Maya, a tall, wiry ex-Manhattanite, was a no-nonsense dogooder who applied to charity work the sort of drive that most people reserved for some combination of career, family, and dental hygiene. In short, she didn't appreciate impediments to efficiency such as unscheduled vomiting.
"I think my pancreas is coming up," moaned Christine.
"Stick your head out the window. We need to be back before nightfall. Can't stop now."
In fact they were barely moving as it was. What they were driving on wasn't so much a road as it was a vague idea of a road; a roughly linear stretch of ground littered with barely navigable rocks. Their destination was a mere twenty miles away as the crow flew, but they had been on the road for nearly an hour and they were only halfway there.
Christine couldn't recall a time when she had been more miserable. She was nauseous, tired, uncomfortable, and dirty, and part of her couldn't help wishing that the world had ended six weeks earlier. Maybe she and Mercury shouldn't have interfered with the plans of Heaven. Maybe the world was meant to end. Sure, the archangel Michelle had assured her that the Apocalypse was indefinitely on hold, but maybe there were powers at work that trumped even the best intentions of the most influential angels. Maybe Michelle was as powerless to stop the Apocalypse as she was.
But if the Apocalypse was still proceeding, wasn't there a whole lot of other bad stuff that was supposed to go down before the final act? Rivers turning to blood and a third of the moon falling out of the sky, stuff like that.
It occurred to her that she was thinking like Harry Giddings, a realization that actually made her feel worse. No matter how bad things were, she wasn't about to adopt Harry as a role model.
Was there even such a thing as destiny? There must be, she mused. If not, then aren't we all just bouncing around aimlessly like ping-pong balls? But if everything is predetermined, then what's the point of doing anything at all? Maybe Mercury was right: we're all just splashing around in the inexorable stream of fate. Of course, Mercury had ended up splashing a little too hard, and had nearly been pulled under by the weight of the Heavenly bureaucracy. Now he was God-knows-where, presumably still on the run from the powers-that-be.
Christine sighed. These sorts of thoughts weren't helpful. She needed to focus on the here and now, not on abstract philosophical notions. And certainly not on the late Harry Giddings or the vanished angel Mercury. She needed to focus on whatever good she could do here in Africa, for whatever time she had left.
At last they reached the remote agricultural testing facility, which consisted of a small aluminum building attached to a greenhouse about half the size of a football field. The entire facility was ringed by a twenty-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Inconspicuous signs identified the structure as "TRI-FED TESTING FACILITY 26." Maya pulled the Land Rover up to the gate and honked.
"What do they do here?" Christine asked.
"They test bioengineered crops," Maya said. "It has to be remote to prevent contamination with the local varieties."
"Remote?" Christine said. "We passed remote about ten miles back. This is...like...godforsaken."
A pudgy, red-faced man with an enormous head emerged from the building and unlocked the gate, swinging it open to let them enter. Thin wisps of pale yellow hair arced out from his gigantic cranium in a futile effort to block some minute fraction of the radiation pummeling his scalp. Christine tried to make out the name on the man's embroidered nametag, but the second half of the name was obscured by a sizeable scorch mark. What she could decipher looked like Crisp---an unlikely, albeit appropriate name.
"Drive around back," the man said. "I've got a pallet ready for you." He lumbered toward the rear of the building, his arms and legs splayed widely in an apparent attempt to prevent any one part of his body from contacting any other part. As they followed slowly in the Land Rover, Christine found herself transfixed by the sweat marks on the man's shirt. There was one big puddle on his upper back, another slightly smaller one on his lower back, and one under each armpit. The dark spots seemed to be growing before her eyes, and she found herself rooting for them to join together as one the one big, happy, sweat stain she knew they were destined to be.
The man, whose name was Crispin Guthbertson, was unaware of the sacred sweat communion about to occur on his back, but he was used to being the source of entertainment for those around him. It had been that way ever since he had arrived at Testing Facility 26. To say that Crispin was ill suited to live in the wilderness of Kenya was like saying that mayonnaise is an inadequate remedy for smallpox. Crispin was so physiologically and temperamentally unsuited to living in an equatorial climate that his own subconscious mind, in an attempt to knock some sense into him, caused him several times a day to nearly trip over an invisible line on the ground which some primordial part of his brain recognized as the dividing line between the two hemispheres of the globe.
Crispin had been designed, through six thousand years of careful inbreeding, to be perfectly adapted to live in the frigid low latitudes of Scandinavia. His body wasted no effort developing melatonin and other pigments to protect his pale, porcine flesh from a distant and ineffectual sun, preferring instead to manufacture copious rolls of fat that it systematically placed around the organs that it considered to be Crispin's most valuable components: his intestines, first of all, followed closely in priority by his stomach, liver, and kidneys. His heart and lungs were given a perfunctory wrapping of blubber, while his brain, in a forgivable oversight, was left out of the calculations completely.
What Crispin's head lacked in fatty deposits, however, it made up for with calcium. Crispin's ancestors lived on an island that had been cut off from the Scandinavian mainland, and the combination of an oversupply of seafood and an undersupply of leisure activities resulted in the primordial Guthbertsons spending a surprising proportion of their time attempting to bash one another over the head with sticks, rocks, and whatever other weapons they could devise with whatever undamaged brain matter that was left in their heads. As a result, an inordinately thick skull had become a significant survival advantage among his people: those with the thickest skulls tended to survive the bashings, allowing them to produce more offspring than their thinner-skulled rivals. These thick-skulled children were, not coincidentally, more than happy to carry on the skull-bashing traditions of their forebears, and thus both massive skulls and massive skull-bashing were passed down for dozens of generations, until it was every mother's dream that her son would grow up to have a skull so massive that he was unanimously elected to be the tribe's chief. The last chief of the tribe, in fact, had a skull that was so heavy that toward the end of his reign he required the assistance of several advisors simply to nod his own head---a fact which raised questions about undue influence of his cabinet and might ultimately have led to the end of his dynasty if his entire government hadn't been wiped out by a neighboring tribe that had developed an unquestioned military advantage by pioneering the use of rowboats and sharpened sticks.
Crispin's ancestors were absorbed into the neighboring tribe, who were equally large and pale, but possessed, on average, slightly smaller skulls and slightly larger brains. The massive-skulled people nearly died out completely, but occasionally, even thousands of years after the whole skull-bashing business started, a combination of recessive genes would result in the birth of a man like Crispin Guthbertson, whose albino features and frequent neck aches would have made him feel right at home with his prehistoric forebears.
These days, however, skull bashing was generally frowned upon and paid poorly, leaving Crispin with few career options in the field to which he was most suited. He majored in chemistry and then attended pharmaceutical college, but due to genetic programming that limited his capability to resolve conflicts without resorting to skull smashing, he was not particularly suited for customer service and ended up working as a lab technician for a small Danish biotech company. This company was then bought by a larger company, based in Germany, which then merge
d with two other companies to become Tri-Fed, one of the world's leading biotech firms. Tri-Fed closed its Northern European locations and relocated Crispin to a remote agricultural research facility in Kenya, thereby flouting 250 generations of breeding designed to make Crispin Guthbertson the ideal survival candidate for a near-sunless arctic village.
Crispin's official title was "site administrator," but he was essentially a glorified supply clerk for the facility. The Kenya facility, officially known as Tri-Fed Testing Facility 26, was sort of the redheaded stepchild of the Tri-Fed family; only half a dozen scientists worked at the facility at any given time, and most of them had been reassigned there because of some sort of personnel issue, generally a sexual harassment lawsuit. Most Tri-Fed locations were several hundred times the size of the Kenya facility, but an edict from senior management required that all research facilities use the same staffing guidelines, and according to those guidelines the number of "productive personnel" in Testing Facility 26 justified 0.125 security guards, 0.108 cooks, 0.281 clerical workers, and 0.333 other support personnel, totaling 0.847 non-scientific employees. Crispin Guthbertson was assigned to fill all of these positions and given a fifteen percent pay cut on top of it, to make things fair.
Mercifully Crispin was generally ignored by the group of sexual deviants making up the research staff. He spent most of his days reading mystery novels and doing paperwork in an aluminum trailer, which, thanks to the modern marvel of air-conditioning, often got as cool as ninety-three degrees Fahrenheit. One day he made the mistake of eating his lunch outside; he had fallen asleep in the shade but woke up drenched in sweat, the sun beating down on his blistered skin. Crispin was an amazingly sound sleeper; even the sunburn might not have woken up if it weren't for the fact that his glasses (which were nearly as thick as his skull) had slipped down his nose and focused the sunlight perfectly on his embroidered name tag, burning completely through his shirt, obliterating the in at the end of his name, and lighting his left nipple on fire. The burns had taken weeks to heal, and the incident had earned him the predictable nickname "Crispy" among the staff.
Crispin's least favorite part of his job, though, was burning seeds. As an agricultural research site, the facility produced a high volume of seeds from genetically modified crops. Most of this seed would never get legal approval to be sold in Africa or anywhere else in the world, and Tri-Fed's protocols required that it be incinerated. That meant that Crispin had to leave his air-conditioned trailer to go to a non-insulated metal building that was always at least a hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit, fire up the incinerator, and then toss many large bags of seed into the fire. It got so hot in the incinerator building that on heavy seed-burning days, he actually feared for his life.
Then those guys from Tri-Fed corporate showed up in a helicopter and delivered a shiny metal briefcase to the scientists. Crispin had no idea what was in that briefcase, but after that, there was even more seed burning to be done. Crispin had had enough.
One day he was sitting at his desk when a seed-burning order came through, and he happened to look up and see a poster for a Canadian relief organization4 working nearby, and he had an idea---an idea that would mean no more trips to the incinerator, not to mention a few bucks in his pocket: he would sell the excess seed to the relief workers. He had called them up and talked to a woman named Maya, who was cautiously receptive to the idea. The first time, Maya had arrived with two men, but the next few times---having evidently been convinced that Crispin posed no threat---she had come alone. This was the first time he had seen this other woman. Kind of cute, he thought, although there was something not quite right about her face.
Maya followed the dirt driveway around the metal building to the greenhouse. A pallet of burlap bags marked TRI-FED lay on the ground. Maya and Christine exited the truck.
"How much?" asked Maya.
"Two hundred," replied Crispin.
"Two hundred? That's double what it cost last time!"
"This is really good stuff. Hey, if you don't want it, I can burn it. Got the incinerator all ready."
"I'll give you a hundred and twenty."
"A hundred and fifty. No less. I've got student loans to pay off, and this job doesn't pay shit."
"Fine," said Maya. "A hundred and fifty." She counted out a hundred and fifty dollars and handed it to the man.
"Nice doing business with you," he said, smiling, and turned to waddle back to the building.
"You're not going to help us load it?" Maya asked.
"Not for a hundred and fifty bucks. Have fun."
"Asshole," Maya muttered. "OK, help me load these bags into the truck. We gotta get going."
"What was that all about?" Christine asked. "I thought they were giving you surplus seed."
"More or less," Maya replied. "Not so much surplus as not-yet-commercially approved. They can't legally sell it, so they give it to us."
"Except that you just bought it."
"I have to give Crispin some spending money or he won't give it to us."
"Oh, so you're not buying it," Christine said. "You're just exchanging money for something you want."
Maya sighed. "We're not buying it from Tri-Fed. They're giving it to us. But sometimes to get somebody to give you something, you have to grease the wheels a bit. It's how things work down here."
"Why can't they sell it? What's wrong with it?"
"Nothing's wrong with it. They just haven't gotten approval to sell it yet. It takes forever for the new seed patents to get approved, and every country has its own rules. They end up having to incinerate thousands of pounds of perfectly good seed. Crispin gives me a call when he's about to burn it."
"And this doesn't strike you as suspicious?"
"Christine, you've seen where we work. People are starving to death every day. I'm not going to let 'suspicious' stand in the way of me helping these people produce their own food. Now shut up and help me load these bags."
Christine did what she could to help, but was still feeling weak from her illness and nearly passed out loading the third bag. She went and sat in the truck while Maya finished up.
Maya was predictably irritated by Christine's inability to help, and on the way back she drove faster, seemingly in an effort to punish Christine. It worked: some ten miles from the Tri-Fed facility, the Land Rover's right front tire hit a cavernous pothole, ejecting several of the seed bags and nearly overturning the vehicle.
"I'll get it," Christine said, getting out of the Land Rover. She steadied herself against the truck, took a deep breath, and then set about reloading the ejected bags. When she had finished, she returned to the truck.
"Oh, shit," she said.
"What?" demanded Maya.
"I think we've got a flat tire."
Maya walked around the truck and inspected the tire. It had lost most of its pressure already, and was hissing more air as they watched.
"You have a spare?" Christine asked.
"That was the spare," Maya replied.
"What?" Christine asked. "We drove twenty miles into the godforsaken Kenyan wilderness without a spare tire?"
"If I didn't pick up the seed today, Crispin was going to burn it. Usually there's no hurry, but he called me yesterday and told me that if I didn't pick it up today, he was going to have to burn it all. Tri-Fed bigwigs coming out to inspect the place or something. I had no choice."
Christine bit her tongue.
Maya used the walkie-talkie to call Brian, the resident EH mechanic, but he was away in Nairobi for the day, picking up supplies.
"Looks like we may have to hunker down for the night," said Maya, bending down to inspect the tire.
"Hunker down?" Christine asked, dismayed. "Is that safe?"
Maya replied, "It's unlikely any of the raiders will come this far out..."
"Raiders?" Christine exclaimed. "There are raiders?"
"Look, we'll be fine," Maya said. "Just don't panic."
"Uh huh," replied Christine. "So, thes
e raiders. Are they tall, mostly naked black guys with spears?"
"Spears?" Maya asked. "Why do you...?"
She looked up to see a group of half a dozen tall, lean men wearing loincloths and bearing spears, standing in front of the Land Rover. The men didn't look happy to see them.
ELEVEN
Not long after the disastrous briefing at which he had floated the idea of a rift in space-time sucking Anaheim Stadium into another dimension, Jacob Slater was pulled off the Anaheim Event and instructed to return immediately to Washington, D.C. He had packed his duffel bag and was currently waiting for the army transport helicopter that would take him to the Los Angeles airport. The helicopter wasn't just for him, of course; HeadJAC had arranged regular flights to and from LAX for the convenience of Deputy Assistant Director Lubbers and the other VIPs at ACHOO.
While he waited, he continued to pace the implosion area (as he insisted on thinking of it), eyeing the dozens of men and women going about various mysterious tasks at the site. He could only assume these were other investigators or scientists of some sort (geologists? structural engineers? immunologists?) developing their own narrative of what had happened at the site. Jacob couldn't help but think of the story of the blind men assessing the elephant: one man, feeling the elephant's tail, described the elephant as being like a rope; another, feeling the elephant's trunk, likened it to a snake; a third, feeling the elephant's leg, said that the elephant was more like a tree trunk.
I'm like the blind man at the elephant's tail, thought Jacob. Except that studying the tail wasn't enough for me. I had to keep pushing, and now I'm elbow deep in elephant shit.
His fellow blind elephant observers milled about the site, oblivious to what the other teams were doing. Each team would write up a report, and that information would work its way up the chain of command until it had reached someone with the appropriate security clearance to compare it to six other reports he couldn't make heads or tails of---probably D.A.D. Lubbers. Lubbers would report to the director of the FBI, who would report to the president of the United States, who would order a bombing raid on some backwater dictatorship that had nothing to do with the Anaheim Event but really wished they had.
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