“What? Why?”
“They’re going to start bombing us in a few minutes.”
Steve stared at her. “You know about that?”
“Sure.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You don’t want to, like, flee?”
“I thought it would be fun to watch. David used to bomb things sometimes. The lights are kind of pretty.” She smiled and held up the bowl. “Plus, popcorn!”
Steve just stared at her.
A moment later she got it. “Oh. They can’t hurt us. I promise.”
“Umm. Have you heard of something called atomic bombs?”
“I’m familiar with them. They won’t try that. Well…they talked about it, but I think they decided not to. Erwin and the Chinese guy wanted to, but the president kept saying ‘not on American soil.’ I’m pretty sure, anyway. I got bored and tuned out.”
He boggled at her. “How the hell do you know these things?”
“I stole it from David’s catalog. When someone is planning to harm me, I can tell.” She glanced at Naga. “It feels sort of like an itch, here.” She tapped the base of her skull. “When I got the itch, I listened in on them. It should start any minute.”
Steve rubbed his temples. “Carolyn…even if they don’t use nukes, they have these things called bunker busters. And something else, I think it’s called a ‘daisy cutter’? Something like that. They’re huge bombs, almost as big as nukes.” He searched her face. “Are you sure that won’t—”
“Relax,” she said, misunderstanding. “There’s nothing to worry about. I promise.” She looked out at the wall behind the television. “Actually, it’s already started. The stuff on television must have been recorded, or something. Look.” She made a gesture and the wall became transparent.
Steve squinted against the glare. “Has the sun come back?”
“No, it’s just the explosions. Hang on.” She gestured again and the glare dimmed a bit. “That’s better.”
For as far back as the eye could see, the air was filled with warplanes. Seeing them she thought of flocks of birds, migrating for the winter. A flight of cruise missiles streaked in through the night sky and blossomed against the wall of the Library, orange flowers in the night. “See? Told you it was pretty.” She ate a piece of popcorn. “Don’t you think?”
“Uh…I guess.”
Next in the line were three big bombers. The bomb-bay doors were open in their bellies. As they approached they disgorged their cargo. Now she could see them on the television as well as through the wall. Fireballs marched up the side of the pyramid in surprisingly tidy rows. One of them was a direct hit. Carolyn adjusted the brightness again.
Steve walked over and put his hand on the wall. “I can’t even feel it. Nothing.”
“Of course not.” She gestured at the pyramid on the TV. “Like I said, it’s a projection. The bombs can’t reach where we actually are. Think of it this way—if someone shot your shadow, that wouldn’t hurt, right?”
“Hmm.” Steve sat back down—farther away from her than he had been—and took a handful of popcorn. “I have a confession to make.”
“What’s that?”
“I knew they were going to bomb you. Well…I knew they were thinking about it.”
“Oh? Did you?”
“Yeah. I’ve been talking to Erwin. And the president—the new one, I mean. Not the head. Plus a couple of others.” He held up Mrs. McGillicutty’s cell phone.
She waved her hand in the air. “I appreciate you saying something, but it’s not a problem.”
“You knew, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you been eavesdropping on me?”
“I’d never do that. Not to you.”
“Then how?”
“Different universe, remember? I had to set up a relay before your cell phone would work. Remember how the first couple of times you tried to make a call, nothing happened?”
“Oh.” He paused. “You’re not mad?”
“Nothing to be mad about.”
“I sort of conspired to murder you. That’s nothing?”
She shook her head. “Nope. On some level you knew it couldn’t work.”
“How do you mean?”
She tapped the base of her skull. “No itch.”
“Ah.” Steve thought to himself for a few seconds. He and Naga exchanged a look. Finally he nodded. “Yeah,” he said softly. “OK.” Then, to her, “Can I get you a drink? There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
“Sure.” A drink sounds really good. “What’s on your mind?”
“Well, the first thing is, I wanted to talk to you about that wish.”
“You know what you want?” She tried to keep the eagerness out of her voice. Maybe he’s coming around after all!
“Yeah. I thought of something. You remember me talking about my dog? The cocker spaniel?”
“Er…”
“That first night, back at the bar.”
“Oh,” she lied. “Of course.”
“Can you find him? Make sure he’s OK? His name is Petey.”
“Yeah, sure. I can do that. But Steve, that’s nothing. If you have—”
He gave her a very earnest look. “You promise?”
“Sure. I promise. I’m not much good with dogs, but I’ll figure something out.”
Steve sat back, nodded. “Thank you, Carolyn. I really appreciate that.”
He fell silent. After a long pause she pulled at the air, a get-on-with-it gesture. “Steve?”
“Mmm. Sorry. How do I put this?” He pursed his lips. “Look, first, I want to tell you that I thought a lot about what you told me the other night. What happened to you. How you got to be…whatever you are.”
“I told you, I’m just a libr—”
He held up his hand. “Whatever. Just know, I’m making a real effort to put myself in your place. To understand why you do the things you do. Like, that’s all I’ve really done since then.”
There was something in his tone that she didn’t like. “Oh? And now you have…opinions?”
He ran his fingers through his hair. “In terms of what you did? To David and Margaret? No. I personally try to stay away from stuff like that, the kicking of ass and so forth. On the other hand, no one’s ever nailed me to a desk. So, really, who am I to judge?”
Ice cubes clinked in a glass. In her heart, something unclenched. “Thank you.”
“But I do have an opinion about something else.”
“What’s that?”
“About what it did to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well…for instance, most people I know wouldn’t get bored and tune out of a conversation where someone was deciding whether or not to drop a nuclear bomb on them. Even if they were pretty sure they’d live through it, they’d be curious to hear how the conversation turned out.” He shook his head. “Not you, though. It did not rise to your threshold of interest.”
“I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”
“At first I thought you were fucking crazy. Maybe you are, by whatever standard the doctors have, but now I don’t think crazy is the right word.”
“What, then?” Her lips felt numb, as if she’d been given some sort of toxin.
“I can’t think of a word for it. It’s like you’re living at a different scale than the rest of us. Normal things—fear, hope, compassion—just don’t register with you.”
“That’s…OK. Maybe. There might be something to that.” Her tone was guarded. He didn’t mean her any harm, she’d know if he did, but there was something there, something…
“It has to be that way,” he said. “I mean, really. How else could you have survived? But, the thing is, it cuts both ways.”
“Steve, you’re going to have to spell it out for me.”
“Yeah, OK. I’m trying to.” He poured half an inch of Everclear into her glass, then filled the rest with orange juice. He emptied the rest of the bottle into a steel stock pot. “Letti
ng it breathe,” he said. He walked over and handed her the glass.
She sipped her drink, made a face.
“Don’t like it?”
“It’s pretty strong.” She drank it anyway.
“Yeah.” He touched his cup to his lips, then set it aside. “Like I said, I’ve been watching the news a lot lately. Are you aware that there have been some agricultural problems? With this new sun you put up?”
“What sort of problems?”
“Well…most of the plants are dying. Almost all of them, really. Trees, grass, wheat, rice, the Amazon Basin…pretty much everything. That has some people a little concerned.”
“About plants?” She was honestly confused. Americans were constantly killing one another. Every time you turned around there was another war. “Why would they care about plants?”
“The thing is, pretty soon there isn’t going to be any food left.”
“Oh! Right. Well, that’s easy. There are plenty of molds and fungi and whatnot that will grow under the black sun. I’ve got books. When I get around to it I’ll make a translation, and—”
“That’s really nice, and I know people will appreciate it. But the problem is getting to be kind of urgent.”
She shifted uncomfortably. “I’ll see if I can block out some time next week.”
“CNN is running a series of special reports on how to get nutritional value from stuff you wouldn’t normally think of as food,” Steve said. “Making stew out of shoe leather. Recipes for your house pets. Things like that.”
“Hmm. Come to think of it, the store was out of guacamole.”
“Did you notice the price on the Everclear?”
“Not really.”
“Seven thousand dollars a bottle is a little higher than usual,” he said. “Probably the only reason you could find it at all is that it’s as much an industrial chemical as a food product. I don’t think anyone except high school kids actually drinks the stuff. They only do it because they don’t know any better.”
“Now that you mention it, the shelves did seem kind of bare.”
“I bet.” He made a concentrating face. “The other day I saw something on the news that made me think of your deer. Isha and…”
“Asha.”
“Right. The other week this kid, sixteen or so, got caught poaching deer on a rich guy’s estate. That’s a capital crime now. They caught him red-handed. Literally. He was sucking the marrow out of a doe’s femur bone. His defense was that the deer were going to starve to death anyway, so why shouldn’t someone get some nutrition out of them? I kind of saw his point.”
Carolyn flashed on a morning she had spent nibbling dew-drenched clover with Asha, watching the spring dawn. This brought a flicker of…something…but she pushed it down.
Steve was watching her intently.
“What happened?” she asked. Her voice was perfectly normal.
Steve was silent a long moment before he answered, softly. “They hanged the kid anyway. Afterwards there were more riots. Like I said, it’s kind of an everyday thing now.”
“Oh.” She drained her glass.
“Another drink?” His voice was stronger.
“Sure.”
He walked back into the kitchen and opened the second bottle. He fixed her drink—a full inch of liquor this time—then poured the rest of that bottle into the stock pot with the first.
“Anyway. There’s some other problems besides the famine. Earthquakes are the biggie. There’s a new one almost every day. There’s not much left of San Francisco. Tokyo is gone. Mexico City isn’t far behind. And apparently there’s some kind of volcano under Yellowstone that’s rumbling. Nothing has really happened with it yet, but the geologists seem worried.” He met her eyes. “They say it’s got to do with this place.”
“The Library?”
“Yeah. Apparently the pyramid thingy over Garrison Oaks is heavy. They say it’s got the same mass as the moon, or something? It’s shifting tectonic plates around?” He took a sip of her drink before he handed it to her. “You hadn’t heard any of this?”
She shook her head.
“Yeah,” Steve said. “I figured. Keeping an eye on your Father’s enemies, right? And catching up on all these other—what did you call them?”
“Catalogs,” she said. “I’ve been consolidating the catalogs. Strategizing. And laying the groundwork for some contingencies. Just in case.”
“Sure,” Steve said. “Sure. You’re careful. You’ve got a lot on your mind. That’s the world you live in, the world you know.”
“Yeah.” She ran her fingers through her hair, stressed. “Look, Steve, about the earthquakes and the famine and all that—I’ll figure something out. But there’s more going on here than you know. Q-33 North is in motion, and I can’t find him. If Liesel or maybe Barry O’Shea decided to make a move against me now, it would be bad for—”
“Bad for everyone. All of us. Regular people. I get that too. And these are legitimately large problems. I do not doubt you for even a single second.” He drummed his fingers against the marble tabletop. “But it leaves me with a problem of my own.”
“What’s that?”
“I talked this over with Erwin. And the rest of them too, the president and the Army guys, but Erwin was the only one who seemed to really get it.”
“Get what?”
“How I can’t get through to you.” He held his hands out to her gently, palms up. “I’ve said it every way I know how, and it’s like you don’t even hear me. I was talking to Erwin about it and he said it’s because we don’t have a common vocabulary.”
Carolyn’s eyes narrowed. “My English is pretty good.”
“That’s what I said too, but that’s not what he meant. He told me about how when he got back from the war, everyone kept telling him to let it go, to find something that made him happy and do that. He said he heard the words, said they even made sense, but he just couldn’t relate to them. Then he said there was this kid, this kid he helped somehow. And that was the thing that made him understand it was possible to move on. And after that the words made sense.”
“Dashaen,” she said. “I remember him.”
“So then I started thinking about how you must have had to shut down, inside. You had to be cold, didn’t you? To get through things like a little kid getting her head split open with an ax, and people being roasted alive.”
Carolyn didn’t answer.
“Cold. Yeah.” Steve was peering at her again. “But you’re not frozen through. Not quite. There’s that one little thing left, isn’t there? The heart coal. That’s it, isn’t it? The very last thing.”
After a long moment she surrendered the barest possible sliver of a nod.
“I thought so. Yeah. That’s going to be the only way anyone can reach you, isn’t it? The only possible way for you to…wake up. To not be cold anymore.”
She didn’t answer.
Steve nodded to himself, then smiled.
Something about that smile was different. What’s changed?
“You never came right out and said, but I think I’ve guessed what it is. The heart coal, I mean.” Still smiling, he stood and walked over to the stock pot.
It took her a moment, but then she got it. He’s at peace, she realized. That’s what’s different about him. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him look really happy.
Standing at the counter, still smiling, he picked up the orange juice. “Another drink?”
“No.” Her voice was hoarse. “What are you doing?”
“I’m so glad you asked. Thank you for cooperating with my segue. Sure you don’t want another drink?”
She shook her head.
“Well, that’s OK too.” He picked up the stock pot filled with Everclear and poured it over his head.
The room filled with the sharp chemical scent of 90 percent pure ethanol. It would, Carolyn suddenly understood, be highly flammable.
Steve spoke to Naga. “Now, sweetie.”
&n
bsp; Carolyn, very quick, moved to stop him. Naga, quicker still, moved to block her way.
Steve smiled at her, calm and friendly. “Before I move closer towards my vision of the Buddha, I would respectfully plead that you adopt a stance of compassion towards the small things of this world.”
He closed his eyes. Somehow he was holding Margaret’s lighter.
Clink. Scratch. Click.
Then, suddenly, all of the great and eternal now was blue flame. Naga held the space between Carolyn and Steve, an impassable frenzy of claw and fang. Carolyn could only watch, helpless, as the flame rendered Steve into blazing tallow, rendered him into black smoke. Normal men, she understood for the first time, burn surprisingly fast. In less than a minute, he was dead. Therein, perhaps, we find God’s mercy. Beyond that, the outer darkness.
Alone now, Carolyn felt the regard of Isha and Asha settle cold upon her.
Someone was screaming.
INTERLUDE V
TITAN
I
Carolyn resurrected Steve, of course. It took a couple of weeks. She was getting the hang of medicine, but burns were tricky. He asked her for two more bottles of Everclear. She said she couldn’t find any. A week later she came down and found him dead in the bathtub, razor at his side. She had to tranquilize Naga to get at the body. That one only took a day or so to fix, but she got the blood type wrong—a rookie mistake, but she was upset—and he died of heart failure almost as soon as he came back. She replaced the razors with an electric and brought him back a fourth time, but the next night at dinner he recited his little speech—“adopt a stance of compassion”? what the hell did that even mean?—before downing a glass of Liquid-Plumr with his roast.
She had left him dead, after that. She couldn’t bear it. Not anymore.
That had been over a month ago. Now she was fully immersed in her studies. One day while she was researching the theoretical framework of reality viruses she happened upon something mis-shelved. There, among the pale violet mathematics, a brown folder. It turned out to be the crafting of the alshaq shabboleth.
It changed everything.
In and of itself the alshaq shabboleth was of little consequence. It was conceptually related to the technique she had found on the bookmark, the one that enabled her to move through the Library invisibly. Its only advantage over the alshaq urkun was that it could be invoked very quickly, with a single word. She had seen it used—once.