Angelfire mt-2

by Marc Zicree

  The others emerged behind us and stood gazing about. “I’m confused,” I admitted. “These can’t be the Adena mounds.”

  “Blue Mounds,” said Kevin. “About twenty miles southwest of Madison, Wisconsin.”

  “Madison? Damn.” Colleen was obviously impressed.

  “So, have I been productive enough?” Goldie asked me.

  I opened my mouth to answer, then realized Magritte had come through the portal with us and was treading air near Goldie. The chill wind moved into my heart. “Should she be out here?” I asked him.

  Goldie’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “She has to come out here, Cal. She doesn’t have a choice.”

  I watched the expression on Magritte’s face as she glided a little farther from the mouth of the cave, was aware that Goldie’s eyes were on her, too. “Do you feel… anything?” I asked. “Hear anything?”

  She nodded. “I hear it-the Storm. Like far-off wind.” “Does it hear you?”

  “Maybe not yet, but it will.”

  Goldie took a step closer to her and for a moment they seemed to be enveloped in a veil of light. I’d seen the effect before, and thought Magritte’s aura had simply expanded to take in Goldie. Now my imagination tried to tell me that Goldie had a faint aura of his own.

  “Right now we’re in a sacred place,” said Kevin. “There’s power here. Outside…” He shrugged and fingered the flute.

  “Let’s go back into the cave,” said Goldie. “I’m freezing my ass off out here.” He turned back, Magritte moving in unison with him. The aqua-gold halo remained intact.

  Back in the comparative warmth of the cavern, Goldie stepped us through his trail of discovery. “It hit me the day the Storm got in-at the waterwheel. Kev’s music allowed me to see the … the patterns of power around the water. When I touched the flute, I could see the same patterns around other objects. Even after he stopped playing, I could see them just by touching the flute. I realized the same thing happened, to one degree or another, whenever I picked up one of Kevin’s or Delmar’s ceremonial artifacts.”

  “Transference,” I said. “You talked about that when we were trying to figure out Enid’s contract.”

  He pulled my Parker out of his jacket pocket and clicked it. “This,” he said, “is how we figured out where that portal ends up. Transference. You have this little thing going with maps. Kevin can see portals. In fact, he found this portal himself. I sat him down in front of it with a map and this pen. It was kind of like dowsing. The transference allowed him to sense where on the map this puppy opened up.”

  “We transferred the ability to open portals the same way,” Kevin said. “Goldie learned to play my flute well enough to-how to describe it-endow a tune and then the flute itself with-well, ‘Goldieness,’ I guess you’d call it.”

  Colleen snorted.

  “Hey, don’t laugh,” said Goldie. “It works. Like I’ve always said, a little Goldie goes a long way. It took a lot of woodshedding, but I got to where I could play the portal open with Kev’s flute. Then he took over and worked until he could play it open.”

  “I thought you couldn’t do sound,” I said.

  “Ah!” he raised a finger. “True. I can’t do sound. But I could visualize the notes. I converted them into light.” He laughed. “I can convert music to photons! They couldn’t even do that on Star Trek. All they could do was make Tachyon fields.”

  “Yeah,” said Colleen, “but at least their Tachyon fields always work.”

  I shot Colleen a glance. Don’t step on him. Not now. “You said you used a map,” I said to Goldie. “You still have it?”

  Goldie pulled it out of his jacket pocket and handed to me. I unfolded it, found the Blue Mounds, and traced the path southeast toward Chicago. I looked up at the others.

  “Thanks, Kevin. This little discovery is going to cut our trip just about in half.”

  It should have been the best sleep I’d had for weeks. We were moving on, after all. Together. With a real chance of finding the Source, and a means of protecting Tina from it and bringing her to a place she could be safe. There was even a chance we could do more than that with Enid’s ability.

  During daylight hours I did a pretty decent impersonation of a man who’d come to accept all the weirdness. But at night, when no one was looking, I could easily imagine that a team of gerbils went into full throttle in my head, their little wheels spinning madly until they exhausted themselves.

  This was the stuff of which dreams were made.

  Pause, rewind, replay. The gerbils reeled out half-waking dreams of sequined portals with musical keys, sonic shields run by wind chime batteries, and legal jargon that resulted in toxic songs. Goldie saw “patterns of power” when Kevin played his flute. Richard Dreyfus looked at a pile of mashed potatoes and said, “This is important.”

  I thought about flares.

  I wasn’t sure-I couldn’t be sure-but I suspected that what the Source wanted flares for was power. What was it Magritte had said: it used them up, bit by bit.

  The way a flashlight uses up batteries.

  The gerbils chugged along, trying to carry me toward an epiphany while I strained toward sleep and mumbled, “I don’t get it.”

  The Quran, so Goldie tells me, records how Muhammad received his revelation from God through the archangel Gabriel. The angel visited the Prophet-to-be in his cave on Mount Hira, held out a book and said, “Read.” Muhammad, being illiterate, could not read, and told Gabriel as much. Three times Gabriel commanded Muhammad to read, and three times, the Prophet said, “I cannot.” Then, miraculously, he read. He got it.

  There was no commanding angel in my dream; there was only Kevin Elk Sings, failing to play a dam and succeeding in playing a key. There was no gleaming holy book; only a contract that slithered with tweaked legalese. There was no nation-building Prophet; only a Manhattan Pharisee, doggedly trying to read-to “get it.”

  It took me more than three tries, to be honest, but as I dipped into an exhausted sleep, I had read a word. And the word was “analogues.”

  All of the warped abilities with their strange new connections were analogues for the things the Change had voided. They were machineries. They didn’t work exactly as the old machineries had, but they worked in a parallel fashion. While material physics no longer applied, we now had a new physics-a physics of imagination.

  In the old physics, there were laws. If you knew how to apply them, you could make things happen-internal combustion, electricity, nuclear fission. I was willing to bet the new physics had laws, too. The trick was in application.

  Albert Einstein had been a prodigy of the old physics. Somewhere between here and our final destination, we had to become prodigies of the new.

  FIFTEEN

  DOC

  Wind. An arctic wind, full of rain that could quickly turn to ice. That was the substance of our world. It blew horizontal to the ground, stinging as if made of microscopic shards of glass. I was transported to the Russian hinterland and knew not even an atom of homesickness.

  The low tent in which we spent our nights shuddered like a drunkard forced to sobriety, fabric popping loudly enough to wake a deaf man. But not Goldie. And, as if to challenge the wind, Goldie snored.

  Somewhere near dawn on this, our third day on the road to Chicago, I decided to take my chances in the open, got up and dragged my sleeping bag out to where our night watch huddled in the lee of an outcrop of rock.

  “What are you doing up?” Cal asked, his voice only just audible above the railing of the wind.

  “I find myself unable to sleep with the noise.”

  “The wind?”

  I nodded. “Yes, that too.”

  Cal chuckled and glanced at his watch, a venerable mechanical device-the only kind that works in our new world. “Well, it’s pretty close to morning anyway. Not that you can tell from that penlight on the horizon. Everything all right in the tent?”

  He meant Magritte, of course. Since we had left the relative saf
ety of the Blue Mounds, she had lived in a state of unease, expecting that at any moment the Source would pounce on her. But it had not. She could hear it, she told us, had to distract herself, steel herself against it, but the call was muted. “Like I’m hearing it from inside a bubble,” she’d said.

  Still, we resorted to physical restraint at night-she was literally tethered to Enid in the event the Source should break through her “bubble,” forcing him to sing. He had gone only days without blocking the Source, and already I could see improvement in his health. The grayish cast was gone from his skin and he slept soundly, which was more than I could say for myself.

  “Things are quiet,” I said to Cal, “after a fashion. At least, everyone else is asleep.”

  I peered into the unrelieved charcoal gray of the Wisconsin landscape. Sunrise, we already knew, would bring little real relief from the gloom. Wisconsin seemed to be perpetually in twilight. “You were raised in Minnesota, yes?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And Minnesota is near Wisconsin, yes?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Are autumns usually this harsh?”

  Cal tilted his head within the hood of his anorak. A banner of steam marked the movement before being stretched and flayed by the wind, and I wondered, irrelevantly, if we would ever again see a jet’s vapor trail. This led to the unwelcome memory that hundreds, even thousands, of people must have been aloft at the moment the Source exchanged our universal constants for its own in-constants.

  “Winters up here,” Cal said, “have always been hard, but I’ve never seen it like this so early. When I was a kid, we’d get snow by Thanksgiving most years. Nice, fluffy snow, like a blanket over everything.” He paused, and I suspected that he had gone back in time to a place that seemed kinder through the filter of recent events. “I always knew when it’d snowed the minute I woke up. There’s no silence in the world like the silence the morning after a first snow. And the light. The light is different. It seems to come from everywhere, like… like in the Preserve.”

  Ah, now that was the sound of homesickness. I had heard it in my own voice when once I spoke of Kiev. Then I had not yet understood that home is not a place, but the people in it. I had no people in Kiev now. Everything I had was here. This was not true of my friend, Cal.

  “We will find Tina,” I said, “and take her there so she, too, can see the light that comes from everywhere.”

  He glanced away from me. “I don’t want to take her there, Doc. If we have to take her there, that would mean there’s still something to protect her from.” He turned back to face me, his eyes burning. “It’s not enough to just get Tina away from the Source. We have to shut the Source down.”

  “Then we will.”

  He laughed without humor, and breathed out a long jet of steam. “You know what I was sitting here wondering just now? I was wondering if I’d be sitting here wondering if I’d accepted that job in the D.A.’s office in St. Cloud instead of buying the New York hype.”

  “The New York hype?”

  “You know-if you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere. I wanted to make it.”

  “And what has New York hype to do with your being here?”

  He did not answer me directly. “You know what I wanted more than anything, growing up? Not to be like my father. Not to do to the people who loved me what he did to us.” He shook his head. “Maybe it’s genetic.”

  “Meaning? You are nothing like the man you described to me, Calvin. That man was selfish, shortsighted-”

  “I worked evenings and weekends. Tina took buses to ballet practice, cabs to recitals. A prima donna with no one in the audience to cheer just for her. She was lonely, Doc. And I was trying so hard to fit into Stern’s zoo, I didn’t notice until she was beyond my reach.”

  “Calvin,” I objected gently to his self-reproach, “you have always done for Tina what you felt she needed.”

  He shook his head. “We’ve all seen it, Doc. The Source twists people physically who have already been twisted by life. And Tina… There was a hole in Tina that I put there. The Change had plenty to work with.”

  The snow changed to a wafting mist. The wind eased to a mere moan, which seemed, at this moment, to come from within Cal Griffin himself.

  “Now we argue nature and nurture,” I observed. “You and Tina have had much the same experience, yes? An absent father, a mother struggling to make a home for her children. The painful loss when she died. Yet, only Tina changed. Have you not considered that this perhaps was due to her nature?”

  He made no answer.

  I leaned close to him and put a hand on his arm. “There is an old Russian proverb: ‘Shit happens.’ ”

  He let out a bark of laughter. “Old Russian proverb, huh? Is that a literal translation?”

  “No. The literal translation is ‘You go uphill and the devil grabs your foot,’ but the point is the same.”

  He nodded, smiling at me from the depths of his hood. “I’m going to go scramble up some breakfast. Believe it or not, it’s morning.” He stood, stretched, and made his way to where the supplies lay beneath their protective shroud of nylon. In a few paces he was no more than a vague shape in the lightening gloom.

  “Nice try, Doc.” Colleen stepped into the place Cal had vacated.

  I shook my head. “I am not sure he listens.”

  “Why should he? You don’t. I’m beginning to think it’s one of those ‘guy’ things. Only affects people with that broken X chromosome.”

  She had surprised me yet again. “What do you mean? When do I not listen?”

  She crouched next to me. “Viktor, for a wise man, you have some surprising gaps in your smarts. They say a person can’t talk and listen at the same time. You’re living proof of that.”

  “I don’t-”

  “What did you just tell Cal: Shit happens? Why can’t you take that to heart? I bet somewhere, deep down inside, you still blame yourself for Chernobyl.”

  My face grew warm, damning me, and I had to deliberately misunderstand her. “Nonsense. I have never blamed myself for Chernobyl.”

  “No? But you made yourself responsible for the victims. Every one you lost, you punished yourself for. Just like you punish yourself for Yelena and Nurya.”

  The anger that forced its way up into my heart was raw and searing. I meant to direct it at her for daring to trespass on this, my sacred ground, but this sudden rage did not bear her name. “You cannot pretend I was not responsible for them. I was. That was the gap in my smarts, as you call it. I made a choice between the good of many strangers and the good of those few I loved. The choice was a lie. There was no choice. I told you, I had so little effect at Chernobyl. At home-”

  “And what about the choice you made back there at the Preserve? Wasn’t that a lie, too?”

  For a moment I felt like a tiny ceramic man in a child’s snow globe, frozen and senseless. I turned to look at her without volition. In the wan morning light her face was more solemn than I had ever seen it. Not even a spark of humor reached her eyes.

  I thought of all the possible responses I could make, but only one was honest enough to be uttered. “History repeats itself,” I murmured, and felt the chill of this Wisconsin dawn drive itself into the marrow of my bones.

  I had not even let myself consider what it meant for me to be back there, within the relatively safe confines of the Preserve, while she and the others were out here, facing what only God knew. There, I was one of many, while they would have been only five against the unknown. Cal had been absolutely right, of course, for any one of us to be absent increased the chances of failure.

  “And how is it,” I asked at last, “that you realized this, when I did not?”

  Her gaze did not waver. “I listen. I listen to the people I trust. Especially when they can tell me things about myself even I don’t know.” She raised her hands in that so typical gesture of surrender. “Okay, so it doesn’t happen often. In fact, I haven’t rea
lly listened to anybody since … well, probably since Dad died. People worth listening to are a rare find.”

  I tried to imagine her as a teenager with a teenager’s faith that the people in her life today would be there tomorrow and the next day, and the next. I imagined a girl who smiled much and worried little, whose mouth turned up at the corners, and between whose brows no lines of worry had yet settled. I thought I had seen her in brief flashes over the past weeks, so I knew she had not been completely conquered by the boi baba.

  We woke the others to a hurried breakfast before hastily packing our goods back onto our well-chilled horses, who had sheltered the night behind a pair of extra tents. As we worked I wandered through the door Colleen had opened in my mind and visited the room that lay behind it.

  “What was a thing your father told you about yourself?” I asked her as we distributed the last of her gear across her horse’s pack.

  “That I shouldn’t follow his footsteps into the military.” “And why was that?”

  She cleared her throat, then said, in a voice of gravel, “ ‘You wouldn’t take orders well, Chief. They’d bust you the first time you were insubordinate.’ ”

  “Chief?”

  Her lips curved. “A nickname.”

  “I take it, then, that your father was never insubordinate. This surprises me, considering what you’ve told me of him.” She grinned, letting the teenager peek out. “Oh, Dad was never insubordinate. Not in any way they could prove. He had a talent for saying things with a smile that… well, that might’ve started a fight or a court-martial if someone else’d said it. I sometimes thought Dad was too laid back, too easy. Now I realize that was a survival tactic. It was his way of staying true to himself in a world that wanted him to conform. Maybe it was his way of daring the world to change him. The immovable object resisting an irresistible force.”

  “You are also good at resisting the irresistible,” I noted.