In the Ocean of Night (20 page)

“What?” Nigel sat upright in the hospital bed.

“Well, I—”

“What did you say about Alexandria?”

Nigel saw that he was stripped to the waist. Lubkin licked his lips in an uncertain, edgy way. His eyes slid away from Nigel’s.

“Dr. Hufman wants to see you as soon as I’m through. We brought you here from JPL, after we got that call, asking where you were. I mean, we understood then.”

“Understood what?”

Lubkin shrugged uneasily, eyes averted. “Well, I didn’t want to be the one …”

“What in hell are you saying?”

“I didn’t know she was that
close,
Nigel. None of us did.”

“Cl… close?”

“That’s what the call was about. She died.”

A nurse found him a stiff blue robe. Dr. Hufman met him in the corridor where he was saying goodbye to Lubkin and shook hands solemnly, silent. Nigel looked at Hufman but he could not read any expression.

Hufman beckoned to him. They moved down the hallway. Somewhere a summoning bell chimed. The sleek walls reflected back to Nigel the face of a haggard man, a day’s growth of beard sprouting, upper face fixed in a rigid scowl. The two men walked.

“She… she died right after I left?” Nigel asked in a croaking whisper.

“Yes.”

“I—I’m sorry I left. You tried to call me…”

“Yes.”

Nigel looked at the other man. Hufman’s face was compressed, eyes unnaturally large, his features pinched as if under pressure.

“You… you’re taking me to view her?”

“Yes.” Hufman reached a gray metal door and opened it.

His eyes fixed on Nigel. “She died, Mr. Walmsley. Uncontrollable hemorrhage. The operating room was busy. There were other patients. We put her aside for the orderlies to carry away. A half hour passed.”

Nigel nodded dumbly.

“Then she began to move, Mr. Walmsley. She rose from the dead.”

Alexandria sat alone. She was in an elaborate diagnostic wheelchair; it bristled with electronics. Her white hospital smock was bunched above her knees and probes touched her at ankles, calves, forearms, neck, temples. She smiled wanly.

“I knew. You would return. Nigel.”

“I…I was…”

“I know,” she said mildly. “You. Spoke. To Shirley. You became. Frightened. By what was. Happening.” She spoke slowly, the words individually formed and separated by a perceptible pause. She had to work for each syllable.

“The New Sons …” Nigel began and then did not know how to continue.

“You need not. Have. Become. Excited. Nigel. He had told. Me. That you sensed it. Too. Briefly.”

“He? Who…”

“Him. What you felt. Before you. Rejected the Immanence.”

Nigel was aware of Hufman closing the door behind them, standing where he could hear but not interrupt. Alexandria seemed delicately balanced, fragile, suspended by some inner certainty. Encased.

“You felt Him. Nigel. My love. Perhaps. You did not. Recognize. Him. To you. For a long while. He was the Snark.”

Nigel was silent for a long, stunned moment. “The telltale,” he said out of the corner of his mouth, toward Hufman.

“Yes. Yes,” Alexandria said in a flat voice. “That is. How He entered me. But I. Recognized Him. For His true nature.”

She closed her eyes and her chest rose in shallow, rapid breaths. Nigel glanced at Hufman. His legs were numb and he felt pinned to this spot, unable to advance toward Alexandria or retreat. Her wheelchair readouts blinked and shifted.

“Can someone—some
thing
—do that?” he said in a quick whisper. “Transmit over that telltale circuit?”

Hufman’s voice was a resonant bass in the small room. “Yes, certainly. Hers has both acoustic and electric contact with her nervous system. It functions passively most of the time, but we can use it to send echo signals through the central nerves.”

“Is that what’s happening?”

Hufman moved to Nigel’s side and, to Nigel’s surprise, put an arm over his shoulders. “I believe so. I’ve told no one about this because, well, at first I thought I had made some awful mistake.”

“Something is going
into
her. Through that telltale.” “Apparently. You collapsed, didn’t you? At JPL? Probably an overload. Or whoever is transmitting shorted out your input and concentrated on her.”

“But she was
dead.
”

“Yes. All functions ceased. I estimate she suffered oxygen deprivation only five or ten minutes, at most. Somehow a stimulus through the telltale jolted her breathing. Restored it to function. Her renal overload has subsided, too.”

“I don’t see how…”

“Neither do I. There is work going on in the use of neurological startups, yes, but they are highly dangerous. And unreliable.”

“It’s bringing her back to life,” Nigel said distantly. “
What
is? Who’s doing this?”

“I can’t say.”

Hufman looked at him piercingly. “You won’t, you mean. You and that other woman have some—”

“What other woman?”

“The one I met. You introduced us earlier. Alexandria asked for her. I wasn’t thinking very clearly. I let her in, and—”

“Nigel?” Alexandria’s eyelids fluttered, mothlike, and she moved her right hand weakly in a beckoning motion. Nigel went to her.

“He is. Seeing. Through me. Nigel. He wants. You. To know that.”

Nigel looked back at Hufman helplessly.

“No, do not be. Afraid. He wants to see. To feel. To walk. In this world.”

“Who is he, Alexandria?” Nigel’s voice broke as he said her name.

“He is the Immanence,” she said, as though to a child. “I know. What He has done. You and the Doctor. Do not need. To whisper. I know.”

“He—it—brought you back.”

“I know. From the dead. To see.”

“
Why?
”

She looked at him serenely. Her eyes crinkled with some inner mirth. “In the sense. You mean. Darling. I do not. Know. But I do not. Question Him. Or question. Moving. With this moment.”

In the antiseptic light her bloodless face shone both strange and familiar, each pore sharp and clean.

Hufman’s voice intruded: “As nearly as I can determine, she is kept alive by the telltale stimulus. Somehow the synaptic breakdown is being offset. Perhaps the tell-tale is providing control functions for her heart and lungs, taking the place of the damaged tissue. I don’t believe that can last long, however.”

Alexandria gazed at him steadily. Her smile was thin and pale. “He is here. With me. Doctor. That is all. That matters.”

Nigel took her hand, squatting beside the heavy wheelchair, and studied her, frowning. Conflicting emotions played on his face.

There was a knock on the gray metal door.

Hufman glanced at Nigel uncertainly. Nigel was lost in his own thoughts. Hufman hesitated and then opened the door.

Shirley stood firmly in the doorway. Behind her were a half a dozen New Sons clad in dhotis and jackets. A man in a business suit shouldered his way to the front of them.

“We’ve come for her, Doctor,” Shirley said. Her voice carried a hard, brittle edge. “We know her wishes. She wants out, she told me. And we have a lawyer to deal with your hospital.”

FIFTEEN

Imagine thin sheets of metal standing vertically, separated by millimeters. In the stark light they become lines of metallic white. In slow motion a projectile, spinning, the color of smoke, strikes the first sheet. The thin metal crumples. The sheet is rammed back into the second layer, silently, as the film goes on. Though it moves with ponderous slowness you can do nothing. The second sheet folds. At the point of impact the bullet is splattering, turning to liquid. But it goes on. The third silvery line is compressed into the fourth, the lines form a family of parabolas, shock waves focused at the head of the tumbling, melting bullet. And you cannot stop it. Each sheet presses on the next. Each act—

Nigel saw this dream, lived through it each night, yet could do nothing. Events compressed. Each moment of those days impinged on the next, carrying him forward in a stream of instants.

—At the hospital. Hufman objecting between clenched teeth. The lawyer smooth, voice resonant with certainty. Nigel had no legal rights over Alexandria; he was not her husband. And Alexandria said she wished to leave. The law, thin sheets compressing, was clear. She wished to live—or die—among the New Sons. They understood. They wished her to walk with Him.

—The wheelchair. Winking its update metric lights, purring, ignored. The New Sons in dhotis wheeling her from the ambulance toward the Baptist church. The old man, the Immanence. His face a leadened silver, lit by arc lamps ringing the church. He cupped his hands and nodded to Shirley. Alexandria was between them, the focus of a swelling crowd. Shirley spoke reverently to the stooped, gnarled Immanence. In the moving shadows Nigel thought he caught a glance from those yellow eyes. A look of weighing, judging, assessing. The old man gestured. There was a subtle shifting in the crowd. The tide of bodies that opened before Alexandria’s wheelchair now lapped around behind her. Sealing her off. Shirley on the edge, the Immanence, sagging face aglow, at the center. Toward the church. An excited babble, a murmur. And the liquid crowd swirled between Nigel and the others. Cut him off. Slowly him.
Shirley,
he cried out.
Alexandria!
Shirley had mounted the steps into the church. She turned, looking back over the tossing sea of faces. She called out something, something about love, and then was gone. Into the shadows. Following the winking wheelchair.

—On 3D.

She was the same—calm, compact, radiating an inner sureness. The snowballing of interest around her had not touched that core. The eyes were set back, away from the questions put to her by her interrogators; viewing, studying. Nigel watched her in their darkened apartment, lit only by the glowing 3D. He saw Shirley in the background crowd. Her face was rapt, like those around her. Three individual Immanences of the New Sons escorted Alexandria down a ceremonial ramp. They were each tall and stately men, sunken cheeks, palms turned outward in ritual gesture; ascetic; lean. They were very careful of her, their first confirmed miracle. The program paused to run a fax of Hufman, angry, jaw muscles clenching. He admitted under direct questioning that Alexandria had died. Was certified. Abandoned. And then rose.

“Did she have an explanation?” the interviewer asked. Hufman’s weary face faded from the screen, to be replaced by Alexandria’s.

She smiled, shook her head, no. And something shifted far back in her eyes.

—At the church they would not let him in. To Nigel all doors were barred.

When his story reached the 3D people they interviewed him, paid attention, promised results. But when the interview was broadcast Nigel came through as a bitter, hostile man. Had he really said these things? he wondered, watching himself. Or were they adroitly rearranging his words? He could not remember. The metallic lines compressed, converged.

—At JPL, alone with Evers and Lubkin. Outside sunlight glinted on trucks as they hauled in new equipment. The facility was being beefed up.

Lubkin: We heard about Alexandria’s recovering, Nigel. That’s great news. We were kind of wondering if, well…

Evers: J-27 transmits on two channels, Walmsley. Using a circuit
you
logged into the board. We’ve got Ichino working on the main signal, but we’re afraid to tamper with this other one. Whatever’s receiving it—

Nigel: It’s my telltale. You know that, don’t you? Evers: Yes. We just wanted to give you the chance to admit it.

Lubkin: You’re receiving J-27? Directly?

Nigel: No. It’s found some way to sidestep me. Evers: We’ll cut it off then.

So he had to tell them about Alexandria. And beg them to allow the transmissions through JPL. Otherwise she would die.

Stony-jawed, Evers nodded. He would let the beeping thread of life go on. They would even monitor it, eavesdrop, try to decipher what they could. The code was a dense thicket of complexity.

After Nigel had left Evers’s office he could remember little of whatever else was said. Events had become so constricted, so compressed, that he confused people and moments. But he could recall Evers’s calculating bland expression, the pursed lips, the hint of forces finding a new balance.

SIXTEEN

He sat on the dusty hillside and watched the people streaming into the V of the canyon. Most of them had made the two-hour ride from Mexico City, carrying box lunches. There were bunches from Asia, though, carefully shepherded by guides. And Europeans, identifiable by their brown standard-issue trousers and wooly shirts, severely cut. Separate rivulets which emptied into the canyon.

A flight of birds entered the canyon from the south, fluttering higher as they came. Probably disturbed by the hum of the vast crowd, Nigel thought. He licked his lips. The morning air already shimmered, far warmer than it had been in Kansas two days before. Or had that been Toronto? He had difficulty keeping the days straight. Each of Alexandria’s appearances drew a larger crowd; these, he’d been told, had encamped days in advance.