City Without End (53 page)

Demat pulled on his shoulder, stopping him. She knelt down and he heard her fumbling at something along the wall. A crack of light sliced at his eyes. With a push, they were through a wall. It pearled closed behind them.

There were on a terrace.

“Too exposed,” Quinn said, squinting into the ebb time sky.

“We will locate Lord Ghinamid. Perhaps from this high view.”

Dead birds littered the terrace.

Seeing them, Demat hissed, “My cousins want no spies.”

Quinn stepped through the birds to join Demat near the railing overlooking the great plaza. The city was deserted. On a lower terrace, a Tarig body lay sprawled. How many had Ghinamid killed?

Demat pulled him down to a crouch and pointed through the balustrades to the canals below. “Do you see the small form there?” she asked. A body lay there. “It is the first of those who crossed over from the Rose. Killed by Ghinamid. He does not allow the migration.”

Quinn squinted at the crumpled form. The thought staggered him. It was someone from the Rose. Though Helice’s plan depended on people coming over, the sight of a dead human was grim. A bad way to die, to come into the Entire and face an executioner like the Sleeping Lord. “What does Ghinamid want?”

She surveyed the plaza carefully. “Nothing that you want.”

“Tell me.”

Still scanning the environs, both in the plaza and on the hill of mansions, she said, “To control us, as is his right. We no longer wish his control.”

It was the first Quinn had ever heard of a schism among them.

She went on, “A million days ago, when we first came into form, it was agreed we would meet in the Sleeping Lord as a plenum. As occasion showed it needful, we would mix in this way, both the solitaires here and the congregate of the Heart. In the Sleeping Lord we would mingle in pure thought. It gave us comfort, to have our consensus near, in the great hall of the Sleeping Lord.”

“You meet in Ghinamid’s form?”

“At first, very often. In recent times, rarely. We grew to prefer autonomy, even if it put us at conflict. We found this interesting, that we could be separate from each other, becoming utterly single with particular desires. Even going back to the Heart, we maintained our strains of particularity, and any Tarig who met physical death in the Entire could be brought forth again. But our congregate state became a convenience, a secondary thing. Some of us loved to be solitaires and went home seldom, utterly abandoning Ghinamid.”

She nodded at the body of the Tarig on the veranda below. “These Ghinamid kills now.”

Ghinamid was nowhere in sight, now. But Quinn wished for a weapon, even if it meant wielding it with his left hand.

Demat narrowed her eyes at the body in the middle of the plaza. “This person of the Rose was the occasion that awakened him. Lord Ghinamid noted the door from the Rose opening here. The violation awakened him. We must blame Lord Nehoov for this calamity.”

“What will you do, Demat?”

Turning to him, she looked at him without expression. Had that been Chiron’s look as well, all those years ago? It seemed he had lost his ability to read the Tarig.

“This lady will kill him,” she said. “He has no usefulness and is a danger to us, slaying indiscriminately. When we have accomplished this, it may be that we will send you home, Titus-een, to do your own killing.”

He heard these words with a shock of hope.

“You must return to us, in that case.”

She might allow him to save the Rose. The Earth might live, after all. In return he would pay the price. His heart was deadening by the moment. He would have to return to her.

“Do you swear to love us then?” She rested her jeweled hand on the railing, her arm, sinuous and strong, her hands, slender, despite the sheathed claws.

“Yes, I swear.”

“Hnn, Titus-een. But would it be true?”

She was not stupid or blind. He had to answer with care. “We would have to find each other again.” He would keep his word. It would be a permanent bargain, he knew.

He looked down on the plaza. “If you’re going to save the Rose, it must be soon.”

“You do not command us.”

Something caught her attention. Snapping her head to the side, she watched, utterly still. He strained to follow her gaze, but the Ascendancy lay under the most profound composure. She shrank back from the stone railing, making a small hissing sound. “Hide,” she whispered.

Quinn crouched next to her, watching where she watched.

Whispering next to his ear, Demat said, “He is in the street below.”

They huddled together for a moment, making themselves small. Quinn caught a glimpse of a very tall Tarig, moving purposively below, carrying a sword. He wore a silver helm. A warrior of great size and determined pace.

After a moment, Demat pulled him to his feet. “Go,” she whispered.

“Hide yourself.”

“Where?”

“Go where we could not imagine. Think like the Roseling you are, then we will never guess your location. When you see him dead, then come to the center of the plaza. This lady will find you. Go!”

“Let me help you kill him.”

She seemed bemused. “Help us, ah? You are crippled and have no knife.”

Well, she knew how to discount a man. “How will you kill him?”

Demat was already retreating across the veranda. He thought he heard her say, “With my army.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

W
HEN LAMAR TOOK THE CALL
, he heard only a tinny, almost deadpan voice: “From the dark to the bright.”

HEN Just one simple sentence, it had the ability to make his heart race and his mind freeze. No need to answer, it was a recorded message, now going out to 1,999 others. He sank into a chair, hearing in his mind that plain, flat sentence, “From the dark to the bright.” He looked straight ahead as the wan afternoon sun silvered his houseboat windows.

Events had eclipsed his ability to process them. The lords of the Entire were killing the universe. He’d betrayed Titus, a man who was like a son to him. When he looked up at the sky at night he confirmed for himself what they said: Sirius, the brightest star in the sky was gone. All this paled before the fact that he’d just killed Caitlin Quinn.

An hour later he took a sweater off its hook and put it on over his shirt. He washed up the few dishes in his sink, setting them on the drain board. Checking his refrigerator for perishables, he threw them into a plastic bag. He shut off the gas valve, then went into his bedroom to fetch the small satchel with his change of socks and underwear. Calling up the time, he calculated he could be at Hanford in about three hours. Road conditions on I-5 southbound would be disastrous, he had cause to know. He decided to head north, taking the Washington side of the river.

On the way out, he picked up the garbage sack in the kitchen. Stepping out onto the deck, he voiced the houseboat door locked. Hanford, then. Oddly, he found he had tears in his eyes. Not for the general demise of the world, but for the particular end of Caitlin Quinn.

On his way to the car, he dropped the sack of food in the garbage bin.

A crowd had gathered outside around the reactor building. They stood talking, singly or in knots, staring at the door to the vault containing the engine, and below that, the transition stage. Children ran freely, their shouts and squeals making the adults seem grim by comparison. Maybe they
were
grim. They really should have waited in the dorms until their number was called, but Lamar couldn’t blame them if they wanted to gather together, now that it had begun.

In the press of bodies, Lamar saw Booth Waller near the reactor door. He was with Alex Nourse and Peter DeFanti. Lamar thought that the crowd was too large, might draw attention. But what attention? Satellites? Spies? Their one apparent spy had been dealt with. He had avoided newsTide accounts of the ball of fire on the freeway; no need for the news—he’d been an eyewitness.

The mothballed reactor towered above him, its steel encasement looking molten in the Eastern Washington sun. The steel dome encased the first mothballing of concrete and lead shielding. That pathetic sarcophagus lasted barely two hundred years. Now, even clad in steel, the beast looked nondescript, nothing like a nuclear reactor, much less a launch platform to other universes. From Lamar’s vantage point on the edge of the crowd, he saw Bechtel’s enormous vitrification plant in the distance. It was very nearly the largest building in the world before it was abandoned. Strictly low-level waste, that place. The aluminosilicate glass tubes could only hope to hold the easy material. The hottest stuff—the cesium and technetium—went into the big trench in the ocean, ignoring the screams of the whale lovers and other paranoids. But despite technical problems that had stymied generations of physicists, the thorniest problem at Hanford was record keeping. As generations of cleanup projects started up and broke off, the reservation filled up with failed, only partially characterized projects. When it was time to leave, contractors simply walked away, sometimes not even locking the doors.

And wasn’t that what renaissance was doing? Normally Lamar would kick such a thought away. Now he let it sit in his mind. Because he had no heart for the thing anymore. It struck him squarely, without doubt: he really didn’t care. He didn’t want to live with himself for the centuries that might lie ahead of him.

He turned around looking toward the access road, wondering if anyone would notice him slipping back to his car and just leaving.

But Booth was walking toward him, Alex Nourse in tow. The three of them nodded at each other, a quick acknowledgement that Lamar had earned back his right to be here.

Booth said, “We’ve begun. First one gone, Lamar.”

Lamar was confused. “Gone? But
you’re
number one, Booth.”

Alex spoke up. “We’re starting a little further down the sequence. For practice.”

The sons of bitches were afraid of screw-ups. They were afraid of their own systems.

Alex looked around at the crowd. “Most everyone’s here. We’re up to 1,989. Some are going to be too late.” An eloquent shrug.

And some died before getting here
, Lamar thought. “Well, how did the practice crossing go?” He tried and failed to keep the contempt out of his voice, but they didn’t notice anyway.

“Looks good,” Booth said. “Solid contact. The strongest on record. We locked on—and here’s the exciting part—we’ve stayed locked. We think she’s managed to stabilize the interface from the other end.”

No need to say who
she
was. Goddamn, to think of that annoying youngster pulling it all off! But he didn’t begrudge it to her. It just surprised him that everything was working. Perhaps somewhere deep in the compost of his being, he’d hoped it wouldn’t.

Booth went on, “We don’t lack for volunteers to move up the list. People are anxious to go.” He nodded at the superstructure of the vault building.

“The engine. Hear it?”

Lamar listened. Yes, a few decibels higher. Now that he focused on it, it threw an ominous, thrumming net over the day. No wonder people seemed grim.

“I’d like to see the pond.” Despite his ugly mood, he wanted to see with his own eyes the migration under way.

“Trent Phillips is going next.”

Lamar hesitated. He was already letting himself get sucked back in.

“Okay, then.” He had liked himself better under the cloud of despair. At least that had showed a little conscience. He followed Booth and Alex toward the access door. Already, Portland seemed a universe away.

The crowd reminded Lamar of shoppers waiting for a sale. They looked enviously at Lamar and Booth as they headed to the door. Alex stayed behind to marshal the list, jockeying people, kids, luggage—didn’t they remember, no luggage? Lamar’s thoughts, though, were on Titus Quinn. What was he going to say to him?

The cement corridors were cramped, cold, and feebly lit. It was like walking through the passageways of an Egyptian pyramid, pathways few were meant to use. The engine’s throbbing pulse was louder here, like the heartbeat of a nuclear beast. But there was no reactor inside. The whole thing had been disassembled and buried in discreet pits around area five of the reservation, pits hot enough to kill sagebrush in three days. All to make room for the engine. It pounded at Lamar’s chest, as though demanding access. Wasn’t there some bible verse?
I stand at the door and knock. If any man hears
. . . What was the next part?
If any man hears
. . . How did it go? It seemed important to remember. But if he remembered, would he be held to account for all that he was doing? And if he’d forgotten, would God forgive him? An old man, after all. He glanced at Booth Waller. So what was this young man’s excuse?