There were reasons why Henry’s anonymity endured. Some people didn’t believe he existed, but was a phantasm invented by the dark side for its own hidden purposes. Because of the constant feed of images from orbit, he was much discussed on talk shows and in social conversation. He and I overheard people talking about him in restaurants and theater lobbies. Most seemed to like the idea that they might walk right by Henry, look right at him, and never know who he was. Even if they suspected that Henry was who he was, restaurateurs and waiters who graciously accepted his crisp tax-free banknotes had no motivation to tip off the paparazzi. Hanging out in public with me was chancy, but the possibility that someone might recognize me as the scarlet woman of the tabloids and realize that Henry must be Henry didn’t seem to worry him. Or if it did, he never said so or behaved as if it was anything to worry about. The real reason that he was spared the burden of celebrity may have been a simple one: Despite his wealth, Henry was perceived to be a nice guy who had done what he had done on his own, by using his head. He had every right to put on airs, even to make a spectacle of himself, but he had never done so. His inventions were regarded by most people as good deeds. Room-temperature superconductors and a virus-free Internet and fusion power and the Spaceplane and the greatest show in orbit had made everyone’s life more interesting, and if he made a lot of money out of them, what was so un-American about a guy taking his cut? Henry’s latest thing, the construction of whatever he was building in Earth’s orbit, clearly had benevolent purposes even if he hadn’t yet revealed them. Who knew what he had in mind this time? Maybe a ship would go forth and in due course return from the other planets, or even the stars, laden with treasure like a Spanish galleon. If so, he was far more likely than any imaginable government to share the loot.
The media might not have shared the good impression of the masses, but the spectacle of the space maidens going about their mysterious work in their bright outfits was a better story. Henry had the power to shut off the cameras and stop the flow of information and the Niagara of money that the images from orbit generated for the television industry. The media did not want that to happen. In the end, the uproar over the enhanced embryos was a two-day story. Henry was not hiding out in the White House or the Pentagon or some imperialist corporate office. He just wanted his privacy, and the fact that he was just about the last man on Earth who had any privacy didn’t seem to bother the common man at all.
2
IT TURNED OUT THAT THIS idyll of wedded bliss was an entr’acte. After months of silence from China, Beijing carried out the threat that General Yao had delivered when he and his soldiers in disguise visited Ng Fred’s factory in Mongolia. A no-holds-barred story in People’s Daily awakened the sleeping scandal of the enhanced embryos. The paper alleged that the hidden purpose of Henry Peel’s work in progress on the fringe of outer space was to build a spaceship whose mission was to rescue a group of multinational capitalists, who were secretly financing it, from a catastrophic worldwide earthquake that was expected to cripple civilization, cause billions of deaths, and make the planet Earth inhospitable to life. The secret plan of the capitalists was to return to Earth as soon as it was safe to do so and impregnate such women as had survived the catastrophe with the genetically engineered embryos recently discovered in Italy. The goal was to establish a new political and economic order imposed by the Übermenschen that would be the product of these technological rapes. The helpless survivors of the apocalypse would be enslaved, and in the dark age to follow, would be bred selectively, like livestock, to ensure an adequate supply of slave labor.
People’s Daily quoted from the report of a commission of one hundred distinguished scientists that had been convened by the ruling body of the country, the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China. The scientific commission was called, inevitably, the Commission of One Hundred. It included not only Chinese scientists, but also scientists and academics from several other countries, including Asian, African, Latin American, and European nations and the United States. All affixed their signatures to the report, and on the day after it was made public by People’s Daily, many of them fanned out to appear on television and websites in their own countries to explain its details in the local language. The scientists described in detail the catastrophic effects of the hyperquake and the role of the core of the earth in generating it. Their vision of the Event was remarkably similar to Henry’s—as of course it would be, since they were at long last considering the same data. Some were certain that the hyperquake would occur soon. Others believed that it was unlikely to take place in the lifetime of anyone now alive. Most agreed that it was inevitable. The consensus of the media, which polled the scientists, was that the odds were fifty-fifty and that X-Day, as journalists immediately named it, would occur sooner rather than later.
This scenario was the paranoia industry’s dream come true. Not only was the world going to come to an end and the accursed United States of America along with it, but the planet that the human race had abused so shamelessly was going to strike back and destroy its tormentors. At bottom, an international capitalist conspiracy was the villain of the piece, and Henry, the capitalist whom the masses had loved, was exposed at last as the villain of villains.
The People’s Daily story pulled no punches. The thesaurus remained the bible of the Reds. Ng Fred was described as the notorious lackey of U.S. imperialism, Amerigo as the infamous international drug peddler, Clementine as the ruthless spymaster and tool of the CIA, Melissa as a Wall Street pettifogger, myself as the notorious courtesan and pornographer. Even the poor Prof was described as an agent provocateur and infiltrator of academia. The engineers were also named, along with others.
The problem was that the underlying facts, if not the frosting about the multinational capitalist conspiracy, were accurate enough. Henry and the rest of us had been doing exactly what the story said we were doing, i.e., building a ship in which a sample of humanity of our own choosing might escape extinction. We had been doing so without revealing our intentions.
Melissa was consulted. She addressed Henry and me as if summing up for a jury that held Henry’s life in its hands. She was eloquent, she was sincere, she offered many examples of Henry’s honesty and probity, his constitutional inability to lie, cheat, steal, or act dishonorably in any way. Every potential juror in the world had believed that until today. I would have preferred that she had gone into the bathroom, closed the door, and screamed into a towel.
As it was, she demonstrated how impossible it was to defend Henry and the work he was doing now that the seeds of doubt and anger had been sown.
3
ONCE AGAIN, THE PLANET INTERVENED within the week and killed the story. A cluster of twenty-one separate earthquakes occurred almost simultaneously in the Pacific Ocean along the Solomon and Bismarck Plates, north of New Guinea and close to the equator. None registered less than 8 on the Richter scale. The strongest, centered in the Bismarck Archipelago, was measured at 9.6, roughly equivalent to the energy released by the explosion of forty billion tons of TNT. It was the strongest earthquake ever recorded by scientific instruments. Thousands perished. Tsunamis swept over the Bismarck, Solomon, and Admiralty Islands, as well as others lying hundreds of miles from the epicenters. Waves surged inland in New Guinea. Dormant volcanoes erupted on many islands, and new volcanoes rose from the sea. A pall of ash obscured the sun, moon, and stars. Parts of northern Australia were underwater. Fishes from the Great Barrier Reef washed ashore in New Zealand. In New Zealand itself, Lake Taupo and several other formerly quiescent volcanoes erupted on both the North and South Islands. In Japan and Alaska, more volcanoes were ignited. In Singapore, Jakarta, Manila, and Hong Kong, the windows of skyscrapers—often every window in the building—were shattered by the shock waves that these events generated. On the island of Hawaii, Mauna Loa, Mauna Kea, and Hualalai belched gas and ash and lava. In the Marquesas, long-dead volcanoes also awakened, and surf overflowed the cliffs and flooded Henry’s h
ouse, among many others. In New York, ten thousand miles from the epicenters, buildings quivered. People walking their dogs in the dark felt the tremor and as memories awakened, stopped in their tracks, waiting for something worse to happen. Dogs in their hundreds of thousands barked and howled and whined from one end of Manhattan to the other. Rats and mice and squirrels fled. Pet cats escaped en masse, so that lost cat posters fluttered from every other lamppost in the five boroughs.
Henry slept through the first part of this news. I watched the live feed—raw unedited footage of events being photographed as they happened and were transmitted via satellite to the network. The images began to come in at about four in the morning. By that time I had been watching with the sound muted for four or five hours. Several moments passed before I realized that the images had changed. I clapped on a headset and listened. Watching raw video can be disorienting because there is no voice-over. Nobody in a suit and tie stands in front of the White House telling the world what’s what, as the soundless images tumble across the screen. Cameras were turned topsy-turvy as their operators fell over backward as the ground heaved beneath them or they were trampled by the crowd. Sometimes they got back on their feet and refocused the cameras, sometimes not. The sky was a funny color, tropical blue brindled in hellish red and black. Many of the pictures were aerial shots. Once in a while images taken from space were intercut. The screen then filled with ocean panoramas in which great columns of black smoke, filled with the boiling blues and yellows of burning gas, burst from the surface of the water and rose thousands of feet into the air in a matter of seconds.
My God, I thought—of course that’s what I thought—it’s all over.
I didn’t scream—not because my brain and nerves did not instruct me to do so, but because I could not let myself wake Henry, the hater of fuss, with a shriek. Instead, I ran to the bedroom and laid a cold hand on his face. He opened his eyes, registered what he was half-seeing in the unlighted room, and laughed. I understood why: I still wore the headset, but nothing else except the afghan I had wrapped around myself to ward off the chilly draught of the air-conditioning. Henry reached for me. I wanted to play Indian princess? Fine, he’d be the cowboy. I leaped back, avoiding his encircling arms.
“Henry, wake up.”
“I’m wide awake.”
He reached for me again.
“No, come quick. Something is happening.”
He followed me into the television room. He turned up the sound. In seconds he put together the horrific jigsaw puzzle that was flashing piece by piece onto the screen. I wanted to ask him for confirmation that the end had come, to cry out, Is it happening?
“I don’t think so,” he said calmly.
“Then what is it?”
“It’s a local event.”
Local? Had he said that the Pacific Ocean was about to be flung into space like a mouthful of spit, I would have been more ready to believe him.
I said, “How do you know?”
“Because nothing is happening here, or anywhere else except in one chain of islands.”
Henry produced a cell phone and punched one of its keys. Ng Fred’s voice said hello. Henry put the phone on speaker so that I could hear what was going on.
Henry said, “Fred—are you aware what’s happening in the South Pacific?”
“I’m watching. What is it?”
“Not It,” Henry said. “Not quite, not yet.”
Ng Fred said, “You’re sure?”
“Aren’t you?” Henry asked. “But be alert. I’ll be there tomorrow afternoon.”
Soon afterward, we were flying toward Mongolia.
In the weeks that followed, aftershocks by the hundreds came one after the other—strong around the epicenter, mild to imperceptible elsewhere. Temperatures dropped throughout the world by an average of 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit and continued to fall, yet the rain was warm. It was also gritty. You could feel it, and see the volcanic dust in the rainwater that swirled in the gutters. The sky was one big bruise. The sun was blurred. Curiously, media panic notwithstanding, not many people looked up. They just went about their lives as if they thought these signs would soon go away and everything would be normal again.
Few wanted to think about the implications of twenty-one simultaneous earthquakes, no matter how many excited scientists and highly paid alarmists were shouting at each other on television. A minor earthquake that turned off the electricity for two weeks might cause mass catatonia in Manhattan—but Micronesia? The twenty-one quakes—now called the “cluster quakes” by the media—hadn’t happened in New York (or London or Paris or Beijing or Moscow). They had only happened inside a television set, and inside the box they remained. Rescue missions were dispatched. Checks were written, schoolchildren drew pictures, politicians harrumphed, the truly disturbed sought therapy. This particular moment of excitement was over. On to the next.
From my point of view, the principal benefit of this mass repression of reality was that the media hubbub about my husband died. He simply disappeared from the airwaves. One moment he was the villain of the hour, the next he was ectoplasm. People’s Daily continued to denounce him, but the rest of the talking heads appeared to have forgotten that he had ever been the subject of commentary. I wanted to believe that the slander died because Henry was and always had been above suspicion. Ng Fred believed that the propaganda failure had robbed the Politburo Standing Committee of its pretext for launching a raid into Mongolia and seizing the factories and human assets of CyberSci, Inc. Henry disagreed. He thought that Beijing would either invent another reason or else just do what it wanted to do in the knowledge that it was too powerful to be challenged.
“The world is looking the other way,” Henry said. “It’s a good moment for the Chinese to act. All they need to take possession of everything we own in Mongolia is a couple of platoons of commandos. It would be over in minutes, without firing a shot. We’re not going to resist and get our people killed. They don’t want to kill them. They know that the human assets are at least as valuable as the equipment.”
“To you, maybe,” Ng Fred said. “But one thing China has got plenty of is people. I can assure you that shots will be fired—one at least, two if you also happen to be here when it happens.”
Henry didn’t argue the point. I hoped this meant that he didn’t intend to be in Mongolia when the raiding parties arrived.
I said, “What about the Mongolian government?”
“They won’t make a sound,” Ng Fred said. “Number one, they’re not crazy. Number two, they’ve already got their money and Beijing will let them keep it if they mind their own business. Number three, you should forgive me, all this stuff belongs to an American capitalist whose body can’t even be identified.”
Ng Fred’s summing-up brought a faint smile to Henry’s lips. It tied my insides into knots and made my mind go dark with fear. At night I dreamed, by day I imagined, one of General Yao’s genteel young officers firing a pistol into Henry’s brain.
Henry continued to behave as if he were going to live forever. We coupled, we talked in the night. Henry waited, or so I thought, for the idea that would calm the situation. Meanwhile he ordered the work to proceed at even greater speed. One hundred additional women were almost at the end of their training. In a matter of days they were lifted into orbit. There was plenty for them to do, and plenty of room for them. The original space maidens had by now assembled two complete spheres and the command module. Two other spheres were under construction. One was almost complete, the other in an early stage. Two new Spaceplanes were almost ready to fly. The circle of booster rockets, rendered obsolete by the Spaceplane, still brooded near the Chinese frontier.
4
ON JULY 11, THE NORTH Magnetic Pole jumped 376 miles in a single day and relocated itself in northern Siberia. On the same day, the South Magnetic Pole moved about 150 miles across Antarctica. Earth’s magnetic field weakened dramatically. In what-if interviews with scientists, the media raised the possibi
lity that cosmic radiation might now penetrate the planet’s enfeebled magnetic field and fry life on Earth. Although nobody could explain why or how this happened, heavy snow driven by high winds fell a few days later in belts of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, stretching from the poles to Seoul in the north and Rio de Janeiro in the south. In Siberia, Scotland, and Canada, as much as ten feet of snow fell. It melted quickly—almost instantaneously, in fact, as might have been expected in midsummer. As usual, most of the public showed little curiosity or concern. Quirks of nature were nothing new. To most human beings it didn’t matter much where the North and South Poles were located. They didn’t believe in X-Day. The media warned that it was coming; therefore the media would soon report that there was no danger.
5
ONE NIGHT, THE PHONE WOKE us up at 3 a.m. Henry put it on speaker.
Ng Fred’s voice said, “They’re here. Fifty men. Special forces.”
“Have you completed the checklist?”
“Everything’s in position, Henry.”
“Our people?”
“They’re OK so far. Don’t come.”
“I’m going to make the call now,” Henry said.
He got up and walked briskly out of the room. I followed, switching on lights as I went. After the click of each switch, Henry’s pale body would take shape, then stride through a doorway into another dark room. I caught up to him in the television room.
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