Blue Labyrinth

And there was the other thing Fábio had said — that before he had gone to America for the second time, Alban had pla

Recalling this, Pendergast felt a chill despite the oppressive heat of the ruined house. There was only one reason he could think for Alban to go to Switzerland. But how could he possibly know that his brother, Tristram, was at a boarding school there, under an assumed name? Immediately Pendergast knew the answer: it would be a simple matter for a man of Alban’s gifts to discover Tristram’s whereabouts.

… And yet Tristram was safe. Pendergast knew this for a fact, because, in the wake of Alban’s death, he had made additional arrangements to ensure Tristram’s security.

What had been going through Alban’s mind? What had been his plan? The answers — if there were any answers to be had — might lie in these very ruins.

Pendergast made his way back to the front of the house and the concrete staircase. It was badly charred, missing its railing. He ascended it carefully, one hand trailing against the wall, the blackened treads squeaking ominously under his feet.

The second floor was in far worse shape than the first. The acrid stench was stronger here. In places, the third floor had collapsed into the second during the conflagration, causing a dangerous welter of carbonized furniture and charred, splintered beams. In several spots, the roof yawned open, revealing skeletal beams and the blue Brazilian sky above. Slowly picking his way through the rubble, Pendergast determined that the floor had once held three rooms: an office or study of some kind; a bathroom; and a small bedroom that — based on the once-pleasant wallpaper and the ribs of a crib it contained — had been intended as a nursery. Despite the scorched walls and cracked and hanging ceiling, this room had fared better than the others.

The bedroom of Danika — of Danika and Alban — must have been on the third floor. Nothing remained of it. Pendergast stood in the half-light of the nursery, musing. This room would have to do.

He waited there, motionless, for five minutes, then ten. And then — grimacing in pain — he slowly lay down on the floor, ignoring the layer of ash, coal, and dirt that covered the tiles. He folded his hands across his chest and let his eyes flit across the walls and ceilings for a moment before closing them and going utterly still.

Pendergast was one of a tiny handful of practitioners of an esoteric mental discipline known as Chongg Ran, and one of only two masters of it outside of Tibet. With years of training, extensive study, near-fanatical intellectual rigor, and a familiarity with other cerebral exercises such as those in Giordano Bruno’s Ars Memoriae, and the Nine Levels of Consciousness described in the rare seventeenth-century chapbook by Alexandre Carêem, Pendergast had developed the ability to place himself in a state of pure concentration. From this state — utterly removed from the physical world — he could merge in his mind thousands of separate facts, observations, suppositions, and hypotheses. Through this unification and synthesis, he was able to re-create scenes from the past and put himself among places and people that had vanished long ago. The exercise often led to startling insights unobtainable any other way.

The problem at present was the intellectual rigor, the need to clear his mind of distraction, before proceeding. In his current state, this would be exceedingly difficult.

First, he had to isolate and compartmentalize his pain while simultaneously keeping his mind as clear as possible. Shutting everything out, he began with a problem in mathematics: integrating e−(x2), e raised to the power of minus x squared.

The pain remained.

He moved on to tensor calculus, working out two problems in vector analysis simultaneously in his head.

Still the pain remained.

Another approach was necessary. Breathing shallowly, keeping his eyes gently but completely closed, careful to keep his mind from acknowledging the pain that coursed through his limbs, Pendergast allowed a tiny, perfect orchid to form in his imagination. For a minute it floated there, rotating slowly in perfect blackness. He then allowed the orchid to languorously fall into its component parts: petals, dorsal sepal, lateral sepal, ovary, post-anterior lobe.

He focused his attention on a single part: the labellum. Willing the rest of the flower to vanish into the blackness, he let the labellum grow and grow until it filled the entire field of his mental vision. And still it grew, expanding with geometric regularity, until he could see past the enzymes and strands of DNA and electron shells into its very atomic structure — and still deeper, to the particles at the subatomic level. For a long moment, he looked on with detachment as the deepest and most profound elements of the orchid’s structure moved in their strange and unfathomable courses. And then — with a great effort of will — he stilled the entire atomic engine of the flower, forcing all the countless billions of particles to hang suspended, motionless, in the black vacuum of his imagination.

When he finally let the labellum vanish from his mind, the pain was gone.

Now, still within his mind, he left the would-be nursery, descended the stairs, passed through the closed front door, and found himself on the street. It was night, perhaps six months, perhaps nine months earlier.

Suddenly the house from which he had just exited exploded in flame. As he watched — disembodied, unable to act, powerless to do anything but observe — accelerants quickly carried the flames through the third floor of the residence. Down a back alley, he saw two dark figures racing away.

Almost immediately the crackle of flames became mingled with the sounds of a woman’s screams. A crowd had gathered, shouting, crying hysterically. Several men tried to force open the locked front door with improvised battering rams. It took them at least a minute, and by the time they succeeded the screams had stopped and the third floor of the house was already collapsing into a fiery labyrinth of beams and glowing ceiling tiles. Nevertheless, several of the men — Pendergast recognized Fábio among them — ran into the building, quickly forming a bucket brigade.

Pendergast watched the frantic activity, a spectral composite of intellect and memory. Within half an hour the fire was out — but the damage had been done. He now saw a new figure come ru

He was met in the doorway by his lieutenant, Fábio. His face was a mess of soot and sweat. Alban tried to push his way past but Fábio barred the doorway, shaking his head violently, pleading with Alban in a low, fast voice not to attempt to enter.

At last, Alban staggered back. He placed one hand on the plaster façade for support. To Pendergast, watching from his mind’s eye, it seemed as if Alban’s world was about to fall asunder. He tore at his hair; he struck the smoke-blackened wall, emitting a half moan, half wail of despair. It was an expression of grief as profound as any Pendergast had ever seen — and never would have expected from Alban.

And then — quite suddenly — Alban changed. He grew calm, almost preternaturally so. He glanced up at the ruined house, still smoking, its ruined upper floors dropping glowing embers. He turned to Fábio, asked him pointed questions in a low, urgent tone. Fábio listened, nodded. And then the two turned and melted away down a side alley.