He paused to straighten up, but his disorientation only grew.
“In exchange for the children, you know, he also promised to fly me out of here in that remaining ghost taxi of his. Either I misplaced it somehow, or the children tricked me and took the artifact—but only a temporary setback, I assure you. After this tribulation time, I will rule in God’s name. I’ve been betrayed, but no matter. ‘For all flesh is as grass,’ Scripture says, ‘and all the glory of man as the flower of grass.
The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away.’”
No sooner had Otis finished speaking than Michael felt Susan abruptly relaxing against his arms.
“Thank you, Mister Otis,” she said. “I’ve helmet-recorded your every word. I think I’ll forward it on to Director Brescoll at NSA. Maybe, if the Divine Plan doesn’t work out quite as you’ve predicted, the courts might be interested, too. I hope you enjoy withering and falling away—in prison.”
Michael thought he saw a flash of doubt flicker across Otis’s face, but he couldn’t be sure.
EYES AND MIRRORS
“Avram, don’t make me do this!” Vida said when they had just about completed another circuit of the Kaaba.
Mahmoud beside him, Avram stared at her even as the pressure of circling humanity called them onward.
“Do what?”
“This.”
Vida began screaming and pointing at Avram. A circle opened around them.
“Infidel! An unbeliever—come to desecrate the Holy Shrine!”
Avram listened, stunned, as she screamed variants of those words—in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, French, English. Men in the crowd began turning toward them.
Mahmoud stepped around him and toward Vida. In his upraised hand flashed a knife of ceramic, white as the floodlit marble floor. Ankawi slashed down with the blade to silence Vida, striking her upraised arm and then her upper left chest, outward from the collarbone.
As Vida fell backward, Avram put out his hands, gripping and stopping Mahmoud from striking again.
“Mahmoud! Stop! What are you doing?”
“Your mission must be accomplished,” Ankawi said, a wild look in his eyes. Avram wanted to say something, to explain, but in the next instant Ankawi turned to Vida and spoke to her in Farsi.
“Woman, cease! Allah wills that this shall happen! Only fire and the sword can cleanse the world of the abomination that names itself Israel! The will of Allah must be fulfilled!”
Avram felt turned to stone. Had he heard right? Could he trust his understanding of Farsi? Was Mahmoud only acting a role now? What role? For whom? For Vida? For the crowds surrounding them?
Had he been acting all along? Avram had pitied Mahmoud as a fool taken in by his own scientific enthusiasms, his own fundamental secularism—a dupe unable to see the potential danger of Avram’s mission. But who might really have been played for a fool? And who would pity him?
As men tackled and bowled both him and Mahmoud to the ground, away from the Kaaba, Avram was thinking, in a strangely detached way, of mirrors and telescopes. He had believed that nongovernmental religious terrorists who attacked centers of secular power would stay on one side of the mirror, and government-backed political terrorists who attacked holy sites would stay on the other side. So wrong.
So very wrong.
Had Mahmoud, playing knave to Avram’s fool…had even he, in some unconscious way, actually revealed the truth of his own mission when he said politics and religion were all mixed together on both sides of the equation? Despite the pain of being kicked and struck by innumerable fists and feet now, Avram most feared that, in this war of mirrors in which he’d become lost, the boundary between salvation politics and liberation theology, the separation between government-backed political terror and nongovernmental religious terror—all such distinctions vanished at infinity.
Looking inward toward the Kaaba, he realized he was still too far away for his implant to trigger. He doubted he would ever get close enough now. But did it matter? Luis had said that if Avram’s implant ever read his physical condition as approaching the last extremity, it would go to final activation on its own. A fail-safe mechanism, he’d called it.
Under the repeated blows and strikes, Avram’s pain had become so excruciating he was surprised he could still think at all—and yet he could, with aching clarity. Even as his body continued to struggle with his attackers, his mind calmly informed him that he was dying as fast as could be reasonably expected.
Nothing to do now but wait.
Intermittently, through the movement of the intervening bodies of the crowd, he could see the Black Stone in its silvery mount. The vertical eye, watching him, like the eyes of so many others distracted by the spectacle of transgression and punishment.
Or was that eye distracted? While many nearby stood preoccupied with his situation, he saw those two short, girlish women again, beside the Black Stone itself, their hands raised to it, touching it, just above their heads. He thought he saw light pouring from the pupil of that eye—fountaining sparks, bright strings and threads and cords of cloud-chamber traceries bending and leaping and rope-dancing into the girls’ palms. One of the women turned to face him, and he knew where he had seen the girl before.
At the camp, by the craters at Wabar. In Michelson’s lab.
A SONG TO SHAPE THE TIME
Although they were separated by hundreds of miles, it was in the same instant that Darla and Marc, most powerfully, and Michael and Susan, only slightly less so, heard inside their minds the full grandeur of the song that the Mawari would have used to sing their mountain to the stars, if the threads of this world’s timelines had allowed.
It was the same cryptic, cosmogonic nursery rhyme—of “cave of night” and “seed of light,” a toy for the minds of alien children—unfolding into the Mawaris’ full tale of spore and spawn and seven ages. Now, hearing the fully realized opus in their own minds, they recognized this was not just a chant to tell a story: it was a hymn for weaving the very fabric of space and time—and embedded within it, as in a hologram, resided all the structures of all possible spaces and times.
Much of what it sang into their minds was beyond their minds’ ability to comprehend, but some of it they already knew or were capable of knowing.
The history of the Mawari, of their sacred stone and totemic mushroom, of their search for quartz stones of a particular lattice configuration as parts for the building of a shamanic machine with which to defy space and time and gravity.
Of the role of sacred stones in tents and temples and holy cities throughout the world. Of the presence and powers of all the spears of God, the meteoritic Nuhus, the starborn Excalibur of Arthur, Odin’s Gungnir, the diamond thunderbolt Vajra thrown by and returning to the hand of a Hindu deity. Of Parzival’s stone exiled from the stars. Of the lapis, the philosopher’s stone. Of the spear head supposedly forged by Tubal-Cain, of meteoritic iron during the Bronze Age. Of the spear of Longinus, sought for its powers by Mauritius, Constantine the Great, Charles Martel, Charlemagne, a thousand years of Holy Roman Emporers, and Hitler. Of the Templars, assassins, Kabbalists, alchemists, and Grail knights who all sought transforming power and the power to transform.
Of tupilak and fairy folk. Of phoenix phenotypes and metaphages, metadiamond cages and silica nanoparticles. Of the meteorite in Mecca as open-ended superstring spawnthread weaving to the plenum of all possible universes. Of cosmic ancestors from the end of time and back again—of that, too, it sang.
All only pieces of truth. All liquidly sparking shards fallen from the infinite, destined to return to the infinite, paradoxically never having left the infinite. Hearing that song of songs, Michael and Susan, Darla and Marc, for all they did not understand, still understood that the children yet had their piece to say.
BRILLIANT PEBBLES
Few human beings on earth were more aware than Jim Brescoll of just how much piece needed saying at that moment. In the crowded Executive Command Suite at NSA, he’d
at last gotten Wang and Lingenfelter blinked up and connected into the system.
“We have ground confirmation of satellite intelligence,” one of his National Reconnaissance Office analysts said over the ECS speakers. “Missile launch flares in southern and western Asia. Syria, Iran, and Pakistan confirmed. Wait. We have indication of launch—eastern Mediterranean. Israel. Negev desert.”
So it had finally come to this. Although it was only the madness the world had been preparing for, all his life, one scenario after another, he could still hardly believe it.
Director Brescoll wished this, too, were only a drill, some apocalyptic war-gaming scenario to be contemplated and evaluated at leisure afterward. In any truly apocalyptic situation, there might well be no afterward—or at least no one to recollect in tranquillity what happened in the thermonuclear heat of a totally destructive passion.
He blinked up maps plotting satellite and telescopic scans of the rising missiles, as well as ground-based and airborne radar tracking. In a moment, after the satellite shots and plotting graphics had settled down, everyone in the room could see what was happening. The situation was growing grimmer by the minute.
Then, in no particular order, missile trajectories began to disappear.
“NRO, do we have malfunction?” Jim asked.
“I don’t know, sir. One minute we’re tracking ballistics, and the next minute there’s nothing there. Like each track just vanished.”
“Or something destroyed them,” Wang said abruptly, following the readout on his blinks and on the imagery on the big screens. “Director, I thought I saw meteor traces on that satellite shot. Can we get the NRO astronomers in on this? I think that ‘brilliant pebbles’ scenario may actually be under way!”
Brescoll put out the call. During the moments it took for the analysts to come on line with their data, more missile trajectories disappeared. Once the spy-satellite and ground telemetry data was checked and posted to the flatscreens and display domes in ECS, it was clear that a very strange sort of meteor storm was indeed taking place.
“Look!” Wang said. “It’s like shooting stars are being targeted on the rising missiles—to knock them down!”
THE PLAY BETWEEN MARVELS
The hundreds of miles separating Ka-dalun and Alii from Ebu and Aubrey were no separation to them, playing together a common game on uncommon ground, in a sky of mind.
The uncommon ground was woven of a song, the song of their people, of cave of night and seed of light.
Of how, in the void of endings, the spore of beginnings bursts into spawn. Of how the threads of spawn, absorbing the stuff of the void, knit it into stars. Whose spores, bursting into spawn, absorb the stuff of stars and knit it into worlds. Whose spores, bursting into spawn, absorb the stuff of worlds and knit it into life. Whose spores, bursting into spawn, absorb the stuff of life and knit it into mind. Whose spores, bursting into spawn, absorb the stuff of mind and knit it into worldminds. Whose spores, bursting into spawn, absorb the stuff of worldminds and knit it into starminds. Whose spores, bursting into spawn, absorb the stuff of starminds and knit it into universal mind, the void of endings, the void that has taken all things into itself, whose spore is the spore of beginnings, the fullness that pours all things out of itself.
On that uncommon ground even the common game of marbles the children played was played in the most complex way. The marbles were all always in motion, falling through space like bullets toward a blue bull’s-eye of a world. The children shifted the shape of the ground under those marbles, too, so that the speed of the marbles also shifted.
The power to shift the shape of space came from a song they had found, which fell now from the sky their minds made:
When the stars—
Threw down their spears—
And water’d heaven—
With their tears—
Did he smile—
His work to see—
Did he—
Who made—
The Lamb—
Make thee?
And they sang it in joy and laughter, despite all darkness and all pain, for they knew that the weapon of heaven powerful enough to overcome all one’s enemies must first pass through one’s own heart.
CHANCE AND NECESSITY
As more of the astronomical data came in, Jim saw it was true. Stars falling to earth, he thought. Like late figs from a fig tree shaken by the wind. Only not nearly so randomly. Were the Mawari children indeed “showing the stars where to fall,” as they’d promised Michael and Susan?
Soon all the trajectories of the initial missile flights were gone from everyone’s view. They were no longer being tracked.
“No one has a missile defense shield anywhere near that good,” Retticker said. “At least none I ever heard tell of.”
“Look at the trajectories of the meteors,” Lingenfelter suggested. “All earth-crossers—Apollo and Aten asteroids. Being used as gravity-powered kinetic-kill vehicles.”
As they watched, the strange storm continued.
“Those Mawari kids—they could do this,” Michelson said. Everyone in the ECS stared at him. “All the properties of the quantum telemorphic tools we trained them on, they fully incorporated that into their neuronal space-states. If they can teleport quantum information densities into the spacetime fabric, they can reshape the curvature of spacetime to control the orbits of those rocks.”
“They’re taking out those missiles by throwing spacetime curveballs at them,” Wang said, a gleeful awe in his voice.
“Just as we predicted!” Lingenfelter said.
Brescoll flicked his blinks up onto his forehead and gave her a sidelong glance.
“I thought you said all this was a ‘big hypothetical—’”
“Well, yes, but now we can see it!”
Jim shook his head and put the blinks back down over his eyes. They could predict it in their own minds, but they wouldn’t believe it until they’d seen it with their own eyes. He continued observing what was happening with any missile flight launching from anywhere in the region. In a moment the pattern was clear.
“Looks like the stars are coming down on anything rising with hostile intent,” Brescoll said. “How the stars would know ‘intent,’ though, I have no idea.”
“I don’t think the star throwers need to know intent, exactly,” Michelson said. “The telemorphic properties those kids incorporated give them transparent access to everything in the infosphere.”
“I thought the MAXX domes were supposed to prevent that kind of access,” Lingenfelter said.
“Maybe the folks under the domes are allowing this to happen,” Brescoll said, sounding more authoritative than he felt, given that the thought had only that moment occurred to him. “Maybe they’re somehow working in tandem with what the kids are doing.”
“All SCADA—supervisory control and data acquisition—systems worldwide would be absolutely transparent to them, as well,” Michelson said. “They know everything that can be known about where those missiles are launching from, what their targets are, under what orders—”
“If Michelson here is right,” Retticker put in, “they’d probably know all that for aircraft-and artillery-delivered munitions, too. Director, if this is about hitting things with space rocks, I’d suggest you get Yuri Semenov out of your happy holding tank and bring him up here, ASAP.”
Jim nodded and sent out that order, even as the people in the room around him broke into excited chatter. Jim refrained from joining in, still contemplating what had apparently happened. He saw, on the screen, that the terminator line of dawn had just risen over Pakistan.
Small fiery stones burning out of the sky, streaking toward other streaks rising on columns of cloud by day, pillars of fire by night. He remembered seeing those images under the dome of the MAXX in California. Seemingly, it had come true. He had seen other things as well, though. Great bursts of forking lightning. Vast thunderclaps. Mushroom clouds rising. Those had not come true—not yet, thank
God.
And who was to be thanked? Those around him seemed content with their explanations. Watson was calling it a miracle, while Michelson dismissed the miraculous as merely the simultaneous action of chance and necessity.
Maybe. Yet whether what had happened was the result of divine intervention, or the intervention of mortals wielding a technology so advanced as to be indistinguishable from divinity, he could not say.
Absently he called up images of the MAXXs in California and China, and the blister domes in Tri-Border. Looking at them reminded him of another vision he’d dreamed under the dome, one involving the Black Stone of the Kaaba in Mecca.
He searched the infosphere for live imagery of the Great Mosque, and there it was. Nothing involving spy satellites or overflights was needed, as it turned out. Al-Jazeera 4 was showing all Hajj, all the time. On the screen there did seem to be some sort of snarl in the lines of flow around the Kaaba, though he couldn’t be sure as to its cause. He began to quiet down the others in the ECS.
“Wait a minute, people. Wait a minute. Don’t break out the champagne quite yet. We still haven’t accounted for Avram Zaragosa. No final location on him—and the Saudis confirm that his alter ego, Ibrahim Fayez, entered Mecca late yesterday their time. We’re not home free yet.”
RISING BEFORE THE SUN
As the crowd about him broke his bones and began to tear Avram apart, his mind still wanted to make sense of the chaos around him, even as his body struggled wildly for life.
The people in the crowd thought they were serving God by tearing him limb from limb, but whose God?
Which God? What God?
Especially if what he suspected would soon happen to him did soon happen.
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