“Somehow. Yes, that’s the implication. I can’t imagine what it means in practical terms.”
“Whatever happened at the lab may still be happening. There was that incident on Beacon Street.”
“God in a pillar of blue light?”
“God or someone.” Howard hesitated. “You know, I truly thought he would be here. Ruth, I had—I still have—a powerful feeling that Stern is alive.”
“Yes. So do I.”
They regarded one another.
“But if he’s alive,” Ruth said finally, “I don’t know where he can be except at the lab, and I thought the lab had been destroyed.”
Maybe not, Howard thought. He recalled the buildings trapped in light; the luminous forms roaming the old Ojibway land.
Ruth stood up. “Howard, it’s getting late. Things being what they are, you shouldn’t cut it too close to curfew. But before you go, there’s something I want you to see.”
She led him up the stairs to a door at the end of a dim corridor.
“It used to be a spare bedroom,” Ruth said. “He made it into his study.”
The door opened on a tiny room crowded with bookcases, the bookcases overflowing with volumes Howard supposed had been his uncle’s. There were physics journals shelved with religious esoterica, philology texts next to photo reproductions of Aramaic codices. Had Stern taught himself to read Aramaic? It was unlikely, Howard thought, but far from impossible.
The room was obviously Stern’s. There was a sweater hanging from the back of the wooden chair that faced an oak desk, an electric typewriter—no computer.
The room even smelled like Stern, a musty echo of pipe tobacco and crumbling paper. Howard felt dizzy with the memories it evoked.
“I never went in here much,” Ruth said. “He didn’t like me to. I didn’t even clean. Even now, I don’t go in here very often. It feels funny. But I’ve looked at a few things.” She picked up a thick bundle of typewritten pages bound with a rubber band. “He left this.”
Howard took the manuscript from her. “What is it?”
“His diary,” she said. “The one he never showed the people at the lab.”
The single word JOURNAL was typed on the top page. Howard regarded it with wide eyes.
He said, “Have you read it?”
“Only a little. It’s technical. I don’t understand it.” She looked at him solemnly. “Maybe you will.”
AXIS MUNDI
PART THREE
Our work yields a harvest of impossibilities. Speculation is that the fragment may not be matter as we conventionally know it—apart from its measurable mass and volume, it lacks qualities we would call material. It cannot be subdivided. Its structure is grainless, undifferentiated even at great magnification, though optical scanning might be misleading for several reasons. Its radiation violates the inverse-square law as if the curvature of local space were being disturbed by an immensely greater mass, though the fragment can be lifted by four reasonably strong men (although none of us would be so unwise as to touch it). It seems to conjure high-energy photons from the surrounding air and shifts them toward the red as it radiates them. The effect includes reflected light: the fragment actually seems disproportionately more distant as you back away; that is, it shrinks too quickly with distance! The inverse is also true and makes nearfield measurement almost impossible. At microscopic distances, the fragment appears as a homogeneous structure as large as the surface of a star, though fortunately not as energetic! Although this makes it hard to handle, perhaps the miracle is that it is not much harder.
What a privilege to be allowed to witness these mysteries. How strange that the fragment should have come from an excavation in a Middle Eastern desert. Draw a radius of a thousand miles around the dig site and it encloses centuries of religious thought: Moses, Jesus, Mithra, Mani, Valentinus. . . .
Recall Linde’s idea of the observable cosmos arising from a chaotic “foam” of possible configurations of space and time: embedded in, tangled up with, other universes similar and dissimilar. In a dream I saw the fragment as something whole, as a sort of “wormhole boat” for traveling between adjacent islands of creation.
In the dream the vehicle was assembled by luminous beings, strange and unknowable: dwelling in the Pleroma? Using the device to penetrate the mystery of Created Matter—but unsuccessfully—broken fragments of ur-substance scattered through countless islands of space–time including our own. . . .
We mean to bombard the fragment with high-energy particles. Knocking on Heaven’s door.
—from the secret journal of Alan Stern
CHAPTER 16
When the Bureau de la Convenance collaborates with the War Department, Symeon Demarch thought, anything is possible.
The test gantry had been assembled in his absence. It rose from a bald patch of ground in the forest two miles west of the wreckage of the laboratory facility, and it looked deceptively simple: a steel tourelle that might have passed for a watchtower. A crane was in place to lift the weapon into its cradle.
The weapon itself—or its parts, prior to final assembly—had arrived on two fiercely guarded trucks from the airstrip in Fort LeDuc along with a cargo of nervous technicians. The bomb parts resided now under the roof of a tin shed nearby, tended under glaring banks of lights by the same white-smocked civilians.
Demarch walked the grounds with Clement Delafleur, the Ideological Branch attaché who had become his chief rival in Two Rivers.
A gentle snow encircled the two men and softened the harsh angles of the gantry on its concrete pad. The snow did nothing to soften the equally harsh lines of Clement Delafleur. He was at least ten years older than Demarch and much closer to confirmation as a fully fledged Censeur. The lines of his face were a geology of ancient frowns and disapprovals. Etched there by decades of political maneuvering, no doubt. Delafleur had more friends at the Centrality than Demarch himself—perhaps even including Censeur Bisonette, whose branch loyalties ran in one direction and personal loyalties, perhaps, in quite another.
All of which meant that Demarch could not openly question the wisdom of hanging twelve of the town’s children by the neck until dead. He could only allude to it—delicately.
Delafleur chose to be more blunt. “What they were doing was insurrection and the actions I took were well within our brief. You know that as well as I do.”
The noon bell sounded across the camp. Demarch listened as the ringing faded into the perimeter of snowy trees. He wondered what he ought to say. His own position was still unclear. He remembered riding back into town and seeing the small corpses dangling like wheat sacks from the street lamps. He had ordered them cut down.
He said, “I won’t debate the justice of it. Or your authority to give the order. Only whether it was wise to generate more ill feeling.” He nodded at the test gantry. “Especially now.”
“I fail to see why I ought to be concerned about the sensibilities of people who are next door to annihilation.”
“To avoid provoking counterattacks, for one.” A military patrol had already taken rifle fire from a grieving parent. The parent had gone the way of his offspring, but on a less public gallows.
“We can deal with that,” Delafleur said.
“But should we have to?”
“It’s moot.” And Delafleur looked at the test gantry as if it answered all objections.
Perhaps it did. Demarch had learned a few things about the nature of the weapon. “Difficult to believe . . .”
“That it can do what they say? Yes. I don’t understand it myself. To think of everything within such a vast radius leveled or burned. The engineers have cleared a firebreak all around the perimeter, or else we might lose much of the forest—we might burn the entire Peninsula.” He shook his head. “They say it operates on the same principle as the sun itself.”
“Incredible.” These trees would be kindling, Demarch thought; and the town a brick oven—an oven full of meat.
The image made hi
m wince.
“You deserve some of the credit,” Delafleur said, looking at him slyly. “It was your idea to plunder the libraries, was it not? Which, I’m given to understand, helped advance the work on the bomb. At least by a few months. They were already well along, of course. So it isn’t all your fault.” Delafleur’s smile was bottomless. “You needn’t look so startled, Lieutenant.”
He consulted with Delafleur and an adjutant about evacuation plans. The agenda came from the capital, but there were details to be arranged. It was almost surrealistic, Demarch thought, to be negotiating escape timetables with this prim, endlessly fastidious Bureau functionary. Delafleur was like so many of the hierarchs Demarch had met, ambitious, loyal, and utterly innocent of conscience. The impending deaths of thousands of people mattered to him less than the protocol of this rush to the exits.
But wasn’t that as it should be? If the deaths were sanctioned by Church and State, wasn’t it absurd to question the decision? If Bureau functionaries made their own policies and obeyed their own consciences, surely the only result would be anarchy?
Still, there was something evil about Delafleur. According to the Church every soul possessed an apospasma theion—a fragment of God. But if such a fragment existed in Delafleur, it must be buried very deeply.
When the negotiations were finished, he drove through a bitter dusk to the house where Evelyn was.
In the bedroom, she looked at him with a wounded wariness—the way she had been looking at him every day since his return. He knew she had seen the executed children, though she hadn’t spoken of it.
Her wide, bruised eyes reminded him of Christof.
Upstairs, intimidated by her silence, Demarch showed her the documents he had obtained from Guy Marris. Evelyn looked at them with no visible emotion. “This is me?”
“For certain purposes.”
The travel permits were blue, registration yellow, citizenship green, birth and baptism pink. Guy had been as thorough as ever.
“I’m not as tall as it says.”
“It won’t matter, Evelyn. No one really looks.”
She folded the papers and handed them back. “This is for when we leave town.”
“Yes.” He knew she had surmised something of what would happen. He didn’t know how much. They hadn’t talked about it; only exchanged glances.
She said, “When?”
“The decision hasn’t been made.”
“How soon, Symeon?”
This was treasonous, he thought. But so were the documents. So were his thoughts. There was no turning back now.
“Before the end of the month,” he said.
CHAPTER 17
Dex talked to Bob Hoskins, who sent him to one of the PTA parents, Terry Shoemaker, who introduced him in turn to a skinny ex–charter pilot named Calvin Shepperd.
They met in Tucker’s Restaurant, in the small back room that had served as a pantry in the days when there was enough food to store. Dex shook the older man’s hand and introduced himself.
“I know who you are,” Shepperd said. “My brother’s girl Cleo was in your history class couple years back.” He seemed to hesitate. “Bob Hoskins vouched for you, but frankly I was reluctant to have you involved.”
“May I ask why?”
“Oh, the obvious. For one thing, you’re seeing that woman from outside.”
“Her name is Linneth Stone.”
“Her name doesn’t matter. The point is, I don’t know what she says to you or you to her. And that raises a question. Plus, didn’t you used to go out with Evelyn Woodward at the bed-and-breakfast? Who’s been on the arm of the chief Proctor lately.”
“Small town,” Dex observed.
“Is, was, and will be. I’m not opposed to gossip, Mr. Graham, especially nowadays.”
“As gossip, it’s honest enough,” Dex said. “All those things are true. Maybe they’re liabilities, but they gave me access to some information you need.”
“Meaning?”
“Bob Hoskins tells me you’re trying to set up an escape route to ferry out some of the local families.”
“Bob Hoskins must have a fair amount of confidence in you.” Shepperd sighed and folded his arms. “Go on.”
Evelyn had come to his apartment three times with fresh information, much of it gleaned from documents Demarch had left unattended on his desk. Dex described the firebreak, the bomb—the apocalypse bearing down on Two Rivers like a runaway train.
Shepperd leaned against a shelf that harbored a single gallon can of pinto beans and listened with a fixed expression. When Dex finished, he cleared his throat. “So what are we talking about—a week, two weeks?”
“I can’t pin it down, but that sounds like the right range. We might not have much warning.”
“They’ll have to evacuate the soldiers.”
“I don’t think they’re planning to.”
“What, you mean leave ’em here? Let ’em burn?”
Dex nodded.
“Jesus,” Shepperd said. “Cold-hearted bastards.” He shook his head. “Bet any money the Proctors move out, though. So there’s some warning there . . . if any of what you’re telling me is true.”
Dex said nothing.
Shepperd put his hands in the pockets of his jacket. “I suppose I should thank you.”
Dex shrugged.
“Incidentally, Hoskins said he was surprised when you came to him with this. He figured you were mainly talk, not much action. So what changed your mind?”
“Twelve kids hanging from the City Hall lampposts.”
“Yeah, well—that’ll do it.”
Twelve kids hanging from the lampposts, Dex thought as he walked the snowy streets.
Twelve kids, some of whom he had known personally; three of them his students.
Twelve kids: any one of whom might have been his son.
Might have been David.
If David had lived.
“He didn’t believe you?” Linneth asked.
She sat at Dex’s kitchen table warming her hands over a pot of ration tea. The sky beyond the window was blue; a cold wind rattled the loose pane.
“He believed me,” Dex said. “He didn’t want me to know it, but he believed me.”
“How large is his group?”
“Maybe thirty, forty adults plus their families. According to Bob Hoskins, they’ve scared up some hunting rifles and even a couple of automatic weapons. Amazing what some people keep in their basements.”
“They hope to escape?”
“So I gather.”
“It isn’t very many people, considering the size of the town.”
“There are other groups like Shepperd’s, but they don’t talk much to each other—and it may be better that way.”
“Still, no matter what, too many people will die.”
He nodded.
She said, “Even the scholars from outside. I don’t think they mean to let us leave. We’ve seen too much and we’re too likely to talk about it.”
Dex said, “We’ll get out. A few lives saved is probably the best we can hope for.” He shrugged into his jacket.
She said, “Where are you going now?”
“Unfinished business. I’m going to look for Howard Poole.”
“Let me come with you.”
He thought about it. “There’s another jacket in the closet. Leave yours here. And keep a scarf around your head. I don’t want us to be recognized.”
She walked beside him in the street, head down, her arm in his. She was small and perfect, Dex thought, and probably doomed, like everybody else in these quiet winter houses.
CHAPTER 18
So much had become clear in the last few days—Howard didn’t know how to begin to tell Dex.
Dex had come out of a cold afternoon without warning. He brought a woman with him: Linneth Stone, an outsider but not a Proctor, Dex said. “You can talk in front of her. She’s an academic, Howard—she has tenure.”
He looked at her.
“What’s your subject?”
“Cultural ethnology.”
“Oh. Kinship systems. Yuck.”
“Howard’s a physicist,” Dex said.
“Oh,” Linneth said. “Atomic particles. Yuck.”
But the news was more important than all this. Howard turned to Dex and said, “Listen, I found her.”
“Her?”
“The woman Stern was living with. She’s only a couple of blocks away. And she has all his notes.”
“Howard, that doesn’t matter now.”
“But it does. It matters a lot.”
Dex exchanged a look with Linneth, then sighed. “All right,” he said. “Tell me what you found out.”
Stern wasn’t the only physicist obsessed with God. Think about Einstein’s objection to quantum theory, or Schrödinger’s notion of the hidden unity of the human mind. If you look hard enough at the cosmos, Howard said, all these metaphysical questions emerge—religious questions.
But Stern’s obsession was much stranger than that. He had been God-haunted from his earliest childhood, driven by what could only be called a compulsion: by dreams or visions or maybe even a hidden physical problem: a tumor, temporal-lobe epilepsy, borderline schizophrenia. Stern had studied the world’s religious texts for clues to a mystery that must have seemed omnipresent, urgent, and taunting . . . the mystery of what might lie beyond the borders of human knowledge.
He had looked for answers with equal vigor in Einstein and the Talmud, in Heisenberg and Meister Eckehart. Physics gave him a career, but he never set aside his volumes of esoterica. He had been especially fascinated by the wild cosmogonies of the early Christian Gnostics, creation myths cobbled together from fragments of Judaism, Hellenic paganism, eastern mystery religions. In the flourishing mystical thought of the late Roman Empire Stern had perceived a fertile metaphor for the universe behind the quantum and before creation.
“He must have been a brilliant man,” Linneth said.
“Terrifyingly brilliant. A little scornful of his colleagues. He was capable of eccentric behavior—he never wore any clothes but jeans and T-shirts, even when he accepted the Nobel prize. But he had the brains to get away with it.”
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