Jim nodded. From distant microphones he heard the sound of a vast, incredible music. Dust began to well up around the edges of the shimmering bubbles of force in Mecca and Jerusalem. Then, as he watched, the Kaaba in its rippling black kiswa seemed to slowly grow taller. With a strange feeling of déjà vu, he realized that the Kaaba was not growing but separating, detaching itself from the earth at a ring of thinning dust.
He remembered where he had seen something like this before. Under the dome in California, when the posthuman creatures which LeMoyne, Benson, and Markham had become had shown him other worldlines. Including one in which the flat-topped mountain of Caracamuni tepui had sundered itself from the earth and, smoothly as a mushroom in the night, ascended in a bubble of force invisible but for the way the light bent around it, like the heat-wave shimmer from desert and mirage.
That same great feat of levitation was now accelerating in both Mecca and Jerusalem. The ensphered Kaaba and the ensphered Temple Mount were both lifting into the air on a wave of angelic song almost unbearable in its beauty. As he watched, he saw that the orb of force lifting its acres of sacred sites from each location left behind a void, a crater conforming to the pattern of flaws inherent in the underlying rock.
The orbs of force, absconding with their enclosed sacred sites, were rising into the heavens—where he thought he saw, in dim outline, vast creatures pale as the moon in midmorning, come out of the sky, to stand there, winged and glowing and waiting.
STRANGE ANGELS
After seeing (via bimodal binoculars) what looked like a human form rising into the sky and exploding, Darla and Marc had slowed the pace of the march with their captives. They finally decided not to descend at all from the ridgetop overlooking the Mina Valley. Even if the song the children had sung into their heads had not compelled them to remain nearby—in witness and farewell, if nothing else—there was just too much going on at the Great Mosque in the valley below, for them to break away just yet.
They too saw the moon-pale creatures waiting. Viewing the scene from the top of the ridge, they in fact saw those entities before they noticed the Kaaba rising toward them.
“Good God!” Fremdkunst said. “They look almost like angels!”
In Jerusalem, where Susan and Michael saw them, too, there were many who would have agreed with that assessment. Marc and Darla and Susan and Michael, however, knew they were strange angels indeed.
CRESCENDO
Jim Brescoll immediately suspected that, in the days to come, there’d be many disagreements over the nature of this music he thought he was hearing and the pale figures he thought he was seeing. He had no more time to wonder at that, however. At just that moment he thought he caught glimpses of human figures, small but glowing, inside the bubbles of force rising above the cities of Jerusalem and Mecca.
“Can we zoom in on the corner of the Kaaba there?” Jim said to the techs in the big room. “The eastern one, I think it is? And into the courtyard in front of the Dome of the Rock?”
What Jim saw as the images zoomed was also what Susan and Michael saw through binoculars from Jerusalem, what Marc and Darla saw through their bimod binocs on the ridgetop above Mecca and the Mina Valley—and what eventually billions of people throughout the world would see, playing again and again on their screens. In each ensphered sacred site, two figures still barely recognizable as human children were dissolving into bright strings and threads and traceries of light, viscous like thin oil or honey, flowing and unraveling and fountaining against gravity into the ensphered space all about them, pooling and spreading out at that boundary invisible but for refractive shimmer.
Out of all those billions who would eventually view such scenes and hear their music, however, perhaps only Jim Brescoll had seen before something like what that flowing pale fire was doing now to the orbs of force ensphering those glowing figures, and the sacred sites drifting upward with them. Jim remembered that other world he had been shown, in which the tepui that had been home to these strange children and their people had also risen into the sky in a bubble of force and begun to shine, with a light like inverted alpenglow.
As he watched the children fountaining away in honeyed light, the husks of their mortal forms vanishing into golden vortices and glowing helices, he saw again that glow at the bounds of each sphere. It increased in intensity until, in a brilliant burst of white-gold light, the ensphered Kaaba and Temple Mount both simultaneously disappeared, just as an ensphered tepui, in another world and time, had also done.
The song that had lifted the orbs built to a crescendo of terrible beauty, until the instant the orbs and all they contained vanished. Silently and completely as a soap bubble bursting in a sky of late summer, the orbs were gone, leaving behind only wispy fading vortices of helical laddered light, twisting stardust stairways dispersing in morning breezes through skies from which strange angels had also vanished—all disappearing as completely as the night-glowing sandstorm of the galaxy, always impending, disappeared before the early-morning light of a nearer star.
Skies from which, without other lightning before or falling stones after, there now issued a clap of thunder heard around the globe, via myriad media, to become part of innumerable memories.
EPILOGUE
Waiting for Vida Nasr amid the parklike grounds of Castel Gandolfo, Jim Brescoll was struck again by a peculiar sense of déjà vu. He glanced at the Castel and the old observatory domes of the Specola Vaticana, but no, it wasn’t that. He’d never been to this scientific installation on a hilltop southeast of Rome, any more than he’d ever previously been to the annual ECOL, the Exobiology Conference on the Origins of Life, now under way in this place.
His gaze lingered on the tall green columns of the Italian cypress trees—towers to the ramparts of the Castel’s high, square-topped hedges. They were casting long shadows as the sun declined toward evening, but that wasn’t quite the source of his sense of “already seen,” either. Likewise, none of what he was looking at had come up in anything he could remember from his time under the dome in California, or in dreams since.
Looking across the large courtyard, Jim was still puzzling over the feeling when he saw Brother Guy LeConte, the conference organizer and head of the observatory. The monk nodded to him as LeConte, along with Vida Nasr, hurried along one of the stone paths that radiated, sundial-fashion, across the Vatican Observatory’s lawns. As Brother Guy parted from Vida, she headed toward Jim. He stood up and introduced himself formally to Doctor Nasr.
“Brother Guy seems to have hit pay dirt with the theme of this year’s ECOL,” Nasr said as they watched LeConte, surrounded by a pilot-fish cloud of reporters, go on about his business. “What’s usually a smallish gathering of specialists in some fairly arcane fields has come up on everybody’s radar, it seems.”
“Not so very surprising,” Jim said as they sat down together on the bench, “given the interest first generated by the meteorite thefts, and then all the more so from those strange events the tepui children precipitated in the Middle East.” He looked at his conference brochure and its title. “Still, calling it ‘The Stained-Glass Telescope: Astrobiology and the Sacred’ does seem to have been inspired.”
Even if he knew who had inspired it, and how Brother Guy had gotten that inspiration.
“Quite the high profile with media and governments everywhere,” Vida agreed. “Including your own.”
“You saw that we put the tepui stone on display here, I presume?”
“I did,” Vida said. “And the guards around it, too.”
“Yes. We’re making a much more coordinated effort to keep track of star stones, worldwide.”
“I just hope the new interest in protecting the stones, on the part of nations and scientific organizations, doesn’t make it more difficult to share information about them.”
“Honestly, I don’t think it will,” Jim said as he turned to his rather dog-eared hardcopy conference program and the notes he had scribbled there. “A successful conference
for all involved—perhaps Brother Guy not least of all. Right man at the right time.”
“How so?”
“He’s ordained religious. What happened in the Middle East has created a huge hubbub among religious organizations.”
“Oh, yes. That’s right. All of the debate, all of the attempts to understand the theological implications of what happened.”
“Exactly. Those implications are already having a tremendous impact on the fundamentals of belief.
Despite its rather ecclesiastical-sounding title, I found LeConte’s address of welcome, ‘Sanctus Situs Absconditus,’ fascinating.”
“Yes,” Nasr said. “Historically solid, on the traditional importance of the Temple Mount and Mecca sites to Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Interesting speculation, too, about how the Peoples of the Book are responding to the ‘absconding’ of those sites and the craters left behind in their places.”
“You agree with LeConte’s conclusions, then?”
“Overall, yes. He largely left out the fact that the Church also lost relics outside the Middle East—Spear of Longinus material mostly—but the craters themselves are already being viewed, by many of the faithful, as signs that the holy sites themselves will return. Until those sites do in fact return, the craters are themselves to be considered holy.”
“Even as teams of scientific investigators work side by side with the worshippers,” Jim said, shaking his head in some disbelief, “to try to unravel their mysteries. That’s a big change.”
“Maybe,” Vida said. “But still controversial. Only Muslim scientists are allowed at the crater in Mecca—and only those who disavow any possibility that the Mawari children might have been any satanic-verse embodiment of Allah and his three sister-goddesses. I’m still the only woman allowed there, too—and me only because of my ‘special circumstances.’”
Jim moved uncomfortably on the bench.
“Yes. About those special circumstances. I want to personally apologize on behalf of my agency and my government for putting you in harm’s way in the Avram Zaragosa matter.”
“No need,” Vida said, but Jim noticed that her hand went unconsciously to where she had been stabbed, then just as quickly vanished. “I hoped there might be something I could do to stop Avram, to help him. I hoped I could get to the good man I thought I knew.”
Jim nodded.
“His desire to avenge his daughter was just too strong. They played upon that—Luis Martin, the old spy who puppetmastered him. Whose strings, in their turn, were pulled by rogue elements of CIA and Mossad, with money and connections in Tri-Border. All part of a powerful cell of Christian Zionist and Kahanist extremists, working ultimately for George Otis. At least that’s the latest and best intelligence, on a very complicated web of relationships.”
“And Mahmoud Ankawi?” Vida asked.
“The strangest of them all. Passing for secular, but in fact a deep-cover Mudayyin jihadist with renegade security connections of his own in the Arab world. Quite from the other side in all this, yet finally after the same thing Otis and his agreeable puppets were also after: the final confrontation demanded by God—or so their respective religious sects claim. And in Otis’s case, personal power as part of the Elect, afterward.”
“Peoples of the Book who’d turned bibliolaters, in every case,” Vida said. “What happened at the holy sites has not been good for their particular point of view. But Avram didn’t seem particularly religious…”
“No, just a man terribly wounded by the death of his daughter. Everything we’ve been able to learn about him suggests he wasn’t an end-timer of any sort, just someone whose pain could be exploited by others.
From what I’ve read of the Saudis’ interrogation of Mahmoud Ankawi, I can’t help thinking Avram Zaragosa was more sinned against than sinning, in many ways.”
Vida stiffened visibly.
“And the thousands of Palestinians who were incinerated, who died in the holocaust at An-Nuseirat…they weren’t more sinned against?”
Jim looked into his hands in his lap, but found no answer there.
“Clearly they were, too.”
“When are ‘rogue elements’ really just foreign policy by other means, Director? That’s what I want to know. Despite all the apologies, all the trials of the perpetrators, all the firings, all the theological debates and negotiations that have been going on ever since that day, I still don’t know what to believe.”
“That I can’t tell you. What I can say is that it could have been far worse. It could have escalated to global nuclear holocaust, if the Mawari kids hadn’t knocked down our spears and given us some breathing space. A breathing space that still prevails, for now.”
“But for how long?”
“Who knows? Free will means the right to be wrong. We’ve exercised that right a lot, as a species.
Nobody intervened like this before. Not during Hitler’s holocaust of the Jews. Or the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians. Or the African diaspora during slavery. Or the genocide of the native peoples of the New World by European conquerors. Still, the fact that we haven’t yet destroyed ourselves as a species, even though we’ve had the means to do so for decades—that gives me hope.”
Vida gave him a long look.
“I hope you’re right.”
“I think I am. You know about the kerogen-rich meteorites that crashed in deserts and forests throughout the world that day?”
“The ‘oil of heaven’ asteroids. I’ve heard rumors.”
“A great windfall—maybe enough to smooth the transition from fossil fuels to a low-carbon economy.”
“But even such starfall windfalls won’t last forever, Director. I’ve already heard rumblings, here, that those meteoritic oil tankers will upset the world economy. Even something good we manage to turn bad.”
“Too often, yes. But not always. That binotech they left behind—the stuff sequestering carbon from the atmosphere—it appears to be slowly moderating greenhouse-gas effects. Damping down the human-induced global climate changes, preventing the whole system from spiraling out of control. And no one has yet figured out a way to make that good wind blow anybody ill.”
“Give us time, Director, and someone will.”
“Nonetheless, there’s still what happened with those kids—especially the way they disappeared. Serious, yet playful. A solemn celebration of their farewell, ending in self-consuming transcendent fireworks. That suggests to me that maybe, just maybe, we’re making progress in our evolution.”
“It would probably have to be our cultural evolution, then. Biological evolution isn’t progressive.”
“Hard to say. When I debriefed Miskulin and Yamada—as I’m also debriefing you now, Doctor Nasr—they told me about a ‘third way’ Doctor Vang and his people were after, in their entanglement with these kids.”
“I didn’t know that in agreeing to talk with you, Director, I’d also consented to being ‘debriefed.’ But go on—what third way?”
“In leaving the way they left, and in leaving behind what they left behind, maybe the Mawari children pointed the way to the new synthesis Doctor Vang hoped for. A synthesis to reconcile the ‘endless time’ promulgated by evolutionary science with the ‘timeless end’ prophesied by eschatological religion. Or so my experts suggest.”
“But not Doctor Vang himself?”
“No,” Jim said with a slight smile. “Though I’ve been very much in touch with him, he remains reticent on the subject, especially since the court cases involving him have not yet come to trial.”
“Though not so reticent as George Otis?”
Jim’s smile turned to a wince. That had been mishandled. The man’s obsession with the kids’ absconding with his reconstructed “Spear of Destiny” was perhaps understandable—if they had in fact done so.
Stranger was his repeated consternation over whether Christ’s blood had given the spear its supposed healing power and paranormal capabilities, or vice versa—and whether or not that lat
ter possibility was heretical in light of the timing of the Resurrection. During interrogation, he only answered questions to the extent that he might turn them into esoteric discussions about such matters, and whether or not “destiny” was only about “power” or might also involve some balance with “compassion.” Otis had not been under suicide watch, as he should have been. He managed to hang himself in his cell, and the story had broken in the media.
“No, not so reticent as Otis. But Fremdkunst, Levitch, and Michelson—even Yuri Semenov and Joe Retticker—they have all proven quite talkative.”
“No doubt.”
“You know,” he said, “one of the few things Vang has said to me about all this has to do with what he thinks those kids might have left behind, besides oil from heaven and binotech carbon sequestration.”
“What’s that?”
“‘Every generation’s children are aliens in the world of their parents, but the children growing up in the world after the Mawari will be more alien than any preceding generation. Watch out for the next generation!’”
“That’s an odd warning.”
“I thought so, too. I mean, not enough time has yet passed to get a good gauge on any particular change, if one has happened. So far there’s no indication of any general myconeural infection. Of course, it’s always possible the Mawari children got beyond the need for such grosser expedients.”
“Are you suggesting,” Vida asked, incredulous, “that those children left behind some as-yet-undetected infection of all the planet’s children?”
“Not my suggestion, Vang’s. But if Alii, Aubrey, Ka-dalun, and Ebu did leave some novel infection or even ‘inflection’ of chemistry or biology—one that might make their particular pineal effect permanent, say—then how might they have done it? Direct manipulation of the genome? Some sort of myconeural binotech?”
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