He panicked, felt like a drowning man, unable to breathe.
But moments passed, long moments in which he remained inside the tree. And he was still alive. Slowly he opened his eyes and saw a mist before him, a gray-green fog that impaired his vision but was clearing moment by moment, revealing something beyond, something he couldn’t quite make out. At first it reminded him of looking through night-vision goggles, but with each passing moment the greenness sharpened and grew lighter.
In this alternate realm Evana was back with him, reanimated, uninjured, and sitting at his side. She spoke his name, her voice like a beautiful bell in his ears. The two of them were inside the tree, or seemed to be, and the interior space was substantially bigger than it had looked from the outside, the size of a large room in an apartment. It was their own special domain from which they looked outside to a world they didn’t ever want to live in again, a world of violence and pain. In his joy he felt the cells of the tree seeping into his body, becoming one with him, green with him.
Were he and Evana becoming the tree, merging into its cellular structure? It was so absurd that he nearly laughed at the folly of the thought, at the way his grieving mind was playing cruel tricks on him. And yet something peculiar had happened to him in the explosion of the ReFac building, something that combined his human cells with plant genetics and something even more alien. Was this an offshoot of that experience, a natural progression?
He caught himself. Nothing was natural about any of the things that had been happening to him.
“Where are we?” Evana asked. Sitting beside him in the enclosure, she no longer had a wound on her head, and the bandage had vanished.
He didn’t answer, because he wasn’t sure. This had to be a weird dream. It just had to be.
* * *
DOWN THE CORRIDOR, a tall, black-haired woman emerged from an anteroom and motioned to Artie, beckoning him. It was Dr. Tatanka, who had been giving the Chairman fusion-antibiotics and other medical treatments. The hubot heard Rahma calling out from the room, his voice saturated with sickness. “Artie! Artie, I need you!”
It was too late to stop what had already been set in motion, so Artie delayed responding. His internal viewing platform showed a burst of Black Thunder spewing out of the large black barrel of the orbital Janus Machine, spreading a swath of destructive energy across the Pacific Ocean, traveling at more than nine times the speed of sound. The water surged and churned, but whales, sharks, porpoises, and other sea life dived deep, and their populations would not be harmed to the catastrophic extent of land animals. On Panasia’s Pacific islands and on their Australian continent, villages and cities were flattened, and people died.
In Artie’s data systems and mapscreens he saw that there was some friendly-fire damage to GSA islands off the western shore of the mainland, behind the target area—but most of the energy surged westward, an enormous swath of destruction over the ocean, wiping out everything and causing all incoming missiles to fall short of hitting the mainland of the Green States of America. In the distance more enemy missiles were being launched, but the powerful approaching energy field was already shutting down their guidance systems and causing them to veer off course, fizzling into the sea even before the swath of primal violence went over it.
He stared, transfixed, absorbing data from the NDS robots. The blast from the satellite was far more powerful than the overconfident SciOs had projected. Black, devastating energy was crossing the Pacific Ocean and hurtling toward Australia and the Panasian mainland, with no loss of destructive energy or speed. In fact, he realized with a sinking sensation, it was actually increasing speed.
In the background of his awareness Artie heard the Chairman’s voice, increasingly urgent and demanding.
Feeling a humanlike reluctance, the hubot made his way to the anteroom and entered. The Chairman lay on a couch, his head on a pillow, with the doctor holding a glass of water to his lips while he drank. An open copy of The Little Green Book lay on a table by him, facedown. Artie wondered if he had been reading his own sayings and poems, perhaps searching for something that would help now. Maybe Dr. Tatanka had been reading the volume, because she was known to greatly admire the Chairman, calling him one of the intellectual giants of all time.
“Where have you been?” Rahma asked, sitting up. He looked weak. “I’ve been calling for you.” He reached for the book, said in a raspy voice, “I want to read you a poem I wrote years ago, something that should never be forgotten.”
“But sir, I must tell you that there is great—”
“Whatever it is can wait. The thing you must understand is that this book of quotations covers matters that are of utmost importance to me, and matters that are critical to this planet.”
“Sir, with respect to the planet, I must tell you—”
“Silence!” Rahma roared. He thumbed through the pages. “This book is, in fact, me. I wrote it in a burst of inspiration that continued without stopping for three days.” His eyes were bloodshot, but brightened with excitement when he found what he was looking for. He cleared his throat, said, “I call this little poem ‘The Wisdom of Plants.’”
Just then, even though he had been programmed to never argue with his superior, Artie summoned a combination of simulated human feelings—anger, frustration, and urgency—and with them he overrode the prohibitive programming. Speaking in a very loud voice and refusing to be silent despite the objections of the Chairman, the hubot got him to listen to a quick summary of the crisis, and then said, “I couldn’t find you, Master, and needed to make quick decisions when you were not available.”
Rahma’s face reddened and his lips moved, but no sound came out for several moments. He looked shocked. Finally he set the book aside and said, “You idiot! I was right here all the time. You should have found me!”
“Everything happened so fast, Master, and much of it was automated. I used the Satellite Janus Machine only when the NDS reported that the missiles fired in response were not enough, and our country was about to be destroyed in a nuclear attack.”
“Oh my God!”
The deity reference surprised Artie, but he didn’t comment on it. Instead, he said, “It was unavoidable, Master, and soon Panasia will be no more because Black Thunder is going more than fourteen thousand kilometers an hour, and has actually gained speed.”
“Jesus!”
It was another inexplicable religious reference from a man who had always professed to be intensely secular. Artie absorbed more data. Linked to him, the NDS computer system processed data faster and faster, assimilating it. He was transfixed by the flow of information and AI analyses, and told the Chairman the crisis was so huge that no one could have any further input. The wave of destruction was stretching out to encompass all latitudes between the northern and southern poles, and still gaining speed. It would sweep across the entire globe, not just one nation—and nothing could stop it.
“This is terrible!” the Chairman exclaimed. He pushed the doctor away and stumbled to his feet, coughing. “Are you sure there’s nothing we can do?”
“Nothing! I don’t know if we’ll survive, though we are in a heavily fortified bunker.”
“And no possible mistake?” He had to hold on to the back of a chair to keep from falling. Dr. Tatanka tried to help him, but Rahma pushed her away.
“No mistake, but probabilities point to a SciO design error, causing the SJM to be much more powerful than they said. That may be exacerbated by a perfect storm of weather conditions, solar flares, tidal forces, and other factors, causing chain reactions of destruction on the surface of the planet. And SJM is no longer operable, so a countering blast cannot be fired.”
Chairman Rahma muttered an expletive, slumped to the floor coughing, then gasped and went silent. The doctor leaned over him and attached a CPR unit to his face and chest, but in a few minutes the machine reported it was no use, and shut off automatically. “He’s dead,” she said, her face a mask of pain and grief. She wiped away t
ears, quoted from his famous book of quotations, “‘Ashes to ashes, green to green.’”
Out of respect, Artie repeated the words, a soft murmur.
“Rahma was a good man,” she said, “a great man.”
The hubot agreed, and felt his own simulated grief, while on his internal viewing platform he continued to receive data from the NDS. The wave of blackness was sweeping onto the Panasian mainland, wiping out cities, farms, factories, everything. Soon it would do the same to the European and African continents under Eurika’s control, and then it would cross the Atlantic Ocean toward the northern and southern continents of the Green States of America.
All projections indicated that Black Thunder was rolling across the entire planet.
Behind him, he heard something breaking, smashing, an increasing noise. At first he thought it must be the mega-storm, but he realized it couldn’t be; it was too early. Even so, he wouldn’t have long to wait for that, maybe an hour and a half, or two at the most.…
* * *
MOMENTS PASSED, AND from the green-illuminated realm Joss saw Kupi, Willem, and Acky outside, staring at him with incredulity, their mouths agape. Other people were gathered behind them, pointing and whispering among themselves.
Joss felt himself sliding back out of the oak tree, emerging from it and bringing Evana with him, into the clear brightness of day. And again he sat with his back against the trunk, but this time she was sitting beside him, her hazel eyes filled with surprise and wonder.
“Did that … Did that actually happen?” she asked, looking around. Evana had no bandages and no apparent wounds, not even the scratches on her arms that he had noticed before.
“She’s alive!” a woman shouted. “They were inside the tree, and now she’s alive!”
Some of the onlookers moved closer, including the children, but others backed away in fear, as if they thought it was witchcraft. On his feet with Evana now, Joss turned and looked back at the gnarled old tree, where he saw the bark shifting, seeming to float on the surface for several seconds before solidifying and returning to normal.
The villagers gasped and whispered among themselves.
Joss could hardly believe that Evana was standing next to him. He looked at her: she seemed to be in complete shock and disbelief. But she smiled stiffly and said, “I’m alive? I’m really alive?”
“You are,” Joss said. He pointed a finger into the air, causing a green thread to shoot upward, and a flash of light. A bunch of wildflowers appeared just above him, purple, red, and yellow blossoms with their stems wrapped in black thread.
Reaching up, he grabbed the bouquet and handed it to her. “Welcome back, my love,” he said.
“How did you do that?” She sniffed the flowers, smiled quizzically.
“I don’t know.”
“These flowers are real!” she said.
“So are you!” He kissed her tenderly, and they embraced.
Willem Mantle and Kupi carried the body of Mord Pelley and laid it on the ground in front of Joss. “Try it with him,” Kupi urged. “See if you can bring him back to life, too.” She seemed to genuinely care about the old man.
Reverently, Joss leaned over and lifted the body, then backed up with it against the oak tree. Again he felt the hard surface of the trunk give way, and once more he found himself immersed in the pale green illumination of the tree trunk’s expansive interior, this time with the dead Mord Pelley in his grasp. Moments later, Joss felt the body jerk slightly, and twitch back to life. Mord tried to speak, but had difficulty forming intelligible words.
Presently, Joss stood beside the white-haired man outside the tree. The tribal leader was very much alive, and his wounds were entirely healed.
Working quickly, Joss used a variety of trees to repeat the process, pulling as many as two people at a time into the larger trees and then bringing them back out, alive. In a remarkably short time, he used the paranormal realm to restore everyone who had been killed, and then followed the same procedure for all of the injured, taking away their wounds and pains as if he were a miracle worker. Soon he found himself surrounded by the entire tribe, and all of the anarchists as well. They all chattered excitedly, praised him and thanked him.
The procedure was stunning to everyone except Joss. For him, somehow, it felt right and strangely familiar, as if a part of his subconscious had known all along that he could accomplish such incredible things.
“We don’t need to run from the robots anymore,” Mord Pelley said, in the midst of the celebratory atmosphere. “Not if Joss can bring everyone back to life.”
“But what if he dies?” old Nanette asked. “Joss, how would you bring yourself back to life?”
Joss didn’t have an answer for that. What were the limits of his abilities? There had to be limits of some kind, and he didn’t think he was immortal, didn’t feel like he was. But each time he entered one of the trees and reemerged, he felt more and more invigorated, and stronger.
What was he becoming? Joss didn’t know, but he felt robust, and even more so with Evana standing beside him, still holding the wildflowers. She gripped his hand tightly.
Finally, she was gripping back.
49
We are life rafts for one another in a dangerous, unpredictable universe.
—Joss Stuart, one of his post-mutation thoughts
THE NONHUMAN DEFENSE System went offline quite suddenly, leaving Artie without an important contact to the outside world. His AI mind remained alert, searching for options. He could still attempt satellite calls to other government agencies, but he didn’t know what good it would do. Perhaps he was better off not knowing any more details.
The hubot considered shutting off his sensory programs, so that he would not feel any simulated pain when the end came. But a humanlike emotion surfaced, reminding him that Glanno Artindale had been a man of courage and a hero of the revolution, so he changed his mind.
Turning toward the increasing noise behind him, Artie thought the bunker was being split apart by the ferocious black storm, arriving earlier than expected. Instead, he was surprised to see that the powerful glidewolf was making all the commotion. Finally breaking through, she burst into the room, ripping the door off the hinges and slamming it into a wall. Gilda’s pale yellow eyes were wild, her jaws open and razor-sharp teeth glistening.
Standing on her haunches, the creature used her forepaws to hold the sides of Rahma’s body between them, and she slid him into her pouch. Then, for a long moment, she gazed at Artie, her eyes questing, as if looking for something. Suddenly she lunged at him, but he didn’t move. She stopped just short of the hubot and raised high on her haunches, towering over him.
He still didn’t move.
The wolf then gripped him firmly with her forepaws and tucked him inside her pouch too, beside the body of the dead man. Artie felt the pouch tighten snugly around his body from the shoulders down, keeping his head out so that he could see.
Rahma’s doctor and lover, Valerie Tatanka, stood nearby, watching silently, somberly. She held a copy of The Little Green Book. The glidewolf walked up to her and sniffed. Then, seemingly satisfied, the animal widened the pouch and slid Dr. Tatanka into it as well (without any protest from her), making everything snug again, with Rahma’s body between the doctor and Artie.
Afterward the animal just sat there, not doing much of anything. Looking up from the pouch, Artie saw the long snout of the creature sniffing vigorously, as if smelling some sort of a scent. The animal looked this way and that with its feral eyes. Artie felt tenseness in the body, and a low, agitated pulse throbbing through the skin. He exchanged uneasy glances with Dr. Tatanka.
Artie listened carefully, aided by his electronic linkage to the bunker’s security and surveillance system, and he detected no unusual noises in the structure or the outside tunnels. Everything seemed to have paused, the proverbial calm before the storm. Outside, he knew the sky would darken at any moment, and the mega-blast would scour the landscape. The NDS w
as still offline, but they were based to the west of him in Berkeley, so they might not have been hit yet.
He felt certain that the stygian storm would break through the heavy techplex roof over the extinct animal habitats, but this bunker control room had layers of protection that just might keep it safe.
The hubot didn’t think he would have to wait long to find out.
* * *
SEVEN HUNDRED KILOMETERS to the west.…
Joss looked up at the cloudless blue sky beyond the trees, but had an odd sensation of uneasiness, a powerful, ineffable feeling that something was very, very wrong.
On impulse, he summoned the people of the tribe to gather around him. When they were all assembled he wove black protective threads around every one of them, and found that he could extend the force field even farther than before, encompassing an entire section of forest. Now he left the shield shimmering in place, and working quickly, he found that he could merge each person into a different tree and leave them inside—utilizing cedars, firs, alders, cottonwoods, and elms, but avoiding the oak for the time being. In each case, he entered the tree with them, then slipped back out alone, leaving them inside, with their faces and breathing bodies showing in hazy, pulsing definition on the trunks—like an eerie, living form of bas relief.
Some were afraid, but Joss assured them that he was taking a necessary action. “I can’t explain why, or how I know this, but something terrible is about to happen, and this is what we all need to do.” At the very end of the process, he slipped Evana into the oak tree, then went back outside himself. From there, he stood sentry, gazing around at the sentient trees that were now his tribe, and up at the cerulean blue sky, visible through the mesh of the force field. Everything was eerily calm, with not even a breath of wind blowing.
* * *
AFTER RECOVERING FROM the deadly Michoacán earthquake, General Bane had regrouped his forces, to the point where he was ready to launch his attack against the GSA, in coordination with his Eurikan allies, who were scheduled to begin moving military assets toward the GSA in a matter of hours—to solidify Bane’s victory. He had planned for every eventuality that he, his war-room advisers, and his allies could think of. But even the best of plans faced unknowns, things that could not possibly be taken into account.
The Little Green Book of Chairman Rahma Page 34
