Jesse knows better than to argue. He says, “I’m sorry.”
And then he is on the floor, his ears ringing and his vision uncertain. Roscoe has clubbed him with one of his big fists, and Jesse didn’t even see it coming.
“Remember me,” Roscoe says.
Jesse will. But what he will remember even more acutely is the casual way Roscoe Candy strides to the door, and the way Jesse’s father bows his head and opens it for him.
* * *
Jesse woke from the dream sweating.
It wasn’t a dream so much as a memory—a memory enacted in the theater of his mind as if it were one of those moving pictures Ms. Baumgartner was so proud of. All of it had happened almost exactly as he had dreamed it. It was a memory refusing to be forgotten.
Just like the other dream. The one that always made him scream.
He glanced around the darkened room, still groggy. This wasn’t his old dormitory room in Tower Two, it was his new room in Tower One—only slightly different, the bathroom door here instead of there, the closet to the left rather than the right. Disorienting. For a split second he thought Elizabeth might be standing over his bed, as she had stood over him in their hotel room in Futurity Station. But of course she wasn’t. It was a silly thought.
He put his head into the pillow and slept dreamlessly until morning. There was no sunlight in this windowless room to mark the dawn, only the insect buzz of the electrical alarm, followed by another buzz from his paging device: Barton, telling Jesse to come to his office ASAP.
* * *
Jesse arrived just behind Elizabeth. Barton was waiting inside, and so was August Kemp himself.
Kemp was smiling, so the news would likely not be bad. Jesse reminded himself again that Kemp was a powerful businessman, though he lacked what Jesse thought of as a tycoon’s demeanor. He wore blue jeans and a shirt without a tie, and he addressed his employees as if they were his social equals. But the future people often behaved that way. To Jesse they seemed like children who had grown up without ever learning how to comport themselves as adults. But appearances were deceptive. Power was power, whether or not it wore a tie.
Barton said, “There have been some developments in the investigation and we’d like to bring you up to speed.”
Kemp seemed to find this declaration too abrupt. “Actually,” he said, leaning against the plate-glass window with his hands in his pockets and a God’s-eye view of the Illinois prairie at his back, “we want to thank you for your hard work. You were absolutely essential to our success here. Great job, both of you.”
Barton said, “Here’s where we stand. Jesse, you sent us Doris Vanderkamp, who was hugely helpful. Doris admits she acted as a go-between for Isaac Connaught and Mick Finagle. She gave us Finagle, and when we called in Finagle he broke down and basically told us everything. The contraband has been coming through the Mirror concealed in shipments to the theatrical division. Baumgartner turned a blind eye in exchange for regular deliveries of cocaine from the pharmacy at Futurity Station, supplied by Connaught. The contraband itself was mostly personal electronics and solar chargers, but it included some weapons. That’s how a lunatic came to make an attempt on Grant’s life with an automatic pistol. As for the shooter, Grant’s people don’t want the event publicized—we turned Stedmann over to a U.S. marshal and a couple of Pinkerton men, to dispose of as they see fit. All that’s left is making sure none of this ever happens again. Questions about any of that?”
“About Doris,” Jesse said. “I told her she wouldn’t be fired.”
“We sent her to the City clinic for detox. There’ll be follow-up testing, of course, but if she can stay clean, she can keep her job.”
“Thank you,” Jesse said.
“Anything else?”
“What about the rest of the contraband weapons?” Jesse couldn’t help thinking of the bag of Glocks he had lugged out of Onslow’s back room. “Apart from would-be assassins, who’s buying them?”
“We’re looking into that,” Kemp said. “But now, today, this morning, we’re taking one of the ringleaders into custody, and we thought you and Elizabeth ought to be present.”
Jesse said, “Where do we find this miscreant?”
“He works at the Mirror,” Kemp said
* * *
In the corridor connecting Tower One and Tower Two there was an elevator operated by a red-and-yellow-striped card reader: for employees of Jesse’s status that meant NO ADMITTANCE. August Kemp, on the other hand, owned an all-pass card: The doors slid open for him as if operated by invisible servants. Jesse followed Elizabeth inside, where there were only three choices on the elevator’s push-button array: MIRROR LEVEL ONE, MIRROR LEVEL TWO, MIRROR LEVEL THREE.
Kemp pushed ONE. “I assume,” he said, “you two have had the standard employee briefing about how the Mirror works.”
“For what it’s worth,” Elizabeth said.
Kemp smiled. “I don’t understand it, either. Maybe no one does. No one but the physicists, and they seem to have trouble explaining it in English. But if you have any questions, I’ll try to answer them.”
After a long descent, the elevator slowed. The door opened on a vast space.
Jesse’s father had once taught him a trick: if something confuses you, imagine describing it to a five-year-old. Jesse pictured Phoebe as a child, the quizzical expression she had so often worn. What’s the Mirror chamber look like?
Well, he imagined telling her, it’s deep under the ground, for one thing. Like a cave or a coal mine. So it has no windows. But it’s not cramped or close or crude like a coal mine. Picture a room as big as two or three cathedrals and square as a box, bathed in artificial light. And clean—cleaner than a rich woman’s kitchen, despite the constant work that obviously goes on here. The floor is crowded with machines made for lifting and carrying and for less comprehensible functions. The men tending the machines wear white cotton pants and shirts, as if they’re about to whitewash a barn, and badges to identify them. The room has four walls, but one of them consists almost entirely of what they call the Mirror. Because it really does look just like a mirror. A mirror in the shape of a half circle, ten stories tall.
“It reflects the light,” Jesse said, an observation that sounded simple-minded, but he was startled by the effect, as if the already enormous chamber of the Mirror were twice its actual volume.
“It doesn’t always,” Kemp said. “It’s transparent when anything’s passing through, reflective when we maintain it at minimal power. There’s a scientific explanation—something to do with the energy gradient between conjoined universes—photons bounce right off the interface, apparently.”
“Thank you,” Jesse said, not that Kemp’s words meant anything to him. “And the future’s on the other side?”
“In a manner of speaking. The Mirror bridges a distance of approximately one hundred and forty-five eigenstate-years through ontological Hilbert space. What’s on the other side eventuated from a world identical to yours, but it’s not your future.”
Whatever else it might be, Jesse thought, the land beyond the Mirror was Elizabeth’s home. The place she would go when she returned to her jailed husband and her daughter. A mere one hundred and forty-five eigenstate-years from here, as the crow flies.
The room is so huge it does peculiar things to sound, he imagined telling Phoebe. Voices and machine noises seem small and far away. But there’s a hum under all those other sounds, soft but powerful, like the drone of a gigantic bumblebee. The air smells of metal, the way a copper kettle smells if it’s been left out in the sun.
“What’s important,” Kemp said, “isn’t what makes the Mirror work but what it does. The use we put it to. That’s what I’m proud of. I was on the other side when we opened it for the first time. And it didn’t open onto this room, I can tell you that. It opened onto pure black Illinois earth. Ancient silt and glacial till. Groundwater came pouring out. So the first thing we did was dig. We tunneled out a foundation for the entire resort, pumped it dry, stabilized it, began to build on it. Jesse, you were among the first local people to show up on our doorstep. But by then most of the work had already been done. Our people had already gone out to establish our claim to the land, to buy the property we needed to buy—to bribe the people we needed to bribe, where there was no other choice. How the Mirror works is a mystery to me. But what we built around it, that’s what I understand. That’s what I’m proud of. And that’s why it pisses me off when some asshole decides he can walk all over me just because he wants to sell iPhones to the locals.”