Mysterium

by Robert Charles Wilson

  In the year since the work began in earnest, Fabrikant had ceased to be impressed by this hubris of man and nature. He would be seventy years old before the next Ascension Day, and what pleased him—one of his few private pleasures—was something much simpler: his continuing ability to make this daily two-mile bicycle trip. Riding, he felt like an athlete. He had colleagues as young as forty (that pig Moberly, the materials engineer, for instance) who would be exhausted by half the journey. Rattling through a grim dream of war on his old blue bicycle, Fabrikant felt as if he might live forever.

  He was a physicist, but the great physicists, the legend went, do all their best work in their twenties. Maybe so, Fabrikant thought. His real work here was in administration, not theory. He was an administrator, nevertheless, who understood the project in every detail, who grasped the work in all its splendid, terrible beauty.

  He had been involved in nucleic science for years. He remembered the primitive laboratories at the Université de Terrebonne, before the war made everything urgent, where he and the physicist Pariseau had packed an aluminum sphere with powdered uranium metal and heavy water and lowered it into a swimming pool—the pool at the old gymnasium; a new one had lately been built to replace it. What they had created was a primitive nucleic pile: neutron multiplication above unity for the first time in a laboratory. But the aluminum sphere had leaked, and when the pool was drained the uranium caught fire. There was an explosion—chemical, thank God, not nucleic. The old gymnasium burned to the ground. Fabrikant had feared he would lose his tenure; but the paper he wrote won him a scholastic prize, and the university collected handsomely, he was told, from the insurance.

  But such fruitful imprecision was no longer allowed. Now Fabrikant spent his days negotiating with the war economy, balancing its amazing largesse against its even more amazing stinginess. For instance: ten thousand pounds of copper for the calutrons. No problem. But paper clips had been on back order for six months.

  Purified silver, but no toilet paper.

  And the endless requisitions were all routed through Fabrikant’s office, which also conducted goodwill tours for military procurement officers and endless informal accountings to Bureau officials skeptical of any expenditure on “mere” science, even a weapons project.

  He left his bicycle in a broom closet, climbed two floors and said good morning to Cile, his secretary. She smiled without conviction. Fabrikant’s office faced west, where much of the view was occluded by the separation buildings, vast gray strongboxes streaked with rain. Beyond them, tundra. Chimneys vented steam into the foggy air.

  He looked at the schedule Cile had prepared. All morning was devoted to a single meeting with a Proctor who had flown in from the capital: a Censeur named Bisonette. Subject of meeting, not stated. Another command performance, Fabrikant thought wearily. A fit agenda for a bleak morning: parading some hobble-footed bald monolingual bureaucrat past the diffusion chambers. He sighed and began to rehearse his own dubious French. Le réacteur atomique. Une bombe nucléaire. Une plus grande bombe.

  Was it evil, Fabrikant sometimes wondered, even to consider constructing such a weapon?

  The military misunderstood the project. One told them, so-and-so thousand tons of TNT. And they would think, Ah, a big bomb.

  But it was not that. Fabrikant had glimpsed the potential, saw it perhaps more clearly than his colleagues. To liberate the energy locked into matter was to tamper with nature at the most fundamental level. Nucleic division was the prerogative of the stars, after all, and what were the stars but the provinces of God?

  “If he flees westward, he finds the fire. If he turns southward, he finds the fire. If he turns northward, the seething fire meets him again. Nor does he find a way to the east to be saved, for he did not find it in his days of incarnation, nor will he find it in the day of judgment.” The Book of Thomas the Contender—Thomas the Humorless, Fabrikant had thought when he was forced to memorize the verses in secondary school. Doom at every compass point. Fabrikant wondered if he had become the hands of Thomas, manufacturing the vehicle of that ultimate flame.

  But the Spaniards were pressing at the western border, and the news was not as rosy as the radio made it seem, and the Republic was worth preserving—for all its faults, Fabrikant thought, it was at least a place where the two races, the French and the English, had achieved a modus vivendi; it was more liberal than the European monarchies, with their nationalist heresies or Romish paganisms. So yes, a bigger bomb, a seething fire, to devastate Seville, perhaps, or some military port such as Málaga or Cartagena. And then the war would be over.

  He looked up from these musings and a cold cup of coffee as Cile introduced the Censeur, M. Bisonette. Tall, a stubble of white hair, eyes sheathed in wrinkled flesh. Long-fingered hands: aristocratic, Fabrikant thought. Damn the French. At Consolidation, there had been no official decision that the English would control the civilian government and the French would dominate the religious hierarchy—but that was how it had turned out, a permanent standoff rendered as constitutional tradition. Miraculously, for 150 years, the truce had held. “Bonjour,” Fabrikant said. “Bonjour, Monsieur Bisonette. Qu’y a-t-il pour votre service?”

  “My English is adequate,” the Censeur said.

  Implying: Better than your French. Well, that was true enough. Fabrikant was secretly relieved. “More than adequate, obviously. I apologize, Censeur. Please, sit down and tell me what I can do for you this morning.”

  The Censeur, who carried a leather case, directed at Fabrikant a smile that provoked his deep suspicion.

  “Oh, many things,” the Censeur said.

  Cile brought more coffee.

  “Your work here is the separation of uranium,” M. Bisonette said, consulting a sheaf of papers he had drawn from his case. “Specifically, the isolation of the isotope, uranium 235, from the raw ore.”

  “Exactly,” Fabrikant said. Cile’s coffee was hot and thick, almost Turkish. Tonic against the northern chill. Taken in excess, it gave him palpitations. “What we ultimately hope to achieve is a cascading nucleic division of the atom through the release of neutrons. To accomplish this—” He looked at Bisonette and faltered. The Censeur was regarding him with a bored contempt. “I’m sorry. Please go on.”

  This might be serious.

  “You’re pursuing three routes to purification,” Bisonette intoned. “Gaseous diffusion, separation by electromagnetism, and centrifugation.”

  “That’s what these buildings are for, Censeur. If you would like to see the work—”

  “The electromagnetic and centrifugal projects are to be discontinued and abandoned. The diffusion will be pursued with certain refinements. You’ll be sent blueprints and instructions.”

  Fabrikant was aghast. He could not speak.

  Bisonette said mildly, “Do you have any objections?”

  “My God! Objections? Whose decision is this?”

  “The Office of Military Affairs. With the consent and approval of the Bureau de la Convenance.”

  Fabrikant couldn’t disguise his outrage. “I should have been consulted! Censeur, I don’t mean to offend, but this is absurd! The purpose of running three processes simultaneously is to determine which is most effective or efficient. We don’t know that yet! Diffusion is promising, I admit, but there are still problems—enormous problems! The diffusion barriers, to take an obvious example. We’ve looked at nickel mesh, but the difficulty—”

  “The barrier tubes are already in production. You should have them by December. The details are explained in the documents.”

  Fabrikant opened his mouth and closed it. Already in production! Where could such knowledge have come from?

  Then it struck him: the obvious implication. “There’s another project. That’s it, isn’t it? They’re ahead of us. They’ve achieved a usable enrichment.”

  “Something like that,” M. Bisonette said. “But we need your cooperation.”

  Of course. The Bureau must have sponsored its
own research program, the hypocrites. Wartime redundancy. My God, Fabrikant thought, the waste!

  And—admit it—he was ashamed that he had been beaten to the finish line; that somewhere else, all his problems had been solved.

  He looked at his coffee cup, all appetite fled.

  “The bomb itself,” Bisonette was saying. “You have a preliminary design?”

  Fabrikant worked to recover his composure. Why was it the Proctors must always strip a man of his dignity? “A sort of nucleic gun,” he told Bisonette, “although this is premature, but in essence, a conventional explosive to compact the purified uranium—”

  “Look here,” Bisonette said, and handed him a technical cutaway drawing of what Fabrikant mistook, at first, for a soccer ball.

  “The casing contains these cells of explosives. The core is a hollow sphere of plutonium. I’m not a theorist, Monsieur Fabrikant, but the documents will explain it.”

  Fabrikant gazed at the drawing. “The tolerances—”

  “Will have to be precise.”

  “To say the least! You can achieve that?”

  “No. You can.”

  “This is untested!”

  “It will work,” Bisonette said.

  “How can you know that?”

  The Censeur displayed once more his secretive, sly smile. “Assume that we do,” he said.

  Fabrikant believed him.

  He sat alone in his office after the Censeur left. He felt stunned, immobilized.

  He had been rendered useless in the space of—what had it been? An hour?

  Worse, it all seemed too real to him now. These blueprints were evidence that the project would go ahead; the Censeur’s certainty was undeniable. The atom would be divided; the fire would seethe.

  Fabrikant, who was not conventionally religious, nevertheless shivered at the thought.

  They would sunder the heart of matter, he thought, and the result would necessarily be destruction. Theologians spoke of the mysterium coniunctionis, the mystery of union: in Sophia Achamoth, of man and woman, perfect androgyny; in nature, of particle and wave, the uncollapsed wave function; the balance of forces in the atom. A balance which Fabrikant, like some noxious demiurge, was about to disturb. And cities would be destroyed, if not worlds.

  He felt like Adam, imprisoned by the Archons in a mortal body. And here, on this desk, was his Tree.

  Its branches are the shadow of death; its sap is the unction of evil and its fruit is the wish for death.

  His last question to the Censeur had been, “How far has this gone? Has the bomb itself been tested?”

  “There is no bomb until you build it,” Bisonette told him. “The testing you may leave to us.”

  CHAPTER 7

  “Until the spring,” Censeur Bisonette said. “Pacify the town until the spring. Can we trust you to do that?”

  There was an insult lurking in the question. Symeon Demarch looked at the telephone with a sour expression.

  It was Evelyn Woodward’s telephone, finally connected to the external world through some sort of impedance transformer the military engineers had installed: no more radiotelephones. But the handset, pink and lightweight and obscenely curved, felt peculiar in his hand. It was made of a substance like Bakelite, but less substantial; an oil-based synthetic, the engineers said.

  “The town is already pacified,” Demarch said. “The town has been pacified for months. I don’t anticipate a problem as long as the militia cooperates.”

  “It will,” said Bisonette’s distant, metallic voice. “Corporal Trebach is not in a position to argue with the Bureau.”

  “He seems disposed to.”

  “He’ll be tamed. The weight of the Bureau is about to fall on his shoulders. The corporal has not led an impeccable life.”

  “If you threaten him, he’ll blame me. I’m the one on the scene.”

  “No doubt. But we’ll also tell him you’ve been ordered to report any obstruction. That should rein him in. He doesn’t have to like you, Lieutenant.”

  “All right. What about the Ideological Branch? I’ve had complaints from the Ordinal attaché.”

  “Delafleur? A pompous idiot. Une puce. Pay no attention.”

  “The Ideological Branch—”

  “The Ideological Branch is under control,” the Censeur said. “I’m giving them what they want.”

  “What Delafleur wants is to destroy the town.”

  “He can’t. Not now.”

  “Not until spring?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Is there a schedule?”

  “Do you need to know more? There should be a packet from the Oversight Committee in a week or two. All I want is your guarantee that the situation is stable for a few more months.”

  “It is,” Demarch said, understanding that his head had just been inserted in a noose: if anything went wrong now, the blame would fall on him. But he was trapped in his own momentum. He heard himself say, “I guarantee it.”

  “That’s all, then.” The Censeur broke the connection.

  Demarch hung up the telephone and sighed. Then he turned and saw Evelyn Woodward standing in the doorway.

  How much had she heard? It was impossible to know. Or to guess what she would make of it. Briefly, he reran the conversation in his mind, sorting his own words from the Censeur’s: how much could she guess?

  She seemed to look at him oddly, but that could have been his imagination. She was an alien, after all. Mistakes were easy to make with these people, especially in matters of body language.

  She said, “I came to see if you wanted coffee.”

  “Yes, please, Evelyn. I would like a cup of coffee.” He gestured at the desk, which had once been her desk, in a room in which she had once kept accounts for her auberge. “A little more work to do tonight.”

  “I see. Well, I’ll be back in a minute.”

  She closed the door behind her.

  Demarch picked up the most immediate paper on the desk. It was the first of Linneth Stone’s reports, essentially her working notes. He had intended to read it tonight, but he wasn’t enthusiastic at the prospect. Linneth Stone was a career academic and wrote like one, tedious pensées in the passive voice.

  On the evidence of Subject’s accounts and numerous contemporary published Works (cf. Time magazine, Newsweek, etc.), the Institution of Marriage in the United States was undergoing a process of rapid Change, from predominantly traditional, religiously sanctioned Monogamie (with a minority of exceptions) to a commonplace of Divorce and Re-Marriage and unorthodox Arrangements including unmarried Parenting and even a certain sanctioning of like-gender Relations.

  Venery, bastardy, and sodomy, in other words. Demarch thought of his own wife and child in the capital. Dorothea had been instrumental in his rise through the ranks of the Bureau: she was a Francophone of good family, an essential career asset for someone like Demarch, born an Anglophone in a rural town. The Bureau de la Convenance was a vast, incestuous bureaucracy—a labyrinth of old families. Demarch’s connection had been tenuous, through his mother Célestine, who was cousin to a retired supérieur ancien named Foucault; that and his university degree had been enough to get him in the door of the Académie at Belle Ile. Dorothea opened doors more arcane and significant. Her father, a Censeur, had shepherded Demarch through a long stint as an Ideological Branch operative. He had earned his bona fides there, had put in years and fought for promotion. Still, even today, aging Censeurs like Bisonette spoke to him with the disdain of a pureblood for a halfbreed.

  Dorothea had been essential to him and he could not imagine leaving her. Divorce was not altogether uncommon among Valentinians in the upper echelons of the civil service, but Demarch disapproved. According to Linneth, American literature spoke often of love. Well, so did every popular literature. But the educated classes were supposed to know better. Marriage had very little to do with love. It was an institution, like the Bureau or the Federal Bank. You don’t cease banking simply because you no lon
ger “love” the bank.

  Love fades; wasn’t that inevitable? And the demands of the body were fickle. One made arrangements to deal with the physical aspect. One did not, Demarch thought, indulge in melodrama or attempt to rewrite history.

  Or maybe that was only the voice of his own buried conscience. His father had been a Sethian of the Order of Luther, a deacon of the Church and a moral pacifist. Hedrick Michael Demarch: the fierce Saxon consonants always made him think of the sound of a dog gnawing a bone. The name still echoed in the lieutenant’s mind, though his father had died ten years ago; sometimes, too, the voice itself, the tides and swells of its disapproval.

  He thought of Bisonette’s nucleic bomb project, dramatically hastened by documents the Bureau had culled from the libraries of Two Rivers. Apparently there was enough in the generally distributed literature to advance the research by months. Once the Censeurs had given this strange documentation their imprimatur of authenticity, it had gone to the engineers and scientists, who had turned it into blueprints.

  This was work Demarch had helped along; it had been his idea to archive the libraries first of all. Theologians in the Ideological Branch had still been debating the metaphysical status of Two Rivers while Demarch was shipping east its books. That was something else his father had taught him: the value of a book.

  But what kind of a world had he hastened into being? His son Christof was eight years old. Now Christof would grow up under the shadow of this transcendent weapon, just as the inhabitants of Two Rivers had. Maybe it was the bomb that would unleash the other horrors: the anarchy, the drug addiction, the rampant immodesty.

  An October wind rattled the window. Demarch looked up from his thoughts. Evelyn had come back with coffee on a wooden tray; she stood at the doorway waiting to be noticed. He waved her into the room.