Glimmering

She held up a small black object, the size and shape of a remote but with a rounded end like an old-fashioned telephone receiver. Blinking red lights chased themselves in a circle across the plastic as she explained. “I can give you a preliminary clearance code now, so that all you need to do at the gate is have them do a retinal and DNA scan—”

Jack laughed incredulously. The courier gave him a sheepish look and shrugged. “Hey, what can I say? Better living through modern chemistry. But if I don’t do this today, you’ll have to get down to the Pyramid and go through the exact same shit. Only there you’ll have to stand in line.”

Jack shook his head. “Isn’t that giving a courier an awful lot of power? What if I was lying or something? All you did was check an expired driver’s license!”

The young woman smiled wryly. “Well, it looks like you, doesn’t it? Plus—”

She lifted her helmet, so that he could see a slender black tube running just beneath the skin at her temple and disappearing at her hairline. “—see? I’m wired. My beta waves and pulse show anything weird, they scalp me. Bing-o! No more Luralay! But they have good health insurance, so give me a fucking break and let me scan you, okay?”

“Uh, yeah. Okay.” Jack frowned. “Are you telling me they—”

“Shhh—if I think about it too much, they get a hot reading. Now, just hold your hand up—no, right hand—it doesn’t hurt, kinda feels like holding a vibrator or something—”

Her gloved hand took his and held it outspread while she fitted the scanner against his palm. There was buzzing, a dull stinging sensation. Immediately she drew her hand back, removed a disposable sheath from the end of the scanner, stuffed that into a tiny biohazard container, and slid the scanner back into her pack. “Okay, that’s all! The entry chip won’t be activated until December 31—that’s New Year’s Eve, at 12:01 A.M. It’ll last exactly thirty-four hours. Then you turn into a pumpkin.” She grinned and gave him a mock salute. “Merry Christmas, Mr. Finnegan! Don’t lose that envelope—it’s got all the instructions and stuff, in case nobody’s able to get in touch with you between now and then. Ciao—”

She turned and strode back up the drive. Halfway to the gate she began to sing again.

Jack looked down at his palm. Nothing there whatsoever that he could see. He heard the courier’s bike firing up as he went back inside and locked the door after him.

The house was still, save for the perfunctory drip of snowmelt falling from the gutters. In the air hung a stale smell of that morning’s burned toast, scorched over the Coleman stove’s flame—there had been no electricity for eleven days. Jack walked into the study and settled into the chair by the window. He took a silver letter opener and deftly slit the gorgeously patterned envelope. A small explosion of glitter and green smoke filled the air. Jack yelped and nearly dropped the envelope. The smoke faded, leaving a tropical scent; the glitter turned out to be more permanent, evading all of Mrs. Iverson’s later efforts to remove it from the oriental rug. Jack looked up, half-fearful that he would see Marz smirking at him from the doorway.

But he was alone, except for the oversize and very beautiful piece of paper he held in his hand. Tissue-thin, it had the watery sheen of fine silk and was patterned with shifting designs: golden zeppelins, a medieval sun, samurai in armor, a velvety black sky covered with glowing constellations, the grasping skeletal gryphon that was GFI’s corporate logo: what at first he thought were extraordinary watermarks, but which instead seemed to be more tricks from GFI’s technological inventory. He spent several minutes just staring at the page, turning it so that it caught the light in different ways to display different patterns. Letters appeared, now Roman, now Japanese characters, now Arabic and Cyrillic. Between his fingers the paper seemed to move on its own, as though he grasped a moth by its wings. Faint bell-like music played, the same song he’d been hearing off and on for months now:

I will give you the morning star:
The end of the end, the end of the end…

ON FRIDAY, DECEMBER 31, 1999,

HUMANKIND WILL ENTER A NEW MILLENNIUM:

A NEW ERA, A NEW DAWN!

THE GOLDEN FAMILY OF

GORITA-FOLHAM-IZED

INVITES YOU, JOHN “JACK” FINNEGAN,

TO BE THERE AT THE GOLDEN PYRAMID WHEN

SUNRA™ IS LAUNCHED

AND THE FUTURE BEGINS…