"Don't—" Kissoon began, but the knife dared to descend before he could forbid it, sliding into his wide right eye. Kissoon didn't scream this time, but expelled his breath as a long moan. Jaffe pulled the knife out and stabbed again, the second stab as accurate as the first, puncturing the left eye. He drove the blade in to the hilt, and pulled it out. Kissoon flailed, his moan becoming sobs as he fell to his knees. With both his fists wrapped around the knife Jaffe delivered a third blow to the top of the shaman's skull, then went on stabbing, the force of the blows opening wound after wound.
Kissoon's sobs stopped as suddenly as they'd begun. His hands, which had been scrabbling at his head to ward off further cuts, fell to his sides. His body stayed upright for two beats. Then he fell forward.
A spasm of pleasure ran through Tesla that was indistinguishable from the highest pleasure. She wanted the bomb to detonate at that moment, matching its completion with her own. Kissoon was dead and it would not be bad to die now, knowing the Iad would be swept away in the same moment.
"Go on, "she said to the bomb, trying to sustain the bliss she felt until the flesh was burned off her bones. "Go on, will you? Go on."
But there was no explosion. She felt the rush of pleasure start to drain from her, and the realization appear in its place that she'd missed some vital element in all of this. Surely with Kissoon dead the event he'd sweated all those years to hold at bay had to come? Now; on delay. But there was nothing. The steel tower still stood.
"What have I missed?" she asked herself. "What in God's name have I missed?"
She looked towards Jaffe, who was still staring down at Kissoon's corpse.
"Synchronicity," he said.
"What?"
"I killed him."
"It doesn't seem to have answered the problem."
"What problem?"
"This is Point Zero. There's a bomb, just waiting to detonate. He was holding that moment at bay."
"Who was?"
"Kissoon! Isn't it obvious?"
No, babe—she told herself—it's not. Of course it's not. The thought was suddenly clear in her head that Kissoon had left the Loop in Raul's body intending to come back to claim his own. Once out in the Cosm he hadn't been able to hold the moment. Somebody else must have done it for him. That somebody, or rather, that some-spirit, was still doing it.
"Where are you going?" Jaffe wanted to know as she started in the direction of the wastes beyond the tower. Could she even find the hut? He followed after her, still asking questions.
"How did you get us here?"
"Ate it up and spat it out."
"Like my hands?"
"No, not like your hands. Not at all."
The sun was steadily being blocked out by the mesh of clots, the light only breaking through in patches.
"Where are you going?" he said again.
"The hut. Kissoon's hut."
"Why?"
"Just come with me. I need help."
A cry in the gloom slowed progress a moment.
"Poppa?"
She looked round to see Tommy-Ray stepping out of shadow into a patch of light. The sun was strangely kind to him, its brilliance bleaching out the worst details of his transformed state.
"Poppa?"
Jaffe stopped following Tesla.
"Come on," she urged him, but she already knew she'd once more lost him to Tommy-Ray. The first time it had been to his thoughts. This time it was to his presence.
The Death-Boy started to stumble towards his father.
"Help me, Poppa," he said.
The man opened his arms, saying nothing, nor needing to. Tommy-Ray fell into them, clutching at Jaffe in return.
Tesla offered him one last chance to assist her.
"Are you coming or not?"
The answer was simple:
"Not," he said.
She didn't bother to waste breath on the issue. The boy had a prior claim; a primal claim. She watched their embrace tighten, as though they were squeezing the breath from each other, then she again set her sights on the tower and began to run.
Though she forbade herself a backward glance, as she came to the tower—her lungs already aching, and still a bruising distance to go before she found the hut—she looked. Father and son had not moved. They stood in a patch of brightness, wrapped around each other, with the clots still assembling behind them. From this distance their construction resembled the work of a monumental and funereal lace-maker. She studied the curtain a moment, her mind racing through interpretations and finding a solution to its existence both preposterous and plausible: that this was a veil behind which the Iad Uroboros were going to rise. Indeed there seemed to be motion behind its folds already; a greater darkness, assembling.
She took her gaze from the sight, glanced up briefly at the tower and its lethal load, then started off again in the direction of the hut.
The trip in the opposite direction, through the town towards the perimeter of the Loop, was no easier than Tesla's. They'd all been on too many journeys: into the earth, into the sea, to islands, caves and to the limits of their sanity. This last trip demanded energies they scarcely had to give. With every other step their bodies threatened to give out, the hard desert floor looking comfortable by contrast with the agony of advancing. But the oldest fear known to man drove them on: that of the pursuing beast. It had neither claws nor fangs, of course, but it was all the more lethal for that. A beast of fire. It was only when they reached the town that they slowed their pace long enough to exchange a few gasping words.
"How much farther?" Jo-Beth wanted to know.
"Just on the other side of the town."
Howie was staring back at the Iad curtain, which had now mounted a hundred feet and more.
"Do you think they see us?" he said.
"Who?" said Grillo. "The Iad? If they do they don't seem to be following."
"That isn't them," Jo-Beth said. "That's just their veil."
"So we've still got a chance," Howie said.
"Let's take it," said Grillo, and set the pace down the Main Street. It wasn't chance. Tesla's mind, befuddled as it was, had the route across the desert to the hut inscribed deep into it. As she trotted (running was beyond her) it was the conversation she'd had with Grillo back at the motel that she went over in her mind, the exchange in which she'd confessed to him the extent of her spiritual ambition. If she died here in the Loop—and that was virtually inevitable—she knew she'd come to understand more about the workings of the world in the days since she'd arrived in Palomo Grove than in all the years previous. She'd had adventures beyond her body. She'd encountered incarnations of good and evil, and learned something of her condition because she resembled neither. If she was gone from this life soon, either at the instant of detonation, or at the Iad's arrival, she had no complaint at that.
But there were so many souls who had not yet made their peace with extinction, nor should have to. Infants, children, lovers. Peaceable people the planet over, whose lives were still in the making and enriching, who, if she failed now, would wake up tomorrow with any chance to taste the same adventures in spirit she'd had denied them. Slaves of the Iad. What justice was there in that? Before coming to the Grove she'd have given the twentieth century's answer to that question. There was no justice because justice was a human construct and had no place in a system of matter. But mind was in matter, always. That was the revelation of Quiddity. The sea was the crossroads, and from it all possibilities sprang. Before everything, Quiddity. Before life, the dream of life. Before the thing solid, the solid thing dreamt. And mind, dreaming or awake, knew justice, which was therefore as natural as matter, its absence in any exchange deserving of more than a fatalistic shrug. It merited a howl of outrage; and a passionate pursuit of why. If she wished to live beyond the impending holocaust it was to shout that shout. To find out what crime her species had committed against the universal mind that it should now be tottering on execution. That was worth living to know-The hut was in sight. Behind her the suspicion she'd had that the Iad were rising behind the veil of clots, was confirmed. The giants of her childhood nightmares were emerging from the schism, and would soon draw that veil away. When they did they'd surely see her, and come in a few thunderous strides to stamp her out. But they didn't hurry. Their vast limbs took time to draw up from Quiddity; their heads (the size of houses, every window blazing) were immense, and needed the full machinery of their anatomies before they could be raised. When she began again towards the hut the glimpse she'd had of the emergents began to resolve itself in her mind's eye, her wits making coherence of their titanic mystery.