Blasphemy (2 page)

“Isabella is behave strange,” said Volkonsky.

“How so?” Hazelius said, from his position at the center of the Bridge.

“Glacky.”

Dolby rolled his eyes. Volkonsky was such a pain. “All systems go on my board.”

Volkonsky typed furiously on the keyboard; then he swore in Russian and whacked the monitor with the flat of his hand.

“Gregory, don’t you think we should power down?” asked Mercer.

“Give it a minute more,” said Hazelius.

“Ninety-nine point nine,” said Dolby. In the past five minutes, the room had gone from sleepy to bug-eyed awake, tense as hell. Only Dolby felt relaxed.

“I agree with Kate,” said Volkonsky. “I not like the way Isabella behave. We start power-down sequence.”

“I’ll take full responsibility,” said Hazelius. “Everything is still well within specs. The data stream of ten terabits per second is starting to stick in its craw, that’s all.”

“Craw? What means ‘craw’?”

“Power at one hundred percent,” said Dolby, a note of satisfaction in his laid-back voice.

“Beam luminosity at twenty-seven point one eight two eight TeV,” said Chen.

Snow spackled the computer screens. The singing noise filled the room like a voice from the beyond. The flower on the Visualizer writhed and expanded. A black dot, like a hole, appeared at the center.

“Whoa!” said Chen. “Losing all data at Coordinate Zero.”

The flower flickered. Dark streaks shot through it.

“This is nuts,” said Chen. “I’m not kidding, the data’s vanishing.”

“Not possible,” said Volkonsky. “Data is not vanish. Particles is vanish.”

“Give me a break. Particles don’t vanish.”

“No joke, particles is vanish.”

“Software problem?” Hazelius asked.

“Not software problem,” said Volkonsky loudly. “Hardware problem.”

“Screw you,” Dolby muttered.

“Gregory, Isabella might be tearing the ‘brane,” said Mercer. “I really think we should power down now.”

The black dot grew, expanded, began swallowing the image on the screen. At its margins, it jittered manically with intense color.

“These numbers are wild,” said Chen. “I’m getting extreme space-time curvature right at CZero. It looks like some kind of singularity. We might be creating a black hole.”

“Impossible,” said Alan Edelstein, the team’s mathematician, looking up from the workstation he had been quietly hunched over in the corner. “There’s no evidence of Hawking radiation.”

“I swear to God,” said Chen loudly, “we’re ripping a hole in space-time!”

On the screen that ran the program code in real time, the symbols and numbers were flying by like an express train. On the big screen above their heads, the writhing flower had disappeared, leaving a black void. Then there was movement in the void—ghostly, batlike. Dolby stared at it, surprised.

“Damn it, Gregory, power down!” Mercer called.

“Isabella not accept input!” Volkonsky yelled. “I lose core routines!”

“Hold steady for a moment until we can figure out what’s going on,” said Hazelius.

“Gone! Isabella gone!” said the Russian, throwing up his hands and sitting back with a look of disgust on his bony face.

“I’m still green across the board,” said Dolby. “Obviously what you’ve got here is a massive software crash.” He turned his attention back to the Visualizer. An image was appearing in the void, an image so strange, so beautiful, that at first he couldn’t wrap his mind around it. He glanced around, but nobody else was looking: they were all focused on their various consoles.

“Hey, excuse me—anybody know what’s going on up there on the screen?” Dolby asked.

Nobody answered him. Nobody looked up. Everyone was furiously busy. The machine sang strangely.

“I’m just the engineer,” said Dolby, “but any of you theoretical geniuses got an idea of what that is? Alan, is that . . . normal?”

Alan Edelstein glanced up from his workstation distractedly. “It’s just random data,” he said.

“What do you mean, random? It’s got a shape!”

“The computer’s crashed. It can’t be anything but random data.”

“That sure doesn’t look random to me.” Dolby stared at it. “It’s moving. There’s something there, I swear—it almost looks alive, like it’s trying to get out. Gregory, are you seeing this?”

Hazelius glanced up at the Visualizer and paused, surprise blossoming on his face. He turned. “Rae? What’s going on with the Visualizer?”

“No idea. I’m getting a steady blast of coherent data from the detectors. Doesn’t look like Isabella’s crashed from here.”

“How would you interpret that thing on the screen?”

Chen look up and her eyes widened. “Jeez. I’ve no idea.”

“It’s moving,” said Dolby. “It’s, like, emerging.”

The detectors sang, the room humming with their high-pitched whine.

“Rae, it’s garbage data,” Edelstein said. “The computer’s crashed—how can it be real?”

“I’m not so sure it is garbage,” said Hazelius, staring. “Michael, what do you think?”

The particle physicist stared at the image, mesmerized. “It doesn’t make any sense. None of the colors and shapes correspond to particle energies, charges, and classes. It isn’t even radially centered on CZero—it’s like a weird, magnetically bound plasma cloud of some kind.”

“I’m telling you,” said Dolby, “it’s moving, it’s coming out. It’s like a . . . Jesus, what the hell is it?” He closed his eyes hard, trying to chase away the ache of exhaustion. Maybe he was seeing things. He opened them. It was still there—and expanding.

“Shut it down! Shut Isabella down now!” Mercer cried.

Suddenly the panel filled with snow and went dead black.

“What the hell?” Chen cried, her fingers pounding the keyboard. “I’ve lost all input!”

A word slowly materialized in the center of the panel. The group fell into silence, staring. Even Volkonsky’s voice, which had been raised in high excitement, lapsed as if cut off. Nobody moved.

Then Volkonsky began to laugh, a tense, high-pitched laugh, hysterical, desperate.

Dolby felt a sudden rage. “You son of a bitch, you did this.”

Volkonsky shook his head, flapping his greasy locks.

“You think that’s funny?” Dolby asked, getting up from the workstation with clenched fists. “You hack a forty-billion-dollar experiment and you think it’s
funny
?”

“I not hack anything,” said Volkonsky, wiping his mouth. “You shut hell up.”

Dolby turned and faced the group. “Who did this? Who messed with Isabella?” He turned back to the Visualizer and read out loud the word hanging there, spat it out in his fury. GREETINGS.

He turned back. “I’ll kill the bastard who did this.”

WYMAN FORD GAZED AROUND THE 17TH Street office of Dr. Stanton Lockwood III, science adviser to the president of the United States. From long experience in Washington, Ford knew that while an office was designed to show the outer man, the public man, it always betrayed somewhere the secret of the inner man. Ford cast his eyes about, looking for the secret.

The office was done up in that style Ford called IWPB—Important Washington Power Broker. The antiques were all authentic and of the finest quality—from the Second Empire desk, as big and ugly as a Hummer, to the gilded French portico clock and the hushed Sultanabad rug on the floor. Nothing that hadn’t cost a bloody fortune. And of course, there was the obligatory “power wall” of framed diplomas, awards, and photographs of the office’s occupant with presidents, ambassadors, and cabinet members.

Stanton Lockwood wanted the world to see him as a man of importance and wealth, powerful and discreet. But what came through to Ford was the grimness of the effort. Here was a man determined to be something he wasn’t.

Lockwood waited until his guest was seated before he eased himself into the armchair flanking the other side of a coffee table. He crossed his legs and smoothed a long white hand down the crease in his garbardine pants. “Let’s dispense with the usual Washington formalities,” he said. “I’m Stan.”

“Wyman.” He settled back and observed Lockwood: handsome, late fifties, with a hundred-dollar haircut, his fitness-club physique beautifully draped in a charcoal suit. Probably a squash player. Even the photo on the desk of three perfect towheaded children with their attractive mother had all the individuality of a financial-services advertisement.

“Well,” said Lockwood, in a meeting-now-under-way tone, “I’ve heard excellent things about you, Wyman, from your former colleagues at Langley. They’re sorry you left.”

Ford nodded.

“So awful what happened to your wife. I’m so terribly sorry.”

Ford willed his body not to stiffen. He never had been able to figure out a way to respond when people mentioned his dead wife.

“They tell me you spent a few years in a monastery.”

Ford waited.

“The monastic life not to your liking?”

“It takes a special kind of person to be a monk.”

“So you left the monastery and hung up your shingle.”

“A man’s got to make a living.”

“Any interesting cases?”

“No cases at all. I’ve just opened the office. You’re my first client—if that’s what this is about.”

“It is. I have a special assignment for you, to start immediately. It will last for ten days, maybe two weeks.”

Ford nodded.

“There’s a little catch I need to mention up front. Once I’ve described the assignment, rejecting it is not an option. It’s in the United States, it doesn’t involve risk, and it won’t be difficult—at least in my opinion. Succeed or fail, you can never talk about it, so I’m afraid you can’t use it to buff up your résumé.”

“And the remuneration?”

“One hundred thousand dollars cash under the table, plus an aboveboard G-11 salary commensurate with your cover position.” He raised his eyebrows. “Ready to hear more?”

No hesitation. “Go ahead.”

“Excellent.” Lockwood slid out another folder. “I see you have a B.A. in anthropology from Harvard. We need an anthropologist.”

“Then I’m afraid I’m not your man. That was just my B.A. I went on to MIT and took a doctorate in cybernetics. My work for the CIA was mostly in cryptology and computers. I left anthropology far behind.”

Lockwood waved his hand dismissively, his Princeton ring flashing in the light. “Not important. Are you familiar with, ah, the Isabella project?”

“Hard to avoid hearing about it.”

“Forgive me if I repeat what you already know then. Isabella was completed over two months ago—at a cost of forty billion dollars. It’s a second-generation superconducting supercollider particle accelerator. Its purpose is to probe the energy levels of the Big Bang and explore some exotic ideas for generating power. This is the president’s pet project—the Europeans just completed the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and he wanted to maintain America’s lead in particle physics.”

“Naturally.”

“Getting Isabella funded was no cakewalk. The left carped that the money should have been spent on the halt and the lame. The right whined that it was just another big-government spending program. The president steered a course between Scylla and Charybdis, rammed Isabella through Congress, and saw it to completion. He sees it as his legacy and he’s anxious to have it running smoothly.”

“No doubt.”

“Isabella is essentially a circular tunnel, three hundred feet underground and forty-seven miles in circumference, in which protons and antiprotons are circulated in opposite directions at almost the speed of light. When the particles are brought into collision, they duplicate energy levels not seen since the universe was a millionth of second old.”

“Impressive.”

“We found a perfect site for it—Red Mesa, a five-hundred-square-mile tableland on the Navajo Indian Reservation, protected by two-thousand-foot cliffs and riddled with abandoned coal mines, which we converted to underground bunkers and tunnels. The U.S. government pays six million a year in leasing fees to the Navajo tribal government in Window Rock, Arizona, an arrangement which was most satisfactory to all parties involved.

“Red Mesa is uninhabited, and there’s just one road to the top. There are a few Navajo towns near the base of the mesa. These are traditional people—most of them still speak Navajo and live by herding sheep, weaving rugs, and making jewelry. That’s the background.”

Ford nodded. “And the problem?”

“In the past few weeks, a self-proclaimed medicine man has been stirring up people against Isabella, spreading rumors and misinformation. He’s gaining traction. Your assignment is to deal with the problem.”

“What’s the Navajo government doing about it?”

“Nothing. The Navajo tribal government is feeble. The former tribal chairman was indicted for embezzlement, and the new chairman’s just taken office. You’re on your own with this medicine man.”

“Tell me about him.”

“His name is Begay, Nelson Begay. Not clear how old he is—we haven’t been able to turn up a birth certificate. Claims the Isabella project is desecrating an ancient burial ground, that they were still using Red Mesa for grazing sheep, and so on. He’s organizing a horseback ride in protest.” Lockwood pulled a soiled flyer from a folder. “Here’s one of his notices.”

The blurry photocopy showed a man on horseback holding a protest sign.

Protect the Diné Bikéyah, the Land of the People! Red Mesa, Dzilth Chíí, is indwelled by the sacred Pollen Being who brings forth flowers and seeds. ISABELLA is a mortal wound in her side, spilling radiation and poisoning Mother Earth
.
Join the ride to Red Mesa. Meet at the Blue Gap Chapter House, Sept. 14 at 9:00 A.M., for the ride up the Dugway to the old Nakai Rock Trading Post. Camp at Nakai Rock with Sweat Lodge and one-night Blessing Way. Take back the land with prayer
.

“Your assignment is to join the scientific team as the anthropologist and establish yourself as a liaison with the local community,” said Lockwood. “Address their concerns. Make friends, calm everyone down.”