that vented the basement. “They’re gone. They evacuated. Today must be the day.”
The day of the bomb, he didn’t need to add. That was why Luke was here: for talking about the bomb.
That was also why Clifford was here, though no one had told him so—no one had talked to him. The soldiers had just put him in this cage and gone away.
It was too late now to do anything but wait, and he told Luke so.
Thibault called him a little idiot, a criminal, a liar. “They can’t leave me here. Sons of Samael! Even the Proctors wouldn’t do that!”
But the morning ticked on and Luke lapsed into a despairing silence. Clifford knew it was past dawn by the faint light in the vent windows. That was his only clock. The shadowy fluorescent tubes overhead were the only other light—and most of those were burned out.
Clifford gazed at that patch of daylight far up at the margin of the ceiling for a time he could not calculate; it was interrupted only by the sound of Lukas Thibault’s sobbing.
Then there was another sound: gunshots, and not far away.
“Sophia Mother!” Luke cried out.
This was a new threat. Clifford was dismayed: better the bomb, Clifford thought, than a gun. He had read about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bomb washed everything away in a tidal wave of light. The people were gone with only their shadows left behind. He had resigned himself to dying in the bomb blast, but this gunfire was different. It worried him.
The shooting paused, crackled for a time, paused again.
Then the door marked FIRE EXIT swung open, and here was the Proctor Delafleur wide-eyed and with a pistol in his hand.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
In the beginning was the ennoia, and the world was made of light.
Then Sophia, a thought of the Uncreated God, committed the sin of creation. Cast out from the primordial Nous, she fashioned base matter, the
Thus the world was both created and separated from its origins; it was matter with a kernel of spirit in it, neither
Here was the metaphor Stern had found so compelling. It resonated with modern cosmology: pull a linchpin from primordial symmetry and everything cascades forth: quarks, leptons, atomic nuclei, stars; eventually kittens, dung beetles, physicists.
And in all this there is embedded an unquenchable
Sophia, abandoned, wanders the infinite shoals of hylic matter with her terrible longing for the light. And yet—And yet… Sophia laughed.
Howard had found the phrase in Stern’s notebook, circled and underlined and crowned with question marks.
Howard calculated that he had to walk a hundred yards across the parking lot of the Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory to reach its central building, the collapsed concrete-block structure where—perhaps—Stern had died.
It was not a long distance, ordinarily. But this was no longer an ordinary place. He had passed the boundaries of the ordinary. He was inside the glow.
No snow fell here. The air was suddenly moist and warm; the neat bordered lawns near the workers’ quarters were green, though the grass had not grown since the spring. Did time pass more slowly here? If so, Howard thought, his attempt to reach Stern might be futile; the bomb would detonate between one footstep and the next.
But he could see the snow falling only a few paces behind him, and it was falling at its usual pace. So time didn’t pass especially slowly here, though he supposed it might pass
His vision was obscured. The eye didn’t like this environment. Nor did the other senses; he felt dizzy, awkward, alternately too hot and too cold. Most confusing, though, was this refusal of any solid object to hold still and be seen. Images curved and lost proportion as if the act of seeing them challenged their reality.
Observation, Howard thought, was a kind of quantum guillotine: it sliced uncertainty into
He understood why the firefighters had beat such a hasty retreat: too much exposure to this would surely affect more than the senses. Madness must look like this, Howard thought.
But he took another step and another after that.
The light around him was bright but sourceless. It wasn’t daylight. It pervaded everything; everything was lit up from within. Colors were divided, split as if by a prism into countless bands. Every motion was a blur.
He took another step and another, though his stomach was churning. There was a turbulence all around him. The air itself seemed to solidify and take form, as if translucent bodies were moving through it. More ghosts, he supposed. Maybe they really were ghosts, the restless remains of the men and women who had died in these bunkers the night of the explosion.
But Howard doubted it. There was something purposive in the way they crossed his path, circling the laboratory buildings as if they were trapped here, and perhaps they were: maybe these were the creators of the fragment, still attached to it, orbiting it a helpless half step out of time.
He shook his head. Too much speculation: that had been Stern’s downfall.
Stern, who was calling him onward. Set aside the rationalization and that was why he was here: Stern had called him. And Stern was calling him yet.
Stern had always loomed over him like a monument, stony and unapproachable. In Howard’s family no-one talked much about the important things. But Stern always came with a baggage of big ideas and he always shared them with Howard. Teased him with them: You like this morsel? Then how about this? And
Howard remembered his uncle leaning forward from the cane chair on the porch, on a summer evening alight with stars and fireflies, his voice obscuring the faint rattle of china dishes on a faraway table: “Your dog sees the same world we do, Howard. Your dog sees those stars. But we know what they are. Because we can ask the right questions. And that’s knowledge the dog can never share. By his nature: never. So, then, Howard—do you suppose there are questions even we can’t ask?”
