Heaven's Shadow (44 page)

“Listen, darling . . . I’m just about out of time and energy. I haven’t slept in three days, I have barely eaten . . . I’ve seen stuff I wouldn’t have thought possible. And I’ve given up my ride home. So there’s a clock on me. I don’t know whether it will be days or hours, but if you and the Architect have anything to share, please do it now.”

Megan knelt and slipped her arms around him, cradling his head the way she’d held Rachel as a child. “Ssshh,” she said, almost cooing. “I know. I do know. You were . . . incredibly brave to come here.”

“You’re the brave one—”

“Hardly. I was in an accident, then these guys brought me back. I didn’t choose any of it. But I would have, to see all this.”

“Yeah. I wish I felt luckier.”

She hushed him, just like Megan of old. “How many people ever get the chance to . . . change the history of the world? Or a couple of hundred worlds?”

“Yeah, well, my team hasn’t done a very good job so far.” He glanced up at the busy Architect. “I’d like to tell our . . . host here that that bomb was a major mistake.”

Megan leaned her head close to his again. “I think you just did.”

“You think, or you know?”

Megan looked at the Architect herself. The giant being looked back. “I know. I mean, I figured my new body had some improvements.”

“You know things you shouldn’t.”

“Even more as time goes by. It’s like I’m being prompted. I can’t just offer things up. But hear the right question—bam! Here’s an answer.”

Zack turned her face back toward him. He put his hand on her cheek . . . their first truly intimate touch, so familiar. “Who are they? What do they want? Just building or outfitting a ship like this would take the resources of an entire civilization!”

She took a breath, then closed her eyes and said: “Okay, trying my best: life is hard to find in the universe. Intelligent life is . . . incredibly rare. We’ve found more dead civilizations than living ones, and we haven’t found many of those.”

“You said
we
.”

“Yes,
we
. I’m Megan. But I’m beginning to share some of their consciousness, too. This vessel . . . he’s really old, on the order of ten thousand years. And our solar system isn’t its first stop. There have been a dozen others.”

“Does it really have the ability to reengineer its environment to suit whatever creatures it encounters?”

A pause. “Yes.”

“For some of these other races, like the Sentries?”

“Other candidates, we call them.” She blinked, as if listening.

Zack was about to seize on the term
candidates
—for what? But he had a more vital question. “And this vessel can magically access specific ‘souls’ of the dead of . . . any race?”

“Yes. Don’t think of it as magic. It’s technology humans don’t possess. We know how consciousness and personality connect to bodies.”

“But you found a handful of souls out of millions!”

“It was accessing data stored in . . . the closest I can come is
morphogenetic fields
. The universe is filled with it . . . with bioelectric data, all kinds of data. Information.”

“Like the akashic records from the Vedas, the ‘library’ of all experiences and memories of human minds through their physical lifetimes.”

“They’re not using those terms.”

“Neither am I, really. They were Taj’s.”

“And I keep thinking of Jung. I guess we all reach for the words and concepts we already know.” She smiled. “This is like trying to explain the Internet to Benjamin Franklin. You know electricity, but you’re a long way from computers and networks.”

Zack looked up at the Architect, who seemed almost indifferent to his presence. “I feel like I’m standing outside the biggest library in the world, only it’s closed.”

“I’m doing my best.”

“Oh, God, honey, it’s not about you. It’s just . . . look at this!” He gestured at the Temple interior. “Okay, why did your friends send this vessel?”

“We’ve found a . . . presence, a challenge, another entity, and it’s been a threat to us. We came here looking for help. We think you might fill that role.”

“Against another race?”

“Another type of being, the Reivers.”

“The what? Sounds Irish.”

“I’m sure it’s Irish, Scots, Gaelic, whatever. It’s the word in my head, and it means
bad guys
. It’s not just that they’re enemies, they are enemies bent on exterminating us, and all memory of us. We can’t coexist.”

Zack took her by the shoulders. “But, still, it’s thousands of years in the past, hundreds of light-years from here, right? Does that threat still exist?”

“Yes. The Reivers don’t live on the same time scale humans do. They’ll be a threat for a million years.”

“In that case, I don’t know how much help we can offer. We could barely make the trip from Earth to here! When we did, it took us a day and a half to try to blow you up. We’re rude, crude, and pretty damn stupid!”

“We’ve become too unattached, too machinelike. We can’t be rude or crude, though we can still be stupid. But you’re alive, and we’re not.”

Zack pointed to the busy Architect. “He looks alive to me.”

“He’s alive the same way I am.” She paused. “But he’s not the actual Architect. . . . Sorry, this is all mixed together in my brain.” Megan actually took several steps. It was another habit that Zack found heartbreaking in its familiarity . . . he had always joked that his wife was the Sundance Kid, the legendary gunslinger who could hit anything as long as he was in motion. Megan thought better when she moved. “The race of Architects is old. If you think of humans as belonging to the past million years, try a hundred times as long.

“We don’t have bodies anymore. The same technology that allows us to identify and copy souls in these circumstances means we can move a consciousness from one machine to another, or when necessary, to a . . . a reconstruction like this.” And here she gave a girlish bow. “It gives us immortality. But it costs us our ability to fight, to think creatively. To care about failure. To suffer.”

“So he’s a Revenant, too.” Zack stepped back and looked up at the busy Architect. “What is he doing?”

“Setting switches.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I don’t know. That’s one of your phrases, isn’t it? ‘Setting switches’?”

“Now you’re channeling me?”

“I lived with you for eighteen years . . . I don’t need to channel you.”

“It means configuring a cockpit. It’s what we did on
Destiny
.”

“I know.”

“So this building is a cockpit?”

“I think we both know it’s not really a Temple.” She thought for a moment. “How about, a command module?”

“Commanding what? Oh,” Zack said, seeing the answer to his own question. “Keanu.”

“Yeah. There are a lot of systems here. I told you there were other chambers. Some of them are bigger.”

“What’s in them? Uh, samples of these other races?”

“No one is saying.” She pointed at the Architect. “But whatever he’s doing, it’s related.”

Zack reached out, taking Megan’s hand. He wasn’t sure when he had leaped from reasonable skepticism to wholehearted acceptance that this was Megan . . . but he had. “You know what’s funny about this?”

“Not a lot that I can see, darling.”

“Megan, your entire life—you were the one who asked everybody all the tough questions. If you’d actually interviewed this guy, we’d have learned this stuff hours ago.”

At that moment, the giant alien stopped what it was doing. It rose to its feet with a grace Zack found surprising. At full height, it towered over the humans, but only for a moment. “Now he’s doing something else,” Zack said, taking Megan by the arm and pulling her back toward the opening. “Is he leaving?”

The Architect was already halfway across the chamber, headed for what Zack would call the back wall. “Yes,” Megan said. “We’re not the most important thing he has to deal with.”

“What could be more important than dealing with two members of this vital human race? Aren’t we the key to his future survival?”

“The race is important. The two of us, not so much.”

“And after all we’ve given up. Does he know we can’t go home?”

“Oh, he knows.”

The back wall opened, revealing the unchanged chaos outside the Temple. “We should follow,” Megan said.

“Back out there? It looks dangerous.”

“Yes.”

But she wasn’t waiting for him. She slipped out of his grasp and began following the Architect. Zack caught up with her in a few steps, as they found themselves once again outside in the near-darkness and buffeting winds.

To Zack’s horror, the Architect seemed to stagger. The creature’s staggering steps were just like those of the Sentry, before it collapsed.

“Is he all right?”

“No. Come on. We’re running out of time.”

My friends, all I can tell you is this: the wondrous rumors circulating about events on Earth’s new moon portend Great Things. Signs are being fulfilled even as we meet here tonight. The Rapture itself could be at hand. Let us pray.

THE REVEREND DICKIE BOTTOMLEY, GREATER KANSAS CITY ALL-SOULS
CHURCH, AUGUST 24, 2019

“This is as far as we go in auto mode,” Harley said.

“Not a moment too soon,” Sasha Blaine said. Rachel agreed. They had left the dirt road and been bumping across muddy grass for the past few minutes. The only thing that kept Rachel from throwing up was their lack of speed.

Harley had stopped the van on the shore of Clear Lake Park, which nosed into Lake Pasadena, the brackish pool of water just south of Armand Bayou. Half a dozen fire and rescue trucks flashed rain-spattered lights from NASA Road One a hundred meters to the south, and to their left. “I think we’re inside the zone,” Sasha said.

Their view toward the Johnson Space Center was blocked by the glowing plasma dome of the Object, doing its slow churn a few hundred meters away, just across the lake. It reminded Harley of the New Orleans Superdome, only illuminated from within—and filled with strange squiggly and angular shapes that seemed to be crawling across its surface.

Or on its inside, trying to come out?

“You did it,” Rachel said. “You got us here.”

“Don’t thank me yet.”

Rachel and Sasha helped Harley out of the van, a process complicated by the astronaut’s insistence that he didn’t need help. “Maybe not getting out,” Sasha said, “but you’re not going to get far in the rain and mud without us, so just put a sock in it.”

The moment the wheels of Harley’s chair began to sink into the soggy grass, the complaints stopped. Fortunately, today’s rain hadn’t completely transformed the soil into muck, though in this part of Houston it wasn’t much of a transformation. Once they disengaged the power, allowing the chair’s wheels to turn freely, Sasha and Rachel were able to push Harley forward, toward the road.

They kept to the trees, partly to avoid being seen from the road, partly for shelter from the steady drumming rain.

The slow flashes of light from the Object reminded Rachel of the time she and Amy and several other friends had sneaked into the Harris County Fair. The lights of the midway and the swooping, whirling, rotating rides had blinded them—they’d failed to see a security guard and gotten caught, escaping punishment only by becoming unusually giggly and flirtatious.

“Does it bother anyone,” Harley said, “that the Object seems to have some kind of beacon?”

Sasha considered it. “It’s not very beaconlike, though, is it?”

True enough; as Rachel and Harley watched with Sasha, the lighthouse-like light seemed to pulse in an irregular pattern . . . flash, dark, flash flash, dark. “I hope it’s not a searchlight,” Harley said.

“With a heat ray behind it,” Sasha said.

“Stop it!” Rachel said.

“Sorry,” Harley said. “Sometimes we forget . . . Anyway, we’re here, as close as we can get. Now what?”

The rain had let up, though there was a strong breeze blowing in from the ship channel. “I want to go closer,” Rachel said. She had already decided that the Object was not a weapon—or it would have gone off already. It was sitting there as if waiting. . .

“Assuming that that’s a good idea,” Sasha Blaine said, “and I don’t think it is . . . how? It’s across this lake!”

Rachel pointed. “We can go across the bridge. All the cops and everybody are down the road.”

“Granted,” Harley said. “But then what? We’re here . . . we’ve had as close a look as anyone else. You are not going to touch it.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, okay? But I think we should be closer. I think it’s supposed to give us something or tell us something.”

“It’s a sophisticated piece of alien hardware! Why doesn’t it just send us a signal?”

“I’m going to find out,” Rachel said. “You can come along or wait here.”

She broke from them and sprinted toward the causeway. But in the dark, the mud and gravel defeated her. She lost her footing trying to climb up to the road, slipped, and slid back to the bottom.

As she was getting to her feet—and Harley and Sasha approached, furious with her—a new light fell on the trio. “Hey, you people—freeze!”

Rachel thought she was going to pass out. Then five men walked forward, and one of them turned out to be Shane Weldon.

“We followed you,” Bynum told Harley. Weldon, Bynum, and their passengers all helped lift Harley up to the causeway.

“Not very closely.”

“We had to stop to pick up some instruments,” Weldon said. He pointed to one of his team, a young man with a boxlike object slung over his shoulder.

“Is that an actual Geiger counter?” Sasha Blaine said.

“Yeah. The best we could do on short notice,” Weldon said. “We got that, a camera”—he raised a Nikon still camera like those astronauts used on missions—“and a spectrometer.” Another of the party was struggling with a box twice the size of the Geiger counter. “That baby was built for lunar surface ops about ten years ago. I’m not sure it even works.”

“Gotta love NASA planning.”

“Don’t worry,” Weldon said. “I’ve got a real team putting together a set of instruments that will be able to tell what this thing had for breakfast this morning.” He nodded toward the Object, which now loomed over them like a dome-shaped building.