The Forge of God (41 page)

He walked aft with the box and Thermos, shoulders twitching. The woman ate her single doughnut delicately, leaning her elbow against the back of the bench, watching him leave. "So what have you two been doing?" she asked, suddenly familiar and friendly.

Ian sat beside her, holding his coffee cup against the boat's gentle sway in the crook of one folded leg. "I've been looting the libraries at Cleveland State," he said. "And you?"

"Case Western," she said. "I and about six others. Two of them are hackers, They brought a truck into the data storage center at the main library and ran cables into the building and took everything they could get their hands on."

"I sent records from the Library of Congress to this fellow in Virginia," Reuben said. "And other stuff. I recruited Trevor Hicks." Neither Ian nor the woman knew who Hicks was. "Have you met any of the ones below the bosses—the humans I've heard on the network, giving orders?"

"I have," the woman said. "One of them's my husband. We were separated, filing for divorce, when we were both possessed. I've had to work with him, and take orders from him, the last two months. He works for the State Department."

Cleveland was no longer visible to the south. There was nothing but blue ice-dotted lake and a fast-disappearing mist from horizon to horizon. They had been on the water for over an hour.

"Do you think there's anybody who's got the whole picture?" Ian asked. "Any human, I mean."

"I haven't met one if there is," Reuben said.

"My husband gives orders, but he doesn't know everything."

Ian licked crumbs and sugar from his fingers. "I hope they have a bathroom on this tub," he said, walking aft.

The boat's motors cut back to a throaty gurgling rumble. The water had taken on a slight chop and as they circled, Reuben felt queasy.
I'm going to regret that doughnut.

"All right," Donovan called on the loudspeaker from the pilot house, "this is where we're supposed to be. Anybody getting messages?"

"Not me," the woman said, standing and brushing doughnut crumbs from her coat.

"Christ," Donovan commented dryly.

They had circled for ten minutes when Ian sang out, "Thar she blows!" He had ascended to the upper deck and now leaned over the railing beside the pilot house, pointing east. Reuben and the woman returned to the bow and followed his point and saw a dead gray block rising from the water, about the size and shape of a moving van's trailer. The pilot gunned the motors and moved them closer to the protuberance.

"What is it?" Ian shouted. "A submarine?"

"I don't know," Reuben said, half laughing. He was excited and more frightened than ever. The woman's face was a stiff mask, but her wide-eyed, glassy stare gave her away.

The boat came to within a few yards of the gray block. The bow wash slapped against it.

A square hatch about as tall as Reuben opened in the smooth dull surface at the level of the boat's bulwarks.

"It's an elevator," the woman said. "No, it's a stairway. We're supposed to go inside. You, me, and him." She pointed at herself, Reuben, and Ian on the upper deck. "Nobody else."

"I know," Reuben said.
At least it's not rocking.

Donovan stood by the port gangway and pulled it aside as the pilot brought the boat as close to the block as he dared. Mickey wheeled a shorter gangplank to the gangway and pushed it out to the block's entrance. It was safe enough and no more. The woman crossed first, impatient, buffeted by the wind, gripping the single raised handrail tightly; then Reuben, and finally Ian.

She was already descending a spiral staircase within the block when Reuben stopped at the rear of the alcove. He peered down after her. Ian came up behind him.

"That's it?"

"That's it," Reuben affirmed.

"Better go, then."

They descended. Above them, the hatch shut with a gentle hum.

There was a wildly canted floor, smoke coming up through the boards and tile, a gout of steam and rock, and the walls falling away. He felt himself lifted and screamed.

Sitting upright in the bed, Arthur blinked at the unfamiliar room. Marty was on his hands and knees crying hysterically in the next bed.

Francine put her arms around Arthur.

"There's nothing," she said. "There's nothing." She let him go and crawled out from under the covers to embrace Marty. "Dad was having a nightmare," she said. "He's all right."

"It was
here
," Arthur said. "I felt it. Ahh,
God
."

Marty was quiet now. Francine came back to their bed and lay next to him. "You'd think they'd help you with your dreams or something," she said, somewhat bitterly.

"I wish they'd blocked that one," he said. "I could—"

"Shhh," Francine said, wrapping her arms around him now. She was shivering. "Bad enough if we have to live through it. Why do we have to dream about it, too?"

"Have you dreamed about it?"

She shook her head. "I will, though. I know I will. Everybody will, the closer it gets." Her shivers turned into something more. Her teeth clicked together as she held him. Arthur stroked her face with his fingers and tightened his grip on her, but she was not to be consoled. Without tears, she shook violently, silently, her neck muscles locked with the effort of not making a sound, not scaring Marty.

"We-we-we wou-would
die
," she whispered harshly.

"Shh," he said. "Shh. I'm the one who had the nightmare."

"We would d-die," she repeated. "I w-want to scream. I n-n-need to scream, Art." She glanced at Marty, still awake, listening, watching from where he lay.

"Is Mommy all right?" Marty asked.

Arthur didn't answer.

"Mommy!" Marty barked.

"I-I'm fine, honey." Her shaking hadn't diminished.

"Your mother's scared," Arthur said.

"Stop it," Francine demanded, glaring at him.

"We're all very scared," Arthur said.

"Is it happening now?" Marty asked.

"No, but we're worried about it, and that gives me nightmares, and makes your mommy shiver."

Francine closed her eyes in an agony of maternal empathy.

"Everybody's ascared," Marty declared. "Not just me. Everybody."

"That's right," Arthur said. He rocked Francine gently. She relaxed her wrinkled brows but kept her eyes closed. Her shaking had slowed to an occasional shudder. Marty came from his bed to theirs and wrapped his arms around Francine, placing his cheek against her shoulder.

"It's all right, Mom," he said.

"It's all right to be afraid," Arthur said to nobody in particular, staring at the flowered wallpaper illuminated by a small night-light pointing the way to the bathroom.

They were in a bed-and-breakfast inn a few miles south of Portland.

The network was not active.

He had been set on his course, given his instructions.

I could use a little sympathy, too.

But none was offered.

PERSPECTIVE

Excerpt from New Scientist, March 25, 1997
: The emergence of a new and radically altered Venus from behind the sun has given planetary geologists many things to ponder. It was supposed that the impact of a block of ice two hundred kilometers in diameter would cause enormous seismic disruption, but there is no sign of that. Some, in fact—connecting the impact with events on Earth—have theorized that the block was artificially "calved" into many smaller chunks, distributing the impact more evenly around the solar system's second planet.

What we now see is a naked Venus, her atmosphere transformed into a cloak of transparent, superheated steam. Surface features thus revealed are little different from what we had expected from the evidence of past planetary probe radar scans.

Planetologist Ure Heisinck of Gottingen University believes that the atmosphere may now have a built-in heat-transfer mechanism that will allow it to cool; that eventually the steam will condense and the resulting opaque white clouds will reflect more of the sun's heat into space than they will absorb. More cooling will occur, and eventually rain will fall, which will turn again into steam on the planet's surface. The steam will condense in the upper atmosphere, conveying heat back into space. In a few centuries, Earthlike conditions may prevail…

LACRIMOSA DIES ILLA!

Smoky haze hung high over the valley from fires in the east: Idaho, Arizona, Utah. The morning sun glowered bright orange through the pall, casting all Yosemite in a dreamy shadow-light the color of Apocalypse.

Edward walked past the general store and saw Minelli sitting in the open doorway of his car in the parking lot, listening to the radio with one leg drawn up on the other knee, picking mud out of his boot tread with a twig.

"What's the word?" Edward asked, leaning his walking stick on the car's bumper.

"Nothing close to us yet," Minelli answered. "Fires to the south, spreading south but not north, and fires to the east about three, four hundred miles."

"Anything else?"

"The bullets have dropped below microseismic background. Nobody can hear them now." He smirked and flipped the mud-tipped twig onto the asphalt. "Makes you wish we were out there at work, doesn't it? Feeling the patient's pulse."

"Not really," Edward said. "Walking today?"

"Been," Minelli said, gesturing to the west. "Since about five. It's nice getting up in the dark. The sunrise was spectacular. Lots of my habits are changing. I'm feeling very calm now. Does that make any sense?"

"Denial, anger, withdrawal… acceptance," Edward said. "The four stages."

"I don't
accept
at all," Minelli said. "I'm just calm about what's going to happen. Where are you going?"

"I'm taking the Mist Trail up to Vernal and Nevada falls. Never been there."

Minelli nodded. "You know, I've specked out where I want to be when the crunch comes." He raised a finger to Glacier Point. "You can see everything up there, and it's going to be spectacular. I'll hike up and camp out for a week or however long it takes, just to be ready."

"What if you meet some kind female?"

"I expect she'll go with me," Minelli said. "But I'm not holding out much hope." He rubbed his beard and grinned fiendishly. "I'm not grade-A Choice."

Edward glanced at a sticker in the side window: BORN TO RAISE HECK. "
Mazel
," he called back over his shoulder, walking east.

"I'm a Catholic boy. I don't know that stuff."

"I'm Episcopalian," Edward said.

"When are you coming back?"

"In time for the meeting at five."

Edward followed the switchbacks of the first leg of the Muir Trail, pausing on rock-masonry vantage points to gaze out over gorges filled with roaring white water. He was halfway up the steep Mist Trail by eleven. The smell of moss and spray and damp humus filled his nose. Vernal Fall bellowed constantly on his left, ghostly clouds of moisture soaking his clothes and beading on his face and hands. He grimaced against the chill but refused to wear a parka or anything else that would isolate him.

The wet dark gray trail rocks reflected the sky and became a somber orange-brown. When the breeze blew thick fingers of mist in his direction, he seemed suspended in a warm amber fog, the fall and weathered, moss-covered granite walls lost in a general vaporous void.

I saw Eternity the other night
, he quoted, and not remembering the rest, concluded aloud with, "And it gave me quite a fright…"

At the top of Vernal Fall, he walked across a broad, almost level expanse of dry white granite, one hand on an iron railing, and stood near the wide, sleek green lip of plummeting water. Here was the noise and the power, but little of the wetness; observation and immediacy and yet isolation. The true experience, Edward thought, would be sweeping down the falls in the middle of the water, suspended in cold green and white, curtains of bubbles and long translucent vertical surfaces distorting all sky and earth. What would it be like to live as a water sprite, able to magically suspend oneself in the middle of certain death?

He looked across at Liberty Cap and thought again of the vast granite spaces within the domes, unseen.
Why an obsession with places out of view?

He frowned in concentration, trying to bring up the monstrous big thought he had so loosely hooked.
Living things see only the surface, can't exist in the depths. Life is painted on the surface of the real. Death is the great unexplored volume. Death rises from the inaccessible
, depth
and
death
sounding so much alike
…

There had been only three other people on the trail that morning, one descending, two climbing behind Edward. Another he had not seen, a blond-haired woman in a tan parka arid dark blue shorts lugging a big expensive blue backpack. She stood on the opposite side of the granite block, looking over Emerald Lake, the pool where water from 600-foot Nevada Fall rested before slipping over the shorter Vernal Fall. She must have camped overnight, or was perhaps on the morning leg of a long trek around the rim of the valley.

The woman turned and Edward saw she was strikingly beautiful, tall and Nordic, a long face with perfectly cut nose, clear blue eyes, and lips both sensual and faintly disapproving. He looked away quickly, all too intensely aware she was outside his range. He had long since learned that women this beautiful paid little attention to men of his mild appearance and social standing.

Still, she seemed to be alone.

Came that high, painful interior singing he had always known when in the presence of the desirable and inaccessible woman, not lust, but an almost religious longing. It was not a sensation he wanted now; he did not wish to be seduced away from worshiping the land, the Earth, to focus on a single woman, let alone one he could not possibly have. The woman or women he had imagined the night before would not evoke this kind of response; they would be safe, undemanding, undistressing. Quickly, with nothing more than a polite smile and nod, he passed the woman where she stood by the bridge and continued along the trail.