Against the Day (107 page)

   
“You
don’t believe any of this. You should.”

“Of
course I believe you. You’re from the future, aren’t you? Who’d know better?”

   
“I
think you know what I’m talking about.”

“We
haven’t got the technical knowhow,” Miles said, pretending a massive patience.
“Remember? We are only skyshipjockeys, we have trouble enough with three
dimensions, what would we do with four?”

“Do
you think we chose to come here, to this terrible place? Tourists of disaster,
jump in some time machine, oh, how about Pompeii this weekend, Krakatoa
perhaps, but then volcanoes are
so
boring really, eruptions, lava, over
in a minute, let’s try something really—”

   
“Thorn,
you don’t have to—”

   
“We
have had no choice,” fiercely, having abandoned the measured delivery Miles had
come to associate with Trespassers. “No more than ghosts may choose what places
they must haunt. . . you children drift in a dream, all is smooth, no
interruptions, no discontinuities, but imagine the fabric of Time torn open,
and yourselves swept through, with no way back, orphans and exiles who find you
will do what you must, however shameful, to get from end to end of each
corroded day.”

Miles,
taken by a desolate illumination, reached out his hand, and Thorn, seeing his
intention, flinched and backed away, and in the instant Miles understood that
there had been no miracle, no brilliant technical coup, in fact no “time
travel” at all—that the presence in this world of Thorn and his people
had been owing only to some chance blundering upon a shortcut through unknown
topographies of Time, enabled somehow by whatever was to happen here, in this
part of West Flanders where they stood, by whatever terrible singularity in the
smooth flow of Time had opened to them.

“You
are not here,” he whispered in a speculative ecstasy. “Not fully manifest.”

“I
wish I were not here,” cried Ryder Thorn. “I wish I had never seen these Halls
of Night, that I were not cursed to return, and return. You have been so easy
to fool—most of you anyway—you are such simpletons at the fair,
gawking at your Wonders of Science, expecting as your entitlement all the
Blessings of Progress, it is your faith, your pathetic balloonboy faith.”

Miles and Thorn directed their wheels
back toward the sea. As evening descended, Thorn, who honored smaller promises
at least, produced his ukulele and played the Chopin Εminor Nocturne, the
tenuous notes, as light departed, acquiring substance and depth. They found an
inn and ate supper companionably, and returned to Ostend in the owllight.

“I
could have passed my hand through him,” reported Miles. “As if there’d been
some failure of physical translation
. . . .
”

“What
spiritualists might have called a ‘plasmic hysteresis,
’ ”
nodded Chick.

“There
is nothing immortal about them, Chick. They have lied to all of us, including
those Chums of Chance in other units who may have been fool enough to work for
them, in exchange for ‘eternal youth.’ They cannot provide that. They never
could.

“You
remember back at Candlebrow, after you brought me to meet ‘Mr. Ace,’ how
disconsolate I was? I could not stop crying for hours, for I knew
then—with no evidence, no reasoned proof, I simply knew, the minute I saw
him, that it was all false, the promise was nothing but a cruel confidence
game.”

“You
ought to have shared that,” Chick said.

“Overcome
as I was, Chick, I knew I would get through it. But you fellows—Lindsay
is so frail, really, Darby pretends to be such a weathered old nihilist, but
he’s hardly out of boyhood. How could I have been that cruel to any of you? My
brothers?”

   
“But
now I have to tell them.”

   
“I
was hoping you could find a way.”

iktor Mulciber—bespoke suit, pomaded silver
hair—though rich enough to afford to send a deputy, showed up at the
Kursaal himself in a state of unconcealed eagerness, as if this mysterious
Qweapon were a common firearm and he hoping the seller would allow him a few
courtesy shots.

“I
am the one they send for when Basil Zaharoff is busy with a new redhead and
can’t be bothered,” he introduced himself. “Everywhere one finds a spectrum of need,
from bludgeons and machetes to submarines and poison gases—trains of
history not fully run, Chinese tongs, Balkan
komitadji,
African
vigilantes, each with its attendant population of widowstobe, often in
geographies barely sketched in pencil on the back of some envelope or waybill.
One glance at any government budget anywhere in the world tells the
story—the money is always in place, already allocated, the motive
everywhere is fear, the more immediate the fear, the higher the multiples.”

   
“Say,
I’m
in the wrong business!” Root exclaimed cheerfully.

   
The
arms tycoon beamed as if from a distance. “No you’re not.”

Trying
to get some kind of grasp on the working principles of the suddenly desirable
weapon, the amiable deathmerchant was conferring in an outoftheway estaminet
with a handful of Quaternioneers, including Barry Nebulay, Dr. V. Ganesh Rao,
today metamorphosed into an American Negro, and Umeki Tsurigane, along with
whom Kit had tagged owing to his latelyintensifying fascination with the Nipponese
peach.

“No
one seems to know what these waves are,” said Barry Nebulay. “They cannot
strictly be termed Hertzian, for they engage the Æther in a different
way—for one thing, they seem to be longitudinal as well as transverse.
Quaternionists may have a chance someday of understanding them.”

“And
arms dealers, don’t forget,” smiled Mulciber. “It’s said the inventor of this
weapon has found a way to get inside the scalar part of a Quaternion, where
invisible powers may be had for the taking.”

“Of
the four terms,” nodded Nebulay, “the scalar, or
w
term, like the
baritone in a barbershop quartet or the viola in a string quartet, has always
been singled out as the eccentric one. If you considered the three vector terms
as dimensions in space, and the scalar term as Time, then any energy
encountered inside that term might be taken as due to Time, an intensified form
of Time itself.”

“Time,”
explained Dr. Rao, “is the Further Term, you see, transcending and conditioning
i
,
j
, and
k
—the dark
visitor from the Exterior, the Destroyer, the fulfiller of the Trinity. It is
the merciless clockbeat we all seek to escape, into the pulselessness of
salvation. It is all this and more.”

“A
weapon based on Time . . .” mused Viktor Mulciber. “Well, why not? The one force
no one knows how to defeat, resist, or reverse. It kills all forms of life
sooner or later. With a Timeweapon you could become the most feared person in
history.”

   
“I’d
rather be loved,” said Root.

   
Mulciber
shrugged. “You’re young.”

He
wasn’t the only arms rep in town. Somehow the rumor had found the others, in
their train compartments, the beds of procurement ministers’ wives, back in the
brush up unexplored tributaries, spreading their blankets in any of a thousand
desolate clearings on the baked and beaten red laterite where nothing would
grow again, displaying to the lesioned and bereft their inventories of
wonder—and one by one they made their excuses, and rescheduled their
travels, and came to Ostend, as to some international chess tournament.

But
they were too late, because Piet Woevre had had the jump on them all along, and
so it happened that on a particular evening in autumn, among the teeming Inner
Boulevards of Brussels, a hotbed of the illicit down toward the Gare du Midi,
Woevre finally concluded the purchase with Edouard Gevaert, with whom he had
done business in the past, though not of quite this nature. They met in a
tavern frequented by receivers of stolen goods, had a formal glass of beer, and
went out in back to close the deal. All around them the world was for sale or
barter. Later Woevre learned that he could have got the article cheaper in
Antwerp, but there were too many quarters of Antwerp, particularly around the
docks, that he could no longer visit without more precaution than the object
was likely to prove worth.

   
When
he came into actual possession of it, Woevre, who hadn’t been able to

imagine it as anything but a weapon, was surprised and a
little disappointed to find it so small. He’d been expecting something on the
order of a Krupp fieldpiece, perhaps assembled from several parts, needing
cargo wagons to bring it from place to place. Instead here was something in a
sleek leather case, shaped exquisitely by northern Italian maskmakers to the
exact facets of the shape within, a perfectly tailored black skin, a deployment
of light among a careful clutter of angles, a hundred blurry highlights
. . . .

   
“You’re
sure this is it.”

   
“I
hope I know better than to misrepresent anything to you, Woevre.”

   
“But,
the enormous energy
. . .
without a
peripheral component, a power supply of some sort, how . . .” As Woevre stood
turning the device this way and that in the uncertain light of dusk and
streetlamps, Gevaert was unprepared for the yearning he saw in the operative’s
face. It was desire so immoderate
. . .
nothing
this somewhat unworldly gobetween had ever witnessed before, nothing many
people in the world had, the desire for a single weapon able to annihilate the
world.

Whenever Kit
found
himself
considering his plans, which he had once

not long ago believed to include Göttingen, there was always
the interesting question of why he should be lingering in this vaguely
glandular shape on

the map, beleaguered, paused at the edge of history, less a
nation than a prophecy of a fate to be communally suffered, an all but
subaudible
ostinato
of fear
. . . .

It had not occurred to him until
lately that Umeki might be in any way an element in this. They had found
excuses to fall more and more into each other’s emotional field, until one
fateful afternoon in her room, with rain in autumnal descent at the window, she
appeared in a doorway, naked, blood beneath skin fine as silver leaf sonorously
all but singing in its desire. Kit, who had imagined himself a fellow of some
experience, was poleaxed by the understanding that there was no use in women
looking any other way than this. He had the profound sense of having wasted
most of the free time in his life up till now. It did not help in this
assessment that she was wearing that cowgirl hat of hers. He knew as with the
certainty of recalling a former life that he must be on his knees, adoring her
flowery pussy with tongue and mouth until she was lost to silence, then, as if
he did this every day, still holding her by each buttock exactly there, with
her exquisite legs gripping his neck, getting to his feet and carrying her,
weightless, clenched, silent, to the bed, and delivering what was left of his
brain by then to this miracle, this sorceress from the East.

·
    
·
    
·

Κit
continued
to catch sight
of Pléiade Lafrisée now and then, out along the Digue, or across the gaming
rooms, or up in the stands at the Wellington Hippodrome, usually attending to
the whimsical schedule of some visiting sportsman. They all looked rich enough,
these customers, but that could always be just flash. Howbeit, Umeki and so
forth, it wasn’t as if he was itching exactly to reconnect, he knew how limited
was the use he’d been put to by her, and after the unfortunate business in the
mayonnaise factory he was only hoping he’d seen her worst. But he did wonder
what she was still doing in town.