Prometheus Road (9 page)

Tom blinked. He felt stupid. “What?”

Magnus reached behind his bench and plucked up a clear bottle containing a thick, viscous brown liquid from the skeletal mouth of what might have once been a cow. “Your mind creates paths between events,” he said, unscrewing the cap from the bottle and pouring some of the liquid into it. “Have you heard of Werner Heisenberg and his uncertainty principle of quantum physics?”

Tom rubbed his eyes, thinking about the books he’d seen in his father’s hidden library beneath the barn, but he couldn’t remember very well at that moment. “I don’t think so, but my head hurts.”

“Drink this,” Magnus said, handing him the cap with the thick liquid in it.

Tom sniffed at the cap, but the slight fishy fragrance didn’t tell him anything. “What is it?”

“It’ll help your head. Drink.”

Tom shrugged and gulped it down as he threw his head back. When his shocked tongue sorted out the taste of the liquid, he thought it tasted like feet, or maybe feet mixed with pepper and prunes. “Yecch,” he said, dropping the cap as he made a face and thought about how stupid he was just to drink anything that this crazy old man handed him.

Then he noticed that his headache was gone. He frowned and looked at Magnus, who was watching him with the same intensity as the vulture at the window. Tom wondered if the vulture knew something he didn’t, like maybe Magnus brought people here often so he could kill them with the brown liquid and leave their bodies for Rocco to pick over. Again, he noted the skull collection on the walls.

“Feel better?” Magnus asked, screwing the cap back on the bottle.

“Yes. Much better.”

Magnus poured the nuts out of the bowl, then handed it to Tom with a nod.

“What’s this for?” Tom asked, just before he vomited into the bowl.

Magnus set the bowl on a branch outside one of the windows. “You might want to lie down, but do it slowly.”

Tom ran his hands out along the surface of the table behind him, gradually lowering himself onto his back, although he got a little confused near the end when his forearms ended up underneath his waist so that he couldn’t lie flat. Although he was tired, it seemed odd that he’d be that uncoordinated. Magnus helped by pulling Tom’s wrists out from beneath him.

“Just relax,” Magnus said, staring at him so intensely that it was hard to think of anything else. “I’m right here with you.”

Tom felt his stomach rising and falling with each breath. His heartbeat thudded in his ears with a dull tone. Although his headache was gone, the dizziness now returned, much stronger than before, and any tiny movement of his head just made the room spin faster. Streaks of color accompanied the swirling motions of the room. Something buzzed in the distance, but the sound oscillated with the patterns of the gray spots bubbling around his head, as if all of the excited air molecules in the room had suddenly grown large enough to see. He no longer felt tired, and his brain seemed sharp and alert despite the dizziness. When he tipped his head to look at Magnus, the old man glowed with blue-and-white rays that formed a transparent, egg-shaped shell of light about three feet from his body. Tom thought the light was a pretty effect, and he wondered how Magnus managed it.

“That was fast,” Magnus said without moving his lips. “You’ve had so many shocks lately, combined with your fatigue, that your mind is more flexible than usual. Let me give you a light for your journey so you won’t get lost.” He held out a glowing ball the size of Tom’s head, and it hovered between the palms of his hands. “Take it.”

Fighting the dizziness, Tom reached out with one hand and accepted the sphere of light. It had weight in his hand, and it had the texture of a crystal ball, but a glowing blue aura danced over its surface. His hand shook, and he felt a sense of dread when he opened his fingers and the sphere remained stuck to his palm.

“Don’t fight it, boy. I’m in the sphere. I’ll be your guide.”

Tom closed his eyes, not wanting to see anymore, but his eyelids didn’t block his view. If anything, his field of vision seemed to have expanded, wrapping around his head so that he saw the wood surface of the table beneath his head, the glowing figure of the seated Magnus, the windows, the ceiling, the ants attracted to the sap in the corner, and the vulture, whose wings were now spread to their full six-foot length, watching him with eyes that had turned completely white. Helix wagged his tail and watched Tom with infinite patience, seated halfway between Tom and the vulture. The sky beyond the windows turned dark, a patchwork of indigo and cobalt blue on which the red branches of the tree seemed to grow, reaching for the stars.

Tom’s body began to vibrate. The buzzing in the distance became a thundering drumbeat. Magnus leaned forward and blew a stream of white smoke out of his mouth. The stream of smoke maintained an even shape until it hit the sphere of light in Tom’s hand, where it turned toward Tom and spread into a wide cloud that enveloped his head in a swirling motion. Where the smoke touched him, it felt like warm oil flowing over his skin. Tension drained out of his muscles, leaving him relaxed and warm. When Tom looked at Magnus again, the old man stood up, and his skin changed into redwood bark as he took on the appearance of a wise old tree, his branch arms arched toward the ceiling.

Magnus spoke in a voice of thunder, and his eyes flashed with yellow lightning. “Objects in the universe do not follow single paths, but move as waves until those objects are observed. As Heisenberg said, the path comes into existence only when you observe it. Your mind creates paths. Between past and future events, there are many connections, and when you focus your awareness on a single path, the other connections appear to vanish, even though they are still present. And why do you usually focus on one path? Because it appears to bring rational order into your world. It’s a least-action path; a habit that you perceive as real because you’re conscious of the world around you and need to make sense of it. Each time you observe an object, it creates a least-action connection with the previous observation, and your reality is built up of these least-action pathways. Your lazy mind chooses the paths taking the least action, requiring the least effort.” The eyes flashed again as they looked into Tom’s heart. “This means you have a choice. You can choose your path of reality. Believing is seeing. And you will soon learn to see the Road.”

With that, Magnus the tree lowered his arms and shrank back down into his glowing human form. Then he took two steps forward, turned into a cloud of blue smoke, and disappeared into the crystal sphere that Tom still held. The blue aura around the sphere had gone, leaving only reflections and a soft red light pulsing deep within its core.

Tom felt something snap inside his skull, then he felt as if he were falling into his own head. He was a particle, a molecule, an atom, an electron, a quark, and many other things, smaller and smaller, whirling down into the realms beneath nature, that defined nature, his consciousness descending into a bright space beneath the darkness, becoming a thought entity that floated in an unreal sea of possibilities. He sensed the presence of Magnus, the vulture, Helix, the ants, the living heartwood of the tree that held them in its arms, the energy of the sun bathing them in its light, the earth that supported the tree with its nutrients, the creatures of the forest, and stranger creatures that he could not name, flitting in and out at the edges of his awareness. Tom sensed these things, felt the power of their linked energies, and heard their thought streams flowing like water into the river of reality.

This is the gap between the walls of the world, Tom thought. Yet it wasn’t his thought; Magnus had placed the concept in his mind. Although he was beyond the realm of visible color, an energetic particle of cobalt blue vibrated close to Tom’s point of consciousness, a piece of the sky brought down by Magnus to make him feel more secure.

Am I dead? Tom wondered. Have I gone to that place where Blythe exists, suspended in time, exchanging pleasantries with her simulated friends in the virtual afterlife?

The cobalt sphere moved closer. “You’re not dead, but we may visit Blythe’s world as you learn more about the Road. Many worlds coexist, and there are points where they overlap, but you’ll have to observe the waves of time and possibility before you focus on the points, for those points will be your reality.”

Tom considered the possibility that he was losing his mind, or that Magnus had poisoned him. This whole experience was too strange. He thought about all the skulls on the walls of the tree house, and he began to panic. Would his own skull join the other trophies on the walls? Was Magnus actually an agent of Telemachus sent to distract Tom until Hermes could arrive to take him to a rehabilitation unit?

The cobalt sphere drifted in a circle around Tom’s consciousness, sending out vibrations of courage and safety. Tom’s panic ebbed away, and his mind opened to receive a stream of images and memory fragments from Magnus’s life: young women bathing in a stream, Magnus driving a car, conversations with men whom Tom didn’t recognize, flashes of The Uplift when San Francisco was hurled into the waters of the bay, Magnus wearing a white coat in a high-energy physics laboratory—whatever that was—and a family seated around a table on a feast day.

There was something familiar about the family. Tom studied the image in his mind, looking at the faces around the table, finally recognizing younger versions of his father and mother, along with a baby and two children he didn’t recognize, a woman with long brown hair, and a laughing man with a brown beard who looked similar to his father. With a shock, he realized that he was the baby at the table, and the bearded man was Magnus.

Magnus was his uncle.

One more image appeared. This time, it was an enormous black balloon in the sky, except that it was long, like a sausage. The sun had just set, leaving a red glow on the horizon that reflected off the bottoms of the clouds. Magnus was working in the field when he saw the balloon, then threw down his shovel and ran toward his house. The balloon followed, staying just behind Magnus as he ran. He stumbled over the furrows in his field, kicking up dust, his hat flying off when he jumped over a ditch. He picked up his young daughter playing in the dirt and continued to run while the sky got darker and the balloon slowly angled down out of the sky. When Magnus reached the ladder down into the light tube of their home, he put the girl on the ladder and looked up with wide eyes to see the balloon getting closer. He yelled something at the girl and started down the ladder after her.

Then the sky erupted in a brilliant flash and a rain of fire, and the memory was over.

Tom understood. A little while later, Tom and his family had arrived to see the boiling crater where Magnus’s home had been, and Ukiah helped his brother climb the slope away from the carnage. Magnus was the only survivor. Tom felt a strong connection to him now, sensing how his own family must have panicked in their final moments of life, leaving only Tom to survive and remember—the one who had brought down the wrath of the gods on them in the first place.

“It wouldn’t have mattered,” said the sphere.

Tom blinked, trying to push the images out of his consciousness. “What?”

“I know what you’re thinking, but it wouldn’t have mattered if you had arrived home earlier. Telemachus would still have destroyed your entire family to rid the community of any potential contamination. It’s how the siliboys think, you see. Their job is to play God, forcing us to live and evolve the way they think is right. We live in a big test tube, cut off from the rest of the world, reacting to stimuli generated by the gods in this controlled environment. Mutations like you and me are removed; otherwise, the whole batch of test subjects would have to be thrown away, and that would make Telemachus look incompetent. And the Dominion doesn’t look favorably on incompetents.”

“I’m sorry. Despite everything, I still have trouble thinking of the gods as completely evil. They watch over us and keep us safe. Maybe Telemachus wasn’t involved in those bombings. Maybe it was Hermes who was responsible; he was human once, so maybe he still has our flaws.”

“Let me show you one more thing, Tom,” said the blue sphere. Tom noticed that Magnus had used his real name, rather than calling him boy.

An image of a shiny box molded in a rough human form, a sarcophagus made of metal. Tom had the impression of seeing the inside and outside of the box at the same time. Except for a glass panel over the face, the box contained thousands of what appeared to be tiny wire brushes that extended to make contact with the naked man inside. Nanoprobes, Tom thought, although he hadn’t known the word before that moment.

“This is a rehab unit, and that’s the coffin where I spent two weeks of my life before they made the mistake of letting me out for exercise, and to remind me of what the real world was like so they could take it all away again. My skin screamed when the coffin was opened, because the nanoprobes had removed the outermost layers of my skin for easier access to my nerve endings. The pain would have driven me insane, or I would have become the perfect reprogrammed citizen, except that I had a way out of that coffin while I was still living inside it. My body was trapped, but my mind was free. They forced images and emotions into my brain, and nutrients with drugs into my body, but I refused to be reprogrammed. When they let me out of the box, the siliboys were trying to decide what to do with me. Mizar still controlled the Marinwood region at that time. Killing me would have been an admission of defeat, so Mizar tried to follow the protocols and reprogram me so that I could be a productive member of the community once more. The Road sustained me while my body was held captive, then I was able to escape from the rehab unit when I had the chance. The Dominion replaced Mizar with Telemachus for his failure to perform the conversion, and I went into hiding so they wouldn’t get another crack at me.”

Tom felt confused. It was too much information all at once, and the mystical awe he heard in Magnus’s references to the Road made him uncomfortable. Magnus still hadn’t explained the Road to him in terms he could understand. He was having enough trouble understanding why he was talking to a blue sphere.