The Millennium Blues

by James Gunn

  In any case, the deforestation of the Amazon basin would pay off only in disappointment. The rain-forest soils would never support agriculture, and the last great rain forest on the planet, with all its untapped resources, would have been sacrificed for nothing. The rational solution would be for the developed nations of the world to compensate Brazil for leaving the Amazon untouched, but the Brazilians were too proud to accept charity and Krebs held out few hopes for rational solutions to any of the problems of the world.

  Instead the scene below had seemed to sum up for Krebs the sorry state of the world—unbearable beauty trembling on the brink of extinction.

  And then the flight began preparing for its landing in Rio de Janeiro, So Sebastio do Rio de Janeiro.

  The Aeroporto International do Galeo had been like international airports anywhere in the world: wide expanses of concrete and glass crowded by people anxious to be elsewhere, but this one had been clean and new and conveniently arranged in two buildings, each one of them two half circles separated by motorways. And the faces had been browner, the clothing, more colorful, and the odors, spicier.

  The Bolivian who had met her had been a surprise; he had looked slender because he was tall, but Krebs had had the feeling that under his tan sport coat and off-white slacks was a well-muscled body. His dark hair had been as curly as a Roman god's, his brown eyes had been warm and knowledgeable, and his face had been so beautiful she had caught her breath.

  “My name is Raul,” he had said, “and you must be Sally Krebs, news producer for CNN,” and, as soon as they had collected her luggage and had instructed a taxi driver how to follow them with the cameraman, they had been off in a limousine waiting at the curb. The limousine had been long and black and polished, but the chauffeur, like the taxi driver, had looked as if he had experienced a lifetime of trouble.

  They had toured the broad avenues and older streets of Rio, passing through or around the hills that sometimes ran clear to the sea. They had toured the broad, white beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema with its palm trees and their blue expanse of the southern Atlantic and their tanned, beautiful people in bathing suits. The cameraman had a picture of the maté-man with his chrome-plated tea-barrel threading his way through the dozens of soccer games on Copacabana Beach, and a bather in a bikini with his head stuck in a plastic orange telephone stall along the mosaic pavement. They had passed by one of the great seaports of the world, with its rows of giant freighters automatically loading and unloading their cargoes, and the rich suburb of Botafogo with its beach sheltered from the Atlantic surf. They had stopped in the old city to promenade along the Ruo do Ouvidor from the market place to the church of So Francisco de Paula. They had viewed the old city palace of the fugitive Portuguese sovereign Dom Joo VI, the Monroe palace, the cathedral, and the church of Our Lady of Candelaria with its twin towers and graceful dome. They had seen the cliffs of the perpendicular mountains held together with band-aids of cement. And they had taken a cable car to the summit of Sugar Loaf, that landmark for generations of sailors hungry for land and the sensual delights of Rio, where they had seen much of the city spread out before them like a rich man's toy, and the funicular railway to the statue of Christ the Redeemer on Corcovado, the peak called Hunchback, where, up close, Krebs had felt dwarfed by its immensity but curiously blessed by its outspread arms.

  A feeling of peace had spread through her, such as she had not known since she was a child, and she wished she had taken the time to go inside the cathedral to cross herself and perhaps even to enter the confessional and unburden her sins to a priest who could not understand English but could give her absolution anyway. But even then, under the spell of the giant figure in a foreign land, she had known that absolution did not come so easily. First she had to forgive herself, and that was difficult, not because her sins were so great but because a concern with individual salvation in a world that might not see another year, much less another millennium, had seemed peculiarly self-centered.

  That had been her last moment of tranquility. Raul had taken her from the residences of the fortunate to the favelas, the shanty towns built of abandoned bits of wood and metal and cardboard, scattered through and around Rio. Just as they had seen and taped the sunny views of the city, Krebs and her cameraman had recorded the lives of the poor and the homeless, the adults drudging in a bit of soil or nodding in a patch of shade, the children, their thin faces hungry for food or money, surrounding the strangers and their shiny vehicles with their grimy hands outstretched. The smell of urine and feces and of rotting food had been almost unbearable. Raul had scattered cruzeiros like royal largess, but Krebs had held back, telling herself that she needed to retain her journalistic objectivity although she had realized later that this was only an attempt to insulate herself from the misery she was unable to alleviate.

  “Where do they come from?” she had asked Raul later, knowing the answer but wanting to voice her protest anyway.

  “From the land, drawn to the promise of the city."

  “But surely they would be better off where they are?"

  “They do not see it that way. Maybe if they owned the land, but they are only peasants, and between rent, taxes, and weather, they have no hope. And now there are generations that have known nothing but this."

  “But what will become of them?"

  “The young ones will go into prostitution, the boys as well as the girls, or into drugs; the old ones and many of the young will die of disease or of malnutrition, or of both; a few will escape through crime, or athletic or artistic ability, or luck. That slender possibility is what keeps them coming."

  The conversation had paused while they sipped their dark Brazilian coffee at a cafe back along the Rua do Ouvidor, where Krebs had indeed entered the church of So Francisco de Paula and blessed herself with holy water but had found nobody there to hear her confession. “You had a purpose in showing me these things today,” she had said, “in my weakened condition."

  “I could say that you were more susceptible,” Raul had said, “but the truth is that events are not. What is scheduled to happen is timed for the day of your arrival. We regret your weariness—your jet lag—but a more leisurely schedule would allow time for discovery by the authorities."

  “And the favelas?"

  “What you have seen today symbolizes the gulf between the poor and the rich. Here within this city we can see living side by side the forces that can tear the world apart."

  “And you're going to give those forces a little help,” she had said skeptically.

  “Charity is the bribe wealth pays to poverty; welfare is governmental charity aimed at keeping rebellion just below the level of explosion. But eventually inequalities raise pressures too high, and a timely revolution is like a safety valve."

  “The state of the world may be more fragile than you think. Mixed with the other millennial concerns, your revolution may destroy the whole vessel."

  “Well, we shall see,” Raul had said cheerfully. “We shall have a late dinner this evening, and at midnight what you have come for will happen. Meanwhile, I will take you to your hotel and give you a chance for a siesta so that you will be fresh and ready to record history."

  As they had parted in the lobby of Copacabana Palace Hotel, Raul had taken her shoulder in a strong right hand. The touch had almost unhinged the backs of her knees. “You find me sexy,” he had said. It hadn't been a question, and she hadn't known whether to admit or deny it. “Mostly it is the allure of power you feel,” he had continued. “You are a desirable woman and I would find much pleasure in making love to you, but I want you to know that I am as celibate as a priest. I am wedded to the revolution."

  As he had parted from her, the imprint of his hand still burning her flesh, she hadn't known whether to laugh or to cry. Instead she had gone to her room and collapsed, only to dream of a whole city going up in flames, of mobs careening through smoke-filled streets, and bullets screaming all around her in the night.

  The spotlighte
d figure on the peak seemed to move, to rise in the air as if some new Assumption were at hand, as if a humanity's aspirations for eternal life had put on the fragile reality of flesh, had become what it represented, and now was ascending into the heavens whence it came. Then the sound of the explosion assaulted their ears, and Krebs realized that the terrible event she had dreaded was happening and she could not look away. The guerrilla group that Raul represented, the Dark Road, had chosen the dark road indeed. It had blown up the giant statue of Christ the Redeemer.

  For a moment the figure climbed before it pitched forward slowly, and, like Icarus shedding his feathers, crumpled to the ground in fragments beyond their line of vision. All they could see was a cloud of smoke and debris rising in the spotlights the statue had vacated.

  The first words Krebs spoke were to the cameraman. “Did you get it?” she asked, and then to Raul, “What a stupid thing to do. It will alienate everyone, even your followers."

  He shrugged. “You hated it, didn't you? I hated it. But we must destroy in order to build. We must free ourselves from our unreasoning attachment to the past. We must destroy the symbols that enslave us."

  At that moment she saw Raul for what he had claimed: He was the priest of a new religion, and in order for that religion to succeed, he had to tear down the old one. As sirens echoed from the hills and the staccato sounds of automatic gunfire seemed like the sound effects for a horror movie, she understood that what she had seen in him was only a reflection of his unattainability. He had given himself to an ideal and he had nothing left for any woman. The virtue of the myths he dealt in were irrelevant: People could dedicate themselves as completely to folly as to truth. And as she turned away from this romantic revolutionary and her own romantic illusions, she realized that she had stumbled across another truth about the condition of the world in this millennial year.

  That was how she edited the tape. She removed any scenes that included Raul, and dispatched it, an hour later, to the Atlanta office. Later she discovered it had become the centerpiece for a roundup of the atrocities committed that night around the world and for the terrorist attacks in Uruguay, Venezuela, and Peru, in another Georgia and Azerbaijan, in South Africa and Israel and the Sudan, in Laos and the Philippines.... It was the best of times; it was the worst of times; it was a time of revolutions, and Krebs's tapes had recorded the most dramatic event of them all.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  December 7, 2000

  Murray Smith-Ng

  The view was spectacular. The sky was a bottomless lake inverted overhead, the redwoods towering in the distance were green-helmeted guards, and here on the cliffs above the white-capped surf of the Pacific the gulls circled and the dried, brown grass rustled in the ocean-scented breeze. But Murray Smith-Ng could think only of his predicament.

  “We're not asking you for miracles,” Victoria said. She was a tall, slender young woman with dark hair and dark eyes and a spectacular chest that she displayed in a low-cut, tightly fitted blouse tucked into her blue jeans. “Just to practice your profession."

  Smith-Ng still wore the clothes in which he had been abducted from the streets of San Francisco, the dark-gray suit with the white shirt and the red and blue regimental tie. His kidnappers had offered him other garments, but as long as he was in academic regalia, so to speak, he had a finger-hold on the real world.

  “You overestimate my abilities, young woman,” he said. His voice wavered on “abilities,” but he hoped she didn't notice. The illusion of cool confidence might be his only hope. “I am a mathematician, not a fortune-teller."

  She sat with her back against a flat upcropping of rock. In her right hand she swung a wooden staff idly back and forth as if to orchestrate her remarks. She seemed totally at ease, and yet she had removed from her waist-band a blue-black, large-barreled automatic and placed it by her side. “But,” she said, “you predicted the eruption at Papandayan."

  She mispronounced the name, as he had before he arrived in Java, but he knew what she meant because she had mentioned it before. Now he wished he had never heard of Papandayan or Java or the Ring of Fire. He regretted it more than he had when he stood on the rim of the erupting volcano, though the event had made his reputation, and the audience of scientists at the conference had sat in respectful silence as he presented his paper and wrote his equations on the blackboard and afterwards gave him an unprecedented round of applause.

  “A stroke of luck,” he said.

  “Nonsense,” she replied. She nudged him closer to the cliff edge with a well-aimed poke of the staff into his right buttock.

  He knocked the staff away. “Don't do that!” The surf breaking on the beach below looked like jagged rocks, and he wouldn't be surprised if they concealed rocks just as jagged, ready to grab and mutilate his body when it fell. Vertigo made his stomach weak. “Heights make me dizzy,” he said. “Maybe a consequence of my Java experience."

  “All the more reason to do as we say,” Victoria said, prodding him again.

  “I won't be any good to you dead,” he said. He hoped he was firm, like Humphrey Bogart telling Sidney Greenstreet that torture wasn't an effective threat unless they were willing to kill him, but his voice may have quavered when he thought of death. He was no Sam Spade.

  “You aren't any good to us anyway if you don't tell us when Armageddon is going to arrive."

  Smith-Ng watched a young man, clad only in a towel, make his way down the narrow path that snaked down the side of the cliff to the narrow beach below. He was the man called “Reggie,” who seemed to be the leader of these crazy survivalists. Smith-Ng watched the play of muscles in the young man's back and legs with a fascination he could not have explained.

  Victoria prodded him again, and he swung around to face her. “Armageddon is a religious term. You can't translate apocalyptic language into scientific language. The Bible is your only source of information."

  “But there's a difference in interpretation,” she said seriously. “There's the premillennialists and the dispensationalists, and who knows who else."

  “Not only that,” Smith-Ng said, “there's the Seventh-Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses and the Church Universal and Triumphant and a dozen other churches and sects and cults, all of whom claim to have a special insight into the end of everything."

  “One of them has to be right,” she said stubbornly.

  “Every one of them has been wrong regularly and consistently. William Miller, who founded the Seventh-Day Adventists, predicted the world would end in 1833, 1834, 1843, and 1844; Charles Taze Russell picked 1914, when Christ, who had been reborn in 1874, would be forty years old, and his followers became the Jehovah's Witnesses; Mother Shipton chose 1881, 1882, and 1991; Elizabeth Clare Prophet picked 1987 for California to fall into the ocean and 1990 for the end of everything; and Marian Keech gathered together her group on Dec. 20, 1954, to be taken away by flying saucers before the worldwide Flood. None of this has anything to do with science."

  “Look,” Victoria said, swinging her staff gently in her hand, “I'm the nice one. Some of the others want to beat it out of you."

  “That's what I'm talking about,” Smith-Ng said. “You can't do science with someone ready to shove a knife in your back—or a stick. When I predicted Papandayan I had data about tectonics and temperatures and earth tremors to put into my equations about volcanic eruptions, along with established correlations. There's no data about Armageddon, and anything I told you would be nothing better than a guess."

  “Well, now,” Victoria said, “there's economic figures, wars, armed uprisings like the one in Brazil and other places around the world, weather, politics, anything you want. We've got computers, you know."

  He had seen at least one of them, all right, and he would be willing enough to give them a prediction if he was certain he knew what they wanted. But he was only a short, fat, near-sighted professor on the wrong side of middle age, and he had the terrible suspicion that if he gave them the wrong answer, they
would kill him just as surely as if he refused to go along with their madness.

  He was reminded of another catastrophe that had occurred on this date. This might well be his Pearl Harbor. His thoughts searched desperately: If this were one of his equations, what would the answer be? But he knew, with an elevatorlike surge in the pit of his stomach, that personalities and individual desires had nothing to do with catastrophe theory and that he was going to have to figure this out without the help of mathematics.

  When they had picked him off the street outside the conference center, still flushed from the success of his presentation, he had been so shocked by their strength and teamwork, one on either side, hustling him along, that he scarcely had had time to protest before he was inside the black sedan with its smoke-colored side windows and it was already on its way toward the Golden Gate Bridge and highway 1. On a happier occasion he might have enjoyed the scenery of the northern California coast, the redwoods and the cliffs and the blue Pacific stretching infinitely into the west. Instead he fretted over what his abductors intended to do with him until, after several hours, the highway had left the coast to join the Interstate and a blindfold had been fitted over his eyes. He had found that comforting.

  The two men in the back with him had refused to tell him why they had kidnapped him, and the woman driving the automobile had said only that if he insisted on asking questions they would have to gag him. But the blindfold had assured him that if they didn't want him to identify their destination they must plan on releasing him afterwards. Though the thought of what came before “afterwards” had been enough to keep him apprehensive.

  The car at last had swerved, had rumbled on unimproved roads and stopped before bumping over some kind of barrier, and had finally come to a halt. The blindfold had been removed, and Smith-Ng had been struck by brightness. The blues and greens and whites and browns had overwhelmed his capacity to interpret them. As his vision cleared, the dazzling impact had not lessened but the sensory impressions had separated themselves into sky and grass and cliffs and trees and buildings.