The Tides of Nemesis (The Windows of Heaven Book 4)

by K. G. Powderly Jr.

  The Word-speaker said, “I set my bow in the cloud. It shall be the sign of a pact between the Earth and Me. It shall be that when I bring a cloud over the land, and storms follow, that the bow will appear in the cloud. Then I will remember my pact, which I have made between me, you, and with every living creature of every bodily form. No more shall the falling waters become a World-end to destroy all life. The bow shall be in the cloud, and I will look at it to recall the everlasting pact between the Eluhar and every living creature on land.”

  A’Nu-Ahki turned back to the Word-speaker, puzzled. “Then the clouds will remain, with storms and upheaval; but not to destroy the world?”

  The Messenger of E’Yahavah nodded, and pointed back to the rainbow. “This is the sign of the pact I have made with all life on land. It is the Sacred M’Ae; the foundation supporting all governance among men.”

  A’Nu-Ahki looked back at his family, who still gawked at the arc of colors. When he turned again to speak to the Visitor, he found him vanished.

  Nu’s pain lashed out all the way down his spine.

  A small breath of wind whispered that Nu and his family should take a portion of the roasting sacrifice, and make a meal of it. He mentioned this to his wife, as he passed through the others to reach the ship. A bowl of strong wine and a small vial of pain powders had his name on it.

  When Nu reached the bottom of the ravine, the cliff-to-cliff pack of milling herbivores saw him, and bolted through the grotto. Only the livestock and a few smaller beasts remained. By now, the searing in his back and foot was horrendous. All he could think was that a great responsibility fled out the hole with the stampede.

  He loved it!

  The stars came out for the first time that night over a new world. Standing on top of the ship’s covering; Nu had to look hard to find the old familiar constellations. Once he did, it was like seeing a party of childhood companions again after centuries of living apart as adults. He did not know what to make of it. How can I even begin to interpret all the changes? Is an interpretation even necessary? Would the sky signs of Seti and Q’Enukki still have any meaning in the new order of things, or just their ancient story?

  Everything was in the wrong place for that time of year. This scared him because interpreting the cycle required the constellations to be in certain places at specific times. And the core fragments of Tiamatu were there—small but still visible. Their encounters with Earth and Planet Seti had shifted their spiral toward the sun into a hyperbolic orbit that sent them on a long ellipse far off the planetary orbital plane. Nu watched them exit the solar system, and wondered how long before they returned.

  A’Nu-Ahki decided he should chart the movement of the two interlopers until they disappeared. Something told him that when they returned—though it were ages after his death—they would usher in more calamity, even if not in the form of a global deluge. If he could measure their arc, and make a trigonometric prediction of their orbit, maybe he could pass some important information on to his descendants about the timing of the Second World-end—or, at least, possible future disasters short of that.

  Nu said to himself, “Now, there’s another reason, beyond my promise to Iyared, to build a monument.”

  By the end of the Flood, rocks and plates everywhere across the planet were sitting either too high or too low. Just as ice cubes pushed beneath the water or pulled above its surface return to their proper position, so also the earth’s rocks following the Flood began rebounding to their appropriate locations.

  But the earth’s mantle does not allow this to happen in seconds… It is estimated that rocks would require about twenty-five thousand years to return to their proper position. Although most of this motion would probably occur in the first thousand years or so after the Flood, some of this vertical motion should be occurring even today. This seems to provide explanation for the active earthquakes in old mountain chains such as the Appalachians and rising mountains such as the Tetons. Neither observation is so easily explained in conventional theory.

  —Kurt Wise Ph.D. (paleontology)

  Faith, Form, and Time

  15

  Fire and Ice

  Q’Enukki watched Planet Earth settle into a traumatized daze rattled periodically by erupting super-volcanoes and rushing giant tsunami waves. For a little over twenty years after his descendants disembarked from the rescue ship, warm, humid weather favored rapid growth of huge carpets of ferns, mosses, and mushrooms across what would one day be plateaus and steppes, but which at present were large mountain-studded islands. Only the higher elevations were safe to inhabit, as it took decades for the ocean basins to sink enough to clear the continents completely of water.

  Frogs, salamanders, and larger amphibians surviving outside the ship rapidly dominated the animal kingdom except in the highest of the highlands. These were wild stock, whose parents had ridden out the Deluge on the few unburied floating vegetation mats, mainly as eggs, free of the most malignant Temple contaminants. Steamy insect-infested malarial summers and damp winters created harsh conditions for the animals descended from Barque of Aeons, however.

  The first series of super-eruptions came as the sea basins had another rapid burst of sinking, and the ocean waters followed.

  The worst of these tectonic upheavals went unobserved, except by Q’Enukki—the small Clan of A’Nu-Ahki was still located near the relative safety of the enormous island where their ship had landed, which would soon become the Anatolian Plateau, and the Caucasus and Zagros mountains.

  Far below the narrow new Atlantic Ocean, the great rift stirred like a giant, sleeping crocodile of stone and fire with troubled dreams. High-pressure steam and magma boiled up through the waves in roiling mushrooms. A gigantic island one day to be known as Iceland erupted above the waters as a spreading wound that triggered another series of global undersea volcanic events all along the rift. Silt-dredging tsunamis, almost as large as those of World-end, raced toward the still-emerging continents.

  Renewed rift activity put pressure onto the continental collision and subduction zones. On a newly exposed peninsula that was rapidly becoming the Malaysian Land Bridge, a super-caldera exploded, followed by another across the world, in a place the People of Time’s End called Yellowstone.

  These would only be the first in a string of super-eruptions that Q’Enukki had already witnessed in part. This time, he saw another dimension; the super-volcanic activity repeated at centuries-long intervals to create a series of mass extinctions during the world’s struggling attempt to heal. Each set of explosions would radically change the global environment in ways that favored differing life forms and ecosystems successively.

  No single plant or animal family would dominate for more than a couple centuries at a time. Each would receive rare nursery ecosystems, where a broad enough range of compatible plant and animal kinds could recover, almost unmolested by predation. Only humanity’s tiny population, mostly located in relatively stable highlands, prevented the mega-volcanoes from being World-ends in the growing pains of humanity’s psyche. Some came close, however.

  Silt-laden tsunamis from the first eruption cluster buried lush young “forests” of fern, swamp, and mold, with most of their unrestrictedly multiplying amphibian denizens. The fossil graveyards were almost identical to the lowland layers left by the waves of World-end. Sulfur dioxide-rich clouds brought a near two-decade-long winter to the freshly uncovered Northern Hemisphere, which intensified as the high humidity of volcanically heated seas condensed into snows compacting rapidly into the first stage of vast glacial sheets.

  Q’Enukki looked ahead and saw what would happen once the long ash haze of the first round of super-eruptions cleared. The sun began to work on the greenhouse-gas-laden lower atmosphere. Wide temperature differentials brought howling, dust-laden windstorms, as a warm era set in quite suddenly. Ice, then dryness, wiped out the amphibian supremacy.

  As low lands warmed, and the sandstorms died, large egg-laying dragons—able to reproduce
much faster than most mammals—became dominant in lush coastal and equatorial river plains. They, too, would have a profuse post-catastrophe resurgence, while the tiny population of human survivors eked out a living on cooler highlands. The coastal river plains became rich nurseries. Nevertheless, the cradlesong of warm ocean waves periodically lashed out to bury most of what they had so generously nurtured.

  It would be a considerable time before humanity could become the dominant life form again on the planet the People of Time’s End called Earth.

  The cannons fired, and the ground shook beneath the careening armored vehicle. The tentacles of Typhunu flew from the blackness at U’Sumi’s face, each with a burrowing tooth on its end to pierce his body. The ground twisted sideways, and tossed him onto the deck of the hull pool mezzanine. Giant arms of water reached for him over the pool bulkheads. He could hear Khumi screaming inside. Then he saw Leviathan’s head curl over the ramparts, needle-toothed jaws clamped on his brother’s limp body…

  U’Sumi huddled in his fur blankets for many seconds. He only noticed that “the deck” was still moving when an explosion ripped through the ground, and tossed him, his wife, and their tent over a cubit into the air. They slammed into the dirt floor, now fully awake.

  U’Sumi scrambled from the collapsing goatskins on his knees, and pulled T’Qinna with one hand, while the other supported his body like a tripod over the rippling ground. Black Akku bolted past them with a yowl. The sphinx had been a cub of long-dead Taanyx, born aboard ship.

  Outside, fresh-fallen snow churned over slabs of frozen earth, crackled and buckling like the skin of some outraged ghost-pale leviathan. Garish reds lit up the night all around the small tent compound, as screeching children scurried from their hovels. U’Sumi turned on every side to try to locate the source of the light.

  Then he saw it.

  Anchorage Mountain belched vermilion rivers of lava, and vast columns of incandescent smoke in quantities that dwarfed even the eruption of N’Zar at World-end. New fissures opened along the lower slopes, yellow scars that heaved the mountainsides with visible convulsions, as if the earth had come to life, only to be annihilated again by Under-world’s groaning violence.

  Farther up, the old caldera of the now partly cannibalized Barque of Aeons appeared relatively undisturbed. The silhouette of the great sediment pack abutting that section of the mountain had somehow slid much lower down than U’Sumi remembered it, and the mountain seemed taller.

  Clutching T’Qinna to offer protection, and to keep himself steady on the bucking ground, U’Sumi stood to draw his children to himself. Their oldest son, Arrafu’Kzaddi, grabbed the two youngest girls under each arm, and dragged them toward their parents.

  New tremors knocked U’Sumi from his feet as a black gulf shot through the snow-crusted earth. Jagged crevasses opened from the direction of the big mountain, one snaking right through the camp. Arrafu stopped short of tumbling into the abyss with both his sisters, and opted to ride the rest of the quake out, belly to the ground, on the other side. Fortunately, no tents had been in the path of the racing void. None of the other children had stumbled far enough from their collapsed shelters to fall in.

  The quake dissipated, easing into the rolling-deck sensation to which U’Sumi had become so accustomed. Tremors were a frequent part of life for the fledgling community—at least a couple each month. This one did not follow the normal pattern, however. Its shock waves dwarfed all others. Nor had the Mount of Anchorage erupted since before the waters had revealed it.

  U’Sumi and T’Qinna got to their feet, and gained back their sea legs. As the rolling earth screeched to an uneasy halt, they approached the edge of the chasm that separated them from most of their children. The gulf had narrowed in the last moments of the quake, and closed off its depths. The couple leaped across with a small running start, after T’Qinna told the youngsters on the other side to stay where they were.

  When they landed on the opposite bank, U’Sumi found the soil near the precipice warm to the touch, and smelling of brimstone. Arrafu’Kzaddi released his two sisters, who ran to their father and clung to his neck. The others soon followed, to gather around their parents in a quivering knot.

  Dawn should have been about to break, but black vapors billowed from the fractured mountain, with a continual rumble, spreading north-to-south over the horizon. Fortunately, steady winds out of the west prevented the firestorm of ash, steam, and noxious fumes from falling over the camp.

  “We’re leaving,” U’Sumi said. “Stow your tents, and ready them for the pack beasts. Assur; you and your younger brothers gather the flocks, if they haven’t bolted too far!” He turned to his oldest son, “I need you, Arrafu, to run a message down to the Ancient. Tell him we’re moving to the main settlement, and that I want a meeting of the Zaqenar. Stay there until we join you. E’Yahavah watch over you.”

  Arrafu’Kzaddi, born but two years after what his parents still called “World-end,” had seen twenty-four sun-cycles of steamy summers and wet winters, broken up by ground that frequently shook, and gray, dark skies that poured down violent rains in summer and biting winter snows. He had never known a more placid world than this. Although his parents told him how things had once been very different, he found it difficult to get too worked up over.

  The big eruption was another matter.

  As he raced across the rolling grasslands beneath the skies of a dawnless day, he began to wonder not only about the stability of the earth beneath him, but of the promise from the heavens above. His father had drilled him, with all his brothers and sisters, on the terms of the Divine M’Ae —the authority of human governance—in the Rainbow Pact. It had been their anchor in the storms and their solid ground during the quakes. Yet for the hours it took to run from his father’s camp to the main homestead, it seemed very much as if day had ceased into an endless night of ashen gloom.

  Only at noon did changing light reveal that daytime still triumphed on its regular course behind the walls of smoke in the east, and high above.

  The harvested fields of barley, vegetables, and smaller plots of medicinal herbs greeted Arrafu, and told him his trek was nearly over. A cottage of clay brick and stoned cypress planks stripped from the great mountain ship sat inside a rock compound just ahead. The building had caved in on one side.

  Arrafu sprinted to the house, and cried out at the top of his voice. A chill went down his spine when he did not see either of his grandparents anywhere.

  Another quake tossed Arrafu into the dirt. Ignoring the tremors, he scrambled to his feet again, and wove toward the crumbling structure. An explosion echoed in the distance, behind him. Anchorage Mountain renewed its early-morning fury with fresh streams of lava down the saddle between it and the second tallest peak, to the southeast. Murky smoke billowed skyward to overshadow the land beneath its outstretched hand.

  Arrafu snatched the lintels of his grandfather’s doorway, both to stop his flight, and steady himself against shrieking quake waves, each stronger than the last. The old ship’s compartment hatch twisted itself from its hinges, until the youth could see the rubble inside. On the floor, legs trapped beneath a fallen ceiling, lay the Ancient. Arrafu realized that his grandmother had to be buried somewhere under the other end of the falling house.

  “Pahpi!” he cried, as he scurried inside the writhing structure.

  “Stay back, lad!”

  The walls wagged back and forth, spitting out bits of loose masonry and timber stoning. Arrafu disobeyed the Ancient’s voice for the first time without fear or guilt. He dove on the rubble, and began to tear through it, ignoring his grandfather’s frantic commands for him to get out of the building. The quake intensified—unlike most convulsions, which lasted only seconds, and returned in lesser aftershocks hours later. Maybe it seemed longer only because of how much masonry Arrafu pulled off his grandfather.

  At last, the Ancient’s crushed and bloodied feet were exposed enough for Arrafu’ to drag him outside. They just made
it out the arch, when the entire house caved in behind them. By the time the dust cleared, the quake began to diminish into a familiar swaying aftermath.

  Arrafu’Kzaddi collapsed with Pahpi’s head in his lap, and cried.

  The old man reached up and stroked his head. “Lad! Lad! It’s fine! Everything’s fine!”

  “I couldn’t get to Mamu! She’s still buried in there!”

  “No she’s not!”

  “She’s not?”

  “No! I sent her to your Uncle Khumi’s camp after the first quake toppled that side of the house—he’s nearest, you know. I don’t understand how a lad your age could have moved all that masonry so fast, but E’Yahavah has seen to it that neither of us are seriously hurt—except these legs, I guess—but they always gave me fits anyway. How is your family?”

  “We were all alive and unhurt when I left this morning, after the first quake. My Pahp wants to meet with the other Zaqenar. I think he wants to move away from here.”

  The Old Man nodded at the collapsed house. “I’m inclined to agree.”

  Arrafu lowered his voice, as if the empty world had ears. “What about the Treasure Cave and the telescope? How can they be moved?”

  “I suppose that’s probably what your father wants to discuss.”

  The children marched off into the fields to keep the herds separate, or to bundle as much of the harvest as they could carry on their migration.

  The “Zaqenar” gathered around a fire pit in front of the wrecked homestead for their council, wet cloths across their mouths to keep from breathing the occasional ash fallout. The mountain had settled to a dull rumble, belching its screen of gray vapor to blot out even most of the late afternoon sun. Though the wind mostly held out of the west, several ash storms throughout the day showed how quickly that could change. The autumn cold intensified, promising another winter more icy than the last—as each winter had grown more frigid since the Sky-Darkening, two years ago.