Just as surely as the fairy blood had changed Beltan, the journal–and the knowledge contained in its pages–had changed Deirdre. After reading it, she would never–could never–be the same person again. But who would she be, she had wondered, sitting alone in the hotel room? Instead of countless possibilities fluttering through her mind, she saw nothing. Nothing at all. The answer to that question would have to wait until what lay ahead of her was done, for good or for ill.
She had spent the last hour in her room softly singing the song Fire and Wonderover and over. As before, she felt close to understanding what it meant, and she found herself wishing she had her lute, for her mind always seemed to work better when the instrument was in her hands. However, at that moment her lute was in her flat in London, and as close as she was to reaching understanding, it might as well have been a thousand miles away; she didn’t know what the song meant.
As the time to leave the hotel drew near, she had found herself staring at the phone. Finally she had picked it up and dialed the number of the hospital. Before it could start to ring on the other end, she hung up. Anders was going to live; that was all she needed to know.
There was a low rumbling as the train rolled into motion. Deirdre watched as the platform slipped past. A large group of people in white sheets stood on the platform, holding signs as they always did. Only the signs no longer contained words or dark spots. Instead they were completely black. Eaten.
The window next to Deirdre went dark for a moment. Then the train emerged into the drizzly morning. The world was still here–for now.
“So, do you have a plan for when we get to London?” Beltan said, his voice low.
“I’m working on it,” she said, hoping she sounded more confident than she felt. Despite staying awake all night, she still had no idea what they were going to do when they got to London.
“The Philosophers can be killed, we know that now.”
“I know.”
“I won’t try to keep from harming them if they get in our way, Deirdre.” A fey light shone in Beltan’s eyes. “They sent the Scirathi after Travis. They nearly killed him, and Nim as well. I don’t care if they’re immortal. To me, their lives are forfeit.”
Gone was the cheerful blond man who liked food, beer, woefully bad jokes, and looking at handsome young men passing by on the street. Over the last several years, Deirdre had let herself forget what Beltan really was, but at that moment she remembered. He was a man of war. And he knew who his enemy was.
“Ah,” Beltan said with a pleased look. “Here’s that cart.”
It looked as if the attendant was heading toward the front of the train, but Beltan stuck out a big, booted foot, bringing the cart to a lurching halt. The attendant–a pasty young man– looked ready to protest, then quickly swallowed his words after one look at Beltan.
“Coffee, please,” the blond man said. “And one of those sticky buns. No, better make it two.”
The attendant complied, then pushed the cart up the aisle so quickly the wheels rattled.
Beltan was about to start in on the second sticky roll when he gave Deirdre a guilty look. “You didn’t want one, did you?”
She shook her head. Food, like sleep, was something she couldn’t conceive of just then. While he ate, she took a sip of her coffee–it had finally cooled to a subthermonuclear temperature–then pulled out a plastic bag of things she had purchased at the shop in the train station. There was gum, a candy bar she could give to Beltan later if he started getting fussy, a pack of tissues, and a paperback book she had plucked at the last minute off a rack of best sellers next to the clerk’s counter.
It was a popular science book entitled Fall From Grace: How the End of Perfection Created the Beginning of the Universe. The book was by Sara Voorhees, the astrophysicist who, in the article in the Times, had suggested that the rifts in the cosmos might be a symptom of the beginning of the end of the universe. By the date inside the cover, the book had been published a few years ago. Voorhees’s recent comments must have renewed its popularity enough to land it back on the best seller list.
Deirdre had grabbed the book on impulse. It wasn’t chance that the gate had come to light on Crete at the same time the rifts had appeared; both were related to the approaching perihelion between Earth and Eldh. And Marius had believed that, whatever transformation it was the Seven sought, it had to do with perihelion as well. So maybe there was a connection between the rifts and what it was the Seven wanted. If so, anything she could learn about the rifts would help her.
The city slipped away outside the window, replaced by the gray‑green blur of the borderlands. Deirdre sipped her coffee, opened the book, and began to read.
Nearly four hours later, Deirdre shut the book and leaned back, resting her aching head against the back of the seat. Outside the window, the rolling hills of lowland Scotland had been replaced by the row houses and industrial buildings of the outskirts of London.
She glanced to her left. Beltan was asleep. Two crumpled coffee cups were jammed into the seat pocket in front of him. Another, empty, was held in his hand. Crumbs dusted his cable‑knit sweater. She decided not to wake him; it would be a few more minutes before they reached Paddington Station, and it was best to let him sleep. He was going to need his strength for what lay ahead. Shewas going to need it. Besides, she needed a few minutes to think about everything she had just read.
Although the book was well written, Voorhees’s technical background in astrophysics had been apparent on every page, and Deirdre had been hard‑pressed to understand a fraction of Fall From Grace. All the same, some of the things she had read had resonated–especially the discussion of virtual particle pairs.
As far as Deirdre was able to understand, the basic fabric of the universe was not made of some concrete substance. Instead, the universe was founded on nothing at all. Its most basic substrate was a vacuum devoid of any kind of matter. But in that very nothingness was stored the endless potential for everything else.
The vacuum contained infinite energy because it contained infinite possibility: At any one moment, anything might come of it. And, in fact, it did. As physicists had discovered, the vacuum was constantly spawning pairs of virtual particles: one of matter, one of antimatter. The particles would exist for a fraction of a moment, then they would collide, annihilate one another, and vanish.
It was like starting with a featureless plain and using a shovel to dig. The result was both a pile of dirt as well as a hole: matter and antimatter. Infinite holes could be dug in the plain, but all you had to do was put the dirt back in one of the holes and it was gone. The virtual particle pairs were the same. Every moment, at every point in space, countless pairs popped out of the nothing and were reabsorbed an instant later; the fact that they existed so briefly was what made them virtual.
Only here was the tricky part: Sometimes the virtual particles could become real particles. For example, when a virtual particle pair appeared on the edge of a black hole, one of the particles might be drawn into the black hole’s gravity well while the other escaped. Thus the two particles would never collide and cancel one another out. And there were other situations in which the particles could become real.
One was the beginning of the universe. According to Voorhees, in the beginning, the universe was perfect. It was completely symmetrical, devoid of all features. Then, somehow, that symmetry was broken, and everything fell out of the vacuum like candy out of a piсata. Matter and antimatter–in the form of tiny particles, quarks and antiquarks–would have gone whizzing around in all directions.