The Forge of God tfog-1

by Greg Bear

  The excitement was returning; he could feel sad later about those left behind. Right now, it seemed certain what he had most hoped for was happening. The network was not blocking his way, or telling him to go back; he was being urged on. Only a few minutes remained.

  “We’re taking a boat?” Francine asked. He nodded. She lifted her purse, and Arthur shook his head: leave it. She slipped a plastic pack of family photos from her wallet and tossed the rest aside almost angrily, face contorted.

  “Aren’t we going to lock the car?” Marty asked. Arthur hurried them away, leaving the tailgate open.

  You do not need possessions. Bring nothing but the clothes on your back. Empty your pockets of change, keys, everything. Bring only yourselves.

  He tossed his keys and change, wallet and comb, onto the asphalt.

  They walked through an open gate in a chain link fence onto a long, broad pier, lined on each side with the gently bobbing masts of fishing boats. “Hurry,” he urged.

  Francine pushed Marty ahead of her.

  “All this for a boat ride,” she said.

  At the end of the pier, the boat he had visualized awaited them. There were indeed about twenty people standing and sitting in the back. A young woman in faded jeans and a windbreaker guided them onto the ramp and they boarded quickly, taking their places in the back. Marty perched on a smelly pile of worn netting. Francine sat on a winch.

  “All right,” the young woman shouted. “That’s the last.”

  Only now did Arthur dare to let his breath out. He glanced around at the people on the boat. Most were younger than he; four children were in the group besides Marty. There were no passengers past late middle age. As he looked into their faces, he saw that many had been involved in the network, and yet they were not being rewarded for their labors. Others on the network had been left behind; many not on the network, like Marty and Francine, were going along.

  Still, nobody seemed to have any idea where they were headed. The boat pulled into the choppy bay waters and headed north. The sun cast welcome warmth, and the winds over the bay took most of it away.

  The young woman came around to each of them and held out her hand. “Jewelry, please,” she said. “Rings, watches, necklaces. Everything.” Everybody handed over the valuables without complaint. Arthur removed his wedding band and nodded for Francine to do likewise. Marty surrendered his Raccoon wristwatch without complaining. He was very sober and very quiet.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” a young man dressed in a business suit asked the woman as he handed her a gold Rolex.

  “Out near Alcatraz,” she said. “That’s what the skipper tells me.”

  “I mean, after that?”

  She shook her head. “Has everybody turned in everything?”

  “Will we get our things back?” a small Asiatic woman asked.

  “No,” the young woman in jeans replied. “Sorry.”

  “Is Becky and Aunt Danielle and Uncle Grant coming with us?” Marty asked solemnly, watching sea gulls glide over the boat’s wake.

  “No,” Francine answered, taking the word from Arthur’s lips. “Nobody else is coming with us.”

  “Are we going to leave the Earth?” Marty asked. The adults around him visibly cringed.

  “Shhh,” the young woman said, maneuvering her way past him. “Wait and see.”

  Arthur reached out and gently pinched Marty’s ear between thumb and forefinger. Smart boy, he thought. He looked out across the water, feeling the bay’s white-caps thump rhythmically against the boat hull. Several people were becoming seasick. A nut-brown, gray-bearded man of about forty came down from the pilot house and passed out plastic bags. “Use them,” he said gruffly. “Everybody. We don’t need anybody sicker than they have to be, and we certainly don’t need chain reactions.”

  Arthur surveyed the city’s skyline, blinking at the salt spray. All that work. Around the world. Thousands of years. He could not even begin to encompass the enormity. Francine came to him and wrapped her arms around him tightly. He leaned his cheek against her hair, not daring to feel as optimistic as he wanted to be.

  “Can you tell me what’s going on now?” she asked.

  Marty snuggled up to them. “We’re going away, Mom,” he said.

  “Are we?” she asked Arthur.

  He swallowed and barely moved his head, then nodded. “Yes. I think we are.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They cut through the water under the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, Yerba Buena Island and Treasure Island to their right, tall mounds of dark green and brown on the slate-colored, white-flecked waters.

  “See, Marty?” Francine said, pointing up at the bridge’s maze of girders and the huge piers and tower legs. “We drove over that just a while ago.”

  Marty gave the wonder cursory attention. The sea was getting rougher. Alcatraz, a desolate rock cluttered with ancient buildings, a water tower prominent, lay dead ahead. The boat slowed, its motors cutting back to a steady chug-chug-chug. The young woman passed among them again, examining everybody closely for unnecessary belongings. Nobody protested; they were either numb with fear, seasick, exhausted, or all three. She smiled at Marty in passing to the rear again.

  The boat stopped, drifting in the chop. The passengers began to murmur. Then Arthur saw something square and gray rise beyond the port gunwale. He thought immediately of a submarine sail, but it was much smaller, barely as wide as a double doorway and no more than ten feet out of the water.

  “We’ll have to be careful,” the woman told them, standing on a short ladder near the pilot house. “The water’s rough. We’re all going to climb down through this doorway.” An empty black square appeared in the gray block. “There’s a spiral staircase going down into the ship. The ark. If you have a child younger than twelve, please hold its hand and be very careful.”

  A burly fisherman in a black turtleneck sweater struggled to extend a short gangplank to the block’s entrance.

  “We are leaving,” Francine said, her voice like a girl’s.

  One by one, in silence, they crossed the none-too-stable plank, helped by the fisherman and the young woman. Each person vanished into the block. When his family’s turn came, Arthur went first, then helped Francine lift Marty across, and grasped her hand firmly as she lurched over.

  “Oh, Lord,” Francine said in a trembling voice as they descended the steep, narrow spiral staircase.

  “Be brave, Mom,” Marty encouraged. He smiled at Arthur, walking before him, their heads almost level.

  After descending some thirty feet, they stepped through a half-oval entrance into a circular room with three doorways clustered on the opposite side. The walls were peach yellow and the lighting was even and warm, soothing. When all twenty stood in the room, the young woman joined them. The fisherman and other crew members did not. The half-oval hatch slid shut quietly behind her. A low moan rose from several in the room, and one man about ten years younger than Arthur sank to his knees, hands clasped in prayer.

  “We’re inside a spaceship,” the young woman said. “We have quarters farther down. In a little while, maybe a couple of hours, we’ll be leaving the Earth. Some of you know this already. The rest of you should be patient, and please don’t be afraid.”

  Arthur clasped his wife’s and son’s hands and closed his eyes, not knowing whether he was terrified, or exalted, or already in mourning. If they were aboard a spaceship, and all the work he and the others in the network had done was coming to fruition, then the Earth would soon die.

  His family might survive. Yet they would never again breathe the fresh cold sea air or stand in the open beneath the sun. Faces passed before him, behind his eyelids: relatives, friends, colleagues. Harry, when he had been healthy. Arthur thought of Ithaca Feinman and wondered whether she would be aboard an ark. Probably not. There were so few spaces available, fewer still now that the ships in Charleston and Seattle had been destroyed. A breeding populat
ion, little more.

  And all the rest…

  The younger man prayed out loud, fervent, face screwed up in an agony of concentration. Arthur could very easily have joined him.

  67

  A loose group of ten took to the Four Mile Trail in the early morning, Edward and Betsy among them. They hiked through the shadows of Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine, pine pitch tartly scenting the still morning air. The climb was relatively mild at first, rising gradually to the vigorous Sentinel Creek ford some two hundred feet above the valley floor.

  By eleven they were on the steep ascending trail cut into the granite facade to the west of Sentinel Rock.

  Edward paused to sit and take a breather, and to admire Betsy in her climbing shorts.

  “They used to charge to climb this,”’ Betsy said, propping one well-made leg against a ledge to retie her hiking boot.

  He looked over the edge at the distance they had already climbed and shook his head. By noon, they had peeled out of their sweatshirts and tied the sleeves around their hips. They stopped for a water break. The ten, by now, were spread along a half mile of the trail like goats in a terraced-rock zoo exhibit. One young man a few dozen feet above Edward had enough energy to beat his chest and let loose a Tarzan cry of dominance. Then he grinned foolishly and waved.

  “Me Jane, him nuts,” Betsy commented.

  Their good cheer continued as they stood at Union Point and looked down across the valley, leaning on the iron railings. The sky was only slightly smoky, and the air was warming as they ascended. “We could stop here,” Betsy suggested. “The view’s pretty good.”

  “Onward.” Edward put on a valiant face and pointed to the goal. “One more heavy climb.”

  By one o’clock they had hiked over a seemingly endless series of switchbacks up the bare granite slope, stopping briefly to examine the manzanita growth. They then followed a much more reasonable, comparatively level trail to Glacier Point.

  Minelli and his companion Inez had already pitched tents in the woods behind the asphalt paths leading up to the point’s railed terraces. They waved at Edward and Betsy and motioned for them to come over and share their picnic lunch.

  “We’re going to take in the view,” Edward called to them. “We’ll be with you in a little bit.”

  Leaning on the rail of the lowest terrace, they surveyed the valley from end to end, and the mountains beyond. Birdsong punctuated the steady whisper of the breezes.

  “It is so peaceful,” Betsy said. “You’d think nothing could ever happen here…”

  Edward tried to picture his father, standing by the railing more than two decades ago, waving his hands, clowning as his mother snapped his picture with a Polaroid camera. They had driven up to the point that time. An hour later, they had been on their way home, ending the last happy time of his childhood. The last time, as a child, he had felt he could have been happy.

  He touched Betsy’s arm and smiled at her. “Best view in the world,” he said.

  “Grandstand seat,” Betsy agreed, shading her eyes against the high bright sun. They stood near the edge for several minutes, arms around each other, then turned and walked back to the tents to join Minelli and Inez.

  The afternoon progressed slowly, leisurely. Minelli had bought a stick of dry salami in the store, and two loaves of bread; Inez had somehow come up with a large wedge of Cheddar cheese. “We had a whole wheel a few days ago,” she said. “Don’t ask how we got it.” Her smile was tough and childish and sweet all at once.

  Minelli passed around cans of beer, warm but still welcome, and they ate slowly, saying little, listening to the birds and the hum of the wind through the trees behind them. When they had finished, Edward spread a sleeping bag on the grass and invited Betsy to lie back and doze with him. The climb had not been exhausting, but the sun was warm and the air was sweet, and large fat bees were buzzing in lazy curves around them. They were well fed, and the beer had made Edward supremely drowsy.

  Betsy lay beside him, head resting in the crook of his arm. “Happy?” she asked him.

  Edward opened his eyes and stared up at white clouds against a brilliant blue sky. “Yes,” he said. “I really am.”

  “So am I.”

  A few dozen yards away, other campers were singing folk songs and sixties and seventies tunes. Their voices drifted in the restless, warm air, finally melding with the wind and the hum of the bees.

  68

  Walter Samshow celebrated his seventy-sixth birthday aboard the Glomar Discoverer, cruising in circles a few kilometers beyond the zone where huge gouts of oxygen had once risen to the ocean surface. The bubbling had stopped three days before.

  The ship’s galley prepared a two-meter-long birthday cake in the shape of a sea serpent — or an oarfish, depending on whether you asked the cook or Chao, who had seen several oarfish in his time, but no sea serpents.

  At five in the afternoon, the cake was cut with some ceremony under the canvas awning spread on the fantail. Bible-leaf slices of the serpent were served on the ship’s best china, accompanied by champagne or nonalcoholic punch for those ostensibly on duty.

  Sand silently toasted his partner with a raised glass of champagne at the stern. Samshow smiled and tasted the cake. He was trying to decide what flavor the peculiar mud-colored icing was — someone had suggested sweetened agar earlier — when the ocean all around suddenly glowed a brilliant blue-green, even beneath the intense sun.

  Samshow was reminded of his youth, standing on the beach at Cape Cod on the night of the Fourth of July, waiting for fireworks and tossing his own firecrackers into the surf just as their fuses burned short. The firecrackers had exploded below the surface with a silent puff of electric-green light.

  The crew on the rear deck fell silent. Some looked at their shipmates in puzzlement, having missed the phenomenon.

  In rapid succession, from the northern horizon to the southern horizon, more flashes illuminated the ocean.

  “I think,” Samshow said in his best professorial tone, “we are about to have some mysteries answered.” He knelt to put his plate and glass of champagne down on the deck, and then stood, with Sand’s help, by the railing.

  To the west, the entire sea and sky began to roar.

  A curtain of cloud and blinding light rose from the western horizon, then slowly curled about like a snake in pain. One end of the curtain slid over the sea with amazing speed in their direction, and Samshow cringed, not wanting it all to end just yet. There was more he wanted to see; more minutes he wanted to live.

  The hull shuddered violently and the steel masts and wires sang. The railing vibrated painfully under his hand.

  The ocean filled with a continuous light, miles of water no more opaque than a thick green lump of glass held over a bonfire.

  “It’s the bombs,” Sand said. “They’re going off. Up and down the fractures—”

  The sea to the west blistered in a layer perhaps a hundred meters thick, scoured by the snaking curtain, bursting into ascending and descending ribbons of fluid and foam. Between the fragments of the peeled sea — the skin of an inconceivable bubble — rose a massive, shimmering transparent of superheated steam, perhaps two miles wide. Its revealed surface immediately condensed into a pale opalescent hemisphere. Other such bubbles broke and released and condensed from horizon to horizon, churning the sea into a mint-green froth. The clouds of vapor ascended in twisted pillars to the sky. The hiss and roar and deep churning, gut-shaking booms became unbearable. Samshow clapped his hands to his ears and waited for what he knew must come.

  A scatter of calved steam bubbles broke just a few hundred meters to the east, with more on the opposite side. The turbulence spread in a high wall of water that caught the ship lengthwise and broke her spine, twisting her fore half clockwise, aft counterclockwise, metal screaming, rivets failing like cannon shots, plates ripping with a sound curiously b’ke tearing paper, beams snapping. Samshow flew over the side and seemed for a moment suspended in froth and flyi
ng debris. He felt all that he was a part of — the sea, the sky, the air and mist around him — abruptly accelerate upward. A much larger steam bubble surfaced directly beneath the ship.

  There was of course no time to think, but a thought from the instant before lingered like a strobed image, congealed in his mind before his body was instantly boiled and smashed into something hardly distinguishable from the foam around it: I wish I could hear that sound, of the Earth’s crust being spread wide.

  Around the globe, wherever the bomb-laying machines had infested the deep-ocean trenches, long sinuous curtains of hot vapor reached high into the atmosphere and pierced through. As the millions of glassy columns of steam condensed into cloud, and the cloud hit the cold upper masses of air and flashed into rain, the air that had been pushed aside now rushed back with violent thunderclaps. Tsunamis rolled outward beneath corresponding turbulent expanding concentric fronts of high and low pressure.

  The end had begun.

  DIES IRAE

  69

  Below San Francisco Bay, hours after boarding the ark, the young woman who had guided them on the fishing boat — her name was Clara Fogarty — went among the twenty in the waiting room and spoke to them, answering questions, trying to keep them all calm. She seemed none too calm herself; fragile, on the edge.

  Help her, Arthur was ordered. He and several others immediately obeyed. After a few minutes, he circled back through the people to Francine and took her hands. Marty hugged him fiercely.

  “I’m going to visit the areas where we’ll be staying,” he said to Francine.

  “The network is telling you this?”

  “No,” he said, looking to one side, frowning slightly. “Something else. A voice I’ve not heard before. I’m to meet somebody.”

  Francine wiped her face with her hands and kissed him. Arthur lifted Marty with an oomph and told him to take care of his mother. “I’ll be back in a little while.”