by Greg Bear
* * *
Francine had said little for the entire time they had been aboard. She sat on the bed, clutching her box of disks and papers with one hand. Marty held her other hand firmly. She stared at Clara with a vacancy that worried Arthur.
Choose four witnesses. The restatement of the command in their minds was polite but unequivocal. It is the Law.
Clara jerked and stood upright. “You heard that?” she asked.
He nodded. Francine turned to look at Arthur. “They want us to choose four witnesses,” he told her.
“Witnesses to what?” Her voice was small, distant.
“The end,” he said.
“Not the children,” Francine said firmly. Arthur briefly conferred with the voice. Two must be younger, to pass on the memories.
“They want two children,” he said. Francine clenched her fists.
“I don’t want Martin to experience that,” she said. “It’s bad enough if we have to.”
“They want kids for what?” Marty asked, looking between them, wide-eyed.
“It’s the Law. Their law,” Arthur said. “They need some of us to watch the Earth when it’s destroyed, and two of them must be kids.”
Marty thought that over for a moment. “All the other kids are younger than me,” he said, “except one. That girl. I don’t know her name.”
Francine turned Marty to face her and gripped his arms. “Do you know what’s going to happen?” she asked.
“The Earth is going to blow up,” Marty said. “They want us to see it so we know what it’s like.”
“Do you know who they are?” Francine asked.
“The people that talk to Dad,” Marty said.
“He understands pretty well,” Arthur said.
“I’ll say,” Clara agreed.
Francine gave her an angry glance, then focused again on Marty. “Do you want to see?” she asked.
Marty shook his head no. “It would give me nightmares,” he said.
“Then it’s decided,” Francine said. “He—”
“But Mom, if I don’t see, I won’t know.”
“Know what?”
“How mad I’m supposed to be.”
Francine searched her son’s face slowly, and then let him go, wrapping her arms around herself. “Only four?” she asked softly.
“At least four,” he said. “All who wish to see.”
“Marty,” Francine said, “we’ll share nightmares, okay?”
“Okay.”
“You’re a very brave boy,” Clara said.
“Are you going to watch?” Arthur asked Francine.
She nodded slowly. “If you and Marty watch, I can’t chicken out, can I?”
How much longer? he asked.
There will be a gathering in the common viewing cabin in an hour and ten minutes.
He sat on the narrow lower bed beside Francine and Marty. “We’ll be leaving the Earth soon,” he said. “In a few minutes, probably.”
“Can we feel it when we take off, Dad?” Marty asked.
“No,” he said. “We won’t feel it.”
Grant had followed the Gordons’ station wagon to the bay, and waited a hundred yards away, engine idling, as they parked and walked to the pier. Then he had parked his BMW beside the wagon, slung a pair of binoculars around his neck, and followed at a discreet distance, feeling like a fool, asking himself — as Danielle had asked when he left — why he didn’t simply confront them and demand answers.
He knew he wouldn’t do that. First, he could not really believe that Arthur would be part of a government escape into space. Grant couldn’t believe such an escape was contemplated, or even possible. Nobody could travel far enough away to survive the Earth’s destruction — not if such destruction was as spectacular as what he had seen in the movies. And even if they could — traveling out beyond the moon, for example — he didn’t think they would be able to live very long in space.
But he was curious. He believed as firmly as Danielle that the Gordons were up to something. In the curious kind of floating emotional state he now experienced, tracking the Gordons offered a possibility for diversion.
He was otherwise powerless. He could not save his family. He felt what billions of others — all who knew and believed — were feeling now, a deep terror surmounted by helplessness, resulting in a dopey calmness, not unlike what his grandparents must have felt as they were led to the death pits in Auschwitz.
This, of course, was vaster and more final than the Holocaust. Nondiscriminatory. Thinking such thoughts pressed him up against a wall of ignorance; he had never been particularly imaginative, and he could not conceive the means or motives behind what he nevertheless knew was coming.
He stood on the concrete seawall and watched them board the fishing boat. The boat, covered with people, sailed out to the north.
Then he sat on the concrete and rock, buttoning his coat and slipping on a cap to keep away the chill of the breezes off the bay.
Grant had no clear plans, or clear idea what he was doing. If he waited, perhaps an answer would come.
Hours passed. He doubled his legs up on the rock and pressed his knees against his chest, chin on the new denim of his pants. The afternoon passed very slowly, but he stuck with his vigil.
The ground trembled slightly and the water level of the bay rose a foot against the seawall, and then fell until the rocks at the base of the wall were exposed — a drop of perhaps four or five feet. He expected — almost welcomed the possibility — that the water would rise again drastically and drown him.
It did not rise again.
Like a robot, he stood and walked through the unlocked gate to the end of the pier, where he leaned his elbows against the wood rail, staring north. He could barely see Alcatraz beyond the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The water just south of Alcatraz appeared rougher than usual, almost white.
A dark gray shape sat in the middle of the whiteness. For a moment, Grant thought a ship had overturned in the bay and was floating hull-up. But the gray bulk was rising higher in the water, not sinking. He lifted his binoculars and focused on the shape.
With a jerk of surprise, he saw that it was already out of the water, and that it had a flat bottom. He had an impression of something shaped like a flatiron, or like the body of a horseshoe crab, four or five hundred feet in length. It rose above the span of the bridge, lifting on a brilliant cone of blinding green. Across the bay came a teeth-aching high-pitched hissing, roaring sound. The object accelerated rapidly upward and dwindled against the late morning sky. In a few seconds, it was gone. How many others had seen it? he wondered.
Could the government really have had something in the works — something spectacular?
He bit his lip and shook his head, crying now, not knowing why. He felt a peculiar relief. Somehow, a few people were getting away. That was a kind of victory, as important as his parents surviving the death camps.
And for those still condemned…
Grant wiped the tears from his eyes and hurried back along the pier, bumping into an iron pole as he passed through the gate. He ran to his car, hoping he would be in time. He wanted to be home with his family.
The bridge was practically deserted as he crossed. He could not see the spot in the bay where the water had been white.
He did not know how he would explain this to Danielle. Her concerns would be more immediate, less abstract; she would ask why he did not try to find a way to save them all.
Perhaps he would say nothing, just tell her that he had followed the Gordons as far south as Redwood City…and stopped, waited a few hours, and turned back.
She wouldn’t believe him.
72
The ship, Arthur learned, contained 412 passengers, all boarded in secrecy during the morning and the previous night. The passengers had been divided into groups of twenty, and for the most part would not mingle until several days had passed, and they had grown used to their situation. The only exception would be the witnes
sing.
Out of their group of twenty, nine had volunteered, two children, three women, and four men, including Arthur, Francine, and Marty. The nine followed the stocky copper robot through the chamber at the end of the curved hall.
They walked along a narrow black strip in a cylindrical corridor. Arthur tried to make a map in his head, not entirely succeeding. The ship apparently had compartments that moved in relation to each other.
Passing through a hatch ahead of them, the robot rolled abruptly to take up a new vertical. They found themselves doing likewise, with a few moans of complaint and surprise. In a cabin about a hundred feet long and forty or fifty feet deep, they faced a broad transparent panel that gave a view of bright steady stars. Marty kept close to Arthur, holding his arm tightly with one hand, the other clenched into a fist. The boy had sucked his lips inward over his teeth and was making small smacking sounds. Francine followed, tense and reluctant.
Arthur looked down at his son and smiled. “Your choice, fellah,” he said. Marty nodded. This was no longer a youngster playing patsy to a pretty blond cousin; this was a boy feeling his way to manhood.
More people entered through a hatch in the opposite side of the cabin in groups of four or five or six, children among them, until a small crowd faced the darkness and stars; Arthur estimated seventy or eighty. He seemed to recognize some from his time on the network, though that was hardly likely; all he had heard were their inner voices, which almost never matched physical appearance. He thought of Hicks’s inner voice, robust and young and sharp, and of his white-haired, grandfatherly presence. I’m going to miss him. He could have helped us a lot here.
Arthur flashed on Harry, desiccated, decaying, buried deep in a coffin in the Earth; or had Ithaca had him cremated? That seemed to suit both of them better.
A tall young black man stood behind Arthur and Francine. Arthur nodded a greeting and the man returned the nod, cordial, dignified, terrified, his neck muscles taut as cords. Arthur examined the other faces, trying to learn something from the mix, how they had been chosen. Age? There were few older than fifty; but then, these were just the ones who had chosen to witness. Race? All types found on North America were represented. Intelligence? There was no way to tell that…
“We’re in space, aren’t we?” the tall young man asked. “That’s what they said, I just didn’t believe them. We’re in space, and we’re going to join with other arks soon. My name’s Reuben,” he said, offering his hand to Arthur. They shook. Reuben’s hand was damp, but so was Arthur’s. “This your son?”
“This is Martin,” Arthur said. Reuben reached down and shook Marty’s hand. Marty looked up at him solemnly, still sucking his lips. “And my wife, Francine.”
“I don’t know how to feel,” Reuben said. “I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t anymore.”
Arthur agreed. He did not feel like talking.
Something flashed against the stars, turning in the sunlight, and then steadied and approached them. Francine pointed, awed. It was shaped like a huge, rounded arrowhead, flat on one side, contoured to a central ridge on the opposite side.
“That’s Singapore,” said a woman behind them. Not all of the network received information at once, Arthur decided; that made sense. It would have flooded them.
“Singapore,” Reuben said, shaking his head. “I’ve never even been there.”
“We have Istanbul and Cleveland,” said a young man at one end of the cabin, hardly more than a boy.
The gray ship passed out of view above them. There was still no sensation of motion, nor any sound except for the murmurs and shuffling of the cabin’s occupants. They might have been standing in an exhibit hall waiting for some spectacular new form of entertainment to begin.
The stars began to move all in one direction; the ark was rotating. Arthur searched for constellations he knew, and for a moment saw none; then he spotted the Southern Cross, and as the rotation continued, Orion.
The white and blue limb of the Earth rose into view and the occupants of the cabin gave a collective gasp.
Still there. Still looks the same.
“Jesus,” Reuben said. “Poppa, Momma, Jesus.”
Danielle, Grant, Becky. Angkor Wat, Taj Mahal, Library of Congress. Grand Canyon. The house and the river. Steppes of central Asia. Cockroaches, elephants, Olduvai Gorge, New York City, Dublin, Beijing. The first woman I ever dated, Kate — Katherine. The bones of the dog who helped me come to grips with the world and become a man.
“That’s the Earth, isn’t it, Dad?” Marty asked quietly.
“That’s it.”
“It’s still there. Maybe we can go back and nothing will happen.”
Arthur found himself nodding. Maybe so.
The woman who had known about Singapore said, “They’re still in the Earth. They’re the last of the planet-eaters. They can’t leave because we’ll get them.” Arthur glanced nervously at her, as if she were a dangerous sibyl; her face was pale and convulsed.
73
“Rock of a-a-a-ges…”
The singing had taken a slightly frantic tone, sharper, higher, more disturbing. The column of smoke from the Ahwanee had risen above the Royal Arches; the hotel was almost consumed, and sparks from the blaze threatened to ignite the surrounding woods. From their vantage, they watched park fire trucks spraying water on the flaming ruins.
Spend your last few minutes trying to save something, Edward thought. Not a bad way to go. He envied the fire fighters and park rangers. The fire took their minds away from the inevitable. Up on Glacier Point, people had nothing to do but think about what would happen — and sing very badly.
The rock beneath them shifted the merest fraction. Betsy returned from the rest room, sat firmly beside Edward on the lowest terrace, and placed her arm through his; they had not been separated for more than a few minutes the last hour. Still, he felt alone, and looking at her, sensed she felt alone as well.
“Do you hear it?” she asked.
“The grumbling?”
“Yes.”
“I hear it.”
He imagined the lumps of neutronium and anti-neutronium, or whatever they were, meeting at the center; perhaps they had already met, minutes or even an hour before, and the expanding front of raging plasma had just begun to make its effects known on the Earth’s mantle and thin crust.
In high school, Edward had once tried to draw a scale chart of the layers of a section of the Earth, with the inner and outer cores, mantle, and crust outlined in proportion. He had quickly found that the crust did not show up as more than the thinnest of pencil lines, even when he extended his drawing to an eight-foot-long piece of butcher paper. Using his calculator to figure how large the drawing would have to be, he had learned that the floor of the school gymnasium might suffice to hold a drawing that gave the crust a line one third the width of his little finger.
Hidden volumes and surfaces again.
Insignificance.
Geologists dealt with insignificance all the time, but how many applied it directly to their personal lives?
“…cleft for meeee…Let me hiiide myself in theeee …”
“The air is getting hotter,” Minelli said. The neckband of his black T-shirt was soaked and his hair hung down in black ribbons. Inez sat farther back, on the upper terrace, sobbing quietly to herself.
“Go to her,” Edward commanded, nodding in her direction.
Minelli gave him a helpless look, then climbed up the steps.
“People are all that matter,” he said softly to Betsy. “Nothing else matters. Not in the beginning, not in the end.”
“Look,” Betsy said, pointing to the east. Clouds were racing across the sky, not billowing but simply forming in streamers at very high altitude. The air smelled electric and was oppressive, tangible, thick and hot. The sun seemed farther away, lost in a thin milky soup.
Edward looked down from the clouds, dizzy, and tried to orient on the valley. He searched for a familiar landmark, some
thing to give him a fixed perspective.
The Royal Arches, in slow motion, slipped in huge curved flakes down the gray face of granite onto the burning hotel. Tiny trees danced frantically and then fell on their own isolated chips of rock, limbs raised by the passing air. The roar, even across the valley, was deafening. The scythe-shaped flakes, dozens of yards wide, crumpled like old plaster on the valley floor, extinguishing the Ahwanee, the fire trucks, fire fighters, and tiny crowds of onlookers in a blossoming cloud of dust and debris. Boulders the size of houses rolled through the forest and into the Merced River. New slopes of talus crept across the valley floor like an amoeba’s pseudopods, alive, churning, settling, striving for stability.
Betsy said nothing. Edward glanced apprehensively at the crack in the terrace nearby.
Minelli had given up trying to hold on to Inez. She fled from the rim, her breasts and arms and hips bouncing as she leaped up steps and over rails. He grinned at Edward and held out his hands helplessly, then descended to sit beside them.
“Some folks ain’t got it,” he said over the declining rumble of falling rocks. He looked admiringly at Betsy. “Guts,” he said. “True grit. Did you see those concentrics come apart? Just like in school. Hundreds of years in a second.”
“We aare chiiildren in youuur haaands…” The hymn singers were self-absorbed now, paying no attention to all that was going on around them. Entranced.
To each his own.
“That’s how the domes are formed, that kind of concentric jointing,” Minelli explained. “Water gets into the joints and freezes, expands, splits the rock away.”
Betsy ignored him, staring fixedly into the valley, her and still locked in Edward’s.
“The falls,” she said. “Yosemite Falls.”