Singularity

by Bill DeSmedt

  The escalators were the giveaway. They could all be re-geared at a moment’s notice to run in one direction: straight down. The shafts the escalators plunged through were pitched at a dizzyingly angle to the vertical. And they all ran at extremely high speed. Conveyor belts, in other words, to shunt as many Muscovites as possible into the safety of the Metro’s subterranean caverns if and when the sky rained death.

  In peacetime, it still made for a scary high-velocity ride, like stepping off the edge of a cliff and plummeting down, down into the bowels of the earth. Even veteran straphangers sometimes blanched at the brink of the Oktyabrskaya escalator. And this was going to be Stevie Schumacher’s first time.

  Preoccupied by what lay ahead, Knox paid scant attention when it finally came time to flash his pass at the wizened blue-capped checker. He and Stevie were halfway to the escalator when an outraged croak came from behind. Knox felt the pluck of arthritic fingers at his sleeve and turned to find himself face to face with the ticket-checker again.

  The old man was mouthing a stream of rapid-fire, spittle-punctuated Russian at him. Something about his ticket.

  Hadn’t the geezer seen it? Knox retrieved the little cardboard booklet that held the monthly transit pass and flipped it open again. This only incensed the old man further. Glancing down, Knox saw why: the pass he held was for August. He must have forgotten to swap it out when he bought the new one yesterday. Did he have the September pass on him? He patted down his pockets distractedly. Where he could have left the damn thing?

  Three stories below, the 4:54 screeched to a halt at the platform.

  “Train!” Stevie cried out joyously. Suddenly his little hand had wriggled free from Knox’s grasp and he was gone.

  Knox watched in stunned disbelief as Stevie dodged between legs on a beeline for the shaft. His paralysis lasted only an instant. Then he shoved the ticket-checker out of the way and took off in hot pursuit. A whistle blasted behind him, not half so shrill as the little boy’s first screams. Stevie was on the escalator!

  “Stevie!” he yelled. He couldn’t make out Stevie’s small form in the crowd, but he could tell from the shrieks echoing up the shaft that the child was already some distance down and moving away rapidly. If he should fall on the racing stair . . .

  “Stevie, hang onto the rail!”

  Knox elbowed through the line and flung himself onto the crowded escalator. Now he could see Stevie as well as hear him, maybe halfway down the long shaft, still screaming at the top of his lungs. And he could see something else as well.

  From the platform far below a young woman in a jeans jacket, hardly more than a girl herself, had run onto the down escalator. Pushing and shoving through the homeward-bound commuters, ignoring their oaths and imprecations, she was working her way up against the tide.

  She reached the terrified child, scooped him up in her arms and hugged him tight.

  Stevie flung his arms around her neck and collapsed with a sob. Together the two rode the rest of the way down to the safety of the platform below.

  To Knox, still shaking with reaction, the sight bordered on the beatific. With her backlit honey-blond hair, the glowing serenity of her face contrasting with the concern in her emerald eyes, the young woman seemed an icon of the Madonna come to life there in the depths of the Moscow Metro.

  Galina, the way Knox had first seen her, the way he would always remember her: Galya, holding a child.

  Marianna took her eyes off the rear end of the minivan she was tailgating just long enough to check on her latest acquisition, her resource and last resort. No change; Jon Knox was still sitting there in the Viper’s passenger seat, not moving a hair, not saying a word. Other than the occasional sharp intake of breath in response to one of her road-warrior maneuvers, she hadn’t heard a sound out of him since she’d handed him the picture of Postrel’nikova maybe five minutes ago. He’d spent all that time just sitting there, gazing at the image with preternatural intensity.

  That gaze, she’d learned, could look right through you. The hooded gray eyes lent an air of uncanniness to an otherwise presentable enough face.

  More than presentable. Pretty good-looking actually, in an older-guy kind of way. A nice smile, a kind smile, the little she’d seen of it; he’d been sort of grim since she’d acquired him. He looked fit enough, too, considering he spent his days behind a desk. Oh, and those socks didn’t really go with his slacks. Most likely hetero, then: the straight guys she knew all seemed to dress in the dark.

  “You okay?” she said.

  “Hmm? Yeah. Or I will be if you’ll keep your eyes on the road!” he added in a tight voice.

  Marianna swerved to avoid the eighteen-wheeler. “You got so pensive there.”

  “I guess. It’s just I’m having a real problem figuring out why Galina, of all people, should have shown up on CROM’s radarscope.”

  “I’m really not at liberty to discuss—” Marianna began, but the Archon resource wasn’t listening.

  “Lord knows she’s smart enough,” he went on, half to himself, “Brilliant, even. But all her research was in MHD, magnetohydrodynamics:

  stellar magnetospheres, fusion power generation, that sort of thing. Nothing with a military application. Nothing that could hurt people . . .

  “. . . Nothing that could hurt children.”

  He wasn’t staring at the picture any more. He was staring at her, as if trying to read an explanation in her face.

  “So, I guess I’ve been sitting here,” he said quietly, “trying to figure out how just about the kindest, most loving person I ever met could have become the target of a counterterrorist witchhunt.”

  “Counterterrorist?” This was getting too close for comfort. “What gave you the idea—”

  “Counter-proliferation, then,” he cut her off, his voice not so quiet now. “Whatever you call it, it’s insane. Ask anyone who knows her: Galina would die before she’d sell blacklisted technology to the monsters. And there just isn’t any other way she could’ve wound up in Reacquisition’s crosshairs, now is there?”

  Marianna swallowed. He wasn’t supposed to know any of that. None of it yet, and some of it never. What was it about this case? Each time she started getting it back on track, it blindsided her from a new direction. Now even the Archon option was spinning out of control on her.

  “You are Reacquisition, aren’t you?” he asked. “Not Interdiction?”

  “If I was Interdiction,” she snapped, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation!”

  “That’s something, anyway.” He sounded as if he understood what turning the case over to Interdiction would mean: don’t make any long-range plans—like, for the weekend.

  “So,” he continued, “that would make you one of Aristos’s direct-reports. His second-in-command, maybe?”

  “Listen, I don’t know how you came up with this stuff, but it had to involve violating the National Defense Security Act seven ways from Sunday.”

  “Actually, you handed me that one yourself, when you had your daemon forwarding email to reack-z. And while we’re on the subject of culpability . . .” He showed her his smile again; it didn’t look so kind now. “You’d best be packing a warrant or two. You could be looking at maybe five counts of wiretapping and mail fraud, not to mention assorted breakings and enterings. Uh, back in lane, please.”

  She crossed back over the white line in plenty of time to keep the frantically honking semi from rear-ending them.

  Look on the bright side, Marianna told herself as she nosed out a BMW to make the Newark Airport exit: the Archon resource was definitely living up to his advance billing. Maybe what Pete persisted in calling her crazy scheme had a shot at working after all.

  5 | Interview with the Shaman

  “IT’S STILL IN there.” Dr. Jack Adler repeated his mantra over and I over as he trudged up the spine of the Silgami Ridge. “I know it’s I still in there.”

  “You spoke, Professor Adler?” his hiking companion asked in accented Eng
lish.

  “Just talking to myself.” Jack glanced over at Dieter Hoffman, Professor of Ethnography at Hamburg University and the expedition’s resident Siberian folklorist, trying to gauge whether the older man might be ready for a rest break. With his wrinkled cheeks and snow-white beard, the lean, ascetic German looked to be well into his sixties, yet so far he’d hardly broken a sweat. If anything, Hoffman’s eagerness for the climb only seemed to increase the closer they approached the summit, and their goal.

  Jack sighed and went back to metering out shallow breaths, his unwelcome doubts beating in time to each one of them.

  Hell, it’s got to be in there. But—

  But can I prove it?

  Jack got that sinking feeling again. His one chance of confirming the Jackson-Ryan hypothesis rested with the Superconducting Quantum Interference Device he’d lugged halfway round the world with him. And the SQUID was malfunctioning. He should be back at base camp right now, nursing his sick machine, instead of trekking through the taiga en route to some improbable meeting.

  An impossible meeting, if you took everyone else’s word for it—impossible to arrange, that is. The man he was going to see had not consented to speak with a Western scientist—indeed, any scientist—in twenty years or more. Still and all, the chance to speak with the last living eyewitness to the Tunguska catastrophe! So Jack had dutifully put in the request. He’d been more surprised than anyone when it was granted.

  And now here he was, against all odds, puffing and wheezing his way to an interview with—

  “What’s this old guy supposed to be again, Professor Hoffman? Some kind of witch doctor?”

  That stopped Hoffman in mid-stride. He turned and looked down his long, thin nose at Jack—no mean trick, seeing as Jack had three inches on him, easy.

  Finally the older man said, “I believe the term you are groping for is ‘shaman.’ ”

  “Same difference, right?”

  “Ah, well, if I may be frank, ‘witch doctors’ exist only in the overheated imaginations of your Hollywood screenwriters. A shaman, on the other hand, is a holy man—a practitioner of mankind’s oldest religious tradition. He is a bridge between the Middle World of men and the Upper and Lower Worlds of the spirits. In short, he is the tribe’s authority on, and emissary to, the wider cosmos.”

  “Sort of a primitive cosmologist, huh?”

  “ ‘Primitive’ is hardly a scientific designation,” Hoffman said, a hint of frost in his voice.

  Jack sighed. Seemed he couldn’t say word one without rubbing Hoffman the wrong way. And he needed the prickly little Prussian: no one else on the expedition was fluent in the Evenki language.

  “In fact,” Hoffman was still talking, “shamanism has as good a claim to modernity as, say, Christianity. It is still practiced throughout the world, in your own Wild West no less than here in Siberia. Though here, of course, is where the term itself originated.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Shaman is in fact an Evenki word, transmitted to Western scholarship via the early Russian anthropologists. Its root meaning is ‘the one who knows.’ ”

  “Knows what?” Jack asked.

  Hoffman’s lips quirked. “That, my dear Professor, is what we are here to find out.”

  It took three rings before Jonathan Knox opened an eye on the unfamiliar dark of the Reston Hyatt hotel room. Triangulating on the noise and on the ghostly glow of the incoming-call display, he managed to snag his Treo handheld from its charger cradle on the third try. He thumbed the unit into cellphone mode.

  “Hello?”

  “Good evening, Jonathan.”

  Evening? According to the handheld, it was a hair past three A.M.

  “Mycroft? I thought you’d be calling closer to, uh . . .” Closer to what? Six-thirty? Seven? Mycroft would’ve long since turned in by any civilized callback hour. Still, Knox supposed he should consider himself lucky the old night owl had bent the rules even this much, agreeing to lift Weathertop’s ironclad late-night communications curfew, just this once. An honor of sorts.

  Knox didn’t feel honored, just groggy. He shook his head to clear it, flicked on the nightstand lamp, and tried again. “Is it done?”

  “Already in your inbox, assuming you’ve got your email set to autofetch.”

  “Let me check.” Knox switched the display to Snappermail and scrolled down the message list looking for Mycroft’s return address. “Okay, looks like it’s here. What now?”

  “If you’ll transfer the attachment to your memory card, I can talk you through installation and testing.”

  It took ten more minutes, and two false starts, before Mycroft finally pronounced himself satisfied.

  “Thanks, Mycroft,” Knox said. “Nice piece of work. Any problems getting it coded up?”

  “None at all, other than timeframe. Why the rush, if I might ask?”

  “I’ve got a meeting first thing in the morning. Could turn adversarial. Will turn adversarial, if the past is prologue. I couldn’t see going in totally naked.”

  “The best defense, eh, Jonathan? Well, I’ll be here and standing by, should you need me.”

  “I appreciate that, Mycroft. But I’m really hoping I won’t.”

  The view from the top of Silgami Ridge was almost worth the climb. From up here, Jack could see the whole of the Cauldron, as the early explorers had christened the valley of the Impact. What must this vast basin have looked like when Leonid Kulik first glimpsed it in 1927, before scrub pine and larch had scabbed over the scars on the land, obscuring the treefall pattern that radiated out to the horizon? Even now there was an eerie foreboding about the place.

  Which made it all the harder to understand why anyone, holy man or not, would have chosen to live here. To live within sight of the disaster that had nearly claimed his life.

  Yet that was what the man he’d come to see had done. Jack abandoned the vista, turned to look at the small encampment set back against the scraggly treeline. Just a cluster of huts dominated by a central choum.

  That choum was an outsized, all-weather edition of Jack’s own birch-bark tepee back at base camp. With one curious extra. As Jack walked up to the dwelling, Hoffman was staring at the strange structure jutting out of its roof: a thin vertical pole with a rectangular frame lashed to it. The whole ensemble had the look of some Neolithic TV antenna, if you discounted the animal hide stretched across its frame.

  “Think he gets MTV on that?” Jack nodded at the contraption.

  Hoffman shot him a disapproving glance before looking up again. “This is really quite unique,” he said. “I have seen such charms, but only in old photographs, never before in real life.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “The deerskin is a sacrifice to appease the storm god Ogdy, in order that he not send his thunderwings against this house.”

  “Thunderwings?”

  Hoffman shrugged. “Mythical birds. They are said to be the size of a grouse, but with bodies made of iron. In Evenki legend, they are the effectuators of the storm god’s wrath, sent forth to rain destruction on the Middle World.”

  “As in the Tunguska Event?” Jack couldn’t quite hide his smile.

  “This must all seem foolish to a man of science such as yourself, Professor Adler. But you would do well not to show it now. We are about to enter the home of someone who believes in it unreservedly.”

  With that, Hoffman faced the choum and uttered a stream of liquid vowels interspersed with harsh consonants, presumably a greeting in the Evenki language.

  It had no visible effect. A minute went by, two, then Hoffman tried again. This time, rustling movement could be heard within. One corner of the tent flap lifted. Jack caught an impression of a small, dark, oval face, high cheekbones, dark eyes peering out at them.

  “That can’t be our guy,” Jack said. The rawhide-clad man—no, woman—now emerging on hands and knees from the choum s interior couldn’t be a day over forty. Any eyewitness to the Tunguska Event would have to
be well over a hundred by now.

  “No, no, of course not. Let me see.” Hoffman spoke again in Evenki, and this time received a lengthy response.

  “Her name is Akulina,” he translated, “an apprentice to the shaman, and his eldest great-granddaughter. She rejoices at the coming of Eagle.”

  Eagle?

  At Akulina’s urging, Jack crouched and followed her into the choum, with Hoffman bringing up the rear.

  It was refreshingly cool inside after the midday heat. Cool and dark. What little sunlight managed to sift in through overlapping layers of birchbark was all but absorbed by the heavy deerskin hangings lining the walls. Only a single bright shaft slanted down from the smokehole to strike the floor and scatter dim illumination throughout the interior.

  As Jack’s eyes adjusted to the half-light, he could see they were not alone. On a small rectangular rug in the center of the choum he could make out a kneeling figure, hunched over, head down.

  “He awaits us on his dehtur,” Hoffman’s whisper came from behind Jack. “A good sign, a very good sign.”

  “His what?”

  “A dehtur is a prayer rug—a consecrated mat of worked reindeer hide. Within its confines are joined the three Worlds of the Evenki cosmos. Its presence here signifies that our host means to speak of sacred mysteries. As does his ceremonial dress—look!”

  The shaman wore a robe of fringed rawhide, metallic talismans dangling from its many tassels. As Jack watched, he lifted his head and inspected his visitors through the eyeholes of a leather mask shaped to resemble the head of a bear.

  With his apprentice’s help, the shaman slowly got to his feet and removed the bear’s head. The face that emerged from beneath it was almost as brown and leathery as the mask itself. A strong, square face bearing the ravages of time and pain and age.

  But what caught Jack’s attention were the eyes. Dark, almost black, they fairly shone with secret wisdom. What had those eyes witnessed on that long-ago morning?