my spirits sinking lower the higher I climbed.
The moment I reached the top of the stairs, I felt a quickening in my blood. The room was crowded, but to my left, above the heads of the people, I saw a life-size sculpture of Jesus hanging on a cross. He wore a silver cloth around his waist and a crown of silver on his head. It wasn't the sculpture that moved me, but something in the room itself. I felt as if I were standing close to a high-voltage cable, with static electricity raising every hair on my body.
'What?' Rachel asked. 'What is it?'
'Something in me is vibrating.'
'You've felt that before. That's a textbook precursor to a hypnagogic hallucination.'
'No… this is different.'
'Ibrahim?' said Rachel.
'Yes, madam?'
'We're going back to the car.'
'Yes,' he said with relief.
I stepped away from them. To my right, a mural showed Jesus lying on the cross, which lay flat on the ground. Some people standing before the mural parted, revealing a cabinet with panels of hammered silver. As I walked toward the mural, pain radiated up my arm from my left hand. For a moment I thought I was having a heart attack. Then pain shot up my right arm as well. I clenched both hands into fists, but it did no good. I turned to Ibrahim.
'What is this place?'
'This is the eleventh station, sir. Where Jesus was nailed to the cross.'
I moaned.
'We have to get him out of here,' Rachel said. 'Can you get help?'
'He is walking,' Ibrahim said. 'Let us go now.'
'I don't think he'll go.'
Some people in the room were staring at me as if I might be mad.
'I can get soldiers,' Ibrahim said. 'But I would rather not do this.'
'No,' Rachel said quickly. 'I mean, yes. That's not necessary.'
A group of pilgrims moved away from the sculpture of Jesus, revealing a fantastically ornate altar. I stepped forward, my eyes locked on a silver-clad Madonna standing below the cross. The altar before her seemed to be sitting on a large glass case, and under the glass I saw rough gray rock.
'What's that?'
'Golgotha,' Ibrahim answered. 'The place of the skull. That is the mountain itself, where the rock cracked when Jesus' blood fell down from the cross. Then came the earthquake.'
Searing white light blotted out the scene before me. I saw the mountain as it had been before the church was here, a bare, rocky hill beside a mountain riddled with tombs. Three crosses stood on the hill, but no one hung from them. The sky darkened and went black, and I fell to my knees.
I found myself staring at a shining silver disk with a hole in it. The disk lay on the marble base of the altar, a foot off the floor. I put out my shaking right hand and laid my palm on the disk.
The pain in my hands instantly eased.
'This is the place,' I said. 'This is where Jesus left the earth.'
'He is right,' said Ibrahim. 'That disk marks the spot where the cross stood in the ground. To the right and left are black disks where the thieves' crosses stood, one being good, another being bad. Afterward, Jesus was taken away to the tomb of Joseph of Aramathea and rose from the death three days later.'
'No,' I said.
Ibrahim blanched. 'Sir, you cannot say such things here!'
'Whisper,' Rachel pleaded.
'What's the hole in the disk for?' I asked, my hand caressing the cool silver.
'You may put fingers through and touch Golgotha. The rock of Calvary.'
I closed my eyes and slipped two fingers through the hole. My fingertips scraped rough stone.
'Did you dream of this?' Rachel asked.
I couldn't speak. Something was flowing into me from the living rock. Rachel's voice receded and did not return. I felt as if my bones were singing, vibrating in sympathy with something in the earth. At first the feel¬ing was something like joy, but as the intensity built, I began to shake, then to jerk spastically.
It s a seizure, said a familiar voice in my head. My medical voice. A tonic-clonic seizure. Through the fog of receding consciousness, I heard people yelling in several languages. Then I fell, and Rachel screamed.
The impact of the floor was like water.
CHAPTER 31
WHITE SANDS
At 7:52 A.M. mountain standard time, Peter Godin went into code blue. Ravi Nara wasn't in the hospital hangar, but he was sleeping nearby, and he got to Godin's bedside in less than two minutes. He'd been expecting the old man to crash. Without a shunt to relieve the pressure in the fourth ventricle of the brain, hydrocephalus was inevitable. But when Ravi arrived in the Bubble, he found the old man suffering a garden-variety heart attack.
Godin's two nurses had already intubated and bagged him, and one was defibrillating his heart. Ravi read the EKG and confirmed their diagnosis: ventricular tachycar¬dia. They were using the paddles because Godin had no pulse. It took two drug combinations and a 360-joule shock to bring the heart back to a sinus rhythm. Ravi drew blood to check for cardiac-specific enzymes that would tell him how much damage had been done to the heart muscle. Then, since Godin remained unconscious, Ravi sat down for a moment to decompress.
He hated clinical medicine. Something was always coming out of left field to surprise you. Godin had had a coronary bypass fifteen years ago, and a cardiac stent implanted in 1998. The risk of an MI was constant, but under the strain of treating the brainstem glioma, Ravi had let the cardiac risk recede in his mind. The nurses had noticed his hesitancy during the code. Not exactly what they expected from a Nobel laureate in medicine. After years in research labs, he was out of practice. So what? A veterinarian could run the protocols of a code blue.
As a nurse started to attach the ventilator to Godin's breathing tube, the old man tried to speak, but his effort produced only squeaks.
Ravi leaned down to his ear. 'Don't try to talk, Peter. You had a little arrhythmia, but you're stable now.'
Godin held up his hand for something to write with. A nurse gave him a pen, then held a hard-backed pad up to his hand.
Godin scribbled: DON'T LET ME DIE! WE'RE SO CLOSE!!!
'You're not going to die,' Ravi assured him, though he was far from sure himself. Hypoxia could easily trig¬ger the fatal hydrocephalus he'd been expecting. He squeezed Godin's shoulder, then ordered the nurses to put him on the ventilator. It would make the old man furious, but he would endure it.
To avoid Godin's protests, Ravi left the Bubble. As he closed the hatch, he saw Zach Levin rush into the hangar.
'What is it?' Ravi asked. 'What's happened?'
Levin had to catch his breath before he could speak. 'Fielding's model is cracking the final algorithms! He's got the memory area linked to the processing areas, and he's creating all new interface circuitry. I've never seen anything like it.'
'You mean Fielding's model is doing all that.'
'Yes, yes. But I've got to tell you, even with the machine running at only fifty percent capacity, I can feel him in there. It's like talking to the man I worked with for the past two years. Like he's alive again.'
'You're at fifty percent efficiency?'
