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Wilson’s grateful for time alone. He needs to think and to augment thought he orders up another shot of IQ. He considers adding a jolt of God’n Country, but decides that the interests of the United States of America may well be in conflict with the interests of his own survival, that—indeed—they have always been so and he has, until now, allowed them preeminence. He’s done his duty, and he’s way past the regulation limit for IQ—his heart doesn’t need any more stress. The drug puts up blinders around his brain, prevents thoughts of home and comfort from seeping in, and he concentrates on the matter at hand. Where are they? What did this? That’s the basic question. If he can understand what happened, maybe he can work out where they are. He references a scientific encyclopedia on his helmet screen, reads articles on quantum physics, not getting all of it, but enough to have a handle on what “changes on the quantum level” signifies. If the bomb caused such changes… Well, a bomb being an entirely unsubtle weapon, the changes it produced would not be discrete ones. A chaotic effect would be the most likely result. He looks up the word “chaos” and finds this definition:

A state of things in which chance is supreme; especially: the confused unorganized state of primordial matter before the creation of distinct forms.

The place they’re in, the cave, Paradise, whatever, could not, Wilson thinks, be described as disorganized, though the supremacy of chance may be a factor. What are the chances that they have not encountered anything in the cave other than things he’s heard about from either the villagers or Baxter? Distinct form has obviously been imposed on a chaotic circumstance. There must be some anthropomorphic element involved. What you get is what you see or, better said, what you expect to see. Since the villagers were the first witnesses, and since they’ve been expecting to see Paradise all their lives, when something inexplicable happened they imposed the form of the Garden of Allah, the metaphorical forms of the Qur’an, on primordial matter, and then spread the news so that anyone who came afterward would have this possibility in mind and thus be capable of expecting the same things. The devils? Maybe half the village expected not Paradise, but hell—thus the two were jammed together in an unholy synthesis. Or maybe, like Baxter suggested, the villagers were holding back some vital details. This explanation satisfies Wilson. He feels he might poke a few holes in it if he did more IQ, but he’s confident the truth is something close to what he’s envisioned. The idea that there may be a congruent truth does not escape him. It’s conceivable the day of judgment, the day when hell is hauled up from beneath the earth, is at hand and that the bomb was the inciting event. None of this, however, helps him as he hoped it might. Knowing where he is has clarified the problem, but not the solution.

GRob stirs, stands, and comes to join him on the lip of the fountain. She unlatches her gauntlets and dips her bare hands into the water and splashes her face.

“Go on take a bath if you want,” Wilson says, grinning. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

She shoots him a diffident look. “Uh-huh.”

“Hey, I’ve seen your ass before.”

“That was training. You see it now, you might take it for license.”

The clear modulation of her voice and her use of the term “license” alert him. “You’re not on downs,” he says.

“I boosted IQ when I racked out. I wanted to work through this mess.”

“Yeah, same here.”

“You hit on anything?”

Wilson tells her his theory in brief and then asks what she came up with.

“We’re close,” she says, patting her face with damp hands. “But I don’t think this place has anything to with Paradise. I think it’s all hell.”

“How you figure?”

“Only things we’ve seen so far are flowers, the wolves, and a pearl with some blood on the door and nobody inside. Now maybe the pearl came from Paradise, but whatever dropped it, dropped it in hell. We find a door that leads out of it, it leads to the brass trees with the boiling fucking air.” With a flourish, she wipes her left hand dry on her thigh. “Hell.”

“Might be other doors.”

“Probably thousands, but I don’t get they’re gonna lead us anywhere good.” GRob cups her right hand, scoops up water and lets it dribble down her throat onto her chest. “Maybe you can reach Paradise from here, but I figure we might hafta pass through somewhere bad to get there. And even if we find it, what the fuck we supposed to do then? We’re infidels, man. We’re unbelievers.”

“You may be taking this all too literally.”

“Taking it metaphorically just makes you confused.” It seems she’s about to say more, but she falls silent, and Wilson says, “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t hold back now. You got something, let’s hear it.”

“Okay.” GRob dries her right hand. “Maybe it’s BS, but back in Tel Aviv I was doing a tech lieutenant. Guy’s always trying to impress me what a huge deal he was. Mr. I’ve-Got-A-Secret. He told me they were fixing up something special for Al Qaeda. A bomb. Didn’t know what kind, but he was working on the triggering device. Part of it was this big fucking electric battery produced seventy thousand volts. So when I saw him at the compound…”

“Fuck!” says Wilson.

“See what I’m saying? I saw him here, I remembered all that shit about hell and seventy thousand ropes. I said, Okay, maybe it’s a coincidence. Then when Baxman started running his mouth in the carrier, when he mentioned it, I was like, Aw, man! This is too weird, y’know.”

Wilson studies the back of his left gauntlet, the grain of the plastic forearm shield, his thoughts looping between poles of denial and despair.

“Seventy thousand’s such a weird number,” GRob says. “I thought it was like a special number for ragheads, so I did a search. Only time it’s mentioned is in relation to hell. Seventy thousand ropes. Seventy thousand volts. Some ol’ raghead mystic back in the day, he got the word wrong… or he received the message right and didn’t know what volts were, so he said, ‘ropes.’”

“Fuck,” says Wilson again—there seems little else to say.

“No doubt.” GRob hefts her rifle. “I say we blow a few holes in those brass trees. Clear a path. See what’s on the other side.”

“Might be a big goddamn forest,” Wilson says dubiously.

“Didn’t you read it? It’s not that big. And we got a lot of goddamn firepower. The other side of it reads infinite, but…” She shrugs. “What’s the option? We hang out here, live off battle juice and C rats? That sucks.”

“Baxter’ll come up with something.”

GRob snorts. “Forget him! Man’s sitting over there drooling into his food tube. I never heard anyone give an order like he gave us. Take downs in the middle of the shit? What’s that about?!”

“You were acting pretty crazy.”

“I saw a fifty-foot wolf that smelled like a dumpster eat my best fucking friend! If I was outa line, Baxter shoulda slapped me down. No way he shoulda told me to get druggy.”

“He’ll bounce back.”

“Oh, yeah. He just needs a nap. That’s whack, man! He was right for command, we’d have stopped five, ten minutes, then kept on burning. He’s over! You’n me, we gotta look to each other from now on.”

Baxter’s helmeted face, half-obscured by reflection, seems at peace. Asleep or on the nod, it’s no way to be in the midst of war. Wilson wants to ignore the idea that Baxter’s showing cracks, but he doesn’t dispute GRob’s last statement. “What’s Arizona like?” he asks.

“You live right next-door. Don’t you know?”