Infinity's Illusion Read online

  Pinkie’s voice became so faint that she had to read his lips. “Grandkids are. She wanted to make sure there was an escape route for them.”

  Morag recalled her strange conversation with Sunil and Vandana, in Balakrishnan’s garden on Hawaii’s Big Island, just before meeting the steely frown in the expensive sari that was their grandmother. “If Iona was right,” she said, “the Architects are parasites. Mind parasites. She shouldn’t want to help her grandchildren become like them. She should want to help me defeat them.”

  Pinkie looked at her with such intensity, such pity and disappointment, that she expected him to reply that defeating the Architects was impossible. Daniel had the same thought, along with another of his premonitions: exactly what this dying stranger’s last words would be. We’re just the latest in a long line. Good-bye Homo sapiens! Too late to defeat them now.

  But he was wrong. Pinkie might have thought it, but he didn’t say it. His eyes shifted away from them, toward the treetops, and his almost invisible pale eyelashes stilled, as if the beauty of the forest had hypnotized him.

  He had nothing left to add.

  Lorna knelt down, closed his eyelids, and took a deep breath before looking up.

  “Morag, love. I have to tell you something.”

  “I think I’ve already guessed what you have to tell me.”

  “Jimmy—”

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  Lorna looked at her and let it sink in. “This lot”—she indicated the three bodies—“there’s hundreds o’ this lot down in Telefomin. We went to the Tainu first, sure, tried te put together a rescue mission. But it was jes’ like ye predicted. Brave warriors, feck! They wouldna even consider goin’ past the waterfall. Fatalists, all o’ them—even Oma. His own daughter, an’ all he could say was, ‘Either she’ll come back, or she’s already dead.’ I s’pose she musta come back, after, but by then we’d gone on down te Telefomin, expectin’ te talk wi’ th’ Danish bloke from the Seraphim. Fischer. But they’d been ta’en over, he was not te be found, an’ we walked intae a trap, basically. The Route Two people, oh, they wanted to use us te find ye fer sure, no lack of interest there. But they were puttin’ a bigger force together, so they chained us up in a shed while they got their act sorted out and figured a strategy.

  “Jimmy kept me sane, he did, by tellin’ me jokes. Jes’ like old times, he said, like when we was chained te that basement wall in Iraq. Oh aye, I said, the fun holidays we’ve had together. But o’ course we was desperate to get away an’ find ye ourselves, an’ warn ye, so we agreed that even if jes’ one of us could escape, we would.

  “We tried te trick them. Jimmy pretended te have the runs, needin’ te use the cludgie all the time. It helped us work out their guard routine, an’ he managed—he almost managed te get away. Oh, gurrl. While we were in that shed he talked about you all the time. He loved you, he did so.”

  They wept silently, heads together, holding on to each other like shipwreck victims, unaware of their surroundings. Kit had moved twenty feet away, watching and listening; when she came hurrying back, she had to shake them by the shoulders to get their attention. She had one hand to her lips, and was pointing toward the clearing.

  “Sorry, Majka, Lorna, but not is time for this, not now. Six more mens. Seven maybe. I am tracking this group earlier. We have to go, now.”

  Morag was conscious of so many emotions, parading themselves across the stage of her mind like actors in a dress rehearsal—grief because Jimmy was dead; anger that anyone would kill a man so wise, good, and kind; sorrow for her mother, who had lost the love of her life; guilt because his death was—Let’s face it, shall we?—all her fault. But the emotions were mere reminders, clues to what she’d have to suppress, face, or use at some later time. Right now, there was no time to feel their power. She was left with nothing but the ability to take in immediate impressions. Three bodies in the mud. Daniel and Kit (her disfigured, filthy, miraculously returned Kit) whispering urgently to one another. A line of people, sunlit as they moved into the open with their guns clearly visible. Kit, barefoot—she noticed that now for the first time—waving frantically at them to follow.

  Everything sounded muffled. She felt numb. She felt as if everything had slowed down—as if there was urgency all around her, in the air itself, but she was trapped, floating, in a bubble of unreality. Kit grabbed her hand and shot her a look of urgent concern—or inquiry? or love? or exasperation?—and pulled her deeper into the cover of the trees.

  CHAPTER 4

  PARADISE LOST

  The Seraphim had indeed been ousted from Telefomin by Uma Chaudry’s hastily assembled private army. But this small New Guinea hill station, in an area so oddly resistant to Seraphim proselytizing, was a mere blip on the radar in the context of their global success. In fact Julius Quinn’s strange new order had become so powerful, so quickly, that wise people in suits had already wasted their breath opining that it might one day infiltrate all levels of government, finance, technology, and the military, all over the world.

  How wrong they were. There never was any need to “infiltrate,” because the Seraphim were never really “they.” The message that Julius Quinn had encapsulated in his world-changing Anabasis proved just as persuasive to the influential—politicians, diplomats, financiers, billionaires, tech gurus, scientists, generals, and even some of the most powerful leaders of the so-called traditional religions—as it had to the world’s factory workers, peasants, and suburban homemakers. So the newest and most successful religion in history, while continuing to insist that it was not a “mere religion,” but something else entirely, on account of being true, found itself in a position beyond the dreams of private wealth. Like the Catholic Church at the height of its power in the later Middle Ages, the Seraphim had begun to behave like a globally connected private state. This state controlled resources on a planetary scale, directed vast armies of both workers and influencers, and ignored the trivial practical questions, such as money, that keep mere governments from sleeping.

  This organization existed for one reason only: to make the human species ready for the end of being human; to prepare us for the returning Architects; to smooth the way for the global Anabasis that the Traditionals had dimly perceived and spoken of as immortality, or eternity, or heaven.

  Eternity for every mind: a noble purpose! Preparation was the key, and to that end the burning of libraries was quite effective, though it had never been more than symbolism. Now a far greater and more significant simplification was within reach. This was a technical feat the leadership declined to speak of, unless you count one occasion on which Zachary Ash, the most prominent of the new Seraphim leaders to come to influence in the wake of Julius Quinn’s death, encouraged his followers to burn also their phones, their televisions, and their computers. “The world’s knowledge is not on paper anymore,” he said.

  The technical feat that Ash had in mind might or might not be successful. But if it was, it would give humanity huge momentum toward the goal. And meanwhile, in anticipation, it made sense for the Seraphim to pour unheard-of resources into the giant construction projects called the Epicenters.

  Vesuvius, overlooking the richly populated Bay of Naples.

  Popocatépetl, on the doorstep of Mexico City.

  Fujisan, facing the sea, with its right arm around Nagoya and its left around Tokyo.

  Merapi, in densely packed central Java.

  Mauna Loa, the great mother of them all, in a state whose population had now bloated to several million.

  Mount Rainier, of course—Daniel and Iona’s old playground—within sight of another several million people in America’s Pacific Northwest.

  And now, like a corporation on an invest-for-the-future tear, they had announced two dozen more Epicenters, not just at great shining peaks in Ecuador or the Philippines but also in ancient dormant areas of mere lava from northern Africa to India’s massively populous Deccan.

  Concentrated populations, unprecedented
scale: it was, the new leaders agreed, exactly the strategy Quinn would have recommended. Hawaii, where the construction was most advanced, would be the first great event since Ararat—and it would dwarf Ararat. The preparations, already many months old, might take another six months to complete. But that was astonishingly little when you considered that it was, to quote Zachary Ash, “both one of the largest construction projects ever undertaken, and one of the last that will ever need to be undertaken.” The biggest sports stadiums in the world could hold a hundred thousand chanting fans; on the Mauna Loa structure, which seemed to float in midair below the summit like the brim of a steel sombrero, not less than half a million carefully chosen and carefully trained Seraphim would be able to perform their very different chant.

  There would be no interference this time, Ash assured his followers. “Because of what we have already achieved, the Architects are stronger now, and you are better prepared than those who went before you. This time, when the Architects come, every single one of you will be freed from your body, freed from time itself, and rise up to take your proper place in the dimension of the eternal.”

  The “event” would tear the Big Island apart. The massif consisting of Mauna Kea, Mauna Loa, and Kilauea would crack open like the broken pit of a nectarine, and all its loveliness would be swallowed by the ocean. The collateral damage would be large, a fact the Seraphim leadership considered regrettable but unavoidable. And at least one thing was clear: those who stood prepared, and waited for the Architects to come to them, would never regret leaving behind the nice hotels and swaying palms and sun-kissed beaches. What use is a mere tropical paradise, to freshly minted gods?

  Mauna Loa: an Anabasis event involving one hundred times as many people as Ararat. That, anyway, was the plan. But summoning the immortals to help you become immortal is a tricky business, and herding true believers is trickier still. Devotion to the Seraphim cause had become easier and easier to arouse—but, once aroused, the raw enthusiasm for eternity proved devilishly hard to control. The desire to rise up and leave mortal life behind was first an idea, then a yearning, then an unquenchable buzzing thirst. It so dominated the minds of converts that it became difficult or impossible to instill the necessary self-control.

  Ash himself had been forced to visit the vast, hastily constructed training camps on the saddle between Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, and he had pumped up the crowd while stressing constantly the need for complete psychological and physical discipline. “The Architects do not want half-prepared individual enthusiasts,” he said. “They want us to approach them as coordinated masses of precisely tuned, carefully prepared minds.”

  But the merely enthusiastic, individually or in small groups, continued to attempt Anabasis on their own, both by breaching security at the designated Epicenters and by constructing their own ziggurats out of rubble or concrete in a thousand other places. It was easy to see why. Ever since the first disappearances at Uyuni in Bolivia, at least some people had succeeded in making the freelance leap into the eternal. As one brave soul had dared to say, in the face of Ash’s pronouncement that such “private experiments” were foolish, doomed, selfish, and wrong: “We are seeking nothing less than to become Architects. Nothing less than to become gods. Some of us believe that we are specially favored—which is to say, that our minds are already tuned, already fully prepared, now. Waiting seems wrong to us, whatever the Seraphim’s self-appointed leaders may say. What made them experts on the Architects?” For many, the risk of failure was nothing when set against the temptation of an infinite reward.

  In the face of these difficulties, Ash was proving to be a master politician, especially for someone who supposedly had no interest in politics, or indeed in the continuation of ordinary life. He responded to the dissent by deploring it, publicly, as a tragic waste, “a distraction from the truest path to success.” Privately, he accepted that some of it would happen anyway. Practically, his focus was on working all the harder to prepare the groundwork for what would be, when the glorious moment came, a quite literally Earth-shaking success.

  “We are in this together,” he said, wrapping up his speech with the great mountain behind him. “All humanity is in this together.”

  But Mauna Loa took him and almost everyone else by surprise.

  The scale of the construction, and the scale of the immigration to the islands, meant that many Seraphim didn’t even make it into the big prefabricated huts of the training camps, where the conditions were barracks basic but tolerable; they were condemned instead to squalid conditions in a vast favela of tents and lean-tos on the volcano’s southern flanks. In a further insult, Zachary Ash’s security people having judged that the area wasn’t altogether safe for him, these Seraphim were denied the blessing of a visit from their leader, and were told by an underling, in insufficiently diplomatic tones, that they should continue preparing themselves, as best they could, for an indefinite time.

  Endured within sight of their proposed “stairway,” these slights might have proved too much in any case. But the actual catalyst for rebellion was a tall, strikingly beautiful woman named Amira Ardalan.

  “Amira.” That’s what her followers called her. She described herself as a Kurdish American, and she used her lilting, musical voice to proclaim that Zachary Ash and the Seraphim leadership were being less than straightforward with their followers.

  “Amira, Amira, Amira!” One name was enough, like she was a saint or a rock star. (Oh, but had they known the truth, she was so much more than any saint or rock star—and so much less.) They thought of her as unique, but she was one of many people around the world making a claim that was absurd from the point of view of science, and also completely inconsistent with the Seraphim’s official story, and yet instantly and unquestioningly believed by their followers: that they had been at Ararat, had experienced Anabasis, and had been asked by the Architects to return, to help others on their journey.

  No need then, it was felt, to check out Amira’s backstory. And her backstory would have checked out just fine anyway, because there really was a Kurdish family in Queens, New York—grieving elderly parents, and siblings, and friends—that was still in shock over a woman who had taken up with the Seraphim, left home without a word, and then been listed among the vanished after the Ararat event. And here she was! And there was a raw power about her, a charisma that was unearthly, unstoppable, that seemed to transcend the word beautiful. People in the crowds were heard to use the phrases that had been used about Julius Quinn, founder of the Seraphim and author of Anabasis, who had also encountered the Architects.

  “So magnetically attractive.”

  “Thrilling.”

  “Can’t look away.”

  “Seems almost superhuman.”

  “And that voice, oh, that gorgeous voice!”

  “Who is she?”

  “The delays are unacceptable”—that was Amira’s message. “The delays are unnecessary. In matters of the spirit, people have to trust their own sense of what is right, not wait for orders. Why should forever be asked to wait?” Her followers on the Big Island numbered in the tens of thousands, and they agreed enthusiastically. And so it was that a coup took place. One night, under a sky curdled with stars, local leaders were kidnapped and guards disabled. Fences were torn down. Then a great murmuring crowd advanced up the southern slope, chanting softly the words of the Architects, oblivious to the rare Hawaiian silverswords they were knocking down and crushing underfoot. From a distance they sounded like locusts.

  A little more than halfway up the mountain, they came up underneath the great half-completed structures, a complex series of cantilevered steel arcs. The flat decking on each arc was of uniform width, like a curved section of road a hundred yards wide, but the arcs varied in length from a few hundred yards to several miles. Linked together by narrow causeways, they formed a structure so big that its familiar horseshoe-and-spiral pattern had been apparent for weeks from the ever-thickening flocks of incoming planes. Someone had
referred to it as the largest place of worship ever constructed.

  Not a Seraphim, clearly: the followers of Julius Quinn would never have used such a term. “The plan of the poor blind scientists to colonize Mars—is that a religion?” Zachary Ash asked pointedly. “And what about the EurAfrica dam, which they are building now across the Strait of Gibraltar to save the cities of the Mediterranean from drowning? Is that a religion? No. These are engineering projects, defined by specific methods and specific aims. Misconceived aims, in those two cases, because saving this planet or leaving it for another one is no longer necessary. But the Epicenters are engineering projects also. And their aim is the true one. Their aim is to enable all of humanity to reach its destiny at last.”

  The Seraphim dissidents all agreed with the Seraphim’s official aims, as outlined by Ash. But they followed Amira because they were tired of waiting, seduced by her voice, and unable to detect that she was just a different kind of lie.

  Once they arrived at the metal stairways underneath the decking, they spread in both directions around the mountain, then began to swarm upward. At the top, they found perfectly flat surfaces. There were no rails or barriers at the edge to prevent them from falling, but no one seemed to notice the potentially lethal drops, and no one fell. Thousands of evenly spaced circles, each one a foot in diameter, were embossed into the metal, each one easily visible in the light of the quarter moon. Each person picked a circle and stood inside it, relaxed and silent, with their hands held in front of them as if reading from a book, or offering up a baby for a blessing.

  When at last everyone had found a place, and all motion had ceased, Amira’s followers began to chant in unison. In hope. In earnest. And they chanted without ceasing for an hour or more, asking to be admitted to the dimension of the eternal.

  Da-SIM-chol

  Ouk-INTH-ge

  Po-XA-thu

  Nil-EH-wan

  Dawn was still an hour away, with the sky still starry and only the faintest line of gray picking out the curve of the eastern horizon. Not that anyone was looking that way, because a beautiful tropical sunrise no longer had any meaning for them. They chanted, and chanted, and emptied their minds of everything except the chanting. And when certain forces unknown to modern physics had aligned, the dark sky darkened more, obscuring the bright pageant of the constellations, and the Architects arrived.