The Messiah Choice (1985) (46 page)

There was a sudden panic, and screams and yells from the assembled multitudes, but MacDonald couldn't take his eyes off Angelique.

The altar stone shook, and the Dark Man fell off the bottom end, but somehow MacDonald stayed on as if stuck to it. The stage trembled as well, and the idols fell backwards and tumbled off with a crash. Suddenly a small form darted onto the stage, dressed in black, and pushed Angelique down onto the altar stone just as the stage itself collapsed. The tiny figure removed something from around its neck and put it over Angelique's head, then looked up at him.

"Maria," he croaked.

The entire island was shaking as if it were about to fracture itself apart, and trees began to topple. There was a strong odor of rotten eggs, and then from the ground all around plumes of steam erupted with great fury.

Maria came up to him and he heard her even above the roar. "Tough shit, Greg, but I told you not to come. The old boy was right after all, huh? I'd like to stay, but maybe I can make it off this sucker before it blows. If not, I sure paid back my dues!" She kissed him and jumped off the rock and started running into the trees.

Angelique lay there, half in the pool of blood, eyes closed, as the whole island continued to shake. He wanted to get to her, to try and get them both off, but he still couldn't move.

All around now there seemed a great fog of white, yet in the white there seemed to be shapes, strange shapes not unlike those of the cloud and the Princes, yet somehow different, brighter,
cleaner.
They were solid, humanoid, yet they seemed to grow out of the clouds and be yet a part of them. None was still long enough for him to get a clear view, but he knew they were all around.

There were the sounds of people screaming in pain and panic, screams which seemed to be progressively stilled.

And still he and Angelique were stuck to that damned rock!

He sensed a presence behind him and perhaps a bit above him, but he couldn't turn his head to see who or what it was. He couldn't be sure, but he thought he heard a clear, joyous voice, one that was very familiar.

"Without a willingness to sacrifice, mankind is not worth saving from Hell or from himself,"

something whispered in what sounded very much like Whitely's voice.
"Without shedding of
blood there is no remission of sin. Take care, son. We've won the battle, but the war goes on."

"My Lord Bishop!" he croaked, and reached out a hand to the air, but there was nothing, nothing there at all.

And now a tremendous blast of heat and flame roared down from the top of the mountain and engulfed not only the pair on the altar stone but also the whole of the island, and he could see the entire jungle ablaze before he passed out from its effects, this time for a very long time.

16

SCIENCE AND SORCERY

He slept the sleep of peaceful dreams. The nightmares were there, but every time they would intrude something gentler intervened and forced them away.

And yet, he finally did awake, although the awakening was tempered by drugs and seemed in its own way a dream. He opened his mouth as if to say something, but nothing came forth but a harsh croak.

"Don't try to say anything," said a woman's voice gently. He tried to focus his eyes, and saw that it was a nurse. "Just relax and take it easy. You are in the intensive care unit of St. Ignatius Hospital in Port of Spain. You've been here for quite a number of weeks now. We thought we were going to lose you."

"Ange
—
lique?"
he managed, although it hurt him even through the drugs and pain killers.

"They found a woman with you, but she's as bad off as you are, if not worse. You just relax now and try not to think. It will take a long time to get you well."

He didn't try any more right then; even that effort had taken all his strength. Yet—how could he stop thinking? Wondering?

Am I
—
whole or
—
disfigured? How badly were we burned by whatever it was? Will we both
look like the Dark Man?

These thoughts drifted in and out with his consciousness.

The improvement was very gradual, but as the days passed he found himself being able to remain awake and alert for longer periods of time, and to manage a few simple questions. Very slowly, he was able to get the whole story from the outside world's point of view, although they would tell him little about his own condition or that of Angelique. Their very evasiveness on it made him nervous and queasy. He was on a bed but all but his head was inside a form-fitting plastic device that was helping repairs and healing and minimizing infection. He couldn't really see or tell what was there, and when they opened it it was like being behind the wheel of a car when the hood was raised—his view was blocked.

After perhaps a hundred thousand years of dormancy, early in the morning of November first, without any prior warning, the ancient volcano that was Allenby Island had blown its top and erupted with tremendous force. The ash cloud reached around the world, and there were still particles in the upper atmosphere that colored the sunsets and might well for years to come.

Actually, there was probably a single early warning, since the telecommunications network had gone off the air a few hours earlier, but a bad storm in the area prevented anyone from coming in by sea or air, and security people on the island, by short wave, had assured everyone that the communications break was caused when a freak explosion of oil storage tanks now under control created a power shortage.

After, there had been a flow of lava, thin and runny like water, very wide but not very deep, and it had run down and spread out so that it blanketed the whole of the island and flowed swiftly to the sea. The Institute, having been built almost entirely within the main crater, was completely consumed, and the flows burned away almost all the jungle and forest and came down to the sea through the town of Port Kathleen, which had been fortuitously evacuated a few weeks before.

Not a single structure remained, although here and there were the blasted remains of trees.

No human being could possibly have survived such a blast and such a flow, and no survivors were expected. There had been a top secret meeting in progress involving a great number of important politicians and influential leaders from all over the world, the reason for the evacuation, but they and their entire staffs were lost, of course.

It was over within hours, and finally the superheated steam and gasses rose and created a torrential downpour that helped cool the mass. It wasn't until November third, though, that the first volcanologist could get to the scene and survey it by helicopter. They were making a swing around to look at a particularly odd formation jutting up from the blackness when they saw two badly burned figures on the thing. They assumed, of course, that both were dead, but managed to land experts who could remove the bodies. It was a shock to find that, impossibly, incredibly, both still had weak but definite life signs.

The mere fact of their survival could not be explained, and the fact that both did not die but actually responded to treatment was considered as much if not more of a miracle.

After emergency aid, they had been placed in special tanks created to transport bad burn victims and taken to the closest burn-specialized hospital, which was St. Ignatius. There they had been suspended in larger tanks, getting their air and food from tubes, while specialized solutions helped heal their burns and promote new skin growth.

All of their treatment involved revolutionary new and in some cases experimental ways of treating victims of burns and dehydration, and he was told that, even if they had survived the volcanic fury, an impossibility that had happened, and had survived the transport as well, they would have died within days in the hospital had it been even a year earlier. There was also the fact that the best specialists were immediately flown in, and money was no object.

The next day, the money walked in the door. The King, without whose help all along it would have been impossible to get as far as they did, looked simultaneously grim and overjoyed.

"I couldn't stay away any longer," said Alan Kimmel Bonner, President and Chief Operating Officer of Magellan. "You aren't supposed to have any visitors yet, but you'd be surprised what money and influence can do."

"I saw it—on the island," he said weakly.

"Well, yes. But even when they found out that their fight was a civil war with other elements of the company, they were so overconfident that they ignored us."

"You want a debriefing?"

"That'll wait. I already know the main facts, even the specific ones."

"But the Bishop—the Dark Man. ..."

Bonner sighed. "Yeah, I know. I'll get your side when you're ready. I don't really need it right now, except for the record."

"If—you know—then you—can tell me," MacDonald managed. "Was it truly the devil? I've got to know!"

"Easy! Take it easy! Officially, and totally classified and buried, that is, it was a mad computer of a generation that maybe we weren't ready to handle yet programmed by even madder individuals. How the magic worked we may never know—but someday we might—but certainly the computer, working with people on the inside and possibly partly on its own, solved the basic matter to energy conversion problem and could somehow project that power wherever and whenever it was needed. Officially, and only for certain people very high in the company, the thing channeled all its reserves into a monstrous image, a fluid, plastic sort of energy, in the air above the institute. It reached down, then, to connect itself to Angelique, and instead the Bishop got in the way. We don't know for sure, but the official theory is that he was trailing something, perhaps a wire, all the way off the stage and onto the ground. When he stuck the cross into the field, the thing was grounded, and it discharged and shorted. Either that or it was partly touching that stone or whatever, to which it was connected, and it created a ground loop. Either way, the energy was forced back on itself, and so great was the power involved that it quite literally melted the rock beneath the Institute down to a depth where it reactivated the volcano. That do it?"

"The Dark Man—an animated corpse. Sir Reginald said he predated SAINT. Said it was his dead brother. ..."

"Well, we checked that out. For the record, Geoffrey is still in his grave. It was hell to get clearances on that, but I just had to know. We know from Angelique that they were masters at mind control as well as transmutation. There's no doubt that Sir Reginald believed everything he told you, but there's some question as to whether or not those memories were implanted later and back dated to fit the facts. As for the corpse, well, the thing could create a giant lizard to order, in energy first and then solid as need be. If it could do that, why not something that looked like an animated corpse? The ancients had a word for it.
Homunculus.
Laboratory created intelligence.

The bright boys think it was the prototype for what it eventually wanted to do with Angelique—

create a human extension for itself.''

MacDonald stared at him. "Do
you
believe that?"

The corporate president looked uncomfortable. Finally he said, "I don't know. I'd
like
to believe it, but there are just a few too many things that can only be explained by stretching the laws of probability beyond their limits. If you ask me if we had a mad computer on our hands, I'd say yes.

If you ask me if it went mad because of the madness of its creator, I'd say yes. But if you ask me if there wasn't something else, something lurking there, waiting, taking advantage of all this and moving in to seize control—well, it's pretty unscientific, but I could feel it, and so could you.

There was something there that came down and heightened the madness of the world beyond even its normal insanity levels, who pushed and probed and saw an opportunity and reached out to take it. It wasn't something new, but something very old, something usually forgotten or rationalized away until it strikes. We beat it in the past, and we beat it this time, but the opportunities our age gives it means we have to keep up the watch and the fight."

"The Bishop—he thought it all would fail from the beginning. He always planned right from the start to do exactly what he did."

Bonner nodded. "Yes. He and the girl. No disrespect to you and the others, but he had more guts than any human being I could imagine."

"Not guts, sir. Faith. He told me that fighting the ultimate evil required sacrifice. That only by sacrifice could we show God that we were deserving of being saved. He saw the key to the spread of the evil. We all had our price. Mostly it's a threat to life, but in Angelique's case it was the fear of total incapacity for a lifetime at first, then
my
life became the price. Sir Reginald was bought with the lure of the ultimate knowledge and understanding of his life's work and passion. For the others, like the leaders and politicians in the meadow and most of the Institute management and security staffs, it was the even older price—the promise of sheer power, the same thing that seduced the German leaders in the last war." He sighed. "I wasn't immune, either, although I kidded myself that I was. Right at the end they found it, and I forfeited my right to really end this thing. In the end, they wouldn't find the Bishop's price, though; they never found a weak spot, and that's what did them in. They didn't find it because of his rock solid faith in his God, even to knowing that God well enough to understand that no materialist threat, no Frawley with his equations and his bomb, could stop them. Only an act of total faith could do so. He looked in the eye something that caused everyone else there to bow down before it merely because they looked on it, and he walked up and spit in its eye before them all."

Bonner nodded slowly and said, "Yeah."

"What about Magellan? Has it survived the loss of its computer heart?"