So much suddenly made sense to Tesla, not least the atmosphere of anticipation she'd always felt in the Loop, particularly when passing through the town. She'd seen films of the bomb's detonation, and of the destruction of the town, on documentaries about Oppenheimer. The houses and stores she'd puzzled over had been built to be blasted to ash, so that the bomb's creators could observe their baby's wrath at work. No wonder she'd tried to set a dinosaur movie there. Her dramatic instinct had been on the button. This was a town waiting for doomsday. It was just the monster she'd got wrong. What better place for Kissoon to hide the evidence of his crime? When the flash came the bodies would be utterly consumed. She could well imagine what perverse pleasure he'd have taken in plotting such an elaborate creation, knowing that the cloud that destroyed the Shoal was one of the most indelible images of the century.
But he'd been outplotted. Mary Muralles had trapped him in the Loop, and until he could find a new body to leave in he was its prisoner, his will perpetually holding the moment of detonation at bay. He'd lived like a man with his finger on a crack in a dam, knowing that the moment he neglected his duty the dam would burst and overwhelm him. No wonder the word Trinity had thrown his thoughts into confusion. It was the name of his terror.
Was there a way to use this knowledge against the Iad? An outlandish possibility occurred to her as she returned into the house, but she'd need Jaffe's assistance.
It was hard to hold on to any coherent thought process in the cess-pool that was spilling from the schism, but she'd fought off influences before, from movie producers and shamans, and she was able to hold the worst of it at bay. It was getting stronger, however, the closer the Iad came to the threshold. She tried not to contemplate the extent of their corruption if this, the merest rumor of their approach, could so profoundly affect the psyche. Not in all her attempts to imagine the nature of that invasion had she considered the possibility that their weapon would be madness. But perhaps it was. Though she was able to ward off this assault of vileness for a time she knew she'd capitulate to it sooner or later. No human mind could keep it at bay forever, and would have no choice, drawing in such horrors, but to take refuge in insanity. The Iad Uroboros would rule a planet of lunatics.
Jaffe was already well on his way to mental collapse, of course. She found him standing at the door of the room where he'd practiced the Art. The space behind him had been entirely commandeered by the schism. Looking through the door she truly understood for the first time why Quiddity was called a sea. Waves of dark energy were beating against the shore of the Cosm, their surf spilling through the schism. Beyond it she saw another motion, which she was only able to glimpse briefly. Jaffe had talked about mountains that moved; and fleas. But Tesla's mind fixed upon another image to characterize the invaders. They were giants. The living terrors of her earliest nightmares. Often, in those childhood encounters, they'd had the faces of her parents, a fact her analyst had made much of. But these were giants of a different order. If they had faces at all, which she doubted, they were impossible to assimilate as such. One thing she was certain of: caring parents they weren't.
"Do you see?" Jaffe said.
"Oh yes," she said.
He asked the question again, his voice lighter than she'd ever heard it.
"Do you see, Poppa?"
"Poppa?" she said.
"I'm not afraid, Poppa," the voice out of the Jaff went on. "They won't hurt me. I'm the Death-Boy."
Now she understood. Jaffe wasn't simply seeing with Tommy-Ray's eyes, he was speaking with the boy's voice. She'd lost the father to the son.
"Jaffe!" she said. "Listen to me. I need your help! Jaffe?" He made no reply. Avoiding sight of the schism as best she could she went to him and took hold of his tattered shirt, hauling him towards the front door. "Randolph!" she said. "You've got to speak to me."
The man grinned. It wasn't an expression that had ever belonged on that face. It was the grin of a Californian prince, wide and toothy. She let him go.
"A lot of good you'll do me," she said.
She couldn't afford the time to try to coax him back from the adventure he was sharing with Tommy-Ray. She'd have to do what she was planning alone. It was a notion simple in the conceiving and, she guessed, damn difficult—if not impossible—in the execution. But she had no alternative. She was not a great shaman. She couldn't seal the schism. But she might move it. She'd proved twice before that she had the power to pass in and out of the Loop. To dissolve herself—and others—in thought, and remove them to Trinity. Could she also jump dead matter? Wood, and plaster? A piece of a house, for instance? This part of this house, for instance? Could she dissolve the slice of the Cosm she and the schism occupied, and remove it to Point Zero, where a force was ticking that might fell the giants before they spread their madness?
There was no answer to the questions this side of attempting the suit. If she failed, the answer was no. Simple as that. She'd have a few moments the wiser for her failure before wisdom, failure and her aspirations to shamanhood became academic.
Tommy-Ray had started to speak again, his monologue now deteriorated to a ragged babble.
"...up like Andy..." he was saying, "...only higher...see me, Poppa?...up like Andy...I can see the shore! I can see the shore!"
That at least did make sense. He was within sighting distance of the Cosm, which meant the Iad were almost as close.
"...Death-Boy..." he started to say again, "...I'm the Death-Boy..."
"Can't you tune him out?" she said to Jaffe, knowing her words were falling on deaf ears.
"Whoo-ee!" the kid was shouting. "Here we come! Here—we—come!"
She didn't look back towards the schism to see if the giants were visible, though she was sorely tempted. The moment would come when she'd have to look it in the eye but she wasn't yet ready; wasn't calm, wasn't girded. She took another step back to the front door, and seized firm hold of the door jamb. It felt so damn solid. Her common sense protested at the idea of being able to think such solidity into another place and time. She told her common sense to go get fucked. It and the madness that was spewing from the schism were not opposites. Reason could be cruel; logic could be lunacy. There was another state of mind that put aside such naive dichotomies; that made power from being in between conditions.
All things to all men.
She remembered suddenly what D'Amour had said, about there being a savior rumored. She'd thought he'd meant Jaffe, but she'd been looking too far afield. She was that savior. Tesla Bombeck, the wild woman of West Hollywood, reversed and resurrected.
The realization gave her new faith; and with the faith, a simple grasp of how she might make the suit work. She didn't try to block out Tommy-Ray's idiot whoops, or the sight of Jaffe limp and defeated, or the whole nonsense of the solid becoming thought and thought moving the solid. It was all a part of her, even the doubt. Perhaps especially that. She didn't need to deny the confusions and contradictions to be powerful; she needed to embrace them. Devour them with the mouth of her mind, chew them up, swallow them. They were all devourable. The solid and insolid, this world and that, all edible and moveable feasts. Now she knew that, nothing could keep her from the table.
She looked at the schism, dead on.
"Not even you," she said, and began to eat.
As Grillo had got within two steps of the front door the innocents had come back to claim him, their assault more pitiless than ever, this close to the schism. He lost the power to move forward or back, as brutalities rose around him. He seemed to be treading on small, bloody bodies. They turned their sobbing faces up to him, but he knew there was no help for them. Not now. The shadow that was moving across Quiddity brought with it an end to mercy. Nor would its reign ever end. It would never be judged; never be brought to account. Somebody moved past him towards the door, a form barely visible in an air thick with suffering. Grillo tried hard to grasp a solid sight of the man, but garnered only the briefest glimpse of a thuggish face, heavy-boned and lantern-jawed. Then the stranger went into the house. A movement on the ground around his feet took his glance from door to floor. The children's faces were still visible, but now the horror had a new twist. Black snakes, as thick as his arm, were crawling over the children as they followed the man inside. Appalled, he took a step forward in the vain hope of stamping one or all of them out. The step took him closer to the edge of insanity, which paradoxically lent force to his crusade. He took a second step, and a third, trying to put his heel on the heads of these black beasts. The fourth step took him over the threshold of the house, and into another madness entirely.