Wonders of a Godless World

by Andrew McGahan

  The orphan gazed at the duke, curled up with his eyes tightly shut. No wonder he had been so upset that day in the garden! And right now they were making it even worse, stirring up his unhappy history. This wasn’t what she had intended, bringing him here. She’d hoped that the foreigner could help him.

  I can’t effect any kind of real healing. But…

  A soothing wash seemed to flow through the air, and the orphan again sensed beautiful rooms around her, and green gardens outside. The duke’s taut body relaxed suddenly, and he slumped back, groaning in relief.

  There. His delusions are intact once more.

  The orphan was gratified. Perhaps it wasn’t a cure, but nevertheless…

  Well, I do feel for the old fool. We’re kindred in a way, he and I.

  Kindred?

  That’s why I had you bring him here. I was planning to speak of such things tonight in any case. For I too was a rich man once, and I too lost it all through a similar kind of presumption. His story mirrors my own.

  The orphan studied the foreigner’s supine form. Rich? What did he mean, rich? He had been a poor man. A goatherd. Even in his second life, after the mountain fell on him and he became a student, he had still been poor.

  Good. You remember. A poor student I was indeed. But it’s time I took up the tale again, for I did not stay a poor student forever.

  Oh, admittedly, in those early days wealth was the last thing on my mind. My studies were all that mattered—my quest to understand the violent workings of the world. I laboured in that cause for many years, and gave no thought to money.

  My research took me from university to university, and indeed from country to country, for my homeland was still impoverished, with lesser academic facilities than some, and I felt no particular loyalty to it. I went where the learning was best, and I excelled. I won scholarships. I spoke internationally at conferences. I became known, in academic circles, for my field work, and for the risks I would take to obtain data. Some considered me reckless. Fearless, perhaps.

  I wasn’t fearless. I still dreaded pain and suffering. It was just that I dreaded ignorance even more. So I tunnelled underground, and climbed over fault lines. I sailed across the oceans, and dived as deep into their depths as I could go. I chased storms across the plains, and huddled on the rims of volcanoes until my clothes caught fire. I stood in the paths of tornadoes, and before the muddy walls of flash floods. I went wherever the world killed people, and I became a master of my field.

  And yet after a decade and more had passed, for all my accomplishments, I found myself haunted by a sense of failure. I knew so much, you see, and yet I was still no closer to understanding what had happened to me when the mountain fell. Oh, I had fully grasped the mechanics of earthquakes and landslides by then. But that was no answer to what I’d experienced that day. I hadn’t simply been caught in a landslide. I’d been singled out—first to suffer to the verge of death at the hands of the earth, and then, alone of all such victims, I had been singled out to live. No mechanics could explain that.

  More disturbingly, I was not sure I cared anymore. As the years had passed, the memory of being trapped—a memory I’d thought would plague me forever—had faded. I began to wonder again if it had really happened. After all, I was alive and healthy, I no longer even had a scar to show for it, so how could it be true? Perhaps it was just a fantasy of my youth, and this whole quest of mine was meaningless.

  I looked around me then, full of doubt. I saw that the knowledge I possessed had other uses. Colleagues of mine were being taken up by wealthy companies searching for oil and gas and minerals. There was a growing demand for these things in the more modern countries, and huge amounts of money to be made. And suddenly it seemed idiocy to condemn myself to the sparse existence I’d been living, all to no avail anyway. I decided to stop pursuing an old dream, and to accept cold reality.

  I decided I may as well get rich.

  I hired myself out to mining companies at first, surveying. I had an instinct about the earth, and an uncanny talent for uncovering its hidden riches. I was paid extremely well for my services, and within ten years of abandoning my academic career—and a full twenty-five years after the landslide—I was so successful that I controlled mining companies of my own. And not only mining companies. I expanded into oilfields and power stations and refineries, too. It was the perfect time for such investments. Another world war was looming, and the demand for resources would soon be insatiable.

  In fact, I doubt that I can explain to you how rich I eventually became. You have no way of understanding. But I was far richer than the duke and his family could ever have dreamt. I could buy anything I liked. I possessed enormous tracts of land all over the world, and was free to do anything I wanted with that land. Level hills, dam rivers. And I would laugh—why had I wasted so much time trying to understand the way the earth worked, when I could control it myself, change it to fit my own desires? Who cared if a mountain had fallen on me, when I could remove mountains entirely!

  The duke was sleeping fast now, and the orphan had forgotten about him anyway. In the darkness, the foreigner’s pale body had begun to glow faintly, or so it seemed to her night eyes. She felt an irresistible desire to touch him, and knew that it was at his command. She knelt at the bedside and took hold of his lifeless fingers. His eyes stared directly upwards, at nothing.

  It was intoxicating, that wealth. I felt invulnerable. Powerful. Virtually immortal. And yet, like the duke and his family, all the while I was courting disaster.

  The planet had not forgotten me.

  The sensation of rushing through air came to the orphan again, as if a sudden storm was in the room, but silent. The floor seemed to sink away, and she knew the foreigner was taking her somewhere, into his own memories again, as he had when he’d first carried her to his icy valley home.

  Not there this time, but to another place, in another country, far from there. And not then, but more than thirty years—a whole lifetime, as I’d lived it—later.

  I want to show you the second time I died.

  13

  She seemed to cover half the globe in a leap.

  It wasn’t the same as when she and the foreigner flew together, gliding smooth and serene above the earth. This was an incoherent tumble. Nor was the foreigner a shadow shape at her side. Perhaps he could not appear that way in his own memory. But he was a presence in her mind, nonetheless.

  The wind rushed around her, and despite her tumbling the orphan glimpsed a sparkling ocean below, and clouds towering. Then, abruptly, she was skimming over land, a great expanse of it, wide and flat and vaster than anything she had seen before, covered with thick jungle and carved by muddy rivers.

  And then she was slowing, and descending. The jungle thinned away to scrub and grass, and here and there villages of small huts were visible. Up ahead was a tangle of hills, draped in green. Cattle grazed on the slopes. And cradled in the middle of the hills, surrounded by low cliffs, was a lake.

  The foreigner’s voice was close.

  It all happened shortly after the world’s second great war had come to an end. In search of gold deposits, I had acquired the mineral rights to the land you see here. The lake, and the hills around it, with permission, fairly bought, to do as I pleased. This was in…well, a wild and poor and somewhat lawless country.

  The orphan was drifting now over the surface of the lake. The water was a profound blue, and eerily calm, the surrounding heights seemingly protecting it from any wind. In one direction, however, the cliffs fell away to a valley, a fertile place of villages and fields, where strange-looking people tended cattle.

  But the lake, as it turned out, was my downfall.

  She was on the ground now, standing at the lake’s edge. The water looked even darker from this angle, and the cliffs higher. The orphan was aware of heat and stillness. Cattle lowed from far off, and there was another sound, the clink of tools striking earth. Some distance around the shore, men were at work, diggin
g.

  Do you see them? They are labourers in my employ.

  The situation was this—my goldmining operation needed water, lots of it, and the only source in the area was the lake. My engineers said that if we cut a channel through the lowest point in the hills, we could siphon off all we needed into holding tanks down in the valley. As a solution it was simple and cheap—and it would lower the level of the lake by only a few feet. Insignificant, I thought.

  The natives, though, were alarmed. They warned me that I should not touch the lake at all, that it was cursed, that it had killed people in the past when roused. I laughed at them. They were tribal cattle herders—what would they know? Besides, I owned it, it was mine, even if the natives didn’t realise their government had sold it to me.

  So I went ahead and cut the channel and began the draining. I wasn’t there in person, you understand. I was busy elsewhere, this was just one project among many. But about a week after the channel was opened, I flew in to visit the site. Everything was working exactly as it should. Only, there was something odd about the lake.

  The scene altered before the orphan’s eyes. The men working on the shore vanished, and now there was a low structure of concrete and piping there. But her attention was drawn to the lake itself. Its colour had changed. The deep blue had been replaced by a milkier shade. And there was a sound. Like the whisper of a far-off wind, even though there was no wind.

  What I didn’t know—what no one knew at the time, because this phenomenon occurs at only two other lakes in the world—was what lay at the bottom.

  The orphan was lifted from the bank and plunged into the water. There was a slap of cold, but it was a distant sensation, only a memory of being submerged. At first it was dark as she dived down, but then, by an act of the foreigner’s will, the entire lake became translucent for her. She felt a sudden vertigo, alarmed by the sight of sheer cliffs plummeting away to a jagged bed far below, a great underwater pit.

  The lake is four hundred metres deep, which is quite extraordinary. It is, in fact, the crater of an ancient volcano. But there have been no eruptions here in millennia, and there won’t be ever again. The danger here is not from an eruption, but from something more insidious. Can you see it, below the ground?

  The orphan extended her inner vision, pushing through the crater floor. She was searching for the familiar red-hot regions of magma, but there was nothing—at least, not until she was far, far down, and even then it was only a dimly glowing pool, a magma that was barely molten at all, a chamber that was congealed.

  Yes, but look closer.

  She did—and then saw it. Leaking up from the magma, insinuating itself through tiny cracks and fissures, came a trickle of gas. Not a rush, nothing that would make the ground rumble or smoke belch forth. Just a trickle. Nevertheless, it worked its way up through the earth remorselessly, and thus emerged at the bottom of the crater, into the waters of the lake. But it didn’t then bubble and froth in the water as the orphan would have expected. Instead it simply…melted away.

  Pressure, that’s what’s happening. If the lake wasn’t so deep, then the gas—it’s called carbon dioxide—would indeed foam up to the surface. But under this much weight, it can’t form bubbles, so it’s forced to dissolve into the water and stay at the bottom. It’s the same set of conditions that you would find in a bottle of fizzy drink: as long as the lid stays on the bottle, the fizz stays dissolved in the liquid. Except that this is on a scale billions of times greater. The carbon dioxide has been gathering down here for hundreds of years, maybe thousands, unimaginable amounts of it. Trapped.

  The orphan was ascending again, quickly. Towards the surface she was aware of tiny streams of bubbles rising alongside her in the water. Only a few tiny little streams. But then another would appear, and another.

  We removed just a few feet from the top of the lake, as I said. But in doing so we released a crucial amount of pressure. And worse, we created currents that swirled down to the bottom, and allowed the first few streams of gas to escape. Those streams created convection currents that increased exponentially, until a flash-over point was reached, and then, in one explosive rush, the whole bottom of the lake—

  The orphan broke through the surface and lifted into the air. Below her the lake was now a stark, seething white, and the subtle sound that she’d heard before had become an all-pervasive and vastly frightening hiss.

  Basically, we shook the bottle, then opened the cap.

  She lifted away, towards the lower rim of the crater, where the fields extended down to the villages. Behind her, the hiss became a roar, and then deepened further still, until it was the most awful thunder the orphan had ever heard. The lake was upending itself, but she could not bring herself to look back and see.

  I didn’t see it either. Oh, I heard it. People heard it twenty miles away. But I was indoors, in an office, down in the valley.

  The terrible thunder went on, but the orphan swept downhill and then landed, not far from where a herd of cattle grazed, and where some villagers stood in shock, staring back towards the cataclysm. Beyond them was a complex of offices and sheds, newly built. Dozens of men had come running out. They too were staring up at the lake in awe. And the orphan saw that one of them was…yes, the foreigner himself.

  He no longer resembled the goatherd who had been crushed under the landslide. He was much older, and more solid. A stronger, richer, more important man. There was no sign at all of the crippling injuries he had borne the last time she had seen him. Nor did he resemble the pale, bedridden figure back in the hospital room. This was a different time, a different life. Yet she would have recognised him anywhere. His expression was puzzled, but quite unafraid as he gazed up at the rim of the crater.

  The roaring sound was fading now.

  By the time I got outside, the water had fallen back into place and there was only some lingering spray visible. I thought that perhaps it was an earthquake—and I remember thinking how lucky we were that the lake hadn’t overflowed.

  I couldn’t see the gas, of course. Later estimates suggested that as much as three cubic kilometres of carbon dioxide escaped that day. It lifted in a great cloud above the lake. Quite invisible. And it isn’t that carbon dioxide is dangerous in itself. It’s not a poison. The deadly thing about it in this case is that it’s heavier than air.

  The orphan finally turned to look. A mist of reddish-white spray was settling back into the lake, but above there seemed to be only empty air. With her other senses, however, she could detect something quite unnerving—an immense dome of gas that had displaced the air. And that dome was slowly collapsing. It was heavy, the foreigner had said, and she could see that it was. It reminded her of a bottle of honey, flipped over. It had already filled the bowl of the crater, and now there was nowhere else for it to go. It oozed over the lip, and came advancing down the hill. But no one around her screamed or ran, because no one could see it.

  I repeat, humans and animals can tolerate small amounts of carbon dioxide. Even in somewhat larger doses it will only make them ill. But if carbon dioxide replaces the air entirely, and there’s nothing else to inhale…

  Closest to the crater were the cattle. For no apparent reason, they suddenly tottered and dropped to the ground. A flock of birds on the wing—disturbed by the earlier thunder, and still circling above—all stalled in mid-flight and tumbled earthwards. Then the group of villagers who had been watching on—men, women and some children—took a few convulsive steps, knees buckling, and sank as one into the grass.

  All of this in total silence.

  Suffocation.

  Now there were screams. The natives were running. The other men, the miners, were swearing and dashing for their offices, or for their vehicles. But the cries were as much of confusion as they were of fear, for no one could identify the threat. People and animals were falling as if struck by unseen lightning. No one knew where to run, which direction would be safe. Only the orphan could see that in fact nowhere would be safe.
The wave of gas was too huge, too high, too wide.

  She turned again to look at the man who was the foreigner. He hadn’t run like the others. He was staring in what appeared to be rapture at the hillside above him—as if maybe he alone could see what she saw.

  No. But I knew, somehow, that there was no escape.

  Then the wave was upon them. There was no sensation, other than a tug of warm wind as the breathable air was pushed away, and they were in the gas. To the orphan it felt that an extra layer of humidity had settled over them. Heavy. Clammy. In an instant more the feeling became horrible. Choking. An unreadable emotion flickered across the foreigner’s face. And then he, like everyone else, was slowly falling.

  Alone, the orphan watched the wave continue down the hill. People still ran before it, and even the cattle had taken fright, but the tide engulfed human and animal alike, cutting them down in rows. Then it piled sluggishly onto the valley floor, filling the depression steadily from end to end. The orphan could count three villages down there, home to what must have been hundreds of people, but there was nothing anyone could do; they died just as the others had, some in the open, some having fled into their huts, some huddled in ditches and some, in vain, climbing trees.

  The cloud of gas sloshed back and forth a few times from one side of the valley to the other. Exhausted finally, it pooled and thickened and began to sink slowly into the ground. Equally slowly, the air returned, until the day around the orphan seemed as normal as any other. It wasn’t even that long since the surface of the lake had started to bubble; the sun had scarcely shifted in the sky. But now nothing moved anywhere within the orphan’s sight, and nowhere in the hills was there a single sound.

  The scene blurred and disappeared.

  The orphan floated in darkness.

  Can you imagine what I felt—the foreigner seemed to be speaking to her from a void, an empty space in his mind, an absence of even the memory of light—in those few moments as I struggled to breathe the unbreathable? As the world spun and went dark around me? As I realised that I was dying?