The Omega Point

by Whitley Strieber

  “Oh, God,” he whispered. “Oh, God, where are we, what is this place?”

  “This is the future,” she said, “if you want it. But it takes love. To come here takes fear, but to stay, there must be love.”

  He thrust and thrust and thrust, and every time he did, a wave of heart-stopping pleasure shot from her curling toes to her shuddering scalp. Then he kissed her, his tongue like fire boring into her and setting everything inside on fire, and the birds made their music, and a soft breeze caressed them, and the sun crossed the sky and went low, and in the long shadows, they heard, like distant bells, the secret harmonies of the human soul.

  It ended then, in a series of declining thrusts. Surely now he would remember their love, and they would gain from it the energy they needed to pass through the time gate and not fall back.

  There was no sound that marked their inevitable descent back into the familiar world, nothing but a gentle, subtle change from cool, pliant grass to the old rug they’d started their journey on.

  “It was your painting, Caroline, the one you’re doing in the art room. It was like we were in it.”

  “Yes. We went there.”

  “Then it’s not a painting.”

  “No, it’s a navigation tool and it worked just as it’s supposed to. We couldn’t control our movement, though. We fell back. You and I should be able to cross easily by now, to prepare the way for others.”

  “Why can’t we?”

  “There must be love, David.”

  His hand withdrew from hers. He sat up.

  She saw that he’d enjoyed himself with her. Lust, though, was all that it had been for him, the lust of a soldier on his way to die.

  She was down to the final card, she saw. No matter Mr. Acton’s instructions, she must play it now because if she didn’t, she would lose him here, now, forever.

  Without love, the journey across time—the physical journey—would last no longer than it had just now, the flicker of a eye.

  “I have something for you,” she said.

  She drew her purse open. This letter, in its fading envelope, had come to her from her father’s hand, as he had wished her well on her quest. “My knight,” he had said, “with no armor. My beautiful girl.” Being held by her father, this man in profound transmutation, was the most sacred experience that she knew. She feared so for him, off there in the Virginia countryside with no guards and no guns.

  “This is for you,” she said. He looked down at the envelope. Then back up at her. “It’s from Herbert Acton,” she said. “It was written over a hundred years ago.”

  He took it, then turned on the magnificent desk lamp, in which Louis Comfort Tiffany, himself a master alchemist, had reproduced, as if they were a swirling rainbow, all the colors of alchemical transformation, from the black of the ground through red to creamy white to green and yellow, then to the radiant white of monatomic matter and the ruby red of super consciousness, to the violet of night and wisdom, the color of the Great Elixir itself. In the lamp, fairies danced.

  As he opened the letter, the dry old paper crackled. For a cold instant, she feared that it might turn to dust. Anything could happen now, in these enormous moments, beyond even the reach of visionaries like Herbert Acton.

  He read in silence.

  “What does it say?”

  “You don’t know? I thought you’d know.”

  “It’s never been opened before, not since the day Herbert Acton wrote your name on it and sealed it.”

  In his eyes she saw flickers of the Great Elixir, shimmering and shuddering faintly, living violet in the blue that had long ago captured her heart. She allowed herself to hope.

  He read aloud, “ ‘David Ford, this will come to you from the hand of the woman you love. Surrender and learn. But quickly, David, for nothing is decided. Goliath follows her close behind.’ ” He made a little sound in his throat. “That’s all.” He held the letter out. “And there’s today’s date.”

  “ ‘From the woman you love,’ David. He knew what was supposed to be between us.”

  “Caroline . . .” His voice faded. Then she realized that he wasn’t looking at her anymore, he was looking past her.

  When she turned, she found herself confronting Katrina Starnes and waves of hate unlike any she had ever felt, and she knew that this was the pure hate of darkness and, even worse, the hate of a scorned woman.

  “I was just leaving,” she said faintly.

  “Oh, no,” Katie snarled. “Fuck him again. Fuck him on the floor, you rich, spoiled filthy bitch.”

  “Now, wait.”

  “I’ve been waiting all day. And hearing!” She turned on David. “You sob a lot, asshole. Sob with pleasure. You sound like a complete jerk when you’re fucking, did you know that? And you’re even worse than Marian says. You’re not only a self-centered piece of shit, you’re an incompetent doctor. If we could get out of here, or we could get the goddamn phone working, your license would be history. And it will be. Because when this is over, you’re going down, Doc.” Now the jewel-hard eyes returned to Caroline. “Like his dick? Tell him to wash it next time, between fuck toys.” Her voice dropped low now. “Guys like him—human garbage—they end up in pieces. Be warned.” She strode out. “There’s a list on your desk, Doctor,” she said over her shoulder. “The patients you missed, the problems you ignored.”

  Silence followed. Hardly above a whisper, he said, “It’s dark. We’ve been here all day.”

  “An uncontrolled move through time.”

  “I have a problem with her now, Caroline. Big problem.”

  “I have to go work on my painting.”

  “I know.”

  Their eyes met, and their hearts danced, but it was a slow dance, full of sorrow and full of fear.

  She wanted to stay with him but she could not stay with him, there wasn’t time. She left, moving quickly down the halls, intent on her task.

  Neither of them was aware of the other eyes that watched them via the surveillance system, Katrina’s eyes, or the true intensity, the towering fury, of the hate that was there.

  DAVID FORD’S JOURNAL: FIVE

  I’ve always moved too fast with women, and now I’ve got two of them on my case. It’s happened before and I’ve always been ashamed, and I feel that now.

  Caroline Light wants my love but I just do not feel anything there. Katie wants it and, again, I just want the comfort of her body.

  Both women are furious at me, of course, but I’m dealing now with a new issue, and they’re going to have to wait their turn. To be frank, I believe that I know what Herbert Acton did to look into the future.

  Educated as I am in modern science, I have always viewed alchemy as the first primitive fumbling of what became chemistry. However, what I now suspect paints a different picture. Alchemy, as we have known it through history, is the degenerated remnant of a chemistry far more advanced than what we have now.

  The shibboleth has always been that the “philosopher’s stone” is supposedly capable of turning something like lead or iron into gold. In the Middle Ages, mountebanks went about in Europe using sleight of hand to convince the wealthy that they could do this, with the intention of fleecing them.

  There is a truth behind it, though, and it is the explanation, I am convinced, for Herbert Acton’s abilities. And, in fact, as I write this, I feel a sort of déjà vu again, as if the words are a kind of echo. I would surmise that this is information from our class, being drawn through the amnesia.

  What this ancient science concerned, I believe, were manipulations that are presently far beyond our ability. It was able to see into the future, and, I think, holds the promise of actually enabling physical movement through time—an orderly, organized version of what happened to that dire wolf in Utah.

  I have made a most interesting discovery about this room. It contains a time machine—not one that can enable physical time travel, but one that can facilitate the sort of seeing that Herbert Acton was so expert at. I th
ink of it as a time telescope, and it stands on this desk, the Tiffany masterwork that is far more than a desk lamp.

  It was the alchemical colors that revealed the lamp’s true purpose to me. The master who created them understood the uses of light frequencies, and when I close my eyes and let the colors wash across my forehead, I am able to see brilliant images of the future. In other words, the legend of the crystal ball or the magic lantern is about lamps like this.

  Accelerating vision into the future—perhaps bodies, too—need have nothing to do with arcane contraptions like supercolliders. It has to do with changing the temporal frequency of the body, and that can be done with light.

  You look into a color of the type produced by this lamp until, when you close your eyes, it fills your head—and then, after a few moments, you will see what for me are flickering, indistinct visions, but which for a master like Herbert Acton must have been exquisitely detailed images.

  Even with my limited skills, though, I have seen the future, and, frankly, I am terrified. Not because of what is there, but rather what is not.

  In my mind’s eye, for example, I can see this room as it will be later tonight, empty, the darkness flickering from the auroras.

  Then something else happens, involving strange light rising in the east—a piercing violet object in the sky. And that light—the color is like that of the Great Elixir, a light frequency of great power, both creative and destructive.

  No sooner does this light wash in through the windows than all light disappears. It’s not night, it’s another kind of dark entirely. When I tried to see into it, it almost seemed to want to suck me in, as if it was in some way hungry. I think that I was seeing the absence of reality itself, the absolute emptiness that surrounds the universe, that is, what exists before light has come and after it has faded, beyond the limits of time.

  In other words, we are almost at the end of time, probably just days away, or even hours.

  And yet, it’s not the entire and complete end, because something else is there, a glimmer in the black ocean.

  I think this is the beginning of new life on earth, thousands of years from now.

  And getting there is our goal, and it is why Caroline refers to her painting as a navigation tool. As she paints, she is looking in her mind’s eye at a specific spot on the Earth of the future, the place she briefly took me to. Once the painting is finished, everybody who sees it, and is properly prepared—no doubt by consuming the substance they’re manufacturing in the arc furnace—will supposedly be able to navigate to the point in time it depicts.

  I have also seen our world as it is right now, and what I have seen has almost made me sweat blood, because hell is unfolding here, and it is far, far worse than I imagined. Even as desperate as we are here at the clinic, compared to what’s going on outside, we are a splendid palace shining in the middle of a wasteland.

  For example, the farm belt all over the world is a gigantic desert of brown, ruined crops. I sailed from Iowa to Texas on the lamp’s magical wings, and saw nothing but stubble and burning cities and long lines of dead cars on the roads, and everywhere bloated, dead cattle, and people in their millions cutting and eating the carrion meat.

  Also, I saw ever more of the huge objects that I glimpsed out my window the other night, drifting over the face of the land, lingering over cities, marching in enormous platoons across the suffering world. I saw them drawing people into themselves in vast numbers, but I could not see what was happening to them. I do remember, though, that it was beautiful. Were these the biblical elect, then, those who have finished with earthly life, being raised up? Or was it something else, the harvest of mankind, perhaps, as slaves or as a DNA pool?

  I could see what was happening, but there was nobody to tell me why.

  I have also seen people cutting themselves to the bone—literally butchering themselves—to get rid of the strange quasi-physical shadows like the ones on Katie’s neck and probably on Tom Dryden. I fear that I know why, and I fear for them both. Katie seems a good person and Tom is innocuous, but we do hide our darkness, we humans.

  Taken together—the vision of the lake of fire from Revelation, and these two encounters with those huge objects, I think that what I am seeing is the beginning of a legendary event, the actual, physical judgment of man.

  At the thought, my guts congeal, my heart overspeeds. This whole planet is on death row, and I feel it not only as a member of human society and a man responsible for a lot of lives, I feel it personally. I am the one whose energy will enable us to take our first step across time. That’s why I am identified with Quetzalcoatl who was, among many other things, the god of new beginnings.

  My impulse is to throw myself into my work, and I have a lot of work to do. My primary immediate responsibility is clear: be sure this place is not destroyed before we’ve completed what we’ve been put here to do.

  I wish that I could say that I was confident, but I am not confident at all. We know literally not a thing about whoever killed Mrs. Denman, and until we do know that, everybody here is in danger, and so is our mission.

  Undoubtedly, somebody has at least an inkling of what we are going to attempt, and wants to take our knowledge and use it in our stead.

  I look to Mr. Acton’s final letter to me. It warns David that Goliath is coming—in fact, that Goliath is here now. But who is Goliath, a person, a storm, some new fire about to be spit from the sun?

  No doubt Goliath is many things, but one of them must be that violet light—the highest color of alchemical growth and also the color of ultimate death. The light is an incredible poison, and it’s coming. But it isn’t the only aspect of the giant. Goliath has servants.

  As I am apparently David to this Goliath, it’s worth asking just how I sling my stone into his forehead. The light must come from the supernova that was mentioned in the document Mrs. Denman gave me to read. Maybe we’re getting close enough to it to see its core as a distinct stellar object.

  A supernova’s core emanates sterilizing sheets of gamma rays.

  As I sit here, night is coming on, the worst time.

  I go to one of my majestic windows, to the glowing, bizarre darkness. Frankly, when I looked into the future, I was surprised that I did not see that the sun had gone supernova. Such things happen all the time, with one stellar explosion blasting nearby stars with so much energy that they explode, too.

  I cannot see around to the east very well, but it looks as if there is a violet-purple tint off beyond the limits of my vision.

  This distant star—previously unknown to science—is, in reality, what controls life on earth. I know from modern paleoastronomy that light of this monster first washed the earth forty thousand years ago, leaving a huge swath of the planet, from Australia through southern and central Africa, empty of large, plains-dwelling animals. They died because they could not hide from the gamma rays. It came again during the end of the last Ice Age, and once again, the plains-dwelling animals, the mammoths, the mastodons, and so many others, were decimated.

  So violet is the highest, and therefore also the most dangerous light, and as I sit here looking into my lamp, I ask for direction, but get only silence in reply, and darkness in my mind’s eye.

  Purple is the light of evolution. But evolution also means death. Ask the dinosaurs—and ask, also, mankind. Are we destined to follow them into final species death?

  We have reached the end of the game. The rules are cast aside, but still we play on, deep into the night.

  And I am left with the question, What is my stone, what is my sling? How do I slay Goliath?

  13

  THE TRACK OF THE CAT

  Mack had moved swiftly through the countryside, but thought better of entering Raleigh during the day. He needed to work fast, but he also had to stay alive, and that was going to take some care. For all of his skills, anyone with a good rifle and a good eye would be a danger to him. He wished that he could have brought the young guard’s rifle with him, but if
it had been gone when he woke up, even though he would have had no memory of what had happened, he’d have known that something was wrong and raised the alarm.

  Hiding in a barn, Mack hadn’t rested, he hadn’t been able to. When so many people were waiting on you and things were deteriorating this fast, the tension was appalling.

  After the sun had at last set, he climbed down from the hayloft and surveyed the farm. It was as quiet as it had been when he’d come here. He needed food and, above all, water, so he decided to take a chance on the house.

  He’d had a great deal of field training, so he knew how unsafe it was to expose yourself to dark windows, but it couldn’t be helped.

  It was pointless to conceal himself, so he just strode forward.

  When he returned to the Acton Clinic, all exhausted and apologetic, he would use the same technique. He would let them lock him in again. The window was hopeless, but there was an escape route through the air-conditioning ducts in his room, and one of his jobs in Raleigh was to go to the county building department and look at the plans of the patient wing. He had not killed yet, but when he got back there, he was going to do a good deal of that, and a good deal of information extraction.

  By the time he reached the house, he knew that it was empty.

  The fridge was warm, but there was a half-finished bottle of Coke inside, flat and hot. He drank it all. The water taps didn’t even drip when he turned on the faucets, so he got a pitcher out of the cabinet and banged through the house to the nearest bathroom. There was water in the toilet tank, which he pitchered out and drank. Down the hall, he saw a woman’s legs in the doorway of a bedroom. The rest of her was sprawled out of sight.

  He left the house and found a pickup in the garage but its electronics were fried so he headed off down the road on foot. With the setting of the sun, the sky had turned an odd pinkish-purple color, something that was new. Pinkish purple, with long, shimmering sheets of green auroras cutting through it. Beautiful, indeed, and so could death be beautiful.