The man smiled up at him, his gold teeth glinting. “The fires of Saint John been burning bright every night since solstice this year.” The whites of his eyes seemed disconnected from his face. “Tonight is a big night, big honor, boss. You be in the brule zin, the kanzo, you be a hounsi ‘fore the night is out.” He started cackling and slapped his knee with his free hand. “Or not, or not. We going to pon-shar-train.”
Reaching down between his legs, the man pulled up a bottle and took a swig from it, then offered it to Vince.
“No thanks,” mumbled Vince, but the man held the bottle up. “NO THANKS!” he yelled this time.
The man shrugged and took another drink himself, muttering in a language Vince’s automated translators couldn’t decipher.
“Pontchartrain,” Hotstuff said, sitting in front of Vince, the rushing wind ruffling her virtual hair. She spun a local map of the area into a display space, collapsing the probability spaces. “He means Lake Pontchartrain and the Saint John ceremonies—”
“I know,” said Vince. He remembered the ghost stories his grandmother used to tell him of the old country where she grew up, a parish not far from where they were now. Half-remembered, these childhood memories ballooned into cartoonish dimensions of ogres and demons that inhabited the swamps.
Thousands of people gathered on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain each year to celebrate old Saint John. Whether he was the same John of Patmos as John the Baptist was disputed, but here it didn’t matter—here they were one and the same. Spinning through the networks nearby, Vince saw they were gathering there today, a giant party was assembling. More than parties, though, these were ceremonial gatherings—voodoo gatherings, and Saint John’s was the most important.
Voodoo. Vince reconsidered and leaned close to the man. “What’s that you’re drinking?”
“A trompe,” the man replied, picking up the bottle and offering it to Vince.
“Vince, I don’t think you should…” Hotstuff started to say, but Vince grabbed it and took a drink.
Warm and sweet at first taste, a trompe seared into Vince’s gullet, a warm fire spreading from his neck to his stomach. He took another big gulp, and then another, coughing, waiting for the alcohol to steady his nerves.
“Bokor gonna get you, you keep drinking that,” laughed the man, taking the bottle back.
“The Saint John fires are…” Hotstuff started a detailed situational report, but Vince was only half-listening.
All his life, Vince had been running from the past; the past of his family, the past of his own life, even the suffocating past of the world. He escaped into the future, became the master of it as a way to run and run, but now he was being dragged back to his roots, back to the past he tried so hard to erase.
How had he ended up here? With his phantom hands he pulled up a workspace, dragging his point-of-view into a recording of his inVerse from the crash landing. His own recollection was fuzzy, the noise and confusion, loss of oxygen when the hull of the turbofan had been breached. But there, he saw himself taking control, programming a controlled landing near New Orleans. It wasn’t just coincidence—part of him wanted to be here, going back to the beginning when he thought his end was coming.
“Vince!” Hotstuff yelled, tugging his mind out of the fog.
Shaking away the inVerse recording, she grabbed his viewpoint and spun it above the airboat. Vince watched himself, white knuckled, gripping onto his seat frame. Soaring higher, ahead he saw a massive bonfire rising up out of the water, surrounded by an undulating mass of people.
The fires of Saint John were burning bright, and they were almost there.
15
Cruel fire burned in the sky.
There was nowhere to escape, not even virtual worlds. Bob’s smarticle reserves were gone. It was just him, in his own head, for one of the first times in his life—and more than anything, he desperately wanted to get out.
That inner voice. Sometimes suddenly, sometimes gradually, Bob would become aware of the words he was listening to, that no one else could hear; telling him, guiding him—judging him. Not his proxxi, not the clipped memetic static that flowed into his meta-cognition systems. It was now the voice of his mother: “Stay out of the sun, Bob, you know you need to stay out of the sun…”
He looked at his arms and laughed. “I can’t, I can’t get out.” New blisters formed under the old in his peeling red skin. He took off his shirt and wrapped it around his head in an attempt to stave off heat exhaustion, but now his body broiled, his flesh cooked under the flames from above.
“Keep moving,” urged the priest, ever ahead, dragging him along. “It is not far now.”
Bob laughed.
They were being hunted, but the hunter wasn’t Toothface anymore. Fear was stalking Bob now, the fear of death, the knowledge of that ultimate predator that kept his feet moving beyond exhaustion, gnawing him away from the inside out until all that remained was a shell. He didn’t believe the priest, but then the choice came down to moving or dying.
He kept moving.
One step after another. His tongue swelled in his mouth, his brain felt like it was bursting against his skull. Each step took concentration and effort as his legs cramped up. He wanted to lie down. To sleep. Just focus. One step, and then another, and another.
“Look!” The priest pointed over the top of the next dune, then he disappeared.
On all fours, Bob scrambled to the top of the ridge, and then, kneeling in the sand, began laughing again. This time it was for joy. In the distance he saw a wall of sand and rock, and before him a trail that led down. Oases in the open Sahara were massive depressions, descending hundreds of feet below sea level into the desert floor where the water table, even here, still flowed in places. A mile or two away stood a small knot of palms, a patch of cool green in the blinding sand.
Water—there had to be water.
His pain gained some meaning, and Bob dragged himself to his feet, stumbling through the sand. The copse of trees remained stubbornly distant. Is it a mirage? But gradually, step by step, the palms grew. Then he was among them. The priest called to him, beckoned him to a well. Bob staggered over and dragged a bucket up out of its depths, splashing water onto his face, laughing and drinking.
“Slowly,” the priest instructed, standing above Bob. “Do not drink too much, too fast.”
Nodding, Bob sank down against the mud and stone side of the well. We can rest here, he thought, we are safe. Then something twinged. Something wasn’t right.
“You feel it,” said the priest, not asking. “Free your mind, let go…”
One of Toothface’s sandbots was approaching. Bob saw it in his mind’s eye, the mechanical cockroach cresting one dune and then another, tracking its way toward them. It didn’t know they were here, it was scouting, but soon it would know.
How did he see it? Bob blinked and looked at the priest. The smarticle count in his body was zero, he had no internal computing resources or extra-sensory networks active.
The priest nodded. “Use me, release your mind.”
Too tired to question it, Bob relaxed into the stone wall of the well, closing his eyes. The image of the sandbot became more vivid. It wasn’t far now. He sensed its internal networks and signaling systems. Worming his mind into the sandbot, he flexed, feeling it shudder.
“Do not destroy it,” said the priest, “divert it, send a signal that we are not here. We become invisible.”
Nodding, Bob logged into its memory core, adding a false sensor reading. The sandbot turned, satisfied it had swept the area, and crawled off in another direction.