Infinity's Illusion

by Richard Farr

  “Buggers the whole scenario, aye?” she continued. “And now can we just get out of here? We don’t know how much time we have left.”

  Truth was, he could guess how much time they had, because all his mother’s urgency was bottled up inside him, all her emotion. It told him only that what the I’iwa had calculated and given to them was a last chance, and a chance that would come to something only if they got it into the right hands. The details of what they were supposed to do, when and if they got out—still fog.

  How much time, M? Probably not enough. Of course he didn’t say it.

  Three of the pale figures with lamps were walking twenty paces ahead of them. Three more followed. Dog stayed more immediately ahead of them, stopping briefly every few paces and cocking its head to listen. The pale tip of its tail was like a beacon in the gloom. Daniel increased his pace, but the long first flight of steps was merely the opening bar in a symphony. The stairways seemed to multiply in every direction: wide and narrow, shallow and steep, well repaired and in ruins. His shoulder muscles began to tire, and he ignored the fact; then they began to hurt and plead, and he ignored that too. Only when they became glowing rivulets of hot-metal pain did he switch to carrying her piggyback style.

  The I’iwa were strong, and they wanted to help him. But they were reluctant to intervene, because they sensed that his saving her was part of his purpose, part of the role he had been assigned—a sort of destiny, or duty, that must not be interfered with. They did the best they could to light the way, and they stopped and waited frequently, exercising once again the patience they had learned in whole lifetimes of waiting.

  “Endurance, Daniel.”

  The words seemed to come directly from Iona, inside his head. It took a moment to grasp that it was Morag who’d spoken, and a moment more to grasp that she wasn’t quoting Iona so much as mimicking his own description of something Iona had liked to say.

  He was twelve again, halfway up a steep pitch on Cir Mhor on the Isle of Arran. “Endurance, Daniel. Only five percent of this is in your muscles. The other ninety-five’s in your mind. The game of self-mastery: knowing how to tell the rebel parts of your own self to get lost, so you can get on with the job. You should read Marcus Aurelius one day. The Meditations. Only self-help book you’ll ever need.”

  “Endurance, yeah,” he muttered, replying to his dead mother as much as to Morag. “No problem.”

  They skirted the edge of a lake, and where the pathway crumbled, they had to wade through broad, shallow pools. The light reflected off the surface, turning the water into a coppery mirror. He couldn’t see the bottom, couldn’t judge the depth, and while the I’iwa moved without hesitation ahead of him, he was forced to feel his way, inch by inch, with his feet. Once, he put his foot in a hollow. There was a sharp stone at the bottom. He cursed and stumbled, grinding his shin into the ragged edge of the hole and pitching both of them into the water. He managed to protect her head from a jutting rock only at the expense of shredding the skin from his knuckles; it felt as if his hand had been set on fire.

  Ignore it, Iona’s voice said. The pain is only yours if you claim it.

  After they clambered out of the water, he put her down. “I can manage now,” she said, shivering despite the warmth. “For a while anyway.”

  The three I’iwa in front of them had stopped, and seemed to consult one another over the flames they held in their hands. Incongruously, like a middle schooler waiting for a bus, one of them carried the backpack, which contained both the meager survival gear Jimmy had packed so long ago and Morag’s Arabic-numeral version of the Number. They stood almost motionless. In the poor light, neither Daniel nor Morag could tell what, if anything, they were communicating. Three flames danced like goldfish in the depths of the water.

  An hour later they were picking their way over rubble in a long tunnel. It was lower, broader, and rougher than most of what they’d seen. Cooler too. Morag wondered what their I’iwa guides were thinking. They must know that most of their friends, most of their species, were dead by now. They must know that their whole buried civilization—preserved in darkness for eons, since their own inconceivably more ancient Babel—had been destroyed in one night. But they betrayed no emotion, and she accepted that this was not because they were unemotional but because their emotions were too distant from her, too strange, too hard to read. Brave? Fanatically determined? Methodical? Resigned? Fatalistic? These were the labels that came most easily to her mind. But each was a stereotype picked from a language they didn’t speak, a culture that was alien to them. Maybe they were just in shock. It pained and saddened her, and infuriated the Bill Calder inside her, to know that she would never know.

  The three pale figures stopped midstride, tense and alert. Silence. Then the sound they’d heard began again. It was a surreal, mechanical duet of bangs and squeaks:

  Clack.

  Clack clack eeeeh.

  Clack. Eeeeh.

  Clack clack eeeeh.

  Because it didn’t make any sense to Daniel, he conjured up a picture to go with it. In his mind’s eye, a man in a tweed suit and a high Edwardian collar, with oiled hair and a handlebar mustache, was sitting at a desk. He was stabbing one finger at the keys of a black typewriter, while rocking back and forth on a squeaky wooden chair:

  Clack. Eeeeh.

  Clack clack eeeeh.

  The man in the image turned and smiled. He had incongruously modern glasses, bright green, and on the lapel of his suit there was a modern button: “May Cause Irritation.” It was Dr. Hayden C. Calder, his great-great-great-grandfather, from the picture in his father’s office. And it was his father.

  Morag didn’t need to make up an image, because she knew the sound. “Bird of paradise,” she whispered. “Isbet showed me one, years ago. They can’t sing worth shite, but that’s the sound the males make during their courtship dance.”

  “What’s a bird of paradise doing down here?”

  The I’iwa had clustered together at one side of the tunnel. She inched past them, using her hands to steady herself, and beckoned, but they refused to move. Daniel went ahead of them and came to the side tunnel at the entrance of which Morag was standing.

  “Look,” she said. “They’re not down here. We’re up there.”

  Some distance down the side tunnel, impossible to judge whether it was fifty feet or a quarter mile, something was moving. Dog went ahead, a little way, sniffing warily. Through a hole in the roof of the tunnel, the roots of a tree were casting shadows in a patch of light. When they crept a little closer, they could see that two birds were dancing around one another on the biggest root.

  The I’iwa with the backpack handed it to Morag. She took it and smiled. “We’re getting out of here, D. People to find. Work to do. You still have the locator beacon in here?”

  “It won’t work,” he said.

  “Don’t be a pessimist. It’s waterproof, right? And the battery’s supposed to be good for months. Besides, it’s Jimmy’s, and Jimmy’s gadgets always work.”

  Daniel felt a shadow of doubt pass across his mind, a worry he couldn’t articulate. He shook his head as if to clear it. As they approached the end of the side tunnel, the birds flew up and away. Looking up through the roots, they could see a neat gap, round as a manhole but fringed with grass. Daniel stood on a rock and pulled himself up on one of the roots. The sky looked cloudy.

  The I’iwa had gathered at the junction between the two tunnels. In daylight, they were not prepared to come any farther. Thank you, Morag gestured. We are grateful for your protection. She wanted to add: What will you do now? But Stripe signed something ambiguous—We wish you luck, perhaps—and something about the way the six figures just stood there, perfectly still, like melting wax statues in the glow of their own lamps, made it impossible for her to say more. She had a sense that they wanted to be left alone before they would move again, as if their return into the darkness, to face whatever they had to face, was something private or secret that no one els
e should witness.

  Daniel already had Dog with him. He reached down for her with his hand held out. In one swift, powerful movement, he pulled her up, grabbing her around the waist and lifting her clear into what should have been late morning sunlight.

  CHAPTER 2

  DEAD ANGELS

  They were on a steep slope, he could tell that much, but it was impossible to see anything. The smoke pouring down around them was thick, vinegary, dirty white, like a river of putrid milk. His first thought was that they’d climbed out into the middle of a forest fire.

  The source of the smoke seemed to be above them, and his first instinct was to move them away from it, downhill. But he knew all about following streams downhill in bad visibility—a lesson he’d learned when a friend of his mother’s had been lucky to survive after going over an unseen drop.

  Morag began to cough again, violently. Wondering vaguely where Dog had gone, he took her by the arm and dragged her with him, feeling his way step by step, sideways. They were in luck; twenty paces later, the smoke began to thin and he was able to move a bit faster; after twenty more, they had staggered out into relatively clean air. He saw with relief that nothing around them was on fire.

  Clack clack eeeeh: the two birds of paradise were watching them from a bush nearby. He could see now that they’d emerged from the caves into a skein of smoke only a hundred yards wide. The wind had been blowing it directly over the ground, but as they watched, it shifted, lifting, until the downhill end rose from its source at a fifty- or sixty-degree angle, leaning as if for support against the blue wall of the sky. Morag looked at the source, farther up the mountain, and remembered the I’iwa with the torch. “They’re burning the ziggurat,” she said.

  Her eyes were red. He couldn’t tell if it was just the smoke or the aftereffects of the gas. Or maybe she was crying. “You can’t burn stone,” he said.

  “You can burn pigment. I bet they know that you can burn pigment, because they’ve tested and rehearsed this scenario again and again, just to be sure. They’re destroying everything they’ve done. Erasing the record. Everything they knew.”

  “It must be like the apocalypse for them.”

  “Aye. And they were prepared to die so that what they knew got into our hands, instead of the wrong hands.” She patted the backpack.

  “We’d better get out of here,” he said. “If they’ve got enough people to invade the caves, they have to have people out in these forests too. Where’s Dog?”

  A soft yi-ip came to them. They stumbled forward, following the sound, and the air cleared. They came to a rock ledge that overlooked an even steeper section of the mountain.

  Yi-ip.

  The animal was sitting below them, near where a stream ran through a flat area in a little valley. When they’d picked their way down, it ran ahead of them and jumped into the water, biting at its own reflection. A small fish broke the surface like a splinter of ice, hung there for a moment, and vanished. Dog looked at it, puzzled, then bounded out onto the bank and shook all over them. It made them forget everything and smile, for a moment.

  “We’ve made it,” Morag said, looking around. She almost added We’re safe now, but didn’t: Surely the I’iwa couldn’t be confident that the attackers, whoever they were, hadn’t come to this part of the forest? Still, there seemed to be no one around, and the thrill of being outside, in the smells and sounds of the forest, was magical. They took turns washing in the stream and drinking the cool, sweet water. While Daniel was crouched over the stream, dunking his head, Morag peered into the trees, up at the smoke—a whole civilization and its memories, dispersing forever on the wind—then into the trees again.

  He came to stand beside her, silver drops cascading off his hair onto his shoulders. “We need to move,” he said. He touched the backpack. “This meant everything to the I’iwa, and it means everything to them too.”

  “Them?”

  “The people who attacked. Route Two, has to be. Dangerous people, playing Mayo’s game. We need to get as far away from here as possible, as fast as possible.”

  “First I want Jimmy and Lorna to know we’re alive,” she said. She wanted to say, Jimmy and Lorna and Kit, but she couldn’t. “Turn on the beacon.”

  He fished out the bright-orange unit, held it up, and slid the latch off the activation button. “Even if this works, no one’s going to just drop in and rescue us. This is the middle of nowhere.”

  “I just want them to know, that’s all.”

  He hesitated, trying to see in his mind’s eye what would happen, or not happen. People found it frustrating that looking into the future was like staring at a wall. Was it better, or worse, that for him the wall had become partly, unreliably, transparent? Again, as in the tunnel, he had a feeling that the beacon would work, but not work.

  There was a noise from farther up the mountain. It could equally have been a distant gunshot or a nearby branch breaking. They moved in closer under a tree, where the shade was deeper. “Go on,” she said. “Do it.”

  The battery was fine, anyway. His thumb’s pressure was met with a satisfying click, followed by a perky, synthesized acknowledgment. (A once-famous rock musician, hired by corporate suits, had been told: “Design a sound that lasts two point four seconds, is easy to hear even at low volume, and makes people in desperate situations feel optimistic.” The result was three rising faux-clarinet tones followed by a single bell—the aural equivalent of three increasingly bright smiley faces and a cute-font exclamation mark.) Three green lights lit up in a row, one after the other, around the curved top edge of the casing. First, POWER CHECK. Then, GPS ACQUIRED—Daniel and Morag were lucky about that one, or then again maybe not. And finally, TRANSMITTING. The last one was the unit’s way of announcing Mission Accomplished: a message in a digital bottle—We’re alive! We’re here!—was launching itself into space.

  Iona had used the same system on her expeditions. Being Iona, she’d taught Daniel how to use it, and then gone the extra mile or three and turned it into a home science lesson, explaining the whole multipart electromagnetic zigzag. He’d lost track a bit over some of the details, like how the atomic clocks had to compensate for relativistic effects, but he had a pretty clear mental picture of what was supposed to be happening. Multiple pings from the GPS satellites, more than twelve thousand miles away. The scratch-pad trigonometry that braided those pings together and gave a unique latitude and longitude on the surface of the Earth. That position, plus a tagging code that gave the unit’s serial number and registered owner, lobbed back into space and intercepted by a satellite at much lower orbit. And, finally, the news being volleyed back down from there to the incident screen at an emergency response center in Singapore, or Canberra.

  Daniel allowed himself to picture the next step too: a call to local rescuers. Maybe the Indonesians? Maybe a floating outpost of the US or Chinese or Australian navy? He even allowed himself to imagine that Jimmy and Lorna, somewhere safe, had told the relevant people to expect the signal and contact them.

  The first bit was right. The distant GPS satellites had done their work, as had the chip and transmitter in the handset. Not even a thousandth of a second after that third green light, the packet of photons encoding Daniel and Morag’s location had erupted out of the atmosphere into the blackness of space. Not even two thousandths of a second after that, it had reached an altitude of five hundred miles, where, in theory at least, it entered the scanning range of a shiny new satellite, the latest of its breed, MetOp-SG-Z3e.

  Daniel clipped the locator beacon to the back of the pack, then rooted around inside it and extracted a small green field compass and a map of the island. In a small interior pocket, there was also a single protein bar, still in its shiny foil wrapper: “TRAILBLASTER. Always organic. Always gluten-free. Blueberry crunch flavor. Maximize your performance.” He tossed it to Morag. “Here. Be my guest. Maximize your performance.”

  “This is the best you can do for lunch, D? Great. Just what I’ve been c
raving all these weeks. Blueberry jock candy. OK, so we consume this with great delight. And then what?”

  “The beacon will update our position once an hour while the battery lasts. Long enough for them to work out which direction we’re headed. But even assuming the signal gets through, it’ll take who knows how long for anyone to reach us. Hours, at least. Days, more likely. Meanwhile, we have to work on the assumption that no one’s coming.”

  He laid out the map so that she could see it easily and pointed to a spot near the middle of the island, north of the central mountains. “We’re here, roughly. This stream must run into the Sepik. Or it’s going in that direction, anyway. North, to the coast.”

  “That’ll take a long time.”

  “We need to get off the island, not deeper into it. The only thing we can get to inland is the airfield where we came in, at Telefomin. Way too dangerous, if people are still looking for us.”

  She sulked for a minute, then picked up a small stick and used it to point at the map. “We were at Oma and Isbet’s village. About here. They took us in a big arc to get from their village to the caves. It looks like we completed more of the same arc while we were getting out. So it’s only five miles over this pass—ten, max—back to where we started.”

  “We’d probably never find it.”

  She pointed to Dog, who was up and alert, tail wagging, as if he’d listened to the whole conversation. “We’ll find it in no time. We’ve got ourselves an expert guide.”

  Daniel shook his head. Something was bothering him, like a fly inside his head.

  “Thing is,” Morag persisted, “if the signal didn’t work, then going back to the village is about the only way we have a chance of locating Jimmy and Lorna. They probably would have left a message there. They could even be there. Besides, the Tainu might be able to help us.”

  The Trailblaster’s wrapper was torn, and its contents had dried and hardened to the consistency of pumice. She held it in the cool flowing water to soften it while Daniel busied himself putting a stick in the ground and orienting the map to the shadow.