Wonders of a Godless World (13 page)

Now, the girl and her mother could bear the beatings, they never lasted long, but the poverty was eternal. Most days it was a struggle just to feed themselves. Their one hope was their garden. Their shack might be falling down, but behind it they had cut out a clearing where they tried to grow vegetables. They worked in that garden day and night, just the two women. And yet nothing ever seemed to grow as well as it should. They subsisted, barely, but for some reason the land refused to give them abundance.

But then one day, when the girl had reached early adulthood and her incipient schizophrenia was just beginning to worm its way into her mind, something quite remarkable happened.

The mother murdered the father.

The incident took place in the garden. The father staggered home from a drinking session late one evening and, inanely, began pulling up whole rows of unripe cabbages. The mother emerged to find him there, and it was too much to endure—that he should ruin the one thing keeping them from starvation. She snapped, as quiet, longsuffering women often will, and attacked him with a trowel. The girl was witness. She saw the blade gash deep into her father’s neck, and watched his blood flow into the soil.

Failure that he was, the father did not even have the grace to die quickly. He fought back, and for a long, desperate, sweating, cursing and pleading half-hour, husband and wife were locked together. The girl was paralysed by the horror of it, and could do nothing to help or hinder either of them. But the father was drunk, and the mother had scored the first hit, robbing him of vital fluids, and so in the end it was he who died, slashed in a dozen places, the garden a charnel ground around him. And it was the mother who rose, bloodstained and unrecognisable, to comfort her daughter.

Together they buried his body right there and then, under the garden. No one found out. They had no close neighbours in the jungle, no relatives who ever came to visit, and everyone else assumed that the father had simply abandoned them.

But the real miracle was the garden. Their next season of plantings flourished as never before. Suddenly the two women had as much food as they could want. No doubt it was because of all that blood spread about as fertiliser, not to mention the corpse itself. And besides, there were only two mouths to feed now. But the girl saw it differently. She had watched something horrible, but out of it had come fertility and plenty. Her young mind, already becoming prone to obsession, made a fateful connection
.

For a couple of seasons more the garden thrived, but then, to the girl’s dismay, the crops began to fail. At about the same time, her
mother grew ill, and then finally died. There was only one thing to do. She dug a hole for her mother in the garden. In the process she unearthed her father’s bones. They fascinated her. The look of them, the feel of them, the smell of them. They seemed…powerful. So after she buried her mother, she kept her father’s bones in the hut, talking to them about the garden. And accordingly, as if the bones had answered, the garden was healthy once more.

Thus the cycle was proven in the girl’s mind. Death was followed by life. Her father’s, and now her mother’s. And bones were her magic talismans.

The bounty did not last, of course. A few years later the garden was barren again, and she had no more bodies to bury. She dug up her mother’s bones, placed them next to those of her father, and consulted the both of them constantly, but to no avail. What was she to do now? And indeed, she might have gone hunting for fresh bodies, and the town might have had a mass murderer on its hands, and a garden choked with corpses.

But fortunately for the townsfolk, the witch went looking instead for more bones, not more bodies. That’s when she started digging in the town graveyard. And that’s when she came to the attention of the authorities. She has been confined here ever since, of course. Decade after decade. And it has not been a pretty life. This place has seen dark times. She has known hunger and disease, and, before she became ugly, many rapes. She has been beaten too, and neglected, and forgotten, and treated with scorn.

Even you, my orphan, are guilty of the last. But she deserves this much respect—she has survived it all, still capable of wonder and, indeed, of joy. And it was her magic that got her through. Her silly spells and potions. Silly they may be, but they give her comfort, they let her believe that she has some control over her surroundings.

But most important of all are her bones. Human or animal, large or small—bones are the source of her true power. With bones in her hand, she feels linked to her mother earth, she feels that she is in tune with the cycles of the world, death and life and life and death, just as she was for those few short years when her garden thrived. The bones let her talk to the volcano, and to the storm.

She is convinced therefore of one thing. Just as her father’s vicious death brought food, and just as destruction within the world always results in creation, so will the ugliness of her own life one day bring forth beauty. She has hope, in other words
.

Poor crazy old thing.

She couldn’t be more wrong.

The foreigner paused a moment, reflective.

The orphan was staring at the lightning bolt. By increments it seemed to writhe and prickle all along its length, slowly brightening even further. And right before her face, a raindrop descended, fraction by fraction. But most fascinating of all, a near-invisible wave of force was creeping outwards in every direction from the lightning. She wasn’t quite sure how she could see it—a distortion in her vision, a quiver in the raindrops as it touched against them—but she knew what it must be. It was noise; it was the sound of the lightning ripping apart the air. She was watching thunder.

The foreigner woke from his reverie.

But what has any of this to do with our purpose here?

Let us return to my second death, felled by an invisible killer from the bottom of a lake and then thrown into a mass grave. You witnessed the horror of my awakening, and my struggle to climb from the pit. An odious memory that—but eventually I did manage to crawl forth, and then to hide my half-decomposed body away from prying eyes. And over many months, I recovered. I grew muscle again, and skin.
True, my new face was very different from my old, but even so I was myself, reborn yet again.

All very well, but what was I to do then?

Should I simply return to my old way of life, I wondered. There was nothing to stop me. In fact, having survived two fatalities, you might think that I’d pursue my old interests with even more arrogance than before. I might have concluded that I was invulnerable. That I could now treat death with indifference, and treat the earth, which kept failing to kill me, with contempt.

But that wasn’t how I felt at all. You have to realise how hideous an experience dying can be. I’m not talking about the physical pain, and the nightmare of the grave, although that was bad enough. I’m talking about the sense of loss. The sense of futility. The sense that all the money and power you have acquired throughout your life have been the most meaningless of distractions. That regret is sharper and more bitter than any bodily agony.

No, I emerged from my second death even more changed than I had from the first. Humbled, chastened, and with a new respect for life.

Life! That would be my passion now. I had no interest in mining anymore, or in dead minerals underground, or in oil refineries. Now I would embrace light and water and air. These were the things that enabled us to exist, these were the truly precious commodities. Yet, when I looked around at what we were pumping into our atmosphere and our oceans—I’d done it myself, after all—I was appalled.

My course was obvious therefore. I decided to devote my third life not to studying the world, nor to exploiting it, but to saving it.

Understand, this was not a popular view in those days. This was over fifty years ago. The economies of the world were booming as never before. No one wanted to slow down and consider the danger, and anyway, the earth seemed so vast and unassailable. It was hard to believe that it could ever be threatened. Still, I was determined to sound
the warning. I set myself up in a new country, with a new identity, and got to work.

Money was no issue. In my previous life, I had stashed away large portions of my fortune in hidden accounts. And to access those accounts, I needed only a number, not my old face or my old name. So I was still immensely rich. I published my own magazines and books, I financed academic studies, I lobbied governments and sued corporations. My message was the same to any who would listen—we were treating the world the way I had treated that lake, and every day we were edging closer to the moment when the water would upend itself, and the very air would turn and kill us all.

Now there were some who considered this possibly a good thing. Man might indeed destroy himself, they declared, but in the long run the world would survive, and be better off without him. Man, they said, was the problem. Man was evil.

Some of these folk lived in the wilderness, and invited me to their homes and camps. And when I went to such places, I was indeed struck by the beauty of life on this planet. Untrodden steppes and deep virgin forests and wild cascading rivers. They each had the innate perfection man somehow ruins the instant he intrudes
.

And yet as wondrous as such places were, I disagreed with my friends. I didn’t think the earth would be better off without man. As I saw it, the beauty of the world was only beauty if there was a conscious mind to perceive it. Man, in fact, created the beauty by witnessing it. Otherwise the world was just chemicals and organisms. Mindless.

Indeed, I argued that humanity was vital to the earth, that we were the whole point of the planet. Obviously we needed to feed and clothe ourselves, and so would always leave our mark on the landscape. But the responsibility of our dominance, of our unique consciousness, was a special one—it was our duty to appreciate the balance of the system that gave us life, and to do our best to preserve it.

In short, we had a deal. If we protected the earth, it would protect us. Oh, individuals would still die by nature’s hand. Floods and earthquakes would still kill people no matter how well we treated the air and the oceans. But they would never kill without the saving grace of offering life to the rest of us. They would never kill to exterminate. They would kill only in the grander process of sustaining existence.

That’s what I came to believe, my orphan, in those years. Does it remind you of anyone? Perhaps our friend the witch?

Ah, the fatal lure of madness. No wonder I was due to fail, and then to die again. And can you guess what brought my third death upon me? It was butterflies. Yes, butterflies! Frail, feeble, flapping little things. These particular ones had yellow wings, laced with crimson. And they were endangered, on the verge of extinction. In fact, they were very rare to begin with, only inhabiting one small forest in a country far from here. Most of that forest had already been felled by the time I heard of it. There were but a few dozen square miles left, and once they were gone, so would be the butterfly.

Some of my activist friends were planning a campaign to stop the logging. They wanted my help. It seemed a small thing to me at first. Surely there were bigger battles to be fought than saving a few insects? But one afternoon I went for a walk in that forest, alone, and the sun came through the trees, and a warm breeze blew, and the air was suddenly filled with dancing gold wings, so many that they made the whole forest whisper.

I knew what I was seeing. A last flourish before death, a festival of despair, the earth crying out at its loss. And I saw that maybe I couldn’t save the oceans or the atmosphere—but these irrelevant little creatures, I could
.

What a romantic dolt I was. But I bought the land and preserved the forest. It was not cheap. It cost a considerable part of my fortune. The company that owned it was laughing at me all the while. A fool
bankrupting himself for butterflies. But I created a refuge, and in my own mind, I had saved far more than the butterflies. I had saved a piece of my soul. I had upheld my part of the deal with the planet.

And then, one day, a storm came along.

Boom! Time rushed on once more. Released at last, the great tower of lightning flickered and disappeared, and the thunder smacked like a hand across the orphan’s face. The witch fell backwards, blown by the immensity of sound. A few fat drops of rain spattered down, and the wind rose—yet the deluge proper seemed to hang back. The wind died away again to a calm.

Butterflies, the orphan wondered. And a storm.

Yes
,
a storm such as this one, such as any of the hundreds of storms that are occurring around the planet at any given moment. Except that the storm I’m speaking of held a secret at its heart. An incredibly rare and deadly secret.

Take my hand now, I’ll explain.

The orphan felt a hopeful excitement. Did he mean…? She reached for his hand, and yes, as soon as she took hold of it, there came a familiar tug at her centre, and then, wonderfully, she was lifting off the ground.

Or at least her shadow self was. She was aware of her actual body falling gently to the concrete, and glancing down she could
see herself sprawled at the foreigner’s feet, stubby limbs outstretched. But the
real
her was rising away, free of weight and flesh. The foreigner was at her side, his useless body also abandoned, his shadow hand clasping hers. They were ghosts now, as light as leaves, and in the still air they drifted out across the jungle, even as the witch goggled up at them in envy.

Of course, this present storm above us holds no such lethal surprise—but it will serve as an example for the moment. First, we need to find our way into an inflow. An updraft. The beginning of the storm cycle. Ah yes, here…

They were well ahead of the storm now, and around them the air stirred again. But this was no fitful, cooling wind like before. This was a lift of warm air, a hot breath that smelt as if it had steamed up off the jungle below.

As it has. The sun warms the earth, the earth warms the air, and the warm air expands and rises. This is the basis of all storms.

The orphan and the foreigner rose too. The airflow heaved into gusts, drawing them back over the treetops towards the storm front.

The other crucial thing is moisture. This is wet air, laden with water vapour. That vapour is invisible to us, but we can always feel it—as humidity.

The updraft gusted stronger still. The orphan looked ahead. They were being swept into an overhang of black cloud that extended forward, roiling and seething in apparent slow motion, from the base of the storm.

Now—what’s happening around us as we rise?

She dragged her gaze from the spectacle above, and considered the air about her. It was growing rapidly cooler.

Exactly. Air cools as it rises because it expands as it rises. It contains only so much heat when it leaves the ground, but now the same amount
of heat has to warm a larger space. It can’t, so the temperature drops. And when the water vapour in the air experiences that fall in temperature, it’s like steam touching a cold mirror…

Ha. Yes! As they lofted up to merge with the rolling underbelly of the storm, the air was magically turning to fog around them.

Do you see? The air is too thin and too cold to hold the water as vapour anymore. It must condense out…

She saw. The unseen vapour was abruptly coalescing into a mist of tiny droplets of water. But as the droplets were virtually weightless, they kept surging higher with the updraft, plunging into the base of the storm. Indeed, the point of transformation
was
the base of the storm. The underside of the cloud, the orphan realised, was merely a line of temperature where the updraft changed from invisible to visible.

Yes. You have it. Now—

They lifted on a great gust. The orphan caught a last glimpse, as if between grey cliffs, of the ground below, but then it was lost in fog, and they were plunging upwards into the darkness of the storm’s interior.

Notice, the updraft does not falter as we climb. This would seem to defy logic. After all, only warm air rises, but this air is cooling—it should be slowing down. And if the air was dry, the updraft would indeed stall; storms can’t develop in dry air. But with wet air, a strange thing occurs. As the water vapour condenses into droplets, it actually releases heat, preventing the air around it from cooling too quickly. The upward push is maintained. In fact, updrafts like this can blast themselves to amazing heights. Ten, fifteen kilometres and more. That’s how the great thunderheads are created.

But all the orphan knew now was speed and violence and noise. The updraft felt like a solid thing, a giant hand at her back, and yet it thrummed and vibrated too, it lurched and shuddered, eased
for moments, and then slammed into her again. Upwards, always upwards. There was no way of knowing how high. The world inside the cloud had no landmarks, only shades of black and grey, or stark, flaring blue when bolts of lightning set the atmosphere ablaze and thunder cracked loud.

Oh, it was marvellous!

I know, but we are approaching the upper reaches of this draft. Barely nine kilometres high, for the moment. This is no supercell storm, not yet.

But watch now! It’s much colder up here, and when the air is this cold, those tiny droplets of fog start to gather together into larger drops. And as the drops get bigger, it gets harder for the weakening updraft to support them.

The orphan sensed a slowing of movement, as if the whole body of air had become confused about its purpose. The push of the updraft faded, and for a time she and the foreigner and the water drops merely drifted, the slightest of winds now urging them sideways. For an instant the world brightened, and the orphan glimpsed a patch of blue high above. And then they were sinking. Back into the cloud. Slowly at first, but then faster. And all around them, the drops of water fell too.

Gravity is winning. The water drops are too heavy. They fall, and they drag the air down with them. The whole mass begins to descend, cold and heavy.

This is now a downdraft, and this is rain.

But note what happens to the temperature. It’s the opposite of what occurs in an updraft. Again, we have a body of air which contains a certain amount of heat. But this time the air is descending and becoming compressed, so the same amount of heat has less space to warm. Hence the temperature begins to rise.

Of course, this should slow the downdraft, because the warmer the air gets, the less it wants to descend. But once more the fact that moisture is involved changes everything. Rain is falling with the air, and as the air warms, some of the rain evaporates again, which absorbs heat, preventing the downdraft from warming too quickly. Thus it can maintain speed all the way to the ground.

The orphan was hardly listening. She was transfixed by the dizzying rate of the fall. She was the rain, she was the wind, she was streaking down from the sky, a crazy descent as thunder roared and lightning sizzled about her.

Suddenly they dropped out of the cloud into clear air. There was only rain about them now, in silver curtains, then the ground was spinning up and the downpour slammed into the jungle. Trees bent under the onslaught, and the orphan and the foreigner were thrown up and out and away. When their tumbling eventually stopped, the rain was gone and they were floating free again, in motionless air. The orphan was amazed to see that they had been deposited far ahead of the storm once more.

The foreigner had held her hand throughout.
A heavy shower, that’s all that was. But it’s via such downdrafts that thunderstorms can produce their worst surface winds—winds that blow down and burst off the ground with devastating force.

The orphan felt her exultation cooling. It had been a turbulent ride, up and down through the cloud, yet she was aware of a sense of anticlimax…

Ah, but that was the mildest of storms. That was but a single cell, destined to rise and live and dissipate in no more than an hour or so. What happens in such a storm is that the downdrafts begin to dominate the updrafts. No more warm wet air gets fed into the base. The cloud starves of fuel and rains itself out.

They were rising again, the orphan noticed.

But if conditions are right, then new updrafts keep feeding into the front of the storm, keeping pace with the downdrafts, and the cycle stabilises—then the storm is free to grow in size and height and intensity for hour after hour.

A breeze stirred—a humid breeze that the orphan could recognise now. A new updraft, being sucked into the storm ahead.

It’s too complex to explain exactly, but if a storm grows in the right way, then it becomes a supercell—a cloud system massively bigger than a single cell, and massively more powerful. And the interior of a supercell, well now…

Then the giant hand was shoving at their backs again, and they were rushing up into the blackness of the cloud.

The orphan could never judge, later, how long she and the foreigner rode the storm together, or to what size it built. She was not even sure that it was the same storm as the first, or if it was a real storm at all, and not merely something relived from the foreigner’s memory. Or a mixture of both. But up and down they went, swapping from updrafts to downdrafts, their ghost bodies drenched by rain and battered by hailstones the size of fists. Winds tore and shrieked from every direction, and vortexes plucked at them from nowhere, spinning them off into oblivion. But what terror and delight there was in the speed and in the wrenching changes of direction. And what splendour there was in the fiery blue latticework of lightning that caged the tumult all about, the very atmosphere stinking of electricity and the din of thunder never ending.

But finally the orphan felt the storm tiring about her. They rode a last updraft as far as it would take them, higher and higher, above any rain or hail, into flurries of shimmering ice crystals. There the last thrust from below died away, and they would have fallen back, but the foreigner took hold now and pushed them
higher, until the greyness turned to dazzling white, and then to the deepest blue.

They were out of the cloud and above the storm. The orphan looked down upon a white cauliflower mass that spilled away in the evening sunshine. From its crown streamed a mantle of ice crystals, sheared off by a high, cold wind, and around its base the dark sheets of rain were fading away to wisps.

Yes
, said the foreigner,
the storm is dying.

The orphan noticed something else. She had expected to see her island far below, but it wasn’t there. Nor was the ocean. Instead they were over a land of hills and farms and rivers. This was some other place entirely, and some other storm. And she was alone. The shadow shape of the foreigner had left her side.

Yes. This is purely a memory now.

Where were they, then?

This is the site of my third death. My private forest, and my endangered butterflies, are almost directly below us. This is the storm that killed me. But it didn’t kill me with rain or hail, or with tornadoes, or with lightning.

The orphan gazed down in bafflement. If it was none of those things, then what could it be? The storm was all but finished, its power spent.

True. This phenomenon can only occur as a storm ends. Observe. The updrafts have ceased, the cell is one giant downdraft now. Normally from this point the storm would dump its last rain and dissolve away. But one time in a thousand perhaps, or one time in ten thousand, a dying storm collides with another weather system. A very particular type of weather system.

Nothing was visible, but the orphan felt it even so. The upper level of the storm was now sailing into a mass of high atmosphere that was unlike anything she had encountered so far. This new air
felt…old, that was the only word for it. And stale somehow. Dry. Like a forgotten crust of bread in the sun.

The lack of moisture is what’s important here. This region of air contains no water vapour whatever. It’s a complex phenomenon in itself actually, such dry air, at such a height. But what matters now is how it reacts when it meets the collapsing storm
.

Slowly, ominously, the air began to drop. It had been suspended there by some means beyond the orphan’s understanding, but now the last downdraft of the storm was opening a vast trapdoor in the sky, through which the dry air could fall.

The orphan fell too.

Faster, and then much faster. But this descent was like no other ride the storm had given. The air about her was clear—it held no rain or mist. It was so dry that it made her shadow skin feel taut. Even the wind sounded different; a drone, rather than a shriek. And as she fell, she felt the temperature begin to rise.

Yes. And that’s the dreadful cruelty of it. As the dry air rushes earthwards, it begins to compress, as any downdraft would, and to heat up. But while a normal downdraft is filled with rain which stops the air from getting too hot, this downdraft is utterly parched. This air will simply get hotter and hotter as it falls.

In theory, that heat should stop the downdraft descending. But if it began high enough, as this one did, and gains enough momentum, as this one has, then nothing can stop it. It will hit the ground at high velocity and high temperature. It’s the rarest of weather events. But meteorologists have a name for it, nevertheless.

They call it a heat burst
.

The orphan stared down at the earth speeding up towards her. She was still very high, but directly below, in the midst of a hilly country that had recently been slashed and cleared, she saw a patch of green forest.

Usually, a heat burst does little harm. The surface winds do not last long, and the air reaches a temperature of only forty or forty-five degrees. Enough to scorch a few plants, enough to be unpleasant to humans, but that’s all.

But if the atmospheric conditions all line up in the worst possible way, then the dry downdraft can stabilise. If that happens, then the hot winds will last for hours, and the temperature will go much higher. Officially, the record temperature for a heat burst stands at over sixty degrees. That’s dangerously hot. Hot enough to wither crops, kill small animals, and distress larger ones. But severe heat bursts are so rare that very few have ever been measured or studied.