“Llewellyn Llewellyn,” said the man in the yellow trousers.
“Quite,” said Rhinnick. “And this Llewellyn Llewellyn fellow claimed to have been sent by a chap named Norm, whose idea it was for us to head to Vera’s shop and inquire about your future. One can only assume that this Norm is also the Norm mentioned by this officious-looking chap in the yellow, unpressed pants,” he added, nodding toward the man in the yellow trousers.
“Carl,” said Carl.
“But why should we trust this guy?” said Ian.
“Carl,” said Carl.
“Why should we trust you?” said Ian.
“Norm’s a priest,” said Carl. “It was his idea to send me. And Llewellyn. We work for him. We’re supposed to help you along. It’s in the scripture.”
“Detroit has priests?” said Ian.
“Detroit has scriptures?” said Rhinnick.
“There isn’t time,” said Carl.
“Oh, there’s definitely time,” said Rhinnick. “It’s all over the place. I mean, that explains all of the clocks and things —”
“No, I mean there isn’t time to talk about this. We have to run. I’ve got to get you to my office.”
“Where’s your office?” said Tonto.
“Down the hall,” said Carl. Then he said something odd that sounded a bit like “I’m on faculty in enje fizz.”
“What’s an enje fizz?” said Ian.
“Engineering physics,” said Professor Carl.
“Congratulations,” said Rhinnick.
“Do you trust him?” said Tonto, grabbing Ian by the shoulders and staring intently into his eyes.
A voice in Ian’s head said that he could trust him. So he did.
“I . . . well . . . well yeah, I think I do,” said Ian.
“All right,” said Tonto, turning to Carl. “Get them out of here. Go now.”
“But what about you?” said Ian.
“I’ve got to stall Socrates. I’ve got to buy you some time and, I don’t know . . . maybe give Nappy a chance to get Zeus out of there. Either way, I’ve got to go back into the Hall.”
Ian looked at her.
Tonto looked at Ian.
There is a face that people make when they’re about to meet The End.
It’s made by submariners right before they say “Close the hatch behind you — someone’s got to stay and shut the valve, and it might as well be me.”
It’s made by soldiers while they’re saying, “You get out of here, I’ll stay behind and keep the bastards busy.”
It’s made by parents as they manage to choke out the words, “You’re in charge now, Suzie. Look after little Jimmy, and make sure that Violet eats her vegetables. Run along now, all of you. Mummy and Daddy will stay behind. We’ll always love you.”
The selfless face of personal sacrifice, the face that means, “I’m taking a bullet because that’s what pals do for each other,” isn’t often seen in Detroit, largely because “personal sacrifice” is rare in a population for whom life and time are infinite resources. But it was seen now.
It was seen on Tonto.
Tonto knew she was going to die. Socrates would wipe her mind, just as he’d wiped Zeus and Vera. She accepted it. She knew that the assassin had come prepared, and she knew what he could do.
She knew that Socrates couldn’t be stopped.
She’d face him anyway. It’s what she was meant to do.
She gave Ian a final squeeze on the shoulder. “Get him out of here,” she said, nodding at Carl. “And you, Ian — go find your wife. I know that Vera was right. Everything depends on it. Go with Carl and Rhinnick.”
Tonto rose to her feet, brushed a strand of hair off her face, turned on her heel, and strode back into Conron Hall.
There was a sudden burst of gunfire, and a scream.
Chapter 37
The apple fell, as it were, on July 17, 18,183, at 5:57 p.m. (Central Time Zone, to be precise), just as Ian and Zeus were chatting with Woolbright Punt: post–duck pond arrival, pre–mindwipe of Zeus. Bisect the temporal line connecting these two points in history, cast your eyes in Isaac’s direction, and you’ll see the apple fall.
Or rather you won’t, because it wasn’t really an apple — not the honest-to-goodness, orchard-variety apple, such as one might use for pies or corporate logos. It was more of a metaphorical apple, which is to say, not really an apple at all. And not being an honest-to-goodness apple — or even, when it comes right down to it, a tangible physical object — it didn’t actually fall. It coalesced.
In other words, Isaac had an idea.
This sort of thing was happening all the time. Isaac was practically famous for it. He had ideas about gravity, he had ideas about matter. He had groundbreaking ideas about mass, and space, and time. He had promising thoughts on hair loss, punctuation, traffic management, and the Dewey decimal system. He had a number of ideas about sex, love, postage rates, potato starch, and hemlines, as well as ideas about the underlying order that bound these things together. Once he’d even had an inspired, surprising, and radical idea he’d called “democracy,” but scrapped it moments after his realization that he’d be outvoted by people who didn’t have ideas.
But Isaac’s most recent idea — the one that wasn’t an apple and didn’t fall — was one of the good ones. Isaac felt it in his bones. This idea would make a difference.
It was precisely the sort of idea that the City Solicitor had meant for Isaac to have when he’d arranged for Isaac to stop taking the pills. And now, less than a week after Isaac had gone cold turkey, the appropriate synapses fired, the relevant neurotransmitters transmitted, and the requisite glial cells rolled up their sleeves, spit in their hands, and flexed their muscles. The apple fell. And the result was even better than an idea. It was a theory.
It explained how Detroit worked. It explained the dual-age phenomenon. It explained Tonto, and Socrates, and the nature of Abe’s power. It came within spitting distance of explaining everything. It was, in a manner of speaking, Principia Detroitius Causa.
But don’t get too excited. Isaac’s theory didn’t explain the Omega Missive — not entirely, at least — and it said nothing at all about the beforelife. It didn’t explain Abe’s origin. But you can’t expect one theory to do everything. Even so, Isaac’s theory came close. And because this theory also suggested a thing or two about the City Solicitor, a creepy-crawly, tingly sensation ran the length of Isaac’s spine.
The City Solicitor was dangerous. He was infinitely more dangerous than Isaac had previously imagined, and that was saying something.
Isaac’s theory explained why.
Isaac’s theory made Isaac nervous.
To use the precise psychological terminology, drawn from Khuufru’s Expansive Log of Cognitive Foibles and Mental Disablements, Isaac’s theory gave him a case of the screaming jibblies. It was owing to the effects of screaming jibblies that Isaac presently paced back and forth on the white ceramic tiles just outside a locked bronze door.
Make that a brass door.
Or rather, an ivory door.
No — check that. It was a pine door. A steel door. A swaying, beaded curtain.
The door was a charred, oaken door. Yes, definitely oaken. And definitely charred. With lots of intricate scrollwork around the edges and fiddly little raised bits near the knob.
Neither of the obvious explanations was correct: Isaac wasn’t going mad, and Rhinnick’s Author wasn’t having an uncharacteristic fit of editorial indecisiveness. The door itself was changing. It really was. Except that it wasn’t, because every time the door changed, it had always been exactly as it was.
When it was bronze, it had always been bronze. When it was pine it had always been pine. When it was highly adorned, charred oak with gargoyles and eldritch runes and otherworldly squiggles it had always been highly ador
ned, charred oak with gargoyles and eldritch runes and otherworldly squiggles.
The door was changing. Retroactively through time. In response to the untold power that lay beyond.
A power that didn’t even know what it was doing.
A power that had been suppressed for centuries.
A power that was struggling to break free.
Isaac shuddered.
This was the same power that had remanifested Socrates — good as new — in the wake of the explosion at Vera’s shop. And here it was, asserting itself unconsciously through feats of home renovation.
At the extreme edge of hearing, Isaac sensed the sounds of gently lapping waves, echoing drips, and an eerie, tuneless hum — sounds that came from beyond the door. Either that, or the sounds were born in the darkest corners of Isaac’s imagination. Producing eerie noises was the sort of traitorous thing that an imagination would do to someone pacing outside this door — provided only that the someone in question knew what lay beyond.
Isaac knew exactly what lay beyond.
A thin fog caressed the doorway’s edges, seeping between the cracks. Something beyond the door produced a tooth-jarring squeak.
Isaac paced and mopped his brow. Owing to the fact that advanced cases of screaming jibblies lead the afflicted to exhibit all manner of self-comforting tics, Isaac exhibited one of his favourites. He pulled a datalink from his pocket and studied a set of calculations.
The file containing the formula needed for these calculations was, as you might expect, heavily encrypted. Had you been able to penetrate Isaac’s cipher, you’d have discovered nothing more than a formula predicting the duration of late-winter storms and an easy-to-follow recipe for a very nice pea soup. But if you then combined the first, third, ninth, and tenth characters of every sentence in each of these entries, and then re-sequenced these characters by reference to the inverse square of that letter’s distance (in picometres) from the centre of the page on which it appeared, you’d have found the basic elements of the formula that lay at the heart of Isaac’s theory.
Isaac called up his formula, re-entering data he’d compiled through observation and experiment. His fingers danced across the keypad at a pace that might have made lightning throw in the towel. The calculations supported a clear conclusion. They confirmed the critical finding of Isaac’s theory. He had known they would. He had hoped they wouldn’t.
The anomaly wasn’t unique. There were others. Other ultra-powerful beings with the long-prophesied power of unmaking — the ability to reshape the world at will. The power to shatter Detroit’s foundations. The unfathomable, mind-bending ability to bring all of reality to its knees — if reality had knees. And if reality didn’t have knees, the power to conjure up a made-to-measure set of knees and bring reality to them.
Every one of the Anomalies was that powerful.
Isaac shuddered at the plural. Detroit, he had discovered, was home to at least three Anomalies, each with the power to change the world. One was Abe. One was Brown.
And the third anomaly — the one that was currently putting Isaac’s sweat-resistant undershirt through its paces — was the City Solicitor.
The City Solicitor had the power to break Detroit and remake it in his own image.
Recently freed bits of Isaac’s brain painted a highly creative and distressing set of apocalyptic images, then ordered another round of jibblies to run the length of Isaac’s spine.
Isaac eeped. Not very loudly, but he definitely eeped.
“I hear you, Isaac,” said a voice from beyond.
Beyond the door, that is. Not “beyond the veil,” “beyond the great divide,” or beyond in any supernatural sense. But you could have been forgiven for attributing to the voice a vaguely supernatural quality.
“Isaac?” said the voice, growing louder.
“Ah. Ahem. Y . . . yes, my lord,” said Isaac. “Are you, erm, decent, my lord?”
The lock turned. The door creaked open with a cinematic, dread-portalish sort of creak. A heavy mist billowed through the gap, steaming Isaac’s glasses and bedewing the polished tiles. It took a lot to leave Isaac fogged, but this mist was up to the challenge.
The City Solicitor stalked out of the mist. Well, hopped, really. It’s hard to stalk while wearing a floral green dressing gown and a pair of grippy flip-flops. He was also holding a big, fluffy towel and doing the one-legged, head-slapping, eye-squinting hop common to everyone whose ears have swallowed a gallon or two of water.
It’s tricky to seem imposing when you’re hopping out of the bath. The City Solicitor could have managed it on his head. The overall air of menace was assisted, to some degree, by the fact that Isaac knew what Isaac knew.
“What is it?” said the City Solicitor, pointing at Isaac with a sponge that he’d produced from who knows where.
What is it? thought Isaac, house-mousier than ever. Oh, nothing, really. Merely that Abe, Brown, and — most distressingly, now that I’ve had a chance to think about it — YOU appear to have the power to bend reality at will. Create life, for example. You created Socrates and Brown created Tonto. And you recreated Socrates — more menacing than ever — after his body was destroyed by Vera’s explosion. Exactly how you needed him. And you did this unintentionally, it seems, without even knowing that you could. The fact that you managed this in a way that changed history — bringing Socrates into being retroactively, as it were, years before the act of will by which you created him — is merely the icing on the cake, if by “icing on the cake” one means “the thing that is apt to keep me sleeping with one eye open for the foreseeable future, as though that would do any good.”
He might have ended this last thought with “Ye gods” had the concept of a god been familiar. It wasn’t. But given the scope of the powers apparently shared by Abe, the City Solicitor, and Brown, the general outline of the concept of a god was starting to etch itself into Isaac’s imagination.
It put the fear of Abe into him. And the fear of Brown. And — due to a combination of proximity, familiarity, and the indefensible prejudice most people have about lawyers — an especially large helping of fear of the City Solicitor.
All these thoughts, up until now, had stayed politely in Isaac’s head. It was one thing to discover a theory of everything. It was quite another to find the words to express it. “You’ve got superpowers, my lord” wouldn’t have fit the gravity of the occasion, and if there’s one thing for which Isaac was a stickler, it was gravity.
In the meantime, various parts of Isaac’s brain — specifically those that had been freed once he’d stopped taking his blue pills — were asking questions. Important questions. One of these was should I lie? Another one was should I tell him anything at all? Yet another was what exactly will he do to me if I don’t tell him what I know, and he finds out on his own?
Isaac stood in silence for 6.7 seconds.
Then Isaac made a mistake.
Isaac told the City Solicitor the truth. The whole truth. Everything he’d deduced.
You will probably have learned, by this point in your career, that there is an extraordinarily broad category of situations in which honesty is not the best policy. This was one of those situations. Isaac failed to notice this, and spilled the proverbial beans — if by “proverbial beans” one means the most important and dangerous secret ever told.
He started with Abe, since most things did. He moved on to Socrates and the dual-age phenomenon. Then he handed over his datalink and walked the City Solicitor through the encoded calculations — the formulae that explained . . . well . . . Everything. Everything that had ever mattered to the Solicitor. And because the City Solicitor was Very Clever Indeed — well equipped with that insidious, pathogenic sort of cunning that naturally thinks up tax loopholes, bio-weapons, and hot yoga — the entire process took no more than thirteen minutes.
Isaac’s Theory of Everything made th
e City Solicitor frown. And then smile. Another frown, a wry twitch of the right-hand corner of his mouth, and then a grim, thin line.
“At last,” is what he said.
Chapter 38
“Ian,” shouted Rhinnick, “you’re a copper. What do we do?”
The speech centre of Ian’s brain formed the words “I’m not a copper.” These words were pinned down in the crossfire between other parts of his psyche, namely (1) the inner policeman, who secretly dwells within the self-image generator of all regulatory compliance personnel, and (2) the primordial survival instinct, which won.
“Run!” he shouted, grabbing Rhinnick’s arm and heading straight for a crowd of especially clever academics who’d had the collective presence of mind to escape the bullets, Vibro-Blades, and boson whips of Conron Hall into the relative peace of the hallway outside.
The phrase “relative peace” is, one has to admit, a less-than-perfect expression for a riot of know-it-alls trying to cram themselves through spaces that Noah would find too cramped for passage. They presently bottlenecked in a T-junction about forty scholars west of the Hall’s main door.
Ian, Rhinnick, and Carl elbowed their way through the mob only to pop out into the path of two burly, uniformed specimens of Detroit’s Finest, presumably on the trail of recently escaped mental patients. This was presumable for two reasons. First, one of them was holding a copy of the familiar Wanted poster that had recently been held by campus security, and second, because that was just the sort of day that Ian was having.
Come to think of it, this was the kind of afterlife that Ian was having.
One of the Men in Blue removed all doubt by pointing at Ian and shouting “It’s them!” over the uproar of the mob. The mob, for its part, assisted matters by sloshing en masse down the hall like an inter-faculty tidal swell, barrelling straight into Ian, Rhinnick, Carl, and the two policemen, all of whom ended up in a struggling heap.
Rhinnick regained his feet first — something he’d have chalked up to lissomness, grace, or the Author’s will, but which had more to do with extra supplies of adrenaline and dumb luck. He assisted matters, uncharacteristically, by laying the boots to the two recumbent officers with a few heartfelt cries. He then helped Ian and Carl to their feet and suggested, in that long-winded way of his, that an immediate escape would constitute sound policy.
Beforelife Page 41