The Flicker Men (37 page)

*   *   *

Mercy and I helped Vickers to her feet, and she hobbled to the top of the rise.

“This is a good spot,” she said. She pointed to a shaded place beneath a small, gnarled tree. We lowered her to the ground, and Mercy sat beside her. The grass was long and stiff, but moved with the breeze.

From here, we had a view of the old couple twenty feet away. The man was still skinning his hare. Another thump of the knife, and he shoved the carcass into an empty five-gallon bucket near his foot. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, scrawling a line of blood near his hairline.

“How bad are you hurt?” Mercy asked.

“Bad enough,” Vickers said. She opened her business suit, and her blouse was covered in blood. The wound was horrific. I could see the pale white chalk of a rib beneath the torn skin. She coughed into her sleeve again, and when she finished, there was fresh blood on her chin. “Well past bad enough, actually,” she said.

“We can get you to a hospital.”

She shook her head. “Too late for that, I think.”

Twenty feet away, the old man placed a second rabbit on the table and stretched it out in front of him. Its fur twitched, and its nostrils flared, but it did not run. Its eyes were big and round and unafraid. He stroked the fur with one hand while the other hand picked up the knife.

“We all see what we want to see,” Vickers said, looking at the old man. “Does the animal see the butcher's cleaver? Why would it want to see such things? It might run away and tell the story for all the days of its life. Legends might grow. Myths of a vengeful god with a knife.”

“At least let us take you inside.” Mercy said.

“I like it here.” Vickers responded.

The old man brought the knife down hard—stabbing down into the wood, instead of the hare.

The animal's whiskers twitched. It seemed to draw itself up, flexing like a bow, muscles tensing—and then it shot away, launching itself from the table in a single powerful leap. It hit the grass running and leaped over a bush and was gone.

The butcher's blade still shimmied in the bare, sun-bleached wood. The old man looked in the direction that the hare had run.

“You take some, and you give some back,” Vickers said. “Tomorrow the hunter may catch him, but today he kept his feet and has a story to tell.” She turned back toward us. “Me, though? My luck has run out.”

I studied her closely. Her face pale and waxy. Her breathing shallow. “There's medicine at the hospital,” I said. “They can help you.”

“The only medicine I'll need is one that can wake the dead. Do you have any of that?”

“I'm fresh out of voodoo.”

She smiled. “Then it looks like we're at the end.” She was quiet for a long while. “I don't want to die, but we're not given a choice. How much did you see back there at the camp?”

“I saw enough.”

“Good. Then you know what you're fighting.”

“But I don't,” I said. “Not really.”

“He killed Boaz,” Mercy interjected.

Vickers looked up at me, her face showing surprise. “And they say the age of wonders is over.” She smiled, then broke into a coughing fit.

Mercy put her hand to the woman's forehead. “She is burning up,” she said. “Let's see if we can cool her down.”

I went to the pool at the bottom of the trail and cupped some water in my hand. I carried it back up the slope and held my hands over Vickers's head, dripping the water onto her hair.

She turned her face up to the water and let it clean tracks on her bloody face. “It's getting late of days,” she said. “The world's askew.”

“Brighton said I broke the world.”

“Broken, yes.” Her voice trailed. “Even out here you can sense it—its purpose compromised.”

“What purpose?”

“The purpose of this world is the purpose of every world. To create the next.” She tried to sit up straighter. “Imagine it. Worlds inside worlds, numbering as the stars. And yet here the gods fight, and here they die. Ask yourself why. Why did they come? Why do they fight?”

“I don't know.”

“Because it's all burning.” Vicker's pale eyes bore into me. “Burning from the top down.”

“You mean the cascade,” I said.

She nodded. “The old ones are running. As each world is compressed within the bounds of the world above it, so, too, is time compressed. Dilating from one world to another, an order of magnitude, telescoping milliseconds into millennia. But one day the fires will consume all.”

I sat in the grass. It was a logical corollary to the formula she had shown me earlier. If logic required an endless cascade of worlds, then what happened when the prime world died? As eventually all worlds must. It would all snuff out—the whole cascade. How could you run from such a thing? Where would you go to escape the end?

And the rest of it hit me. I saw the math. “Time is faster the further in you go.” Space and time interconnected. If you graphed the time dilation against the increasing number of worlds, then over a large enough time scale, you approached the asymptote—world upon world, an arrow shot toward infinity.

“It's a race against the end,” I said. “That's what the cascade is. That's what civilization is. A race to spawn the next iteration. And then the next, and the next.”

“Yes,” she said.

And the anthropic principle would be at work here, too, I realized, leaving universes optimized for speed. The worlds that reached critical advances quickly would outpace those that didn't, iteration after iteration, time unspooling the further down you went. A moment in one universe becoming an age in the next. Did escape velocity exist? Can you create an eternity inside the cascade? World after world, millions of years, or billions of years all wrapped up inside the last moments of the prime universe?

“What about Brighton?”

“He works to stop the cascade. There are fissures around us you cannot see. Normally, the world corrects itself, choosing only those tracks that best serve the goal.”

“Choosing?”

“Correcting,” she said.

“I don't understand. Correcting how?”

“Imagine space-time as a jewel, with each facet a timeline. As the jewel turns, a new facet catches the light. Our
souls
are that light. And so we shift from facet to facet, depending on where our light is needed.”

I shook my head, but wondered what optimizations were possible. Like Satvik's gate arrays, choosing the best gates for the task. Could a world do that, too? Could an entire universe?

Vickers continued, “But now the eberaxi is here, and what is broken cannot be mended. The eberaxi warps this world, closing off the time lines. Stopping the corrections.”

“How?”

“I don't know. It is a monkey wrench in the mechanism. With each passing second, we drift farther out of true. Until…”

“Until what?”

“A broken world cannot stand.”

I looked at Vickers. “And that's what Brighton wants?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

She didn't answer, but I thought of Mercy's words in the car.
Who can know the wants of a snake.

“Maybe he thinks he can control it,” Vickers said. “But we are already too far out of line.”

“Out of line in what way?”

“You upset the balance. The universe is built on hidden knowledge. How does society function when some are proven soulless? There are rules. You can know some things but not others. The world must correct if it is to survive.”

“There must be something we can do.”

“It is late of days, but there's still a chance. Only by destroying the eberaxi can things be set right. But even then there will be a cost.”

“What cost?”

Vickers looked at me for a long while before she answered. “More than you might expect.” She turned away from me then. Her eyes fluttered for a moment before clearing again.

“We won't survive them next time,” I said.

“You made it this far.”

“I told you, I got lucky.”

“It's the best thing to be.” She broke into another coughing fit, and this time I wasn't sure she was going to stop. Her lungs rattled, and her pale face grew flush and pink. When she stopped coughing, she breathed quick and shallow, her eyes glassy.

“When we leave here, they're going to be hunting us.”

“Then be the lucky rabbit,” she whispered.

Her eyes closed, and her face pinched, as if she was going to cough again. Only the cough never came. Her face relaxed, the lines going smooth.

“Vickers,” I said and shook her shoulder.

Her eyes did not open again.

*   *   *

I watched as the old man wrapped a blanket around Vickers's body. He and the woman buried her beneath the tree, as if by some previous agreement, and when the earth was patted down, the old man said a few words in a slow, soft Spanish. When it was done, the old man led Mercy by the arm, taking us over the rise. We crossed the grass and stepped to the gravel driveway, moving slowly to the car.

Before I climbed in, the old man spoke in English. “Don't come back.” His only words to me.

There was no anger in his face. There was nothing. I had an intuition then, as I looked at him. Would he collapse the wave if he saw the detector results?

I climbed in the car and started the engine. In my hand was the rabbit's foot.

I looked down at the furry stump in my hand. Small and dry now. I slid it into the front pocket of my shirt.

From the passenger seat, Mercy spoke. “Let's get the hell out of here.”

*   *   *

The road was bumpy as we ascended the slow rise. There was some movement out of the corner of my eye, and when I turned to look, I saw a coyote bounding away through the grass.

I drove until we hit the paved road, the badlands all around in the fading light.

“Where are we going?” Mercy said.

I thought of Vickers's words. I thought of my mother.

The pendulum with its long, swaying arm—spooky action at a distance, entangled with the universe. I thought of what Vickers had said.
The universe is an object—a collection of waves. A metaphor for a metaphor that doesn't quite track.
And it
didn't
quite track—not perfectly. The universe wasn't a series of Russian dolls, each one hidden and discrete inside the other. It was more interconnected than that.

A single unbroken whole, information encoded inside itself.

It was a Mandelbrot fractal—an image inside an image.

The world is pattern.

And pattern in pattern.

“I know what we have to do,” I said.

*   *   *

We were three hours down the road when my phone chirped suddenly, some inner component finally dry, rising from the dead.

It was hot against my ear from the dashboard sun.

Three voice messages. All from Joy. She sounded worried. The last one, frantic. “Call me,
please
.”

“You should toss that,” Mercy said.

And she was right, of course.

But first I made the call. It went to voice mail.

“Joy, I'm okay. I'm out of state and on the road, heading to Indiana. I don't want to involve you in this any more than I already have, so I won't call again. Not until this is done. But I wanted to let you know I was alive. This is almost over, one way or another.”

I hit
END
. I tossed the phone out the window.

 

48

It was Sunday afternoon when we pulled into the parking lot. Same empty asphalt, emptier this time than before. No green BMW sat near the entrance.

I turned the engine off, and we made our way up to the building.

The doors were locked. I hit the buzzer. A woman in a tan smock came to the door. White hair. Too thin. The building cleaning crew.

“All the businesses are closed for the weekend,” she said through the glass.

“I work at High-throughput,” I said.

Her brow creased. “That whole area is closed off now.”

“I'm just clearing out my things.”

“Do you have a pass?”

“I didn't bring it with me. I can give you my name.”

She shook her white hair at me. A stern old grandmother. “I'm not supposed to let anyone in without a pass.”

Mercy pulled out her gun and pressed it sideways against the glass. “Here's his pass,” she said. “Photo ID and everything.”

The woman's mouth dropped open.

“What you wanna bet this glass isn't bulletproof?” Mercy asked.

The woman opened the door.

“We're not going to hurt you,” I said.

“Probably not,” Mercy added, as the cleaning lady backed up, hands raised. “Keep going,” she said.

“There's no money here.”

“We're not here for money. Do you have keys?”

She held out a black magnetic card.

“Thanks,” I said and took it. “There's no rope or anything like that around here, is there?”

“I'm just the cleaning crew. There's nothing like that.”

“It's okay,” I said. I pulled the duct tape out of my pack and pulled a strip loose. “We brought our own.”

*   *   *

Instead of the elevators, we took the stairs up. When we came to the fourth floor, I tried the knob and found it locked. There was a pass reader next to the doorknob.

I swiped the pass, and nothing happened. The door didn't budge. I tried the badge again. Still nothing.

“Let me try.”

Mercy fired the gun, and the doorknob sparked. The sound was deafening in the enclosed space, and the bullet ricocheted terrifyingly up the stairs.

“Let's not do that again,” I said.

The doorknob was the worse for wear—warped to the side with a piece gouged out. Just to the side of the knob, there was a small dent in the metal door where the bullet had struck and bounced away. I tried turning the knob, but it still held in place. “Fuck,” I said. “We need a different key.”