The Apocalypse Codex

lie because now I think about it she didn’t ask for one in the first place—

“No thanks.” Her cheeks dimple. “I’m avoiding alcohol for the next few months.”

Mo catches the dropped penny first: “Congratulations! How long—”

“It’s been nearly ten weeks. We’re not out of the first trimester yet, I wasn’t going to announce it for a little longer.”

Opposite me, Pete’s expression has switched from muted disapproval to the smug anticipation of fatherhood-to-be.

“Congratulations to the two of you,” I say slowly. “Well, good luck with that.” I lower the wine bottle and pick up my glass. “Here’s to sleepless nights ahead, huh?”

Mo raises her glass, too, keeping her expression under rigid control. But I can see right through it; right to the core of delight for their joy, and suppressed envy for Sandy’s condition, and above all else, horror at the fate they’ve unwittingly condemned themselves to.

LATE THAT NIGHT, AS WE LIE IN BED, I FEEL MO’S SHOULDERS shake. I slide an arm around her, try to provide comfort. She’s crying, silently and piteously to break a man’s heart; and the worst part is that I can’t do anything about the cause of her grief.

We’re not going to have children.

For months now, and for decades to come, we’ve been living on borrowed time. I can feel it in the prickling in my fingers and toes, in the strange shapes and warped dead languages of my dreams. We’re living through the end times, but not in any Biblical sense—the religions of the book have got their eschatology laughably wrong.

Outside the edge of our conscious perceptions, the walls between the worlds are thinning. Things that listen to thoughts and attend are gathering, shadows and fragments of cognition and computation. The Laundry has a code name for this phenomenon: CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. Magic is a branch of applied mathematics: solve theorems, invoke actions, actions occur. Program computers to do ditto, actions occur faster and more reliably. So far so good, this is what I do for a living. But consciousness is also a computational process. Human minds are conscious, there are too damn many of us in too small a volume of space on this planet right now, and we’re damaging the computational ultrastructure of reality. Too much of our kind of magic going on makes magic easier to perform—for a while, until space itself rips open and the nightmares come out to play.

But that’s not why we aren’t going to start a family. Abstract principles aren’t sufficient. No, it’s a lot simpler: we know the sort of thing that’s likely to happen during CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, and we’re not selfish enough— or evil enough—to condemn a child of ours to die that way.

There’s going to be an epidemic of dementia—not mad cow disease, new variant CJD, but something our house doctors call Krantzberg syndrome: if a sorcerer unintentionally thinks the wrong thoughts, performs magic by mind, the listeners and feeders and actors they invoke from the quantum foam take tiny bites out of their brains. Dream the wrong dreams, and you can wake up with a palsy or an aneurysm.

There will be amazement and miracles, too. Magic wands stuffed with silicon chips that work wonders. Twisted biological creations that obey our directives. Ordinary people discovering they have the power to summon demons and angels and warp reality to their will. Somnolent sentient species rising from the deeps to take an interest in the suddenly interesting land-dwelling aboriginals. Alien emissaries, and powers beyond our comprehension like the Sleeper in the Pyramid—

—Monstrous conquerors no bullet or atom bomb can kill—

—And their willing servants.

No, this isn’t a sensible decade to start a family. Especially not for the likes of Mo and me, insiders and experts with a ringside seat at the circus of horrors.

WEDNESDAY MORNING DAWNS, GRAY AND MOIST. I YAWN, ROLL out of bed, and stumble downstairs to the kitchen to switch on the kettle. I glance at the clock: it’s a quarter to seven. I shiver, the skin on the soles of my feet sticking to the cold linoleum. We talked, for a bit, when the tears dried, then I slept fitfully. No dreams of the plateau and the pyramid, which is a small blessing. But today is a workday, and I’ve got at least one meeting booked in the office. I reach for my phone, which is still sitting on the kitchen table where I left it last night—

There’s a notification. A call. I blink, bleary-eyed. Six forty-two last night, from oh fuck it’s Lockhart. There is voicemail. I listen to it. “See me first thing tomorrow morning. Bring your bag. Be prepared to travel.” Click. He doesn’t sound happy: probably expected the good little minion to be in the office until whenever he felt like going home. I yawn, then get the coffee started.

Half an hour later Mo and I are sitting opposite each other across the table. Toast, marmalade, a cafetiere full of French roast. Mo is showing signs of sleeplessness, yawning. “I had a bad dream,” she remarks over the coffee.

“Bad enough to remember?”

“Very.” She shivers. “I was alone in the house. Upstairs, in the attic.” The roof space is big enough that we’ve been planning to add a dormer window and turn it into a spare room one of these years. “There was—this is going to sound cheesy, but it was just a dream—a window. Under the window, there was a cradle, and a woman in a chair sitting next to it with her back to me. I couldn’t see very clearly, and her face was in shadow, or she was wearing a veil, or there was something between us. She had a bow, and she was playing—lullabies. Except I couldn’t hear them. To the crib. Although I couldn’t see anything in it.”

“Um.” There’s no way to say this tactfully, so I don’t. “Are you sure it was empty? Because if so, that’s classic projection—”

“No.” She shakes her head. “I know what you’re thinking.” She looks troubled. “The thing is, in my dream I knew the melody. It was familiar from somewhere. Only I don’t. It’s not a tune I’ve ever heard. And I’m not sure the crib was empty. But it was definitely my instrument.”

And now it’s my turn to look troubled, because nobody in their right mind would play lullabies to a baby on Mo’s violin. It’s an Erich Zahn original, with a body as white as the bone it’s carved from, refitted with electric pick- ups and retuned to make ears and eyeballs bleed. It has other properties, too.

“Have a bagel,” I suggest, buying myself some time to chew on the problem. “It sounds like projection, but if you think it’s something else…well.” A thought strikes me. “The violin?”

“Huh.” Mo glances at the corner of the room. She brought the violin downstairs. It’s still in its case. Come to think of it, the only time she leaves it in another room is when she’s having a bath or a shower. “Think it’s jealous?”

She shivers. “Don’t say that.”

“My new boss phoned,” I say to change the subject. “Told me to bring my go-bag. I might be late for dinner.”

“Oh.” She stands up and walks around the table. “So soon?”

“Can’t be sure. Hope not.” I stand up and we embrace, awkwardly because of the coffee mug glued to the palm of my right hand (it’s a shape-shifting leech that feeds on fatigue poisons in my blood; it’ll fall off when I’m fully awake).

“Take care. Remember to write. Or call, if you can keep track of the time zones.”

“I shall.” I remember something. “Pinky had a little toy waiting for me. Not the kind of toy that’s supposed to go walkabout, I think. Your doing?”

“What toy—oh, that. I don’t think so. But last week Angleton made a point of asking me the kind of hypothetical question that’s not so hypothetical: I reminded him about that time in Amsterdam.” The hole in a hotel corridor’s wall, blowing air into vacuum in a dead-cold world beneath the blue- shifted pinprick stars of a dying cosmos. Pinky’s little toy is the direct lineal descendant of the machine they issued me for self-defense back then. “Promise me you’re going to make sure you don’t get into a situation where you need it. Please, Bob?”

I shudder. “I promise. You know what I think of violence.”

“And you’ll draw a new ward. And a HOG. Two HOGs. And you’ll brush your teeth every night. Okay?”

I kiss her. “Sure.”

And, oddly, when I go in to work later that morning my first stop is the armory, just to draw a new and unused protective ward and a pair of mummified pigeons’ feet in leather bags. I draw the line at toothpaste,