by Barry Klemm
No one had proven anything against him. No one could call him thief without the serious risk of litigation for slander. No one, that was, except Joe himself, who made the accusation every time he looked in the mirror, and saw the guilt in the suspect’s eyes. But he knew the solution to that problem. He needed to stop looking in mirrors.
The truth was, as a man with failed kidneys and a dicey liver and being overweight, high blood pressured and sedentary in his wheelchaired ways, he wasn’t going to last. Moreover, the planet was on an even shorter life expectancy. Seven months tops. There just wasn’t going to be time to get him into a courtroom, even if they nailed him dead to rights. That was the first justification.
The second came from Lorna. ‘It isn’t as if you’re stealing their money for personal gain, Joe. You’re using it for the benefit of all humanity. That makes it different.’ Sure it did. Al Capone and Adolf Hitler would have made the same argument. Al supplied moonshine to a nation crippled by evil prohibition, and there would certainly have been a peaceful planet, free of racial and religious wars, if everyone left alive was a blonde, blue-eyed heathen Nazi. You could justify anything that way if you were sufficiently deluded.
After all, Lorna’s argument harboured the rather dubious assumption that Project Earthshaker—that was, the Unofficial Project Earthshaker since apparently the official one lacked the imagination to think of another name—was indeed a great benefit to humanity. Certainly not if humanity was blown to smithereens before the year was out. Certainly not if Thyssen was in error. And grave doubts were arising from all quarters concerning the big man.
Joe had been suspicious all along. Others weren’t sure but he had never been in any doubt. Thyssen was too good to be true, organised the impossible too easily, had dubious friends. Maybe the CIA connection and the sinister Mr. Cornelius were nonsensical but you simply could not take a man like Thyssen at face value. He was too powerful, and too complex. Like a tame grisly bear—just because he hugged you affectionately today didn’t mean he might not crush the life out of you tomorrow.
Thyssen knew that Joe had buried the slush fund and made no objection. A man you could trust would have at least commented. Thyssen was dishonest to that degree, and told lies about his data or so he had heard. Not a man to be trusted. And Thyssen was Joe’s third and biggest justification of his own actions.
‘Grab all the money you can get hold of, Joe, but any means you can,’ Thyssen had told him. ‘We are going to need every penny you can raise.’ ‘Any means?’ Joe had asked. ‘Any means your conscience can handle,’ Thyssen replied pointedly. Fine, and the money was rolling in. Andromeda’s concerts and Lorna’s soaring media career and donations from the followers of Christine Rice and just general public generosity from true believers. There was plenty of money, enough to bankroll the private war Kevin Wagner was waging in Africa. Heaps of the stuff.
And now, Joe had a new project, for Thyssen had passed the message down the line and as soon as he heard it, Joe knew what to do. He rolled his way through the convent and got on the Internet and faxed every property dealer he could find in California and Nevada. His request was simple. He had a client who was interested in buying up any property available on the eastern side of the San Andreas fault.
*
Then, as the first days of the new year began, Chrissie discovered that she had lost her faith. It was hard to say how it happened—maybe it had not been there all along, only presumed, and she had failed to notice. She had been to Rome for an audience with the Pope, a man from the Jurassic period whose hand, when she kissed his ring, was cold and reptilian. He had murmured a few words in Latin that everyone later translated differently and gave her a blessing and she walked away from what was plainly another failed attempt at the greatest moment in her life.
He was just an old man, senile and incapable, who could barely sit on his throne. Her sense of disappointment, despite the pomp and media coverage of the occasion, could not have been more pronounced.
All along, she knew she was playing a role, keeping up appearances, faking it. Perhaps that was when her faith began to dissolve.
No, not really. She’d never really been much of a Catholic anyway, disgusted by the church’s money grabbing ways and its general failure to uphold the fundamentals of Christ. She had known it was all bullshit all along—her experience in Rome did not change anything.
In an attempt to get real, she rushed off to Africa to try and help but never even got close. Malawi and the neighbouring regions were in utter chaos and the disaster had precipitated a full-scale war with several sides and even the news reports had little idea of just exactly what was happening in there. The borders were all closed, even to her, and she got no closer than Salisbury.
Although she could have. Kevin Wagner had arrived in full force, his two huge transport planes full of men and equipment. They would be going in the next week if she wanted to wait. But she looked at the combat ready troops and their guns and fierce expressions and decided that it was not the sort of company she wanted to keep. Felicity Campbell, who had been there before her and been similarly frustrated, had already headed for home.
The only truly Christian thing Chrissie found to do there was visit Jami in the hospital. It meant she also had to visit all the other patients and chat with them, followed around by the media crews, but the price for that was that she got to talk to Jami in private.
It was immediately apparent that while she might have suffered extensive physical injuries, Jami was undiminished. Admittedly, her hair was ungreased and unspiked because ‘you need two hands for that’ and the ring through her nostril—and presumably any others she wore—had been removed for fear of infection. Her greatest trouble seemed to be that her favourite tattoo had been obliterated by third degree burns—it was the one on her bum. Jami, all in all, looked strangely normal.
“Sometimes there’s something you’ve just got to do, Chrissie,” Jami said by way of explanation. “It doesn’t matter if its silly or dangerous. You gotta do it. If you don’t, the rest of your life will be wasted regretting that you passed up the chance.”
“Yes, I understand that,” Chrissie smiled, trying to get into benign mode. “It probably explains why most women undergo the horrors of pregnancy and childbirth.”
“Yes. That’s it. I just had to do it, just once, to see what it was like.”
“Even if it killed you.”
“If it did, it did. But if I got away with it, then Wow!”
“So this is the joyous state of ‘Wow!’ Laid up in hospital wearing more plaster than the walls?”
“It’ll come off. I’m doing wheelchair practice already and I’m out of here in two days. Kev is going to fly me to his convent. His planes have to go back to get more equipment anyway.”
“What do you want to go there for?”
“First because Joe has a fulltime nurse who can also look after me. Second because a full set of Earthshaker monitoring equipment has been established there. Third because with the way the tourists are flooding New York for the last New Year’s Eve, I’d rather not go back there just yet. And fourth, because I want to avoid Harley until I’m ready for him.”
Chrissie blinked. “I missed on that last point.”
“He lied to us, Chrissie. God damned Harley, he rigged the data so only he could make the proper sense of it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. He’s got something called Drongo buried away under a ton of electronic safeguards and Drongo is some sort of system which is the reason why his predictions are right and everyone else is just guessing.”
“Drongo?”
“It’s Carrickspeak for fuckwit.”
“Yes. We have the expression in New Zealand. But why?”
“I don’t know why. To prove he’s smarter than everyone else or something... To maintain his power over us and the project...”
“But what is it?”
“I don’t know, but when I get to the convent I’ll
be hacking furiously until I find out.”
It was too much to take in at one gulp. Chrissie backed off, thinking it through and trying to get to the more essential aspects.
“You say, everyone else is just guessing. Explain that.”
“Perturbations in the movements of the Earth, and the Sun and Moon, mean that the configuration is never quite right. We can get the longitude reasonably—because the time period between each event is the same number of days, less about ten percent, each time. Trouble is that they can only get the ten percent bit accurate within one hour—but that hour means 1670 kilometres as the earth spins. Drongo eliminates that hour of give or take. The latitude is always in the quadrant opposite the previous event and then its a configuration of the positions of the Earth, Sun and Moon, taking any major bumps and wobbles in their orbits into account. Again, Drongo can do that more accurately than anyone else can.”
“So the data is useless without Harley.”
“Yes, because there’s some other factor that only Harley has thought of. Anyone can work out the zone of influence within an area about 1500 kilometres by 5000 kilometres. After that, they look at the fault lines and such like and guess. Harley can get it to an area a few hundred kilometres each way.”
“And he won’t tell anyone how he does it?”
“No. The bastard. But I’ll find out.”
Perhaps it was all the fault of Jami, whose loss of faith in her god—Harley—had contaminated Chrissie’s faith in her own God. Although that was hardly likely—her own faith was slipping before she knew of Jami’s apostasy. And anyhow, Harley had provided her with a CD that she carried to Rome which she was eventually able, in a plush office in the Vatican with Valerno and several other red robed cardinals peering over her shoulder, to plug into a computer and show them the way to the Project Earthshaker data.
“There it is. Best of luck.”
Of course, she hadn’t known about Drongo.
She returned to the tranquility and sanctity of the convent and the small chapel that had, more or less, become her own, and as the world began counting down to the end of human history, she knelt and tried to pray. But her faith was gone and she could not catch God’s attention. Instead she began to weep and, as far as she knew, she knelt there, sobbing, all night.
So they had come to the final New Year’s Eve. And simply because it would have been so appropriate, an inordinately large number of people decided that this might well be the end of the world. Chrissie knew better, but she spent the long night in prayer, just in case.And when the rising sunlight stretched long hazy fingers of light through the stained glass windows, she dried her tears and rose, staggering on ruined knees, and made her shuffling way to the door and threw it open. She walked out onto the steps, pale and shaking and deathlike in her pallor. The beautiful, radiant, magnificent planet she lived on was still there in all its glory. There just wasn’t any way that she could believe that it would ever be any different.
*
In the café in Paris as the sun rose, and the staff were packing up and hosing down the footpath, Lorna lowered the boom on Brian Carrick. It might have been a sad occasion, had Brian not been so bloody stoic about it.
“And there I was thinkin’ we’d be together until the end of the earth,” Brian chuckled.
“It isn’t funny, Brian. I feel like such a bitch.”
“Well, don’t. If I’d got the chance, I’d of shot back to Judy and left you in the lurch without a second thought.”
“I know,” Lorna said, smiling but forced to dab a tear from her eye while she did so. “But I did think I might have stuck it out until that happened.”
“Oh I see. You wanted to be the one who got dumped.”
“It is my usual role.”
“Okay, you’re dumped.”
“You just can’t take this the least bit seriously, can you?”
“No hope. Look, Lorna, you are a truly wonderful young woman. I had the time of my life with you. And I am sad it’s over, but you gotta face reality. You’re an international superstar. I’m a solid family man. While you hit the high spots, I’d rather be at home in front of the telly with a beer and the wife cookin’ in the kitchen and the kids playin’ in the yard. There was no future in this. We were the original odd couple.”
“I’m not the high flyer you think I am, Brian. I’m just a simple suburban girl at heart.”
“Yeah, sure. But one who has managed to turn her simple suburbanness into a global icon. There’s no going back from there.”
And, for the first time in their relationship, they had run out of things to say. Then the obvious occurred to Lorna. “So how are things with Judy, anyway.”
“I rung her on New Year’s Eve. To speak to the kids. After which, unusually, she wanted to speak to me.”
“What about?”
“Nothing at all, which I think was the point. Apparently, Larry was out getting drunk with his mates and left her abandoned with the kids, just the way I usta. I reckon there’s a bit of reality being faced down that way at the moment.”
“Kids good?”
“They still call me Daddy. Although Larry seems to have graduated from uncle to ‘pop’.”
Again there seemed to be nothing to add to that, but Lorna was brightening, and finally the obvious did occur to her. “Don’t you want to know why?”
“Why what?”
“Why I’m dumping you.”
“You mean there’s a reason.”
“Yes, there’s a reason.”
“Somehow I knew I couldn’t have been getting it right the way I thought I was.”
“No, silly. You were the perfect man. If only they were all like you. The reason has nothing to do with you at all.”
“So why tell me?”
Lorna bowed her head in dismay. “Do you have to be so fucking practical all the time?”
“Sure. After all, I am twenty years older than you. It’s my job to be the practical one.”
“Older doesn’t matter.”
“Maybe not, but it probably is time you played with someone your own age.”
“That isn’t quite what I’ve got in mind…”
“Okay. So you can tell me, if you really must.”
“Well,” Lorna said, finding the words hard the way she rarely did these days. “I wanted you to know in advance. It was only fair.”
“Know what.”
“I’m going after Harley,” Lorna murmured embarrassedly.
“Oh I see. So impressed with us forty year olds, you thought you might up it another twenty.”
“He isn’t that old!”
“Alright, only about fifteen. Still, I can’t say I’m not losing out to a better man.”
“I am enormously attracted to him.”
“Aren’t we all. Has he suggested any reciprocal feelings?”
“No. I have tested the water from time to time…”
“And?”
“Zero response. He treats me like a daughter.”
“Grand-daughter?”
She poked her tongue out at him. “In any case, I’m going to have to make it happen.”
“You sure ain’t lacking in ambition, Lorna.”
“It isn’t really ambition. I think it’s necessary—for all of us.”
“You’re doing it for us?”
“We need to know this man. We have got to get to the bottom of him. I believe the only way to really know a man is to sleep with him, and I need to know—and we all need to know—all we can about Harley.”
“Maybe he’s bottomless.”
“Oh very funny. But seriously. I’ll need all the help I can get with this one.”
“You surely know how to create a challenge, sweetheart” Brian laughed. “Are you sure Harley does normal things like sex?”
“You mean, maybe it’s below his dignity?”
“Or maybe he’s just too old,” Brian said.
“You’re not being helpful.”
“That�
�s because I can’t imagine how it can be done.”
“You must be able to offer some suggestions. Something I might say to grab his attention.”
“Ask him about the Uncertainty Principle.”
“The what?”
“Look it up. Ask him about Schrodinger’s Cat.”
“Cat?”
“The wave-particle conundrum.”
“Can we have a nice simple version that I can slip in over a glass of champers?”
“What all these things amount to is this: the experimenter is, of necessity, a part of the experiment.”
“I’m still not getting it.”
“You cannot open the box and see exactly what is inside without disturbing the contents.”
“Well, at least I understood the words that time. Why is it important?”
“It’s a random universe. The laws of physics and mathematics are meaningless in reality. Yet, whenever we humans apply those laws, they always work for us. Everything we do obeys those laws. And what’s more, if we fuck up and break the laws, what we do won’t work. The bridge falls down, the spaceship blows up, the aeroplane crashes. How can that be?”
“Magic?”
“Sort of. If it is true that the laws of physics and maths don’t work in reality but always work for us, there is only one possible explanation.”
“We make them work.”
“More than that. Those laws describe our minds and how they function. And what it means, therefore, is that when all those random elementary particles and quanta and suchlike, fall within the influence of our intelligence or collective consciousness or whatever, they conform.”
“They fall into line with our perception of how things are? How very obliging of them.”
“So that’s what we are really. Chaos destroying machines. We force order into the randomness.”
“Wow!”
“Wow indeed. You tell that to Harley and watch what’s left of his hair stand on end.”