Aftermath a-1

by Charles Sheffield

  “And then, twenty years ago, my fate was revealed. One night I could not sleep. I did not understand why, until in the hours before dawn I saw a thousand disasters. I saw floods sweep away cities and dams and levees. I saw fire run unchecked across a thousand miles of parched forest, jumping rivers and gorges, and man-made firebreaks. I saw dust storms swirling and smothering over a whole continent. I saw icebergs in tropical seas, and great whales basking in summer heat. All these things would happen at once, as the world tottered under a gigantic blow from Heaven. The damage would be made worse by a false faith in new technology, new technology that seemed like magic.

  “And the Word came to me. What I saw would happen not then, nor in a week or a month or a year, but in twenty years. The machines of that time, the near-intelligent machines of which their creators were so proud, would fail. And even that was not the worst news. Unless humanity learned a lesson, and cooperated over the whole world, a still greater disaster would come. I could see no details, but all would die. Humankind had only one hope, one way of averting that new catastrophe. The City of God must be created here on Earth. It was my role to lead that building. Humanity must be purged of evil, if necessary by force. It was my role to lead that purging. Humanity must be cleansed of sin, even if it meant scraping to the bone. It was my role to be the Eye of God, to prophesy and define what must be done. Then it would be my task to lead the carrying out of that cleansing. I could not rely on new technology, but old technology would provide me with my tools.

  “I did not like the burden laid upon me. I fought against it, prayed that the cup might pass. I tried to reject it and to deny it. I hated many of the things that I knew I would be required to do. But, finally, I accepted my destiny.” Pearl Lazenby turned to Wilmer and offered the cup that she was holding. “Would you like tea?”

  He shook his head, and leaned toward her. “You saw disaster in this year, 2026. And you saw a possible later disaster. When? What did you see around 2076?”

  “Fifty years from now?” A frown wrinkled the skin of her high forehead. “I saw nothing. Should I have?”

  “Yes. In that year, or within five years of it, a second great disaster will arrive.”

  “What kind of disaster? Can you describe it?”

  “Yes.” Wilmer’s face took on the blank look of Pearl Lazenby’s, five minutes earlier. “Let me put it in terms easy to understand. There will be fire in the sky, as a deluge of high-energy particles hits our upper atmosphere. We will see auroras bright as no one has ever seen them. Worse trouble follows. For a short time the atmosphere will become opaque to visible wavelength radiation — darkness at noon. When sunlight returns, Earth will be unprotected. The ozone layer will have been lost. Ultraviolet radiation will hit Earth more fiercely than we have ever known. And while this goes on, the global temperature will rise. The thermal shock to the planet will be ten times that of the past two months. Civilization, even if it has been rebuilt from today, will crumble and collapse.”

  “You see it.” Pearl Lazenby was sitting bolt upright, absorbed in Wilmer’s words. “That’s it, isn’t it? You see these events.”

  “You could say that I see them, yes.”

  “But where does your vision come from?”

  “From the equations governing stellar energy release, clear to those who can read them. It is in the formulas for element nucleosynthesis, in the equations for radiative transfer, and in the quantum laws that govern the interaction of the electromagnetic field with atoms and electrons. It was foreordained by the occurrence of the supernova itself. And beyond 2076, far beyond it, I see a faint shadow of something even more ominous.”

  “Can others see these things?”

  “Some. But if I am honest, I have to say, not many. It requires a lot of training.”

  Pearl Lazenby subsided slowly in her chair. “It is like my own gift. It must be grown from its first seed. Native ability is nothing without long, hard work. Could you teach me to see as you do?”

  “I think not.”

  She nodded. “Any more than I have been able to teach others. I accept that. It was clearly foreordained that you come here. You will tell me more of your visions. But not today. You are, I know, exhausted, and so am I. My people will show you to your accommodations.” She did not seem to move, but three armed women appeared at the door of the room.

  Celine took the hint and stood up. The others of the Mars group, more slowly, followed her example.

  Pearl Lazenby rose, too, a little unsteadily. She patted Wilmer’s arm. “We have much to learn from each other. Good night.”

  She waved to the uniformed guards, who escorted Celine and the others away.

  Following Celine’s lead, Wilmer, Reza, and Jenny said nothing until they had been taken along another underground corridor and shown two small rooms, each containing two cot beds. The armed women motioned Reza and Wilmer to place their small backpacks in one room, Jenny and Celine to use the other.

  “What about food?” Celine asked. “It is many hours since we ate.”

  One of the women shook her head. “There will be no food tonight.” She had the same wooden manner as Eli, and she spoke as though she grudged every word.

  “Mealtimes are fixed. At seven in the morning, at midday, and at six at night. Anyone who does not eat at those times does not eat.”

  “I don’t believe it. Food must be available for people who have been working late or working at night.”

  “There will be no food tonight.”

  “Then tomorrow I will report your action to Pearl Lazenby herself. She said that we would be treated well here. She does not expect us to be starved.”

  Mention of the leader’s name had an immediate effect. The other two women turned to the one who had spoken and Celine could see fear and worry on all three faces. After a few seconds the first woman nodded.

  “You will have food. But you must eat here, nowhere else.” She nodded to one of her companions, who hurried out. “Tonight you may not leave these rooms.”

  “Believe me, we don’t propose to go anywhere. We are hungry and exhausted. Something to eat, then we’ll collapse into bed.”

  “We will be on guard outside, to make sure that no one tries to leave. Your food will be brought in.” The woman looked all around the room as though searching for some invisible escape route, nodded, and motioned to the other woman. They left in silence.

  Celine looked at Jenny. “Are we going to let them dictate who sleeps where?”

  Jenny shook her head. “I don’t see why. It’s our business, not theirs.”

  She moved her pack to the bedroom with Reza. Celine brought Wilmer’s things in with her. Then she sat down on the bed and stared at him thoughtfully.

  “You know, sometimes I wonder about you. All that stuff about visions and foreordained disaster.”

  “I told the exact truth,” Wilmer said placidly. “When a supernova occurs, the initial burst of radiation must be accompanied by particle emission. Those ions travel more slowly, at a small fraction of light speed. Foreordained describes very well the nature of physical laws, and the inevitable future arrival of a particle storm from Supernova Alpha. Thousands of scientists on Earth could have told Pearl Lazenby that. And if she’d asked me, I could have suggested a possible way of avoiding the disaster. But she didn’t. I guess scientists don’t have much clout in this place.”

  “But what about her visions? That’s all mystical gobbledygook.”

  “We think so. But she believes what she sees, and so do her followers. That gives her visions a reality that we have to accept, even when they sound vague enough to apply to a lot of natural disasters.” Wilmer motioned toward the door. “Those guns are real. The willingness of her followers to do anything that Pearl Lazenby commands is real. Based on the evidence, I can make a case that she has a better handle on reality than the rest of the world. After all, she was the one who predicted and prepared for disaster. We had no idea it was coming.”

  “I agr
ee with Wilmer.” Reza had been standing in the doorway, a rapt expression on his face. He came forward. “She knew, many years ago. No one else did. There are more ways to truth than science admits. I think that Pearl Lazenby is an amazing woman.”

  “Or at least a lucky one,” Jenny said. She came across and sat on the bed next to Celine. Her eyes were red from fatigue and loss of sleep. “Don’t glare at me like that, Reza, pure luck would do it. Pearl Lazenby decided, for whatever reason, that she disliked smart machines that made use of microchips. So she predicted that they would fail, and after that she and her followers avoided them. Did you notice the railcar we rode here on, and those guns and bullets? They were old. No chips in them.”

  “Maybe. But they are more useful than anything that does use chips.” Reza seemed ready for more argument. “So who was the smart one, tell me that. Pearl Lazenby, or the rest of us? Hate the Legion of Argos as much as you like, you can’t deny that her prophecies came true.”

  “By dumb luck.” Jenny stared up at Reza, who shook his head. Celine sensed a new tension between them. “Pearl Lazenby and her followers are one-eyed prophets,” Jenny went on, “in the country of the blind.

  She knows she has a temporary advantage, and she intends to do something with it. My question is, what? How many followers does she have? A thousand, or a million? Where are they? And what are they going to do?”

  “She made her intention clear enough.” Celine was watching the other three closely. “You heard her, humanity has to be cleansed of sin, even if it means ’scraping to the bone.’ I don’t know what that means, but I don’t like the sound of it. We have to find out what they propose to do — and we have to find a way to warn other people, so the Legion of Argos can be stopped.”

  “I do not think that they can be stopped.” Reza stared at Celine defiantly. “Not by anyone or anything. The Eye of God has seen the future.”

  “Stopping them certainly won’t be easy.” Celine changed her mind about what she was going to say next, as the door opened and two women entered carrying trays of food. She took the offered bowl of thick lentil soup, and went on, “We don’t have enough information. We don’t know what’s been happening in the world since the supernova. We don’t even know where we are, within a couple of hundred kilometers. One thing’s for sure. In the next few days we must all become the most loyal, devoted, and dedicated members that the Legion of Argos has ever had. And I suspect that Wilmer will be our star performer.”

  25

  The thaw at the Maryland Point Syncope Facility was not a local event. It extended from the hidden Virginia valley, where the Clark orbiter had made its emergency landing, all the way north across the Appalachians to the Pennsylvania/New York border.

  The Indian Head naval base lay well within that region. Saul had gone to bed — alone, and far later than he cared to recall — in a starless night of crackling frost and sudden wind. He awoke to clear, bright morning and the steady trickle of snowmelt from a slate roof. He frowned up at the yellowed ceiling, and realized that he had been roused by a brisk rat-a-tat-tat on the thick oak of the bedroom door.

  A head peeked discreetly into the room. “Good morning, Mr. President.” A huge tray loaded with covered dishes went onto the cherrywood table by the door. The head — it was attached to a young woman in an old but well-laundered white uniform — nodded. She withdrew before Saul had time to notice her rank, or wonder what the woman would have done if she had walked in on a naked President. The stock diplomatic answer — “Sorry, madam” — wouldn’t work in this case.

  He walked over to the window. It faced west, across the three-mile-wide Potomac. In all that broad expanse he could count just seven vessels. Four were Navy ships, moving away from Indian Head. Saul guessed that they were part of last night’s flurry of activity when word spread along the river of his trip by water to Indian Head. Only one ship now lay at the jetty where he had landed. It was smaller than the frigate that had brought him, and it had the lines of a small tugboat.

  The other three were fishing boats, all heading downstream to the bay. The river was a flat calm, and the lines of their wakes lay ruler-straight on the surface.

  Good. If Yasmin had any trouble traveling to the Q-5 facility by road, she would certainly be able to get there by water. Which led to one other thought. He walked back to the bed, picked up the unit on the bedside table, and stared at it dubiously. It lacked control panel, display, antenna, and keypad. As he held the truncated black cone to his ear, a voice said, “Yes, Mr. President?”

  “What year was this telephonic unit made?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  Ask a stupid question. Saul suppressed the urge to inquire if the man at the other end had been sitting up all night, awaiting a possible presidential call. The odd thing was the chatter of children’s voices in the background.

  “One of my aides, Ms. Yasmin Silvers, will be visiting the Q-5 Syncope Facility today. In view of last night’s activity downriver, I would like her to have a military escort.”

  “Very good, sir. It will be arranged.”

  Which ought to be enough — except for a possible excess of zeal. “Not a big escort, please. No more than a dozen.”

  A moment’s hesitation, enough to make Saul think his added command was justified. “Yes, sir. Sir, I have two hundred and seventy-three messages for you here, forwarded from Washington.”

  “Hold them for me.” A quiet morning, by presidential standards. “It is not necessary for me to meet with Ms. Silvers before she leaves. And if convenient to Captain Kennecott, I will be ready for a review of the base in thirty minutes.”

  “Do you wish to speak with him, sir? He is right here.”

  And probably has been, poor devil, since before dawn. “Yes, put him on, if you please. Captain Kennecott? Good morning to you. Yes, it looks as though we have a much better day for a tour than yesterday. No, as a matter of fact I haven’t tried it yet. But I’m sure the food will be fine.”

  Saul hung up, reflecting that in many ways it was better to be asked about a meal before you tasted it. A relay of cooks had probably been working on that since before dawn, too.

  They had taken no chances. A dozen different dishes sat on the tray. Saul drank hot tea with lemon, ate a piece of brown bread onto which he slathered several ounces of grape jelly, and resisted the urge to explore a large, light blue egg.

  Salmonella tested? Not in this universe. The standard household test kit undoubtedly contained at least one chip.

  Captain Kennecott was waiting in full dress uniform. He was not alone. Saul accepted a bouquet of thornless red roses from a shy three-year-old toddler whose finger went up her nose as soon as she had delivered her gift.

  He smiled and thanked her with grave politeness. 7 am President of all the people. You had to work on that at first, but after two years it became automatic. It was even true. She would remember this seventy years from now.

  “Is there anything you would particularly like to see?”

  Captain Kennecott’s question was a natural one, but Saul couldn’t answer it. He had come here on inexplicable impulse. Impulse would have to guide him still.

  “I would like to see the weapons storage.”

  “We had anticipated that.” Kennecott turned and nodded to a woman in civilian dress, who left at once. Saul noticed the captain’s left hand, its skin smoother and whiter than the right. It was a grown prosthesis, a combination of Voorhees-McCall nerve cell regeneration with tissue engineering. The technique was still experimental, no more than five years old. But Kennecott was well over seventy. In which war had he lost it?

  The captain had seen his look, and flexed his hand. “Good as new, sir. Feels like a natural arm. I suppose in a way it is. My own DNA, even if I didn’t grow it myself. No chips in it — thank God.”

  Saul changed his mind about the captain. Last night he had noticed the big Adam’s apple, tired eyes, and deep-lined cheeks. Kennecott had seemed old and frail, a man o
ut to pasture. Today he was someone who noticed everything, alert and in command, a man who had adapted rapidly to deal with the unexpected factor of a presidential arrival.

  Saul tried a guess based on age and casualty rates. “Vietnam?”

  Kennecott laughed. “No, sir. I was there, all right, Navy aviator, but I came through without a scratch. Then I was fool enough to do this to myself on a peacetime run. Flying an F-24 modification in ’05.”

  “You weren’t invalided out?”

  “They tried. I pulled every string in the Disabilities Act.”

  They had been walking as they talked, down the slight slope that led away from the Officers’ Mess and the river beyond. The group of well-groomed children had disappeared. The military escort remained a careful ten paces to the rear. The air was so warm and the sun so bright that Saul imagined he could see the snow on either side of the path melting away before his eyes.

  Kennecott made a right before they reached the building labeled prominently as Bachelor Enlisted Quarters, and led them on through an open gate. Saul read the sign on the high wire fence: authorized personnel only beyond this point, no foreign. The flower beds and neat shrubs emerging from the snow on either side of the gate seemed incongruously at odds with the brusque sign. The brick building beyond was square, huge, and windowless.

  The civilian to whom Kennecott had signaled earlier was waiting at the open double doors. Saul had his first chance for a good look at her. Thin, late forties, maybe five-three, she stood between white-painted shell cases taller than she was. Blond, straight hair. Probably in first-rate physical condition except for the fair skin whose rugged look suggested too much direct sunlight. Why didn’t she replace it with a cultivated mask of her own face, cheap and easy to grow?