The Engines of God

by Jack McDevitt

  When they’d finished they ran tests, adjusted the power cells, and executed a successful drill from the cockpit. Afterward, they retired to the dome for a turkey luncheon. Hearty meal, thought Hutch. Good for morale.

  They cracked a couple of bottles of Chablis, and made jokes about the weather.

  No one had much appetite. In a world that had lost its anchor to reality, it was hard to get seriously involved with a turkey sandwich. Anything now seemed possible.

  Long ago, when she was nine years old, Hutch had gone with her father to see Michael Fairish, the magician. It had been an evening filled with floating cabinets, people getting sawed in half, and a black box that yielded an unending supply of doves, rabbits, and red and white kerchiefs. Priscilla Hutchins had tried to fathom the methods used by the magician, but she had been astonished time and again. And although she knew that trickery was involved, that magic wasn’t real, she had nevertheless lost touch with the physical world, and reached a point at which the impossible failed to surprise her.

  She was at that point now.

  After dinner, she went outside and sat down in the snow. She let the alienness of the scene suck at her, as if it might extract some hidden part, and infuse a portion of itself, a particle of enchantment that would re-establish a cable to comprehension. It was almost as if this world had been placed here exclusively for her and her companions, that it had waited through billions of unchanging years for precisely this moment.

  The others joined her after a while, en route to other tasks, but they too paused in the growing radiance of the thing in the east.

  Ashley continued to relay updates on the dragon, which was still running hot and true. Drafts was sliding from professional acceptance to near-panic, and had begun urging them to use the shuttle to get off-world. Janet, who had perhaps been through too much with Hutch and Carson, merely told them she knew they’d be okay.

  After a while, they got up and straggled over to the shuttle. They disconnected the 1600 and carried it inside the dome. Not that it would matter when the fire fell out of the sky.

  They began packing.

  “I don’t think we should wait until tomorrow,” said Angela. “I’d feel better if we cleared out tonight.”

  “We live better here,” said Carson. “There’s no point in scrunching up in the shuttle for an extra day.” He went inside and came back with more Chablis. To prove the point.

  So they waited under the hammer and debated whether they would be safer on the ground or in the air at the moment of impact. Whether it wasn’t paranoid to think they were actually being chased by this thing. (“It’s not us” each of them said, in one form or another. “It’s seen the mesas. It’s the mesas it’s coming after.”) Whether, if they made a run for it, the object would adjust course again and come after them. Them, and damn the mesas. After a while, despite the tension, Hutch couldn’t keep her eyes open. No one went to bed that night; they all slept in the common room, stretched out in chairs.

  Hutch woke, it seemed, every few minutes. And she decided, if she ever went through anything like this again (which she would, but that’s another story), she’d by God, clear out at the first hint of funny business.

  Somewhere around five, she smelled coffee. Angela held out a cup.

  “Hi,” said Hutch.

  The dragon was an angry smear in the sky.

  “I’ll be glad,” said Angela, “when we’re out of here.”

  There was a ring around the sun, and a thick haze over the plain. A half-moon had broken through in the southwest.

  Fresh snow lay on the ground when Angela and Hutch came out of the dome, carrying their bags. There were a few flakes in the air. “It’s frustrating when you think about it,” said Angela. “Cosmic event like this, and we have to go hide on the other side of the world.”

  Hutch climbed into the shuttle. “I suppose we could stay, if you insist,” she said.

  “No. I didn’t mean that.” Angela handed her bags through, took her place at the controls, and studied her checklist. “But I wish we had a ship, so we could lay off somewhere and watch the fireworks.” Hutch activated the commlink, and picked up the feed from Ashley. The dragon blinked on. The view wasn’t good now because the ship was very distant. And still retreating.

  Angela thought the main body might be more than a million kilometers behind the forward spouts. Yet the mind still saw it as a thundercloud. An ominous thundercloud. Belching and roiling and flickering. But still only a thundercloud. She tried to imagine a similar visitation over the Temple of the Winds. What would a nontechnological race have made of this harpy? And she wondered about the Monument-Makers. Why had they sicked it on that unfortunate race? And left their final ironic taunt? Farewell and good fortune. Seek us by the light of the horgon’s eye.

  And, in that moment, she understood.

  The comm panel blinked. “Incoming,” said Angela.

  David Emory’s face blinked on. “Hello, ground station,” he said. “What’s happening? Do you need help?”

  Relief and pleasure swept through Hutch. “David, hello. Where are you?” But he did not react. She watched and counted off the seconds while her signal traveled outward to him, and her newborn hope died. He was too far away.

  Carson climbed through the hatch. “I see the cavalry has arrived,” he said. “Where are they?”

  David broke into a wide smile. “Hutch. It’s good to see you. I’m on the Gary Knapp. What is that thing? What’s going on?”

  Hutch gave him a capsulized version.

  “We’ll get there as quickly as we can.”

  “Stay clear,” she said. “Stay clear until the dust settles.”

  By mid-morning they were in the air.

  They all watched the dragon: Emory on the Knapp, Janet and Drafts on Ashley, and Carson’s group in the shuttle.

  The pictures now were coming from the Knapp. They were clearer than anything they’d had before. Delta resembled a child’s ball floating before a cosmic wall of black cloud.

  They were about to be swallowed.

  Enormous fountains of gas and vapor billowed away; vast explosions erupted in slow time, as if occurring in a different temporal mode. Fiery blossoms disconnected and drifted away. “It’s disintegrating,” Angela said. “It’s moving quite slowly now, and I’d guess it’s thrown off seventy percent of its mass. It’s coming here, but afterward it won’t be going anywhere else.”

  They’d left the plain and its mesas behind, and were gliding above a nitrogen swamp, bathed in the shifting light. Carson was in the right-hand seat. He kept making remarks like “My God, I don’t believe this,” and “No wonder they all got religion.”

  Gales battered the craft. Hutch, in back, wondered whether they’d be able to stay in the air. She watched the pictures coming in from Knapp. “The gas giant’s tearing it up,” she said, straining to make herself heard over the wind. “If we’re lucky, maybe there won’t be any of it left when it gets here.”

  “Forget that idea,” said Angela. She took a deep breath. “It’s a Chinese puzzle. Have you noticed anything odd?”

  Carson studied the display. “Have I noticed anything odd?” He stifled laughter.

  She ignored the reaction. “No quakes,” she said.

  “I don’t follow.”

  But Hutch did. “It’s fifteen hours away. Does this place have plates?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at Carson. “A celestial body that close should be raising hell with local tectonics. Right?”

  “That’s right.” Angela poked her keyboard, asked for new data. “If nothing else, we should be getting major tidal surges.” The swamp had given way to a mud-colored sea. Thick, slow waves rolled ashore. A few meters higher up, the rock was discolored. “That would be high tide,” she said. “This doesn’t look like anything unusual.”

  “What’s the point?” asked Carson.

  “The point is that these oceans, even these kinds of oceans, ought to be jumping out o
f their beds. Hold on.” She opened the Knapp channel, and asked David to get readings on the positions of the satellites. While she waited, she brought up the entire file on the gas giant and its family of moons. She established orbits, computed velocities, and calculated lunar positions.

  When the ship began relaying its information, she checked her predictions.

  Tau, the misshapen rock at the edge of the system, had strayed out of its orbit. But by only about four hundred kilometers. Negligible. Rho was two hundred kilometers in advance of her predicted position. Everything else, within tolerances, was correct.

  The sun was rising again as the shuttle gained on it. They were moving out over a gasoline swamp. Behind them, the sky burned.

  “It’s not solid,” said Hutch.

  “That’s right,” Angela announced with finality. “It’s a dust cloud, after all. Has to be. There might be a solid core in there somewhere, but it must be small.”

  “But a rock,” said Hutch, “even a big rock, isn’t going to hold that thing together.”

  “That’s right, Hutch. Find the glue and win yourself a Nobel.”

  Sunday; 1146 hours.

  The thing on the monitors seemed like a visitant out of the old tales. A messenger from the Almighty. Carson wondered what the skies had looked like over Egypt on the first Passover? What the weather report had been for Sodom? What they’d seen from the walls at Jericho?

  Something deep in his instincts signaled the approach of the supernatural. Out here, pursued by an apparently angry cosmic anomaly, watching it close in, Carson was getting religion.

  He made no effort to shrug the idea off; rather he aggressively entertained it, wondering where it might lead. Might beings with cosmic power actually exist? If they were confronting one here, it was manifesting a disquieting interest in the more primitive races. A stupid god, driven to destroy right angles. A thing dispensing serious trouble to those who defied the divine edict to build only in the round.

  He scanned through the religious and romantic art of Nok and Quraqua, as recorded in Maggie’s records, looking for correlations. He found some. Here was a cloud demon of terrifying similarity to the thing in the sky. And there, a dark god with red eyes and lunging talons emerging from a storm.

  1411 hours.

  Lightning flickered through the gasoline-drenched skies. Ethyl rain swept in torrents across the windscreen, and clung to the shuttle’s wings. Angela would have gone higher, above the atmosphere, but the turbulence was strong, and intensifying. She was not certain she could make it safely back down when the time came.

  It was, by turns, terrifying and ecstatic. The shuttle rolled and plunged. When she wasn’t fighting for control of the vehicle, she was dreaming of glory. She would always be associated with this phenomenon. It might even one day carry her name: the Morgan. She liked the sound of it, rolled it around her tongue. Visualized future scholars addressing seminars: Several categories of Morgans are known to exist.

  Well, maybe not.

  Carson was imagining a wave of dragon clouds, perhaps thousands of light-years long, swirling out of the Void, an irresistible, diabolical tide. Drowning entire worlds, with clocklike precision. Pumped into the system by the rhythm of a cosmic heart. And not one wave. Three waves. Maybe a thousand waves, their crests separated by 108 light-years.

  To what purpose?

  Was it happening everywhere? All along the Arm? On the other side of the Galaxy? “The big telescope,” he said.

  Hutch looked at him. “Pardon?”

  “I was thinking about the telescope at Beta Pac. It was pointed toward the Magellanic Clouds.”

  “You figure out why?”

  “Maybe. The Monument-Makers knew about the dragons. Do you think they might have been trying to find out whether other places were safe? Beyond this galaxy?”

  Hutch listened to her pulse. “That’s a good question,” she said.

  1600 hours.

  The Knapp was approaching from sunward. Carson talked at length with David Emory. Despite the time delay, the conversations distracted him from the moment-to-moment terrors of the ride through that fierce sky. Emory asked about everything, the conditions in the city by the harbor, what they had seen at the space station, how they had found the dragon. He expressed his sorrow at the loss of their colleagues. He had known Maggie, had worked with her, admired her. “I never met George,” he said.

  Carson had by then changed places with Hutch. In the cockpit, Angela asked if she understood why Emory was so inquisitive.

  “He doesn’t expect us to survive,” she guessed. “He doesn’t want mysteries afterward. So he’s getting all his questions in now.”

  1754 hours.

  They had left the dragon behind, and the sun as well, and passed onto the night side. But an eerie red glow lay on the horizon. Below, the land flowed past, rendered soft and glossy by the snow. “We’ll go another hour or so,” Angela said, “and then we’ll look for a plain somewhere, as flat as we can find, where nothing can fall on us.”

  The pictures coming in from Knapp revealed that the anomaly had become so tenuous, so inflated, so unraveled, that one could not say precisely where it was. It seemed to have spilled across the system of moons and rings.

  At the target area, monitored by the cameras, boiling light filled the sky.

  1952 hours.

  The shuttle cleared a range of glaciers and glided low over country that was flat and featureless, save for a few hills on the horizon. They had come approximately halfway around the globe. “Ideal,” said Carson. “Let’s park it right here.”

  On board NCA Ashley Tee. 2006 hours.

  Ashley reached the end of its forward flight. For a microsecond, a flicker of a moment, it came to an absolute halt, relative to Delta. Then the instant was gone, and it reversed course and began its return. Inside the ship, the moment would have gone unnoticed (the thrust, after all, continued unabated from the same quarter of the vessel), had not a green console lamp blinked on.

  “Closing,” said Drafts. He knew that Janet had seen the signal, had in fact been watching for it. But it was something to say. A benchmark to be noted. They were, at last, on their way.

  2116 hours.

  Angela gave up trying to raise the ships. “It’s getting worse,” she said. Her gauges were all over the park. “That thing is putting out a hurricane of low-frequency radiation, mostly in the infrared, microwave, and radio bands. But we’re lucky: it could just as easily be generating X-rays, and fry us all.”

  Their own sky was almost serene, save for the angry glow on the horizon.

  2304 hours.

  Two hours to impact. More or less. With so ephemeral an object, who could know?

  Transmissions from the mesa site were garbled beyond recovery. Angela switched away from them. She also shut down all nonessential systems, and did a strange thing: she turned out the cockpit lights, as if to conceal the location of the shuttle.

  The conversation was desultory. They talked about incidentals, how strange the sky looked, how nobody was going to leave home again. And they reassured one another.

  Had long-dead Pinnacle experienced these things? “They have to be part of the natural order,” Carson said. “Every eight thousand years they come in and take you out. Why?”

  “It’s almost as if,” said Angela, “the universe is wired to attack cities. Is that possible?”

  Hutch sat in the darkness, feeling like prey. What was the line Richard had quoted? Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. “It might be,” she said, “that it’s part of a program to protect life.”

  Carson’s brows drew together. “By blowing it up?”

  “By discouraging the rise of dominant species. Maybe it’s a balancing effect. Maybe the universe doesn’t approve of places like New York.”

  In the west, they saw lightning. Coming this way.

  “Air pressure’s going down fast,” said Angela. The ground shook. It was only a tremor, a wobble. “Maybe we sho
uld get back upstairs.”

  “No.” Carson sank into his chair and tried to relax. “We’re safer here.”

  Monday; 0004 hours.

  Ashley was accelerating. But whatever was going to happen would be over long before they arrived on the scene. Janet had spent much of her time trying to talk with Emory, but the signals had faded in the electromagnetic flux created by the dragon. On her screens, Delta and the thing had joined. Drafts was frantic, and had grown worse as the hour approached. He was not helped by the loss of communications. And being pinned in his web chair did nothing to ease his frustration.

  Janet tried to sound optimistic. Hutch and Angela Morgan together! If there was a way to survive, she knew one or the other would find it.

  0027 hours.

  The skies flowed past, churned, exploded. Heavy bolts ripped the night, and the wind howled around them. Snow and ice rattled against the shuttle.

  The plain trembled. One by one, the shuttle’s monitors died.

  Carson hovered in the rear doorway, between the two women. “We’re doing okay,” he said.

  “Never better,” said Hutch.

  “You betcha,” said Angela, with mock cheer. “Here we sit with God coming after us.”

  “We’ll be fine,” said Carson.

  There was no point at which it could be said that contact actually occurred. The dragon no longer possessed definitive limits. It had opened out. Filaments tens of thousands of kilometers long had broached Delta’s atmosphere hours earlier. But Carson and the women knew that the moon was now firmly in the embrace of its fierce visitor.

  The air was thick with ash and snow. It drifted down onto the plain, and a black crust began to form.

  “Maybe,” said Angela, “there really is no core.”

  “Let’s hope not,” said Carson. And he was about to add, optimistically, that maybe it wouldn’t be much worse than a large storm after all, when white light exploded overhead, and a fireball roared out of the sky and ripped into the snowscape.

  It wasn’t close, but they all flinched.

  “What was that?”

  “Meteor?”

  “Don’t know—”