We passed through gingerly-like a bunch of cats on snow-and emerged into another cave. Silvery light poured down onto us from somewhere up a gently sloping passage.
I hesitated a moment, then climbed up and into the light with Mary beside me. A cold wind slashed through my wet jeans and sucked the air out of my lungs. Tiny ice crystals brushed my face and swirled in little eddies over the ground. Visibility was poor, but in the murky distance I could see that we were surrounded by a group of hillocks.
The others emerged behind us and stood gazing about. “I’m confused,” I admitted. “These can’t be the Adena mounds.”
“Blue Mounds,” said Kevin. “About twenty miles southwest of Madison, Wisconsin.”
“Madison? Damn.” Colleen was obviously impressed.
“So, have I been productive enough?” Goldie asked me.
I opened my mouth to answer, then realized Magritte had come through the portal with us and was treading air near Goldie. The chill wind moved into my heart. “Should she be out here?” I asked him.
Goldie’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “She has to come out here, Cal. She doesn’t have a choice.”
I watched the expression on Magritte’s face as she glided a little farther from the mouth of the cave, was aware that Goldie’s eyes were on her, too. “Do you feel… anything?” I asked. “Hear anything?”
She nodded. “I hear it-the Storm. Like far-off wind.” “Does it hear you?”
“Maybe not yet, but it will.”
Goldie took a step closer to her and for a moment they seemed to be enveloped in a veil of light. I’d seen the effect before, and thought Magritte’s aura had simply expanded to take in Goldie. Now my imagination tried to tell me that Goldie had a faint aura of his own.
“Right now we’re in a sacred place,” said Kevin. “There’s power here. Outside…” He shrugged and fingered the flute.
“Let’s go back into the cave,” said Goldie. “I’m freezing my ass off out here.” He turned back, Magritte moving in unison with him. The aqua-gold halo remained intact.
Back in the comparative warmth of the cavern, Goldie stepped us through his trail of discovery. “It hit me the day the Storm got in-at the waterwheel. Kev’s music allowed me to see the … the patterns of power around the water. When I touched the flute, I could see the same patterns around other objects. Even after he stopped playing, I could see them just by touching the flute. I realized the same thing happened, to one degree or another, whenever I picked up one of Kevin’s or Delmar’s ceremonial artifacts.”
“Transference,” I said. “You talked about that when we were trying to figure out Enid’s contract.”
He pulled my Parker out of his jacket pocket and clicked it. “This,” he said, “is how we figured out where that portal ends up. Transference. You have this little thing going with maps. Kevin can see portals. In fact, he found this portal himself. I sat him down in front of it with a map and this pen. It was kind of like dowsing. The transference allowed him to sense where on the map this puppy opened up.”
“We transferred the ability to open portals the same way,” Kevin said. “Goldie learned to play my flute well enough to-how to describe it-endow a tune and then the flute itself with-well, ‘Goldieness,’ I guess you’d call it.”
Colleen snorted.
“Hey, don’t laugh,” said Goldie. “It works. Like I’ve always said, a little Goldie goes a long way. It took a lot of woodshedding, but I got to where I could play the portal open with Kev’s flute. Then he took over and worked until he could play it open.”
“I thought you couldn’t do sound,” I said.
“Ah!” he raised a finger. “True. I can’t do sound. But I could visualize the notes. I converted them into light.” He laughed. “I can convert music to photons! They couldn’t even do that on Star Trek. All they could do was make Tachyon fields.”
“Yeah,” said Colleen, “but at least their Tachyon fields always work.”
I shot Colleen a glance. Don’t step on him. Not now. “You said you used a map,” I said to Goldie. “You still have it?”
Goldie pulled it out of his jacket pocket and handed to me. I unfolded it, found the Blue Mounds, and traced the path southeast toward Chicago. I looked up at the others.
“Thanks, Kevin. This little discovery is going to cut our trip just about in half.”
It should have been the best sleep I’d had for weeks. We were moving on, after all. Together. With a real chance of finding the Source, and a means of protecting Tina from it and bringing her to a place she could be safe. There was even a chance we could do more than that with Enid’s ability.
During daylight hours I did a pretty decent impersonation of a man who’d come to accept all the weirdness. But at night, when no one was looking, I could easily imagine that a team of gerbils went into full throttle in my head, their little wheels spinning madly until they exhausted themselves.
This was the stuff of which dreams were made.
Pause, rewind, replay. The gerbils reeled out half-waking dreams of sequined portals with musical keys, sonic shields run by wind chime batteries, and legal jargon that resulted in toxic songs. Goldie saw “patterns of power” when Kevin played his flute. Richard Dreyfus looked at a pile of mashed potatoes and said, “This is important.”
I thought about flares.
I wasn’t sure-I couldn’t be sure-but I suspected that what the Source wanted flares for was power. What was it Magritte had said: it used them up, bit by bit.
The way a flashlight uses up batteries.
The gerbils chugged along, trying to carry me toward an epiphany while I strained toward sleep and mumbled, “I don’t get it.”
The Quran, so Goldie tells me, records how Muhammad received his revelation from God through the archangel Gabriel. The angel visited the Prophet-to-be in his cave on Mount Hira, held out a book and said, “Read.” Muhammad, being illiterate, could not read, and told Gabriel as much. Three times Gabriel commanded Muhammad to read, and three times, the Prophet said, “I cannot.” Then, miraculously, he read. He got it.
There was no commanding angel in my dream; there was only Kevin Elk Sings, failing to play a dam and succeeding in playing a key. There was no gleaming holy book; only a contract that slithered with tweaked legalese. There was no nation-building Prophet; only a Manhattan Pharisee, doggedly trying to read-to “get it.”
It took me more than three tries, to be honest, but as I dipped into an exhausted sleep, I had read a word. And the word was “analogues.”
All of the warped abilities with their strange new connections were analogues for the things the Change had voided. They were machineries. They didn’t work exactly as the old machineries had, but they worked in a parallel fashion. While material physics no longer applied, we now had a new physics-a physics of imagination.
In the old physics, there were laws. If you knew how to apply them, you could make things happen-internal combustion, electricity, nuclear fission. I was willing to bet the new physics had laws, too. The trick was in application.
Albert Einstein had been a prodigy of the old physics. Somewhere between here and our final destination, we had to become prodigies of the new.
FIFTEEN
DOC
Wind. An arctic wind, full of rain that could quickly turn to ice. That was the substance of our world. It blew horizontal to the ground, stinging as if made of microscopic shards of glass. I was transported to the Russian hinterland and knew not even an atom of homesickness.
The low tent in which we spent our nights shuddered like a drunkard forced to sobriety, fabric popping loudly enough to wake a deaf man. But not Goldie. And, as if to challenge the wind, Goldie snored.