rocks below. Above, a few small clouds chased across the skies like dark-grey riders. Darius threw back his head and sucked down great lungfuls of sea air. It was going to be, he believed, a lovely day.
Especially, he thought, if you were lord and master of all you surveyed. L amp;M, he thought, not the cigarette but the God who ruled this citadel. He giggled again to himself, thinking what a pity it was that no one around him was clever enough to appreciate his sense of humor. No one, that is, save mighty Perseus, whom he was on his way to meet.
Clamped to his shiny bald head, Bluetooth headphones were providing a sound track for this private morning movie. It was Wagner today, but always Wagner or Rachmaninoff or Schubert, and this morning he was grooving to Ride of the Valkyries, one of his favorites. He’d listened all night to Schubert’s Impromptu op. 90 no. 3 to help him sleep, finally said to hell with it, popped one or two Ambien, and cranked up the Wagner.
Darius’s mode of transportation was unusual, to say the least. Technically, it was a wheelchair. But, technically, it was like no other wheelchair in existence: for starters, this particular wheelchair had no wheels. It floated on a cushion provided by controllable gas nozzles. It was powered by a cold-fusion system of Darius’s own invention. The mother of this particular invention was his birth defect, an infirmity that caused the loss of use of his legs.
Darius was nothing if not inventive. He was blessed (some might say “suffered”) with a condition known as synesthesia, a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in other sensory pathways. Say a number, and Darius could not only “taste” it, he could locate and see that number in space, in color, and actually “hold” it in his hands.
He had put his extraordinary capabilities to good use since childhood, building ever more complex computers, mastering sixteen languages, creating one of his own, and solving complex problems of physics at a level few but Einstein himself could appreciate. In addition to his experiments in the field of artificial intelligence, his current interests involved study on two fronts: cosmology, the study of the universe on the grandest scale, and particle physics, the study of the universe on the tiniest scale.
Both scientific fronts were derived, ultimately, from the work of his god, Albert Einstein: cosmology was based on the general theory of relativity, Einstein’s rewriting of our understanding of gravity, while particle physics had evolved from quantum mechanics, the rules that govern the universe on the atomic and subatomic scale. These abstractions were his playgrounds, and this was where his mind spent most of its time.
On a far more humble scientific level, the hover-chair that now transported him was one of his most primitive inventions. Still, it was not without its attractions. In addition to being surreally speedy and completely silent, it was also heavily armored-and heavily armed. Unusual for a wheelchair, perhaps, until you considered that Dr. Darius Saffari, with good reason, was hyperparanoid about his safety every second of his life.
It was only because of his intense relationship with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, that none of his countless enemies within the Artesh (Persian for army) or the secret sect known as PMOI (People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, sometimes known as MEK) had yet to succeed in assassinating him. MEK, he knew, was providing intelligence about Iranian nuclear capability to the Americans and, worse, the Israelis. He had shared this information with authorities in Tehran. Hundreds of PMOI had been killed and three thousand arrested. For this, they wanted his head.
He controlled his flying machine with twin joysticks located at the front of each armrest. Atop the control sticks were buttons, triggers, just like on a Sukhoi jet fighter. Two laser-sighted 9mm machine guns faced forward, two aft, all swivel mounted. When the mood struck him, he would zoom out to the terrace just beyond his bedroom doors, maneuver up close to the parapet overlooking the sea, and blaze away at the shrieking and diving and shitting seagulls that were constantly annoying him. To this day, he’d never managed to hit one but that didn’t stop him from trying.
If a man’s home is his castle, certainly that was true of Darius’s. His large compound was located about fifty miles southeast of the port city of Bandar-e Bushehr, Iran, on a high cliff overlooking the Persian Gulf. It had been built entirely within the monstrously thick walls of an ancient Persian fortress known as the Ram Citadel. Built sometime before 500 B.C., the citadel is surrounded by walls six or seven meters high. It had withstood the fierce Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. The Ottoman-Persian wars had raged on for nearly three centuries, but never once had the great fortress succumbed to siege, nor had its mighty walls been breached.
Much remains from antiquity. Inside the most internal wall of baked clay bricks stands the citadel, the barracks, the mill, a forty-meter-deep water well, and stalls for two hundred horses. Houses for the rulers and the ruled-over still stand. There are as many as thirty watchtowers including the two “stay-awake” towers for which Ram is famed. People inhabited the Ram until the mid-nineteenth century when they mysteriously disappeared. The Iranian army kept a presence there until 1932, and then the structure was wholly abandoned until a wealthy grandee purchased it, began construction of a lavish palace, and made it the family compound.
Now, of course, it all belonged to Darius.
The new palace had been built of limestone and white Carrara marble to Darius’s exacting specifications. The towers and domes of stone shone a brilliant pink as he emerged into the daylight, hurtling across a vast walled plaza dotted with gardens, Renaissance Italian sculpture, and fountains. The various structures, laboratories, domed residences, and minarets surrounding the plaza were just now catching the first rays of the sun rising above the mountains to the east.
Atop the highest point within his compound stood one of the world’s ten most powerful telescopes. It was called a Large Binocular Telescope, and, to use the language of astronomy, it had “seen first light” in October 2005. The LBT’s two twenty-eight-foot mirrors worked together to provide as much resolution as would be derived from a single thirty-foot mirror, and they were ten times more powerful than Hubble’s. Darius had traveled to places in the universe where no man had been before.
And, he chortled, he had the pictures to prove it.
Darius’s home base was a mighty fortress, but Darius, being deliberately quaint as was his wont, always referred to the huge, fortified complex as his “little cottage by the sea.” There were large block dormitories for scientists, guards, a massive bioengineering laboratory and servants, and a massive power plant to supply the unusually high-energy requirements of Darius’s latest creation, Lord Perseus.
Few “cottages” in the world were as highly secure, in terms of radar-guided antiaircraft systems, armed guards, dogs, sonic sensors, and sophisticated radar and sonar installations. The Ram Citadel was known to the mullahs in Tehran only as “the Rocks.” Darius was a secretive man. And few places had hidden within them so many secrets, so many, as it would turn out, dark and potentially catastrophic secrets.
At the sight of his rapid approach, guards manning the massive steel gates adjacent to the marina quickly opened them. He zoomed right through them, a wide smile on his cherubic face. He was happy.
He was going to see his best friend, Perseus!
Darius, a quadriplegic since birth, sped out along the great steel pier that jutted into the pale blue waters of the harbor. At the end of the pier, a gleaming white yacht was moored. It was large, nearly a hundred meters in length overall, three hundred feet, and had formerly belonged to Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the last ruler of the Persian Empire.
After the Revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini had bestowed it upon Darius in honor of his scientific achievements in nuclear physics on his twentieth birthday. This was for public consumption. The truth was, he’d discovered a new star in the Alpha Centauri system and named it after the nation’s religious leader. Darius was not a religious man (he was secretly an atheist), but he was not stupid, either. Khomeini and the mullahs who succeeded him had ruled Iran since the 1980s, and therefore, to some extent, they ruled him.
But no longer. No one ruled him. Not anymore.
Not since Perseus.
Darius was excited about this morning’s meeting with his closest friend and companion. He had lain awake all night, restive, tossing and turning, his mind roiling with troubling questions for Perseus. He’d been thinking about the origins of the universe, too. And about the wondrous possibilities of exceeding the speed of light, about parallel universes, about Damnable companion, his mind.
Had been all his life, since boyhood. Questions, questions, questions: What makes that clock tick? How did the music get inside the radio? Why, when I drop my ball, does it fall straight to the ground? And what about all those billions of stars out there in the night sky above the vast deserts of his forefathers? How did they get there? Who made them? How?
Now, of course, the questions were much more specific. They came from the government of Iran. Tehran’s
