Текст книги "Mysterium"
Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson
Соавторы: Robert Charles Wilson
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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 18 страниц)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Work at the test site peaked and ebbed, many of the civilian workers had been sent back to Fort LeDuc. A battalion of physicists and engineers remained behind to initiate the bomb sequence and study the results. The stillness of completion had descended on the circle of cleared land; the air was cold and tense.
Clearly, Demarch thought, these were the final hours. Censeur Bisonette had flown in from the capital for a one-day tour: Two Rivers, before the end. Demarch stood on the snowy margin of the test grounds while Bisonette marched about with his press of Bureau personnel, Delafleur unctuously proclaiming each tedious landmark. This was followed by a lunch in one of the freshly emptied tin sheds, trestle tables stocked with the only decent food ever to be trucked into town: breads, meats, fresh cheeses, leek and potato soup in steaming bouilloires.
Demarch sat at the Censeur’s left, Delafleur to his right. Despite this ostensible equity, conversation flowed mainly between Bisonette and the Ideological Branch attache. More evidence of a shift of patronage, Demarch thought, or an even deeper movement in the geology of the Bureau de la Convenance. He felt left out but was too numb to care. The wine helped. Red wine from what had once been Spanish cellars in California. Spoils of war.
After the meal he had Bisonette’s attention exclusively, which was really no improvement. Demarch rode in the Censeur’s car during what was meant to be a tour of the town itself, though it was difficult to see much beyond the bustle of security cars on every side. The procession wound eastward from the fragmentary highway, over roads full of potholes, past drab businesses and gray houses under a sunless sky. The wealth of the town and its impoverishment were both much in evidence.
Bisonette was unimpressed. “I notice there are no public buildings.”
“Only the school, the courthouse—City Hall.”
“Not much civic spirit.”
“Well, this wasn’t a city of any proportion, Censeur. You might say the same of Montmagny or Sur-Mer.”
“At least at Montmagny there are temples.”
“The churches here—”
“Aggrandized peasant huts. Their theology is impoverished, too. Like a line drawing of Christianity, all the details left out.”
Well, Demarch had thought as much himself. He nodded.
The cavalcade wound through Beacon Street and back to the motor hotel the Bureau had appropriated as headquarters. The chauffeur parked and stood outside without offering to open the doors. Demarch moved to get out, but Bisonette touched his arm. “A moment.”
He tensed now, waiting.
“News from the capital,” Bisonette said. “Your friend Guy Marris has left the Bureau.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. With three fingers missing.”
Demarch stiffened. Three fingers was the traditional penalty for stealing Bureau property. Or lying to a hierarch.
Bisonette said, “I understand the two of you were close.”
Nauseated, weightless, Demarch could only nod.
“Fortunately you have other friends. Your father-in-law, for instance. He’s fondly remembered. Though very old. No one would want to insult him or his family. Not while he’s alive.” Bisonette paused to let this wisdom sink in. “Lieutenant, I assume you want to keep your fingers.” He nodded again.
“You have the forged papers Guy Marris gave you?” They were in his breast pocket. Demarch said nothing, but his hand strayed there.
“Give them to me. No more need be said. At least for now.”
Demarch caught and held the Censeur’s eyes. His eyes were a mild blue, the color of a hazy sky. Demarch had wanted to find something there, the apospasma theion, or its opposite, the antimimon pneuma, a visible absence of the soul. But he was disappointed.
He took Evelyn’s pass papers from his breast pocket and put them in the Censeur’s ancient hand.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Bisonette’s visit was more troublesome than Delafleur had expected. It distracted his attention from the situation developing in the military barracks.
Two militiamen had been caught trying to bluff past the checkpoints out of town. Questioned, they admitted that they had heard the town would be burned with the soldiers still in it; that the Proctors had decided they were expendable.
Which was true but not for public consumption. It was a dangerous rumor and needed to be stopped. Today three more militiamen had disappeared on routine patrol: perhaps killed or captured by townspeople, more likely on the run.
All this would be taken care of in less than twenty-four hours, but a lot could happen in that time. If the soldiers rioted it would make everything problematic. Delafleur had taken over City Hall as his quartier general and made the basement storage rooms, into a kind of stockade; Lukas Thibault was down there, but Lukas was not the only font of this poisoned water.
Delafleur moved restlessly through what had once been the office of the mayor, with its commanding view of the town. The town was deceptively still. Motionless, except for the wind and the falling snow. The trouble was subterranean, but for how long? And the weather was a problem in itself. Would snow postpone the bomb test? He listened to the chatter on the radio monitor the military men had installed for him, but it was only technical caquetage. The countdown hadn’t begun.
Delafleur wished he could hurry time onward, push the hours until they tumbled over.
There was a knock at the door. Delafleur said, “Come in!” And turned to see a soldier waiting.
“The woman you wanted us to pick up was out, Censeur,” the man said.
“I’m not a Censeur,” Delafleur said irritably. “Call me Patron. It’s in your handbook, for God’s sake.”
The soldier ducked his head. “Yes, Patron. But the boy. We found the boy.”
Delafleur looked past the soldier and saw the boy in the waiting room: a nothing-in-particular marmot wearing spectacles and a rag of a shirt. So this was Clifford Stockton, Lukas Thibault’s nemesis.
“Lock him downstairs,” Delafleur said.
Perhaps the rumors could no longer be contained. Maybe it was too late for that. But it couldn’t hurt to try.
He shooed out the soldier. Then he picked up the telephone and called the military commander, Corporal Trebach, and told him to keep his troops confined to quarters today. There had been gunfire from the townspeople, he said, and he didn’t want anyone hurt. It was a lie, of course. Two lies: no gunfire, at least not yet, and he didn’t care who got hurt. Whether Trebach was fooled… who could say?
It was strange work, Delafleur thought, like plugging holes in a dike until the dike can be destroyed.
“It’s tomorrow,” Evelyn Woodward said. “I don’t know what time. Probably around noon. I heard him talking to Delafleur on the phone. There are some problems with the soldiers, so no one wants to wait.”
Dex nodded. Evelyn had shown up at his door for what he supposed was the last time, bearing this final nugget of information. She looked cold, he thought; gaunt, though there was no doubt plenty to eat while she was under Demarch’s wing. Her eyes took in the room without expression; she never smiled—but why should she?
He promised he would pass on the news. Then he said, “You can come with us, Evie—there’s room in the car.”
He had told her about Linneth, about his escape plans. She had not seemed jealous and Dex supposed she didn’t have the emotional capacity for it, after so much else. She had only looked at him a little wistfully. As she looked at him now.
She shook her head. “I’ll go with the lieutenant,” she said. “It’s safer.”
“I hope so.”
“Thank you, Dex. I mean, really—thank you.” She touched his arm. “You’ve changed, you know.”
He watched from the window as she walked into the falling snow.
∞
Shepperd came by later with essentially the same information from a source of his own: D-Day was tomorrow; the convoy would begin an hour before dawn. “Bless you if you aren’t ready, but we can’t wait; everybody just head west up what used to be Coldwater Road and pray for luck. And carry that damned pistol! Don’t leave it lying on your kitchen table, for God’s sake.”
Dex offered him the use of the scanner, but Shepperd shook his head. “We have a few. Useful items. Check the marine band, though, if you’re curious, and a signal up around thirteen hundred megahertz—we think that’s coming from the bomb people. Mostly it’s incomprehensible, but you might pick up a clue. Mainly, though, don’t worry about that. Set out on time is the main thing. I would like us all on that corduroy road westbound by daybreak. You have a car, I gather.”
He did, an aging Ford in a basement lot, the car he used to drive to work on days when the weather made walking a chore. He had already stashed a couple of jerricans of black market gasoline in the trunk.
Shepperd offered his hand. Dex shook it. “Good luck,” he said.
“To us all,” Shepperd told him.
∞
Linneth came before curfew—AWOL, though nobody cared anymore; the guards had been posted elsewhere. There was no question of sleep. She helped Dex carry supplies down to the car; he filled the tank with acrid-smelling American petrol.
Three hours after midnight they ate a final meal in Dex’s kitchen. A granular snow was still gathering and blowing in the street. The wind rattled the casements of the window.
Dex raised a glass of tepid water in a toast.
“To an old world,” he said. “And a new one.”
“Both stranger than we thought.”
They had not finished drinking when they heard the sound of distant gunfire.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Among the Huichol Indians of the Sierra Madre Occidental it was called a nierika: a passageway—and simultaneously a barrier—between the everyday world and the world of the spirits.
The nierika is also a ceremonial disk, both mirror and face of God. It resembles a mandala. The four cardinal directions radiate from the sacred center.
In Huichol paintings, the axis always rests in a field of fire.
∞
Howard reached the highway before dark but was barred from crossing it by an uninterrupted stream of traffic, mainly trucks and automobiles—the Proctors and their possessions, a few military commanders, the last looting of the town; all bound south for Fort LeDuc and safety. It can’t be long now, Howard thought.
He broke into an abandoned shack, off the road and out of the snow, and pulled his sleeping bag around him for warmth while he waited. There was no possibility of sleep and probably no time for it. He rested in an ancient bentwood rocker made brittle by the cold. The windows were choked with dust.
Waiting was the hard part. He was all right while he was moving; there wasn’t time to think beyond the next step. But while he waited he began to grow frightened.
He was as close to death as he had ever been.
For a time, the immediacy of the danger paralyzed him. Fear seemed to fall as inexorably as the snow, in icy crystals from a dark sky. Howard shivered and closed his eyes.
∞
After midnight the sound of the traffic lapsed. He stirred, rose on cold and aching legs, and folded his sleeping bag into his backpack to carry with him.
He jogged across the highway. Multiple tire tracks were already dimming under fresh grains of snow, the asphalt slick and treacherous beneath. The woods on the far side, the old Ojibway land, were black with shadow. Howard used a watchman’s flashlight to find his way along the dirt track eastward among the trees. The trees were tall and he listened to the snow sifting among the pine needles. Each ripple of wind sent snow showers cascading around him and made a flickering ice tunnel of the flashlight beam.
He passed a fork in the road. To the left was the way to the testing ground. Ahead, the way to the ruined lab. He pressed forward, though this road was less traveled, old snow still frozen under the new, a difficult walk.
∞
As he approached the near radius of the lab he saw more of the ethereal forms he had glimpsed in the night last autumn. They were less frightening now, though not less mysterious. They seemed disinterested in him, disinterested in anything but their own stately motion, perhaps a circle around the ruined buildings: restless ghosts, he thought. Chained here.
In fact they were strangely beautiful, nearly human flags of light casting very real shadows among the trees, their reflections glinting from countless prisms of fallen snow. It was as if the trees themselves were moving, performing oddly graceful pirouettes against the blackness of the night. Howard’s eyes blurred with tears at the sight, though he could not say what moved him. He walked for what seemed hours among the shifting shadows. It was hard to remember to follow the road. It was hard to remember anything at all.
He paused when one of these creatures (if it could be called that) came near him. He held his breath as it moved across his path. He felt a prickling heat on his skin; the snow nearby melted to gloss. He looked deep inside it, past translucencies of green and fiery gold to inner complexities of indigo and luminous purple evolving outward like the corona of a star, then fading and falling back like the arc of a solar prominence. Its eyes were shadows, dark as the night. It didn’t pause or look at him.
It moved on. Howard took a deep, ragged breath and did the same.
∞
He reached the laboratory grounds as dawn was lightening the sky.
He walked fearlessly past the wire fence and guardpost the Proctors had erected and abandoned. There was no one here; there hadn’t been for months. This was the mystery the Proctors had declared too frightening to contemplate and too dangerous to endure.
Their works lay scattered under softening dunes of snow: earth-moving machinery, rusted tin sheds, a few vehicles stripped to the axle and open to the sky. The largest intact structure the Proctors had left was a windowless brick box with wide tin doors, sealed with a bar and padlock. Howard moved that way.
The dome of blue light surrounding the original Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory loomed above his head. He had never been this close. It interested him. The border of light, the passage between inside and outside, was crisp and distinct. Within that border, no snow had fallen; the grass was still an eerie green, a single tree still held its leaves… though all these things began to change and mutate if he stared very long. Strange, Howard thought. But had the phenomenon at the lab cast a subtler effect beyond its borders? Those creatures in the forest, for instance. And even here, in the dawning light, the snow-humped detritus looked oddly bright, as if his peripheral vision had grown prismatic, flensing rainbows from every acute angle—as if a junkyard had been strewn with jewels.
∞
In his last days Stern had viewed the fragment in the laboratory as a new sort of matter: quantum matter, its material volume only a fraction of its true size, which was incalculable because it lay outside the observable universe. It was a piece of the Protennoia and therefore unknowable; its effects on surrounding matter were quantum effects, acting on the collapsing wave function of reality in ways unpredictable and often bizarre.
Was that true, Howard wondered? If he stepped past that border of blue light, would he be in some sense inside the fragment? Or was he already inside it? Perhaps the Proctors and their world, all their universe to its farthest limits, was inside the fragment already—the illusion was that the universe contained it.
It was a gateway, a barrier—a nierika.
Axis mundi, his uncle had called it.
∞
The Proctors had left much of their equipment and salvage protected from the weather in this shed. Files, boxes of paper retrieved from the nearest of the laboratory buildings; notebooks abandoned, tables strewn with aerial photographs of the site, books of physics, books of the Bible. There was a tumble of white smocks and lead aprons in the corner. And in a doorless closet, three of the suits Clifford had described to him in the autumn: heavy, quilted vests with a sort of hood, a smoked-glass helmet. The vests to ward off radiation, Howard supposed. He remembered hearing that the fire chief Dick Haldane had died after driving his truck into the glow. The helmets he guessed were to diffuse a glare he had not yet seen… some unimaginable radiance, the blinding light of creation… but what could protect you from that?
He took the outfit off its shelf and draped it over himself, no doubt a futile gesture, but it made him feel less vulnerable.
Then he stepped out into the cold air. The sun had only begun to rise and the air was gray under gusts of low cloud. He walked past this deserted building, past diamond fields of rusting machinery, onto the flat snow-contoured surface of the road and into the nimbus of blue light.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Morning found the test site hushed and vacant.
The last technician had left at midnight. The observation bunker was miles to the east, a slit-windowed slab of reinforced concrete. Remote monitors communicated the status of the weapon to banks of telemetry consoles inside, their anodized faceplates glittering with jewel-faceted lights. The telltales showed amber or green in reassuring patterns. Everything was going according to plan. Everything was as it should be, Milos Fabrikant thought—at least within the narrow compass of these machines.
Fabrikant had been invited here as an observer, and he still had not received a convincing explanation why the Proctors had chosen this particular place to test the weapon: was Cartagena a snowbound target? Was Spain so full of pine woods?
But the Proctors, inevitably, followed their own logic. He hadn’t pressed the issue. All Fabrikant had done was his duty, which was to extract enriched uranium isotopes and apply them to the manufacture of a bomb. Three functional implosion-type weapons had been constructed, with more on the way; one of them rested on the gantry in the forest. The other two had been shipped to some Atlantic airbase or other, and if this test was successful the bombs would be dropped on belligerent Europe. And then God help us all.
He had seen the yield prediction from the Bureau Centrality, and it was even more prodigious than his own calculation. He wondered who was right. In either case, the numbers defied imagination. Divining energy from mass, he thought, as if we were Archons ourselves: the sheer hubris of it!
He was privileged to be here. And not a little frightened.
He turned to the Censeur in charge, that unpleasant man Bisonette. “How long—”
“Two or three hours yet, Monsieur Fabrikant. Please be patient.” I wasn’t trying to hurry it, Fabrikant thought.
∞
Symeon Demarch had stayed close to the telephone all night, talking in relay rounds to Bisonette at the test bunker, Delafleur at City Hall, Trebach at the soldiers’ quarters, and the commandant at Fort LeDuc. From the dim light of Evelyn’s study he had watched the parade of lights along the far shore of Lake Merced, a huge detachment of Proctors and senior military men in a convoy bound for safety and the south. The traffic had possessed a strange beauty in the falling snow. It looked like a candlelight procession, like a body of Renunciates making a midnight pilgrimage on Ascension Eve.
The procession of automobile lights faded long before dawn. Of those leaving Two Rivers, only Trebach and Delafleur and himself (and their chauffeurs) were left. Delafleur was worried about some unrest at the military barracks; he tied up /???/ the line to Bisonette and Demarch’s phone was quiet for an hour before sunrise. Demarch sat motionless in the silence, not asleep but not really awake… only sitting.
A military car came for him at dawn.
He answered the knock at the front door and told the driver, “All right. Yes. Just wait a moment.”
“Sir, we don’t have much time.” The driver was a young man and worried. “There’s trouble in town. You can hear the shooting. And this snow is a problem, too.”
“I won’t be long.”
He trudged upstairs to the bedroom. Evelyn was inside. Perhaps she hadn’t slept, either. She was wearing the dress he had imported from the capital so many months ago. She looked frail in that confection. Frail and beautiful. The bedroom window faced the wind, and the snow had covered it completely; Evelyn looked up at him from a dimness of silk and ice. Her eyes were wide.
She said, “Is this it? Are we leaving now?”
Demarch felt as if something had lurched inside him. Incipit vita nova, he thought dazedly. A new life begins: not when he joined the Bureau but now, here in this room. Now something is left behind; now something is forsaken.
He thought of Dorothea and the memory was so vivid that her face seemed to float in front of him. He thought of Christof and of Christof’s wary eyes. He had left home for a place less real, a makeshift and temporary place, he thought; it would only exist for a few hours more.
He thought of Guy Marris, missing three fingers from his right hand.
Downstairs, the driver was calling his name. Evelyn frowned.
“It’s only a chore,” he told her. “They want me at City Hall. I’ll be back before long.”
He left the room before she could answer. He didn’t want to know whether or not she believed him.
∞
Evelyn hurried downstairs and reached the big window in the front room just as the car was pulling away. It skidded on the snow-slick surface of Beacon Street, then picked up speed as it headed east and out of sight.
When the sound of the motor faded she was able to hear another sound—popcorn bursts of distant gunfire, faint but unmistakable.
Was there still time to reach Dex Graham? Evelyn doubted it… and anyway, that wasn’t what she felt like doing.
Mainly she wanted to watch the snow. It looked lovely as it fell, she thought. It absorbed the attention. She would sit in her bedroom and watch the morning snow shaped into ripples and dunes by the wind that blew across the frozen surface of Lake Merced.
That would be a fine thing to be doing, Evelyn thought, when the bright light finally came. But first she wanted to change her clothes. She didn’t like this dress anymore. She didn’t want it touching her.
∞
Clement Delafleur lost the phone line with Corporal Trebach and reached him moments later by radio. Trebach was shouting something about the barracks, about his men, but it was unintelligible in gusts of static; Delafleur told him, “Leave, for God’s sake—it doesn’t matter now! Just leave.” But there was no response. Trebach’s radio had failed, too.
Delafleur went to search for his own driver. He had fulfilled his duties with what he thought was considerable élan under pressure, and any inconvenience would soon be erased: as in the joke about doctors, he would bury his mistakes. If Trebach ran into trouble and was forced to stay, then Delafleur would be the last to leave… and that might impress Censeur Bisonette, who seemed to have overcome his distaste for the Ideological Branch. Delafleur was attracting patronage these days the way sugar attracts insects. It was a consoling thought.
He walked to the outer office where his chauffeur should have been. There was another radio here, tuned to the broadcast from the test bunker. It emitted a high-pitched whistle punctuated by bursts of incomprehensible data or mechanical time checks. Less than three hours to the detonation, Delafleur noted, and a little late to be leaving, but this messiness with Trebach had delayed him.
Where had the driver gone? The rest of the office was empty, of course. He had dismissed the staff, all faithful Proctors and pions, and sent them off in a midnight cortege. The driver had stayed behind, drinking black coffee from the strange cafetiere in the comer. But now the room was empty.
Delafleur roamed the carpeted hallways with an increasing but carefully suppressed anxiety. He checked the toilet, but the driver wasn’t there. Nor in the empty offices, their doors all ajar, nor in the marbled foyer on the first floor. There wasn’t time for this! He was suddenly conscious of the ebbing minutes, to which he had been oblivious only an hour ago. There was snow on the roads and some of it had drifted dangerously deep. They must leave soon.
He heard the sound of gunfire from the west. According to Trebach’s last dispatches, that was some disturbance at the edge of town: a guardpost had exchanged gunfire with civilian automobiles, presumably refugees attempting to escape on one of the logging roads. Trebach had sent out a few more troops, and that should have ended it. But the sporadic firing went on and on—a bad sign.
Maybe the driver was in the basement, Delafleur thought, down among the water pipes and concrete walls and the steel cages where Thibault and the boy Clifford Stockton were imprisoned. But no, that wasn’t likely. In any case, Delafleur was reluctant to go down there. He was afraid of being trapped. All these walls seemed suddenly too close.
He pulled on his winter pardessus and went out through the main doors to the allee: damn the man, let him burn, he would drive the car himself if necessary! But as he hurried down the snow-rounded steps he saw that it was not just the driver who was missing. The car was gone, too.
Delafleur was mute with outrage.
He’ll pay more than three fingers for this, Delafleur thought. He’ll pay with his head! There had not been a beheading in the capital since the Depression, but there were still men in the Committees for Public Safety who knew what to do with a traitor.
But that was irrelevant; he needed transportation more than he needed revenge. No vehicles had been left behind. His cowardly chauffeur had taken the last. Delafleur felt a surge of panic but instructed himself to think, to be constructive. There was still the radio. Maybe Bisonette could send someone from the bunker. There might be time for that.
He was about to march back up the steps of City Hall when a black van came roaring around the corner past the Civic Gardens, and for a moment Delafleur felt a blossoming hope: somehow, they had come for him already! But the van had taken the corner too quickly; it wavered drunkenly from side to side and finally skidded off its wheels and over the curb.
Delafleur stared. The van was silent a moment, then armed men began to leap from the outflung doors like ants from a disturbed nest. They were soldiers, and they were obviously drunk and dangerous.
One man aimed a rifle at a streetlight, fired a single shot and sent a flurry of shattered glass to join the falling snow. The others began to shout incoherently. Not just drunken, they were also terrified. They know what’s about to happen, Delafleur thought. They know they’re doomed.
He thought: And they know who to blame.
A window shattered somewhere over his head. Had he been seen, here in the shadow of City Hall? Perhaps not. Delafleur ran back inside and barred the big door behind him.
