Mysterium

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Mysterium

  Wilson, Robert Charles

  Macmillan (2010)

  * * *

  * * *

  SUMMARY:

  In a top-secret government installation near the small town of Two Rivers, Michigan, scientists are investigating a mysterious object discovered several years earlier. Late one evening, the local residents observe strange lights coming from the laboratory. The next morning, they awake to find that their town was literally cut off from the rest of the world...and thrust into a new one!Soon the town is discovered by the bewildered leaders of this new world--at which point, the people of Two Rivers realize that they’ve arrived in a rigid theocracy. The authorities, known as the Bureau de la Covenance Religieuse, have ordered Linneth Stone, a young ethnologist, to analyze the arrivals and report her findings to the Lieutenant in charge.What Linneth finds will challenge the philosophical basis of her society and lead inexorably to a struggle for power centering on the mysterious object that Two Rivers’s government scientists were studying when the town slipped between worlds.

  MYSTERIUM

  BY ROBERT CHARLES WILSON

  FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES

  A Hidden Place

  Darwinia

  Bios

  The Perseids and Other Stories

  The Chronoliths

  Blind Lake

  Spin

  Axis

  Julian Comstock

  ROBERT CHARLES WILSON

  MYSTERIUM

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

  Table of Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Before

  Mysterium: Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Mysterium Tremendae: Part Two

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Axis Mundi: Part Three

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  After

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  MYSTERIUM

  Copyright © 1994 by Robert Charles Wilson

  Originally published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam

  Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  An Orb Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  ISBN 978-0-7653-2741-3

  First Orb Edition: September 2010

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Jo:

  parallel worlds

  BEFORE

  The Republic of Turkey, 1989.

  On a dry inland plain, under a sky the color of agate, a handful of Americans scuffed at a rubble of ancient clay masonry.

  The Americans, mainly graduate students doing fieldwork toward their degrees and a few tutelary spirits in the form of faculty members, had arrived three weeks ago. They had driven from Ankara by Land Rover, away from the Kizil Irmak and into the heart of the dry central plateau, where a neolithic Anatolian townsite had lain dormant for almost nine thousand years. They had erected their tents and Porta Potties in the shade of a rocky hill, and in the cool of the morning they worried the soil with wire brushes and whisk brooms.

  The site was ancient, but small and not very productive. A graduate student named William Delmonico was nibbling his way through a string grid that had produced only a few flaked stones, the prehistoric equivalent of the cigarette butt, when he uncovered what looked like a shard of polished jade—an anomalous substance, and immensely more interesting than the flints he had already cataloged.

  The jade fragment was deeply embedded in the stony earth, however, and no amount of toothbrushing would free it. Delmonico alerted his adviser, a tenured professor of archaeology who welcomed this respite from what had begun to seem like a wasted summer of fruitless and repetitive fieldwork. Delmonico’s nubbin of glass (not jade, certainly, though the resemblance was marked) represented at least an intellectual challenge. He assigned two experienced diggers to the grid but allowed Delmonico his proprietary excitement. Delmonico, a lanky twenty-one-year-old with a shine of sweat on his face, hovered over the site.

  Three days later a jagged spar of dull green material the size of a tabletop had been uncovered . . . and still it remained embedded in the earth.

  That was odd. Even more peculiar, it looked as if they would have to call in a materials expert to identify this substance. It was not jade, not glass, not pottery of any kind. It retained its warmth long after sunset—and nights were often brutally cold on this high, arid plain. And it looked strange. Deceptive to the eye. Slippery. From a distance, it seemed almost to shrink—to disappear, if you stood a few yards outside the dig, in a stitch of air and sand.

  On the fourth day after his discovery Delmonico was confined to his tent, vomiting every twenty or thirty minutes into a half-gallon mason jar while a windstorm battered the canvas and turned the air to chalk. He had come down with the flu, everyone said. Or common dysentery—he wouldn’t be the first. Delmonico accepted this diagnosis and resigned himself to it.

  Then the sores appeared on his hands. The skin blackened and peeled away from his fingers, and the bandages he applied turned yellow with suppuration. Blood appeared in his stools.

  His faculty supervisor drove him to Ankara, where an emergency room physician named Celal diagnosed radiation sickness. Celal filed a report with his chief of staff; the chief of staff notified an official of the Ministry of Public Health. The doctor was not surprised, given all this, when the delirious young American was taken from the ward by a military escort and driven into the night. It was a mystery, Celal thought. But there were always mysteries. The world was a mystery.

  Delmonico died in a closed ward of a U.S. Air Force medical complex a week later. His companions from the dig were quarantined separately. The two postgrads who had labored over the jade fragment lived another day and a half before dying within an hour of each other.

  The rest of the expedition were treated and released. Each was asked to sign a paper acknowledging that the events they had witnessed were classified and that divulging those events to anyone for any reason would be punishable pursuant to the Official Secrets Act. Shaken and at a loss to make any sense of what had happened, all fourteen surviving Americans agreed to sign.

  Only one of them broke his oath. Seven years after the death of William Delmonico, Werner Holden, formerly an archaeology major and now an auto parts dealer in Portland, Oregon, confessed to a professional UFO researcher that he had witnessed the recovery of a portion of the hull of a flying saucer from an archaeological site in central Turkey. The UFO researcher listened patiently to Holden’s story and promised to look into it. What he did not tell Holden was that the whole crash-fragment approach had grown unfashionable—his audience expected something more intimate: abductions, meta
physics. A year later, Holden’s account appeared in the researcher’s book as a footnote. No legal action was taken as a consequence. Holden died of a runaway lymphoma in January of 1998.

  The Jade Anomaly, as Delmonico had thought of it before his death, was retrieved from the soil of the abandoned archaeological site by a platoon of military men equipped with spades and protective clothing. They worked at night under floodlights so the sun wouldn’t cook them inside their lead-lined suits. Over the course of three nights they succeeded in unearthing a gently curved piece of apparently homogeneous material 10.6 cm thick and irregular in shape. One observer said it looked like a piece of an eggshell, “if you can imagine an egg big enough to hatch a stretch limo.” The fragment was highly radioactive in the wavelengths around 1 nm, but the intensity of the radiation fell away to undetectability at distances greater than a meter or so, an apparent violation of the inverse-square law that no one attempted to explain.

  Arrangements were made with the Turkish government to have the material quietly removed from the country. Blanketed in lead and packed in an unmarked shipping flat, it left a NATO airbase in a Hercules transport bound for an undisclosed destination in the United States.

  Alan Stern, a professor of theoretical physics and recent recipient of the Nobel prize, was approached at a conference on inflationary theory at a hotel outside Cambridge, Massachusetts, by a young man in a three-piece suit—quite an anomaly, Stern thought, among this rabble of thesis-writers, academic hacks, bearded astrophysicists, and balding cosmologists. Stern, both bearded and balding, was intrigued by the younger man’s air of quiet authority, and the two of them adjourned to the bar, where the younger man disappointed Stern by offering him a job.

  “I don’t do classified work,” he said. “If I can’t publish it, it’s not science. In any case, defense research is a dead end. The Cold War is over, or hasn’t that news reached your Appropriations Committee?”

  The younger man displayed an impenetrable patience. “This isn’t, strictly speaking, a defense project.”

  And he explained further.

  “My God,” Stern said softly, when the young man had finished. “Can this be true?”

  That evening, Stern sat in the audience as a Lucasian Professor of Mathematics read a paper defending the anthropic principle in the language of set theory. Bored by the lecture and still excited by what the young man had told him, Stern took a notebook from his pocket and opened it across his knee.

  God is the root of the All, he wrote, the Ineffable One who dwells in the Monad.

  He dwells alone, in silence.

  The Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory was constructed over the course of six months on a parcel of uninhabited land in northern Michigan deeded to the government by an impoverished Ojibway band.

  The nearby town of Two Rivers accepted the facility without complaint. Two Rivers had begun life as a mill town, survived as a hunting and fishing town, and had recently become an alternative to the suburbs for white-collar workers who commuted by fax and modem. The main street had been refurbished with imitation brickwork and gas lights, and a gourmet coffee shop had opened up next to the Baskin-Robbins. Lately there had been complaints about water-skiers chasing the ducks out of Lake Merced. Sports fishermen complained and hired charter planes to carry them farther from the encroachments of civilization, but the town was prospering for the first time in thirty years.

  The construction of the research facility provoked little comment from the Town Council. Construction crews and equipment came up the highway and approached the site from the west along a corduroy logging road, often at night. There had been some expectation that the project would create employment among the townspeople, but that hope soon flickered and dimmed. Staff were trucked in as quietly as the concrete and cinder blocks; the only local work was temporary and involved the laying of high-capacity water and power lines. Even when the facility was up and running—doing whatever clandestine work it did—its employees stayed away from town. They lived in barracks on federal property; they shopped at a PX. They came into Two Rivers to arrange fishing trips, occasionally, and one or two strangers might stop by the bars or take in a movie at the Cineplex in the highway mall; but as a rule, they didn’t mingle.

  One of the few townspeople who expressed any curiosity about the facility was Dexter Graham, a history teacher at John F. Kennedy High School. Graham told his fiancée, Evelyn Woodward, that the installation made no sense. “Defense spending is passé. According to the papers, all the research budgets have been slashed. But there they are. Our own little Manhattan Project.”

  Evelyn operated a bed-and-breakfast by the lakeside. The view, particularly from the upper bay windows, was pure postcard. Dex had ducked out of a Friday staff meeting for a session of what Evelyn called “afternoon delight,” and they were savoring the aftermath—cool sheets, curtains twining in long sighs of pine-scented air. It was Evelyn who had turned the conversation to the Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory. She had a new boarder who worked at the plant, a young man named Howard Poole.

  “Amazing,” Dex said, turning his long body lazily under the cotton sheets. “Don’t they have their own quarters out there? I never heard of one of these guys boarding in town.”

  “Don’t be so cynical,” Evelyn scolded him. “Howard says there’s a housing problem—too much staff, short accommodation. Musical chairs, I guess, and he was left standing. He’s only here for a week. Anyway, he says he wanted to see the town.”

  “Admirable curiosity.”

  Evelyn sat up and reached for her panties, vaguely annoyed. Dex possessed a deep, automatic cynicism she had begun to find unattractive. He was forty years old, and sometimes he sounded a little too much like the toothless janitor at his school, the one who was always mumbling about “the government.”

  The question was, would Dex give Howard Poole a hard time over dinner?

  Evelyn hoped not. She liked Howard well enough. He was young, shy, bespectacled, vulnerable-looking. She was charmed by his accent. Bronx, perhaps, or Queens—places Evelyn knew mainly from her reading. She had never been east of Detroit.

  She dressed and left Dex in bed, went downstairs to the kitchen and began to prepare a coq au vin and salad for herself, Dex, and her two boarders, Howard and a woman named Friedel from California. She hummed to herself as she worked, a tuneless little song that seemed to arise from the memory of what she and Dex had done in the bedroom. Sunlight tracked across the linoleum floor, the wooden chopping board.

  Dinner went better than she had expected. Mrs. Friedel, a widow, did most of the talking, a gentle monologue about her trip across the country and how much her husband would have enjoyed it. The coq au vin put everyone in a benevolent mood. Or maybe it was just the weather: a fine spring evening, the first warm evening of the year. Howard Poole smiled often but spoke seldom. He sat opposite Evelyn. He ate sparingly but paid attention to the food. The vivid sunset through the dining room window was reflected in his oval glasses, disguising his eyes.

  Over dessert, a cinnamon cake, Dex raised the forbidden topic. “I understand you work out at the defense plant, Howard.”

  Evelyn tensed. But Howard seemed to take it in stride. He shrugged his bony shoulders. “If you can call it that—a defense plant. I never thought of it that way.”

  “Government installation is what they call it in the paper.”

  “Yes.”

  “What exactly do you do out there?”

  “I’m new to the place myself, Mr. Graham. I can’t answer the question.”

  “Meaning it’s classified?”

  “Meaning I wish I knew.”

  Evelyn kicked Dex under the table and said brightly, “Coffee, anyone?”

  “Sounds wonderful,” Howard said.

  And Dex just smiled and nodded.

  Curiously, Mrs. Friedel had packed her bags and announced her intention to leave as soon as dinner was over. Evelyn settled the account but was worried: “You’re d
riving after dark?”

  “I wouldn’t ordinarily,” the widow confided. “And I don’t believe in dreams—I really don’t. But this one was so vivid. I was taking a nap this morning. And in the dream I was talking to Ben.”

  “Your husband.”

  “Yes. And he told me to pack and leave. He was not upset. Just a little concerned.” Mrs. Friedel was blushing. “I know how this sounds. I’m not such a lunatic, Miss Woodward—you don’t have to stare like that.”

  Now Evelyn blushed. “Oh, no. It’s all right, Mrs. Friedel. Go with a hunch, that’s what I always say.”

  But it was strange.

  She took her evening walk with Dex after the dishes had been washed.

  They crossed Beacon and headed for the lakeside. Gnats hovered under the streetlights, but the mosquitoes weren’t a menace yet. The breeze was gentle and the air was only beginning to cool.

  She said, “When we’re married, you have to promise not to harass the guests”—more in reference to what might have happened than what had happened.

  And Dex looked apologetic and said, “Of course. I didn’t mean to badger him.”

  She admitted that he hadn’t. It was only her apprehension: of his unyielding nature, of the grief he carried deep inside him. “I saw you biting your tongue.”

  “Howard seems like a nice enough kid. Bright university grad. Probably drafted by some headhunter. Maybe he really doesn’t know what’s going on out there.”

  “Maybe nothing is going on out there. Nothing bad, at least.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Whatever they do, I’m sure it’s perfectly safe.”

  “So was Chernobyl. Until it blew up.”

  “God, you’re so paranoid!”

  He laughed at her consternation; then she laughed, too. And they walked a silent distance along the shore of Lake Merced.

  Water lapped at wooden docks. The stars were bright. On the way back, Evelyn shivered and buttoned her sweater.