Chapter 59
***
The day I left that thick paper folder — with its pretentious, naive inscription *Geschenk für die Menschheit* scrawled across the cardboard cover — on the Leader's bedside table, I dropped a pebble from the top of a very tall mountain. Figuratively speaking. No, more accurately: I pulled the graphite rods out of the reactor. And the situation in the world developed in precise accordance with that image. Slowly at first — the Leader himself. Then faster: the first three hundred test subjects. Then faster still: the nurseries and kindergartens of the Union. After that, it was simply an avalanche.
In '75, the Union opened negotiations with China. In '78, the Communist Party won in India — God only knows how it got a foothold there in the first place, given the local mentality. That same year, student unrest broke out across the United States. That same year, the US declared martial law across its entire territory. That same year, the North Atlantic Alliance brought its forces to full combat readiness and marched troops to the border with the Union.
Well. I was never particularly strong in geopolitics. Or in politics in general. That takes a certain kind of mind. And long-term planning has never really been my strong suit.
***
The morning began with strange sounds. Anything unfamiliar triggers an instinctive alarm. My eyes opened practically on their own; my nose pulled in the air. No strangers nearby. Just the two of us in the apartment: me and Suo.
The sounds were my wife moving furniture. Not with her hands, of course — with magic. Though "moving" wasn't quite the right word. She was *removing* it. Levitating each piece through an open portal to Kamar-Taj.
"What are you doing at this hour?" I asked, in no hurry to climb out from under the blanket — warm from a full night's sleep and doubly inviting for it — and indulged in a long, sweet yawn.
"Evacuating the furniture, taking my things. Can't you tell?" Suo turned to me with a pleasant smile. "By the way, you were especially passionate last night. I liked it."
"I was making an effort."
"It showed."
"So what's all this about?" I swept my gaze across the apartment, steadily emptying around me.
"Good furniture — the kind that's both aesthetically pleasing and perfectly suited for practice — is hard to find. And I've grown attached to it besides…" She ran a hand thoughtfully along the nearest wardrobe. "And tomorrow the nuclear war begins, with missile strikes by the US and Britain on Moscow and Leningrad. I'd hate to accidentally scratch the lacquer, so I'm being proactive."
"I'm sorry?" I didn't quite follow what she was saying — sleep hadn't fully let go yet. "What war?"
"Nuclear," she answered helpfully. "Or thermonuclear, perhaps. I'm not great with the terminology."
"But En Sabah Nur destroyed the entire nuclear stockpile on the planet!"
"Darling," Suo said to me, the way you'd speak to a child who hadn't quite grasped something obvious. "Eight years have passed. People rebuilt their stockpiles. Doubled them, in fact — in both quality and quantity. So tomorrow, at five-thirty in the morning, the first launches begin."
"Okay. Stop." I sat up sharply in bed and threw the blanket aside. Then I slapped myself twice across the face — right hand, then left — hard enough to knock the last scraps of sleep out of my head and shift into working mode. I closed my eyes and clapped my hands together once in front of my face: a simple exercise for focusing attention and clearing the mind of everything unnecessary. A kind of express meditation.
"First: where is this information coming from? The exact time of the strike?" I opened my eyes and looked at my wife.
"You've forgotten again who I am and what I do, haven't you, dear?" Suo purred, swinging the Eye of Agamotto on its chain around her neck.
"Will you intervene?"
"No." She shook her head. "It's outside my competence. My jurisdiction, even. The Sorcerer Supreme protects the Earth Dimension. Wars are not within my area of responsibility. People are always at war. There has not been a single day in the history of humanity when someone, somewhere on this planet was not fighting. Am I supposed to spend eternity pulling them apart?"
"But nuclear war — and the nuclear winter that follows — will destroy the planet. Kill everything living on it." I narrowed my eyes slightly. "Isn't that reason enough to intervene?"
"It isn't." She repeated the same negative gesture. "You're greatly exaggerating the possible consequences. Who would know better than you how much larger our planet is than modern scientists believe? Three to four billion casualties immediately, another one and a half to two billion over the following two years — but the planet as a whole will survive. It won't even suffer all that badly."
"What about the Sanctums? New York, China? If they fall, the protection of the Dimension collapses with them."
"They won't fall. The Sanctums' protection has been activated. They've effectively been displaced outside ordinary dimensionality — they no longer exist in the locations you know. The blasts won't touch them. The missiles simply won't reach them."
"Something like the Mirror Dimension, but in reverse?"
"Something like that," Suo said, wincing faintly at my simplistic framing, but she didn't elaborate. "So I'm moving out, back to Kamar-Taj. Dinner is as usual. Shall I cook for you?"
"Wait." I raised a hand to stop her.
"Yes, darling?" Suo looked up at me with an expression of perfect attentiveness. At the bottom of those eyes, little sparks of amusement were hiding. For a moment I thought she was just playing with me — that the nuclear war supposedly about to begin was nothing but a joke. Only for a moment, though. That kind of prank wasn't her style.
"The dust. The radioactive fallout and all the rest of the contamination. The toxic releases from every bombed factory and nuclear plant."
"A couple of years of tedious work," Suo said, pulling a slight face. "Sorcerers aren't quite the arrogant, blind reactionaries you might imagine — ones who pay no attention to the human world whatsoever. Methods for neutralizing new threats tend to be developed almost faster than the threats themselves appear."
"So the sorcerers *will* get involved?" I cut to the heart of it.
"Well, nobody enjoys living in a garbage dump," she said with a shrug. "A general Coven will convene, spend a couple of months working out a unified solution, then spend about a year arguing with the Council of Externals, eventually reach some sort of compromise, and after that — roughly two years of work — and the sky above will be clear again, and the average radiation, acid, alkaline, or whatever-else background won't exceed comfortable, safe levels."
"Three years?" I asked, not hiding my displeasure. "Not sooner?"
"The long-lived don't like to be rushed," Suo said with a shrug, light and easy, as though we were discussing the professionalism of the waiters at the restaurant next door rather than nuclear war.
"But the sorcerers *will* intervene?" I pressed the affirmative in my question a little harder.
"Not before everything has already happened," Suo replied. Then she flashed her eyes and bit the tip of her finger, without releasing the chain of her green bauble. "Victor Sabretooth Creed is hoping for the help of sorcerers? Has Galactus died? Or will the sun rise in the West tomorrow?"
"If you're right about the launches, it won't rise at all tomorrow. We won't see it behind the radioactive dust blanket that'll smother the planet."
"So I am right?" Suo "marveled." She was, in fact, overplaying the whole conversation — that much was evident throughout. Only someone who knew her very well could have caught it. I wouldn't have called myself someone who belonged in that category, but my wife and I had been acquainted for more than one decade.
"So the sorcerers will intervene?" I kept pressing. Suo shrugged and turned back to the remaining furniture still in my apartment. A portal opened. The wardrobe rose smoothly into the air and drifted toward it.
"No, Victor. The sorcerers won't intervene. They won't have time. There won't be enough of it."
"But you could give them that time?" I glanced pointedly at the chain around her neck and the Eye resting on it.
"I already told you — I can't intervene. I'm not permitted to. And I can't pass the Eye of Agamotto to another sorcerer either. Again: I don't have that right. Surely you understand — the temptation for a novice would be too great. And it's even greater for a powerful Sorcerer." I said nothing, just frowned. A direct, clear answer. Though — why the extra words? A simple, short "no" would have been enough for me to understand. So what was the point of all this? Suo had never been particularly prone to rambling. And her eyes…
I studied my wife's face in silence. She kept swinging the green pendant on its chain. I studied her closely, very closely, as though trying to push past that face with my gaze and reach into her head. Into her thoughts.
The next moment, a realization shot through me like an electric current. I understood what the entire conversation had been for. The whole performance with the furniture, the exaggerated indifference to the Nuclear War. I don't know — I'm not certain — whether it was mental contact or simply a guess, but I understood. And apparently that understanding showed itself in large letters across my face, which Suo had no trouble reading.
She raised her shoulders slightly and tilted her head toward her left, as if to say: *Well, something like that.*
"No…" I said, lost. "You can't… It's impossible… I can't…" Suo responded to this by raising one eyebrow and smiling. The smile came out wry, but serious at the same time, and her gaze was hard. "You did this on purpose, didn't you?"
"Did what exactly, darling?" The playfulness and amusement that had colored her voice throughout the conversation began to drain out of it — gradually, not all at once. "Gave a committed revolutionary a second life? Or stirred up the hornet's nest of global politics by handing the Leader a recipe for mass-producing Super Soldiers? Or was it my mind — not Stark's corporation's — installed in every third ballistic missile, letting it carve a path for its payload through any conceivable missile defense system? No, darling. *You* brought this world to the threshold of Nuclear Apocalypse. This is the result of your actions, your efforts. As for me…"
"You took advantage of the situation to back me into a corner," I said, finishing the sentence for her, my voice flat.
"Sharp one, aren't you," my wife said, walking over and ruffling my hair. "A strong mind… mostly hindsight, though." I wanted to snap back at that, but I couldn't find the strength — physical or moral. The air went out of me the way it goes out of a balloon. My shoulders dropped on their own. My hands followed.
"Fine. You win. Show me how to use the thing."
"Not so fast, darling," the Sorceress smiled. "The Eye of Agamotto is an extremely complex instrument. Using it without a certain foundation of knowledge and skill is impossible."
"The world only has until five in the morning," I said, my voice still flat.
"The world — perhaps. But you and I have no such deadline. We'll have tiiiime for everything, darling! Don't worry yourself." Suo smiled and gave the pendant a spin. It began to glow green, and outside the window, the sun reversed its course across the sky.
***
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