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"Gone somewhere? But we're still here, in Lake Arrowhead, California, in America. Where we've always been." Randolph's expression softened. "Do you remember, Frank, when you were little. Your mother or father, they would bring you a bubble ring on a plastic stick, and some soapy water. You'd blow bubbles through it for hours and watch them float away. Sitting maybe on the steps of the back porch. And, and remember how the soapy film reset after the bubble was ballooned out?" Bede did remember. He had been a kid once, if only for a few years, before juvie and the streets. "Yeah." "The Storm, you see, Frank, it was your breath; and the Earth, it was your bubble ring, your soapy film." Randolph indicated the piles of paper, penciled formulas, graphs, and models cluttering the table. "We're the bubble, Frank. The transdimensional effulgence that escaped from the Rift blew through the Earth, imprinted, but imperfectly, and then traveled back outside the plane of our reality." He rubbed his red-stubbled chin. "It created us, Frank. And it transported us to this foreign analog of space-time. We're a cracked mirror image. Genetically modified and mixed, some parts seemingly pure, others catastrophically hybridized, paradoxically grafted together. It created us and pushed us into a new dimension. And like it or not we're here to stay. Permanently." "So the Earth's still back there somewhere? The real Earth?" "Yes, exactly. And you and I are still on it. You in prison. Me in my office in Pasadena." Randolph's eyes moistened a little. "Sometimes the knowledge that I'll never see my grandchildren again gets to me, but then I stop and remember: I am with my grandchildren. The original Dr. Felix Albert Randolph, Professor emeritus of Cosmology and Physical Mechanics, Director of the Brane Piercing Project, avid golfer, bridge player, spoiler of grand kids, is alive and well and living in Arcadia, California - two blocks from his daughter's house." He smiled. "I, on the other hand, am here with you, and my hungry new flowers, and all the other hundreds of other survivors we've located. And except for me and my staff, each survivor is like you, Frank - the bearer of a unique miracle, a special unreproducible gift. It's not so bad. Not really." Frank waited as the old man daubed his tears with a flannel kerchief. Then: "Why didn't the rest of humanity get copied, too? Why just us?" Dr. Randolph stood, with effort, and leaned against the back of his chair. "We'll never know for certain. Why did the Sloan Annex and the Applied Physics building pass through, while the rest of Caltech, the rest of Pasadena, disappear - replaced by an unrecognizable, and decidedly unfriendly, florascape? My intuition says that we weren't the only bubble. When we fired our gun and shot a hole into the Ekpyrotic intervoid, we thought we could close it just by taking our finger off the trigger. But we were wrong, Frank. I was wrong. It didn't work that way. We had poked a pinhole in the skin of a balloon, a balloon full of mischief - and that mischief just kept pouring out. It wouldn't stop, no matter what we did. Who knows, by the time we were finally able to blast it shut with a surge - the Big Bang, millions, maybe even billions, of them might have sprung into being and each with its own diverse interspecies remnants. Think of a camera taking thousands of split-second photographs of an object in motion. Some of those pictures will be blurred. Yet others will achieve crystal, near-perfect clarity. Maybe we're one of the blurrier pictures, Frank." It had taken almost an hour to calm Riddle down. She had shrieked at the top of her lungs for most of that hour. Bede tried to restrain her, hugging her thrashing little form to his chest, whispering. She spat, clawed, snarled, and wailed. She broke free and raced around the room on all fours. Her face ceased to look human. The cheek bones elongated. The eyes receded. Her body twitched and jolted at every touch. Eventually she collapsed - exhausted and drained - in a corner. At about that time the terrific whine of the prairie dogs died away. The battle for the moundtown had, from what Bede could tell, apparently ended. When Bede collected the twins he made a point of inspecting their den, the small tool shack they had been sleeping in for the past two or so months. It was an aluminum prefab with flimsy sliding metal doors and no floor - just dirt. The girls had piled tattered old clothes here and there, a few toys, a doll - tear stained and broken from what Bede imagined had been fierce nighttime clutching, some trinkets - costume jewelry, wooden figurines. In one corner was the opening to a burrow. Recently dug from the richness of the turned earth. He flashed an electric torch down it but saw no bottom. It descended out of sight. He'd asked them what it was. Talker explained that some funny looking rabbits had dug their way in just before the Big Bang (she called it the Big Sleep). They weren't scary, she informed him brightly. Sure, they made a lot of noise, but they never bit them. Since Riddle was the one sleeping on that end of the shack, they had naturally chattered at her the most, encircling her. That was Talker's last memory before the lights went out. When she and her sister awoke, they felt different. There were things they knew they had known that were no longer there. On the other hand, there were things they never had known before that they suddenly knew. Things like the time of day without looking outside, or the nearness of other animals - without seeing or hearing them. It was weird. They spoke to each other - but it wasn't like it used to be. They didn't have words for the objects around them or themselves. They had sounds - squeals, grunts, and barks. The assault came just before sunup. A racket like softball-sized hail rang them all awake. Crows, thousands of then, were flying directly into the outer walls and exploding. Each impact shook plaster loose. The walls quaked. Dust rose from the floor. The din was deafening. Cracks began to appear along the exposed joints of the building's frame. Bede rolled to his feet, still dressed but for his back-slit jacket. He grabbed the rifle. Talker was wailing, gibbering. Riddle lay stiff on her back - arms and legs shaking - eyes wide open. "They've come to get her," Talker suddenly screamed. "They're in her head. I can feel them." Part of the south-facing wall broke open and a stream of crows flew in, arcing around the ceiling at speed. Bede hit a few keys on the rifle's top pad, then opened up. The report was soft and quiet, like a BB gun's. But the impact was breathtaking. He'd programed the pellets to angle toward movement. Since the birds were moving and the building was not, each pellet found a target. The result was a series of popping flashes. The crows disintegrated instantly. But it wasn't enough. It couldn't be. There were just too many of them. A cluster of crows struck him chest-on. He batted them away, but staggered. More came at him. Others were landing by Talker, who was shrieking and lashing out with her feet and arms. Yet more were alighting on Riddle. They were cawing at her in a funny, patterned way. Her eyes opened abruptly. She got up - jerkily - then turned and stared at Bede. Her gaze was like nothing he had ever seen before. She cawed at him. His finger squeezed instinctively. "No," Talker yelled, colliding with him, knocking off his aim. The pellet veered upward and tore open a jagged hole in the ceiling. "That's not her, that's them." A rushing sound filled the room; like sand being poured onto a clean floor. The prairie dogs. They were bursting in, widening the crows' collision holes. Bede could hear their buzzing, more like a vibration than a sound. The pulsing had an immediate effect on Riddle. Her eyes cleared. She stood. Then she smiled and spread out her arms. A sound like a thousand hornets filled the room. The interior roiled. Prairie dogs were snatching crows from the air, breaking their necks, Crows were tearing back at them. Blinding, Maiming. The fighting was brutal beyond description. Blood flew. Carcasses littered the floor. It was a madhouse, a madhouse so loud Bede reeled. Then Talker was tugging at his sleeve. "Can you get us out of here?" He cast about, fending off crows with his free hand. There didn't seem to be a way out. The walls were crawling with combatants. Talker pointed to the skylight. It had been shattered by the crows, even its chain-link reinforcement was flower-petaled in. Did he have that kind of strength? He wasn't sure. The melee grew to a fever pitch. If they stayed, they died. Without any further consideration, he aimed and fired. A dozen pellets hit the skylight dead-on and blew it out into the grey dawn, a nimbus of splinters and metal shards. He dropped the rifle, scooped each girl into an arm, unfurled his wings. He beat them harder than he ever had in his short tenure as a flying man. He lifted up, off-balance, teetering. The skylight approached; a narrow, rectangular opening. He would have to pump up into it and close his wings to fit through. The crows flailed away, scratching at his face and eyes, pecking at his hands, and wings. But he made it. He flapped higher, into the upper cloud of crows, looking desperately for an escape route. Nothing. His energy flagged. He dropped ten or more feet. The girls shrilled, panicking. He was practically covered by crows now. They were drilling to him. It was over. He couldn't fight them off and he couldn't fly with them attached. He began to spiral down. Then the boom of a watch siren sounded. Nearby. Very nearby. He stared down at Highway 18, glittering black and tan in the dawn. Rolling down it was a convoy of armored wagons. Men and women in chain mail, wearing steel helmets and sporting electric-shock swatters, like giant spatulas, were jumping off the skids. They moved ahead with calm, efficient strokes, pushing toward the station. Incredibly, on the roofs of the wagons were prairie dogs. Bede's remaining strength failed and he plummeted. As his vision faded, he saw a mass of prairie dogs converge beneath him and felt their soft, furred forms cushion his crash. "She is what we might call a natural polymath of this new world," Dr. Randolph said, stroking Riddle's neatly combed hair. "She instinctively understands that which is around her, from a social and a linguistic perspective. When the Big Bang came she must have been in close proximity to, probably in corporal contact with, at least one prairie dog. She emerged from the Storm with their group-think wired into her genes. It enabled her to sense the connectedness of everything around her. It's very similar to what happened between you and your pet pigeon during the Big Bang. I'm convinced that pigeon gave you your wings. As I said, during the Big Bang, the prairie dogs gave Riddle their wide net of communal self. But her version is catholic, polyglot, all-embracing. With her at your disposal, you could see into the workings of your enemies, of your neighbors, of everything." He smiled, gently. "That's why the crows were after her. Their group mind is similar to the prairie dogs, on a much more primitive level. They, or it, tapped into the Local Net, if you will, and discovered Riddle. She must have been like a beacon of flames in their psyche. That's why the prairie dogs were on your tail. They had been searching for her for weeks. They could sense her, feel her, but couldn't find her." He nodded at Bede. "It took you to do that." "I came upon her by accident. I had decided to leave, and then thought - I don't know - that I'd better make one more pass," Bede said. Randolph's smile broadened, "Yes. Yes, precisely." The hammering, sawing and general tumult of a wagon-works could be heard through the open windows of Bede's second-story bunkroom. A line of tanker wagons was being finished. If all went according to schedule, they would be rattling their way down to the moundtown later in the week. "How are you feeling, Frank?" "Much better, thanks." Which was true. He was getting stronger every morning. His wings were about healed. One had been broken in the fall. After he had lost consciousness, the rescuers, with the help of the prairie dogs, had fought off the crows and loaded him and the girls into a wagon. The crows had retreated, had refused to follow the wagons into the mountains - where, they knew, the Conference Center's watchtower flame throwers waited. But they hadn't given up. They were still out there. Implacable. Even Bede could sense that. "Good. We'll be needing you to ride down with the convoy." "Me? Why?" "Talker tells me Riddle won't go anywhere without you. While the prairie dogs might be our new allies, they still need Riddle to make them feel comfortable. And we need her, and Talker, to communicate with them. For us it's a three-step process. We talk to Talker. Talker talks to Riddle. Riddle buzzes to the prairie dogs." Bede thought he got it. "Okay." He still hadn't figured out exactly how Randolph knew what the prairie dogs were trying to say when they arrived under a banner of truce at the Conference Center. It occurred to him that perhaps the protective aura created by the LPT hadn't been absolutely impenetrable. Randolph rose from the arm of the sofa he had been leaning against. "We'll let you get some rest." He guided the two girls away. Both touched Bede's arm as they walked by. After they were gone, Bede got up - haltingly - and shuffled to the window. Below, the Caltech scientists, dressed in rough leather and canvas aprons, were chiseling, hammering and fitting away. Massive keg-shaped canisters were being stanchioned to a row of armored drays. Down by the foam and crust line of the shore, horses were grazing. Overhead, two suns were blazing; the blue primary and above it, its milky little sister. A warm breeze had picked up, carrying with it the fragrance of Eucalyptus and Pepper Tree. Yes, this was a bubble, a partial copy, a blurry picture, and a mixed-up Cartoon Network version of reality. But for the first time it felt like home. |
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