That was it, Laura told herself: it was like being under the influence of some drug, not a mind drug or a stimulant but some sleepy narcotic, something syrupy and potent, the way she imagined opium must be. She moved down these antiseptic drab tiles thinking, This way to the Emerald City… through the poppy field…
The corridor narrowed until it was only a little wider than her body.
A bell was ringing somewhere. An alarm bell, Laura thought. Some sort of emergency in progress. But she ignored it, walking.
And then the corridor came to an end and there was only a room, a last windowless cul-de-sac revealed dimly through a final archway; and Laura thought, Why, this must be what I want, this is where I meant to go.
She stepped through the narrow doorway and saw a woman.
It took her by surprise. The woman looked so utterly ordinary. She was an ordinary middle-aged woman in familiar clothes, Levi’s and a loose blouse, dressed maybe too young for her age. Her hair was graying faintly and the expression on her face was? poignant, Laura thought, a mixture of bewilderment and longing. This woman, she thought, must have lost her way somehow.
But then Laura took a second step into the room —and so did the woman—and she realized that the far wall was in fact a mirror and that this sad middle-aged person was herself.
Her knees felt suddenly weak. Not me! she thought. That’s not me, I’m not like that at all! I’m the pretty one, she thought—and, incidentally, what am I doing here, and where is everybody? Where was Karen, where was Michael?
She wanted to turn away but could not. Instead she took another step forward (and so did that sad bewildered reflection) and she turned and saw—to her horror—that the side walls were mirrored, too, and facing each other at a canted angle, so that there were suddenly more images of herself than she could tolerate, an infinity of them, multiplied down dark mirrored aisles, all of them staring back at her with this same dumbfounded expression. Not me, she thought again, none of them are me, and she raised her hands as if to push them away, as if they were physical bodies crowding in around her. She wanted to leave… but she was, mysteriously, too weak to move; the door was. too far away. They can’t keep us here, she thought, and groped for a secret way out, a route back to San Francisco and the sunlight, a hidden door or private window.
But there were none. No doors or windows or angles here. Only the mirrors, like wells, drawing her down. She felt a surge of claustrophobic terror and saw the mirror-woman staring back at her wide-eyed, mouth opening in a scream; realizing all at once that she was trapped, that there was no way out and nobody here but herself.
3
Cardinal Palestrina joined Carl Neumann in his office in the Defense Research Institute. The room was crowded. There was a man Cardinal Palestrina identified as a Pentagon bureaucrat—Neumann’s superior. There were three of the Institute’s seers, dwarfish creatures in cheap cotton smocks. There were two of the men Neumann called scientists, whom Palestrina preferred to think of as mages: the men who had cast the binding spells.
The sense of excitement in the room was palpable. It showed, especially, in Neumann. This was his I triumph, the gratification he had deferred for too many decades. His face was flushed; his eyes darted around the room as if he were memorizing it, every detail of this day, the people present, their expressions. He looked at Palestrina and then approached him.
Palestrina said, “The boy is here already?”
“We’ve had him in containment for hours.” Neumann grinned. “And the boy seems to have attracted the others. Bees to honey. It’s all coming together.”
“When can we see him?”
“Soon. We’re waiting here until everything is in place. We have spells and geases twenty years in the making—and they’re all coming to a peak, right here, right now. God, you can feel it in the air.”
Cardinal Palestrina imagined he could. The air smelled odd, as if it had been singed in some vast, hot machine.
Neumann said, “We’re just waiting for word from our seers.”
The seers—the three dwarfish beings, who from the knotted closeness of their features must have been homunculi—sat staring into space. There was one for each of the three, Neumann said, Karen and Laura and Michael, each one linked in tandem to its subject. One of the creatures yawned and stretched as Cardinal Palestrina watched, and the gesture was so animalistic—so simian—that Palestrina suppressed a shudder.
The homunculus grinned at him from across the room, an animal grin.
Palestrina said to Neumann, “But can you hold them?”
“We’re certain of it. This building is a cage—it’s been designed that way. Since that original escape we’ve contemplated the problem and designed what we believe is an impenetrable barrier. You understand, not a physical barrier.”
“Prison magic,” Palestrina said.
“Exactly.”
“Can you calculate that so precisely?” “We believe so.”
“It’s been said—please don’t take this the wrong way—the Americans have a genius for the profane sciences.”
Neumann was in a generous mood. “But it’s true,” he said. “Look around.”
Cardinal Palestrina drew a second cup of coffee from the urn in the corner. Too much would aggravate his stomach, but he felt he needed the alertness. So much was happening here.
Good things, presumably. After all, Palestrina thought, Neumann’s arguments were hard to dismiss. His amorality was unmistakable, but the American understood the significance of events in the Middle East. A weapon is a weapon, after all. Death, deceit, ravaged innocence: wasn’t that what warfare meant? Cardinal Palestrina had been dispatched by the Vatican to evaluate Neumann’s secret weapon and its utility in war. Also its position in the moral order… but maybe that was finally irrelevant, a luxury the West could ill afford. Is a sword more humane than a bullet, a bullet more godly than a bomb? The news from Sicily was very bad; bad enough, perhaps, to overrule a delicacy concerning means.
But it was impossible to look at these grinning homunculi and white-coated mages without at least a shiver of disquiet.
He found Neumann and said, “Assuming you keep these people… can you guarantee their utility?”
Neumann seemed to resent the distraction. “They can be revised into utility.”
These words, Palestrina thought. These cool, blank, terrifying words. Revised! “You mean surgery.”
“It’s delicate, obviously, but we’re more sophisticated than we were when we intervened with Walker. This is a faculty of the imagination we’re trying to capture. It’s like some fabulous rare butterfly. The trick is to contain it without killing or crippling it. Fortunately there are certain neural functions that can be localized, at least generally. With the right scalpel in the right place you can sever the will from the imagination, cauterize the one without destroying the other. We can make them work for us.”
“But it’s the boy you need… not the others.”
Neumann looked at his watch. “What do you want me to say?”
“Tell me the truth.”
Palestrina was surprised by the tenor of authority in his own voice.
Neumann said, “This is not a confessional.”
“You’ll operate on them—you’ll fine-tune your surgical procedures.” (He thought, I know these words, too.) “You’ll mutilate them and then use them or kill them, as it suits you.”
Neumann said, “This tone of yours—look, I don’t appreciate—” He stopped and recovered his composure. Cardinal Palestrina felt something of his own power here: legate from Rome, the ancient Imperium, Old Europe and all that implied. Neumann took a breath and began again: “These are moot questions, Your Eminence, or ought to be. In this kind of enterprise a certain amount of cruelty is built in. We all know that.”