Tintagel (19 page)

He stared at her resolutely.

"Ok, I'm going in after Ellie."
Privilege of rank
. "When the rest of her profile comes in over the computer, let me see it. We'll just bump back the other runs for today. It won't kill me to work a little overtime." He paused. "And one other thing, look into HomeCom and unscramble some of those 'rumors' of yours. DataCom won't have any of the gossip since the government isn't interested in the personal scandals of movie stars and politicos. Got it?"

Got it."

"And while I'm gone, I want you to start digging up some facts on Randell. I need more than what we already have on file. Try to expand the security clearance on the use of DataCom. If they don't give it to you, go ahead and buzz the President. She'll give it if I read her right."

Then he said, "Be sure to find out about his 'friends' and some of his connections. Charlie will be over soon, and he'll be handy. He hasn't had much to do since we moved up here.

He'll like the excitement." Then, as an afterthought, he added, "You know, I shouldn't have ever gone after Randell. It was against my better judgment in the first place. I should've let him rot in his bloody paradise."

"You didn't know it was bloody until you got there."

"That's beside the point."

He stalked off toward his room. "And if you run into a snag," he yelled into Christy's office, "lean on Charlie. This is just the sort of thing that turns him on."

Christy gathered the files on her desk.
With Charlie here, things would be fine
, she thought. But at the same time she was feeling uneasy over Francis's anger.
Why anger
?

She held the square sonic-wafer of the piece of music to which Ellie Estevan had succumbed.
Sibelius. Pohjola's Daughter
.

What's going on?

The rain outside thrummed monotonously, dripping from the eaves. The dark gray of the morning light filtered throughout the household. In the living room, she heard the fire jump and spit in the fireplace. She rattled a small plastic box of Baktropol in her other hand. It was the strongest dosage available. She shivered, hoping that it was from the incipient cold. Already, the Baktropol was beginning to wear off. She thought of Charlie.

Strapping the equipment onto his waist and vest, Lanier stood alone in the workroom. He snapped on the priest's collar and adjusted the holster with the Malachi. He thought about Ellie. And the report.

Senator Randell had accompanied her to an elite gathering of movie industry friends and officials where they planned on a private screening of Ellie Estevan's latest movie. The report indicated that everyone had taken substantial dosages of Baktropol, including Ellie. The movie had already been screened at the studio without the music track, and they all had gotten together to view the movie in its totality, with the music fully transcribed.

But it seemed that at the screening a number of drinks were passed around, and some other drugs turned loose. The showing evolved into a minor celebration. When the movie ended, they discovered that Ellie Estevan had vanished in her seat. But everyone was so stoned that it was hours before she was reported missing.

Lanier signaled Christy when he was prepared. The lights slowly dimmed in the workroom.

The music came to him over the micro-receiver in his car, and he began his mantra this time. He had some difficulty calming himself down. Images of Randell rose and fell in the troubled music. Images of Ellie in the late afternoon light of Nacimiento began to appear. Autumn was in her eyes.

He fell down a tunnel, a vortex of energy, as the meditation took him deeper into his mind. He synchronized himself with the music, dropping deeper and deeper. And vanished.

Like a soul damned to Hell, he fell into a blistering inferno of towering yellow flames that burst from bubbles on a sea of burning oil.

Hazy and sluggish from the transference, the heat flashed across his face so suddenly that he came to full consciousness within a fraction of a second. He stood on a flat rock that was approximately ten meters across and relatively circular in shape. The rock was an island in an ocean of ugly flame.

He dropped down to his knees, simultaneously whipping off his long coat and priest's collar, a disguise he could afford to do without for the moment. If this was Ellie Estevan's private version of Hell, then the presence of a priest would only make things worse. Much worse. Besides that, it was just too hot to fool with the extra clothing. Such as it was, he could hardly breathe.

The flames geysered about him, falling back, leaving behind clouds of a vile orange vapor that gagged him. From his utility belt, he quickly snapped off the oxygen-assisted filter-mask and drew it over his head.

It took a few precious seconds for him to clear his head of the odors from the sea that surrounded him. It was the odor of burning human flesh, among other unpleasant things. It was a perfect hell of noxious industrial chemicals, pustulant and suffocating. Nowhere was there any sign of life, human or otherwise.

He opened the collar of his tunic as perspiration streamed down his neck and face. The temperature was ghastly; humidity high. It was only marginally livable.
But for how long
? he asked himself, looking around. The rock was too hot to sit on, but his insulated boots kept the heat from scorching his feet. He stood up quickly and tried to see through the. bright glare of the fiery ocean and shimmering heat.

Leaving his long coat where it lay, Lanier jumped out across the boiling surface of the sea and landed on another, if somewhat smaller, island-rock. Like a string of carefully sculpted stones in a Japanese Zen garden, the rocks beckoned him out over the seething ocean. He leaped from one rock to another, covering about a hundred meters until he came to an immense rock. The moisture in the air and the sweat of his own body had nearly soaked his uniform through. He knew that he wouldn't be able to take much more of this.

The larger island was, like all the others, completely flat, and was composed of an unidentifiable porous substance. Nothing grew here. Nothing could. He squinted his eyes above the mouthpiece of the filter-mask.

With the flames exploding upward around him, and the fumes wafting in the air, his vision was severely limited. He could see no more than a hundred meters in any one direction. All there seemed to be to this universe was the incredible flaming ocean and the island-rocks that barely protruded from the oily surface. There were no tides, which was just as well.

But, looking upward into the orange sky, Lanier could make out objects—not quite clouds—hovering just out of the range of the flames. They were almost undefined in the shifting waves of heat, but they appeared to bob on the rising and settling currents of hot air from the ocean. Their undersides shimmered with the luminescent explosions that rocketed up at them from the chemical sea.

He couldn't tell for certain what the objects were. The heat obscured his vision. Whatever they were, they were drifting in every direction, at all altitudes, seemingly at the mercy of the thermals.

He pulled out his binoculars.

The objects were actually hemispherical structures, flat on the bottom, and they were lifting and plunging on the heat. Some of the hemispheres were very high in the sky, and others were nearly touching the surface of the flaming ocean.

The sky was filled with the hemispheres. Thousands of them.

And they were very large. Through the binoculars, Lanier estimated that they were about the size of football fields, perhaps even larger. The flat undersides, from what he could tell, were laced with a honeycomb design. Perhaps the honeycombs were used to capture the heat that kept the hemispheres buoyant. He couldn't understand how such a thing was physically possible. But there they were.

And here I am
, he thought, looking around in the heat.

Lowering the binoculars, he closed his eyes, breathing the fresh oxygen from the filter-mask. The rushing flames and the belching oily sea were somewhat distracting, but Lanier focused inwardly onto the vibrations set up by Sibelius's
Pohjola's Daughter
reliably coming through his micro-receiver. Ellie Estevan clearly was not here on one of these isolated islands in this wretched sea. She was inside one of those drifting hemispheres.

The nearest one, too
, he surmised. The music had taken a sudden shift.

It may be Hell here below, but the vibrations suggested just the opposite about the hovering structures. Despite the furious, savage inferno of the surface, the feelings emerging from the music suggested that in those drifting hemispheres was a paradise, a place where the inhabitants of this world dwelled securely and comfortably.

The problem he faced was how to get up to one of them.

He knew right away which hemisphere was meant for him. Behind him, coming up slowly at a height of about twenty meters—quite low—was an enormous hemisphere. It seemed almost iridescent, glowing on its own, in the orange and pink sky. And it danced on the heat waves, seeming impossibly delicate and light.

Lanier carried both nylon rope and grappling hooks. Swiftly, he unfastened the rope from the side of the utility belt. The hemisphere was silently coming up upon him, lifting ever so slightly on the heat.

Strapped to Lanier's right leg was a small tube. He pulled it out of its tight holster. The hemisphere would be too high to merely toss the rope upward and hope that the grappling hook would find a hold on the underside of the craft in the mesh of honeycombs. The cylinder he withdrew was a miniaturized launch-tube. Like a mortar, it would be infinitely more accurate than tossing the rope with his arm.

He tucked the grappling hook into the tube, letting the rope itself trail outside at his feet. The large shadow of the hemisphere drifted overhead. It was somewhat intimidating in its immensity, like trying to board a dirigible in midflight. But this thing appeared to weigh several thousand tons. The honey-comb arrangement on the underside of the hemisphere looked as if there were places where a hook could easily take hold.

And right in the center of the hemisphere's bottom was a circular opening.
The entrance? The exit
? He had to find out: the vibrations were right for this hemisphere, the music very intense. Ellie Estevan was living in it—somewhere.

He held the tube on his thigh and leaned back. The grappling hook, followed by the rope snaking upward, burst out in a muffled explosion. The recoil bruised his leg slightly. But the hook struck the underside of the honeycombs and fell around a girder, catching not too far from the circular opening in the bottom of the hemisphere.

Lanier ran after the rope as it drifted away with the hemisphere. He quickly pulled on his gloves so that he could grip the nylon rope. And he swung out over the flaming ocean.

The hemisphere, now fully out over the tremendous caldron of the bubbling sea, lifted suddenly. Lanier began the long climb, hoping that the moisture in the air wouldn't make the cord too slippery, and hoping, as well, that his strength would hold out.

It took him several difficult minutes, most of which were spent in prayer that the rope would actually hold, as he made the ascent. The sea below didn't look as if anything could survive in it for more than a second or two. He decided not to look down any more than he had to.

The honeycombs of the underside were lined with girders composed of an albaster-colored material. Perhaps plastic. Grabbing the lower end of one of the girders, Lanier hoisted himself up, breathing with great difficulty. The oxygen-assisted filter-mask could only work efficiently at a normal rate of respiration. He rested, wrapping himself around a girder.

It was an odd sensation, holding to the underside of the drifting hemisphere. He felt as if he were beneath a zeppelin out over the Atlantic. The view, even from fifty meters, and rising, was spectacular. >From here, he could see no end to the burning sea. The islands stretched for a distance, then faded. He had landed on an archepelago of some kind, for the ocean seemed for the most part to be empty of islands or other land masses. He had been lucky in that respect.

The heat collected by the honeycombs of the hemisphere was beginning to affect him.

He inched over toward the circular opening, nearly losing his grip at one point, and pulled himself upward into the hole. There was a small lip, where he sat up, resting. Here, he checked that he hadn't lost any of his equipment in the climb. The Malachi was firmly secured in its holster. The medicine pouch was still strapped to his utility belt. Everything was in place.

The opening in the bottom of the hemisphere appeared to be a well of some kind. Here, the heat wasn't nearly so unbearable as it had been out in the honeycombs. Looking down, he almost felt as if he were a bombardier in an ancient airplane cruising over the ruins of Dresden: the flames beneath him were all that was left of some colossal Armageddon. Hell stretched from horizon to horizon. The heat was making him dream with the music chiming in his ear.

He got up carefully and found a convenient column of iron rungs running up into the hemisphere. So he climbed. He questioned their presence in the well, but dropped it. Everything here was impossible, possessing a logic all its own. And there was no such thing as coincidence anywhere, as Two Moons had once instructed him long ago. Everything served a purpose.

He poised himself for traps, but the climb was only about three meters above the opening. He reached a pressurized door.

Swinging it open, he stepped inside a very small airlock chamber. The door opposite him wouldn't open until he closed the one through which he had just entered. He sealed it, spinning the wheel around. Pressing the button beside the opposite door, a hissing sounded, and the door swung open of its own accord.

Cautiously, he stepped inside.

He recalled Two Moons' statement about the balance in nature. Real or imaginary, there was always an element of good and an element of evil in the world. Pleasure and pain. No one could escape from that one essential fact of human existence.
No one
. And even here, inside the magnificent hemisphere, was the balancing factor. It was the paradise, as Lanier had guessed it would be.