Jongleur plunged himself back into his house system, opening a link to the network. A long moment of terrified waiting passed, but the Other's autonomic security routines allowed him his rightful access. He reached for the controls that would trigger the Grail process and bring his sleeping virtual double to life—a Felix Jongleur who would live forever, whatever happened to his flesh, the Felix Jongleur he would awaken into, refreshed and immortal, as though death were an afternoon nap.
The gray light faded. The darkness came.
He did not understand. He had done nothing yet. The Grail process was still coming on line, had not been activated. Why was the space around him turning black?
The darkness slowly took on shape—long, low, and sealed in secrecy. Felix Jongleur stared, dumbfounded. Somehow, without his ordering it, he had been drawn into his own Egyptian simulation—for surely that was Set's coffin. But where was the rest of the temple? Why was all in shadow?
A red line gleamed along the edge of the sarcophagus. Jongleur found himself being drawn forward. He searched desperately for the override commands, but was as helpless as in a nightmare. The line of fire became wider. The lid was opening. There was someone inside.
The man sat up, his black suit almost invisible against the shadows inside the sarcophagus. His bleached face glowed like a candle beneath his black stovepipe hat as he smiled and stretched out his pale ancient hands.
Terror gripped Felix Jongleur, squeezed him, crushed him. The staring eyes burned into his, scorched his thoughts to cinders but Jongleur could not look away. He tried to scream but his throat was locked shut, his pulse racing so swiftly that no chemical could slow it; no machine could regulate it.
"I'm coming for you." Mister Jingo's tombstone grin grew wider and wider until it seemed to swallow everything. "I've finally come. Riding the sky." He opened his mouth wide to reveal the blackness behind the teeth. The new star burned in that blackness, streaming flame, growing larger and brighter as it hurtled toward him like the headlight of an approaching train.
"Here I come, Felix," said Mister Jingo.
That smile. Jongleur's heart suffered, lurched. That empty, fiery smile. . . !
"I caught you at last."
And then, in the shadows and silence where only electrons moved, the old man finally screamed. It went rattling out into the vacancies that lay behind moments, fading but not dying, echoing on and on through that place where even Time itself did not rule.
The star sped down the sky toward her, a streak of fire like the hands of a midnight clock.
Olga did not even turn to watch the fat man and the thin one as they ran shrieking toward the elevator. The plummeting satellite was growing larger every moment; it now filled the sky beyond the opened roof like a blazing eye. She could feel her son in her mind, close as her own heartbeat. The flames were all around him now, and even though it was his own hand that had broken the bough and thrown down the cradle, his fear was terrible.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a curl of laminated paper.
"I'm here, Daniel." She stared at the hospital bracelet for a moment, then closed her eyes. "I'm here with you."
And then she could feel him, truly feel him, as though he were in her arms not just her mind—the way it should have been. She pulled him close and comforted him.
A few meters behind her, in another universe, the elevator had arrived. The door opened halfway, then stopped. The fat man and the thin man grunted and tore at each other as they both tried to force their way in. The fat one squeezed the thin one's throat. The thin man sank his teeth into the other's hand and scratched bloody runnels down his naked belly with his fingers and toes.
In a place behind her eyes, in a time out of time, Olga held her son. The light of the falling star blazed down on her, brighter by the moment. Alarms wailed from every wall, unwanted voices yammered in her ear, and the two men squealed in pain as they fought before the elevator, but she heard only one thing.
"Sshhh," she told him. "Don't cry. Mama is here."
Ramsey shouted her name, over and over, but Olga Pirofsky did not reply.
He could see her in the visual window Sellars had opened. Considering the circumstances, she looked strangely calm as she stared out at the night through the skylight Beezle had opened, but the two naked men who had chased her now seemed to be fighting to the death in front of the elevator. Things weren't exactly making sense.
He called Sellars, but got no answer there either.
"Beezle, what the hell is going on? Sellars said we had only a few minutes to get her out, but she won't come—won't even answer me. She must be out of time by now. Is security on the way yet?"
"Not security." Even for a piece of gear, Beezle sounded strange. "But something is."
A new view flashed open on Ramsey's screen. He stared at it for a stunned moment, then let the pad slide from his lap. He stumbled to the window of his room, fumbled for a helpless moment with the shade, then ripped it loose and threw it on the floor so he could see out the window.
"Oh, sweet Jesus," he murmured. "Sorensen! Get everyone down on the floor!"
He heard a clamor from the next room, thumping, Major Sorensen's voice shouting, but he could not tear his eyes from the sky. A new star shone in the Louisiana night, a star that burned more brightly than any others in the sky and which was growing larger every second.
As the streak of flame shot past overhead, smaller lines of light leaped up from the darkness in the distance, from the island in Lake Borgne.
Must be automatic defenses, he thought distractedly. Missiles. Everyone else is off the island. Almost everyone.
Oh, shit, he thought. Why, Olga?
The smaller lines leaped up toward the streaking star. Two of them swept past without contact, then faded into the endless night sky, but one struck the burning thing. Bits of fire spun away, backward and down, but the core had only been diminished, not destroyed. It swept on toward the horizon, sinking, and then Ramsey could not see it as it passed beyond the buildings and the great dark ruck of the swamps.
Silence. The night, undisturbed. Catur Ramsey let out half a breath.
A dazzling flash blanked the sky like sheet lightning. A pillar of fire climbed swirling up from the middle of the dark lake. Ramsey gaped as it boiled toward the clouds, God's own barber pole made of solid flame, rolling, billowing, its harsh light turning the city and swamp flat electric white. He threw himself backward, rolled across the couch and onto the floor just as a crash like the end of the world smashed the glass out of the hotel windows.
When he climbed to his feet half a minute later his ears were ringing painfully. He crunched through broken shards to the window and stood with the Gulf air cool and wet on his face. The pillar of living flame had shrunk a little, but still seemed tall enough to scorch the underside of Heaven.
CHAPTER 48
Unreal Bodies
NETFEED/NEWS: ANVAC Unveils The Doctor
(visuaclass="underline" test subjects in convulsion)
VO: ANVAC Corporation today announced what it calls the new benchmark in crowd control—a product nicknamed "Doctor Fell." The heart of the device premiered at the International Security Exposition, whose official name is Mob Disruption Field Electronics Launcher (hence the nickname, MD FEL) is a device that fires a fist-sized projectile that blankets an area of several hundred square meters with a finely tuned electromagnetic field. Anyone within range who is not wearing a field inhibitor, which ANVAC supplies as part of the package, loses all body control and, frequently, consciousness as well. ANVAC claims that Doctor Fell is "a huge step forward in the control of dangerous humanity. . . ."