Mysterium (26 page)

“Yes. The Gnostics said, ‘You can find your way to this, because you’re part of it. You long for it. It’s your original true home.’ ”

Howard pictured Stern as a lonely child, perhaps too aware of his own awkwardness and great intelligence. He must have felt it keenly, that lost imperium from which he had dropped into humble matter.

“And we
do
live in an unholy world,” Ruth said. “He was always conscious of that. When he watched the news on TV, the wars and the starving children, he looked like he was in pain.”

Howard said, “It became an obsession.”

“Oh, at least.”

“More than that? Ruth, are you questioning his sanity?”

“I don’t want to judge. I knew him for a little more than a year, Howard. We were close. I loved him. Or I thought I did. All I can say is, during that time, he changed. Maybe something at the lab affected him. He started spending more time with his books. He picked up religious arguments everybody else abandoned centuries ago. Worse, he wanted to have these arguments with
me
.” She held up her hands in a helpless gesture. “I don’t have any particular faith in God. I don’t know if evil is a creative force. I worry about, you know,
shopping
. Or the national debt, if I’m ambitious. Not theology.”

The room was silent for a moment. Howard listened to the ticking of snow on a windowpane. He sipped coffee.

Ruth toyed with her cigarette pack but didn’t light one.

He said, “It’s hard not to make the connection.”

She nodded at once. “I’ve thought of that. It’s a neat little scenario: Stern is obsessed with Gnosticism. He runs the Two Rivers Research Lab. Something happens out there, God knows what, and we’re transplanted into a place where there’s a powerful church that professes a version of Gnostic Christianity.”

“I wasn’t sure you knew about that.”

“I’ve heard the soldiers at the food depot swearing by Samael and Sophia Achamoth. I don’t know the details.”

“If it’s a meaningful connection,” Howard said, “what are we saying? That Stern, somehow,
brought us here
?”

“Somehow. Yes, that’s the implication. I can’t imagine what it means in practical terms.”

“Whatever happened at the lab may still be happening. There was that incident on Beacon Street.”

“God in a pillar of blue light?”

“God or someone.” Howard hesitated. “You know, I truly thought he would be here. Ruth, I had—I
still
have—a powerful feeling that Stern is alive.”

“Yes. So do I.”

They regarded one another.

“But if he’s alive,” Ruth said finally, “I don’t know where he
can
be except at the lab, and I thought the lab had been destroyed.”

Maybe not, Howard thought. He recalled the buildings trapped in light; the luminous forms roaming the old Ojibway land.

Ruth stood up. “Howard, it’s getting late. Things being what they are, you shouldn’t cut it too close to curfew. But before you go, there’s something I want you to see.”

She led him up the stairs to a door at the end of a dim corridor.

“It used to be a spare bedroom,” Ruth said. “He made it into his study.”

The door opened on a tiny room crowded with bookcases, the bookcases overflowing with volumes Howard supposed had been his uncle’s. There were physics journals shelved with religious esoterica, philology texts next to photo reproductions of Aramaic codices. Had Stern taught himself to read Aramaic? It was unlikely, Howard thought, but far from impossible.

The room was obviously Stern’s. There was a sweater hanging from the back of the wooden chair that faced an oak desk, an electric typewriter—no computer.

The room even smelled like Stern, a musty echo of pipe tobacco and crumbling paper. Howard felt dizzy with the memories it evoked.

“I never went in here much,” Ruth said. “He didn’t like me to. I didn’t even clean. Even now, I don’t go in here very often. It feels funny. But I’ve looked at a few things.” She picked up a thick bundle of typewritten pages bound with a rubber band. “He left this.”

Howard took the manuscript from her. “What is it?”

“His diary,” she said. “The one he never showed the people at the lab.”

The single word
JOURNAL
was typed on the top page. Howard regarded it with wide eyes.

He said, “Have you read it?”

“Only a little. It’s technical. I don’t understand it.” She looked at him solemnly. “Maybe you will.”

AXIS MUNDI

PART THREE

Our work yields a harvest of impossibilities. Speculation is that the fragment may not be matter as we conventionally know it—apart from its measurable mass and volume, it lacks qualities we would call material. It cannot be subdivided. Its structure is grainless, undifferentiated even at great magnification, though optical scanning might be misleading for several reasons. Its radiation violates the inverse-square law as if the curvature of local space were being disturbed by an immensely greater mass, though the fragment can be lifted by four reasonably strong men (although none of us would be so unwise as to touch it). It seems to conjure high-energy photons from the surrounding air and shifts them toward the red as it radiates them. The effect includes reflected light: the fragment actually seems disproportionately more distant as you back away; that is, it shrinks too quickly with distance! The inverse is also true and makes nearfield measurement almost impossible. At microscopic distances, the fragment appears as a homogeneous structure as large as the surface of a star, though fortunately not as energetic! Although this makes it hard to handle, perhaps the miracle is that it is not much harder.

What a privilege to be allowed to witness these mysteries. How strange that the fragment should have come from an excavation in a Middle Eastern desert. Draw a radius of a thousand miles around the dig site and it encloses centuries of religious thought: Moses, Jesus, Mithra, Mani, Valentinus. . . .

Recall Linde’s idea of the observable cosmos arising from a chaotic “foam” of possible configurations of space and time: embedded in, tangled up with, other universes similar and dissimilar. In a dream I saw the fragment as something whole, as a sort of “wormhole boat” for traveling between adjacent islands of creation.

In the dream the vehicle was assembled by luminous beings, strange and unknowable: dwelling in the Pleroma? Using the device to penetrate the mystery of Created Matter—but unsuccessfully—broken fragments of ur-substance scattered through countless islands of space–time including our own. . . .

We mean to bombard the fragment with high-energy particles. Knocking on Heaven’s door.

—from the secret journal of Alan Stern

CHAPTER 16

When the Bureau de la Convenance collaborates with the War Department, Symeon Demarch thought, anything is possible.

The test gantry had been assembled in his absence. It rose from a bald patch of ground in the forest two miles west of the wreckage of the laboratory facility, and it looked deceptively simple: a steel tourelle that might have passed for a watchtower. A crane was in place to lift the weapon into its cradle.

The weapon itself—or its parts, prior to final assembly—had arrived on two fiercely guarded trucks from the airstrip in Fort LeDuc along with a cargo of nervous technicians. The bomb parts resided now under the roof of a tin shed nearby, tended under glaring banks of lights by the same white-smocked civilians.

Demarch walked the grounds with Clement Delafleur, the Ideological Branch attaché who had become his chief rival in Two Rivers.

A gentle snow encircled the two men and softened the harsh angles of the gantry on its concrete pad. The snow did nothing to soften the equally harsh lines of Clement Delafleur. He was at least ten years older than Demarch and much closer to confirmation as a fully fledged Censeur. The lines of his face were a geology of ancient frowns and disapprovals. Etched there by decades of political maneuvering, no doubt. Delafleur had more friends at the Centrality than Demarch himself—perhaps even including Censeur Bisonette, whose branch loyalties ran in one direction and personal loyalties, perhaps, in quite another.

All of which meant that Demarch could not openly question the wisdom of hanging twelve of the town’s children by the neck until dead. He could only allude to it—delicately.

Delafleur chose to be more blunt. “What they were doing was insurrection and the actions I took were well within our brief. You know that as well as I do.”

The noon bell sounded across the camp. Demarch listened as the ringing faded into the perimeter of snowy trees. He wondered what he ought to say. His own position was still unclear. He remembered riding back into town and seeing the small corpses dangling like wheat sacks from the street lamps. He had ordered them cut down.

He said, “I won’t debate the justice of it. Or your authority to give the order. Only whether it was wise to generate more ill feeling.” He nodded at the test gantry. “Especially now.”

“I fail to see why I ought to be concerned about the sensibilities of people who are next door to annihilation.”

“To avoid provoking counterattacks, for one.” A military patrol had already taken rifle fire from a grieving parent. The parent had gone the way of his offspring, but on a less public gallows.

“We can deal with that,” Delafleur said.

“But should we have to?”

“It’s moot.” And Delafleur looked at the test gantry as if it answered all objections.

Perhaps it did. Demarch had learned a few things about the nature of the weapon. “Difficult to believe . . .”

“That it can do what they say? Yes. I don’t understand it myself. To think of everything within such a vast radius leveled or burned. The engineers have cleared a firebreak all around the perimeter, or else we might lose much of the forest—we might burn the entire Peninsula.” He shook his head. “They say it operates on the same principle as the sun itself.”

“Incredible.” These trees would be kindling, Demarch thought; and the town a brick oven—an oven full of meat.

The image made him wince.

“You deserve some of the credit,” Delafleur said, looking at him slyly. “It was your idea to plunder the libraries, was it not? Which, I’m given to understand, helped advance the work on the bomb. At least by a few months. They were already well along, of course. So it isn’t
all
your fault.” Delafleur’s smile was bottomless. “You needn’t look so startled, Lieutenant.”

He consulted with Delafleur and an adjutant about evacuation plans. The agenda came from the capital, but there were details to be arranged. It was almost surrealistic, Demarch thought, to be negotiating escape timetables with this prim, endlessly fastidious Bureau functionary. Delafleur was like so many of the hierarchs Demarch had met, ambitious, loyal, and utterly innocent of conscience. The impending deaths of thousands of people mattered to him less than the protocol of this rush to the exits.

But wasn’t that as it should be? If the deaths were sanctioned by Church and State, wasn’t it absurd to question the decision? If Bureau functionaries made their own policies and obeyed their own consciences, surely the only result would be anarchy?

Still, there was something evil about Delafleur. According to the Church every soul possessed an
apospasma theion
—a fragment of God. But if such a fragment existed in Delafleur, it must be buried very deeply.

When the negotiations were finished, he drove through a bitter dusk to the house where Evelyn was.

In the bedroom, she looked at him with a wounded wariness—the way she had been looking at him every day since his return. He knew she had seen the executed children, though she hadn’t spoken of it.

Her wide, bruised eyes reminded him of Christof.

Upstairs, intimidated by her silence, Demarch showed her the documents he had obtained from Guy Marris. Evelyn looked at them with no visible emotion. “This is me?”

“For certain purposes.”

The travel permits were blue, registration yellow, citizenship green, birth and baptism pink. Guy had been as thorough as ever.

“I’m not as tall as it says.”

“It won’t matter, Evelyn. No one really looks.”

She folded the papers and handed them back. “This is for when we leave town.”

“Yes.” He knew she had surmised something of what would happen. He didn’t know how much. They hadn’t talked about it; only exchanged glances.

She said, “When?”

“The decision hasn’t been made.”

“How soon, Symeon?”

This was treasonous, he thought. But so were the documents. So were his thoughts. There was no turning back now.

“Before the end of the month,” he said.

CHAPTER 17

Dex talked to Bob Hoskins, who sent him to one of the PTA parents, Terry Shoemaker, who introduced him in turn to a skinny ex–charter pilot named Calvin Shepperd.

They met in Tucker’s Restaurant, in the small back room that had served as a pantry in the days when there was enough food to store. Dex shook the older man’s hand and introduced himself.

“I know who you are,” Shepperd said. “My brother’s girl Cleo was in your history class couple years back.” He seemed to hesitate. “Bob Hoskins vouched for you, but frankly I was reluctant to have you involved.”

“May I ask why?”

“Oh, the obvious. For one thing, you’re seeing that woman from outside.”

“Her name is Linneth Stone.”

“Her name doesn’t matter. The point is, I don’t know what she says to you or you to her. And that raises a question. Plus, didn’t you used to go out with Evelyn Woodward at the bed-and-breakfast? Who’s been on the arm of the chief Proctor lately.”

“Small town,” Dex observed.

“Is, was, and will be. I’m not opposed to gossip, Mr. Graham, especially nowadays.”

“As gossip, it’s honest enough,” Dex said. “All those things are true. Maybe they’re liabilities, but they gave me access to some information you need.”

“Meaning?”

“Bob Hoskins tells me you’re trying to set up an escape route to ferry out some of the local families.”