Sweat, chilly and clammy, was moistening Gerade’s forehead and upper lip. With a shaking hand, he brushed above his eyes. Tor watched with clinical interest. “What—what—” Gerade stopped and licked his lips, then began again. “What are you bleating on about, Tor?”
Anger, raw and savage, turned Tor’s features into something alien and terrible. “Don’t ever speak to me in that manner again!” Gerade flinched, and suddenly Tor calmed down, his face assumed its normal cast. “I’m merely telling you, Father, as I promised. You told the story of your soul. I heard you. Now that you are dying, like an ignorant and superstitious peasant woman, you’re considering crawling on your belly, drooling and sobbing, to the Christian God. It would be amusing if it weren’t so pathetic.”
Count Gerade von Eisenhalt’s eternal fate—as it had for ages and for countless men and women—hinged on the next few moments. Tor waited, his eyes burning with a secret dark glee, as his father struggled with terrible pain, with great grief, with horrible loss, with fear and loneliness and longing for God—and also with the enchanting and seductive vision of dying an invincible and proud icon of man’s power.
Gerade dropped his eyes, took a ragged breath, and said hoarsely, “I am getting older, and I contemplate eternity as any thinking man must do. It does not mean, Tor, that I am ready to be turned into a sniveling, low church hymn-singer.”
And so his eternity was sealed.
Tor smiled, and if Gerade had seen it, he might have been truly afraid for the first time that night. When his father looked up, however, Tor’s features were impassive. With mild emphasis, Tor said, “I cannot die, Father. I know that this triumph, in particular, had nothing to do with your supposed begetting of me. But I offer it to you as a sop . . . of vinegar, if you will,” he said, with mild amusement.
Gerade had no idea what he was talking about; the pain was subsiding, but it had left him weak and a little disoriented—and vastly relieved and hugely grateful. To whom, he did not know nor care.
“He shot me twice, you know. Point-blank, in the chest. Today not even a small crimson mark remains,” Tor said conversationally. “Poor fellow; he couldn’t kill me, though it certainly seemed that he should have. And then he died, rather badly. It took a long time, it seems . . . but I’m not too sure of that. I was a bit distracted at the time by other matters.”
Obviously struggling, Gerade stammered, “Tor—Tor—are you saying that you were shot? In the chest, twice? And no one even notified me?”
“You might say that I didn’t notify anyone,” Tor said, with bizarre humor. “The bullets did not touch me, Father. They couldn’t harm me. Nothing, and no one, on this earth can harm me ever again.”
Gerade stared at his son, his eyes round with surprise, and something close to alarm.
“You believe me, don’t you?” Tor asked, with a certain quiet menace.
Gerade swallowed hard; he couldn’t look away from Tor’s heated gaze. Finally, he managed to croak, “Yes. Yes, I believe you.”
“Yes, you do,” Tor agreed, a clear threat. “I wandered the desert for nine days. No food touched my lips, no water quenched my thirst, not a drop of my blood was spilled . . . and I saw no man. For nine days.”
“What—what did you see in the desert, Tor? What happened to you?”
He rose and stood over his father, his presence and strength suddenly terrifying to the old man. “I saw no man,” he repeated with urgency, “but I saw the truth in the form of my spirit-father, and I saw my destiny, and I saw myself. I saw no man.”
He began to pace, his steps hard and pounding. “I am going to rule this entire world, Father,” he said in a thunderously deep voice quite unlike his own. “I have conquered much of Europe. When this old and decrepit continent is subdued, Asia, including that most accursed Middle East, will know my fury. But first”—he smiled, a terrible grimace—“first of all, I will have the pleasure of turning our mightiest and most despised enemy of all into a barren and forsaken wasteland. Only worms and poisonous plants and vipers will thrive there. I have set my plan in motion. It will begin soon, and it will end quickly.”
Gerade struggled to breathe evenly; he was gasping with sheer shock. “Are you—are you talking about America?”
“Of course.”
“Tor—Tor—are you mad? Are you insane?” Gerade recovered some of his strength in fury. “I have worked for years—decades!— to isolate that accursed country, in her laziness and weakness and cowardice! And I, almost single-handedly, have succeeded! Now she is nothing but a fat slug, slopping up the world’s goods and paying for them with the only money that has any worth in this world, you fool! Don’t you understand what it will do to the global economy if America is decimated?”
Tor turned to face his father, and the exasperated amusement on his face convinced Gerade, more than ever, that his son had gone irretrievably mad. “Do I understand?” Tor mocked him. “Of course. Do I care? I do not.”
Gerade started choking. His face, which had been a pasty shade of gray, started turning a dire warning red. When he managed to swallow the bile rising from his horror and uncontrolled fury and regain his breath, he gasped, “You—you can’t do this, Tor. You will not do this. It’s . . . insane! I forbid you, and I will fight you as long as I live!”
Tor cocked his head slightly to the side with detached interest. “Too bad. Father, you look very ill. Here, let us have more of General—or should I say Emperor—Napoleon’s brandy, and calm down and discuss this like the intelligent and civilized men that we are. I think we both might be a little overwrought.”
Gerade was mollified slightly by Tor’s calm reasonableness, and jerkily he nodded. “Yes, yes—please—a drink would help . . .”
Tor went to the low marble table between their chairs, maneuvering so that he stood in front of his father. He stared down at the bottle, at the two graceful glasses, at the amber liquid that was so precious it could not be priced. He saw nothing, however, but a dark gray shimmering light, like a candle shining through black gauze. He felt as though he were standing on the very edge of a precipice; one wrong step . . . no, one wrong move . . . he would fall, and fall, and fall, and forever . . .
I cannot die . . . I cannot be killed. I have power, I learned power, in those stark days of unforgivable exploding light in the desert, and those dark and whispering cold nights . . . I learned of you, from you, Father, my real father, my father of blood and iron, of weeping and terror and gnashing of teeth, of power such as this world has never seen before . . .this pitiful little shamble of a man behind me is not my father. He is merely a pothole in my Roman road, a chafe in my skin, a bone that could catch in my throat and choke me . . .
He dies, Tor! Now!
For a breath-stealing moment, Tor thought that the death curse had been said aloud; he even wondered if he had said the words. But in the next breath, Tor surrendered to all of the power, knowing full well the terror and the weeping and the blood and iron that followed.
He poured two fingers of brandy into each of the balloon glasses. Slowly, with precise and cautious movements, Tor thrust his forefinger into the heavily fragrant golden liquid. On this, his left forefinger, was a heavy beaten-silver ring, curiously wrought, with the four eternal circles crowning it. The brandy moved, slopped, and three golden rings radiated outward to rise high against the side of the glass. Then it was still. Tor handed the glass to his father, then picked up the other one and raised it high.
“To my father,” he said in a low voice.
Gerade barely noticed; he longed for the coarse burning warmth to numb his fright and his pain and his overwrought mind. He took a long drink.
Tor stood rigid, watching as his father’s light blue eyes widened, then distended, seeming to strain out of their sockets. A wisp of smoke, bearing a noxious odor, rose from between Gerade’s twisted lips.
“They called it Prussian blue—or iron blue. The color, you know,” Tor whispered. “Because it was invented by one of our est
eemed ancestors—a Prussian of high family, Heinrich de Diesbach. And from Prussian blue they made hydrocyanic acid . . . it is rather fitting, don’t you think?”
Count Gerade von Eisenhalt could not answer; his tongue and lips had burned away, leaving a horrid stench on the air. He was, unfortunately, still breathing. Obviously he wasn’t listening to Tor; perhaps in those last seconds of life he was crying out to the Galilean he had scorned only a few short minutes before.
But Tor thought that unlikely. Drinking Prussic acid, though a quick way to die, was hellishly painful.
Tor continued, “I might have chosen for you to die like a man, like a true Prussian soldier, or a Junker nobleman . . . but he wouldn’t allow it. My real father, my spirit-father . . . do you understand?”
Gerade von Eisenhalt, mercifully, was dead.
Count Tor von Eisenhalt thoughtfully sipped his fine Napoleon brandy, and reveled in glorious visions of his destiny. It awaited him, soon, so soon . . .
America One
Washington National Airport, Washington, D.C.
Though America had by choice become a weakened country, she was still viewed as a dangerous, though sluggish, giant by the rest of the world. In the same cautious analysis, her president was still considered to be the most powerful man on earth.
President Bishop Beckwith stood at the door of America One, the titanic C-6 Ajax that had been outfitted as palatially as any luxury hotel, posing for the Cyclops live comm of his and his family’s departure for the West Coast. Though he waved and cheerily smiled, his thoughts were dwelling upon this irony—of his great power, and the near-impossibility of wielding it.
Unconsciously his arm tightened around his wife. Josephine Beckwith was a rather insignificant woman, only modestly pretty and rather shy. She adored Beckwith with all of her heart. She was only twenty-eight and was pregnant with his fifth child, her first. Behind them were Beckwith’s four children by his first wife, who had died: his two sons, proud U.S. Marines, and his two daughters, one in junior high and the other in high school. It was an excellent photo op, for they were a photogenic family.
Beckwith’s wide smile, when seen up close, looked hot-glued onto his face. “Come on, I think this is enough.”
The family went inside, followed closely by an army of Secret Service men, aides, staff, and of course, Beckwith’s beloved Marine honor guard. As soon as they were out of the reach of Cyclops’s prying eye, Beckwith loosened his tie, took off his coat, and settled down to talk to his wife privately for a while, which was a rare and welcome interlude for him. He felt the power of the engines throughout his solid body as the enormous aircraft began lumbering along the landing strip.
Jo sank gratefully into the seat beside him, holding a tomato juice.She was rarely without a glass of it these expectant days; in spite of the fact that medical technology had established that pregnant women’s cravings were psychosomatic, Josephine Beckwith wanted tomato juice day and night, and whatever the first lady of the United States wanted, she got.
They stared out the window as the green grass of the runway turned into a long verdant blur. “Jo,” Beckwith said in a low voice, “I’ve come to a decision about how I’m going to spend the rest of my term.”
Jo studied him with serene blue eyes. “This sounds important.”
“It is. Right now it’s just kind of an intention. I haven’t really got my tactics in mind, but I do have a strategic goal.”
Secretly amused at her husband’s habit of the military way of thinking, she merely asked, “Can you tell me about it?”
He looked directly into her eyes and smiled gently. “I can tell you about it, Josephine. Always.”
She returned his smile with a Madonna-like one of her own.
Encouraged, he said in a very low tone, “I’m going to figure out how to dismantle this accursed Man and Biosphere Project. It’s an atrocity. It’s like a tumor. Shoving Americans into little boxes in twenty-something cities! It’s—it’s criminal!”
“But Bishop, it’s such a well-entrenched project. The bureaucracy itself involves thousands of people. And you know very well that the Executive Council has gotten control of almost half the economy since they took over Cyclops and Proto-Syn and Earth’s Light.”
“I know all that,” he growled. “It doesn’t matter.”
“But how can you—one man—possibly do such a thing?” Jo asked, distressed.
He turned to her, then took both her slender hands in his. His steel-colored eyes glinted with cold fire. “Jo, this is the United States of America, the most powerful, the wealthiest, the most blessed nation the earth has ever seen. I still see it—and I don’t care how silly and fatuous it sounds—as the land of the free and the home of the brave. And I’m the leader of this nation. I can lead her to a better and nobler future, as our past was.”
She stared deeply into his fevered gaze for long moments, and then she whispered, “Yes, Mr. President, I know you can. And, Bishop, I love you very much.”
“Jo, I love you, too.”
The words were certainly not the worst ones to have on your lips at the moment of death. The plane cleared the runway and turned upward in the familiar sharp ascent. The cabin dissolved in a burst of phosphorous white flame. The last breath that President Bishop Beckwith took cooked his lungs, but he never knew it. He died instantly, along with every human being on America One.
The camera had recorded the takeoff and all of the cameramen blinked stupidly at the huge ball of flame that vaporized the C-6 Ajax.One of them finally gasped, “It’s gone! The president—he’s gone!” His horrified gaze fixed on the mile-high black-and-white explosion of flame, he could think of nothing else to say. “He’s gone—he’s gone!”
One moment of time, one fiery blast.
All the hopes and dreams of America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, died in that moment, too.
PART III
AUTUMNAL EQUINOX
And they shall look unto the earth; and behold trouble and darkness, dimness of anguish; and they shall be driven to darkness.
—ISAIAH 8:22
“Lord,” answered Lecanius, as pale as a wall, “the
whole city is one sea of flame; smoke is suffocating the
inhabitants, and people faint, or cast themselves into the
fire from delirium. Rome is perishing, Lord.”
—HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ, QUO VADIS
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
—MATTHEW ARNOLD, DOVER BEACH
FOURTEEN
THIS DAWN BEGINS A DAY of strength through unity. “Today is the autumnal equinox. On this magical day all of the spiritual forces from which we draw our strength—the earth, the moon, the sun, the stars—are in perfect harmony. Each of you, if you will meditate on our Lady Earth, and the high and noble spirits of all of her wonders, will gain knowledge and wisdom and dominion from her . . .”
Oberstleutnant Rand von Drachstedt turned from the window to glance at the great Cyclops screen for a moment. The picture was a breathtaking view of dawn at sea. A fingernail moon faded to a mere ghost in the lightening sky. A sliver of vivid orange signaled the rising sun, and the placid ocean’s horizon line glowed a rich plum. Minden Lauer’s voice overprint floated, interweaving with the colors and the light and the whisper of waves.
Frowning, Drachstedt turned to study his aide-de-camp, Oberleutnant Jager Dorn. Dorn was seated at the small worktable in his plain barracks room, staring almost slack-jawed at the Cyclops. Seeing his assistant’s obsessive attention to Minden Lauer’s Earth’s Light broadcast, Drachstedt restlessly turned back to stare out the window at the spotlessly clean street below. It was Officers’ Row, the smallest street on Patrick Air Force Base, which for the last three years had belonged to the German Luftwaffe 99th Air Wing.
Beyond the street and a generous expanse of green parade ground,
Drachstedt knew that men were still working feverishly, spraying the eight great C-6 Ajax transports. Since President Beckwith’s death—still unexplained—in America One, which was an Ajax, the Americans had superstitiously shunned the enormous planes. The Germans had bought six of them for half their cost. The polymer spray with its sea salt content was the only sealant that would keep out this dreadful organism that actually reduced one of the elemental powers of the universe to nothing but a germ’s offal. So bizarre . . . all of it is unsettling . . . , Drachstedt reflected uneasily.
Even as he had turned his eyes and attention away from the Cyclops, he felt a mental tug, a nagging imperative to watch the broadcast and especially to direct his hearing to absorb Minden Lauer’s husky, erotic voice. I thought she must use subliminal messaging . . . that is the only explanation I could think of for the—the urgent command, the irresistible pull one feels to attend to her broadcasts.
But then Colonel Drachstedt had found out that Minden Lauer only did live broadcasts, with real-time audio. She had even admitted, with amusement, that no one could explain— including she herself—why recorded broadcasts were not watched and received nearly as avidly as her “live communications.” Contributions for recorded broadcasts were always about one-third of the contributions for her live comms.
It had disquieted Colonel Drachstedt when the Lady of Light had told him this. Now he felt even more repelled by the throaty urging of her voice that was so hard to blot out.
“Oberleutnant Dorn, if I am not intruding too much on your time, I would like to go over the plans for Project Final Unity again,” Drachstedt said, much more sharply than he intended.
“Hmm? Oh . . . oh, yes, of course, sir,” Dorn responded with some confusion. He touched a button on the remote control, and the Cyclops screen changed from Minden’s lovely form on some high rooftop to the Cyclops red eye logo. “I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t realize that you required my attention. I was just . . . just . . .”
The Beginning of Sorrows Page 22