Mysterium

He paused when one of these creatures (if it could be called that) came near him. He held his breath as it moved across his path. He felt a prickling heat on his skin; the snow nearby melted to gloss. He looked deep inside it, past translucencies of green and fiery gold to inner complexities of indigo and luminous purple evolving outward like the corona of a star, then fading and falling back like the arc of a solar prominence. Its eyes were shadows, dark as the night. It didn’t pause or look at him.

It moved on. Howard took a deep, ragged breath and did the same.

∞

He reached the laboratory grounds as dawn was lightening the sky.

He walked fearlessly past the wire fence and guardpost the Proctors had erected and abandoned. There was no one here; there hadn’t been for months. This was the mystery the Proctors had declared too frightening to contemplate and too dangerous to endure.

Their works lay scattered under softening dunes of snow: earth-moving machinery, rusted tin sheds, a few vehicles stripped to the axle and open to the sky. The largest intact structure the Proctors had left was a windowless brick box with wide tin doors, sealed with a bar and padlock. Howard moved that way.

The dome of blue light surrounding the original Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory loomed above his head. He had never been this close. It interested him. The border of light, the passage between inside and outside, was crisp and distinct. Within that border, no snow had fallen; the grass was still an eerie green, a single tree still held its leaves… though all these things began to change and mutate if he stared very long. Strange, Howard thought. But had the phenomenon at the lab cast a subtler effect beyond its borders? Those creatures in the forest, for instance. And even here, in the dawning light, the snow-humped detritus looked oddly bright, as if his peripheral vision had grown prismatic, flensing rainbows from every acute angle—as if a junkyard had been strewn with jewels.

∞

In his last days Stern had viewed the fragment in the laboratory as a new sort of matter: quantum matter, its material volume only a fraction of its true size, which was incalculable because it lay outside the observable universe. It was a piece of the Protennoia and therefore unknowable; its effects on surrounding matter were quantum effects, acting on the collapsing wave function of reality in ways unpredictable and often bizarre.

Was that true, Howard wondered? If he stepped past that border of blue light, would he be in some sense inside the fragment? Or was he already inside it? Perhaps the Proctors and their world, all their universe to its farthest limits, was inside the fragment already—the illusion was that the universe contained it.

It was a gateway, a barrier—a nierika.

Axis mundi, his uncle had called it.

∞

The Proctors had left much of their equipment and salvage protected from the weather in this shed. Files, boxes of paper retrieved from the nearest of the laboratory buildings; notebooks abandoned, tables strewn with aerial photographs of the site, books of physics, books of the Bible. There was a tumble of white smocks and lead aprons in the corner. And in a doorless closet, three of the suits Clifford had described to him in the autumn: heavy, quilted vests with a sort of hood, a smoked-glass helmet. The vests to ward off radiation, Howard supposed. He remembered hearing that the fire chief Dick Haldane had died after driving his truck into the glow. The helmets he guessed were to diffuse a glare he had not yet seen… some unimaginable radiance, the blinding light of creation… but what could protect you from that?

He took the outfit off its shelf and draped it over himself, no doubt a futile gesture, but it made him feel less vulnerable.

Then he stepped out into the cold air. The sun had only begun to rise and the air was gray under gusts of low cloud. He walked past this deserted building, past diamond fields of rusting machinery, onto the flat snow-contoured surface of the road and into the nimbus of blue light.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Morning found the test site hushed and vacant.

The last technician had left at midnight. The observation bunker was miles to the east, a slit-windowed slab of reinforced concrete. Remote monitors communicated the status of the weapon to banks of telemetry consoles inside, their anodized faceplates glittering with jewel-faceted lights. The telltales showed amber or green in reassuring patterns. Everything was going according to plan. Everything was as it should be, Milos Fabrikant thought—at least within the narrow compass of these machines.

Fabrikant had been invited here as an observer, and he still had not received a convincing explanation why the Proctors had chosen this particular place to test the weapon: was Cartagena a snowbound target? Was Spain so full of pine woods?