The Forge of God (33 page)

"I've already given up smoking, thank God," Sand said.

Edward Shaw sat in a comfortable antique chair in the bar of the Stephen Austin Hotel—alone, with a whiskey sour in one hand and a fistful of Smokehouse almonds in the other. He had returned to Austin to straighten out his affairs, as might a man condemned to death by lingering illness. He found himself unable to cope with ordinary life any longer.

Austin and environs had been his final effort to get in touch with the past and attempt at least a symbolic reconciliation. His last girlfriend—almost a fiancée—had married a bank vice-president and wanted nothing to do with him. The university had taken his departure philosophically.

He had even broken free of Reslaw and Minelli in Arizona, though Minelli had promised to meet him in Yosemite in late March, weather allowing. He did not want his malaise to burden them. Reslaw, lightly bearded, hair cut to a thin shag, told them he was going to Maine to live with his half brother.

Edward had come back to his hometown to discover that his two-bedroom apartment had been emptied and rented to another tenant the month before—having been forgotten by the government agents looking after his affairs during his quarantine. That seemed a rather major oversight. At least the landlady had been kind enough to store his belongings in the event of his return. He had sold the furniture, but—to his own amusement—learned he still had a few things he couldn't bear to part with. These he had stored in a rental shed at the exorbitant rate of one hundred dollars a month, paid in advance for five months.

These things done, Edward became what he wanted to be, footloose and fancy free.

He had few doubts that the Earth would soon come to an end. He had bought a small-caliber pistol in case that end might prove too painful. (Pistols were at a premium now.) He had apportioned his savings and the government money to allow him a full five months of travel.

He had no urge to step outside the boundaries of the United States. Purchasing a small motor home (trading in his Land Cruiser) had depleted his assets by about a third. Now, for his final day in Austin, he was spending the night in the hotel, wrapped in a peculiarly enervated melancholy.

He was anxious to get moving.

He would travel around the country, and in late March or April he would end up in Yosemite, where he would settle in. The first part of his journey would give him a great overview of North America, as much as he could cover—something he had always wanted to do. He would spend a few weeks in the White River Badlands of South Dakota, a few days in Zion National Park, and so on, hitting the geological highlights until by full circle he came back to his childhood and the high rocky walls of Yosemite. Having surveyed some of what he wanted to see of the Earth, he would then begin to catalog his interior country.

Good plans.

Then why did he feel so miserable?

He could not shake free of the notion that one spent one's life with a treasured friend or loved one. Edward had always been essentially a loner. He felt no need to see his mother; she had kicked him out of the house at sixteen, and he had lost touch with her years ago. But there was still the myth, the image of the dyadic cyclone, as John Lilly had called it… the pair, facing life together.

He finished the whiskey sour and left the bar, brushing salt dust from his hand with the screwing motion of a bunched-up napkin. The doorman nodded cordially at him and he nodded back. Then he went for a two-hour walk around downtown Austin, something he had not done since he had been a student.

It was Sunday and the town was quiet. He wandered past white picket fences and black iron fences surrounding old well-kept historic houses. He studied bronze historical plaques mounted on pillars. Leaving the older neighborhoods, he finally stood in the center of concrete and stone and steel and glass pillars, the balmy midwinter Texas breeze rippling his short-sleeved shirt.

A human city, yet very solid and substantial-looking.

How could it just go away?

Not even geology encompassed the instant demise of worlds.

The next morning, having slept soundly enough and with no memorable dreams, Edward Shaw began his new life.

December 24

Lieutenant Colonel Rogers sat in his trailer, waiting for word from the civilian liaison, a small, dapper saintly faced NSA man named Tucker. Tucker had but one role in this conspiracy—there was no other word for it—and that was to convey whether or not the weapon had been acquired.

The Sunday New York
Times
lay spread across a desk below three blank television monitors. On the front page, three headlines of almost equal size vied for attention:

PRESIDENTIAL CRONY ASSASSINATED

Reverend Ormandy Shot by Lone Gunman in

New Orleans

CROCKERMAN VETOES ALIEN DEFENSE ACT

FORGE OF GODDERS GATHER TO "PROTECT" ALIEN CRAFT

Gathering of England-Based Cultists in California

The whole world was going mad, and taking him along. In the past week, he had three times violated his oath as an officer. He was participating in a conspiracy that would ultimately subvert the expressed orders of the Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces. Within two weeks, sooner if all went as planned, he would attempt to destroy the very object the cultists surrounding the site wished to protect.

What disturbed him most of all was that he was not more disturbed. He hated to think of himself as a hardened radical, but he had indeed been radicalized, and he was no longer able to see and think of opposite courses of action. All he could see was a threat to his nation and a government in complete disarray. Extraordinary times, extraordinary measures.

The trailer phone rang. He answered and the command center operator told him he had an outside call from CINCPACFLEET-Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet.

Tucker's voice came on the line. He was, more than likely, calling from the aircraft carrier
Saratoga
operating a hundred miles due west of San Clemente Island. He had, more than likely, just finished speaking with Admiral Louis Cameron.

"Colonel Rogers, we have an arrow and all the feathers we need."

"Yes."

"Do you understand?"

"I understand."

"Your next contact will be Green."

"Thank you."

He hung up the phone. Green was Senator Julio Gilmonn, Democrat, California. Gilmonn was chairman of the Senate Alien Defense Subcommittee. He would ride in a big limousine through the cordon of cultists and onto the site in approximately ten days. He would be heavily guarded.

In the trunk of the limousine would be the "arrow," a three-kiloton warhead originally designed for an anti-submarine missile aboard the
Saratoga
.

Carrying this warhead in a custom sling, Rogers would enter the bogey.

He folded the newspaper neatly and stood to make his afternoon rounds.

PERSPECTIVE

CBS Daylight News, January 1, 1997, hosts Tricia Revere and Alan Hack
: Revere: Were you in Times Square or watching it on TV?

Hack: TV. I value my life. Revere: I've never seen anything like it. An absolute frenzy.

Hack: They think it's our last year on Earth. (
Shakes his head at comment off camera
) The hell with that. Let's be real. They do. So they're going to party.

January 3, 1997

The wonder of it was that Arthur still felt like a private individual. He had driven Marty through drizzling rain to school, in a fit of parental solicitude—the school bus was perfectly adequate and stopped less than fifty yards from the front door. Returning, while parking in the carport, he had heard distant voices, some speaking English, most not. He had sat in the car with eyes closed, listening as if he were on some ham radio or satellite dish connection, but the voices had stopped, replaced only by a humming expectancy.

He had walked into the house, removing his overcoat. Francine had met him with a cup of hot cocoa. His eyes misting, he had sipped the cocoa, put it down on the kitchen counter, and hugged her. She had moved against him with more and more enthusiasm, verging on desperation, and he had led her into the bedroom, where they had made love.

He had not been "watched."

When not carrying out specific tasks, he was as free—within rational limits—as anybody he knew. He would not even contemplate leaving his zone of activity, the northwestern area of the United States. And if he tried to do so, he would be prevented. But there was plenty of work to do here, and more would be coming later on…

He lay with his head on his wife's ample tummy, hand around one breast, dozing lightly. She curled a lock of his hair in one finger and watched him with that womanly calmness he had so often marveled at. There had been passion, even obsession, in their bed that morning, yet now she was as placid as a crockery madonna.

He could tell her about the spider. Nothing would prevent him. He lifted his head and was about to speak, but then stopped.
So who's in charge? Is it me, hesitating, or something else?
It was him. She had enough to think about without learning her husband was possessed. That word amused and irritated him. It did not describe what was happening…

Why don't they take her, too? Possess her?

Because they didn't need her, and their resources were limited. Suddenly his spine tingled and his neck tightened. Only one or two thousand… What if nobody in his family was among that chosen group? None of his friends, colleagues, acquaintances? What if
he
was not?

"Something wrong, Art?" she asked, stroking his forehead.

He shook his head and caressed her nipple.

"You make me feel like something other than a mother and PTA member," she said. "You should be ashamed of yourself."

"Oh, I am," he said. "Thoroughly."

The rain gusted against the windows and a cold wind howled under the eaves. Ominous, patently ominous, yet it made him feel safe and warm. He could lie nude beside his woman in an enclosed warm bedroom and feel himself a master of infinite space. His body did not yet understand.

A network was being formed. Abruptly, he knew that libraries were being raided in New York, Washington, B.C., and elsewhere. What was their scheme? Would they literally pluck up the Sistine Chapel and disks of Bach and the entirety of the Parthenon or Angkor Wat and lift them into space, along with the geniuses of Earth? Somehow, that seemed obvious and very naive.

He had listened many times to Harry's "essay" on the tape. Ever since, he had been mulling it over, comparing Harry's ideas with what the nascent network was relaying to him.

In his head, a concept more than a word:
grammars
.

Hooked to that concept was a maze of connotations: grammar of a planet's ecosystem, from genetic material on up, how the species fit together as "words" in a "book," the structure of evolving plots and the implications for a denouement…

Grammar of society, how human groups interact as part of the overall ecosystem…

Fruit, gonads, a planet's reproductive system, a fertile pseudopod reaching up into space away from the surface and having to learn
Jesus Jesus.

To learn about deep vacuum and gravitation and the wind between worlds, the ecosystem of Earth must evolve an "organ" or arm equipped with perception and logic, just as life had once adapted to the land by developing certain kinds of eyes and limbs and neurological structures. Sentences in Earth's book using the syntax of land-walking, space-walking, all implied by the original ecosystem grammar, all inherent. As on a thousand other worlds with similar living grammars. Humans were the Earth's organ for crossing between worlds and stars.

They speak Life. They know what to take to keep the essence, the basic meaning, of the planet intact.

That was what he was being told. Harry had said, on the tape,

"I've spent twenty years of my life as a biologist. You, Arthur, kept me up to date in other disciplines; you got my mind working fifteen years ago when you gave me Lovelock's book on 'Gaia.' Recent events have made me dig out some of my own old theories and speculations, made after reading Lovelock and Margulis. We've talked about them, off and on, but I was never so sure of myself that I put them down on paper. Now I'm pretty sure, but I'm too weak to put them on paper, so… this.

"Gaia is the entire Earth, and she's come alive, she's been an organic whole, a single creature, for over two billion years now. We can't make complete analogies between Gaia and human beings, or dogs or cats or birds, because until recently we've never studied actual independent organisms. Dogs and cats and birds—and humans—are not independent. We are bits and pieces of Gaia. So is every other living thing on the Earth. Imagine a single cell trying to make analogies between its cytoplasm and organelles, and the role it plays in a human body; it's going to be misled if it compares too rigidly.

"So Gaia, the Earth, is the first independent organism we've studied. I'll call her a 'planetism.' A planetism is made up of plants and animals and microorganisms, and these are made up of cells, or are themselves cells. Cells are made up of cytoplasm and organelles and so on. An organism regulates itself with hormones, neurotransmitters, and it does its work and gets its nutrition with enzymes and other substances… all organized, on schedule, synergistic. Self-controlled.

"Gaia does her work with ecosystems. Like any organism, a planetism has a schedule and certain goals to meet. She grows and develops and goes through different stages in her life. Sometimes she undergoes radical shifts, destroying whole ecosystems. Maybe she's experimenting in ways that smaller organisms cannot; she reaches a dead end, clears some of the slate, and starts over. I don't know. But ultimately she has to do what all living things do—mature and reproduce.

"How can a planetism make others like herself? She came into being—probably—without outside interference, though maybe she's the offspring of another planetism. Maybe life was seeded here a long, long time ago. I don't think so, frankly. I think most planetisms have no parents, at least not right now, and so they're free to develop on their own schedule. This takes a long, long time, but eventually she finds a way to reproduce. She develops a reproductive strategy.