The Forge of God (42 page)

In the rocky tree-spotted upland meadow beyond Emerald Lake, he found a natural granite bench and laid out his lunch of two processed-American-cheese sandwiches and dried fruit, very much like what he had eaten on hikes in the valley as a boy. Facing the white plume of Nevada Fall, still a few hundred yards distant, he chewed crescents from a leathery apricot and brewed hot tea on a tiny portable stove.

Someone came up behind him, tread so light as to be almost undetected. "Excuse me."

He twisted his torso and stared at the blond woman. She smiled down on him. She was at least six feet tall. "Yes?" he asked, swallowing most of a mouthful of half-chewed apricot.

"Did you see a man here, a little taller than I, with a very black full beard and wearing a red parka?" She indicated the man's height with a hand held level above her head.

Edward hadn't, but the woman's worried expression suggested that it would be best if he paused to consider before answering. "No, I don't think so," he said. "There aren't many people here today."

"I've been waiting two days," she said, sighing. "We were supposed, to meet here, at the Emerald Lake, actually."

"I'm sorry."

"Did you see anybody like him down on the valley floor? You came up from there, didn't you?"

"Yes, but I don't remember any men with black beards and red parkas. Or any with just black beards, for that matter—unless he's a biker."

"Oh, no." She shook her head and turned away, then turned back. "Thank you."

"You're welcome. May I offer some tea, fruit?"

"No thank you. I've eaten. I carried food for both of us."

Edward watched her with an embarrassed smile. She seemed unsure what to do next. He half wished she would go away; his attraction to her was almost painful.

"He's my husband," she said, staring up at Liberty Cap, shading her eyes against the hazy glare. "We're separated. We met in Yosemite, and we thought if we came back here, before…" Her voice trailed off and she made a negligible shrug of her shoulders and arms. "We might be able to stay together. We agreed to meet at Emerald Lake."

"I'm sure he must be here someplace." He gestured at the lake and trail and the Nevada Fall.

"Thank you," she said. This time, she did not smile, simply turned and walked back toward the head of Vernal Fall and the descending Mist Trail. He watched her go and took a deep breath, biting into his second sandwich.

He stared at the sandwich ruefully as he chewed. "Must be the white bread," he told himself. "Can't catch a beauty like that with anything less than whole wheat."

At three, the meadow and the perimeter of the lake, the falls and the trail below, were empty. He was the only human for miles, or so it seemed; might even be true, he thought. He crossed the bridge and lingered in the trees on the other side, with only the roar of the falls above and below and snatches of birdsong. He knew rocks of any description but little about birds. Red-winged blackbirds and robins and jays were obvious; he thought about buying a book in the general store to learn the others, but then, what use applying names? If his memories were soon to be scattered fine-ground over space, education was a waste.

What was important was finding his center, or pinning down some locus of being, establishing a moment of purity and concentrated awareness. He did not think that was possible with people all around; now was a chance to try.

Prayer perhaps. God had not been on his mind much recently, a telltale void; he did not wish to be inconsistent when all the world was a foxhole. But consistency was as useless now as nature studies, and not nearly so tempting.

The valley was still in sun, Liberty Cap half shadowed. The smoke had cleared some and the sky was bluer, green at the edges of the haze, more real than it had been.

"I am going to die," he said out loud, in a normal tone of voice, experimenting. "What I am will come to an end. My thoughts will end. I will experience nothing, not even the final end."
Rising rocks and smoke and lava. No; probably not like that. Will it hurt? Will there be time for pain?

Mass death; God was probably busy also with mass prayer.

God.

Not a protector, unless there be miracles.

He shuffled his booted feet in the dry trail dirt. "What in hell am I looking for? Revelation?" He shook his head and forced a laugh. "Naive sonofabitch. You're out of training; your prayer muscles, your enlightenment biceps, they're all out of shape. Can't lift you any higher than your goddamned head." The bitterness in his voice shook him. Did he really want revelation, confirmation, assurance of existence or meaning beyond the end?

"God is what you love." He said this softly; it was embarrassing to realize how much he believed it. Yet he had never been particularly good at love, neither the love of people in all its forms nor the other kinds, except perhaps love of his work. "I love the Earth."

But that was rather vague and broad. The Earth offered only unthinking obstacles to love: storms, rock slides, volcanoes, quakes. Accidents. Earth could not help being incontinent. Easy to love the great mother.

The wind picked up and carried droplets of mist above the Vernal Fall and over the forest, landing cool and lightly stinging-tickling on his cheek. He thought of down on his cheek and not whiskers, and of wanting his father to stay with them, even then knowing (truly did he realize it then?) that the unknit would soon separate.

That time, in Yosemite, had not been altogether blissful. The memories he now recovered were of a young boy's ignorant but sharp eye, observing a man and a woman, shakily acting the roles of mother and father, husband and wife, not connecting anymore.

The boy had been unable to foresee what would happen after the separation so obviously but so deniably coming.

He squinted.

Earth = mother. God = father. No God = no father = inability to connect with the after.

"That," he said, "cuts the fucking cake." He swatted at a gnat and hefted his pack higher on his back, descending along the wet dark gray rock steps carved out beside Vernal Fall, and then following the path above the foaming, violently full Merced.

Pausing with a slight smile, he left the path and stood on a granite boulder at the very edge of the tumult, contemplating the lost green volumes of water beneath and between the white bubbles. The roar seemed to recede; he felt almost hypnotized. He could just lean forward, shift one foot beyond the edge, and all would end very quickly. No suspense. His choice.

Somehow, the option was not attractive. He shook his head slowly and glanced up at the trees on the opposite side of the spill. Glints of silver shined through the boughs and moved along the trunks. It took him a moment to resolve what he was seeing. The trees were crawling with fist-sized silvery spiders. Two of them scuttled along a branch, carrying what appeared to be a dead jay. Another had stripped away a slice of bark from a pine trunk, revealing a wedge of white wood.

He thought of the Guest, and did not doubt his eyes.

Who controls them?
he asked himself.
What do they mean?
He watched them for several minutes, vaguely bothered by their indifference, and then shrugged—yet another inexplicable marvel—and returned to the path.

Edward was back in the valley, freshly showered and in clean jeans and white shirt, by five o'clock, as he had promised. The amphitheater was more crowded than it had been for yesterday's meeting. No music was scheduled; instead, they had a minister, a psychologist, and a second ranger arrayed before the podium, waiting their turn after Elizabeth's introduction. Minelli grumbled at the New Age lineup, but he stayed. There was a bond growing between all of them, even those who had not spoken; they were in this together, and it was better to
be
together than otherwise, even if it meant sitting through a handful of puerile speakers.

Edward looked for but did not see the jilted blonde in the audience.

After three days of interrogation by the FBI and agents from the National Security Agency, as well as six hours of intense grilling by the Secretary of the Navy, Senator Gilmonn had been set free from his office and apartment in Long Beach, California. He had ordered his chauffeur to drive east.

Nobody had been able, or particularly willing, to hang anything on him, though the trail of the arrow or monkey or whatever from the U.S.S.
Saratoga
to his car was reasonably well defined. Given more than a mere two and a half months of investigation and second-guessing, he might have been in some trouble, and the captain of the
Saratoga
relieved of his command, but things had changed markedly now in these United States. It was a different nation, a different government—functioning to all intents and purposes without a head. The President, under impeachment, was still in office but with most of his strings of influence and therefore power severed.

Gilmonn's incarceration, which might have been
pro forma
half a year ago, was now simply out of the question.

For all that, what had they accomplished? They had killed Lieutenant Colonel Rogers and perhaps thirty Forgers who had refused to vacate the desert around the bogey. They had blown the bogey into scattered pieces. Yet few involved in the conspiracy believed, now, that they had done anything to even postpone, much less remove, the sentence of death placed on the Earth.

He stood on the sand near the gravel road that passed within two miles of the site of the disintegrated bogey, binoculars hanging on a leather strap from his neck, face streaming with sweat under the brim of his hat. The white limousine that he had hired with his own money waited a few yards away, the chauffeur impassive behind his dark glasses and blue-black uniform.

Army and government trucks passed along the road every few minutes, some bearing radiation stickers; many of those outward bound, he knew, carried fragments of the bogey. He was not privy to what they were finding. Basically, his presence was tolerated, but now that the conspiracy had accomplished what virtually everybody wanted, those directly involved, while not charged, were being shunned. Scapegoats might be too strong a word… and it might not be.

Gilmonn unabashedly cursed Crockerman for having forced them all into an untenable and illegal no-man's-land of circumventions and conspiracies.

And still, deep in the Earth, what some—mostly geologists—had called "the freight trains" and others "bullets" rumbled toward their rendezvous. They could not be traced anymore, but few doubted they were there. The end might be a matter of days or weeks away.

Gilmonn entered the limousine's rear door and poured himself a Scotch and soda from the dispenser. "Tony," he said, slowly twirling the glass between the fingers of his right hand, "where do you want to be when it happens?"

The chauffeur did not hesitate. "In bed," he said. "Screwing my brains out, sir."

They had talked a great deal during the drive from Long Beach. Tony had been married only six months. Gilmonn thought of Madeline, his wife for twenty-three years, and while he wanted to be with her, he did not think they would be screwing their brains out. They would have their kids together, and their two grandchildren, perhaps in the ranch house in Arizona. A huge family gathering. The whole clan hadn't been together in five or six years.

"All that, and we didn't accomplish a
Goddamned
thing, Tony," he said with a sudden deep flood of bitterness. For the first time since the death of his son, he felt like cursing God. "We don't know that for sure, Senator."

"I do," Gilmonn said. "If any man has a right to know he's failed, I do."

HOSTIAS ET PRECES TIBI, LAUDIS OFFERIMUS

March

During his last hours, Trevor Hicks sat at his computer skimming and organizing genetic records sent from Mormon sources in Salt Lake City. He was staying at the home of an aerospace contractor named Jenkins, working in a broad living room with uncurtained windows overlooking Seattle and the bay. The work was not exciting but it was useful, and he felt at peace, whatever might happen. Despite his reputation for equanimity, Trevor Hicks had never been a particularly peaceful, self-possessed fellow. Bearing and presentation, by English tradition, masked his true self, which he had always visualized as frozen—with extra memory and peripheral accomplishments—somewhere around twenty-two years of age, enthusiastic, impressionable, quick-hearted.

He rolled his chair back from the table and greeted Mrs. Jenkins—Abigail—as she came through the front door, carrying two plastic bags full of groceries. Abigail was not possessed. All she knew was that her husband and Trevor were involved in something important, and secret. They had been working straight through the day and night, with very little sleep, and she brought in supplies to keep them reasonably comfortable and well fed.

She was not a bad cook.

They ate dinner at seven—steaks, salad, and a fine bottle of chianti. At seven-thirty, Jenkins and Hicks were back at work.

Being at peace, Hicks thought, worried him somewhat… He did not trust such flat, smooth emotions. He preferred a little undercurrent of turbulence; it kept him sharp.

The alarm went through Trevor Hicks's brain like a hot steel lance. He glanced at his watch—the battery had run down without his noticing, but it was late—and dropped the disk he had been examining. He pushed the chair back and stood before the living room window. Behind him, Jenkins looked up from a stack of requisition forms for medical supplies, surprised at Hicks's behavior. "What's up?"

"You don't feel it?" Hicks asked, pulling on a rope to open the curtains.

"Feel what?"

"There's something wrong. I'm hearing from…"He tried to place the source of the alarm, but it was no longer on the network. "I think it was Shanghai."

Jenkins stood up from the couch and called for his wife. "Is it starting?" he asked Hicks.

"Oh, Lord, I don't know," Hicks shouted, feeling another lance. The network was being
damaged
, links were being severed—that was all he could tell.