Sunlight

POV: Felix

From the lamp-chamber at the top of the Dome, the world looked like a painting someone had left in the rain.

Felix knelt at the open edge of the stone floor with both hands wrapped round a brass rail, and looked down through the oculus at the end of everything he knew. Far beneath him lay the white hall, the gilt chairs, the ring of mirrors glowing like coals. Over his head, a hole in the sky: a black disc haloed in pale fire. Between them, filling the space like a column of smoke, the memories of Merrick Bay fell and fell.

He could not speak. He had not spoken since the Heart began to beat.

It sat behind him, on its plain wooden table, in the middle of the round stone room: a sphere of black glass the size of a man's head, with a hairline crack from pole to pole. In the dark it was bright. The frozen rose-pink thing in its center had swollen, flushed, quickened. It no longer beat once an hour. It beat now like a living animal, thumping in a wild exuberant rhythm that he could feel in his teeth. Each beat sent a pulse of light up through the roof. Each pulse shed a thousand silver threads.

Ma Tilly knelt beside it in her black bombazine, with both hands cupped round the glass as if warming them at a stove. Her lips moved. He could not hear what she said. He did not need to.

"Don't look at it too long, love," she said, without turning. "It'll sing you to sleep."

"I'm not," said Felix.

He was looking down.

…

He could see his father.

He was a small dark figure on the white dais, a hundred and sixty feet below, standing in the beam of light. Felix could make out the silver of his hair, and the line of his shoulders, and the glint of something gold at his waistcoat. He had both hands wrapped round a globe of clear glass. It was a very small thing, from this height. It was a drop of water in a dark room.

The picture was still on the sky.

Felix could not look at it. He had seen the first of it, and that was enough. He had seen the long gray house, and the torches. He had seen a younger man in a charcoal coat, dismounting at the end of a drive, with the face he wore at the breakfast table when someone had asked about the price of coal. He had seen that face say, perfectly calmly, put him down it.

He had thought he was prepared. He had spent two weeks preparing. He had thought, I know what he is. I have known since the pier. He had been so sure.

He had not known he would feel it in his hands.

"Hollis," he said.

Hollis crouched at his side. He had the long rifle in the crook of his arm and a pair of tarnished brass binoculars at his eyes, and his face was lean and tight. He did not take them down.

"I see him."

"He's holding it."

"He is."

"He's holding it against his chest." Felix's voice cracked. "Hollis. He's holding it. He's got both hands on it, he's pulled it right up to his face. And the first light—the first ray—"

"I know."

"It'll be a hundred inches from his eyes."

Hollis lowered the glasses.

…

He knew what the sphere would do.

He had designed it himself, in a hot kitchen, over four sleepless nights. A small flash, bright as a magnesium flare, that would blind for a minute and no more. A thin clean puff of smoke. He had calculated the angle of the lenses. He had calculated the aperture. He had tested it on a rooftop in front of Dex, with pigeons, and not one feather had singed. It was a harmless thing. It would never hurt anyone who looked at it from the proper distance, at the proper hour, through a smoked glass.

But he had built it for a lectern.

He had built it to sit on a stand, three feet away from a man, on the far side of a velvet cushion. He had not built it to be held in two hands, against a pair of naked eyes, in the first full-strength ray of the returning sun.

He had no idea what that would do.

It will blind him, he thought. Possibly forever. His own hands had begun to tremble. And he'll be holding it, in his hands, when it goes off.

There was a moment when he could have stayed.

He knew this. He would know it all his life. There was a moment in the lamp-chamber, with Ma Tilly singing under her breath and the Heart pounding like an engine, when he could have said, it is Father's choice. He could have said: He ordered me killed. He buried a nine-year-old alive. He put the key in the lock himself. He could have watched. And nobody in the world would have blamed him.

Not even him, he'd said to Dex on the roof, in the dawn. I want to be able to look at myself afterward.

He stood up.

"Felix," said Hollis.

"I'm going down."

"It's a hundred and fifty feet and there's a hall full of rifles."

"There's a service stair." He was already moving. "The sun's coming back in under two minutes. I have to get to him before it does."

"Why?"

He turned. In the thin cold light, Hollis was a lean dark shape with a face half-lit by the Heart's pink glow. His light-brown eyes were steady and warm.

"Because I made it," said Felix. "And he's my father."

For a moment Hollis did not answer.

Then he picked up his rifle.

"Go," he said. "I'm behind you."

…

It was the longest staircase of his life.

It spiraled down inside the wall of the Dome like the inside of a shell, narrow, cold, lit only by the pale light that fell through slit windows. Felix took it three steps at a time, with one hand on the rope rail and the other pressed to the stitch in his side. His boots rang on the stone. Behind him Hollis's steps echoed, steady and swift. The whole stairwell shook to the thunder of the Heart.

He passed the first landing. The second. On the third he almost fell, and caught himself, and kept going.

Don't think. Don't think. Run.

Somewhere below him a man was shouting. Somewhere farther below the murmur of a crowd had risen into a roar. He heard the crash of a chair going over. He heard a woman screaming a name. And through it all, a clear, high, ragged voice that he knew by heart, a boy's voice, a thief's voice, thin as a violin string, singing a lullaby.

Every name they locked away is waiting at the door.

He reached the bottom.

A narrow door of iron-bound oak, half open. He hit it with his shoulder, and the world opened out in front of him, enormous and white.

…

The hall of the Dome was in chaos.

He had never seen so many people frightened at once. They had risen from their seats, in the black dark, under a sky full of silver rain, and some of them were running. Some knelt. Some sat quite still with their hands over their faces, weeping, with the look of those who have had a limb restored and found it broken. An old man in a dress coat was kissing the floor. Two Councillors in gold chains were fighting over a handkerchief. The Lamp Order troops along the wall stood like statues, with their rifles trailing, gazing upward in blank peace.

And over all of it, from a black sky, that terrible dragging yellow light was dying away.

He didn't stop.

He ran across the open marble, between the toppled chairs. A man grabbed his sleeve. He tore free. Someone shouted Whitcomb! in a high shrill voice, and he realized, with a distant surprise, that they thought he was his father. The resemblance was enough. For a moment the crowd parted before him like water.

He mounted the dais.

…

Augustus Whitcomb stood at the center of the black stone in the pillar of white light, with a sphere of clear glass clasped to his breast.

He had not moved. He stood quite rigid, with his head thrown back and his silver hair disordered, staring upward at the sky. At the picture. At the last of the yellow flame. His mouth was a little open. His face had no expression at all. It was the face of a man at the bottom of a well, who has just been shown a small window, a long way up, with his own reflection in it.

The watch in his waistcoat had stopped.

Felix saw that first. It was a small thing, a gold chain hanging slack from a buttonhole, a dull glint of enamel, and no sound. The half-beat tick that had followed him through his whole childhood, from the study, from the carriage, from the dinner-table, had ceased.

Beyond the Chairman, at the edge of the light, Dex stood with his cane in his hand and his mouth still half open on the final note. He looked at Felix. He did not say anything. His face went white.

"Father," said Felix.

The old man's head turned, slowly.

His eyes, gray and pale as rain, came down from the sky. They traveled across the dais, across the white lamp-lit hall, to the thin boy in a stolen coat who stood three paces away with his spectacles crooked. They stopped.

"You," said Augustus Whitcomb.

…

It was a voice Felix had never heard. It was small and cracked, with the grain showing. It was the voice of a very old man.

"You."

"Father, drop it."

"This is yours," said Whitcomb. "Isn't it? This is what you made. You made it for them. Oh, you clever boy. You made it so well." His arms tightened round the sphere. "It is the only true thing I have left. They have taken the rest. You see that? They have taken it. It is all in the sky. I put it away. I put it away so carefully."

"Father."

"Do you know what it was?"

"I saw."

"It was a mercy." The Chairman's lip trembled. "It was the only mercy I had. I had to put it somewhere. I could not carry it. A man cannot walk about for eleven years with a thing like that in his chest and be of any use to anyone. Do you understand? Tell me you understand. It was an efficiency."

"I understand," said Felix.

He found, to his own astonishment, that it was true.

"Then you'll tell them." The pale eyes burned. "You'll tell them it was necessary. You'll tell them that it was for the city. You are my son. They'll listen to you." The old hands crushed the glass. "I made you. I made you with my own hand."

Felix looked at the sphere.

It lay in his father's grasp like a captured bird. The clear glass was bright. The pink glow turned slowly in its core. And on the underside, where the thumb pressed, so that the old man's skin lay against it, a tiny letter had been cut into the base by a boy with a graver at three o'clock in the morning.

He saw his father's thumb move over it. He saw the old man's face change.

"What is this?"

He turned the sphere. He tilted it to the light. His fingers traced a single clean line, a second, a third.

"F," said Whitcomb.

He raised his head.

"You made this. You made this thing. You carved your name on it." The words came slowly, with a kind of dreadful wonder. "Even now. Even in this. You put your mark on it, like a child."

"Yes."

"You were always," said Augustus Whitcomb, softly, "my greatest mistake."

…

It was not said cruelly. That was the dreadful thing. It was said with sorrow, with the dry honesty of a man reading out an account. It dropped between them, light and cold, and lay there.

Felix felt it go in.

He had known for twenty-one years that it was in the room. He had heard it in the silence of the study, in the rustle of newspapers, in every careful question about marks. He had known it in his bones, as one knows the weather. And now at last it had been said aloud. It was so simple. It was a plain sentence of eight words.

He found that he was not crying.

"No," he said.

"What?"

"No. That isn't right." He drew a breath. His voice was shaking, but it was clear. "I wasn't your mistake, Father. I was your son."

The old man's eyes widened.

"I was your son," said Felix, "and I loved you, and you weren't there. That isn't a mistake. That's just a thing that happened. It happened to me. I'm sorry that it did." His voice broke. "And I'm sorry it happened to you. I'm sorry nobody ever held you. But I'm not going to be it anymore. I'm not going to be the thing you're sorry for."

He took a step forward. He held out both his hands.

"Give it to me."

"Felix—"

"Put it down. Please. Please just put it down, and step back. The sun's coming. It'll—" His eyes went to the oculus. The black disc had a bright thread on its edge. A thin hard line of white, a pinprick, no bigger than a diamond. He felt his heart seize. "Father. Now."

The old man did not move.

For one second Felix saw his face quite clearly. The age in it. The gray pouches under the eyes. The fine tremor of the lip. A child's face, almost, left too long in the cold. A flicker moved behind the eyes. Something rose, and trembled, and almost came to the surface.

Then it closed over, as water closes over a stone.

"No," said Whitcomb.

…

The first ray of the sun came through the roof of the Dome.

It was a single shaft, no thicker than a pencil. It struck the sphere in his father's hands, and slid across the clear glass, and found the three little lenses in the base.

"Dex!" shouted Felix. "Eyes!"

He threw himself forward.

He hit his father with his whole weight, shoulder to chest. He felt the old man stagger. He felt a hand clutch at his coat, and a bony elbow, and the sphere between them, burning hot. He had one arm over his own face. He saw a white light bloom through his sleeve, and heard a roar, and the hiss of a thousand serpents. A hand seized his collar from behind and dragged him backward. He stumbled. He fell. He rolled.

And the world went white.

…

It was not like the rooftop. It was not like the pigeons and the thin white flare. It was a great clean blast of light that went up through the dome like a thunderclap and filled the hall to its corners. For one moment every face in the place stood out stark as bone. Every shadow vanished. Then a thick, rolling, choking cloud of white smoke burst out from the center of the dais and billowed in every direction, boiling, silent, enormous.

Somewhere, men were screaming. The Lamp Order troops along the wall, who had been staring up at the sky without glasses, clapped their hands to their faces and doubled over. Chairs crashed. A woman was shouting a name. A bell rang, high and far, in the lantern at the top of the Dome.

Felix lay on his back on the cold stone with his arm over his eyes.

A heavy weight was on his chest, and a hand was on the back of his head, pressing it down. It smelled of gun-oil and horse. He knew that hand. He had fitted gloves to it.

"Stay down," said Hollis, in his ear. "Stay down. Keep your eyes shut. It's all right. I've got you."

"My father—"

"I know."

"He had it in his hands—"

"I know, Felix. Lie still."

He lay still.

Slowly, the roar died. The light faded from red to orange to a dull brown-gold behind his eyelids. The smoke thinned. He heard it hissing out through the oculus in long ribbons. He heard the great Heart, far above, slow down, and fall back to its rhythm. A beat. A pause. A beat.

At length, very carefully, he took his arm away.

…

It was daylight.

It was a thin pale gold daylight, the first of the returning sun. It fell through the oculus in a clean slanting shaft, and lit the drifting smoke like fine gauze. Hollis crouched over him, with his hat gone and his face gray with soot. Beyond him the dais spread out, a black circle littered with fragments of glass.

In the middle of it, a man was kneeling.

He knelt on the black stone with his arms hanging at his sides. His head was bowed. His silver hair was dull with ash. His coat was torn and one sleeve was scorched to the elbow. His eyes were open. He was staring straight ahead, at nothing, at the pillar, at the air, with the wide fixed unblinking gaze of a man looking into the sun.

He could not see.

Felix understood that at once. He saw the milky film already creeping over the gray irises. He saw the hands feeling about on the stone, feeling for something, fumbling at the shards. In his right palm lay a heap of fine white dust, like the remains of a burned letter. It was all that was left. The sphere had gone to powder in his grasp.

He had kept hold of it to the end.

"Father?" said Felix.

The old man turned his head toward the sound.

"Felix?"

"I'm here."

"I cannot see you."

"I know."

"It is quite dark."

"I know, Father. I'm so sorry."

The Chairman of the Meridian Trust opened his hand, and looked down at it, with his blind gray eyes. The ash ran through his fingers. A little wind from the oculus caught it, and blew it away across the stone.

"I had it," he said, in a puzzled voice. "I had it just now."

Felix got up on one knee. Hollis's hand tightened on his shoulder. He did not go forward. He had done what he came to do. He had stepped in front of his father's fall, and dragged him from the edge. It was all he could give.

He stayed there on the floor of the Dome, in the clearing smoke, with his friend's hand on his shoulder, and looked at the old man he had loved.

He was so small. That was what Felix kept thinking. He knelt there in the new sunlight, shrunken and gray, in a burned coat, with nothing in his hands but ash.

For the first time in his life, Felix thought, his father looked like a person.