Nest of Worlds (19 page)

Thompson acted swiftly. Less than an hour later, the drone of copters came from the east. Six black points appeared in the sky and grew larger. The craft were in formation, at a very low altitude, practically brushing the roofs with the bellies of their hulls. No doubt these were the same copters that had bombed the ruins of the DS. From both east and west along 5665 Avenue, divisions of the Guard approached, supported by armored infantry carriers. The copters hovered, waiting for the order to strike.

Gavein, Ra Mahleiné, and Lorraine were too close. He had underestimated the range of the attack. If there was bombing, they would feel it. But to go out on the street now would be like committing suicide. They would only be saving Thompson’s soldiers trouble.

Ra Mahleiné gripped the arms of her wheelchair so tightly, her hands turned white. She sat like the queen of a fallen government, who looks on with dignity and contempt as the enemy troops advance.

“See?” she couldn’t help remarking, at the expense of her royal bearing. “You should have sat quietly! These are scum, killer scum. With that kind you don’t enter into conversations.”

“You were right. Thompson turned out to be even stupider than I thought.”

The copters were close now. It seemed to him that he could hear even the individual blades beat the air. Each copter had two rotors, one in front, one at the rear; on the sides were extended rocket launchers; and beneath the cabins sat remote-control guns. He could practically feel on him the eyes of the pilots through their telescopic sights. They were taking aim . . .

After the majestically rolling tanks, the soldiers walked. They would move in after the air strike. Gavein didn’t doubt that every street was covered. Thompson was thorough—hadn’t Saalstein commented on that?

The command was given: Gavein felt it instinctively. And at the same moment, something happened that was highly improbable and yet expected now.

One of the copters wavered, veered, lost control, as if the hand guiding it had weakened. The craft dipped, careened, and fell among the buildings on 5665 Avenue. Crashing into one of the apartment buildings, it exploded with the force of the several tons of bombs and missiles that it carried. Fire from the fireball rained down on the division in the street. One of the blades of the copter, Gavein saw, described a blazing arc in the air and hit the back rotor of a neighboring copter, breaking its axle. The second copter, losing stability, dropped and disappeared among the houses. It too crashed, and the fragments flying from that second explosion struck the next copter, which caught fire but quickly rose, trailing black smoke, to reach a region of enough time retardation that it could wait for assistance. Though in flame, the third copter grew darker.

Gavein couldn’t help laughing—one weak hand had eliminated half the squadron. In the distance he saw tanks and armored carriers on fire. He heard the cannonade of shells detonating from the heat. He saw soldiers reeling in flame. He pitied them, though they had come to kill him. It was Thompson who had sent them to their death. But the thought that Sergeant Kurys and his men might be among those soldiers put an end to Gavein’s pity.

“The effect,” he said. “It works, it works, Little Manul!”

She didn’t answer.

“We are in no danger. You can see for yourself.” He turned to Lorraine. “Let’s go back home,” he said. “The fear is over.” But Lorraine was now more in dread of him, he guessed, than she was of all those soldiers and their machines of war.

The surviving copters flew off, but the burning street was in chaos. Rescue operations began. The division on 5665 Avenue to the west remained in place. On the avenue to the east, various military vehicles blazed. The only copter still present was the one burning overhead in retarded time. Gavein looked down 5454 Street: the troops, standing at a distance, showed no inclination to advance.

Ra Mahleiné shouted that the telephone was clattering. He went to pick it up, judging that at the moment his umbrella of safety wasn’t necessary for the two women.

“You’ve won, Throzz,” Medved said. “They accept your terms.”

“The other squadrons, why aren’t they attacking?”

“There are no other squadrons.” Medved’s voice quivered with amusement. “Someone accidentally started a fire, it made its way to the gas tanks, and twenty-four copters packed with bombs were blown sky-high. Thompson’s entire fleet. Davabel’s entire air force, practically. Three machines are left, half of the first squadron that you polished off. Are you satisfied?”

“You’re laughing, Medved?”

“From the first, I told them this would happen.”

“And Thompson, how is he taking it?”

“Thompson doesn’t concern me. He’s under arrest now. Behind bars, on the president’s order. I looked into those murders. It was Thompson’s commandos all right. They acted on his orders, given without the knowledge, let alone consent, of the other members of the commission. The old jackass really had it in for you.”

He stopped, expecting some remark from Gavein. When Gavein said nothing, he added:

“The only problem is that that division, the one with the commandos, went into action today, and I don’t know if those men will live.”

“Medved. We have three hours till sundown. In that time your men must get here. They must take away the bodies, straighten the house, repaint the walls, scrub the floors, bring new furniture—and food. My wife is too weak to sleep on the street, so all this must be done before nightfall. That’s what I want from Davabel. In addition, you will make public, on television, the whole truth about the Commission of Defense and Thompson’s plan, and about the bombing of the Division of Science. Tomorrow we will receive medicine for Ra Mahleiné. Dr. Nott must make a house call. And no more tricks.”

“I’m not an idiot, Throzz. There will be no tricks. I’ve been observing this phenomenon from the beginning, and now I no longer have over me a horse’s ass with a title and medals. The investigation is in the hands of the head prosecutor of Davabel.”

“I’d like to believe that,” Gavein said under his breath, able to imagine all sorts of scenarios in which the past would be repeated.

“There’s another problem,” he said to Medved. “One of the residents, a woman, survived Thompson’s hatchet men. Her name is Lorraine Patricks. She’ll stay with us, to take care of Ra Mahleiné and also because those who step away from me tend to die. I’d like to save her. Make her a sleeping place on the first floor with a separate TV set, so she doesn’t get too much in the way. Make us an apartment in the front room.”

“Consider it done, Throzz. That’s all? I’ve already sent people. There will be two trucks with furniture and equipment. They’ll cross the cordon at 5665 Avenue, from the west. White trucks.”

“Good. I’ll wait for them.” Gavein put down the phone. He had to trust in the sanity of those who ruled Davabel.

It wasn’t long before the two promised trucks arrived. They pulled up in front of the building. First, the usual police work was done. Flashes of the cameras came through the window. Then the bodies, five of them wrapped in plastic, were removed on stretchers and placed on carts. The cleanup crews went into action: some took out furniture, some put in new windowpanes, some washed floors. Wallpaper was torn off and walls spray-painted. Gavein counted at least twenty workers. Because the paint needed an hour to dry, they took a break. Some smoked. All wore masks.

One of the crew approached Gavein and the women. Glittering eyes showed through the slits of his black mask.

“You are David Death?” the man asked.

“Yes?” Gavein stood to shield his wife.

“No, I just . . . I wanted to look you in the face.”

Medved’s team was quick and efficient. Once the walls were dry, new wallpaper was put up, and the window frames were painted.

“We’ll sleep in a new apartment,” Gavein said.

“They better hurry,” said Ra Mahleiné, “or I’ll pee all over your book.”

For an hour she had been sitting on
Nest of Worlds
. They had both decided that the safest place for it was under the cushion of her wheelchair.

The workers now carried in the new furniture. When they were done, one of the men came up to Gavein and saluted.

“Lieutenant Adams. I have a letter for you from Colonel Medved.” He handed him a sealed envelope.

Gavein opened it with a finger and took out a page folded in four and covered with a tight, hardly legible handwriting.

Dear Mr. Throzz:

I chose this private form of communication to avoid the delay that attends the processing of messages delivered through the official channels of our organizational mill. Most of the information in this letter is not confidential, but please do not send a reply. That will spare me bureaucratic consequences that are most tiresome.

You must have met Dr. Omar Ezzir, a physicist at the DS, though it is possible you do not remember him.

The man could get to the point, thought Gavein.

Ezzir died in the earthquake, but earlier, at one of our meetings, he put forth the idea that no one but you is in a position to solve the mystery of this epidemic of deaths.

I do not recall his arguments—possibly I did not follow them that carefully, or it may have been only conjecture on his part. Ezzir was a man who went by intuition, and by that time our ears were open to any hunch.

My request to you, in any case, is that you devote yourself entirely to figuring out the phenomenon that is yourself. Perhaps you will discover what is causing the tragedies of Davabel.

There is no subterfuge in this, I assure you. We are setting up an environment in which you can live and think. We are installing three phones. The white phone is general, municipal; with it you can call any number in the city. It is monitored. The beige phone is your hotline to me or to the scientists of our committee—we have at our disposal here experts in various fields. The red phone is a direct line to the president; it was installed at the request of his office.

In your apartment is a television set that carries the public programs of Davabel, but on channel 33 you can watch a program that has been created especially for you: tapes using the images of actors and statisticians who are no longer among the living. This channel gives the results of our research, hypotheses concerning your activity—as much as was done in the DS but honestly this time, without censorship. Obviously we can dictate nothing to you, but we ask that you watch only channel 33 to minimize the effect of the epidemic.

The final matter is the business of the murders. The criminals seem to have become heroes. Sergeant Kurys and Olsen managed to pull an infantry carrier from the flames. [They were saving their asses, Gavein thought.] Both are in serious condition. The rest of the suspects perished in the fire. The wish here is to give these men medals. You understand: the honor of the army, morale. The prosecutor in any case will come and question you and all witnesses.

The television downstairs, for Miss Patricks, will receive only the public programming.

Sincerely yours, and in the hope that you will join us in our effort to lift this bizarre curse that is afflicting Davabel.

Frank Medved

How am I supposed to solve the mystery? Gavein thought. At the DS they brought together the best brains of Davabel; they studied me, analyzed me, kept me there for three weeks—and nothing. They ended up bombing ruins. I certainly have no privileged insight into the effect. If I hit on an answer, it would be by dumb luck. The man in the street could do as well.

He folded the letter back, four ways.

And what do I end up bombing, if I find no answer? he thought with a bitter smile. They must all be stepping damned gingerly if their own chief resorts to private letters—unless this whole thing has been orchestrated.

He could move anywhere, live anywhere, linked as he was to the government by both phone and television.

“What ugly furniture,” Ra Mahleiné commented. “Tasteless, and the colors don’t even match, though it obviously cost them plenty.”

It looked as if someone had bought the most expensive pieces possible, indiscriminately, at the nearest furniture store.

A strange evening followed, the first spent in a furnished room in—he couldn’t remember how long. It was also the first time they had been together in three weeks. The television played loud till late at night, but no one looked at it. Ra Mahleiné, sitting on the sofa, knitted as before, carefully counting loops. Monotonous work, but she liked it. It kept her mind off all the things that had happened.

Lorraine stared vacantly at the screen. Though she had been heavily sedated, she couldn’t sleep. It was better to have her in sight.

Gavein made himself comfortable in his armchair.

Maybe I can at least solve the mystery of Wilcox, he thought, reaching for
Nest of Worlds
. What could the man have found in this book?

As he opened it, he felt a pleasant current flowing into him, through his fingers, from the little mosaic tiles on the cover. He loved books, particularly the kind that were bound with such care and affection by the printer.

After Wilcox’s suicide, Zef had read the book. Then, when Zef was murdered, Ra Mahleiné found it among his things. She had not parted from it since. To protect it from a possible search by the police, she sewed a special pocket for it inside her pillow. Every night she placed the book there.

Between the pages were a few index cards containing notes made by Zef. The cards were dated. The handwriting was small and hardly legible.

Gavein opened to the title page.

The tree branch
Holds the nest.
The branch is the nest,
The tree is the nest.

First, a few words of explanation. Look in another copy of this book, then in another. You will find that the text of each differs. This is the rule.

By now you have read many books, but did it ever occur to you that, in every book, you were reading something that was not what others read? We speak here not of words, not of a certain quantity of black ink pressed into a sheet of paper, but of everything else: the sense, the content. When you open a book, its characters come to life: they talk, fight, love, eat. But when you close the book, what happens to them? Does their time stand in place, in the place where you left off, or does their existence continue in some insubstantial way, devoid of anything that matters? The world that forms in your imagination, is it like the world that forms in the mind of another reader? Does the world of the book exist independently of its readers, or does it come into being thanks only to them? Whichever answer you give will be correct.

It depends on you alone whether you become the Significant Reader of this book, causing what happens in it to happen genuinely. The events that unfold before the Reader are as real as the Reader’s own existence. More: a world made real, regardless of its degree of nestedness, creates a whole with every other nested world. In many respects these worlds are surprisingly similar to one another (and to yours). That is their characteristic.

This world is divided into nine Lands. Their names are: Lamieh, Tahian, Mougarrie, Tolz, Schpiez, Buhl, Gorah, Dozya, and Abil. At one time, supposedly, the Ocean surrounded them on all sides, but even the earliest chronicles say nothing of an ocean or of its drying out. Today the plateau of each Land is separated from the others by the deep trough of an evaporated sea. The Lands are oases in which life is made possible by spring water. The depressions that lie between are all desert. After fifteen years and two hundred days every person must traverse the desert to reach the next Land. The desert places limits on the living together of people of different ages. The solution seems simple: if your wife is younger by six months, you may think you can have her take a six-month-longer route, so that at the place you rejoin her you will both be the same age. But in a nested world it does not work this way, though roads of common time do exist. Taking the same route from Mougarrie to Tolz, a caravan can travel several days or several weeks. No one knows how much time has passed, then, in Tolz and how much in Mougarrie.

The black fog claims some caravans. A caravan with a higher number, even if its vehicles keep to the path at every point, cannot reach its destination before a caravan with a lower number. Therefore, if the second caravan arrives and the first has not, then the first has perished.

Transportation by plane is possible only above the regions of the plateaus; no copter that ever ventured over the desert, piloted by daredevils, either returned or reached its destination. Even above the Lands, unnecessary flight is avoided, because a strong wind or an error in navigation can send a craft off a plateau.

* * *

It was very late when Gavein lifted his tired eyes from the yellowing pages.

I am not the Reader of this book, he concluded. Wilcox might have been.

Ra Mahleiné slept on the sofa, her legs folded under her, her work draped over her knees. He took the knitting needles from her hands. Lorraine, curled into a ball, slept with an open mouth. The television crackled quietly, sparks of different colors flickering across the screen. The Davabel anthem had been played long ago. Gavein turned the power knob off and carried his wife to bed. She was very light. She awoke in his arms and went to wash. Lorraine he didn’t wake, because she might not have been able to fall asleep again. Ra Mahleiné came out of the bathroom in a long nightshirt that covered her gauntness. For him she was as beautiful as ever. She said she felt dizzy. He put an arm around her waist and led her to bed. She fell asleep instantly.