The Forge of God (46 page)

Betsy lay beside him, head resting in the crook of his arm. "Happy?" she asked him.

Edward opened his eyes and stared up at white clouds against a brilliant blue sky. "Yes," he said. "I really am."

"So am I."

A few dozen yards away, other campers were singing folk songs and sixties and seventies tunes. Their voices drifted in the restless, warm air, finally melding with the wind and the hum of the bees.

Walter Samshow celebrated his seventy-sixth birthday aboard the Glomar
Discoverer
, cruising in circles a few kilometers beyond the zone where huge gouts of oxygen had once risen to the ocean surface. The bubbling had stopped three days before.

The ship's galley prepared a two-meter-long birthday cake in the shape of a sea serpent—or an oarfish, depending on whether you asked the cook or Chao, who had seen several oarfish in his time, but no sea serpents.

At five in the afternoon, the cake was cut with some ceremony under the canvas awning spread on the fantail. Bible-leaf slices of the serpent were served on the ship's best china, accompanied by champagne or nonalcoholic punch for those ostensibly on duty.

Sand silently toasted his partner with a raised glass of champagne at the stern. Samshow smiled and tasted the cake. He was trying to decide what flavor the peculiar mud-colored icing was—someone had suggested sweetened agar earlier—when the ocean all around suddenly glowed a brilliant blue-green, even beneath the intense sun.

Samshow was reminded of his youth, standing on the beach at Cape Cod on the night of the Fourth of July, waiting for fireworks and tossing his own firecrackers into the surf just as their fuses burned short. The firecrackers had exploded below the surface with a silent puff of electric-green light.

The crew on the rear deck fell silent. Some looked at their shipmates in puzzlement, having missed the phenomenon.

In rapid succession, from the northern horizon to the southern horizon, more flashes illuminated the ocean.

"I think," Samshow said in his best professorial tone, "we are about to have some mysteries answered." He knelt to put his plate and glass of champagne down on the deck, and then stood, with Sand's help, by the railing.

To the west, the entire sea and sky began to roar.

A curtain of cloud and blinding light rose from the western horizon, then slowly curled about like a snake in pain. One end of the curtain slid over the sea with amazing speed in their direction, and Samshow cringed, not wanting it all to end just yet. There was more he wanted to see; more minutes he wanted to live.

The hull shuddered violently and the steel masts and wires sang. The railing vibrated painfully under his hand.

The ocean filled with a continuous light, miles of water no more opaque than a thick green lump of glass held over a bonfire.

"It's the bombs," Sand said. "They're going off. Up and down the fractures—"

The sea to the west blistered in a layer perhaps a hundred meters thick, scoured by the snaking curtain, bursting into ascending and descending ribbons of fluid and foam. Between the fragments of the peeled sea—the skin of an inconceivable bubble-rose a massive, shimmering transparent of superheated steam, perhaps two miles wide. Its revealed surface immediately condensed into a pale opalescent hemisphere. Other such bubbles broke and released and condensed from horizon to horizon, churning the sea into a mint-green froth. The clouds of vapor ascended in twisted pillars to the sky. The hiss and roar and deep churning, gut-shaking booms became unbearable. Samshow clapped his hands to his ears and waited for what he knew must come.

A scatter of calved steam bubbles broke just a few hundred meters to the east, with more on the opposite side. The turbulence spread in a high wall of water that caught the ship lengthwise and broke her spine, twisting her fore half clockwise, aft counterclockwise, metal screaming, rivets failing like cannon shots, plates ripping with a sound curiously like tearing paper, beams snapping. Samshow flew over the side and seemed for a moment suspended in froth and flying debris. He felt all that he was a part of—the sea, the sky, the air and mist around him—abruptly accelerate upward. A much larger steam bubble surfaced directly beneath the ship.

There was of course no time to think, but a thought from the instant before lingered like a strobed image, congealed in his mind before his body was instantly boiled and smashed into something hardly distinguishable from the foam around it:
I wish I could hear that sound, of the Earth's crust being spread wide.

Around the globe, wherever the bomb-laying machines had infested the deep-ocean trenches, long sinuous curtains of hot vapor reached high into the atmosphere and pierced through. As the millions of glassy columns of steam condensed into cloud, and the cloud hit the cold upper masses of air and flashed into rain, the air that had been pushed aside now rushed back with violent thunderclaps. Tsunamis rolled outward beneath corresponding turbulent expanding concentric fronts of high and low pressure.

The end had begun.

DIES IRAE

Below San Francisco Bay, hours after boarding the ark, the young woman who had guided them on the fishing boat—her name was Clara Fogarty—went among the twenty in the waiting room and spoke to them, answering questions, trying to keep them all calm. She seemed none too calm herself; fragile, on the edge.

Help her
, Arthur was ordered. He and several others immediately obeyed. After a few minutes, he circled back through the people to Francine and took her hands. Marty hugged him fiercely.

"I'm going to visit the areas where we'll be staying," he said to Francine.

"The network is telling you this?"

"No," he said, looking to one side, frowning slightly. "Something else. A voice I've not heard before. I'm to meet somebody."

Francine wiped her face with her hands and kissed him. Arthur lifted Marty with an
oomph
and told him to take care of his mother. "I'll be back in a little while."

He stood beside Clara Fogarty at the middle hatch on the side opposite where they had entered. The hatch—little more than an outline in the wall's surface—slid open and they passed through quickly, before they had a clear impression of what was on the other side.

A brightly illuminated broad hallway, curving
down
, stretched before them. The hatch closed and they regarded each other nervously. More hatches lined both sides of the hallway.

"Artificial gravity?" Clara Fogarty asked him.

"I don't know," he said.

At a silent request, they stepped forward. They remained upright in relation to the floor, with no odd sensations other than the visual. At the end of the hallway, another open hatchway awaited them; beyond was a warm half darkness. They entered a chamber similar to the waiting room.

In the center of this chamber rose a pedestal about a foot high and a yard wide. On the pedestal rested something that at first examination Arthur took to be a sculpture. It stood about half as tall as he, shaped like a hefty square human torso and head—rather, in fact, like a squared—off and slightly flattened kachina doll. Other than an abstracted and undivided bosom, it lacked any surface features. In color it was similar to heat-treated copper, with oily swirls of rainbow iridescence. Its skin was glossy but not reflective.

Without warning, it lifted smoothly a few inches above the pedestal and addressed them both out loud:

"I am afraid your people will soon no longer be wild and free."

Arthur had heard this same voice in his head just a few minutes ago, beckoning them through the hatches.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"I am not your keeper, but I am your guide."

"Are you alive?" He did not know what else to ask.

"I am not biologically alive. I am part of this vessel, which will in turn soon become part of a much larger vessel. You are here to prepare your companions for me, that I may instruct them and carry out my own instructions."

"Are you a robot?" Clara asked.

"I am a symbol, designed to be acceptable without conveying wrong impressions. In a manner of speaking, I am a machine, but I am not a servile laborer. Do you understand me?"

The object's voice was deep, authoritative, yet not masculine.

"Yes," Arthur said.

"Some among your group might panic if exposed to me without preparation. Yet it is essential that they come to know and trust me, and come to trust the information and instructions I give them. Is this understood?"

"Yes." They answered in unison.

"The future of your people, and of all the information we have retrieved from your planet, depends on how your kind and my kind interact. Your kind must become disciplined, and I must educate you about larger realities than most of you have been used to facing."

Arthur nodded, his mouth dry. "We're inside one of the arks?"

"You are. These vessels will join together once we are all in space. There are now thirty-one of these vessels, and aboard twenty-one of them, five hundred humans apiece. The vessels also contain large numbers of botanical, zoological, and other specimens—not in most cases whole, but in recoverable form. Is this clear?"

"Yes," Arthur said. Clara nodded.

"Most of my early communications with you will not be through speech, but through what you might call telepathy, as you have already been directed by the network. Later, when there is more time, this intrusive method will be largely abandoned. For now, when you go among your companions, I will speak through you, but you will have the discretion of phrasing and timing. We have very little time."

"Has it begun?" Clara asked.

"It has begun," the object said.

"And we're leaving soon?"

"The last passengers and specimens for this vessel are being loaded now."

Arthur received impressions of crates of chromium spiders being loaded from small boats through the surface entrance of the ark. The spiders contained the fruits of weeks of searching and sampling: genetic material from thousands of plants and animals along the West Coast.

"What can we call you?" Arthur asked.

"You will make up your own names for me. Now you must return to your group and introduce them to their quarters, which are spaced along this hallway. You must also ask for at least four volunteers to witness the crime that is now being committed."

"We're to witness the destruction of the Earth?" Clara asked.

"Yes. It is the Law. If you will excuse me, I have other introductions to make."

They backed out of the shadowy room and watched as the hatchway slid shut.

"Very efficient," Arthur said.

"The Law.'" Clara smiled thinly. "Right now, I'm more scared than I ever was on the boat. I don't even know all the people's names yet."

"Let's get started," Arthur said. They traversed the curved hallway. The hatch at the opposite end opened and they saw a cluster of anxious faces. The smell of fear drifted out.

Irwin Schwartz stepped into the White House situation room and nearly bumped into the First Lady. She backed away with a nervous nod, her hands trembling, and he entered. Everyone's nerves had been frazzled since the evacuation the night before and the rapid return of the President to the Capital. No one had slept for more than an hour or two since.

The President stood with Otto Lehrman before the high-resolution data screens mounted on the wood paneling covering the concrete walls. The screens were on and showed maps of different portions of the Northern Hemisphere, Mercator projection, with red spots marking vanished cities. "Come on in, Irwin," Crockerman said. "We have some new material from the Puzzle Palace." He seemed almost cheerful.

Irwin turned to the First Lady. "Are you here to stay?" he asked bluntly. He respected the woman, but did not like her much.

"The President specially requested my presence," she said. "He feels we should be united."

"Obviously, you agree with him."

"I agree with him," she said.

Never in United States history had a First Lady deserted her husband when he was under fire; Mrs. Crockerman knew this, and it must have taken some courage to return. Still, Schwartz had himself given long hours of thought to resigning from the administration; he could not judge her too harshly.

He held out his hand. She accepted and they shook firmly. "Welcome back aboard," he said.

"We have photos about twenty minutes old from a Diamond Apple," Lehrman said. "Technicians are putting them on the screens any minute." Diamond Apples were reconnaissance satellites launched in the early 1990s. The National Reconnaissance Office was very zealous with Diamond Apple pictures. Usually, they would have been reserved for the eyes of the President and Secretary of Defense only; that Schwartz was seeing them indicated something extraordinary was in store.

"Here they are," Lehrman said as the screens blanked.

Crockerman apparently had been told what to expect. Lines of glowing white rimmed in red and blue-green laced across a midnight-black background. "You know," Crockerman said softly, standing back from the screens, "I was right after all. Goddammit, Irwin, I was right, and I was wrong at the same time. How do you figure that?"

Schwartz stared at the glowing lines, not making any sense of them until a grid and labels came up with the display. This was the North Atlantic; the lines were trenches, midocean ridges and faults.

"The white," Lehrman said, "is heat residue from thermonuclear explosions. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, maybe tens of thousands—all along the Earth's deep-ocean seams and wrinkles."

The First Lady half sobbed, half caught her breath. Crockerman stared at the displays with a sad grin.

"Now the western Pacific," Lehrman said. More white lines. "By the way, Hawaii has been heavily assaulted by tsunamis. The West Coast of North America is about twenty, thirty minutes away from major waves; I'd guess it's already been hit by waves from these areas." He pointed to stacks of white lines near Alaska and California. "The damage could be extensive. The energy released by all the explosions is enormous; weather patterns around the world will change. The Earth's heat budget…" He shook his head. "But I doubt we'll be given much time to worry about it."