In other words, it was possible to contemplate the technology of becoming a god.
Stern thought it had already been done. The Turkish fragment was the result of an effort, perhaps, to connect two branches of the World Tree. These ghosts (they moved through Howard and around him with clockwork regularity) might be its makers. Mortal gods. Demiurges. Archons, but trapped: chained to this vortex of creation.
Here at the center of the building the ruins were more chaotic. Howard climbed a bank of broken brick and tile. He was dizzy, or perhaps the world really was spinning around this axis. He fixed his eyes rigidly ahead. Everything he saw seemed to swarm with iridescence.
Blackened walls rose above him like broken teeth. He passed markers and signs, some words still faintly legible: WARNING and AUTHORIZATION and FORBIDDEN.
The core of the building had been a containment unit surrounded by two layers of reinforced steel. This was the matrix into which all the cabling and conduits had run; this was where Stern had focused immense energies on the fragment, particle beams hotter than the surface of the sun.
The containing walls had been breached, but sections were still standing. Everything else—debris, dust; shrapnel—had been scoured away by the explosion. The containment unit stood alone in a sort of black slag crater within the larger ruins of the laboratory building. Howard stepped into that circle, reached the tattered containment room, felt a new wash of terrible heat as he moved through air thick with ghosts and stars, to the crenellated walls, through a vacancy that had once been a doorway, and inside, to the heart of the world: axis mundi.
Inside, Stern was waiting for him.
It was Stern, even though it was not human any longer.
He must have been here when the fragment was bombarded with energy—closer than he should have been, by design or by accident.
The fragment had become an egg of blue-green phosphorescence. It was perhaps twenty feet in diameter, or seemed to be—appearances, Howard knew, were immensely deceptive. It was hot and vividly alive. It looked as fragile as a bubble but much more menacing, a bubble of spun glass containing the substance of a thousand stars.
It was patently radioactive and Howard assumed it had already killed him. No matter what happened here—even if a miracle happened here—he would not live longer than another few hours.
Alan Stern stood outside the sphere. He was touching it.
Howard knew this was Stern, although there was not much left of him. In some sense Stern probably was dead; some incomprehensible event or process had preserved only a fraction of him here: his mind, but not much of his body. What Howard saw against the glare of the sphere was a body as translucent as a jellyfish. The nervous system—the brain and bundles of nerves—pulsed with a strange luminosity. Stern’s arms touched the sphere and seemed to merge with it, and so did a dozen other limblike projections that had grown into and from his body, fixing him in place like the roots of a tree.
Stern’s presence was more nebulous; it enveloped Howard and seemed to speak to him. Howard sensed a terrible stasis, an entrapment, a speechless fear. If the sphere was a doorway, Stern was powerless to pass through it and couldn’t retreat. He was caught between flesh and spirit.
He turned his head—a fleshless bulb in which even the skull was only a dim shadow—and, somehow, eyeless, looked at Howard. He was pleading for help.
Howard hesitated for a time he couldn’t count or calculate.
All his speculation, and all of Stern’s, had circled around a truth: that the object in this room was a passage between worlds—or even a means of creating a world. The idea seemed to flow from the object itself. Wordlessly, the sphere announced its nature.
But if that was so, the only way he could help Stern (this thing, this tortured essence of Stern) was to step into that doorway, perhaps to open it wider. To succeed where Stern had failed.
And how could he do that? Stern was the genius—not Howard. Stern had revised and elaborated the work of Hawking and Guth and Linde. Howard had barely understood them.
Stern was the wizard. Howard was only an apprentice.
The intangible bodies of the ghosts pressed closer around him now, as if the question interested them. Howard took a dizzy breath. The air was blisteringly hot.
The memory that came to him was of his mother at the kitchen sink washing dishes while Howard dried. Years ago. How old was he? Fifteen, sixteen. Better days.
Stern had just accepted the Nobel prize—his picture had been on television—and Howard was babbling about how great it was to know this man, this genius.
His mother rinsed the last porcelain dish and began to drain the soapy water. “Alan is smart all right. But he’s also … I don’t know a word for it.” She frowned. “For him, everything was always a puzzle. A trick. Show him a stone, he could tell you what it was made of and how it came to be at your feet, or how its atoms worked or what it would weigh on Mars. But just to pick it up? To look at it, to hold it in his hand, to feel it? Never. It was beneath him. It was a distraction. Worse, an illusion.” She shook her head. “He understands the world, Howard, but I will tell you this: he does not love it.”
Contemptus mundi: contempt for the world and the things of the world. When Howard read the words in an undergraduate philosophy text, he thought immediately of Stern.
He hesitated, but there was nothing to turn back to; only the Proctors, their terror, a fiery wasteland. He was surprised the detonation hadn’t come sooner.
The entity that had been Stern regarded him with a pain as tangible as this awful heat.
Howard put out his hand. The skin of it pulsed with new veins of light.
Now the light was all around him, a sudden presence of it.
A world of light.
The bomb, Howard thought.
Sophia wept, and was in pain, because she had been abandoned alone in the darkness and void; but when she thought of the light that had abandoned her, she took comfort, and she laughed.
A field of fire.
He touched something. Everything. He held it in his hands, a stone.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Ellen Stockton cried when she saw Clifford running for the car. The cold air had made her sober; she knew how unlikely this reunion was. She opened the door for him and he ran into her arms.
Dex stood outside with Linneth. She looked at him as if awaiting some verdict. He said, “Fifteen minutes—if the countdown can be trusted.” He lowered his voice so the boy and his mother wouldn’t hear. “We’re too far east. These roads, the snow … we can’t make the town limits in that time, much less a safe perimeter.”
Linneth was almost ethereally calm. “I agree. Is there anything else we can do?”
“Drive and hope for a miracle.”
“The Proctors won’t delay this explosion. Not if they have a choice. Too much has gone wrong already.”
“Drive and pray,” Dex said, “or else—”
“What?”
“I keep thinking about Howard. You remember what he said? The only way out is in.’ ”