River of Blue Fire (9 page)

“What exactly do you do here?” she asked.

“Ah, we haven't told you, have we?” Lenore smiled. “Must seem pretty strange.”

“Bugs,” said Cullen. “We do bugs.”

“Speak for yourself, scanman,” said Lenore. “Me, I
watch
bugs.”

!Xabbu got up on his hind legs long enough to run his fingers along the wall, feeling the texture. “Is this a game, this place?” he asked, echoing Renie's earlier thought.

“Serious as a heart attack,” Cullen countered. “It may be a playground for Kunohara, but to us entomologists it's like dying and going to heaven.”

“Now I'm really curious,” said Renie—and, surprisingly, she was. The fear for her companions' safety had not disappeared, but Other-land had again caught her off guard.

“Hang on a minute and we'll give you the whole thing. Let's just get you some visitor passes and then we can show you around properly.”

Renie, overwhelmed by the bustling realism, had expected Lenore to lead them to some office, but instead they were still standing in the middle of the corridor, where Lenore had opened a data window in midair, when a stocky woman suddenly materialized beside them. She had an extremely serious face, well-simulated Mediterranean features, and short brown hair.

“Don't look so startled,” she told Renie and !Xabbu. It sounded almost like a command. “Here in the Hive we don't have to put up with all that ‘realistic' crap.” As they pondered this confusing statement, she turned to Lenore. “You wanted to talk to me? About these people, right?”

“We would have checked them in before we got here, but Cully almost ran us down a bird's throat on the way in, so it was a little distracting.”

“You wish,” was Cully's riposte.

“They wandered in from someone else's simworld—Atasco, was it?” Lenore turned to Renie for confirmation. “And now they can't get offline.”

The new woman snorted. “I hope you're getting enough water and glucose wherever you call home, sweetie, because we don't have much time to help you right at the moment.” She turned back to the pilots. “That
Eciton
front has swung around, and it's about forty feet across when it's moving. I want you two to go and check it out again tomorrow morning.”

“Aye-aye, Cap'n.” Cullen saluted.

“Piss off.” She returned her attention to Renie and !Xabbu, examining the latter with eyebrows arched. “If I had the time to waste on an old joke, I'd say ‘we don't get many baboons in here'—but I don't have the time. I'm Angela Boniface. You two are a problem. We've got a very strict agreement with the leaseholder, and we're not supposed to bring in anyone without his approval.”

“We don't want to be in your way,” Renie said hurriedly. “We'll leave as soon as we can. If you can take us to the nearest . . .” she paused, unsure of the word, “border, I guess, we'll just get out.”

“Not that easy.” Angela Boniface squinted. “Damn. Oh, well—Kwok, see if you can find someone around here who might be able to figure out what's gone wrong with their gear. I have to go kick Bello's ass about something.” Before she had turned halfway around, she was gone, vanished like a stage magician.

“Project administrator,” said Lenore by way of explanation.

“What did she mean by ‘that realistic crap'?” asked !Xabbu. Even Renie had to smile at his inflection.

“She meant in here we don't have to pretend like it's a real world,” Cullen explained, extending his long arms in a catlike stretch. “Kuno-hara doesn't want anything disturbing the natural look of the simulation, so if we want to examine things up close, we have to interact, have to be part of the environment—but an unobtrusive part of the environment. That's why the vehicles look like big bugs. He set up all these other incredibly irritating rules we have to follow. It's kind of a little game he's got going, and he enjoys making us jump through the hoops. At least that's what
I
think.”

“And when you earn your first billion or two,” Lenore pointed out, “you can build your own simulation, Cully. Then
you
can make the rules.”

“Well, when I do, Rule Number One is going to be ‘No sixteen-hour days for the boss.' I'm going to take care of some notes, then I'm outta here. Sayonara.” He flicked his fingers and disappeared.

“There really isn't any place to sleep,” Lenore apologized as she left them in a conference room. “I mean, no one bothers to do that here—wouldn't make sense.” She looked around at the empty space. “Sorry it's so bare. I can put something on the walls if you want, maybe make some more furniture.”

Renie shook her head. “It's all right.”

“Well, I'll come back to get you in a few hours. If any of the gear-heads are available before then, I'll have them buzz you.” She evaporated, leaving Renie and !Xabbu alone.

“What do you think?” !Xabbu had clambered onto the featureless rectangular block that served as a table. “Can we talk here?”

“If you mean in real privacy, I doubt it.” Renie frowned. “It's a virtual conference room—this whole thing's just the visual interface for a multi-input, multi-output communications machine. But do I think they're listening? Probably not.”

“So you do not think these people are our enemies.” !Xabbu crouched on his heels, brushing at the short hair on his legs.

“If so, they've gone to a lot of trouble for very small chance of reward. No, I think they're just what they say they are—a bunch of university people and scientists working in an expensive simulation. Now the fellow who owns the place, whatever his name was, him I wouldn't be so sure about.” She sighed and lowered herself to the floor, putting her back against the stark white wall. The jumpsuit her sim wore was only a little the worse for wear despite immersion in the river, but it was within the bounds of what would really happen. It seemed these Otherland simulations even took note of wear and tear.

Who were these people, this Brotherhood, she wondered again. How could they build a network this realistic? Surely money alone, even in almost unimaginable amounts, was not enough to bring about this kind of performance-level jump.

“So what do we do?” !Xabbu asked. “Have we lost the others for good?”

“I really don't have any answers.” Bone-tired and depressed, Renie struggled to get a grip on her thoughts. “We can wait and hope that Sellars finds us before any of those Grail people do. We can keep moving, keep looking for . . . what did Sellars say that man's name was?”

!Xabbu furrowed his simian brow in thought. “Jonas,” he said at last. “Sellars spoke to him in dreams. He set him free, he said.”

“Right. Which tells us exactly nothing about where he might be. How are we supposed to find him, anyway? Follow the river? Which could go for millions of miles through virtual space, for all we know. It could be some kind of Moebius river, for God's sake, and keep changing so that it has no end at all.”

“You are unhappy,” !Xabbu said. “I do not think it is as bad as that. Look at this place! Remember the man Atasco's country. There cannot be enough people in the world to construct a million such complicated things as this.”

Renie smiled a tired smile. “You're probably right. So that's it, is it? Back to the river, and hope we find Martine and the rest, or this Jonas fellow. Have you ever heard the expression, ‘a needle in a haystack'?”

!Xabbu shook his narrow head. “What is a haystack?”

Her dreams came and went almost unnoticed, like early morning rain showers. She woke, curled on her side on the floor of the imaginary conference room, and listened to !Xabbu's gentle breathing beside her.

A memory floated through—only an image at first, an amalgam of sound and feeling. On cold mornings, when he was small, Stephen would crawl into her bed. He would mumble drowsy nonsense for a moment, then curl against her and within seconds drop back into deepest sleep, leaving Renie herself resignedly half-awake and waiting for the alarm.

It was terrible, this between-state that Stephen was now in, this unresolved nothingness. At least her mother had gone for good, to be missed and mourned and occasionally blamed. Stephen was neither dead nor alive. Limbo. Nothing to be done about it.

Nothing but
this
, perhaps, whatever “this” turned out to be—a hopeless search? A confused assault on incomprehensible powers? Renie could only wonder. But every moment that Stephen remained ill and that she did not make him better was a burning reproach.

The pain summoned another memory: When he was five or six, he had come home one afternoon full of agitation, flapping his arms as though he would fly. His wide-eyed upset had been so exaggerated that at first Renie had almost laughed despite herself, until she noticed the blood on his lip and the dirt on his clothes. Some of the older children had waylaid him on his way back from school. They had tried to make him say something he didn't want to say—one of the tired rituals of malevolent youth—and then had shoved him down in the road.

Without even pausing to wash his split lip, Renie had dashed out of the house. The little gang of ten-year-old thugs had scattered when they saw her coming, but one of them was a step too slow. Shouting with rage, Renie had shaken that boy until he was crying harder than Stephen. When she let him go, he slumped to the ground, staring at her in mortal terror, and she had been pierced by a deep shame. That she, a grown woman and a university student, should put such terror into any child. . . . She had been horrified, and still had never quite forgiven herself. (Stephen, who had watched from the doorway, had no such compunctions. He was gleeful about the bully's punishment, and did a little laughing dance as she returned to the house.)

How could someone set out systematically to injure children? What did these Grail people believe could be worth such monstrousness? It was beyond her comprehension. But then, these days, so many things were.

Her contemplative mood turned sour, Renie grunted and sat up. !Xabbu made a quiet sound and rolled onto his other side.

What could she do but go on? She had made mistakes, had done things she didn't like to remember, but Stephen had no one else. A life, a most important life, was in her hands. If she gave up, she would never see him run again in his skittery, gangly-graceful way, never hear him chortle at the painfully stupid jokes on the net shows, or do any of the things that made him uniquely Stephen.

Perhaps that bullying ten-year-old hadn't deserved such angry reprisal, but he had never bothered Stephen again. Someone always had to stand up for the weak and the innocent. If she didn't do all she could, she would spend the rest of her life beneath a shadow of failure. And then, even if Stephen died, he would always remain in limbo for her, a ghost of the most real sort—the ghost of a missed chance.

CHAPTER 4

In The Puppet Factory

NETFEED/NEWS: Mini-Elephants Not Just A Fad

(visual: Cannon with miniature elephant “Jimson”)

VO: Business is very good indeed for Good Things Farm these days. Owner Gloriana Cannon, shown here with young bull Jimson, breeds and sells almost a hundred of the mini-elephants sometimes affectionately known as “half-a-lumps” every year. The business, which began as another mini-pet fad a decade ago, has outlasted the experts' best guesses.

CANNON: “Part of it is because these little guys are so smart. They're not just novelties, they're real companions. But they're also a lot more stable than some of the other genetic minis
—
their DNA just handles it better, or something. Stop that, Jimson. When you remember how unpredictable those little grizzlies were, all those accidents they had. And those small jungle cats that turned out so nasty . . . what was that stupid marketing name? ‘Oce-littles' or ‘Oce-lite', something like that
 . . . ?
”

D
ULCINEA Anwin put her hand on the palm-reader and noticed that her nails were ragged. She frowned, waiting for the door to decide to trust her. Too much to do. She must look dreadful, but at the moment, life was even wilder and more overwhelming than usual.

The last time I went through this door, I had never killed anyone
. That thought, or others much like it, had been cropping up for days. She was pretty sure she was handling it well, but she had little with which to compare it. Still, she did not feel consumed by guilt. It would have been different, she supposed, if the victim had been someone she really knew, instead of some minor Colombian gearhead Dread had hired.

Besides, she had seen this coming for years. You couldn't be successful in her business without coming into personal contact with violence, or at least you could not avoid it forever. Still, she had thought her first experience with murder would be watching someone else do it, not performing the act herself. She pushed the thought away again, but the memory of Antonio Celestino's sightless eyes, both before and after the killing shot, seemed unlikely to go away soon. . . .

The apartment door, unable to distinguish between the new Dulcie who had shot Celestino and the old Dulcie who had not, hissed open. When she had crossed the beam, the door paused exactly one point five seconds, then shut itself. Jones appeared in the bedroom doorway, stretched luxuriously, then padded across the floor toward her with no apparent haste, as though her mistress had not been gone for almost two weeks.

Dulcie dropped her bag and leaned down to stroke the cat, who bumped her shin and then turned and sauntered away. Jones' fluffy backside, Persian-wide but bearing the Siamese coloring of the other half of her heritage, showed no signs of unfashionable shrinkage. At least Charlie from downstairs seemed to have fed her properly.

The wallscreen was pulsing with a faint pink light, but Dulcie ignored it. She hadn't accessed any messages since boarding the flight in Cartagena, and she was in no hurry to do so. She felt as though she hadn't been properly clean for days, and God knew that she would be busy enough soon.

“
Priority message
,” said a soft male voice, cued by the front door opening and closing. “
You have a priority message.
”

“Shit.” Dulcie flipped her hair out of her eyes and rubbed her forehead. It couldn't be Dread again already, could it? She felt positively waxy. “Play the message.”

Her current employer's ugly-handsome face appeared a meter high on her wallscreen, his long hair lank and damp. He looked like someone who had been chewing khat, exalted and buzzing like a downed power line. “
Dulcie, call me as soon as you get in. It's extremely, extremely urgent.
”

“Oh, Christ. No peace.” She told the screen to return the call, then slumped onto the couch and kicked off her shoes.

He came on almost immediately. “We've got a problem.”

“Didn't those subroutines work?” She had cobbled together a few reaction loops before leaving Dread to mind the fort in Colombia, behavior gear that would allow them to leave their puppet sim untenanted for short stretches of time, but which would keep the impostor looking occupied and alive. Nothing that would confound serious scrutiny, but enough to get through sleeping periods and the occasional distraction on the handlers' end of things.

“It's all working fine. But the group's been split up. That African woman and her monkey friend—they're lost, maybe drowned. There was some kind of fish frenzy on the river. The boat tipped over and the rest of the group are stranded on shore.”

Dulcie took a deep breath, fortifying her patience. Men, no matter how intelligent or powerful, sometimes couldn't help acting like boys, so lost in their games that they forgot they
were
games. Women, on the other hand, remembered what was important—an occasional bath and clean hair. “But our sim is still with the rest of the group?”

“Yes. Everyone's together now, except those two. But they're clearly in a dangerous situation, so we could lose them all at any time. I need to get on with researching some of the things they've already talked about. I can't do it while I'm handling the sim.”

“Could this possibly wait just another hour? I'm sure you're tired, but I just walked through the door and I have to eat something before I faint.” Men didn't understand baths, but they usually understood food.

He stared for a long moment. The look on his face seemed to suggest imminent violence, or at least harsh criticism, but then he grinned instead, his teeth bright in his dark face. “Of course,” he said. “Sorry.”

Dulcie could make little sense of the man—his odd reactions, like this one, the flares of brilliance, the childishness of his nickname, did not quite add up to make a full picture. Not being able to categorize him irritated her. “I really do need a chance . . .” she began.

“Call me back when you're ready.” He broke contact.

Dulcie looked down at Jones, who had returned and was sitting patiently by her stocking-clad feet. “Hurry, hurry, hurry,” Dulcie told her. “Always hurrying.” Jones lidded her round eyes; she seemed to agree that it was no way to do things properly.

Her curling red hair was wrapped in a towel-turban and her softest bathrobe coddled her damp but now wonderfully clean skin. She had stretched lengthwise on the couch with her feet up, a squeeze-tube of mango yogurt in her hand, and Jones resting comfortably—it was comfortable for Jones, anyway—along her thighs.

Look at me
, she thought.
I've shot someone. There are a lot of men who couldn't even do that. But look at me. I'm so calm
. She made sure her pose reflected this impressive fortitude. “Now,” she told the wallscreen, “you may redial.”

Dread appeared thrice life-size. He seemed a little less manic. “They're all asleep, so it's not such an emergency. The puppet looks great—a little snore here, a little twitch there. You do good work.”

“Thank you.”

“Did you get something to eat?” His dark eyes flicked along the length of her bathrobed form in a way she found both sexual and somehow dismissive. “I'd like to take this opportunity to bring you up to date.”

“I'm fine.” She waved her yogurt tube. “Fire away.”

Dread began where she had handed over the reins that morning, with the whole crew still floating on the river in the boat that had become a leaf, and brought her up to the present moment, with special emphasis on character continuity. “We really ought to see if we can find some agent gear that will take subvocalized notes on the fly,” he said. “Otherwise, if a lot happens, we might lose some important detail after a hand-over and blow the puppet's cover.”

Dulcie wondered inwardly how long he would want to keep this up, but reminded herself that with the bonus he had already credited to her account, and the salary he had promised for her share of sim-time, she could take at least a year or two off. That much freedom was worth some inconvenience.

Another part of her wondered at how quickly Celestino had become nothing more than a number in her credit account.

Aloud, she said: “Is there a chance we could find a third person to help with this? Even if those people sleep for eight hours a day, that's still a full working day for both of us, seven days a week, indefinitely. I could probably find someone to help.”

Dread went silent, his face suddenly expressionless. “You have someone you want to bring in?”

“No, no.” Until today, he had been so ecstatically happy about the results of the Sky God project she had almost forgotten his mood swings, but now they were again in high gear. But, she told herself, at least he wasn't boring, like most men. “No, I don't have anyone in mind. I'm just thinking about us both going crazy from overwork. And you said there's a lot of other stuff you have to do with . . . with that data.” She had almost said Atasco's name: she
was
tired, she realized. She doubted anyone was actually tapping her lines—Dread himself had sent her some topflight defense gear, which she was using on top of her own precautions—but it was stupid to take any unnecessary risks, and certainly the Atasco assassination had been world news for days now.

“I'll consider it.” For a moment, his stony look lingered. Then, as if someone had poured hot liquid into a cold cup, life came back into his features. “And there're a few other things we need to discuss, too . . .”

“
There is someone at the door
,” said the house-voice. “
Someone at the door.
”

Dulcie rolled her eyes. “
Intercom
. Who's there?”

“
Me
—
Charlie
,” was the response. “
So you really are back!
”

“Who is that?” Dread had gone zero-degrees again.

“Just my downstairs neighbor.” She got up, dislodging a silent but irritated Jones. “She feeds my cat. I can call you back if you want.”

“I'll wait.” Dread killed his visual and the wallscreen went blank, but Dulcie had no doubt he would be listening.

Charlie's white-blonde hair was elaborately foiled; the strands encircled her head like the electron paths of a model atom, so that the closest kiss she could bestow landed somewhere in the air a handspan from Dulcie's cheek. “Oh, God, Dulce, where's your tan? What good is going to South America if you don't get a tan?”

“Too much work.” Charlie, Dulcie felt sure, would think a nuclear explosion had an upside—all those skin-darkening rays. “Any problems with Jonesie? She looks great.”

“No, everything was just ‘zoonly. Your mother came by one day when I was here. She's a chort.”

“Yeah, she's a chort, all right. Laugh-a-minute.” Dulcie's feelings about Ruby O'Meara Mulhearn Epstein Anwin at their very strongest could not be called affectionate, but other people always seemed to think her mother was a wonderful character. Dulcie wondered what she was missing. “Anything else?”

“Oh, God, you must be exhausted. I really just came up to make sure that was you I heard.” Charlie abruptly twirled, catching up her silvery tesselated skirt and exposing her long, slender legs. “Do you like this? I just bought it.”

“It's great. Well, thanks again for taking care of Jones.”

“Problem not. Do you think you could feed Zig and Zag next week? I've got . . . I'm going out of town. You just have to give them lettuce and check their water.”

Charlie had always maintained that she was an account executive for a cosmetics firm—a lie that Dulcie guessed was rooted in some briefly-held teenage job. Charlie thought Dulcie did not know that she was a call girl—and a fairly expensive one, too: her cartoony voice and schoolgirl figure were doubtless very appealing to a certain type of well-heeled clientele. Charlie believed her career was a complete secret, but Dulcie made it her business to find out everything she could about all her neighbors, and Dulcie was good at finding things out.

Charlie thinks she's so wicked. She doesn't know that her friend upstairs is an international terrorist-for-hire. She's been feeding the cat of a professional murderess
.

Even when shared only with herself, the joke was beginning to wear thin. In fact, she had just decided not to think about Celestino for a while, to allow the incident to find its proper place in the Dulcie Anwin scheme of things.

When Charlie had gone posture-walking back to the elevator like an oversized, overdressed Girl Scout, Dulcie turned back to the wall-screen.

“She's gone.”

Dread's face popped up immediately, as she had known it would. Of course he was listening. He'd probably been watching, too, and thinking perverse thoughts about blonde, short-skirted Charlie. But if he had been, he made no mention of it, or gave any sign at all.