The Nail and the Oracle (33 page)

Simple as a transistor, as difficult to understand.

And who, using a transistor, needs to understand it?

But a transistor (however precise) without a power supply (however tiny) is useless. The runes and the bones without the runesmith … nothing. With one, with the smith called Smith, fear more terrifying than any ever known by humankind; disaster unexpected,
inexplicable, seeming random, operating on unknown logic and unleashing unknown forces.

In the hall of the Seven Faceless ones.

Stood the incubus and the nixie.

Before their masters.

Who told them.

Things they needed to know.

The time has come. After time within time that has eaten time till it be gorged on its own substance, the time has come. You have been chosen emissaries. You will go and you will find us an instrument and you will train it and teach it and hone it and mold it to our needs. And when the instrument is ready you will use it to open a portal, and we will pour through and regain what was once and always ours, what was taken from us when we were exiled.

Here.

Where it is cold.

Where it is dark.

Where we receive no nourishment.

You will do this.

I am ready to serve
. So am I. But what sort of weapon do you want us to get?
I think I know what they mean
. You always know what they mean; listen, masters, I don’t want to be a nuisance, but I can’t work with this incubus. He’s a complainer and a befuddler and he’s got delusions of authority.
Masters, don’t listen to him. He’s jealous of the faith and trust you’ve put in me. He rails under the lash of envy. My success with the coven against the Norns infuriates him
. Rails? What the Thoth are you gibbering about? Look, Masters, I serve gladly; there isn’t much else for me to do. But I can’t work under this lunatic. One of us has to be in charge of things on this. If it’s him, then put me on some other duty. If it’s me, then put him in his place.

Silence!

You will work together as needs be.

The incubus.

The nixie will be in charge of this matter.

And you will assist.

I serve gladly, Masters
. Then why are you foaming?
Shut up!
Darling, you’re lovely when you’re angry.

We will hear.

No more.

You will begin now.

Find.

The weapon and teach it.

Open the portal.

We long to return.

How you do it is your concern but.

Do not fail us.

The nixie and the incubus had worked together as well as might be expected. The nixie said: We’ll give him magic and let him use it. We can’t go through, not yet at least, but we can send dreams and thoughts and desires: they’ll pass through the veil.
And what good will that do?

He’ll tear a rift in the veil for us.
Oh, I can’t believe the stupidity of your ideas
. Stupid or not, it’s the way I’m doing it; carefully and smoothly, and you keep your trachimoniae out of it.
Just don’t order me about. I’m the highest-ranking incubus—

Just shut up will you.

Shut up? How dare you speak to me like that? You’d better succeed quickly, nixie. My principals are anxious, and if you go wrong or slow down I’ll make certain they have their way with you
.

The nixie had found his weapon. Smith. He had given him first a series of dreams. Then a hunger to know the convolutions of black magic. The bulge in the floor. The hunger of curiosity. Leading him, step by step through his life: the Black Arts Book Store, the proper volumes, the revealed secrets, the dusty little room, and at last … the power. But given not quite whole. Given in a twisted manner. The runes had been cast, and the mistake made—and Smith had destroyed the world, tearing the veil in the process. But not quite enough for the return of the Faceless Ones.

And the incubus grew impatient for his revenge.

The girl.

Smith was sorry. Standing in the room to which his bat had led him, he was sorry. He hadn’t meant to do it. Smith had not, in the deepest sense, known it was loaded (nor had he been meant to know); and when it went off (in this room with half a candle and dust and books bound in human flesh, and the great grimoire) it was aimed at the whole world.

Peking, Paris, Rome, Moscow, Detroit, New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles: Miles of cinders burying cold roast corpses. Checkerboard arrangements of bottomless pits and glass spires. Acres of boiling swamp. Whole cities that were now only curling, rising green mist. Cities and countries that had been, were totally gone.

And in the few cities that remained … Water no longer flowed through their veins nor electricity through their nerves, and there they sat, scraping the sky, useless, meaningless, awaiting erosion. And at their dead feet, scurrying loners and human rat-packs, survivors hunting and sometimes eating one another, a species in its glorious infancy with the umbilical cord a thousand ways pinhole-perforated before it had had a chance really to be born; and Smith knew this and had to see it all around him, had to see it and say, “My fault. My fault.”

Guilty Smith the runesmith.

Back then, here, to the room where the runes had begun, to trap a girl he sensed would come. He set a noise-trap at the outer door (it opened outward so he propped a 4×4 against it and an old tin washtub under it; open the door and
whamcrash!
) and next to it a rune-trap (which cannot be described here) and he settled down to wait.

The nixie to the incubus:

What have you been doing?
I’ve lured him back to the focus location
. You fool! He may suspect now.
He suspects nothing. I’ve implanted a delusion, a girl. When he sleeps we take him and rip the veil completely
. What girl!? What have you done? You can ruin it all, you egomaniac!
There is no girl. A succubus. I tried earlier, but it went wrong. This time he’s weaker, he’ll sleep, we’ll take him
.

What makes you think he’ll succumb this time, any more than he did the last time?
Because he’s a human and he’s weak and stupid
and lonely and filled with guilt and he has never known love. I will give him love. Love that will drain him, empty him. Then he’s mine
.

Not yours … ours!

Not yours at all, Nixie. The Masters will see to you
.

He stood in a dark corner, waiting. And sleep suddenly seemed the most important thing in the world to him. He wanted to sleep.

Sleep! Should a man live three-score years, one of them must go to this inert stupidity, a biochemical habit deriving from the accident of diurnal rotation. The caveman must huddle away behind rocks and flame during the hours of darkness because of the nocturnal predators who can see better in the dark than he can. They, in turn, must hide from him. Hence the habit, long outmoded but still inescapable. A third of a life spent sprawled out paralyzed, mostly unconscious, and oh vulnerable. Twenty years wasted out of each life, when life itself is so brief a sparkle in a surrounding immensity of nothingness. Brief as it is, still we must give away a third of it to sleep, for no real reason. Twenty years. Smith had hated and despised sleep, the cruel commanding necessity for sleep, the intrusion, the interruption, the sheer waste of sleep; but never had he hated it so much as now, when everyone in the world was his enemy and all alone he must stand them off. Who would stand sentry over Smith? Only Smith, lying mostly unconscious with his own lids blinding him and his ears turned off and his soft belly upward to whatever soft-footed enemy might penetrate his simple defenses.

But he could not help himself; he
wanted
to sleep.

He lay down fully dressed and pulled a blanket over him. He murmured his goodnight words, which for a long time had been (as he slid toward the edge of slumber’s precipice and scanned the day past and the weeks and months since that first terrible rune-work) “I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry. I’m sorry …” and as he tumbled off the edge of waking, he would catch one awful glimpse of tomorrow—more of the same, but worse.

But not tonight. Perhaps it was his exhaustion, the long thirty-six-hour flight up the Empire State Building, trying, out of guilt and
compassion, not to use his terrible weapon (how many times had he made that firm resolution … how many times, falling sickly asleep, had he determined to walk out unarmed, to build an attention aura around himself, to get from the new barbarians that which his guilt deserved?), or perhaps he had reached a new peak of terror and shame, and feared especially the vulnerability of sleep.

As he approached the dark tumble into oblivion, something made him claw at the edge, hold fast, neither asleep nor awake, just at that point through which he usually hurtled, unable to stay awake, on guard no more.

And he heard voices.

Now I send her to him. Now when he’s weakest
. Wait! Are you sure? This man … he’s … different. There’s been a change in him.
Since we last manipulated him? Don’t be ridiculous
. No, wait! There is … something. Sleep. Yes, that’s it. It had to do with sleep.
I’m not waiting; my Principals want through now, in this tick of time, now! I want success more than you, that is why the triumph and the rewards will be mine. The twelve generations it took to breed this Smith as a gateway and the lifetime it took to train him. It’s all come down to me, to me to fail or succeed, and I’ll succeed! I’m sending the succubus, now! He’s never been loved
 … now
he’ll be loved
.

No! You fool! Your ego! Sleep is his strength. You have it all wrong. Nothing can harm him when he sleeps!

Success!

Smith had a brief retinal impression of
something
 … it was being a gateway, and what it was like. Mouth open till the flesh tore at the corners. Darkness pouring from within him, then flames that expanded and rolled over the land, filling the sky; and himself burning burning burning.

Then it was gone. Smith clung for one more amazed moment to this place, this delicately-limned turnover point between waking and sleep. This line was a crack in—in something incomprehensible, but it was a crack through which his mind could peep as between boards in a fence.

Something began to beat in him, daring him to move, hope. He
quelled it quickly lest it wake him altogether and those—those
others
—know of it. Slipping, slipping, losing his clutch on this half-wakefulness, about to drop and over end into total sleep, he snatched at phrases and concepts, forcing himself to keep and remember them: twelve generations it took to breed this Smith as a gateway … lifetime it took to train.

And: nothing can reach him, nothing can harm him while he’s asleep.

Sleep.

Sleep the robber, sleep the intruder, sleep the enemy—all his life he had tried to avoid it, had succumbed as little as possible, had fought to live without it.
Who had taught him that?
Why did he want to unlearn it so desperately now? And what did the doctors and poets say about sleep: surcease, strengthener, healer, knitter-up of the raveled sleeve of care. And he had sneered at them. Had he been
taught
to sneer?

He had. For
their
purposes, he had been taught. More; he had been bred for this—twelve generations, was it? And why? To be given the power to decimate humanity so that something unspeakable, something long-exiled could return to possess this world? Would it be the Earth alone, or all the planets, the galaxies, the universe? Could it be time itself? Or other sets of dimensions?

The one thing he must do is sleep.
Nothing can harm him when he sleeps
.

Then she came to him. The girl from the stairwell, alive again, a second time, or how many times back to the inky beginnings he could not even imagine? She came to him through the door, and there was no sound of crashing washtub; she came through the room and there was no stench and death from the rune-trap.

She came toward him, lying there, without clothes, without sound, without pain or anger, and she extended her flawless arms to him in love. The pleasure of her love swept across the room. She wanted to give herself, to give him everything, all she was and all she could be, for no other return than his love. She wanted his love, all of his love, all of him, everything, all the substance and strength of him.

He half-rose to meet her, and then he knew what she was, and
he trembled with the force of losing her, of destroying her, and he murmured words without vowels and a slimy darkness began to eat at her feet, her legs, her naked thighs, her torso, and she let one ghastly shriek as something took her, and her face dissolved in slime and darkness, and she was gone … and he fell back, weak.

Smith the runesmith let go his shred of wakefulness and plunged joyfully into the healing depths. It was not until he awakened, rested and strong and healthily starving, that he realized fully what else he had let go.

Guilt.

The sin was not his. He had been shaped to do what he had done. A terrible enemy had made him its instrument, its weapon. You do not accuse, condemn, imprison the murder-weapon.

The runesmith, smiling (how long since?) fumbled for the skin-bag of knucklebones. He closed his eyes, his strong, clear rested eyes, and turned his rested mind to the talent (inborn) and skills (instilled) in him alone of all men ever. No jaded blind buckshot in the faces of his kin, done in anguish to stay alive, but the careful, knowing, precise drawing of a bead. The location, direction, range known to Smith the weapon in ways impossible to Smith the man.

The knucklebones spilled chatteringly on the floor.

The pattern was random; his talent and his skills understood it.

He murmured a new murmur.

Hunkered down on his haunches, he called up the power.

There was the faintest hiss of a breeze in the tumbled warren of this focus-room, a breeze that was peculiarly bittersweet, the way Holland chocolates used to be. A chill breeze that broke sweat out on Smith’s spine, in the hollows between his shoulder blades.