When Orson whined again, I firmly said, “Dead and gone,” with that ruthless focus on the future that gets me through the day.
Forgoing one more look at the photograph, I tucked it into my shirt pocket.
No grief. No despair. No self-pity.
Anyway, my mother is not entirely dead. She lives in me and in Orson and perhaps in others like Orson.
Regardless of any crimes against humanity of which my mother might stand accused by others, she is alive in us, alive in the Elephant Man and his freak dog. And with all due humility, I think the world is better for us being in it. We are not the bad guys.
As we left the vault, I said “Thank you” to whoever had left the photograph for me, though I didn’t know if they could hear and though I was only assuming that their intentions had been kind.
Above ground, outside the hangar, my bicycle was where I’d left it. The stars were where I’d left them, too.
I cycled back through the edge of Dead Town and toward Moonlight Bay, where the fog—and more—waited for me.
FIVE
NEAR DAWN
30
The Nantucket-style house, with dark wood-shingle siding and deep white porches, seems to have slid three thousand miles during an unnoticed tipping of the continent, coming to rest here in the California hills above the Pacific. Looking more suitable to the landscape than logic says it should, sitting toward the front of the one-acre lot, shaded by stone pines, the residence exudes the charm, grace, and warmth of the loving family that lives within its walls.
All the windows were dark, but before long, light would appear in a few of them. Rosalina Ramirez would rise early to prepare a lavish breakfast for her son, Manuel, who would soon return from a double shift of policework—assuming he wouldn’t be delayed by the extensive paperwork associated with Chief Stevenson’s immolation. As he was a better cook than his mother, Manuel would prefer to make his own breakfast, but he would eat what she gave him and praise it. Rosalina was still sleeping; she had the large bedroom that had once belonged to her son, a room he’d not used since his wife died giving birth to Toby.
Beyond a deep backyard, shingled to match the house and with windows flanked by white shutters, stands a small barn with a gambrel roof. Because the property is at the extreme southern end of town, it offers access to riding trails and the open hills; the original owner had stabled horses in the barn. Now the structure is a studio, where Toby Ramirez builds his life from glass.
Approaching through the fog, I saw the windows glowing. Toby often wakes long before dawn and comes out to the studio.
I propped the bike against the barn wall and went to the nearest window. Orson put his forepaws on the windowsill and stood beside me, peering inside.
When I pay a visit to watch Toby create, I usually don’t go into the studio. The fluorescent ceiling panels are far too bright. And because borosilicate glass is worked at temperatures exceeding twenty-two hundred degrees Fahrenheit, it emits significant amounts of intense light that can damage anyone’s eyes, not just mine. If Toby is between tasks, he may turn the lights off, and then we talk for a while.
Now, wearing a pair of goggles with didymium lenses, Toby was in his work chair at the glassblowing table, in front of the Fisher Multi-Flame burner. He had just finished forming a graceful pear-shaped vase with a long neck, which was still so hot that it was glowing gold and red; now he was annealing it.
When a piece of glassware is removed suddenly from a hot flame, it will usually cool too quickly, develop stresses—and crack. To preserve the item, it must be annealed—that is, cooled in careful stages.
The flame was fed by natural gas mixed with pure oxygen from a pressurized tank that was chained to the glassblowing table. During the annealing process, Toby would feather out the oxygen, gradually reducing the temperature, giving the glass molecules time to shift to more stable positions.
Because of the numerous dangers involved in glassblowing, some people in Moonlight Bay thought it was irresponsible of Manuel to allow his Down’s-afflicted son to practice this technically demanding art and craft. Fiery catastrophes were envisioned, predicted, and awaited with impatience in some quarters.
Initially, no one was more opposed to Toby’s dream than Manuel. For fifteen years, the barn had served as a studio for Carmelita’s older brother, Salvador, a first-rank glass artist. As a child, Toby had spent uncounted hours with his uncle Salvador, wearing goggles, watching the master at work, on rare occasion donning Kevlar mittens to transfer a vase or bowl to or from the annealing oven. While he’d appeared to many to be passing those hours in stupefaction, with a dull gaze and a witless smile, he had actually been learning without being directly taught. To cope, the intellectually disadvantaged often must have superhuman patience. Toby sat day after day, year after year, in his uncle’s studio, watching and slowly learning. When Salvador died two years ago, Toby—then only fourteen—asked his father if he might continue his uncle’s work. Manuel had not taken the request seriously, and he’d gently discouraged his son from dwelling on this impossible dream.
One morning before dawn, he found Toby in the studio. At the end of the worktable, standing on the fire-resistant Ceramfab top, was a family of simple blown-glass swans. Beside the swans stood a newly formed and annealed vase into which had been introduced a calculated mixture of compatible impurities that imparted to the glass mysterious midnight-blue swirls with a silvery glitter like stars. Manuel knew at once that this piece was equal to the finest vases that Salvador had ever produced; and Toby was at that very moment flame-annealing an equally striking piece of work.
The boy had absorbed the technical aspects of glass craft from his uncle, and in spite of his mild retardation, he obviously knew the proper procedures for avoiding injury. The magic of genetics was involved, too, for he possessed a striking talent that could not have been learned. He wasn’t merely a craftsman but an artist, and not merely an artist but perhaps an idiot savant to whom the inspiration of the artist and the techniques of the craftsman came with the ease of waves to the shore.
Gift shops in Moonlight Bay, Cambria, and as far north as Carmel sold all the glass Toby produced. In a few years, he might become self-supporting.
Sometimes, nature throws a bone to those she maims. Witness my own ability to compose sentences and paragraphs with some skill.
Now, in the studio, orange light flared and billowed from the large, bushy annealing flame. Toby took care to turn the pear-shaped vase so that it was bathed uniformly by the fire.
With a thick neck, rounded shoulders, and proportionately short arms and stocky legs, he might have been a storybook gnome before a watch fire deep in the earth. Brow sloped and heavy. Bridge of the nose flat. Ears set too low on a head slightly too small for his body. His soft features and the inner epicanthic folds of his eyes give him a perpetual dreamy expression.
Yet on his high work chair, turning the glass in the flame, adjusting the oxygen flow with intuitive precision, face shimmering with reflected light, eyes concealed behind didymium goggles, Toby did not in any way seem below average, did not in any way impress me as being diminished by his condition. To the contrary, observed in his element, in the act of creation, he appeared exalted.
Orson snorted with alarm. He dropped his forepaws from the window, turned away from the studio, and tightened into a wary crouch.
Turning as well, I saw a shadowy figure crossing the backyard, coming toward us. In spite of the darkness and fog, I recognized him at once because of the easy way that he carried himself. It was Manuel Ramirez: Toby’s dad, number two in the Moonlight Bay Police Department but now at least temporarily risen by succession to the top post, due to the fiery death of his boss.
I put both hands in my jacket pockets. I closed my right hand around the Glock.
Manuel and I were friends. I wouldn’t feel comfortable pointing a gun at him, and I certainly couldn’t shoot him. Unless he was not Manuel anymore. Unless, like Stevenson, he had become someone else.
He stopped eight or ten feet from us. In the annealing flame’s coruscating orange glow, which pierced the nearby window, I could see that Manuel was wearing his khaki uniform. His service pistol was holstered on his right hip. Although he stood with his thumbs hooked in his gun belt, he would be able to draw his weapon at least as quickly as I could pull the Glock from my jacket.
“Your shift over already?” I asked, although I knew it wasn’t.
Instead of answering me, he said, “I hope you’re not expecting beer, tamales, and Jackie Chan movies at this hour.”
“I just stopped by to say hello to Toby if he happened to be between jobs.”
Manuel’s face, too worn with care for his forty years, had a naturally friendly aspect. Even in this Halloween light, his smile was still engaging, reassuring. As far as I could see, the only luminosity in his eyes was the reflected light from the studio window. Of course, that reflection might mask the same transient flickers of animal eyeshine that I’d seen in Lewis Stevenson.
Orson was reassured enough to ease out of his crouch. But he remained wary.
Manuel exhibited none of Stevenson’s simmering rage or electric energy. As always, his voice was soft and almost musical. “You never did come around to the station after you called.”
I considered my answer and decided to go with the truth. “Yes, I did.”
“So when you phoned me, you were already close,” he guessed.
“Right around the corner. Who’s the bald guy with the earring?”
Manuel mulled over his answer and followed my lead with some truth of his own. “His name’s Carl Scorso.”
“But who is he?”
“A total dirtbag. How far are you going to carry this?”
“Nowhere.”
He was silent, disbelieving.
“It started out a crusade,” I admitted. “But I know when I’m beaten.”
“That sure would be a new Chris Snow.”
“Even if I could contact an outside authority or the media, I don’t understand the situation well enough to convince them of anything.”
“And you have no proof.”
“Nothing substantive. Anyway, I don’t think I’d be allowed to make that contact. If I could get someone to come investigate, I don’t think I or any of my friends would be alive to greet them when they got here.”
Manuel didn’t reply, but his silence was all the answer I needed.
He might still be a baseball fan. He might still like country music, Abbott and Costello. He still understood as much as I did about limitations and still felt the hand of fate as I did. He might even still like me—but he was no longer my friend. If he wouldn’t be sufficiently treacherous to pull the trigger on me himself, he would watch as someone else did.
Sadness pooled in my heart, a greasy despondency that I’d never felt before, akin to nausea. “The entire police department has been co-opted, hasn’t it?”
His smile had faded. He looked tired.
When I saw weariness in him rather than anger, I knew that he was going to tell me more than he should. Riven by guilt, he would not be able to keep all his secrets.
I already suspected that I knew one of the revelations he would make about my mother. I was so loath to hear it that I almost walked away. Almost.
“Yes,” he said. “The entire department.”
“Even you.”
“Oh, mi amigo, especially me.”
“Are you infected by whatever bug came out of Wyvern?”
“‘Infection’ isn’t quite the word.”
“But close enough.”
“Everyone else in the department has it. But not me. Not that I know. Not yet.”
“So maybe they had no choice. You did.”
“I decided to cooperate because there might be a lot more good that comes from this than bad.”
“From the end of the world?”
“They’re working to undo what’s happened.”
“Working out there at Wyvern, underground somewhere?”
“There and other places, yeah. And if they find a way to combat it…then wonderful things could come from this.”
As he spoke, his gaze moved from me to the studio window.
“Toby,” I said.
Manuel’s eyes shifted to me again.
I said, “This thing, this plague, whatever it is—you’re hoping that if they can bring it under control, they’ll be able to use it to help Toby somehow.”
“You have a selfish interest here, too, Chris.”
From the barn roof, an owl asked its single question of identity five times in quick succession, as if suspicious of everyone in Moonlight Bay.
I took a deep breath and said, “That’s the only reason my mother would work on biological research for military purposes. The only reason. Because there was a very good chance that something would come of it that might cure my XP.”
“And something may still come of it.”
“It was a weapons project?”
“Don’t blame her, Chris. Only a weapons project would have tens of billions of dollars behind it. She’d never have had a chance to do this work for the right reasons. It was just too expensive.”
This was no doubt true. Nothing but a weapons project would have the bottomless resources needed to fund the complex research that my mother’s most profound concepts necessitated.
Wisteria Jane (Milbury) Snow was a theoretical geneticist. This means that she did the heavy thinking while other scientists did the heavy lifting. She didn’t spend much of her time in laboratories or even working in the virtual lab of a computer. Her lab was her mind, and it was extravagantly equipped. She theorized, and with guidance from her, others sought to prove her theories.
I have said that she was brilliant but perhaps not that she was extraordinarily brilliant. Which she was. She could have chosen any university affiliation in the world. They all sought her.
My father loved Ashdon, but he would have followed her where she wished to go. He would have thrived in any academic environment.
She restricted herself to Ashdon because of me. Most of the truly great universities are in either major or midsize cities, where I’d be no more limited by day than I am in Moonlight Bay, but where I’d have no hope of a rich life by night. Cities are bright even after sunset. And the few dark precincts of a city are not places where a young boy on a bicycle could safely go adventuring between dusk and dawn.
She made less of her life in order to make more of mine. She confined herself to a small town, willing to leave her full potential unrealized, to give me a chance at realizing mine.
Tests to determine genetic damage in a fetus were rudimentary when I was born. If the analytic tools had been sufficiently advanced for my XP to have been detected in the weeks following my conception, perhaps she would have chosen not to bring me into the world.