Mysterium

by Robert Charles Wilson

  He passed a fork in the road. To the left was the way to the testing ground. Ahead, the way to the ruined lab. He pressed forward, though this road was less traveled, old snow still frozen under the new, a difficult walk.

  As he approached the near radius of the lab he saw more of the ethereal forms he had glimpsed in the night last autumn. They were less frightening now, though not less mysterious. They seemed disinterested in him, disinterested in anything but their own stately motion, perhaps a circle around the ruined buildings: restless ghosts, he thought. Chained here.

  In fact they were strangely beautiful, nearly human flags of light casting very real shadows among the trees, their reflections glinting from countless prisms of fallen snow. It was as if the trees themselves were moving, performing oddly graceful pirouettes against the blackness of the night. Howard’s eyes blurred with tears at the sight, though he could not say what moved him. He walked for what seemed hours among the shifting shadows. It was hard to remember to follow the road. It was hard to remember anything at all.

  He paused when one of these creatures (if it could be called that) came near him. He held his breath as it moved across his path. He felt a prickling heat on his skin; the snow nearby melted to gloss. He looked deep inside it, past translucencies of green and fiery gold to inner complexities of indigo and luminous purple evolving outward like the corona of a star, then fading and falling back like the arc of a solar prominence. Its eyes were shadows, dark as the night. It didn’t pause or look at him.

  It moved on. Howard took a deep, ragged breath and did the same.

  He reached the laboratory grounds as dawn was lightening the sky.

  He walked fearlessly past the wire fence and guardpost the Proctors had erected and abandoned. There was no one here; there hadn’t been for months. This was the mystery the Proctors had declared too frightening to contemplate and too dangerous to endure.

  Their works lay scattered under softening dunes of snow: earth-moving machinery, rusted tin sheds, a few vehicles stripped to the axle and open to the sky. The largest intact structure the Proctors had left was a windowless brick box with wide tin doors, sealed with a bar and padlock. Howard moved that way.

  The dome of blue light surrounding the original Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory loomed above his head. He had never been this close. It interested him. The border of light, the passage between inside and outside, was crisp and distinct. Within that border, no snow had fallen; the grass was still an eerie green, a single tree still held its leaves . . . though all these things began to change and mutate if he stared very long. Strange, Howard thought. But had the phenomenon at the lab cast a subtler effect beyond its borders? Those creatures in the forest, for instance. And even here, in the dawning light, the snow-humped detritus looked oddly bright, as if his peripheral vision had grown prismatic, flensing rainbows from every acute angle—as if a junkyard had been strewn with jewels.

  In his last days Stern had viewed the fragment in the laboratory as a new sort of matter: quantum matter, its material volume only a fraction of its true size, which was incalculable because it lay outside the observable universe. It was a piece of the Protennoia and therefore unknowable; its effects on surrounding matter were quantum effects, acting on the collapsing wave function of reality in ways unpredictable and often bizarre.

  Was that true, Howard wondered? If he stepped past that border of blue light, would he be in some sense inside the fragment? Or was he already inside it? Perhaps the Proctors and their world, all their universe to its farthest limits, was inside the fragment already—the illusion was that the universe contained it.

  It was a gateway, a barrier—a nierika.

  Axis mundi, his uncle had called it.

  The Proctors had left much of their equipment and salvage protected from the weather in this shed. Files, boxes of paper retrieved from the nearest of the laboratory buildings; notebooks abandoned, tables strewn with aerial photographs of the site, books of physics, books of the Bible. There was a tumble of white smocks and lead aprons in the corner. And in a doorless closet, three of the suits Clifford had described to him in the autumn: heavy, quilted vests with a sort of hood, a smoked-glass helmet. The vests to ward off radiation, Howard supposed. He remembered hearing that the fire chief Dick Haldane had died after driving his truck into the glow. The helmets he guessed were to diffuse a glare he had not yet seen . . . some unimaginable radiance, the blinding light of creation . . . but what could protect you from that?

  He took the outfit off its shelf and draped it over himself, no doubt a futile gesture, but it made him feel less vulnerable.

  Then he stepped out into the cold air. The sun had only begun to rise and the air was gray under gusts of low cloud. He walked past this deserted building, past diamond fields of rusting machinery, onto the flat snow-contoured surface of the road and into the nimbus of blue light.

  CHAPTER 25

  Morning found the test site hushed and vacant.

  The last technician had left at midnight. The observation bunker was miles to the east, a slit-windowed slab of reinforced concrete. Remote monitors communicated the status of the weapon to banks of telemetry consoles inside, their anodized faceplates glittering with jewel-faceted lights. The telltales showed amber or green in reassuring patterns. Everything was going according to plan. Everything was as it should be, Milos Fabrikant thought—at least within the narrow compass of these machines.

  Fabrikant had been invited here as an observer, and he still had not received a convincing explanation why the Proctors had chosen this particular place to test the weapon: was Cartagena a snowbound target? Was Spain so full of pine woods?

  But the Proctors, inevitably, followed their own logic. He hadn’t pressed the issue. All Fabrikant had done was his duty, which was to extract enriched uranium isotopes and apply them to the manufacture of a bomb. Three functional implosion-type weapons had been constructed, with more on the way; one of them rested on the gantry in the forest. The other two had been shipped to some Atlantic airbase or other, and if this test was successful the bombs would be dropped on belligerent Europe. And then God help us all.

  He had seen the yield prediction from the Bureau Centrality, and it was even more prodigious than his own calculation. He wondered who was right. In either case, the numbers defied imagination. Divining energy from mass, he thought, as if we were Archons ourselves: the sheer hubris of it!

  He was privileged to be here. And not a little frightened.

  He turned to the Censeur in charge, that unpleasant man Bisonette. “How long—”

  “Two or three hours yet, Monsieur Fabrikant. Please be patient.”

  I wasn’t trying to hurry it, Fabrikant thought.

  Symeon Demarch had stayed close to the telephone all night, talking in relay rounds to Bisonette at the test bunker, Delafleur at City Hall, Trebach at the soldiers’ quarters, and the commandant at Fort LeDuc. From the dim light of Evelyn’s study he had watched the parade of lights along the far shore of Lake Merced, a huge detachment of Proctors and senior military men in a convoy bound for safety and the south. The traffic had possessed a strange beauty in the falling snow. It looked like a candlelight procession, like a body of Renunciates making a midnight pilgrimage on Ascension Eve.

  The procession of automobile lights faded long before dawn. Of those leaving Two Rivers, only Trebach and Delafleur and himself (and their chauffeurs) were left. Delafleur was worried about some unrest at the military barracks; he tied up the line to Bisonette and Demarch’s phone was quiet for an hour before sunrise. Demarch sat motionless in the silence, not asleep but not really awake . . . only sitting.

  A military car came for him at dawn.

  He answered the knock at the front door and told the driver, “All right. Yes. Just wait a moment.”

  “Sir, we don’t have much time.” The driver was a young man and worried. “There’s trouble in town. You can hear the shooting. And this snow is a problem, too.”

&n
bsp; “I won’t be long.”

  He trudged upstairs to the bedroom. Evelyn was inside. Perhaps she hadn’t slept, either. She was wearing the dress he had imported from the capital so many months ago. She looked frail in that confection. Frail and beautiful. The bedroom window faced the wind, and the snow had covered it completely; Evelyn looked up at him from a dimness of silk and ice. Her eyes were wide.

  She said, “Is this it? Are we leaving now?”

  Demarch felt as if something had lurched inside him. Incipit vita nova, he thought dazedly. A new life begins: not when he joined the Bureau but now, here in this room. Now something is left behind; now something is forsaken.

  He thought of Dorothea and the memory was so vivid that her face seemed to float in front of him. He thought of Christof and of Christof’s wary eyes. He had left home for a place less real, a makeshift and temporary place, he thought; it would only exist for a few hours more.

  He thought of Guy Marris, missing three fingers from his right hand.

  Downstairs, the driver was calling his name.

  Evelyn frowned.

  “It’s only a chore,” he told her. “They want me at City Hall. I’ll be back before long.”

  He left the room before she could answer. He didn’t want to know whether or not she believed him.

  Evelyn hurried downstairs and reached the big window in the front room just as the car was pulling away. It skidded on the snow-slick surface of Beacon Street, then picked up speed as it headed east and out of sight.

  When the sound of the motor faded she was able to hear another sound—popcorn bursts of distant gunfire, faint but unmistakable.

  Was there still time to reach Dex Graham? Evelyn doubted it . . . and anyway, that wasn’t what she felt like doing.

  Mainly she wanted to watch the snow. It looked lovely as it fell, she thought. It absorbed the attention. She would sit in her bedroom and watch the morning snow shaped into ripples and dunes by the wind that blew across the frozen surface of Lake Merced.

  That would be a fine thing to be doing, Evelyn thought, when the bright light finally came. But first she wanted to change her clothes. She didn’t like this dress anymore. She didn’t want it touching her.

  Clement Delafleur lost the phone line with Corporal Trebach and reached him moments later by radio. Trebach was shouting something about the barracks, about his men, but it was unintelligible in gusts of static; Delafleur told him, “Leave, for God’s sake—it doesn’t matter now! Just leave.” But there was no response. Trebach’s radio had failed, too.

  Delafleur went to search for his own driver. He had fulfilled his duties with what he thought was considerable élan under pressure, and any inconvenience would soon be erased: as in the joke about doctors, he would bury his mistakes. If Trebach ran into trouble and was forced to stay, then Delafleur would be the last to leave . . . and that might impress Censeur Bisonette, who seemed to have overcome his distaste for the Ideological Branch. Delafleur was attracting patronage these days the way sugar attracts insects. It was a consoling thought.

  He walked to the outer office where his chauffeur should have been. There was another radio here, tuned to the broadcast from the test bunker. It emitted a high-pitched whistle punctuated by bursts of incomprehensible data or mechanical time checks. Less than three hours to the detonation, Delafleur noted, and a little late to be leaving, but this messiness with Trebach had delayed him.

  Where had the driver gone? The rest of the office was empty, of course. He had dismissed the staff, all faithful Proctors and pions, and sent them off in a midnight cortege. The driver had stayed behind, drinking black coffee from the strange cafetière in the corner. But now the room was empty.

  Delafleur roamed the carpeted hallways with an increasing but carefully suppressed anxiety. He checked the toilet, but the driver wasn’t there. Nor in the empty offices, their doors all ajar, nor in the marbled foyer on the first floor. There wasn’t time for this! He was suddenly conscious of the ebbing minutes, to which he had been oblivious only an hour ago. There was snow on the roads and some of it had drifted dangerously deep. They must leave soon.

  He heard the sound of gunfire from the west. According to Trebach’s last dispatches, that was some disturbance at the edge of town: a guardpost had exchanged gunfire with civilian automobiles, presumably refugees attempting to escape on one of the logging roads. Trebach had sent out a few more troops, and that should have ended it. But the sporadic firing went on and on—a bad sign.

  Maybe the driver was in the basement, Delafleur thought, down among the water pipes and concrete walls and the steel cages where Thibault and the boy Clifford Stockton were imprisoned. But no, that wasn’t likely. In any case, Delafleur was reluctant to go down there. He was afraid of being trapped. All these walls seemed suddenly too close.

  He pulled on his winter pardessus and went out through the main doors to the allée: damn the man, let him burn, he would drive the car himself if necessary! But as he hurried down the snow-rounded steps he saw that it was not just the driver who was missing. The car was gone, too.

  Delafleur was mute with outrage.

  He’ll pay more than three fingers for this, Delafleur thought. He’ll pay with his head! There had not been a beheading in the capital since the Depression, but there were still men in the Committees for Public Safety who knew what to do with a traitor.

  But that was irrelevant; he needed transportation more than he needed revenge. No vehicles had been left behind. His cowardly chauffeur had taken the last. Delafleur felt a surge of panic but instructed himself to think, to be constructive. There was still the radio. Maybe Bisonette could send someone from the bunker. There might be time for that.

  He was about to march back up the steps of City Hall when a black van came roaring around the corner past the Civic Gardens, and for a moment Delafleur felt a blossoming hope: somehow, they had come for him already! But the van had taken the corner too quickly; it wavered drunkenly from side to side and finally skidded off its wheels and over the curb.

  Delafleur stared. The van was silent a moment, then armed men began to leap from the outflung doors like ants from a disturbed nest. They were soldiers, and they were obviously drunk and dangerous.

  One man aimed a rifle at a streetlight, fired a single shot and sent a flurry of shattered glass to join the falling snow. The others began to shout incoherently. Not just drunken, they were also terrified. They know what’s about to happen, Delafleur thought. They know they’re doomed.

  He thought: And they know who to blame.

  A window shattered somewhere over his head. Had he been seen, here in the shadow of City Hall? Perhaps not. Delafleur ran back inside and barred the big door behind him.

  CHAPTER 26

  Dex didn’t like the idea of driving into gunfire, but Shepperd’s plan was the only real option: make for the logging road and pray for confusion. The snow was deep enough now to be a real impediment, bad enough on the streets of Two Rivers and certain to be worse on a one-lane track through the forest. But he would worry about that later. His first task was to pick up Clifford Stockton and his mother, and his second was to put distance between himself and the fission weapon in the Ojibway land.

  Linneth sat beside him with her attention focused on the predawn gloom beyond the windows. The streetlights burned pale amber overhead. There were lights in many of these houses, as if the buildings themselves had been startled awake. Dex wondered how much of the population had been warned about the escape. Lots of the parents had been contacted, Shepperd had said. Getting kids out was a priority, and school staff had been generous with names. The black community around Hart Avenue had been nervous ever since the Proctors forced them to register as “Negroes or Mulattos” on the town rolls; that was another substantial fraction of the convoy.

  But Two Rivers was too big for a genuine mass evacuation. Word had spread rapidly in the last couple of days, but there must be many who simply hadn’t heard. Dex saw them peering cautious
ly from the draped windows of their houses, no doubt wondering at the sound of gunfire and all the unaccustomed traffic. Dex’s car was not the only one on the road. Several sped past him, too panicked for caution, and at least one ended up in the ditch beside La Salle Avenue with its wheels spinning vainly.

  Dex pulled over at the address Clifford had given him, a house not far from Coldwater Road, and left the motor running as he ran to the door. He knocked, waited, knocked again. No answer. Was it possible that Clifford and his mother had somehow slept late? Or left early? In desperation he pounded his fist on the door.

  Ellen Stockton opened it. She wore a housecoat and her eyes were red with weeping. She held in one hand what appeared to be a mason jar of oily water—but it smelled like bathtub hooch.

  Dex said, “Mrs. Stockton, I need you and Clifford in the car right away. We really don’t have time to wait.”

  “They took him,” she said.

  The falling snow clung to her dark hair. Her eyes were red and unfocused. Dex said, “I don’t understand—you’re talking about Clifford? Who took him?”

  “The soldiers! The soldiers took him. So go away. Fuck you. We don’t need you. We’re not going anywhere.”

  Linneth helped get the drunken woman dressed and into the car. Despite the occasional obscenity, Mrs. Stockton was too tired to fight and too intoxicated to offer more than a token objection. In the back seat she became a malleable object under a woolen blanket.

  Dex sat at the wheel of the car. It was fully morning now. There were plumes of smoke all over town, Linneth saw, and still that sporadic crack-crack of gunfire—sometimes distant, sometimes much too close.