Alternate Routes

by Tim Powers

  Castine reached for the knob, but Vickery waved her hand back. “Is that your man Eliot?” he whispered.

  “Oh!” Castine winced, and shook her head. “I don’t know . . .” She leaned forward and said, hoarsely, “Eliot?”

  The laughter continued without a pause, and behind it a deep booming had started up.

  “It’s the malmeme!” said Castine. “We shouldn’t listen!” She turned to Santiago and said, “Cover your ears!”

  “It’s not your malmeme,” said Vickery, “or not yet. Anyway, what Terracotta didn’t want you to hear was just quotes from a poem, Dryden’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses—like my ‘air is free’ couplet.” He glanced sideways at her. “I guess the quotes from the poem only happen when there’s that drumming in the background?”

  “It’s when the ghosts are near that factory. It makes that noise. You remember—”

  “I remember the factory.”

  Santiago shifted his position on the vinyl kitchen deck. “The factory moves, the ghosts say.”

  The voice on the radio had finally stopped its repetitive laughing noise. “The boy doesn’t eat right,” it said. “Get him to eat proper food—I would but cannot; my son’s image stands before my sight.” The booming was still going on in the background. “If nymphs were waiters and, with naked feet, in order served the courses of the meat, he’d still be a vegetarian.” Vickery guessed that the odd phrases were more quotes from Ovid.

  Castine waved, and when Vickery looked away from the road at her, she mouthed, Terracotta is a vegetarian.

  Vickery nodded and gestured toward the radio, raising his eyebrows.

  “In sequence,” she whispered to him, “one word at a time.” More loudly, she went on, “Terracotta . . .” and then nodded to Vickery.

  He shrugged, frowning, but said, “Is.”

  “Your,” said Castine.

  Vickery guessed her intent. “Son?” he said.

  “No, no!” said the voice from the radio. “Emilio Benedetti is my son! He wrote his name in wet cement when they put in the new post office. Is that stupid or what? I whupped him good for it too, don’t worry.” Again the ratcheting laughter started up, and it continued for so long that now Vickery reached for the knob.

  “Wait,” Castine whispered sharply; and she raised her palm toward Vickery.

  Not knowing what she wanted to ask now, Vickery rolled his eyes and ventured, “Is.”

  Castine pursed her lips, then said, “his,” and exaggeratedly mouthed the word name.

  “Name,” said Vickery obediently.

  “Terracotta,” said Castine.

  Vickery had guessed where she was going. “Now?” he said, and Castine nodded.

  “Terracotta is clay fired in a kiln,” the voice said. “And it’s kiln me, the clay statue, but the boy didn’t mean to do it—the little scamp!—and now there he is, at the top of the tornado, I can see him up there in the sky, from beside the highway. Talk to him, make him stop, he’s gonna break everything! What, what? This is a toll call, ask not for whom.”

  “Emilio,” said Castine slowly, then nodded to Vickery.

  “Killed,” said Vickery with certainty.

  “You?”

  The drumming background noise was louder. “Ah!” said the voice, “the wretched father, father now no more, but stricken down lies prostrate on the floor!”

  The booming and the voice both stopped, and now synchronized music was at last playing from both radios again.

  When the music had continued for several seconds, and Vickery had concentrated only on steering the truck along the curving uphill lane, he heard Castine shift in her seat as she relaxed.

  “He,” she said, “wants us to get Terracotta to stop being a vegetarian.”

  “Make a note of it,” said Vickery faintly.

  “And get him down from the top of the tornado. I saw a tornado, when we were . . . there, in the Labyrinth.”

  “I did too,” said Vickery, “way off in the distance on the other side of the highway. It looked like it was sucking up little bits of stuff into the sky.”

  “I watched it, while I was sitting by Galvan’s burned-up car, before you found me with your strings. It was human figures being drawn up by the tornado. A lot of them.”

  “Ghosts,” said Vickery.

  “Well, obviously. Who else is there?”

  The road straightened and leveled out at last, and cars were parked along the shoulders in both directions. Ahead Vickery could see the three black domes of the Griffith Park Observatory.

  He guessed that there would be a few parking spaces available in the lot, despite the cars parked out here beside the road, and he pressed on. “In the church parking lot yesterday, you said that Terracotta’s been acting screwy on the job, like ignoring his official duties to talk to ghosts about the Labyrinth—what is it he wants to find out, or accomplish?”

  “I don’t think Terracotta much wants anything, anymore,” said Castine. “He’d say emotions, like wanting, are like insignificant vibrations in a machine. I think something else has stepped into the vacuum, the deprivation chamber, that he’s made of himself.” She smiled at him nervously. “I think it wants to combine that world with the freeways. Make itself bigger, more complete.”

  Vickery remembered the inhuman roaring in the Labyrinth and shivered, wondering if this detour was a waste of precious time after all. “We’ll be on the road to Nevada right after we talk to this guy,” he said, to himself as much as to Castine.

  He drove up one aisle of the lot and down another, and did find a parking spot, and edged the truck into it; and after Castine and Santiago had climbed out, he pulled down the canvas covers on both sides of the truck.

  Castine was pointing at a nearby kiosk. “You pay for parking there,” she said.

  “To hell with that,” said Vickery. “Let Galvan get a ticket.”

  The three of them started walking between parked cars toward the wide, imposing white structure under the black domes a hundred yards away.

  A broad green lawn lay between the parking lot and the observatory; three cement walkways extended across it, and Vickery led the way along the center one. The breeze across the hilltop was chilly. Late afternoon sun threw their shadows on the grass to his left, and to his right across the receding hills he could see the Hollywood sign and the distant towers of Westwood.

  Halfway across the lawn they walked around a pedestal with tall marble statues of bearded old astronomers on it, and then a sundial. Looking ahead toward the Art Deco-style observatory with its three widely spaced domes, Vickery thought the place looked like a temple to gods of order.

  “Uranus,” said Santiago, who was walking behind Castine.

  She turned to stare at him, but the boy was pointing at the pavement, where a brass plate was inset in a slightly curved groove that transected the sidewalk cement. Vickery peered at it and read orbit of uranus.

  “Walk of stars,” the boy said. He waved around at the broad view. “You can see pieces of their rings wherever there’s cement. The marker for the sun is in the middle of all the rings, up there in the sidewalk by the doors.”

  “Planets,” corrected Castine.

  Santiago shrugged. “They’re all higher than the moon, anyway.” His tone seemed to imply that things under the moon were a mess.

  Vickery was looking ahead at the tall bronze doors, and when he and Castine and Santiago tapped up the marble steps, a group of tourists pushed the doors open and came squinting out into the late afternoon sunlight. Vickery realized to his surprise that he had been hoping the place was closed, in spite of the crowded parking lot; and that he was ashamed at the prospect of meeting Laquedem again.

  I promised to bring something real back from the Labyrinth, he thought, and I failed. He said parts of the highway there were real, and I grabbed a part that apparently wasn’t—and then didn’t try to find another.

  Vickery caught one of the heavy doors and held it open for his compan
ions and then stepped through after them.

  The room beyond was under the middle dome, wide and octagonal, and high overhead the inner surface of the dome was a fresco of mythological figures from the zodiac. Through a hole in the center of the dome hung a long cable, and Vickery’s gaze followed it down into a broad well that filled most of the floor. The well was ringed by a waist-high marble wall, and he shuffled across the tile floor to look down into it.

  At the end of the cable six feet below, a big, highly polished brass ball swung ponderously from one side of the well to the other, and then all the way back, just above a reflective concave stone surface; a brass table only inches high had been set up at one end of the pendulum’s long arc, and a couple of dozen black pegs were lined up on it. The six at the left side were lying flat, and as Vickery watched, the pendulum, which he now saw had a spike extending from the bottom of it, swept over one of the fallen pegs and then began its long retreat to the other side of the well.

  “You didn’t succeed,” said a gravelly voice beside him, “or more likely you didn’t even have the guts to try. Some poor devil crossed over yesterday at around 2 PM—could have been a plain accident, the way things are now. The ghost voices drowned out KFI again on my radio, and the freeway gypsies were all excited about it. But the conduit between the worlds remains open.”

  Vickery sighed and turned to face Isaac Laquedem. The old man was still wearing his shirt and pants backward, and along with one pair of glasses dangling on a lanyard around his neck he had a blue canvas bag slung over one shoulder.

  Vickery was trying to frame a question, but the old man waved down at the pendulum and said, in a voice flat with evident control, “Ordinarily its arc shifts enough to knock over one peg every ten minutes, and if you waited twenty-four hours the arc would rotate clockwise all around the circle. But the pendulum itself doesn’t shift—it just appears to, because the earth rotates counterclockwise under it.”

  “—Oh,” said Vickery.

  “But today,” Laquedem went on, more harshly, “ it’s taking more like fifteen minutes for the pendulum to knock over each peg in the line. The Labyrinth’s lack of rotation—or counter-rotation!—is imposing itself on Los Angeles; there’ll be stretch-marks in the hills, riptides offshore, cesium clocks deviating from one another by whole seconds. Spiritually, the city and the Labyrinth are now very close to merging, becoming one. I’ve been watching the pendulum here for hours, to see if you might yet do what I said.” He nodded toward the swinging brass ball. “It’s clear you did not. And so the boy and I are getting on a bus to Barstow.”

  Laquedem pushed himself away from the wall, and Santiago held his crutches while he fitted them under his arms. “Let’s go outside. I have some time before we need to be at the bus station, and I want to know what didn’t happen.”

  “Look,” said Vickery, “it’s getting late—”

  “Tell me about it. You can spare me a couple of minutes, though, right?”

  Vickery spread his hands. I owe him that, he thought. “A couple.”

  Castine had been hanging back by the wall, but when Laquedem began making his way toward the door, she fell into step behind Vickery and Santiago.

  Out in the coppery sunlight, Laquedem poled his way down the steps and then swiveled to the left and sat down on a knee-high concrete slab with a planter on it.

  He looked up at Vickery, then at Castine, who was now standing between Vickery and Santiago.

  “Who’s this?” Laquedem asked.

  “Uh,” said Vickery, “this is Ingrid Castine. Ingrid, Isaac Laquedem. She’s the friend,” he added, “who I went into the Labyrinth to fetch out.”

  Laquedem cocked his head and frowned. “It was you who crossed over, yesterday? Deliberately?”

  “Yes,” said Vickery.

  “That’s what a ghost on the island told me,” put in Santiago, almost too quietly to be heard.

  Laquedem turned a stern look on Castine.

  She nodded. “He did. And it’s not an easy place to get out of.”

  Laquedem waved at her bandaged head. “You got injured?”

  “Oh, no. Somebody shot me earlier in the day.”

  The old man raised his white eyebrows. “Must have been quite a day.” He swung his gaze back to Vickery. “I apologize, sir. I had concluded that you were too cowardly to try. But—” and he made a snatching motion in front of his face with one hand, “—weren’t you able to get to the highway? Or did you just forget what I told you, what you promised to do?”

  “I don’t think you remember what the Labyrinth is like,” said Vickery, wishing his tone didn’t sound defensive. “I did pick up a piece of asphalt from the highway edge, like you said—but it turned to water.”

  Laquedem shook his head, baring his teeth in a grimace. “I told you that only parts of the highway would be real. Que balagan! Why in literal hell didn’t you try grabbing another piece of it?”

  “A ghost was chasing us,” protested Castine.

  Laquedem was staring at Vickery now in open dismay. “Is that true? Is that why?”

  Vickery wished Castine hadn’t tried to help. “Partly,” he admitted.

  “Klutz mit aoygn! Idiot! You ran away! because—a ghost was chasing you?”

  “We were—in that place, you—” Vickery let out the rest of his breath in a sigh. “The short version is, yes, that’s why we ran away. But you didn’t tell me—remember?—that planting a piece of something at the omphalos would stop the Labyrinth from crashing into LA. I meant to do it, I tried to do it, but I thought it was just some private concern of your own.” He slapped his pocket to make sure he had the truck keys. “And now, if you’ll excuse us—”

  “Wait, you’re right, I was wrong not to tell you. I wasn’t sure of you. You work for Galvan, and without ghost traffic most of her business enterprises would surely be gone. Many a career would surely evaporate. In contrast with those certainties, I didn’t think you’d find my purpose entirely desirable, any more than the TUA man did yesterday.” Laquedem had rocked back to look into the sky as he spoke, and now he lowered his head. “Do you know why the Minoan civilization fell to the Mycenaeans?”

  “No I don’t. And we only came here to drop the kid off.” Vickery took Castine’s arm.

  “Wait, wait,” the old man went on. “Listen to me, please! Daedalus built the physical part of the Labyrinth on Minoan Crete, at Knossos, but the Minoans later built a duplicate of it on the island of Thera, sixty-eight miles away. This was all four thousand years ago. On Crete they were careful to send only a limited number of slaves through the Labyrinth—just enough to get the field effect, see a ways into the future. But on Thera they pushed it. Wait, look.”

  Vickery caught Castine’s eye and nodded toward the parking lot, but she shook her head and looked back at Laquedem.

  The old man unzipped the blue canvas bag and pulled out a pair of glasses and a sheaf of papers. Vickery noticed a couple of blocks of Blue Ice in the bag, and saw frost on the glasses.

  “You keep your glasses cold?” asked Castine.

  “I have to, the lenses are ice. Shut up.” Laquedem rubbed off some of the frost and unfolded the pages. The top sheet was a photocopy of sketchy squiggles arranged in a spiral, and he fitted the glasses on over his nose and peered closely at it.

  “This script is Linear A,” Laquedem muttered, “the written script of the old Minoan culture, and only a few very secretive people have figured out how to read it—and it helps if you read it through lenses that are frozen water from Lake Kournas, on Crete.”

  Santiago gave Vickery a stern look, as if daring him to laugh at the old man. Vickery shook his head.

  “The two Labyrinths became the same thing, it says,” said Laquedem, touching a pair of symbols on the paper, “same identity, you see. If two things become in some important sense identical, become the same entity—well, they can’t go on being two separate things any longer, can they? They strive to become one. And the old Minoans ha
d foolishly made this second Labyrinth, another living image of the thing they remembered as the Minotaur.”

  “What happened?” asked Castine, clearly interested in spite of herself.

  “Thera tried to merge with Crete—and blew up,” said Laquedem. “The whole island blew to smithereens, and so Thera was gone, and even Crete never recovered from the resulting tidal wave damage, and the Mycenaeans conquered the crippled Minoan civilization. It was a truly devastating explosion.” He looked up, and his melting glasses made tracks like tears down his furrowed cheeks. “That’s about to happen now, here.”

  Vickery had heard of the volcanic explosion of ancient Thera, and he tried to grasp the idea that Los Angeles was about to experience a similar, or identical, disaster.

  Castine looked to her right, at the Hollywood sign visible on a hill a mile or so away. “Is there still a way to stop it?”

  “There’s still the same way,” said Laquedem. “A piece of something real, from the Labyrinth, needs to be situated at the omphalos, to close the conduit.”

  “The conduit you opened in 1960,” put in Vickery.

  “Shall we discuss that?” asked Laquedem. “Or the present situation?”

  “Get somebody from the TUA to do it this time,” said Vickery, again slapping his pocket for the truck keys. “They’re a government agency, and they know about this stuff.”

  “Until Sunday I worked for the TUA,” said Castine. “I think the work we did was responsible for this. The work they’re still doing.”

  “Yes,” said Laquedem, “your section chief, Terracotta. He has had you shifting ghosts to this side, from the Labyrinth, and traffic accidents on the freeways provide ghosts going the other way.” Laquedem squinted up at Vickery. “When two masses are drawn together by gravity, or a piece of iron is drawn to a magnet, how do they know to approach each other?”

  “For God’s sake,” muttered Vickery, glancing uselessly at his stopped watch.

  Laquedem answered his own question. “They exchange force-carrying particles. Gravitons or photons. The closer the things get to each other, the more force-carrying particles are exchanged, and the stronger the attracting force is. In this case—” He paused and shrugged.