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        Once down from the mountain, Eric got in his car and drove. Half an hour by road brought him to the nearest town, the tourist resort of Ichabod. There, he posted the Luxembourg serum to himself, care of a friend in Hawaii.
        He parked his car at Soapy's, locally his favorite bar. (There was a choice of two.) He hauled his backpack out of the trunk then started walking, following the road out of town through the forest.
        If anyone saw him, they would later report that he had been trying to hitchhike out of town. But, in fact, after walking for an hour -- stepping off the road any time he heard vehicles approaching on the isolated highway -- he quit the road and began hiking through the trees, following a compass bearing. Walking north.
        He had thought this through carefully. His enemies -- Coil Ranch, Gelhammer Jantz and Jarline Plab -- were children of the modern age. They would think in terms of escape by car, helicopter, truck. Once they found him gone, they would never imagine that he was so close, escaping so slowly. They would never look for him in the woods.
        Eric was an outdoorsman from way back. The forest held no dangers he could not handle. Three days later, by which time the Institute had probably expanded its search for him all the way to Singapore and Vienna, he emerged onto a highway running north of Ichabod. A truck stopped for him, and he was on his way.

*


        When you check into a big hotel, they're going to want a credit card imprint. No credit card, no room. But you can pay by cash. As long as they have that credit card imprint up front, they'll let you settle the bill in cash, protecting your privacy from snooping computers.
        But Eric did not plan to play cash. Rather, he planned to pay by credit card when he checked out, so his enemies would hunt for him here, in Detroit.
        Once in his hotel room, Eric plugged in his new computer and accessed the Internet. He went to his own web site, which he had set up six months previously. The data on the web site was all encrypted, and you needed a password to enter.
        "Password?" queried the computer.
        "Seven ate nine," typed Eric, and hit ENTER, and was in.
        Having accessed his own web site, Eric entered the passwords which caused the data to decrypt, then sent it as a suite of e-mail messages to a thousand pre-selected destinations. Newspapers, police agencies, TV stations, muck rakers, college professors and high school teachers.
        The Basilica project was now in the public domain.
        The last stage would be to provide the world with the proof that it actually worked. That it was too important to be deemed unethical, switched off, closed down, left to perish. That humanity needed to take this step -- the next step in the evolution of the brain.
        For that last step, Eric needed an experimental subject. One prepared to run the risk of dying.

*


        He slept, and he dreamt of whirling snow. Alvin whirled down through the snow. An angel, falling. Intelligence collapsing from the crystalline sphere. The snow was white, a blizzard. The tanks froze in the snow. Men cut open horses to sleep inside them. The graph showed Napoleon's army shrinking, vanishing. Bright red inclusions in the snow. Blips of orange, azure and fleeting crimson. The blood was red.
        "Blood is red because blood is red," said the machinegunner.
        A truth-conditional statement. The statement that "Blood is red" is true if and only if humans really do bleed in crimson. If it is an observable fact, in the real world, that blood is indeed red, then the linguistic statement which embodies this fact is also true.
        "Blood is blood and rats are rats," said the machinegunner, lecturing him about it.
        They were in a snowmobile somewhere, marooned in one of the trenches of the Western Front. The Arabs had hiked up the gas prices, and the power pylons were falling, collapsing in the ice storm. She kissed him, lightly. She offered him half of her pizza. The machinegunner kissed her. The machinegunner was a linguist and a philosopher and a German.
        "The British will attack at dawn," said the machinegunner. "You must think they are sticks of chewing gum."
        It was not clear to him why he must think that.
        They were having this conversation in Russian but Eric could follow it okay, even though he was being audited by the accountant from his cocaine connection.
        He woke from dreams at last, blurred and groggy. Couldn't remember his own name. A side-effect of Luxembourg. He had taken a dose and the cancer was establishing itself in his brain. No. Not true. I don't even have the doses yet.
        His hand was on the floor and a black dog was chewing at it. Still asleep, then. Time to wake up? No. Dream a little longer. When you wake, Alvin will be dead, and you don't have the cure for that. Or the pancake recipe, either.
        "Shaken, not stirred, please," he said to the barman. "And go easy with the garlic."
        Dreams. Russian consonant clusters. A memory of a barren town in Siberia, somewhere on the coast. The philosopher. What was his name? Wittgenstein -- that was it. Wittgenstein was a machinegunner in the First World War. But -- on the Western Front? Eric couldn't even begin to remember. And, anyway, Wittgenstein had nothing to do with truth conditional statements. Did he? "La neige est blanc" est vrai si est seulement si Labek neige est blanc. The statement that snow is white is true if and only if snow is possessed of whiteness. That wasn't Wittgenstein, that was someone else, you should know who. You've forgotten? You should shoot yourself!
        "Sir?"
        A voice, penetrating.
        "Sir? We're about to land, sir."
        A lie. They were not landing just yet. But their plane was heading downhill, definitely. Waiting ahead: Hawaii, land of a thousand sushi bars. Hawaii, and Eric's encounter with Luxembourg.

*


        Hawaii greeted Eric with an embrace of hot wet flannel. Welcome to the tropics. Though he was lightly dressed, it felt as if he was wearing a wetsuit. His only luggage was a single flight bag, but that was enough -- a constant irritant in the unrelenting heat. All he wanted to do was flop down somewhere cool and act exhausted, but he felt compelled to do the action man thing and go wandering through the streets, trying to work out whether anyone was following him. After an hour of this, however, he gave up. There were thousands of Asian faces in the streets which, in a xenophobic moment of paralyzed despair, merged into one inscrutable enemy.
        He'd done all he could. He was out of juice, finished. If the Institute's agents were onto him, then they were onto him. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen. He just needed to go home -- not that there was any real home left for him here on Oahu. He stepped into a taxi and gave directions.
        "Here," said Eric, when he was still an hour's walk from Auntie May's.
        Once the taxi was out of sight, Eric started walking.

*


        The package he had mailed to himself was waiting at Auntie May's.
        "Are you on the run?" said Auntie May.
        "Why what?" said Eric.
        "I saw on TV ...."
        Not only had she seen, but she had also made videotapes. She had always treated Eric like a son, even though, technically, she was not a part of the family.
        Eric watched the videotapes. The Institute had been raided, Gelhammer Jantz imprisoned, Jarline Plab sent to a mental hospital for psychiatric evaluation, Coil Ranch jailed for assaulting a law enforcement officer. There were press conferences, denunciations, extended finger-pointing exercises.
        "Never again," said the President, promising the nation.
        "But we must," murmered Eric.
        This was the way forward. The evolutionary leap. All it needed was just one experimental animal to prove it.

*


        "You mean you're going to make yourself sick?" said Auntie May.
        "It's an experiment," said Eric.
        And he explained, as best he could. He had to convince her. He could not do this alone. She needed to believe -- or, at least, to be prepared for him to believe.
        The earlier versions of the product had killed. But -- all going well -- this one would not.
        "In fact, my friend Alvin tried it," said Eric.
        "And what happened to him?" said Auntie May.
        "He had a climbing accident," said Eric, blandly.
        Fact: Alvin took Luxembourg and survived. Fact: Alvin's survival proved that Luxembourg's next manifestation would be not cancerous but angelic. A singing metabrain ready to explore the realms of pure thought, the crystalline sphere of hypothesis and theory.
        
        However --
        If so, then why had Alvin chosen death?
        "Luxembourg is a culture of modified cells," said Eric. He carefully avoided the term "cancer cells". "On injection," continued Eric, "the cells migrate to the brain."
        Luxembourg also contained a tailored virus which temporarily destroyed the blood/brain barrier, with potentially lethal consequences. But Eric said nothing about that, either.
        "The tailored cells get to the brain," said Eric, "and they grow a new layer. We have ... it's complicated, but, briefly, our ancestors were crocodiles, something like that. We still have an old crocodile brain -- the kind of basement of our brains. The brain has evolved by adding on new layers. Luxembourg will add a layer we've codenamed Basilica."
        Or, if the cancer cells did not switch off their uncontrolled multiplication on schedule, becoming tame and stable, then the victim would die unpleasantly of swiftly-spreading brain cancer. But we don't have to talk about that. Let's keep things clean and simple.
        "Then," said Eric, "this new brain, Basilica, when it's virgin ... you've heard of savant skills? Idiot savants? They see a thing done, they know how to do it. In the early days of its existence, Basilica exists in what we call an eidetic phase. It's teachable. Instantly."
        Then Eric talked about the nine long years of effort which had gone into preparing Parlom Prentis, the teaching suite designed to tutor Basilica. The Basilica brain was especially designed to decrypt the compressed and coded knowledge of Parlom Prentis, converting man into angel.
        "Perception," said Eric. "Logic. Insight. It will all be mine. Do you see what I'm on about?"
        "I think you're crazy," said Auntie May. "But I won't stand in your way."
        Having known her all his life, Eric had anticipated exactly that reaction. But, even so, he found himself shuddering with relief. With a single phone call Auntie May could trash his hopes for both science and the human race. But she wasn't going to make that call.

*


        Are you ready? Yes, Eric was ready. He had made his decision. He was done with living in this animal world of blood and emotion, of dumb instinct and hardwired appetite. He was going to make the breakthrough. He was going to ascend into the realms of the angels. To build for himself a new brain, one evolutionary step beyond where we have come to so far, and dwell there together.
        And isn't that what science is all about? Isn't science, really, a quest for a higher truth? Isn't the quintessential scientist bent, essentially, on achieving the next evolutionary step in consciousness? Isn't science, really, a neoplatonic quest?
        "The Simpsons" was playing on the TV. Eric switched it off. It's difficult to get serious about neoplatonic quests in the middle of a cartoon show.
        "Goodbye, Bart," said Eric, speaking to the dead TV screen.
        He wished he could have said goodbye to Auntie May. But she had gone out shopping, aiming to get some chocolate fudge icecream.
        "This," said Eric, meticulously drawing the contents of one vial of Luxembourg into a syringe, "is our attempt to quit our body of blood and sinew. Leaving that behind, to colonize the realms of pure platonic truth which exist beyond the delusions of our instincts and our emotions. To become, if we can, truth itself, and limitless."
        This sonorous sermonizing comforted him, and gave him the courage to drive home the needle. Almost.
        Okay. Let's do it. One small step for a guinea pig, one huge leap for mankind. Let's make some history, okay? Let's do the tourniquet bit. Nice veins, Eric. You've got a great career in heroin. Want to take a walk on the wild side? Good! This is a syringe. Drunk? No, I am not drunk. This is my left hand and this is my right hand. I am not drunk. And so --
        The needle was in.
        Eric studied the stuff in the barrel of the syringe. Purple. Yeah. The good stuff. The ichor of angels. Okay. Let's say goodbye to the human race.
        "Goodbye, human race."
        So saying, Eric pulled back the plunger of the syringe and was rewarded by the appearance of a red flush of blood in the barrel of the syringe. He was in a vein. Good. For optimal effects, mainline it -- that had been Alvin's advice. So Eric pushed down on the plunger and drove the full dose of Luxembourg into his system.
        And now you know you're a scientist. A real scientist. As mad as those guys who get themselves killed climbing down inside the craters of live volcanos. As mad as that guy way back in history who studied the human eye by deliberately blinding himself by staring at the sun.
        Three hours later, he was hot with fever. In six hours, delirious. Twelve hours after taking Luxembourg, he was unconscious. But, true to his instructions, Auntie May did not call an ambulance. She had been, in her time, a mortician, a bank robber and an indicted war criminal -- not your standard housewife by any means.
        And, seventy-two hours later, a recovering Eric was able to take his first sip of chicken soup.

*


        The illness -- it was impossible to think of it as anything else -- dragged on for weeks. In that time, Eric had strange, often surreal dreams. Dreams of the taste of triangles, of having sex with polar bears. But dreams are just dreams. And maybe the dreams, too, were self-generated, products of his old brain.
        "You need Parlom Prentis," said Eric to himself.
        Yeah. He needed to program Basilica -- always assuming that it existed.
        "Patience," he said.
        Before doing the programming, he had to wait. To allow Basilica, his angelic overbrain, to grow to full size. No need to hurry. He already had a head start on the rest of the world. Even if someone was resolved to defy the nation's latest laws and illegally replicate the Institute's work, Eric would get there first.
        At last, the day arrived. If the research data was correct, Basilica would have grown to full size. He was ready.
        Eric got online and accessed the second of his secret websites. At this one, he had a password-protected copy of the whole Parlom Prentis teaching suite.
        "Password?" queried the computer.
        "I'd like my cigar back," typed Eric, and hit ENTER, and was in.
        The teaching suite was there. Waiting. Complete. Perfect. Untouched. Untampered with. Everything he needed to bring to life Basilica, his new angel brain. Once he had finished absorbing this, he would be ... what? Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein alive in the same constellated pinball machine.
        All day, Eric stared at the sleeting white screen, watching the fractal snow, absorbing the encrypted data which Basilica would decompress, decrypt and build into language, theory and thesis. A whole new world of intellectual skills.
        It was the most boring job in the world. Though there was a certain amount of redundancy built into Parlom Prentis -- sustained one hundred per cent concentration was not required -- sitting there for hour after hour was as boring as watching paint dry. Eric's thoughts drifted. Wittgenstein. Thesis versus antithesis. Germans versus British. Wittgenstein maintaining his side of the argument with a machinegun. The confrontational mode of Western thought finding its apotheosis on Flanders fields.
        That night, he had confused dreams. He was a ticker tape parade. He was astronauts and war heroes and angels parading down Broadway, and he kept protesting, no, it should be Fifth Avenue, not Broadway but fifth. Bagels served him angels and sea cucumbers in a candyfloss shop in the Forbidden City. He was Gelhammer Jantz, selling the sexual favors of an antiquated typewriter to a succession of smirking baseball bats. Finally, he was mud. Marmalade-flavored mud. An ocean of it. He felt worms wriggling through his mass, felt the sailors in sunken submarines dying inside him.
        He woke at nine in the morning with a massive and headache and the taste of iron-flavored mud in his mouth. Someone was at the door.
        "Eric?"
        It was Auntie May, with a manilla envelope. It was addressed to Eric in Alvin's handwriting.
        "This came to your brother Bill from his attorney in New York," said Auntie May.
        "What attorney in New York?" said Eric.
        "From when he had that ... that Federal trouble," said Auntie May. "Didn't you know about that? No? Well, anyway, Bill passed this on to me."
        "You told him I was here?" said Eric, alarmed.
        Family was too obvious. To avoid capture, Eric had to stay well clear of any true blood relations.
        "I didn't say and he didn't ask," said Auntie May. "He asked me to take care of this for you, that's all. I didn't ask him what he guessed."
        Gingerly, Eric took the envelope. Too light for a bomb. But how would Alvin know about an attorney in New York whom even Eric had never heard of? And why was this message arriving only now, so long after Alvin's death?
        Eric opened the envelope carefully, dissecting it into fragments as he searched for a hidden threat -- a miniaturized radio beacon, for example. But there was nothing in the envelope but a letter.
        A letter. Black on cream. Dissolving print. A buckling alphabet. He could not get his eyes to focus on it. He could feel the burgeoning weight of his brain within his skull, a huge rotten pumpkin swelling inside its cage of bone.
        "I'll read this later," said Eric, unwilling to confess that, right now, it was out and out impossible for him to read anything.

*


        A full week later, Eric finally read the letter. He had been putting it off. To read was to awaken the pain of Alvin's death, something that Eric still found hard to deal with.
        "If you are reading this," said Alvin, "maybe I met a guy in Samara."
        Samara? What the hell are you on about, Alvin? Something about ... death. Death, I think.
        He read on.
        "Assuming I'm dead," wrote Alvin, "maybe you've gone ahead with Luxembourg. If so, the Basilica brain is a big disappointment -- am I right? No choirs of angels. No Big Theory walking tall in your head. No cosmic understandings."
        True. Eric's payoff for gambling with his life had been a bunch of strange dreams, no more. And he had been having strange dreams even before taking a dose of Luxembourg.
        "I don't want to be rude," said the letter, "but you were never more than a linguist. Your understanding of the project was never more than rudimentary. The thing is, Basilica is passive. It's a realm above our rat-cockroach thing. It's not driven by our food heat sex hungers. You want to integrate it with your own psyche? You need to switch it on."
        More followed. Details. Additional to Parlom Prentis, the data suite Eric had already loaded into his head, the designers of Basilica had created an additional programming suite called Arcadia.
        "Arcadia is the switch-on key which will give Basilica initiative," wrote Alvin. "It will activate the full potential of the new brain. Now here's the good news, Eric. As a linguist, you'll appreciate this. The Basilica brain is designed to use a freshly designed language. It uses the grammar of the angels. You won't be tied to our gift-giver-recipient grammar. You'll see new relationships. You'll see our individuality in the context of the holistic whole. You'll see through the Eye of God, at once specific and universal."
        Psychobabble? Eric was not sure. He had personally worked on only his own tiny part of the Institute's project, painstakingly creating explanatory contexts, item by item, for a lexicon of sixty thousand words. He had never been privileged to know how his own work fitted into the overall project. But it could have been a step along the road to the creation of a new language. And if the letter's claim was true ....
        "Arcadia," said the letter, "is the most closely held of all the secrets associated with the Basilica project. Gelhammer has always planned to destroy Arcadia if the project was closed down by the authorities. I figured you might be under observation. He might have you followed and confiscate everything you collected. That's why I have left this revelation so late. If you are reading this, you are safe from Gelhammer's scrutiny. You have escaped his reach. You and you alone have unique access to the materials."
        Unique access. The academic's dream. Only me. No competition in the library with the ruthless others.
        Guilty memories surfaced. Long-buried memories from those frantic final years at the university. Years in which, competing for scarce resources with his predatory classmates, he had committed way too many sins. Hiding his favorite linguistics texts in the library, seeding them amongst the unvisited tomes devoted to ancient Greek. The books are mine, but nobody knows I have them, so I can't be asked to bring them back.
        Ultimately, on one memorable day, when he had been under intense deadline pressure, and there had been monstrous queues for all the copy machines, he had done the unpardonable. He had taken a library book into the toilet and, flushing to mask the sound of his vandalism, had ripped out the pages he needed. In that moment he had experienced, for the first time in his life, a true sense of blasphemy, of having committed an offence against the sacred.
        And now here was Alvin's letter, offering him the magic key to scholarly success. Payment for his nine years of linguistic drudgery. Payment for the risks he had run -- so far, fruitlessly -- by injecting himself with Luxembourg.
        "Return to the Institute," said the letter. "The door to my closet is hollow. Open it. Inspect the top edge. You will find a narrow strip of plywood. Lever it out. A nylon cord hangs from the plywood into the hollow center of the door. On the end of the cord is a plastic bag. In the bag is a disk. A DVD. It contains the full Arcadia details."
        Okay. So he would have to go back to the Institute.
        "No problem," said Eric to himself. Gelhammer Jantz and Jarline Plab were in jail, and the Institute had been closed down. "So ... backpack in ... the path on the ridge ... break a door, I guess .... "
        Yes. He would do it. He had to. Otherwise -- for what had he risked his life? If he didn't somehow bring Basilica to life, how was he going to redeem those nine years -- nine years! -- which he had lost to the Institute?
        There was no choice.

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