Weissenbaum's Eye - Stetten

Weissenbaum's Eye - Stetten - Chapter 5

CHAPTER FIVE

"Is it two o'clock yet?"

"No."

"Is it two o'clock yet?"

"No."

"Is it two o'clock yet?"

A hot day crept by beneath the sun. From the old church steeple, Bellringer could see across the red brick wall, and down into the courtyard. Cracked windows stared back from under heavy brows of ivy, and a stillness hung throughout the overgrown decaying fortress known as the campus, which lay between Bellringer and the ocean.

There was no sign of life except a gray dog, prowling along the old wall down to the water's edge. With the patience of an astronomer, Bellringer watched the animal move, nostrils wide open, and head cocked to one side. With the next paw about to hit the ground, the dog would push to change its course, following some scent that only it could smell. Bellringer methodically predicted that ten steps would take the animal around the wall and out of sight.

Through another of the steeple windows, away from the calm ocean, the deserted roofs of the city were steaming in the heat. Black and purple algae pools stretched up the hillside like a patchwork quilt.

Near the top of the hill, Bellringer could describe a young man just now coming into view. Even at this distance, Bellringer could clearly magnify his face. The little muscles tightening around the traveler's eyes held something of his story. The strain of his anxiety and fatigue showed in his squint. Bellringer was particularly watchful of him, feeling a great desire to know more about this man, a feeling that came from somewhere up the line.

Under the ivy, inside the stone walls of the steeple, a cable ran down in a sheath of darkness through the ancient foundations of the church. Red lights flashed along glass threads, to where they met other threads underground. From here it was impossible to tell the threads apart. At each junction fewer of Bellringer's signals remained among the torrent of crosstalk. But still a faint discussion could be heard under the city...

"Is it two o'clock yet?"

"No."

"Is it two o'clock yet?"

The glass threads reached almost everywhere, and in the few places where none yet ran, little metal spiders spun more, digging tunnels as they moved through dirt and rock.

But the spiders could not dig under the campus, although the red wall was just a hundred feet from Bellringer. Heavy thumping things crouched between the brick foundations, that shook the ground and made the glass webs shatter. To Bellringer the campus seemed like an itch that was impossible to scratch. But it was precisely to observe the campus that Bellringer had been placed in the tall steeple so close outside the campus wall, to keep track of the comings and goings at Synapse, and report them all to somewhere up the line.

Elsewhere in the city, the fiber bundles twisted, branching up to couches where the people lay. Two metal balls within each couch's pillow sent out patterns to capture the imagined movements, and supply appropriate perceptions. The city slumbered in a million simulations.

Down from where the people lay, the fibers ran into dark airless chambers filled with nodules of endless memory. The hoarded wealth of all mankind was there, and other things ingrown so deeply that the human species could not reach them, things for which Bellringer was a spy, a sleepless sensor. Far across the surface of the earth, all were embedded in this net of glass, like particles in the outer membrane of a cell.

Within one isolated chamber, a laser clock pulsed out its perfect rhythm to the circuits that encased it. This was the blind man's timepiece, which could ignore the passage of the sun and stars.

After the proper time had passed, the clock divulged a message that branched up in all directions out along the fibers. Pulses spread like ripples on a pond, past a thousand destinations till they reached the old foundations of the church, where the message rose up in the steeple.

"Yes, it is two o'clock."

Keeping an eye on the solitary traveler outside, Bellringer slowly flexed the magnets that served as muscles, pushing and pulling on the speaker diaphragms, carefully following a pre-set table of instructions, a recipe for the synthesis of church bells. The vibrant clang surrounded the old steeple and radiated out over the afternoon.

Sand finally cleared the hill. He stood on a gymnasium of rooftops, a surface of connected buildings. Here and there, the remnants of what once had been a street remained between the buildings, but most had been filled in by the continual expansion of the rooms and couches.

Keeping an eye ahead with urgent determination, Sand gripped his aching side. He was in no shape for such a climb. From time to time he rested, measuring his slow progress, as the view to the shoreline permitted.

There was the campus.

Church bells drifted up and seemed to bring his destination closer. Sand had vague memories of this place as a child. He could see the old church, and just beyond it the red brick walls of the campus weaving like a ribbon to the sea, dividing the peninsula of the campus from the city. An old and bygone security, a brief wind that was soft and gone.

The howling resentment of a broken family returned him to where he was, stationed under a distant sun, with the campus still a long walk away. The algae bubbled and burped from sludge-fish at the bottom, and Sand was tired of the tedious worry of falling in.

The roofs had no railings, and the pools smelled rotten. It nauseated him to think of eating the wafers processed from this wasteland. He was anxious to carry out Holly's mission and then return home to his room, to his couch. He felt wrong out here, insignificant and vulnerable, lost over a sea of strangers who slept in little rooms just like his own. If only he had stayed away, and not been tempted by the glory of Benjamin Holly.

But here he was, searching out a mother he had not seen for years, an unknown woman whose power overshadowed even that of Benjamin Holly, because she did not compete with him. She had invented the simultron. She was the president of Synapse. The medium was hers to begin with.

Sand thought of his little program about Mara inventing the couch, which Peter had shown Benjamin Holly without asking. Long ago, Sand's mother had told him of that first experience within the simultron, and described that moment when her vision would no longer answer to her will. To move her eyes and have the picture stay the same...

He almost lost his balance winding down a long spiral ladder, but finally Sand cleared the last building and stepped off a concrete rampway onto solid earth. He followed the dirt path across the yard. The wooden doors of the church loomed large as Sand walked by. They were massive and bolted shut by scrolled metalwork.

Above the church doors colored glass spanned a lattice, forming scenes from some bygone religion. Its faith no doubt had moved these stones, so long ago that even the weeds could not remember. Higher still, the steeple cleared the ivy and jutted skyward, its windows too small and dark to discern.

Sand crossed the narrow field. The brick wall of the campus stood before him topped with spikes, uninterrupted except by a single iron gate. Its black paint was shiny and blistered, cracking here and there over the rust. From beyond the bars the shade of trees summoned a cool dark breeze across his face. Sand gave the heavy gate a shake. It was securely locked.

"Hello," he said.

There had to be a password. The gate had never been locked when he was a child. Sand leaned as close as he could and peered around the wall.

Suddenly, a growl erupted close behind him. He spun around. A large gray dog stood there, its grizzly face bristling with whiskers and teeth. Its lips twitched, and its eyes had no whites but held Sand in an off-center gaze. Sand stood perfectly still with his back to the gate, clenching his fists to hit the dog's head. The dog crawled closer.

"Back, Ru! Get back!"

The voice came from behind Sand, from within the campus.

"Go on! Get back!"

Sand did not dare take his eyes off the animal to investigate the source of the command, but as he watched, the dog cowered and crawled off. Only then could Sand glance behind himself.

His first impression of the man reminded him of the dog. Small black eyes poked out from a patch of weather-beaten face surrounded by a jungle of curly hair, and a full black woolly beard.

The gate opened and the fierce little man said, "Move over."

Sand stepped aside. The dog slowly circled, and then bolted through the gate. The bearded man knelt to embrace the dog, and then sat back on his haunches with the animal pinned, in apparent bliss, between his knees. The man looked up at Sand.

"You want to come in."

Whether this was a question was hard to tell. Sand felt an intensity about this man, a mixture of humor and hostility. There was a playful menace behind those shiny little eyes.

"I want to see Mara Gould," said Sand.

The words were rough and close in his throat. The bearded man looked at him harder with that same, almost intimate aggression.

"Mara Gould is not here. Whoever told you that is having a joke at your expense."

"Benjamin Holly said she was here," protested Sand.

The man's eyes, were they laughing at him?

"Benjamin Holly?" he growled. "And who are you?"

Sand could not answer for a moment.

"I am his student."

The bearded man's expression did not soften as he stood up and looked directly at Sand with something akin to recognition.

"I'm afraid you have made your journey in vain. There is nobody named Mara Gould here. You had better start back now, while you still have light." The nearest thing to kindness faded from his face. "The surface is no place for someone like you at night."

With that, the man whistled for his dog, and without waiting to see that he had been obeyed, turned and disappeared behind the lengthening shadows of the campus wall.

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