End Time (74 page)

No, not every grocery store was stocked with milk and cookies. Not everyone was a Good Samaritan, but mankind had shaken off a crazy bit of itself and somehow emerged a little freer, a little stronger. As if a silent power had exhorted every person to
Be Good and Do What You Can
. People rallied and somehow scrambled back from the abyss.

Was it because of mankind's inner decency, or because mankind had a little help?

Maybe both.

After the crisis abated, an explanation appeared on Lattimore's desk in the form of a large manila envelope, perhaps the best answer anyone was ever going to get. Lost in the company mailroom, then suddenly found again, the envelope explained a lot.

Originally posted from Belgrade, it arrived at Lattimore Aerospace headquarters over a year ago, and was misplaced on its trip from the mailroom to the boss' in-box. Mildred found it wedged underneath the reception counter. Fallen on the floor, slid under a crack, and overlooked at about the time everybody and his or her aunt were getting high on rainbow dust.

“I just found this downstairs,” Mildred told him quietly. The flap was already open, the clasp broken.

“God, this thing's been here for months,” Lattimore remarked. The envelope was marred with stuck crumbs and the smudge of a footprint, the way things look when they live under a desk.

The cover letter:

Dear Mr. Chen:

The curator has reconsidered your request. Please find copies of all our materials regarding Lagrange Points in our files. We assume they were mistakenly included in Nikolai Tesla's materials by person or persons unknown. These have been catalogued as “Miscellaneous.” The museum has no record as to the circumstances of their inclusion, their authenticity, chain of title, and no recorded source of origin.

We assume the photographic materials and handwritten notations to be frauds or hoaxes of some kind, and are prepared to say so publicly.

Yours Sincerely—

The contents were a series of photographs and some foolscap, the photos too strange for words, nearly impossible for anyone to have actually taken, though Lattimore recognized one physical snapshot immediately.

An old Polaroid print from one of those big plastic Polaroid Swinger 3000 land cameras.
His father's Polaroid.
Raindrops dotted the picture where Pop had brought it in from outside. On the back of Dad's Polaroid picture his old man had written,
Dear Curator—for your Tesla files.

So this is where my father sent the pictures after he and my mother disappeared and just as suddenly returned, wet and naked.
Squirreled away, safe and sound. Buried the evidence in a sheaf of another man's work in a foreign country. Send them to Belgrade. Nobody'd find them there.

What of the photo itself?

Pop Lattimore's abduction Polaroid showed another image of a silver Tea House trailer; this one in the blackness of space and lit up with sunlight. In the background Earth looked like it did from the moon, only a little bigger, a fat blue cloud-swirled planet about the size of a half dollar. No way a Lattimore Aerospace satellite took
that.

Is this where Mom and Dad went, Light Teslas whisking their physical bodies off on a little trip? How else could they have taken Polaroid photos? Well, why not? Any entity that could stick you on the deck of a lost container ship or drop you in Alaska to chase a flying cafeteria tray could take you into space for a photo shoot and bring you back.

The designation
L1
was strikingly visible on the trailer's metal skin, but instead of merely etched on the outside of the container, the designation seemed to be glowing from the inside of the Tea House, as though this picture captured some kind of radiation. Not just a label on the skin of the trailer, but an internal signature, and damned if Lattimore knew what made it glow.

Moreover, the Tea House looked broken; a meteor had struck it amidships, leaving a dirty black hole. Colored gas vented into the space, the remnants of whatever was housed inside—bulrushes, blue birds, koi fish, and fire pits?

Finally, it hit Lattimore—
L
stood for Lagrange.
L1
would be Lagrange Point Number One. He didn't recognize it at once because it almost always appeared

L
1

With the numeral dropped a half space.

Of course,
Lagrange Points
. The Mind Gliders, the Light Teslas, had taken Mom and Pop to Lagrange Points to show them all the Tea Houses.

Lattimore clicked into Jasper's laptop to find an image:

Those static gravitational points near any massive pair of objects where a third object can be stationary. At five points between the Earth and the Sun (1 through 5) gravitational balance allowed yet another object, in this case
a silver shipping container,
to remain in a “fixed” position. Stick the Tea House in the proper Lagrange area and it would follow Earth around for eternity. I mean, if you needed to hide something in plain sight—a needle in a haystack, a speck of sand on a beach—what better place to put it? Stick it in space.

How could Lattimore
the satellite manufacturer
miss something so obvious as L1/5? It beggared belief.

L1/5 would mean Lagrange Points Number 1 through Number 5. Maybe if the silver Tea House trailer sprouted solar panels and beacon antennae, or even appeared as a black monolith hanging in space, he might have made the connection. But in a plain silver wrapper, so to speak—a plain silver box stuffed with living goodies, pretty blue birds, lazy carp—his mind had seen what he wanted to see, a busy stream and cute bunny rabbits, and overlooked the rest. Of course! There had to be more than one Tea House.

Five, at least.

Obviously, the silver trailer in the container ship
Anja
beached in a Floridian swamp was the one from L
2
, Lagrange Point 2, the point on the far side of the moon, at a mere 932,000 miles. Nothing much out there but a couple of big government radio telescopes: the Advanced Composition Explorer, the Wilkinson Microwave Probe. Lattimore saw the logic of it. If the closest Tea House at L
1
was rendered a smoking hulk from an asteroid hit, might as well go to the second-closest Tea House at L
2.

How the damn trailer from Point L
2
got down to Earth and into the hold of a ship was anybody's guess. But any “Taker” who let a rocket scientist from Pennsylvania take a pic of Tea House L
1
could probably arrange for Tea House L
2
to land on Earth without too much trouble. Even hide a whole Norwegian container ship in a fog bank so no vigilant Coast Guard inspectors investigated a curious heat bloom. Once among the earthlings, that silver tractor-trailer would vanish among the millions of other containers sitting around the globe in warehouses and industrial parks and docksides.

Then came the last photo. A sixth Tea House of the Hidden Moon.

Not one of his father's Polaroids. The final impossible photo was a black-and-white glossy of a moon crater. A caption on the photo read
Тесле.
And its moon coordinates:
38.5 N 124.7 E
. And over the whole image appeared the words
Совершенно секретно
in red. Lattimore guessed the red letters said what they said in every government office on the planet:
Top Secret.

A crater on the dark side of the moon. The dark side being a misnomer as it got just as much sun as the light side; you just couldn't see it from Earth. The crater was called Tesla, and since the name was written in Cyrillic, obviously the photo had been taken in Soviet's
Luna 3
flybys in the late 1950s. NASA did comprehensive mapping in the 1960s, but you had to wonder if America's space administration had bothered to enlarge the image as the Russians had. The depth of the 31-kilometer-wide Tesla crater was still unknown to this day, but there in the center the Ruskies had managed to capture the clean angles of yet another silver Tea House trailer. This one half-buried in moon dust; visible on its roof, that same peculiar metal etching process, the words:

Кратер Тесле Луна

A Soviet State secret? Hell, the Central Committee wouldn't know what to make of this any more than NASA would. Ignore it. Bury it in the Tesla archives. Lattimore was tempted to pop the Cyrillic letters into a Russian-English translator. Not necessary, he had a good idea what the Russian words etched on the Tea House meant: Crater Tesla Moon.

Make that, Tesla Moon Crater.

The real question was, so how did the silver trailer know to display its name in Cyrillic? The Ruskies didn't go down to the moon and write it there. And why not English or Chinese Oracle Bone script? In a stab of insight, the answer stared him in the face. The designation changed as the position of the Tea House changed—and most importantly, depending on
who looked at it
. When a Tea House was in the bowels of a ship off the coast of Florida, it showed in English, the simple message revealing its origin: L1/5 now L2.

Make up your mind.

Actually, it did it for you. Full English Translation:

This is one of the five Tea Houses, this one from Lagrange Point 2.

When another silver Tea House was photographed from a Russian spacecraft, it told its point of origin in Russian. If you found one off the coast of Bombay, the curious etching would present in Hindi. Cleverly and conveniently, it told you a little bit about itself in whatever language was most accessible to the reader.

Then a dangerous thought struck Lattimore even harder. The Tea House of the Hidden Moon
reacted
. The thing was sentient. Perhaps it could change its appearance at will to suit its background like a lizard or a frog. In a ten-story stack of containers waiting to be loaded aboard a ship maybe it was red or blue. To be hidden or discovered at its own discretion, hiding in plain sight until desiring to reveal its presence. That turned coincidence into intelligent design.

Tea House of the Hidden Moon—how had that name
even come to him
? It fit okay; and it still fit. Five Tea Houses hidden at Lagrange Points, making them the extra and “hidden” moons of Earth. A sixth on the moon itself, hidden on the far side. But the phrase had just popped into his head as if the thing was trying to tell him its name. A Tea House
hidden
in space, a Tea House
hidden
on the Moon …

Tea House of the Hidden Moon.

Of course … Why explain something one way when three or four ways will do even better?

Redundancy, the drum of cognition.

The Rosetta Stone Principle. Very wise.

Lattimore put the Russian crater photo aside.

The last item in the envelope from the Tesla Museum was photocopied foolscap. Pop Lattimore seemed to have written a few notes from his space trip. Halting, fragmented words as if to confirm every one of his son's assumptions and conclusions.

They showed me a box, and then showed me inside. They told me its name. Tea House of the Hidden Moon.

As Lattimore held the photocopy of his father's scribbling he felt himself standing in the bowels of the ship again, overcome by the same warm rush of heaven on Earth—the rice-paper windows, the stone fire pit. The steaming teakettle and the carp staring lazily from the pond. The sound of falling water over river stones, and the scent of cherry trees in blossom filled his head. A wise old cricket stroked his wings as if to say,
Remember?

Of course he remembered.

Was the silver Tea House its own little world? Yes and no, Lattimore realized, and he sensed it was something much, much bigger in the scheme of things, especially if you took the long view. Lattimore shuddered and grasped the purpose of the hidden Tea House. The Tea House of the Hidden Moon was existence distilled. The essence of all you saw. When half the world died, you could bring it back to life, back from the dead.

Pop Lattimore had scribbled a few more lines. Hypothesis confirmed.

It is my conjecture that even the weight of the container does not reflect its true size. Its mass many times heavier that what appears. A drop of water equal to an ocean.

Ah, the nub of it. The Ancestors of Existence had planned their project well. In the fluttering heart of a single bluebird, the muscle mass of every breathing animal, beating away at the same time. In the iron kettle, the tonnage of every mountain in every range across the planet. Within the fire in the fire pit, the molten core of the planet itself.