Certain chatty Net-zines are rife with blurry pictures of him. Snooty tech types claim the photos are fakes, but that doesn’t bother the faithful who collect grand old TwenCen automobiles and polish them, saving up for that once-a-year spin down the highway, meeting at the nearest Graceland Shrine for a day of chrome and music and speed and glory.
Along the way, they stop at ghostly abandoned gas stations and check for signs that he’s been by. Some claim to have found pumps freshly used, reading empty but still somehow reeking of high octane. Others point to black, bold, fresh tire tracks, or claim his music can be heard in the coyotes’ midnight serenade.
Elvis roams the open interstates in a big white cadillac. How else to explain the traces some have found, sparkling like fairy dust across the fading yellow lines?
A pollen of happier days … the glitter of rhinestones.
• CORE
Across eight thousand miles of open ocean, the autumn gale had plenty of time to accelerate, to pick up power and momentum. So did the waves and tides. Over that great stretch, each grew accustomed to mastery. When they met the island’s stiff resistance, therefore, they protested in fists of spume that climbed the steep shelf then clenched and shook in rage.
Alex stood at the window of his hut, listening to the storm. Even indoors, he felt each boom with his fingertips. Each breaker set the glass panes vibrating. Rain bursts assaulted the roof in sudden, pelting furies, rattling it like a war drum before receding just as quickly again, driven by the wind to drench some other place.
Out beyond the bluffs, over the sea, luminous backlit clouds advanced on parade, parting now and then to let the moon spread a brief, pearly sheen across the turbid waters.
A lonely color, he thought. No wonder they say moonlight is for lovers. It makes you want someone to cling to.
Alex was remembering. Remembering when weather like this had been his friend.
As a student he used to walk the fens and dikes of Norfolk, traveling all the way from Cambridge at the rumor of a squall. They were seldom as powerful as this gale, of course. Easter Island lay unsheltered in the middle of a vast ocean, after all. Still the North Sea used to put on some impressive shows.
The locals must have thought him daft to go out in his wellies and slicker, striding into stiff gusts and cloudbursts. But that hardly mattered. Nothing in the world felt as vivid or as potent as a tempest. That year, facing the torture of exams, he had felt a real need for vividness, for potency. Others craved sunny days, punting on the Cam, but to Alex the sky’s power seemed to offer something even better—an anodyne to the ethereal ghostliness of his mathematics and to those uncertain adolescent qualms.
Once, while walking in keraunophilic splendor through a thunderstorm, he had actually experienced a sudden insight into mysteries of transactional quantum mechanics, an intuition that had led to his first important paper. Another time he shouted into the rain, demanding it explain to him why Ingrid … yes, that had been her name … why Ingrid had dropped him for another boy.
Generally, the thunder answered only irrelevancies. But perhaps it had been the shouting itself that provided a cleansing generally unavailable to Englishmen indoors. Whatever. He usually came away drenched, drained, restored.
Now, though, the fens and farms of Norfolk were drowned. The dikes had surrendered to the sea at last and those problems that once had vexed Alex now seemed trivial in retrospect. What wouldn’t he give to have them back, in exchange for today’s?
From the darkness behind him there came a rustle. “Alex? Can’t you sleep?”
Momentary moonlight filled a trapezoid-shaped portion of the small room as he turned around. June Morgan lay half within that canted illumination, propped on one elbow, watching him from bed. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
Her smile was warm, if tired. June’s blonde hair was tousled and flattened on one side. “I reached out,” she said. “You weren’t there.”
Alex inhaled deeply. “I’m going to the lab for a little while. I’ll be back soon.”
“Oh, Alex,” she sighed and got out of bed, wrapping the sheet around herself. She crossed the narrow floor and reached up to brush at his wild hair. “If you keep this up you’ll kill yourself. You’ve got to get more rest.”
She had a pleasant smell—a feature more important to Alex than it was to most men. Still, there are some women whose aroma hits me like … ah, never mind.
It was no reflection on June, whom he liked a lot. Probably, it was just a matter of mysterious complementarity—of the right interlocking pheromones. Lucy and Ingrid had smelled like goddesses to him, he recalled … similarities between two otherwise completely different lovers, known more than a decade apart. If only one complementarity carried with it all the others, he thought wistfully. Then all we’d have to do is go around sniffing each other behind the ear, to find the perfect mate.
“I’m all right, really. Much more relaxed.” He threw his shoulders back, stretching. “You’d do professionally, as a masseuse.”
Her eyes seemed to twinkle. “I have. Someday I’ll show you my license.”
“I quite believe you. And … thanks for being so patient.”
She looked up at him. Since it seemed expected of him, and because he knew he really ought to want to, Alex took her into his arms and kissed her. All the while though, he chided himself.
She deserves better. Much better than you can give her now.
Of course she had her own memories and pain. As he held her, Alex wondered if maybe she felt the same way toward him as he did toward her. More grateful than in love.
Sometimes it was enough just to have someone to hold.
Alex said hello to the techs on duty when he arrived. They, in turn, waved and greeted their tohunga, their pakeha-pommie expert on weird monsters and cthonic exorcism. Several of them crawled over scaffolding surrounding the gleaming gravity wave resonator, giving it required servicing. Their unit’s next run wouldn’t be for several hours yet, so nearly everyone else was taking advantage of the lull to catch up on sleep.
Those of us who can.
He sat down at his own station, touching panels and bringing displays to light. The subvocal he left on its stand. Lately he’d been having trouble controlling the hypersensitive device. It picked up too many random, useless surface thoughts which insistently manifested in his clenching jaw muscles and a recurring tightness in his throat.
All right, he thought, grimly. What’s the latest death toll?
Alex dialed the special database he’d set up to track their guilt. Instantly, the far left display unrolled a list of “accidents” reported in the media, whose time and location coincided with one of their emergent beams … a ripped zeppelin … a minor tidal wave … a missing aircraft … a mile-long freshwater tanker with its rear end shorn off.
Surely some of these would have happened without our intervention.
Yes, surely. Mishaps occurred all the time, especially at sea. This epoch’s ocean sediment consisted of a rain of manmade junk, sunken vessels, and myriad other debris.
But looking at the list, Alex knew some would never join the growing layer on the sea bottom. Some, in all probability, were no longer on Earth at all.
He thought of Teresa Tikhana, the first person he knew who had lost someone to this strange war. She had forgiven him, even now helped carry the burden. After all, what were a few lives against ten billion?
But what if we fail? Those men and women will have been robbed of precious months. Months to spend with their families, with lovers, with summer skies or rain. Robbed of their good-byes.
It was about to get worse, too, because the project had been going exceptionally well. Until yesterday, each of the four resonators had acted independently. Almost every gazer beam had emerged along a line nearly straight through the Earth’s core. And opposite each of their four sites lay only open ocean.
But now they had the right parameters. Beta, their taniwha, had pulsed
and throbbed with every scan. Each time it mirrored amplified gravitons, it also experienced a kick. Those kicks were starting to add up. Soon, if luck held, the trough of its orbit would rise out of Earth’s crystalline inner core.
And so the tricky part began—coordinated scans from two or more stations at once. That would be arduous to arrange in secrecy, but Alex wasn’t daunted by that, only by the inevitability of doing even more harm. From now on, the beam would emerge in a different location every time, and he’d face hard choices.
Should he scrub one run because a beam might graze a suburb? There were so many vast suburbs. What if it happened at a crucial stage, when a beam deferred might mean losing control of their monster for an orbit, or ten … or perhaps forever?
Anyway, only a fraction of the beams interacted with the surface world at all. Most passed through silently, invisibly. Alex was only starting to piece together clues as to why some did so while others coupled so dramatically with seismic faults, seawater, or even man-made objects. Unfortunately, they couldn’t delay to figure it all out before continuing. They had to go on.
The holo showed Earth’s inmost regions. The pink core still enclosed two pinpoints, but his Iquitos singularity had nearly evaporated. Another day and it would be invisible.
The other object, though, was heavier than ever. Ponderously, Beta rose, hovered, and fell again. To Alex it appeared to throb angrily.
Each day, seemingly, he got coded queries from George Hutton asking about the monster singularity’s origin. Pedro Manella, running interference for the project in Washington—routing their communications through the most secure channels he could find—added his own insistent questions. Who had created the thing? When and where did the idiots let it fall? Was there evidence that could be shown to the World Court?
Next week Alex would have to answer in person. It was frustrating to have learned so much and still be unable to give a conclusion. But something was queer about Beta’s life history, that was certain.
It’s got to be fundamental. The thing can’t be less than ten years old. And yet it has to be, or no one could have made it!
Above the liquid outer core, the lower mantle glowed many shades of green, tracing ten thousand details of hot, slowly convecting, plasti-crystalline minerals. Some currents looked patient and smooth, like trade winds, while others were spiked cyclones, spearing toward the distant surface.
Dotted lines tracked intense magnetic and electric fields—June Morgan’s contribution to the model. Most currents flowed slow and uniform, like heat eddies. But there were also faint traceries of lambent blue—slender, snaking threads that flickered even as he watched in real time—the superconducting domains they had only just discovered. Fragile and ephemeral, they were the energy source used to drive the gazer.
Have they changed? Alex wondered. Every time he looked, the pattern of interlaced strands seemed different, captivating.
A tone startled him, but the watch officer only glanced over from his own console, reassuringly. “New Guinea’s about to fire in tandem with Africa, tohunga. Don’t worry. We’re off line ourselves for another four hours.”
Alex nodded. “Uh, good.” Internally he sighed. June is right. I’m running myself straight into the ground.
He was grateful she stayed with him, despite his moodiness and hesitant libido. Theirs was a wartime comradeship of course, to be lived moment by moment, without playing “push me, pull you” over intangibles like permanence or commitment. People tend to worry less about such things when the world itself seems a makeshift, temporary place. One was grateful for what one got.
Among other things, June had at least given him back his sexuality.
Or maybe it’s the gazer, Alex wondered. For all the machine’s potential destructiveness, he still felt a thrill whenever it suddenly cast beams of titanic power. No one had ever created anything so mighty. Those brief rays were powerful enough to be detected a galaxy away … provided someone looked in the right direction, at the right moment, tuned to an exact frequency.
He touched a key and saw the computer had finished reworking his design for the next-generation resonator—this one a sphere only a little over a meter across. Spiderweb domain traceries laced an otherwise flawless crystalline structure. Even in simulation it was beautiful, though probably they’d never have time to use it.
He entered a few slight modifications and put the file away again. Alex yawned. Perhaps he might sleep now.
Still he lingered a few minutes to watch the next pulse-run. Seconds ticked down. Beta’s image passed beneath a channel of pulsing blue. Suddenly, as Alex watched, yellow lines lanced inward—George Hutton’s New Guinea resonator casting its triggering beam inward simultaneously with the one in Southern Africa. The lines met deep within the core, right on target.
Beta throbbed. Blue threads pulsed. And from the combination something flickered like a fluorescent tube coming to life. Suddenly a beam, white and brilliant, speared outward at a new angle, through all the layered shells and into space beyond.
Alex read the impulse generated, compared the recoil coefficients with those calculated in advance and saw they matched within twenty percent. Only then did he check for point of exit, and blinked.
North America. Right in the middle of a populated continent. He sighed. Well, it had to begin sometime, somewhere.
He wasn’t masochistic enough to sit and wait for damage reports. There’d be guilt enough for later. Right now his duty was to rest. At least he wouldn’t be alone. And June didn’t seem to mind if he occasionally moaned in his sleep.
Halfway back to his hut, however, negotiating a slippery, narrow path through the wet, waving grass, Alex was caught suddenly in a glare of lightning.
The flash didn’t startle him entirely, since bursts of rain still rolled like traffic across the plateau and the air tingled with the scent of ions. Nevertheless he jumped, for the sudden light brought figures out of the gloom—stark, tall shapes whose shadows seemed to reach like grasping fingers toward him. During that first stroke, and the black seconds that followed, Alex felt abruptly cornered. His heart raced. The next burst only reinforced that impression of encirclement, but cut off too soon to show what or who was really there. Or, indeed, if anything was there at all.
Only with the third stroke did he make out what company of things stalked the dim slope. Alex exhaled through nostrils flared by pumped adrenaline. Lord. I must be keyed up, to jump half out of my knickers at the sight of those things.
It was only the statues, of course … more of the eerie monoliths constructed long ago by the native folk of Rapa Nui, in their pessimistic, manic isolation.
They saw the end coming, he thought, looking down the file of awful figures. But they were dead wrong about the reasons why. They assumed only gods had the power to wreak such havoc on their world, but people caused the devastation here.
Alex felt compassion for the ancient Pasquans—but a superior sort nevertheless. In blaming gods, they had conveniently diverted censure from the real culprit. The designer of weapons. The feller of trees. The destroyer. Man himself.
More rain pelted him, finding entrance under his hat and collar to send chill rivulets down his spine. Still he watched the nearest of the great statues, pursuing a reluctant thought. Lightning flashed again, exposing stark patterns of white and black underneath those brooding brows. The pouting lips pursed in sullen disapproval.
For more than a hundred years we’ve known better. No outside power can approach human destructiveness. So we managed not to fry ourselves in nuclear war? We only traded in that damoclean sword for others even worse …
Something was wrong, here. Alex felt a familiar nagging sensation—like the tension just before a headache—that often warned him when he was on a false trail. He could sense the brooding stares of the ancient basalt figures. Of course it was the night and the storm, encouraging superstitious musings—and yet still, it felt as if they were trying to tell him something.
&n
bsp; Our ancestors used to see all disasters originating outside themselves, he thought. But we know better. Now we know humanity’s the culprit. We assume …
Alex grabbed at the idea before it could get away. Lightning struck again, this time so close the pealing thunder shook his body.
… we assume …
He knew it was only static electricity, crackling and pounding around him. The atmosphere’s equilibration of charge, that was all. And yet, for the first time Alex listened … really listened as his ancestors must have, when they too used to stand as he did now, under a growling sky.
The next crackling stroke shook the air and bellowed at him.
… Don’t assume!
Alex gasped, stumbling backward, staggered by a sudden thought more dazzling and frightening than anything he’d ever known. All at once the great statues made horrifying sense to him. And within the thunder, he now heard the angry voices of jealous gods.
World areas expected to be submerged when Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets fully melt. [ Net Vol. A-69802-111, 04/11/38: 14:34:12 UT Stat-projection request.]
Large portions of Estonia, Denmark, eastern Britain, northern Germany, and northern Poland.
The Netherlands.
Western Siberia (the Occidental Plain) east of the Urals, linking the Black Sea to the Caspian and Azov seas, nearly to the Arctic.
Lowlands of Libya, Iraq.
The Hindustan and Indus valleys in India.
Portions of northeastern China.
Southwestern New Guinea and a large bight extending into the Eastern Australian Desert.
The Lower Amazon and La Plata valleys, the Yucatán Peninsula. Large portions of the states of Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.
Florida. Louisiana …
• LITHOSPHERE
Logan ignored the insistent beeping of his wrist-pager. Whoever was calling, they’d have to wait till his hands stopped shaking. Besides, it was easy to dismiss one tiny sound in this cacophony of disaster.