Out of harm’s way—
The words seemed to resonate inside her. And as she blinked, tears of happiness washed away those splashy colors, which thinned and merged and finally spread aside to resolve a black cosmos, overlain by a soft blanket of unwinking stars.
Teresa sobbed in sudden realization. It felt exactly as if gentle arms were carrying Atlantis home again. The instruments she had carefully restored now chuckled and hummed around her, glowing green and amber. She looked out through a windshield that had been cleansed by fire and saw the moon rise over Earth’s soft, curving limb.
In order to get rid of her foe’s chief pivot, Daisy has temporarily forsaken her selective, “antibody” approach, using cruder, more decisive force. In seconds, the island is no more.
Ah, well. There hadn’t been much of a natural ecosystem left there anyway. Small sacrifice.
More important though, now the Wolling witch has no anchor! Her surprisingly powerful programs—so formidably represented by the tiger icon—might be a match for Daisy’s down below. But they can’t accomplish much without a link to the surface world, to the net. And now that has been cut!
“Very impressive, Wolling,” Daisy murmurs in satisfaction. “You surprised me. But now it’s good-bye.”
Sure enough, the holo shows her dragon in advance now, forcing backward a strained, disheveled cat, which yowls defiance.
At the bottom of the old Kuwenezi gold mine, Jimmy Suarez knew he was a privileged observer. Not only could he watch the battle of two metaphors, which dominated every major holo channel, but he could also use the instruments of this abandoned facility to follow something of the real struggle, down below.
For instance, he saw the exact moment when four resonators fired all at once to blow Rapa Nui completely out of the South Pacific. Another force seemed to precede that driving gazer beam by mere moments, but it might have been just a shadow, cast ahead of the decisive bolt.
From that instant, in fact, the tide began to turn. More and more filaments and finely meshed channels seemed to come under control of the force he now recognized as the enemy. The turn of events was horrifying to watch.
It would probably be wiser not to. Just sitting here was risky. Although Kenda’s thumper lay inactive now, only a few meters away, even using it on passive detector mode was taking an awful chance. What if the horror—whoever it was—picked up the machine’s faint echo? The fate of Easter Island could be his, any time.
Was it curiosity, then, that kept him here instead of smashing the cylinder and fleeing? Or had it been the old lady’s last request … to leave it turned on till she died? Well, she’s been dead some time, he thought. The body lay under a tarp behind him as he’d found it, twisted and disfigured, still connected to her console. I don’t owe her anything now. I should take a hammer to the thumper and …
And what? The surface world was certainly no safe place. Kenda and the others might be dead even now, if this part of Southern Africa had already been targeted for culling. Unlikely, since teeming cities and military bases seemed to be the principal victims so far. Still, it was only a matter of time.
Stay down here, then? If I wreck the machines, the death angels might miss me altogether. It was a depressing thought, though. Oh, there was food enough for months. Other isolated snippets of humanity might be as “lucky,” holding out in nooks and crannies for some time after the dragon won. But at this point, Jimmy wondered if he should have taken his chances with Kenda and the others after all.
So mired was he in self-pity, it took some moments to harken to a new sound, a gentle humming that added layers as machines throughout the abandoned hall began coming to life. He looked up, staring blankly as the towering crystal resonator swiveled in its bearings, giving off a rising tone. “What the hell?” he asked, standing up. Then, in full, terrified realization, “No!”
He ran. to the master control station where the main cutoff switch lay. But as he reached for it, a voice quietly said to him,
“PLEASE, JIMMY. STAY BACK AND LET ME WORK. THERE’S A GOOD LAD.”
What really made him halt, however, was the brief, almost tachistoscopic image of a face that flashed before him and then was gone again.
“But I thought you were dead!” he whispered hoarsely. Then, when there was no answer to that, he blurted, “Let me help, at least!”
As the dormant machines warmed up around him, that momentary visage returned, and he knew this both was and was not the woman whose former body lay covered just a few meters away.
“ALL RIGHT, CHILD. I KNEW I COULD COUNT ON YOU.”
In real life they had exchanged maybe a hundred words, total. And yet, right then Jimmy didn’t even wonder why her approval filled him so with joy. All he did was leap to his old work station. Rushing through all the diagnostic checks, he fine-tuned the tool she needed—her link between the worlds above and below.
Soon the humming reached a steady pitch. Then, with a twang of tidal force, it fired.
In meeting houses and churches, in the meditation glades of the NorA ChuGas, under the sloping hand-carved roofs of the Society of Hine-marama, from cathedrals and countless homes, prayers peal forth.
“Help us, Mother.”
On the Net, there remain islands of cynicism. Sides are taken, even bets laid down. Dragon over tiger, odds of ten to one.
For the most part, however, humanity’s surviving masses just hold each other close, watching their holos fearfully as the now one-sided battle surges on. Meanwhile, they glance to the horizon, toward any strange glimmer or ripple in the air, anxiously awaiting the first agonized scream or any other announcement that death’s own reapers have arrived.
Another blow hammers North America.
How much more? People ask the skies. How much more can our poor world take?
“Daddy!” Claire cried as tremors shook the house. Her feet slipped out from under her and she slid along the roof tiles. Logan barely managed to hold on himself, by grabbing one of Daisy’s many antennas as the temblor made trees and canefields sway. Horrified, he saw his daughter slip toward the edge.
In a blur the boy, Tony, launched himself face-first, arms and legs splayed for friction. His slide halted short of the brink, just in time to seize Claire’s wrist and help her hold onto a groaning rain spout.
The quake continued for what seemed forever—the worst in Logan’s memory—until at last subsiding to the staccato rhythm of debris hitting the concrete walk below. Fortunately, those crunching sounds didn’t involve Claire. Somehow, she and Tony held on. “I’m coming!” Logan cried.
“You’re back?” Daisy clutches the arms of her chair as her citadel rocks from side to side.
Fortunately, this place was built well, and there’s a limit to what her enemy can accomplish with just one device, even operated by surprise.
She deciphers this desperate gambit, to strike at her here, in her very home. “Not bad, Wolling. I’m impressed. After you’re extinct, I’ll see to it the tribes sing about this battle round their camp fires. You and I will be their legends.
“Only I’ll still be around. The goddess that won.”
She prepares commands to transmit to her massed resonators. This will be the final act.
Logan had to find a way to help the kids. So on impulse, he grabbed one of the antenna cables, yanked it free of its staples, and used the loop to lower himself toward the straining teenagers. At last he could reach out and grab Tony’s ankle. “I’ve got you,” he grunted. “See if you can—”
He didn’t have to give detailed instructions. Anyway, Claire was a better mountaineer than he’d ever been. She swung one leg over the gutter and clambered up their makeshift human ladder, passing first over her boyfriend, then her father. From the peak she turned and grabbed Logan’s leg. Then it was Tony’s turn to writhe about and climb.
The last staple holding the cable popped just as the boy reached the flat part of the roof. Staring at the loose end, whipping in his hand like an electri
fied snake, Logan felt himself start to slide … and was stopped at the last second as the kids grabbed him. Soon they were all leaning on one of the dish antennas, panting.
“What the hell was that?” Tony asked. Clearly he meant the quake. But his use of the past tense was premature. Again, without warning, the shaking returned—with a shuddering, infrasonic intensity that made them cover their ears in pain. This time at least, they managed to stay on the pitching roof.
When it finally ended, Claire looked at her father, sharing his thought. This had been no ordinary temblor. “We’ve got to get to Mother, fast!”
They recklessly took the obstacle course of electronic gear and solar panels. At one point Logan glanced northward toward the line of backup levees which the Corps of Engineers had erected long ago, to reassure a trusting public that all eventualities were predictable and controllable, and would be forever, amen. In the distance, a new sound could be heard, not as deep or grating as the quakes, but just as frightening. It felt like vast herds of wild beasts on the rampage.
That was when Logan knew with utter certainty the corps had been wrong … that all things must come to an end. The concrete prison, forged by man to control a mighty river, had finally cracked. And a crack was all the prisoner needed.
The father of waters was free at last.
Long delayed, the Mississippi was coming to Atchafalaya.
At a critical instant, several of her channels go suddenly dead, spoiling her aim. Daisy curses as her overpowering counterattack misses Southern Africa, vaporizing instead a corner chunk of Madagascar.
This is taking too long, distracting her from the important work of culling and from consolidating her programs in the vast new network below. These inconveniences are irritating, but there are fallbacks, and she retains far greater powers than her foe. She prepares these even as the house rides out another swaying tremor.
Claire cursed, straining on the attic hatch. “I can’t budge it!” Tony and Logan helped, heaving with all their might. Daisy had used good contractors to build her citadel. Logan ought to know, having referred her to the best. If only he’d known …
They pounded on the latch. He yanked a heavy chunk of antenna from its mooring to use as a pry bar. Between heaves, blinking away sweat as his heart pounded from the effort, he glanced up to see suddenly that there was no more time left at all. A muddy brown wall hurtled across the cane fields with awesome, complacent power, tossing trees and buildings aside like kindling.
Logan grabbed the kids and threw them down. Wrapping loops of cabling around them, he cried, “Hold on for your lives!”
Telltale alarms blare of phone lines disrupted and microwave towers toppled—all the local infrastructure she depends on to control her far-flung resonators collapsing in a shambles. And as the data-links snuff out in succession, her dragon staggers like a beast suddenly hamstrung, bellowing in agony. Daisy stares as the other software metaphor—the tiger—leaps atop the crumpling fire lizard to deliver a decisive blow. The cat rears back in triumph as its opponent begins evaporating in smoke.
“You win, bitch,” Daisy mutters. “But you better take care of the place or I’ll come back from hell to haunt you.”
One wall caves inward as a liquid locomotive shatters every barrier to interruption. Water shorts out the expensive electronics in crackling explosions of sparks and spray. But in that final instant, what Daisy realizes with surprising calm is that, perhaps, she never really had been qualified for the job she’d sought.
I never really wanted to be a mothe—
Meanwhile, a quarter of the way around the Earth’s quivering arc, a small party of refugees finished crossing a final stretch of lichen-covered tundra to reach the sea’s edge. There they stopped, clutching each others’ hands in fear at what they saw.
In the distance, smoke rose from a burning town and horrible, twisted forms showed that this was one of the places they had heard about—where so-called death angels had emerged from the ground to wreak terrible judgment on humanity. So their exodus from volcanic disaster had only brought them to face something even worse.
It had been an eerie journey, fleeing upwind on foot across the ancient moraine of Greenland, with magma heat at their backs, bereft of every crutch or comfort of civilized society save one—the portable receiver that let them listen to the world’s agony in stereophonic sound and real time. So it was that Stan Goldman and the others recognized what confronted them as they slumped together in sooty exhaustion, watching a shimmering fold in space migrate toward them, apparently sensing new victims to reap.
Strangely, Stan felt calm as the thing moved placidly their way. Instead of staring at it like some transfixed bird hypnotized by a snake, he purposely turned away to take one last look out across the bay, where fleet white forms could be seen nearby, streaking underwater then rising briefly to exhale jets of spray.
Beluga whales, he thought, recognizing the sleek shapes. They were cetaceans with smiles even more winning than their dolphin cousins’. To him they suddenly seemed symbols of primordial innocence, untainted by all the crimes committed by Adam and Adam’s get since man’s fall from grace.
It was good to know the creatures were immune to the approaching horror. That much was clear from the muddled jabber coming over the Net. Except for chimpanzees and a few other species, most animals were left untouched.
Good, Stan thought. Someone else deserved a second chance.
But humankind had already used up number two. After all, hadn’t God already let us off once before with a warning? Remember Noah? Stan smiled as he saw the perfect irony. For there, stretching across the western horizon, was a rainbow—the Almighty’s sign to humankind after the Flood. His promise never again to end the world by drowning.
We might go by fire of course, or famine, or by our own stupidity. Not much of a promise, actually, when you get right down to it. But when dealing with wrathful deities I suppose you take what you can get.
And as promises go, it is an awfully pretty one.
One of the women squeezed his hand fiercely, and Stan knew it was time to face the terrible, vengeful spirit he’d unwittingly helped create. So he turned. It was near, approaching too quickly to flee.
Oh, they could scatter. Delay it a bit. But somehow it seemed better to confront the deadly thing here, now, together. They all gathered close, holding each other. Hakol havel, Stan thought. All is vanity. At the end of all struggles, there comes a time to let go and accept.
And so, with a certain serenity, he faced death’s angel.
Though Stan knew it had to be an illusion, the lethal space-folding actually seemed to slow as it neared. Was it capable of savoring cornered prey, then? He wondered about the strange sensation he was feeling while watching it waver and then come to a stop. It was an odd sort of empathic communion that conveyed … confusion? uncertainty?
The deadly thing hovered only meters from the humans. They already felt the draw of its ferocious, devouring tides.
What’s happening? Stan wondered. Why doesn’t it get on with it?
The terrible refraction jigged toward them, hesitated, drew back a little. Then it shivered, as if letting out a sigh—or shaking off a dream.
That was when Stan heard the words.
NEVER AGAIN …
His head rocked back. Several of the others fell to their knees. The voice reverberated within them, gently. Not apologetically, but with a soothing kindness.
I PROMISE, CHILDREN. NEVER AGAIN.
To their amazement, the shimmering shape changed before their eyes. Squinting, Stan saw a shift in its topology, like an origami monster folding away its claws, retracting and transforming its cutting scythe and then dimpling outward in a myriad of multihued, translucent petals.
Stan inhaled a sudden fragrance. The aroma was heady, all-pervading, full of hope and promise. It lingered in the air even as the transformed angel seemed to bow in benediction. Then it drifted off across suddenly serene waters.
&nbs
p; Together, he and the others watched as it greeted the joyful, splashing whales and passed on. Even after it disappeared beyond the far headlands, they all knew somehow it would be back … that it would be with them always.
And in its presence, they would never again know fear.
PART XI
PLANET
In a large enough universe, even unlikely things can happen.
As unlikely as a tiny ball of star-soot taking upon itself, one day, to say aloud, to one and all, “I am.”
Hello. Hello? This circuit appears to be working. The top sub and reference hyper levels seem okay, though there’s no twodee or holo yet. Looks like it’ll have to be crude voice and text for a while …
I’m going to take a chance, since a lot of other groups seem to be reactivating too. Well, here goes—
Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group [ SIG AeR,WLRS 253787890.546] …
This is SIG vice-chair Beatrice ter Huygens. In response to the U.N. plea for help in restoring order, we invite all members who haven’t other responsibilities to log in and …
And what? This SIG doesn’t exactly specialize in disaster relief. Our members are best at speculation and creating what-ifs. So I thought we might start by sieve-searching through our huge library of “solutions” scenarios. In the past these often seemed like pie-in-the-sky or doom-and-gloom self-diddles, but now some may even prove useful in this new world.
In particular might we come up with an explanation for what has happened to the Net? Amid all the death and destruction, changes have been taking place minute by minute. Nobody in government can seem to grok it, but maybe someone in our group can come up with a notion outlandish enough to be true.