Quicksilver(73)

“Of course you did. Was Frodo a hero?”

“Yes. A great one.”

“After he carried the One Ring all the way from the Shire to the evil realm of Mordor, to the place where it could be destroyed, the ring corrupted him. He put it on.”

“Only for a moment. He did nothing evil.”

“Because Gollum bit Frodo’s finger off to get the ring. Frodo would otherwise have succumbed to the lust for power.”

“I’d like to think he wouldn’t have.”

“Of course you would like to think it. That’s you. But Frodo lost his innocence and never was quite at home in the Shire again when he returned to it, never at home among the innocent hobbits.”

“I never liked that part. I wish he could have been at home among them,” I said.

“Of course you do. He was nonetheless a great hero. Had he not been, the hobbits would have perished, every one, and with them all others with any room for innocence in their hearts. Middle-earth would have been a place of endless horror. We’re guardians. Aluf shel halakha. Legis naturalis propugnator. We are called upon to be scourges. We belong in that honorable and essential place between innocence and corruption, a place called duty. Either get with the program, Quinn—or your fate will be an early, meaningless death.”

Wiping my face to slough from it sweat that was occasioned by more than the heat, blotting the hand on my shirt, I said, “You don’t pull your punches, do you?”

She smiled. “What would be the point?”

“‘Guardians.’ You said it might be a quest, but now you call us ‘guardians,’ which sounds like . . . for life.”

“I told you we might be in part on a quest to secure something, but at the moment I don’t know what the object of the quest is. I know for sure that being guardians is our reason for being, and that will never change.”

“Are we going into the Oasis to save someone?”

“You know as much as I do. Maybe someone waits to be saved. Maybe many someones. We’ll know when magnetism has taken us to the task.”

“Or,” I pressed, “are we going down there to kill someone?”

“Emmerich won’t peacefully abdicate. If he has a praetorian guard, perhaps we’ll have to kill many to save a few. We will know when we know.”

I wanted a clearer sense of our mission. However, I had been born into this world a mystery, and the clarity I wanted was not mine to demand. “All right. I’m with the program,” I said at last.

How odd it seemed that making a mortal commitment of mind and heart and soul should be at one and the same time deeply satisfying and terrifying. Movies hadn’t prepared me for that dichotomy. In fact, I was beginning to suspect that movies hadn’t prepared me for much of anything.

Bridget came to me and put an arm around my waist and had the wisdom to know that nothing she might say was better than her touch. From his luggage, Sparky retrieved spare magazines for his and Bridget’s weapons.

To Panthea, Bridget said, “There’s a long slope to get down there, and no vegetation for cover until we reach the bottom.”

“They won’t see us. He sleeps by day and lives by night.”

I didn’t like what that might signify. I mean, Dracula slept by day and lived by night. I’m not saying that I believed in vampires. Or disbelieved in them. After the events of the last few days, I was willing to consider the existence of everything from werewolves to fairy godmothers.

“But the others,” Sparky said. “How many others are in the Oasis?”

“I don’t know. But they all live according to his rhythms. When he sleeps, they sleep. I believe . . . somehow they have no choice.”

“Guards?”

“My sense is that guards are thought unnecessary. They believe they’re safe behind their steel doors and electronic locks.”

“Aren’t they?” I asked.

“No,” said Panthea Ching, and she started up the slope toward the rim of the crater and the Oasis beyond.





BACK IN THE DAY


THE INNOCENT BOY, THE EVIL FATHER, THE ANTS, THE FISH, THE BIRDS

A hard, steady, windless drizzle fell on Phoenix that morning. In the wing of the orphanage dedicated to schooling, in a classroom where I was expected to be learning English grammar, I heard the teacher only as a flat and distant droning, as though I must be in a parallel universe alone with my thoughts, her voice leaking through a rift in the barrier between worlds. The rain seemed not to be pure but as gray as the sky that dispensed it. Beyond the windows, the courtyard playground was now a cheerless realm, the swings and the other simple amusements transformed by the distorting skeins into a grim geometry that suggested devices designed to torment and restrain.

My mood was neither as solemn as the rain-drenched morning nor as light as in the days before the murder of Litton Ormond. In fact it was in flux between the pleasures of anticipation and a disquiet that arose from a better understanding of—and adjustment to—the world as it was shapen. My depression had in part lifted to the extent that I’d gotten out of bed without being coaxed to do so. I had eaten breakfast with an appetite that I’d recently lacked. I’d made my way to class not in a shuffling slouch, but rather as an eleven-year-old boy with a renewed, though tentative, sense that something was worth looking forward to in the day ahead.