Part 50 (1/2)

On the third night, the mercenaries came for the girl again. Hours later she was returned, semiconscious. While she and Troy washed the girl, Ali quietly hummed a tune. She wasn't even aware of it until Troy said, 'Ali, look!'

Ali raised her eyes from the yellowing bruises on the child's pelvic saddle. The girl was staring at her with tears running down her cheeks. Ali lifted the hum into words. 'Through many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come,' she softly sang. ''Tis grace that brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.'

The girl began sobbing. Ali made the mistake of taking the child in her arms. The kindness triggered a terrible storm of kicking and thras.h.i.+ng and rejection. It was a horrible enlightening moment, for now Ali knew the girl had once had a mother who had sung that song.

All night Ali spent with the captive, watching her. In her fourteen years the girl had experienced more of womanhood than Ali had in thirty-four. She had been married, or mated. She appeared to have borne a child. And so far she had kept her sanity through brutal ma.s.s rapes. Her inner strength was amazing.

Next morning Twiggs needed to go to the bathroom for his first time since the starvation. Being Twiggs, he did not ask the soldiers' permission to leave the room. One of the mercenaries shot him dead.

That spelled the end of what little freedom the rest of them had. Walker ordered the scientists bound, wired, and removed to a deeper room. Ali was not surprised. For some time now, she had known their execution was imminent.

24 - TABULA RASA.

And darkness was upon the face of the Deep -GENESIS 1:2.

New York City The hotel suite was dark except for the blue flicker of the TV.

It was a riddle: television on, volume off, in a blind man's room. Once upon a time, de l'Orme might have orchestrated such a contradiction just to confound his visitors. Tonight he had no visitors. The maid had forgotten to turn off her soaps.

Now the screen showed the Times Square ball as it descended toward the deliriously happy mob.

De l'Orme was browsing his Meister Eckhart. The thirteenth-century mystic had preached such strange things with such common words. And in the bowels of the Dark Ages, so boldly.

G.o.d lies in wait for us. His love is like a fisherman's hook. No fish comes to the fisherman that is not caught on his hook. Once it takes the hook, the fish is forfeit to the fisherman. In vain it twists. .h.i.ther and thither - the fisherman is certain of his catch. And so I say of love. The one who hangs on this hook is caught so fast that foot and hand, mouth, eyes and heart are bound to be G.o.d's. And the more surely caught, the more surely you will be freed.

No wonder the theologian had been condemned by the Inquisition and excommunicated. G.o.d as dominatrix! More dizzying still, man freed of G.o.d. G.o.d freed of G.o.d. And then what? Nothingness. You penetrated the darkness and emerged into the same light you had left in the first place. Then why leave in the first place? de l'Orme wondered. For the journey itself? Is that the best we have to do with ourselves? These were his thoughts when the phone rang.

'Do you know my voice, yes or no?' asked the man on the far end.

'Bud?' said de l'Orme.

'Great... my name,' Parsifal mumbled.

'Where are you?'

'Huh-uh.' The astronaut sounded sluggish. Drunk. The Golden Boy?

'Something's troubling you,' de l'Orme said.

'You bet. Is Santos with you?'

'No.'

'Where is he?' Parsifal demanded. 'Or do you even know?'

'The Koreas,' said de l'Orme, not exactly certain which one. 'Another set of hadals has surfaced. He's recording some of the artifacts they brought with them. Emblems of a deity stamped into gold foil.'

'Korea. He told you that?'

'I sent him, Bud.'

'What makes you so sure he's where you sent him?' Parsifal asked.

De l'Orme took his gla.s.ses off. He rubbed his eyes and opened them, and they were white, with no retina or pupil. Distant fireworks streaked his face with sparks of color. He waited.

'I've been trying to call the others,' Parsifal said. 'All night, nothing.'

'It's New Year's Eve,' said de l'Orme. 'Perhaps they're with their families.'

'No one's told you.' It was an accusation, not a question.

'I'm afraid not, whatever it is.'

'It's too late. You really don't know? Where have you been?'

'Right here. A touch of the flu, I haven't left my room in a week.'

'Ever heard of The New York Times? Don't you listen to the news?'

'I gave myself the solitude. Fill me in, if you please. I can't help if I don't know.'

'Help?'

'Please.'

'We're in great danger. You shouldn't be at that phone.'

It came out in a tangle. There had been a great fire at the Metropolitan Museum's Map Room two weeks ago. And before that, a bomb explosion in an ancient cliffside temple library at Yungang in China, which the PLA was blaming on Muslim separatists. Archives and archaeological sites in ten or more countries had been vandalized or destroyed in the past month.

'I've heard about the Met, of course. That was everywhere. But the rest of this, what connects them?'

'Someone's trying to erase our information. It's like someone's finis.h.i.+ng business. Wiping out his tracks.'

'What tracks? Burning museums. Blowing up libraries. What purpose could that serve?'

'He's closing shop.'

'He? Who are you talking about? You don't make sense.'

Parsifal mentioned several other events, including a fire at the Cambridge Library housing the ancient Cairogenizah fragments.

'Gone,' he said. 'Burned to the ground. Defaced. Blown to pieces.'

'Those are all places we've visited over the last year.'

'Someone has been erasing our information for some time now,' said Parsifal. 'Until recently they've been small erasures mostly, an altered ma.n.u.script here, a photo negative disappearing there. Now the destruction seems more wholesale and spectacular. It's like someone's trying to finish business before clearing out of town.'

'A coincidence,' said de l'Orme. 'Book burners. A pogrom. Anti-intellectuals. The lumpen are rampant these days.'