The Radio Magician and Other Stories (29 page)

They took the turn to the left, around a granite wall, out of the sun and into the stone bowl that held the mine. Rock surrounded them on three sides, like a small arena. The sound of Charles’ hard-soled boots echoed. At the far side, a metal gate held closed by a clasp lock marked the mine’s entrance.

“You’re going to be staying here, boy.” Charles removed a chisel from his satchel, set its edge against the lock, raised the hammer, then paused. Always he judged before he struck. Was the chisel set correctly? Would the hammer do its job? There could never be a strike without the pause for judgement, where a mistake could be saved. The metal’s sharp report reverberated off the rocks. Another blow broke it, then Charles pulled the door open; it screeched against the stiffness in its hinges. He’d never seen a mine entrance like the Crossroad’s. The floor looked worn smooth, as if thousands of feet had marched on it through the years. How had the miners done that?

“Don’t you love me, Papa?” the boy said again.

Charles didn’t look at him. From his satchel he removed a blanket, candles, a small bundle of food and a water bottle. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“You must not be my Papa.” He didn’t sound insincere this time. “My Papa loves me. He’ll find me, my Papa.”

“Just get in!”

Charles could barely see the new lock he put on the door through the tears.

Behind the iron gate, he heard the boy move, a large sound, as if what stirred in the tunnel had suddenly grown huge. He fell back. Impossibly, the door stirred in its iron frame, and for a second Charles thought the inch-thick bolts might pull from the rock. He scuttled away. Even at the edge of the granite arena, when Charles looked at the mine entrance, he could hear the boy behind the gate, breathing loud, his heart throbbing. The sky grew dark and the air thick. A noxious cloud seeped around the door’s edges, filled the stone chamber, its tendrils crawling on the floor toward Charles. The boy said, his voice full of old mining timbers and cold, wet stone a thousand feet deep, “Papa?”

Charles fled.

West Yellow Dog had been dynamited. All that remained of its entrance was twisted ore cart track. Ron searched the cliff base to both sides. A niche three hundred yards to the right might have been where they stored powder, but it was only ten feet deep and didn’t have a door. Below the mine, partially hidden behind scrubby pine growing between the rocks, he found a small tunnel barely tall enough for him to enter on his hands and knees, but twigs and dirt blocked the way a few feet in and it smelled of marmot. Ron sat on his haunches outside the hole and closed his eyes against the sun.

He’d know if Levi had died, wouldn’t he? A father and son had a bond, he’d told the detective.

Within his view, visible only because the sun cast long shadows, several foundations rose from the grass in the clearing below the slope. There must have been a small community here, or they might have been part of the mining operation. At the Gilpin County Courthouse, Ron had looked at pictures of the town from the 1880s, and beside them were modern shots taken from the same spot. The buildings changed. Trees changed. But the rocks and mountains stayed the same. He trembled. To the mountain, time didn’t exist; all times were interchangable. He glanced at his watch. To a little boy dying in a mine, every second stretched like skin on fire.

He pushed himself upright.

The New Baltimore had a park service gate on it. Ron slowed as he approached. Covered in dust, the remains of a broken lock lay on the ground. He rubbed the scratches in the metal. No rust. Someone had been here this summer.

“Levi!” His voice sounded hollow and out of place.

The gate gave reluctantly, its base dragging over the rock as he pulled it open. Moisture seeped from the walls a few feet in. Resting one hand on the black-slime ceiling just above his head, he shone his flashlight on indistinct footprints on the muddy floor. Back in the depths, a watery
plink-plink-plink
broke the silence. The tunnel split. To the right, a pile of rock and broken timbers blocked the way. To the left, the passage sloped downward for another twenty feet before ending at a pool of water. The footprints led here. Ron played the quivering light across the surface, penetrating to the bottom. Rocks. More timber. Metal so heavily rusted he couldn’t tell what its original shape had been. No wrapped bundle. No horror-story patch of white that resolved itself into a face.

He released a pent-up breath. Why had someone broken into the mine? Turning, he studied the walls and ceiling. A slippery, unhealthy looking fungus covered the surfaces, and the stagnant air smelled rotted and mildewed. Near the ceiling to the left of the pool, a patch of rock peered through the growth, as if it had been brushed clean, and above it, a crack wider than his fist swallowed the light. Ron reached in, touched plastic. He found four bags in the crack, about a pound each. A whiff of the first one showed he’d uncovered someone’s stash.

Ron left the bags on the floor. Ten minutes wasted.

According to his map, all that remained was the Crossroad. It took a half hour of backtracking across the gulch’s east side before he found a faint trail that led to a gap around a rock wall.

He spotted the lock on the door on the other side of the stone arena as soon as he rounded the corner, a brand new, brass padlock, like the row of them on top of Sims’ dresser. He ran without thinking about it. Old metal door, not park service. Ron ripped off his backpack, fumbled for the bolt cutter, gripped the handles and squeezed. The lock snapped.

Was now the moment when he would know? Ron had dreamed of finding Levi in a thousand ways. Bad dreams, in some, where Levi was dead. Either dead over a month, or even worse, dead a few days. He’d be starved or dead from thirst or exposure. In some dreams he was alive but sick, damaged from exposure or the time alone. In one dream Levi didn’t know him, his mind gone. What could be worse than an eight-year-old driven insane by abuse and fear? In that dream, Ron loved his son back to sanity. No evil could be so bad that love could not change it to something good.

Ron tore the lock from the hasp, jammed his fingertips into the gap between the door and the frame. Pulled.

In the good dreams, Levi waited. “Daddy!” he would cry. He always called Ron “Daddy,” like it was a blessing.

The door swung open.

Charles didn’t even try to get to sleep. Sitting at the table in his cabin, the tiny slice of moon providing the only light again, he thought about the locked gate and the boy behind it. His intention was to never return.

He thought, what’s the greater evil? Every time he closed his eyes, he saw dead children, a fingerprint on their foreheads; he also saw the boy at the Crossroad, staring at a candle, maybe, or sleeping. What kind of dreams would a bringer of death like him have? But Charles was evil too. The boy, no matter what else he was, was his son. A father should take care of his own. One time when Charles was young he locked a storage shed on his father’s farm. A week later his father sent him to fetch some tools. The storage shed stank, a solid wall of putridness rolling out when Charles opened the door. A cat had been locked in, its mouth gaping open, dry as dust, the stomach burst. If he had known, wouldn’t it have been merciful to have killed the cat a week earlier?

Charles looked through the darkness to his own bed. He couldn’t imagine sleeping again. The boy behind the gate moved in his mind. The room was so black, Charles could almost see the boy without closing his eyes. Like the cat, the boy was locked in. But the cat wasn’t the devil. No, not by a long shot. Maybe a creature like the boy thrived on the black air behind the gate. Could such a thing be killed by an act as simple as being shut into a mine? What if it could do some magic to save itself?

In a sudden vision, Charles saw himself as an older man walking down a street. A beautiful carriage clattered by, the horses’ hooves loud on the bricks. In the vision, Charles glanced up. Sitting in the carriage was his son, grown now, and the look he gave from the carriage was full of hate.

Charles made a fist on the table, alone in his cabin in the midst of the night and moaned. The boy was behind the gate. “I’m cursed,” Charles said to the four walls. Already he felt the guilt like a blood-soaked blanket settling over his head, suffocating him.

He’s a boy dying slowly, my son, Charles thought. He’s a monster who can save himself in some evil way.

Like the New Baltimore, the Crossroad was wet. Footprints showed clearly in the mud. Little prints. A child’s shoes.

“Levi!” Ron’s eyes strained to see into the mine, pulse throbbing huge in his chest. “Are you there, son?”

He took a few steps down the tunnel. Where was Levi? Ron turned on his flashlight. The powerful beam cut into the air showing the path curving away before him. His feet slipped on the muddy floor as slick as polished marble, and suddenly he felt scared, as scared as he’d ever been in his life. His breath puffed out in a plume before him. Every instinct told him to run. The mine didn’t feel right. The air clung to his arms like icy cockleburs, and he had to brace himself with a hand against the wall. Then the floor shook, but it wasn’t just the floor; everything jolted or quivered. Every cell in his body flinched. He wasn’t sure if he had turned around and was heading out. He thought, the world has shifted.

He stepped forward again. Where am I? Where am I going?

A voice came from the tunnel before him, a little boy’s voice.

“Papa?” it called.

Ron rushed forward, his fear forgotten. He would greet him with love like he’d never known.

“Papa?”

His son was coming home.

Charles stood at the Crossroad gate. He’d pulled it open, but he wouldn’t step inside. No, he was too frightened for that. He couldn’t
see
the boy, or all would be lost. He had one chance to make it right, and only one.

“Boy?” he yelled into the mine.

For a long time there was no sound, then Charles felt a peculiar twitch, like the mountain had shrugged. The air itself contracted, and his ears popped.

He shook his head. Whatever else was going on, he could not be swayed.

“Boy?” he shouted again.

A voice came from far back in the mine. “Daddy?” it cried. “Is that you, Daddy?”

Small feet splashed through the mud, growing louder.

“I knew you’d come, Daddy,” the voice exclaimed, very close now.

Charles stood by the door out of sight, his hammer raised high, paused above him. When the boy stepped out, he would bring it down. Oh, yes he would. He would end it here.

And all would be right.

THE LAST AGE SHOULD KNOW YOUR HEART

::::: blink :::::

M
arvell checked his clock and power supply. Fourteen thousand years had passed, and the beach-ball sized maintenance machine had six minutes stored before he would have to enter sleep mode again. Other figures flicked through his engineered consciousness: two percent less of the twenty-seven hundred square miles of his photoelectric grid was active than had been there the last wake time, but most of the bad sectors were much farther than six minutes away. They showed as tiny black dots on the power grid’s smooth green representation in his display, almost all of them to his west. The sun’s energy output had reduced too, by .04 percent. His sensors displayed it as a dull red plain on the other side of the grid, filling half the sky, only a dozen miles above, its wrinkled, gassy surface sliding by at orbital velocity. If nothing else changed, he’d be out for seventeen thousand years, clinging to the sun-encircling grid, gradually storing energy, before waking again. Could he get to the nearest bad sector and at least repair it before shut down?

And where was ThreeAndrea?

At the cost of ten seconds of wakefulness, he powered up the locator. She was on the west edge of her grid, fifteen minutes away, inactive. Somewhat closer than she had been fourteen thousand years ago. What were the odds they would ever be awake at the same time? Sacrificing a few more seconds, he ran a diagnostic on her grid. Nearly the same rate of degradation.

He set course for the nearest bad sector to his east, uncoupled from the system, the copper crimps snapping open in unison, then released the pulse that would send him toward the repair. To conserve time, everything on him powered down, except his awareness, but that drew the most energy. He recited poetry during the drift, from billions of years earlier, his favorite works in a long dead language from a long dead species, whose connection to the Makers was lost in history. Had they once traded? Had there been interstellar commerce? Were the Makers their descendants who’d moved from sun to sun, carrying the poetry with them until it ended up here? There was no way to know. The authors were gone, their star not even a distant memory. Only the literature lasted, not the lengthy path it had taken to end up within him.

Marvell’s memory banks were extensive, and in the super cold on the grid’s shadow side, he only needed to expend a nanowatt to plumb his memory’s depths. “Had we but world enough, and time,” he thought, and he let the words cycle over and over. Then he threaded another line through it, “the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace.” Marvell had taken to mixing and matching his poetry, choosing favorite lines only, since there was hardly the luxury of the entire poem. Funny, to long for embracing, he thought.

He tried to remember if he’d dreamed. It seemed unreasonable that in fourteen thousand years of sleep he hadn’t dreamed, but he couldn’t come up with a single image in the silent time while he’d been shut down. He wouldn’t know the time had passed at all except his clock reminded him, and that in the blink the power grid had gained a few more black spots, but he felt it, hanging on him, like a heavy ebony blanket, the psychic time of the years passing while he clung beneath the grid, millions of years old, much closer to the end of his life than the beginning.

The timer told him he had arrived. Visuals brightened. Above him, the power grid glided past, a great, opaque sheet between him and the sun, capturing every stray radiation, converting it to electricity and storing it in his batteries, but now there was almost nothing to capture. The sun was only mildly warmer than the space around it. He slowed himself, unlimbered his arms. As always, links were broken in the fabric above. Time was cruel. The Makers had built the grid to last forever, and it had certainly outlasted them, but forever is an unreachable goal. His sensor-laden fingers found the ruptures, wove them together in automatic competence, measured their capacity.

If he could have shrugged, he would have. All the grid’s connections were thinning, breaking down, the essence of their mass sublimating slowly. He paused while his subtle intelligence did the calculations. Idly, as he waited, he scanned the system. On each corner of his orbiting fiefdom rose the old power transmitters that used to beam the gathered energy to the Makers’ planet beyond, but he’d long since lost contact with them. No heat from it. No light. There was no way to sense it, and there hadn’t been for millions of years. The towers remained, their mechanisms useless. He recited a bit of verse: “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

The calculations finished. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” he thought. “Old time is still a-flying.” If he was lucky, he might wake up another three or four times. The race was between the sun reducing to so little output that the grid couldn’t convert it into electricity, or the grid itself failing utterly.

His arms folded back into his shell. The crimps reanchored. He wondered if ThreeAndrea would see that he’d moved closer to their shared border. Would she do the same calculations and come to the same conclusion. When was the last time he’d talked to her? There wasn’t time to access his records. Screens faded to black. Sensors powered down.

Just before his six minutes ended, he said to himself, “That age is best which is the first, when youth and blood are warmer; but being spent, the worse, and worst times still succeed the former.”

::::: blink :::::

Seventeen thousand years, almost exactly, and he only had five minutes. More of the grid was down. As it had been for several of the last cycles, it was falling apart faster than he could repair it. His duty was clear. The bulk of bad sectors was to the west. The most efficient plan would be to head for the heaviest concentration and begin repairing there. Already he’d mapped out the best course. He could extend the grid’s life by thousands on thousands of years. The sun would go out eventually, but it was dying at a slower rate than the grid, and it was possible that it could flicker into renewed life, that deep inside, where the gravity-tortured physics became unlikely, the chain reactions could push themselves into momentary brightness. Not long-lived, for sure, but the sun could pulse. It had before, and if it did, the power would flow. He’d be able to stay alert indefinitely to completely repair the system.

His job was to outlast the dormant periods.

He scanned for ThreeAndrea. She was on the west edge of her grid, only four minutes away. She must have headed straight toward him during her last active period.

Oh, for the heady days when the sun glowed brightly and energy flowed in abundance! He never slept then, cruising along the grid’s protected side, making sure the towers beamed their power to the Maker’s planet safely below them. Then, a chain of grids encircled the star like a huge ribbon, and there were thousands of mechanisms like him, sentient, self-aware, independent machines devoted to repairing the inevitable breakdowns. He’d seen pictures of the sun as viewed from the Maker’s planet, a beautiful, bright light in the sky with a narrow stripe cut through its middle, the grid’s shadow. Now, as far as he could tell, ThreeAndrea and he were the only ones left, two small robots, mending their sections. Then they had power to spare, in constant communication, swapping poems, conversing about their jobs, about their lives. No one lives a limited life, he thought. Our lives are as important as any. He felt a longing to hold onto his, lonely as it was.

But as the sun waned, they went increasingly into sleep mode. He hadn’t spoken to her for millions of years (although he’d only been aware of a handful of them), and he realized he might never speak to her again.

Seconds ticked relentlessly, and he didn’t move. There were dead patches between ThreeAndrea and him. He could go closer to her, but it wouldn’t be efficient. A thought crossed his mind: there are no more Makers. I have no responsibility to them, but the grid called. His programming and habit pulled at him to go west, away from ThreeAndrea and into the heart of the damaged system.

And what would be the use of going her way? She could well move farther from their shared border. He couldn’t lock onto her grid any more then she could lock onto his. The connections would be incompatible. To leave his area would be suicide.

A snippet of John Donne surfaced in his memory, “For the first twenty years since yesterday I scarce believed thou couldst be gone away.” It was the poem that ended with, “Yet call not this long life; but think that I am, by being dead, immortal. Can ghosts die?” ThreeAndrea liked John Milton, although she dwelt more on the last works of the Makers. The sad dirges to themselves, made as they dug deeper and deeper into their planet, pursuing the heat at the core, breathing air transmuted from minerals and rock, their own atmosphere having long ago frozen and fallen to the surface.He decided, set a course, unclamped and released a pulse.

Duty ruled out. He must repair as much damage as possible.

Then he remembered a bit of Shakespeare, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments . . . Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom.”

Seconds ticked away, much more important to him than distance. The clock ruled what was left of his life. Above him, the blank-slate grid scooted by. Every passing instant was a crisis, a turning point, a crux, a moment lost and a trial of resolution.

Fully formed, the thought leapt before him, I don’t need to be duty’s fool.

Before he calculated fuel, before he could even determine if what he wanted to do was possible, he unshipped an arm, reached up and grabbed the grid. His metal shell snapped into the black surface. Ripples stretched along the metallic fabric. Connections broke. In a second, more damage was done to the grid than had occurred in the past hundred-thousand years. But his momentum slowed until he stopped, and the grid rebounded, pulling him back. Marvell let go at the end to the bounce, sending himself in the other direction, toward ThreeAndrea asleep on the border.

Only three minutes left. The math was unforgiving. He’d have to stop considerably short of her. By the time he’d recharged himself, she would be long gone. His errand was futile. Still, he plotted the best angle, made a small correction, set his timer and waited. Another poet drifted through his mind, “Now let us sport us while we may, and now, like amorous birds of prey, rather at once our time devour than languish in his slow-chapped power,” and if Marvell could have smiled, he would have.

He slowed, clamped. Dug up some Shakespeare to meditate on while he was shut down, if there was a chance for dreams: “In me thou see’st the twilight of such day as after sunset fadeth in the west, which by and by black night doth take away, death’s second self that seals up all in rest.”

::::: blink :::::

ThreeAndrea hadn’t moved. Marvell noted that first. Then, the time, sixty-four thousand years. He’d reduced the grid’s capability that much? No. His damage wasn’t that big, and the decline in functioning sectors was as predicted. It was the sun, even dimmer now, throwing out less usable radiation, cooling in the universal heat sink. There would be no chance for a saving pulse. The last burst of radiation truly had been its ending gasp, and the decline was comparatively swift and inevitable. Too small to nova, not even enough mass to become a neutron star, it would just continue to fade, like a filament in a light bulb caught in slow motion. Neutrons would break into protons and electrons, and, eventually, those too would go their separate ways, joining the background heat that was all that remained of the universe, but this was unimaginably far into the future, even for an intelligence as old as Marvell’s.

Was she dead? Marvell activated his sensors, spending precious seconds of consciousness. She’d done no repairs to her grid as far as he could tell since she’d activated last. More chilling, though—she hadn’t budged from where she’d anchored on the closest edge of her grid. He had three minutes to act. Quickly, he unanchored, recalled the course, released a pulse, then turned his sensors off. The numbers said he would reach her with seconds to spare.

Nothing to do in the seconds left but to recite poetry, a little Yeats. At first he considered “Sailing to Byzantium,” and then “The Second Coming,” but he couldn’t imagine a birth in his future, not even the grim one with a rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. He chose instead some Gerald Manley Hopkins. It called to him pictures of a life he’d only imagined on planetary surfaces he’d never walked on. There were so many terms in it he hadn’t experienced, but there was something in the tone:

Nothing is so beautiful as spring,

When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;

Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush

Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring

The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing.

He kicked the sensors back on, slowed himself to a stop, reanchored. Her shell looked whole. The nearly invisible seams where her arms folded into her body appeared clean. No outward damage, but that didn’t reflect what might have gone on inside. A critical relay could have broken, or, he thought, she could have ended it herself. They both had the capability. He could shut himself down forever easily enough. Is that what she had done? Why hadn’t she moved? How could he communicate with her?

Only seconds remained before he shut down. What could he do? If he could have, he would have wept in frustration. Instead, he extended his arm, his mechanical manipulators, loaded with sensors and so like fingers stretching out to touch her. She was a shade too far. No time to bring it back. One arm out, inches too short, Marvell retreated into sleep mode.

::::: blink :::::

Marvell woke to poetry, and for a moment it puzzled him. It didn’t come from within him. He hadn’t called it up, but there it was, running through his brain, “When I consider how my light is spent ere half my days in this dark world and wide, and that one talent which is death to hide lodged in me useless, though my soul more bent to serve therewith my maker . . .” He recognized the poet, John Milton.