Mysterium

by Robert Charles Wilson

  He steered left on Oak, still fighting the wheel. The car danced but moved approximately north.

  He was two blocks gone and around another corner before he dared slow down.

  “Christ Jesus!” Ellen Stockton said suddenly, as if all this had only just registered. “What are they doing to Cliffy!”

  “It’s all right, Mrs. Stockton,” Dex said. He looked at Linneth. She was pale with anxiety, but she nodded at him. “They don’t seem to have any particular interest in the municipal building. We’ll just have to go in from the back.”

  Time was a precious commodity, and worse, there was no way to know exactly how precious it really was. Nevertheless, he waited in the car until the sound of the soldiers’ sporadic gunfire had moved away.

  He was two streets beyond City Hall, in a quiet residential neighborhood—quieter than ever, except for the pop and echo of the gunshots. The road was flanked on either side by tall row houses, old buildings but carefully preserved. Some of these houses were empty; some, undoubtedly, were still occupied, but the occupants weren’t showing themselves. The snow fell in gentle gusts. On some distant porch, a wind chime tinkled.

  It was cold, Ellen Stockton said, with the wind coming in these shot-out windows.

  “Get under the blanket,” Dex said. “I want you to stay here while we’re gone. Can you do that?”

  “You’re going to get Cliffy?”

  “I mean to try.” Though it looked more and more like a futile effort, or worse, a gesture. City Hall had been evacuated. Clifford Stockton, in all likelihood, had been killed or carried off to Fort LeDuc.

  He told Linneth, “Maybe you should stay here with Ellen.”

  “I’m sure she’ll be all right.” She looked at him steadily. “It’s a misplaced chivalry. I’m not baggage, Dex. I want to find him, too.”

  He nodded. “We should go on foot. It’s less conspicuous.”

  “A good idea. And don’t forget about that pistol in your jacket.”

  The funny thing was, he had. He took it from the vest pocket and slid the safety off. The grip was cold in his hand.

  They moved across a snow-humped backyard, over a cane fence collapsed and unrepaired, across another quiet street. The wind swirled snow into exposed skin and sifted it like sand against Dex’s vinyl jacket.

  He reminded himself that Clifford was not David. It was tempting to yield to that obvious parallel: back into another doomed building to save another doomed child. Tempting, Dex thought, but we’re not allowed to reenact our sins. It doesn’t work that way.

  But the memory came back more powerfully than it had in a long, long time, and he made room for it. Some part of him welcomed it. It was possible to smell the reek of burning in all this cold snow.

  There were no soldiers in the space behind City Hall, only a narrow corner of the Civic Gardens and the white wasteland of Permit Parking Only. No one had been here lately, Dex thought. The snow was pristine. He hurried into the shadow of the building with Linneth next to him.

  City Hall was not a large building under all its stone facades and sculpted lintels. It contained an assembly room, a rotunda, and a battery of offices on two floors. And the basement. In better times he had visited this building sporadically, to renew his driver’s license and pay his rates.

  The employees’ entrance was unlocked. Dex stepped inside with his pistol drawn, then beckoned Linneth after him. He listened for voices but heard only the rush of the wind through some distant vent. To his left, stairs led upward. He followed them to the second floor and out into an empty broadloomed hallway.

  He passed doors marked OMBUDSMAN, LICENSE BUREAU, LAND MANAGEMENT. All these doors were wide open, as if the rooms had already been searched. “All abandoned,” Linneth whispered. She was right. Papers had been strewn everywhere, many with the letterhead of the Bureau de la Convenance plainly visible. Some of the office windows were broken; the wind rattled vertical blinds and rolled plastic cups like tumbleweeds over the carpet.

  Dex touched Linneth’s arm and they both stood still. He said, “You hear that?”

  She cocked her head. “A voice.”

  He held the pistol forward. A marksmanship course in the Reserves had not prepared him for this. His hand was shaking—a gentle tremor, as if an electric current were running through him.

  He located the source of the voice in the anteroom of the Office of the Mayor: it was a radio . . . one of the Proctors’ radios, an enormous box of perforated metal and glowing vacuum tubes. It was plugged into a voltage converter that was plugged into the wall.

  It spoke French.

  “Quarante-cinq minutes.” And a continuous metallic beeping, as of a time clock, once per second. Dex looked at Linneth.

  “Quarante-quatre minutes,” the radio shrilled.

  He said, “What is this?”

  “They’re counting down the time.”

  There was another burst of speech, indecipherable with static, but Dex heard the word détonation.

  He said, “How long?”

  She took his hand. “Forty-four minutes.” Quarante-trois minutes. “Forty-three.”

  Clifford recognized the man who came through the FIRE EXIT door. This was the Proctor the others had called Delafleur. An important man. Lukas Thibault drew a sharp breath at the sight of him.

  Delafleur wore an overcoat nearly long enough to touch his ankles, and he reached into the depths of that garment and took out a gun—one of the long-barreled pistols the Proctors sometimes carried; a revolver, not an automatic weapon like the one Luke once showed him. The handle was polished wood inlaid with pearl. None of these refinements seemed to matter to Delafleur, who was sweating and breathing through his mouth.

  Luke said, “Patron! Let me out of here, for God’s sake!”

  Delafleur looked startled, as if he had forgotten about his prisoners. Maybe he had. “Shut up,” he said.

  There was the sound of more gunfire outside the building, but was it growing more distant? Clifford thought it might be.

  Delafleur stalked down the length of this basement room between the stockade cages and the wall with his long coat swinging behind him. He carried the pistol loosely in his left hand. In his right hand was a pocket watch, attached by a silver chain to his blue vest. His eyes kept traveling to the watch, as if he couldn’t resist looking at it—but he plainly didn’t like what he saw.

  He pulled a wooden crate under one of the high, tiny windows, and stood on the crate in a vain attempt to look outside. But the window was too high and louvered shut. Anyway, Clifford thought, it opened at ground level. There wouldn’t be much of a view.

  Delafleur seemed to arrive at the same conclusion. He sat down on the crate and fixed a baleful stare at the door where he had come in.

  Luke said, “Please, Patron! Let me out!”

  Delafleur turned in that direction. In a prim voice he said, “If you speak again, I’ll kill you.”

  He sounded like he meant it. Luke fell silent, though if Clifford listened carefully he could hear his labored breathing.

  Luke had often been silent in the last few hours. But never for very long. Would Delafleur really shoot him if he made a sound? Clifford was sure of it. The Proctor looked too frightened to make idle threats.

  And if he shot Luke, would he then shoot Clifford? It was possible. Once shooting started, who could tell what might happen?

  But he didn’t want to think about that. If he thought about it, the cage began to seem much smaller—as tight as a rope around his neck—and Clifford worried that he might make a sound, that the terror might leap uncontrollably from his throat.

  Time passed. Delafleur looked at his watch as if he were hypnotized by it. At the sound of each fading gunshot he cocked his head.

  “They’re going away,” Delafleur said once—to himself.

  More fidgeting with the watch. But the Proctor seemed to regain a degree of composure as the seconds ticked past. Finally he stood up and adjusted his vest. Without look
ing at the cells, he began to walk toward the FIRE EXIT.

  Lukas Thibault panicked. Clifford heard the soldier throw himself against the bars of his cage. “FUCK YOU!” he screamed. “DON’T YOU LEAVE ME HERE! GODDAMN YOU!”

  And that was the wrong thing to say, because Clifford saw Delafleur hesitate and turn back.

  The Proctor shifted the long-barreled pistol into his right hand.

  Clifford cowered in the corner of his cell, as far away from the Proctor as he could force himself—which was not very far. He had ceased thinking coherently as soon as Delafleur turned back from the door.

  Delafleur walked past him with a steely expression, around the L-bend to where Luke was. Both men were out of Clifford’s sight now. But he could hear them.

  Lukas Thibault had stopped shouting. Now his voice was low and feverish and hoarse with panic. “Bastard! I’ll kill you, you bastard!” But it was the other way around, Clifford thought.

  Delafleur’s pistol sounded like a cannon in this stony basement room.

  Lukas Thibault gave a choked scream. Clifford heard him fall against the cold floor. It was the terrible muted sound of bones and soft tissue striking concrete. A limp, dead sound.

  Now the Proctor came back within the compass of Clifford’s sight. Delafleur was pale and grim. The pistol in his hand trailed wafts of blue smoke. His eyes roamed a moment before they fixed on Clifford.

  Clifford felt the pressure of that gaze, as dangerous as the gun itself. The eyes as deadly as the weapon. He couldn’t look away.

  But then there was another sound, and Delafleur’s eyes widened and he jerked his head toward the door.

  FIRE EXIT opened. Dex Graham stepped into the room.

  Dex fired a handgun at the Proctor and missed. Now the Proctor’s weapon came sweeping up and Clifford had time to cover his ears before the batteringly loud bang. No telling where that bullet went.

  Dex fired a second time and the Proctor sat down on the floor. The pistol dropped from his hand. He slumped against the bars of the cage, moaning.

  Dex came striding forward. Linneth Stone came through the door behind him. She picked up the weapon the Proctor had dropped.

  Dex found a length of copper piping and used it to pry the lock from the door of Clifford’s cell. The lock burst and the door rattled open and Clifford ran to the schoolteacher without thinking.

  He noticed Dex Graham’s eyes, how strangely calm they seemed.

  Linneth took the boy to the stairway.

  Dex lingered a moment longer.

  He looked at Delafleur, who was still alive. The bullet had shattered his hip. He was paralyzed below the waist. The wound was bleeding freely into the silk-lined folds of his long winter coat.

  “I can’t move,” the Proctor said.

  Dex turned to leave.

  Delafleur said, “You don’t have time. It’s hopeless.”

  “I know,” Dex said.

  CHAPTER 29

  Some of the cinder-block walls of the high-energy laboratory had melted to slag and most of the roof was gone. A sky of blue sheet lightning illuminated a maze of corridors.

  Howard walked through the rubble. During the brief intervals when his vision cleared he saw structural rods protruding from concrete forms, broken electrical cables as thick as his arm, ceramic insulators scattered like strange pottery all around him.

  When his vision was not clear he saw these things through endlessly multiplied prisms, as if a snow of faceted crystal had filled the air.

  He moved toward the heart of the building. He felt its heat like sunlight on his face.

  Stern’s last coherent scientific writings had leaned toward the idea of chaotic inflation: a cosmological scenario in which quantum fluctuation in the primordial void gives birth to universes in endless profusion. Not a single creation but infinite creations. And no universe accessible to any other, except perhaps through quantum tunnels known as wormholes.

  In this schema, a universe might even contain a universe. If you could somehow compress an ounce of matter inside the orbit of an electron, it would blossom into a new avenue of time and space—someone else’s Big Bang; someone else’s quarks and leptons and stars and skies.

  In other words, it was possible to contemplate the technology of becoming a god.

  Stern thought it had already been done. The Turkish fragment was the result of an effort, perhaps, to connect two branches of the World Tree. These ghosts (they moved through Howard and around him with clockwork regularity) might be its makers. Mortal gods. Demiurges. Archons, but trapped: chained to this vortex of creation.

  Here at the center of the building the ruins were more chaotic. Howard climbed a bank of broken brick and tile. He was dizzy, or perhaps the world really was spinning around this axis. He fixed his eyes rigidly ahead. Everything he saw seemed to swarm with iridescence.

  Blackened walls rose above him like broken teeth. He passed markers and signs, some words still faintly legible: WARNING and AUTHORIZATION and FORBIDDEN.

  The core of the building had been a containment unit surrounded by two layers of reinforced steel. This was the matrix into which all the cabling and conduits had run; this was where Stern had focused immense energies on the fragment, particle beams hotter than the surface of the sun.

  The containing walls had been breached, but sections were still standing. Everything else—debris, dust, shrapnel—had been scoured away by the explosion. The containment unit stood alone in a sort of black slag crater within the larger ruins of the laboratory building. Howard stepped into that circle, reached the tattered containment room, felt a new wash of terrible heat as he moved through air thick with ghosts and stars, to the crenellated walls, through a vacancy that had once been a doorway, and inside, to the heart of the world: axis mundi.

  Inside, Stern was waiting for him.

  It was Stern, even though it was not human any longer.

  He must have been here when the fragment was bombarded with energy—closer than he should have been, by design or by accident.

  The fragment had become an egg of blue-green phosphorescence. It was perhaps twenty feet in diameter, or seemed to be—appearances, Howard knew, were immensely deceptive. It was hot and vividly alive. It looked as fragile as a bubble but much more menacing, a bubble of spun glass containing the substance of a thousand stars.

  It was patently radioactive and Howard assumed it had already killed him. No matter what happened here—even if a miracle happened here—he would not live longer than another few hours.

  Alan Stern stood outside the sphere. He was touching it.

  Howard knew this was Stern, although there was not much left of him. In some sense Stern probably was dead; some incomprehensible event or process had preserved only a fraction of him here: his mind, but not much of his body. What Howard saw against the glare of the sphere was a body as translucent as a jellyfish. The nervous system—the brain and bundles of nerves—pulsed with a strange luminosity. Stern’s arms touched the sphere and seemed to merge with it, and so did a dozen other limblike projections that had grown into and from his body, fixing him in place like the roots of a tree.

  Stern’s presence was more nebulous; it enveloped Howard and seemed to speak to him. Howard sensed a terrible stasis, an entrapment, a speechless fear. If the sphere was a doorway, Stern was powerless to pass through it and couldn’t retreat. He was caught between flesh and spirit.

  He turned his head—a fleshless bulb in which even the skull was only a dim shadow—and, somehow, eyeless, looked at Howard.

  He was pleading for help.

  Howard hesitated for a time he couldn’t count or calculate.

  All his speculation, and all of Stern’s, had circled around a truth: that the object in this room was a passage between worlds—or even a means of creating a world. The idea seemed to flow from the object itself. Wordlessly, the sphere announced its nature.

  But if that was so, the only way he could help Stern (this thing, this tortured essence of
Stern) was to step into that doorway, perhaps to open it wider. To succeed where Stern had failed.

  And how could he do that? Stern was the genius—not Howard. Stern had revised and elaborated the work of Hawking and Guth and Linde. Howard had barely understood them.

  Stern was the wizard. Howard was only an apprentice.

  The intangible bodies of the ghosts pressed closer around him now, as if the question interested them. Howard took a dizzy breath. The air was blisteringly hot.

  The memory that came to him was of his mother at the kitchen sink washing dishes while Howard dried. Years ago. How old was he? Fifteen, sixteen. Better days.

  Stern had just accepted the Nobel Prize—his picture had been on television—and Howard was babbling about how great it was to know this man, this genius.

  His mother rinsed the last porcelain dish and began to drain the soapy water. “Alan is smart all right. But he’s also . . . I don’t know a word for it.” She frowned. “For him, everything was always a puzzle. A trick. Show him a stone, he could tell you what it was made of and how it came to be at your feet, or how its atoms worked or what it would weigh on Mars. But just to pick it up? To look at it, to hold it in his hand, to feel it? Never. It was beneath him. It was a distraction. Worse, an illusion.” She shook her head. “He understands the world, Howard, but I will tell you this: he does not love it.”

  Contemptus mundi: contempt for the world and the things of the world. When Howard read the words in an undergraduate philosophy text, he thought immediately of Stern.

  He hesitated, but there was nothing to turn back to; only the Proctors, their terror, a fiery wasteland. He was surprised the detonation hadn’t come sooner.

  The entity that had been Stern regarded him with a pain as tangible as this awful heat.

  Howard put out his hand. The skin of it pulsed with new veins of light.