The Magic Circle, Katherine Neville [parable of the sower read online .TXT] 📗

Laf took my hand in his and looked into my eyes as if he were peering across the aeons.

“Gavroche,” he said. “With eyes like yours, the color of the sea, I assure you that if you ever did make such a mistake, even a god would hesitate to blame you. But your grandmother believed his time was coming quite soon now, this Dionysus. And since he is the god of moisture, of springs and fountains and rivers, if called upon he will come and free the waters. The rains will pour down as in the time of Noah, and rivers will flood their banks.…”

Suddenly I flashed in panic to the boy who’d cried wolf when there was no wolf. Suddenly I dreaded those powers that Laf had said my grandmother could summon and he’d hinted I might, as well.

“Do you mean the world could be flooded and wrecked if somebody just asked for help before they really needed it? Somebody like me?” I said.

Laf was silent a moment. When he spoke, he did not reassure me.

“I think, Gavroche, you will know the right moment to ask,” he said softly. “And I’m quite certain the god himself will know precisely when to come.”

I had rarely thought of this episode from my childhood in the past twenty years. But now, as we crossed onto the island and neared our destination, I glanced once more at the canvas satchel on the backseat beside me, the bag containing Pandora’s manuscripts.

We pulled through security and up before the International Atomic Energy Agency. As I stepped from the car still clutching the lethal bag, in my mind echoed, just for an instant, what Uncle Laf had said so long ago in Vienna: that I’d know exactly when to call upon the god. And I wondered if the critical moment was now.

Maybe I wasn’t sure about the critical time, but by lunchtime I had a pretty clear idea where the critical place was located: it was back in the USSR, in a region commonly referred to as the Yellow Steppe. In the geography books it was known as Central Asia.

To hear Lars Fennish tell it—as he and his colleagues did tell it, locked with us in an IAEA conference room for our “brief” multiple hours of briefing—it was one of the most mysterious and volatile regions of the world.

This slice of the globe we were talking about, displayed on a four-color map on a nearby wall, included the Soviet Republics of Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan—a group that together possessed some of the world’s highest mountains, a recent record of polycultural and religious ferment, and an ancient history of intertribal warfare and violence.

They possessed some noteworthy neighbors too. Those just across the fence included China, a member of the league of “big five” weapons-wielding nukes; also India, a nation that claimed it possessed no nuclear weapons but had only “exploded a peaceful device” a few years back; not to mention Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran—a trio I’m sure would have been delighted to join the club. Not the most relaxing spot to pay a visit.

The item most crucial to the future of humanity was also the International Atomic Energy Agency’s chief mission: ensuring that weapons-grade materials weren’t diverted toward “proliferation,” or more bombs in the hands of ever more countries. It hadn’t occurred to me until our briefing that this was a goal that could never be achieved by the IAEA, even with the full support of the United States and all our allies, without the added cooperation, even the steel-fisted clout, of an equally supportive and on-board Soviet Union to balance the east-west axis. That the USSR had actually shown such support over the past several decades was my first surprise. My second, a real humdinger, was that it was not the IAEA who’d initiated Wolfgang’s and my mission inside the USSR—the Soviets had invited us in themselves.

It’s true that in recent years, especially in the wake of a catastrophe of Chernobyl’s magnitude, the Russians might have grown a bit more mellow about outside intervention from folks like the IAEA. But glasnost and perestroika aside, Soviet external relations weren’t quite as cozy as their public relations might suggest. Why would the Soviets suddenly be reversing their earlier cold-war stance and coyly asking us in to inspect their lingerie?

By the time our heavy briefing was completed, I had learned the answer to that and a number of other questions having to do with a mysterious clique I’d never heard of. They were called the Group of 77 and their ambition, it seems, was to join the club that controlled all the weapons-grade material in the world.

It was one P.M. when Wolfgang and I finally escaped from the conference room, graciously thanked Lars and friends for torturing us these past three hours, and headed off to have lunch. With little sleep or breakfast followed by hours of intensive briefing, I was more than ready for some solid food and a little gemütlich atmosphere. Luckily, Viennese coffeehouses almost never stop serving chow.

We left our luggage at IAEA headquarters to be picked up later, and got a taxi. We were dropped at the canal and headed on foot to the landmark Café Central, where Wolfgang said he thought they’d still be holding our reservation for lunch. Though I felt awkward lugging my heavy shoulder bag through the cobbled streets of Vienna, at least I’d worn comfortable shoes. And it helped to walk. Before we’d gone far, the bracing fog from the canal had cleared my head enough so I could focus my thoughts a bit.

“Fill me in a bit more on this Group of 77,” I suggested to Wolfgang. “They sound like some kind of Third World hit squad trying to grab all the liquid plutonium they can get their hands on. Where did they come from?”

“Here in Vienna we’ve known about them for a long time,” he told me.