Solstice

by David Hewson

  He gulped at the water, and wondered about the vodka before pushing away the thought. 'Sometimes.'

  'You should have had kids, Michael. You're good with them. You can talk to them like a grown-up and on their own level too. That's a gift. I can feel Annie coming out of her shell a little more every time we meet'

  'Why's she in that shell, Mo?'

  'Jesus.' She gulped at the drink. 'We don't take the long way round to questions these days, any of us.'

  'Blame it on the weather. It shines right through everything.'

  'Not quite. Annie's like that because of me. Is that what you want to hear?'

  'No. Because I don't really believe it. We all get sidetracked in our lives sometimes. Me more than most. There are times when you should blame yourself. And times when you have to accept that some days it just rains. None of us controls as much as we like to think.'

  'No,' she said. 'Maybe not. But I'm grateful for the way you talk to Annie. Like she's real. Not some ornament around here. Can't we leave it at that?'

  He pulled up a chair, planted it next to hers on the balcony, looked at the sky, and felt like a jerk. She was scared and he should have known that, would have known too if all the right parts inside him had been working as they should.

  What scared her were the Northern Lights that stood above them, rolling and dancing, ageless, formless. There were reasons for this exhibition. They stood at the back of his imagination, hard and cold and factual, reasons that talked of all those extra protons and electrons that the sun had emitted colliding with the upper atmosphere of the earth, racing toward the magnetic poles and giving off their mutual energy in this psychedelic panorama that took your breath away, made you feel small and powerless beneath its vastness. But reasons belonged in the plain, all-seeing light of day. Sometimes they never followed you into the dark, unfamiliar rooms where you needed them.

  This was the biggest Aurora he had ever seen, at any latitude. It flowed like a continuous greenish blue curtain to the north of them, its lower hem a fringe of violent ruby red.

  Inside, the fabric seemed to be alive, seemed to move and pulse and breathe.

  They stared at the lights, so bright they made the stars in the south invisible in the radiant night sky. She was shivering, he could see that, and it wasn't that she was cold.

  'Take it easy, Mo. It's no big deal.'

  The usual night noises were oddly absent, with few bird calls, only a gentle rustle of hot air across the dry grass. And beneath it all, like some distant, mystical orchestra, the sound of the lights. A gentle fizzing and crackling that was like static, the rustling of electricity.

  She reached up, covered her ears, trying to stifle this sound from the sky. 'I don't want to listen, Michael. I can't stand the thought of being underneath all this. Not being able to hide.'

  'You don't need to hide. This isn't Charley. This is natural. Being afraid of this is like lying awake at night worrying someone is going to turn off the gravity and send us all cartwheeling off into space. Even if that were a possibility, fretting over it would be pointless.'

  She watched the green electric curtain pulsing, alive, above them, and said, 'You know these things. They make sense to you. All I see is… insanity.'

  'No. You see change. The world changes. We get used to thinking that we control those changes but that's an illusion. It's always been changing. It's not what we have to be frightened of. It's what's inside ourselves when we realize how tiny we are against all this.'

  Did this reassure her? He thought there was no way to tell. She kept something tight and close and private inside her, something that rarely saw the light of day.

  'You're scared for Annie,' he said. 'You needn't be. It's people in the cities that need to be scared. When things break down, people damage each other. Charley knows that. She's not going to bother with us any more. We're too small.'

  'I'm scared for all of us. The world scares me. Michael…'

  Gently, gingerly, she put her arms around his neck, cradled her face against his skin. She was warm. There was moisture there. A dim memory, he thought: It was a long time since a woman had cried against him. A dim memory.

  'What happened today-'

  'Shhhh…' He put a finger against her lips, felt the warm, dry skin. 'What happened today is in the past. We got out of there. We survived. We will survive.'

  She moved her face closer against him; he felt the hard, damp sharpness of her teeth on his neck, her fingers running through the back of his hair. Mo Sinclair kissed his cheek, pulled back, and he found himself staring into her strained, expressionless face.

  'Michael,' she said, 'I can't be alone just now. I can't be.'

  Something like electricity ran between them, mirroring the fire in the sky.

  'This isn't a good idea,' he said, and she was rising already, back into the room, taking off her shirt, walking over to the bed. She was wearing nothing beneath the old red fabric. Her breasts stood small and taut against her thin, straight chest.

  'We don't have time for ideas. Don't think, Michael. Feel.'

  He took one more gulp of the water, tried to force some sense into his head, looked at the sky, and decided this was futile. 'You sound like me,' he said, out over the balcony to no one but the dancing, raging sky. 'You sound just like the old part of me, not my favourite part.'

  Something clicked inside his head. Something that gave no way back. He rose from the chair and started to remove his shirt, his jeans. She was in the bed now, beneath the single sheet, her body just visible through its flimsiness, her face stained by the green light coming in through the open windows. She held out her hand. Pleading, Lieberman thought, and something now slumbering inside him asked: Why?

  He sat on the side of the bed and pulled back the sheet, down to her breasts, staring at the dark, small nipples, soft as he touched them, not stiffening. He pulled the fabric down farther, revealing the long slender body, the colour of fading copper, too tanned, a triangle of dark hair.

  'Don't think,' she said, and reached for him, felt the developing stiffness at his groin. 'Please.'

  He let his head break free of this baggage of adulthood, shrugged off the last of his clothes, and climbed on the bed, touched the gentle rise of her stomach, bent down, licked her navel, felt the taut, tight lines of her stomach, her thatch, the damp, inviting sweetness it concealed, kissed her hard, hand raising now, into her long, dry hair, eyes closed (not in the green light, not in the green light), felt her legs submit, moved, was above her, inside her, gently shifting, rocking, probing, feeling.

  And there was so much to feel: This part of being alive was hot and fevered, slow and ecstatic. In the faint green light that filtered into the room there lived a frenzied line of electric delight that brought them, moaning, screaming, fighting to some swift, elemental climax.

  Her eyes were closed. She smiled, delicately, a tiny corner of her mouth turned upward, like a piece of punctuation on a physical page, and it came to him how new this was: to see her in some senseless delight, to know that within her taut, strained being there lived some small, insensate oasis of carnality, unfettered, wild, free.

  Like this, she was truly beautiful: satiated, content, made whole by their joint coupling. He stayed in this place, relishing the fleshy warmth between them, becoming ever more conscious of it again. A voice inside his head said: Don't think, feel. And the pictures, the images of the day rolled behind it, in counterpoint, like a slow-moving video.

  Michael Lieberman felt himself hardening, and the fire of procreation began the urging again, starting to order his hips, his groin into motion. Breathless, he pushed himself away, felt himself come free, with a small ache, pulled back over her body, rolled over onto the bed.

  She opened her eyes and this was the old Mo again, closed, mysterious. 'Michael,' she said, looking into his face, some hurt there inside her voice, 'I thought…'

  In the green light now she looked different. Her eyes rolled, like those of a frightened anima
l. She stared at the ceiling. Lieberman reached over, touched her face with his fingers, gripped her chin, forced her head round. 'Mo,' he said. Tears now, forming like transparent pearls at the corner of her eyes.

  'Don't,' she said, trying to snatch herself away.

  'I know.'

  It was there so clearly now, like a photograph inside his head, and he wondered why it took so long to make sense of the image.

  'You know what?' she answered, and there was as much fear in her voice, he thought, as there was aggression.

  'You recognized that woman,' Lieberman said, still working to understand these words himself. 'On the mountain. In the mouth of the mine. You knew her.'

  She closed her eyes, tight, so tight, and shook her head from side to side, so fast, so hard her hair went flying around like some whirling, wispy halo.

  'You saw,' he said quietly. 'And you thought you could fuck that memory out of my head too.'

  CHAPTER 38

  Slipping

  Airborne, northwest of Las Vegas, 1749 UTC

  'McCarran Tower, this is November Five Seven Eight Whiskey Sierra.' The pilot let go of the PTT button and listened to the static, called again, then tried another frequency.

  'Something local?' the co-pilot asked from behind impenetrable Ray-Bans.

  'Probably. Give it a minute, Mike.' The distant city rolled out on the desert plain in front of them, dead flat in the valley between two arid mountain ranges, unmistakable across the clear, cloudless desert sky.

  Mike pressed the button and made another call. 'Still static'

  'Shit,' the captain said. 'I feel a command decision coming upon me.'

  'The woman did say to call her if anything like this occurred.'

  'Yeah, I know. But it doesn't matter if we have to go into McCarran blind, for God's sake. They grounded all the commercial airline traffic for today. Hell, you go talk to her.'

  'Sure.' Mike unstrapped his harness and went aft. Helen Wagner was on the videophone and she looked angry. 'We got some static, some interference,' the co-pilot said.

  'Tell me about it,' she grumbled. On the screen in front of her Lieberman's face appeared intermittently. Most of the time the image was filled with junk: white noise and distortion. When it was clear, she didn't like what she was seeing. Lieberman looked ashen and as miserable as sin.

  'When you're ready,' the co-pilot said, and went back to the cockpit, feeling relieved.

  'Michael,' she said, 'drop the video. Just put this over to voice. Maybe we'll get more over.' The screen died altogether, and, for a moment, the sound with it.

  Then Lieberman said, 'Is that any better?'

  'A little. But it's not great.'

  'No,' he replied, in what was close to a distant, unintelligible mumble, 'same for you. What's the problem? Everything else seems clear this end.'

  'I don't know. Some local interference here possibly.'

  'This is electromagnetic, remember that.'

  'I will,' she replied, and became aware of Barnside and Levine at her shoulder.

  'You do that,' he yelled through the noise. 'I've been thinking about this. Charley said she'd give us a sign. And she hasn't. She's got something up her sleeve, something that comes straight out of the sky, not a box marked Semtex. It will be electromagnetic. It has to be. And this place you're going — a nice big network of wires and high-intensity, open-air electronic devices in the middle of the desert — is one hell of a location to try it out.'

  'I know this,' she answered, trying not to sound too touchy. 'Is that why you called? Because if it is, we're going over old ground and I've got better things to do.'

  The line went dead. Then Lieberman said, 'Keep your hair on. Are you sitting down?'

  'Go on,' she said testily.

  'We've found someone here who was one of the Children. And then made it here. They put her into La Finca as some kind of spy. She knows them. But we need to handle this thing carefully. I don't want some gooks just treading all over this woman because that won't do any of us any good.'

  Levine looked at Barnside and said, 'Get that guy of yours hooked into this conversation. This is his damn job. Not some goddamn academic's.'

  'Michael,' she said. 'Calm down. Take this slowly.'

  'I am calm, Helen.' He didn't sound it at all, she thought. 'I have found someone who was one of them. And was told to come here, get inside this place.'

  'She did that?'

  'She's here. But she says that's as far as it went. She didn't do anything. She's scared. Of you. Of them. And scared for herself, her kid. You need to treat her right. Otherwise she'll just stay quiet, clam up.'

  'I understand… Michael?' The line went dead in a big burst of static.

  'You still there?' he said eventually.

  'Yes.'

  'Look,' Lieberman continued, 'I don't know how much she has to give, and this isn't going to be easy. But if we try, if we're patient, we can work something out.'

  'Patient?' Levine snorted. 'You hear the guy? This woman could put us on the line with Gaia. Who the hell does he think he is?'

  'Who was that?' Lieberman's voice asked out of the speaker.

  'One of my colleagues.'

  'Right. I guess I'm being dumb here, huh? You people are just going to break out the leg irons and beat it out of her.'

  'No!'

  Levine said, 'We'll do what it takes. What the hell does he expect?'

  'I heard that,' Lieberman said, only half-intelligible through the noise. 'And you listen to me, whoever you are. You guys may enjoy running around with hard dicks and guns hanging out of your pants. But it hasn't done you much good so far, now, has it?'

  Levine swore. Then glowered at Barnside working the radio on the other side of the plane, a headset clamped to his ears. 'That guy of yours asleep or something?' Barnside said nothing, just carried on talking quietly into the mike.

  'Listen to me,' Lieberman said. 'If we take this slowly, easily, I think we can bring her around.'

  'I hear you, Michael,' Helen said. 'Just trust us on this one.'

  'Trust you?' The rest of the sentence disappeared in a sea of white noise. She saw Barnside dragging the headset off, wincing with pain.

  'Give it a moment…' she suggested. But the aircraft bucked beneath them and she almost retched as her stomach rose up inside her body. It felt as if the plane had dropped a thousand feet or more in a single second, hit something hard below, and was running along some solid, rough ledge cut into the air. The impact scattered every loose object in the cabin: notebook computers, writing pads, pens, papers, mobile phones. She clung to her seat, desperately trying to fasten the strap, and watched Levine and Barnside struggling to do the same. A hand gripped her shoulder. It was the co-pilot.

  'Belts,' he said. 'I want you all strapped in right now.'

  'We're talking,' she objected.

  'No one's talking, lady. The comm systems just went stone dead and we don't even want to think about what might have gone with it. This is no big deal. We got plenty of altitude and we could just glide into Vegas from this height if we wanted. But there's something turbulent out there and that means we want you tied. Now!'

  She wished she could see beneath the opaque Ray-Bans. This man looked scared, she thought, and that was rare in a pilot. 'I asked you to tell me if we had problems.'

  'Please…'

  She unhooked the strap, got up, holding tightly to the seat, tried to smile at him, and said, 'You have a jump seat. I'm taking it. And that is an order.'

  'Go for it,' Barnside yelled, buckling himself into his seat, and gave her what she hoped was a look of encouragement. 'You heard the woman.'

  'Shit,' the co-pilot muttered, then turned his back on them, worked his way to the front of the cabin, holding on tight to every seat as he passed it, and pushed open the cockpit door. A sea of light the colour of gold flooded through it, then he was dragging her with him, pushing her hard into the tiny jump seat, strapping himself in, and pulling down the military-sty
le harness that sat above it.

  'Make it tight,' he said. 'You can wear these too.' He pulled out a spare pair of sunglasses from a pocket in the cabin and thrust them at her. She put them on, took a deep breath, and looked ahead.

  Still trying to believe her eyes, she gasped, 'What the hell is that?'

  The captain turned round and smiled. 'We were rather hoping you'd be telling us that, ma'am.'

  On the horizon, suspended over the south-western portion of the city, level with their own altitude, stood a vast, elliptical golden shape, like a miniature sun stretched and distorted by gravity. It ran almost the breadth of the valley, joining the mountain ranges on either side of the flat, strung-out urban area, and shimmered, motionless, in front of them.

  'What do they say on the ground?' she asked, already knowing what the answer would be.

  'All communications are down,' the co-pilot answered, tapping away at the buttons in front of him. 'We haven't a clue.'

  'Can't you even listen?'

  The co-pilot turned his sunglasses on her. He reached for the panel and upped the volume. The sound of static, screeching, meaningless, filled the speakers. 'I've been dialling through everything, from the McCarran tower through to local radio on the NDB frequency and they're all the same. Beats me. I never had interference that could run clear through from UHF to AM.'

  The captain eased back some more on the throttle. The aircraft had slowed, she now realized. They didn't know enough to turn it round, but they wanted more information before heading straight toward the object. It sat several miles away from the commercial airfield, which she could see clearly now, directly in their flight path.

  'Ordinarily,' the captain said, 'I would have suggested that was some kind of optical illusion. You get this thing called a parhelion, a sundog. Caused by crystal diffraction in the atmosphere. Harmless.'

  'I know what a parhelion is,' she replied. 'And this isn't one.'

  'No. I guess the interference ought to tell us that. You wouldn't expect that from an optical illusion.'

  'So what is it?'