Go.
It hit him like a shot of whiskey on an empty stomach. Farley had to fight to stay upright. He looked up at the distant cavern ceiling and felt that he was falling.
Directly ahead the enormous octagon hovered just outside the rim of the largest cylinder of the vast machine Farley thought of as the dynamo. A conical projection from the middle of the cylinder pointed at the center of the octagon. At the point of the cone the green light was unbearably bright. Afterimages trailed when Farley looked away. He heard a steady noise like the soft buzz of a fluorescent light with dirty poles.
The windless gale roared silently. A hurricane inside himself.
He stood behind Yone on a small railed platform beside a wall of pale green light so bright that Yone was a silhouette before him. The platform rested atop a spindly metal pole like a cherry picker rising from a catwalk fifty feet below. The catwalk itself an insubstantial span a hundred feet above the ground.
Farley gripped the thin low railing with both hands. A ringing in his ears so loud it hurt.
Yone did not seem to see him but stared out at the wall of brilliant light. Farley shouted Yone’s name but Yone did not react. Instead he braced himself against the rail and leaned out into that space and put his silhouetted hand out toward the coruscating sheet of light. On the other side of it Farley made out the dim shape of a long slim cone that tapered to a point, like an enormous spearhead that almost touched the wall of light.
Yone turned back and Farley put a hand on his shoulder. Yone looked at him like a man accosted by a stranger raving in a different language. Not a hint of recognition in his eyes.
“We have to find Wennda,” Farley said.
Yone pointed down.
“There’s nothing—” Farley broke off.
A hundred fifty feet away he saw Wennda’s foreshortened figure walking toward the base of the machine. Her long shadow flickered.
“Wennda!” Farley’s throat felt scoured as he shouted down at her. “Wennda!”
She kept walking and did not look back. Farley let go of Yone and ran. His leg still pained him from the fall into the crevice. Behind him he heard Yone’s voice. Like a whisper in his ear but far away. He looked back but Yone was gone. Farley was on the cavern floor.
He felt dizzy and looked forward again. Wennda was no longer there. He stopped.
“It’s here. The heart of the locus.”
Farley turned. The voice had been Yone’s but Wennda stood a few feet behind him. The two of them were on a railed catwalk a hundred feet above the cavern floor. A long, pegged pole rose high up from the center of the catwalk to a small railed platform. Like a cherry picker. Its bucket poised before a long, narrow cone that tapered to a point before a sheet of blinding green light in the center of the floating octagon. The cold light wavered and rippled like water, a vertical eight-sided pool.
He was on the machine.
Wennda brought her smartsuit’s visor to her eyes and looked up at the curtain of light. “Can you feel it?” she asked.
Farley felt a plunging fear. “Wennda. We have to go.”
She raised the visor and looked up at the curtain of light. “Can you feel it?” she repeated.
Farley stepped forward and grabbed her wrist. She turned to him and her face was all hard reflections and he was terrified and then he saw that she had activated her visor. “Look,” she said, and held out the visor.
“We have to go.”
“Look,” she said, and held out the visor.
The time was stuttering.
Farley took the visor from her and held it over his eyes. For a moment he did not understand what he was looking at. Then he realized that the view was highly magnified. He lowered the visor from his eyes and oriented himself on the point of the cone in front of the insubstantial platform on its spindly pole and raised the visor again. The green light was much dimmer, filtered by the visor. He could see something in the middle of the sheet of light, directly in front of the cone. A bug in the ointment. It wavered and shook, and Farley held his breath and forced himself still.
There. A small hemisphere with a stem emerging from one end, like a mushroom or a top.
“What am I looking at?” Farley asked.
“The thing that brought you here. To my world. To this room. To me. The locus.”
“That thing?”
“Not a thing. An area. A set of equations. Coordinates. Instructions. Laws. It connects realities. Times.”
“It’s the size of a jawbreaker.”
“It destroyed the world.”
Farley pulled the headpiece off and stared at Wennda. She had sounded exactly like Yone when Yone had started sounding crazy.
Farley felt a sudden certain horror. “Wennda,” he said. He glanced at the mote in the cold sheet of light. “Is that you talking to me?”
Near the bottom of the stairs Yone vaulted the rail and ran in the direction of the dynamo. Farley missed a step and grabbed the rail. He was certain he had just seen himself on the floor of the huge room, looking up at himself and Wennda running down the stairs.
Wennda nearly ran into him. “You all right?” she asked.
He pushed open the door and stepped out onto a small platform at the top of a narrow staircase bolted to a sheer stone wall several hundred feet high. A space that would fit a dozen typhon repair bays. Distant walls. A machine the size of a battleship. Sudden vertigo. Wennda pushed a workstation chair into the doorway. “Here,” she said. Farley let go the door and stepped in. A small man stood before him. Scabbed face, limpid eyes, filthy jumpsuit.
“We are at the heart of the locus,” Yone said. “I am so glad you found me.”
“We have to go,” said Farley.
“Look.” Wennda held the visor out to him.
He held it to his eyes and looked. The silhouette hand flickered as it reached toward the light. Floating in front of the cone was a small object shaped like a mushroom or a top.
“The thing that brought you here,” Wennda told him. “Did you feel it?”
“I felt something. I don’t know that I’d say it was alive, but it was something.”
“A set of equations. Instructions. A bunch of chemicals that organize into cells that evolved to combine and grow and reproduce. Entire machines made out of millions of little machines. Independent pieces programmed to work together. A consensus. It connects.”
Farley lowered the visor and looked at her. The jumbled letter blocks of time and event were spelling out a message.
“It’s trying to communicate with us,” he said. “Isn’t it?”
“Is a baby alive? Aren’t you a hammer that decides what to hit?”
She stood on the cliff top before the artificial sun went out. And she stood outside the door to the control room. And she held the rail on the staircase platform. And she pointed at the locus from the ledge of the machine. Can you feel it? And she looked at him and smiled.
And the green light flared and the world paled out to white.
THIRTY-SIX
Broben took a deep breath and pressed his throat mike. “Pilot to flight engineer. You’re sure about this.”
“Flight engineer here,” came Wen’s voice. He sounded like he had marbles in his mouth and the world’s worst nose cold. He had insisted on manning the top turret even though his nose was broken and one side of his face looked like he was storing nuts. “The bugs’ll come through for us, lieutenant.”
“Uh-huh.” Broben nudged the throttle underhanded and the Fata Morgana began to roll toward the huge blank wall of closed main door directly ahead.