The Dove (26 page)

Mark Andrew stood in the center of his circle frowning at the low banks of clouds on the eastern horizon. In his hands he held a tall, wooden pole. If the clouds did not lift within the next few minutes, his most important sighting would be lost.  He would have to wait until sunset and hope the clouds would go no lower on the horizon.  The last two days had been quite stormy and overcast.  Already, he could see the red glow of the sun under the edge of the clouds.  Sophia stood ready on the eastern edge of the circle, waiting with a white stone in her hands in order to mark the place where the shadow crossed the circle.

Technically, he could have laid out the thing with his compass and the knowledge in his head, but he wanted to take no chances.  The old way would ensure no peculiarities in the earth’s magnetic field would interfere with the construction of the circle.  The recent nuclear war might have affected the magnetic forces surrounding the earth, even the orbit itself, and he had also learned scientists believed that the earth was actually slowing its rotation incrementally each year as the moon pulled away in a slow spiral that would eventually place it in an orbit around the sun quite independent of the earth.  It would no longer be a moon, but a planet in its own right.  But that day would be far in the future and if they did not succeed in thwarting the rapidly approaching cosmic events as well as dealing with the more terrestrial problems facing mankind, none of them would be around to plot Luna’s new orbit. 

He knew very little about the technological advances in astronomy that had been made in the past two centuries other than what he had snatched from newspapers and television reports in his ‘spare time’.  His education was sorely in need of updating, but Oxford was out of the question at the moment.  Someday, however… they might be able to tamper directly with the magnetic field, but they could not altar the earth’s rotation on its axis, nor its orbital position about the sun… at least, they couldn’t yet…. Or so he hoped. 

The appearance of the great comet had been most surprising to the rest of the world, but Mark had already seen it in his travels with Inanna.  It was moving at an incredible rate of speed, much faster than he had first surmised. Unlike some of its icy companions, this one would be visible only a few days and then it would be gone… forever.  It would not return.  But even he had missed the smaller fragment that had crashed into the moon the previous evening.  It had been Sophia who had come running to find him as he sat in the tent scribbling in his notebook by the light of the lantern, when the moon had topped the horizon.  Her panicked cries had brought him out of the shelter and they had stood together, staring up at the scarred face of the earth’s closest celestial companion.  Fully a third of its visible surface was obscured by a roughly circular patch of darkness.  Mark Andrew had recognized it immediately as the result of an impact… a large impact!  Large enough to throw tons of debris into space.  The moon’s low gravitational field had allowed the ejecta to drift much higher than it would have had it been a larger body.  Even after several days, the slowly drifting cloud of dust was still visible on the moon’s face.  It would fan out in the almost non-existent atmosphere and sift quietly back to the surface. The ejected material cast another separate shadow on the moon’s surface as it drifted away into space and gave the satellite a ruddy glow.  Mark had no doubt that there would be great shows in the night sky for sometime to come as the stuff began to be pulled into the earth’s upper atmosphere.

But even though the impact on the moon had created a bizarre show for the earthly observers, it had been the result of a fairly small object, possibly no bigger than a small house or a train engine.  The bulk of Sophia I, the name Mark Andrew had given the main comet, would have almost certainly have destroyed the entire moon, if it had struck it and spelled certain disaster for its nearest neighbor as pieces fell to the earth in a reign of molten firebombs the size of mountains.  But it was not the sun’s glowing companion that concerned the Knight of Death.  It was the fragmentary portion that he had found behind it, traveling at the same speed on a slightly different trajectory that bothered him.  A course that would take it much closer to the sun.  Its smaller size and closer approach would greatly skew its return path as it was thrown back at them.  He wondered how many more pieces of Sophia I were coming at them.  Too small to find even in the most sophisticated telescopes still available on earth, yet big enough to wreak havoc, if they were captured by the earth’s gravity.  The wonderful glory of the Hubble space telescope had been one of the first things lost when the wars had spread across the continents.  The telescope was still in orbit, but the groundlinks had all been destroyed. The secondary portions of Sophia I had most likely been chipped off the comet when it had passed through the cloud of rocks that had once been his son, Lemarik’s, planet, Vulcan, between Mars and Jupiter.  If the Hubble and several other orbiting telescopes had still been on line, they would have been discovered much earlier and something might have been done, but now it was too late and there was no technology left on earth to do anything about what was coming.

Today, he would get a reading on true west and east.  The autumn equinox, when the day and the night would be of equal duration.  If he missed it today, it would be six months before the opportunity arose again on the spring equinox and they didn’t have six months.  He didn’t even have six days.  If he could get these stones set today, he would be able to use the telescope to see Sophia I’s dim companion, find its position, its declination and plot the likely arrival time of the impending disaster. The thing was riding blissfully along in the comet’s long tail, obscured from the astronomers still struggling to watch the night sky from dark hilltops with handheld telescopes, or bigger models on tripods, and compasses.  The wars had set science back at least a century and if worse came to worse, there would be no time for recovery. If he was careful, he might even be able to discern the general location of the inevitable impact.  Which hemisphere, if it was more likely to strike land or water and whether or not he and Sophia should just leave the planet and mourn their losses or wait it out.

The limb of the sun popped over the horizon, sending a fan of long, red rays under the purple-gray clouds.  The clouds were higher than he had first reckoned.  If they would remain so, he would be able to make the reading.

Mark left the pole erected in the center of the circle, took up his staff and walked past Sophia to a point outside the circle and set the staff on the ground.  The sun continued to climb until it seemed to rest temporarily on the horizon.  He turned and adjusted the staff he was holding so that the shadow aligned with the staff in the center of the circle.

“Now!”  He called to Sophia and she marked the spot with the white stone.  Almost as soon as she plopped it down, a peal of distant thunder rumbled across the land and the sun’s rays were diminished as it passed behind the storm clouds.  Mark dropped his stave and hurried to where Sophia was dusting off her hands.  He grabbed her up and squeezed her tightly.  “We did it!” 

This simple action took her off guard.  She had rarely seen him display such emotion.  It was very hard for her to imagine they were one and the same person, both alike and yet so very different.  When they came together, it was if a great light erupted between them.  He let go of her and backed away.  They were attracted to one another and yet, repelled from each other like a pair of magnets that could not make up their minds about their alignment.

“Sorry.”  He mumbled and turned quickly, walking away from her.

“Wait!”  She called after him and hurried across the rocky ground.  The cold wind bit her cheeks and blew back her silvery, blonde hair.

She caught up with him near the flap of the tent.

“Mark!”  She touched his arm.  “What are we supposed to do?”

He looked into her brilliant blue eyes and shook his head slowly.

“I don’t know.”  He said quietly.  “That will depend on what I learn tonight, weather permitting.”

“No…” she looked at the ground.  “I mean what are
we
supposed to do?  How do we… what are we… I mean us!  You and I.  What are we supposed to do?  You act as if you are afraid of me.  Afraid to touch me and then when you do, we clash somehow.  Are we to go through eternity like this?  Together and yet separate?  I don’t like it!  Why do you think I came looking for you?”

“I don’t understand.”  He told her bluntly.  “You are simply part of me.  I cannot reconcile this.  I can’t believe it for one thing.  I look at you and I see myself.  You are like looking in a mirror.  I know all your thoughts and you know all of mine.  Why do you have to ask me?”

“I don’t know
all
your thoughts.  I only know what went on after we were separated.  I don’t know the Mark Andrew Ramsay from before Semiramis put the curse on you.  I know the Andrea that you were for a time, but I am not Andrea. And I know Sophia from after that time.  And Mark, Sophia loves you.”

Mark pressed his hands over his ears.  He had fallen in love with Sophia!  It was an abomination.

“Mark!”  She grabbed his wrists and pulled his hands down.  “We are not the same person.  We may have been the same at one time, but we are not the same person any more.  We are two completely different people now, just like the others.  Don’t you see that?”

“I see Andrea Larmenius when I look at you.”  He shook his head and the silver earrings jangled in the white braid in his silver hair.

“Look.”  She grabbed the silver ornaments.  “Look at this one thing, for example.  I don’t have those.  Andrea Larmenius had those.  Andrea Larmenius was a different person.  She was you in female form.  And you were her.  But now you are Uriel and I am Sophia.”

“But Sophia is in the desert with Mark Ramsay.”  He told her.  “And she loves him.  I am not Mark Ramsay.  I mean…” he sighed and closed his eyes and it was as if a light was turned off.  “I
am
Mark Ramsay, but not really.”

“I know.  I know.”  She looked down again.  She could not make him understand.  “And I love you.  Don’t you love me, Mark?”

“Of course I do!”  He looked up at the sky which was growing even darker above them.  “You don’t understand.”

“I do understand.  Look!”  She smiled at him.  “Look at Ereshkigal and Nergal.  Look at Semiramis and Marduk.  Meredith and Nanna.”

“Yes!  Look at Meredith and Nanna.  My wife.  My son.  For God’s sake! Do you hear what you are saying?”  His face was full of pain at the mention of Meredith.  “Are they lovers, Sophia?  Does John Paul… does Meredith… do they… what are they?  Tell me!”

Sophia’s face fell.  She had no idea.  He had a point.  Then her face lit up again.

“When Nanna was John Paul, he was your son, correct?”  She asked him.

“Of course.”  Mark said miserably.

“And Meredith was your wife when she was with you?”

“Yes.  For the most part.”  He almost smiled.  “There were… well, I think you know.”

“Yes, I do.”  She nodded her head.

“And now both John Paul and Meredith have gone the way of all people?”  She raised one eyebrow.  “John Paul and Meredith are dead, Mark.”

Mark’s face went slack as if he had never really thought of the possibility.  He had mourned them as dead.  In fact, he had mourned Meredith as dead twice.  In fact, he had killed her once himself!  It was totally bizarre.

“And when you saw her… the last time you saw her… was she really Meredith?”

“No!”  He turned his back on her again so that she would not see his tears.  “She was not.”

“And your mother, Mark.  The spirit of the woman you rescued from hell simply because you felt responsible for her… do you think of her as your mother or do you think of her as an old love?”

“No!  I don’t want to hear this!!”  He held out one hand behind him as if to push her away.

“She was simply a woman, Mark.  First your lover, and then your mother.”  Sophia continued relentlessly.  “You did right to bring her out of perdition.  She has suffered enough.  She never understood.”

“Please, Sophia!”  Mark crumpled onto a low boulder near the smoking remnants of the fire.  “Why are you doing this?”

“And now Sophia is in the desert with Mark Ramsay.  First, she was his lover and now she is his mother.  She has raised him as surely as any mother raises a son.  And his heart is as pure as the snow!  He knows nothing except his love for her.  He would die for her.  She is his whole life and yet, she is neither his mother or his wife.”

Mark raised his head and frowned up at the sky as the first drops of cold rain fell into his face.

“Do you love Sophia?”  She asked him again.

“Yes.”  He lowered his head again.  “But that doesn’t make it right.”

“The rules are not the same for us.”  She placed one hand on his shoulder.  “We write the book as we go along.”

Mark got up and took her hand.  “We’d best get out of the weather.  I have something I would like to show you.”

“Oh?”  She smiled and started for the tent.

“Not there.”  He pulled his hood of his mantle over his head.  “Up there.”  He nodded toward a slight incline to the north of where they had set up their tiny camp.

“What is up there except more rocks?”  She frowned.  “Am I supposed to remember it?”

“You should.”  He pulled her along as the rain fell harder.  “You must have been with me when I built it.”