Route 666

Dr McFall-Ngai shrugged but made a suggestion. 'Having a religious experience?'

The Frankenstein monster staggered towards the spidercopter. The aperture nervously contracted shut.

'Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

To mould me man? Did I solicit thee

From darkness to promote me?'

The creature was imploring. The spidercopter was silent.

Tyree was baffled, but Dr McFall-Ngai told her, 'Milton, Paradise Lost. The epigraph to Frankenstein. All cyborgs revere the book, and the films Pinocchio and The Wizard of Oz. For obvious reasons.'

With a Karloffian roar, the Frankenstein monster attacked the spidercopter. Its large, ungainly hands found no purchase on the smooth machine surface.

'It's molecule-locked ceramic,' Huff explained. 'Three times as resilient as durium alloy.'

'That thing's a pot?' Tyree exclaimed.

The Frankenstein monster's fingers scrabbled and broke. An arm extruded from the spidercopter and a needle- beam sliced through the 'bot's neck, shearing away the head.

The thing fell dead.

'That shouldn't have happened,' Dr McFall-Ngai said. 'With no graymass, it could only follow programs. It could not act independently. It could not quote Milton.'

'It did a pretty snazz job, missy,' Quincannon said.

'Dr Zarathustra acted prematurely,' the Japanese woman said. 'The specimen should have been maintained in its state until a thorough examination could be conducted.'

Tyree looked again at the featureless spidercopter, impressed. Zarathustra was a household name, a force in GenTech's BioDiv. If anyone born of woman lived forever, it would be his fault.

The Japanese was politely puzzled.

'This has been an Unknown Event,' she concluded.

'I've heard that expression before,' Tyree said. 'I've seen it in reports.'

The scientist looked almost afraid.

'There have been many UEs. Things that should not be have been and continue to be.'

'Didn't we used to call them miracles?' Quincannon asked.

The scientist nodded vigorously, fringe shaking.

'The world is coming apart. Immutable laws have been broken. Laws of physics.'

'Other laws have been broken,' Quincannon said. 'Laws of America. Against murder, for instance. The 'bots killed a couple of pilgrims just over the Utah border.'

The sergeant was looking at Dr McFall-Ngai, but was speaking to Zarathustra inside the spidercopter.

'There's a case that anyone claiming ownership of the robo-remains could be classed an accessory. Like a dog-owner who lets his pitbull savage kids. If BioDiv were monitoring the Knock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots' actions and didn't intervene, there could be hefty charges.'

The aperture reappeared, wordlessly summoning the scientists. Huff had collected a string of egg-shaped devices in a clear plastic suitcase. Dr McFall-Ngai bowed rapidly and apologetically, then retreated with her assistant into the spidercopter. The machine snapped shut, extruded blades and rose vertically in parallel with the stone column.

'That woman was worried, Quince,' Tyree said.

All around them, left-over robo-bits ticked. A wind seemed to pass through. Valves still functioned, pistons clicked, joints locked and unlocked, cables contracted.

'So she should be, Leona.'

Yorke picked up the Frankenstein monster's head, holding it as Hamlet held the skull. Dr Almighty God Zarathustra had left the anomalous thing behind. He wanted only evidence that conformed to expectations and would suppress anything that didn't fit in with the rigidly maintained scientific world image of consensus.

'This'd look fine in the mess hall trophy case,' Yorke said.

The mouth opened, dropped, and a voiceless buzzsaw whine came out. Yorke dropped the head fast and kicked it away, shivering.

'Very funny, Yorke,' Quincannon said.

Burnside scanned the painfully blue sky until the spidercopter was gone in the haze.

'Remember clouds,' the trooper mused. 'It's been a long time since you saw a cloud.'

Quincannon took a last recce of the site and ordered everyone back to their ve-hickles.

'We should backtrack from the original incident,' he said. 'Pilgrims don't just come in pairs. There'll be a whole load of folks, probably in trouble.'

Trouble, Tyree thought; our job.

VII

9 June 1995

Without the spectacles, the Summoner boiled with anger. The surface of his mind was still as glass but great rages tore and shrieked in the depths. He wished to bathe in blood. As the half-human, half-machine abominations were smitten, the Path was blooded. Another move in the ancient rite. The one-eyed girl had disrupted the ritual. The Summoner saw something in her. She was young and foolish, but behind her face was something struggling to be born, something with row upon row of shiny teeth. There was a moment when he could have killed her, but he had let it pass. After so long a wait and so close to the culmination, he needed to leave loopholes. Or else where was the challenge, where the enterprise? He could regain the spectacles. He would wipe away the one-eyed girl. But first he would be tested and proved.

He felt her tugging at the corner of his mind. Jessamyn Bonney was not yet aware she had impinged upon his consciousness. Doubts bothered her like butterflies, but she had not yet troubled herself to think too much of her prize. If she continued to wear the spectacles, she would of course be forced to think more deeply.

At a swallow, he learned the girl's history, probed her flaws, knew where she would bend, where break. Her years were so few, so brief, so banal. When they met again, he would know which points to pressure.

In the Outer Darkness, the Masters stood still and silent, regarding the tiny bauble of the Earth with ferocious interest The Summoner knew the Dark Ones would soon stir. The entities had many names, earthly and otherwise: Nyarlathotep, Cihulhu, Tzeentch, Nurgle, Sathanas, Ba'alberith, Klesh, Tsa-thoggua. Princes of Darkness and Blood and Fear, dimly perceived by every human culture that ever was. No man but the Summoner had any but the faintest idea of their true nature.

Sacrifices must be made. Elsewhere, the Nullifiers were intent For there was a balance to the darkness, a concentrated dot of light that would grow as the Last Days proceeded. The great game of infinite universes would be played out one more time, one last time.

He felt the weight of years lifting from his mind as he developed the strength he would need to survive the few remaining moments of human history. Sometimes he wondered if he could remotely be considered a human being. The shape he wore was transient and deceptive: the labyrinth of memory that was his mind was beyond human imagining. Even geniuses and madmen had been unable to share his visions. His other selves, from the other continua – the masked sorcerer in his castle, the information-bloated leech in his pyramid – overlapped his mind briefly, flaring with their own purpose.

Would the one-eyed girl come to appreciate the gift she had taken? She could no more use the spectacles than an ant could conceive of a whale, but she might discern a certain curvature of the landscape, a certain quality of shadow…