Mysterium (33 page)

The funny thing was, he had. He took it from the vest pocket and slid the safety off. The grip was cold in his hand.

They moved across a snow-humped backyard, over a cane fence collapsed and unrepaired, across another quiet street. The wind swirled snow into exposed skin and sifted it like sand against Dex’s vinyl jacket.

He reminded himself that Clifford was not David. It was tempting to yield to that obvious parallel: back into another doomed building to save another doomed child. Tempting, Dex thought, but we’re not allowed to reenact our sins. It doesn’t work that way.

But the memory came back more powerfully than it had in a long, long time, and he made room for it. Some part of him welcomed it. It was possible to smell the reek of burning in all this cold snow.

There were no soldiers in the space behind City Hall, only a narrow corner of the Civic Gardens and the white wasteland of Permit Parking Only. No one had been here lately, Dex thought. The snow was pristine. He hurried into the shadow of the building with Linneth next to him.

City Hall was not a large building under all its stone facades and sculpted lintels. It contained an assembly room, a rotunda, and a battery of offices on two floors. And the basement. In better times he had visited this building sporadically, to renew his driver’s license and pay his rates.

The employees’ entrance was unlocked. Dex stepped inside with his pistol drawn, then beckoned Linneth after him. He listened for voices but heard only the rush of the wind through some distant vent. To his left, stairs led upward. He followed them to the second floor and out into an empty broadloomed hallway.

He passed doors marked OMBUDSMAN, LICENSE BUREAU, LAND MANAGEMENT. All these doors were wide open, as if the rooms had already been searched. “All abandoned,” Linneth whispered. She was right. Papers had been strewn everywhere, many with the letterhead of the Bureau de la Convenance plainly visible. Some of the office windows were broken; the wind rattled vertical blinds and rolled plastic cups like tumbleweeds over the carpet.

Dex touched Linneth’s arm and they both stood still. He said, “You hear that?”

She cocked her head. “A voice.”

He held the pistol forward. A marksmanship course in the Reserves had not prepared him for this. His hand was shaking—a gentle tremor, as if an electric current were running through him.

He located the source of the voice in the anteroom of the Office of the Mayor: it was a radio . . . one of the Proctors’ radios, an enormous box of perforated metal and glowing vacuum tubes. It was plugged into a voltage converter that was plugged into the wall.

It spoke French.

“Quarante-cinq minutes.”
And a continuous metallic beeping, as of a time clock, once per second. Dex looked at Linneth.

“Quarante-quatre minutes,”
the radio shrilled.

He said, “What is this?”

“They’re counting down the time.”

There was another burst of speech, indecipherable with static, but Dex heard the word
détonation.

He said, “How long?”

She took his hand. “Forty-four minutes.”
Quarante-trois minutes.
“Forty-three.”

Clifford recognized the man who came through the FIRE EXIT door. This was the Proctor the others had called Delafleur. An important man. Lukas Thibault drew a sharp breath at the sight of him.

Delafleur wore an overcoat nearly long enough to touch his ankles, and he reached into the depths of that garment and took out a gun—one of the long-barreled pistols the Proctors sometimes carried; a revolver, not an automatic weapon like the one Luke once showed him. The handle was polished wood inlaid with pearl. None of these refinements seemed to matter to Delafleur, who was sweating and breathing through his mouth.

Luke said, “Patron! Let me out of here, for God’s sake!”

Delafleur looked startled, as if he had forgotten about his prisoners. Maybe he had. “Shut up,” he said.

There was the sound of more gunfire outside the building, but was it growing more distant? Clifford thought it might be.

Delafleur stalked down the length of this basement room between the stockade cages and the wall with his long coat swinging behind him. He carried the pistol loosely in his left hand. In his right hand was a pocket watch, attached by a silver chain to his blue vest. His eyes kept traveling to the watch, as if he couldn’t resist looking at it—but he plainly didn’t like what he saw.

He pulled a wooden crate under one of the high, tiny windows, and stood on the crate in a vain attempt to look outside. But the window was too high and louvered shut. Anyway, Clifford thought, it opened at ground level. There wouldn’t be much of a view.

Delafleur seemed to arrive at the same conclusion. He sat down on the crate and fixed a baleful stare at the door where he had come in.

Luke said, “
Please,
Patron! Let me out!”

Delafleur turned in that direction. In a prim voice he said, “If you speak again, I’ll kill you.”

He sounded like he meant it. Luke fell silent, though if Clifford listened carefully he could hear his labored breathing.

Luke had often been silent in the last few hours. But never for very long. Would Delafleur really shoot him if he made a sound? Clifford was sure of it. The Proctor looked too frightened to make idle threats.

And if he shot Luke, would he then shoot Clifford? It was possible. Once shooting started, who could tell what might happen?

But he didn’t want to think about that. If he thought about it, the cage began to seem much smaller—as tight as a rope around his neck—and Clifford worried that
he
might make a sound, that the terror might leap uncontrollably from his throat.

Time passed. Delafleur looked at his watch as if he were hypnotized by it. At the sound of each fading gunshot he cocked his head.

“They’re going away,” Delafleur said once—to himself.

More fidgeting with the watch. But the Proctor seemed to regain a degree of composure as the seconds ticked past. Finally he stood up and adjusted his vest. Without looking at the cells, he began to walk toward the FIRE EXIT.

Lukas Thibault panicked. Clifford heard the soldier throw himself against the bars of his cage. “FUCK YOU!” he screamed. “DON’T YOU LEAVE ME HERE! GODDAMN YOU!”

And that was the wrong thing to say, because Clifford saw Delafleur hesitate and turn back.

The Proctor shifted the long-barreled pistol into his right hand.

Clifford cowered in the corner of his cell, as far away from the Proctor as he could force himself—which was not very far. He had ceased thinking coherently as soon as Delafleur turned back from the door.

Delafleur walked past him with a steely expression, around the L-bend to where Luke was. Both men were out of Clifford’s sight now. But he could hear them.

Lukas Thibault had stopped shouting. Now his voice was low and feverish and hoarse with panic. “Bastard! I’ll kill you, you bastard!” But it was the other way around, Clifford thought.

Delafleur’s pistol sounded like a cannon in this stony basement room.

Lukas Thibault gave a choked scream. Clifford heard him fall against the cold floor. It was the terrible muted sound of bones and soft tissue striking concrete. A limp, dead sound.

Now the Proctor came back within the compass of Clifford’s sight. Delafleur was pale and grim. The pistol in his hand trailed wafts of blue smoke. His eyes roamed a moment before they fixed on Clifford.

Clifford felt the pressure of that gaze, as dangerous as the gun itself. The eyes as deadly as the weapon. He couldn’t look away.

But then there was another sound, and Delafleur’s eyes widened and he jerked his head toward the door.

FIRE EXIT opened. Dex Graham stepped into the room.

Dex fired a handgun at the Proctor and missed. Now the Proctor’s weapon came sweeping up and Clifford had time to cover his ears before the batteringly loud bang. No telling where that bullet went.

Dex fired a second time and the Proctor sat down on the floor. The pistol dropped from his hand. He slumped against the bars of the cage, moaning.

Dex came striding forward. Linneth Stone came through the door behind him. She picked up the weapon the Proctor had dropped.

Dex found a length of copper piping and used it to pry the lock from the door of Clifford’s cell. The lock burst and the door rattled open and Clifford ran to the schoolteacher without thinking.

He noticed Dex Graham’s eyes, how strangely calm they seemed.

Linneth took the boy to the stairway.

Dex lingered a moment longer.

He looked at Delafleur, who was still alive. The bullet had shattered his hip. He was paralyzed below the waist. The wound was bleeding freely into the silk-lined folds of his long winter coat.

“I can’t move,” the Proctor said.

Dex turned to leave.

Delafleur said, “You don’t have time. It’s hopeless.”

“I know,” Dex said.

CHAPTER 29

Some of the cinder-block walls of the high-energy laboratory had melted to slag and most of the roof was gone. A sky of blue sheet lightning illuminated a maze of corridors.

Howard walked through the rubble. During the brief intervals when his vision cleared he saw structural rods protruding from concrete forms, broken electrical cables as thick as his arm, ceramic insulators scattered like strange pottery all around him.

When his vision was
not
clear he saw these things through endlessly multiplied prisms, as if a snow of faceted crystal had filled the air.

He moved toward the heart of the building. He felt its heat like sunlight on his face.

Stern’s last coherent scientific writings had leaned toward the idea of chaotic inflation: a cosmological scenario in which quantum fluctuation in the primordial void gives birth to universes in endless profusion. Not a single creation but infinite creations. And no universe accessible to any other, except perhaps through quantum tunnels known as wormholes.

In this schema, a universe might even
contain
a universe. If you could somehow compress an ounce of matter inside the orbit of an electron, it would blossom into a new avenue of time and space—someone else’s Big Bang; someone else’s quarks and leptons and stars and skies.

In other words, it was possible to contemplate the technology of becoming a god.

Stern thought it had already been done. The Turkish fragment was the result of an effort, perhaps, to connect two branches of the World Tree. These ghosts (they moved through Howard and around him with clockwork regularity) might be its makers. Mortal gods. Demiurges. Archons, but trapped: chained to this vortex of creation.

Here at the center of the building the ruins were more chaotic. Howard climbed a bank of broken brick and tile. He was dizzy, or perhaps the world really was spinning around this axis. He fixed his eyes rigidly ahead. Everything he saw seemed to swarm with iridescence.

Blackened walls rose above him like broken teeth. He passed markers and signs, some words still faintly legible: WARNING and AUTHORIZATION and FORBIDDEN.

The core of the building had been a containment unit surrounded by two layers of reinforced steel. This was the matrix into which all the cabling and conduits had run; this was where Stern had focused immense energies on the fragment, particle beams hotter than the surface of the sun.