man’s grasp, but Fiona did not move.
She didn’t know how to begin describing what she felt when she looked at the pieces of stone in the display cases. It was different than with the artwork. The paintings and sculptures seemed to both sing and glow, and while she couldn’t quite put that into words-into English words at least-she was starting to feel like she understood. It was like trying to describe a color; there were no words for it, you just had to find an example. She understood that the pieces of rubble had once been art, but whatever message they contained, ought to have been destroyed when the original statues had been blown up. The message of art wasn’t an intrinsic thing; a message written on a piece of paper didn’t fundamentally alter the paper.
Or did it?
Maybe it was like with a computer hard drive, where no matter how hard you tried to erase old data, there were always ways to retrieve the files. At least that was how it worked in all the police shows she watched on television.
Maybe what she was looking at was the original message, but all distorted and jumbled.
She was still trying to figure out how to put that idea into words when a hideous shriek ripped through the room, overpowering the atonal hum from the speakers. She clamped her hands to her ears, but the sound was undiminished, vibrating through every fiber of her body. Behind Fiona, Sara had collapsed on the floor, writhing in agony under the sonic assault that was playing havoc with her sensory disorder.
Alexander whirled to look at his equipment, undisguised concern on his face, then turned back. “Get out of here! Now!”
Fiona didn’t need to be told again. She knelt beside Sara and tried to help her to her feet, aided by an uncomprehending Julia. The electronically amplified shriek changed pitch, cycling randomly through different frequencies and occasionally falling silent, but even when she heard nothing, Fiona could sense that the sounds were still present, albeit at a range inaudible to the ordinary human ear.
Then, with an almost painful abruptness, true silence came.
Sara, now on her feet and braced between Julia and Fiona, gave a tortured gasp but seemed to regain some of her strength.
Julia, sensing that her assistance was no longer required, relaxed her grip and turned to Alexander, who was now hunched over a laptop on the table. The curator hastened to confront him, but whatever demand she had been about to make died on her lips when she reached the big man’s side. Her gaze was riveted to something on the table and after a moment, she reached out and plucked up one of the plastic disks. Even from halfway across the room, Fiona could see that something had changed; the center of the disk was now almost black.
“What does this mean?” Julia asked, thrusting the dosimeter into Alexander’s face, her voice trembling with fear.
The big man’s expression tightened, as if trying to hold back unimaginable grief. “You know what it means. We’ve all been exposed to a concentration of gamma radiation.” He took a breath. “A lethal concentration.”
The pronouncement was too mind-boggling for Fiona to process. Radiation? Lethal? That just didn’t make any sense.
“Gamma rays?” Julia countered, her voice edging on hysteria. “From what?”
Alexander’s reply, if he had intended one, never came, for in the next instant, the room heaved and Fiona felt herself falling sideways into oblivion.
CAUSE/BECAUSE
In the beginning, there was everything.
From the first moment of existence, the first moment of time, the universe was complete.
Before that instant…there was no before. Time did not exist. Nothing existed. And then, the singularity…what scientists would some fourteen billion years later call ‘the Big Bang,’ brought everything into being.
All of the matter and energy that would ever exist began at that moment, as did the laws and forces that would govern their behavior. And because those laws were immutable, the very nature of reality and the ultimate destiny of this new universe existed as well. There was no other possible outcome. Everything that would happen- the changing states of matter and energy, the creation of simple elements from subatomic particles, the forging of the primary elements by gravity and atomic fusion and violent supernovae explosions into more complex metals, the emergence of molecules, even the arrangement of those molecules into living organisms-all of it was, from that incipient moment, inevitable. Everything that would ever exist, existed in that moment as an eventuality.
The final eventuality, where all that had been brought into being would return to the singularity, where even time and concepts such as before and after would cease to have meaning-the thing that Kushan villagers in the Bamiyan Valley had, with astonishing insight, imagined to be Angra Mainyu, demon of darkness and bringer of absolute destruction-had always existed as well, poised like the Sword of Damocles above all that had been made reality in the instant of the singularity.
But this awakening…this was something different.
27
Paris-2028 UTC/Local
King guided the Zodiac north, up the channel separating the two islands, and scanned the banks looking for a place to land the boat. He had just spied a stone ramp, descending from the battlement-like seawall surrounding Ile de la Cite, when the hull beneath him began to shudder as if passing over a washboard. King eased back on the throttle, letting the boat coast, but if anything, the turbulence seemed to increase. The black water all around him rippled violently, sloshing onto the nearby ramp and splashing in frothy waves against the seawall. Huge stone blocks were tumbling from the wall, crashing onto the nearby ramp and splashing into the undulating surface of the river.
King killed the outboard, and as the throaty roar died away, the night became filled with a discordant symphony of car alarms and grinding stone, punctuated every few seconds by an explosion. Even from his low vantage, King could see city lights bobbing crazily. Far off in the distance, a brilliantly illuminated needle shape-the Eiffel Tower-was snapping back and forth like the radio antenna of a speeding car.
“Earthquake?” King muttered. Paris was one of the most geologically stable places in Europe, but impossible as it was, there could be no other explanation.
The shaking continued, intensifying, and the cacophony grew louder. Then, as abruptly as a candle flame being blown out by a stiff wind, the entire skyline went dark. Other lights started to dance across the skyline, not stationary fixtures but the running lights of aircraft-helicopters, he guessed-spiraling chaotically downward to disappear in the darkened cityscape.
King shuddered in horrified disbelief. Helicopters were falling from the sky. An earthquake couldn’t cause that. What the hell is happening?
As suddenly as it had begun, the earthquake stopped. The deep rumbling noise ceased, but the din of the temblor’s aftermath continued to fill the lightless city-strident alarms and screams, punctuated by the crump of distant explosions and collapsing buildings. Though he could barely comprehend it, he knew that in a few mere seconds, the City of Light had become a disaster zone.
Brown still lay unmoving in the boat, and King dismissed the idea of trying to rouse him. The gambler was unlikely to share anything meaningful and King wasn’t in the mood to entertain the man’s triumphant crowing. He knew that this event was somehow connected to the activation of the quantum phone, and his gut told him that Brown’s grand scheme would not merely be limited to a regional catastrophe. Whatever his plan, this was surely only the opening gambit.
There was one man who would be able to give King the information he needed. Not Brown. From past experience, King knew the gambler rarely troubled himself with the details-the physical realities-of his schemes. No, the man who could answer his questions was the man who had built the quantum phones in the first place.
