Infinity's Illusion Page 17

  as when a pack of wild dogs gather at the carcass of a goat, and drive off the leopard that killed the goat, and do not know in their blood-lust whether to fight one another or eat. Thus [illegible] and a time will come when desperation overtakes them, and we, the priests of many languages, who interceded with them, are no longer necessary to them, and may also be taken [illegible] no longer a few, but all [illegible] exactly as if they were people. And their greed [illegible] chaos [illegible] and this will be the end of us, the end of everything, unless [end of fragment]

  A bad day in Iceland. You can gauge how bad from the fact that the destruction of Hekla shattered windows in Scotland, was experienced as deafening thunder in Norway, and caused an ash plume that blotted out the sun over Moscow. The next day, by chance, a group of Seraphim five times larger than at Hekla visited giant Popocatépetl in Mexico, where Julius Quinn had had his own fateful visitation with the Architects. The person leading them called herself Beatriz Zamudio, as well she might: if you’d been Beatriz Zamudio’s own mother, or husband, you’d have sworn, yes, that this was the one victim whose body they’d never found after the Uyuni event in Bolivia. Her new followers, like their brethren in Iceland, chanted and chanted until the gods dripped down. And their reward came.

  The largest Anabasis yet. Half a million souls.

  People in Mexico City, forty miles away, saw a great flash, or were blinded by it. Some turned their faces to the southeast in time to see something extraordinary bearing down on them from the mountain, like a moving wall of glass. When the glass wall arrived, they and their city were wiped from the Earth like cornmeal being brushed from a countertop.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE REVENGE OF THE BABYLONIANS

  Morag woke from a nightmare.

  It was already fading: a jumble of images that seemed to confuse Rosko on Ararat with Rosko, instead of her, falling into the river in New Guinea. (In the dream, she was too frightened of the water to save him.) Anyway, it was him in danger. As he was swept downstream, between boulders that actually were walls of blue glacier ice, he kept saying not to worry. Everything would be OK: he had a plan. She was arguing, angry, begging him to just stop, right there in the river, and listen to her. He wouldn’t. When he was no longer in sight, she shouted louder and louder, until she was hoarse, knowing it was too late.

  She lay in the dark, her heart still racing. She became aware that her head felt heavy, like she was suffering from a concussion or something. She could hear rain laughing at the windows. No idea where she was, or whether she’d slept for ten minutes or ten hours.

  She reached one hand out and encountered a sleeping form. Kit. OK. Yes, she was at the Eislers’ house. She sat up and her head reeled. She felt dizzy, sluggish, disoriented. There was a noise like a distant drill, and she sat listening to it for a minute, massaging her temples and wondering if she was going to be sick. Slowly, so as not to wake Kit, she peeled herself off the bed, got up, and stumbled painfully against the doorframe on her way into the darkened corridor.

  Wait—this was the day. This was the day. What time was it?

  She came fully awake in an instant, as if someone had dashed cold water in her face, and was down in the living room in three seconds. There, the drilling noise resolved into something that made sense: Hideo Murakami, on the couch, snoring.

  It was just after three in the morning, and Rosko had failed to wake her up. She grabbed a flashlight and looked in on the study nook where he’d been sleeping on a camping mat, having given up his own room. Not there. She went into the kitchen, saw through the window that Stefan Eisler’s beloved vintage car was gone, and threw up.

  Stupid boy! Stupid, stupid, stupid. She almost said it out loud. The digital “gift” they’d created had to be spoken, in the Architects’ own language, and it was incredibly complex, and it had to be delivered with absolute precision or it wouldn’t work. That was why she had to do it. Rosko had decided to play the hero and would just screw it up. Stupid boy!

  Her head was banging like a drum and her balance was off. What was wrong with her?

  The keys to Brunhilde were on a frog-shaped hook by the door. She picked them up, looked at the door she must step through, and experienced a fresh wave of nausea as she faced the decision whether to go back and look at Kit’s sleeping face one last time. Then she saw Rosko’s note.

  The note explained everything. It warned them to get away from Seattle, preferably to the Olympic Peninsula, as quickly as possible. It even apologized for the drugs.

  To make sure she’d understood correctly, she clawed through the garbage under the sink until she found the little brown plastic bottle with its printed label: “NATAZSCHA CERENKOV—ZOLPIDEM 10 MG ORAL—TAKE HALF TAB (0.5 MG) AS NEEDED FOR SLEEP—MAY CAUSE DROWSINESS.”

  “May cause drowsiness,” she said, addressing the bottle directly. “That’s really bloody brilliant, that is. Epic. You’re fuckin’ sleeping pills—of course you cause drowsiness.” The bottle was empty, and didn’t say anything back. She threw it in the sink, scribbled her own note, and left it on the counter next to Rosko’s, where they couldn’t miss it.

  How long had he been gone? Could she catch up with him, or even find him? If she did, could she persuade him to stop, and let her take his place, which after all had been the plan anyway, and was the rational solution? No idea: the zolpidem-induced fog had lifted just enough for her to be aware that she was on an essentially hopeless mission, but not enough to stop her. Not even when it dawned on her that she was sitting in the VW van, revving the feeble old engine and making horrible grinding noises, because she’d never really learned how to drive a stick.

  What did stop her, after she’d lurched forward and stalled a couple of times, was the silhouette of the man banging on the driver’s door.

  The man was bellowing something. She thought she was being attacked. She almost was: she didn’t think she’d ever seen Daniel seriously angry before. Out of habit, she’d locked the door; he was pulling on it so hard she thought he might rip it off its hinges.

  His voice was muffled, but not much. “You were just going to leave? After telling us a load of bullshit? And without even saying good-bye?”

  “I didn’t have a choice!”

  “Get out of the van!”

  “No!”

  She tried to put Brunhilde in gear again, and stalled again. The fact that she was crying, and couldn’t see the gearshift clearly, wasn’t helping. Then Daniel put his fist through the window. Instead of creating a neat hole, it collapsed the whole pane into a confetti of sharp blades.

  “Old glass,” he said. “Dangerous.” His voice was suddenly quiet. “Listen, M. You can’t get anywhere in this. And Natazscha’s car is faster.” He held up the key. “If you want to catch Rosko, I’ll drive while we talk.”

  He reached in, carefully avoiding the edges of the glass though his hand was already bleeding, and opened the door from the inside.

  Daniel drove fast, to begin with, despite the fact that Natazscha’s ageing T-bird was making a noise like a chainsaw while blowing teal-colored smoke. The roads were surprisingly clear, and in South Seattle, where the morning freeway traffic should have been building to its worst, there were almost no vehicles at all; the city had already divided into those who’d left and those who were hunkering down, quiet as mice, in their houses and apartments, choosing not to believe that the danger was real. They were out of the city by the time the stream of cold air from an open passenger window had gotten Morag’s lingering nausea under control.

  “Rosko and I had the whole thing planned,” she said. “We were going to wait until everyone was asleep, then leave. I can’t believe he tricked me like this. Pulled the wool completely. It never crossed my mind that—How could I have been so bloody stupid?”

  “What about the fact that you tricked me?” Daniel said. “And how could you just leave Kit like that?”

  “Last night, when I had to try to sound normal while saying good night—it’s the h
ardest thing I’ve ever done. But it was necessary.”

  “Obviously Rosko thinks it’s necessary too.”

  “He created the virus. But this is a virus written in a language that I had to learn in next to no time. He can’t possibly know it as well as I do. He isn’t as quick, and he was just basically looking over my shoulder anyway.”

  “So you ought to be the one making the heroic sacrifice? No, M. There has to be another way. I’m not going to let you near that mountain.”

  “This is exactly why I planned to leave without telling you. It should be me, not him. Everything is at stake here, D. Everything—and I know I can do it.”

  “No. You think you can. And Rosko thinks he can too.”

  “But he’s wrong.”

  There was a thick silence between them for a moment.

  “If Rosko thinks he can do it,” Daniel said, “I believe him.”

  “You’re betting the future of the human race on a hunch?”

  He was silent again. He could see Morag surviving, could picture it quite clearly—but he couldn’t tell whether it was a vision of the future or only a desperate desire, projected onto the blank canvas of a future that didn’t exist.

  “It’s hopeless anyway,” Morag said, the reality of the situation dawning on her. “We’ll never find him.”

  “Not hopeless. He took Stefan’s car.”

  “That old two-seater?”

  Morag had always had a blind spot about cars. “Stefan’s car is a shiny, waxed, perfectly restored 1958 Mercedes 300 SL. It’s white, there can’t be more than three of them between here and New York, and if that isn’t enough, it has a red FC Bayern München sticker in the rear window. We’ll see it a mile away. That’s not the problem. The problem is, even if we do see him and stop him, he won’t change his mind.”

  Actually, the problem wasn’t that either—the problem was Natazscha’s car. They’d been too busy to notice its troubles, because they’d been distracted by the pedestrians. Just the occasional lone one to begin with, or a group of three or four perhaps, striding south in the middle of the freeway, and Daniel found that by slowing to thirty, forty even, he could still avoid them. But each intersection added a few more stragglers in their white scarves, like water trickling from the tributaries into a riverbed. There were plenty of abandoned vehicles, parked at odd angles, some of them burned, some with their doors hanging open. At one point a semitruck, sideways-on like a long stick in a narrow stream, left only just enough space for them to get around. After that they slowed to twenty miles an hour, then ten.

  At that pace they passed Boeing Field and got close to the eerily quiet runways of the main airport at Sea-Tac. Meanwhile the teal-colored smoke had thickened, and the yellow oil-warning light had come on. A mile later, when they’d been reduced to walking pace anyway, smoke started to come out from under the hood too. With a final cough of protest, the car breathed its last.

  “We’ll never catch him now,” Morag said, looking around at the incurious faces on the road and hoping that by some miracle she’d spot Rosko among them. “We’ll have to go back for the others.”

  “Yes. No.” Daniel got out of the car and looked back along the freeway toward the city. He could see one chunk of the future more clearly now, though the knowledge was an emotion more than an image. It wasn’t that he knew Rosko would succeed in what he was trying to do, or that he and Morag would meet up with the others, or even that any of them would survive; only that their window of survival was quickly narrowing. The Architects were coming. There was no time to get back to Seattle, which in any case Kit and the others should have already left. And the winter weather was about to turn exceptionally hot.

  “We should never have come this way,” he said. “We need to get to the coast. To the other side of the Olympics.”

  “How d’you plan to do that?”

  “You manage a three-mile walk? Maybe four?”

  “I’m not yer feck’n grandmother, Daniel. But where to?”

  He looked at the smoking car. “We need faster transportation.”

  Derek Partridge and Ella Hardy had been up late, at their camp in the mountains. They knew more about what was going on in the world than the others because they’d just run into a man whose own VW bus—same color, same year, pleasure to meet you—had a cheap ham radio in the back. They were so unnerved by what they heard that they packed their things, and though the radio guy was headed for Spokane, and urged them to follow him, instead they drove through the night back to Seattle.

  Partridge had been sleeping in a pup tent for a week, permanently damp and cold; for the first couple of nights it had been a nostalgia trip, back to his army days, but now he looked like he’d moved a decade into the future. Ella had slept in the cab of her truck, and her hair looked like she was trying for dreads but didn’t know how. They stepped, disheveled, into the unnatural quiet of the Eislers’ dark neighborhood and tapped on the door.

  And knocked on the door.

  And hammered on it.

  There was still an hour to go before first light. Ella felt her way round the side of the house, put a new rip in her pre-ripped purple tights by stumbling into a rosebush, and stubbed her toe on a stone sculpture that Gabi had bought at a yard sale. The sculpture was a horse. After banging and shouting at the back door, she heaved the horse through a kitchen window and was just about to reach through and open the latch when Murakami, still half asleep but startled awake at last, opened the back door for them.

  On the kitchen counter they found the note from Daniel. Underneath it, the one from Rosko. With great difficulty, they woke the others, and they stood in the kitchen together, blinking and piecing together what had happened.

  “Daniel is right,” Partridge said. “We have to get out of the city, and get as far away from Rainier as possible. There’s going to be an event. Soon. Multiple events, probably.”

  “But he’s talking about us going to the Olympic Peninsula,” Natazscha said. “That’s mountains too.”

  “The Seraphim have concentrated on the Cascade volcanoes. West is safer. Anyway, it’s our best chance.”

  “But Morag and Daniel—” Lorna began.

  Kit put an arm around her. “Daniel and Morag will protect each other. And they will be OK. And they will find us.” She turned to Partridge. “How long it is taking to get out to far side of peninsula?”

  Derek Partridge was looking out at the rain. “Ella? You know the area much better than I do.”

  “Normally, three hours,” she said. “Now? No idea.”

  Lorna looked as pale as a ghost. Kit hugged her. “We have to trust, OK? We have to get ourselves out of here and trust. Morag is in good hands, OK? Best hands.”

  Boeing Field was a two-hour walk that took three. Daniel and Morag spent another hour in climbing a tall, locked gate, finding the right hangar, and breaking into the hangar.

  “When did you last fly?” Morag asked.

  “About a year ago. Don’t worry. This thing flies itself. And it’s not like I’m in much danger of colliding with an incoming wide-body.”

  Iona’s dual-control de Havilland Chipmunk was an antique. It had a long, narrow cockpit, in which the pilot sat up front with the student behind, and it could cruise at 120 knots if you asked nicely. He’d looped the loop, on his first outing—or rather, Iona had cheerfully shouted instructions and taken over enough to correct his mistakes. “It’s simple, Daniel. Just go into a dive. Push forward gently on the stick until we get up to about one fifty. Then pull back smoothly, all the way, and—”

  He remembered pulling three g’s at the bottom of the dive, weighing a temporary 540 pounds, and being convinced that his brain would come out through his sinuses in fat gray bubble-gum coils. He remembered the contrasting terror, seconds later, as they flipped backward at the top of the climb, into weightlessness. He remembered the desire to laugh out loud as they leveled off, because she was right: this dangerous, daredevil maneuver was easy.

  She
’d kept the plane in good condition, but a year of neglect had done its work. Oil had leaked; the fuel had evaporated; one tire was flat; the canopy was jammed. It was already late afternoon when he managed to find a decent toolbox in another hangar. By the time he got back, it was too dark to work.

  Rosko had started driving more than two hours before Morag even woke up, and he drove more recklessly, more aggressively. Instead of slowing down for the walkers, he swerved and honked. He even used the car’s long hood to push a few of them aside, and they responded only by turning briefly to cast a puzzled look in his direction, as if shoulder-checked by a ghost. No cop was going to stop him. Nobody was going to so much as look at him, not even if he ran someone over.

  He made it much farther than Daniel and Morag—he was more than halfway to his destination, and had already left the freeway behind him to the west, when the crowds on the local roads thickened to the point where progress became impossible. Not far from the town of Orting, he abandoned his father’s prized wheels by a farm gate, leaving the keys in the ignition. In normal times, saner times, someone with a loose relationship to the law would probably have come by, thought, Must be my lucky day, and driven off. But the desire to steal a cool set of wheels was a thing of the past. For the people on the surrounding roads that day, the physical world itself was a thing of the past.

  He shouldered a small pack, into which he’d flung a bag of trail mix, a water bottle, a field compass, and some other basic gear. Steep, wooded country: it would be hard hiking, but he liked hard hiking. The fields and woods were almost empty of people; he liked that too. But still he might not get there in time. When the mountain came into view at all, it was wreathed in cloud. Was that steam coming from the summit? How many more hours did he need? How many did he have?