“I knew it wasn’t you,” Tiva said. “The words weren’t yours. They belonged to someone you didn’t know. Something evil put them in your mouth, not you. I’ve heard them before, and you could never have guessed them, or imitated them.”
“I don’t understand. I mean, I know I was under a bad influence, but I thought I really hated you, and that my words came from my hate.”
Tiva smiled. “You didn’t hate me that much—you couldn’t. And even if you did, you would have used your own words, not the ones I heard. So think no more of it, and let’s try to be friends again.”
“I’ll try,” Sutara whispered. “But I’m not sure I know how anymore. I can’t feel anything, Tiva. I mean, I know I should be sorry, and I am, but I can’t really feel it. It’s like I’m just walking through the motions. It’s not fake, or a hate thing—it’s just that there’s nothing. Except that I want to make things right if I can—even if it’s just ‘cause my mind tells me to.”
Tiva had been there. She squeezed her sister-in-law’s hand, thinking it the sort of thing T’Qinna might do. “I think I understand. We can try together—I mean, go to, it’s not like I’m that great with saying stuff either.”
The ocean beds hardened and sank before Q’Enukki’s eyes, as if in a matter of moments. The waters rushed toward their new basins, and then returned to cover the lands again in huge torrents that dredged up and re-laid sediments in massive sweeps along topographical paths of least resistance. Each time the tides returned, however, the depth decreased. Soon the sheet water currents over the continents broke up permanently, giving way to violent, concentrated cutting erosions. These carved out valleys and gorges around the volcanic cones and up-warps that lined both the globe’s subduction and plate-collision zones.
Carving erosions also ripped up and re-laid sediments in the many vertical lift and depression zones between new fault lines.
Subduction slowed, but did not stop. Sticking and sliding would continue in several catastrophic episodes for centuries to come. Great mountain ranges that would someday bear names like Andes and Rockies heaved up higher at each braking action. At lower elevations, it eventually produced long archipelagos, to be given names like the Solomons, Marianas, and Philippines. Chain reactions buckled across the future landmasses to rear up lesser ranges, warping huge stacks of fresh, pliable sediment layers. The tectonic slabs would eventually grind to a screeching crawl.
Crooked rows of mountainous wrinkles formed when a sheared-off portion of the future Arabian Plate collided against the southwestern end of future Eurasia. Tucked away in this simmering labyrinth, lay a cooling volcanic crater just beneath the waves. Inside it, sheltered from hydrologic forces no manmade vessel could possibly survive, waited the seed of humanity and all higher land-based life.
Sutara worked alone over the manure desiccator. She felt peace, now that she had mended her bridges with the others as best she knew how—peace, as in the absence of conflict. She still preferred to work in solitude.
I’ve forgotten how to feel love or hate. My feelings are too deep to unearth, stone dead as the world-that-was. She remembered flopping on the divan last night, passive and bored, while Iyapeti tried to make love to her. It was his first awkward attempt at approaching her since she had returned. She hadn’t resisted, but she hadn’t exactly participated either. If he noticed, he said nothing. Suta was glad when he rolled over and went to sleep without talking. She had nothing to tell him anyway that mattered.
Sutara dumped another load of manure onto the drying screen. When will the tears come, or the joy? She wondered. I’ve done the right thing—what I know E’Yahavah wants. I always used to feel good about doing that. Now I feel nothing. What’s wrong with me?
She saw her mother-in-law enter the feed bay. Suta could see that Na’Amiha wanted to talk. I guess there’s no avoiding her…
“How are you these days, Sutara?”
“Fine, Mahm.”
“If you need to talk, you know I’m always here for you.”
“I know, Mahm. Thanks.”
Na’Amiha smiled, her wise, green eyes radiating their sad warmth, as she rested a hand on Suta’s shoulder. “You know, you’re the only daughter-in-law I had any real part in choosing for my sons. That makes you special to me. Your mother was my only friend outside the family, and you grew up to become as much a friend as she. I just wanted you to know that.”
“Thank you, Mahm.”
“I know how much you must still be hurting…”
Sutara cut her off. “With respect, Mahm, you’re wrong about that. I don’t feel anything. What’s more, I don’t want to.”
‘Miha nodded. “I think I understand—scar tissue of the heart?”
“Perhaps. I have no fine poetic words for it.”
“That’s understandable. I wanted you to know that I’m thinking of you, and that my thoughts are warm.”
“Thank you, Mahm.” Sutara said, as she turned to shovel more manure. She imagined that somewhere under the huge reeking pile was her life. The shovel moved, but Suta was in no hurry to unearth anything.
T’Qinna found Tiva in the morning, up in the forward con shack, just ready to open the sliding shutter. Two months of watching since anchorage had given no satisfaction to either woman over when new land would appear. Each day merely renewed the gray oblivion that enveloped both the world outside, and their hearts within. Neither of them expected what they saw when the window flew open to let in its ashen light.
Barque of Aeons sat on a great table of smooth effervescent water, the sides of which overflowed into an airy abyss of roiling foam like an ocean on the edge of a flat world. Slightly south of east, the peak of their formerly submerged mountain jutted some fifty cubits over the cauldron with cradling arms on either side. T’Qinna raced aft to throw open the stern shutter, while Tiva called up the others on the oracle.
Outside the fantail window, barely visible in the mists over the caldera’s edge, lay several lower peaks protruding over a horrendous out-rush of white water that rippled to the horizon. One of them caved in and vanished into the foam, its base planarized by the gravel-laden tide. The roar carried up to the anchorage, a savage harmony of a billion cataracts to the screech of the non-stop winds. Only the newly exposed summit blocked the ship from its full blast.
T’Qinna stood mesmerized while her breath came in shallow gasps. The sheer scale of the water’s movement surpassed anything she could have imagined. For a long time, she gaped at the wondrous violence, while the water tore across the landscape below.
Then the noise slackened, until T’Qinna noticed that the seas beyond the caldera had settled into a new level, farther down the hidden slopes. It seemed as though things would stabilize—the edges of the crater lake now blocked the escape of any further water from their anchorage. Then a new bulge of foam cut through the mists on the western horizon. Behind it came a steel gray hump of water that must have been hundreds of cubits high.
T’Qinna braced herself, expecting the return wave to re-engulf the smaller peaks, and slam into their mountain with all its might—perhaps even to bring the sea level back up to the caldera. It seemed to take forever for the tidal wave to reach the farthest of the lower summits and swallow it up.
As the torrent approached, T’Qinna fell back against the bulkhead, and held on to the lintels. The watery mound reached out as if to snatch her in its curling fingers, but she never saw its foamy claws close against the caldera’s rim. The deck fell out beneath her, and she almost hit the overhead as she left her stomach high in the winds.
The entire ship was falling.
A’Nu-Ahki hugged the compass console, as he watched the emerging rocks outside spin past the window. Barque of Aeons dropped with the water level nearly seventy cubits in less than half as many seconds. Somewhere far below, a fissure must have burst open to the outer slope under the pressure of the caldera’s pool.
Angular momentum hurled everyone in the bow shack to one side when the gy
ration stopped. Gazing out the open window, Nu saw rippling water pulling the ship toward the now towering cliff face, above what must have been a submarine hole in the mountain to the outer slope. Again, the crew flew into each other when the anchor cables yanked the vessel to a halt before it could ram the sharp rocks. The deck slowly steadied at the resumption of a stable mooring.
A’Nu-Ahki pulled himself up into the console chair, and gave the necessary orders. “Ladies, if you would be so kind as to check the status of the animals? U’Sumi and ‘Peti, I’d like for you both to please unfoul and hoist in the slack anchor lines—but not all the way taut, in case the tide comes in through whatever opening made the water level drop. Khumi, if you could go to the lower decks, and inspect the hull below the waterline—I didn’t feel any scraping, but we should make sure. Where’s T’Qinna?”
Tiva replied, “She went aft for a view in the other direction.”
“Very good; fetch her along with you then.”
As the others scattered, A’Nu-Ahki poked his head out the window to survey their new surroundings. In the suddenness of the outlet, the ship had turned almost completely around, so that the bow now faced west.
He searched the surface of the new lake, and saw ripples near the wall, beneath which the waters doubtless made their escape down the slopes. The surface still dropped, but at a slower rate. The incoming tides must have resumed an elevation almost equal to that of the outside opening.
Nu checked the chronometer on the compass console, and saw that it would be another six hours before the tide began to drop again. It would not be a resonant giant. He also noted the date reading: The first day of the tenth month—about two and a half months since they had made anchorage—two-hundred and twenty-four days since E’Yahavah had sealed them in.
“We need to watch that ripple below the scarp,” he muttered.
Then it occurred to him that once the tides left the caldera’s fracture high and dry, they would have no way at all to track the further abatement of the flood from behind their encircling shroud of stone.
Q’Enukki was relieved and amazed at the fury of the silt-dredging waves—relieved that his children’s vessel lay in a completely protected anchorage—amazed at the power of water driven boulder-blasting that sculpted the emerging landmasses below.
As low mountains and muddy plateaus grew visible for longer intervals, he began to get a better look at how the mega-continent had split into smaller landmasses, separated by tracts of ocean. While the survivors would be able to disembark after a little over a year onto a large, stable island of what would later be mountains and steppes, it would be decades before the ocean levels sank to anywhere near what they had been before the Deluge.
Once warm, sunny, and green with pine forests, Aertimikkor had moved south toward the Polar Regions. For centuries, its northernmost coasts would still be habitable, but by the end of the continental braking actions, its fossilizing sediments would become a wasteland of ice and stone that the dim voices from Time’s End called Antarctica.
Q’Enukki looked ahead through the first millennium of New-world. Vast ice packs formed over desolate northern continents in cycles interspersed by severe global warming—both geothermally driven. Volcanic ash clouds hid the sun, producing intense ice ages that grew longer in duration, but not as extreme in temperature, with each cycle. Then the volcanically exhausted greenhouse gases—having sparse plant material to convert carbon dioxide to oxygen—incited global warming episodes for as long as a few decades to a couple centuries, until the next super-eruption cycle.
Near-globally catastrophic at first, the volcanism of these tectonic plate adjustments stabilized over time, lengthening the phases of cold and heat, while lessening their temperature extremes. During the short ice ages, high humidity from warm oceans brought massive precipitation over landmasses made frigid by decreased sunlight from the volcanic ash. Glaciers grew rapidly, receded, and then grew again, depending on the intensity of ash haze from decade to decade. Violent melts occasionally added to the fossil record, whenever the skies cleared sufficiently.
Only at the end of this era of natural upheaval did ice packs retreat permanently to the poles, while deserts spread into lasting wastelands in certain tropics.
Q’Enukki watched U’Sumi’s sons map the coastlands of the south polar continent before it froze—long before men colonized any of the distant lands. Small ships, driven by a remnant of prediluvian quickfire technology stored aboard A’Nu-Ahki’s ship, sailed in wide expeditions, seeding the nether continents with select plants and animals, as surveyors calculated the geographic center of all the Earth’s landmasses, where their ancestors had charged them to build a great monument to house Atum-Ra’s sarcophagus.
Q’Enukki began to enjoy following the little ships, until a vast shadow dropped between them, obscuring his line of time-sight. Then he felt it again—that great loss of knowledge, hope, and civilization shrieking out of the future at him like a spiritual tsunami. He fought to keep track of the ships against a cacophony of noise and shifting patterns.
Only this time, something actively tried to break through from behind the blackness, something that wanted to tear his mind apart while it laughed. The boats vanished, whether consumed or merely hidden by the dark wave, he could not tell. For a flickering moment, he thought he saw a mass behind the Great Shadow, like the decaying ziggurat that he had seen earlier, on the river plains.
Q’Enukki focused harder, until holes burned through the horrendous shadow. Inside the gaps, he caught pieces of what happened to the ships and their mission—mainly the vessel that crossed what was a third of the way into becoming the Atlantic Ocean. They had discovered a “lost” continent.
The mariners named the new land Aztlan, after the western lands of A’Nu-Ahki’s day. Stories of it came to them in the memoirs of their father and mother—writings soon lost to the devouring Shadow that lurked ahead. Still later peoples settled there—mostly descendants of Khumi and Tiva—who also used the name Aztlan. This name would survive among the branching civilizations to spring from them, but only as a fable.
A group of tribes descended from Iyapeti, called the Greeks, would hear of these far-flung colonies through the Egyptians, and corrupt the name into Atlantis. Fading knowledge of early settlements across the Atlantic, mixed with stories of continents destroyed by a deluge, and those of nearby islands devastated in that cataclysm’s millennia-long aftermath, would serve in the confused dark ages to come as a dim memory of the World-that Was. The widening ocean would find its most permanent name from these sources nonetheless, though the People of Time’s End would rarely consider why.
Periodic losses of civilization and knowledge in the harsher new world would cause the barren country in the South Pole, and the colonies of the Far West, to be all-but-forgotten, until rediscovered by the Time’s Enders.
Q’Enukki snapped his vision back, and penetrated other holes in the growing black mass, through which he time-followed later migrations, long after the ships had faded into myth. The landmass of Ae’Ri, which had been driven north, away from Aertimikkor’s plate, became a vast jungle and desert land known to People of Time’s End as Australia. The new ocean floors sank in spurts for many centuries, punctuated by super-volcano eruptions and tsunami clusters, until tectonic adjustments caused the sea bottoms to rebound and then stabilize.
For a time, this southern continent connected to the main “Asian” landmass by an isthmus paralleling an old subduction zone. Higher animals—many of them marsupials—with tribes descended largely from Khumi and Tiva, used this migration bridge for several generations, until the next eruption cycle flooded it out into the Malaysian and Indonesian islands.
The far western continents had a similar connection to the extreme northeast of Asia, over the future Bering Strait—until the oceans rose again to their more-or-less permanent level in the tectonic rebound. Other less-stable migration routes existed between continents during the earliest centuries after
the Deluge. The Atlantic Ocean, still somewhat narrow between what was becoming Northwest Africa and Brazil, had a spine of volcanic island chains and shallows stretching over the bulged-up rift zone.
Dragons and other big animals rapidly reproduced unchecked, across the tropical coastlands during a two-hundred-year-long global warming spell. As the rift bulged for a few decades before the next eruption cycle, it became possible for herds of these creatures to cross from Africa into South America through the shallows, once North Africa became too dry to support them at the end of the short “hot age.” Life exploded everywhere, faster than Q’Enukki would have thought possible. So did death.
The Seer watched the river plains of the primitive Fertile Crescent approach over the horizon. A huge “chaos screen” collapsed the vision holes and blocked his view, until only the tawdry ziggurat flashed in his eyes. Something lurked there—something huge and living, twisted and malign. Confused shouting and weeping spread in its shadow, as if reason itself had broken down into a fevered delirium.
Super-eruptions exploded on all sides of the globe, bringing a ferocious ice age. Smoke blackened the skies, and snows began to howl, as the perverted whispers of savages filled Q’Enukki’s ears.
U’Sumi’s appetite had only sporadically returned, despite the calmer deck conditions since anchorage, and particularly in the forty days after what the crew had come to call “The Big Drop.” The mounting argument over breakfast did not promise to aid his digestion any.
Khumi said, “Look, we’re stuck out in the middle of this lake! Our keel hasn’t even scraped! We’re not going to know anything until we build a landing boat, and search the cliffs for a place to go ashore!”
Even Iyapeti, usually adverse to controversy, added, “The tide hasn’t returned through the hole in fourteen days. It looks like a small streambed runs out through the grotto, which is all that remains of the fissure. We can’t see through to the other side. Maybe a boat isn’t such a bad idea.”
The Tides of Nemesis (The Windows of Heaven Book 4) Page 29
