by Scott Mackay
‘‘White holes? Cam, white holes are theoretical. They’re mathematical doodling.’’
‘‘Just because we’ve never detected one doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Look at it this way. Black holes suck in all matter and energy. White holes do exactly the opposite, according to the theoretical models. They producematter and energy. They are the gods of the galaxy. Look at Alpha Vehicle. It reflected all light. It had a gravitational push. It produced all those Moon towers, and the Moon towers then went on to produce energy cells. Matter. Energy. Positive outflow.’’
‘‘So you think Alpha Vehicle is a white hole?’’
‘‘It’s not beyond the realm of possibility.’’
It was while they were maneuvering Mark into the access chute of the dormitory that Cam noticed a small spot of blood a centimeter across near the young scientist’s carotid artery. It reminded him of the red dot artists put beside their paintings when they make a sale. The spot of blood quickly widened, and a second later, Cam realized a weapon had been used.
He swung around and looked up the hub, but didn’t see anyone. He swung back around in time to watch globules of blood float from Mark’s neck. He watched helplessly as the spot widened into a hole, then a gash, and finally into a gaping wound.
An explosion of blood splashed into the weightlessness of the hub, and automated spill-mites emerged from the recessed spots along the wall, a swarm of two or three hundred turquoise units that swirled through the spray, gobbling every last bit of it. Lesha cried out. Mark had an odd lurching seizure. Cam put his hand over the wound, like the Dutch boy and the dike, trying to get it to stop. But the wound kept widening, and finally his hand fit right in.
By the time the grisly episode was over, and there were only a few spill-mites circling around, and Fye was rushing toward the scene from Cremona, his corpulent frame reminding Cam of a beluga whale, it was too late. Mark’s head dangled by only its spinal cord and a few threads of flesh.
29
Outside New Hanover, Pittman saw something flopping on the road. He pulled over to investigate.
He got out and, making sure he had his gun ready, walked around the hood to have a look.
It turned out to be a seagull. He knelt next to the creature. It couldn’t fly away, nor even walk away. It was missing a lot of feathers, had a festering sore on top of its head, and was bleeding from its mouth. After a short hobble, it squatted and looked up at him, scared, breathing fast. The webbing between its toes was coming apart. It started to choke, and during this spasm, it coughed up bloody tissue. Pittman sighed. He knew the seagull suffered from radiation sickness, and had most probably flown up from Philadelphia, where the levels from the bomb blast had to still be fairly intense.
Rather than waste a bullet, he wrung the creature’s neck. In doing so, he couldn’t help thinking of Haydn.
On the outskirts of Philadelphia, the rain-filled gutters ran with white residue—nuclear fallout. A lot of roofs were missing. He opened his window. The smell of dead bodies—a smell he remembered well from operations during the PRNC War—was enough to gag.
River Road wasn’t more than a couple hundred meters from the Schuylkill River. He found a small business—a neon sign place. The big gate was chained and padlocked. He didn’t let the gate stop him. He bashed through it with his truck. He drove across the gravel parking lot to the shipping yard and soon came to the water’s edge.
He stepped onto the lot, walked around to the back of the truck, got his raft out, and took it down to the riverbank.
He saw a few dead bodies float by. He pulled the dinghy out of its sack and laid it on a small muddy part, where a couple of dead birds had washed up. The stench of the river was horrendous. He went back to his truck, got the paddles, his knapsack full of supplies, and a box of extra ammo, then returned to the water’s edge. He pulled the dinghy’s rip cord and the raft inflated.
He pushed the dinghy into the river, walking in up to his knees, certain the water was full of disease by now. He jumped into the raft and paddled farther out to the middle.
After a while, he drifted under the archways of the old Manayunk commuter rail bridge, and once he got past it, the destruction to the city became more apparent.
Houses and buildings had been flattened, and numerous cars and other vehicles lay toppled or gutted up on the road, the charred scent of melted automobile upholstery reaching him all the way down here on the river.
As he reached Market Street a while later, he finally got a glimpse of the downtown skyline, or at least what was left of it. Many of the tall buildings were gone. Yet oddly, some had been spared, as if by the chance of their design and position they had miraculously withstood the blast. Many of the remaining buildings looked badly gutted by fire. One was severed halfway up. Another had been shorn of its outer layer of glass so that all he saw were the girders underneath. Warehouses and factories along the river’s edge had been flattened.
He didn’t want to look at it. It told him Sheila, Becky, and Tom must have had little chance.
He maneuvered around the great lumps of concrete, steel, and asphalt that made little islands in the Schuylkill. He understood the chain of events clearly, and knew that this rubble, now piled in the river, had once been Philadelphia, and was here as a direct result of his decision to launch a nuclear strike against Alpha Vehicle. The farther along he got, the more clogged the river became.
It took him close to an hour to get to Philadelphia’s south end, his old neighborhood, built on the former site of the Philadelphia Gas Works, not far from the General Frank Ibert Building, where he had worked for many years developing orbital warfare strategies. He felt weak as he paddled the dinghy toward shore. Was this radiation sickness from his ground-zero excursion in Crater Cavalet getting the better of him again, or was this simply the novel regret he felt— unusual in a warrior like himself—for having caused all this destruction?
He placed his boot in a muddy flat next to the river’s edge, and it sank up to his heel, not in mud, but in wet ashes. Three dead bodies floated next to what looked like a melted piece of pink insulation.
He walked up the riverbank into the neighborhoods. He took heart. While many buildings had been destroyed, others remained standing, sticking out of the rubble like gappy teeth. All the street signs had disappeared. This particular subdivision, until ten years ago bulldozed rubble from the Philadelphia Gas Works, was rubble once more. All the debris was soaking, and gray ashy water flooded large portions of the neighborhood.
It took him most of the afternoon to find Tiago Avenue, where Sheila and the kids lived. He finally found it by recognizing a part of the Tiago Park Clubhouse, where all the local moms took their kids to day care. The clubhouse had only its foundation left, and part of its west wall. He walked south on Tiago for three blocks until he came to Delmar Street, or at least what he thought was Delmar. He stopped and surveyed the last two blocks of Tiago. His heart beat with hope because a number of the houses at this end were still standing.
As he traversed the final two blocks, his pace quickened, and his eyes focused through the gloom on what he thought for sure was number 19.
While the second floor had caved in, the first floor stood intact. He walked up the drive. A car he didn’t recognize was half-backed out of the garage. The garage had toppled on top of it. Debris cluttered the driveway, in some cases a half meter deep.
He walked to the side door. He pulled it open and ash shook loose. He tried the inside door but it was locked. He found a brick and smashed the window. He reached inside and turned the latch. He had to shove because debris blocked the door on the inside. At last he got it open.
‘‘Sheila?’’
The house was quiet and smelled of furniture rotting in the damp. Steps led to the basement on the right, and he saw that the basement was full of water. The steps immediately before him led to the first floor. He climbed. He tried the light at the top of the stairs but it didn’t go on. He picked his way through deb
ris to the kitchen. The cupboards were open and all the food had been looted. Water trickled through the ceiling, and the plaster up there sagged.
‘‘Kids?’’
He went through the kitchen into the vestibule, then the living room where he picked through yet more debris. The entertainment unit had been pushed over. He saw Tom’s junior league baseball trophy, lifted it, and brushed all the dirt off. He finally got an inkling of how Joe Haydn must feel about Gunther.
He put the trophy down and walked into the dining room.
The silver had been left untouched, as if in this age of the looming red giant, silver no longer mattered.
He went back into the hall and ventured to the den.
Sheila’s sewing machine lay toppled on its side. Becky, an archery enthusiast, had taken her longbow—or at least someone had—but her target equipment and a quiver of arrows had been left in the corner.
He sniffed the air. It had a faint electrical smell but otherwise didn’t reek of dead bodies. He took that as a good sign.
He learned from survivors that military officials had turned the Museum of Art into a morgue and triage center, so that’s where he went to look for his family.
As he reached the top step, he gazed out at the grounds. Soldiers dug various mass graves, not only in the space out front, but farther away, in Eakins Oval. He was sad to see that in Eakins Oval the statue of George Washington had been blown on its side. Bodies were sheathed in black plastic body bags, the polymer laced with chemicals to stop the spread of disease, and to contain the smell. The rain slanted down, and it was bathwater warm. He felt faint, nauseated, and knew that the radiation was starting to take its toll.
Inside the museum’s grand front foyer, a military triage unit had established phalanxes of waferscreens on trestle tables. He waited in line to use one. Those in front keyed in particulars, and some were offered a chit while others were turned away. The emergency lighting did little to dispel the gloom. People looked hungry and dispirited.
Pittman finally got to a terminal and filled in the fields, starting first with his children. His body sagged as he saw on the waferscreen that they were both marked deceased, Becky a DOA, and Tom succumbing to massive internal hemorrhaging shortly after arrival. He could have cried but he didn’t. It was as if the Builders had dried the capacity for tears right out of him.
Sheila was a different story. She was marked in critical condition. Her location was gallery 161. He wasn’t much of an art lover, and didn’t know the museum that well. He accessed the floor plan and saw that gallery 161 was to his right. He took his chit and headed that way.
He had to go through a number of other galleries, and they were full of sick people lying on the floor, with too few nurses and doctors going from one to the other. He wasn’t sure what they were doing about sanitation because the whole place stunk of human waste.
At last he came to gallery 161, and it was large and spacious, and hexagonal in shape. He presented his chit to one of the military clerks, and the clerk, struggling in his radiation suit, and doing ten things at once, waved to the west side of the gallery. ‘‘She’s over there. Bed sixteen. Under the van Gogh.’’
He walked over and found his ex-wife lying under a blanket on a bedroll. Hanging above her was a painting he actually recognized, Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers. It hung inside a protective case. No one was looking at it.
Her head was bandaged and he saw only her right eye and mouth. The skin around both was blistery, scorched, and red. She looked at him with her one uncovered eye, but didn’t seem to recognize him.
‘‘Doctor?’’
He sighed. ‘‘No, Sheila. It’s me. Tim.’’
She grew agitated. ‘‘Tim?’’
‘‘The thing tells me the kids are dead.’’ And he didn’t mean to make it sound as if he were blaming her, but maybe he did, just a little, even though in his heart of hearts he knew he was the one to blame.
Tears brimmed in her one good eye. ‘‘Oh, Tim, I’m so sorry.’’
‘‘Were you in the house when it happened?’’
‘‘No.’’ She reached up. ‘‘I can’t see anything. You’re all blurry. Could you find a doctor? This pain is bad.’’
‘‘Where were you?’’
‘‘You mean when the bomb hit?’’
‘‘Yes.’’
Her lips quivered and her hand sank to her chest. ‘‘We were on our way to Lincoln Field to see the Eagles. We were just exiting the expressway, and it hit, and the car went dead. It was so bright. I couldn’t see a damn thing. Like a flashbulb. My eyes stung, and I thought at first it might be this sun thing that’s going on.’’ In a more quavering voice, she asked, ‘‘We’re going to be all right with that, aren’t we? This Guarneri thing’s going to fix the problem, isn’t it?’’
He didn’t think his ex-wife was going to live long and so told her a lie. ‘‘I’ve learned through some of my contacts that Guarneri’s been a success.’’ He paused. ‘‘So . . . the kids.’’
She nodded woefully and her tears came more quickly. ‘‘After all the brightness disappeared, I saw it. I wouldn’t exactly call it a mushroom cloud, more like a huge white wave of fire and debris, and after that, the car was pushed right off the expressway into Roosevelt Park, along with a lot of other cars. We were trapped there. I got burned all over my face. It took about two days for someone to come, and by that time . . .’’ She got choked up. For several seconds, she couldn’t go on. ‘‘By that time, Becky was dead. They put me and Tommy on this big military truck with a lot of other injured people, and it took us about eight hours to get to the museum because all the debris blocked the roads. Tommy lasted another day.’’ Her face creased in anguish. ‘‘Then my poor baby died.’’
Pittman sat with Sheila through the night, scarcely able to believe that he had personally been responsible for the deaths of his children. His eyes clouded with tears for a while, as if the Builders had decided to give him back the ability to cry after all. But then a blue light seemed to envelop everything around him, and he knew the Builders were with him; he felt not a peace, such as Dr. Conrad had described, but a resignation. It felt like the dark side of the yin-yang symbol. Then the visitation passed. And he once again found himself waiting for her to die.
She died early in the morning.
He went back to the river to get his dinghy.
He paddled upstream much of the night until, at dawn, he came to the abandoned neon sign factory.
His truck was still there.
He got in his truck and started heading west.
Back to the desert.
Back to face the coming red giant by himself.
30
A day later, with Mark’s body now commended to deep space, Cam sat at Station A in Cremona going over the scraps of code the late junior scientist had dredged from the subconscious reservoirs of his mind. Cam wasn’t a forensic software specialist, but he certainly felt like one, gluing together bits of language the way an archaeologist might reconstruct a shattered Grecian urn.
Parts of the language in three less infected nodes might be reversed, he decided, and when he mentioned this to Lesha, who was sitting next to him going over her own bits of recovered language, her delicate brow rose, and for the first time since Mark’s murder, he saw hope in her aquamarine eyes.
He pointed. ‘‘I’ve isolated this strand, and by breaking it down, I’ve managed to sever the command sequence so the bit can’t pass on instructions to node four. But there’s got to be a faster way. Some of what I’m seeing tells me there’s a master key, a mechanism that will throw the tumblers all at once and get the code to retreat from Guarneri in a piece. If we can isolate that mechanism, we can go ahead with the sequenced acceleration and define our anti-Ostrander region. If that happens, the hydrogen flow reverses—at least enough so that the Builders might take notice.’’
Some of the hope faded from her eyes. It was a long shot. At the same time, it was better than no shot a
t all.
He glanced over her shoulder where tethered beyond the science bay’s large polycarbonate dome he saw the survival modules, now turned into holding cells. They were secured by life support umbilicals, and acted as improvised brigs for the Chinese observer staff. The white lozenge-shaped objects drifted twenty-five meters behind them; one was upright, and Cam saw Foster Chong staring at them from across the void. He knew Foster was an excellent scientist, and loyal to the new regime, a man who was trying to do good in his life; but they couldn’t take any chances.
Lesha asked, ‘‘So how much time do we realistically have?’’
Cam turned from Foster and stared at the code. ‘‘Forty-eight hours would be pushing it.’’
‘‘So if we had this hypothetical master key . . .’’ She glanced toward the hub access bay. ‘‘I wonder what’s taking Oren?’’
‘‘He’s extremely thorough when it comes to his work.’’
‘‘I hate to say this, but I’m glad he’s here.’’
‘‘Yet will the Builders judge us harshly?’’
‘‘You talk of the Builders as if they’re gods.’’
‘‘Define God.’’
A short while later, Fye appeared at the hub access hatch. ‘‘He’s been sufficiently softened, Dr. Conrad.’’
Cam glanced at Lesha. How he hated this. It wasn’t supposed to be like this at all. It was supposed to be a reaching out between two galaxies, not one long sad comment on the barbarity, stupidity, and short-sightedness of humankind. And yet he would not give up.
He unstrapped himself and drifted free of his stool. Lesha did the same. He remembered the music. Sweet. Sighing. Tender. Compassionate. Positive. And if the Builders could make music like that, tried to communicate with harmony and melody of such mystical caliber, then they must be capable of forgiveness.
He pulled himself over. Fye’s face was set, had a fleck of blood on it. Violence? Sure, why not? After Mark’s near decapitation by a vicious little PRNC macrogen, what was to stop the emotions from boiling over? This had nothing to do with the beauty and sublimity of First Contact. This was all about war.