Текст книги "Mysterium"
Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson
Соавторы: Robert Charles Wilson
сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 18 страниц)
Dex said, “You come from out of town?”
“Yeah, but I spent the night in Two Rivers. Had the alternator replaced. I sure as hell wish I could leave, but it’s the same at the other end of the highway, about three miles beyond the quarry. Dead end. I think we’re locked in, unless there’s some side road they missed.”
“They?”
“Whoever did this. Or whatever. You know what I mean. Maybe there’s still a way out of town, but I doubt it.”
The woman repeated, “How is that possible?” By the expression on the truck driver’s face, Dex guessed she had been saying it for a while now.
He couldn’t blame her. It was the right question, he thought. In a way, it was the only question. But he couldn’t answer it; and he felt his own great fear treading on the heels of the mystery.
∞
Howard Poole chased the ladder company as far as the old Ojibway reserve. As he came over the rise where Chief Haldane and his crew had recently been, and as he saw the research installation in its veil of blue light, a memory came to him unbidden.
It was a memory of something Alan Stern had said to him one night—Stern the physicist, who might have perished in the trouble last night; Stern, his uncle.
Howard had been sixteen years old, a math prodigy with a keen interest in high-energy physics, about to be launched into an academic fast track that both excited and frightened him. Stern had come to visit for a week that summer. He was a celebrity: Alan Stern had appeared in Time magazine, “preeminent among a new generation of American scientists,” photographed against a line of radio telescopes somewhere out west. He had been interviewed on public television and had published journal articles so dense with mathematics that they looked like untranslated Greek papyruses. At sixteen, Howard had worshiped his uncle without reservation.
Stern had come to the house in Queens, bald and extravagantly bearded, infinitely patient with family gossip, courteous at the dinner table and modest about his career. Howard had learned to cultivate his own patience. Sooner or later, he knew, he would be left alone with his uncle; and the conversation would begin as it always began, Stern smiling his strange conspirator’s smile and asking, “So what have you learned about the world?”
They sat on the back porch watching fireflies, a Saturday night in August, and Stern dazed him with starry sweeps of science: the ideas of Hawking, Guth, Linde, himself. Howard liked the way such talk made him feel both small and large—dwarfed by the night sky and at the same time a part of it.
Then, when the talk had begun to lull, his uncle turned to him and said, “Do you ever wonder, Howard, about the questions we can’t ask?”
“Can’t answer, you mean?”
“No. Can’t ask.”
“I don’t understand.”
Stern leaned back in his deck chair and folded his hands over his gaunt, ascetic frame. His glasses were opaque in the porch light. The crickets seemed suddenly loud.
“Think about a dog,” he said. “Think about your dog—what’s his name?”
“Albert.”
“Yes. Think about Albert. He’s a healthy dog, is he not?”
“Yes.”
“Intelligent?”
“Sure.”
“He functions in every way normally, then, within the parameters of dogness. He’s an exemplar of his species. And he has the ability to learn, yes? He can do tricks? Learn from his experience? And he’s aware of his surroundings; he can distinguish between you and your mother, for instance? He’s not unconscious or impaired?”
“Right.”
“But despite all that, there’s a limit on his understanding. Obviously so. If we talk about gravitons or Fourier transforms, he can’t follow the conversation. We’re speaking a language he doesn’t know and cannot know. The concepts can’t be translated; his mental universe simply won’t contain them.”
“Granted,” Howard said. “Am I missing the point?”
“We’re sitting here,” Stern said, “asking spectacular questions, you and I. About the universe and how it began. About everything that exists. And if we can ask a question, probably, sooner or later, we can answer it. So we assume there’s no limit to knowledge. But maybe your dog makes the same mistake! He doesn’t know what lies beyond the neighborhood, but if he found himself in a strange place he would approach it with the tools of comprehension available to him, and soon he would understand it—dog-fashion, by sight and smell and so on. There are no limits to his comprehension, Howard, except the limits he does not and cannot ever experience. So how different are we? We’re mammals within the same broad compass of evolution, after all. Our forebrains are bigger, but the difference amounts to a few ounces. We can ask many, many more questions than your dog. And we can answer them. But if there are real limits on our comprehension, they would be as invisible to us as they are to Albert. So: Is there anything in the universe we simply cannot know? Is there a question we can’t ask? And would we ever encounter some hint of it, some intimation of the mystery? Or is it permanently beyond our grasp?”
His uncle stood and stretched, peered over the porch railing at the dark street and yawned. “It’s a question for philosophers, not physicists. But I confess, it interests me.”
It interested Howard, too. It haunted him all that night. He lay in bed pondering the limits of human knowledge, while the stars burned in his window and a slow breeze cooled his forehead.
∞
He never forgot the conversation. Neither did his uncle. Stern mentioned it when he invited Howard to join him at the Two Rivers research facility.
“It’s nepotism,” Howard said. “Besides—do I want this job? Everyone talks about you, you know. Alan Stern, disappeared into some government program, what a waste.”
“You want this job,” his uncle told him. “Howard, you remember a conversation we once had?”
And he had recalled it, almost word for word.
Howard gave his uncle a long look. “You mean to say you’re pursuing this question?”
“More. We’ve touched it. The Mystery.” Stern was grinning—a little wildly, Howard thought. “We’ve put our hands on it. That’s all I can say for now. Think about it. Call me if you’re interested.”
Fascinated despite himself—and lacking a better offer—Howard had called.
He had been investigated, approved, entered onto the DOD payroll; he had shown up three days ago and toured a part of the facility… but no one had explained its essential purpose, the fundamental reason for these endless rooms, computers, concrete bunkers and steel doors. Even his uncle had remained aloof, had smiled distantly: it will all be clear in time.
He came over the rise and saw the buildings gilded with blue light; saw the smoke rising from the central bunker. Worse, he saw a fire department ladder truck and chase car inching down the access road, the image fluid and indistinct.
He could not imagine what this veil of light might mean. He knew only that it represented some disaster, some tragedy of a bizarre and peculiar kind. No one was moving in the complex, at least, no one out in the open. The facility had its own fire control team, but it wasn’t anywhere near the smoldering central bunker—at least, as far as Howard could tell. The blue light made his head swim.
Maybe they were all dead. Including his uncle, he thought. Alan Stern had been at the center of this project, that much had been obvious; Stern had been its lord, its shaman, its guiding presence. If the accident was lethal it would have taken Stern first of all. All this fluorescence suggested some kind of radiation, though nothing Howard could pin down—something powerful enough to kick photons out of the air. He knew there was radioactive material at the facility. He had seen the warning labels on the closed bunkers. They had given him a film badge as soon as he passed the gate.
That was why he’d chased the Two Rivers VFD all the way out here. He didn’t think small-town volunteer firemen were trained or equipped to fight radioactive fires. Most likely they weren’t even aware of the danger. They might blunder into an event more deadly than they could guess. So Howard had jumped into his car and rushed after, meaning to warn them—still, meaning to.
But he saw the trucks hesitate and stop, then reverse, wobble, retreat.
He drove down the hillside to meet them.
∞
Assistant Chief Haldane saw the civilian automobile come over the rise, but he was too dazed to worry about it. He had climbed out of his car, vomited once into the young weeds by the side of the road, then sat on a wedge of natural granite with his head in his hands and his stomach still churning.
He didn’t want to see anyone, didn’t want to speak to anyone. What mattered was that he was beyond the border of blue light, that he had found his way back into the world of sanity. His relief was immense. He took deep, cleansing gulps of air. Pretty soon he would be back in his sane house in the sane town of Two Rivers and this nightmare would be over. All these buildings could burn to the ground as far as he was concerned—the better if they did.
“Chief?”
He spat on the ground to clear the taste of puke from his mouth. Then he looked up. Standing before him in blue jeans and a pressed cotton shirt was a civilian, presumably the man from the automobile—more like a boy, though, Haldane thought, with his pink skin and his bug-eye glasses. Haldane didn’t speak, only waited for this apparition to justify its presence.
“I’m Howard Poole,” the civilian said. “I work at the facility. Or I was supposed to—I would be, if this hadn’t happened. I came because I thought, if you were fighting the fire, you might not know—there might be some radioactivity in there, some particulate matter in the smoke.”
Poole seemed exquisitely uneasy. “Particulate matter,” Haldane said. “Well, thank you, Mr. Poole, but I don’t believe particulate matter is our problem right now.”
“I saw you turn back.”
“Yessir,” Haldane said. “That we did.”
“May I ask why?”
Some of the firefighters had shaken off their queasiness and gathered behind Poole. Chris Shank was there, and Tom Stubbs, both looking demoralized and numb under their helmets and scuffed turnout coats. Haldane said, “You work here, you know more about it than me.”
Poole said, “No—I don’t understand any of this.”
“It’s like we crossed a line,” Chris Shank volunteered. Good old Chris, Haldane thought, never failed to open his mouth when he could just as well keep it shut. “We were heading down to size up the hazard, and it was weird, you know, with all this light and everything, but then we crossed some kind of line and suddenly it was—I mean, you couldn’t tell where you were going or coming from.” He shook his head.
“There are things in there,” Tom Stubbs added.
Haldane frowned. That had been his own perception, true enough. Things in there. But he hadn’t wanted to come out and say it. From here, the space between himself and the defense plant looked empty. Odd, in some shimmery way, but clearly deserted. So he had seen… what? A hallucination?
But Chris Shank was nodding vigorously. “That’s it,” he said. “I saw…”
“Tell the man,” Haldane said. If they were going to talk about this, they might as well speak plainly.
Shank lowered his head. Awe and shame played over his face like light and shadow.
“Angels,” he said finally. “That’s what I saw in there. All kinds of angels.”
Haldane stared at him.
Tom Stubbs was shaking his head vigorously. “Not angels! Nossir! Mister, it was Jesus Christ Himself in there!”
Poole glanced between the two men without comprehension, and the Saturday silence seemed louder now. A crow screeched in the still air.
“You’re both fucked up,” Chief Haldane said.
He looked back into the no-man’s-land of the research facility, so thick with light that it seemed as if a piece of the sky had fallen onto it. He knew what he’d seen. It was quite clear in his mind, despite the nausea, the sense of no-direction that had overtaken him. He remembered it. He remembered it vividly. He would remember it forever.
He said, “There’s no angels in there, and there sure as hell ain’t Jesus Christ. The only thing in there is monsters.”
“Monsters?” Poole said.
Haldane spat into the dry earth a second time, weary of all this. “You heard me.”
∞
What spread through the town that day was not panic but a deep, abiding unease. Rumors passed from backyard to main street to gatepost. By sunset, everyone had heard about the miraculous barricades of virgin forest north and south on the highway. Several had also heard about Chris Shank’s assertion that there were angels flying around the Two Rivers Physical Research. Laboratory. Some few even gave credence to Tom Stubbs’s claim that it was the Second Coming; that Jesus Christ, two hundred fifty feet tall and dressed in Resurrection white, was about to come striding into town—a point of view condemned Sunday morning at nearly every church service in town. That Sunday, all the churches were full.
The weekend rolled on without electrical power, phone service, or adequate explanation. Most people stayed near their families and told each other it would all come clear soon, that the lights would flicker back and the TV would make sense of things. Food stocks began to run low at the few grocery stores open for business. The big supermarket at the Riverview Mall remained closed, and without power for refrigeration, some said, it was just as well—after two days of warm spring weather it must stink like sin in there.
Saturday night, Dex Graham and Howard Poole exchanged accounts of what they had seen. They were careful at first not to strain each other’s credulity; less cautious when they realized they had each witnessed miracles. In the morning they set out to map the perimeters of the town. Dex drove while Howard sat in the passenger seat with a recent survey map, a pencil, and a pair of calipers. Howard marveled at the southern interruption of the highway, then marked it with careful precision on his chart. Similarly the northern limit. Then they followed private roads, logging roads, and the east-west axis of the farm roads. Each ended abruptly in humid pine forest. At the western margin of County Route 5, Howard creased the map with his pencil and said, “We might as well quit.”
“It does get a little monotonous.”
“More than that.” Howard held the map against the dashboard. He had marked every dead end and joined them together: a perfect circle, Dex observed, with the town of Two Rivers in the southeastern quadrant.
Howard used his calipers to mark the center of the circle, but Dex had already seen what it must be: the old Ojibway reserve, the Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory, where Howard had seen veils of blue light, and where the fire chief had seen monsters.
∞
Sunday, a charter pilot named Calvin Shepperd took off from the air docks at the western end of Lake Merced and flew southeast toward Detroit—or the place on the map where Detroit used to be.
From the air it was easy to see the circle Dex Graham and Howard Poole had mapped. It was as clear as a cartographer’s line. Two Rivers—much of Bayard County—had been transplanted (that was the word that occurred to him: like his wife’s droopy ficus, transplanted) into the kind of white pine forest that must have covered Michigan when Jolliet and La Salle first crossed it. Shepperd, a calm man, understood none of this but refused to be frightened by it; only observed, took note, and filed the information for later reference.
Another troubling piece of information was that his VOR receiver wasn’t registering a signal. Which was okay—Shepperd was old-fashioned enough to have calculated his course with a VFR chart and a yardstick, and his dead-reckoning skills were quite intact, thank you very much. He was not one of these modern pilots: RNAV junkies, lost without a computer. But it was peculiar, this radio silence.
He flew south by compass along the coast of the Lower Peninsula, coming within sight of Saginaw Bay. He should have passed Bay City and he adjusted his course to take him over Saginaw, but neither town seemed to exist. He did see a few settlements—farms, mineheads, and some obvious forestry. So there were people here. But not until he was within sight of the Detroit River did Shepperd encounter anything he would call a town.
Detroit was a town. Hell, it was a genuine city. But it was not Detroit as Shepperd had known it. It was like no city he had ever seen.
There was air traffic here, large but frail-looking planes he could not identify, mainly to the south; but no tower chatter or beacons he could pick up, only hiss in the headphones—which made his presence here a danger. He flew a broad circle low over the city’s outskirts, over long tin-roofed buildings like warehouses hugging the river’s edge. There were taller buildings of some dark stone, narrow streets crowded with traffic, vehicles he didn’t recognize, some of them horse-drawn. Afternoon sun stitched the city with shadows. From Shepperd’s vantage point it might have been a diorama, something in a museum case, not real. Surely to God, he thought, not real.
He had seen enough to make him nervous. He flew home with the sun at his wingtip, trying not to think about any of this; it seemed too fragile to bear the weight of thought. During the long trip back he fretted that he had made some error in his reckoning, or that Two Rivers might have vanished in his absence, that he would be forced to land in the wilderness.
But he knew this terrain, even without its man-made landmarks, as well as he knew his wife Sarah. The land was family. It didn’t betray him. He was back on the calm surface of Lake Merced before nightfall.
He told no one what he had seen; not even Sarah. She might have called him crazy, and that would have been unbearable. He thought about talking to someone in authority—the police chief? The mayor? But even if they believed him, what could they do with this kind of information? Nothing, he thought. Nothing at all.
He decided to repeat the journey, if only to convince himself that it had been real. Monday morning, he refueled at the dock pumps and took off. He charted the same course to the south. But Two Rivers was barely beyond the green line of the horizon when Shepperd turned back, his heart pumping madly and his shirt drenched with sweat.
Something out there had frightened him. Something in the combination of white pine wilderness and dark, angular city had scared him off. He didn’t want to see it again. He had seen too much already.
∞
Monday afternoon, a formation of three strange aircraft flew over the town of Two Rivers. The noise drew people into the streets, where they shaded their eyes and stared up into the cloudless June sky. Superficially, the aircraft were conventional enough. Certainly they were old-fashioned: single-engine, propeller-driven, their quilted-metal bodies brilliant in the sunlight. The insignia on their wings were too distant to recognize, but most people assumed the planes were military craft of some kind.
Calvin Shepperd thought they looked like World War II-vintage P-51’s, and he wondered what had drawn them here. Maybe it was his fault. Maybe he showed up on some radar screen. No telling what alarm he might have triggered.
But he didn’t like that idea, and like most of his ideas since the accident last Saturday, Shepperd kept it to himself.
He watched the three strange aircraft circle once more and then wheel away to the south, pale dots on a pale horizon.
∞
Evelyn Woodward had spent the last of her household money on groceries and a set of fresh batteries for her radio. The batteries were a dangerous luxury—money was scarce, and who knew when the bank might open again?—but she still believed in the radio. It was a lifeline. Once or twice in every long winter a snowstorm would send pine boughs plummeting onto the power lines, and the house would grow cold and dark while the linemen battled the weather. During those times, Evelyn would listen to her radio. The blackout would be announced on WGST; the affected counties would be named. The calm of the announcer was contagious. Listening, you knew the problem was temporary; that there were people out there working on it, mending things in the windy dark.
Despite what Dex and Howard Poole had said, despite the length of the crisis, so peculiar in this lovely June weather, Evelyn still nurtured her hope that the radio would revive. Perhaps WGST was unavailable, but there had been that other station, that curious fragment of it, surely not as sinister as Dex had made it seem.
She replaced the batteries and turned up the volume until the kitchen filled with the spit of static, but no voice came through. No matter, she thought. Soon.
The radio was a private thing. She turned it off when anyone came into the kitchen, especially Dex or Howard. She was afraid of seeming stupid or naive. It was too easy to see herself as stupid or naive; she didn’t need anyone’s help. Anyway, time to herself wasn’t hard to find. Evenings, Dex and Howard got together in the front room, where Dex had put the old hurricane lamp, and they talked about the emergency—as if, by talking, they could make it sensible, as if they could bury it under the sheer weight of their words. Evelyn went to the kitchen and sat in the gathering dark with her radio: Sunday night, Monday night.
Monday was the day the planes had flown over, an event that had cheered her considerably. Dex, of course, put some paranoid interpretation on it. To Evelyn, the meaning of the planes was much simpler. The problem—whatever the problem was—had come to someone’s attention. It was being worked on; it was being fixed.
That was the evening the radio began to talk again. When Evelyn heard the voices, faint and laced with static, she smiled to herself. Dex was wrong. Normality was not far off.
She sat at the kitchen table with sunset fading outside her dusty window and the radio close to her ear. She listened to fifteen minutes of a radio play (there were radio plays on this station), about policemen who were religious, or priests who were policemen—she couldn’t tell. The actors all had thick accents. Their accents sounded sometimes French, sometimes English, sometimes just unfamiliar; they used curious words from time to time. It must be a European play, Evelyn thought. Something avant-garde. Then there was an ad for Mueller’s Stone-Pressed White Flour, “our purity is never questioned,” in a similar voice. Then a time check and the news.
According to the news, there had been a naval battle in the Yucatan Channel with tremendous losses on all sides. The Logos was damaged and limping back to Galveston, but the Spanish Narvaez had sunk with all hands. And the land campaign was meeting stiff resistance in the hills around Cuernavaca.
At home, the announcer went on, Ascension Day had been marked by fireworks and public celebrations from coast to coast. On an unhappy note, incendiary displays in New York Harbor had inadvertently set fire to a pitch and tar warehouse on the Jersey shore and caused the death of three night watchmen.
A pacifist demonstration in Montmagny had been broken up by police. Though it was claimed to be a student demonstration, Proctors said the majority of those arrested were either apostates, trade unionists, or Jews.
More news at the turn of the hour, but first: don’t mark another Ascension without a new hat! Millinery to order at Roberge Hats and Yardgoods, a hat for every budget!
Evelyn snapped off the radio, resisting by a hair her urge to throw it across the room.
∞
In the absence of television, Clifford Stockton had spent much of the past three days in the company of his bicycle.
The bicycle was more than transportation. It was his key to the mystery. Clifford was as curious about the events that had overtaken Two Rivers as any adult—maybe more so, since there was no explanation he rejected out of hand. Aliens, monsters, miracles: all fair game as far as Clifford was concerned. He had no theory of his own. He had heard his mother laughing out loud (but nervously) at the idea that angels had been seen flying over the defense plant. Clifford wasn’t keen on the idea of angels himself: he wouldn’t know what to expect from an angel. But he didn’t rule it out. He had tried to get close to the research building on his bike; but the Two Rivers police had posted a car at the access road to turn away the curious, so he couldn’t confirm any of this personally.
He didn’t really care. The defense plant was a long ride by bike. There were mysteries closer to home.
For instance, the mystery of Coldwater Road. Coldwater Road ran for a couple of miles northeast past the cement factory. It had been zoned for housing, and water and power lines had been installed—there were fireplugs planted like tropical shrubs in the raw earth of empty lots. But no houses had been built. Hardly anyone went out Coldwater Road (except teenagers at night, he had heard), and that was fine with Clifford: he had few friends and quite a few enemies among the kids his age. Clifford was nearsighted and thin, a reader of books and watcher of television. He liked his own company. Out on Coldwater Road he could spend an afternoon in the scrubby fields and patches of woods without much fear of interruption, and that was good.
But since Saturday, Coldwater Road had changed. The grid of vacant lots had been cut in half by what looked to Clifford like an old, old forest. It was a mystery of enormous proportions.
The forest was deep and cool. Its floor was loamy and it smelled moist and pungent. It was both inviting and frightening. Clifford didn’t venture far into that dimness.
Instead, he was fascinated by its perimeter: a straight line bisecting the blank lots, maybe curving a little if you stood at the far end of the cleared land and sighted northeast along the treeline—but only maybe.
Not every tree was intact. Where the white pines crossed the border, they were neatly cut. The cut trees were eerie, Clifford thought. The heartwood was pale green and bled a sticky yellow sap. On one side: green branches thick with needles. On the other: nothing.
He tried to imagine some force that could have enclosed Two Rivers, could have drawn it up from the world like the dough in a cookie cutter and deposited it here, wherever here was: a wilderness.
He had heard the phrase pathless wilderness, and he guessed that was what this was—except, Clifford discovered, it was not entirely pathless.
If you turned left where Coldwater Road ended, if you followed the line of woods past the vacant lots, over scrubland and a small hill (from which he could see the cement factory and, far beyond it, the tangle of culs-de-sac that contained his own house), and if you left your bike behind and persisted through berry canes and wildflowers and high weeds, then you came to a trail.
A trail in the new forest, which approached Two Rivers but ended there, as all the town’s roads ended at the forest.
It was a wide trail where the trees had been cleared and the undergrowth trampled down as if by trucks. A logging road, Clifford would have called it, but maybe it was not that; he made no assumptions.
He walked a few yards down this path, listening to the sway of the pines around him and smelling the moist pungency of moss. It was like stepping into another world. He didn’t go far. He worried that the connection between this forest and Two Rivers might close behind him; that he would turn back and not be able to find his bike, his house, the town; only more trees and more of this primitive road, its source or destination.
Monday, riding home along Coldwater Road, he saw three airplanes pass overhead. Another clue, he thought. He didn’t know much about airplanes, but it was obvious to Clifford that these were old-fashioned. They circled, circled, circled, then veered away.
Somebody’s seen us, he thought. Somebody knows we’re here.
∞
He spent a day at home with his mother, who was frightened but trying not to show it. They opened cans of Texas-style chili and heated them over wax candles. His mother played the portable radio that night, and for a while there was music, but not anything Clifford or his mother recognized: sad, trilling songs. Then a man’s voice that faded into static.
“I don’t know this station,” his mother said absently. “I don’t know where it’s from.”
∞
In the morning Clifford cycled back to the forest road.
He was there when more planes passed over the town. Bigger planes this time, huge planes, wings bristling with engines. The planes dropped black dots into the June sky: bombs, Clifford thought breathlessly, but the dots grew billowing circles: parachutes, men dangling beneath, a rain of them.
And he heard a rumbling from the earth under his feet, and he ducked into the shadow of the trees and watched terrified from the margin of the road as a column of armored vehicles roared past in choking shrouds of dust and diesel smoke, the men at their helms in black uniform bearing rifles with bayonets, none of them aware of Clifford watching as they broke from the forest into scrub waste and daylight and rumbled over sunlit empty lots to the gray ribbon of Coldwater Road.
