Caliph nodded, still marveling at the tube of shifting light.
“Now here’s something that’ll really bake yer noggin. Come with me.”
He led Caliph down a metal staircase into the gritty squalor of the lab. Huge machines stood rampant, bolted to the floor. Bizarre geometry unfolded like industrial plant life. It moved on heavy hinges by hydraulics or pressurized gas.
Caliph noticed the rack of additional solvitriol cells Sigmund had mentioned. They scintillated against the wall, a pale rainbow of ethereal colors.
“You must have found a lot of stray cats.”
Sigmund shrugged and led him toward two giant anvils of grease-blackened steel. They stood opposite each other, fenced off by chains, and separated by an empty groove of space.
Like great metal shoes, the anvil-shaped things had been anchored to the floor with massive bolts as well as huge reinforced posts driven many feet into the foundations of the building.
“It’s mostly solid forged like the bulkheads for the
Caliph heard an ominous creak deep in the floor.
“This was our prototype containment housing since the blueprints didn’t go into what we should do if we managed to separate. Now we’ve got something better.”
As usual, Caliph was lost in Sigmund’s racing dialogue, trying frantically to make sense of parts Sigmund left unsaid.
“Contain what? Separate what?”
Sigmund pointed toward the anvils, anchored to the bedrock beneath the building. More creaking sounded from deep in the rock, speaking of enormous forces exerting against the bolts and posts. Caliph still couldn’t tell where the strain was coming from.
The empty field of space between the anvils rippled with darkness.
“And what’s that?” asked Caliph, pointing toward the void.
“Mother of Mizraim, Caliph—what did you hire me for? Solvitriol power, man.” He slapped Caliph in the chest lightly with the back of his hand. “Souls. Remember?”
Now caliph saw them. At the center of each anvil a tiny window of pastel light gleamed fitfully from a bubble of glass embedded in the steel.
“Remember how I told you I had some ideas. Stuff nobody else’s ever tried. Well, we built a cold tank like they used in the south to freeze light. That’s how I managed to separate one. I mean that’s how I managed to split a soul . . . in half.”
“What?”
“Yeah. It’s crazy. You get your arm cut off but not part of your soul. Fucking difficult. Splitting the unsplittable. I ain’t a priest but according to the blueprints souls have . . . high viscosity and they’re independently self-attractive—magnetized to their own unique structures. Shit. They’re indestructible.
“Anyway you can trick ’em out for a few seconds with devastating cold, plasma diversion I call it, when the attractive charge goes kinda limp. Bottle ’em up like soda pop and put ’em in the containment housing. Whoa! Watch out.”
A shuddering creak went through the cement floor.
“We’re going to have to hook up a big-ass crane to pull these little chums apart. Stress fluctuates between the two housings with active torque and an attractive force of not less than twenty thousand tons. That means the little bugger inside the glass—which is holomorphically unbreakable by the way and extraordinarily expensive to make—is actively trying to twist ’round on the bolts, swivel the housing on a path of least resistance back to its other half. We made the mistake of fusing the glass cells with the metal housing in this model. Anyway, not bad for a stray calico, eh? Meow.
“Now check this action out. Here’s housing number two.”
Caliph walked toward a table with a strange device on it. A disk of black metal housed a solvitriol cell on either side, back to back, in little cages that allowed the glass orbs containing the souls to turn independent of the metal housing.
“The whole thing’s made of tunsia but still not as expensive as that huge contraption over there. See this tunsia plate here could probably support almost a dozen tons of force applied to one side but that’s not what’s going on. What’s going on is the thrust of both cells pushing against the plate from both sides with equal force. They actually keep each other trapped and the bulbs are free to spin.”
Caliph watched the cells revolve slowly, grinding with immense pressure against the tunsia plate between them. They seemed to growl as the soul fragments turned their prisons against the metal disk, furious to undo the division.
“They can’t try alternate directions,” said Sigmund, further explaining why the second housing worked. “They don’t have any power beyond the holomorphic glass. They can spin the cells, but the attractive force between them isn’t a choice. They’re not consciously trying to meld. It’s just some kind of transdimensional physics, some law that says split souls beeline for one another.” He lifted the plate and spun it in his hands. The soul fragments must have adjusted instantaneously to his sudden dynamics, never pushing in a direction other than toward their better half.
“What you’re looking at here could be modified, rigged with springs and other power cells, wired up and housed in a solitary casing. What you’re looking at here is the fundamental heart of a solvitriol bomb.”
Caliph stood speechless, waiting for Sigmund to go on.
Sigmund smiled. “Yeah. What you do is create a mechanism that allows the two orbs to come together, a hole in the plate or an inclined plane or some shit like that. You can roll ’em toward a point of contact with hydraulics or . . . well I haven’t got that part figured out just yet. But once the glass touches it’s over. Absolute attraction.” He rapped the plate of tunsia. “This is quarter inch. But even holomorphically tempered glass isn’t going to hold split souls a sixteenth of an inch apart. Attraction between the fragments increases to a kind of snapping point. That’s where you get your explosion.
“Over there,” he shook his hand carelessly at the steel anvils, “you’ve got twenty thousand tons of attractive force. Here,” he rapped the plate, “you’ve got grundles more.”
“How big?” asked Caliph. “How big of an explosion?”
“Well . . .” Sigmund seemed to whine as though he had misled Caliph’s imagination. “It’s not an explosion like you’re thinking. It’s a ripple. Like take this beaker for instance.” It was filled nearly to the top with water. He took the top of a bun left over from a day-old sandwich and brushed a rain of tiny dark seeds into the beaker. They formed a carpet along the surface of the water. “Like I said, I ain’t no priest, but let’s say them little seeds is us, suspended in some spiritual layer we can’t even detect. Along comes a solvitriol bomb.” Sigmund let slide a thick drop of water from his finger over the beaker. It fell with a plop, disrupting the surface tension of the fluid, shaking the seeds like beetles from a rug. They fell, floating down into the bottom of the beaker.
“See, the seeds don’t get blown up. You don’t feel it when a solvitriol bomb goes off. Buildings don’t break apart and go somersaulting through the air. There isn’t any discernable shockwave. But everybody. Everybody falls down.” Sigmund, shirtless in his blackened overalls, scratched his meaty arm while chewing at his beard.
“Some invisible inexorable tide comes in and washes your soul out of your body like a mussel from its shell. And you’re dead. You’re meat lying on the bottom of that beaker, nothing left to hold you up,” said Sigmund. “That’s what solvitriol bombs can do.”
For a while Caliph and Sigmund shared industrial-strength coffee mixed with brandy from Sigmund’s flask. They stared at the tunsia plate separating immeasurable opposing forces and listened to the foundations creak beneath the lab.
“What’s that dark ripple between the housings?” asked Caliph.
“The path of attraction,” said Sigmund. “You can’t see it in the smaller housing because the cells are just too close together. But it’s there. Displacing light. That’s all it is. I’ve been trying to find a way to predict how the cells will spin their housing so I can use the path of attraction to calculate some kind of endless cycle, you know . . . like a perpetual motion machine. But it’s still too dangerous to try.”
Caliph nodded. He asked all kinds of questions. What the attractive force measured at a distance of one, two, even three miles. What the ethereal blast radius of a solvitriol bomb would be. Sigmund had sketchy answers but promised he would do the calculations and get back to him in a couple days.
