Astronomy(51)

A second volley made a soft, syrupy impact where it hit the creature itself. A shriek of rage swept through the observatory as the thing swung away toward the road.

Whoever was up there got a load of what they’d angered. The gunfire stopped. Susan heard cries of dismay, a diesel engine growling into reverse. In moments, a desperate volley and anguished cries marked the end of the chase.

She held her breath, waiting for the thing to return. She heard a crash along the highway, as if something huge were shouldering it clean of debris, and then another shriek, paled by distance.

The screaming from the Summoning Tower seemed to dissipate. Maybe this was a good sign. She figured one of two things had to be happening—the Zentralbund troops were taking back their island, or Azathoth’s attendant entities had run through all the available humans.

She closed her eyes. She strained to listen as the screams died out. A new sound overlaid the chanting of the sorcerers. She could not place it at first. And then she did, and found herself gaping with amazement.

It was the “Horst Wessel Lied,” a Nazi drinking song rooted in the days of the Beer Hall Putsch. She had not heard it since her first mission into Cologne, in 1942. She opened the door a bit just to make sure what she was hearing.

The bar itself shimmered a little as she watched. It seemed not quite settled in this universe. But there was no mistaking the music. The “Horst Wessel Lied” came out of every open window, strident and lachrymose as rancid honey.

The song wound up in a long piano roll-out. A raucous, beer-drenched roar announced: “He is here! Soon He is here! Time for the Renewal of Time!” Out on the patio, a couple of technicians were preparing their xenon torch for another shot against the moon. A pair of Luftwaffe Generals were pacing anxiously, their six-handed watches at the ready, awaiting the start of the game.

Apparently, nothing stopped the party at the Four Winds Bar. Not even the end of the world.

Susan wondered if she might see the black man, tending his bar as if it were the only place for a natural man to be. She squinted into an open door to catch some glimpse of him, and found herself under the gaze of an SS Stürmbannführer, and his friend, the young boy with eyes so blue they seemed to glow in the dark. They were smiling at something as if sharing a secret joke—smiling at her? She could not tell. She slipped back into the gloom of the observatory and eased the door closed.

Susan wondered if she had trapped herself here. The only other door led back out toward the highway. Out that door waited the creature that had chased her here in the first place.

She glanced around for a weapon. She found herself in an echoing darkness, light years away from the horror outside. In the center of the room, the barrel of a great reflector telescope rose up toward a retractable aperture. The opening was pulled back just enough to show a few stars in the western sky. Something up there was huge and misshapen, and burning the clean blue of sapphire—Sirius?

Whatever it was, the light of it touched every upturned surface in the room. Susan could see smaller telescopes in various states of disassembly, scattered about. A dimly lit anteroom produced fixtures of brass and aluminum and steel.

A second room was sealed off from the main workshop by a heavy glass door. She took this to be the polishing room. The tables beyond the glass were stacked with various sizes of carefully wrapped optical glass. Precision mirrors were racked in small, supported structures to guard against the subtle sagging effects of gravity.

A room had been set aside for timekeeping. An Eddic poem from the thirteenth century had been inscribed on the door in crayon:





Woe’s in the world, much wantonness;

axe-age, sword-age—sundered

are shields—

wind-age, wolf-age, ere the world

crumbles;

will the spear of no man spare the other?





Beyond the door lay a catalog of timepieces, each supremely accurate at measuring the thing its makers valued most.

Here was a Mayan calendar from 600 B.C., showing an overarching year of 18,980 days. Birth, death, plantings, harvestings, divided into units of thirteen numbered days meshed with twenty named days.

Here was a clepsydra water clock, built by the Roman architect Vitruvius. Water poured from a cistern at a uniform rate, lowering a float. The float moved a hand about a dial. Only, the rate of measurement was uniquely pre-Christian—instead of measuring by hours, it measured by signs of the Zodiac.

At the end of a workbench rested a small, beautiful Chinese incense clock. It had been lit sometime earlier. Ash filled half the ornately inlaid alleyways. The scent of myrrh filled the room.

An image of stars flickered across the back wall. At first she thought she saw a movie, because of the metronomic click of light that passed across it every half-second.