VACANCY & ARIEL

I had spent much of the previous week in Los Angeles, hiding from Siskin—I assumed he had discovered the ruin of the cabin and would want to talk with me—and working with a hacker who, using the 1-212-AKHITAI phone number as a starting point, put together a detailed picture of the project in Tuttle’s Hollow. He had discovered that the project did not receive government funding—there were connections to the military, but these seemed unofficial, and the hacker’s opinion was that we were dealing with a private organization with friends in the military. Twenty-one personnel were on-site, twelve of them high-priced private security. Twelve was not sufficient to patrol such a large perimeter, but I assumed they could rapidly deploy whenever an intruder registered on their monitors.

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.”