The Way of Sorrows

by Jon Steele

  “Yeah, but he’s one of us and I had orders to keep him in line. But no, I don’t get handwritten notes and my phone goes both ways. I don’t watch the History Channel, either. If management wants to slip me intel, they turn me on to a bootleg.”

  “A what?”

  “The Dead jammed for thirty years, through the sixties and seventies. From the Fillmore in San Francisco to the pyramids of Egypt. Their shows were epic, they’d run for hours. And everywhere the Dead jammed, people recorded the shows with little recorders, ergo, bootlegs. When management wants me to know something, they slip the info into one of the recordings, put it on YouTube, and I give it a listen. And yeah, sometimes I end up in joints like this waiting to be told where to go next. That’s why joints like this are here.”

  “This café, you mean.”

  “Yup.”

  “So you’re here to tell me what to do next.”

  “Not quite. I’m taking you to where you can do what you’re supposed to do next.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I hear the taxi coming, brother.”

  Something moved in the corner of Harper’s eye. He looked outside the café windows, saw Krinkle’s tour bus with the tinted windows and blue running lights ease into the parking lot and stop. Harper looked at the roadie.

  “Let me guess: Inspector Gobet’s clever lads have plotted an infil solution through the shifting sands of time.”

  “Yup.”

  “Who’s driving?”

  “Me, if I have to.”

  Harper glanced at the bus. The side door opened and chrome-plated steps lowered to the ground.

  “Who’s driving the bus now?”

  “Nobody.”

  “The bus drove itself?”

  “More like it called me and relayed a message that coordinates have been synced with the particular time-warp madness at the destination. Then I programmed the bus to pick us up.”

  “You drove your bus by cell phone?”

  “Twenty years from now every local on the planet with a car will be doing the same thing, if they make it that far.”

  Harper scanned the room, watched the locals talk and laugh. “Not looking good for them, is it?” he said.

  “Or us.”

  Harper laughed a little and raised his glass in a toast. Krinkle matched him.

  “Cheers.”

  “Amen.”

  They drank in communion, rested their empty glasses on the table.

  “So it’s just you and me making the infil then?” Harper said.

  “Yes and . . . Shit.”

  Krinkle rubbed his eyes a few seconds, then looked at Harper.

  “No. I drop you off, you infil and recon the site. I stay on the bus and hang at the perimeter for fifteen minutes.”

  “Then what?”

  “If you come out with Katherine Taylor, I bring you both to Lausanne and get her to the clinic in Vevey.”

  “And if we don’t come out within fifteen minutes?”

  “I assume the site has collapsed with the two of you inside.”

  “Fifteen minutes is all I’ve got?” Harper said.

  Krinkle shook his head and rubbed his eyes harder this time. “Shit!”

  “What is it?” Harper said.

  “Those friggin’ blue lights. Fuck, they’re bright. What was I saying?”

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  “Oh yeah. Here’s the deal: The site is crashing, so time is looping within the perimeter. A minute will seem longer than it is, which is why you need this.”

  Krinkle reached in the front pouch of his denim overalls again. This time he pulled out something small enough to be hidden in his big hands. He set the thing on the table and pushed it toward Harper. It was a small plastic chicken, sitting on a round base with ruler markings around the diameter.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “An egg timer. Actually, this one goes up to fifteen so you can time other stuff with it, too. You know, pasta and stuff. But it’s an egg timer, basically.”

  “What am I supposed to do with it?”

  Krinkle picked it up, gave the chicken a twist till its red beak lined up on the number fifteen. The chicken started to tick.

  “You get inside the time warp, you set the timer to the max at fifteen, and you put it in your coat pocket. It counts down and rings, you reset it and do it again. You’ll have four goes at it. If you don’t get out before the fourth ring, you don’t get out.”

  Harper added it up. “So in reality, I’ve got sixty minutes.”

  “Yeah, inside the perimeter, but outside it’s only fifteen minutes. You’re talking about two different temporal realities. Don’t get confused.”

  “I’m already confused.”

  “Look, the real-world watch on your wrist won’t work inside the warp. The warp you’re going into is collapsing. Bottom line is you can get seriously fucked in there and never see it coming. That’s why you need this.”

  Krinkle twisted the chicken again, lined its beak to zero.

  Riiiinnnng.

  The sound caught the attention of the locals in the café. Krinkle and Harper lowered their eyes. The locals looked at the table in the shadows, but they did not see Harper or Krinkle; then they all started checking their own cell phones.

  Krinkle laid the plastic chicken on the table, looked at Harper. “The time mechanics said it’s the best they could come up with on short notice.”

  “An egg timer that looks like a chicken.”

  “No, the chicken was me. The mechanics said any fifteen-minute egg timer that could be manually rewound would work, as long as it contained no electrical circuitry. Something about erratic electromagnetic pulses or some shit. I got messaged to pick up an egg timer on the way here. I made a stop at a hardware store in Renens. This was all they had in stock.”

  Harper leaned across the table and stared at Krinkle. “The locals have taken photographs of dust clouds giving birth to stars seven thousand light-years away. They put a telescope in low Earth orbit that can see thirteen and a half billion bloody years back in time. At the South Pole they’ve got a radio telescope that’s looking for echoes of the Big Bang as we speak. In a few years they’ll park a new telescope so far away it will see the creation of the bloody universe as it happened and live at the same time. Not to mention just now, seven floors under our feet, there’s a Stone Age computer built by Astruc’s half-kind son that’s plugged into a supercomputer named Blue Brain. Together those computers are updating an SOS about a mass extinction event to a bloody space probe presently breaking into interstellar space.”

  Krinkle nodded. “Yeah, and what’s your point?”

  Harper held up the plastic chicken.

  “I’m being sent on a recon mission through the shifting sands of time with this.”

  Krinkle stood up. “I know. Trippy, isn’t it? Let’s go. Bring the sandwich.”

  NINE

  Guitars clanged through the bus like a wall of sound, loud as the seven bells of Lausanne Cathedral ringing out over the town. Harper sat in one of the bolted-to-the-floor chairs of the passenger cabin. He watched Krinkle lean over a Neve 8028 audio console. The roadie’s eyes were closed, a set of Audio-Technica ATH W5000 headphones were over his ears, and his big frame swayed from side to side in his swivel chair. His fingers danced over the faders, sliding them up and down, or pressing a button to isolate a specific audio source. A kick drum or a snare, the ticking of a clock, a bass guitar or a screaming lead. Then he’d tweak EQ knobs to get the exact sound he wanted, release the button, and the wall of sound would clang through the bus again. Above him a huge bank of reel-to-reel tape machines rolled in sequence at fifteen inches per second. When a tape ran out, Krinkle jumped up to thread a new reel. Every once in a while he’d check his cell phone, then glance ahead through the windshield to check the bus was driving itself as programmed. Checking, this time, the roadie didn’t like what he saw on the cell phone. He turned to one of the three laptops next to the console
and typed furiously. A satellite shot looking down at the A9 north of Lausanne appeared onscreen. The shot was live, with Krinkle’s black bus in the frame, cruising at speed. He hit a few more keys and the screen zoomed in ahead of the bus and highlighted a section of the motorway running south before banking left to run in a straight line due east. The computer marked that section in green before the road disappeared into a hillside.

  Just then Harper felt the floor of the bus vibrate with the same cycles per second as the wall of sound. He’d felt it once before, on the bus ride from Montségur while bringing Astruc to Lausanne. Feeling it this time, a thought dropped. The wall of sound wasn’t just as loud as the seven bells of Lausanne Cathedral, it was creating the same massive subharmonic hum: ommm. He looked through the open door to the driver’s compartment, saw the empty driver’s seat, saw the steering wheel turn this way and that way on its own. He had the urge to grab the wheel before realizing he had no idea how to drive. He felt Krinkle’s hand tapping his shoulder.

  Harper looked at him.

  The roadie had spun around in his swivel chair and was pointing ahead through the windshield. His lips moved, but Harper couldn’t hear a word for the music. Harper pointed to his own ears and shook his head. Krinkle spun in his chair again, brought down a fader, and lowered the volume to a dull roar. He pulled his headphones from his head and faced Harper. The vibrations coming up through the floor of the bus calmed.

  “We’ve got a problem,” the roadie said.

  “Hearing loss?”

  “Funny, but no. The road.”

  Harper looked ahead through the windshield. It looked like any Swiss highway of an evening. Dual carriageway, BMWs and Mercs and Audis with drivers ignoring the speed limit and driving as fast as they damn well pleased. He looked at Krinkle.

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “We hit acoustic levitation in less than two minutes, but the only stretch of road long and dead-east enough runs through the Belmont-sur-Lausanne tunnel. At the speed we need it’ll take sixty-three-point-four seconds to clear the tunnel, and we hit levitation at sixty-five. If the bus’s onboard computers don’t get it right and we don’t clear the tunnel in time, it won’t be good.”

  “Define ‘won’t be good.’”

  “Imagine a gasoline truck slamming into a truck loaded with nitroglycerin. In a friggin’ tunnel.”

  “How about waiting for another stretch of road?”

  “Any hope of getting you in and out of the location before it collapses means we need to go not just now, but now now.”

  Krinkle glanced at the table near Harper, saw the Gruyère and lettuce in a baguette Harper had brought from the café at Blue Brain HQ.

  “You going to eat that, brother? I need some food to settle this blue shit in my eyes so I can see straight.”

  “Bon appétit,” Harper said.

  Krinkle grabbed the baguette, peeled away the paper wrapper, and took a healthy bite. He tapped at the laptop, watched numbers crunch on the screen. With another bite he looked at Harper.

  “More drone,” he said with a full mouth.

  “Or maybe you could just take the bloody wheel and drive the bus yourself.”

  “Too busy with the music. I’ll take the wheel on approach.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Hey, the music is how I get the drone. The drone is how I get the giddy-up into the go, got it?”

  Not really, Harper thought. “Whatever you say, mate.”

  Krinkle reset his headphones over his ears, spun around, and kicked a drawer under the console; it slid open. Inside were kill kits, jars of potions, boxes of injector jets, and one tall green bottle with a black label.

  “Pour us some whiskey. There’s some coffee mugs behind you. I’ll be back after the break.”

  Krinkle hit a button; the wall of sound came roaring back till the guitars slammed to a stop and a whirl of harmonics was suspended in the air. Krinkle leaned into the console’s microphone, pushed up a fader on the board.

  “Epic post-rock visions from Sweden’s pg.lost. ‘Crystalline’ is the name of the track. In Never Out is the LP. Welcome to the evening. You’re tuned to the last radio station on planet Earth. Next up, a special mix of ‘When You Sing’ from School of Seven Bells out of Brooklyn, New York. Listen close, brothers and sisters, these are good vibrations for a world in need. Close your eyes and open your hearts, for you are not alone. Come, fly with me to a place in the stars where you may witness the ascension of the watchers.”

  He closed the microphone and raised another fader, and ethereal sounds sailed through the bus. Then came a rhythm guitar climbing through a progression of major chords, then a perfect silence for half a breath . . . then a massive drone rushed forth. Harper felt it before he heard it. It was like being caressed in something warm, light maybe. Then came voices from the far beyond.

  When you sing

  You sing loud.

  Rewind

  And build the fires

  Around my heart.

  Round and round went the drone. The floor vibrated again, then came the hum of Lausanne’s seven bells—ommm—and the bus raced into the Belmont-sur-Lausanne tunnel.

  Weirdness commenced. The tunnel’s tubular walls pulsed to a four-four beat. Headlamps and taillights of speeding cars melted into streaks that stretched and broke apart into threads of red, violet, and blue. Sixty-three-point-four seconds ahead, at the far end of the tunnel where vanishing point met horizon, Harper saw a brilliant white light.

  “Will wonders never cease?” He laughed to himself.

  He grabbed two coffee mugs, slammed them on the small side table. He reached for the tall bottle in the drawer. He looked at the black label: single malt, 1999, from the Ardbeg distillery on the Isle of Islay. Straightforward label for a pedigree single malt . . . except instead of a picture of a grouse or stag or a family crest, there was a silver spaceship rising from the Earth and heading to the stars. Then there was the whiskey’s name: Galileo.

  “Or the wonders could just keep coming.”

  He opened the bottle and poured two fingers’ worth into both mugs. He stood, set one mug next to the audio console. Krinkle snapped it up, raised it to his nose, breathed deep, then drank. Harper did the same. The roadie went back to his broadcast. Harper stepped to the driver’s compartment and stared ahead through the windshield. The white light at the end of the tunnel was coming fast; then everything slowed, then the threads of colored light seemed to hold in place. Harper felt a sense of being lifted up, floating; maybe it was the whiskey.

  Ziiiiing.

  Rushing ahead now, separating from the ground, crashing through the light at the end of the tunnel and coming out in a place somewhere between heaven and earth with a lone star, dead east, to guide them. Harper could only stare, almost forgetting to breathe. Then he heard Krinkle’s voice behind him.

  “And more I admire thy distant fire, than that colder, lowly light.”

  Hearing the words, Harper realized the wall of sound had quieted. He turned around and saw the roadie with his headphones around his neck and his legs propped up on the console.

  “Sorry?”

  “Edgar Allan Poe. ‘Evening Star.’”

  “Right. What happened to the music?”

  “Once I get it off the ground the bus goes by itself till we get to the location.”

  Harper looked at the lone star again, then to the reel-to-reels rolling fast above the console, then to the roadie sitting comfortably below.

  “What did you call it? Getting off the ground?” Harper said.

  “Acoustic levitation.”

  “And it works how?”

  “Standing waves, transverse waves, the angle of incidence equalizing the angle of reflection. Or you could just call it letting the earth spin under our wheels.”

  “It’s the up-and-down part that’s hard.”

  “What?”

  “You said those words the last time coming from Montségur. Sidewa
ys, west to east, is easy, you said. It’s the up-and-down part that’s hard.”

  Krinkle nodded. “Not a problem this time. The location is only one degree north. We’ll get to where we’re going in three hours instead of six.”

  Krinkle reached for the bottle, poured himself another two fingers’ worth. He offered the bottle to Harper.

  “In the meantime, we got work, brother,” the roadie said.

  “Such as?”

  “You need to know what to do when we get to where it is we’re going.”

  “In the States.”

  “Yup.”

  “Where in the States exactly?”

  “Sit down, would you? My arm is getting tired holding the bottle.”

  “Sure.”

  He walked back to his chair and sat down. Krinkle poured a healthy measure into Harper’s mug.

  “Like you said in the cathedral, where we’re going doesn’t exist on a map. It exists in a time warp wedged in at 45°47´29.41˝ north by 121°57´43.42˝ west. Your mission is to get in and sweep the site from the town to the house ending up at the bunker. You’re looking to confirm or deny life status of Katherine Taylor and her son.”

  Hearing her name, Harper saw her at another point on his timeline—two and a half seconds’ worth. Just after the cathedral job, standing on the esplanade below the belfry with the lad’s cat in her arms. She was heavily juiced, so much so she didn’t know she was pregnant. She was getting ready to leave Switzerland with . . .

  “Officer Jannsen.”

  “Say again?”

  “Miss Taylor’s bodyguard. One of Inspector Gobet’s Swiss Guard gang. A Swiss German girl with a solid left hook, yeah? The last time I saw Miss Taylor she said they had become friends.”

  Krinkle sipped his whiskey and smiled. “Weird the way it starts coming back in nonlinear drips and drabs, isn’t it?”

  Harper nodded. “Somewhat.”

  “It’s going to happen a lot more now. Don’t rush it. Too much too fast can cause some bad shit. And it hurts. And as she’s had a child, it’s Madame Taylor to the likes of us.”

  “Right.”

  “And they were more than friends.”