Now the light was all around him, a sudden presence of it.
A world of light.
The bomb, Howard thought.
Sophia wept, and was in pain, because she had been abandoned alone in the darkness and void; but when she thought of the light that had abandoned her, she took comfort, and she laughed.
A field of fire.
He touched something. Everything. He held it in his hands, a stone.
CHAPTER 30
Ellen Stockton cried when she saw Clifford running for the car. The cold air had made her sober; she knew how unlikely this reunion was. She opened the door for him and he ran into her arms.
Dex stood outside with Linneth. She looked at him as if awaiting some verdict. He said, “Fifteen minutes—if the countdown can be trusted.” He lowered his voice so the boy and his mother wouldn’t hear. “We’re too far east. These roads, the snow . . . we can’t make the town limits in that time, much less a safe perimeter.”
Linneth was almost ethereally calm. “I agree. Is there anything else we can do?”
“Drive and hope for a miracle.”
“The Proctors won’t delay this explosion. Not if they have a choice. Too much has gone wrong already.”
“Drive and pray,” Dex said, “or else—”
“What?”
“I keep thinking about Howard. You remember what he said? ‘The only way out is in.’ ”
“He meant the ruined laboratory. Do you think that would offer us some sort of protection?”
“I can’t imagine how. But maybe. Who knows?” He touched her shoulder and said, “Something else we should think about is that it’s closer to the bomb.”
“Hardly an advantage.”
“Linneth, it might be. If the worst happens—it would be faster.”
She looked into his eyes. Irreclaimable seconds ticked away. She said, “You may be right. But I want this to be because there’s a chance. Do you understand? Not just suicide. I think some part of you wants that. But I don’t.”
Did he want to die, out there on the wooded Ojibway reserve? The strange fact was, he did not. For the first time in many years, he would have preferred to go on living. Wanted desperately to live.
But the roads were thick with snow, and he remembered the yield predictions Evelyn had smuggled out of Symeon Demarch’s study. He remembered everything he had ever read about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A quick death would surely be better than some lingering, blistered agony. He couldn’t bear to see Linneth die like that.
And there was a chance, he thought; at least a long shot—at least, Howard had seemed to think so.
The snow was soft and seemed suspended in the air. The air itself seemed to tremble with anticipation. He said, “We’re wasting time.” The research lab was not much closer than Coldwater Road. It would take some fancy driving to get them there in—what? He checked his watch. Thirteen minutes.
Linneth pressed her face to the window as the car passed along Beacon Road. Much of the commercial district was on fire. The flames reflected wildly on the snow. Smoke fanned across the road.
Dex was driving at a perilous speed, but he knew the route. She avoided looking at the strange digital clock on the dashboard. She couldn’t change the time and didn’t want it to obsess her.
Instead, oddly, she thought of her mother, dead years ago in some Bureau prison. Something lives in everything, she had said. Perhaps something lived in that tangle of ruins Dex was driving toward; perhaps it was the man Howard had called Stern. Who was a sort of Demiurge, if she had understood correctly. A mortal god.
A good or malevolent angel.
Low clouds rolled across the sky. The snow fell in a gentle curtain. The car turned onto the highway.
Clifford understood soon enough where they were headed.
He didn’t question it. He had seen enough to know Dex Graham meant him no harm. But when the car left the highway for the narrow road into the forest—a road Clifford knew too well—he could not contain a sigh of resignation.
“It’s all right, Cliffy,” his mother said, as a roof of pine boughs closed over the car. “It’ll be okay now.”
She didn’t know any better.
The trees had sheltered this road from much of the snow, but the road itself was deeply rutted. The military vehicles had a wider wheelbase than Dex’s car, which kept wandering in and out of the ruts. The old snow here had been beaten down to black ice. More than once, the wheels began to spin freely and the car slowed and Dex had to fight it forward, patiently, carefully.
Like Linneth, he tried to ignore the clock. Not as successfully. The time available had slipped below five minutes.
Clifford had guessed their destination. He said, “There’s a hill before you get to the lab where the road cuts through the escarpment. It might be slippery.”
Dex saw it ahead. Not a steep rise, but a long one. The angle was maybe thirty degrees. He eased his foot down on the accelerator, carefully, carefully. The car picked up speed. It wobbled alarmingly from side to side, but he kept the nose pointed forward.
The car was doing sixty through the snow when it reached the foot of the hill. He was counting on the momentum to carry them forward, and it took them a long way up before he began to lose traction. Linneth held her breath as Dex worked the gas pedal and the car slowed to a crawl.
Now the front wheels lurched sideways and the car slid back a foot or so. Dex stepped on the gas. Let the wheels spin: maybe they would grind down to a solid surface. Blue smoke roared from the exhaust pipe. The car jumped forward, hesitated, jumped another yard or two. The peak of the hill was tantalizingly close.
Dex made the mistake of glancing at the dash clock.
They were on overtime now, and the bomb was less than half a mile away. Clifford had been staring out the back window. From here, he could see the gantry above the trees.
Linneth’s hands were clenched into fists in her lap.
Another yard forward and another. The motor screeched as if it had been burned clean of oil—which was possible, by the look of the steely blue smoke in his rearview mirror.
Almost there now. He pushed the gas pedal all the way down. This wasn’t strategy, it was panic—but the car surged over the summit of the hill in a series of spastic leaps, and suddenly it was the brake he was fighting.
The ruined Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory lay ahead. This blister of strange light was more energetic than Dex had expected from Howard’s description of it. It was like liquid lightning—frightening to drive into. More accurately, to slide into. The car was gathering speed and he was on the verge of losing control.
“Everybody hold on,” he said.
Linneth whispered something about “time.” Ellen Stockton held her son against her. Dex took his foot off the brake. If the wheels locked now the car would tumble. We’re a sled, Dex thought madly. This is free fall.
A timeless moment passed. Then the sky was full of light, and the pine trees caught fire and burned in an instant.
CHAPTER 31
Milos Fabrikant followed the Censeur, M. Bisonette, to a trench that had been carved into the cold, bare hillock in front of the bunker.
The snow had stopped. The clouds were high and thinning. The countdown proceeded with a relentless precision, and Fabrikant listened to the numbers unreel from the mouth of a metal-horn loudspeaker. When the count reached twenty seconds, Fabrikant and Bisonette and a half dozen other privileged observers crouched with their backs to the west wall of the revetment.
The light from the detonation was sudden and shockingly bright. Shadows flared to the east. A revision of nature, Fabrikant thought. Silent at first. It was his thoughts that were loud.
Bisonette stood up immediately, cupping his hands around his amber-colored goggles. Fabrikant’s joints were agonized by the cold; he was slower to stand.
The fireball glowed like sunset in the far undulations of the pine forest. Incredibly, the clouds above the blast had been torn open. A pi
llar of smoke boiled into the sundered heavens.
The sound came at last, a battering roar, like the outrage of the offended Protennoia.
Fabrikant touched the sleeve of the Censeur’s greatcoat. He felt Bisonette’s unconcealed tremor of delight. He is as full, Fabrikant thought, as I am empty.
“We should take cover again, Censeur,” he said.
Bisonette nodded and ducked into the trench.
The wind came next, as hot as the wind from Tartaros.
Evelyn Woodward was blinded at once. The new sun devoured her eyes. Briefly, the sensation was beyond pain.
Then Lake Merced turned to steam as the shock wave crossed the water, and suddenly the window was gone. And the house. And the town.
Clement Delafleur had tried to staunch his bullet wound with the silk lining of his torn pardessus, but he had lost a great deal of blood despite his best efforts. In the time it took Dexter Graham to drive to the Ojibway reserve, Delafleur managed to drag the insensate meat of his legs as far as the door marked FIRE EXIT. From there, his plans were vague. Perhaps to lift himself to salvation. But time was short.
He was panting and only dimly conscious when the high basement windows admitted a column of superheated steam, and the stone walls of City Hall were crushed and carried away above him.
Calvin Shepperd listened to the countdown on a portable scanner, up at the limits around 1300MHz. When the count approached zero, Shepperd stopped the lead car and flashed his blinkers. The signal went down the long line of the convoy: it meant, Take cover. That is, hunker down on the upholstery and turn your engine off. Which he did. His friend Ted Bartlett huddled next to him, and in the back a sharpshooter named Paige. Shepperd’s wife Sarah was seven cars back, riding with a woman named Ruth and five-year-old Damion, Sarah’s nephew. He hoped they were all right, but he hadn’t been able to check. No time to stop. It was slow driving on this old log-truck road, even with chains.
The flash was distant, but it penetrated the cathedral pines like slow lightning.
The sound came later, a basso thunder that barreled out of the troubled sky. And then a hot, whipping wind. The car was buffeted. “Christ Jesus!” Paige exclaimed. Then a series of hard but muffled thuds against the roof, the windshield, the hood. Some kind of bomb debris, Shepperd thought wildly, but it was only snow, huge mounds of snow shaken out of the crossed boughs of the trees. It slid against the window glass, already wet in this unnatural heat.
“Drive on,” Ted Bartlett said as soon as the roar abated. “This can’t be healthy.”
Shepperd started up his engine and heard others revving behind him. Hang on, Sarah, he thought, and put the car in gear.
Shepperd’s convoy reached the abandoned logging camp, which was three tin-roofed wooden longhouses and a potbelly stove, at dusk.
He calculated that this expedition had saved maybe one hundred families out of the thousands in Two Rivers. The rest were smoke and ashes . . . and that was a crime so grievous it beggared comprehension.
But the people with him had been saved, no small accomplishment, and that included a lot of kids. He watched them filing out of the cars as they were parked in a defile between the tallest trees. The kids were cold, stunned, but alive. It was the kids he had some hope for. They knew how to adjust.
Not that the future looked especially rosy. One of his scouts had come back from the south with a road map, and sales of hoarded bottle liquor and bathtub hooch to the soldiers had built up the gasoline fund, in local currency, to a respectable size. But they were marked strangers. Even their cars were strange. No amount of paint or pretense would allow a Honda Civic or a Jeep 4×4 to pass for one of those cumbersome boats the natives drove.
Still . . . the few roads west were said to be lightly traveled (if passable!) this time of year, and if they made it over the unthinkable obstacle of the Rocky Mountains, even if it took until June . . . the northwest was supposed to be wide open, hardly a policeman or Proctor to be seen outside the biggest towns.
He held that thought. It was comforting.
The clouds were gone by sunset. Even the towering mushroom cloud had dispersed, though there was still a column of sooty black smoke, which he supposed was the incinerated remnant of Two Rivers, Michigan, drawn up like a migrant soul into the blue ink of the sky.
Sarah joined him under the shadow of a longhouse roof and Shepperd put his arm around her. Neither of them spoke. There were no words for this. A military aircraft passed overhead—amazing how much those things resembled P-51’s, Shepperd thought—but it didn’t circle, and he doubted they had been seen. It was a safe bet, he thought, that they would all live to see morning.
AFTER
Mr. Graham says it’s important to keep this diary. He wants me to keep up with my English, although that’s not what they speak here, and with history, although they have a different history, here, too.
Today, although still winter by our calendar, is warm. Almost as warm as the day we came here. I don’t remember all of that, which is just as well, my mother says.
Mainly I remember how green everything seemed after we came through the light. The lab looked very strange, a few ruined buildings in a clearing as round as a crater, all surrounded by green, the bushes with long pointed leaves and the trees that looked like green feathers. A few snowflakes were still in the air around us! Of course, they melted quickly.
The blue light was gone.
For a few days after that we stayed in a partly collapsed dormitory building at the edge of the forest, but Mr. Graham said we couldn’t stay too long because there might still be radiation. We had the food and supplies in the car but no road to drive on, only trails.
Then the new people came and took us to their town.
The town is really as big as a city, Mr. Graham says, if you count the underground part.
The people have been good to us. Their skin is mostly dark, sometimes even a shade of dark green. The green of shadows in a forest. Most of them are not as tall as Mr. Graham. About the size of Miss Stone. Their language is hard to learn, but I already know several words. When I learn a new word I write it the way it sounds in my “language” notebook.
They treat us well and are curious about us. We’re not prisoners. But everything is very strange.
Above ground, the buildings are as green as the trees. The ceilings are arched, like church ceilings.
I saw an airplane yesterday. Its wings were painted purple and white, like butterfly wings.
Mr. Graham and Miss Stone talk a lot about all the things that have happened to us. Last night we went up to what we call the courtyard, an open space with stone benches not far from the market square. You hear music there some nights and it’s never crowded.
The stars were out. The stars are the same, Miss Stone says, even if everything else is different.
She thinks it was Howard Poole who created this world. She says he is a “Demiurge” now.
Mr. Graham said he didn’t think so. “I think this world’s gods are a little more distant. It’s not a haunted place. But I think Howard may have steered us here, at least.”
“A godlike act itself,” Miss Stone said. Her voice was quiet, and she was looking at the stars.
I don’t know if I believe in God. My mother says if you believe in Jesus it doesn’t matter if you go to church or not. She never did.
Miss Stone says something lives in everything.
I don’t know what the new people believe. But I am curious to find out, and as soon as I learn more of their language I hope to ask them.
Table of Contents
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Before
Mysterium: Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Mysterium Tremendae: Part Two
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Axis Mundi: Part Three
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
After
Robert Charles Wilson, Mysterium
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