The rest of my time I spent studying the cylinders in Ariel’s case and what I had learned gave me firm hope that I could penetrate their defenses. The four cylinders with clawed ends were key. One was a beacon that, if Ariel had chosen to use it in conjunction with the SETI radio telescope at Green Bank, would have enabled her to send out a distress call to any portion of the multiverse. The other three were weapons, the least destructive of which generated a rolling wave that would extinguish all life within a radius of two hundred yards, exempting a small safety zone at the center of the wave—this should be sufficient to handle the security force. That I was prepared to kill testified to an evolution of purposefulness only peripherally related to my obsessive personality. Ten days of accessing the cylinders, absorbing the memories of a mind not quite human, may have had some physiochemical effect and certainly was responsible for a psychological one. I was prone to strangely configured paranoias—I experienced, for instance, a stretch of several days during which I was convinced that if I were able to turn my head quickly enough, I would be able to catch a glimpse of my own face, and I had panicked moments when I was certain that another Isha was watching me, waiting to exact vengeance for the death of our analogue. My thoughts of Ariel were an environment whose functionary I had become and, thankfully, were less poignant in their impact than inspiriting. Distanced from her, I was distant from all things. Though my enhanced understanding of the multiverse allowed me to recognize the connectivity of all life, it also served to devalue it. Passion was in me, as were the concomitant emotions of longing and desire, but the character of my search was now colored by aggression. I fully intended to track her down. Nothing was going to stand in my way.
When we arrived at the streambed in late afternoon, Henley shook my hand and said, “Take care now, Professor. You too good a customer for me to lose.” He lifted his hat, scratched his head. “’Course maybe you ain’t comin’ back this way.”
“You have one of your feelings?” I asked.
“Just a bitty one. The bitty ones ain’t always on the mark.” He gave me an uncertain look. I thought he wanted to ask a question, but if so he left it unspoken and shouldered on his pack. “You know where to find me.”
The task ahead suddenly seemed daunting and, anxious now that he was leaving, I tried to hold him there a while longer and made a lame joke about his returning to Mickey’s to watch Mountaineer baseball.
“Baseball!” he said. “Shit, I don’t watch no baseball. I just pray for football season to come.” He adjusted the weight of his pack. “Even though it ‘pears God don’t give a damn ’bout what happens to the Mountaineers.”
+WALKING ALONG THE streambed, its banks hedged by buzzing thickets, the air alive with a dusty vegetable freshness, I fell into an emotional rhythm, passing over and over again through a cycle of despondency to fatalism to grim determination, as if a wheel of fortune were turning in my head, offering three choices upon which an arrow of thought might land. Toward dusk, when the birds started a racket in the treetops, I cheered up a notch and conjured images of a happy result, picturing Ariel and me together, bypassing the interval between that possible future and the now; but with the coming of darkness that interval consumed me. As had always been the case since I’d become aware of Ariel, I was chasing flimsy clues and improbabilities. Knowing how to operate an Akashel vehicle would do me little good if there were no vehicles to be had in Tuttle’s Hollow, and all that supported the notion that there were was the photograph of the dead man Siskin had shown me in New York. If a vehicle was to be had, was I then prepared to endure the violent transformation that waited at journey’s end? Could I find Ariel? Would I be satisfied with someone almost her, a sister from a neighboring plane? I answered these questions with another question: What was I to do otherwise? Live? Write my idiot books? Build a tiny fire from the embers of our blaze and pretend to love its heat? The risks of a search were insignificant when compared to the crummy inevitability of accepting loss and moving on with things. I didn’t want anything to be ordinary about Ariel and me, not even our ending.
Four miles out from the project I removed Ariel’s gun and the four claw-ended cylinders from my pack. I had rigged a sling for the gun; I looped this over my shoulder, hid it beneath my jacket, and stuffed the pack beneath a bush, doubtful that I would need it again. I twisted the end of the first cylinder until it clicked twice and taped it to my palm. Holding death in my hand drew a curtain of black intent across my thoughts. I walked a mile or so with only a simple awareness of the world, noting sounds and movement, the suggestions of danger. A moonless dark replaced the dusk. I switched on a flashlight. After I had gone two more miles, well inside the perimeter Henley had described, I began to wonder why my presence hadn’t been detected. They must be watching, I decided. Trying to decide whether I was an accidental or a purposeful intruder. Maybe they wouldn’t approach at all, but would have a sniper take me out. I started shouting as I walked, identifying myself, calling to Paul Siskin, saying I had information for him. About fifty yards farther along, a voice hailed me, ordering me to switch off the flashlight and stand still. I obeyed, wondering how close I had come to eating a bullet. Ahead and behind me, men were filtering out of the thickets. I could barely make them out at first. They were dressed in black and wore night vision goggles, which they soon removed. One shone a light in my face, blinding me as he came up, and said, “Mister Cyrus! Where have you been keeping yourself?”
Siskin.
Whatever reluctance I might have had about using the cylinder taped to my palm vanished when I heard his voice. It was he I blamed for everything—but for his attempted usage of me, I would still have Ariel. I hadn’t really expected to find him there and I felt as if I had hit a trifecta at the racetrack.
“Surprised to see me?” He angled the light away from my eyes. “I’m not surprised to see you. Isha always comes after Ariel. Usually doesn’t take so long. Guess she didn’t set the hook real deep.”
I couldn’t tell how many men surrounded me, but it was close to the full complement. What Siskin had said, however, stayed my hand. I asked what he was talking about and he chuckled. “You haven’t figured it out yet? Well, let’s just say your situation is hardly unique. Don’t you worry. I’ll put you in the picture when we get back to base.”
“Put me in the picture now.”
He made a bemused sound and turned toward a man standing about ten feet away, perhaps to give an order; but as he turned I grabbed him around the neck, drew him close and thumbed the end of the cylinder—it emitted a double click. Siskin struggled, dropping his light, then went limp as the men around us slumped to the ground, into the stream, giving not a single outcry. I couldn’t tell how they had been stricken and was grateful for that. All I felt was a sudden warmth, as if I’d come too close to a furnace; all I heard was a windy whistling—lasting for several seconds—as of someone imitating a ghostly breeze. I shoved Siskin to the ground and he went crawling toward the nearest of the fallen men. I covered him with Ariel’s gun, told him not to get crazy, and picked up his light.