Marc Zicree - Angelfire

“Right now we’re in a sacred place,” said Kevin. “There’s power here. Outside…” He shrugged and fingered the flute.

“Let’s go back into the cave,” said Goldie. “I’m freezing my ass off out here.” He turned back, Magritte moving in unison with him. The aqua-gold halo remained intact.

Back in the comparative warmth of the cavern, Goldie stepped us through his trail of discovery. “It hit me the day the Storm got in-at the waterwheel. Kev’s music allowed me to see the … the patterns of power around the water. When I touched the flute, I could see the same patterns around other objects. Even after he stopped playing, I could see them just by touching the flute. I realized the same thing happened, to one degree or another, whenever I picked up one of Kevin’s or Delmar’s ceremonial artifacts.”

“Transference,” I said. “You talked about that when we were trying to figure out Enid’s contract.”

He pulled my Parker out of his jacket pocket and clicked it. “This,” he said, “is how we figured out where that portal ends up. Transference. You have this little thing going with maps. Kevin can see portals. In fact, he found this portal himself. I sat him down in front of it with a map and this pen. It was kind of like dowsing. The transference allowed him to sense where on the map this puppy opened up.”

“We transferred the ability to open portals the same way,” Kevin said. “Goldie learned to play my flute well enough to-how to describe it-endow a tune and then the flute itself with-well, ‘Goldieness,’ I guess you’d call it.”

Colleen snorted.

“Hey, don’t laugh,” said Goldie. “It works. Like I’ve always said, a little Goldie goes a long way. It took a lot of woodshedding, but I got to where I could play the portal open with Kev’s flute. Then he took over and worked until he could play it open.”

“I thought you couldn’t do sound,” I said.

“Ah!” he raised a finger. “True. I can’t do sound. But I could visualize the notes. I converted them into light.” He laughed. “I can convert music to photons! They couldn’t even do that on Star Trek . All they could do was make Tachyon fields.”

“Yeah,” said Colleen, “but at least their Tachyon fields always work.”

I shot Colleen a glance. Don’t step on him. Not now . “You said you used a map,” I said to Goldie. “You still have it?”

Goldie pulled it out of his jacket pocket and handed to me. I unfolded it, found the Blue Mounds, and traced the path southeast toward Chicago. I looked up at the others.

“Thanks, Kevin. This little discovery is going to cut our trip just about in half.”

It should have been the best sleep I’d had for weeks. We were moving on, after all. Together. With a real chance of finding the Source, and a means of protecting Tina from it and bringing her to a place she could be safe. There was even a chance we could do more than that with Enid’s ability.

During daylight hours I did a pretty decent impersonation of a man who’d come to accept all the weirdness. But at night, when no one was looking, I could easily imagine that a team of gerbils went into full throttle in my head, their little wheels spinning madly until they exhausted themselves.

This was the stuff of which dreams were made.

Pause, rewind, replay. The gerbils reeled out half-waking dreams of sequined portals with musical keys, sonic shields run by wind chime batteries, and legal jargon that resulted in toxic songs. Goldie saw “patterns of power” when Kevin played his flute. Richard Dreyfus looked at a pile of mashed potatoes and said, “This is important.”

I thought about flares.

I wasn’t sure-I couldn’t be sure-but I suspected that what the Source wanted flares for was power. What was it Magritte had said: it used them up, bit by bit.

The way a flashlight uses up batteries.

The gerbils chugged along, trying to carry me toward an epiphany while I strained toward sleep and mumbled, “I don’t get it.”

The Quran, so Goldie tells me, records how Muhammad received his revelation from God through the archangel Gabriel. The angel visited the Prophet-to-be in his cave on Mount Hira, held out a book and said, “Read.” Muhammad, being illiterate, could not read, and told Gabriel as much. Three times Gabriel commanded Muhammad to read, and three times, the Prophet said, “I cannot.” Then, miraculously, he read. He got it.

There was no commanding angel in my dream; there was only Kevin Elk Sings, failing to play a dam and succeeding in playing a key. There was no gleaming holy book; only a contract that slithered with tweaked legalese. There was no nation-building Prophet; only a Manhattan Pharisee, doggedly trying to read-to “get it.”

It took me more than three tries, to be honest, but as I dipped into an exhausted sleep, I had read a word. And the word was “analogues.”

All of the warped abilities with their strange new connections were analogues for the things the Change had voided. They were machineries. They didn’t work exactly as the old machineries had, but they worked in a parallel fashion. While material physics no longer applied, we now had a new physics-a physics of imagination.

In the old physics, there were laws. If you knew how to apply them, you could make things happen-internal combustion, electricity, nuclear fission. I was willing to bet the new physics had laws, too. The trick was in application.

Albert Einstein had been a prodigy of the old physics. Somewhere between here and our final destination, we had to become prodigies of the new.

DOC

Wind. An arctic wind, full of rain that could quickly turn to ice. That was the substance of our world. It blew horizontal to the ground, stinging as if made of microscopic shards of glass. I was transported to the Russian hinterland and knew not even an atom of homesickness.

The low tent in which we spent our nights shuddered like a drunkard forced to sobriety, fabric popping loudly enough to wake a deaf man. But not Goldie. And, as if to challenge the wind, Goldie snored.

Somewhere near dawn on this, our third day on the road to Chicago, I decided to take my chances in the open, got up and dragged my sleeping bag out to where our night watch huddled in the lee of an outcrop of rock.

“What are you doing up?” Cal asked, his voice only just audible above the railing of the wind.

“I find myself unable to sleep with the noise.”

“The wind?”

I nodded. “Yes, that too.”

Cal chuckled and glanced at his watch, a venerable mechanical device-the only kind that works in our new world. “Well, it’s pretty close to morning anyway. Not that you can tell from that penlight on the horizon. Everything all right in the tent?”

He meant Magritte, of course. Since we had left the relative safety of the Blue Mounds, she had lived in a state of unease, expecting that at any moment the Source would pounce on her. But it had not. She could hear it, she told us, had to distract herself, steel herself against it, but the call was muted. “Like I’m hearing it from inside a bubble,” she’d said.

Still, we resorted to physical restraint at night-she was literally tethered to Enid in the event the Source should break through her “bubble,” forcing him to sing. He had gone only days without blocking the Source, and already I could see improvement in his health. The grayish cast was gone from his skin and he slept soundly, which was more than I could say for myself.

“Things are quiet,” I said to Cal, “after a fashion. At least, everyone else is asleep.”

I peered into the unrelieved charcoal gray of the Wisconsin landscape. Sunrise, we already knew, would bring little real relief from the gloom. Wisconsin seemed to be perpetually in twilight. “You were raised in Minnesota, yes?” I asked.