“Yeah, sure,” Krystee answered. “Might be a little twitchy, though.”
“Aren’t we all?” said Goldie. That got a nervous laugh.
“Let’s talk about manpower,” Cal said.
“There are two forces,” Shango explained. “The blocking force isolates the building, delta force goes inside.”
“So we have one group keeping the portal open while the other goes in,” Cal said. “Now, we’re not going to know what’s on the other side till we get there, so we want to get in, see what’s up”—Cal didn’t say, Hopefully get Tina, he didn’t need to—“and get back out again quick, shut everything down. The second assault can be more prepared, utilizing what we learn first time out.”
Cal spoke with assurance, knowing what was required of him. He wasn’t fooling anyone, that wasn’t the point. They were all volunteers here, knew full well what a rickety structure this was, how prone to disaster.
Still, in creating the illusion of confidence, Cal understood it increased their chances, gave them renewed hope…including, he was surprised to realize, himself.
Print the legend….
Which was, he supposed, how legends got started in the first place.
Cal then asked Rafe Dahlquist to describe the modifications secretly being made to the device, which might contain the whirlwind, if only for a time. Then Doc explained the outré accoutrements he was stitching together.
Which didn’t exactly make anyone want to order lunch.
“Any questions?” Cal asked. “No?”
There would be soon enough. He called the meeting to a close, and everyone dispersed to their various assignments.
Emerging out into the brisk coming-winter day, Cal took the steps to the sidewalk two at a time, kicking the golden-red leaves aside, sending them flying.
We just covered the what, Cal thought worriedly, but not the who.
What intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic would be waiting on the other side of that door?
He and Shango had both met one of them, Fred Wishart, who was no longer a man, but who still had some buried part of him that felt human emotions, that could be reached if one knew the key.
Cal had utilized that knowledge back in Boone’s Gap, when he had played upon Fred’s love of his twin brother, Bob, to get him to relent, if only momentarily, in his ferocious attack on Tina and Cal himself.
In the autopsy room here in Atherton, Doc had said that the dragons and grunters and flares were all in some fundamental way still human. And Wishart had been, too; at least, enough to be reminded of the loss he had sustained, to summon up a longing that could be transmuted to empathy, to compassion.
What else waited at the Source Project?
Something incredibly powerful, a force of will that had yanked Wishart back to its core, and drawn flares mercilessly from wherever they lacked a sufficiently armored protector.
What lurked at the Source was unimaginably strong, and growing stronger every day. Cal knew he had pitifully little with which to oppose it…except perhaps knowledge of what that power might have secreted unknowing within itself.
In the aftermath of their battle at Boone’s Gap, Fred Wishart’s brother Bob told Cal that the consciousness at the Source made a mistake in seizing Fred back, that now Fred was a virus, perhaps one that Cal might trigger, awakening his humanity once more.
Fear and brutality reigned at the Source; Cal had seen the result of it spread over the land like ink spilling across a map.
But if Fred Wishart was a virus, it was because there was more to his nature than brutality and fear, despite the havoc he had wreaked upon Boone’s Gap; gentler impulses that his human soul might bring into play.
And he might not be alone.
So perhaps the question Cal needed to ask was not what lurked at the Source, but rather who….
In his pocket, Cal could feel the crumpled paper he’d carried with him since copying it from the list Shango had shown him in the woods of Albermarle County.
On the fifth floor of the Atherton University Research Library, nestled among dusty tomes, Cal found the volume he was searching for. He withdrew it from its place on the shelf, and settled at a desk beside a window to read.
To some, Who’s Who in Applied and Molecular Physics, eighth revised edition, might have seemed the next best sleep aid to a Steven Seagal film festival. But to Cal, it was utterly enthralling.
Including, as it did, virtually every scientist at the Source Project.
Herman Goldman walked in the sunlight, wishing he could empty all the querulous and contrary thoughts from his skull. He was tired of it. Tired of the constant chatter, the nagging self-recrimination and self-justification, all the cacophony of words running in his head like water from a broken faucet. He wanted the frigid sun of waning autumn, like a white circle painted on the dome of the world, to dry it up.
He walked through town, and the cool wind felt good on his face, fresh and clean and a little sharp. Towering white clouds like mountain peaks skimmed the horizon.
The day was bright if austere, and the storefronts and dingy brick warehouses by the river gleamed in the sun, grand in their tawdriness, faded and ethereal, trapped in the silvered afternoon like bugs in a gossamer web.
Like when you were young, Goldie thought, and still going to school, before the madness, but it was a Wednesday and you’d skipped out and all the row houses were unnaturally quiet, as if the neighborhood had declared a holiday from children and all the adults had elected to celebrate with a nap.
He wanted that isolation and that quiet, away from all the people and their noise; to center and quiet himself, too. It was in that silence and solitude that he could best summon back the sight of her, and the sound, and the smell.
That he could be with Magritte.
He let his footsteps follow the river. There was a kind of boardwalk along the riverbank beside some scrubby parkland, some municipal manager’s halfhearted attempt at beautification currently overgrown with devil grass and assorted thistles. Power lines crossed the river here.
Goldie walked past them, and past the deserted subdivisions now surrendered to weedy fields, past the zoned but undeveloped properties with their sidewalkless streets, past civilization, to a place where the Powdercache River flattened into a silver braid that stitched prairie to prairie. There was duckweed here, and a few faint trails flattened into the tall grass.
He crouched by the river, plunged his hands into the chilling current, brought forth the cupped and bracing water, and drank. It quenched and burned icily going down, forcibly reminding him of the many things in his foolish life that had sated and brought thirst, soothed and pained him, all at the same time.
He caught his reflection in the bright surface, and was surprised at the hardness in his eyes, the lines around his mouth that others might have deemed fretfulness but he thought more telling of rage.
Would Magritte have loved this face, as she had the gentler one he’d worn upon their first meeting? Would she love it still were they to meet again?
He didn’t believe in such an absurdly sentimental notion as heaven, of course, but he longed for it; Magritte was the first person he had lost with whom he ached to be reunited, the first love he hadn’t severed himself from and fled.
In the rippling, elusive surface, he thought he could discern her face, a ghost of liquid and light. He wondered if she would approve of the path he had set himself on, the acts he planned in the days ahead.
Were they for her, for her memory, as he told himself by way of justification…or only for himself?
He stifled the answer he already knew, and chased the words away.
It was beautiful here, the long sunlight raking the high yellow grass, the occasional sound of insects, a V of geese subdividing the meridian. He rose and continued walking, the brittle reeds crackling under his feet. This must all be marshland, Goldie thought, when the river runs high.
The sun, which had seemed fixed and motionless in the
sky, was suddenly lower; soon he would be in the dark. Dangerous things were abroad in the land; one shouldn’t be out alone. But along this particular stretch of river, he knew he was the most dangerous creature of all.
He caught a sound of footsteps behind him, and knew who it was before he turned. In their hajj across the continental United States, they had all of them become accomplished trackers.
Cal Griffin approached him in the gathering dark, and Goldie saw in his face a mirror of his own, weighted with the future. Cal held out a sheet of paper.
“There’s some places I’d like you to go,” he said.
THIRTY-THREE
ANOTHER NICE MESS
Waiting had always been the worst part for her, even when she was little and it was the endless anticipation of scanning the horizon for Santa Claus or summer to appear on the glide path coming in on approach.
Which wasn’t a patch on waiting for some Union of Concerned Scientists, Hearty Man TV-dinner sweet old pencil-pusher—namely, Dr. Rafe Dahlquist—to give you the green light to step over the threshold into hell.
As the days slid one into the other and winter came on in earnest, Colleen Brooks had to admit that it was her own damnable impatience and not everyone and everything getting on her last nerve that made her want to haul off and kick a puppy.
So contrary action was in order….
“What’s the deal here?” Cal inquired as Colleen led him slogging blindfolded along the slushy sidewalk of the main drag toward the Art Deco structure that was still in reasonably good shape, despite being subjected to more than sixty corrosive Iowa winters in its long and distinguished tenure here in town. Doc obligingly brought up the rear, as did Goldman, who had been mostly absent in recent days—and infuriatingly mum on the subject, to boot.
Colleen had made it a point to seek out the surprisingly young Bohemian who still kept the place running and charm the socks off the guy (not that hard a trick, really, when she set her mind to it; hell, she could walk and talk with the best of the bipeds). So he’d led her downstairs to his Fortress of Solitude, the big basement that doubled as a storage vault, and let her peruse what turned out to be his fairly impressive holdings.
Now, some days later, Colleen drew Cal out of the winter chill into the steam-heat warmth of the lobby, then to the larger hall beyond. Contrary to the exterior façade, its interior style was not Deco but rather a neo-baroque eruption of gilt chandeliers, cherub sconces and rococo stairways—a Depression-era proletariat vision of grandeur.
She sat Cal down front and center, and whipped off the blindfold.
The acoustics of the theater were pretty damn good, so the ovation that erupted was close to deafening.
They stood arrayed along the rows of seats and up the twin aisles, grinning broadly at him, Krystee Cott and Mike Kimmel and the rest, the orphaned wayfarers Cal had led through the valley of the shadow and other perilous realms to the respite and relative safe harbor of Atherton (all in attendance save Rafe Dahlquist, naturally, who was under lock and key with the full chorus line of guards, not to mention the unholy troika of Arcott, Siegel and Wade, building the Son of the Megillah).
“Surprise,” Colleen said.
“It’s not my birthday,” Cal said.
“Shut up,” she said. She waved her arm up at the little high window in back, and the house lights dimmed.
For the first time in a long time, they watched a movie.
Kenny Escobar, the manager-cum-projectionist, had a number of fairly recent releases (recent prior to the Change, of course) available for screening. But Colleen had gotten to know Cal pretty well by now.
So she chose Laurel and Hardy in Sons of the Desert.
Cal laughed until the tears rolled down his cheeks.
(Goldman, meanwhile, sat watching totally stone-faced. “Don’t think I’m not enjoying this,” he explained to her in a whisper. “It’s just that when I was a kid my Uncle Vaclav had a complete collection of Stan and Ollie flicks that he’d screen in his weird old mansion and make me sit watching without cracking a smile, ’cause he was of the conviction they weren’t comedians but rather great tragedians—a theory which I suppose has its merits.” “Christ, Goldman,” Colleen responded, “does everyone in your family have a screw loose?”)
Then she showed Cal North by Northwest.
It was only as she sat watching there in the dark, alongside those with whom she had inextricably bound herself, the three so-very-different men who had entrusted her with their lives, that she realized how much like these films their journey had become. They were all of them as helpless as dandelion fluff in a hurricane, totally at the mercy of whatever weird shit the Fates threw at them.
Give in to the moment, it invited, surrender to the currents of storm and flow with them, be uplifted.
Which, paradoxically, didn’t mean that she shouldn’t fight like hell at the same time—just not be so preoccupied with the struggle that she failed to recognize what resources might avail her.
In the darkness around them, Colleen could discern the other baby birds Cal had taken under his wing, and the townies and college kids who had filtered in to watch the show, who were now sharing the experience along with them.
We aren’t alone in this, Colleen thought. We never were.
Ely Stern may have brought them here, all the legions of the damned might be awaiting them at the end of the road, and she might not be able to do a damn thing about it, none of them might.
But that wasn’t for her to say.
Remarkably, with that awareness she felt suddenly unburdened, so light it was akin to weightlessness, and it occurred to her that this flush of exhilaration might well be labeled hope.
She sat anonymous and totally present, her eyes filled with the timeless, fleeting images on the screen—Eva Marie Saint dangling from Mount Rushmore, Cary Grant extending his hand out to her, grasping her wrist and pulling her effortlessly up into what was now transformed into the interior of a sleeping compartment, as they kissed and the train that bore them vanished howling into the blackness of a railway tunnel and the unknown future beyond.
Amid the torrent of applause, the music of communal experience, the houselights rose again. Colleen perceived the bulky, rumpled figure awaiting them in the aisle, Goldman standing behind him, having spirited him here.
“We’re T minus thirty-three minutes,” Rafe Dahlquist said.
The light was like nothing in this world, and Jeff Arcott couldn’t take his eyes off it.
The resonance chamber was banked down like logs gone to ash in a fireplace, barely glowing now. But it was hypnotic in its lazy, ceaseless motion, the flashing bits of evanescence winking in and out of existence in the vacuum of the huge cylinder, leaving vaporous rainbow trails like fingers dangled casually in a stream. As he watched it entranced, it seemed almost to be talking to him.
And scant minutes from now, Jeff Arcott knew, it literally would be.
No longer murmuring in myriad whispers like the legions of the departed, it would soon be invested with power on a scale that would heighten and focus those voices to crystal clarity…and quite a good deal more.
It elated him, and scared him, too.
The letter of introduction Ely Stern had brought with him all those months back—along with the first delivery of prime gemstones—had been written in a delicate, almost feminine hand. But the power it promised, the secrets of the universe it offered to reveal in the fullness of time, had been anything but demure.
The driving force, the intellect behind all of this, was brilliant, sublime, commanding—a mind undeniably beyond anything human history had previously produced.
It has come to my attention, the letter began, that you have been embarked on a line of research that might yield considerable benefit, were it combined with several areas of inquiry and experimentation in which we ourselves have recently excelled.
The letter was signed Marcus Sanrio.
And it invited Jeff Arcott to collaborate.
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In the letters and breathtakingly original designs that followed, Sanrio had taken Arcott’s initial work and built on it in a way that was mesmerizing, counterintuitive and unexpected—but, in hindsight, undeniably correct in its assumptions and execution.
Arcott had given himself over to its siren song, and followed where it led.
This much he knew, or at least had been able to read between the lines: for reasons unknown and unstated, Marcus Sanrio, the greatest thinker of the twenty-first century (and who always in correspondence oddly referred to himself in the royal we), had been previously unable to join Arcott here in person. But via the Spirit Radio and the instantaneous matter transmission it permitted, Sanrio would soon be with him.
Then the pace of the work would accelerate to a phenomenal degree. And this post-Change world would no longer signal the arrival of a new Dark Age of suffering and ignorance; no, with Sanrio and himself at the forefront, the wild energies let loose on the earth would be tamed and brought into orderly service to mankind. It would be the dawn of a new Industrial Revolution, one that made the pace of the first look leisurely by comparison.
Thus far, Arcott had merely been able to apply a few of Sanrio’s principles in order to recapture some of the technology that had been lost, a pallid replication of the old ways of the world. Soon, however, very soon, they would be able to eclipse those accomplishments, create a new understanding and application of that understanding that would allow remarkable new strides.
A rebirth, a renaissance, an enlightenment; a total redefinition of virtually everything, starting most importantly with men’s minds.
It was the way of things, Jeff Arcott recognized.
With his laws of motion in the Principia Mathematica, Isaac Newton had defined a coherent, observable cosmos around him, the natural world for all to see. But he little dreamed of the transcendent gospel that Einstein would unveil several centuries hence, the crazy-but-true universe where matter and energy were equivalent, gravity bent light, and velocity defined the pace of time; moreover, that the universe was a hyperbolic paraboloid and, wherever you went, if you traveled long enough you invariably arrived back where you started.
Magic Time: Ghostlands Page 28