The Council of Shadows (36 page)

None of that meant anything to the Power, of course. Even Harvey's modest talent could sense the minds there, the flow of energies, and feel the bunching of world-lines. It was like a
smell
. The ability had evolved to track down humans doing their very best to hide—in caves, among other things—and to foil competitors equipped with the same brain centers.

Everything had an effect on the world, casting its shadow back from the infinite spray of possible futures into the present. A grain of sand on the other side of the galaxy did, though of course that was far too faint even for the greatest adept to detect. People most of all, because their minds touched the foaming substrate of reality even if they couldn't mold it the way a Power wielder did.

Only now it isn't there and I can't smell a thing,
he thought.
It's like the Power doesn't
apply
there. But not in a way that would be obvious if I didn't already know otherwise. It's just about the most dramatic undramatic thing conceivable, when you think about it.

“It's like it's vanished,” he said, wondering. “Not like a silver barrier. You can
feel
that even if you can't get through it. Silver's like a hole in the universe, or like having a tooth drilled if you try to probe. This isn't an absence, it's as if there's nothing there
to
sense.”

Boase was grinning from ear to ear. “How's
that
for accelerated R and D—”

Harvey blinked. Everything was
back
, and now he could hardly believe that he hadn't noticed anything before.

“Whoa, that is one odd effect,” Harvey said. “Sorta tampering with reality, if you know what I mean. Now you don't see it, now you do, and the whole universe switched over from one to t'other without making no fuss I could detect.”

Boase was scowling and punching at his phone. He looked up as he did.

“Says the walking quantum effects manipulator!” he said. “
You
people have been screwing with
my
nice rationalistic if indeterminate worldview for
years
now.”

Harvey was grinning too, happy enough that not even being classed with the Shadowspawn annoyed him. He supposed that from the point of view of someone who couldn't Wreak at all, it was fair enough.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Boase said thoughtfully, pausing in midprod at the smartscreen. “I think I've just had a thought.”

“Happens to most people with functioning brain stems every now and then. What sort of thought?”

“The Fermi Paradox.”

“What . . . Oh, why we haven't had little green men droppin' in on us in flying saucers?”

“Yes. We know there are planets around most stars and a lot of them are Earth-like, we know that for sure now. Why hasn't anyone shown up or at least sent a message? But it just occurred to me that it's quite likely any species with a conscious brain would eventually evolve the Power—or some subset of every species would. And that means no science.”

“How so?”

“Well, to invent the scientific method, you've got to believe in an orderly, rational,
deterministic
universe. The sort of billiard-ball world Newton and Laplace thought they were discovering.”

“Hell, that isn't the whole truth, is it?”

“No, but it's the indispensible first step. But if the Power is around, the universe wouldn't feel that way. It would be
magical
.”

The word sounded slightly obscene in the scientist's mouth. He went on:

“It would be irrational, arbitrary. Mhabrogast glyphs, water running uphill because you
wanted
it to, doing things because they felt lucky, shaping reality by sheer willpower. I don't see how you could even get as far as a Hellenistic view of the world with that stuff around. Not if you're living in a fairy-tale world for real. It would look like Hansel and Gretel all the way down, and that means you'd never discover any way to really analyze the world—or even just the Power. And without that, you'd always be limited to what brains could handle, which means no interstellar flight. And if you had telepathy, would you ever want radio?”

“Phones are a lot less trouble.”

“But not at
first
. And you'd never think that way to begin with.”

Harvey looked up into the blue arch of the sky. “Oh, great, a universe full of Shadowspawn.”

“Except here.”

“Except here from the Bronze Age to the Victorians,” Harvey said. He slapped Boase on the back hard enough to stagger him a little. “And with your help, Professor, we're going to keep it that way!”

Peter shrugged, embarrassed. “Anyway, the effect only lasted thirtyeight seconds,” he said disgustedly. “Come on, Duquesne—”

A conversation happened; Harvey Ledbetter didn't even try to follow it. For one thing it was in New Middle Physics Babble-onian, a language he had never learned, and for another, unless he wanted to Wreak he could hear only half of it.

“What happened?” he said, when the other American pocketed his phone.

“Well—”

Harvey listened to two sentences and then held up a hand. “In Ignoramish!” he protested. “Pretend you're Samantha Carter trying to tell O'Neil something.”

“Oh, you watched
SG-1
when you were a kid too?”

“Professor!” Harvey said; and he'd been a young adult, which suddenly made him feel his sixty-odd years more.

Boase stood silent for a minute, obviously lost in thought, then shook himself.

“Ah . . . we blew a fuse.”

“That mean what it sounds like?”

“No, it's just a metaphor, and not a very good one either. Equipment failure, let's say. There was a spillover of. . . A fuse blew. But we have proof of concept.”

“Yes!”
Harvey shouted, punching his fist in the air.

When it came down he pointed his finger at the younger man's face.

“Son, if Duquesne
did
have a spunky, red-haired daughter, your handsome assistant ashes would get thoroughly hauled. She'd not only be smooching you, she'd be throwing herself on her back and throwing her heels towards her ears right this—”

“Hey, I'm
not his assistant
!” Boase said. “Hell, I'm his
boss
, if anything. I'm the theorist. He's the experimentalist. And most physicists do their best work in their thirties!”

“Yeah, he's just the man with the soldering iron.” Harvey chortled. “You run along now and make one that's reliable for days at a time and doesn't weigh more than half a ton. Something we could put on an eighteen-wheeler truck and not take up more than, oh, half the load would do right nice.”

“Wait a minute! Going from proof of concept to—”

“You
git
, you high-forehead wonder, you!”

Harvey stood quiet for a moment and then pulled out his own phone. It had a specialized little program that not only ate all record of the conversation at either end but erased it from the servers in between.

I come from a place northwest of San Antonio,
he thought whimsically, as he waited for the acknowledgment icon as the little machines shook hands.
Paranoia County.

Operation sheet is go
, he tapped out.

A long pause, and then:
All right. I'll want details on that, but provided you satisfy me, Defarge can proceed. Surprised you got Mowgli to sign off on it.

He turned off the phone function and did a purge just to be sure, then drew back his arm and threw. The little black oblong soared away, turning in the air and then hitting a lakeside rock with a faint
crack
. The pieces went into the lake like a string of pebbles, and then the crystal blue water closed over them.

“Hallelujah,” he whispered.

Deep within his mind an image of a mountain city grew. And a fire brighter than a thousand suns. When he spoke again, for a moment his voice was an exultant shout that echoed off the hills:

“ ‘For I am become death, breaker of worlds.' ”

 

 

“At last, a place where neither of us sticks out, Jack,” Anjali Guha said, looking out the window of her side of the cab. “Here in the entranceway to Europe.”

“More like the stinking lower intestine of Europe,” he said sourly, slumped behind the wheel of the waiting vehicle; the elevation gave a good view. “Which orifice it uses to eat
and
crap.”

“I grant it is not beautiful,” she said, and sniffed at air heavy with a mixture of stale brackish water and every variety of hydrocarbon. “Nor is it a rose garden.”

Europoort-Scheldt wasn't. The whole area was reclaimed marshland in the Scheldt delta, flat as a tabletop, and covered in gray concrete for the most part to match the gray North Sea just visible beyond the cranes and container blocks, and the gray November sky above. The stacks of shipping containers around them were the most colorful things in sight, their blue and red and yellow in contrast to the many acres of oil refinery, the storage tanks, and the vast coal and iron-ore heaps. Boxy, hulking modern freighters plowed the waters, and heavy trucks and strings of freight cars moved in and out in an intricate computer-controlled dance.

“Still, Veracruz was worse.”

“Yeah, it
literally
smelled like shit. This just smells like PetroDystopiaLand.”

But they both
did
fit in with the human geography; Farmer had a generic northwest European look, as long as he didn't open his mouth and expose his heavily accented Dutch or French or American-variety English, and the Netherlands' long-standing connections with the east made her South Asian features boringly unremarkable anywhere outside the depths of tulip-growing rural Blondistan.

Besides which, I speak better Dutch than Jack does,
she thought a little snidely.
Better English, too, if you want to be picky, and I do.

They were dressed in stained blue overalls, and they had really
good
forged IDs as well. None of that would help them if some Shadowspawn simply followed a line of
might-be
down to the docks. Her own slight talent was already starting to shrill at her, a feeling like giant snake slithering through her dreams. Or as if her mind had looked too long into the sun, a rolling wave of flame and heat coming at her out of the future. On many of the possible world-lines that bomb was going to send lives by the tens of thousands into the stratosphere in a gout of radioactive flame.

Possibly including all the strongest adult Shadowspawn,
she thought with savage satisfaction.
Oh, indeed, yes. Decapitation! So many years of defeat, and at last victory is possible.

The freighter was the CM
Pavlina
, Panama-registered with a mixed but mainly Filipino crew, currently out of Mexico with a cargo that was officially mainly industrial parts. The Panamax cranes moved like vast robotic elephants as the last of the load came ashore, neatly grouped in rectangles four containers high, half a dozen technicians performing labor that would once have taken hundreds of stevedores days of effort.

The control unit on their dashboard beeped as the code for the container matched that loaded into the truck's computer. In a few years this wouldn't need humans at all . . . or perhaps in a few years this would be broken ruins, with the sea reclaiming it and the metal gantry shapes tilting up out of the mud.

Jack engaged the engine and let the big eighteen-wheeler purr forward; it was a nearly new Daimler hybrid, and the all-glass control panel looked like an F-42's. It also prompted the driver in a female German voice that somehow conveyed a grating, hectoring, anal-retentive personality along with a strong Mecklenburger accent.

“Very slow,” it said. “Continue strictly on this line—”

A glowing track came up on the screen forward of the wheel, with an outline of the truck approaching a matching form beneath the crane.

“Halt! Reverse ten centimeters!”

“Shut up; it's a fucking truck and I'm only two inches off!”

“Halt! Reverse ten—”

“Shut up, you fucking Nazi bitch!”
Jack screamed, hammering a fist on the wheel and punching the controls more or less at random until he found the mute function; then he tapped the
ready
icon on the screen.

“Ve haff wayz of making you stop talkink!” he shouted, then added: “Sorry,” in more normal tones.

Oh, my, but Jack is not wired too tightly at all now and then,
Guha thought—not for the first time.
At least I only scream when I am dreaming.

The screen switched to one of the pickups on the cab of the truck, showing the huge four-legged crane as it trundled over on its man-high wheels. The heavy weight spooled down smoothly and landed on the truck bed with a muffled
clunk.
Clamps were inserted and turned. Guha hopped down briefly, did a visual examination to confirm the video and sensors, and then climbed back in.

“You may now proceed to exit gate seventy-six-B,” the truck said. “Please follow the indicated route. Do not deviate from the route or Europoort Security will be alerted. A condition of heightened security awareness is in force. Thank you.”

“
Fuck
you, bitch!” Jack snarled, as he pulled away.

“It's just a truck, Jack,” Guha soothed.