“Somebody’s watching us.”
They instinctively moved together, back to back, and turned in a circle to pan the whole compartment. A shuffle from the watertight hatch drew their attention aft.
The phantom flitted down the companionway outside, to be absorbed into the shadowy tangle of cages and machinery beyond.
A wraith-chant yanked Tiva from a sound sleep. Taanyx and the male cat continued to nap in their stall. For that reason, Tiva was unsure if the sound was real or not—Taanyx usually awoke at the subtlest noise.
“Tivvaa! How does it feel to have an innocent woman’s blood on you? She was sucked into Under-world, Tiva—where you should be!”
The quickfire pearls went black, and Khumi’s wife huddled close to Taanyx, trying to wake the great cat up.
“What’s the matter, Tiva? Won’t the kitties come awake for you? A little kharsha leaf in their food gives them such sweet dreams.”
“Why are you doing this to me, Sutara? A’Nu-Ahki didn’t trade your mother to the Basilisk for me! I even asked him—when I first came to the family. I was afraid he might have—but I didn’t know him then like I do now! You should know he could never do such a horrible thing!”
“Oh, Tiva, my blubbering sow princess, I know no such thing anymore. We both watched him leave my father out to die!”
“But the others outside were threatening! They had hand-cannons! E’Yahavah shut the door!”
“Oh yes! Whenever something horrible happens, let’s just blame it on E’Yahavah. It’s E’Yahavah’s plan when children die in their mother’s arms. It’s E’Yahavah’s will when war stomps through hard-worked fields, and leaves piles of rotting bodies—his idea of fertilizer, maybe? And, of course, it’s E’Yahavah’s wish that the door be slammed in my father’s face, before it was E’Yahavah’s will that a world of billions be massacred!”
“None of us wanted it that way!”
“Pahh! You’re a woman of blood, Tiva—bathed in it, drunk on it—just like him! Only you’re worse! You have no family honor. You’re just a scavenger wurm. You’re not even really a full wife—no betrothal, no ceremony—barely a legal scroll. No, you’re nothing but a bynty chamber whore. I’m not going to let you forget that.”
“I’ve kept quiet about my hand,” Tiva said. “I haven’t told anybody what you said to me! Please, I just want to be left alone. If I could bring your mother and father back, Suta, I would! But I can’t!”
The singsong left Sutara’s disembodied voice. “Spare me your pity, slut! Next time, I’ll brand your forehead—with a hot iron. That way nobody will mistake you for anything but what you are! You may have the others fooled, but you don’t fool me! I see how you try to entice the men—you can’t help yourself. It’s just that way with some women. But E’Yahavah help you if I ever see you near my husband!”
Tiva began to hyperventilate, as a presence filled the compartment, curling around her like a snake, foul smelling and cold. Hideous laughter echoed from the bulkheads, all around, yet from no particular direction. She expected her brother’s touch, as she had just heard his exact words.
The lights came back on, and the watertight hatch opened.
A’Nu-Ahki shuffled in, and stood before her stall. “Tiva, this has gone on long enough,” he said. “I want you to return to your husband, even though he is too much of a fool to ask you himself.”
She stood up to obey without a word.
A’Nu-Ahki glanced at her sideways. “What’s the matter, my girl? You look as though you’ve seen a specter.”
Something stopped Tiva from telling him how close his words hit.
Sutara crouched in one of her many darkened recesses throughout the ship, from which she maintained her self-imposed exile, and her private terror campaign against Tiva. Strangely, she felt unsatisfied.
She knew she had scared the little whore to death, but it disturbed Suta to think that Tiva might have considered A’Nu-Ahki’s role in her mother’s murder so early on, long before even Sutara had. That Khumi’s wife might have had the boldness to confront A’Nu-Ahki about it agitated her even more. I’ve seen her confront A’Nu-Ahki with hard questions before—questions I would never have thought of, much less dared ask.
“No matter,” Suta muttered to herself. “So the little sow feels guilty. Good! She ought to—so much the better!”
Yet Sutara did not feel better.
She fumbled in her skirt pocket for her father’s prayer stone, and held it up to the dim light that filtered down the creaking elevator shaft. The maintenance niche beneath the main lift was her favorite hiding place. It barely gave enough illumination to activate the crystal facets, however.
Suta knelt and held it out to catch as much glow from the third deck quickfire pearls as it could. When the fire inside the prayer stone began to grow, she started her Khavilak divinity chant—the kind her mother had used occasionally before she had come under A’Nu-Ahki’s power and renounced the practice. My father was Orthodox—even a son of Urugim! He never made my mother forsake her family traditions! That’s another problem with A’Nu-Ahki—it always has to be his way or no way!
“Come fill me E’Yahavah. Come fill me E’Yahavah. Come fill me E’Yahavah. Come fill me E’Yahavah. Come fill…”
The trance brought on by the focused repetition came slowly, almost imperceptibly. A sensation of peace and sympathy engulfed Suta even quicker than it had on the first night she tried the stone. Her fears faded, melting into a warm light. She saw the crystal’s red image through her shut eyelids. Its shimmering refraction recombined and coalesced into a blob of color that became a man’s face. He had a fatherly beard, and eyes that radiated warmth. It had to be the real E’Yahavah—the one who could never have left her father out to die.
“Envision me as your father, child,” said a benevolent inner voice.
Sutara allowed thought to drain from her mind, and let her heart settle on the form it yearned to see. Slowly, her E’Yahavah-image shifted in angular crystalline revisions. It lost the beard, raising its forehead, until a face like that of her father peered back at her from out of the stone’s fire.
“Can it really be you?”
Satori’s image spoke tenderly, “I can be whomever you want.”
“Tell me please, why have you brought World-end?”
“I did not. I could not. World-end came by the collective hate from human arrogance against the Earth. Man became frightened by the potential of his own uncontrolled divinity, and it was attributed it to me. I tried to stop it, but once collective humanity generates such rage, it must release itself.”
“But are you not all powerful?”
The image smiled at her. “My child, believe with your feelings, not your mind. Reason only clouds your vision, and doubt causes my power to fade. Feel my warmth. See my face. Let these be enough for you.”
Sutara instantly obeyed, although what the image said still troubled her. She tried to form a question to dispel the uneasiness, but thinking caused the fire in the stone to fade by degrees. She stopped thinking.
The inner flame brightened again, and this time engulfed Suta in the closing jaws of a white-light gryndel. She moaned quietly in the rush of pleasure and relaxation that washed over her body.
“Reason is foolishness. It is by feeling that I am known.”
The gate-creature seemed to lurched into a sudden course change, breaking Q’Enukki’s view of the embattled ship below until it slid under the horizon.
Then he saw that the first core fragment had decelerated enough to swing into an elliptical orbit around the Earth.
He yelled, “We are moving away! Wait! I must see the outcome!”
Samuille said, “We can do nothing further here until the second core fragment pulls the first one free of Earth’s attraction. Then the moon and the Earth’s axis will begin to stabilize. We must loop around the sun to meet your world again as it emerges on the other side. When we return to planetary orbit again the tactical situation
will have changed—one way or the other. Turn and keep watching.”
Q’Enukki quietly forced himself to obey.
Tiamatu’s second core fragment passed its closest point to the planet—almost twice as far away as the first shard had—close enough only to deviate its own path. Q’Enukki could see now that the first fragment would only half-orbit Earth once, to be pulled free again at the farthest limit of its hyperbolic arc, away from the planet by its more massive partner. Both Nemesis Fragments would then assume a long parabolic orbit about the sun, as they endlessly circled each other in a ghostly dance. Their new orbit would take thousands of years to return them near Earth.
Q’Enukki watched ahead in time, until the shards passed close to the second planet, Seti—a world the Time’s Enders would call Venus—on their way toward the sun. A cataclysm resurfaced this globe in much the same way as Earth’s ocean floors, by spreading mantle material. Except on Seti, the process would continue at high speed, beneath a thickening atmosphere of sulfur dioxide cloud and sulfuric acid rains in oven-like heat.
On Earth, the pressurized steam jets out-gassing from the mantle had reached escape velocity early on, bleeding off the intense heat into outer space, allowing the new ocean floors to begin cooling instantly in the frigid depths, as they spread away from the rift zones. Oceans grew warmer, but not enough to destroy all life there. Patches of the old sea floors remained to preserve a cross-section of living things able to adapt into new ecosystems. Only over the rift lines did the seas boil in snaking cauldrons.
The main asteroid swarm trailed the last core fragment, except for groups of stragglers that had yet to intersect Earth’s orbit, and those that would scatter when the first fragment pulled free of its half-orbit. Some would find their way into the sun. Most, like the core fragments, would slingshot about until they picked up irregular orbits of their own, later to be discovered by the giant telescopes of the People at Time’s End. The battered moon, as promised, returned to a stable orbit, pulling the Earth’s axis with it, toward what eventually settled into a twenty-three degree tilt—just a couple degrees and a fraction more than its original one.
After the release of the first core fragment, the horrendous pull on Earth’s mantle began to subside. The oceans would be subject to gigantic tides for many weeks to come—until the fragments gained distance. The world-wrapping undersea fissure, with its branches, continued to build up into submarine volcanic ridges between the crustal plates. Hemorrhaging torrents of magma that had forced the plates apart so rapidly began to lose momentum for the first time.
Coral polyps suspended in the cycling oceans began to settle on rich new seabeds farthest from the heat, where they would enjoy many centuries of accelerated growth in the plankton-rich waters.
Q’Enukki snapped his attention back to the present, and found that he could no longer spot the ship. Instead, he saw the high-speed water currents across the soon-to-be landmasses break up into smaller cavitations over each of the new continental plates. Softer, lighter sediments tended to cycle away from the higher rift edges toward the deeper subduction zones.
Cavitation and sheet erosion would continue for some time yet, until the cooling sea beds thickened enough to sink into depressions—a process that would actually take many decades, although secure highlands would be dry enough for habitation little more than a year after the Deluge began.
The lighter material of the new ocean bottoms did not subduct as easily below the continental cratons as the old colder sea floor plates had. Instead they collided and stuck, then released again, only to crash and grind in an irregular braking sequence that would eventually help form mountain chains taller than any in the old world. Subduction slowed, as trenches deepened parallel to the growing mountain chains. The entire rim of the future Pacific Ocean reflected this kind of formation, as did the future Marianas, Malaysian, and Puerto Rican Trenches.
With decreased volcanic tides and slower subduction, the new continents buckled violently. Pile-ups across various plates raised smaller up-warps far in from the colliding edges, especially when drive from the rifts exceeded the speed of the plate’s leading edge over a subduction zone. The forcing of plate stone into the mantle slowed, as did the resulting pressure from the mantle material forced up through the rifts. Smaller faults formed inside the thicker continental cratons, along with vertical upthrust and sagging, which redistributed the sediment layers on top of them.
The separated continental plates bogged down, some torqueing and breaking in different directions, each blanketed in smooth layers of mostly oceanic sediments deposited by water cavitations and deeper rift-to-subduction zone currents. Some of the deeper sediment sheets folded in their plastic state like looped stacks of fabric rather than cracking.
Super-saturated brines, caused by carbon dioxide degassed from the magmas, precipitated into fine limestones and carbonates, which either solidified on formations of ground seashells, or on dissolved pre-Flood bicarbonates that had condensed in the rising ocean temperatures. Where folded under by plate collision, heat, and pressure—as in the forming Aegean and Mediterranean Sea region—these beds crystallized into fine marbles. This continued long after the waters left the highlands.
The Mediterranean, which the sinking sea floors temporarily cut off from the outer oceans, underwent hyperactive boiling along the subduction deeps skirting its northern shores, coupled with high winds. This caused rapid evaporation, which reduced the sea to a system of dead, salty lakes in an arid desert below sea level in just a few decades. Only the rebound of the ocean floors, during later jolts of the continental braking actions, several centuries after the Deluge, caused the land between the mountains called the “Pillars of Heracles,” and later still, “Gibraltar,” to split apart. The outer ocean water only then broke through to create what the People of Time’s End called the Mediterranean Sea.
Q’Enukki stopped looking so far ahead, and focused back to the immediate departure of the waters, and the oddly colored lakes they often left behind. The separate carbonate and lime deposits in residual pools of chalk-producing plankton stretched across moist continents to flourish in the brief warm spell, before their burial in the first set of post-Deluge super-volcanic eruptions.
Even before the waters began to depart, heavy clouds, dust, and volcanic ash smothered the tormented planet, though precipitation became more sporadic with the demise of the great rift geysers. The atmospheric blanket blocked out the sun’s heat, and produced an unnatural cold that reacted violently with the geothermal warmth that rose from the ocean in the volcanic zones. Savage winds ripped across the unbroken seas to initiate air currents that would continue to govern weather patterns for ages to come, once land arose to moderate their ferocity.
Q’Enukki considered the endless ocean with awe and grief for the countless dead it covered. Shock set in to numb his emotions, and sharpen his observational clarity—or perhaps only to randomize his focus onto certain things that he would not normally have noticed. Usually he only considered sea creatures, like fish or leviathan, for their value as prophetic symbols for deeper, transcendent principles. Today there was more. The marine environment had undergone an upheaval only less drastic than that on land because in it there were still pockets where creatures could survive.
Marine reptile leviathans died by the hundreds of thousands, often unable to adapt to sudden temperature changes. The survivors flourished again briefly in the warm post-Deluge seas. However, once the oceans cooled more permanently, the leviathans dwindled, until few remained.
Increased salinity from dissolved earth salts had a toxic effect on many creatures, both swimmers and bottom dwellers. Rare sheltered pockets of near-fresh water hovered over springs on the continental plates, where contours allowed. These ensured the survival of some exclusively fresh-water fish. Many fish kinds produced both salt and fresh-water descendants. Nevertheless, life forms unable to adapt to the emerging new marine ecosystems soon went extinct.
The storm had res
umed its former fury, and even surpassed it. Huge waves broke over the stern, grabbing at the ship like the watery hands of drowning giants. After a respite of mere overcast between the forty-first and fifty-eighth days of the voyage, the winds and rains had redoubled in a maddening roar, inescapable even on the lowest deck.
T’Qinna prayed as she worked—not because of the storm, but to muster her courage in case she became first to confront Sutara. Thunder jolted the planks until bits of stoning shell crumbled from the overhead. She felt it inside her bones, and rumbling against her skin like a terrible drumbeat.
As distorted as she knew the assumptions behind her Temple upbringing were, T’Qinna had still been carefully trained there to observe human behavior. Any illusion Sutara suffered from a mere case of grief-driven mania gave way under the oppression of a malign and palpable onboard presence. Far greater than the cataclysm’s terror, this phantom somehow stalked the decks, with one of the crew already in its belly. Everybody sensed it, with the possible exception of Khumi, who had little thought for anything that did not involve tools, wood, quickfire, or gears.
The livestock eyed T’Qinna like refugees, as she zigzagged past their stalls. Thunder continually reminded her that her rage was worse even than her fear. Nevertheless, she had a fixed purpose. All malice must die. Otherwise, she could well become the next casualty.
“I’m trusting you to maintain your self-control,” A’Nu-Ahki had counseled her privately a few nights ago. “If you snap, Tiva will go right along with you, and that will hurt our chances with Sutara. Remember the kind of battle this is—like the night when Tiva first came to us.”
T’Qinna recalled that night of intense prayer, when A’Nu-Ahki had gone up to Grove Hollow alone to rescue Tiva—not with one of U’Sumi’s hand-cannons, but only a staff and the power of E’Yahavah. She also remembered the lessons of her own youth under Pandura, at Temple City Epymetu. A seed is no good if it rots inside the husk before it can germinate.
The Tides of Nemesis (The Windows of Heaven Book 4) Page 25
