River of Blue Fire, Page 35

  The man nodded as though some great truth had been revealed, then slipped the cigarettes back into the pocket of his overalls. He wore the same factory-issue boiler suit that she had seen on all the other henrys in Emerald, but he did not strike her as one of those domesticated creatures. “Who are you?” she asked.

  He looked irritated. “Who are you?”

  Renie introduced herself and !Xabbu under the same assumed names as she had given in Kunohara’s bugworld—after all, she told herself, the stranger had only given her a cigarette, not donated a kidney. “We just stumbled in,” she said, assuming that if this man were not one of the bovine residents of the simworld, their outlander status must be obvious. “And apparently that’s a crime around here. Who are you and how did you wind up here?”

  “Azador,” the stranger said.

  Confused by his accent, Renie at first thought he had said “At the door,” and she turned to look. He corrected the misunderstanding.

  “I am Azador. And I am here because I made the mistake of offering advice to His Wise Majesty the King.” His smirk contained an entire world’s worth of world-weariness. Renie had to admit that he had quite a handsome sim. “You are both Citizens, yes?”

  Renie looked at !Xabbu, who was sitting on his heels well out of Azador’s reach. The monkey-skimps returned glance was inscrutable. “Yes, we are.”

  The stranger did not seem interested in gleaning more details, which left Renie feeling she had made the right decision. “Good. As am I. It is a shame that, like me, you have had your freedom stolen from you.”

  “What’s with this place?” She suddenly remembered Emily. “The scarecrow-man—the king—he has our friend. Will he hurt her?”

  Azador shrugged: he could take no responsibility for the foibles of others. “They have all gone mad here. Whatever this place once was, it has fallen apart. You see this in bad simulations. It is why I offered my advice.” He stubbed out his cigarette. Renie recalled that her own was burning down, unsmoked; she drew on it again as Azador continued. “You know the film of Oz, do you not?”

  “I do, yes,” Renie answered. “But this doesn’t seem quite right. It seems much . . . much bleaker. And this is Kansas—Oz wasn’t in Kansas, it was somewhere else, wasn’t it?”

  “Here, it did not start this way.” He took out another cigarette, then changed his mind and tucked it behind his ear. Renie found herself watching it avidly, even with one burning between her fingers. She didn’t like that feeling. “I told you,” Azador went on, “the simulation has fallen apart. It has two connected locations, Oz—which I think was also a book, for reading—and Kansas, the American state. They were like the two ends of the hourglass, you see, with a slender part between them where things could pass back and forth.”

  !Xabbu was inspecting the cell with solemn attention. Renie thought he seemed upset.

  “But something went very wrong on the Oz side,” Azador said. “I have heard terrible stories—murder, rape, cannibalism. I think it has been all but abandoned now. The three men—the Citizens—who were first playing the characters of Scarecrow, Tinman, and Cowardly Lion, all brought their respective kingdoms through to the Kansas side.”

  “So it’s some kind of war game?” she asked. “How stupid! Why recreate something sweet like Oz just to make it into another shoot-em-up?” How typical of men, she wanted to add, but didn’t.

  Azador gave her a lazy smile, as though he read her thoughts. “It did not start quite that way. The Tinman, the Lion—they are not those who originally began the game. They came in from outside, just as you did. But they have taken over the simworld, or nearly so. Only the Scarecrow fellow had a strong enough position to resist them, but I think he will not last much longer.”

  “And that other stuff? For a moment, it seemed like the whole simulation turned upside down or something. Did you feel that?”

  !Xabbu had climbed to the top bunk of the bed nearest the wall, and was examining the tiny, screened window. “Do you remember what Atasco said?” he asked. “When that thing ran across the room, that thing made of light?”

  Renie went cold at the mention of the murdered man’s name, but Azador seemed to be paying little attention. “I don’t . . .”

  “He said that he thought the system was perhaps growing too fast. At least, that is what I remember. Or growing too big, perhaps. And Kunohara said . . .”

  “!Xabbu!”

  Now Azador did take notice. “You met Kunohara? Hideki Kunohara?”

  “No,” Renie said hurriedly. “We met someone who knew him, or claimed they did.”

  “The bastard found me in a flesh-eating plant—a ‘pitcher plant,’ I think it is called.” Azador’s indignation sounded very real. “He lectured me, as though I were a child, on the complexity of nature or some nonsense. And then he left me there, standing in foul-smelling liquid that was doing its best to digest me! Bastard.”

  Despite her worry, Renie was hard-pressed not to laugh. It did sound rather like the odd, self-satisfied little man they had met. “But you got away.”

  “I always do.” Something dark passed behind his eyes. He changed the moment by taking the cigarette he had stashed behind his ear and elaborately applying the flame of a chunky silver lighter to it. When he had put the lighter back in his pocket, he rose and walked slowly past her toward the cell door, where he stood humming an unfamiliar song. She suddenly felt sure that he had spent lots of time in places like this, either in VR or plain old RL.

  !Xabbu crept down from the upper bunk and leaned in close to Renie’s ear. “I said those names on purpose,” he whispered. “To see what he would do.”

  “I wish you hadn’t.” More anger seeped through her quiet tone than she had intended. “Let me handle the cloak-and-dagger stuff next time.” !Xabbu gave her a surprised look, then moved to the far corner and crouched there, examining the floor. Renie felt terrible, but before she could do anything about it, Azador had strolled back to their end.

  “I will go mad if I stay here any longer,” he said abruptly. “We will escape, yes? I have knowledge that will give us our freedom. A plan of escape.”

  Renie looked around, startled. “Are you sure you should say things like that? What if the cell’s bugged?”

  Azador waved his hand dismissively. “Everything is bugged, of course. It does not matter. The Scarecrow creature does not have enough subjects left to review the tapes—miles and miles of tapes! The technology of this Kansas simworld is strictly twentieth century—have you not noticed?”

  “If you have such a good plan,” !Xabbu asked, “why are you still here?”

  Renie had been wondering how the stranger knew so much about the Scarecrow’s security procedures, but she had to admit that the Bushman’s question was a good one too.

  “Because this escape needs more than one person,” Azador said. “And now we have two people and a very smart monkey!”

  “I am not a monkey.” !Xabbu frowned. “I am a man.”

  Azador laughed. “Of course you are a man. I was making a joke. You should not be so sensitive.”

  “You,” !Xabbu suggested darkly, “should perhaps make better jokes.”

  ALTHOUGH he would tell them no other details of his plan, Azador insisted they must wait until evening before attempting their escape—although how the man would tell the time in a cell whose only window looked out onto a horizontal airshaft, Renie could not guess. But she welcomed the opportunity to rest. Both their tornado-thrashed sojourn in Kansas and their dragonfly-crashing venture through Kunohara’s bugworld had entailed one life-or-death struggle after another, all of them exhausting and painful.

  !Xabbu was immersed in a self-sufficient silence that Renie knew was in part due to hurt feelings, and Azador was sitting with his eyes closed, whistling tunelessly but quietly. She found herself for the first time in a l
ong while able simply to sit and think.

  Not least of what occupied her was their mysterious cellmate. Azador had proved unwilling to be drawn out on the subject of his own background, or what brought him to this simworld or to the Other-land network in the first place. If he was not a living, breathing Citizen, he was a Puppet that had been constructed with great care to seem like one—he spoke of the network and its illusions with every sign of a knowledge so intimate as to border on contempt. He was also quite impressive, in his way, and not just because of his handsome sim—Renie could almost imagine the word “swashbuckling” applied to him—but at times he seemed to show a different side, flashes of someone vulnerable, even haunted.

  But why waste time thinking about this stranger when there were so many other things to consider, so many life-or-death problems still unsolved?

  Well, for one thing, girl, she told herself, you’re a bit randy. It’s been too long between men—way too long—and this constant danger, all this adrenaline, it’s getting to you.

  She looked at the bulge of the package in Azador’s pocket, was sorely tempted to ask for another cigarette. Surely anything that helped her relax would be a good thing? She felt like one of the Tiktoks, wound far beyond its optimum tension. But she did not like the way she was thinking about cigarettes again, as though they were somehow just as important as the quest to save her brother. She had hardly thought about them in two days—was it going to start all over again now? She hadn’t eaten anything since entering the network, and she wasn’t obsessing about that.

  With strong effort, Renie forced her mind away from distractions, back to the problems at hand.

  Instead of their entrance into the network bringing answers, the mysteries had only deepened. Who was this Circle group Kunohara had mentioned—were they really the same people who had helped !Xabbu leave the Okavango to attend school? If so, what could it mean? Did !Xabbu know more than he was telling? But if so, why admit he knew anything about the Circle at all? She dismissed this newest line of thought, too. The entire Grail Brotherhood thing was so broad and so confusing, and there was so much she did not know, that at some point it began to seem like someone’s street-corner rant, all absurdist self-referentiality and throbbing paranoia. She should stick to the big ideas.

  But what were the big ideas, exactly? What had they learned? Anything? Kunohara had seemed to insinuate that there was some kind of conflict going on between the Grail people and this Circle group. But he had also suggested that both sides might be wrong, and that the system was somehow more than they realized. Could that, and the other things they had seen—Atasco’s scuttling anomaly, the false creatures and effects catalogued at the Hive, the bizarre breakdown in the Scarecrow’s throne room—be indicators of a system in trouble?

  A sudden thought jabbed her like a long, cold needle. And if Stephen is tied up in this system somehow, if he’s been sucked into it in some way, and the whole thing goes down—what then? Will he wake up? Or will he be trapped in a dying . . . whatever it is? Machine? Universe?

  Without thinking, she looked to !Xabbu as though the little man could protect her from the chilling thought that she had not spoken aloud. He was holding his hands before him, wiggling his fingers—doing the string game without string again, she realized. His thin back was turned toward her.

  She needed this man, she realized in a rush of affection, this sweet, clever person hidden behind a monkey’s shape. He was her best friend in the world. Astonishing to consider—she had known him less than a year—but it was true.

  Renie worked the lace of her boot free, then slid closer to !Xabbu.

  “Here,” she said, handing him the cord. “It’s easier with real string, isn’t it?”

  He turned it over in his small hands. “Your boot will not stay on. That is not safe.” He furrowed his brow in thought, then lifted the bootlace to his mouth and bit it through with sharp teeth. He handed back half the lace. “I do not need a long piece. My fingers are smaller now.”

  She smiled and retied her boot. “I’m sorry I spoke that way to you earlier. I was wrong.”

  “You are my friend. You want what is best for me—for both of us.” It was astonishing how serious a baboon face could look. “Would you like to see me work the string?”

  Azador, seated against the wall a few meters away, glanced over at them for a moment, but his eyes were distant; he seemed lost in thought.

  “Certainly. Please show me.”

  !Xabbu tied a knot in the section of bootlace and stretched it into a rectangle, then his fingers moved rapidly in and out, plucking at the strands like a pair of nesting birds, until he held between his palms a complex, geometrical abstraction.

  “Here is the sun. Can you see it?”

  Renie was not sure, but she thought the diamond shape near the middle of the design might be what he meant. “I think so.”

  “Now the sun sinks low—it is evening.” !Xabbu moved his fingers and the diamond moved down toward the line of horizon, flattening as it went.

  Renie laughed and clapped her hands. “That’s very good!”

  He smiled. “I will show you another picture.” His monkey fingers moved quickly. Renie could not help noticing how much his movements resembled someone using squeezers to input data. When he stopped, he had made a completely different design, with a tight nexus of strings in one of the upper corners. “This is the bird called the ‘honey guide.’ Can you see him?”

  Renie caught her breath, startled. “You said that name before.” It seemed important, but she needed long moments before she remembered. “No. Sellars said it. When we met him in Mister J’s, and you were . . . unconscious. Dreaming, whatever. He sent a honey guide to bring you back from wherever you had gone.”

  !Xabbu nodded his head solemnly. “He is a wise man, Sellars. The honey guide is very important to my people. We will follow him for great distances until he leads us to the wild honey. But he does not like to lead humans to the honey—we are too greedy. Ah, see now, he has found some!” !Xabbu wiggled his fingers and the small spot in the corner moved agitatedly from side to side. “He is going to tell his best friend, the honey badger.” !Xabbu quickly made another picture, this time with a large shape at the bottom and the small shape at the top. “They are such close friends, the honey guide and the honey badger, that my people would say they sleep under the same skin. Do you know the honey badger, Renie?”

  “It’s also called a ratel, isn’t it? I’ve seen them in zoos. Low to the ground, claws for digging, right?”

  “Mean bastards,” Azador said without looking up. “Take your fingers off if you give them a chance.”

  “They are very brave,” !Xabbu said with deliberate dignity. “The honey badger will fight to protect what is his.” He turned back to Renie. “And the little bird is his best friend. When the bees have finished making the honey, and it is dripping golden inside the tree or in the crevice of a rock, the honey guide comes flying out of the bush, calling, ‘Quick, quick, it is honey! Come quick!”’ As !Xabbu repeated the words, this time in his own clicking language, he made the small upper figure vibrate again. The larger one remained immobile. “Then his friend hears him, and feels that there is no better sound, and he hurries after the bird, whistling like a bird himself, calling, ‘See me, o person with wings! I am coming after you!’ That is a wonderful sound, to hear friend calling to friend across the bush.” !Xabbu worked the strings with his agile fingers, and now the lower shape was moving too, and as the smaller figure became tiny, so did the larger shrink away, as though the honey badger hurried after its guide.

  “That’s wonderful,” Renie said, laughing. “I could see them!”

  “They are the closest friends, honey guide and honey badger. And when the honey badger comes to the honey at last, he always throws some out on the ground for his friend to share.” He let the string fall slack bet
ween his fingers. “As you do for me, Renie. We are friends like that pair, you and I.”

  She felt something catch in her throat, and for a split-instant thought they were no longer locked in an institutional cell, but stood again beneath the ringed moon in !Xabbu’s memory-desert, exhausted and happy from their dancing.

  She had to swallow before she could speak. “We are friends, !Xabbu. Yes, we are.”

  The silence was broken by Azador loudly clearing his throat. When they turned toward him, he looked up, feigning surprise. “No, do not mind me,” he said. “Carry on.”

  !Xabbu turned back to Renie and his mouth curled in a shy smile that wrinkled the baboon muzzle. “I have bored you.”

  “Not at all. I love your stories.” She did not know what else to say. There were always these strange watersheds with !Xabbu, and she had no idea what they might be leading to—a deeper and more familylike friendship than she could imagine? True love? At times she felt there was no human model for what their relationship might be. “Tell me another story, please? If you don’t mind.” She looked over to Azador. “If we have enough time.”

  Their cellmate, now engrossed in his quiet whistling again, made a vague hand gesture, bidding them amuse themselves however they pleased.

  “I will tell you another story with the string game,” !Xabbu said. “We use it sometimes to teach stories to the children.” He suddenly looked abashed. “I do not mean to say that I think you are a child, Renie. . . .” He examined her face and was reassured. “This is a story of how the hare got his split lip. It is also a story of Grandfather Mantis. . . .”

  “May I ask you a question before you start? Mantis—Grandfather Mantis—is he an insect? Or an old man?

  Her friend chortled. “He is an insect, of course. But he is also an old man, the oldest of his family, and the eldest of the First People. Remember, in the earliest days, all the animals were people.”

  Renie tried to figure this out. “So is he tiny? Or big?” She could not help remembering the terrible, razor-limbed monstrosity that had stalked them through the Hive. From the look that passed across his long face, she could see !Xabbu remembered, too.