The Millennium Blues

by James Gunn

  “That's part of the input to my equations. The rest is data gathered from around the circle of fire. The experts tell me we're in for a renewed episode of volcanic activity, culminating toward the end of December. As a matter of fact, it's already starting. I saw eruptions in Kamchatka, Japan, the Philippines...."

  “You still haven't answered my first question: what you're doing here,” Kelso said. “If you think Papandayan is going to erupt in the next day or two—"

  “The next twelve hours if my equations are correct."

  “Why are you here?"

  “What do you mean?"

  “If it goes up,” Kelso said, “chances are it takes you along."

  Smith-Ng stared at Kelso blankly while several hundred feet below them the crater floor began to buckle. Kelso moved quickly for a big man. He ran to the recording instruments in the center of the room, vaulting the wicker enclosure. The crater floor opened like a china platter shattering in slow motion. Vapor poured out of the cracks and rose in columns that joined into one. Explosions rocked the hut. A block of stone as big as a small automobile hurtled past the window. Through the ascending ashes and descending mud as they mixed with the condensing steam, Smith-Ng saw, awe mixed with terror, glimpses of glowing lava rising in the volcano's throat like the anger of a vengeful god.

  It had all started out of frustration.

  The day after the impromptu celebration with his seminar class, Calley—she of the cool reserve and the tantalizing hand—had stopped by his office to say hello. On impulse, he had asked her if she were going to attend a regional meeting of mathematicians.

  She hadn't planned on it. Should she go, she had asked, her eyes on her professor.

  It was important to be involved early in one's academic career, Smith-Ng had said, avoiding the possible misinterpretations of a direct answer. To be seen. To experience the profession. To give a paper, even as a graduate student, was even better, but, of course, it was a little late for that.

  And all the while, as he had heard his words babbling as if they came from someone else and the perspiration beaded at his hairline, he could not avoid the realization that she had touched him intimately and that she knew that he was thinking about that touch as he spoke so professorially.

  Was he going, she had asked.

  “Well, yes,” he had said. “I have a paper to give.” It was, he had heard himself say, a paper that had emerged from the very seminar she had experienced. A paper about catastrophism, about the end of the world.

  “If it came from the seminar,” she had said, with a smile as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa's, “then I really ought to be there."

  He had almost forgotten the conversation—it played in his fantasies but not in his waking life—when he checked into the conference hotel. He was walking toward the elevator with his bag when a slender figure clothed in faded jeans and a lacy white blouse had intersected his path.

  “Professor Smith-Ng,” Calley had said. “I came to the meeting as you suggested. But there's one small problem."

  “Yes?"

  “There are no rooms available."

  “No rooms?” he had heard himself say. “Then you must take mine."

  She had taken his arm instead and half-urged him forward into the elevator. She had lifted his hand that did not hold the bag—what is she doing? he had time to wonder—and looked at the key held tightly in it. “Oh, I couldn't do that,” she had said, and had pushed the button for the floor of the room inscribed on the key.

  After that everything had happened as inevitably as in his dreams and almost as satisfyingly. They had left the room only when he gave his talk, and then only because Calley insisted, and once when, tired of room service, they had met at a restaurant remote from the conference hotel, even though Calley had scoffed at his caution and had asked if he were ashamed of her.

  He had not even cared that his paper went over badly and that he had been challenged from the floor to back up his theories with checkable predictions. “This isn't catastrophism,” the mathematician from Purdue had shouted. “This is charlatanism."

  When he had returned home, exhausted from his regained youth but spiritually reinvigorated, he had found the courage to leave his wife and to rent an apartment. Not catastrophism indeed. With the surprise of his wife still swirling like a halo around his head, he had called Calley and heard her cool voice saying that she was going to Europe for the summer.

  “With whom?” he had asked, hearing himself once again.

  “Now, Professor,” her voice had come over the telephone, “you sound like my father."

  He was proud of himself that he had not protested or pleaded or reminded her of her breathless words in the dark. He knew the dubious value of words in the dark, even though his own, as he had demonstrated upon his return, had endured into the day. “Have a good trip,” he had said and hung up gently.

  Everything was catastrophe.

  In an unprecedented act of hubris, before he could reflect upon it and conjure up a congerie of reasons why such an act would be unwise and an accompanying set of scenarios in which he came off the fool or the buffoon, he had telephoned Lisa. Surprisingly enough, she still had been in town, and, even more surprising, not surprised to hear his voice.

  She had accepted his invitation to dinner and enjoyed, with good appetite, the meal he had prepared with his own hands, wiping the last bit of sauce from her spaghetti plate with a bit of crusty bread, fishing the last bit of salad from the wooden bowls he had purchased just that day at the so-called import store, draining the last bit of Chianti from her glass. And she had come easily out of her sweater and jeans, her breasts even more erotic than he had imagined, her hips even rounder. As a matter of fact, it had been Lisa who had asked him for a tour of his new apartment and had turned to him, looking up provocatively out of the corner of her blue eyes, asking whether he had baptized the new mattress. And it had been Lisa who, fulfilling all his fantasies, had removed his clothing as well as her own and had made love to him.

  Why hadn't it been enough? Why, in the afterglow of satiety, holding her ample flesh, seeing her red hair scattered upon his pillow, had he asked her why she had accepted his invitation, why she had not been surprised.

  “Calley said you would call,” she had said.

  He had paused before he responded, trying to master the anger rising in his throat. “You mean I'm that predictable?” he had asked evenly.

  She had laughed, heartily, unaffectedly. “All men are predictable."

  “And you talk about them?"

  “Why not? Just the way guys talk about women."

  “You talked about me."

  “I'm not one of her best friends. But we both knew you were hot."

  “And Calley passed me along. How thoughtful of her."

  “You were the one who called."

  “What did she say about me?"

  Lisa had smiled. “That you were boyish and sweet and terribly grateful.” She had started to say something else and then had stopped and shaken her head. She had pulled his head down to her chest; her hand had moved down his body. “Talk is good,” she had said, “but sometimes action is better."

  “What else did Calley say?” Smith-Ng had insisted, his face pressed into those breasts he had admired so much.

  “Nothing,” she had said, her hand teasing him back toward amorousness.

  “I want to know."

  “If you insist,” Lisa had said lightly, “she said you were enthusiastic but you needed guidance."

  Although she had been with him twice after that, nothing was the same. The second time Lisa had said, “You really don't want me, do you? You just want to want me."

  When she hadn't resonded to his calls, he had turned to volcanoes. They might be temperamental, but they were always there for him.

  The route that had brought Smith-Ng to Papandayan had taken him around the western arc of the circle of fire. The seemingly interminable flight from the U.S. had passed near Kamchatka, with i
ts dozen or so active volcanoes, before landing at Narita Airport outside Tokyo. Dust and ashes from the eruption of Bandai-san about 120 miles to the north still were being scoured from ledges and swept from the streets. Even had there been time, Smith-Ng could not have explored the strange philosophic resignation with which the majority of the Japanese accepted the breathing presence of their islands. But the airport, always crowded, teemed with further hordes who refused to share the fate that might await Japan.

  Departing, the airplane had passed over the lava-filled mouth of Fuji-san, and, a couple of hours later, over the troubled Philippines, shaken by earthquakes, volcanic explosions, and revolutions. The airport at Singapore, five and a half hours after take-off from Tokyo, had been quiet, but whiffs of sulfurous smoke from Sumatra had drifted by the windows. Singapore, however, had been nervously quiet as it digested the effects on the world's economy of the approaching third millennium.

  Only half an hour away, Djakarta had astonished Smith-Ng with its contrasts. In Singapore the past was carefully preserved among the skyscrapers; in Djakarta it existed side by side with the future. From the air this city of nine million had looked like a patchwork quilt of green trees and mossy, orange-tiled roofs, all surrounded by innumerable villages. On the ground Djakarta was divided by the ten-lane Jolan Thamrin.

  An English-speaking Indonesian businessman who had sat beside him in the van from the airport had pointed out the bongkaran to the west, the packing-crate warrens set among bubbling, black-water canals in which people bathed and brushed their teeth while others defecated into the same water from bamboo scaffolds. To the east was Menteng, the white-washed mansions of old wealth and new.

  Along Jolan Thamrin itself were foreign embassies, luxury hotels, glass-and-steel towers, and the 430-feet-tall marble National Monument capped by 77 pounds of pure, flaming gold. Smith-Ng had stood for a moment at the canopied glass entrance to his hotel and looked at a scene he could never have imagined: modern automobiles and buses competing with bicycles and motor scooters and pedicab drivers. Transvestites parading along the sidewalk; banci his Indonesian companion had called them, and the prostitutes, WTS's, which translated as “women of wounded morals.” And the peddlers pushing carts loaded with Gucci-like bags and Levi-like jeans and the fast-food venders with their smoking kabobs and goat's feet soup. The street had been filled with odors, the familiar ones of internal-combustion engines and human wastes and the strange ones of spices and tropical blossoms like the frangipani.

  Above the noise of the traffic and the shoulder-to-shoulder people had come a strange music like Arabic melodies set to a rock beat. The figures of the people were slight—he felt grossly overfed and overweight among them—and the faces were brown and handsome. The women were beautiful, and the men were even more beautiful. Before he had left Djakarta for Bandung and the resort city of Garut not far from Papandayan in the company of an English-speaking driver, Smith-Ng had begun to distinguish differences among the various races mingled together in Indonesia that his companion had pointed out: the Javanese, the Sundanese, the Balinese, the Buginese, and the Mandonese. And, of course, the Chinese.

  For the trip the driver had brought along a native lunch of salted eggs and rice cakes in banana leaves, which he shared with Smith-Ng, who, improvidently, had brought nothing. He had escorted Smith-Ng to the foot of Papandayan and then, looking up at the smoking peak, had refused to go farther. “There have been omens,” he had said.

  “Omens?” Smith-Ng had repeated.

  The Javanese had gestured broadly. “Omens. The Bharatagadha may be at hand."

  “The Bharatagadha?” Smith-Ng had asked, but the driver would say nothing more. Smith-Ng had shrugged and started his difficult, panting way to the top of the mountain of old lava—all 8,744 feet of it.

  With the world exploding around him, Smith-Ng had time to feel a moment of triumph before the realization of what was happening sank in. Catastrophes were better considered from a distance. Close up they were dramatic, but too final. He had always been terrified of instability. Throughout his career he had tried to protect himself from abrupt change. Perhaps catastrophism, the search for mathematical certainty, was his way of appeasing the gods, much like the prayers of the Indonesians.

  But as these reflections crossed his mind he was already turning toward Kelso. “What do we do now?” he asked.

  “Die, I'd guess.” Kelso opened a drawer in the table. He pulled out a gas mask and tossed it to Smith-Ng before he brought out another for himself. “But you are in luck. Normally there's two of us here, but Greg took a week off. Put that on."

  By the time Smith-Ng had struggled into the unfamiliar hood and adjusted the straps, Kelso had opened a gate in the wicker, motioned him inside the railing, and fastened the gate behind him. “Unlike you,” Kelso said, his voice distorted by the mask he was wearing, his face looking alien in the gathering gloom, “we may not be able to predict the future, but we prepare for it."

  He lifted a protective plastic shield from a switch on the table and pressed it closed. Cables exploded below the table. He pushed another button and the walls of the hut fell outward. The volcano's wrath struck them. Heat blasted against Smith-Ng's face and neck and hands but did nothing to warm the cold terror that came with the realization of imminent death....

  He heard a rushing sound like gas escaping, and felt someone shaking him. Kelso's goggled face was close to his. The floor shifted under his feet. Panic flooded his throat.

  “Hang on!” Kelso shouted and moved Smith-Ng's hands to the wicker railing.

  Smith-Ng clung to it, even as the wicker jerked under his hands and he felt his body moving, rising. “This is it,” he had time to think. “The top of the volcano has blown away.” For him the millennial year was over; he would not be around to see the end of it. And then he realized that they were rising too slowly for that. He looked up. The fabric that had been draped below the ceiling now was curved toward him like a balloon. He looked down and saw, through occasional breaks in the smoke, the complete jagged circle of the volcano's mouth slowly filling with red vomit.

  Then they were above the smoke, high in the air, drifting above green valleys, leaving Papandayan and its waking god behind. “We're going to live,” he said. As Kelso looked at him he realized that the vulcanologist had removed his mask. “We're going to live!” he shouted joyously. Kelso nodded and motioned to Smith-Ng's mask. Only then did Smith-Ng realize that not only were his hands clenched to the railing of what now clearly was the basket of a balloon but that he could not possibly release them to remove the mask. Moreover, as the balloon drifted along the length of Java, high enough that he could see ocean on either side, he realized that they were not safe and that he was terribly, desperately afraid of heights.

  The basket swung in the clear, bright air, and he clung to it, forgetting Calley and Lisa, and his wife, afraid even to hope that he would set his feet on the solid ground again.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  September 24, 2000

  Barbara Shepherd

  Barbara Shepherd was all tied up. Her arms, stretched above her head, were fastened together at the wrist with rough twine, and her wrists were bound to the handle of a pitchfork whose tines had been driven deep into the dirt floor of the horse stall. Her legs were stretched just as tightly in the other direction, and her ankles, bound together like her wrists, were fastened to the pillar on the other side of the stall.

  Isaiah had knotted them with the skill of a farmer used to tying bales of hay. The twine, bristling with coarse, loose fibers, cut into Shepherd's soft skin, and the straw beneath her, odorous with horse urine and dung, was lumpy beneath her back, protected only by the thin flannel of a nightgown.

  Isaiah had come for her in the night, creeping into the women's barracks with the grace peculiar to a big man, awakening her with a rough hand over her mouth and a whisper in her ear. “Come!” he said. She had been summoned to the service of God. Mutely she rose and followed him into the chill
night, without a robe, without shoes or slippers.

  In the months before she had sought out this sanctuary, she had read stories in those scandalous supermarket weeklies about Isaiah's “marriages.” He was, they had said, the self-proclaimed Prophet of the Second Coming, and Prophets were not bound by the rules of lesser men. She had not believed the stories. Recently, however, she had overhead some of the other women mentioning private audiences with the Prophet, and noticed some of the comelier women looking aside and smiling. Even then she had not believed: Isaiah was a man of God, and what need had he of the consolations of the flesh?

  But if the stories were true, if this was the contribution she could make to the Prophet, if she could ease for a moment his awesome responsibilities and comfort his terrible encounters with the Almighty, well, she had given herself to lesser men for lesser purposes. Isaiah had promised that his flock would be saved. She believed that Judgment Day would come upon the world within a few months. And in that Judgment Day, she believed, the sins of the flesh would be melted away and they, the Saved, would be reborn as pure spirit.

  She had not struggled when he bound her nor even when he swore because she was too short to tie between pillars and he had to substitute the pitchfork, driving it angrily into the earthen floor with all the strength of his massive back and shoulders. If this was his will and his way, her chosen way was to submit without question. But for some minutes now she had heard him digging in the soft dirt in the far corner of the barn, and when he returned with a damp spade in his hand, she would have screamed if he had not silenced her with an upraised hand.

  He tossed the spade into the corner of the stall. “It is not meet,” he said, the bass rumble of his preacher's voice bouncing off the bare wooden walls, “for a sinner to share the Kingdom of God."

  For a confused moment she thought he was referring to himself. But then she realized that he meant her. She was a sinner, she knew, and all her revelation, all her conversion, all her humiliation of the flesh, all her obedience, had come to this.