The War of Immensities

by Barry Klemm

  “I almost understand it. Is it true?”

  “No one knows. But that’s what I reckon Harley thinks is happening. That’s the Shastri Effect.”

  *

  How the hell had they talked her into this? When Wagner’s plane landed her in the middle of a war zone, all of Andromeda’s illusions about a concert tour honouring her African origins and aiding a crippled nation were annihilated. Fires burned all about the airfield, and troops ran this way and that, ordered by their hotfaced leaders. Wagner’s commanders were the only white men to be seen anywhere. She heard sporadic gunfire coming in from all directions, and occasional explosions further out. She wanted to get right back in the plane again.

  “It’s okay,” Captain Maynard of the US Navy said. “This area is secure now.”

  The captain, who insisted he was a sailor, was dressed like a combat soldier in camouflage fatigues with the sleeves torn out, and he was filthy and his clothing ripped. On his muscular shoulders, blood showed, running with the sweat down his arms. He had a US army netted helmet from under the shadowed rim of which his dark eyes peered fiercely, but despite the disguise, Andromeda knew who he was. Not only had she been told who would meet her, but she might have recognised him from his media image anyway, for she had followed the case with great interest. This was the captain of the ship that Felicity had defended so remarkably in San Diego, and the other soldiers scattered about were his crew.

  “Looks a bit rough, I know. But it’s safe,” he said to assure her as he gripped her arm in a very gentlemanly fashion and nudged her toward a jeep.

  They set off, Maynard driving, and a truckload of US soldiers who were probably also sailors following. Andromeda pointed a playfully accusative finger at him.

  “You’re the one who stole the ship,” she told him.

  “That’s right, ma’am,” he grinned, seeming very at ease for a sailor in a landlocked war zone.

  “You don’t meet a lot of pirates in this century. Did you also steal the jeep?”

  Maynard relaxed, the stiffness and formality but not the urgency draining out of him. He seemed very relieved to discover that this woman, a global celebrity, a full head taller than he was, had a sense of humour. He knew she was going to need it. “As a matter of fact, we did, ma’am. It belongs to the government troops. But they don’t care for it anymore.”

  “Wait till I tell Felicity.”

  “Finest woman I ever met, ma’am.”

  “She’s that all right. And this, I suppose, is punishment for your sins.”

  “No, ma’am. Dr Campbell got the admirals at the court martial so bewildered they couldn’t reach a conclusion. This is what the navy does with people they just want to go away.”

  “Turn them into soldiers, you mean?”

  “Something like that. Better than the brig, no matter how you add it up.”

  “Well, captain. I don’t like it much here. Let’s do some further going away.”

  “Ma’am, this is one of the prettier places to be found in Malawi right now.”

  He was not mistaken. After a very short distance, they drove into a village that had been shot to pieces. Bodies lay all about in the street and town square. All the walls were chipped by bullet holes. Burned out vehicles were everywhere. Few of the corpses wore any sort of military garb.

  “Stop here,” Andromeda ordered.

  “We can’t, ma’am. The Red Cross has all this under control.”

  “Stop, I tell you.”

  Maynard sighed and stopped. She got out and walked amongst the corpses, the swarms of flies made most of them hard to see distinctly. Maynard was right at her side, with his machinegun levelled this way and then that.

  “These are mostly women and children,” Andromeda said bitterly.

  “Yes. The government troops went through here as they fled.”

  She looked about. There were some medical people but mostly they seemed engaged in driving the vultures away. Men were busy at the other end of town, collecting the bodies and loading them into trucks.

  “Is this typical?”

  “In some places, unfortunately. We just couldn’t cover everywhere. Mr. Wagner has only a thousand troops at his command. It wasn’t anywhere near enough.”

  “And the rebels? Are they any better behaved than the government troops?”

  “Not really. But mostly, the people abandoned the villages and hid in the jungle. They’re waiting for you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. Everyone knows that you are coming to lead them to the place of peace.”

  “Oh good. And where, exactly, is this place of peace I’m supposed to lead them to?”

  “Wherever you go, but Mr. Wagner has placed his camp so that when you go, it will be into the capital.”

  “I’d like to talk to Kev baby, right now.”

  “That’s where I was taking you, ma’am. There’s nothing you can do here.”

  “So I see.”

  They drove on and, only hours before the linkage was due to occur, they arrived at the camp. It was really a village that looked exactly like the first one—and several others along the way—only this time the bodies had been removed. But still it smelled of death. Kevin Wagner was dressed just like Maynard, except he wore a peaked cap instead of a helmet.

  “Good of you to come, Andy,” Wagner said. They were in the tavern. Carlsberg would keep their beer monopoly no matter who won the war.

  “Did I have a choice?”

  “Not everyone gets to stop a war, Andy.”

  “Cut the crap and tell me the plan, Kev.”

  “In a few hours, you start out from here to the capital, which is the right direction for the pilgrimage. They’ll follow you, right into the capital, and the war will be over.”

  “And you’ll be claiming victory?”

  “The rebels have already claimed victory. Once it was known the pilgrimage was on, the government troops all ran away. The rumour that you would be here did the job. Now, it’s just a formality.”

  “So, I’m doing nothing really.”

  “You’re doing what Chrissie did in Italy. Leading the pilgrims to safety.”

  “And into the hands of the rebels.”

  “It was a popular revolution, truly.”

  “Yeah, I know. A whole lot of dead women and children back there told me how popular it was.”

  Wagner looked tired. He rubbed his eyes. There was no point talking about this. It was going to happen and nothing could change it. But Andromeda needed to make someone pay for this, and Kevin Wagner, with his own little private war, was the only one available to received her anger.

  “How do you know they’ll follow?”

  “There’s about 600,000 pilgrims, out there in the bush, mostly south of here. Shortly, they’ll be heading north. So will you. So will I. And when they go, everyone else will follow.”

  “I don’t like this, Generalissimo. It’s a put up job and you know it.”

  “No. It’s genuine. These people see you as a spiritual leader. I made use of that, I admit, but only because it was there to be done.”

  “Are you telling me they play all my records here?”

  “Practically nothing else. They love it. You are the greatest. Bigger than basketball players even.”

  “Damn you, Wagner. Damn you. What I did was clean and honest. You’ve dirtied it somehow.”

  “The war will have stopped. Thousands of lives will have been saved. You can’t argue with that.”

  “That’s the same justification that you lot used for dropping atom bombs on Japan. You Yankees just don’t learn, do you?”

  “Either you walk or thousands more will die, Andy. That’s all there is.”

  And so, when the time came, she walked, and the people came out of everywhere in their thousands, tens of thousands, to tramp the road amid the soaring dust, ragged and thin with malnutrition, their bony legs seeming unable to hold them up yet they walked boldly, striding on with bare feet on the hot dus
t. As she walked, they crowded about her, called her name and called her Marava, which seemed to mean Messiah. Andromeda opened her arms and her heart and walked tall amidst them and carried on down the road to the capital and they followed, coming out of the bush on all sides. Ahead, Wagner rode atop a tank and troops lined the way, looking grimfaced and battleworn but determined, sharp-eyed, ready for trouble but there would be no trouble. Andromeda knew the time of danger was past and so did the population accumulating behind her. The people came out of hiding and walked the roads everywhere, and the war was dumbfounded and stopped.

  She walked on, and the people kept coming, their tramping feet on the road throwing up enough dust to turn the sun orange. The Shastri Effect was no longer a factor—not for the moment at least—they were following her because they could not go home and had nowhere else to go, and because they believed she had somewhere to lead them to, but most of all because she was who she was. And she regretted her words then, because she knew Wagner was right. These people did see her as their spiritual leader. They worshipped her with a simple reverence that no words could describe. She walked and they followed, and Andromeda knew that although she had never been here before, still she had come home.

  *

  From every available vantage point, they came to watch the greatest show on earth. Every peak in the Santa Monica Hills and the San Gabriel Mountains was foolishly crowded by those who had not paid sufficient attention to the warnings and thought themselves safe, but further out, more prudent and only slightly less foolish soles crowded the peaks of the San Bernardino Mountains, and the southern extremities of the Coastal Range and Sierra Nevadas.

  As they flew in the Orion along the coastline offshore from Long Beach, Felicity Campbell gazed out the window in continuing astonishment and shook her head in dismay. Everyone had been warned—the Lorna/Andromeda show had been the highest rating program since the moonwalk. There had been time, she knew, and every possible warning had been offered, to ensure the entire evacuation of the endangered area, but in its last moments of existence, Los Angeles remained the mad thriving metropolis that it had always been since the movie moguls first came to town, a hundred years ago.

  All along the coast, from San Raphael to Tijuana, the people had generally heeded the warnings of the President and packed up their belongings and headed inland. A lot of diehards remained in San Francisco but even they had moved across the fault line and those parts of the city south and west of the Bay area were virtually deserted, as were most towns in Monterey and all down the coast, and San Diego. Cross the San Andreas fault and go at least twenty miles inland, President Grayson warned them. Most people had done just that. And this despite the official Project Earthshaker assurances that the disaster would occur offshore from Mexico and there would be no danger. The Unofficial Project Earthshaker, in the bright-eyed form of Lorna Simmons, had said goodbye to California, and the President added that although he believed the Official outcome would prevail, Harley Thyssen was not a man to be ignored if you valued your life.

  The population of Los Angeles, it seemed, had generally viewed the matter one of three ways and seemed fairly evenly divided in those classes. There were those who took Lorna, Grayson and Thyssen at their word and packed up and fled to the east, causing the greatest traffic jam in history. People were spending three days or more, camped in the gridlock, just to get into Nevada. But really, most people who feared ‘The Big One’ had moved away from the southern California coast years before, scared off by the Northridge, Landers and Loma Prieta shocks.

  The second group were those had heard the warnings too many times before and weren’t any more likely to believe it now and determined to stay and get on with their business. The third class shared the beliefs of the second, and then changed their minds at the last minute. There was little chance of escape from Los Angeles for those who left it to the final twenty-four hours—every road and track, not to mention freeway, was solidly gridlocked, every plane had been flown away and every boat had sailed off or else, more heartlessly, had long since been hauled onto a trailer and driven away by the owner. As they flew by the airport, Felicity could see huge crowds moving amid the fires of several crashed planes, offshore were only the navy vessels, plucking desperate souls off the beaches.

  Helicopters buzzed everywhere, as if a swarm of giant bees had invaded the city. They were snatching people off the rooftops and out of the open land of football fields and parks and desperately hurrying them to the giant camps established in the Mojave Desert and the hills above Bakersfield—anywhere at all as long as it wasn’t near the White Wolf Fault, on which Harley had also offered grave pronouncements. Every volcanic cone, even those extinct, from the Salton Sea to Yosemite, could be expected to erupt and the region around them should be avoided.

  And what, Felicity and many others had wondered, of those people safe from fault lines and calderas but within the zone of influence and subject to the Shastri Effect. Of this Thyssen had offered little information. The zone could not be known with certainty, it would be huge and probably unavoidable, and anyway, the task was to save lives whereas the Shastri Effect was not likely to kill anyone. That, Felicity Campbell knew, was a very dubious proposition.

  Harley offered a circle of six hundred miles diameter centred roughly on the Grand Canyon, which took in half of Baja California, stretched into Oregon and Idaho, east to the borders of Kansas and Oklahoma, south to Chihuahua, and somewhere in that vast area, a region of perhaps two hundred square miles would fall into the Zone of Influence of the Shastri Effect. It was just simply far too great an area to clear, or even consider seriously. Felicity wondered. She was sure that in the past, Harley had pinpointed it closer than that. Indeed, he had assured the pilot of the Orion that ‘if you stay offshore, you’ll be alright.’ That placed them two hundred miles inside the western extent of the possible affected zone—how the hell did he know that?

  But her mind was shaken back to more immediate matters when all of the alarms in the cluttered belly of the Orion went off and a frenzy of activity began. It was happening, and she turned with a sickened feeling in her belly to watch the death throes of Tinsel town. By media outlets and scientists alike, no event in history was more precisely nor copiously recorded, and yet for all that, it was rather hard to say exactly what happened. For in an instant, the entire metropolitan area was completely lost in a haze of dust.

  Down in the city, the few miraculous survivors subsequently reported that the first effect was the rolling and jolting of the earth and then they were blinded by a hail of dust. This was because the impact of the earthquake caused the sedimentary soil on which the city stood to liquefy and virtually turn into quicksand, and all around, buildings and vehicles and people disappeared underground. Los Angeles began to sink into the earth before it began to sink into the sea. Then, as the masonry began to fall, there was a great roar and geysers of water erupted out of every drain, often hurling the grates high into the air. Vast fissures opened in every street and steam gushed out, adding its searing horror to the pandemonium. Now the buildings were collapsing all about with the noise with continuous thunder. And then it stopped—the geysers, the shaking, the thunder and everything was still for a moment.

  In the Orion, Felicity had seen the city simply vanish in a yellow dust cloud and thought that was the end, but then it seemed that a great wind suddenly blew the dust and smoke away, and Los Angeles, looking decidedly jagged and uneven but still possessing its proud towers, reappeared for an encore performance. It lasted only a moment and then the veil of steam and dust and smoke engulfed it again, but that magical lull was extraordinary, and from her position, Felicity could see why. The water had drained out of Santa Monica Bay and welled up in a giant bulge about the Channel Islands, parallel to the coast, and now the swell turned and rushed back toward the city. A tsunami, maybe two hundred feet high, raced up the newly exposed beach and crashed over the docklands as if it was tripped, cascading down upon the doomed city. />
  The great wave swept away the people on the Santa Monica and San Gabriel Hills, such was its enormity. It forked and cascaded up the San Fernando and San Bernardino valleys, swallowing all the towns and landscape beyond. All along the coast, the rivers, even the mighty Colorado, flowed backwards for a while and flooded all the lowlands about them. The wave roared northward and drowned Santa Barbara and hit the San Raphael Mountains and to the west, it began to crash against an indomitable cliff. Mighty jagged escarpments had appeared, all long the horizon line and the sea struck there and surged back, thick with mud. All of the waters over their newly claimed land churned dark and muddy as currents and whirlpools surged everywhere. Again and again, the greedy sea hurled itself at the cliffs, demanding more and more land but it was to be denied. From Palm Springs to Tejon Pass, the San Andreas fault was the craggy new coast of California and the high ground west of that line was distributed as islands. And only about a thousand survivors were awash, clinging to debris as the helicopters rushed in to begin plucking them from the water.

  Perhaps the most startling image, certainly the one the TV news people most favoured as symbolic of the whole event, was the one that passed under the Orion as they crossed onto the land. The great Route 5 Freeway from the north of the state, sliced through the landscape relentlessly until it reached a point just below the town of Gorman, where it came to an abrupt end at the edge of a sheer precipice that dropped vertically into the surging waves of the Pacific Ocean.

  Three new long peninsulas formed between Santa Barbara and Salinas as the sections in between fell beneath the sea, and all along the new towering coast, great chunks of earth and rock broke off and plunged into the jubilant ocean, dark versions of the way icebergs fall from the face of glaciers. San Diego, although wrecked, remained above the waterline but now stood at the end of a peninsula that ran back as far as the place where the Salton Sea had vanished but four small volcanoes now erupted furiously. North of the new cape, the Gulf of Catalina had now doubled in size, and into it the Colorado River now flowed.