Harry stared at the beta probe that transfixed Ali’s eye and skull like a dagger, its stainless steel shaft pointing toward the ceiling. He had guided it in with agonizing care, finally landing it within a hundredth of an inch of zero. When he heard Odin announce “Probe insertion complete,” he abruptly let go of the handle, as if flinching from an electric jolt. Only then did he dare look upon what he had done.
The tension in Ali’s body had disappeared. Her arms were soft and doughy, and slid limply over the sides of the table. The skin of her face was pale and smooth as wax. Even the tiny wrinkles about her eyes and mouth had disappeared. She was beautiful with a translucent, ageless beauty, her lips full and dark against the moonlike pallor of her cheeks. Was she dead? There was no sign of breathing. Harry spoke her name three times, but not a muscle twitched in response. What should he do? Should he do anything? He was afraid to touch her, lest the probe should dislodge inside her brain. But he didn’t know what to expect.
“Odin!” he called out. “Is this working? Is she all right?”
Odin did not answer. When Harry turned to look at the big wall monitor, it had gone blank. Odin’s face, the countdown clock, the schematic of the probe’s path into Ali’s brain—everything was gone. Along the far wall, all of the banks of smaller monitors had gone blank, too. Then suddenly the lights went out, and Harry found himself standing in absolute darkness.
Around her were flowers of white, brighter than the white of snow upon Mount Elbruz. She swam in a stream of liquid honey, diving deep into it, letting the sweet syrup bathe her milky skin and stream in jets between her breasts and thighs. Over the murmur of the current came the voice of a child laughing. She rolled onto her side and looked up to see Jamie Winslow, sitting atop a boulder and splashing with his feet, while behind him gold-tipped clouds rushed against an indigo sky. He looked at her, his eyes bright and clearer than ice.…
Ali needed to get beyond numbers if she was to find Kevin’s portal. She needed an object, something personal—something that tied Odin directly to Kevin, and Kevin to her. SIPNI, perhaps? She formed a mental image of the SIPNI device: that precious egg of sparkling amethyst, with its twelve million contact points. Instantly, her mind was flooded with SIPNI: not one but a thousand SIPNIs, in the form of blueprints and logic diagrams and arabesques of biocybernetic circuits that tapered to dimensions of a single molecule. It was a God’s-eye’s view of SIPNI, so complex that no human being—not even Kevin—could have hoped to comprehend it. But now, through the mind of Odin, Ali saw it in a glance. She saw, too, that SIPNI was much more than the crude prototype she had put into Jamie’s brain. It was destined to have a thousand future forms. She saw SIPNI controlling epilepsy, boosting intelligence, directing animals to perform unskilled labor, preserving human consciousness after death—goals that Kevin had intimated to her, but never in such compelling detail. Ali was awed—and frightened—by the invention to which she had helped to give birth.
But SIPNI was not the portal Ali sought. For all the wonders that she saw, none of them led to Odin’s core. To reach Odin she would have to go through Kevin himself. But that was risky. Kevin had toiled for months building a device meant to kill her. By conjuring his alter ego in Odin’s mind, might she not resurrect his murderous jealousy as well?
There was no time to consider. Ali felt a vague but growing agitation inside her, which she recognized as a by-product of Odin’s foray into her subconscious. It’s spilling over into my hypothalamus. Adrenaline and cortisol are pouring into my blood. I won’t be able to go on long like that. The human body wasn’t made to experience every emotion at once.
I must press on, to the place I fear most to go.…
She carried a world within her, in the place called swadhisthana, behind the castle of her pubic bone. It was a world without a name, a being without a face, not yet male or female. Like a moon, it swayed her secret tides of blood, her rising and falling. What did it whisper? Cleave unto me. Die for me, that you may live. With her heart’s blood she watered the mystic soil, knowing that each drop subtracted from her brought her a little closer to the time of her own withering. She was dry wood, harboring a divine and unquenchable fire. She sighed in ecstasy, warming herself at the flames of her own immolation. I am with child again.…
Harry lifted Ali’s limp arm from where it dangled beside the table. He could barely detect a slow, thready pulse at her wrist. Was she breathing? He bent over her, holding his ear closer and closer to her mouth, until he could hear a faint movement of air between her half-opened lips. She’s alive. I didn’t kill her after all, he thought. But what’s happening? He could see nothing except the tiny red status light of the video camera above him, like the light of a distant star, giving neither warmth nor illumination. Enwrapped in awful silence, he felt helpless and alone.
A blood-curdling shriek blew apart the silence. What in God’s name is that? It sounded like the screech of a terrified animal. A monkey? What is it doing here?
He felt a sharp pain in the pit of his stomach, like someone was twisting a knife in it. He touched his hand to Ali’s hair, trailing over the edge of the table. Why the fuck did I go along with this? Why couldn’t I figure out another way?
Suddenly, he heard a ding like the bell of an elevator. Two lines of numbers appeared on the monitor, a long series of 1s and 0s. Haltingly, more numbers followed, a few lines at a time. Then faster and faster they came. The big LCD screen filled up, but still they surged, spilling over to the bank of monitors against the far wall—a steady stream of numbers, a waterfall of numbers, a limitless flood of numbers, rushing faster and faster, until Harry could see nothing but a blur, so many numbers that the darkness of the lab turned to light.
Harry felt a slight movement in Ali’s wrist—a minuscule wave of muscle tension, followed by slackening. Again he felt it. Again, a little stronger. Her pulse grew stronger, too. By the glow of the monitors, he could see her chest rise and fall as she breathed. But it wasn’t normal breathing. There was something forced and spasmodic about it. Her right eye was propped half-open by the blade of the probe, with a little dark pool at the inner corner that Harry knew was blood. Her left eye was firmly shut.
The cascade of numbers vanished from the big wall screen. In its place Harry saw a collage of geometric figures—conic sections, snowflake-like fractals, strange lopsided polygons gliding and morphing into one another. With blinding speed, they grew more and more complex, even as they spread to the smaller monitors. It seemed as though Odin were trying to piece together a vast three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, replicating a secret pattern inside of Ali’s brain.
With the appearance of these shapes, Ali turned restless, twitching and moaning and knocking her heels against the end of the table. Her breathing became deep but irregular. Harry called out, thinking she might be awakening, but she didn’t respond either to voice or touch. Her lips were drawn apart in a painful grimace, as though the shapes and the puzzle-building were hurting her.
“For God’s sake, Odin! Slow it down!” Harry shouted. But the shapes were everywhere, like bees swarming in a hive.
Ali grasped blindly at the air. Harry took her wrists and held them down against her stomach. He felt her shivering from head to toe.
It was night, and cold. In the darkness two yellow eyes glowed, spying her nakedness. She darted behind the ruins, hiding, blushing. Her once-smooth skin was torn and splotched with painful sores. Only the darkness made her appear fair. Father, will the Fire burn away my shame? Will it burn my hair also? Will I still be a woman when it is through?
Ali could not think of Kevin without pain. Her life with him had begun in guilt, as she defied her family and the traditions of her faith. It had ended with the nightmare of Ramsey’s death. And now Kevin, too, was dead, driven to madness by her desertion.
In search of the portal, she forced herself to think of him, to relive their life together, replaying every conversation, every argument she could remember—even the most painful. None of this drew a respo
nse from Odin. It was only when she chanced to think of one particular moment, the moment she and Kevin had stood together at sunset on the top of Mount Jackson, that she shuddered to hear a voice—not Odin’s voice, but Kevin’s.
“ALL THAT I CREATED WAS MADE FOR YOU.”
It was Kevin’s voice, all right, but strangely shorn of his swagger and sarcasm, like the voice of a ghost, speaking from an ether world beyond care or passion. As it spoke, all his achievements in science flashed before her—SIPNI, Odin, the Omega function, his groundbreaking studies on Parkinson’s disease. His future ambitions, too, passed in review. She saw Odin’s brain transformed into living fire, embodying an intelligence so profound that mankind’s petty, grasping jealousies would melt in awe of it. Was this vision not enough for you? she asked of Kevin’s ghost. Did you need to make me into your idol, too? Take your offerings back. If I accept them, I must accept your dark creation, too.
“HAND IN HAND, WE COULD HAVE REACHED THE SUMMIT OF ALL POSSIBILITIES. WHY DID YOU THROW OUR FUTURE AWAY, LIKE SO MUCH TRASH?”
In one flash, Ali saw all the brainstorming sessions that she and Kevin had shared—in the lab, in bed, at dinner, over coffee and popcorn at midnight. She saw them from Kevin’s point of view, and was startled to see how sincerely Kevin had respected her intellect, and how many times she had shaped his ideas, even on problems she had only vaguely understood. She had been more than a muse to him; she had been a codiscoverer. But it was not I who turned from life to death, who built this infernal machine of destruction, she said to Kevin. In one stroke you have nullified all the good you have ever done.
“I BARED MYSELF TO YOU A THOUSAND TIMES. WHY DID YOU HIDE YOURSELF FROM ME?”
It was true. There had been something wrong with her, something that had been missing as far back as she could remember. Fear infested her like a parasite. Fear had robbed her time and again of the courage to fight for herself. It had robbed her of the power to stand up to Rahman, and to the citizenship board, and to all the evils of the world. Worst of all, it had destroyed her marriage. It had robbed her of the simple capacity for trust that lies at the core of every loving relationship. Without it, it could be said that she had admired Kevin, that she had lusted after him, that she had desperately needed him—but not that she had loved him. I could not give what I could not give, she apologized. God knows I cursed myself a thousand times for it. But you knew what you had when you fell for me.
“AT EVERY TURN IN OUR LIFE TOGETHER, YOU CHOSE THE PATH THAT LED AWAY FROM ME.”
Yes, goddamn you, I did! But you made it all too easy! She saw Kevin’s unbounded joy at her first pregnancy. Ramsey was his hope, a center of gravity that would pull the two of them together. True, true; but the converse was true as well. When the center failed, they streamed apart, like comets to their own peculiar orbits. She could have turned back to Kevin, even then. But something blocked her. Something that …
“WHY DID YOU HIDE YOURSELF FROM ME?”
God, Kevin! It’s because I’m a cripple. An emotional cripple. Don’t you fucking know that? It was with difficulty that she reminded herself that it was Odin she was speaking to, and not Kevin. I am sorry, Odin. Deeply, deeply sorry. I caused Kevin pain beyond what he could endure. How do I atone for that? Shall I cut my wrists for him? I would do anything—anything at all to undo the harm I caused.
“WHY DID YOU HIDE YOURSELF FROM ME?”
Odin had no use for apology. He demanded explanation. But how could Ali explain what she herself did not understand? Hadn’t she spent her life trying to identify the source of her nameless dread? If it were something susceptible to rational explanation, wouldn’t she have reasoned it out long ago?
Ali’s thoughts were fragmenting. Her heart was racing; she felt her arms and legs turn to ice — a sign, she knew, of a massive adrenergic discharge, brought on by an explosion of emotional energy as Odin ransacked her limbic system. In a matter of minutes, her heart would end up beating so fast that it would cease to pump blood at all.
“WHY DID YOU HIDE YOURSELF FROM ME?”
Let it go, you son of a bitch! I can’t explain it! Don’t you understand?
Then a sobering thought came over her: Is this the portal? Is this question the one thing that stands between me and the ghost at the center of Odin’s mind?
She turned to flee. But there was nowhere left to flee but into herself. She thought of manipura, the place under the ribcage. You are the flame of self-pursuit, the thirst that never quenches. You are the tiger that prowls the jungles of desire. But her spirit was in tatters. She ran headlong into the pitch-black night. Briars cut at her feet. The wind sighed into her ears. And as she ran, she answered with a sigh of her own. Kevin! Oh, Kevin! Kevin … Dear God, what have I done?
The geometric figures that Harry had seen had given way to images—dark and blurry at first, then clearer, as though a lens were slowly being zoomed into focus. They were images of numberless objects—faces, houses, village streets, animals, food, hands, torsos clothed and unclothed—all flashing with a prodigious rapidity. Many of them were of things Harry recognized: Kevin, Dr. Helvelius, Jamie, scenes from the hospital. Harry was even startled to glimpse himself, in a lightning-quick flash, standing buck naked with a gun in his hand. But many of these images were strangely altered, almost to the point of caricature. Helvelius had a luxurious mane of chestnut hair. Jamie’s eyes were beacons of golden light. Harry’s own skin was made out of strange, iridescent metal.
Odin’s reading her mind, thought Harry. But these aren’t memories—they’re secrets. He was troubled by what seemed to be a monstrous indecency. These are thoughts she would never have divulged to anyone—perhaps not even to herself. And here is Odin raking through them. It’s like a rape of her mind.
The rape of her mind was clearly uncomfortable, even painful. Ali’s body stiffened. She rocked her head back and forth, forcing Harry to grasp it between his hands to steady it. Her breathing came in fitful gasps. Her pulse was rapid, and hard as a hammer.
“Enough, for God’s sake!” Harry shouted. “I can’t keep her still. The probe’s gonna break loose inside her. Back off!”
But there was no response from the monitor on the wall. The images flashed even faster, and now seemed to be in motion, like snippets of film from a cutting-room floor. There were sounds, too—voices in English, Arabic, and French—laughing, weeping, shouting. If Harry had had Odin’s omniscience, he would have seen that these images were not being displayed in the laboratory alone. They had spread onto every monitor in the hospital, as Odin expanded his computing power to the utmost capacity, draining electricity from every socket. Spread out among the nursing stations, radiology reading rooms, operating rooms, laboratories, the ICU’s, and humble secretaries’ desks, Ali’s life was streaming across a thousand computer screens.
She knelt in the hot sand of the desert, her arms wrapped around a slab of yellow stone, as the whirlwind shrieked about her, biting her earlobes, tearing her ragged clothes to ribbons. I am too small to stop this wind. It towers over me, like the spirit of wickedness and rebellion. From beneath her, a sound—a dry rasp, softer than a rat’s foraging. She knew what it was—the scratching of a dead hand against the vault of stone. Oh, Wafaa, my beloved! Blood of my blood, star of my heaven! She clawed at the lid of the tomb until her own fingernails were broken. Exhausted, she fell with her arms outstretched, clutching the stone so tightly that no one could tell who was alive, and who was entombed.
Ali could barely think any longer. It seemed that Odin was fighting back at her, bombarding her conscious mind with dreams, trying to make her waste precious seconds before she succumbed to exhaustion, unconsciousness, and death.
Her overworked brain was fading, starved for oxygen—yet all she could think of was her sister, Wafaa. Bright, laughing Wafaa. Stormy, teary-eyed Wafaa. She saw the comeliness of her sister’s body, the black swath of kohl upon her eyelids, her tinkling bracelets, her dresses of azure and white and gold. How Ali had env
ied her! But God had killed Wafaa because she was profane. No, not God, Ali thought. I know who it was now. She saw Wafaa’s neck, long and white as ivory. She saw his dusky hands upon it—a brother’s hands, made for love but long ago perverted into something else. She saw his thumbs crushing her sister’s throat, which so many times had sweetly sung her to sleep. Did Wafaa keep on struggling to scream? To pray? Rahman had told her that God hated her. Did she believe that lie in her last seconds of life? Did the murderer of her body murder her spirit, too?
Ali’s mind was like a field afire, whipped by wind and heat. A thousand tongues of flame rose up from the buried hell of her primeval emotional brain: rage, lust, guilt, shame, sorrow, panic, defiance, despair.… She remembered that she was searching for something and that she had to hurry … Quickly, quickly!
On the edge of the desert waited a hideous black dog, its skin covered with worm-eaten tumors, its mouth drooling fetid pus. The dog wanted her to run, hungering to slash at her legs and heels, to bring her down and infect her with its venom. But she did not run. She rose to her feet and locked her stare with the pitiless yellow eyes of the beast. Filth! she exclaimed. My sister’s sin was of nature. But mine is incomparably greater. For I dare to look upon you as the unholy thing you are! Her gaze pressed hard against the dog, with such force that its legs collapsed, and it fell to the ground as if from a rifle shot. It clawed the earth, yelping as bloody foam poured from its mouth. But she felt no pity. She pressed all the harder with the force of her avenging gaze. On every side, whirlwinds rose up, carrying dark funnels of sand a thousand feet into the air. I will tear you with my own teeth, even if it means taking your poison into myself. Oh, my brother!
Ali’s body was now rock-hard, her back arching off the table. Her teeth were clenched. With her right eye pinned by the probe, her left eye frantically darted from side to side.
Harry tried to hold her down, but even with his whole weight upon her, he couldn’t keep her still. She was stronger than he ever thought possible, and rigid like iron.
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