River of Blue Fire

  “That’s not a good way to think, Christabel,” Mister Sellars said gently. “Please, I’m very tired. I’ll call you when I want you to come, and you’re definitely still my friend. Your job right now is to be Christabel, and make sure your parents are happy with you. Then, if there’s something big and important I have to ask you to do, it will be easier for you to do it.”

  She had heard this kind of talk before. When she wanted to have her hair cut in the same style as Palmyra Jannissar, the singer she saw all the time on the net, her mother had said, “We don’t want you to look like Palmyra, we want you to look like Christabel.” Which meant N-O spells “no.”

  “But . . .”

  “I’m sorry, Christabel, but I really must rest. I’ve worn myself out working in my garden—it has grown so tangled! . . . and I must . . .” He let his eyes close for a moment. His funny, squishy face looked empty in a way she hadn’t seen before, and it frightened her all over again. She felt very worried—he didn’t have a garden anymore, now that he lived in a hole, not even one plant, so why would he say something like that?

  “C’mon, weenit,” the boy said, standing over her now. “El viejo‘s sleepy. Leave him alone.”

  For a moment, because he said it strange, she almost thought he cared about Mister Sellars. But then she thought about how he lied and stole, and knew he didn’t. She got up, and for the first time she knew what it meant in her stories when it said “her heart was heavy.” Something inside her felt like it weighed a million pounds. She walked past the boy and didn’t even look at him, although she could see out of the corner of her eye that he was doing a stupid bow, like someone in a flick. Mister Sellars didn’t say good-bye. His eyes were already shut, his chest going up and down, up and down, fast but gentle.

  Christabel did not eat much of her dinner. Her daddy was talking about bad things at work, and about pressure he was under—she always imagined it like the roof that came down and squished people in Kondo Kill, which she saw once at Ophelia Weiner’s when all the parents were having a party downstairs—so he didn’t notice that she just kind of rearranged her food on her plate, pushing her mashed potatoes into a funny skinny shape that sort of looked like she’d eaten some.

  She asked to be excused and went to her room. The special Storybook Sunglasses that Mister Sellars had given her were sitting on the floor near the bed. She looked at them and frowned, then tried to do some of the arithmetic problems in her school workbook, but all she could think of was how sick Mister Sellars had looked. He had seemed crumpled up, like a piece of paper.

  Maybe the boy was poisoning him, she thought suddenly. Like in Snow White. Maybe he was putting something bad in that boiling pot, just like the poison that the bad queen dipped the apple into. And Mister Sellars would just get sicker and sicker.

  She picked up the Storybook Sunglasses, then put them down again. He had said he would call her. He would be angry if she called him, wouldn’t he? Not that he had ever really been angry with her, but still . . .

  But what if he was going to get poisoned? Or maybe even just get sicker from something else. Shouldn’t she bring him some medicine? She hadn’t asked him because she was so unhappy, but now it seemed like he might really need some. That boy would never be able to get medicine, but Christabel’s mommy had a whole cupboard full of things—patches and bottles, painblockers, all kinds of things.

  Christabel put the sunglasses on and stared into the black that was inside them, still thinking. What if Mister Sellars did get angry, and then told her not to talk to him or come see him any more?

  But what if he was really sick? Or getting poisoned?

  She opened her mouth, thought about it for a just a little longer, then said “Rumpelstiltskin.” She didn’t say it very loud, and she was just wondering whether she should say it again when a voice spoke to her, but not a voice from the glasses.

  “Christabel?”

  She jumped and pulled off the Storybook Sunglasses. Her mother was standing in the doorway with a funny look on her face, her eyebrows squinchy. “Christabel, I was just talking to Audra Patrick.”

  Christabel had been scared that Mommy knew she was calling Mister Sellars with their secret word, and for a moment she couldn’t understand what her mother was talking about at all.

  “Mrs. Patrick, Christabel? Danae’s mother?” Her mother frowned even more. “She said you didn’t come to Bluebirds today. Where did you go after school? You didn’t get home until almost four. In fact, I asked you how Bluebirds was, and you said ‘fine’.”

  Christabel couldn’t think of anything to say. She stared at her mother, trying to think of another lie, like all the others she had been telling, but this time she couldn’t think of anything, of anything at all.

  “Christabel, you’re scaring me. Where were you?”

  Down in the tunnel, was all that was in her head. With the boy with missing teeth, and the poison clouds, and Mister Sellars all sick. But she couldn’t say any of that, and her mother was staring at her, and there was a feeling of Really Big Trouble starting to fill up the air, just like the steam filled up the tunnel, when all of a sudden the Storybook Sunglasses in her hands made a little crackling noise.

  “Christabel?” said Mister Sellars’ little tiny voice. “Did you call me?”

  Christabel stared at the sunglasses for a moment, confused. She looked up at her mother, who was staring at the sunglasses too, her face almost completely without expression.

  “Christabel?” said the tiny voice again, but it seemed very loud.

  “Oh . . . my . . . God! What is going on here?” Her mother took two steps into the room and snatched the sunglasses from Christabel’s hand. “Don’t you move, young lady,” she said, scared and angry together. She turned and went out, slamming the door behind her. A moment later, Christabel could hear her talking in a loud voice to Daddy.

  Alone in her room, Christabel sat without thinking for a few moments. The bang of the door closing still seemed to be going on and on, a booming noise like a cannon, like a bomb. She looked down at her hands, empty now, and burst into tears.

  CHAPTER 27

  The Beloved Porcupine

  * * *

  NETFEED/NEWS: “Diamond Dal” Dies

  (visual: Spicer-Spence meeting Pope John XXIV)

  VO: Dallas Spicer-Spence, known to the tabnets as “Diamond Dal,” was found dead in her Swiss chateau, a victim of heart failure. She was 107. Spicer-Spence won and lost several fortunes and several husbands during her colorful life, but she was probably best-known for her legal battle during her residence in Tanzania to make a chimp named “Daba” the executor of her estate, an attempt to dramatize her concern for the rights of the country’s ape population, sold by the hundreds every year for biomedical research.

  (visual: Daba sitting at desk, smoking a cigar)

  Spicer-Spence succeeded in her legal challenge, but Daba the chimpanzee predeceased her by more than a decade. The disposition of her estate is now in the hands of several human lawyers . . .

  * * *

  RENIE was finding it hard to move. Her entire body throbbed with pain and fatigue, but that pain was nothing compared to the greater weariness which gripped her. She had no strength to go forward, and no belief left from which to draw more strength. The world had become a solid, resistant thing, she herself as boneless as the river she had escaped only minutes before.

  !Xabbu had just finished arranging the firewood in a neat cone at the center of the forest clearing. Emily, the refugee from New Emerald City, sat shivering in a swiftly narrowing patch of sunlight and watched without interest as the nimble baboon fingers drew two more pieces of wood from the place they had been collected. The Bushman-baboon fitted the tip of the smaller stick into the hole in the larger, then steadied the larger log with his feet and began twirling the smaller piece between his palms, as though
he meant to enlarge the hole.

  Renie felt a reflexive jerk of guilt watching her friend do all the work, but it was not enough to overcome her misery. “You didn’t need to pull out the Aboriginal Camping Kit, !Xabbu,” she said. “We’ve got Azador’s lighter.” She handed him the lighter, which she had been gripping so hard in the river that there were still marks on the virtual skin of her hand.

  How about that Otherland VR technology, she thought sourly. Pretty impressive, huh? Hooray, hooray.

  !Xabbu studied it for a moment, his raptness of attention almost comical—a monkey, by all appearances, trying to make sense of something clever and human. “I wonder what this letter ‘Y’ stands for,” he said, studying the design engraved on the lighter’s cover.

  “It’s probably that bastard’s name—I mean, we don’t know if Azador’s a first name or a last name, do we?” She hugged her knees as the beginning of what promised to be a stiff evening breeze swept down the riverside, rattling the jungle foliage.

  !Xabbu turned the lighter over, then looked up at her. “He said to me that his name was Nicolai. That Azador was his last name.”

  “What? When did you talk to him about that?”

  “While you were sleeping. He did not say very much. I asked him what country his name came from and he said it was Spanish, but that his people were Romany, and to the travelers Spain was just a country like many others. He said his first name was Nicolai, which was a good Romany name.”

  “Damn.” Despite her dislike of the man, Renie could not help being irritated that the mysterious Azador had told !Xabbu more about himself in a five-minute conversation than he had shared with her over several days. “Well, then we’ll never know what the ‘Y’ is for, will we? Maybe it was his father’s. Maybe he stole it. I’m betting on the second.”

  !Xabbu found a way to flick the button with his not-quite-human thumb; the tiny nova blazed just above the end of the lighter, and did not move even when the breeze strengthened. When the kindling had caught, !Xabbu handed the lighter back to Renie, who stuck it in the pocket of her tattered jumpsuit.

  “You seem very sad,” he said to her.

  “Should I be happy?” It seemed a waste of time, explaining the obvious. “Azador’s real name is the least of our problems. We’re stuck in the middle of this bloody simulation without a boat, surrounded by God knows what kind of homicidal monstrosities, and just to keep things interesting, the entire network seems to be falling apart.”

  “Yes, it was very odd, very frightening, the way the whole world . . . changed,” !Xabbu said. “But that is not the first time we have experienced such a thing. Emily, what happened to us on the river and in Scarecrow’s palace—has it happened here other times?”

  The girl looked up miserably, her huge eyes full of the need to surrender. “Don’t know.”

  “You’re not going to get anything out of her,” Renie said. “Trust me, it’s happened here before. And it will happen again. Something’s wrong with the whole system.”

  “Perhaps they have enemies,” !Xabbu suggested. “These Grail people have hurt many—perhaps there are others who are fighting back.”

  “I wish.” Renie tossed a fallen seedpod onto the fire where it blackened and curled. “I’ll tell you what’s going on. They’ve made themselves a big network, and they’ve spent billions and billions to do it. You remember how Singh said that they employed thousands of programmers? Well, it’s just like building a big skyscraper or something. They’ve probably got Sick Building Syndrome.”

  “Sick Building syndrome?” !Xabbu had turned his back to the fire, and was waving his tail slowly back and forth as he warmed himself, as though conducting a symphony of flames.

  “When someone makes a complicated system and seals it up, little things begin to turn into big things just because the system is closed. Over time, a tiny flaw in a skyscraper ventilation system becomes a very serious problem. People get sick, systems fail, like that.” She didn’t have the energy to crawl nearer the fire, but it cheered her the smallest, smallest amount just to see its movement and feel the pulse of its heat. “They’ve forgotten something, or one of those early programmers sabotaged it, or something. It’ll all come apart.”

  “But that is good, is it not?”

  “Not with us stuck inside it, !Xabbu. Not if we can’t figure how to get offline. God knows what a system collapse would do to us.” She sighed. “And what about all the kids—what about Stephen? What if the network is all that’s keeping them alive, somehow? They’re locked into it, just like us.” As soon as she had said it, a chill that had nothing to do with the wind on the river gripped her. “Oh, my God,” she moaned. “Jesus Mercy. I’m an idiot! Why didn’t I think of it before . . . ?”

  “What, Renie?” !Xabbu looked up. “You sound very upset.”

  “I’ve been thinking all along, well, if worst comes to worst, someone will open up those tanks and pull us offline. Maybe there will be pain, like that kid Fredericks talked about, but maybe not. But I’ve just now realized that . . . that we must all be like Stephen.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “We’re comatose, !Xabbu! You and I! Even if they pulled us out of those tanks, we wouldn’t be awake, we’d be . . . just there. As good as dead. Like my brother.” Tears came—unexpectedly, because she had thought she had cried them all.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m not sure about anything!” She rubbed at her eyes, angry with herself. “But it makes sense, doesn’t it? Something that pulls you in and won’t let you get back into your physical body—doesn’t that describe just what happened to Stephen, and Quan Li’s granddaughter, and everyone else?”

  !Xabbu was silent. “If that is so,” he said at last, slowly, considering, “then does that mean Stephen, too, is here? In the Otherland network somewhere, with a body, like the ones we have?”

  Renie was stunned. “I never thought of that. Oh, God, I never even thought of that.”

  Her dreams were fretful and feverish. The last was a long, disjointed epic, which began with her chasing Stephen through a house of endless branching tunnels, his footsteps always ahead of her, while he remained only a shadow or a blur of motion disappearing around a corner, always just heartbreakingly out of reach.

  The house itself, she slowly realized, was alive—only the fuzziness of dreaming had prevented her from seeing the sweaty elasticity of the walls, the intestinal roundness of the corridors. She could feel its monstrously drawn-out breathing, inhalation and exhalation minutes apart, and knew that she had to catch Stephen before he went deeper into the thing and was lost forever, absorbed and digested, irrevocably changed.

  The twisting passageways came to an end in front of an immense darkness, a chasm that fell away, ever narrowing, like a huge black mountain of air turned upside down. There were voices in the depths, forlorn cries like the lamentation of birds. Stephen was falling—she knew that somehow, and also knew she had only an instant to decide whether to leap after him or let him go. !Xabbu’s voice was on the path behind her, telling her to wait, that he was coming with her, but !Xabbu did not understand the situation and there was no time to explain. She moved to the rim and, with her toes at the very edge of the precipice, had tensed to throw herself outward into the whispering darkness when someone grabbed her arm.

  “Let go!” she screamed. “He’s going down! Let me go!”

  “Renie, stop.” The pulling grew more insistent. “You will fall into the river. Stop.”

  The darkness stretched away before her, the pit abruptly becoming longer and narrower, until it was a black stream, a Styx rushing past. If she could only get into it, she would be carried after her brother. . . .

  “Renie! Wake up!”

  She opened her eyes. The true river—for nothing in this experience could be called “real”—burbled only a few feet
below her, almost invisible in darkness but for the shimmer of the current and the undulating reflection of the moon. She was crouching on her hands and knees on the edge of the crumbling riverbank, with !Xabbu clinging to one of her arms, his small legs braced against a root.

  “I . . .” She blinked. “I was dreaming.”

  “So I guessed.” He helped her straighten up before releasing his grip. She stumbled back toward the fire. Emily lay curled in a fetal position near the coals, breathing softly, her elfin face deformed against her pillowing arm.

  “Isn’t it my turn to take watch, !Xabbu?” Renie asked, rubbing her eyes. “How long have I been asleep?”

  “It does not matter. You are very tired. I am not so tired.”

  The temptation was strong to let go, to slide back into dreams, however disturbing. Anything was better than this grim, waking reality. “But that’s not fair.”

  “I am very good at waiting for sleep. That is the way of a hunter, as my father’s family taught it to me. In any case, you are important, Renie, very important, and we can do nothing without you. You must have some rest.”

  “Me, important? That’s a good one.” She slumped. Her head seemed made of concrete, her neck too weak to hold it up for more than a few moments at a stretch. Nowhere to go, nothing left to do, and nothing even to distract her from her misery. She newly understood her father’s habitual urge toward oblivion. “I’m about as much use as . . . as . . . I don’t know. But it isn’t much use, whatever it is.”

  “You are wrong.” !Xabbu had been poking up the fire, but now he turned, his posture strange even by baboon standards. “You really do not know, do you?”

  “Know what?”

  “How very important you are.”

  Renie did not want to hear a pep talk from anyone just now, !Xabbu included. “Look, I appreciate it, but I know what I can and can’t do. And at the moment, I’ve run way beyond my areas of competence. In fact, we all have.” She tried to summon up the passion to explain it to him properly—to let him know just how hopeless things were—but there were almost no reserves left. “Don’t you see? We’re up against something far bigger than we ever guessed, !Xabbu. And we’ve done exactly nothing—nothing! Not only haven’t we made any inroads against the Grail Brotherhood, they don’t even know we’re here. And they wouldn’t care if they did know. We are a joke—a bunch of fleas making plans to wrestle an elephant.” Her voice sounded dangerously uneven. She bit her lower lip, angry now and determined not to cry again. “We’ve been so . . . so stupid. How could we have thought we could do anything against an enemy this big, this powerful?”