that mean?”

  “Just . . . just so you’ll be comfortable.”

  “Oh, yeah? And if you still believed I was a guy, would you have said that?”

  Orlando had no honest answer. He shrugged. “Okay, so I’m a total woofmaster. So take me to Law Net Live.”

  “Perhaps I should tell you lads a story,” the tortoise said brightly. “That sometimes helps to dig a path toward the Sands of Sleep.”

  “You said something about the Shoppers.” Orlando had been intrigued, although he did not know if he had the strength to listen to an entire story. “Do you believe they’re the ones who made you? Who made all the . . . the people in the Kitchen?”

  Fredericks groaned, but the tortoise ignored him. “Made us? Goodness, no.” He took his spectacles off and wiped them vigorously, as if the mere thought made him jumpy. “No, we are made elsewhere. But the Shoppers, if the stories are true, bring us here from that other place, and thus we spend our nights in the Kitchen, longing always to return to our true home.”

  “Your true home?”

  “The Store, most call it, although I met a group of forks and spoons once who belonged to a flatware sect that referred to the great home as ‘The Catalog.’ But all agree that wherever that great home is, it is a place where we do not sleep unless we choose to, and in which the Bulb is beautiful and bright through a night which never ends. There, it is said, the Shoppers will serve us.”

  Orlando smiled and looked to Fredericks, but his friend’s eyes were already closed. Fredericks had never been very interested in the hows and whys of things. . . .

  As the tortoise droned quietly on, Orlando felt himself sliding into a sort of waking dream in which he and his fellow Kitchen-mates could live their cartoon lives without fear of being put back in drawers or cabinets, and in which all the violences of the night before were gone when darknes
s returned again.

  Kind of like it would be if I lived here all the time, he thought groggily. It’s funny—even the cartoons want to be alive. Just like me. I could live here forever, and not be sick, and never have to go into that hospital again, ‘cause I will go there again, and next time I won’t come out, maybe I won’t come out this time the tubes and the nurses all pretending they’re not sad but I wouldn’t have to if this was real and I could live here forever and never die. . . .

  He sat up suddenly. Fredericks, who perhaps against his or her better judgment had curled up against his shoulder after all, protested sleepily.

  “Wake up!” Orlando shook his friend. The tortoise, who had lulled himself into a kind of gentle reverie, peered at him over the rim of his spectacles as though seeing him for the first time, then slowly closed his eyes again and dropped back into sleep. “Come on, Fredericks,” Orlando whispered loudly, not wanting to drag the tortoise into this, “wake up!”

  “What? What is it?” Fredericks was always slow as a sloth to wake, but after a few moments he apparently remembered that they were in a potentially dangerous place and his eyes popped open. “What’s happening?”

  “I figured it out!” Orlando was both elated and sickened. The full import of the thing—the dreadful bargain those people had made—was just becoming clear to him. It could never mean as much to Fredericks as it did to him, never be as personal to anyone else, but even with his own fears and obsessions screaming their empathy, the thought of what the Grail people were doing made him angry to the very core of his being.

  “Figured what out? You’re having a dream, Gardiner.”

  “No. I’m not, I swear. I just figured out what the Grail Brotherhood people want—what all of this is about.”

  Fredericks sat up, annoyance turning to something like worry. “You did?”

  “Think about it. Here we are, and we’ve already been in a bunch of these things—these simworlds—and they’re just as good as the real world, right? No, better, because you can make anything, be anything.”