Mysterium (30 page)

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 25

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.