Against the Day (186 page)

Cyprian offered him a local
cigarette, and they lit up. “But you’re still on station out here? What if
fighting were to start? how would you be expected on your own, to . . .”

Vámos gestured up at the Tesla
transmitter. “The War Office maintains receiving facilities on the Sussex
coast, and cable links to London. We thought that’s where you’d be by now, back
in England happy and secure, drinking tea in a garden someplace. Who in his
right mind would want to be out here?”

There seemed no point in not bringing
up the
Interdikt.
Without going into names or dates, Cyprian gave Vámos
a quick summary of what he’d

been up to.

“Oh. That.” Vámos took off his
goggles and wiped them on his shirt while pretending to look carefully at the
sky. “Around here they call it the
Zabraneno.
Whoever installed it, it
no longer belongs to anyone—the Germans and Austrians pretend they never
heard of it, the local people are terrified, the Turks send their probes every
month or so, believing it is like the Great Wall of China, there to keep
them
from invading. The British as
always are of two minds as to its usefulness. None of us know how to dismantle
the thing, so the best we can do is wait, ride patrol, east to west, west to
east, see that no one triggers it by accident.”

   
“And
has it ever
. . .
?”

Vámos had an unaccustomedly solemn
look. “It behaves as if it’s alive. Knows when someone’s coming and takes steps
to protect itself. Anyone who passes within a certain radius. We have learned
the way in, for all the good that does us. I suppose now you’ll want to see
it.”

Gabrovo Slim remembered an
appointment with an attarfactory rep from Philipopolis, and left apologizing.
Cyprian and Reef each climbed on behind one of the R.U.S.H. cyclists and were
taken snarling across the foothills of the Sredna Gora, past trees grown over
with ivy, a sinister topiary of green creatures stooped and hooded that almost
looked like familiar animals but were deformed past comfortable recognition,
that seemed to watch the riders as they passed, only a breath of wind away from
having faces revealed from inside their dark green hoods
. . . .

And creeping at the edges
. . .
or actually by now industriously in
and out like a loom shuttle all through the structure of the field of vision,
mapped onto the crossed invisible threads on which all that is is deployed,
Cyprian, out in the ungentle wind, acquiring a variety of interdental insect
life, was witnessing distortions, displacements, rotations
. . .
something else was there, just about
to appear, something he understood had always been there, but that he had not
been receptive to
. . . .

“Here is where we must dismount,”
said Mihály Vámos, “and walk carefully.” In single file, walking a zigzag
pattern, as if counting paces, they approached a long structure of weathered
concrete, strangely dark in this unaccustomed summer cold, a repetition of
elements all grimly turned the same way, as toward intruders unknown but
equally undeserving of mercy.

Vámos led them into a sort of
enlarged casemate, built not long ago but already begun to corrode. Inside, in
the afternoonochre shadows, flaking communiqué forms that once had screamed
with emergency were still pinned to a framed ancient announcementboard, though
many had fallen off and blown in drifts into the corners. Tunnels led off into
stone darkness,

toward adjoining structures unindicated miles away in what so
clearly announced itself as a great barrier fortification.

In a storeroom they found hundreds of
canisters, brand new, dustfree, each labeled
phosgène
.

“They’re real enough.” Vámos said.
“Phosgene isn’t especially exotic anymore, there are production plants
everywhere, it’s only chlorine and carbon monoxide. With access to enough
electric current, it’s easy to produce chlorine from salt water, and carbon
monoxide can be collected from nearly any combustion process. Expose them
together to light and you get phosgene.”

   
“Born
of light,” said Cyprian, as if about to understand something.

“It seems this isn’t a gas weapon,
after all,” said the
motoros.
“ ‘
Phosgene’
is really code for light. We learned it is light here which is really the
destructive agent. Beyond that the creators of the
Zabraneno
have
proceeded in the deepest secrecy, though the small amount of published
theoretical work seems to be German, dating back to the early studies of city
illumination— they were devoting great attention to the Æther then, using
as their model the shock wave that passes through air in a conventional
explosion, looking for similar methods to intensify the lightpressure locally
in the Æther
. . . .
From military
experience with searchlights, it was widely known how effectively light at that
candlepower could produce helplessness and fear. The next step was to find a
way to project it as a stream of destructive energy.”

“Fear in lethal form,” said Cyprian.
“And if all these units, all along this line, went off at once—”

“A great cascade of blindness and
terror ripping straight across the heart of the Balkan Peninsula. Like nothing
that has ever happened. Photometry is still too primitive for anyone to say how
much light would be deployed, or how intense—somewhere far up in the
millions of candles per square inch, but there are only guesses—expressions
of military panic, really.”

   
“God,”
said Reef.

   
“Maybe
not.”

   
Slim
had mentioned black cables. “But I don’t see any light sources here.”

The look he got from Vámos was not
one Cyprian would remember with any sort of comfort, “Yes. Odd, isn’t it?”

As
they were leaving, Vámos said, “Is this what your people sent you to find?”

“They
said nothing about code,” Cyprian quietly furious. “More damned code.”

   
The
riders left them at a crossroads near Shipka.
“
Sok szerencsét,
Latewood,”

nodded Vámos. By the protocol of these things, particularly
perhaps in

Thrace, one did not turn and look back. Soon the engine
sounds had faded and the hawkbearing wind resumed.

   
“What
do we tell Yash?” Reef wondered.

“That
we couldn’t find it. We’ll pretend to keep looking for a while, but in the
wrong directions. We must keep her and the baby well away from this, Reef. At
some point declare the mission a failure and get back to . . .”

   
“Lose
your train of thought there, podner?” Reef inquired after a while.

“I’m
wondering what to tell Ratty’s people. They’re under such a deeply mistaken
impression, aren’t they.”

   
“That’s
if those motorcycle boys were givin us the ‘straight dope.
’ ”

“They’re
the guardians of the thing now. Of this whole sad, unreadable Balkan dog’s
dinner, come to that. They don’t want the job, but they’ve got it. I don’t want
to believe them, but I do.”

From
then on, in moments when his time was less closely claimed, Cyprian would find
himself waiting for a vast roar of light, toxic and pitiless, turning the sky
blank of all detail, from which not even his dreams would be exempt.

When they got
moving again
, Reef was
delighted at how easily this baby took to being out on the road. Ljubica cried
for the reasons any baby would, but no more, as if she knew her trooper’s
destiny and saw no point in delaying her embrace of it. Any object she learned
to hold, she would next start throwing around. Though Reef did and didn’t need
it just then, she reminded him of his son Jesse back in Colorado.

   
“You’re
acting like she’s your second chance,” Yashmeen said.

   
“Anythin
wrong with that?”

   
“There
is if you think you’re entitled to one.”

   
“Who
says I ain’t?” he almost said, but thought better of it.

They
were heading east toward the Black Sea, with some halfthoughtout idea of
setting up in Varna, resuming the old resort life, raising a few leva with some
lowintensity gambling and so forth, baby to the contrary notwithstanding,
whatever.

   
“Somebody
said the King’s summer palace is there.”

   
“And
. . .”

“It’s
still summer, ain’t it? When the King’s in town, there’s suckers around, you
never heard that? ancient proverb.”

The
topic of the
Interdikt
had not arisen again. Ljubica’s birth had taken
the question, for Yashmeen, to a far lower priority. That neither young man was
bringing it up suggested to her that they might all somehow be of the

same mind. Even an amateur
neuropathist observing them at this time would have diagnosed a postpartum
folie
à trois.
The rest of the world were heading for cover, the dreams of
bourgeois and laborer alike were turned rattling with terrible shapes, all the
prophesiers agreed there was heavy weather ahead—what were these people
thinking? and with an infant to look after, too. Irresponsible if not outright
hebephrenic, really.

There was a perfectly good road to
the sea, but somehow they could not stay on it. They kept turning uphill, into
the Balkan Range, even backtracking westward again, as if blindly obeying a
compass fatally sensitive to anomaly.

At certain hours of midday, pine
branches with dark streaks of shadow between reached trembling toward them like
the arms of the numberless dead, not pleading so much as demanding, almost
threatening. Birds here had not sung for generations, no one alive in fact
could remember a time when they had sung, and these skies belonged now to
raptors. The country was well prepared for what was soon to break over it.

Up above the red tile roofs of
Sliven, having climbed through clouds of butterflies inquisitive as to
Ljubica’s status, which she was doing her best to explain to them, they came
upon a strange rock archway twenty or thirty feet high, and the minute she
caught sight of it, Ljubica went a little crazy, waving arms and legs and
commenting in her own language.

“Sure,” Reef said, “let’s go have a
look.” He cradled her in one arm and together with Yashmeen they made their way
over to the formation, Ljubica gazing up as they passed under it and out the
other side. They returned to find Cyprian talking and smoking with a couple of
boys who’d been lounging around. “That arch you just walked under? They call it
the
Halkata.
The Ring.”

She thought she knew his voice by
now. “Oh, another local curse. Just what we need.” But he was gazing at her,
unwilling to speak, his eyes agleam.
  
“Cyprian—”

“If you walk under it with someone,
you will both—you will all, it seems— be in love forever. Perhaps
it’s your idea of a curse. Not mine.”

   
“Then
go ahead, it’s your turn.”

His smile just managed not to be
wistful. “And anyone who passes through it alone, according to my informants
here, turns into the opposite sex. I’m not sure where that would leave me,
Yashmeen. Perhaps I don’t need the confusion. The last time I was out here,” he
continued later that evening, down in Sliven, in a room they had taken for the
night in an old house off Ulitsa Rakovsky, “I had to put my impulses away for
the duration, Balkan gender expectations being a bit as you’d say emphatic.
Details one had simply ignored at Cambridge or Vienna demanded the most urgent
attention here, and I had to adapt quickly. Imagine my further surprise when I
discovered

that women, who appear to be without power, in reality run
the show. What did that mean then, for one’s allegiance to both sexes at once?”

“
Oh
dear.” And Ljubica was laughing too.
Reef was off in some local
krâchma.
Yashmeen and Cyprian watched one
another with some of the old—already, “old”—speculative trembling.

Up in the Balkan
Range
one day for the
first time, defying the predators above, they heard birdsong, some kind of
Bulgarian thrush, singing in modal scales, attentive to pitch, often for
minutes at a time. Ljubica listened intently, as if hearing a message. All at
once she leaned out of the crocheted shawl Cyprian was carrying her in and
stared up past them. They followed her gaze to where an old structure of some
kind, destroyed and rebuilt more than once over the centuries, hung above a
deep canyon, seemingly impossible to get to past the rapids in the river and
the steep walls of bare rock. At first they weren’t even sure what it was they
were seeing, because of shifting curtains of mist thrown upward by the roaring
collision of water and rock.

“We need to go back,” it seemed to
Reef, “climb up top, try to get to it by coming downhill.”