River of Blue Fire

“So?”

  “So why do you think they made these places? Just to run around in, like you and I run around in the Middle Country?”

  “Maybe.” Fredericks rubbed his eyes. “Listen, Orlando, I’m sure this is utterly important and everything, but could you just tell me in a few words?”

  “Think about it! You’re some majorly rich person. You have everything you want, everything money can buy. Except that there’s one thing you can’t do, no matter how much money you have—one thing money can’t buy, that makes all the houses and jets and everything worthless.

  “They’re going to die, Fredericks. All the money in the world can’t stop that. All the money in the world won’t help you if your body gets old and dies and rots away. Until now.”

  Now his friend’s eyes were wide. “What are you saying, exactly? That they’re going to keep themselves from dying? How?”

  “I’m not sure. But if they can find a way to live here, in this Other-land place, they don’t need bodies any more. They could live here forever, Fredericks, just like they’ve always lived—no, better! They can be gods! And if they had to kill a few kids to get it, don’t you think they’d be willing to pay that price?”

  Fredericks gaped. Then his mouth closed and his lips rounded. He whistled. “Tchi seen, Orlando, you really think so? God.” He shook his head. “Scanny. This is the biggest thing ever.”

  Now that he understood the stakes for the first time, Orlando was also realizing that he hadn’t known how frightened he could be. This was the black, black shadow of the golden city. “It is,” he whispered, “it really is. The biggest thing ever.”

  THE dark-skinned army man behind the desk was not the normal, friendly Corporal Keegan that usually sat there. He kept looking at Christabel like the waiting room of an office was not the place for a little girl, even if it was her dad’s office and he was just on the other side of the double doors. Corporal Keegan always called her “Christalulu-bel” and sometimes gave her a piece of candy from a box in his drawer. The man at the desk now was all scowly, and Christabel did not like him.

  Some people just made mean faces at kids. It was scanny. (That was Portia’s word, and Christabel wasn’t entirely sure what it meant, but she thought it meant stupid.) And it was stupid. Couldn’t the man see that she was being extra special quiet?

  She had a lot to think about, anyway, so she just ignored the scowly man and let him go back to working his squeezers. A lot to think about.

  The boy from outside was what she had to think about, and Mister Sellars. When the boy had come into Mister Sellars’ tunnel and frightened Christabel so bad, he had been waving a sharp thing and she had been really, really sure he was going to hurt them both with it. And he had even waved it at Mister Sellars and called him bad names, like “freak,” but instead of being scared, Mister Sellars had just made a kind of funny quiet laugh and then asked the boy if he wanted something to eat.

  Christabel had seen a show on the net once where a bunch of people were trying to catch the last tiger somewhere—she didn’t remember if it was the last tiger in the world or just in that place, but she remembered it was the last—because the tiger had a hurt leg and broken teeth and it would die if it tried to live in the outside by itself. But even though the tiger’s leg was so hurt that it could barely walk, and they were offering it food to try to get it to go in a special trap, it still wouldn’t come near them.

  That was the look the strange boy had given Mister Sellars, a you-won’t-catch-me look. And he had waved the knife around again and yelled really loud, scaring Christabel so bad she would have peed her pants again if there was anything left to pee. But Mister Sellars hadn’t been scared at all, even though he was so thin and weak—his arms weren’t any bigger than the boy’s arms—and was in a wheelchair. He just asked him again if he wanted something to eat.

  The boy had waited a long time, then scowled just like the man at the desk was doing, and said “What you got?”

  And then Mister Sellars had sent her away.

  That was the hardest thing to think about. If Mister Sellars wasn’t afraid of the boy who was named Cho-Cho, if he didn’t think the boy would hurt him, why did he send her away? Did the boy only hurt little kids? Or was there something Mister Sellars was going to do or say that he didn’t want Christabel to hear, only the boy? That made her feel bad, like the time when Ophelia Weiner had said she could only have three people to her slumber party, her mom’s rules, and had invited Portia and Sieglinde Hill and Delphine Riggs, even though Delphine Riggs had only gone to their school for a few weeks.

  Portia said afterward that it was a dumb sleepover, and that Ophelia’s mom made them look at pictures of Ophelia’s family at their house in Dallas where they had a pool, but Christabel had still felt very sad. And having Mister Sellars send her away so he could talk to the boy and give him something to eat made her feel the same way, like things were different.

  She wondered if she could take out the Storybook Sunglasses and say “Rumpelstiltskin” and then ask Mister Sellars why he did it, but even though she really, really wanted to, she knew it would be a very bad idea to use them here, right in her daddy’s office with that man looking over at her with his face like a rock. Even if she whispered ever so quiet, it was a bad idea. But she really wanted to know, and she felt like crying.

  The door to her daddy’s office room suddenly opened, like it had been pushed open by the loud voice that was talking.

  “. . . I don’t really care, Major Sorensen. Nothing personal, you understand, but I just want results.” The man talking was standing in the doorway, and the man behind the desk jumped up like his chair had caught on fire. The man who said he didn’t care wasn’t as tall as her daddy, but he looked very strong, and his coat was tight across his back. His neck was very brown and had wrinkles on it.

  “Yes, sir,” her daddy said. Two more men stepped out of the office and moved to either side of the door, like they meant to catch the man with the brown neck if he suddenly fell over.

  “Well, then get it handled, damn it!” the man said. “I want him located. If I have to throw a cordon a hundred miles wide around this base and institute house-to-house searches, I will—I consider finding him that important. You could have done whatever was necessary before he had time to find a hiding place, and I would have made sure General Pelham backed you all the way. But you didn’t, and there’s not much point in stirring up a hornet’s nest now. So, do it your own way . . . but you better get it done. You read me?”

  Her daddy, who was nodding his head as the man spoke, saw Christabel over the man’s shoulder and his eyes opened wide for a second. The man turned around. His face was in such a frown that Christabel was certain he was going to start yelling at everyone to get this little kid out of here. He had a gray mustache, much smaller and neater than Captain Ron’s, and his eyes were very bright. For a moment he stared at her like a bird would look at a worm it wanted to eat, and she was scared all over again.

  “Aha!” he said in a growly voice. “A spy.”

  Christabel pushed herself back into the chair. The magazine she had been holding fell onto the floor with the pages open.

  “Ohmigod, I scared her.” Suddenly he smiled. He had very white teeth, and his eyes crinkled up when he did it. “It’s all right, I’m just kidding. Who are you, sweetie?”

  “My daughter, sir,” her daddy said. “Christabel, say hello to General Yacoubian.”

  She tried to remember what her daddy had taught her. It was hard to think with the man smiling at her. “Hello, General, sir.”

  “Hello, General sir,” he said, and laughed, then turned to the man who had been sitting at Corporal Keegan’s desk. “You hear that, Murphy? At least someone connected with this man’s army gives me a little respect.” The general came around the desk and kneeled down in front of Christabel. He smelled like something
she smelled on cleaning day, like furniture polish maybe. From close up, his eyes were still like a bird’s eyes, very bright, with pale flecks in the brown. “And what’s your name, honey?”

  “Christabel, sir.”

  “I’ll bet you are your daddy’s pride and joy.” He reached out and took her cheek between his fingers, just for a moment, very gentle, then stood up. “She’s a beauty, Sorensen. Did you come down to help your daddy work, honey?”

  “I’m not quite sure why she’s here myself, sir.” Her daddy walked toward her, almost as though he wanted to be close in case she said something wrong so he could stop her. Christabel did not understand why, but she felt scared again. “Why are you here, baby? Where’s your mommy?”

  “She called the school to say Mrs. Gullison was sick, so I should come here. She’s shopping in the town today.”

  The general smiled again, showing almost all his teeth. “Ah, but a good spy always has a cover story.” He turned to her daddy. “We’re due back in Washington in three hours. But I’ll be back beginning of next week. And I’d love to have some definite progress. I recommend that to you highly, Sorensen. Even better, I’d like to come back and find you-know-who under full guard in a suicide watch cell, ready for questioning.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The general and his three men headed toward the door. He stopped there after the first two went through. “Now you be a good girl,” he said to Christabel, who was trying to get the idea of a suicide watch out of her mind, and wondering who would wear something like that. “You mind your daddy, you hear me?”

  She nodded.

  “Because daddies know best.” He gave her a little salute, then walked out. The scowly man went out last, looking very spyflick, like if he didn’t keep watching carefully, Christabel’s daddy might run up behind the general and hit him.

  After they all left, her daddy sat on the desk and stared at the door for a while. “Well, maybe we should get you home,” he said at last. “Mommy ought to be back from shopping by now, don’t you think?”

  “Who are you supposed to find, Daddy?”

  “To find? Were you listening to that?” He walked over and messed up her hair.

  “Daddy, don’t! Who are you supposed to find . . . ?”

  “Nobody, sweetie. Just an old friend of the general’s.” He took her hand in his. “Now come on. After the day I’ve just had, I think I can take a few minutes off work to drive my daughter home.”

  IT was odd, but the thing that awakened Jeremiah Dako was the silence.

  The oddity was that as one of only two people roaming through a huge, abandoned military base, he should have been startled by anything except silence. Living in the Wasp’s Nest with only Long Joseph for company was most of the time like being the last inhabitant of one of the ghost townships that dotted the southern Transvaal, where the Tokoza Epidemic had emptied the shantytowns so quickly that many of the fleeing residents left even their few miserable possessions behind—cooking pots, cardboard suitcases, tattered but wearable clothing—as though their owners had all been snatched away in a second by some dreadful magic.

  But even the deserted Transvaal worker stations had been open to wind and rain and the incursions of wildlife. Birdsong could still be heard echoing through the dusty streets, or rats and mice scrabbling in the rubbish dumps.

  The Wasp’s Nest, though, was a monument to silence. Shielded from the elements by uncountable tons of stone, its machineries largely stilled, its massive doors so tightly sealed that even insects could not slip in and the air vents so finely-screened that no visible living organism could enter, the base might have been something from a fairy tale—Beauty’s castle, perhaps, where she and all her family slept, powdered in the dust of centuries.

  Jeremiah Dako was not a fanciful man, but there were times in the eternal night of indoor living, when his companion Joseph Sulaweyo had finally slipped into fitful sleep—a sleep that seemed plagued by its own malign fairy folk—when Jeremiah stared at the vast cement coffins that were now his responsibility and wondered what tale he had stumbled into.

  He wondered, too, what the Author expected him to do.

  I’m one of the ones they don’t talk about much in the stories, he decided on a night when the readings were unremarkable and the hours went by slowly. It was only a slightly painful realization. The man holding the spear by the door. The one who brings in some magical something-or-other on a velvet pillow when someone important calls for it. One of those people in the crowd who shouts “Hooray!” when everything ends happily. I’ve always been that man. Worked for my mother until I was grown, worked for the doctor for twenty-four years after that. I might have run away from it all for beautiful beautiful Khalid if he had asked me, but I would have wound up keeping house for him, too. I would have been in his story, that is all, instead of the doctor’s or my mother’s, or right now this crazy thing with machines and villains and this big empty building under a mountain.

  Of course, a spear-carrier role was not entirely without rewards, and neither was this multistory ghost town. He had time to read and to think now. He had not had much time for either since he had gone to work for the Van Bleeks. All his spare time had gone into assuring his mother’s comfort, and although Susan would not have begrudged him the occasional quiet hour spent reading or watching the net while she was deep in her researches, the mere fact of her trust had spurred him on to great—and almost always unnoticed—efforts. But here there was literally nothing to do except to watch the readouts on the V-tanks, and make sure the fluid levels stayed topped up. It was no more difficult than maintaining the doctor’s expensive car—which was now parked in the lowest of the Wasp’s Nest parking lots, and which would be gathering dust if he didn’t go up there every few days to clean it with a soft cloth and agonize over the ruined grill and cracked windshield.

  He sometimes wondered if he would ever get to drive it again.

  Jeremiah, despite not liking the fellow very much, would have been willing to devote more of his leisure time to conversation with Long Joseph, but Renie’s father (who had never been exactly warm) was growing increasingly remote. The man spent hours in brooding silence, or vanished into the farther reaches of the base and returned with his eyes reddened by tears. Jeremiah had liked it better when the fellow was just nasty.

  And Jeremiah’s every attempt to reach out had been rebuffed. At first he had thought it was only the man’s pride, or perhaps his hopeless, provincial prejudice against homosexuality, but lately he had come to realize that there was a knot in Long Joseph Sulaweyo that might never be untied. The man lacked the vocabulary to define his pain except in the most obvious ways, but more critically, he did not seem to understand that there could be an alternative, if he would only try to find the answers within himself. It was as though the entire twenty-first century had passed him by, and he could imagine emotional pain solely in the primitive ways of the prior century, only as something to be raged against or endured.

  Lately, as though the inner turmoil were coming to a rolling boil, Long Joseph had taken to walking incessantly, not only vanishing for long journeys through the base—Jeremiah had thought at first he was searching for alcohol, but surely he had given that up by now?—but even pacing in a most maddening way when they were in the same room, always moving, always walking. In the past few days Joseph had even begun singing to himself as he did so, filling the long silences between irregular conversation with a tuneless murmur that was starting to make Jeremiah feel like someone was poking him repeatedly in the back of the head. The songs, if that was what they were, did not seem to have any application to Long Joseph’s situation. They were just old popular standards, repeated over and over again, sometimes—bereft of their original melodies and with the lyrics mumbled or even turned into nonsense syllables—just barely, though irritatingly, recognizable.

  Jeremiah honestly
did feel sorry for the man. Joseph had lost his wife in a horrible, lingering way, his son was all but dead with a mystery illness, and now his daughter had gone away into danger, although she remained cruelly, deceptively near. Jeremiah understood that Long Joseph was hurting badly, and that the absence of anything to drink had removed one of the man’s few emotional crutches, but that did not mean that the mumbling and the pacing and the incessant idiot crooning were not soon going to make Jeremiah far more crazy than Long Joseph could ever aspire to be.

  Thus it was that when he awakened in the middle of the night, several hours before he was due to take his next shift from Renie’s father, the silence—the absence of even the distant whisper of Joseph’s songs—startled him.

  Jeremiah Dako had dragged the military-issue camp bed down to the underground lab in part because he had been working longer and longer shifts watching over the V-tanks, filling in for Long Joseph when the man was late returning from one of his rambling walks around the complex—or sometimes when he did not come back at all. At least, that was the reason he cited, not without some heat, when Joseph Sulaweyo demanded to know his reasons for moving a bed into the lab.

  But in a dark part of his imagination, he had also begun to lose trust in Long Joseph. Jeremiah feared that, in a fit of despondency, the other man might actually do something to damage the tanks or the processing equipment that made them run.

  Now, as he lay in the darkness of the office he had chosen as his makeshift bedroom, listening to a very unfamiliar silence, he felt a cool wind of fear blow through him. Had it finally happened, then? Or was he just strung too tightly himself? Being trapped for weeks in a deserted underground base, listening to the echoes of his own footsteps and the mumbling of a crazy man, was not the way to keep anyone mentally healthy. Perhaps he was jumping at shadows—or at innocent silences.

  Jeremiah groaned quietly and got up. His heart was beating only a little more swiftly than it should, but he knew he would not get back to sleep until he saw for himself that Long Joseph Sulaweyo was sitting in the chair in front of the tank readings. Or perhaps off using the toilet—even Jeremiah occasionally left the room on his own shift to answer a call of nature or to make coffee, or even just to get a little cold air in the face from one of the ventilation ducts.