“Kellie,” he said, “hold off on departure.”
“Why? We’ll lose our window.”
“You’re going to need another one.”
“I’ll go with you,” Whit said.
“No.” Digger had released his harness and was sitting up. “We’ll only need one person on the ground.”
“What’s going on back there?” asked Kellie.
“The weather report created a problem,” Julie told her. She looked at Digger. “You’ll need a pilot.”
Kids always think they’re immortal. “Bill can take us down.”
“That’s not a good idea.”
Whit was still watching him. “I’d take it amiss if you don’t let me go along.”
Digger saw no point in it, but he also saw that Whit was serious. “If you insist,” he said. He was trying to think it out. The four landers were tied down on a mountaintop north of Hopgop. He’d need the AV3. And the helicopter. “Plus a pilot,” he said reluctantly. “I guess you’re in, Julie.”
“Why do you need the hauler?” demanded Kellie, who had appeared in the doorway.
“It’s got a better chance of surviving heavy weather.”
“I can pilot the damned thing. There’s no need to drag Julie along.”
“You’re not qualified.”
“Digger—”
“We need all the edge we can get. And don’t look at me like that. We don’t have time to argue about it.”
THEY HAD TO make another pass around the night side before they could get set up. Kellie told him it was a fool’s errand, and he could see she was struggling to hold back tears. But she finally admitted it was the only thing they could do.
God knew Digger didn’t want to go back down with the omega coming on. But he had too much invested in the Goompah cities to walk away from them now. “Listen,” he told Kellie, “we’ve been reasonably confident they can get through it. If they can, we can.”
He checked the prepared broadcast to be sure he hadn’t overlooked anything, downloaded it onto disk, made an extra copy just in case, and put both in a pocket. The sun dropped behind them, and they plunged into the night. The cloud rose and filled the sky. Everyone was quiet. They’d all seen too many sims, where you go one extra time into danger and pay for it. But they came back out into the sunlight without incident.
When the ship was clear, and they were getting ready to leave, Kellie joined him, and for a long minute, put her hands on his arm, held on, but said nothing.
“It’ll be okay,” he told her.
Her eyes were damp. “I have to take the Jenkins out of orbit.”
“I know.”
“That means—”
“—I know what it means.”
There was another long silence. “I won’t ask you not to go, Dig. Just, please, come back.” She looked around at the others, making her request binding on all.
“We will. We’ll be okay.”
“Don’t do anything dumb.”
“Nothing dumb. Check.”
“And make for the high ground.”
“Love,” he said, taking her into his arms, “I’m already on the high ground.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know, Kel. Don’t worry. I’ll be careful. I’ve too much to come back to.”
WHEN THE MOMENT arrived, she gave the word, and they slipped through the airlock, the three of them. They were tethered together, and Julie wore a go-pack. The AV3 was only a short burst away.
It was a big vehicle, but it was all storage space. Digger took a quick look in back to make sure the Falcon was there. The blades had been shortened somehow to save space. Otherwise, the oversize cargo hold was empty.
The cabin was no bigger than the one in the Jenkins’s lander. He climbed into the right-hand seat, Whit sat down in back, and the harnesses slid down over their shoulders. Julie settled in, turned on one of the monitors, and began powering up. Lamps blinked on, and Julie was talking to both Bill and Kellie.
Kellie gave her clearance to go, and she throttled up. “How are we going to do this?” she asked, as they slipped away and began their descent.
Digger explained what he wanted. They dropped through the cloud cover and emerged over the ocean. They were down among electrical storms, west of the isthmus, when Bill’s elderly sea captain image appeared on the overhead. “The Jenkins has left orbit,” he said.
Moments later Kellie was on the circuit. “We’re pulling out to a range of 3 million klicks. I don’t want the ship anywhere near this place when the omega hits.”
“That should be safe enough,” said Julie. Her smooth features were expressionless in the glow of the instrument panel.
Digger twisted around but still couldn’t really see Whit. “May I ask you a question?” he said.
“Sure.”
“Why did you come? You don’t have a dog in this race.”
Whit looked momentarily offended. “I’m as involved as anyone else, Dig. I don’t think I’d want to be on hand for this and have to tell my grandkids all I did was stand in the third row and watch.”
It occurred to Digger that none of them would have been out of the third row had it not been for Whit’s prompting. Digger didn’t think he would have gone back to the Intigo on his own. But it was hard to stay aloof after Whit had made it clear that they were preparing to abandon the Goompahs.
“Hang tight,” said Julie. “Rough weather ahead.”
MOUNTAINS JUTTED OUT out of the clouds. “Mt. Alpha is that way”—Julie jabbed a finger—“and Hopgop over there.” Off to the right. It was late afternoon in Goompah country.
“Do you want to wait until it’s dark?” Julie asked.
“No. Too much to do, and we’re too short on time.”
Mt. Alpha was craggy, snow-covered, probably the tallest peak on the isthmus. It was sheer on the west side, as if something had taken a hot knife to it. The remainder was broken into notches, ridges, slopes, gullies, and buttresses.
Julie brought the hauler down cautiously atop the snow cover at the summit and quickly lifted off again when the ground gave way. “Not too steady up here,” she commented. They made it on the second try.
The mountaintop was flat. A few trees were scattered about, and some bushes. It was about the size of a soccer field, maybe a little larger. A rock chimney rose out of the center, and a massive fissure had been gouged into the northern angle. Everything beyond it looked ready to plunge into the clouds below.
Two landers were parked on either side of the chimney, anchored to it, to a couple of trees, and to a spread of boulders.
“I think,” said Digger, “they’re safe from rising water up here.”
“We thought so,” she said, without a trace of a smile.
They released the cables and tossed them into the vehicles. Digger climbed inside each and uploaded the disk.
The third lander was in the shelter of a buttress, well down the side of the mountain. They were in the weather by then, lightning walking about, rain hammering down. It was secured to five trees. The fourth was in a clutch of forest in a saddle.
They piled out of the AV3 at the saddle and climbed into the lander. Julie activated the vehicle’s lightbender, while Digger inserted the final disk.
They were ready to go looking for broadcast locations.
SANIUSAR WAS EFFECTIVELY isolated in the northwest, and needed a site of its own. They picked out a ridge in a remote area, and Bill started one of the landers forward. It turned out to be an unnerving experience because the storm kept loosening Bill’s grip on the unmanned vehicle, and they almost lost it altogether while he was setting it down.
They settled on a second site midway across the Intigo, from which they could reach Mandigol and Sakmarung on the west coast, and Hopgop and Roka to the east. It had grown dark when they established a similar location farther south, which provided access to Kulnar, Brackel, Avapol, and Kagly. Finally, in the late evening, they took the AV3 to a mountaintop, where the bro
adcast range covered Savakol and T’Mingletep.
LONG BEFORE THE landers were in place near Brackel and T’Mingletep, Digger had activated the programs in the north. Unlike Saniusar, which was a sprawling collection of towers and ornate houses and bridges and public buildings spread across several urban areas, Hopgop was a modest town with about a tenth the population and an inclination toward the austere. Where the western city was flamboyant and almost baroque, the New York of its world, Hopgop liked to think of itself as casual, informal, no-nonsense. Another Moscow. Its architecture was purely utilitarian; its literature (as the translators were already learning) was lucid, uncontrived, vigorous. Sometimes lurid. And often powerful. Hopgop was the intellectual center of the Intigo.
When Digger started the transmission, which occurred shortly after the torches were lit in both cities, anyone passing before the cutlery shop on Hopgop’s main avenue, or in any of the major parks of Saniusar, would have been startled to see a luminous apparition appear apparently from nowhere.
Macao had been in Hopgop for three days. She’d been performing, visiting relatives, attending shows. The real reason she was there was that she had not forgotten Digger’s prediction. The timing was incorrect. The previous day had been the ninety-third day, the day it was all supposed to happen. She’d even talked her cousins and her brother into clearing out, into sitting on a nearby ridge under animal skins, while the rain came down and the sky remained in its accustomed place.
Still, she wondered if she might have misunderstood something. Whatever the truth might be, they had clearly fallen on ominous days, and, if Digger turned out to be belatedly right, she wanted to be with her family.
It was impossible to know what to make of events. Suddenly it seemed she lived in a world of zhokas and levitation and lights in the sky. A zhoka had been seen just a few days ago in Avapol. Of course, they had always been observed with some regularity, but that could usually be ascribed to an overabundance of piety or wine or imagination. Take your pick.
She wondered about the three ships, out in the night somewhere, on the wide ocean while terrible things were happening. She tried to console herself with the possibility that they were beyond the sunrise, and beyond the reach of the thing that seemed to be coming at them out of the night.
She was in her brother’s villa on the southern edge of town, near Klaktik Square. They had been at dinner when the next-door neighbor came pounding on the door. “Something’s in the sky,” he roared. And then ran off, leaving them gaping.
They opened the shutters and looked out at the storm, which had consisted only of gray rain all day. But now there was a downpour, and the evening was full of lightning. “I don’t see anything,” said her brother.
But Macao had a feeling, and she remembered Digger Dunn, would never forget Digger Dunn. She went outside and looked up. And she saw it in the flickering light: a giant bird, but not a bird, a thing that moved somehow independent of the wind, that did not seem to use its wings. She watched it vanish into a cloud.
Then she went back into the house and told her brother what she’d seen. “It’s hard to see in the storm,” he said. “Maybe it was something else.”
But it had been something not of this world. She knew that as surely as she knew the children were in bed.
AFTER ABOUT AN hour, the rain let up, and the thunder subsided. Macao was still wondering whether she should suggest they get the children and go out into the storm. Repeat the fiasco of the previous night.
Was it even possible the ocean could overflow the shoreline? Could such a thing happen?
She was thinking about it when a fresh commotion started in the street. Voices. Shouts. Running.
They hurried out, into the courtyard.
People were moving past. Toward Klaktik Square. “Miracle!” someone said. And another: “Have mercy on us.”
Klaktik was a large park, with shops and a children’s pool and a meeting house.
The street was full of shouts: “I don’t know, but it’s her.”
“What’s happening?”
“The goddess.”
“Lykonda.”
“Worst weather I’ve ever seen.”
The commotion quieted as they approached the square. There were a hundred people standing in the rain. More than a hundred. And they were coming in from all directions.
Macao stood on her tiptoes, trying to make out what was happening. There was a glow in the trees. People were crowding toward the children’s pool. Toward the light.
She couldn’t make out what it was. The night grew quieter, and everything seemed to be slowing down, the people around her, the rain, the wind. Even the children.
A woman stood within the light. Incredibly, her feet rested on the air, unsupported.
It was hard to breathe.
The woman surveyed the crowd. She seemed utterly serene, sometimes solid, sometimes as insubstantial as the clouds.
She was dressed for the forest, in green leggings and a loose yellow blouse. And she carried a blazing torch.
People in front of Macao were removing their hats, whimpering, falling to their knees.
She was the most beautiful woman Macao had ever seen. And there was something eerily familiar about her.
The power that ran through the night, that brightened the skies, ran into Macao’s mind. And she knew who the woman was.
Lykonda.
Goddess of the hunt. Patroness of the arts. Protector of Brackel.
Another being who should not exist.
But in that moment of darkness and confusion and fear, Macao welcomed her into her heart.
THE GODDESS SEEMED detached from the physical world. The wind pulled at the trees, but her garments remained unruffled. The rain sparkled when it touched her aura, but never seemed to touch her.
In all that assemblage, no one spoke.
Macao heard the boom of the distant surf and somewhere behind her the brief cackle of an oona. And she realized this was the supreme moment of her life. For the first time, she embraced the faith of the Intigo, and knew the joy that came with it.
She was vaguely aware that people were still coming into the park, but how big the crowd might have become, she could not have said. Nor did she care.
And then, shattering the mood, a voice: “O Goddess, why have you come among your servants?” The voice was male, with a strange accent. She was annoyed that anybody would presume to speak. And she thought it a voice she had heard before.
The light changed subtly, and Macao saw that the goddess’s blouse was ripped, her leggings torn. And there was a smear on her right cheek that looked suspiciously like blood.
Lykonda switched the torch to her left hand and beckoned with the right. “Hear my words,” she said. “A great storm is coming. You have seen it now for many months. We have been engaged with it, trying to subdue it, and we have reduced its power. But know that even we cannot vanquish it altogether, and you must now look to your safety.”
The crowd stirred. Some began to sob. Cries and moans went up.
“The waters will rise and flow across the land.”
More lamentations.
“Take your family and your friends and hurry to high ground. Do not panic. There is time, but you must leave the city quickly. This is your last night before the storm breaks over you. Stay away from the city until the danger is past. Take supplies for six days.”
“Goddess.” It was the oddly accented voice again. “Many of us are old and weak and cannot make the trek you describe.” Macao could not see who was speaking. But she knew the voice.
“Be of good courage. You will not see me, but I will be with you.”
The whimpers turned to cries of thanks.
And then, abruptly, the light faded and went out, and Lykonda was gone.
IN BRACKEL, PARSY the librarian helped his kirma, his brother-husbands, get their twenty-two spouses to safety. He had witnessed, had been stunned by, the appearance of the goddess. Who would have thought suc
h things actually happened? But he was, if anything, a prudent man. Having heard her words, he needed no additional encouragement.
Until this night, although he assumed the gods existed somewhere, that they kept the stars moving and brought the seasons and the harvest, he’d never thought much about them. To him, they tended to be occasional characters in the dramas, showing up to give advice, to move the plot along, to teach a much-needed lesson. He would be more cautious in the future. Whatever years were given him, he would reverence the gods and their ways, and he would walk in righteousness.
He stood on the crest of a hill within sight of Brackel. The roads between the city and the surrounding hills were narrow, and they were choked with the fleeing population. The dawn was near, although he didn’t expect to be able to see the sun. The rain had finally stopped, but it had gotten cool. The children were wrapped in skins, and the new day would be long and trying. But they would get through it. How could they not, if Lykonda walked with them?
The signs of the coming hazard were everywhere: The wind was rising, the tide was unnaturally high, and the rivers were beginning to flood. Parsy had long since discovered that prudence always suggested he assume the worst, and that if he did so, he would seldom be either surprised or disappointed. So he had ordered his family to bring everything they could carry. Prepare for a siege on the hilltops. And get high. No matter that the climb was tiring.
Now it was done, and they were as safe as he could make them. So it was time to consider his second duty. “Who will come with me?” he asked.
“Let them go,” said Kasha, his special mate, the woman with whom he shared his innermost thoughts. “In the end, they are only scrolls. They are not worth your life.”
“You won’t be able to get through that,” said Chubolat, signifying the refugees pouring out of the city. Chubolat occasionally worked at the library.
“I have no choice,” he said. “It is my responsibility.”
Tupelo came forward and stood by his side. Reluctantly, but he came. And then Kasha. “Where you go, I will go,” he said.
“No. I cannot allow it.”
“You cannot stop me.”
“And I,” said Yakkim, with whom he spent so many of his evenings in conversation about the ancients.
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