North Wind (39 page)

They explored, and reached a place where the passage floor was sheared away; shone their lamps into a chaos of shattered walls and ceilings, pumped full of glassite stone. It was obvious that the center of the explosion, the one recorded on that ancient videotape, had been here: not in the reactor. Kumbva’s ankus, held casually in his large bare hand, agreed with the tally Sid was getting from his suit. Radiation levels not healthy, but not significantly above the Prussian background.

said Kumbva. “Lead on, librarian.”

Bella led them through the basements until they hit the Campfire Girls’ barrier material. Kumbva smeared it with stone-devouring commensals. They passed through.

asked the engineer.

said the master at arms, after brief thought.

They passed walls scarred black from the fire of Bella’s torches; found the stairwell above the lobby and began to climb.

Now it was the Aleutians’ turn to feel the dread. Sid caught the trickster’s eyes, glittering wide and dark in the beam of his lamp. They’d sealed the way out behind them. They believed there was no danger, but if it came to it they’d rather die in here than have one of the things they called weapons escape. The empty tomb was haunted, for Aleutians and humanity alike, by the ghost of the king of horrors: Death the invincible in His most terrible form; as the invited guest.

At the third turning of the stair they heard the sound of footsteps, light and bipedal. A corridor stretched on either side of the landing where they stood. On the noticeboards print stood out clear on paper shriveled and fractured by age. Someone from the university was walking through a crack in time. It appeared in the corridor. Before Sid could make out more than a vague humanoid shape it was rocketing towards them, a raw projectile of blood and teeth and bone. Bhairava was ready. It dropped, in a whoosh of superheated flame.

The master at arms knelt and touched a patch of unburned skin, put his fingers to his mouth. There was stir of relief among the Aleutians. Bhairava addressed Sid. He did not speak formally, for none of this was to be evidence, but expressed himself slowly and clearly.

mugged Sid clumsily,

Bhairava slipped a hand inside the neck of his clothes. It came out weeping blood-red wanderers; he shook his fingers over the burned flesh. The Aleutians covered their faces. Sid, after a moment’s awkwardness, did likewise.

whispered Bella.

Bhairava stood, and put his arms around her. Casually, in strange contrast with his ritual reverence of a moment before, he raked the charred body again. They left the streak of black, dry ash behind them.

They reached the room where Viloma had held his séance. The door was rent and shattered and burned. There were thick black stains on the walls and doorjambs.

Bella led them on, shuddering.

They reached the other door. They saw the letters, clumsily incised and filled with black pigment.

DEUS PROVIDEBIT SIBI VICTIMAM SACRIFICI

On the other side there was a narrow metal stair, leading up. Sid finally took off his helmet and gauntlets and they climbed: the Fat Man, Sid, Bella; the two other captains, Bhairava at the rear. The door at the top was sealed. When Kumbva had opened it they looked into a cave. They were outside the building, on the flat roof of the residential block, but still inside the tomb. Beside them, within the canopy of instant stone, rose a wall of dark metal, with ladder-like rungs set in it. Kumbva applied more of his stone-eating commensals to clear the way upwards. They climbed again. The sheet of glassite that wrapped them was in places thin and translucent as coffee-colored alabaster, the light of their dimmed lamps filled it with a red, moving glow. Sid thought of Buonarotti, the golden-haired Aryan goddess. He saw the Fat Man climbing through walls of flame, to Brunnhilde’s high couch.

The head of the ladder was guarded by a metal cage, which had kept most of the stone foam at bay. Kumbva squeezed into it. They had reached the top of a tower set on the roof. A broad plate lay at Kumbva’s feet, sealed by extrusions of glassite, a slotted ring still visible. The Fat Man was shaking. Sid could feel the shudders in his own arms, as he clung to the top rung of the ladder.

he begged.

Disdaining commensals now, Kumbva heaved on the ring and shifted the hatch by brute strength. He let it fall back at once. He covered his face.

“I don’t know, Sid,” whispered the Fat Man, his voice trembling. “I don’t know!”

When the whole party had climbed down into the secret room, Kumbva stripped off the heavy plastic shrouds. They looked at a chunky workstation of unfamiliar design, the casing humbly worn and scratched, the symbols on the alphanumeric keypad faded with use.

Beside it stood a foam couch, like the kind of thing used in early whole-body virtuality. There was a narrow cot, a bed on legs, with a deadstuff blanket folded on it. On the wall above hung a gallery of framed, sepia blurs; the still images faded beyond recall.

asked Rajath, at last.

repeated Kumbva, distractedly.

The engineer drew a deep breath. He settled himself in the molded seat, at Peenemünde Buonarotti’s desk. “In London, at the headquarters of the Royal Society, there is a doorbell powered by a battery that was built by Michael Faraday. I have rung it. I ran away: what else are doorbells for? But it works. A machine like this had what they called an integral recycling powerpack, and its memory is not volatile. I don’t see why it shouldn’t be functional.”

He laid his hands on the keys, reverently. Nothing happened.

remarked Sid: he leaned over the Fat Man’s shoulder and poked the on switch.

“My friend, my dear lord,” said Kumbva. “I’m here.”

The upright monitor fizzed and cleared to blue. Dust showered from it. An image of the room itself appeared. A large woman with a mass of greying yellow hair sat on the edge of the cot. She wore an ugly blue suit. Her hands were knotted in her lap, in an agony of livespace shyness.

“Hallo,” she said, in an accented English. She smiled, a petrified grimace. “Who are you? I wonder. How many years have passed? I am almost sure that you are an Aleutian, and I do not know if I am glad or sorry that you have found me. The lord himself will provide a victim for the sacrifice.”

An editing shift: Peenemünde Buonarotti leaned forward. “Now, listen. I am going to tell you a little about my discovery. You must listen because I will not repeat myself. You can stop this record and start it again but you cannot replay it, and it will play once only. Are you listening? In the basement of the Du Pont/Farben building there is an accelerator. Beside this desk is a Kirlian couch, which maps the quantum properties of an entire human being, particle by particle. I will leave you to consider the mathematics of the compression. The couch is connected to the collider. The entity modeled in data by the Kirlian couch becomes a particle source. A stream of energy-packets is accelerated to the threshold of the speed of light, divided and set on a collision course with itself. At the collision something happens, uniquely because of the way each energy-packet in this stream ‘remembers’ the complex perceptual state of the entity of which it is a part.

“It seems to me, because it is what we call conscious. The state of having no location is achieved. The person who lay down on the couch
almost
reaches this state: and borrows energy from beyond the threshold, to make the leap possible. From the state of having no location, one can step out onto the surface of a distant, Earthlike planet. I have done so. All that’s necessary is a clear knowledge of where you want to go. The informational entity takes material form from the surrounding environment. You are flesh; you can bleed and can even die. Yet to return to the couch—as far as my experiments go—requires only an effort, no, a ceasing of effort, like the recognizing that you are dreaming and deciding to wake.”

An editing shift. “Are you ready? First, you must find a suitable power source. In your time, that may be the difficult part. In the case that you have a reliable power supply, go down to the accelerator chamber and I will lead you through the set up: if this is still possible. But only once.”

“Oh my God,” breathed Sidney Carton. “Is that what they did? Is that what Johnny and Braemar did?” To be torn apart, particle by particle, literally ripped to shreds, sent hurtling to shatter against your self…. “It gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘smashed,’” he giggled.

“They didn’t know,” murmured Kumbva. “She didn’t tell them. She said: lie down on my magic bed, and you can be wherever you desire to be. So they lay down.”

Sid and the Fat Man looked at each other.

“What are we waiting for!”

They ran part of the way. In the Du Pont/Farben basement, Buonarotti was looking from a monitor screen, the paused video frame making it seem she was nodding shakily in approval. They patched the giant disk into twenty-first century power cable, and set to work under Peenemünde Buonarotti’s orders. The two captains, Bella and the master at arms had nothing to do except keep out of the way, Sid at least was barely conscious of their presence.

As they followed Peenemünde’s instructions—which were not particularly clear—, he and the Fat Man kept catching each other’s eye and mugging ecstatic disbelief. They laughed wildly (it was all right, she couldn’t hear them) when the Professor lost her thread, degenerated into mumbling apologies, made them undo that sequence, start again.
Unbelievable,
Sid kept muttering,
unbelievable.
Sidney Carton! You have won our star prize!

She told them to go back upstairs.

They returned to the secret room, meeting no monsters on the way. Buonarotti was on the screen, sitting on her cot. Her notes (she’d been projecting scribbled equations for them) had disappeared. She said: “Now you are ready. Now I will tell you the problem. If you are human,
beware.
For human beings, the experience is too much like a dream. Your mind/brain will enact false meaning on what happens, as it does on the images that pass through your consciousness in sleep. In effect, it is impossible for a human being to take action in the visited world without falling into a psychotic episode. The dream becomes a nightmare, in which the traveler is trapped. I have found no way out of this impasse, no solution for the problem, and because of the way we construe our consciousness—the mind in the machine—I am not hopeful that a way can be found. We humans may travel, but only as ghosts, shadows, spectators.”

She paused, and went on calmly. “If you are Aleutian, as I believe you are, the case is different. It is the pattern of consciousness that ‘travels.’ For you, the pattern of consciousness is diffused through your air, your tools, your whole world. You, I believe, may find a way to use this key.” She looked out, eyes brimming. “Not on this mountain,” she said, “Nor in Jerusalem. But in spirit and in truth, we shall worship together. Well, my unknown friend. ‘Good Luck’ as the English say. Until we meet.”

The screen went blank.

Kumbva gave a smothered cry, reaching out. He seemed to try to haul Peenemünde physically from that dead space. But she was gone.

Sid stood looking dumbly at the empty screen.

“Oh no,” he shouted. “No! You hear me? You can’t have it! It’s ours!” His head was spinning. There were hordes of noseless monsters round him. The human race was fading, like Peenemünde fading under her strange skies: becoming meaningless. Meaningless!

“I am sorry,” said Clavel, coming forward. “Kumbva told me that you understood: I was afraid he was wrong. Now you’ve heard it from your Buonarotti herself. Why else do you think Peenemünde Buonarotti hid the device away? Instantaneous travel is not for humans. If you didn’t want it to be ours, you should have taken my offer and walked away from the treasure hunt.”

Sid felt Bella and the Fat Man looking at him unhappily. He thought of Peenemünde’s trail of dreams. Peenemünde herself had told him plainly enough that that was all she had…unless some alien successor came along, to make the dreams come true.

He rubbed his hands over his face, which was still glistening with the sweat of joy and labor. He wished he’d kept his helmet on, it was good camouflage. But he struck as careless an attitude as one can strike, in an ill-fitting army surplus noddy suit.

“Sorry folks. I don’t know what came over me. You can keep your sympathy, poet. The Fat Man and I understand each other, we always did.” He grinned at Kumbva. “It’s yours. We knew that. Peenemünde left the trail for
you.
If my compatriot,
the greatest mind in the known universe,
wanted you shipwrecked refugees to have the secret, who am I to argue?”