by Barry Klemm
“There’s Daddy,” Lou cried.
“Yes, darling. That’s Daddy.”
There were shots from helicopters but as the sun crept toward the horizon, the camera crews took themselves onto the ground and roamed amongst the public. There seemed to be every kind of human imaginable, and they were interviewed by the crews in every language. But then the reporters hurried away and only stationary, remote cameras remained. The interviews ceased.
We’ll stay on the air right to the end, they said, and only those crews who were already pilgrims remained, sticking it out to the last.
“Are you afraid?” was the most common interview question. Most answers were non-committal. Well maybe a little but I wouldn’t be here if I thought…. Do you really think that…? Oh yes, I really believe.
They stayed and the sun descended and the tension became unbearable. Judy knew that when the moment came, the images would cease, the cameras and communications would go blank, and she couldn’t wait for that. She went outside where the children were playing shuttlecock on the lawn. Neighbours, relations, others were watching. They would tell her what happened.
*
Fabrini, the customary Uzi tucked under his arm, stood on a rock, the only high ground for miles around. Away in the distance on the barren plain, he saw what might have been a dust storm. Through binoculars, he studied the cloud. There was no doubt about it—it was a large force of men moving toward them and somehow he could see plainly their menacing intent. The raiders, closing in for the kill. He glanced toward the sun, as it inched toward the horizon. In less than an hour after dark they would be upon these helpless people—heavily armed and with murderous intent.
He hurried down from the rock to where he had parked his jeep. On the radio, he spoke to Captain Maynard, and reported what he had seen.
“We need to get helicopter out there. We must see what they are up to. It don’t look no good to me.”
Captain Maynard smiled thinly as he listened to Fabrini’s garbled report. “All choppers are grounded, Mr. Fabrini. And you better get yourself back here right away.”
He was appreciative of Fabrini’s warning, but really it only allowed him to feel more secure. When the choppers had been flying earlier, they had already reported the advancing ground-force, and Fabrini only assured him that they would not arrive in time.
In time for what? He had his troops deployed, but Thyssen had instructed him to take no action against them.
“Let them come,” Thyssen smiled. “They’re within the zone. They add to our strength. The more the merrier.”
Maynard shook his head. It was rare enough that an enemy invasion was welcomed. Strange times indeed. His own troops were positioned and ready if needed, but by the minute Maynard was becoming surer that they would not be.
*
When the screens dropped out to static, it hit Glen Palenski like a physical blow. He had expected it, of course, but that didn’t make it shock him any less. There in the final frame was Thyssen and the others, positioned on a slight hillock at the centre of their magic city, smiling and happy, and Glen wanted more than anything to be with them. It didn’t matter what happened now, whether they lived or died. He knew he should have been there, and that was all.
Because he had to say something, do something, he turned to the operator nearest him and asked: “How long before transmission can be restored?” He asked not for the information—he ready knew that—but out of anxiety, and out of an even more desperate need to show that anxiety—to show he cared, to show he was still human, to himself if no-one else.
“Just as soon as we can get a working camera in there. All those in the zone had burned out circuits and are stuffed. The most likely is camera H3. That one. They could be to the edge of the camp within a few minutes. They’ll overfly it and… we’ll…”
But the operator didn’t want to say what they would see and what they would not see. Nothing, everything, it no longer mattered. The game was played out, and Thyssen had won, whatever happened from here. And Glen knew he was condemned to the role of Judas for eternity.
*
Alone in a roomful of advisers, President Grayson sat on a couch in the oval office, the First Lady at his side, with his head in his hands throughout the entire period of the transmission blackout. At one point, a junior officer, in the next room, could be heard to murmur—”Eleven minutes to estimated restoration of signal…” One of the white house staffers went to tell him to be silent.
*
Brian Carrick sat with the others on the slight rise, comfortable in a director’s chair, a bundle of nerves in this place—the focal point—where the anxiety was supposed to end. In a few minutes, they would know and it was the knowledge of that which contented him—the outcome was less important. This would be the beginning of the war of immensities, as Thyssen had termed it. The conflict of mind and matter. If they survived, it would all be plain, not just Thyssen’s plan but the whole thing—the very purpose of human existence. It would be a journey to the end of the universe and when they arrived they would be there to stop it from happening. Simple as that. And the journey began here, now, this coming minute.
And now that he knew where he was going, Brian was anxious to get underway. Of course, another possibility was that he might be dead, but who could care about that? For sure he wouldn’t be caring about star warriors nor anything else. All that mattered was that they had got here and it was ready to happen. What followed was simply formality.
Andromeda Starlight stood on the mound with her arms uplifted to the horizontal, her great robe billowing even in this slight breeze. Now that she was here, she realised it was her fulfilment. The vast sea of faces before her, to the horizon in every direction, was breathtaking to see, and she responded. Not just to her own supporters, those she had brought so far, but to all of them. This would be the last time, whatever happened. Never again would she have so massive an audience, and she relished it. This was what mattered, where it had all been leading, and tomorrow—if there was a tomorrow—there would be a new dream to pursue, perhaps a new image to evolve. She was beginning to weary of being Gaia anyway. She had played the role to the hilt, to its ultimate point. Now it was time to move on. But this final performance would be the one to remember, for all time to come. And she sang not a word to the biggest audience anyone had ever experienced. All she needed to be was there, and there she was in all her glory.
In the end, Lorna, who had been the eyes through which the world saw these events, could not look. She couldn’t stand lest she would fall and there was nowhere to sit, so in the end she knelt beside Thyssen’s legs and rested her face in his lap. His great hand closed about her face, caressed her cheek and she felt safe, felt fulfilled, felt it had all been worth it.
Often she had reflected on how far she had come these recent months—from humble Kiwi receptionist-typist to global media superstar and it astonished her and made her proud beyond all reason but somehow it all seemed natural to her as well, as if it would have happened anyway. But now she knew that was not the real journey she had taken, that it was all just life and could be over in a few minutes and she was terrified.
Worst was to think that she didn’t need to be here. She was the one pilgrim who had already been cured and who could say what effect a third dose would have on her. But all attempts to get rid of her had failed—this was where she belonged. If it killed her, if it made her a pilgrim again, if it did some other horrible thing to her, it didn’t matter. This was where she belonged. Everyone else had come from somewhere else to be here—she was at the centre of her world. She wrapped her arms around Thyssen’s legs and hung on with everything she had.
Thyssen was calm. The moment was at hand. There would be the irrevocable posterity, of course, but he didn’t care so much about that. In a few seconds, he would be the man who saved the planet, or else the madman who led thirteen million people to their deaths. But really, in the end it didn’t make a lot of difference. They coul
d say what they would—all Thyssen really wanted to know was if he was right, if his theory would be vindicated by the facts. For that was the horrible truth—he had never really believed it. All the way as he swept events along before him, he had never completely believed it. In a continual state of doubt, he went forward because forward seemed the only way he could go. But he never believed.
Now, finally, one way or the other, the agony of doubt would end, and he would be at rest.
There was a blinding, devastating flash, an earth swallowing, planet bursting, mind scattering crunch, and then silence.
20. CLASH OF INFINITIES
People lie everywhere. All over the Plain of Confrontation, bodies are strewn. It is like the outcome of a primitive battle—they lie every which way, beside each other, across each other, curled in the foetal position, stretched out, twisted. Every way you look there are more and more of them, all still and silent. No primitive battle was ever so great as this.
On for mile after mile, a great carpet of humanity covers the earth, away in all directions to the horizon. Like leaves fallen from the trees in autumn, like the sea weed thrown up along the beach, like the rows and rows of derelict cars in an eternal junkyard. Passing over them for mile upon mile, it is possible, just for a moment, to understand exactly how populous this planet was, to see so many people, from all nations, in all attires, of every age and every kind, all strewn like the litter of civilisation upon the earth.
The wind blows amongst them, flapping this garment, swirling some dust, then darting away as if disturbed by the lack of animation. The sky breathes upon them, as if expecting them to respond as they always have, but not now. Nothing happens.
And still the sea of bodies, reminiscent of those forests flattened by the volcanoes that have roared and thundered in the past. But no volcano roars. There is only the gentle breeze, and the stillness.
The minutes pass, like an eternity and perhaps it is. Perhaps all existence lies between this moment and the next, in the hiatus of existence that has befallen humanity—brave, foolish, inadequate humanity, a species still in its childhood, cut off from all time and memory. They came from nowhere, for no reason, and set out to stamp their mark on the universe but now were struck down, devastated, dashed on the very earth upon which they were forged.
Minutes pass elsewhere, here there is no time. This death of multitudes is beyond conception, beyond measure, beyond time. The sun has now sunk completely below the horizon and the darkness begins to cast a forbidding shadow over the scene. In the half light, child lies with its arm over their still parent, lover face to face with lover, the solitary within the aura of strangers, all still and…
Then there is a voice, but it is a radio voice, that of Professor Harrington in some distant safe location, fading in and becoming louder, a voice over as we fly across the ocean of bodies and tents and belongings, motionless but for the swirling dust and the wind…
“So they came with their hopes and dreams, as so many had come before them—the Seventh Day Adventists, the Children of Allah, and all those other credulous hordes all down through history, to the chosen place at the chosen time, as spoken by the words of their so-called prophets, to meet their maker, to watch the apocalypse… So too came the millions of the children of the false prophet Harley Thyssen, to gather at the end of the world at the place the fire and brimstone would burst forth, where the planet-eating monster of Thyssen’s insane nightmares would show its face to them. So they came in their pathetic hopes, like some many before and yet more numerous than all the others put together, to the Plain of Confrontation, in the heat beside the muddy waters of Lake Chad. They came and they waited and the moment of destiny arrived, with the setting of the sun, as their false prophet had told them. They lifted their eyes to heaven, and waited for this the greatest of all miracles, the gullible in their last moment of belief. And what happened, as the moment of judgment passed. Nothing happened.
Nothing happened at all. The moment passed, the sun set on the plain of Chad, and not one thing moved. All around the world, there was not a flicker on the seismographs. There were no great fires in the skies. The earth did not crack with fire and lava, nor did the face of doom emerge from its subterranean lair. Nothing happened.
And they, like all the gulled masses before them, this time knew the truth, that they had been deceived, that they had come all that way and gathered for nothing. They saw only the falsity of their prophet and knew only the lies they had been told…
Then, Harrington’s voice is cut off. Somewhere, there is a cry. Of a bird, perhaps. No, it extends. A continuous, unabating cry that few animals can maintain. Where is it coming from? Where amongst all this scattered, discarded flesh. This desert of human flesh… There.
It is a child, a toddler, sex indeterminate, standing in the wind and the dimness, clutching its mother’s arm.
Then others, far across the field of bodies, other older children sit quietly, or play, smiling at each other. Here a man raises himself on his elbows, shakes the dust from his face, and sits up, looking around. There an elderly couple reach out and hug one another. The mother sits up as if summoned, to comfort her crying child.
And now there are people awakening everywhere, all looking around, puzzled, smiling, greeting one another. They are standing, walking, moving to help those still sleeping, always looking around and wondering.
On the hillock at the centre, Lorna was the first awake. She remained with her head resting on Harley’s thighs, but her eyes were open and there was a smile on her lips. Then Harley’s hand moved to enclose her cheek and run through her hair.
Andromeda Starlight lifted herself, raising herself to her full height, gazing away across the multitude where hundreds of those rose as she did. She lifted her arms and they raised theirs, and a mighty roar of jubilation began to rise from their multitudinous throats...
Brian Carrick shook his head to clear it, and then looked toward Thyssen, his grin firmly fixed on his face. Thyssen pretended not to notice him. Brian reached and punched the old man playfully on the shoulder, but Thyssen rocked exaggeratedly from the blow, and could not avoid the slight flicker of a smile on his face.
The sun had set, satisfied with its day’s work, and the first stars began to appear. Thyssen raised his tear-glinted eyes toward them, and his grin broadened.
###
About the Author
Barry Klemm enjoyed an array of abandoned careers before resorting to literature. He was a crane jockey, insurance clerk, combat soldier, advertising officer, computer programmer, cleaner, stagehand, postman, sports ground manager, builder’s labourer, taxi-driver, film and TV scriptwriter and radio dramatist. He has published two novels for teen-age readers, The Tenth Hero, in 1997, and Last Voyage of the Albatross in 1998 through Addison Wesley Longman and Running Dogs, a novel of the Vietnam war by Black Pepper in 2000.
Barry Klemm has published several books in print which can be found at most online bookstores.
Email: [email protected]
Table of Contents
1 THE VOLCANOES OF TONGARIRO
2 UNCONSCIOUS COLLECTIVE
3 EXACTLY NOWHERE
4 THE LEMMINGS OF GRAN CANARIA
5 BEYOND COINCIDENCE
6 THE VOICE OF GAIA
7 NATURAL PROGRESSION
8 SLEEPERS AND PILGRIMS
9 CORE PROBLEMS
10 THE CHAMPAGNE FLOWS
11 ELECTROMAGNETIC RODENT GHOSTS
12 THE GRAVEYARD OF GALAXIES
13 GOODBYE CALIFORNIA
14 EVERLOVIN’ BOSONS
15 THE THIRD LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS
16 THE JAPANESE PIMPERNEL
17 THE MARGIN FOR ERROR
18 ATLAS STUMBLES
19 THE PLAIN OF CONFRONTATION
20 CLASH OF INFINITIES
1. THE VOLCANOES OF TONGARIRO