“Surely not. Pastor Phillipson told me you quote Virgil.”
“She’s a liar. She quoted, I recognized it. Wait, here’s something else.”
He handed Edwin the Gilgamesh book.
“And you say this guy is you.” Edwin pointed at the cover, which showed a bas-relief of a rather sticklike ancient warrior holding a lion up by a hind leg in either hand.
“No, not exactly. But read it, and tell me what you think.” Rob leaned his seat all the way back and closed his eyes. He felt more nervous than he wanted Edwin to see. I’m getting nearer, he thought. Getting to the bottom of this. My life has been upside down since last May. Now I might find out how and why. He had been looking backwards so long, back to an old life as perfect and complete as the jewel in the bezel of a ring. Now he looked forward, and the future was unknowable, blank. He could not imagine what they would find in Aqebin, but surely it was unlikely to lead him back to his old happy life in Fairfax County. He would never be able to return completely even if he found a cure there. He himself had changed too much. Even his shirt size had gotten bigger. He’d noticed that at Edwin’s outdoor store—probably from doing so much physical labor. He fell asleep thinking about the fun Julianne would have choosing new clothes for him.
It was a long flight, more than thirteen hours. Edwin had managed the bookings, because he had the credit cards to clinch reservations. “But even American Express isn’t all-powerful,” he said. “I predict glitches.”
“I thought we had tickets, paid for in hard currency.”
“I talked to folks who had to bribe the pilot to take off in Novosibirsk.”
“At least we won’t have that problem,” Rob said smiling.
“Weren’t you going to give up muscling people?”
“Ordering innocent folks around is one thing. But if I buy and pay for something, at an agreed price, and the guy welches so as to screw more money out of me—then I think a little push might be in order.”
Moscow was deep in snow and bitterly cold. At the Aeroflot desk they learned that their flight to Samarqand had been cancelled. “You’ve got to be kidding,” Edwin said. “There’s only four a week, and you cancel one?”
The pretty airline clerk shrugged one shoulder, uninterested. “Fuel shortage.”
“I bet that’s what you tell all the guys.” He turned to Rob. “You want to spend a few days seeing Moscow, till the next flight?”
“No.” Rob leaned an arm on the counter. “Could we speak to someone in higher authority?”
The clerk’s big eyes got bigger. “How well you speak Russian!”
“I do?” Rob recovered fast. This was a perfectly reasonable extension of the weirdness. “I’m anxious to get to either western Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan. Can you help?”
“Your accent is perfect! That’s rare in an American.” She gave him a flirtatious half-smile. “I will call my superior. He will know.”
Edwin nudged him as she vanished into a side room. “You understand her?”
“It sounds like English to me. And she just said my Russian accent is perfect.”
Rob shook his head. “Sorry, Ed. Maybe the meaning has to jump from a living brain to mine.”
Edwin stared into the distance, a look of dreamy abstraction on his face.
“Afer all this is over I’m going to write a paper about it.”
“How about ‘Superhero Sidekick Tells All’?”
Edwin laughed. “I never thought of that! No, it’ll be more on the order of ‘Glossolalial Behavior as an Aspect of the Lewis Phenomenon.’ “
The supervisor was an entirely bald man in an ill-fitting blue suit. “No flight to Samarqand today,” he announced.
“But I have tickets.” Rob passed them over.
The supervisor flipped through them, clicking his tongue in annoyance.
“Very sorry for your inconvenience, but if there is no plane, what can be done?”
“Are there other flights to the area? We can be flexible.”
“Probably no.”
“Anywhere in Uzbekistan, how about that?”
“Let me see.”
He disappeared into the back. Edwin said, “So what’s happening?”
“We may well see the sights of Moscow after all. This guy says there’s no plane, and he believes it’s true—no question about greasing him. I wanted to get close to him to be sure.”
“Oh, come on!” Edwin slumped exhausted against the counter. “Can you, you know, do anything?”
Rob sat on one of Edwin’s bigger bags. “Sure. I could twist his arm, push him into overdrive, get him to pull some other plane or something. But should I do it? The problem is, Ed, the stronger I get, the less casual I can be about using this thing. In fact, if you carry the logical progression to the very end, you could imagine a time when I’m totally all-powerful—and can do absolutely nothing.”
“Sounds real Zen. And boring. You really think you’ll come to that?”
Rob stared out through the foggy window at the dull gray tarmac and wintry sky. If he couldn’t get a grip on the weirdness, if the monster inside
became impossible to keep down … “If I have to,” he said. “But maybe it’ll be like traveling near the speed of light—I’ll approach it, but I’ll never get there.”
“Good. Navel-gazing is not your style.”
“You got the map? They might be able to route us through some of these smaller towns. There’s nothing set in stone about Samarqand, right?”
Edwin pulled a map out of the side pocket of his briefcase and unfolded it.
He had marked their destination on it in pen. The northern swathe of the old USSR, now labeled the Russian Federation, swept across the large-scale map from the Baltic to the Sea of Japan. Cuddled beneath this enormous mass was Kazakhstan, itself the size of a third of the US. South below that dangled the smaller breakaway republics, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikstan. The Aqebin site was on the border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
“The big hassle is, there’s no there there,” Edwin said. “The Brits were digging in the middle of the Kyzylkum Desert, a couple hundred miles from any settlement. The Intourist people were going to have some sort of car for us at Samarqand. If we go anywhere else we’ll have to dredge up wheels ourselves. So don’t commit us to too long a drive.” He compared the distances by measuring with the edge of the paperback novel.
They waited for almost an hour before the pretty clerk returned.
“Zarafshan, all right? It’s not on the Intourist lists at all, so we usually don’t send Westerners there. But you won’t have any problems!”
Edwin stared expectantly at Rob, who consulted the map. “Close enough,” he said, pointing the town out to Edwin. “All right.”
Distances here were so tremendous that Rob’s expectations were confounded. The flight would take ten hours, but that seemed far longer than their crossing from America to Europe. The old Tupolev-154 plane did not inspire confidence as it labored through the air. The wintry tan and white landscape below was endless, a continent broader than many an ocean. “And it’s so old,” he said, looking out. “People have been crossing these plains since—since when, Ed?”
Edwin was valiantly clicking away on the laptop. “Oh, probably ever since we started walking upright. Couple million years or so.” After twenty-four solid hours awake, he was running on empty, nodding as he sat. When he dozed off at last Rob reached over and powered the computer down, to save the battery. Then he leaned back in the uncomfortable seat—designed for a shorter passenger—and took out his pocket notebook.
He headed the list Questions, and began marking off sections, leaving space for further additions: Origin. Control. Dealing with Regular People. After some thought he added, Other Place.
When he wrote this down it struck him. Had his private kingdom been invaded, spoiled forever by the mysterious visitor? Suddenly it really worried him. The inside place had always been there, part and parcel of the powe
r. He had forgotten it for weeks together, taken it entirely for granted as it had developed and changed inside his head. Now the prospect of its loss hit him with something like panic. He closed his eyes and dove within.
The important thing was not to get drawn into the dead-end paper landscape. He was obeying, going to Aqebin, so the unknown arrogant commander had no beef. Besides, if he went into another seizure Edwin would get upset.
Whether because of his deliberate effort or not, all went well. He found himself in a deep window alcove lined with books. “A library!” Rob exclaimed aloud.
It was no library he’d ever visited in real life. American libraries didn’t usually have carved ceilings and polished marble floors, or window seats cushioned in balding sun-faded corduroy. Perhaps it was a very large research library at a major British or European university.
He ran his fingers over the spines of the books, pulling out a volume here and there. A large collection of old books has its own aroma, a smell of paper and leather and glue all mellowing together. Rob sniffed it joyfully.
None of the titles was familiar and many weren’t in English. As in Moscow, his language skills apparently only extended to spoken words.
Beyond the first alcove was another, and then another. “This is great!” Rob said. He pottered happily for a long uncounted time through the maze of rooms, which connected and interlocked in a way that brought to mind the library in The Name of the Rose. If the books were organized, he could not fathom the system.
There were other patrons in the library too, quietly pulling books off the shelves or sitting at tables and taking notes. Rob hardly noticed these first human residents of his domain. They fit in so well they seemed like part of the building: typical library patrons, shabby-intellectual men in tweed jackets, and women with glasses and bulging leather portfolio briefcases.
Then, browsing down a long aisle, he saw something new—a small bright yellow object on the marble floor. It was a toy dump truck, a Matchbox. Rob picked it up. Around the corner sat the owner of the toy, a little boy.
Rob flinched. Davey? But this was an older kid, maybe four or five years old, in some kind of school uniform—knee pants and a blazer and cap to match. In Rob’s opinion though he was too young to be alone. “Where are your parents?” he asked.
The child accepted the toy that Rob held out but said nothing. Did he not speak English? Or had he merely been thoroughly drilled about talking to strangers? From the tears in the big brown eyes Rob judged it was the
latter. The kid was lost, and unwilling to admit it. “Come on then—we’ll look for them,” Rob said, and held out a hand. The boy thought it over, and took it.
There is a protocol about lost children, at least in America, that Rob instinctively adhered to. Never take the kid into a car, or into your house, or even to the potty. Go straight to the people in charge of the place and hand the kid over. The distraught parents would go there too. A reunion could then be achieved through the mediation of the building management, without lawsuits or accusations of molestation or kidnapping.
But this library was different. Search as he would Rob never came to the circulation desk, or the checkout counter, or the reference librarian, or even an exit. The bays opened out into galleries which led to interlocking rooms that petered out in dozens of alcoves. It was endless. He had not known there were so many books in existence. The scholars and researchers at the tables and carrels didn’t look up as they passed.
Rob was beginning to worry. Surely there must be a librarian in the place, if only to create and maintain order in the collection. He wasn’t in the right place. The boy’s mother or father must be getting frantic. The boy clung trustingly to Rob’s hand, a new sensation—his own two had been too small to walk hand in hand with a tall man. If he’d had any sense he would have circulated right in the immediate vicinity where he found the kid.
Probably the parent had been right there, one row over or something. Now he
wasn’t even sure if he could find the original aisle again. His good intentions were only making things worse.
The only thing to do, though it was not protocol at all, was to ask the other library patrons. He stopped at a long table where two scholars sat at opposite ends, each surrounded by stacks of musty fat books. “Excuse me,” Rob said. “I have a lost child here. Could you direct me to the librarian?”
The older reader, an elderly man with a goatee, put his finger on the yellowed page to mark his place and looked with surprise up at Rob. Then he looked down through his glasses at the little boy and said, “We’ve landed, Rob. Time to boogie.”
“What?” Rob blinked. Edwin was standing in the aisle of the plane, leaning on a seat back and staring humorously down at him. For a second Rob panicked—he’d left a child in trouble, unattended! Then he relaxed. The other library patrons could pick up the ball.
“You weren’t kidding,” Edwin said, “when you said you could sleep anywhere. You missed a landing I never want to go through again. Everyone’s gotten off the plane but us.” He held out Rob’s brown duffel bag.
Rob took it. “Did you see anything unusual? Or touch me?”
Edwin frowned at him. “Oh, I get it. No, you were smiling in your sleep, perfectly normal. I did give you a good poke when the seatbelt light came
on, but you didn’t stir so I hitched you up myself.”
“Good. Thanks.” Elated, Rob followed him up the narrow aisle. Much better than in the motel, he thought. I’m really getting there.
The Zarafshan airport was small and painfully ugly, a cinderblock building erected by Stalinists. The new independent government had removed the Communist emblems and the statues of Lenin without making any other improvements. As Edwin stepped through the door onto the sidewalk he was instantly engulfed by drivers, touts, and pimps, all shouting offers of cars, hotels or other services. Staggering with a bag under each arm, Rob burst out to rescue him. “Cut it out,” he snapped.
“You speak Uzbek!” an astonished hotel tout said. “But aren’t you foreigners? Americans?”
“That’s right,” Rob said recklessly. “And you are driving us to your hotel for an honest fare. Take this bag, please.”
In no time their gear was loaded into a rust-pocked Lada. Rob wasn’t using muscle, but still the driver gave him startled and curious glances in the rearview mirror as he drove them into town. “How’d you pick this guy?” Edwin asked.
“At random. Sometimes any firm decision’s better than dithering.”
Zarafshan was a tiny dust-colored town with no industry and no obvious tourist attractions. Cold winds swept powdery sand across its washboard roads under a brilliant blue sky. If Alexander the Great or Tamerlane had come through here on their conquests, they had left no signs of their passage. An older mud-brick central square was surrounded by a few tatty concrete blocks in poor repair.
The hotelier also seemed to find a tall fair man, visibly American but speaking perfect Uzbek, disconcerting. Rob had no trouble negotiating a reasonable rate for an open-ended stay. The hotel was tiny and primitive, a private house incompletely and badly converted for commercial use. It boasted only three guest rooms, but it was a block off the central square and therefore quiet.
In such a small town, organizing the next leg of the trip was going to be excruciatingly difficult. They spent a day resting up and adjusting to the time change before making plans. Edwin said, “Our problem breaks down into two sections. First, we need a vehicle that can handle the desert. And second, we need as detailed a map as we can get. The site map shows only ten miles or so of terrain, and the big national map doesn’t give the road detail we’ll need.”
“Intourist was going to set us up with a car in Samarqand,” Rob reminded him.
“Probably it would’ve been one of those Ladas. Didn’t the one from the airport sound like a lawnmower? I want four-wheel drive and a decent engine under the hood, if there is such a thing here. A vehicle we can rely on for desert travel.”
They were sitting in the only restaurant in Zarafshan, a liquor and wine shop that also served drinks and the local shish kebabs. Edwin held his glass of harsh red Uzbek wine up to the light. “I remember,” he said meditatively, “when you first turned up at the lab in October. You were in rags, practically inarticulate, scared spitless—am I right? Running on raw courage. And here you are six months later, full of confidence, total master of the situation.”
Rob squirmed uncomfortably in his green parka. “Don’t let me push you around, okay? I’m trying to quit bullying people. I just thought that having credit cards would make it easier for you to do the car rental.”
Surprised, Edwin looked at him over the glass. “I was speaking with admiration, bud. You’ve come a long way, and I don’t just mean to Uzbekistan.”
The unexpected praise made Rob so embarrassed he had to look around the
room. Most of the store customers wore local dress, loose woolen robes and baggy pants and sheepskin hats. But at the bar sat somebody different, a gray-haired man in a long tailored gray-green coat. Rob recognized the garment but it took him a moment to recall where he had seen one like it—in photographs of the old Communist regime, of course, worn by grimfaced old codgers on reviewing stands watching armored divisions and soldiers parade by. This must be somebody who used to be with the old government. And government people would have maps. Impulsively he stood up, carrying his glass with him. “Come on, Ed.”
“Where are we going?”
“A friend of mine just came in, and we have to say hello.”
Edwin stared around, startled. “Here? Who?”
“I don’t know his name yet, but hang on.” Rob went to the bar and stood beside the old Soviet. There were medals pinned to the front of his coat—better and better, a military type. Rob said, “Hi, I’m Rob Lewis. I’m a friend.”
How Like A God Page 19