“They do. They have to.” It was his vanity at stake now. “You’ll see. You just don’t know them. You—”
“I know they’re capable of this.” This room, she meant; their imprisonment. “They don’t care about you!” Scornful now. Chiding him. “It was only Michael they ever wanted.”
“You pretend to know,” Tim said. “You don’t know a fucking thing.”
He was not patient anymore.
“And now they have him,” Laura pressed, “and what do you matter? You’re nothing. Last year’s | model.”
“All of us,” Tim said hotly, “they want all of us. He’s no different. Why is he special? He’s just like the rest of us.”
He waved dismissively at Michael, who was sitting in a chair, impassive, watching. Michael had been impassive for most of the last three days. The spell, Karen thought. It had this effect on all of them.
But now he stood up. He looked at Tim across the room and Karen noticed for the first time that they were approximately the same size: Michael was as tall as his uncle. For a moment he seemed somehow taller.
Tim—startled for the second time today—fixed his gaze on his nephew.
Michael glared back.
“You’re wrong,” he said. “I am different.” And what was that flashing on Tim’s face now? Karen wondered. Was it fear? Was that possible? The air filled with sudden electricity.
4
Cardinal Palestrina was with Neumann in his office when the homunculus burst through the door. The creature leaped onto Neumann’s desk and whispered something in his ear. With a mixture of fascination and loathing, Palestrina watched the creature’s apelike features contort. But this was nothing like a smile.
Cardinal Palestrina had been finalizing the report he would present to the Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs. He had decided—reluctantly—that his finding would be positive; that he would suggest a joint European-American research effort involving the otherworldly child; that the strategic possibilities outweighed the ethical considerations. He would present his report to the consulate tomorrow and it would be forwarded by Marconi to the Vatican. Everything else would follow. Neumann would have his money, his prestige; in time, his ghostly armies.
But Carl Neumann stood up suddenly and his fists were clenched and his lips were taut; and Cardinal Palestrina thought, What is this? My God—what now?
“Something unforeseen,” Neumann said tightly, “is happening at the cell.”
Chapter Twenty-three
Tim was wrong, Michael thought. It is me they want. He had thought about this over the last few days— tentatively, ploddingly, under the blanketing influence of the prison magic. And he had come to some conclusions.
If they want me, he thought, it’s because I’m different.
Laura had said as much, standing on the windy bluffs above Turquoise Beach. It’s more than I could lever do, she had said.
And he remembered the way he used to feel, the electricity raging up out of the earth, the vortex of time and place and possibility, and the way he had held it in his hands.
They want that, he thought.
But it was a new thing—this power. They had anticipated it, but maybe they didn’t understand it.
And he let that idea lie fallow for a time.
Later he thought, How do you build a cage for an animal you’ve never seen?
It was an interesting question.
Well, you build according to what you know. Michael’s grandparents—his natural grandparents—had once escaped a place like this. Tim had said so and there was no reason to disbelieve him, at least about this. So this room must be a bigger, stronger cage; they must have fortified their spells and their magic. But, still, wasn’t that like building a wolf trap when you set out to trap a tiger? He thought, Hey, they don’t know me.
But it begged the question: How strong am I really?
He was new to his talent. It was not something he had much practiced. He felt the imprisoning magics around him like physical bonds, and he experimented, one night, fighting against them, exerting a counter-force.
But it was fruitless. Nothing yielded. He was alone and empty and all the countless doors of time and possibility had been brutally slammed shut.
So maybe he wasn’t such a tiger after all.
He put all this out of his mind for a time. He slept, and when he woke he tried not to think about anything at all.
It was easy enough. The confining spells made it easy.
But then another thought drifted into his mind, not a thought so much as a daydream: it was the world he had envisioned at the Fauves’ house in Polger Valley, and often since then.
Thinking about it made him feel better. It was a place, Michael felt certain, without prisons like this one.
He allowed himself to dream about it.
He drifted on the edge of sleep. It was a place and a daydream both. It was everything he felt when Laura talked longingly about “a better world.” Maybe it was the kind of place she had been looking for when she found Turquoise Beach, a world she had reached for but could not grasp. And Michael discovered that he knew things about this world. He knew about the highways stretching from the watery French villes of the South up to the big northern cities of Tecumseh and New Amsterdam and Montreal. He knew about the rail lines running west across the prairies, the grain towns and Indian towns and cold switching-yard towns like Brebeuf and Riel. He knew about the Russian towns of the Northwest coast, where people still trapped for furs in winter. He knew about the Incan and Spanish cities of the Southwest, their freeways and temples and bright clothes and odd, raucous holidays. He knew that all this was called simply America and that it was not a country so much as a loose confederation, a kind of commonwealth. He knew that borders didn’t matter much in this world. He knew that you could travel from Quebec to Coquitlam or Shelekhov to Cuernavaca without showing a passport. He knew that the market streets were rich with common goods, that any able-bodied individual could find a job in the cities, that the harvest had been bountiful this year.
But he knew this world best by its landscapes: geographies teased out of the air, as faint and unmistakable as the smell of rain. Salt marshes still in calm, empty southern noons; icy northern midnights bathed in radiant aurora glow. He had occupied these places in his dreams, walked these streets in his sleep. There was an affinity—an attraction. He thought, A homing instinct.
He knew all this as effortlessly as he knew his own name. He knew, moreover, that he could make himself a life in this place… that it was a place you could live without the quotidian threat of nuclear annihilation or imminent war, the daily roulette of robbery and violence.
A place where the Novus Ordo couldn’t reach him.
A place where he would not be a freak.
And oddly it was this daydream—and not any struggling against his bonds—that made him feel suddenly freer, that opened his horizons for a tantalizing moment. He blinked and thought, This is what makes me different: this is what they didn’t expect.
But then the walls and the ceilings closed around him and he was back in this room, which was only a room, and which contained him.
He stood up when he heard Tim talking about him. “You’re wrong,” he said. “I am different.” And he understood by the expression on Tim’s face that he had said something important.