Solstice

by David Hewson

  'Search me. But one thing I know is we're going nowhere near it. I'm keeping this altitude just so we're nice and safe and as close to the airfield as need be.'

  She stared at the object in the sky. The colour was changing occasionally. At the perimeter of the ellipsis it turned blue and green in flickering waves of flame.

  'If I didn't know better,' the co-pilot said, 'I'd reckon that was ball lightning.'

  'Not that anyone knows what ball lightning is,' the captain muttered. 'Or has ever photographed it. Or proved it does exist. And, if my memory serves me right' — he stared at the golden shape ahead of them — 'it's generally supposed to be about the size of a soccer ball.'

  'Yes,' she said, and found it impossible to take her eyes off the object. 'But it is some kind of lightning.' The aircraft rocked again. Not so bad this time. There was a sound close by, like escaping air.

  'Shit,' the co-pilot said, and started to press gingerly at the bank of switches and buttons in front of him. Vegas lay in front of them like a giant lightning conductor, the metallic spine of the Strip running through its core. Silence invaded the cabin. On the panel the lights went dead. The two pilots stared at each other.

  'It's moving,' Helen said. They looked ahead and saw that the rim of this miniature, elongated sun was now almost completely blue. What looked like flames or wild electrical discharges ran flickering along the skin.

  The captain watched it for a second or two and came to a swift decision. 'To hell with McCarran. I'm taking this thing into Nellis whether they like it or not. And fast.'

  She watched them run through the checks on the panel, push and pull the levers in front of them. Nothing much seemed to be working on the plane. The nose had slipped beneath the horizon, and the pilot was working the machine physically, with his hands, with his feet. The smell of ozone, of burning wiring, was starting to became noticeable in the cabin.

  'We lost the flaps,' the co-pilot said quietly. 'No power, no flaps.'

  The captain shrugged. 'Oh my. Well, I always did want to do this with someone else's ship.' And he turned the wheel full to the left, then kicked in hard with the right rudder, putting the plane into a sharp side slip. The aircraft jerked itself uncomfortably around in the air, the nose twitching to the right, no horizon visible, and it felt as if they would fall out of the sky any second. She watched the altimeter. It was unwinding at three thousand feet a minute. This crazy attitude made it difficult to see what was going on in the city. The wing obscured the view. All there was out to the left of the plane was a sheet of gold and flickering blue. She closed her eyes. The plane, the world, seemed out of joint. She tried to think of Michael Lieberman, and what he had said. He was probably right. They attacked this problem as if it were something that could be cured with conventional force, conventional procedures. Charley Pascal was smarter than that. Even more, she was only part of the problem, almost a symptom of it.

  Her head hurt. Maybe a nosebleed was imminent. She screwed up her eyes, tried to will away the pain. Then felt the plane move again, swing forward, back into balance, return to something like normality. Against her instincts, Helen Wagner lifted her head and saw a long, empty runway approaching quickly in front of them, military planes parked either side of the extended finger of asphalt.

  The co-pilot operated a lever on the floor and something shifted with a bang beneath them. 'Gear down,' he said.

  'All right,' the captain muttered, and toyed gently with the wheel. The aircraft kissed the ground with scarcely a noise, and began to decelerate along the asphalt runway of Nellis. She didn't want to look but there was no avoiding it. To her left, the fiery ellipse was descending, streaking blue and green and red as it came to earth.

  'Lightning,' the co-pilot said. 'Has to be.'

  'I think,' she said, 'we should get out of the plane. As quickly as possible. Get away from anything that is flammable or liable to attract an electrical discharge.'

  The co-pilot’s opaque sunglasses were fixed on her. A line of blood stood hard and red in one of his nostrils. 'You mean we just stand out in the open, ma'am? And wait for this thing to come our way?'

  CHAPTER 39

  Shared Love

  Yasgur's Farm, 1908 UTC

  'It's a bad place,' Gunther said. 'It deserves what's coming to it.'

  Sundog was primed now, sat in the sky with fire in its belly. The solar cycle was on the rise. Charley felt nervous. All the tests, all the minor experiments they had conducted — everything before had been a prelude to this event. They had learned so much, how inflexible and difficult to control the satellite could be. They had learned too how important it was to monitor the flux of the cycle, to time the moment they captured it precisely so that they stole as much of its energy as possible.

  But there was still too much guesswork, and the cycle itself was so unpredictable. Time was running out for them as much as for anyone else. They had to be realistic, they had to accept that there were limits to what they could achieve. This was a gigantic instrument of destruction, but it concerned her that the precise way in which it would manifest itself was still, to some extent, in doubt. In this mix of fire and radiation, this whirring digital demon that slipped into the networks of the world and devoured them from inside, there remained uncertainties. Some experiment, some proof was needed, not just as a sign for the world, but also for her own peace of mind.

  'No,' she said, bringing her mind back onto the small circle of figures around her. 'This isn't a time to think of good and bad, Gunther. We're not avenging angels. We're not punishing anyone. This is about a change in direction. A return to a natural order. Equilibrium. Balance.'

  She closed her eyes and smiled: It was a bad place all the same. She could remember the gaudy, heartless streets, the phony smiles they met everywhere, the tawdry glamour. Vegas, it seemed to her, epitomized what was false and dishonest and wicked about humankind. That it should present such an opportunity to make the sign gave her no regret whatsoever.

  Billy Jo asked, 'What will happen to them? Will they all die?'

  'We don't know,' Joe Katayama, sitting cross-legged on the floor, said. 'How can we? Not all of them. Maybe not even many. That's not the point.'

  You could think and you could dream and you could calculate, Charley thought, but in the end there was always the mystery. People misunderstood the signs: It was believing that the mystery could be removed that led you into seeking your own petty godhood in the first place.

  'We walked in darkness,' she said. 'And then Gaia gave us hope, gave us light. For everything. For the world. Can't you feel it?'

  Joe Katayama said, a thin smile starting to crack his face, 'I can feel it.' And someone else too. In a moment, there was laughter in the room, and it was genuine, she knew that. It would be strange if they didn't feel some foreboding, but still there was a close, compelling certainty that drove them forward. They remained a family even in the face of this forced dispersal.

  'And you think,' Gunther said, 'that we really will change things? So soon?'

  She nodded urgently. 'Of course. Why would we be here otherwise? This is a world ripe for change, Gunther. Like a caterpillar emerging from the chrysalis. Think how much we have achieved already. Closing the markets. Shaking the apparatus of the state.'

  'But,' Billy Jo said, 'people aren't exactly changing right now. I've been following what's going on through the Web, on TV. People are scared. But I get the impression that for some of them this is just a way of getting a free day or two off work while they wait for the government to fix it. Like a power outage or an earthquake.'

  'What do you expect them to say?' Charley replied instantly. 'That their world really is about to end? Change happens in your heart. Unless it begins there, it means nothing at all. And we will touch their hearts, we will make them look at themselves with fresh eyes.'

  Joe Katayama said, 'It's a point, Charley. Maybe we ought to have told them a little more.'

  'No,' she said. 'People are blind. People are st
upid. They want proof. So we'll give them proof. And when it happens, it will be so big, so unavoidable, they'll know.'

  They didn't argue. They never argued these days. 'The proof starts now. In Vegas. And here too. We have to move on. We have to disperse.'

  They watched her, hanging on every word. 'We all know, through this shared love we possess, where this leads. We can't inflict this damage, this pain on these people — and that will be real — without showing them that we share it ourselves. This is our shared grief, our common legacy. We all move forward, hand in hand, to this fate.'

  There was silence in the hot, airless room. Some were holding hands. Most looked happy. In this state, such closeness between them, it became easy to think with a single mind, she thought. It was when people were separated, moved outside the family, that they ran the risk of becoming lost.

  'We will redeem ourselves, like them, in pace with the world. Joe?' He looked up at her from the floor, a thin smile on his face, content, she thought, like all of them. And he would be the last to leave the nest. He was needed to see this final stage to its conclusion.

  'Yes?'

  'How many of us are there now?'

  'Twenty-four.'

  'Twice the number as there were disciples,' Charley said, happy, relishing the love in their faces. 'Slowly, over the next eighteen hours, we disperse. You must leave the farm, go back into the outside world. The die is cast here. We've got the programs to prime Sundog. Someone has to stay, see it through. From now on you must start on a new journey. What we've achieved is good and important. But people will kill you for it if they know. Until the awakening, until they see this is a new beginning, we remain silent. We remain apart. We wait.'

  Billy Jo put up her hand. There were tears in her eyes. Charley watched them roll down her cheeks. Tears of joy, she guessed. There was, in this fast-diminishing space in front of them, a hard, gripping form of ecstasy that wouldn't let them go.

  'You're dying, Charley,' Billy Jo said. 'We won't see you again.'

  'We're all dying. I'm no different than any of you, except that I have this knowledge that lets me say goodbye to you now.'

  'All the same. I thought I'd be here. I thought I'd hold your hand.'

  Charley touched the soft white cotton of her shirt with pale, shaking fingers. 'I wish it could be like that. But we can't jeopardize the very reason we're here. We're smaller than Gaia.'

  Gunther nodded. 'Charley's right, Billy Jo. This is the way it has to be.'

  'Okay.'

  'Only love lies between us,' Charley said, 'and that love survives wherever we are.' She leaned down from the wheelchair, took Billy Jo's hand, and Gunther's too. 'If you like, if Joe is agreeable, you can be the first to leave. Together.'

  They looked at each other and smiled.

  CHAPTER 40

  Trompe l'Oeil

  Las Vegas, 1944 UTC

  Room 2341 of the Mirage Hotel looked directly south along the Strip, out past Caesar's Palace in the adjoining block, with its marble figures and fake porticoes and colonnades glistening white in the midday heat, past Bellagio, New York New York, and the big gleaming hulk of MGM, with the towers of Excalibur and the peak of the Luxor pyramid in the distance. Somewhere beyond that, Sam Jenkinson dimly recognized, was the airport where they had arrived, jet-lagged and exhausted, from England two days before. But no circling planes marked its location. The emergency had arrived in Vegas.

  They were in the new Dali wing of the Mirage. Here everything was surrealistic. The elevators looked as if they had been modelled out of naked flesh. The clocks melted on the wall (and still worked). Even the waitresses, wandering around the floor area trying to sell you cigarettes and Keno tickets, looked like something out of a nightmare: huge feathered tresses, gold swimsuits, bizarre makeup, but not on their chests; their chests gleamed out into the big casino room everywhere, twin peaks of flesh, bobbing between the tables.

  He stared at the big golden sky down from Luxor, took a swig of rum and Coke, then looked at his wife. Marion Jenkinson was fifty-seven, one year younger than her husband. She lay on the bed dressed in a pale red and lime-green polyester jumpsuit, one she bought the day before from Emporio while he was in the bar. Her clothes matched the room. The standard lamp was in green verdigris copper, twisting round on itself like a serpent. The bathroom door had some painting on it that looked vaguely familiar: a woman, half-naked, turning to sand. And on the ceiling, watching you all the time, huge, staring eyes, Dali eyes, with big eyebrows and, as a recurring motif, that twirled-up waxed moustache. He gazed out the window, looking puzzled.

  'What's wrong, Sam?'

  'Nothing…'

  Marion Jenkinson climbed off the bed and came and sat next to him at the window. 'It's very bright out there.' In the distance, beyond Luxor, somewhere close to where the airport ought to be, he guessed, the sky was simply golden, as if the sun were so bright it had turned into a local corona.

  'It's moving,' they said, almost in unison.

  He shut his eyes for a moment. The day was so bright it began to make the back of his pupils hurt with a pain that was like a long, slow bruise. When he opened them, the huge golden shape was directly behind the Luxor pyramid, and it was vast, like the filament from some vast light bulb. As it got closer, it appeared more complex too. An incandescent blue, like electric flame, ran along its skin.

  'What is it, Sam?'

  'I don't know.' He surveyed the street. No crowds, no lines of people. Hardly anybody at all. It was a hot day, he thought. Maybe everybody would stay indoors to watch this kind of show, whatever it was.

  'It is fireworks,' she said, and he was aware of her arm on his shoulder.

  'I suppose so.' And thought: No.

  The storm — it was some kind of storm, he thought, it had to be — was now engulfing the peak of the Luxor pyramid, and from its underbelly fell what looked like giant gleaming hailstones, hundreds, even thousands of them, pouring out from the churning guts of the thing, down into the dark glass, down to the ground. Then it moved on. The great golden cloud was swamping the fairy-tale towers of Excalibur. It was impossible to see what was left in its wake. The shimmering golden ellipse covered everything behind.

  He looked across the street. As he watched, the lights started to go out. First on the Flamingo, then on the Imperial, finally on Harrah's, opposite them. There was a distinct electronic ping in the room. The TV died. The air-conditioning died. The sudden, unexpected silence seemed to occupy the entire room. Outside, the golden cloud had reached Caesar's. Spheres the size of soccer balls were tumbling down from its livid underbelly, some spinning on their axis, the movement visible by a whirling filament of streaks in their sides, some pure gold, all the way down, a few turning pale, dying in the sparkling air.

  'Sam…' she said.

  'I'm thinking, woman. Give me time.'

  The cloud moved on and on. He went to the door of the room, threw it open, stared across at the elevator. A bunch of people stood around it, banging the buttons, swearing, looking frightened, some pushing at the door to the fire stairs. Marion was at his shoulder.

  'I can't go down them stairs,' she said. 'Not twenty-three floors, and who's saying it's safe in there anyway?'

  'Nobody.' He pushed her back into the room, wishing she'd be quiet. Behind them the window was now pure gold. The cloud was enveloping the Mirage, and with it came the shower. They sat on the bed and watched the light show outside the glass. The painted eyes on the ceiling, so many, bright and huge and vivid, seemed to be laughing at them.

  The picture outside the window was changing. The light was no longer quite so solid. Elements were moving in it. Maybe this was how they formed, he thought. Maybe this was the beginning of the ball shower. She clutched his hand. Her skin was wet with sweat. The temperature seemed to have climbed ten degrees. There was a thin, acrid smell, like ozone, and, above them, a chirruping, fizzing noise that seemed to fall down on the room, with a physical movement, like rain.

 
'It can't get in,' she said. 'It can't break the window, for God's sake.'

  'Right. We just wait. It'll soon be over and then…'

  Making a sound like a nest of snakes, a gleaming, fiery ball appeared at the window and hung there, as if it were looking at them. It was a good three feet across, blue light flickering across its skin, and revolving slowly, like a globe turning on its axis. Briefly, it rose a few feet in the air, as if it were examining the sea of eyes painted on the ceiling.

  'Shit,' he said quietly.

  'Sam, it can't come in.'

  'No.'

  The ball came down to their level, came right up to the window, so close he expected to see the skin pushed back, like a nose pressed up to the glass. Then it moved forward again and he thought she was going to snap off his hand. It was protruding through the glass, two-thirds of it outside the room, one-third in. And growing. Moving. Behind it, two more spheres had appeared, were hovering in the same way, like mute animals, catching the scent of prey.

  There was a noise like the firing of a small gun, and then the first sphere plopped through the window, hung in the air, eighteen inches off the ground. The room was filled with the sound of hissing; it seemed to come at them from every direction. The smell of ozone was unbearable, and there was a sense of heightened atmospheric pressure, the sort you got when a plane was landing. He looked at his wife. Her nose was bleeding profusely. She had her hand to it, her mouth open, the blood dripping in.

  'Sam,' she said thickly. And then it was gone. The ball raced past them, heat brushing their legs, into the open door of the bathroom opposite, skittered around the four walls, hovered over the toilet, and disappeared over the edge of the bowl.

  'Bloody hell,' he said. A blue light hovered over the pink ceramic unit and steam was rising from the hidden water. Then the basin exploded with a roar, ripping off the half-open door, sending shards of porcelain blasting through the room. They ducked beneath the bedclothes and waited for the noise to die down.