The Vistor

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Everybody was watching, of course, so any conspiracy of silence is impossible. This time there is no chance at keeping it quiet. All the hysteria and panic we tried to prevent is happening. There is looting. There are rapes. There are riots. The National Guard has been called out. Order is being restored. This morning the President announced, totally without factual foundation, that even though Earth would be hit, the damage would be "sustainable." At the observatory, the questions keep coming, over scrambled lines and by encrypted e-mail. Should the government recommend evacuation? Should people be told to dig storm cellars? It takes forever to get the answers, because we still don't have any figures that work! All we know for sure is that it's big—if one measures the outside, smoky layers—and what's inside can't be seen. Infrared does not help. The newest gimmick for looking inside things, "lazar," yields only nonsense. Hubble shows us a featureless blob that looks faintly dumbbell shaped. A bitch. That's what we star-geeks had started calling it, the Bitch, an epithet soon picked up by the press, and the critter is living up to its name.

  Day before yesterday, Neils put all the papers into his briefcase and he and I went to D.C. where the Joint Chiefs of Staff were waiting to hear the final words. How big. How fast. How much damage.

  The answers were: Too big. Too fast. Total damage. I didn't do any talking; I just pulled up the proper pages as Neils needed them, but I saw the very high brass swallowing deeply before they admitted they had nothing in the arsenal that could possibly shove it away or blow it up. They might crack it, they said, but Neils brushed this off with a don't bother. Cracking it wouldn't help. The pieces will still come down. One piece or twenty, the effects will be pretty much the same. We'd worked on that equation for weeks.

  The biology-geeks, who were also present, said yes, well, it looked to them as if the Bitch intends extinction on a wide scale. Fimbulwinter, so to speak. No sunshine for a very long, long time, and Ragnarök, or at least the death of us little terran Gods, though it's entirely possible that some people, some animals, some green and growing stuff could survive if it or they could find enough to eat during a very long cold spell and didn't freeze to death in the interim. We left them with this faint ray of hope. I guess it was better than nothing.

  Jerry professes to being "hurt" that I hadn't told him about the Bitch, originally, even though I explained that we'd all been sworn to secrecy in order not to start a panic. His response to the situation is to join the IPC in the mass local prayer meetings they've started in addition to their simultaneous international sessions. Jerry said I could make up for lying to him by going to the meeting with him. I did not lie, but it isn't worth arguing over.

  I've always been a deist, in the sense of having a belief in the essential order and purpose of the universe, but my idea of an omnipotent and omniscient God has always been of a being utterly beyond our comprehension who sets creation in motion knowing that intelligence will inevitably evolve inside the system, either because He, She, or It just knows, or because He, She, or It has played this game before. God intends that intelligence (or those intelligences) will apply itself (themselves) to the development of purpose and meaning. If I prayed to my God, the only response my belief would allow would be, "I gave you a mind, now use it!" When we married, I thought Jerry had similar ideas.

  Jerry now believes, however, in a God concerned almost entirely with mankind on this one planet, a deity who spends a good part of his time peeking through people's bedroom windows and who has a hell and lots of roasting spits ready for sinners. Despite this, I felt I owed it to Jerry to share his feelings and needs with him; he'd done the same for me often enough. I'm fairly good at sitting quietly while others go about their pursuits, anybody who's worked in any kind of a hierarchy can do that, so I did sit quietly in the middle of a considerable crowd, though I was almost overcome by the purple.

  During the last few days the Bitch has changed course and speed several times. The first time, everyone cried and slapped someone else on the back and took a deep breath. Then it changed back again. Then it slowed down. This time the elation was muted and brief, because within hours it speeded up again. On one of the TV religion channels that Jerry has begun leaving on all day, someone finally said what a lot of people had been thinking: Earth isn't going to be an accidental collision. Earth is the target. I'd had the thought, but I'd rejected it. I glared at the screen, yelling, "That's crazy. That's crazy. Why would we be the target?"

  And Jerry patted my shoulder like he'd pat a pet dog, and he smiled his lofty smile and told me since everyone had been praying for divine intervention, I shouldn't be surprised it was coming. He put his arms around me tenderly, and sort of rocked me, as though I were an infant with the colic.

  I yelled at him. "How can you smile! How can you be so calm?"

  "Stop tearing yourself apart, Sweetheart."

  "Jer, I'm not... tearing myself apart any more than is justified! I'm just terrified, that's all. For all of us!"

  "You have to submit to it, Nell. Nothing you can do in the next few months will change what's going to happen. The children and I have accepted it. Stop crying." Something in the satisfied, almost luxurious way he said it bothered me a great deal more than the mere content of the words.

  Meantime the high level conferences went on, every day, late into the night. How much should the public be told? After interminable top secret debates it was decided there was no point in telling the world that everyone and everything was going to be almost totally destroyed. There is nothing people can do about that, so why spend the last months of life in hysteria and panic and mass rape and looting and god knows what? Let people alone. Lie to them. Tell people it's going to hit in the Arctic, there'll be some damage but nothing we can't overcome. Let people die with some dignity. The insiders issued this from on high, like the Ten Commandments, graven in stone. Let governments do what they can to provide help for survivors, if any, but don't panic the populace, because if you do, there'll be no survivors.

  Neils says there have been a series of one-to-one summit meetings among the leaders of those countries who either know the truth or are likely to find out on their own, and after a lot of breast beating they've all agreed to what they called "Death with Dignity Solution." What all the governments did do, including our own, was to pick up amateur astronomers, confiscate their telescopes, and swear all the professionals to secrecy. After this happened I saw Selma Ornowsky again. She dropped by the observatory (which was guarded) and when I went down to get them to release her, she and I had a few words together.

  "They're calling it the Bitch," she said, only slightly bitterly. "I guess that's all right. I don't want it called the Ornowsky Catastrophe."

  I hugged her, and we parted. There was nothing I could say. The grapevine had it that some mavericks, including friends of mine, had been locked up when they wouldn't swear not to talk. There's also a worldwide clamp on the media. The media moguls and the ACLU fought it at first, sort of a knee-jerk reaction, but they sagged once they got it through their heads that widespread disorder will reduce the chance of any survival at all, and the right to sell a few more papers in the months we have left is irrelevant.

  Of course, all the top level meetings haven't gone unnoticed. Even with the media gagged, there's still the Web, and the powers that be are floating several outer space stories to cover all the astro-cum-military activity that's going on. The U.S., in cooperation with the Russians and the Chinese, announced a new international lunar settlement, "To be accomplished before our space effort is compromised by the asteroid." The best we can figure, the moon will not be hit. A sizeable agglomeration of hackers has been hired to do nothing but flood the Web with details about the new moon colony.

  The publicized Lunar mission is also the basis for a secret Mars Mission. Half the hardware needed to start a settlement is already on Mars, but the Mars settlement was planned to take place in "pulses," with automatic, robotic accumulations of hydrogen and oxygen going on between arrivals, ea
ch arrival scheduled after the essentials have been stored. Since there won't be time for that to happen, we're putting everything we can on the moon or in orbit around it, including the international space station and some of the telescopes, hoping the people there can pick up on the Mars Mission. For long-term survival, it's estimated Mars gives four or five times the probable success Luna does. The selected colonists will be young and fertile, and if they don't go to Mars, they can possibly get back to Earth later on, if they survive and there's anything here to come back to.

  While that's being done, the powers-that-be have also adopted a last-ditch survival plan for earth. Everyone in the field agrees it's the lengthy period of darkness that's the major threat, so warehouses full of survival goods will help. Builders have already started on a great many huge, widely scattered, "Disaster Relief Warehouses."

  In addition, the U.S. Government wants to build a redoubt, a kind of combination fortress and library, in which all mankind's knowledge and art can be preserved so the survivors won't have to discover it all over again. Geologists and engineers are doing studies of several widely separated sites for this redoubt, and they'll decide where it goes once they figure out where the Bitch is going to hit, which is a damned frustrating question because the thing continues to change speed and course for no discernable reason except, perhaps, to show us it can.

  13

  the fortress at strong hold

  The Fortress of Strong Hold was built originally as a simple castle with a keep and a wall. Over time, however, it grew like a cancer, bulging at first into the area between keep and wall, then breaching the wall itself from within. Masonry piled on masonry as roofs became balconies for higher rooms, as walls became foundations for higher walls, as the shadows of seasons and centuries flickered across stones heaving upward as though thrust from below.

  Each addition brought new chimneys and flues, little pipes entering bigger ones that plunged into larger yet, eventually evolving into enormous smokestacks that pythoned aloft through a stony accretion that reared and ramified, heaving itself into an irregularly pinnacled mountain, stabbed through with light wells and air shafts, pierced with alleyways and wandering flights of precipitous stairs, with so many tunnels penetrating the fabric of the place as to make it spongelike, mostly dark within, terribly dark below where tenebrous tunnels lit by feeble lanterns stank of mold and tallow.

  Every scraggy pinnacle was topped by a roof, some large, some small, some peaked, some flat, many of them occupied by attic itinerants, transients of the tiles, migrants among roof-mesas and airshaft-arroyos, sooty dwellers both upon and within the massive chimney whose many vents spewed filthy smoke into a reproving sky. Here lay a plank athwart a chasm, and across it scampered scrawny chimney boys, brush laden and black from brow to ankle. There a century-old tree, rooted in a soil-filled gutter amid the stones, was slanted by the wind over a vertiginous shaft to become a leafy bridge between abutments. There on a larger flat were towering treadmills occupied by teams of a dozen or more felons, walking endlessly in all weathers to pump water up into the tanks suspended in the great chimneys whose smoke warmed the baths of the officers. Another even larger set of lawbreakers walked sporadically, in accordance with a system of bells, to raise or lower the elevator that served the highest ranks on the upper floors.

  Here was a chimney-side huddle of huts whose denizens performed some necessary if unspeakable function in the structure upon which they lived, like so many ticks upon a dog, invisible in their poverty, hunger, and dirt. Here was the Bat-keeper of the Shrilling Cave (once the rooftop chapel of a sub-sub-sect, now fallen into ruin) and the Pigeon-keeper with his apprentice boys and their cooing cote. Here too was the roof-dwellers' own treadmill-winch, hidden in a far recess behind an ancient parapet, cobbled together from short bits of lumber and tangles of wire, its rope woven of a hundred shorter pieces, its line dropping deep into a half forgotten airshaft so its creaking would be lost in the sound of the ever turning water-mill. This winch brought up any and everything needed for the rooftop community to survive: a few bricks, a sack of flour, a stolen bucket, an abandoned baby. All such was on the lee side of the chimney, the dirty side, ash-laden, smoke-spewing from a thousand hearths, boilers, laundries, ovens, oasts, and incinerators.

  The windward side of the great chimney is a different matter indeed. There, sandwiched between the great chimney and the parapet wall that plunges sheer to the clangorous cobbles and shout-echoing walls of the street, a roof garden floats like a green islet above the fetid humors of the town below. The elaborate and elegant penthouse that gives access to this marvel is the territory of the Commander in Chief of Bastion, General Gregor Gowl. If the Fortress is the armory of Bastion, its barracks, its HQ, its market, and—in its higher reaches—the living quarters of its officers and their families, then this roof garden is their park, their promenade, their place to take the sun and air and let the babies play, all by kind permission of sorrowful Scilla, the Commander's wife.

  On this afternoon the rooms of the penthouse are thronged with brightly dressed visitors. Beneath gay umbrellas, the tables beside the reflecting pool are crowded. Flowers nod in the light wind. People chat. Members of the Bishop's Holy Guard set aside their weapons to pass trays of sandwiches and cookies. Scilla pours tea and her younger girls, including five-year-old Angelica, join the children of guests to dart like hummingbirds among potted roses, toddler voices rising in shrill gaiety over the ritual feigning and fencing of their elders.

  The general is at the center of all this, impeccably dressed in his white dress uniform, belted, bemedaled, roped and ribboned in gold, affably accepting the compliments of his guests on this, the sixtieth anniversary of his birth and the twentieth of his accession to the leadership of the Spared. He is hand in hand with Gregor Gowl III, penultimate child got by Gowl upon Scilla, only son, much longed-for heir, a boy who can be neither disciplined nor swayed. "A chip off the old block," cries Gowl, as he admires this six-year-old terror of the Fortress. When Angelica was born, yet another girl, Gowl declared himself weary of begetting, and Scilla spent most of a span saying fervid thanks in the tiny, hidden Lady's chapel where men did not go.

  The roof garden is no less a symbol of the general's power than the uniform he wears. On the day six years ago when his wife finally presented him with a son, he decreed into existence the garden Scilla had long begged for. Within days, it was a fact: arbor, potted trees, reflecting pool, fountain and all. Some of the guests arrive at the garden easily, for they are of the Regime's elite who live only a floor or two below. They are entitled to use the elevator, and they have servants to climb and carry for them. On today's occasion, however, they are joined by their counterparts from Apocanew and Newland and Amen-city who have been clambering toward this height all their lives, a longer ascent by far than merely a walk up the hill to the Fortress capped by a climb of fifteen or twenty stories to the top. Here are the pretenders to power, the holders of irrelevant office, the receivers of trivial titles, the elected but impotent representatives to the Congress of the Spared. As compensation for their inconsequence, they are accorded the honor of an invitation to the general's birthday gala. Some of them, aware that fortunate liaisons have been known to arise from mere childhood acquaintance, have brought their children along today, to meet the general's children and bask in their glow.

  The general moves among his guests with a sham congeniality that fools no one. Even five-year-old Angelica, currently in hot pursuit of the Colonel Bishops youngest daughter, plans her darting and fluttering to keep herself well away from her father. The general's wife occupies herself at the tea table where her handing of cups is aided by the wives of senior officers, one of whom, the Colonel Bishop's wife, leans forward to say, with some envy, "Angelica's turning out to be so very pretty!"

  "Yes," agrees the general's wife, with a wary glance at her youngest daughter. "It's surprising, for she was an ugly baby. Every day she looks more like my first child, Ovelda, the daughte
r who died."

  "I remember her, of course," says the bishop's wife. "She was a sweet, dear girl. Every time I go to the Hold bottle wall, I stop and greet her."

  "Kind of you," murmurs the general's wife, tears filling her eyes.

  "I notice there's a fence around the roof garden now," the bishop's wife comments approvingly. "So much safer."

  "Oh, it wasn't a roof garden then," said the general's wife, staring at the fence atop the parapet that surrounds the roof on three sides, the fourth guarded by the looming mass of the great chimney. "Our quarters were down two floors from here. We never came up here. We never knew how Ovelda got up here. There was nothing here, no reason for her to come."

  "But there is a fence now," persisted the bishop's wife.

  "Yes. No other child will fall all that terrible way again. Crush themselves like that. Die like that."

  "Now, now, my dear, she isn't dead. She's in the bottle wall, awaiting the final days. She was just Angelica's age, wasn't she?"