“No, but… but we can stop the war,” he said desperately. “Get rid of the empires. Can’t we?”
“You cannot stop such a thing. You cannot alter the nature of nature. All life desires destruction. The only thing that matters is if it survives it.”
Hayes bowed his head. “But I can’t.”
“When the city burned they did not look to you, yet still you came,” said the voice. “Still you came, and showed them the way. And did you not feel joy? Did you not know their hearts, and love that they were safe?”
“Yes, but-”
“This is who you are. This is what you are. This is what you must be. With the last of my strength, I can help you. And there is no time. The changes that I have brought about are unraveling your city. Already a boy stumbled across a part of me, a part that had long been separate and alone and had grown depraved, and when the boy came to it, it changed him. Changed him for the worse.”
“Changed him how?”
The voice sighed again. “It was a part of me for travel. You have seen it yourself, hidden away in buildings not far from here. It has its own mind, for its own purposes. It bent…” The voice clicked again. “… Time. Bent reality. Twisted it so I could move through vast distances in months instead of eons. When the boy found it, it… elevated him. Took his being and sped it up. Placed it on a different level. Now he is a half-thing. Mad and distorted. Living in two times. And the things he has done have torn your city apart. That is how fragile it is. And that is why you must be ready.”
Hayes swallowed. “What do you want from me?”
Another harsh click. “Once a man came among me and walked away with a handful of trinkets. He changed the world with these meager things, these toys. He made a new age, though he did not know it. Imagine what could be done with all the concepts that could be willingly shown to you, given to you. Imagine what a world you could make. I can give them. Now, in an instant.”
Hayes thought quickly. He looked back on his years, lonely and wandering, always living on the razor’s edge. Living nameless lives, adrift among the hopes and madnesses of the people who passed him by.
“Will it hurt?” Hayes asked. “Changing?”
“Yes,” said the voice.
Hayes winced. “And what will I know? After this, what will I know?”
“Secrets. Laws. Devices. Truths hidden in the furrows of reality. Tools that will carve out a home among the coming years. These and more.” Click. “Will you do it?”
Hayes thought about it and said, “What will I do? With the knowledge you give me?”
“I cannot say. I am not one of you. I know only how to curb your desires, not how to build. And the path your civilization has taken since my interference has gone well beyond any reckoning I have.”
Hayes shut his eyes. “And what if I say no?” he asked.
There was silence.
“What if I say no?” he asked again. “What if I turn it down?”
The voice said, “If you, who have walked among these people for a lifetime, and know their hearts and minds more than any other person alive… If you say no, and doom them to a future of ash and scorched earth, then I will trust your judgment, and let it be, and die voiceless here in the dark.”
Hayes sighed. He found he was weeping. He was not sure if the tears were real or part of this strange vision, but they felt hot and wet on his cheeks, and seemed real enough. “Will I remember everything from before?” he asked. “Will I remember that?”
“If you wish.”
Hayes nodded and wiped tears from his eyes. “All right. Okay, then. Do it.”
The hum intensified. He became aware that somewhere machinery that had long been silent suddenly came to life, desperately working for one last undertaking.
“Once this is done I will be no more,” said the voice. “I will be gone. Know this.”
“I know. Just do it.”
Silence. The thing out in the fields was still.
“Just do it already!” shouted Hayes.
The image around him flashed briefly, flickered like a candle flame. Then the air around him grew hot. There was a feeling in his skull of a thousand fingers probing his mind, rearranging it. Dissecting it and rewiring it.
“Jesus,” Hayes said. “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ!”
The air was burning hot now. Hayes felt memories melt into one another, felt experiences and times long lost suddenly flare up as if they were the present. He saw a desert train trundling across desolate flats and watched as the rail in front of it erupted, and he heard himself laugh in satisfaction. Then his father was howling at him, screaming about his idiot son and his foolish ways, and he ached with shame. Next he was grinning as he watched a McNaughton trader being led away, sobbing like a child. And then he felt the madness of grief as he watched a funeral from the gates of a cemetery, stinking drunk and half-suicidal. Watched the coffin slowly descending into the dry ground, knowing that the girl inside it and the child in her belly were dead by his rashness.
The thoughts came together. Crumbled. Rebuilt. Then everything went dark.
A memory blossomed somewhere in him. One he knew was not his own. He saw the ruins of a city, gray and gutted, and he recognized it as the one he’d glimpsed in the trolley tunnels. He saw the city was ravaged beyond belief, its endless wreckage dark beneath the night sky. Yet somewhere within it there was a train of people, a small thread of folk walking through its rubble, and in each of their hands they held a candle, sheltering the flames against their bodies. A vein of light, still alive in these wastelands. And at the front of the procession he saw a man holding a great torch aloft, leading them away from the city, away from their broken homeland, and out to the wilderness beyond where something waited. A building, or a city, it was difficult to make out. Some great white architecture that reached up to the sky, past the clouds and up into the veil of stars.
Survive, said the voice. Survive. Peace. And bring tomorrow.
Hayes opened his eyes and found he was still underwater. He fought the urge to breathe in and failed, and icy water rushed into his mouth and throat. He convulsed and then kicked himself up to the surface.
He burst up from the water, gasping, and clung to the smooth side of the rock wall. He breathed for a few seconds before heaving himself up and over, where he retched water onto the stones. It was then that he noticed a red rain falling from his face, rosy blossoms pattering the stone below. He touched the red drops on the rocks and then touched his face and felt the rivers of blood running from his eyes and ears and nose and mouth. Then he crawled to the edge and washed the blood away and looked at his reflection in the water.
It was still the same face. Yet the hair had changed. It was now sheet-white, white as bone. He touched it, half-expecting it to crumble under his fingers. It did not.
Then he looked beyond, past the surface and the reflection to the deeper waters. There was something missing there. An absence or void where a mind had watched and waited, grieving silently for its lost children. He could no longer sense it.
He stood up and breathed until he was steady. Then he looked at the city below.
Only madmen could hear it, he remembered. Only madmen, and children.
Then he walked down to his car, started it up, and began back down the hilly paths.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Garvey and Samantha sat next to each other on the cot, the stolen files laid on the ground, neatly organized into the most important parts. As the wild night had raged on out in the rest of the city they had both been far too restless to sleep. Garvey had found a small bottle of gin in the desk, no doubt squirreled away there by Hayes for his dry spells, and they’d sipped it while they waited for the wailing and the fire to die down. Now in the early reaches of the morning the drink wore off, and though the smell of smoke still hung heavy in the air and there was still the odd scream out in the streets Garvey figured it was now or never.
