Mysterium

FIRE EXIT opened. Dex Graham stepped into the room.

Dex fired a handgun at the Proctor and missed. Now the Proctor’s weapon came sweeping up and Clifford had time to cover his ears before the batteringly loud bang. No telling where that bullet went.

Dex fired a second time and the Proctor sat down on the floor. The pistol dropped from his hand. He slumped against the bars of the cage, moaning.

Dex came striding forward. Linneth Stone came through the door behind him. She picked up the weapon the Proctor had dropped.

Dex found a length of copper piping and used it to pry the lock from the door of Clifford’s cell. The lock burst and the door rattled open and Clifford ran to the schoolteacher without thinking.

He noticed Dex Graham’s eyes, how strangely calm they seemed.

?

Linneth took the boy to the stairway. Dex lingered a moment longer.

He looked at Delafleur, who was still alive. The bullet had shattered his hip. He was paralyzed below the waist. The wound was bleeding freely into the silk-lined folds of his long winter coat.

“I can’t move,” the Proctor said.

Dex turned to leave.

Delafleur said, “You don’t have time. It’s hopeless.”

“I know,” Dex said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Some of the cinder-block walls of the high-energy laboratory had melted to slag and most of the roof was gone. A sky of blue sheet lightning illuminated a maze of corridors.

Howard walked through the rubble. During the brief intervals when his vision cleared he saw structural rods protruding from concrete forms, broken electrical cables as thick as his arm, ceramic insulators scattered like strange pottery all around him.

When his vision was not clear he saw these things through endlessly multiplied prisms, as if a snow of faceted crystal had filled the air.

He moved toward the heart of the building. He felt its heat like sunlight on his face.

?

Stern’s last coherent scientific writings had leaned toward the idea of chaotic inflation: a cosmological scenario in which quantum fluctuation, in the primordial void gives birth to universes in endless profusion. Not a single creation but infinite creations. And no universe accessible to any other, except perhaps through quantum tunnels known as wormholes.

In this schema, a universe might even contain a universe. If you could somehow compress an ounce of matter inside the orbit of an electron, it would blossom into a new avenue of time and space—someone else’s Big Bang; someone else’s quarks and leptons and stars and skies.

In other words, it was possible to contemplate the technology of becoming a god.

Stern thought it had already been done. The Turkish fragment was the result of an effort, perhaps, to connect two branches of the World Tree. These ghosts (they moved through Howard and around him with clockwork regularity) might be its makers. Mortal gods. Demiurges. Archons, but trapped: chained to this vortex of creation.

?

Here at the center of the building the ruins were more chaotic. Howard climbed a bank of broken brick and tile. He was dizzy, or perhaps the world really was spinning around this axis. He fixed his eyes rigidly ahead. Everything he saw seemed to swarm with iridescence.

Blackened walls rose above him like broken teeth. He passed markers and signs, some words still faintly legible: WARNING and AUTHORIZATION and FORBIDDEN.

The core of the building had been a containment unit surrounded by two layers of reinforced steel. This was the matrix into which all the cabling and conduits had run; this was where Stern had focused immense energies on the fragment, particle beams hotter than the surface of the sun.

The containing walls had been breached, but sections were still standing. Everything else—debris, dust; shrapnel—had been scoured away by the explosion. The containment unit stood alone in a sort of black slag crater within the larger ruins of the laboratory building. Howard stepped into that circle, reached the tattered containment room, felt a new wash of terrible heat as he moved through air thick with ghosts and stars, to the crenellated walls, through a vacancy that had once been a doorway, and inside, to the heart of the world: axis mundi.

Inside, Stern was waiting for him.

?

It was Stern, even though it was not human any longer.

He must have been here when the fragment was bombarded with energy—closer than he should have been, by design or by accident.

The fragment had become an egg of blue-green phosphorescence. It was perhaps twenty feet in diameter, or seemed to be—appearances, Howard knew, were immensely deceptive. It was hot and vividly alive. It looked as fragile as a bubble but much more menacing, a bubble of spun glass containing the substance of a thousand stars.

It was patently radioactive and Howard assumed it had already killed him. No matter what happened here —even if a miracle happened here—he would not live longer than another few hours.

Alan Stern stood outside the sphere. He was touching it.

Howard knew this was Stern, although there was not much left of him. In some sense Stern probably was dead; some incomprehensible event or process had preserved only a fraction of him here: his mind, but not much of his body. What Howard saw against the glare of the sphere was a body as translucent as a jellyfish. The nervous system—the brain and bundles of nerves—pulsed with a strange luminosity. Stern’s arms touched the sphere and seemed to merge with it, and so did a dozen other limblike projections that had grown into and from his body, fixing him in place like the roots of a tree.

Stern’s presence was more nebulous; it enveloped Howard and seemed to speak to him. Howard sensed a terrible stasis, an entrapment, a speechless fear. If the sphere was a doorway, Stern was powerless to pass through it and couldn’t retreat. He was caught between flesh and spirit.

He turned his head—a fleshless bulb in which even the skull was only a dim shadow—and, somehow, eyeless, looked at Howard. He was pleading for help.

Howard hesitated for a time he couldn’t count or calculate.

All his speculation, and all of Stern’s, had circled around a truth: that the object in this room was a passage between worlds—or even a means of creating a world. The idea seemed to flow from the object itself. Wordlessly, the sphere announced its nature.

But if that was so, the only way he could help Stern (this thing, this tortured essence of Stern) was to step into that doorway, perhaps to open it wider. To succeed where Stern had failed.

And how could he do that? Stern was the genius—not Howard. Stern had revised and elaborated the work of Hawking and Guth and Linde. Howard had barely understood them.

Stern was the wizard. Howard was only an apprentice.