River of Blue Fire

  “But I couldn’t see anything. Not until we got there.”

  “I do not think you would have been able to. That tool, that thing that looks like a cigarette lighter, belongs to one of the Grail Brotherhood, I am sure. The person who holds it can see things others cannot—can act as gods act. I do not doubt that if we could make it work properly, we would find many wonderful things we could do.”

  Renie’s heart quickened. This was good news—no, this was excellent news! They might be able to take their destiny back into their own grasp. She looked at the lump of shiny metal still clutched in !Xabbu’s skinny fist, and for the first time in days, felt hope return.

  “But I saw other things, too,” he continued. “No, not ‘saw’—that is a misleading word. Knew? Felt? I am not sure. But I could see that Lion’s creatures, those sad and torn people, were nothing more than shadows, no more alive than the trees or stones or sky in that place. Lion, though, was alive as Emily is alive,” !Xabbu flicked a glance at the sleeping girl, “a real person, or at least a force—not just a part of the simulation.”

  “And you can tell that now? What’s real and what’s not?”

  He shook his head. “It was in those minutes only, when the feeling was strong in me. Sometimes, after we dance, it as though we stand in a high place and can see great distances, or with great sharpness. But not always, and even when it happens, it does not last.” He turned toward the sleeping girl. “Emily looks no more or less real to me now than she did when we met her.”

  “But you could do it again!”

  He made a little barking sound, a tired laugh. “It is not something you can turn on and turn off, Renie, like one of your machines. I had a great need, and I danced to search for answers. For a moment, I had many answers. I saw what was real and what was not, and I summoned a gateway. But even while it happened, I had no idea of where the gateway might lead, which is why we are in this strange place. And I might dance every night for a year and never have that happen again.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it. “I just . . . I was just hopeful.”

  “But there is reason to be hopeful. We have this thing that Azador carried. It opened a gateway. I cannot promise to understand its working as well as I did when the trance was still on me, but it is of your machine world—it has rules. Something we can do will make it work again.”

  “May I hold it?” She took it from him as carefully as if it were a soap bubble. Despite all the rough handling it had survived just since she had known of its existence—dropped on a cement cell floor and on the tugboat’s deck, submerged in the river—it was suddenly a precious object; she did not want to risk anything going wrong.

  It looked no different than it had before, a chunky, old-fashioned lighter, its raised “Y” monogram ostentatiously over-elaborate. Even knowing what she knew, there was nothing to suggest it was more than what it appeared. “How did you . . . what did you do to it?” she asked him, running her fingertip along the raised surface of the monogram. “To make it work.”

  “It is hard to explain.” !Xabbu yawned again. “I was seeing with my truest eyes. But there are ways to move your fingers on it.”

  Renie examined the object in the way her own training had taught her, trying to see what its maker had intended, but it was not a device normally meant to be understood by anyone other than its user—no normal standards of interface design had been employed. It was a rich person’s key, the secrets it unlocked meant for that person alone.

  Or in certain circumstances, she reflected with sour amusement, Aboriginal trance-dancers or gypsy thieves.

  For the briefest instant she thought of Azador, and even felt a twinge of sympathy for the man, although it didn’t last long. If he had been using this pilfered object to find his way around, he was now part of the common herd again.

  Trying to imagine how !Xabbu had seen the thing during his moment of clarity, Renie continued to turn the lighter in her hands, kneading it like a lump of dough, squeezing, stroking, twisting it in her fingers. Once she almost thought she felt it shudder ever so slightly, a tiny vibration like the beating of a moth’s wing under velvet, but it ended almost immediately. No matter what else she did, it remained an obstinately unmagical object. She handed it back to !Xabbu, who took it gently, sniffed it, then weighed it in his palm.

  “So where do you think we are?” she said. “And who or what the hell is Emily, if she isn’t part of that simulation?” She had a sudden thought. “Azador must have known, the rapist bastard! But he kept pretending she was a Puppet.”

  “Perhaps,” !Xabbu said. “But remember, my knowing was only because I had been given a moment of understanding. Perhaps this object can tell such things, and so he did know . . . but perhaps not. In any case, if he stole the lighter, Azador himself may not have understood all the ways of its working.” He considered the heavy, shiny object. “As for what Emily is, I cannot say. She is a person, and must be treated as one. Perhaps she is a ghost—you said once there were ghosts on the net.”

  Renie shivered, despite the nonclimate. “I didn’t. I said that some people believed there were ghosts on the net—the same people who probably used to believe in the other kind of ghosts, or that if you step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back—and all that kind of nonsense.”

  !Xabbu tipped his head sideways, which often meant he was considering some polite way to say he disagreed, but if he meant to dispute her, he changed his mind. “I do not know what she is, in any case. As to this place, I suspect it is something unfinished, do you not think?”

  “Maybe.” She looked around, frowning. “But it seems strange that they wouldn’t just finish it before they turned it on, if you know what I mean. There might be bugs in the gear, but most of it would work, and the engineers would fix whatever didn’t. But Atasco said they grew these places, so . . .” She shrugged. “Whatever, it doesn’t matter. But I don’t like it here. All the funny reflections and colors make me feel sick to my stomach. Hurts my eyes, too. Is there any chance we could go somewhere else?”

  “Do you mean find another gateway?” !Xabbu sniffed the lighter again. “I do not know, Renie. I really am tired, and I do not have the feeling that I had earlier—the true-seeing.”

  “But like you said, it’s just a machine. I don’t want you to exhaust yourself, !Xabbu, but give it a try, anyway. See if you can remember what you did.”

  “What if we open a gateway to somewhere much less pleasant than this?”

  “Well, then we turn around and come back to Patchwork Land. Those gates must work both directions, don’t they?”

  “I am not sure.” Nevertheless, he handled the lighter with a bit more intention now, sliding it between his palms like a bar of wet soap. After a moment, he stopped. “I feel that I might be able to do it again, Renie, but I am truly very tired. I do not think this is the best time.”

  She had a sudden vision of him convulsing, not half an hour before, and cursed her own heedlessness. “I’m sorry, !Xabbu. Of course it can wait. You need rest. Come here—put your head in my lap.”

  She settled herself back against an irregularity that had the blurred-edges look of a bit of VR sketchwork—more a statement of intent than an actual object, in this case something that planned someday to be a tussock of grass on this potential hillside. It was not tremendously comfortable, but she’d been in worse places lately. !Xabbu crept over and stretched his torso lengthways along her leg with his tail tickling under her chin. He folded his arms across her knee, then rested his head on them, a curious mingling of animal and human postures. He was asleep within seconds.

  Renie herself lasted several minutes longer.

  She did not know how long she had slept, since there was no way to mark time in this completely timeless place, but she felt as though she had gone fairly deep. As her eyes opened, she had a certain confusion abou
t what she was looking at, which quickly became a feeling that something important had been turned inside out.

  Her first coherent recognition was that the no-color sky now had a color. It was not much of a color, rather a slight curdling from its previous nameless shade toward something more like faint gray, but it was a change. Other colors had changed, too, as though some global filter had shifted one notch to the side, rendering most things in the unfinished simworld a shade darker and more solid. But all of the changes were not toward solidity: a few other things seemed to have slipped back toward unbeing, phantom versions replacing objects that had previously been fairly solid features of the landscape, other objects simply gone, swallowed back into nothingness. Perhaps the whole environment was in slow transition, she thought—was on its way to becoming something else.

  But transition from what to what, exactly? And why should it seem slow? What was the benchmark? The massive and instantaneous alteration of the entire landscape when they had lost Azador and the boat, the mind-warping upheaval, seemed to be the answer to her second question. Were the fast changes there and the slow changes here simply different versions of the same process? Was the network breaking down, as she had suspected? Or could it be building itself into something else instead?

  Bedeviled by unanswerable questions, she had just realized that !Xabbu’s head was no longer resting on her knee when she heard him speak.

  “Do you know, Renie, I woke up with a thought.” He was crouching a few paces away, examining Azador’s lighter once more.

  “Did you get some good sleep?”

  “Yes, I did, thank you. But I want to tell you my thought. I spoke of this thing as if it were a tool, like a digging stick. But what if it is more than that?”

  “I’m not following you.” Renie saw that Emily had disappeared from the spot where she had been sleeping, but since !Xabbu did not seem concerned, she let it go. “More than. . . .”

  “What if this is more than a tool. What if it is a Name? One of the things my people believe—most so-called primitive people believe, in fact—is that there is a great power in names. To know something’s true name is to have power over it. Well, what if this does belong to one of the Brotherhood?”

  “Then we can use it to get around, go from place to place,” she said, considering. “Maybe actually plan where we want to go instead of just winding up there.”

  “Ah, but if this is something that belongs to one of the Grail people, perhaps it will do for us what it does for that person—perhaps it will be a Name.”

  “Like an access key, you mean? Get us into places we couldn’t get to without it? Maybe get us off the network entirely?”

  “Or into the files and information of the Grail Brotherhood.” He bared his teeth. “If so, there is much mischief we could do them.”

  “Oh, !Xabbu!” She clapped her hands together in pleasure. “That would be better than I’ve hoped for in a long time! Maybe we could finally get some information about Stephen and all the others. . . .”

  Her moment of euphoria was interrupted by the arrival of Emily, who came running down the hillside, all legs and flailing arms, as though pursued by demons. “Help me!” she shouted. Renie jumped to her feet.

  Emily skidded to a halt, her face contorted into a mask of pain and fury. “I told you, I’m hungry and I need something to eat! You said you’d look, but you didn’t, and I’m starving! There’s nothing around here anywhere!”

  Renie was startled by how upset the girl was. How could they know whether Emily really needed to eat or not? They didn’t even know what she was, let alone what kind of way she might interact with the network. Maybe she was truly hurting. “We’ll help you look . . .” she began, but was interrupted by a scream of frustration.

  “I already looked, I told you, and there’s nothing anywhere! And it’s not just for me, you think I’m selfish and stupid, but you don’t even know me! It’s for my baby! I have a baby in me!”

  “Again?” was all Renie could think of to say, and then added, “I mean, still?”

  “You don’t know anything about me,” Emily wailed, then sank to the ground, weeping bitterly.

  “We may really need to find something for her,” Renie said to !Xabbu, and sighed. “Maybe there’s some, I don’t know, fruit-in-progress or something we could pick around here.” She stared at the girl. “She’s still pregnant. What is this all about?”

  !Xabbu was working the lighter in his deft fingers, tracing his way around it as though reading a long poem in Braille. “Perhaps we do need to find another place,” he said. “A place more like we are used to, a place with food for Emily, and shelter and familiar things.”

  Yes, familiar things like obstetricians, Renie was about to say, but she was struck by a new and worrying thought. “When is your baby coming?”

  Emily’s sobbing had abated somewhat. “Don’t . . . don’t know.”

  “When did you last have your period—your time of the month?”

  The girl frowned. “I’m six weeks late. That’s how I know.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “And I feel . . . funny.”

  Renie sighed her relief. Sometimes it was hard to tell with the skinny ones, but it sounded like even accounting for distorted network-time, Emily was not due for a while. “We’ll do what we can to help,” she said, her tone a little softer now. “We’ll find you some food . . .” She broke off. !Xabbu had become very quiet, his hands moving very slowly now. He was no longer looking at the lump of metal in his hands, but rather off into the indeterminate distance; he almost seemed to be listening for something.

  “Renie,” he said calmly, “I think I have found an opening, and it is very close to where we are. Perhaps it is the one through which we came. . . .”

  “That’s good—that’s very good!” Emily’s problems aside, if the Bushman could make the lighter work under normal circumstances, then many things would be resolved for the better.

  “. . . But there is something strange happening. I can feel someone out there.”

  “What do you mean?” A sudden interior chill made her voice sharp. “What are you talking about, someone? Who?”

  !Xabbu closed his eyes and was silent for long moments, holding the lighter so carefully in his small dark fingers he might have been a gemcutter preparing to place a master-stroke. “This will sound very mad,” he said at last. “It feels like someone is standing on the other side of a pan, a desert pan. When the breeze is blowing true, I can hear the voice very close, although I cannot see the person at all.” He made an oddly human face, wrinkling his brow and frowning, and for the first time in hours she was struck by the incongruity of her best friend being a baboon. “Renie, I think it is Martine.”

  “What? You’re joking!”

  “I can hear her, or feel her. There are no words. But she is just on the other side of something, and she is looking for a way out.” His head snapped back, as though he had been startled by a blast of noise. “She is very close!”

  Renie crawled toward him, but stopped a few inches away. She was unwilling to touch him, afraid that she would somehow disrupt this incomprehensible circuitry. “Is she with the others? Can you find them? Can they find us?”

  “I do not know. I will try to open the gateway, if I can remember what I did before.” His frown became a scowl of pained concentration. “It is so hard this time—I am doing something wrong.”

  But even as he spoke those worried words, an invisible hand abruptly peeled a piece out of the air just a few meters away, letting golden light leak through. Within a second the rip had lengthened into a glimmering horizontal streak about the span of a human’s extended arms. Twin lines of fire began to crawl toward the ground. A moment later a membrane of shimmering golden radiance connected them, a light that could be called nothing less than brilliant, but which also seemed strangely confined by i
ts own outline.

  Emily stared, gape-jawed. Renie, too, was helplessly fascinated. It was only the second time she had seen this happen, and it was just as impressive an effect as it had been in Forest. Only !Xabbu was not captured by the unearthly look of the thing: his eyes were tight shut and his lips moved in some silent invocation.

  The brilliance became a little less. The curtain of flame darkened a fraction toward amber, and Renie was struck by the dreadful certainty that the experiment had failed, that if Martine had actually been somewhere on the other end, they had missed the connection.

  A rush of noise erupted from the glow, a roar so sudden and immense that Renie could not hear her own shout of astonishment. Several shapes fell out of the gateway in a tumbling mass and knocked her and !Xabbu to the ground. The noise dropped away, and as it did, Renie saw the golden rectangle flare, then die. She could see little else, because something very heavy and spiky and sharp was lying on top of her, pressing her face into the unfinished ground.

  “Martine?” she shouted as she struggled to squirm out from beneath the painful mass. “Is that you?”

  T4b, the Goggleboy robot in his attack-armor, rolled away with a bellow of surprise. He landed on his backside and sat for a moment, staring at her, as though she were something quite impossible to believe.

  One of the other shapes detached itself from the tumble of bodies. “Renie! My God, it is you!” The sim was still a nondescript Temilúni woman, but the accented voice was unmistakable.

  “Martine!” She scrambled to her feet, ignoring the bruises she had gained cushioning T4b’s landing, and caught the other woman in such a powerful embrace that she lifted Martine Desroubin’s feet from the ground. “Oh, Jesus Mercy, how did this all happen? We thought we’d lost all of you forever! Is Orlando with you?”