River of Blue Fire, Page 33

  Somewhere, Dread felt himself laughing. It was worth laughing about. Too much, too much.

  But was that how the Old Man felt? Was that what the Old Man’s kind of power felt like, all the time? That the world was his, to do with as he wished? That people like Dread were just tiny spots of light, less significant than fireflies?

  Even if so, Dread was not bothered. He was wrapped in his own silver smugness and did not need to envy or fear the Old Man. All would change, and very soon now.

  No, he had other things to consider now, other dreams to dream. He let the single pulsing tone take him out of himself again. The twist warmed him as he returned to the cool, silvery place, the place where he could see far ahead and consider all the small things he needed to do along the way.

  Dread lay on the bare office floor and listened to his thinking music.

  She took an irritatingly long time to answer the call. He had already tapped in on the sim line and knew that the Otherland travelers were sleeping. What was she doing, taking another one of her showers? No wonder she was obsessed with her cat—she was practically one herself, constantly grooming. The bitch needed a little discipline . . . maybe the creative kind.

  No, he reminded himself. Remember the silver place. He brought up a little music—not the thinking music (he had used his week’s allotment, and he was very stern with himself about such things) but a faint echo, a quiet tonal splashing like water dripping in a pool. He would not let irritation spoil things. This was the thing he had been waiting for all his life.

  Although the call carried his signature code, her voice came on without visuals. “Hello?”

  Silver place, he told himself. The big picture. “It’s me, Dulcie. What, did you just get out of the bath again?”

  Dulcie Anwin’s freckled face popped into view. She was indeed wearing a terrycloth robe, but her red hair was dry. “I just left the picture off when I answered the phone earlier, and forgot to turn it back on.”

  “Whatever. We’ve got a problem with our project.”

  “You mean because they’ve split up again?” She rolled her eyes. “If things go on this way, we’ll be the only sim left. With the barbarian boys gone, we’re down to four—five, counting ours.”

  “That’s not the problem, although I’m not very happy about it.” Dread saw a shadow move in the kitchen door behind her. “Is there someone there with you?”

  Puzzled, she turned to look. “Oh, for God’s sake. It’s Jones. My cat. Do you honestly think I’d be having this conversation with you if someone else was here?”

  “No, of course not.” He turned the splashing music up a little louder, creating an annoyance-soothing calm for himself out of which he could produce a smile. “I’m sorry, Dulcie. A lot of work on this end.”

  “Too much work, is my bet. You must have been planning the . . . the project we just finished for months. When did you last take some time off?”

  As if he were some poor, downtrodden middle-manager. Dread was inwardly amused. “Not for a while, but that’s not what I want to talk about. We have a problem. Not only can’t we bring in a third person to help drive the sim, we can’t even use two people anymore.”

  She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I guess you haven’t been paying attention.” He tried to make it sound light, but he was not happy to have to point out something so obvious, especially in light of what he was going to ask her. “This Martine—the blind woman. If she is telling the truth, and I see no reason to doubt it, then she’s a real danger to us.”

  Dulcie, as though realizing she had been caught napping, now abruptly put on her professional face. “Go ahead.”

  “She processes information in ways we don’t understand. She says she senses things in the virtual environment that you and I—or the rest of the Sky God refugees—can’t feel. If she hasn’t noticed yet that our sim is being inhabited by two different people, it’s only a matter of time until she works through that white-noise problem of hers and it becomes clear to her.”

  “Ah.” Dulcie nodded, then turned and walked back toward her couch. She sat down and lifted a cup to her lips and took a sip before speaking. “But I did think of that.”

  “You did?”

  “I figured that the worst thing we could do would be to suddenly change whatever subliminal cues we’re giving off.” She took another sip, then stirred whatever was in the cup with a spoon. “She might already have developed a signature for us, and just accept it as what our sim gives off. But if we change again, then she’d notice something different. That’s what I thought, anyway.”

  Some of Dread’s early admiration for Dulcinea Anwin returned. Complete bullshit, but pretty good for something she’d thrown together on the spot. He couldn’t help wondering if she’d sit there so calm and self-satisfied if she ever saw him in his true skin—was made witness to his true self, when all the masks were thrown aside. . . . He wrenched himself from the distracting line of thought. “Hmmm. I see what you mean. That makes sense, too, but I’m not sure I buy it entirely.”

  He could see her decide to try to consolidate what her quick thinking had bought her. “You’re the boss. What do you think we should do? I mean, what are our options?”

  “Whatever we’re going to do, we should make a quick decision. And if we don’t go on with things as they are, the only other option is for one of us to take over the sim full time.”

  “Full time?” She almost lost her hard-won composure. “That’s . . .”

  “Not a very appealing idea, I know. But we may have to do it—in fact, you may have to do it, since I’ve got so bloody much to do. But I’ll think about what you said and call you back later. This evening, 2200 hours your time, right? The sim should be asleep then, or we can wander it off from the group to take a leak or something.”

  Her poorly-hidden irritation amused him. “Sure. 2200 hours.”

  “Thanks, Dulcie. Oh, a question. Do you know many old songs?”

  “What? Old songs?”

  “I’m just curious about something I heard. It goes . . .” He suddenly didn’t want to sing to her—it would feel like he were surrendering a little of his edge to someone who was, after all, his subordinate. He chanted it instead: “. . . ‘An angel touched me, an angel touched me . . .’ Like that. Over and over.”

  Dulcie stared at him as though he might be engaged in some particularly devious trick. “Never heard it before. What got you so interested?”

  He gave her his best smile—his I’d be happy to give you a ride, sweetness smile. “Nothing much. It sounded familiar, but I can’t put my finger on it. 2200 hours, then.” He clicked off.

  “CODE Delphi. Start here.

  “It was only the river. Strange how even with ears as sharp as mine, ears augmented by the best sound-carrying equipment lawsuit money could buy—which are now processing information from what is apparently the best sound-generating equipment that Grail Brotherhood money can buy—I can still be fooled by the noise of running water.

  “I have been thinking about this new journal, and I realize that I have begun it on a very pessimistic note. I am hoping that someday these entries can be retrieved, but to spend so much time talking about my own history seems to assume that someone other than myself will be the one to hear these thoughts. That may be pragmatic, but it is not the right spirit. I must pretend that I will one day rescue these thoughts myself. When I do, I will want to be reminded how I felt right at this moment.

  “I cannot say much about coming through into this network, because I remember so little. The security system, whatever it was, seems to me of the same character as the program that captures children, the deep-hypnosis gear which Renie described so horrifyingly from her experience in the virtual nightclub. It seems to operate at a level below the subject’s consciousness, and to cause involuntary physical
effects. But I remember only a sense of something angry and vicious. Clearly it is a program or neural net whose sophistication and power dwarfs the things I know about.

  “But since entering the network I have gradually found my way back through the awful, battering noise, both real and metaphorical, to a kind of sanity I feared I would never find again. And I can do things I never could do before. I have passed beyond the confusion into an entirely new realm of sensory input, like Siegfried splashed by the dragon’s blood. I can hear a leaf fall, the grass grow. I can smell a drop of water trembling on a leaf. I can feel the very weather in its complicated, semi-improvisational dance, and guess which direction it will step next. In a way, it is all quite seductive—like a young eagle standing on a branch and spreading its wings against the open wind for the first time, I have the sensation of limitless possibility. It will be hard to give this up again, but of course I pray that we will succeed, and that I will live to do so. I suppose at such a time I would give it all up happily, but I cannot imagine such a thing convincingly.

  “In fact, it is almost impossible to imagine success. Four of our number have been pulled away from us already. We have no way of knowing where Renie and !Xabbu have gone, and my sense of them being here, in this particular place, has sharply diminished. Orlando and his young friend have been swept away down the river. I do not doubt that the boys, at least, have passed through into one of the uncountable numbers of other simulations.

  “And so we are five. The four who are lost are perhaps the four I would have preferred to stay with—Renie Sulaweyo in particular, despite her prickliness, has become almost a friend, and I find that I miss her very much—but, to be fair, perhaps that is only because I do not know the other four well yet. But they are a strange group, especially in contrast to the openness of !Xabbu and Renie, and I am not entirely easy with them.

  “Sweet William is the strongest presence, but I would like to believe his sour irony hides that oldest of clichés, a kind heart. Certainly when we returned to the beach and found him and T4b, there was little question that William was devastated to have seen Orlando and Fredericks taken away. He feels, to my new and as yet not completely understood sensitivities, curiously incomplete. There is a hesitancy to him at times, despite his brash manner, like someone who is afraid of discovery. I wonder what his refusal to discuss his real life hides.

  “The old woman, Quan Li, appears less complex, but perhaps she only wishes it to seem that way. She is solicitous and quiet, but she has made some surprisingly good suggestions, and she is certainly stronger underneath than she pretends. Several times during the afternoon, when even tough-minded Florimel was ready to quit the search for Renie and !Xabbu, Quan Li managed to find the resources to push on, and we could only be shamed into following her. Am I reading too much into things? It is not surprising that someone from her culture and generation might feel the need to hide her abilities behind a mask of diffidence. Still . . . I do not know.

  “Florimel, who is as aggressively private as William, troubles me most of all. On the surface, she is all business, terse and almost contemptuous of the needs of others. But she herself seems at other times to be barely holding together, although I doubt anyone else would notice that but me. There are such strange fluctuations in her . . . what is the word? Affect, I think. There are such odd but subtle changes in her affect that at times it seems like she is a multiple personality. But I have never heard of a multiple personality pretending to be only one person. From what I understand, in true multiples each internal personage revels in its chance to become dominant.

  “Still, my ability to understand all that I perceive is still limited, so perhaps I am mistaken, or am overinterpreting small oddities in her behavior. She is strong and brave. She has done no wrong and much good. I should judge her on that alone.

  “Last of this small group, which may contain all that are left of Sellars’ desperate attempt to solve the Otherland enigma—after all, we can only hope that Renie and the others have survived—is the young man who calls himself T4b. That he is a man is also an assumption, of course. But certainly there are times when his energies and presentation feel decidedly male to me—he has a barely-hidden swagger sometimes that I have never seen on any woman. But he can be careful, too, in a curiously feminine way, which is why I assume he is younger than he pretends. It is impossible to discern age or anything else from his street dialect, which forces a few short words to serve a variety of meanings—he might be as young as ten or eleven for all I can tell.

  “So here I am, with four people who are strangers, in a dangerous place surrounded by, I have no doubt, even more dangerous places. Our enemies must number in the thousands, with immense power and wealth on their side, and the controls to these pocket universes in their hands. We, in contrast, have already seen our number halved in just a few days.

  “We are doomed, of course. If we even survive to reach the next simulation, it will be a miracle. There is danger everywhere. A spider the size of a truck caught an insect a few meters from me just yesterday afternoon—I could hear the fly’s vibrations change as the life was sucked out of it, one of the most chilling things I have ever experienced in worlds real or virtual. I am so frightened.

  “But from here on I will continue this journal as though that were not true, as though I believed that someday I might again move through the familiar spaces of my home and think about these moments as something in the past, as part of a heroic but diminishing time.

  “I pray to God that may be true.

  “Now someone is stirring. I must go, returning to this strange voyage. I will not say good-bye to you, my journal-of-the-air. I will only say, ‘Until I see you again.’

  “But I fear it is a lie.

  “Code Delphi. End here.”

  THE cat, with her usual queenly indifference to everything not directly Jones-related, was grooming herself in Dulcie Anwin’s lap. Her mistress was psyching herself up for a confrontation. At least, that was what the first glass of that not-great Tangshan red had been about. The second glass—well, perhaps because the first had not made her ready enough.

  She didn’t want to do it. That was really what it came down to, and he would have to understand that. She was a specialist, had spent more than a dozen years refining her skills, had received on-the-job training that your average gear hack couldn’t even imagine—the recent job in Cartagena had been perhaps the bloodiest, certainly for her personally, but by no means the oddest or most far-flung—and it was ridiculous for him to expect her just to shove that aside and become a full-time babysitter for a hijacked sim.

  And for how long? Judging by the wandering way this whole thing was going, those people might be a year stuck in this network, if their life-support held up. She would have to give up even the pretense of a social life. She hadn’t had a date in almost six weeks as it was, hadn’t gotten laid in months, but this would be ridiculous. In fact, the whole thing was ridiculous. Dread would have to understand that. He wasn’t even her boss, after all. She was a contractor—he was just one of the people she worked for, when she chose. She had killed a man, for Christ’s sake! (A brief moment of worry squeezed her at this last thought. There was something rather jinxlike about that accidental juxtaposition.) She certainly didn’t have to curry favor like some little mouse of a junior assistant.

  Jones’ increasingly energetic grooming was beginning to annoy her, so she dumped the cat off her lap. Jones shot her a look of reproach, then sauntered away toward the kitchen.

  “Priority call,” announced the wallscreen voice. “You have a priority call.”

  “Shit.” Dulcie drained the last of her wine. She tucked her shirt into her pants—she wasn’t going to be answering the phone in her robe any more; that was just asking not to be respected—and sat up straight. “Answer.”

  Dread’s face popped onto the screen, a meter high. His brown skin had been
scrubbed, his thick unruly hair pulled back in a knot behind his head. He also seemed more focused than he had earlier, when half the time he had seemed to be listening to some inner voice.

  “Evening,” he said, smiling. “You’re looking well.”

  “Listen.” She barely took a breath—no point in beating around the bush. “I don’t want to do it. Not full-time. I know what you’re going to say, and I’m certainly aware that you have lots of important things to do, but that still doesn’t mean you can force me to take over the whole thing. It’s not the money either. You’ve been very, very generous. But I don’t want to do this full-time—it’s been hard enough as it is. And although I will never say another word about it to anyone no matter what happens, if you insist, I’ll have to resign.” She took a deep breath. Her employer’s face was almost entirely still. Then another smile began to grow, a strange one; his lips quirked up in a wide curve but never parted. His broad white teeth were entirely hidden.

  “Dulcie, Dulcie,” he said at last, shaking his head in a mockery of disappointment. “I called you back to say that I don’t want you to take over the sim full-time.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No. I thought about what you said, and it makes sense. We risk making a more noticeable change. Whatever pattern we’re showing by having two of us doing it, the blind woman may have already decided it’s just the way our sim acts.”

  “So . . . so we’re going to keep on splitting the job?” She snatched for something to help regain her emotional balance—she had leaned so far in anticipation of an argument that she was in danger of falling over. “But for how long? Is this just open-ended?”