Текст книги "Mysterium"
Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson
Соавторы: Robert Charles Wilson
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 18 страниц)
Then he opened his eyes, one last blink of reassurance, and saw the light.
It was a diffuse light that threw the shadows of trees onto the skin of the tent. The light was dim at first, then brighter. The sun, Howard thought dazedly. It must be dawn.
But the light was moving too quickly to be the sun. Tree shadows glided over the fabric above him like marching figures. The light, or its source, was traveling through the forest.
He reached for his eyeglasses and couldn’t find them. He was blind without his glasses. He remembered folding them and laying them down somewhere on the floor of the tent—but which side? He had been sleepy; the memory was dim. He swept his hand in panicky circles. Maybe he had rolled over on them; maybe, God help him, his glasses were broken.
The frames, when he touched them, felt as cold and fragile as bone china. He hurried them onto his face.
The light was brighter now.
A lantern, Howard thought. Someone was out in the woods with a lantern. The tent and fly were a vivid orange and impossible to miss. He would be seen, might already have been seen. He tugged the zipper on the sleeping bag all the way down, wanting to be free of it when they came for him—whoever they were.
The zipper growled into the silence. Howard shucked off the bag and huddled in the coiner of the tent where the flap opened into the cold air outside, ready to bolt.
But the shadows on the tent reached a noon angle and then grew longer; the light dimmed moment by moment until it was gone.
Howard waited for what seemed an eternity but might have been four or five minutes. Now the darkness was absolute once more. He couldn’t see his hand in front of his face, glasses or no.
He took a deep breath, opened the. tent flap, and crawled outside.
His legs were weak, but he managed to stand.
He was able to see the dim silhouettes of the trees against an overcast sky faintly alight with the dim glow of Two Rivers. There was nothing threatening out here—at least, nothing obvious. No sign of what had passed except a strange, acrid odor, quickly gone. The air was cold and hazy with ground fog.
He staggered ten steps from the tent, suddenly aware of the pressure of his bladder, and relieved himself against a tree. So what the fuck had happened here? What exactly had he seen? A lantern, flashlight, headlights on some car? But there had been no sound. Not even footsteps. Well, he thought, people see weird things in the woods. Swamp gas. Ball lightning. Who could say? The important thing was that it was gone, that he hadn’t been seen.
Probably hadn’t been seen, he amended. But even if he had, there was nothing to do about it. Sleep, he thought, if that was possible, and move on in the morning.
He had reached a state of tentative calm when a second light began to flicker on the pinetops.
He felt marginally less threatened this time. This time he could see what was going on. He crouched in the cover of a young maple and watched the sourceless glimmer rising through a foggy thicket some tens of yards away.
What made it eerie, Howard thought, was its noiselessness: how could something as bright as a spotlight move through these woods without rattling the underbrush? And the smoothness of the motion. A glide. Shadows tall as houses wove among the trees.
Howard squatted in the dark with one hand buried in the loam to brace himself. He felt aloof now, in a state of fine concentration, only a little frightened.
The light moved steadily closer. Now, he thought: now it will come around that hillside and I’ll see it…
And it did—and he gasped in spite of himself, cut by a breathless, helpless awe.
The light had no source. It was somehow its own source. The light was a thing; the light had dimension. The light was a nebulous shape ten or fifteen feet tall, almost too bright to look at, but not quite, not quite. It was not a sphere; it had a shape that was tenuous but seemed to suggest a human form—head, arms, trunk, legs. But the features weren’t solid; they twined like smoke, were lost to the air, flickered alive. Veins of color pulsed in the brightness.
It came closer. Closer, it wasn’t easier to see. The edges blurred; it was diffuse. It moved like a flame; Howard was suddenly afraid it might come close enough to burn him.
Now it paused a few yards away.
The apparition possessed no visible eyes. Nevertheless, Howard was convinced that it looked directly at him—that it regarded him with some complex, chill intelligence that flowed toward him and into him like a slow current.
And then it simply moved on: glided past him and away beyond a scrim of trees.
Howard kept still. There were more lights now, none so close, but all nearby, each casting its own grid of shadows into and around the weaving trees. The woods were populated with these things, each one marching on some stately orbit. My God, Howard thought. The urge to pray was powerfully strong. My God, my God.
∞
He watched until each source of this nebulous light had passed and a genuine darkness descended again.
Then—bone by bone, tendons creaking—he lifted himself and stood erect.
The cold wind was brisk but the sky seemed less weighty now. It was ink-blue beyond the eastern margin of the forest. Dawn, Howard thought. That bright star might be Venus.
He stumbled back to the tent bereft of every emotion but a wordless gratitude for the fact of his own survival.
∞
He woke hours later in cool sunlight filtered through orange nylon. His body felt raw and his thoughts were quick and fragile.
Time to start thinking like a scientist, Howard scolded himself. Find the center of this problem.
Or just keep walking: that was the other option. Walk past the ruined research buildings, walk deeper into this forest, south toward Detroit or whatever mutation of Detroit existed here; walk until he found a population to lose himself in, or until he died, whichever came first.
The fundamental question, almost too sweeping to ask, was simply Why? So many things had happened to Two Rivers, so many enormous, numbing events. All linked, he supposed; all connected in some causal chain, if only he could begin to unravel it. Obviously the town had moved through an unimaginable latitude of time, but why? Had arrived in a world full of archaic technology and perverse religious wars, but why? Why here, of all places? And the night shapes in the forest: what were they?
What single line could possibly connect all these things?
He rolled his tent, fielded his pack, and followed the trail eastward.
∞
Sunlight chased cloud into the hazy east. Howard crossed a brook at its shallowest point, where the water streamed in cool transparency over granite rubble. He wished his thoughts were as lucid. He was out of food; he felt hungry and light-headed.
It seemed appropriate that he was moving toward the heart of the crisis, through the undeveloped lands of the old Ojibway reserve toward the ruined Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory. Through mystery toward revelation. At least, perhaps. Eventually.
Last night these woods had been haunted. Today, in flickering sunlight, the memory seemed ludicrous. And yet there was a presence here, never seen but often felt, a private visitation. He felt his uncle with him as he walked: Stern as a presiding spirit. He guessed that wasn’t scientific. But that was how it seemed.
∞
The woods thinned. Howard moved more cautiously here. He came to the logging road that connected the lab with the highway. The road had been widened by military traffic. He waited until a truck rumbled past, its primitive engine loud in the silence. Then he crossed the rutted, wet road and walked parallel to it behind a screen of low pines.
He reached the hill from which, long ago, he had watched Chief Haldane’s ladder company move beyond a border of blue light. Another trail crossed the road here. It seemed to lead to higher ground along this ridge, and Howard followed it through berry thickets and white pine, sweating under his Navy coat. It was afternoon now and the sunlight was warm.
He came to the peak of the ridge. The Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory lay in the flatland beyond. Howard felt conspicuous in this elevated place. He shrugged off his pack and left it under a tree. The ridge sloped steeply here and Howard lay on his belly at the edge of it, looking down an incline of rock and wild grasses.
The ruined buildings were still enclosed in their dome of iridescent light. They looked much the way Howard remembered them looking in the spring. The central bunker had stopped smoking, but nothing else had changed—the grounds were embalmed in this glaze of illumination. The single elm outside the staff housing had kept all its leaves.
There was a breeze, at least here on this escarpment, but the tree was not moving.
Human activity was restricted to the outside of this perimeter. Obviously, the military had taken an interest in the Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory. It would have been easy enough to deduce that the lab was at the center of what had happened at Two Rivers, and this persistent skein of light would have captured anyone’s attention. The soldiers had put up a wire fence around the circumference of the property. Tents and a pair of tin sheds had been erected. The contrast was striking, Howard thought. Inside the dome, everything was pristine. Outside, the grass had been trampled into mud, ditches had been turned into latrines, garbage had been heaped in enormous mounds.
His attention was focused so closely on the lab that he didn’t hear the footsteps behind him until they were too close. He rolled onto his back and sat up, ready to bolt for the trees.
Clifford Stockton regarded him through magnifying-lens eyeglasses. The boy blinked twice. Then he held out a wrinkled paper bag.
“My lunch,” he said. “You can have some if you want.”
∞
Howard said, “How did you know I wasn’t a soldier?” They sat in the shade some yards away from the edge of the escarpment.
“You don’t look like a soldier,” the boy said.
“How can you tell?”
“The way you’re dressed.”
“I might be out of uniform. I might be in disguise.” The boy inspected him more closely. He shook his head: “It’s not just your clothes.”
“Okay. Still—you should be careful.” Clifford nodded.
The boy had left his bicycle inclined against a tree. He offered Howard half a sandwich wrapped in brown paper and a drink from a thermos of cold water. Howard had brought his own water on this expedition, two Coke bottles tucked into the deep pockets of his jacket, but most of that was gone. He drank from the thermos and said, “Thanks.”
“My name is Clifford.”
“Thank you, Clifford. I’m Howard.”
The boy offered his hand and Howard shook it.
Then, briefly, they worked at the food. It wasn’t much of a sandwich, Howard thought, but it was better than most of what he’d been eating lately. Some kind of coarse-ground bread, some meat, probably military rations, not bad if you were hungry. He discovered he was very hungry indeed.
He finished the sandwich and licked the pale grease from his fingers. “Have you been here before, Clifford?”
“A few times.”
“Long ride out from town, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
Howard felt at ease with the boy. Maybe it was his obvious myopia or his solemn style, but he felt an echo of his own childhood here. One look at Clifford and you knew he was the kind of kid who kept a collection of coins or bugs or comics; that he watched too much TV, read too many books.
His eyes were pinched and cautious, but Howard supposed that was natural; everyone was cautious nowadays.
He said, “How safe is it up here?”
“It’s a long hike up from the valley. I’ve never seen a soldier here. Mostly they stay near the trucks.”
“How often do you come here?”
“Maybe once a week or so. Like you said—it’s a long ride.”
“So why come at all?”
“Find out what’s happening.” The boy gave Howard a thoughtful stare. “Why are you here?”
“Same reason.”
“You walked from town?” Howard nodded. “Long walk.”
“Yup.”
“First time?”
“Yes,” Howard said. “At least, since the tanks came.”
“It’s quiet today.”
“Isn’t it always?”
“No,” the boy said. “Sometimes there are more soldiers or more Proctors.”
Howard was instantly curious, but he didn’t want to intimidate the boy. He ordered his thoughts. “Clifford, can you tell me what they do here? This might be important.”
Clifford frowned. He balled up his sandwich wrapper and tossed it into the dark of the woods. “It’s hard to tell. You can’t see much without binoculars. Sometimes they take pictures. A couple of times I saw them sending soldiers in.”
“What—into the lab?”
“Into one of the buildings.”
“Show me which one.”
They crept to the edge of the escarpment. The boy pointed to a tall structure at the near perimeter of the parking lot: the administration building.
Howard remembered Chief Haldane and his firefighters on the first Saturday after the transition. They had ventured a few yards into that radius and had come out babbling about monsters and angels… and sick, Howard remembered, perhaps sicker than they knew. Haldane had died this September, of symptoms that sounded like a runaway leukemia. “I’m surprised they can go in there.”
“They wore special clothes,” Clifford said, “like diving suits, with helmets. They went in and they came out.”
“Carrying anything?”
“Boxes, filing cabinets. Books. Sometimes bodies.”
Bodies, Howard thought. The installation wasn’t as empty as it seemed. Of course not. People had died here… died in their beds, most of them, neatly out of sight.
“They’re really well preserved,” the boy added.
“What?”
“The bodies.”
“Clifford—from this distance, how can you tell?” The boy was silent for a time. Some nerve had been touched, some delicate truth. The boy avoided Howard’s eyes when he finally spoke:
“My mom has a friend. A soldier. Who comes over. That’s how we get bread for sandwiches. Chocolate bars sometimes.” Clifford shrugged uncomfortably. “He’s not a bad guy.”
“I see.” Howard kept his voice carefully neutral. “But he talks sometimes?”
The boy nodded. “At breakfast mostly. He brags.”
“He’s been here?”
“He was on duty when they brought out a body. He said it was like it only just died. It hadn’t decomposed.” Another shrug. “If he’s telling the truth.”
“Clifford, this could be the most important part yet. Do you remember anything else he said? Anything about what they’re looking for here, or what they found?”
The boy settled on a granite shelf away from the lip of the escarpment. “He didn’t say too much. I don’t think he’s supposed to. He said people come out of there, even the ones in suits, talking about the weird things they’ve seen. They can’t stay inside too long or go too far. It makes them sick. Some of the first people who went in, died.”
Howard thought again of Chief Haldane’s leukemia.
“And at night,” the boy continued, “everybody leaves. Nobody stays out here at night. It gets strange.”
“Strange how?”
The boy shrugged. “That’s all I remember. Luke doesn’t really talk that much. Mostly he complains about the Proctors. He hates them. Most of the soldiers do. It’s the Proctors who keep bringing people out here; the soldiers just follow orders. Luke says the soldiers have to take all these risks because the Proctors decided this place is important.” The boy paused, seemed to hold the thought a moment. “But it is important, isn’t it? That’s why you’re here.”
“Yes,” Howard said. “That’s why I’m here.”
The boy turned away. He looked small against the blue sweep of the sky. A wind came up the escarpment.
The boy said, “So much has happened. No one knows where we really are—where the whole town is. It just seems like such a long way back home.” He turned to Howard, frowning fiercely. “1 don’t know what happened out here, but it’s hard to believe anybody could fix something like that.”
Howard looked at the forest beyond the ruined buildings, at the Ojibway land blending seamlessly into ancient white pine wilderness. The hills rolled to a horizon lost in autumn haze. It would be so easy to walk into that vastness. Die or find a new life. Leave.
“Maybe it can be fixed,” he said. “I mean to try.”
∞
He learned what he could from Clifford, and when the boy took his bike and cycled away Howard sketched a crude map of the compound, estimating distances and the rough circumference of the dome of light.
He crossed the highway before dark and spent another night in the woods nearer to town; nothing disturbed his sleep.
He left his camping gear wrapped in the tent fly and buried under a mound of leaves—he might find his way back here someday—and hiked home through town. He stank of his own sweat and he was desperately thirsty, but he made it back to his basement before curfew without arousing suspicion.
Howard had brought very few possessions into this new world. They were all contained in his single canvas shoulder bag, stashed behind the water heater in the Cantwell house. He brought the bag out and opened it. There was not much inside. Some notebooks, journal extracts he had planned to read, his birth certificate, his lab credentials … and this.
Howard took it out of the bag and examined it under a light. A single sheet of canary-yellow paper torn from a note pad. On the paper was written, Stern. And a telephone number.
CHAPTER SIX
Milos Fabrikant was the eldest of the battalion of scientists assigned to the work of constructing a nucleic bomb.
Each day, weather permitting, he bicycled from his home—a dreary bunker full of dreary male physicists—to his place of work, an office in one of five enormous buildings occupying a bleak, flat hinterland of northern Laurentia.
Each day, he was drawn to the same observation: everything here was too large. The landscape, the sky, the works of man. Indeed, here was the largest structure the human race had ever created, a huge box-shaped building full of air-evacuated calutrons—he cycled past it on a plain of smooth, black asphalt, under a sky threatening rain.
In the year since the work began in earnest, Fabrikant had ceased to be impressed by this hubris of man and nature. He would be seventy years old before the next Ascension Day, and what pleased him—one of his few private pleasures—was something much simpler: his continuing ability to make this daily two-mile bicycle trip. Riding, he felt like an athlete. He had colleagues as young as forty (that pig Moberly, the materials engineer, for instance) who would be exhausted by half the journey. Rattling through a grim dream of war on his old blue bicycle, Fabrikant felt as if he might live forever.
He was a physicist, but the great physicists, the legend went, do all their best work in their twenties. Maybe so, Fabrikant thought. His real work here was in administration, not theory. He was an administrator, nevertheless, who understood the project in every detail, who grasped the work in all its splendid, terrible beauty.
He had been involved in nucleic science for years. He remembered the primitive laboratories at the Universite de Terrebonne, before the war made everything urgent, where he and the physicist Pariseau had packed an aluminum sphere with powdered uranium metal and heavy water and lowered it into a swimming pool—the pool at the old gymnasium; a new one had lately been built to replace it. What they had created was a primitive nucleic pile: neutron multiplication above unity for the first time in a laboratory. But the aluminum sphere had leaked, and when the pool was drained the uranium caught fire. There was an explosion—chemical, thank God, not nucleic. The old gymnasium burned to the ground. Fabrikant had feared he would lose his tenure; but the paper he wrote won him a scholastic prize, and the university collected handsomely, he was told, from the insurance.
But such fruitful imprecision was no longer allowed. Now Fabrikant spent his days negotiating with the war economy, balancing its amazing largesse against its even more amazing stinginess. For instance: ten thousand pounds of copper for the calutrons. No problem. But paper clips had been on back order for six months.
Purified silver, but no toilet paper.
And the endless requisitions were all routed through Fabrikant’s office, which also conducted goodwill tours for military procurement officers and endless informal accountings to Bureau officials skeptical of any expenditure on “mere” science, even a weapons project.
He left his bicycle in a broom closet, climbed two floors and said good morning to Cile, his secretary. She smiled without conviction. Fabrikant’s office faced west, where much of the view was occluded by the separation buildings, vast gray strongboxes streaked with rain. Beyond them, tundra. Chimneys vented steam into the foggy air.
He looked at the schedule Cile had prepared. All morning was devoted to a single meeting with a Proctor who had flown in from the capital: a Censeur named Bisonette. Subject of meeting, not stated. Another command performance, Fabrikant thought wearily. A fit agenda for a bleak morning: parading some hobble-footed bald monolingual bureaucrat past the diffusion chambers. He sighed and began to rehearse his own dubious French. Le reacteur atomique. Une bombe nucleaire. Une plus grande bombe.
∞
Was it evil, Fabrikant sometimes wondered, even to consider constructing such a weapon?
The military misunderstood the project. One told them, so-and-so thousand tons of TNT. And they would think, Ah, a big bomb.
But it was not that. Fabrikant had glimpsed the potential, saw it perhaps more clearly than his colleagues. To liberate the energy locked into matter was to tamper with nature at the most fundamental level. Nucleic division was the prerogative of the stars, after all, and what were the stars but the provinces of God?
“If he flees westward, he finds the fire. If he turns southward, he finds the fire. If he turns northward, the seething fire meets him again. Nor does he find a way to the east to be saved, for he did not find it in his days of incarnation, nor will he find it in the day of judgment.” The Book of Thomas the Contender—Thomas the Humorless, Fabrikant had thought when he was forced to memorize the verses in secondary school. Doom at every compass point. Fabrikant wondered if he had become the hands of Thomas, manufacturing the vehicle of that ultimate flame.
But the Spaniards were pressing at the western border, and the news was not as rosy as the radio made it seem, and the Republic was worth preserving—for all its faults, Fabrikant thought, it was at least a place where the two races, the French and the English, had achieved a modus vivendi; it was more liberal than the European monarchies, with their nationalist heresies or Romish paganisms. So yes, a bigger bomb, a seething fire, to devastate Seville, perhaps, or some military port such as Malaga or Cartagena. And then the war would be over.
He looked up from these musings and a cold cup of coffee as Cile introduced the Censeur, M. Bisonette. Tall, a stubble of white hair, eyes sheathed in wrinkled flesh. Long-fingered hands: aristocratic, Fabrikant thought. Damn the French. At Consolidation, there had been no official decision that the English would control the civilian government and the French would dominate the religious hierarchy—but that was how it had turned out, a permanent standoff rendered as constitutional tradition. Miraculously, for 150 years, the truce had held. “Bonjour,” Fabrikant said. “Bonjour, Monsieur Bisonette. Qu’y a-t-il pour votre service?”
“My English is adequate,” the Censeur said.
Implying: Better than your French. Well, that was true enough. Fabrikant was secretly relieved. “More than adequate, obviously. I apologize, Censeur. Please, sit down and tell me what I can do for you this morning.”
The Censeur, who carried a leather case, directed at Fabrikant a smile that provoked his deep suspicion. “Oh, many things,” the Censeur said.
∞
Cile brought more coffee.
“Your work here is the separation of uranium,” M. Bisonette said, consulting a sheaf of papers he had drawn from his case. “Specifically, the isolation of the isotope, uranium 235, from the raw ore.”
“Exactly,” Fabrikant said. Cile’s coffee was hot and thick, almost Turkish. Tonic against the northern chill. Taken in excess, it gave him palpitations. “What we ultimately hope to achieve is a cascading nucleic division of the atom through the release of neutrons. To accomplish this—” He looked at Bisonette and faltered. The Censeur was regarding him with a bored contempt. “I’m sorry. Please go on.”
This might be serious.
“You’re pursuing three routes to purification,” Bisonette intoned. “Gaseous diffusion, separation by electromagnetism, and centrifugation.”
“That’s what these buildings are for, Censeur. If you would like to see the work—”
“The electromagnetic and centrifugal projects are to be discontinued and abandoned. The diffusion will be pursued with certain refinements. You’ll be sent blueprints and instructions.”
Fabrikant was aghast. He could not speak.
Bisonette said mildly, “Do you have any objections?”
“My God! Objections? Whose decision is this?”
“The Office of Military Affairs. With the consent and approval of the Bureau de la Convenance.”
Fabrikant couldn’t disguise his outrage. “I should have been consulted! Censeur, I don’t mean to offend, but this is absurd! The purpose of running three processes simultaneously is to determine which is most effective or efficient. We don’t know that yet! Diffusion is promising, I admit, but there are still problems—enormous problems! The diffusion barriers, to take an obvious example. We’ve looked at nickel mesh, but the difficulty—”
“The barrier tubes are already in production. You should have them by December. The details are explained in the documents.”
Fabrikant opened his mouth and closed it. Already in production! Where could such knowledge have come from?
Then it struck him: the obvious implication. “There’s another project. That’s it, isn’t it? They’re ahead of us. They’ve achieved a usable enrichment.”
“Something like that,” M. Bisonette said. “But we need your cooperation.”
Of course. The Bureau must have sponsored its own research program, the hypocrites. Wartime redundancy. My God, Fabrikant thought, the waste!
And—admit it—he was ashamed that he had been beaten to the finish line; that somewhere else, all his problems had been solved.
He looked at his coffee cup, all appetite fled.
“The bomb itself,” Bisonette was saying. “You have a preliminary design?”
Fabrikant worked to recover his composure. Why was it the Proctors must always strip a man of his dignity? “A sort of nucleic gun,” he told Bisonette, “although this is premature, but in essence, a conventional explosive to compact the purified uranium—”
“Look here,” Bisonette said, and handed him a technical cutaway drawing of what Fabrikant mistook, at first, for a soccer ball.
“The casing contains these cells of explosives. The core is a hollow sphere of plutonium. I’m not a theorist, Monsieur Fabrikant, but the documents will explain it.”
Fabrikant gazed at the drawing. “The tolerances—”
“Will have to be precise.”
“To say the least! You can achieve that?”
“No. You can.”
“This is untested!”
“It will work,” Bisonette said.
“How can you know that?”
The Censeur displayed once more his secretive, sly smile. “Assume that we do,” he said.
∞
Fabrikant believed him.
He sat alone in his office after the Censeur left. He felt stunned, immobilized.
He had been rendered useless in the space of—what had it been? An hour?
Worse, it all seemed too real to him now. These blueprints were evidence that the project would go ahead; the Censeur’s certainty was undeniable. The atom would be divided; the fire would seethe.
Fabrikant, who was not conventionally religious, nevertheless shivered at the thought.
They would sunder the heart of matter, he thought, and the result would necessarily be destruction. Theologians spoke of the mysterium coniunctionis, the mystery of union: in Sophia Achamoth, of man and woman, perfect androgyny; in nature, of particle and wave, the uncollapsed wave function; the balance of forces in the atom. A balance which Fabrikant, like some noxious demiurge, was about to disturb. And cities would be destroyed, if not worlds.
He felt like Adam, imprisoned by the Archons in a mortal body. And here, on this desk, was his Tree.
Its branches are the shadow of death; its sap is the unction of evil and its fruit is the wish for death.
His last question to the Censeur had been, “How far has this gone? Has the bomb itself been tested?”
“There is no bomb until you build it,” Bisonette told him. “The testing you may leave to us.”
