River of Blue Fire

  “I live . . .” She stopped again, and several seconds of silence followed. “Oh, no. If you saw my name, looking into this Tandagore thing, then that means . . . that means anyone can find out.” Her voice got smaller at the end, as though she had stepped away from the speaker, or toppled down a hole. “Oh, God,” she murmured. “I have to get off. I can’t talk.”

  “Ms. Pirofsky, please . . .” he began, but the connection clicked off.

  He sat staring at the dark screen for some moments before he brought his wallpaper back up, wondering what he could give up to make time for a visit to Canada, and wondering how he would feel about that if the woman turned out to be as unstable as she sounded.

  Jaleel Fredericks was one of those people who gave the impression you’d just dragged him away from something really important—that even if you were calling to tell him his house was burning down, he’d be a little surprised you’d bothered him when there were things that truly deserved his attention.

  “Forgive me, Ramsey, but I’m tired,” he said. “What this comes down to is that you don’t really have anything yet. Am I right?”

  “Basically.” It was bad strategy to equivocate with Fredericks, but you couldn’t let him run roughshod over you, either. He was a good man, Catur Ramsey had long ago decided, but he was used to folding people into shapes that suited him. “But you have to clear the brush before you can start building the cabin.”

  “I’m sure.” He frowned as his wife said something offscreen. “That’s not what he’s calling about.” Fredericks turned his attention back to the attorney. “She says she’s been trying to get the authorization for those records you wanted, but it may be a few more days. And did you get that stuff of Sam’s she sent you.”

  “No problem. And yes, I got those files, but I haven’t had a chance to look through them yet. I’ll get back to you at the beginning of the week, let you know what all this research amounts to.”

  As he was waiting for the Gardiner family’s number to pick up, Ramsey watched the stream of cars sliding past on the elevated freeway three floors below his office window, the rain-slick asphalt streaked with reflections from the headlights. He knew he should have asked the Frederickses to authorize a trip up to Toronto, but the idea of explaining the Uncle Jingle woman to Jaleel Fredericks was less than appealing. He wasn’t sure himself why he felt there might be something worth pursuing there.

  He only had to wade halfway through the incoming call filter before Conrad Gardiner picked up. He was Ramsey’s age, perhaps even a bit younger, but he looked ready for retirement, his face barely animated.

  “What can we do for you, Mr. Ramsey?”

  “I was just curious about something. Do you still have that problem with your son’s agent and the missing files?”

  “Yes. We’ve had two different companies in to see what they can do, but no results.” He shook his head slowly. “I can’t believe all that stuff has just been mailed right out of our system by . . . by a program. Gear, making its own decisions.” His laugh was not a happy one. “Well, that’s the twenty-first century for you, isn’t it?”

  “What was its name?”

  “You mean Orlando’s agent? I don’t know. It was ‘something something PsAI‘—a Pseudo-Artificial-Intelligence, you know? Old, but expensive when we got it. I suppose I could look it up.”

  “Actually, I was wondering if Orlando had a name for it. You know, a nickname? People, especially kids, often do that.”

  “Jesus, you’re kidding.” Gardiner was taken aback. “I really can’t remember. Vivien!”

  His wife walked into the room, just barely visible on Ramsey’s screen. She was taking off her coat; he guessed she’d been at the hospital. Her husband passed the question on to her, and she said something Ramsey couldn’t hear.

  “Beezle Bug,” Gardiner reported. “That’s right. I’d forgotten. He’s had it since he was a little kid.” His mouth twitched, and he turned away for a moment. When he had mastered himself, he asked: “What do you want to know that for, anyway?”

  “Just wondering,” Ramsey said. “An idea. I’ll tell you about it another time.”

  He broke the connection, then sat back to think, watching the cars leave snail trails of light on the freeway below.

  It was midnight by the time he got home. Third time that week, and it was only Thursday.

  IT was almost worse that he knew it was a dream.

  Such visions were all that ever came to him in the bloodless darkness that was now the closest he came to sleep—the same tired images, the same recycled shames and horrors. They might be broken apart and then sifted together in strange combinations, but they were still the very ones that had visited him for years, some for over a century.

  Even Felix Jongleur’s ghosts were growing old.

  The three senior boys stood before him, blocking the stairway and any chance of escape. Oldfield had the collar of his white shirt turned up, and held a cigarette cupped in his hand. Patto and Halsall, who had been waiting for their turn, followed Oldfield’s gaze. The three stared at him like Macbeth’s witches.

  “What are you looking at, Jingle-Jangle?” Oldfield demanded.

  “Little sniveler,” added Halsall. “Sniveling Frog bastard.”

  “Juggles wants to join in,” Patto said, grinning. “He wants a puff on your fag, Oley.”

  It was all so predictable—history and fantasy splashed together in an untrustworthy mix. The part of Jongleur’s ancient brain that stood at a critical distance from the dream-stage recognized that the stairwell and landing were not from the Cranleigh School residence but his childhood house in Limoux, and that the dream-Patto had almost entirely lost his true features, and looked instead like a man Jongleur had known (and whose business he had ruined) back at the turn of the most recent century, almost ninety years later than these imperfectly remembered school days.

  But for all its repetitions, the humiliation of this dream and others like it did not become less.

  The English boys were on him now, like jackals on a fallen antelope. Halsall wrenched his arm behind his back while Oldfield grabbed at his crotch and twisted until he screeched with pain and sucked in air and smoke from the stolen cigarette. He could feel it again, that horrible taste; each breath was a red fire going down his throat. He choked until he almost vomited.

  “Parley-voo, Juggles.” Patto twisted his ear. “Parley-voo, you sodding Frenchie spy.”

  But instead of kicking him as they usually did, they snatched his elbows and pulled him around, facing him toward the end of the second floor landing. Toward the window.

  That doesn’t belong here! he thought, and suddenly the tired old dream filled him with a surprising panic. Not that! Not the window!

  But he was being hurried toward it, his arms pinioned. The window grew larger before him, round and without any kind of grille or crossbars, backed by what his dream-self knew to be a profound blackness, a poisonous dark abyss, from which he was protected only by the thinnest sheet of glass.

  He knew that he did not ever, ever, ever want to find out what was on the far side.

  They can’t do this to me, he thought in terror. They think I’m a boy, but I’m not, I’m old—I’m old! They can’t . . .

  He was shouting it in the dream, too, telling them he was too frail, but Oldfield and the others only laughed louder, then shoved him toward the window. Shrieking, he struck the hard surface, but instead of the glass breaking, it was he, ancient, dry, and brittle, who shattered into a thousand pieces.

  The dreams, the truth, his memories, shattered, mixed together, and flung . . .

  . . . Showering outward into the sunlight like a spray of water, each piece spinning like a separate planet, the cloud of iridescence a universe that had lost its equilibrium, now flying apart in high-speed entropic expansion.

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nbsp; The cries echoed and echoed, as they always did, but this time they were his.

  He awakened in blackness, without even the virtual lamplight of Abydos to soothe him. For a brief moment he was actually in his body and nothing else, but the horror was too much and he plunged back into his system. A blind, helpless thing, a slug wrapped in gauze and mylar, floating in a dark tank—he shuddered at the thought of having to exist as he truly was. He pulled on his machinery as though it were armor.

  Once into the system, the world’s oldest man did not bring up the full glories of his custom-made Egypt, but raised instead a much simpler virtual world that held nothing but dim and sourceless blue light. Jongleur basked in it, caressed by subliminal sonics, and tried to calm the great fear that gripped him.

  The young could not understand the horror of being old. That was nature’s way of protecting them from uselessly harmful knowledge, just as the atmosphere around the Earth created a blue sky that shielded humanity from constant exposure to the naked unconcern of the stars. Old age was failure, limitation, marginalization—and that was just the beginning. Because every moment was also a step closer to nothingness, as Death drew ever nigh.

  Felix Jongleur had dreamed of a faceless, shadowy figure all through his childhood, the Death that his father had told him “waits for us all,” but it was when his parents sent him away to that ghastly school in England that he had finally learned what it looked like. One night, as he leafed through a tattered newspaper one of the upperclassmen had left behind in the dormitory cabinet, he had seen an illustration—”an artist’s rendition,” the caption read, “of the enigmatic Mr. Jingo,”—and had known at once that this was the face of what hunted him through his dreams far more implacably than even the cruelest older boys had ever stalked him in the Cranleigh halls. The man in the picture was tall, wrapped in a dark cloak, and wore a tall, old-fashioned stovepipe hat. But it was his eyes, his mesmeric, staring eyes, and his cold grin which had caused young Felix’s heart to race with recognition. The article, the explanation of who the artist’s lurid drawing represented, had been gnawed away by rats and would thus forever remain a mystery; only the picture had survived, but that had been enough. Those eyes had watched Felix Jongleur ever since. As all the intervening decades had rolled past, he had lived under the gaze of those amused, soul-empty, terrifying eyes.

  They waited. He—it—waited. Like an unhurried shark beneath a failing swimmer, Mister Jingo had no need to do anything else.

  Jongleur fought now against the morbidity that sometimes grew on his isolated mind like an opportunistic parasite. It would all be easier if only one could believe in something outside oneself—something loving and kind, a counterweight to that hideously patient gaze. As his mother’s sisters had done. Positive that Heaven waited for them—a place apparently identical to Limoux, except that good Catholic spinsters no longer had to put up with aching joints and noisy children—they had been the picture of security, even on their deathbeds. Not a one of them had left life with anything other than calm, even cheerful, acceptance.

  But he knew better. He had learned the lesson first from his father’s sad, tired face, then learned it again and more brutally in the jungle of English public school. Beyond the sky there was no Heaven, but only blackness and abounding space. Beyond one’s own self there was nothing to trust, nothing upon which to rely. Darkness waited. It would take you when it wished, and no one would lift a finger to save you. You could scream until you thought your heart would burst, and someone would merely push a pillow over your face to muffle your cries. The pain would go on. No help would come.

  And Death? Death, with his top hat and hypnotist gaze, was the greatest bully of all. If he did not take you from behind and unawares, if in some way you managed to avoid him and grow strong, he merely stood in the shadows and waited until time itself dragged you down. Then, when you were old and weak and helpless, he would stalk you as brazenly as a wolf.

  And this the young, in their magnificent stupidity, could never understand. For them, death was only a cartoon wolf, something to be mocked. They did not see, could not know, what it would be like in that day when the monster became real—when straw, or wood, or even walls of brick would not save them.

  Jongleur shuddered, something his attenuated nervous system reported rather than felt. His only solace was that since he himself had been old, he had watched three generations of youth inherit this dreadful realization and then go before him, dragged screaming out of their shattered houses into the night while he himself still avoided those smiling jaws. Genetic therapy, vitamin-flooding, low-dose triggerpoint radiation, all the tricks available (unless you had Jongleur’s almost limitless assets and Jongleur’s seminal ideas) could only delay death a little. Some, the luckier and the wealthier, had recently lived into a second decade past their first century, but they were still children compared to him. As the others all fell, as his own grandchildren and great- and great-great-grandchildren had been born, aged, then succumbed, one after the other, he alone had continued to cheat Mr. Jingo’s patience.

  And God or whatever willing, he would do so forever!

  Felix Jongleur had faced night-terrors for more than two long human lifetimes. He knew without looking at the chronometer, without reference to any of the information he could summon with little more than a thought, that outside his fortress the last hour before dawn lay heavy on the Gulf of Mexico. The few fishing boats that he allowed in Lake Borgne, his private moat, would be loading up their nets. Police in surveillance labs in Baton Rouge would be nodding off in front of their monitors, hoping that the morning shift would remember to bring them something to eat. Fifty kilometers west of Jongleur’s tower, in New Orleans, a half-dozen or more tourists would be lying in the gutters of the Vieux Carré, missing their money cards, key cards, and self-respect . . . if they were lucky. Some less fortunate might wake up drugged, with a hand gone and the wrist hastily cauterized so the thieves could avoid a murder charge (most rental car companies had abandoned palmprint-readers, but a few still held out.) And some of the gutter-flung tourists would not be lucky enough to wake up at all.

  The night was almost gone.

  Felix Jongleur was angry with himself. It was bad enough that he should float in and out of sleep without realizing it—he did not remember drifting off—but to wake up, heart aflutter like a frightened child, because of a few familiar and now-tiresome dreams. . . .

  He would do some work, he decided. That was the only good solution, the best way to spit in the face of the man with the tall hat.

  His first impulse was to return to Abydos-That-Was, to review recent information from the comfort of his god-throne, surrounded by the attentions of his priests. But the nightmare, and especially its unusual juxtaposition of elements, had unsettled him. His home suddenly did not feel secure, and although the great house that his physical body never left was more heavily defended than most military bases, he still felt the urge to have a look around, if only to assure himself that all was as it should be.

  Anchored by seven subterranean floors (a hundred-plus vertical feet of fibramic cylinder, which had been literally screwed into the delta mud), Jongleur’s tower reached another ten stories up from water level into the foggy air above Lake Borgne, but the great tower was only part of the vast complex that covered the artificial island. An engineered mass of rock about fifty kilometers square, the island housed only slightly more than two thousand people—a very small town by numbers alone, but more influential than most of the world’s nations put together. Jongleur was only slightly less a god here than he was in his virtual Egypt: with a subvocalized word, he brought up the battery of video images that detailed every corner of his domain. All over the tower and the surrounding buildings, wallscreens became one-way windows in an instant, and words and numbers superimposed on the surveillance pictures began to fly past him like sparks.

  He started on the outside
and worked his way in. The east-facing perimeter cameras brought him the first hints of sunrise, a reddish glow above the Gulf, still dimmer than the tangerine lights dotting the oil rigs. The guards in two of the perimeter observation towers were playing cards, and a few were not fully in uniform, but the squadrons in all six towers were awake and alert, and Jongleur was satisfied; he would memo the commanders about keeping a watch on discipline. The rest of the defenders of his domain—the human defenders, in any case—slept in their bunks, row upon row upon row. Their quarters and parade grounds alone took up almost half the artificial island on which the tower stood.

  He moved his inspection inward to the tower itself, flitting from viewpoint to wallscreened viewpoint over scores of rooms and dozens of corridors like some magical spirit that lived in mirrors. The offices were mostly empty, although a skeleton crew was in place taking overseas requests and pulling information off the nets for the morning shift to examine. A few custodial workers at the end of their shift, local men and women who had no idea how closely they had been examined before being hired, were waiting on the esplanade for the shuttle boat that would take them around to their quarters on the island’s far side.

  His executive staff had not come in yet, and their offices stood hushed and dark except for the glow of electronic displays. Above the executive offices were the first of the tower apartments, reserved mainly for visiting dignitaries: the few of these treasured and envied living spaces that had been fitted as permanent residences were awarded to only the very luckiest of Jongleur’s entire worldwide operation.

  Jongleur’s remote eye discovered the bathrobed president of one of his larger Ukrainian subsidiaries sitting on one of the tower apartment balconies, looking down at the lake. Jongleur wondered if the man might be awake so early because he was jet-lagged, and then remembered he had a conference scheduled with the fellow later in the day. It would take place through intermediary screens, of course; the Ukrainian executive, one of the richest and most powerful men in his entire country, would doubtless wonder why, after coming all this way, he should not meet his own employer in person.