Against the Day (152 page)

   
“Ouspenskian!”

   
“Bolshevik!”

   
“It
certainly resembles a capacitance effect, though on a planetary scale—a

slow, incremental investment of
energy, followed by a sudden catastrophic payback.”

“Exactly what I’m saying. Timetravel
isn’t free, it takes energy. This was an artifact of repeated visits from the
future.”

“
Nichevo.
Something that
wasn’t supposed to be where it was. Maybe deliberate, but maybe not. It’s all
we can say.”

Meantime
, in
another part of the taiga, Kit and Prance were going round and round as usual,
on the interesting topic of which one was less constitutionally able to clean
up after himself, when with no announcement, everything, faces, sky, trees, the
distant turn of river, went red. Sound itself, the wind, what wind there was,
all gone red as a living heart. Before they could regain their voices, as the
color faded to a blood orange, the explosion arrived, the voice of a world
announcing that it would never go back to what it had been. Both Kit and Prance
remembered the great roaring as they passed through the Prophet’s Gate.

“It’s up by Vanavara,” Kit said when
~when the day had resumed. “We ought to go up there and see if there’s anything
we can do.”

“You go if you want. I was not sent
here for this.” Prance was hugging himself as if for warmth, though it was
summer.

   
“Because
. . .
?”

   
“My
remit was political. This is not political.”

   
“Maybe
it is. Maybe it’s war.”

   
“Out
here? Over what, Traverse? Logging rights?”

Two small black birds
who had not been there now emerged out of the light as it faded to
everyday green and blue again. Kit understood for a moment that forms of life
were a connected set—critters he was destined never to see existing so
that those he did see would be just where they were, when he saw them.
Somewhere on the other side of the world, an exotic beetle stood at a precise
distance and compass bearing from an unclassified shrub so that here, in this
clearing, these two black birds might appear to Kit, precisely as they were. He
had entered a state of total attention to no object he could see or sense, or
eventually even imagine in any interior way, while Prance was all but
hysterical.

“Our
mortal curse to be out here in the way of whatever force decides to come in out
of that unlimited darkness and wipe us from the Creation,” Prance delivered
into religious mania. “As if something in the Transfinitum

had chosen to reenter the finite
world, to reaffirm allegiance to its limits, including mortality
. . .
to become recognizably numerical
again
. . .
a
presence come to
Earth
. . . .
”

And soon the drums began
.
The
dungur,
rising to them out of the taiga inscrutable and vast.
Through the long twilight into the pale evening. One drum would have been
soulrattling enough, but there were at least a dozen. Deep and farreaching. Kit
stood nearly paralyzed. It went on for days. After a while he thought he heard
something familiar in it. He had begun to mistake it for thunder. Not ordinary
thunder but whatever it was Agdy had brought down on the day of the Event. Were
they trying to commemorate it? summon it back? Or provide homeopathic echoes to
protect them from its return?

“
I was shot at today
,”
Prance announced. “Again.”

   
“Was
it as much fun as last time, what’d you call it, ‘exhilarating’?”

It
had become disagreeably evident that young Prance was widely taken now for a
Japanese spy, allowing Kit only so much slack to try and convince the
Englishman’s many illwishers otherwise.

“If
only you didn’t ask so many questions all the time. Scholarly curiosity’s one
thing, but you just don’t know when to quit. And you don’t look too local
either.”

   
“Well
I certainly don’t look Japanese.” Then into Kit’s silence, “Do I?”

“How
many Japanese does anybody out here ever get to see? Prance ol’ buddy, let’s
face it, out in these parts—you’re Japanese.”

“But
I say look here, I’m
not
Japanese. I mean am I walking about in sandals?
gesturing with fans, speaking in unsolvable riddles, any of that?”

Kit
raised his eyebrows and angled his head. “Deny it all you like, but what about
me, I go on coverin your back long enough, folks here start thinkin I’m
Japanese, too, where are we then?”

Among
Siberians one school of thought placed the origins of the mysterious visitation
in Japan. Not good news for Prance, actually.

“But
it was sighted coming in from quite the other direction—from the
southwest,” he protested. “China.”

“Maybe
they’re what you’d call a little ‘disOriented’? If it was a projectile, or
perhaps a ray of some kind, it might not even have been dispatched through what
we think of as ordinary space.”

   
“And
. . .
what do we ‘think of as ordinary
space’ again, one does keep

forgetting.”

   
“Up
and down,” Kit patiently, “left and right, to and fro, the three axes we know
from our everyday lives. But
someone
may have command of Quaternion
space—three imaginary axes plus a fourth scalar term containing energies
few of us can imagine.”

He
had been thinking, with deep anxiety, about the Quaternion weapon he’d turned
over to Umeki Tsurigane in Ostend. For the likes of Piet Woevre, the instrument
had promised an advanced level of destructiveness, a chance to introduce large
populations to the embrace of death and death’s companion, Time, which the
w
term might easily be taken to mean. Might the Tunguska Event have been
caused by the discharge, planned or inadvertent, of a Qweapon? It wouldn’t have
been Umekisan, but perhaps someone she had trusted. Who had perhaps betrayed
her. And if someone had betrayed her, how fatally? And what did that make Kit?

For a while
after
the Event, crazed Raskol’niki ran around in the woods, flagellating themselves
and occasional onlookers who got too close, raving about Tchernobyl, the
destroying star known as Wormwood in the book of Revelation. Reindeer
discovered again their ancient powers of flight, which had lapsed over the
centuries since humans began invading the North. Some were stimulated by the
accompanying radiation into an epidermal luminescence at the red end of the
spectrum, particularly around the nasal area. Mosquitoes lost their taste for
blood, acquiring one instead for vodka, and were observed congregating in large
swarms at local taverns. Clocks and watches ran backward. Although it was
summer, there were brief snowfalls in the devastated taiga, and heat in general
tended to flow unpredictably for a while. Siberian wolves walked into churches
in the middle of services, quoted passages from the Scriptures in fluent Old
Slavonic, and walked peaceably out again. They were reported to be especially
fond of Matthew 7:15, “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s
clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” Aspects of the landscape of
Tierra del Fuego, directly opposite the Stony Tunguska on the globe, began to show
up in Siberia—sea ernes, gulls, terns, and petrels landing in the
branches of fir trees, swooping to grab fish out of the streams, taking a bite,
screaming with distaste, and throwing them back. Granite cliffs rose sheer and
unexpected out of the forest. Oceangoing ships unmanned by visible crews,
attempting to navigate the shallow rivers and creeks, ran aground. Entire
villages came to the conclusion that they were not where they ought to be, and
without much advance planning simply packed up what they had, left behind what
they couldn’t carry, and headed off together

into the brush, where presently they
set up villages no one else could see. Or not very clearly.

And
from everywhere in the taiga, all up and down the basins of the Yenisei, came
reports of a figure walking through the aftermath, not exactly an angel but
moving like one, deliberately, unhurried, a consoler. Accounts differed as to
whether the outsize figure was man or woman, but all reported having to look
steeply upward when trying to make out its face, and a deep feeling of fearless
calm once it had passed.

Some
thought it might be some transfigured version of the shaman Magyakan, whose
whereabouts had been puzzling folks along the Stony T. No one had seen him
since the Event, his
izba
was empty, and the magical force that had kept
it from sinking, like everyone else’s dwelling in Siberia, into the
summerthawed earth, had abated, so that the cabin now tilted at a thirtydegree
angle, like a ship at sea about to slide beneath the waves.

None
of the strange effects lasted long, and as the Event receded in memory,
arguments arose as to whether this or that had even happened at all. Soon the
forest was back to normal, green underbrush beginning to appear among the
deadwhite trunks, the animals fallen speechless again, treeshadows again
pointing in their accustomed directions, and Kit and Prance continued to make
their way through it with no idea what this meant for their mission out here.

Kit had almost
gotten used to riding Kirghiz horses, or more often their shaggier ponysize
cousins, his feet all but dragging along the ground, when one day he and Prance
came across a band of reindeer herders, moving the herd to new pasture, and he
immediately caught sight of one reindeer, pure white, who seemed to be looking
back at him pretty intently, before disengaging himself from the herd and
trotting over.

   
“As
if he knew me,” as Kit explained it later.

“Of
course, Traverse,” Prance blithely demented, “and what did he
say
to
you?”

   
“Told
me his name. Ssagan.”

Prance
stared. “That’s a Buriat pronunciation of
tsagan,
which is Mongol for
‘white.
’ ”
He went over to the
critter and began talking Buriat, now and then pausing as if to listen.

It
didn’t seem that odd to Kit, talking with reindeer. Folk out here were said to
do it all the time. Since the visitation at the Stony Tunguska, he had noticed
that the angle of his vision was wider and the narrow track of his life

branching now and then into
unsuspected side trails.

   
The
herders were reluctant at first, believing Ssagan to be the reincarnation of a
great Buriat teacher. They consulted with him for days, shamans came and went,
wives put in with useful advice. Finally, from what Prance could learn, Ssagan
convinced them that Kit was a pilgrim who could not proceed farther without
Ssagan to pilot him ~though confusions in the terrain.

They had entered
a
strangely tranquil part of Siberia, on the Mongolian border between the Sayan
and TannuOla ranges, which Prance had been briefly through and said was known
as Tuva. Kit reckoned if a fellow was going to come riding in anywhere on a
white reindeer, he could do a lot worse than here. After Kit dismounted and
took his saddlebags, Ssagan, as if having discharged a duty, turned abruptly
and went off the way they had come, to rejoin his herd, wherever they’d got to
by now, without looking back.

   
“He
says he’s done all he can,” said Prance. “His job was to bring us here.”

They
slept that night in a bark hut with a pointed top, and woke into the dawn to an
unearthly guttural singing. Some Tuvans were tending a herd of sheep. The man
singing was standing alone, but after a while Kit heard a flute accompanying
him. He looked around, but there was no fluteplayer, no other musicians of any
kind, in fact. He looked at the singer more closely and could see lip movements
that matched up with the sound of the flute. It was all coming from the one
voice.

“They
call it
borbanngadyr,
”
Prance
explained. “Perhaps shamans are not the only ones who know how to be in two
states at once. On the other hand, perhaps there really is a fluteplayer but
he’s invisible, or a ghost. It all needs to be looked into more closely, which
is why I think I’ll stay here for a while if you don’t mind.”

There
was something else. Prance seemed almost embarrassed. “This is the heart of
Earth,” he whispered.

   
“Funny,”
said Kit, “all’s I see’s a bunch of sheep.”

   
“Exactly.
Traverse, I know we’ve had our differences—”