River of Blue Fire, Page 74

  Finch looked at the small boy struggling in Mullet’s grip, and Paul could hear the smile in his cold voice. “Certainly. He is nothing. A crack-dweller. A crevice-haunter.”

  Paul fought a terrible numb listlessness. “Very well,” he said hoarsely, and took a step back toward them.

  “No!” Gally screamed. The boy kicked out against the giant Mullet, swinging his feet up against the vast, robed belly and pushing as hard as he could, and simultaneously grabbed and bit hard at the restraining fist. Mullet let out a surprised, outraged bellow. He lifted his other hand and pulled the boy away, then flung him down to the ground with astonishing force. Paul heard bones snap, then there was a terrible silence.

  Mullet leaned and picked up the limp form, shook it once, then grunted and tossed it aside. The boy’s body skidded across the tiles like a rag doll—utterly, utterly lifeless.

  “Gypsy!” Eleanora’s scream, a long, keening note of agony, ended as though cut with a scalpel in the instant her image vanished. A moment later the crypt began to bend and deform, twisting inward as though crushed in a giant fist. Finch and Mullet and Gally’s limp body all disappeared from sight as the vast room collapsed and swallowed them.

  Blasted to his core, emptied of everything, and so stunned he could not even weep, Paul turned and flung himself into the doorway made of light.

  CHAPTER 31

  The Voice of the Lost

  * * *

  NETFEED/NEWS: Marine Farmers Say Krill Scare Unreasonable

  (visual: sloop “Johanna B.” casting sound-nets)

  VO: Marine farmers are furious with the wildfire rumors of a parasite in harvested krill that causes a disease called Tandagore Syndrome.

  (visual: UOF’s Tripolamenti on dock)

  Clementino Tripolamenti head of the multi-national Union of Ocean Farmers pointed out that many doctors have already said that Tandagore Syndrome, a mysterious neurological disorder, has no connection to diet. TRIPOLAMENTI: “People can say anything. Have you seen this? They call it “Mad Krill Disease,” like it’s a joke. We harvest millions of tons of this healthy marine protein, and it gets put into thousands of healthy products, and all someone has to do it put some stupid joke on the net and our lives and livelihoods are threatened . . .”

  * * *

  “CODE Delphi. Start here.

  “There is so much to tell, so much that is sad and strange and terrible, that I do not know where to begin. I suppose whoever plucks these words from the air will not understand unless I explain everything. I have a moment to speak now—to mumble to myself as it must seem to anyone else—before the madness begins again. I will try to tell all that has happened in order, no matter how frustrating I find it.

  “We were among the flying people in Aerodromia, as we had named the place. A girl disappeared, and as strangers we fell under suspicion. We had been befriended by the head of one of the families, Builds a Fire on Air, and when he came for us, grim-faced, and with armed guards, I thought we were to be executed for the crime or perhaps sacrificed to some god of theirs. I was not far wrong.

  “The prison-cave to which they brought us was not as pleasant as the one we had shared with Builds a Fire on Air’s family. It was cold and damp and spattered with the excrement of bats and birds. Quan Li wept quietly by the small fire, the light rippling on her nondescript features—like Florimel and me, she still wore the generic, vaguely Amerindian female sim she had been given on her entrance to Temilún. T4b, sullen and uncommunicative, was making and then leveling piles of stones on the cavern floor, over and over, like a child kept after school. Florimel and William were engaged in yet another argument, Florimel as usual angry because she felt we were too passive in all we did. I moved to the other end of the cavern to avoid listening to them.

  “The Aerodromic tribespeople did indeed suspect us of having something to do with the disappearance of the girl named Shines Like Snow. We were to be put through some kind of ordeal, beginning at the first shadows of evening, to determine our guilt or innocence. When Builds a Fire on Air told us that the few who survived this ordeal usually became insane, I could not help feeling a touch of nostalgia for the old Napoleonic Code. We were miserable and unhappy and frightened, every one of us. Even though we did not know for certain that we could die from what happened in these simulations, we knew already that they could cause us pain.

  “As I looked around at my companions, observing their now quite distinct manifestations and feeling the dull throb of their fear, I suddenly perceived that I had shirked my responsibilities.

  “I have had the inarguable excuse of my blindness since I was a child, and sometimes have used it in a manipulative way. I would be furious if I were given a job or invited to a party solely because I was blind, but I must admit there have been times the reverse was true—when I told myself I am allowed, and begged off from some gathering, or avoided someone, or failed to do something I did not want to do, making my blindness my excuse.

  “In that same way, I now realize, I have let my problems shield me from my current situation. I have not suffered less than my companions—in fact, my peculiar circumstances meant I lived with terrifying, overwhelming agony for the first several days after we entered this network. But I have not suffered like that lately, and I have abilities here no one else can even approach, yet I have avoided taking a larger role in guiding this group.

  “I did not make a life and career in the real world that most sighted people would envy by being so pliant, so without force. Why should I do so here?

  “Ah, but I have already begun to wander away from the events I wish to describe. This is another thought, another debate, for another day. It is enough to say that I have resolved that I will no longer be so aimless. Whether or not I can help these frightened people, I certainly do not want to confront my own obliteration and think, ‘I could have done more to help myself.’ Call me selfish, but it is my respect for myself that most concerns me.

  “The day of our imprisonment wore on, and even Florimel and William finally lost the strength to argue—something they had been doing more to keep the illusion of self-determination than anything else, I guessed. I tried to make conversation with Quan Li and T4b, but both were too depressed to say much. Quan Li in particular seemed convinced that we would be executed, and that her comatose granddaughter would lose her one slim chance. The person in the spiky warrior costume did not even try to communicate. He responded to my questions with grunts, and I at last left him making his endless piles of stones.

  “We were finishing the meal our jailers had given us—a small pile of berries and one piece of flat, unleavened bread each—when Sweet William came to sit beside me. Although the others were several meters away, each in his or her own small world of miserable apprehension, William whispered as he spoke. There was something odd about his manner which for all my newfound abilities I could not understand or name. He was agitated somehow, that alone was clear—the information by which I perceived him had a strange vibrational quality, as though he were excited rather than depressed.

  “He said, ‘I suppose it’s time I told you something about meself.’ I regarded him with a little surprise—he had always been one of the most reticent about his real situation—but supposed it had to do with the ‘death row’ feeling we all shared.

  “I said, ‘If you wish, of course. I would be lying if I said that I have not wondered. But you do not owe me anything.’

  “‘Of course I don’t,’ he said with a little of his old snappishness. ‘Don’t owe anybody anything.’ But instead of reacting to his asperity, I noticed for the first time that something in his accent—an accent I have heard many times used for comedic effect in dramas based in Britain, where apparently they find the mere sounds of Northern England humorous—seemed inconsistent. The vowel sounds were a little awkward, and the two anys on his remark were subtly different.

 
“He was quiet for a moment. Then, as if he had sensed my thought, he said, ‘I don’t always talk like this, you know. In real life, I don’t.’

  “I stayed quiet. Was he explaining, or making some kind of excuse? I couldn’t understand why he seemed to buzz so, although people respond to stress and unhappiness differently.

  “‘I’m not really like this at all, y’see. In RL.’ He flapped one of his arms, the batlike cape billowing. ‘It’s just, what, a bit of glamour. Trying to have a bit of fun.’

  “For the first time in several days I wished I could see as other people see. I wanted to look into his eyes, see what was hiding there.

  “He leaned closer to me. ‘In fact, I’ll tell you something funny. Promise you won’t tell the others.’ He did not wait for me to assent or decline. ‘I’m not anything like this at all—this vampire stuff, the deadly-but-beautiful kit and everything. For one thing, I’m old.’ He laughed quietly, nervously. ‘I’m really quite old. Eighty, and a few months past it. But I like to have a bit of fun.’

  “I thought of him that way, as an old man, and could make some sense of it, but still was not entirely certain what was going on. For one thing, I wasn’t sure he was a he, so I asked him.

  “‘Yes, yes. ‘Fraid so. Nothing so exciting as a full-scale tranny. I haven’t been out of the house in years, so I don’t know that you’d label it anything at all—I mean, who cares what someone is on the net?’

  “I had to ask him. I felt I was being manipulated in some way. ‘If no one cares, then why are you telling me, and why do you seem so ashamed, William?’

  “This caught him by surprise. He sat back—I could feel him folding into himself, like some winged thing huddling on a rainy branch. ‘Just wanted to tell someone, I guess,’ he said. ‘In case something happens to us. You know what I mean.’

  “I felt sorry for having pushed him. On the eve of battle, they say, men in the trenches tell their life stories to strangers. There is nothing so intimate and yet so bonding, perhaps, as the approach of death. ‘What brought you to the network?’ I asked, a little more kindly.

  “He did not answer right away, and I had the strange sense that he was preparing to tell a story and making sure he had the details right, as one might when about to spin a tale for a small child. But when he spoke, it sounded genuine.

  “‘I’m not a young person,’ he said, ‘but I like young people. That is, I like the freedom I never had that they have now. I admire that they can just be who they want—make a new sim, join a new world, be anything. When I was young, you still had to do everything face-to-face, and as faces go, I’ve never liked mine much—know what I mean? Not horrible, don’t get me wrong, but not exciting either. Not . . . memorable. So when I finally left the postal service—I was an inspector, ran the regional inspection center actually, retired about ten years ago—I made a life for myself on the net. And no one cared who I really was, only who I was online. I made this character for myself, Sweet William, and made him as outrageous as I could. Sexual roles, social niceties, I bent them all until they screamed, I guess you’d say. I memorized obscure poets, some of those NewBeat folk, some of the Quiet Apocalypse geezers, too, and passed it off as my own. I was having the time of my life, and wondering why I didn’t retire earlier.

  “‘Then a few of the younger members of my online crowd got ill and disappeared from the net. It was this thing that we all recognize now, this coma thing, but all I knew then was that some nice young ones were gone, as good as dead, and no one knew why. And I was shocked that some of them were so young, too. Like me, they had been pretending to be something they weren’t—one of them was only twelve!

  “‘So I began to look into all this, these illnesses, whatnot.’ He smiled a little. ‘I suppose it was a bit like the work I used to do, and I admit I got a touch obsessed. The more I searched, the more questions I had, until I ran into the first of Sellars’ little clues. Eventually I used a tip from a mate of mine pretty high up in UNComm and hacked into the Otherland network, looking for Atasco’s city. And that’s that.’ He nodded, his tale told. I felt a certain dissatisfaction, not with the story itself, but with the way he had suddenly told it, after being so secretive for so long. Was it simply fear of what was to come? It seemed odd—we had faced danger almost continuously since we had entered the network. Perhaps, as it seemed, he was reaching out to me in a search for human contact. If so, I was not giving him what he needed. Perhaps I was being unfair to him, I thought. Many have said I am cold, detached.

  “But whatever his reasons, and whatever my responses, Sweet William seemed to want more than simply to share his own confession. He asked me about my own background. I told him about where I had grown up, and that I had lost my sight in a childhood accident, which was not the entire truth, but I was not sure why he was asking. He was still strangely elevated, and I found his energies disturbing. William also wanted to know what I thought about the crime of which we’d been accused, if I had any idea what might really have happened. The whole conversation had an unusual tone to it, as though there were a subtext I could not quite understand. After another quarter-hour’s worth of seemingly unrelated questions and small talk, he gave me a jaunty little farewell and went to go sit by himself in the corner of the cave.

  “As I was pondering all this, Florimel came to ask me what Builds a Fire on Air had told me about the missing girl. Since I had seen her and Sweet William speaking animatedly earlier, I said, ‘William is surprisingly talkative tonight.’

  “She looked at me with even less expression than usual and said,” ‘Well, I am not,’ then turned and walked back to her place a short distance from the fire. Perhaps she thought I was trying to draw her out. Perhaps I was. Meanwhile, I was left to wonder again just what sort of group of misfits I have fallen in with.

  “When a blind woman who has spent several days in convulsive madness asks that question, anyone could guess that such a group is in trouble.”

  “Builds a Fire on Air and other Red Rock Tribe members I did not recognize—most of the local families seemed to be involved—came for us as sundown approached. We were taken to the base of a huge horizontal tree, on which sat a trio of the tribe’s eldest men. The father of the missing girl spoke vehemently about her abduction. Her necklace, something she always wore, had been discovered near the mouth of her family’s cave, which seemed to suggest that Shines Like Snow had not left of her own will. Other families said they had seen nothing and heard nothing, and spoke of how long it had been since any of the other tribes of the valley had come raiding. When Florimel demanded we be able to ask questions and speak in our own defense, she was refused. The frailest of the three elders, a man so shrunken he seemed to have not just hollow bones but hollow everything, told us courteously but firmly that since we were outsiders, nothing we said could be trusted. He also pointed out that if we were allowed to query witnesses, we might use the opportunity to put a spell on those we questioned.

  “Thus our judges arrived at the foregone conclusion—we would undergo an ordeal to test our truthfulness. We would be taken, they declared with great solemnity, to something called The Place of the Lost.

  “None of us liked the sound of this. I could see that under other circumstances Florimel or T4b might have been in favor of trying to fight our way out, but we were outnumbered by a hundred to one and the long day’s imprisonment had weakened our resolve. We allowed ourselves to be handled, less roughly than we expected—the Middle Air folk were decent at heart, I think—and led away through the day’s dying light.

  “Although prisoners and guards had to walk, we nevertheless went to the place of our ordeal as a veritable aerial parade, since an army of onlookers swooped and hovered just behind us, like gulls following a garbage scow. We were forced to march for the better part of an hour, climbing at last to a hollow in the cliff face several hundred meters across—a natural bowl where Aerodromians a
thousand generations or so in the future might one day attend symphony concerts. This scooped-out space, no doubt the work of some glacier, was empty but for a talus slope that carpeted most of the bottom, and one large round rock in the middle that to my senses seemed ominously like a sacrificial altar.

  “I imagined our virtual bodies being tested by the Thousand Cuts or something similar, and for the first time the likelihood of torture and death truly struck me. I began to sweat, though the evening breeze was cool and pleasant. A sudden and oddly horrifying thought came to me—what if they did something to my eyes? The idea of an assault on these—the most useless organs in my body, and virtual besides—nevertheless filled me with a terror so great I writhed in the grip of my two guards, and would have fallen had they not held me up.

  “Two dozen or so of the younger and stronger men glided to the ground beside the stone. They put their shoulders against it, grunting and even shouting in their exertion, until at last the stone trembled and slid a meter or two sideways to reveal a blackness beneath. One by one we were dragged to this opening and thrown in. Sweet William went first, and with surprising dignity. When it was my turn, I made myself as small as possible. When I had dropped through, I spread my arms and hovered. I had not known for certain that we would still be able to fly in the cave, but the place was full of strange updrafts—unpredictable, yet enough to keep us floating in one place if we worked at it.

  Quan Li had not yet mastered the art of staying upright, and I sensed her now a short distance from me, struggling for equilibrium. Before I could say anything to ease her fears, the vast boulder slid back across the hole and we were plunged into complete darkness.

  “Of course, Unknown Listener, as you must have guessed if you have heard my other journal entries, the situation was not as bad for me as it was for the rest of my companions—not at first. Darkness is my element, and the disappearance of light registered to me only as a shift in what the simulation itself was allowed to show in the visible spectrum, not in what I could actually perceive. I could sense the convoluted space of the cave around us, even track the intricate, fluted walls and spiky stalactites as whorls in the flow of information, much as someone watching a river might discern the position of hidden stones by how they deformed the river’s surface.