The Edge of Ruin (25 page)

Richard turned until he faced the young scientist full on. “Yes. We really are.”

“But this isn’t real,” Eddie protested feebly.

Grenier spoke up for the first time. “You said yourself, son, you don’t know what’s real anymore. Your scientific principles still apply, but they’re being affected, warped, by the magic.”

“Magic isn’t real,” Eddie said. The frown and tightly compressed lips showed the level of his denial.

“It is. And getting more real by the minute,” Grenier countered. His voice was thick with amused enjoyment.

“That’s enough for him right now.” Richard stood up. “Dr. Tanaka, you’re tired, you need to process what I told you about the Lumina and the multiverses, and you need to come up with a plan to break Kenntnis free. How did you put it? Release the pulse. But right now I’ve got other things, mundane but pressing, that I have to do.”

Eddie looked up at Angela. “You won’t let me sleep through dinner?”

She laughed. “We’ll ring the dinner bell real loud.”

“I’d like to study that sword thing,” Eddie mumbled as he headed out of the kitchen. “But if it won’t stay in phase unless he’s holding it, how do …”

Distance reduced the words to a baritone hum, and then they were gone with the shutting of a bedroom door.

R
ICHARD

I
t was like feeling eyes or tasting a change in the air.
Someone was in the bedroom with me.
I opened my eyes to the barest slit. Fortunately there was enough city glare leaking around the folds of the drapes to make out shapes. A shadow within the shadows hovered at the side of the bed. My stomach gave a lurch, and suddenly my decision to keep my guards outside the condo seemed beyond stupid. These were people who could travel across the continent using a tear in a wall.

I dropped a hand off the side of the mattress, and my fingers touched the textured edge of the pistol’s grip hidden beneath the bed. Once I had the gun firmly in hand, I shot my right hand up and grabbed the material at the person’s throat, dragging him down toward me. At the same time, I brought up the pistol and jammed the barrel deep in under the intruder’s short ribs.

There was came a
woof
as the air was driven out of his lungs and a strangled squeak of fear. My eyes had adjusted to the gloom, and I found myself face-to-face with Eddie Tanaka. The young scientist’s breath, blowing across my face, was unpleasantly sour. The small amount of lasagna I had managed to choke down was threatening to make a return.

“What do you want? What are you doing in here?” I demanded, and Eddie recoiled. I realized the words had emerged in a harsh, tense whisper.

“I had a question.” The words emerged as a croak because I had the material twisted tight against his larynx.

I checked the clock and tried to process that. “You came into my bedroom at three in the morning to
ask me a question
?”

“Yeah.”

“It couldn’t wait until morning?”

“I couldn’t sleep,” came the disingenuous answer.

“Well,
I
could.”

Not that it had been easy. Watching the red sauce bubbling had taken me back to the house on Quincy, and Aldo’s death had left me feeling like this entire excursion had been a waste of time and fucking dangerous as well. I truly didn’t have a clue about what to do next. And added to all this there was Rhiana. I had spotted her BMW ineptly following our limo as we returned from the airport. Since it was no secret where we were going I just let her follow, but it was scary and confusing. When I had three seconds to myself I needed to analyze her behavior and try to figure it out.

Tanaka frowned. “Oh, yeah. Didn’t think about that. Do … do you think you could take the gun out of my side? And then answer my question.”

I sighed and released him, and set the Starfire back under the bed. “Okay.”

“You always keep a gun with you?” Tanaka asked.

“That was the question?”

“Uh. No. But do you always keep a gun with you?”

I was suddenly wavering between screaming annoyance and laughter. I thought back on my psychology classes in college.
Asperger’s. It had to be Asperger’s syndrome.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because people keep trying to kill me.”

Tanaka’s eyes widened. “Wow. Really?”

“Yes, really. Can we get to the question?” I prodded.

The scientist sat down on the mattress. His hip was pressed against my thigh. Fortunately it wasn’t my right leg. “I’ve never seen anybody die before … before … Indonesia,” the young man said. “When my grandma was dying I wouldn’t go in the hospital room until it was all over. And I get the shakes just thinking about … what happened.”

“Dr. Tanaka, forgive me, but it’s late and I’m tired. Is that question at least on approach? Will it be arriving soon?”

“Oh, yeah, sorry. And could you call me Eddie? I get real uncomfortable when people call me doctor.” I nodded. “Anyway, they said you used to be a policeman. So, have you ever killed anybody?”

“Yes.” It was such a small word to encompass so much, but I didn’t amplify.

“Is it hard to do?” Eddie asked. “I mean, would the way I feel about seeing people die affect … I mean, keep me from—”

“Killing someone?” I broke in.

“Yeah. Did it bother you? When you killed them?” Eddie asked.

I stood on the edge of a sea of complex emotions—grief, guilt, pride, excitement. I was afraid I’d drown if I went in. “Yes. Look, Eddie, if you don’t have to kill people, I don’t think you should.”

“But I want them to pay! For what they did … to everybody!”

I laid a hand over the young scientist’s and felt Eddie’s fingers close convulsively over mine. “You figure out how to free Kenntnis. That’s a far better thing to do for the memory of your friends,” I said.

Eddie stood, and his hand slipped free. My hand felt suddenly very cold. “Thanks.” He got almost to the door before he slewed around like a gawky foal and added, “Oh, yeah, I’m sorry I woke you up.” Eddie slipped out of the room.

I pummeled a pillow, trying to get some lift in the feathers. Great, now I was wide awake, and I had to go back up the hill to Congress today. I tried to think about what I had to do, had to say, but disjointed thoughts and memories kept flashing like brief bursts of lightning through my mind. I saw the blood pumping from a throat wound when I’d shot the perp who nearly killed my partner. The bone chips flying when I’d killed Snyder. There was another thought buried deep. I dug it up and looked at it. I wanted to find the men who’d brutalized me, and let a bullet peel back skin and muscle and listen to them scream. But of course I knew where one of them lived. Drew Sandringham was a quick flight up the coast in New York City.

My fantasies shattered when faced with the tangible reality of killing a man I’d known for most of my life. Maybe I wasn’t really a killer. Which should have made me feel good, but instead I felt depressed, as if I didn’t have the grit to do a hard job.

All these thoughts of death had me thinking about morgues, which made me think about Angela. We had been dating back in Albuquerque, trying to see if we could build a relationship. We hadn’t been alone since I’d swept us all off to Washington. She’d suggested a date night, and I’d put her off. Honestly, I’d even felt resentful. She shouldn’t have come; she should have stayed in New Mexico and done her job. Weber needed her. A conversation we’d had about the dead scientists from the Santa Fe Institute came floating to mind. Like a puzzle piece, it snapped into place with the killings in Indonesia.

I came out of bed and made a limping run into the living room. Laptops, their lids gleaming silver, lay on various surfaces like tiles in a giant’s Mahjongg set. I found one open and still running. I logged onto VICAP and typed in
scientists
and
murders
.

The list of incidents scrolled by for a long time. And that was just crimes in the United States.

“
W
hat’s been accomplished?”

Grenier looked up from his book at the sound of Richard’s voice approaching down the hallway of the condo.

What emerged into the living room looked more like a flying wedge moving down the field during an Australian rules football game. Richard, walking quickly, was pulling on gloves. Dagmar strode along at his side. Angela, with her short legs, was almost trotting to keep up, and she kept offering Richard a fedora. Tanaka, towering over everyone, looked like a wading stork. Behind him were the judge and Pamela, and bringing up the rear were Rudi and Estevan.

“I’ve blanketed our scientific facilities with security,” Dagmar said.

“And alerted local law enforcement?” Richard asked.

“Alerted and paid off as necessary depending on the part of the world,” Dagmar replied.

“Is it enough? Depending on how badly they’ve been affected by the gates, the guards might turn on our people. And they’re functionally mercenaries. We bought them. Someone else could buy them.” Richard ran a hand through his hair. “Do we need to get our people out?”

“We could charter planes and hire pilots, but where do we take them? And if we remove them from the companies and facilities, we’re going to see a profound drop in productivity and income.”

“Dagmar, scientists are being targeted and killed. I’ve got to protect my people. I can’t worry about money right now. And we’ve got to get the warning out to universities and laboratories everywhere.”

“We’re working on that.”

“Work faster.”

Richard finally took the hat from Angela, but he just held it by the brim and kept turning it in his hands. The physicist saw his moment and pushed Angela aside.

“Richard, I think I have a plausible answer to your question.”

“Which question was that?” Richard looked up from checking his inside breast pocket. “I ask so many people so many questions every day that I end up not remembering anything I said to anybody.” He lifted out a checkbook, looked satisfied, and put it back in the pocket.

“About why the craziness and … magic”—Tanaka stuttered over the word, and Grenier smiled to himself—“hasn’t spread faster and gone more deep.”

“And why is that?”

“Okay, so our universe is a universe of laws and probability. Take an action, you get a reaction and an expected result. And we can reproduce those results time after time after time,” Tanaka said.

“The basic scientific method,” Richard said. They were moving again, the people breaking into discrete streams as they flowed around the furniture. “And by laws you mean like gravity?”

“And relativity, and the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and conservation of energy, yeah, that kind of thing. Of course, down at the quantum level there is an element of chaos in our universe.”

Richard’s expression was both dismayed and frustrated. “I don’t have time for this.”

“Yeah, right, okay, so let’s ignore that for now.”

“Yes, let’s.”

“Anyway, I put together what you told me about how magic violates natural law, and how every magical act tears a hole in the fabric of our reality. Then I talked to Mr. Grenier.” Tanaka nodded to him, and Grenier nodded back. “About how he did magic, and it became pretty clear that the same spell won’t get the same result every time. It might use electricity, but how it manifests can be totally different. So it seems that magic is random and essentially chaotic. Magic is the result of a supreme act of personal will, which makes it antithetical to our multiverse of probability and order.”

“But isn’t magic normal and natural in the other universes?” Richard asked.

“Yes, they have their own laws, however weird they might be, but they’re alien to ours, so our multiverse is pushing back, resisting and to some degree neutralizing the effect of the invaders.”

“So you’re saying it’s a stalemate.”

“No, I don’t think we’re going to be that lucky. I mean, I’m flying blind here, but I ran some calculations and it seems that the continued pressure from these other multiverses bulging into our multiverse will begin to break down our reality. The more magic, the more erosion to our physical laws. The more erosion, the more magic. Eventually … well, I don’t know. Do we just get torn apart and subsumed into these other multiverses? Or do we become a place of functional chaos that’s indigestible to the other multiverses, and we mess them up, too?”

“That strikes me as the very definition of a Pyrrhic victory,”

“So we have to close the gates,” Pamela spoke up, and for an instant the cool facade pulled back and Grenier saw her fear, but Richard reacted to the sharp, hectoring tone.

“Yes, thank you. I have grasped that.”

“What happens to the creatures who’ve come through these gates after we close them?” Dagmar hurriedly asked.

Richard didn’t sugarcoat it. “They’re here.” The German blanched, and Richard gave a short laugh. “What? You were hoping they would shrivel up and die if they got stranded?”

“I could hope.”

“Nice thought, but wrong. Remember, some of the ones who came through thousands of years ago are still here.”

“So what do we do about them?” Tanaka asked.

“Same thing our distant ancestors did. Hunt them down and kill them,” Richard answered.

The scientist was shaking his head. “We haven’t got any ancient ancestors. What we’ve got is
you
.
You’re
gonna have to hunt them down and kill them.” Richard seemed to shrink as if the words had weight.

“And that’s why he needs allies,” said the judge. “You’re due on the Hill in fifteen minutes. “I do hope you’ve prepared what you’re going to say. You can’t skate through this on charm and a smile. I would have gone over your statement if you’d finished it last night.”

The long veiling lashes were quickly lowered, but not before Grenier saw the flash of pure fury in Richard’s eyes.

Yes, yes! Do it. Say it!

But the moment passed, and Richard seemed to become smaller yet as he said, “I should have, sir, but I was making notes at five
A.M.
, I didn’t want to wake you.”

Grenier sighed and threw aside the book, stood, and gripped Robert Oort’s shoulder.