“Broadcast him?” Kane sat back on his heels, bringing himself further away from the girl.“You’re crazy.”
“Do you think so?” she said, and Kane saw that he had carelessly opened an old wound.“Well, I did broadcast him. I gave him the one thing he wanted in the entire universe.”
“Where?” Kane said.“Where did you send him?”
“He brought me a data base that showed maybe a habitable planet around Barnard’s Star. He should reassemble there, if everything works.”
The diskette, Kane thought. So that’s what it was for.That meant that Reese had known about all of this before they’d landed, probably known before they left Earth. One more betrayal.“Barnard’s Star?”
“He’ll know in about 5.868 years. Of course, it won’t be that long for him.”
“Jesus,” Kane said.This was it, then, the source of power, of more power than he had imagined.The electricity that had charged his hand at Reese’s gateway was all around him; he stood in the Omphalos, the navel of this world.The roots of the tree of life grew under his feet, and from here the waters could be freed, releasing grace, nourishment, and light to transform the universe.
He stood and let the awareness electrify him like current charging a capacitor.
Suddenly the girl jerked her head around, and Kane followed her gaze to the lights over the airlock, which had just shifted from green to red.
“Somebody’s coming,” Kane said.
“Curtis.”
“How do you know?”
She shook her head and pointed to a ladder along the nearest wall. “There’s a catwalk up there.You can watch without them seeing you.” Kane hesitated and she said,“You’d better go.”
Kane climbed, the strain on his arms sending waves of pain through his pectorals and deep into his chest.At the top he found a perforated aluminum walkway that circled the cave. It was barely a yard wide and less than six feet from the ceiling, forcing Kane to walk with bent legs and cling to the handrail.
He circled toward the front of the cave, then froze as his foot touched yielding flesh.
“Hello,” said a voice.“Are you from Earth?”
Kane squinted.A boy of about eight or nine clung to the railing, staring intently back at him.A clumsily repaired cleft palate had left the boy with a scar that ran through his upper lip and along the entire left side
of his nose.
“That’s right. My name is Kane.”
“Avec plaisir. I am Pen of My Uncle. Do you speak French?”
Fifteen feet below them the airlock door swung open and they began coming in, two at a time: first Curtis and Molly, then Lena and Hanai, then two of Curtis’s shock troops. Seeing Molly gave him a pang of lust and sorrow that quickly gave way to alarm. Something major, something pivotal was happening; Curtis was making his move. Kane could barely concentrate on what the boy was saying to him.“No,” he said. “English, Japanese, a little Russian.”
“Practical,” the boy said.“French is stupid, nearly useless, except for the existentialists. Russians are good, though. Do you read Ouspensky?”
“I don’t read much,” Kane said.The girl with the swollen head was talking to Curtis and Molly now. The low air pressure kept the sound from reaching him and he could only tell that an emotional storm was building; tears ran from Molly’s eyes.
“Ouspensky is Verb’s favorite.That’s where she got the idea for her physics.” Overhead lights came on and Kane moved further into the shadows.
“Who’s Verb?” he asked.
“That’s her down there. Did you know she was Curtis and Molly’s kid?”
Kane shook his head.“That’s weird. It’s like everything is tied to everything else, all these lines of force...”
“Ouspensky says,‘Every separate human life is a moment of the life of some great being, which lives in us.’ ”
The boy’s words staggered Kane, parted for an instant the membrane that separated his dream personalities from his waking existence. He could feel them watching behind his eyes: Percival, maddened by his imperfection and loss of the Grail,Yamato-Takeru of the shattered spirit, Jason, the fanatic sailor who had failed to intuit the Pattern.
“The Pattern,” Kane said.
“Sure, that’s it, a pattern.That’s all we are in space-time, you know. Just a pattern. In seven years you don’t even have any of the same cells you used to have.There’s only the pattern left.The pattern survives.”
“Yeah,” Kane said.The fever swept over his brain like a brushfire. His neurons all seemed to be firing at once; he rode the tide of electric potential to a psychedelic level of consciousness.“The Pattern of the Hero survives.”
“Ouspensky says heroic characters are just ‘reflexed images of human types which had existed ten thousand years before.’ He says they’re reproduced by ‘mysterious powers controlling the destinies of our world. That which has been will return again.’ ”
On the floor below them,Verb had led Curtis and Molly into a sudden cone of light. It revealed a wooden folding screen of Japanese design; the back had been fitted out with aluminum cages to hold circuit cards and ribbons of cable that led to disk drives and bubble storage.
Kane focused on one panel of the screen, on one 18- by 24-inch sheet of plastic, studded with chips and crowned with a dark blue ceramic box the size of his open hand.
He began to hallucinate in earnest.
From somewhere behind his eyes, a ghostly schematic of the circuit card formed and began to spin into his field of vision, slowly turning through all its axes and dropping away from him, toward its physical counterpart below.
He shut his eyes, and the glowing diagram remained, sketched in the visual purple pigment of his retina, still falling, spinning away from him.
He swayed queasily, opened his eyes, and grabbed for the railing.The phantom projection had aligned itself with the genuine board, and as Kane watched, awed and terrified, the image superimposed itself on the original.
For an instant the entire cave was suffused with brilliant, golden light, and a spasm of pure pleasure arced through Kane’s nervous system.
He dropped to his knees, shivering.
He had just seen his grail.
It seemed to molly that she was watching a butterfly metamorphose into a worm.Ten years ago Curtis had seemed full of strength and beauty and grace; in the cocoon of the Center’s isolation tanks he had become another personality: dry and bitter, erratic, amoral.
In the explosion of the rock ledge outside the dome his transformation became complete.
She hadn’t believed it was really going to happen until the mountain trembled under her feet.There had been no single moment when Curtis had hesitated or lost momentum long enough for the weight of her fear to stop him, to push the balance away from the vision of doom that now obsessed him.And if she had seen her moment, she thought, Alonzo and the goon squad would have kept her from seizing it.
Curtis had sat through the preparations with a phone in one hand, giving orders to his henchmen back inside the dome. Molly could see that he missed his cameras; the explosion would not be completely real for him until he could replay it on the video screen.
It had shocked her to learn that Verb already had packets of antimatter whose retaining fields could be switched off. For experiments,Verb said, or for extending the cave. It was just something they’d made up, that they’d thought would be useful.To Molly it seemed hopelessly naive to have built something that could so easily be transformed into a weapon.
And now they were huddled together, father and distorted daughter, Curtis watching her program the coordinates for Moscow into the computer.Think, she told herself.You’re not helpless. She knew the machine, knew its weaknesses well enough to disable it if she had a chance.