The bridge to Heilige Berg lay in fragments at the bottom of the gorge, and the plateau on the other side was a cluster of smoking craters. For all the destruction, all the wreckage strewn across the mountainside, he saw no bodies anywhere. Either the battle had indeed been some kind of automated exercise, with unmanned planes fighting computer-controlled autocannons, or the field had already been sanitized.
Here and there, shadowy figures moved on the battlefield. He saw dumptrucks creeping across the plateau with crews of people in white winter camo snowsuits shoveling snow on fires, gleaning wreckage off the ground and tossing it into the trucks. The snow would cover the rest.
Nobody would believe it, because nobody knew it was here. The people who heard it would believe whatever they were told, because none of them had died. The cover-up probably wouldn't even make the front page, would flash across the bottom of the screen for three seconds during football highlights.
There were no witnesses. The National Guard units had vanished. Greenaway's men were gone. He supposed the people out there were from Heilige Berg, but in some strange, biological way, they belonged to Dr. Keogh.
This was a crime scene. It should be crawling with FBI, state police and the real Army, but there was only gunless, carless, phoneless, dickless Special Agent Cundieffe, AWOL in Idaho and one step ahead of the insurance investigator. Even Sheriff Manes had deserted him, speeding off the moment he climbed out of the Bronco. He had little doubt that the authorities would be up here in force to assist in the clean-up. Macy and Mentone would be along as soon as they'd cleaned up Karl Schweinfurter.
You'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh, so he did. He knew now that this had to be a nightmare. This whole day was a bad dream, had to be, because if all the things he'd seen and suffered today were real, he'd have gone insane or died from shock.
"There are many shades of reaction to tragedy, Agent Cundieffe," said someone behind him, "and none can say which is or isn't valid or healthy."
Cundieffe turned and ducked. He saw no one among the pillars of charcoal tree stumps and rolling smoke. "Who's there? I'm—" They knew his name, they'd probably know he was unarmed.
"I myself am rather torn about the loss of life. On the one hand, there is the pain and fear of the flesh, but beyond that, in the cessation of pain and the loneliness of the soul, there is peace, of a sort. I don't profess to know what lies beyond this world, but I do what I can to ease the suffering, in this one."
Cundieffe looked around again, and gave a short scream. Someone was simply there beside him, as if he'd dropped out of a tree or sprouted up out of the ground. Cundieffe gasped and took a step back. He knew this voice almost as well as he knew Storch's, though it had come out of Storch's mouth. Utterly barren of accent, though subtler, more aware, than Storch's. We are all one flesh, becoming one mind. "What are you doing out here, Dr. Keogh?"
He looked the older man up and down. He wore a woolen overcoat and sorrels. A black pickup was parked on the shoulder of the hill. He wondered if he hadn't noticed it parked there, or hadn't heard it drive up as he laughed at this nightmare he couldn't wake up from.
Very well. It was all a bad dream. "How many people were really in there, Dr. Keogh?"
The doctor ran his hands through his white hair and craned his neck down into Cundieffe's face. He bit his lip and looked away. Those eyes had bored into him once before— again, out of Storch. "Only forty patients and staff were present, along with the complement of security. We were very fortunate, in that the majority of our residents were recently rotated out to outpatient care. Many of them will be returning to their homes, or near to cities where they can get treatment and support. I myself was in Seattle until this evening, inspecting a new clinic. This place was only a way-station, a gateway."
Feeling emboldened now he knew he would wake up from this, Cundieffe met the scientist's gaze. "But people don't come to Radiant Dawn to die, do they, Dr. Keogh?"
Moonlight glinted off Keogh's smile. "Who wants to die, Agent Cundieffe? Who wants to be born into the world with the delusion of immortality, of individual freedom, and to build and destroy like a god, only to go alone into the dark, and feed their flesh to worms? Canceris the life force trying to change us. People come to us to learn how to open themselves to that change."
"You'd have to keep something like that well-protected, to keep all the sick people out, not to mention the Mission. You'd have to have armed guards, and military ordnance. That's going to a lot of trouble, when you could just ask the government for help. But then people would know about what happened in California, and here. Don't you think keeping this secret has cost enough lives?"
"I wouldn't presume to tell your masters their business. They have their reasons for what they do, and need justify it to no one. Why doesn't your kind let the world know about themselves?"
Hot flashes hit Cundieffe. Change the subject. "I met a boy from right down the road who seems to have cancer in every major organ, can you believe that? And he seems to believe that he left his community at just the wrong time, and everybody else got healed, but him. Unlucky boy, eh?"
"Or unfit. But you know all of this, Agent Cundieffe. You know as much as you need to about my business, and what was accomplished here tonight. You were sent for to help provide security, which you've done adequately. I'm grateful for the chance to have answered your questions, but there's still much to be done—"
"One more question, Dr. Keogh. How old are you?"
Dr. Keogh turned and went around the hood of the pickup, then stopped to look at Cundieffe. His eyes probed him as if he was speaking with his mind, but Cundieffe felt only a deeper chill stealing across wherever the eyes took him in. "Old enough to know better," he said, "but young enough to still try. You wanted to change the world once, when you were younger, didn't you, Agent Cundieffe?"
Up until about two weeks ago, he thought. Then I thought I knew what the world was. "I'm not as old as I look," he said lamely.
"Never stop trying to change the world," Keogh said as he climbed into the van.
Cundieffe watched the van go down the hill and out of sight before he began the precipitous trudge down to the road. He slipped and fell more times than he could count, and soaked his clothes. By the time he staggered out into the road with teeth chattering fit to cut his tongue to ribbons, the first state police jeeps and cruisers noisily logjammed the road where the National Guard had been only hours before. Sheriff Manes stood at the open gateway, beside two soft, sour-faced men he supposed were Boise FBI, and a short jelly-doughnut of a man with honest-togoodness mutton chops framing his flabby jowls, who could only be Lou Duckworth, the State Farm investigator.
Wake up! He screamed at himself as he walked down to meet them.
Sheriff Manes lurched at him and grabbed him by his right wrist. Cundieffe stepped back, but Manes twisted his arm behind his back and levered him onto his knees. "Young fella, these gentlemen here are from the Boise field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and they say they have no idea who the hell you are."
The handcuffs pinched, but he didn't complain. As he got into the back of the Sheriff's Bronco, he lost his footing in the slush and banged his forehead on the rear doorpost, and fell to his knees. No one moved to help him up. He saw only blobs of color and spinning wheels of blue and red fire in the darkness. The only thing he had that had survived this god-awful day, his glasses, were broken and lost in the road.
~27~
From the porthole in his sleeping compartment in the Spektr science module of Mir, Dr. Sherman Moxley could see the spacecraft grow from a speck to a silhouette against the cobalt backdrop of the earth, 250 miles below. For a moment, before he blinked and rubbed his eyes and took a good look, he thought, I'm going home.
The ship was black and sleek and predatory, and looked more like a fighter-bomber, or Lockheed's old SR-71 spy plane, than a shuttle. It was less than a third the size of big white school buses like Atlantis or Columbia, but bigg
er than the unmanned Progress drones that brought their supplies and took their garbage. They were two weeks past their extraction date, and had all but decided to abandon ship in the Soyuz capsule by week's end, but he knew from looking at it that this was not their ride home.
Moxley climbed out of his sleep-sack and swam through the Spektr module, threading a painfully memorized route through the maze of shadowy scientific gear, to the three-foot circular hatchway leading into the node.
A spherical chamber of hatchways, the node was the intersection of the six modules that made up Mir. From inside the modules, Mir was like a cruciform chain of interlocking motor homes, but inside the node, Moxley saw Mir for what it was. It reminded him of the plastic Habitrail hamster tube cities his parents bought for him in the Seventies. The ever-expandable habitat of modules and tubes, complete with treadmills and bottled food and endless busy-work, even smelled like the gerbil cages he had lovingly tended for a few weeks, then abandoned. That's us, he thought ruefully, swimming faster through the node and into the core living module: abandoned pets in a fancy cage.
One of the wags in his NASA support team had packed him some supplementary light reading that he only discovered a week after he'd arrived on the station. It was the full text of the 1998 House Science Committee Report, itemizing the many potentially lethal safety hazards aboard Mir, the rigidified incompetence of the Russian Space Agency's TsUP ground control, the cash-and-carry duplicity of cosmonauts who routinely covered up disasters, and the corruption at Energiya, the mostly private contractor that designed and operated Mir before and after the fall of the Soviet Union, and which had run the station and its human cargo into the ground. The recommendation of Congress two years ago had been that Mir be decommissioned and allowed to fall out of orbit, burning up in the atmosphere. In his dreams every night, it did, while they were still inside.
Ink-stamps in the margins beside the especially gut-wrenching passages gave the anonymous donors away: the PUSHies, a Bible-study group of spiritually flabby, childishly vindictive born-again astronauts. They were the kind of Christians who drove Moxley to lone-wolf spirituality—the well-fed, spoiled yuppie mystics who thanked God for everything, but asked for even more, as if God were a whipped parent with nothing better to do than stage-manage their super-biblically comfortable lives. If God did hear all their prayers, it logically followed that they were hogging His attention, and thus partly to blame for all the unchecked famine, disaster, plague and genocide in the world. He'd pissed them off once by posing this question at one of their weekly prayer brunches, and again by getting himself shoehorned into this mission. Their ubiquitous ink-stamps bore the two four-letter acronyms that defined the alpha and omega of their tedious creed: WWJD—"What Would Jesus Do?"—and PUSH—"Pray Until Something Happens."
Moxley crept across the core module, scrambled over the bundles of cable and ventilation hoses choking the mouth of the hatchway, and floated into the Kvant docking module, danger-close behind Arkady, who crowded the sealed docking port.
The Kurs automated docking system engaged as the ship approached the Kvant docking module, but true to form, the software crashed and aborted when the shuttle was only ten meters from the docking port. It backed away and immediately shot back at them at reckless speed, rolling to accept the docking collar on its dorsal surface, just behind its cockpit.
"What is it, Arkady?" he asked.
The mission commander only shrugged, grunted, "No radio contact."
There was no point in asking whether they'd heard from earth; out the porthole, he could see the piebald face of the South Pacific. They had radio contact for only fifteen minutes of every ninety-minute orbit, and were currently at the bottom of the black-out.
He found himself leaning as far over Arkady's shoulder as he could in hopes of getting a breath of fresh, or at least different, air from the ship. The air on Mir was synthesized from water distilled from their own urine, with all the springtime freshness such a process implied. The air of Mir stank of sweat and farts, fungi and the scorched maple syrup reek of antifreeze from leaks in the coolant system. Nobody trusted the SFOG solid-fuel oxygen generator canisters, which had caused a major fire in the Kvant module, four years ago. Every breath had been breathed in, and yawned, belched and farted out thousands upon thousands of times. Every story was told to death after the first month, and their faces had become meaningless elements of the cluttered environment of the station. Any change was welcome.
At the same time, he fought the urge to back away as far as he could. This ship had not come to take them home. Ergo, it was more people coming into an already unbearably claustrophobic place. They were practically castaways here, already, with only two more weeks worth of food and potable water left, and no resupply shuttle, no Progress drone on the way, which was probably a good thing, since one had crashed into Mir in 1997, and almost killed them all.
In his months aboard Mir, he had learned nothing if not how to think like a Russian. Astronauts expect safety and comfort; they expect good things to happen. Cosmonauts expect disaster, and they are seldom disappointed.
This was not what they needed, right now. It was one more enigma in an already unfathomable, unacceptable mystery. Literally anything could be behind that hatch, but nothing good.
"We're not expecting anybody?" Moxley probed.
Behind him, Ilya, the engineer, laughed and shoved aside billowing plastic sacks of trash they stored in the docking module. "We were expecting not to be here, so why tell us anything?"
The shuttle manually docked, and the docking port gasped and popped open readily enough after Ilya beat on it with a spanner. A crewcut head on a meaty bull-neck jutted into the Kvant module. The cosmonaut regarded them blandly for a moment, then shook out a cigarette and lit it. Moxley watched the flame with a caveman's mixture of awe and fear. In zero-gravity, the flame from the gunmetal blue Zippo lighter was a perfect, expanding sphere, like a new sun.
There were three of them. Their commander took Arkady aside for a brief, heated exchange while the other two swooped through Kvant and the core module, ducked through the node and into Kvant 2 as if they had the layout memorized, and had been training in zero-G all their lives. Moxley looked to Ilya, but the engineer's morose frown kept him from speaking up. The commander barked something at Ilya, and he retreated, presumably to help the other two cosmonauts.
Arkady settled into the command center, a foxhole amid stacked computer monitors, joysticks, clipboards and manuals. He punched up EVA protocols. Moxley was aghast. Before an EVA was even seriously discussed, the cosmonauts always wrangled for hours with Energiya. Contracts had to be revised, bonus allotments had to be posted, and insurance rates adjusted. But their visitors weren't regular Energiya employees. These men moved like the cosmonauts of yore, like the second coming of Yuri Gagarin. They moved like soldiers. They wore black jumpsuits with a single red star on the shoulder. The commander had a silver eagle on the collar of his tunic. He had a pistol in a holster at his hip.
Five minutes later, the two commandos emerged from the airlock at the far end of Kvant 2 in Mir pressure suits and speed-crawled, hand over hand, down the science module and back out onto the core. The one time Ilya had outfitted Arkady for an EVA, it had taken an hour to suit them up and check all the safety systems. Moxley had never asked, or been invited, to go outside. Ilya crawled back into the core module and hovered by the hatch, staring hard at the back of the shuttle commander's head.
Moxley resisted an absurd urge to tap on the glass and salute as they passed his porthole. Had they been detailed to repair some critical experiment Arkady couldn't be trusted with? But no, they were creeping over the skin of their own ship, of which Moxley could only see the nose from Kvant. He moved node-wards to find a better vantage, but the shuttle commander blocked the way.
"What do you know about it?" he demanded. His accent was so thick he might have been cold-reading from a phrase book. Moxley didn't answer, couldn't, so lost was he in the strang
er's face. It had been three months since he saw any living, breathing person aside from Arkady or Ilya. After such a lapse, a new person is a new species, speaking a new language, and must be acclimated to. Compounding the problem was the officer's face itself, which appeared carved out of flint, and turned molten before Moxley's startled eyes. "You were sent here to study. What did you learn?"
Moxley blinked. This was about him? About his wasted time in a can in orbit, watching something that defied all his understanding of astrophysics, and being able to tell no one on earth about it?
He told the commander what he'd told Houston. He made a production of it. He got out his charts, his spectrographic analyses, his gamma ray and X-ray images, hundreds of photographs.
From Mir he had logged eighteen separate events, documenting many of them extensively, given the limits of the outmoded, cranky Russian equipment, and the indeterminable nature of the event itself. At infrequent intervals, at a fixed point in space about a thousand miles above Mir, ordinary sunlight underwent an almost alchemical transformation into an energy that spiked all wavelengths in a complex pattern that overloaded his instruments, but left no quantifiable record at all, for a duration of one to six seconds. It was like hearing a cosmic symphony, when he could only perceive one percent of the notes.
That it was doing something meaningful, he could not dispute. It occurred at irregular intervals, but at very fixed locales, over the same precise points on the globe. Hovering just behind the terminator, it deflected the dying light of the setting sun onto northwestern Idaho; near Kiev in the Ukraine; several points in a belt across equatorial Africa; the Mato Grosso, in Brazil, and the foothills of coastal Peru; southeastern Iraq, hard by the Iranian border. He was no closer to knowing what caused it. He watched the sky and saw nothing until it occurred, and then he could see only the light. He showed the commander the few photographs that captured even a breath of the ugly majesty of the phenomenon. How the light twisted on itself and seemed to curdle as it poured down. It lasted for only a few seconds, and was visible for even shorter duration, but each glimpse was like a vision of some new, unimaginable eternity.
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