The O.D. (34 page)

XXII

May Day, as celebrated by the inhabitants of Eydos, didn’t have the pagan or political connotations as elsewhere. The date was used instead as a collective birthday and was the second most important day in the island’s calendar after August 4th. For Lonnie Pilot it also marked the anniversary of his meeting with Forrest Vaalon – in this case, eleven years.

Normally, it would have been a day of merrymaking, but Josiah Billy’s suicide had thrown a blanket of melancholy over Nillin that was difficult to kick off. To lift the somber mood, Rebecca Schein suggested a moonlit bike race to the convoy and back in Billy’s memory. Everyone but Paola Rendina, whose initial shock at the loss of her partner had been replaced by anger at his selfishness, thought this a great idea. Twenty years earlier, Schein’s mother had killed herself with champagne and tramadol. But in the time since, Rebecca had reasoned that her mother’s inner anguish must have far outweighed all other considerations, including the feelings of her teenage daughter. Schein had long ago forgiven her mother and took that same reasoning to Rendina’s dome. It worked. Twenty minutes later, Paola wheeled her bike out to join the others. Only the women in the latter stages of pregnancy and those with young children (Eydos now had seven youngsters ranging in age from two months to four years) were missing from the start of the ‘Tour d’Eydos’.

The first stage to the barges, being all downhill and with a strong following breeze, lulled everyone into a false sense of achievement, in marked contrast to the return leg, which presented not only the incline to fight against, but also a westerly wind gusting to 30mph.

Nirpal Banda won the race, but there was no one at the finish to cheer him home. Pilot himself, on coming in fifth from last, downed the remainder of a flagon of cider and went home, knowing Macushla would still be up. Three hours of painful uphill peddling had been a physical reminder to him of what lay ahead vis-á-vis their Big Idea and he needed to talk to her. Not about the speech they’d been painstakingly crafting for the past six months, but about how they were going to operationalize the concept.

For five years, the Islanders had been applying their imagination and energy to analyzing global threats and concocting cures. They viewed each situation from afar, like Martians. But then, they were the nearest thing the Earth had to aliens. It certainly made for some novel thinking. Task groups had been formed around each issu
e−
working independently, mostly, but in concert if two or more of the ‘cancers’ overlapped. One overriding peril seemed to engulf them all, and this forum Pilot led personally. Crew were encouraged to move from group to group to ensure that lines of thought would always be fresh, wide and inventive. As with any proposal, there had to be some kind of editorial shaping and polishing and this was exercised by Pilot, Mara and Serman. The final word on everything, however, was Lonnie Pilot’s. The fact that Eydos had still not set out its stall in the outside world was because he felt they weren’t yet ready. Ultimately, the Big Idea would be viewed as a preposterous intrusion if it were presented half-baked, so it was still in the oven.

Pilot’s immediate problem was how to remove the tension that was beginning to grip him like angina. He lay fully dressed next to his partner for a long time, not wanting to wake her, but knowing that the tension in his body would soon permeate her sleep. It didn’t take long.

“What are you thinking, Lonnie?” Mara asked.

It took him a few seconds to realize he was being spoken to. “Ah… I’m glad you’re awake,” he said. “What am I thinking… I was thinking about thought… about the thinking
processs
.”

“And?”

“Here’s the question. How do a billion cells in Person One’s brain link together to write a poem… a billion cells in Person Two’s split an atom… and a billion cells in Person Three’s kill hitchhikers?”

“Or hurl themselves off a cliff,” Macushla said.

Pilot stood up and peeled off his cycling shorts. “Speaking of cliffs, how do we get the brain cells of nine billion people to follow the same line of thought as ours and pull away in unison from the edge of
their
cliff?”

Macushla helped Lonnie pull his T-shirt up and over his head. “First of all, I don’t think you need all nine billion,” she said. “There are leaders and followers. All we need to do is convert the leaders, and the rest will follow.”

“Hmmm. Mrs. Normal raises her ugly head again.”

“Mrs. Who?”

“Normal.” The eleven-year-old image of Jane Lavery sitting across from him in
Ptolemy’s
mess room flitted across Pilot’s mind’s eye. “Normal isn’t always good, Coosh, it’s what
usually
happens
. We don’t want leaders and followers.
Everybody
needs to be enfranchised in their own salvation and liberation. There’s a blanket of fear and apprehension descending on the entire world and it’ll take
all
of us to throw it back.”

“But in that world there’s a natural hierarchy of leaders and followers. Always has been, always will be.”

Pilot helped his partner out of her nightdress, laid her on her side with her back to him, placed his arm over her and began stroking her seven-month-old bump and ripening breasts.

“When the human world reaches the edge of the precipice,” Mara said, “the first person to come along with an understanding of leverage and a strong enough stick can either send the boulder crashing, or maneuver it back from the rim, depending on their own particular leaning. The right idea, the right appeal to mass emotions, the right promises – these are the strong sticks. Understanding leverage is knowing when to use them. The magic moment isn’t a long one, but the impact can be long-lasting, and either constructive or destructive. Spartacus, Lenin, Mao, Hitler, McCarthy, Gorbachev, Bin Laden, Chuan Wa, Williams, Tomashvili – they all knew when to exert leverage.”

Pilot moved his hand to the base of Macushla’s skull and traced her vertebrae lightly with his fingertips, up and down, going lower and lower with each stroke. “The magic moment isn’t far away now,” he whispered, stopping at her tailbone. He knew that she knew where his hand was going to go next, and seconds later her wetness confirmed it. He moved his head downwards and she automatically pulled her knees towards her chest. His fingertips passed her tailbone and continued south, quickly replaced by his lips and his tongue as he expertly began leading her on a short but thrill-packed journey to completion. When she could bear no more pleasure, Macushla pulled Pilot’s face from between her legs and waited for the tremors to die down. After a short rest, she shifted her position, rolled her lover over, kissed his chest and began moving her head slowly down his torso…

When Lonnie was spent, and before he could get his breath back, Macushla did what she did after every blow job. Talk. “Those electric maps you get in town squares that light up the route between where you are and where you want to go when you push a button… that’s the brain at work,” she said. “One single route linking centillions of brain cells lights up and the connection becomes the thought. If you then want to express this thought to someone else, you have to get all those bits of information down to the speech warehouse and pack them into boxes. The boxes are words and sentences, but because they’re too small to accommodate the full thought, half the idea gets left on the floor. That’s why saying something is never as rich and complete as the original thought.”

Macushla’s words were like falling leaves and took several seconds to settle on Pilot’s consciousness. “Some of the cleverest people are the least articulate,” he said eventually, taking his partner’s hand and gently placing it over his testicles. He relaxed into the feeling and was about to power down his brain again when another notion appeared from nowhere. “Do you believe there’s such a thing as extra sensory perception?” he asked. “I think that if we practiced more we could master mind-reading. All the basic emotions, like fear, hunger, greed, amusement, lust and contentment have chemical and electrical fingerprints. They’re the same whether you’re an antelope, a squirrel or a human. Identifying these thoughtprints, or emotionprints is just a case of having a developed sixth sense – of having the ability to interpret the information the other five senses are collecting. There’s nothing mysterious about – “

Pilot stopped abruptly, sensing he was alone in the room. He leaned over Macushla and listened to her soft, rhythmic breathing. She’d been asleep for the past two minutes, dashing any ideas he may have had for a second helping of the only activity that was capable of disengaging his overactive brain.

Franz Barta arrived in Nillin for the latest in a series of meetings Pilot had been having with the man to realign the Island’s financial affairs. Vaalon’s slice of wealth invested in Eydos’ name had always posed a dilemma. Pilot considered it dirty because of its connections, direct or indirect, with the very industries and businesses that, like plaque, were causing the world’s slow decay. So, with the consensual agreement of the Islanders, he had decided to sell the holdings and funnel the capital into projects considered clean and worthy of patronage, for example, the Wide Mouth Generator.

Barta had been given the job of processing these projects and had already submitted a hundred and ninety-three to Eydos. Of these, forty-six groups and individuals, whose ideas the Islanders felt deserved risk capital, were given immediate support. As the last item on his agenda, Barta presented a new application for venture capital from a man in Australia who had a proposition for harnessing energy via the heat in the Earth’s mantle –
Pyrogeneration
, he called it.

“Good luck to him. We’ll study it later and let you know. One more thing, Franz.” Pilot handed Barta a map of the world with half a dozen circles drawn on it at various latitudes. “We need you to find six serviceable office blocks in these locations and ready them for occupation. The particulars of what goes in them will follow.”

“That I can do.” Barta put the map in his briefcase and walked to the helipad with Pilot. When the helicopter had disappeared from sight, Pilot took
Pyrogeneration
back to his dome, imagining the Australian scientist hard at work in his laboratory with a saucepan of porridge, a pancake and some spam simmering over a Bunsen burner.

XXIII

Pilot awoke late, quickly donned track suit and trainers and arrived at the satellite dish for his match with Kerry Jackson just before eight. His opponent had not yet arrived, so Pilot set down his basket of tennis balls and began to practice.

The dish, a giant of its type, had been airlifted onto the island unsolicited by a communications baron who saw it as a possible lever into the minds of the islanders. The dish had been accompanied by 40 HD receivers and all the other cabling and connections required to drown Eydos in soap operas and reality TV shows. The natives, unimpressed by these beads, had voted to return everything but the satellite dish, which was locked at a 45 degree downward angle. Rackets and balls completed the equipment needed to play ‘satellite tennis’. Jackson was currently at the top of the ladder and Pilot had been looking forward to the game for weeks, having worked his way up from twentieth to second. The sky was cloudy, the air not too hot, and there wasn’t a breath of wind. Perfect conditions.

“Nice day for it,” Jackson said, tardily timing his appearance in true champion style.

Pilot’s first serve landed just outside the circular court, drawn to three times the diameter of the satellite dish standing at the edge of the circle. Fault. His second serve landed at about 4 o’clock on the ‘clock’ and two inches in from the line. Jackson’s scrambled return bounced weakly off the dish into the centre of the court, allowing Pilot time to pick his spot on the dish and deliver a point-winning smash.

Fifteen minutes later, the score stood at twenty-thirteen to Jackson (the first player to reach 30 points won). Pilot gradually clawed his way back to within a point of his opponent at twenty-six to twenty-five, but at that score the game ended, never to be resumed.

The sheep sensed it a split second before Pilot and Jackson did – an infinitesimal vibrato rising from deep below the surface of the island. At first it merely tickled the players’ soles, but soon grew in intensity and pitch to a level that struck terror into their souls.

“EARTHQUAKE,” someone behind them shouted. Throughout Nillin, the residents were abandoning their domes in favour of open territory, erroneously so, as the domes’ geodesic structure could withstand the most severe seismic activity. Those who knew this simply preferred to see, as well as feel, what was happening around them.

Pilot dropped his racket and sprinted towards his dome, reaching it just as Macushla was exiting, carrying their two month old daughter, Pandora, in her arms. The ground was shaking so violently, it was impossible to stand, so they found a soft patch of moss and sat down. Each was lost in their own worst thoughts and no words were exchanged. Pandora gurgled at her mother’s breast, unaware of the drama unfolding around her. Eventually, Pilot grounded himself, took Mara’s hand in his and gave it a reassuring squeeze. He peered beyond the cottonwood wall of the harbour, trying to catch a glimpse of the water level to see if it was rising, but his view of the shoreline was blocked. The tremors were becoming more violent and Pilot could see panicked looks on those faces around him not already thrust between knees in ‘crash position’. A particularly brutal tremor pulled Macushla’s nipple from Pandora’s mouth and sent Pilot’s heart rate to 180.

A loud crash heralded the demise of the satellite tennis dish, followed by another as their communications mast hit the ground, fatally crushing Jim McConie under its metal skeleton.

“ARE WE SINKING?” someone shouted.

“WE’VE SUNK FIVE OR SIX FEET AND ARE STILL SINKING,” Aaron Serman called from his position higher up.

Dubi Horvat, who had been manning the communications dome with McConie and was as yet unaware of her colleague’s death, crawled up to Pilot with the first few words of a transmission from the IGP. Pilot took the printout and tried to steady his hand, which was being violently shaken by the earthquake. ‘EMERGENCY,’ he read. ‘BATTEN DOWN THE HATCHES, YOU’RE IN FOR A –’, and that was it.

“We lost our connection when the mast went down,” Horvat explained.

Some of the other mothers were sobbing into their babies’ necks, certain that the cold Atlantic would soon be swallowing them whole. It felt as though they were riding a derailed train over cobblestones – next stop, the bottom of the Bay of Biscay.

For fifteen minutes, the fledgling island of Eydos shivered in its cold bath, the humanity on its skin counting and treasuring every second it remained above sea level. After a particularly bone-jarring seizure deep within the rock, Pilot locked eyes with Macushla’s to fix what he was sure would be his last vision on Earth. There was one final, awful, back-breaking jolt and then it was all over…

In the IGP building in London, six scientists were hunched over a computer monitor watching readings being transmitted by the IGP research ship
Pima
Verde
200 miles west of Nillin. Five thousand miles away at his ranch in Taos, New Mexico, Forrest Vaalon was instantly in the room with them via speakerphone. ‘Why didn’t we see this coming, Geoff?’ the disembodied voice asked one of the geologists.

The man in the firing line could only stand mutely staring at the screen.

“The anomaly was too small to pick up through general monitoring, Mr. Vaalon,” one of his colleagues said. “But now that we know it’s there, we’ve been able to lock on and follow it.”

‘What
is
it?’

“A localized extrusion on the dorsal plane of the pyrocoagulum,” the man said. “About a mile long by two hundred metres wide… with a mean height of fifteen metres. Half an hour ago it impacted with the crust about seven miles north of Nillin. At the point of initial impact it read… hang on.” The man double-clicked one of the measurement bars and with his left arrow took the readings back thirty minutes. “Six point three magnitude.”

“Is Eydos still there?” Vaalon asked.

“We’ll get back to you on that, Sir,” the voice in London said.

Although they couldn’t see it, Forrest Vaalon was the picture of despair – a broken man in a broken world. He closed his eyes and pressed his hands over his temples. Could it all be ending here – a hundred men, women and children washed into oblivion at
his
instigatio
n−
his life’s work nullified by a geological hangnail snagged on the sheet under their island? The mental anguish had awakened the angry tumour inside him and he swallowed a pill to relieve the sharp pain assaulting his gut. Before the medication could take effect, a signal from his laptop indicated an encrypted message coming in from Eydos. He jerked upright, typed in the decryption code and waited anxiously for the communication to appear. Seconds later it burst onto his screen and Vaalon’s anguish fell away like a bath towel.

In his message, Pilot reported the loss of Jim McConie, the seven injure
d−
two serious, the intense level of fear and panic still pervading, and the hasty re-erection of the communication mast.
What’s
the
prognosis
,
Forrest
?
We
need
one
FAST
. At the same time, London got back to Vaalon with news that the tremors were receding and that the transponder installed five years earlier on the headland above Nillin showed a reading only 2.49 metres lower than it had been at the start of the day. The important thing was that the reading had stabilized.

Immediately, Vaalon shot back a reply to Pilot, repeating what he had just been told from London and reassuring Lonnie that, to the best of their knowledge, the worst was over. ‘You don’t have to stay, though,’ he concluded. ‘We can fly everyone out now with Jim’s body.’

‘Yes,’ Pilot fired back without hesitation. There was a pause, then a qualifying transmission settled across Vaalon’s screen. ‘By
yes
, I mean, YES, I
do
have to stay.’ Anyone else who wants to go, can.’

When Pilot, Mara and Pandora returned home later, Jennifer Spring’s
The
Destruction
of
Eydos
was still hanging defiantly from the cross struts of the dome.

Three months after Eydos’ brush with drowning, three ‘lifepods’ ordered from The Antigua and Barbuda Salvage Company arrived on the island. Unlike the open-topped lifeboats of old, these were watertight fiberglass modules with a hatch similar to a submarine’s. There was a forty person capacity for each pod – more than enough to accommodate all the settlers and any other people who might be on the island in the event of an emergency evacuation. These particular lifepods had once served the Carribbean cruise ship,
Sargassso
Sunrise
, now lying at the bottom of the sea off Tortuga, and had proved their effectiveness by saving the lives of over a thousand of that unfortunate ship’s passengers. Lonnie Pilot had acquired three of them for $10,000 each. An open space in the middle of Nillin was designated for their deployment and metal rings sunk in the rock to secure them with quick release knots. In front of the three lifepods, engraved into the moss in one metre high letters, were the words, ‘EMERGENCY EXIT’.

Work on the new harbour wall, which had to be raised three metres in line with the raised sea level, was going well, as was the blasting to produce the hardcore required as landfill behind the wall. What the earthquake had created was a new deep water harbour capable now of receiving much larger vessels. This fact had given Pilot an idea, which he jotted down and put with the hundreds of others that were beginning to collect inside the admin dome.

Early morning milking had just finished when the ‘djum-djum-djum’ of an approaching helicopter was heard in the distance. Pilot watched with curiosity as the machine set down and a single figure stepped onto the rock. As he watched his old friend approach, he noticed that Fridrik Geirsson had barely aged in ten years. The hair was still predominantly blond as opposed to his own, which was now more salt than pepper. But the closer Geirsson got, the sicker Pilot felt. With that sinking sensation associated with falling from a great height, and with an overwhelming sense of dread, Pilot began preparing himself for the news he could see etched on Geirsson’s face.

“We didn’t want to tell you by radio,” Geirsson said.

“When did he die?”

“Yesterday afternoon. It was expected and it was peaceful.”

Invisible black curtains were already being drawn across Pilot’s face.

“This is for you, Lonnie,” Geirsson said, handing over an envelope.

Pilot led Geirsson to a table at the far end of the mess hall, opened the envelope and unfolded a letter of several pages. As the words leapt athletically off the page onto Pilot’s retinas, Forrest Vaalon seemed far from deceased.

‘
Dear
Lonnie
,
The
fact
I
didn’t
get
a
chance
to
speak
to
you
in
person
from
the
proverbial
death
-
bed
is
to
be
regretted
.
We
don’t
choose
the
time
or
manner
of
our
natural
deaths
,
so
this
letter
will
have
to
do
,
sad
though
it
is
for
me
not
to
have
seen
you
one
last
time
.

Paradoxically
,
and
at
no
disrespect
to
myself
,
with
my
death
the
integrity
of
Eydos
has
been
purified
.
There
are
few
modern
day
capitalists
greater
than
I
was
and
,
although
I
used
my
wealth
as
a
means
to
an
end
,
that
doesn’t
excuse
the
fact
that
for
the
past
fifty
or
sixty
years
I’ve
played
a
leading
roll
in
bringing
your
‘
boulder’
to
the
edge
of
the
cliff
.