Everfound (45 page)

“Because,” said Mikey, “the Dancing Bear wants us to suffer.”

But Jix had a different opinion on the matter. “I think the Universe wants only to point us in a direction, not tell us what to do. If it tells us, then we’re not really choosing. It only means something if we choose it.”

“Yeah, but if we’re supposed to save the stinkin’ world, why make it so hard?” said Johnnie. “In fact, why make us do it at all? If ‘the light’ is all-powerful, then ‘the light’ oughta save the world itself, and leave us alone.”

“Maybe it doesn’t want to save the world,” said Nick.

Mikey laughed bitterly. “If that’s what you think, then why are you even here? You should join my sister; you’re in love with her anyway.”

“Just hear me out,” said Nick. “Mary wants to destroy the living world. We want to save it. The ‘Universal Whatever’ is willing to accept either outcome, so it makes the odds fifty-fifty.”

“ ‘Fifty-fifty’?” said Mikey. “If you ask me, Mary’s got the advantage right now.”

“So if you were the light at the end of the tunnel, how would
you
even out the odds?” Nick asked.

“I’d tell the losing side to get a clue!”

“Or,” said Nick, “you’d
give
them a clue . . .”

Nick’s thought left everyone speechless. Suddenly the temple around them began to actually feel like a temple, and although none of them worshipped at the same altar, there was a sudden singularity of purpose that bound them.

. . . Fat Alamo, the Trinity, Ground Zero . . .

“It’s places we’ve been,” said Mikey. “It has to be. Ground Zero is what the living call the place where Mary used to live. You know—the towers that gave her her name. And Jix was at the Alamo, right?

“So maybe we’re supposed to go back to those places,” offered Nick.

Johnnie pointed an oversize finger at Mikey. “I ain’t going back nowhere unless it’s where I started. And anyway, it don’t explain the Trinity.”

Jix scratched his whiskers and gave it more thought. “
Álamo
is Spanish for a kind of tree. . . .”

“So we’re looking for a fat tree?” asked Mikey.

“Perhaps.” Jix went over to one of the guards
“¿Dónde hay un álamo gordo?”

The guard shrugged.
“Los álamos son todos delgados.”

Suddenly something caught in Nick’s mind with such force, he thought his brain might be ecto-ripped right out of his head. “What did you just say?”

“I just asked him if he knows where—”

But Nick cut Jix off. “Los Alamos . . . Alamogordo! My God, I know what it means. I know
exactly
what it means!” They all looked at him, waiting, and Nick tried to keep his voice steady. “There’s this town in New Mexico called Alamogordo. It’s kind of famous if you’re a geek, and I think I was one, when I was alive. The thing is, Alamogordo has its own ‘ground zero.’ I imagine it would be like a giant deadspot—perfectly round.”

“Charlie and I saw that!” said Johnnie-O. “We passed right over it. It was weird—full of static and stuff.”

“That’s only two out of three,” Jix pointed out. “It doesn’t explain ‘the Trinity.’”

“Not THE Trinity—just ‘Trinity,’” Nick explained. “That’s the name of the site!”

“You figured it out!” said Mikey, slapping him on the back. “That’s good news, isn’t it?”

Nick swallowed nervously. “Trinity was a military test site.” And as he thought about it, all his remaining chocolate began to harden and crack like fused desert sand. “Mary’s going to the place where they tested the first atomic bomb.”

T
here are about three hundred billion stars to a galaxy, and more than eighty billion galaxies in the known universe. That means that if only one in a million planets can support life, and one in a million of those actually
has
life, and one in a million of
those
planets has
intelligent
life . . . then there are at least one and a half million civilizations out there.

Of course, chances are they’ll never find one another, being so spread out in time and space. Yet all of these civilized worlds have distinct similarities when it comes to the works and wisdom of the living, namely, the “befores” and “afters” that define every intelligent world:

before and after the harnessing of fire

before and after written language

before and after the smelting of iron

But above and beyond all of these is the single most important milestone of all: before and after a world discovers the ability to lower the number of life-sustaining planets by one.

On July 16, 1945, the human race reached the single most important man-made moment in its history. In the
Jornada de
Muerto
—“Journey of Death”—desert, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, mankind discovered the power to end all life on earth. Until that moment, it had only been an idea, a mathematical calculation in the minds of geniuses who could theorize a step beyond the average individual. But on that fateful day, the smartest minds in the world, funded by the wealthiest nation in the world, toward the end of the most devastating war the world had ever known, turned theory into reality.

The first atom bomb, modestly called “The Gadget,” was detonated, in the single greatest moment of earthly invention and destruction, for the power to create always goes hand in hand with the power to destroy. The twenty-kiloton blast firmly put the blade of self-annihilation into the hands of mankind, and from that moment on, nothing on earth would ever be the same.

The bomb was not beloved, but even so, the universe could not ignore such a world-altering event, and so at the very instant The Gadget was dropped from its tower and detonated, the entire blast zone crossed into Everlost, becoming the world’s largest deadspot, perfectly round, and perfectly preserved. And at ground zero, the very center of the deadspot, sat the bomb itself. While its atoms had been shredded in the living world, in Everlost, The Gadget sat a millimeter above the Journey of Death desert, poised at the last microsecond before detonation, waiting at that final moment of infinite possibility.

Waiting, perhaps, for Mary Hightower.

M
ary Hightower and her huge cumulus of Afterlights crossed the Nevada desert, pulled by Mary’s conviction that something spectacular lay ahead of them. They carried with them more than twenty Interlights whose bodies lay comatose back in the town of Artesia. If all went according to plan, every single one of them would awake as a skinjacker.

On a bright chilly January morning, Mary stepped from the living-world desert, and onto the Trinity deadspot. Mary was not a girl easily impressed. She had seen many things in her deathtime, but nothing could prepare her for this moment. All around them, on a deadspot that stretched for more than a mile, was a treasure trove of crossed objects. The ground was a giant repository of random items. Chairs and cars and toys and clothes and books and boxes and basically every type of manmade object imaginable stretched for as far as the eye could see. Flashes of static, like tiny forked lightning, sparked around them every few seconds; phantom branches of light, shooting between metal objects.

Clearly this wasn’t just a deadspot; it was some kind of
vortex. In all her years in Everlost, bargaining and trading with finders for crossed items to keep her children in perpetual comfort, she had never had seen so many things. Not even her brother, during his monstrous days filling the cargo holds of the
Sulphur Queen
, had ever accumulated this much! Mary had no idea where it had all come from, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that it was here now, for her, and for her children.

“Is it real?” one of her younger children asked.

“Of course it is,” Mary answered. This was not exactly what she had imagined when she pictured the place she was being drawn to, but in its own way it was better. It was very clearly the center of gravity, the focal point of the world.

Mary and her children wandered through the maze of crossed belongings, spellbound by all the things around them.

“What is this place?” her children asked.

“The heart of Everlost,” she told them. “We’re finally home.”

Mary, as it turns out, was not the first to stumble upon the Trinity vortex. Another resourceful, if somewhat water-logged, spirit had gotten there first.

After the attack on the train, hundreds of refugees had scattered. Only some of them had rejoined Milos. The rest formed their own vapors and went their separate ways. Many had been reabsorbed into Mary’s growing cumulus as they stormed across Texas into New Mexico, but one group, numbering close to a hundred, had been shepherded by none other than Speedo.

Speedo never fancied himself much of a leader, but because he had been close to Mary, because he was the train’s conductor, and because he had been the only nonskinjacker with special privileges, he was the one his group of refugees turned to for guidance.

“Well, Mary wanted us to go west, so we’ll go west,” he had told them. He didn’t know what he would find there, but it sure beat hanging around to be attacked by the Neons again.

What a marvelous surprise it was to stumble across the giant deadspot, just a few weeks later. It was a Finder’s delight—and Speedo, who was still a Finder at heart—knew a great business venture when he saw one. Why, with all this stuff, he would be the wealthiest Finder in all of Everlost! So, like an old-fashioned prospector, he staked his claim and had his Afterlights begin the monumental task of cataloging all his new finds.

He had no idea what this place was, but to Speedo, it didn’t matter. He had big, big plans for his business empire . . . but it all came crashing down when Mary Hightower showed up. All his Afterlights instantly abandoned him in favor of Mary, and there he stood, his hopes dashed, and his claim jumped. Speedo suddenly found himself, both literally and figuratively, all wet.

Mary was, of course, surprised to find Speedo there, but pleased as well, because it added quite a few more Afterlights to her growing cumulus. She would soon have to come up with a new word for them. Thunderhead, perhaps. “A thunderhead of Afterlights.” She rather liked it!

“Thank you so much,” she told Speedo, “for taking care of these children and finding this wonderful place for me.”

“Right,” said Speedo, “for you.” There wasn’t a trace of his typical over-wide smile on his face.

Around them, Speedo and his squad had begun to separate things into piles. One pile caught Mary’s attention. At first glance it appeared to be a pile of bodies.

“What on earth?”

“Oh, don’t worry,” said Speedo. “I know what it looks like—but they’re just plastic.”

“Plastic?”

“Yeah, I know. Weird, right? Lots of weird things here.” Then he got a little bit quiet. “But that’s nothing. I’ll show you the weirdest thing of all.”

The plastic personages scattered about the deadspot might have seemed odd if one didn’t know where they came from. The fact is, it was common for many nations to use test dummies to discover the effects of a nuclear blast on the human body. Entire communities were evacuated and test dummies were installed in the homes, and then bombed. The communities were usually old military housing, but sometimes not. There were entire islands in the South Pacific blown to radioactive smithereens, along with the abandoned homes of those who once lived there.

And, of course there were the wartime attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that not only took things, but people as well. In those two deadly blasts, more than 100,000 souls were instantly sent into the light, bringing a tragic end to a painful war.

. . . But the things consumed by nuclear fission in those cities, as well the things incinerated in every nuclear test ever performed, did not leave the universe entirely. They came here: ground zero of the first cataclysmic blast—the one that made all the others possible, and therefore will forever bear the burden of all things lost.

The Trinity vortex was the repository of nuclear memory.

To Mary, whose lifetime had not included such things as nuclear fission, it was all new. She knew the living world had found extraordinary methods of large-scale destruction, yet she had no idea the extent of it. . . .

. . . But as Speedo led her deeper into the deadspot, Mary began to tingle. The gravity that had pulled her here felt stronger than ever before, and she knew, without ever having to ask, that Speedo was leading her to the center of the Vortex.

“Have a look at this,” Speedo said. They came around one of Speedo’s sorting piles, to reveal a clearing about fifty feet across. In the center was an object hovering just above the sand. To Mary it resembled some sort of metallic jar turned upside down or maybe a child’s top. It was dull green, with wires all over it and it stood more than ten feet high.