The Forge of God

by Greg Bear

  He was past any expression of awe or wonder. What he was seeing could only be one thing: east of the Sierra Nevada, along the fault line drawn between the mountains formed by ages of wrinkling pressure, and the desert beyond, the continent was splitting, raising its jagged edge dozens of miles into the atmosphere.

  Edward did not need to do calculations to know this meant the end. Such energy—even if all other activity ceased—would be enough to smash all living things along the western edge of the continent, enough to change the entire face of North America.

  Acceleration in the pit of his stomach. Going up. His skin seemed to be boiling. Going up. Winds blew that threatened to lift them away. With the last of his strength, he held on to Betsy. He could not see Minelli for a moment, and then he opened his tingling eyes and saw against a muddy blue sky filled with stars—the atmosphere racing away above them—saw Minelli standing, smiling beatifically, arms raised, near the new rim of the point. He receded through walls of dust on a fresh-hewn leaf of granite, mouth open, shouting unheard into the overwhelming din.

  Yosemite is gone. The Earth might be gone. I'm still thinking. The only sensation Edward could feel, other than the endless acceleration, was Betsy's body against his own. He could hardly breathe.

  They no longer lay on the ground, but fell. Edward saw walls of rock, great fresh white revealed volumes on all sides—thousands of feet wide—and spinning trees and disintegrating clumps of dirt and even a small flying woman, yards away, face angelic, eyes closed, arms spread.

  It seemed an eternity before the light vanished.

  The granite volumes enclosed them all.

  74

  From ten thousand miles, the Earth seemed as natural and peaceful and beautiful as it had over thirty years before, when Arthur had first seen it in full-frame pictures from space. That view—a clouded jewel, opal and lapis marbled with rich whorls of cloud—had entranced him, made him more than ever before feel a part of some cosmic whole. It had changed his life.

  The witnesses were subdued. Nobody said a word or made a loud sound. He had never experienced such rapt concentration in a crowd. Marty stood by his side, having let go of his hand, a boy barely four feet eleven inches tall, standing alone. How much does he understand?

  Perhaps as much as I do.

  Nothing compared with what they expected to see. Not the burning of an ancestral house, or the sinking of an ocean liner; not the bombing of a city, or the horror of mass graves in time of revolution or war. The crime that had been committed against humanity was virtually total. Except for them—the occupants of the arks, and the records saved for transport in the arks—the Earth would be no more.

  He could not wrap his thoughts around the totality. He had to take separate losses and mull them over. They were highly personal losses, things he would regret; but his single mind was not the holographic mind of humanity.

  Essential things would be destroyed that he had never known. Connections, evidences, histories as yet uncovered, irretrievable. All the arks could save was what humans had so far learned about themselves. Hereafter, they would be refugees with no hope of ever returning to a homeland, no hope of recovering the thread of the pasts they had lost.

  They would be dependent on the kindness, or whatever their motivations might be, of strangers, of nonhuman intelligences that so far had shown little evidence of being willing to reveal themselves; benefactors as mysterious as their destroyers.

  Lives. Billions of human beings, their existence always fragile, sharing mutual oblivion. There was no way Arthur could encompass that. He had to deal in abstractions.

  The abstractions were enough to sear him. Backed by the realization that what he saw was real and immediate, his soul burned. He had had months to come to grips with these facts and implications; those months had not done to him what the vision of the Earth, whole and bright, was doing to him now.

  No explanations came from the network. Later, when each of the witnesses had faced their private griefs, perhaps the details of the end would be made clear, and a planetary postmortem would be conducted.

  Strange images flashed through his mind. Television commercials from his childhood, smiling women in Peter Pan collars with tightly coiffed hair, images of motherhood tending perfect families. Faces of soldiers dying in Vietnam. Presidents standing one by one before the television cameras, ending with Crockerman, a very sad image indeed.

  The 200-inch telescope at Mount Palomar. He had never worked there, but he had toured the historic site often enough. The 600-inch at Mauna Kea. His dormitory room at Cal Tech. The face of the first woman he had ever made love to, that first year in university. Professors lecturing. His joy on discovering the properties of a Mòbius strip; he had been thirteen at the time. Equal joys on grasping the concepts of limits in calculus, and reading the first articles on black holes in the late 1960s.

  Harry. Always Harry.

  The first time he had seen Francine, in a skimpy black one-piece swimsuit, as voluptuous as a goddess from the sea, with long wet black hair, the backs of her legs and her inner thighs rough with damp sand, running to take a towel from her friend and collapsing on her back with a laugh not five yards from where Arthur sat. Not all is lost.

  Marty touched his arm. "Dad, what's that?"

  The globe did not seem noticeably different. But Marty pointed, and others among the witnesses were murmuring, pointing.

  Over the Pacific, a silver-white mass grew like mold in a petri dish. Over the western United States and what they could see of Australia, similar blossoms of condensing moisture expanded.

  Within minutes, the Earth blanketed itself in an impenetrable blanket of white and gray. Waves passed through the mass, ripples as visible as those in a pond, but moving with clockwork slowness. Above the north pole, frantic curtains of light played, guttering and re-forming like lines of candles in a breeze. They were aurorae. Something was wreaking havoc with Earth's interior dynamo.

  Arthur pictured the explosion expanding through the superhot, highly radioactive inner core to the outer core, where the Earth's magnetic field was born. The dense molten material compressing even more highly on the edge of the expanding blast. Mechanical shock waves shooting out to the crust, shifting the ocean basins— already weakened by the chains of thermonuclear explosions—and shifting the continents, up to ten times thicker than the ocean basins, buckling them all, raising them a few hundred feet, or a few miles. Oceans receding, spilling out over the continents . . . All now hidden behind the masses of clouds.

  The Earth's surface extremely hot, atmosphere sloshing like water in a bowl. Most of humanity dead already, destroyed by earthquakes, horrendous atmospheric storms or floods. Soon the rock below would compress no more, and the Earth would—

  "Jesus," Reuben said behind them. Arthur glanced at him; the young man's face expressed both fascination and horror.

  The clouds clarified. They glimpsed through smeared atmospherics a muddy, churning mass, fit in places with the hellish light of magma welling up through fractures hundreds of miles wide. Continental and ocean-floor plates drove together at their edges, fusing into solids no more able to keep their shape and character than gases or liquids, rippling like fabric.

  Nowhere could he see any of the works of humanity. Cities—if any still existed, which did not seem likely— would have been far too small. Most of Europe and Asia were on the other side of the globe, out of sight, their fate no different from what they saw happening to eastern Asia and the western United States and Australia. Indeed, these landmasses could no longer be distinguished; there were no oceans or land, only belts of translucent superheated steam and cooler cloud and tortured basins of mud, shot through with dull brown magma and, here and there, great white spots of plasma beginning to burrow out from the interior.

  "Is it going to blow up?" Marty asked.

  Arthur shook his head, unable to speak.

  Despite the growing distance between the ark and Earth, the globe visibly expanded
, but again with clockwork slowness.

  Arthur checked his watch. They had been viewing for fifteen minutes; the time had passed in a flash.

  Again the Earth took on the appearance of a jewel, but this time a great bloated fire opal, orange and brown and deep ruby red, shot through with spectral patches of brilliant green and white. The crust melted, turning into basaltic slag adrift in slowly spinning patches on a sea of brown and red. There were no discernible features but the colors. The Earth, dying, became an incomprehensible abstraction, horribly beautiful.

  Already, with the appearance of long spirals of white and green, intensely bright, the final fate became obvious. The limb of the world no longer made a smooth curve; it had visible irregularities, broad low lumps distinct against the blackness. From these lumps, jets of vapor hundreds of miles high lanced through the turbid remnants of the atmosphere and cast pale gray fans into space.

  Such volcanoes might have been seen in the early ages of the Earth's coalescence, but not since. New chains of released fire and vapor emerged across the face of the distorted globe. Slowly, a spiraling snake of white plasma shot chunks from its interior coils outward, the projectiles traveling at thousands of kilometers an hour but still falling back, being reabsorbed.

  No single piece of the Earth's crust had yet been flung out with a velocity equal to or greater than eighteen thousand miles per hour, orbital velocity, much less escape velocity. But the trend was obvious.

  Countless island-sized bolides pocked the face of the Earth with a churning effervescence. These bolides rose hundreds, even thousands of miles, then fell, scattering broad trajectories of smaller debris. At the limb, the increased altitude of these molten projectiles was apparent. Energy rapidly built sufficient to toss them into orbit, and even to blow them free from the bulk of the globe.

  Home. Arthur connected suddenly with all that he saw; the abstraction took on solidity and meaning. The stars behind the glowing, swelling Earth suddenly filled with menace; he imagined them as the glints of wolves' eyes in an infinite night-bound forest. He paraphrased what Harry had said on his tape:

  There once was an infant lost in the woods, crying its heart out, wondering why no one answered, drawing down the wolves . . .

  He was past tears now, past anything but a deep blunt suffocating pain. Home. Home.

  Marty faced the panel with eyes wide and mouth open; almost the same expression Arthur had seen when his son watched Saturday morning cartoons on television, only slightly different: tighter, with a hint of puzzlement, eyes searching.

  The Earth bloated horribly. Beneath the swelling crust and mantle, the spirals and fractures of white and green light widened into vast canals and highways running crazy random courses through a uniform dull red landscape. Huge bolides exited in long graceful curves, arcing thousands of miles—entire Earth radii—out in space, and not failing back to the surface, but tracing glowing orbits around the stricken planet.

  Twenty-five minutes had passed. Arthur's legs ached and he had drenched his clothes in sweat. The room filled with an awful animal stench, fear and grief and silent agony.

  Virtually everyone he had ever known was dead, their bodies lost in the general apocalypse; every place he had ever been, all of his records and the records of his family, all the children Marty had grown up with. Everyone on the ark was cut adrift in nothingness. He could distinctly feel the separation, the sudden loss, as if he had always known the presence of humanity around him, a psychic connection that was no more.

  The brilliant highways and canals of the revealed plasma energy sphere now stretched thousands of miles, vaulting the molten, vaporized material of the Earth outward in a rough ovoid, the long axis at right angles to the axis of rotation. The tips of the ovoid spun away huge globules of silica and nickel and iron.

  Against the dominant light of the plasma, the twisted remains of mantle and compressed streamers of the core cast long shadows into near-Earth space through the expanding dusty cloud of vapor and smaller debris. The planet resembled a lantern in fog, almost unbearably bright. Inexorably, the ovoid of plasma pushed everything outward, attenuating, blasting, diminishing all that was left, scattering it before an irresistible wind of elementary particles and light.

  Two hours. He glanced at his watch. The moon shined through the vapor haze, a quarter of a million miles distant and seemingly aloof. But tidal bulges would relax; and even though the moon's shape had been frozen by ages of cooling, Arthur thought the relaxation would at the very least trigger violent moonquakes.

  He turned his attention again to the dead Earth. The plasma glow had dimmed slightly. Distinct ethereal pinks and oranges and grayish blues gave it a pearly appearance, like a child's plastic ball illuminated from within. The diameter of the plasma ovoid and the haze of debris had expanded to well over thirty thousand miles by now. The ovoid continued to lengthen, spreading the new belt of asteroids into the stubby beginnings of an arc.

  The transparent panel became mercifully opaque.

  As if released from puppet strings, fully half of the witnesses collapsed on the floor. Arthur hugged Francine and gripped Marty's shoulder, unable to speak, then walked among his fellows, seeing what could be done to help them.

  The copper-colored robot appeared at the end of the cabin and floated forward. Behind it came dozens more survivors, bearing trays and bowls of water, food, and medicines.

  It is the Law.

  The words echoed again and again through Arthur's thoughts as he helped revive those who had fallen.

  It is the Law.

  Marty stayed by his side, kneeling with him as he elevated a young woman's head and held a metal cup of water to her lips.

  "Father," the boy said, "where are we going now?"

  AGNUS DEI

  The child, ravaged by wolves, falls quiet in the forest, and the long darkness is filled with an undisturbed silence.

  PERSPECTIVE

  New Mars Gazette,

  December 21, 2397;

  Editorial by Francine Gordon:

  The screen for today’s edition is filled with news from the Central Ark. Four hundred more of us, most from the Eurasian arks, have been revived from deep sleep, and prepared for their arrival on New Mars by the Moms. (Does anybody remember who first called the robots Moms? It was Reuben Bordes, then nineteen, revived eight years ago and now on the New Venus Reconnaissance Mission.) Our population today hit the mark of 12,250; the Moms say we are doing well, and I believe them.

  New Mars today celebrates its first year of autonomy. The Moms no longer exercise what my husband has called zookeeper's authority. Already we begin to factionalize and squabble; but these are the signs of a reborn planetism coming once again to maturity. Does that bring us much cheer? Not the politicians, bracing for the arrival of more Marxists .

  But what we really celebrate, of course, is the four hundredth anniversary of the Ice Strike that began New Mars. This world has already become home to most of the human race. I feel a stronger connection to New Mars now than to Earth, blasphemous as that might seem; in our hearts I think we must acknowledge that the ten years since most of us came out of sleep have blurred the pain of Earth's death. Not banished, just subdued . . .

  We cannot forget.

  In four days many of us will celebrate Christmas. On Earth, that was a time of hope, of the promise of resurrection. Even the atheists among us must feel the power of this particular season and holiday, especially now, for like Christ, we carry the weight of billions on our shoulders; and more, we bear the responsibility of an entire planet's biosphere. We are like children dragged prematurely into parenthood, and the burden is frequently too heavy to stand.

  Still, the suicide rate on New Mars has dropped precipitously in the last three years. We are finding our feet once again; we are desperately weak, but we are determined. We will not perish.

  We will not forget our duties, nor will those who fly outward on the Ships of the Law to seek the home of the planet-eaters. My son i
s out there; what does he have to celebrate, on his equivalent of December 21?

  For those of you who have supported this ofttimes undisciplined, wandering little journal, on this day of celebration, my husband and I extend our heartfelt thanks. We hope that our philosophy—that New Mars and New Venus are and will be our true homes—has provided some comfort.

  All of Earth has been reduced to one small town. Whatever our differences, we are all extraordinarily close. We love you all, and welcome our newly awakened Eurasian brothers and sisters.

  Arthur put on his coldsuit and strapped a small tank of oxygen to his belt. Even in the past year, the air had grown richer, and not just in Mariner Valley, but on the green moss and lichen plains of the highlands as well. Still, it was best to be safe; if he should need to exert himself, the oxygen tank could save his life.

  In the small individual air lock, he could hear the distant, tinny sound of the celebration in the main hall of Geopolis. He had had enough company for the evening; he needed solitude now, time to think and reappraise.

  The hatch opened and he stepped out onto a patch of ubiquitous crisp lichen. The valley air at dusk was cold and still and the stars steady as crystal.

  The sky glowed a lovely, subdued mauve, edging toward blue at zenith. To the southeast, the high valley walls caught the last sunlight of the day, a thin irregular horizontal ribbon of intense orange.

  New Mars had recovered from its collision with the icy fragment of Europa in the 390 years they had been in cold sleep, dropping its mantle of cloud after two centuries of almost steady rain. Floods had scoured the red and ocher terrain, and the increased temperature had released the frozen carbon dioxide of the poles, thickening the atmosphere. At that time, a century past, New Mars had been ideal for primitive plants. Up and down the valley, the dust and rock had been carpeted by lichens and mosses, and the new small seas had been seeded with phytoplank-ton.