sun had just set when it happened. The earth shook with such violence that the men were knocked from their feet and the forests below them seemed to toss like waves in a storm. The tremors calmed for a moment and, looking wildly around, Paul saw it: a great ring of dust about halfway up Caracamuni’s height. The tremors gradually stopped and from where he lay sprawled on the ground, Paul saw something that made him instinctively grab up his videocam and frame the scene in his viewfinder.
Caracamuni appeared to be growing taller. As its top continued to rise, though, he saw that it was not growing but separating, top half from bottom half, at that ring of thinning dust. In moments the top half had risen free and a space of clear sky intervened between the sundered halves of the ancient mountain.
Caracamuni was decoupling from the earth, rising smoothly as a mushroom in the night. Garza stood beside Paul, seeing it too, crossing himself and murmuring prayers he probably hadn’t said since he was a boy. After a time, seeing that framed in the viewfinder it looked like trick photography, cinematic special effect, Paul continued taping its ascent only out of habit, mostly watching it unframed, with his own eyes.
Jacinta too now sensed a shift in the ghost people’s singing. It had become less urgent and more dreamlike. In the waking dream the chantsong now induced, she saw Caracamuni tepui as the ghost people had always known it, skirted so persistently by clouds that it had long seemed an island of stone floating among them, one of that misty billowing company grown solid, wreathed in drifting fog and drizzle. Crowned by a forest of rainblack stones, the nutrients of Caracamuni’s soils had been ceaselessly pounded out of its top by incessant storms, until it truly embodied the paradox of a raindesert island above a rainforest sea. Caracamuni tepui had stood haunted and holy for eons, sanctified by isolation, until more than half the species on its top came to be found nowhere else on earth.
Now, at last, it was becoming the actual floating island its isolated inhabitants had long dreamed it would become. Now it was about to become more remote than ever. No part of all its uniqueness—none of its strange bromeliads and sundews and fungi—would be found any longer upon the Earth.
Dreamily, Jacinta remembered reading once that angels and photons, both traveling at the speed of light, sensed no passage of time, no time at all, an Eternal Now, from their point of view. What she was experiencing was not quite that, however—not yet. Remembering those long ago physics courses, she thought it was more like another type of bifurcation, the two spacetime frames surrounding an imploding star when it reached critical circumference. To those looking down from “normal” spacetime onto the star’s implosion, the implosion stopped and froze forever at the critical circumference, at the event horizon. But for observers on the star itself (if there could ever be such creatures) the implosion continued on and on, far beyond critical, all the way down to singularity’s infinite density and zero volume.
Jacinta vaguely wondered which side of what kind of singularity she would soon be standing on.
The anvil-shaped top of the mountain called Caracamuni was beyond the highest clouds when the sound hit the men in a great wave that drove Garza’s Pem”n assistants to bury their clenched faces against the bosom of the earth. It was a fearful, prodigiously powerful sound—
—but one which Jacinta had heard before, more softly. It was the song of thought strengthened by stone uncountable times.
Is the universe friendly, or not? Jacinta asked herself that question again, making it her own, trying to keep mental contact with Paul until the latest possible instant. Looking through her brother’s eyes at the mountaintop disappearing into the sky before him, Jacinta hoped her escape hatch would not prove to be a trap door.
The sun shone full upon the ascending mountaintop, now clear of earth’s curve, where the men lay in deep twilight below. Caracamuni was ascending in a bubble of force, its high waterfall plunging down only to spread out again in a broad swirl along the boundary’s edge. As the cave’s deep chamber stood ensphered in the stone bubble of its mountain, so too the mountain itself now stood ensphered in the bubble of force. From the mountain in its sphere a pale fire began to shine, increasing in intensity until—
Looking through her own dreaming eyes again, Jacinta sensed that she was on her way to discovering an answer to Einstein’s great question. No time like the present—
—in a brilliant burst of white light—
—to find out—
—the many fields of ensphering force dispersed—
—the present is like—
—the mountaintop disappeared—
—No Time.
—as silently and completely as a soap bubble bursting into a summer sky.
* * * * * * *
Unsteady Alteration in the Steady Constellations
Paul Larkin had come to Death Valley to get drunk, wander off into the desert, and disappear. The idea of it, when he was sober, had shone in his head: elegant, simple, hard and bright as diamond. He had felt tired for too long, too tired to continue with the facade of his life. Best to put an end to it at his earliest possible convenience.
He had awakened to an omen that very morning—or rather, from one. A vision in a dream, actually. Paul usually didn’t remember his dreams, but he woke up in the middle of this one, so he remembered it. In the dream he was sitting in an overstuffed armchair, talking pleasantly to two older people. Dreaming, he knew who they were, but when he woke he couldn’t quite remember. Maybe they were his parents.
In the dream he was conversing in that pleasant living room when he happened to glance over his left shoulder. There, standing in the archway to the darkened room behind him, half in shadow and half in light, were his Uncle Tim, who had died recently, and his sister Jacinta, who had been gone, disappeared, ten years now. Someone else he knew was also there, but he couldn’t remember on waking who that person might be.
He did, however, remember thinking in his dream, “Oh, these are the dead, standing behind me, watching and waiting.” That thought knocked him right back to consciousness. He was sure the dream had something to do with all that had happened to him recently—and with the prospect of the plan that had been forming in his mind for the past week.
Sitting in his dusty, battered car, he took another sip from the bottle of Edradour—“Single Highland Malt Scotch Whisky from the smallest distillery in Scotland”—which his Uncle Tim had brought back as a gift for him, years before. Tasting the warm, peaty sting and sizzle of the scotch lingering in his mouth and throat, Paul turned his attention to a piece of paper sealed in a plastic sleeve, lying on the seat of his car.
Breaking the seal on the plastic, he removed a carefully folded sheet of age-brittled white paper, upon which could be seen a dusty blue image like the photo-negative of a brain. It was the spore print he had first found in an envelope ten years earlier, buried deep in his backpack, after he emptied the pack on returning home from Caracamuni tepui.
Whether the spore print had been secretly planted there while he was in the cave, or during that last long night on the tepui top—and by whom—Paul did not know. He only knew that for a decade he had never been able to bring himself to make public the print’s existence. Nor could he bring himself to destroy it, any more than he could destroy any of his information on Jacinta. Information, as she had been fond of saying, is everything. Even information held in the limbo of the lost.
He had gone public with other matters from that time. Maybe too public. Ten years back, when
