Manny nodded in agreement. Somewhere he’d picked up a stick and was tracing with it in the gravel.
“Humanity is still mainly a debtor species,” he said. “We still take out a lot more from the world than we give back to it. We haven’t begun to turn that around yet.”
“I wonder if Jiro Yamaguchi’s ‘irenic apocalypse,’ as his brother calls it, might yet prove too little, too late,” Diana said quietly.
The three of them sat in silence for a minute. Brandi cleared her throat.
“Manny mentioned Seiji Yamaguchi,” she said. “He said I should visit him while I’m here.”
“Certainly,” Diana agreed. “Seiji and Jhana Meniskos are sharing a place in one of the new ’borbs, though. They just moved.”
“Really?” Shaw said, surprised. “I imagine those places are pretty raw, yet. Land of the stick trees. Nothing’s had a chance to grow or settle in. Like this place in the early days.”
Brandi glanced down, disappointed.
“You should see them if you get a chance,” Diana Gartner said, standing up and stretching. “Between the two of them they probably know as much about what the Light is or was as anybody does.”
Manny and Brandi followed Diana’s lead and also stood up. The three of them walked along through the commons in silence again for a while, admiring the edge-gardens around its margins. Once again it was Brandi who broke the quiet.
“I was just wondering,” she said. “You were the one who taught my mother how to trigger her talent, weren’t you?”
Diana looked away, seeming suddenly very interested in the flower she was looking at.
“Yes,” she said, nodding. “I almost wish I hadn’t, given what eventually happened to her.”
“You taught her about ‘going Elsewhere’?” Brandi asked. “And her ‘witch’s brew,’ as Manny calls it?”
“I’m afraid so,” Diana said. “I learned about those sorts of things indirectly. From the Project. Funny thing was, Cyndi didn’t want the talent for the talent’s sake.”
“Why did she want it?” Brandi asked. She tried to keep a certain unease out of her voice as they strolled along together.
“So she could better understand what I felt,” Diana said, “and what Acton felt, when we had our encounter. So she could document it better for her Five Million Day War. In some sense she did it for her art’s sake.”
“That’s always bothered me,” Brandi said.
“Why?” Diana said, genuinely curious. “Afraid the talent might be hereditary?”
“Not that, really,” Brandi said, looking down at a border of poker primroses labeled Primula vialii, their pink and purplish flowers blooming off like a slow-motion rocket launch. “I just wouldn’t want to risk my life and sanity altering my brain chemistry to trigger something like that.”
“What your mother chose is not for everyone, certainly,” Diana said with a shrug. “More and more people seem to be following her route, however. Even without the old triggers.”
“What do you mean?” Manny asked, turning away from the lupines he’d been examining.
“Just that, if you took a census or a big survey,” Diana replied, “I bet you’d find that the occurrence of subtle abilities—siddhis, or paranormal powers, if you like—has gone up quite a bit since the Light.”
“And you think these effects, these traces, were left by the Light?” Brandi speculated.
“In a lot of different heads,” Diana said with a nod. “My evidence is only anecdotal so far, but I think it’s pretty strong.”
“No ‘powers’ in my case,” Brandi averred. “Thank God.”
They came to the edge of the commons from which a webwork of paths and trails led away. Each path was broad enough to walk three abreast at first, but they soon narrowed as less-traveled paths branched off.
“My way splits from yours here,” Diana said to her companions. “I hear you have other talents, Brandi—besides a precocious understanding of spaceship design. The newsbuzz a while back said you’re one heck of a fireboarder. True?”
“I’ve burned in a few times,” Brandi said with a shrug, in the understated argot of her sport.
“Good,” Diana said, nodding. “I have access to a quaint little piece of ship design myself—a stealth trans-at spyflyer. She’ll do Mach 30 in the upper atmosphere. I’ll take you for a spin, if you’d like.”
“I’d like!” Brandi said, eyes wide and smiling. She’d heard rumors of such craft, but had always thought they were as mythical as unicorns and sea monsters. “Let me know next time you’re doing a downhill run and I’ll be happy to ride shotgun.”
“Ah, you aggressive women and your violent metaphors,” Manny said. “Tsk, tsk.”
They tried to ignore him. Shaking hands and hugging good-bye, they set up a date for Brandi’s ‘shotgun’ run. As they walked away, Brandi was happy—and only mildly worried about how Juan might react to the prospect of a trip to one of the other ’borbs, and a run down the well.
* * * *
A hand falling heavily on a marble chess cube. A light forming around it as the hand seems to press the cube into the floor. No—the height of the cube shrinking, shrinking, becoming a flat two-dimensional sheet, still marked with the light and dark squares of its chessboard top. The hand taking the thin stone sheet in hand and rolling it up into a cylinder. Rolling the cylinder tighter, growing it longer, a strange checkerboard stone hose with meanders running through it. Taking the ends of the hose and bringing them together into a thin donut shape. Shrinking that down smaller too, one edge thinning in the process and the other bulging, until the donut shape metamorphoses into a small sphere. Pushing the sphere down into a point, smaller and smaller, until it disappears—
Barely understood forces warping the air around the four men in the den, warping something much deeper than the air itself, smoothly if fatally everting the men, turning them wrong side out, subtly twisting them into shapes out of a topologist’s nightmare—
Coming out of the infoburst this time without passing out, Mei-Ling Magnus gasped. Maybe she was getting a handle on this strange new “strengthening” of her crime-scene reconstruction ability. Or maybe this location—the death site of Samir Hijazi in Salisbury—wasn’t quite so strong in its impressions because it was older, less recent. She removed Hijazi’s connection gear and looked at Sullivan, who hovered protectively nearby.
“I think I’ve got something, Robert,” Mei-Ling said, exhausted, to her redheaded companion. “I just flashed on four people being killed in a group. Topologically. One of the men looked like that picture you showed me of Schwarzbrucke. We need as much information on Schwarzbrucke’s death as we can get our hands on.”
“I’ll do it,” Sullivan said with a frown, “but I’m tempted to counter with a demand that you promise me you’ll stop this deathsite touring. This is the third one, and you go into that catatonic remming seizure or whatever it is every time. When you come out of it, all the stuffing’s been knocked out of you. I don’t want the next death site you visit to be your own.”
“At least I didn’t pass out this time,” Mei-Ling said gamely, waving him away.
“I don’t know if that’s a good thing,” Robert replied. “Heaven forbid you should grow accustomed to experiencing other people’s deaths!”
“I’m not really experiencing their deaths,” she corrected as she got unsteadily up from Hijazi’s virtuality workstation. “I’m experiencing their last moments, as it were. Mainly the stuff they were being blasted with, in that brief moment while the infodensity built up around them. I’m beginning to see patterns. Perseverative thought patterns, to be precise. I think those patterns are reflections of what our killer is obsessing about.”
Sullivan maintained a thoughtful silence as they walked from the room and out onto the landing above the steps.
“You think this thing isn’t an AI?” he asked as they proceeded down the stairs. “This ‘Topological Voyeur’ is human, then? And connected with S
chwarzbrucke’s death?”
“I believe so,” she replied as they walked out the front door of Hijazi’s abandoned residence and onto the narrow street. “We’ll need more evidence to confirm the link. I think my initial hunch was correct: someone with an axe to grind against CMD or Schwarzbrucke himself.”
Sullivan beamed open the doors and they got into his car.
“Is this ability to live the last moments of the dead the reason why Landau and Mulla brought you in on this?” he asked as he started the car and pulled away from the curb.
“Not at all,” Mei-Ling said. “This ‘ability,’ as you call it, is all new to me. I’ve always been good at crime-scene reconstruction.”
“Minute observation?” Robert suggested as much as asked.
“More infotech focused, actually,” she replied “Putting myself into the logics of machines and grasping what was behind all the code, initially. Then I got pretty good at what the psychs call ‘temporal tracing’.”
“Putting yourself inside the ‘heads’ of killers,” Robert said sourly.
“Or killer machines—or their victims,” Mei-Ling said. “Just looking at where they’d been. Teletracing, profiling, scan keying—they’re all related. That’s how I came to be working undercover in Sedona. That’s where eventually I got hooked up with Landau.”
“A rather odd talent,” Sullivan said, shaking his head.
“Blessing and a curse,” Mei-Ling agreed. “But, before, it was always a sort of informed intuition and guesswork. It was never this blatant. The whole thing’s been cranked up a level. Now, it’s like I’m able to really see these things—not just guess at them. The more recent the crime scene, the better. It’s almost as if time hasn’t had time to collapse the events back into itself yet.”
As they cruised through sunset light beneath the grandiose steeple of Salisbury Cathedral—which seemed to loom over almost every prospect in the vicinity—they came toward a roundabout on the edge of town which jogged Mei-Ling’s memory.
“Hey, isn’t Stonehenge near here?” she asked.
“Not that near,” Sullivan said, “but close enough, I suppose.”
“Let’s go,” she said, putting her hand lightly on his. “I’ve never been there.”
“You were out on the cloudier edge of Scotland for God knows how long—and you’ve never been to Stonehenge?” Sullivan asked, incredulous.
“No, I haven’t,” she said. “Come on.”
“Look, Mei-Ling, it’s getting dark,” he said, gripping the wheel more firmly.
“Not yet,” she said, “and there’s a full moon rising early tonight. You can already see it. Please. Indulge me.”
“It’s the company car and the company’s money,” Robert said with a shrug, pulling off the road onto a side street in his usual breakneck manner of braking. “I’ll just check the travel holo—”
A three dimensional image popped into space between them, providing you-are-here overviews as well as two dimensional street grid coordinates.
“I would have thought every London resident would know immediately how to get to Stonehenge,” she said dryly, “since you’ve all been there before.”
“Does every South Dakotan know immediately how to get to Mount Rushmore without consulting a map?” Robert shot back.
“Touché,” Mei-Ling said, “touché. Humor the romantic in me. Stonehenge is where Tess gets captured by the police—”
“In both Hardy’s novel and Polanski’s movie—I know,” Robert said, pulling back onto the road. Following the directions appearing from time to time in the heads-up display on the windscreen, he drove along the A345, the sun disappearing and the moon rising, wheels larger and smaller turning and turning.
Above town they drove past the site of old Sarum, then to the town of Amesbury and left onto the A303, on toward the A360 and Salisbury Plain.
“The parking lot on the other side of A360 may be closed, you know,” Robert warned. “It’s late. The tramtrain from London has probably already stopped running for the night. The pedestrian walkway under the highway may be closed too.”
“It’s not that late,” Mei-Ling said confidently. “We might get lucky.”
As it turned out, they were lucky, at least from Mei-Ling’s point of view. The parking lot was open, as was the lightrail stop and the pedway underneath the road. Each of them purchased a disposable/recyclable/programmable ten-channel earplug “narrator.” Walking under the highway and up to ground level again on the other side, they made their way, station by station, around the stone circle, learning about the many Stonehenges that had stood at this location.
The “narrator” whispered into their heads speculations about the builders and the purpose of the ruined monumental complex. Paleoastronomy and the Druids and Merlin and Atlantis, the Celts and Romans and eighteenth century antiquarians—Mei-Ling heard about all of them. Her favorite, however, was the folkloric name for Stonehenge: “The Giants’ Dance,” a legend which held that the stones were actually giants that had been petrified for dancing on Sunday. More importantly, through the story of the giants the narrator linked Stonehenge and other British megaliths to Scandinavian stone labyrinths.
After nearly two full circuits of the lithic complex, Mei-Ling stopped in her tracks and just stared at the ruined maze of stones before her.
Robert stopped short, beside her.
“You aren’t ‘flashing’ on the stones, are you?” he asked warily.
Mei-Ling laughed lightly.
“No, no,” she said smiling. “Not the way you’re thinking. No doubt murders have happened here, but they’ve long since dissolved back into the timestream.”
Into their heads the narrator whispered about station stones and barrows, heel stones and slaughter stones.
“How do they strike you, then?” Robert asked, curious. “Most people I know were initially disappointed by how small the stones actually are. Usually they expected something a good deal taller.”
The narrative in their ears had moved on to a discussion of the Bluestones and the Sarsen stones.
“That’s true, I guess,” Mei-Ling said, “but they have even more of a looming presence than I thought they would. Before Mulla and Landau snatched me out of my, um, sabbatical, I was doing some research into the history of mazes and labyrinths. Stonehenge strikes me as either a solar maze or lunar labyrinth. And that reminds me of Sedona.”
They began to walk slowly around the great stone complex again. In their heads the tour narrator spoke of trilithons and lintel stones.
“What about Sedona?” Robert asked, above the earphone narration regaling them with thick detail about the moving and carving and dressing and positioning of the stones.
“Manqué had his computer systems set up so as to replicate the outline of an unruined, final Stonehenge,” Mei-Ling said, remembering it as they walked. “My partners, Marvin Tanaka and Erinye Jackson, and I—we had to make our way down several flights of stairs and through a labyrinth of air-conditioned corridors to get to Manqué and his ‘Brainhenge.’ A maze inside a maze of underground spaces. I never expected to find all that, blasted out of the living redrock the Myrrhisticine Abbey was built into.”
Under the fat full moon, the narrator whispered in their ears about ditches and banks, Aubrey holes and Z and Y holes.
“After passing through the maze of stairs and corridors,” Mei-Ling continued, “we came into a warehouse-sized room. At the center of that big space, Manqué had built a Stonehenge of tall Paralogics units. Each LogiBox was a massively parallel supercomputer worth kerjillions in the major world currency of your choice, at the time. I’d never seen more than one of them at any single site before. In Manqué’s Brainhenge there must have been forty of them.”
Walking in the moonlight the two of them somehow managed to hear both their discussion of Sedona and the whispering narrative about the overall construction of the great stone works, as it had taken place over thousands of years in the past.
; “Quite a collection of computing power,” Sullivan said.
“That’s what I said when we passed inside that computer ring of his,” Mei-Ling remarked with a nod. “We followed Manqué on to the center of his henge. That’s where his command console and desk stood. They were covered with faux stone, like everything else. At first glance, the central console looked like a Druid high altar.”
Something jogged Robert’s memory and he stopped on the asphalt path.
“Ka Vang, the head honcho of Paralogics, was a Myrrhisticinean,” he said, “if I remember my Tetragrammaton research correctly.”
“That’s right,” Mei-Ling said, turning back toward him, just as he started walking again to catch up to her. “Those brainboxes were donations to the Abbey, a huge tax write-off. They were the main servers for all the computing and virtual equipment up there.”
Robert paused beside her, noting how impressive the old Henge looked under moonlight.
“But you could probably run a dozen abbeys off of just one of those boxes,” he said, speculating.
“Off a fraction of one,” Mei-Ling agreed as they walked on. “Manqué knew that quite well.”
She lapsed into silence a moment. Robert felt no desire to prompt her or intrude upon her thoughts.
“The only time I ever saw him look truly comfortable was seated at his console,” she said when she began again. “On an ergonomic ‘boulder’ that conformed to his body shape. The big spider at the center of his web, bringing up a holovirtual in the space before his face—all very state of the art.”
“What was he working on?” Robert asked.
“I was curious too,” she said, “so I shoulder-surfed what he was looking at on that first tour he gave us. He pulled up a schematic of the architecture of the entire system. He had an incredible amount of memory and infocrunching power in reserve, there—and what turned out to be connections into virtually every sector of the infosphere. Links into every net and bulletin board in sharespace, no matter how small or obscure.”
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