The Machinery of Light

“The Manilishi was what mattered,” says Jarvin.

“You need to know what she really is,” mutters Spencer.

The child’s billowing through her mind now—like she’s in some kind of tunnel, walls flowing ever faster past her. Haskell realizes tears are running down her cheeks. The Moon around her seems to shimmer. Wind chimes ring out—resolve themselves into her own voice. The one from all those years ago.

Only the start of it,” repeats Lynx.

“I realize that,” says the Operative. He pauses.

“It’s all about Haskell—”

“No,” says Lynx, “it’s fucking not.”

She’s just the key,” Spencer says.

“To everything,” adds Sarmax.

“About time you got involved,” says Jarvin.

I don’t want to talk to you,” she says.

“That doesn’t matter,” says the child.

“I can’t face this.”

“Do you remember that time you couldn’t speak?”

“When I was seven,” she says. “For six weeks.”

“I’m seven now,” says the girl.

Haskell stares. She remembers being seven—or what she thought at the time was seven, since accelerated genetics had resulted in twenty-four months of real memories layered in by five years of false ones. She recalls six weeks during which she was operated on nearly every day—it suddenly flashes back in her head like another nuke going off, and like some kind of trigger, the psychic vibrations of Sinclair’s mind start to pulsate around her, press in against her, show her where he really is. Exactly where she thought he’d be. Her destination—

The Room,” says Lynx. “That’s where all this is going. That’s where it’s been heading all along.”

The Operative nods slowly.

Sinclair created an ultimate sanctuary,” says Spencer.

“Containing the real ultimate weapon,” says Jarvin.

“And he’s gearing up to switch it on,” says Sarmax.

The child subsides toward the endless reaches in the back of her head. She can sense the outer perimeter now, as though it’s a faraway light glowing through endless mists. It’s still well below her. But there’s only one road she can follow. It doesn’t surprise her in the slightest when the last set of pursuers moves in behind her.

Sinclair’s going to feed Haskell into what he’s created,” says the Operative.

“Into it?” Lynx looks puzzled. “Now I’m not tracking—”

“Christ man! So he can feed off it!”

“What?”

“Don’t you fucking get it? He’s trying to become a god.”

Assembling computing power so vast no other term would be appropriate,” says Spencer. He stares at them both, wonders how to make them see. “It’s all about manipulating information. And the final part of Sinclair’s file is all equations. Nothing but fucking math.”

“Part of which is some kind of unified field theory,” says Jarvin.

“And how the hell would you know that?” says Sarmax.

“Jesus, man, what else could it be? Marry relativity to quantum mechanics, and you’d unlock the secrets of the universe. You could redefine the field of black-ops weaponry—”

“Along with science itself,” says Spencer. “These goddamn formulas have got symbols that whoever cooked them up had to invent along the way.” Spencer starts beaming it over.

“Fuck,” says Jarvin.

“I wonder who did cook them up?” says Sarmax suddenly.

“Try Sinclair’s pet AI,” says Spencer.

Control. That gutless phantom. The original sneak—sent by its master to wreak havoc upon the opposition— undermining InfoCom the whole time. And doing so much else—she can feel that thing’s mind out there somewhere, synthetic sidekick riding shotgun on the brain of Matthew Sinclair.

But her immediate problem is right behind her. It feels like a full-fledged triad, only a few klicks back. The Rain down on the Moon have played their hand at last. And she’s playing hers; she accelerates, starts taking these caves in hairpin turns, her position closing on the coordinates she has to make.

And you wanted to sit at his fucking side while he—”

“Never mind what I wanted,” says the Operative.

“You’ve got the maps.”

Lynx grins. “Damn straight,” he says.

“Damn.”

“You were figuring you’d just ditch me somewhere in the tunnels?”

“The thought maybe crossed my mind.”

“Well, think on it no more.”

“I get that,” says the Operative.

And he also gets the implications. If Lynx has kept up with him across the last few days—if he was able to decode that file that Sorenson kept in his mainframe, those charts of sublunar terrain forbidden like no other—then Lynx is good enough to be a factor in what’s about to take place when everyone hits the Moon. And the Operative’s desperate to find more talent to go up against Sinclair. The Operative eyes his own copy of those maps—the endless tunnels stacked beneath Congreve, the arrows that show the approach to the threshold of the Room. He glances at what he knows of the blueprints of the Room itself—looks back at Lynx.

“I know,” he whispers. “You can’t go back any farther than when you built it.”

Lynx nods. “A time machine isn’t a vehicle.”

It’s really more of a place,” says Spencer.

“The place,” says Jarvin.

“And what’s down there is about a lot more than just time.” Spencer’s onscreen image glances at Sarmax. “Right, Leo?”

Sarmax nods. “Sinclair seeded the Earth-Moon system with teleport devices,” he says. “Gateways to other such gateways.”

“And one device that was an entirely different kind of gate,” says Jarvin slowly.

“Which was what the Rain who rebelled against Sinclair got wind of,” says Sarmax.

“Along with Morat,” says Jarvin. “Jesus Christ. Everyone who mattered in CICom always knew he had an ace in the hole; they just didn’t know how out there it was. Or how out there he is.”

“To say nothing of her,” says Spencer.

But none of them ever had a clue as to what that really meant … to understand that memories aren’t in the past, that portents aren’t in the future. To realize that now is all there is. Even as her pursuers close in behind her, that single moment fills her—a single stone dropping through the shafts of eternity. Her mind’s something far more