Somehow Vida managed to stop their brutalizing of him and clear a space around him. A miracle. As her face hovered above his, however, Avram realized her miracle was too late. He felt only the lassitude of a man approaching death, with no illusions about his end. He was entering his last extremity, with all that might entail.
Suddenly he felt himself floating weightlessly upward. Rather like the sensation of drifting up from bed, relaxed and rising in relaxation, shortly after he had just begun to nod off in the sleep of ordinary days and nights. Unlike the waves that had at times lifted him from gravity at the edge of sleep, however, this time the floating upward didn’t stop, the wave didn’t break. No crash or undertow pulled him down, only a feeling like a great wave lifting and lifting him.
His body canted slightly and he found himself looking toward the Kaaba. He saw beside it the two girls seemingly ablaze with light, each holding one fiery palm toward him. As he rose and rose, he sailed far above the Kaaba, out of the floodlit confines of the Great Mosque entirely. Soaring into the starry sky, he wondered distantly if this might be some near-death, out-of-body manifestation he was experiencing.
He felt his breathing growing labored, as if with an altitude far higher even than that to which this weightless flight had lifted him. He gasped for breath, fighting to keep his exhale from becoming a death rattle.
He did not succeed. The implant monitoring his vital signs determined he had reached last extremity. It uploaded its location and diagnostics to a Saudi military communications satellite built jointly by, and leased from, Otis Diversified and ParaLogics.
Receipt of that information on Avram’s location and condition caused the satellite to download the implant’s triggering instructions.
Receiving those, the implant sent a shiver through Avram’s flesh as it transformed the entirety of his body’s DNA into a computational system focused like an informational lens on the implant itself.
Pumped to supercritical information density, the implant imploded, displacing from real to virtual.
The explosive combustion of Avram Zaragosa’s body was the single most important trace the device left of that virtualization.
The lifting wave broke. For a moment, a stillborn shooting star, achingly bright, flashed in the firmament, a fiery apotheosis high above predawn Mecca.
HYPERVELOCITY OBJECT
In the ECS, Jim Brescoll watched in amazement the Meccan scene transpiring on Al-Jazeera 4—as did the rest of the impromptu think tank surrounding him, including its latest captive addition, Yuri Semenov.
The network had only three cameras in play, so the view kept switching from a long shot of the Kaaba, to the two figures standing beside it blazing with light, to the human figure rising above the crowd, finally shrinking to a glowing dot before disappearing from view.
The Jazeera cameras didn’t capture the moment of ignition when that rising human form exploded into a very short-lived nova. Several of the satellites looking for missile launch flares and nuclear detonations, however, did record the scene.
“Any estimate on altitude and location of that burst?” Jim asked.
“Thirty thousand feet,” Bree Lingenfelter said, surveying the data funneled to them from the big room next door. “About three miles due east of the Great Mosque.”
“Estimated yield?”
“Nothing exact,” Wang said, surveying the data on his blinks. “A good deal less than complete conversion of a body to energy. Three to five kilotons, best guess. Half a Hiroshima at worst, but maybe a good deal less. Might raise some dust on the ground, but nothing too dangerous.”
“Fallout? EMP?”
“No nuclear debris indicated,” Bree said. “Readings are still hovering around background level. Should be some ground-effect EMP, but no reports of it. Odd.”
“How ‘odd’?”
“I’ve cross-referenced Oersted and Magsat data. For a blast that size the signature is surprisingly contained, electromagnetically speaking.”
“Leave it for now. Let’s see if our image analysts can use the Jazeera footage to build us a picture of that person who got lofted out of the crowd.”
In moments the Jazeera pixels had been computer-massaged enough to yield a bloodied face. A bit more pixel-massaging removed the blood.
“All right, let’s compare that to the most recent shots we have for Avram Zaragosa.”
The two most recent images—of Ibrahim Fayez on a local news show out of Taif, and from a Saudi checkpoint near Mecca, respectively—matched the face of the man lofted from the Great Mosque.
Compared to Avram Zaragosa’s actual passport picture, the man called Ibrahim Fayez and the man lofted from the Mosque looked very much like Zaragosa might have looked had he lost considerable weight, gotten sun-bronzed, and started growing a beard during a journey through the Empty Quarter.
Avram Zaragosa seemed a very plausible candidate for the unidentified flying man who exploded.
“Time to break out the champagne yet?” Amaral asked.
“Not quite,” Brescoll said. “Someone at NASA just sent this on several priority channels. For me.”
He blinked the message to the tabletop display dome. One section was grainy, stuttering footage of an unfamiliar rock from space, with a numerical readout beside it. The little movie that accompanied the grainy telescopic footage, however, was disturbingly familiar: graphics of a large skystone coming in at a relatively shallow angle of attack, braking and breaking up explosively in light, heat, and lightning some distance above the earth, sending an EMP lightning wave racing around the planet, putting out on the nightside earth all the lights of civilization.
“Oh, hell,” Bree said. Brescoll nodded glumly. Now he wished he hadn’t sent Miskulin and Yamada into the field. Meteoriticists were in short supply. He glanced at Yuri Semenov expectantly. You’ll have to do, he thought.
“Jittery numbers, on frames of filmed rock?” Semenov asked. “May be coordinates on celestial sphere?
Swing some radio, some optical telescopes onto them, for confirmation, can you?”
Out in the big room, teams went to work. In moments they had a fix on the object.
“What did they find?” Jim asked impatiently. “Is it actually out there?”
“We’ll patch it through to the flatscreens and blinks,” Steve said.
Same rock, less grainy.
“How big?” Semenov asked.
“Roughly ninety meters in diameter,” Bree said.
“How fast?”
“Approaching at approximately twelve miles per second,” Wang said.
“Hypervelocity object, then. How close?”
Wang read him the figure in miles and kilometers.
“That will put it well inside moon orbit—very soon,” Semenov said. “Point of extinction?”
Lingenfelter gave him the figures, in miles and kilometers above the earth. Then she gave him latitude and longitude. Semenov whistled softly.
“Let me guess,” Jim said. “It will burst at the lowest spot in the lower Van Allen Belt. Smack dab in the South Atlantic Anomaly.”
Semenov nodded, much impressed by the director’s “guess.”
“This just doesn’t make sense,” Jim said. “Why save the world from nuclear missile exchange, only to bring on a global blackout that’ll kill millions?”
Semenov looked ready to say something, but at that moment the jittery-rock and EMP-roll imagery was replaced by the face of an elderly Asian man, looking nervous. Jim had once met the man, in the flesh, but he doubted anyone had ever seen Doctor Vang looking nervous.
“Hello, Director Brescoll. My children are misbehaving, I’m afraid.”
MENTAL FIGHT
Michael thought the Temple Mount looked surprisingly peaceful in the dawn, all its trees and stones clear and calm in the sunrise. If, however, what Director Brescoll said was true—when he commanded them here posthaste to debrief Doctor Vang—then it seemed all too likely to prove the false calm of a false dawn, th
e last day of the old world, the first day of a new dark age.
Brescoll had told him and Susan of the great stone the children had apparently set on a course to blind Argus. “The mountain from the stars that they are singing to earth,” Michael told his audience in the distant ECS. “Just the inverse of ‘singing their mountain to the stars,’ the way Jacinta always said the Mawari planned.”
Yet Michael found hope in that very idea of singing. The kids had sung much into his head that he did not understand, but he could not help trusting them, even in the midst of the baleful news of a great star falling.
Even as the gangway unfolded from the last stealth airship on earth, as if the heavens were opening.
Even as Doctor Vang and the crew of his craft walked down that gangway.
Even as those who had just stepped down from that stairway to heaven walked with the glum determination of the living dead, approaching Michael and Susan and the waiting peacekeepers, across the plaza in front of the scorched Dome of the Rock.
“Doctor Vang?” Michael asked as the blue-helmeted soldiers brought the weary-looking old man in their direction. “I’m Michael Miskulin, and this—”
“—is Susan Yamada,” Vang said as he sat down on a bench, facing the Dome. “I know who you are.
My children are quite fond of you.”
“‘Your’ children?” Susan asked. She and Michael turned their backs on the plaza and the Dome to address the man seated and slumped before them.
“Mine…though not mine alone. The Instrumentality’s. Your uncle’s and your aunt’s, too, Michael. Yours as well—both of you. I presume Director Brescoll told you of our plans to precipitate the next stage of human evolution?”
Michael and Susan nodded.
“The Instrumentality’s ‘split kids,’ right?” Michael asked. “Tetragrammaton’s ‘tesseractors’?”
“The ones who can hack their own DNA to become human starships, or whatever they were supposed to become,” Susan said sourly. “The ones who had to be tormented, in the name of the great leap forward.”
“I would prefer to think of them not as tormented,” Vang said, “but as those whom the ‘curse’ cures.
They are all that and more, the Mawari children. Ka-dalun and Alii. Aubrey and Ebu. They named themselves that—and it should have been a warning to us all. I believed they would not disobey their parent. I thought I could use them. I thought I could control them. I was the one who drummed to them across the Web, with word of Project Argus and its implications.”
“Why on earth do that?”
“To wake people up,” he said tiredly. “To restore the glory of Tetragrammaton and the Instrumentality.
To make all humanity see the need to plan for the long-term survival of our species. To rouse us from our lemminglike drive to self-destruction. Surely you can understand that, Michael.”
Michael pondered it. The apocalyptic progress of humanity via overpopulation, environmental destruction, aggressive territorial expansion, and all the rest were perhaps clearer to him than to most people, but the way things had turned out didn’t make sense, even to him.
“How would steering the children toward Project Argus help that?”
“It would have allowed us to take the whole world hostage for its own good. The threat of closing all the eyes of Argus, of shutting down the entire global system, in order to hard-reboot it, if necessary. And it is necessary, for in the great endgame, both science and religion have failed.
“Those who see the world through stained-glass windows view science as a joke without a punch line, claiming to provisionally explain what it cannot ultimately understand. Those who view the world through telescope and microscope see religion as a punch line without a joke, claiming to ultimately understand what it cannot even provisionally explain. Yet any understanding that is significantly incomplete cannot accurately determine which of its data are or are not completely insignificant. The scientists believed too strongly in the reality of things, the religionists too strongly in the literality of words. A third way was needed. A way in which explanation and understanding, journey and goal, the maze of science and the labyrinth of religion would become one.”
“And if the world would not listen to the new way?” Michael asked.
“The slate would be wiped clean again, by a much bigger rock even than that now headed toward Argus.
Shut down the planetary ecosystem and force it to restart in a new form.”
“And the children?” Susan asked, coaxing, but not so impatiently as she might once have.
“From all those meteorite fragments, from what they contained, we hoped those children would fashion themselves into the stained-glass telescope—would become that new way. They would have, too, if I just could have controlled them. If I just could have used them. But they used me, you see? To contact the worlds under the domes, and beyond. To reach inside my head, to prevent me from destroying them.
What I could not destroy I could not control. They’ve turned everything I planned into a mad kaleidoscope of their own making. I have been trying to fight them with my mind, and I am so tired. I have lost that mental fight.”
“Where are they?” Michael asked. By way of answer, Vang pointed. Susan and Michael turned in time to see, descending the stairway that vanished into the stealth-crafted sky, two beings with light flowing up like sensitive flame from their heads and shoulders. They seemed no longer children now. Perhaps they were no longer human.
PILLAR OF FIRE
The dawn terminator moved west past Jerusalem, past the smoldering ruins of An-Nuseirat in Gaza, then over the calm blue of the Mediterranean Sea. Jim Brescoll and all with him in the Executive Command Suite at NSA could only watch, with equal powerlessness, as another terminator, poised to kick humanity back to before the dawn of the Electronic Age, plummeted in from space toward the still-dark sky above the south Atlantic.
The stone to blind Argus was only moments away from extinction point. Radar and infrared astronomical satellites had long since picked up its progress. Bree and Steve monitored the data from the Magsat, Magstar, Oersted II, and Gauss satellites for any signs of EMP, any changes in the earth’s electromagnetism. Real-time imagery of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the Great Mosque in Mecca, and the force-field blisterdomes in China and North and South America played on in the ECS, ignored for the moment in the face of more immediate calamity.
Now the meteoroid began to show up optically as a meteor on every telescope turned in its direction. A British cruiser, some miles to the west of where the star was falling, caught its progress on camera, without magnification. At every wavelength and apparent distance, however, the image was the same: a head growing brighter and more pronounced, a tail lengthening in light. As Jim watched, the meteoroid’s approach to Earth from space reminded him, perversely, of sperm and egg coming together in vast anticonception, a consummation devoutly to be unwished.
The incandescently burning, stadium-size skystone explosively braked and shattered at the Argus point.
At that instant, the South Atlantic Anomaly became far more anomalous. It took the human watchers a moment to determine the specifics of that strangeness, however.
“This can’t be right,” Bree said.
“What can’t?”
“None of the satellites are showing any significant electromagnetic propagation outward from the extinction point,” Steve Wang said. “The only EM signature out there is something about a mile across at most. It appears to be behaving like a confined plasma.”
The camera view from the British cruiser to the west was even more startling. From a stillborn star at the extinction point, what looked like millions of confined lightnings speared down in a coherent column toward the ocean’s surface—and, glowing through the water, disappeared beneath it. As the pillar of fire disappeared beneath the waves, a sound like thunder came to them over that distant camera’s attached microphone.
Wang and Lingenfelter simultaneously blinked up a
contour map of the planet showing global readouts of reversed flux patch positions.
“Two new reversed flux patches have just appeared,” Wang said, “in—”
“Mecca and Jerusalem,” Jim Brescoll said.
He didn’t need to see their contour maps. An unseen bubble of force, growing at Temple Mount, was already pushing blue-helmeted soldiers before it as it expanded. A similar phenomenon, surrounding the Kaaba in the Great Mosque, was at the same time, gently but persistently, sweeping clear of worshippers the space around the monolithic black cube.
SELECTIVELY PERMEABLE MEMBRANE
In the plaza fronting the Dome of the Rock, Michael and Susan were more than willing to move quickly out of the way of the transparent circle of force as it spread, invisibly but tangibly, in every direction about the children’s location.
Even as the earth beneath their feet was shaken by what felt like persistent small earthquakes, Michael found himself looking over his shoulder again and again, fascinated by the nature of that bubble of force even as he ran from it. The only sign of the otherwise invisible membrane’s movement was a slight shimmer as it passed fluidly over the buildings, walls, courtyards, trees, and shrubs of the Temple Mount, without harming them—while it yet remained steadfastly impermeable to human bodies.
The transparent bubble of force continued to spread. Michael thought it wouldn’t be long before the thing covered the entirety of the Temple Mount—and, with it, sites sacred to all Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
RIGHT ASCENSION
Brescoll blink-shifted the feeds from Mecca and Jerusalem to the main screens. Through his myriad Argus eyes he had access to what was going on there, from all levels of data penetration, all manner of perspectives.
“The expansion of the fields seems to have stopped,” Bree Lingenfelter said.
“About thirty-five acres are under the bubble at the Temple Mount,” Steve Wang said. “Dome of the Rock, al Aqsa, the Western Wall—the whole of the Mount, it looks like. The force-field footprint in the Great Mosque is smaller, perhaps only a tenth the size of that in Jerusalem. Seismic activity around both seems to be increasing.”
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