"Are you sure you don't want us to go find Tesla? I thought this was urgent?"
"It was. It is. I just...need to spend a little time here first."
"I can wait. I don't mind."
"I told you, no."
"You don't want me to take you back? I thought maybe we could hang out tonight. You know, go to a few bars..."
"Another time, maybe."
"Tomorrow?"
"Just another time."
"I get it. This is thanks but no thanks, right?"
"If you say so."
"You're fucking weird, man. First you come on to me. Now you don't want to know. Well, fuck you. I can get my dick sucked plenty of places."
Hotchkiss glanced round to see the Adonis stalking back to his car. The other man was already out of sight. Pleased to have the distraction over with he went back to searching the shelves. The section of books on Motherhood didn't look too promising, but he began to make his way through it anyhow. It was, as he'd anticipated, all pap and platitudes. There was nothing in the pages that made reference, even obliquely, to any Trinity. Only talk of motherhood as a divine calling, woman in partnership with God, bringing new life into the world, her greatest and most noble task. And for the offspring, trite advice. "Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right."
He dutifully went through every title, throwing the volumes aside when they proved useless, until he'd exhausted the shelves. There were only two sections remaining to be searched. Neither of them seemed too promising. He stood up and stretched, looking out towards the sun-beaten lot. A sickening sense of foreboding was churning in his guts. The sun was shining, but for how long?
Beyond the lot—a long way beyond—he caught sight of the yellow Beetle, making its way out of the Grove towards the freeway. He didn't envy the Adonis his liberty. He had no wish to get in a car and drive. As places to die went, the Grove was as good as any: comfortable, familiar, empty. If he died screaming, nobody would hear his cowardice. If he died silently, nobody would mourn him. Let the Adonis go. He presumably had his life to live, somewhere. And it would be brief. If they failed in their endeavors here in the Grove— and the night beyond this world broke through—it would be very brief. If they succeeded (small hope) it would still be brief.
And always better in the ending than the beginning, the interval between being what it was.
If the exterior of Coney Eye had been the eye of a hurricane, the interior was a glint in that eye. A sharper stillness, which made Tesla alive to every tic in her cheek and temple, every small raggedness in her breath. With Jaffe following in after her she crossed the hallway towards the lounge where he'd committed his crime against nature. The evidence of that crime was everywhere around them, but cold now, the distortions set like so much melted wax.
She stepped through into the room itself. The schism was still in place: the entire environment pulled towards a hole no more than six feet across. It was quiescent. There was no visible sign that it was trying to make itself any wider. If and when the Iad reached the threshold of the Cosm, they'd have to step over it one by one, unless, with this lesion begun, they could simply hack it open till it gaped.
"It doesn't look too dangerous," she said to Jaffe. "We've got a chance if we move quickly."
"I don't know how to seal it."
"Try. You knew how to open it."
"That was instinct."
"And what do your instincts tell you now?"
"That I haven't got the power left in me," he said. He raised his broken hands. "I ate it up and spat it out."
"It was all in your hands?"
"I think so."
She remembered the night at the Malclass="underline" the Jaff passing poison into Fletcher's system from fingers which seemed to be sweating potency. Now those same hands were decaying wreckage. And yet she couldn't bring herself to believe power was a matter of anatomy. Kissoon had been no demigod, but his scrawny body was a reservoir of the direst suits. Will was the key to authority, and Jaffe seemed to have none left.
"So you can't do it," she said simply.
"No."
"Then maybe I can."
He narrowed his eyes. "I doubt that," he said, with the faintest trace of condescension in his tone. She pretended not to have noticed.
"I can try," she said. "The Nuncio got into me too, remember? You're not the only God in the squad."
This remark bore the fruit it had been planted to produce.
"You?" he said. "You've not a hope in hell." He looked down at his hands, then back up at the schism. "I'm the one who opened it. I'm the only one who ever dared do that. And I'm the only one who can seal it up again."
He walked past her towards the schism, that same lightness in his step as she'd noticed when they were climbing out of the caves. It allowed him to negotiate the uneven floor with relative ease. It was only when he came within a yard or two of the hole that his pace slowed. Then he stopped completely.
"What is it?" she said.
"Come look for yourself."
She started across the room towards him. It wasn't simply the visible world that was twisted and dragged towards the hole, she realized; so was the invisible. The air, and the minute particles of dust and dirt it carried, was hauled out of true. Space itself was knotted up, its convolutions pliable enough to be pressed through but only with the greatest difficulty. The effect got stronger the closer to the hole she went. Her body, already bruised and battered within an inch of its Lazarite life, was barely equal to the challenge. But she persevered. And step by step she achieved her goal, coming close enough to the hole to see down its throat. The sight was not easy to take. The world she'd assumed all her life to be complete and comprehensible was here undone utterly. It was a distress she'd not felt since childhood when somebody (she'd forgotten who) had taught her the trick of looking at infinity by putting two mirrors face to face, each staring into the other's reflection. She'd been twelve, thirteen at most, and completely spooked by the idea of this emptiness echoing emptiness, back and forth, back and forth, until they reached the limits of light. For years after she'd remembered that moment, confronted with a physical representation of something her mind revolted at. Here was the same process. The schism, defying her every idea about the way the world was. Reality as a comparative science.
She looked into its maw. Nothing that she saw was certain. If it was cloud, then it was cloud half turned to rain. If it was rain, then it was rain on the verge of combusting, and becoming a falling fire. And beyond the cloud, and rain, and fire, another place entirely, as ambiguous as the confusion of elements that half hid it: a sea that became a sky with no horizon to divide or define them. Quiddity.
She was seized by a fierce, barely controllable desire to be there, to climb through the schism and taste the mystery beyond. How many thousands of seekers, glimpsing in fever dreams and drug dreams the possibility of being where she now stood, had woken wanting to die rather than live another hour, knowing they could never have that access? Woken, mourned, and still gone on living, hoping, in the agonized, heroic way her species hoped, that miracles were possible; that the epiphanies of music and love were more than self-deception, were clues to a greater condition, where hope was rewarded with keys and kisses, and doors opened to the everlasting.
Quiddity was that everlasting. It was the ether in which being had been raised, as humanity had been raised from the soup of a simpler sea. The thought of Quiddity tainted by the Iad was suddenly more distressing to her than the fact of their imminent invasion. The phrase she'd first heard from Kissoon revisited her. Quiddity must be preserved. As Mary Muralles had said, Kissoon only told lies when he needed to. That was no small part of his genius: to hold to the truth as long as it served his purpose. And Quiddity did need to be preserved. Without dreams, life was nothing. Perhaps it would not even have come into being.