Matt banged the gavel. “Joey, what are you talking about? Boston is leaving Boston?” Damn it, this might be important.
Joey glared at him. “Its all written down. I’d like to just read it.”
“Well—carry on. I suppose we can reserve questions until later.”
Joey cleared his throat again. “The Boston and Toronto people are going to an area along the fortieth parallel, probably in Ohio, which their Helpers say will be safe from storms and where they can establish a town and a radio beacon for people to follow. They say this will attract survivors from all over the continent and they’d like us to join them as soon as we can, because there are about enough people in North America to make one good-sized town. They’re carrying mobile radio equipment and they want us to let them know as soon as possible when we’re going to join them.
“Also, Colonel Tyler is travelling toward the northwest looking for survivors and he’ll be passing through Buchanan in a couple of months, or he can rendezvous with us on the road if we decide to join the Boston-Toronto convoy.
“End of report.”
Pandemonium.
* * *
Several people wanted to pack up and leave immediately. Bob Ganish, the ex-car dealer, spoke for the group: “We can beat the damn storm, get across the mountains before it finds us. No offense, people, but I like the idea of seeing some new faces.”
Abby raised her hand. “There are things here we’d all hate to leave… but maybe it’s better if we do. Should we put this to a vote?”
Matt argued that they should stay in Buchanan at least for the time being—wait until the Boston group had a more solid plan, have somebody besides Joey talk to them. Weather the storm, then think about moving. It wasn’t the kind of decision that could be made impulsively.
Privately, the idea terrified him. He didn’t want to abandon Buchanan. Christ, not yet!
It was too soon to give up Buchanan. Everything was still intact, still functional, only a little tattered.
There’s hope, he wanted to say. We can salvage something. It’s not over yet.
Kindle moved to postpone debate until more facts came in—“This is the first I’ve heard of it, and I’m half the damn Radio Subcommittee.” With a long sideways look at Joey Commoner.
The motion passed five to two.
Matt listened numbly through three more subcommittee reports and adjourned the meeting at midnight.
* * *
He wanted only to go to bed, to sleep, to table for a few hours all his own private debates.
But Annie Gates was waiting when he pulled into his driveway.
She must have walked here, Matt thought; her own car was nowhere in sight. None of these people seemed to drive anymore. He saw them walking sometimes, a curious light stride, not quite human, as Rachel might have admitted.
The sight of Annie filled him with fear.
He had avoided her for months, avoided her because she was one more component in a problem he couldn’t solve… and because he had slept with her when she was human, loved her when she was human, an equation he didn’t care to balance.
But now she scared him, because she was waiting on his doorstep under the hospitality light, dressed too lightly for the cold night air, looking at him with a terrible sympathy, terrible because it was authentic, because she was waiting to speak.
“Rachel’s gone Home,” Annie said. “Matt, she’s not here anymore. She wants me to tell you that.” Annie’s voice was solemn and very sad. “She says she misses you. She says she loves you, and she’s sorry she didn’t say goodbye.”
Annie was not human, but Matt put his head against her pale shoulder and wept.
Chapter 23
View from a Height
It was the winter the oceans bloomed with strange life.
The Travellers, perceiving the thermal imbalance of the planet and the human desire to restore it, dispatched seed organisms into the Earth’s restless hydrosphere.
The organisms multiplied in the shallow surface waters. Like the phytoplankton they resembled, the new organisms fed on mineral material from the upwelling ocean currents, fed on sunlight, but fed also on the water itself, assembling themselves from atoms of hydrogen and oxygen. The ocean was food, and the Traveller organisms increased their tonnage by the minute.
As they multiplied, they began to avoid the coastal waters rich in natural diatoms. Their role in the oceanic ecology was temporary and there must always be enough phytoplankton to feed the krill. They confined their bloom to less nutrient-rich waters far from land.
They grew so numerous that autumn that in places they covered the surface water in crystalline slicks hundreds of miles in diameter, their opalescent coats bouncing rainbows from the swell.
Then they began their significant work: They began to devour atmospheric carbon and bind it to themselves, as the phytoplankton do, but more efficiently—voraciously.
The oceans combed the air of C02.
* * *
The population of the Earth plummeted daily.
In the Greater World, a few acts remained malum in se but none were malum prohibitum. The inhibitions of a thousand generations had been swept away by Contact. The last devotees of the flesh celebrated their bodies even as their bodies grew pale and light.
They danced to silent music in abandoned mosques, made love in infinite variation in the shadows of cathedrals. They laughed and embraced and surrendered their bodies by the light of Arab sunsets, Oriental noons, African dawns.
Daily, they vanished into the Greater World; and their abandoned skins, like phantom armies, roamed the streets of Djakarta, Beijing, Reykjavik, Capetown, until they crumbled to dust and the dust was borne off by the rising wind.
* * *
Matt Wheeler picked up a school notebook at Delisle’s Stationery—where Miriam Flett used to buy Glu-Stiks and paper cutters before the Observer ceased publication in October—and began a private journal.
According to Rachel, everyone started fresh at Contact. Basically, they entered a new state of being. It’s not the Last Judgment—no sins are punished. It’s not the Judeo-Christian paradise at all. More like the ancient Greek idea of the Golden Age, when men were so pious they socialized with the gods.
“Everything is forgiven,” Rachel said. “Nothing is forgotten.”
I try to believe this. It sounds noble. But what does it really mean? It’s hard to imagine guys who wore Cartier watches joined in spiritual union with Third World sharecroppers. Or, much worse, men who battered their infant children to death allowed to live forever. Nirvana for mass murderers. Terrorists surviving their victims by a millennium or more.
Unless they’ve changed, it isn’t just. And if they’ve changed so radically—it isn’t human.
Rachel admitted as much. The human baggage is too unsavory to carry into a new life.
She claimed the real punishment for such people is to understand what they were—to truly understand it.
I suppose this is possible, though it beggars comprehension. For her sake, of course, I want it to be true.
He chewed on the end of his pencil and decided he might as well ask the big questions: There was nothing to be lost by honesty, not at this late hour.
But what about those of us who stayed behind? What made it possible or necessary for us to turn down immortality? Why are we here?
None of us seems extraordinary in any outward particular. The opposite, if anything.
What is it we have?
What is it we lack?
The next morning, Beth Porter phoned and said she wanted to be a nurse and would Matt be willing to help her?
He asked her to repeat the question. He hadn’t slept much the night before… these days, his eating and sleeping habits didn’t encourage a lucid state of mind. He’d lost fifteen pounds since November. His reflection in mirrors took him by surprise: Who was this skinny, hollow-eyed man?
“I think you should teach me how to be a nurse,” Beth said.
“I’ve been thinking about this. You’re the only doctor in town, right? So maybe you need an assistant. At least somebody who knows what to do in an emergency. This storm that’s coming, for instance. Say a lot of people get hurt. Maybe I could at least put on a bandage or stop some bleeding.”
He closed his eyes. “Beth… I appreciate what you’re saying, but—”
“This is not a come-on. Jesus, I hope you don’t think that.” Pause. “I’m serious. Maybe I can save somebody’s life somewhere down the road.”
“Beth—”
“I mean, I feel so useless just sitting here in this room all by myself.”
He sighed. “Do you know CPR?”
“I’ve seen it on TV. But I don’t know how to do it, no.”
“You should.”
* * *
Joey Commoner used the handicam he’d stolen from the Newcomb house to videotape Buchanan.
Joey had heard all this talk about the weather. If half the talk was true, there might not be much left of Buchanan in a month or so. He didn’t love this ugly little bay town, but he liked the idea of saving it on videotape while it was still intact. Joey Commoner, the town’s last historian.
So he drove up and down the main streets and some distance into the suburbs, guiding his motorcycle with one hand and running the camcorder with the other. He drove slowly in order to capture all the detail.
The images he played back on his basement VCR were unnerving and strange: empty streets bouncing when the Yamaha bumped over buckled asphalt; empty storefronts, empty sidewalks, empty buildings in whitewashed ranks all the way to the Marina and the cold winter sea. Empty everything.
It made him feel peculiarly alone. It was the feeling you might get, Joey thought, if you were locked inside some big mall at night with the mannequins and the mice.
It made him want to ride over to Tom Kindle’s place and work the radio. But that was probably a bad idea; since the big cities began their migration, Joey had been edged off the radio by Kindle and Bob Ganish and that asshole Chuck Makepeace. Gimme the microphone, this is important. Well, fuck it. He was tired of the radio. He had better things to do than DXing foreigners who couldn’t even speak English.
He videotaped some important personal places. His basement. His street. The street where Beth Porter used to live. The motel she’d moved into.
Hidden behind a highway abutment where she couldn’t see him, he videotaped Beth climbing into a white Volkswagen and driving north.
Beth didn’t have a driver’s license. She had only started driving since Contact, and it was funny how she drove, a clumsy jerk-and-stop. He wondered where she was going.
Where was there to go?
He watched the car bump out of sight.
She might be shopping. Idly curious, or so he told himself, Joey waited a prudent few minutes and then followed on his Yamaha. He checked the empty mall lots along the highway for her car, but it wasn’t there.
Visiting somebody?
So who was to visit?
Slow suspicions formed in Joey’s mind.
Not that he cared what she did. He hadn’t seen her much lately. He wasn’t sure what Beth meant to him or used to mean to him. A few good Friday nights.
But he remembered the way she used to undress for him, shy and bold at the same time. He remembered her shrugging out of an old sleeveless T-shirt in a dark room, unbuttoning her pants with one hand while she watched him watch. The memory provoked a knot of tension in his belly. Not desire. More like fear.
He rode past Kindle’s house, past Bob Ganish’s ugly little ranch house.
No Volkswagen.
Then he drove past the hillside house where Matt Wheeler lived. Her car was in the driveway.
Joey parked his motorcycle in a garage half a block away. He approached the house along a line of hedges and used the camcorder’s zoom to spy on the doctor’s house. But the blinds had all been pulled.
He waited about two hours until Beth came out again, looking somewhat pink in the cheeks.
He taped her climbing into the car and bump-jerking away from the curb.
Bitch, Joey thought.
* * *
Among the last things Tom Kindle moved down from his mountain cabin was his Remington hunting rifle, old but sturdy.
He hadn’t used it much in the last few years. Hunting in the coast forests wasn’t what it used to be; too many hobby shooters had moved into what had once been some pretty secluded territory. Every autumn, the woods grew a new crop of chubby CPAs in orange flak jackets. It made for a dangerous situation, in Kindle’s opinion. He didn’t relish getting shot by somebody who carried his ammunition in a nylon fanny pack.
But this talk of storms and travel made him nervous, too. So he brought down the Remington and picked up some shells and took some practice shots at the knotholes of a long-dead slippery elm back of his house.
The crack of the gunshots echoed a long time in the still air; the bullets struck the decayed tree with a different and softer sound, like a mallet head hitting a fence post.
Kindle found his aim was reasonably accurate even after too many lax years. But the rifle kicked harder than he remembered. Of course it wasn’t the rifle that had changed: He was getting old. There was no denying the fact. He bruised too easily, went to bed too early, and pissed too often. Old.
For shooting, he wore the corrective lenses he’d had made up a couple of years ago. Kindle was mildly myopic, which affected his aim, but the condition didn’t seem to have worsened—which was good, because where were the opticians since Contact? Gone to heaven, every one.
He sighted on a circle where the bark had dropped from the tree. Squeezed off a shot and missed by what appeared to be a good half foot.
“Damn,” he said, and massaged his shoulder.
He could have gone inside, where Chuck Makepeace was talking by radio to Avery Price, the Boston guy, but Kindle distrusted this business about Ohio. It was where everybody wanted to go, a new Promised Land, a Place Prepared; worse, it was where the Helpers wanted them all to go. Boston and Toronto were both travelling with Helper guides, and probably so were a bunch of small towns like Buchanan.
At least they called it guiding. Another word for it was herding. All the wild human beings were being assembled in one place—and Kindle guessed there were other such places on other continents, little reservations, little corrals. Barns. Pens.
He didn’t like that idea at all.
No doubt, he thought, the promises were true. Everybody would be defended against the weather; the land would be fertile and the skies would be blue. They would all be well cared for.
Like cattle.
Cattle were well cared for. Cattle were also slaughtered.
He put three more shots into the bole of the tree and then stopped because his right shoulder felt damn near dislocated.
The sky was a high, luminous blue brushed with cloud. The air smelled of brine. There had been ground fogs every morning for the last week. Sunsets had been wide and vivid.
If old bones tell the weather, Kindle thought, then something big was indeed about to break. The last few days he had been sleeping restlessly. This morning, he had woken up at dawn in a cold sweat. His body felt tight, as if it was braced for something.
He turned and squinted across the bay. The water was choppy, whitecaps feathering in a stiff breeze.
The ocean, Kindle thought.
Dear God, what mischief had been committed out there?
* * *
Storms were already raking the east coast as the President of the United States prepared to leave the White House.
He was alone in the building. The First Lady had abandoned her skin many weeks before. Elizabeth had been captivated by the Greater World and had wanted to explore it in greater detail, an impulse William understood; in any case, she had never liked bad weather. It frightened her.
William, on the other hand, had been a devotee of thunder, a relisher of storms.
It was not entirely his aim to relish the weather that had already begun to wreak so much destruction. There were still many mortal human beings on the surface of the Earth… and many of them would die, despite the best efforts of the Helpers. But it was the paradox of the senses that they did not make such distinctions. A stormy sky made his skin tingle, his pulse quicken, no matter what the circumstances.
Fundamentally, though, it wasn’t the storms William wanted to see; it was the country—the nation he had once governed, if “govern” was a meaningful verb.
That was why he had clung to the flesh even after Elizabeth went Home. (Besides, she was not really absent, merely less accessible.)
Only a small minority of Contactees had retained their corporate bodies, and many of those, like William, had changed or were changing themselves in some critical way.
After all: it wouldn’t do to go tramping across the landscape in an old man’s cumbersome shell.
Therefore William went to bed for a week; and while he slept the neocytes altered certain genetic instructions and ran his cell division at a feverish pace. He radiated heat, and when he woke he was many pounds lighter than he had been. He was also younger.
He peered at himself in a full-length mirror and saw a face he hadn’t seen since the year the Allies marched into Berlin.
What age would he have guessed this boy to be? Twelve? Thirteen?
Anticipating the change, William had obtained some clothes to fit before he went to sleep. He dressed himself in blue jeans and a T-shirt and fresh running shoes. The shoes were a little loose; he’d had to guess at the size. But how glorious.
He felt newly minted. He felt like a bright penny.