The War of Immensities (55 page)

“I am
enormously attracted to him.”

“Aren’t we all.
Has he suggested any reciprocal feelings?”

“No. I have
tested the water from time to time…”

“And?”

“Zero response.
He treats me like a daughter.”

“Grand-daughter?”

She poked her
tongue out at him. “In any case, I’m going to have to make it
happen.”

“You sure ain’t
lacking in ambition, Lorna.”

“It isn’t
really ambition. I think it’s necessary—for all of us.”

“You’re doing
it for us?”

“We need to
know this man. We have got to get to the bottom of him. I believe
the only way to really know a man is to sleep with him, and I need
to know—and we all need to know—all we can about Harley.”

“Maybe he’s
bottomless.”

“Oh very funny.
But seriously. I’ll need all the help I can get with this one.”

“You surely
know how to create a challenge, sweetheart” Brian laughed. “Are you
sure Harley does normal things like sex?”

“You mean,
maybe it’s below his dignity?”

“Or maybe he’s
just too old,” Brian said.

“You’re not
being helpful.”

“That’s because
I can’t imagine how it can be done.”

“You must be
able to offer some suggestions. Something I might say to grab his
attention.”

“Ask him about
the Uncertainty Principle.”

“The what?”

“Look it up.
Ask him about Schrodinger’s Cat.”

“Cat?”

“The
wave-particle conundrum.”

“Can we have a
nice simple version that I can slip in over a glass of
champers?”

“What all these
things amount to is this: the experimenter is, of necessity, a part
of the experiment.”

“I’m still not
getting it.”

“You cannot
open the box and see exactly what is inside without disturbing the
contents.”

“Well, at least
I understood the words that time. Why is it important?”

“It’s a random
universe. The laws of physics and mathematics are meaningless in
reality. Yet, whenever we humans apply those laws, they always work
for us. Everything we do obeys those laws. And what’s more, if we
fuck up and break the laws, what we do won’t work. The bridge falls
down, the spaceship blows up, the aeroplane crashes. How can that
be?”

“Magic?”

“Sort of. If it
is true that the laws of physics and maths don’t work in reality
but always work for us, there is only one possible
explanation.”

“We make them
work.”

“More than
that. Those laws describe our minds and how they function. And what
it means, therefore, is that when all those random elementary
particles and quanta and suchlike, fall within the influence of our
intelligence or collective consciousness or whatever, they
conform.”

“They fall into
line with our perception of how things are? How very obliging of
them.”

“So that’s what
we are really. Chaos destroying machines. We force order into the
randomness.”

“Wow!”

“Wow indeed.
You tell that to Harley and watch what’s left of his hair stand on
end.”

“I almost
understand it. Is it true?”

“No one knows.
But that’s what I reckon Harley thinks is happening. That’s the
Shastri Effect.”

How the hell
had they talked her into this? When Wagner’s plane landed her in
the middle of a war zone, all of Andromeda’s illusions about a
concert tour honouring her African origins and aiding a crippled
nation were annihilated. Fires burned all about the airfield, and
troops ran this way and that, ordered by their hotfaced leaders.
Wagner’s commanders were the only white men to be seen anywhere.
She heard sporadic gunfire coming in from all directions, and
occasional explosions further out. She wanted to get right back in
the plane again.

“It’s okay,”
Captain Maynard of the US Navy said. “This area is secure now.”

The captain,
who insisted he was a sailor, was dressed like a combat soldier in
camouflage fatigues with the sleeves torn out, and he was filthy
and his clothing ripped. On his muscular shoulders, blood showed,
running with the sweat down his arms. He had a US army netted
helmet from under the shadowed rim of which his dark eyes peered
fiercely, but despite the disguise, Andromeda knew who he was. Not
only had she been told who would meet her, but she might have
recognised him from his media image anyway, for she had followed
the case with great interest. This was the captain of the ship that
Felicity had defended so remarkably in San Diego, and the other
soldiers scattered about were his crew.

“Looks a bit
rough, I know. But it’s safe,” he said to assure her as he gripped
her arm in a very gentlemanly fashion and nudged her toward a
jeep.

They set off,
Maynard driving, and a truckload of US soldiers who were probably
also sailors following. Andromeda pointed a playfully accusative
finger at him.

“You’re the one
who stole the ship,” she told him.

“That’s right,
ma’am,” he grinned, seeming very at ease for a sailor in a
landlocked war zone.

“You don’t meet
a lot of pirates in this century. Did you also steal the jeep?”

Maynard
relaxed, the stiffness and formality but not the urgency draining
out of him. He seemed very relieved to discover that this woman, a
global celebrity, a full head taller than he was, had a sense of
humour. He knew she was going to need it. “As a matter of fact, we
did, ma’am. It belongs to the government troops. But they don’t
care for it anymore.”

“Wait till I
tell Felicity.”

“Finest woman I
ever met, ma’am.”

“She’s that all
right. And this, I suppose, is punishment for your sins.”

“No, ma’am. Dr
Campbell got the admirals at the court martial so bewildered they
couldn’t reach a conclusion. This is what the navy does with people
they just want to go away.”

“Turn them into
soldiers, you mean?”

“Something like
that. Better than the brig, no matter how you add it up.”

“Well, captain.
I don’t like it much here. Let’s do some further going away.”

“Ma’am, this is
one of the prettier places to be found in Malawi right now.”

He was not
mistaken. After a very short distance, they drove into a village
that had been shot to pieces. Bodies lay all about in the street
and town square. All the walls were chipped by bullet holes. Burned
out vehicles were everywhere. Few of the corpses wore any sort of
military garb.

“Stop here,”
Andromeda ordered.

“We can’t,
ma’am. The Red Cross has all this under control.”

“Stop, I tell
you.”

Maynard sighed
and stopped. She got out and walked amongst the corpses, the swarms
of flies made most of them hard to see distinctly. Maynard was
right at her side, with his machinegun levelled this way and then
that.

“These are
mostly women and children,” Andromeda said bitterly.

“Yes. The
government troops went through here as they fled.”

She looked
about. There were some medical people but mostly they seemed
engaged in driving the vultures away. Men were busy at the other
end of town, collecting the bodies and loading them into
trucks.

“Is this
typical?”

“In some
places, unfortunately. We just couldn’t cover everywhere. Mr.
Wagner has only a thousand troops at his command. It wasn’t
anywhere near enough.”

“And the
rebels? Are they any better behaved than the government
troops?”

“Not really.
But mostly, the people abandoned the villages and hid in the
jungle. They’re waiting for you.”

“Me?”

“Yes. Everyone
knows that you are coming to lead them to the place of peace.”

“Oh good. And
where, exactly, is this place of peace I’m supposed to lead them
to?”

“Wherever you
go, but Mr. Wagner has placed his camp so that when you go, it will
be into the capital.”

“I’d like to
talk to Kev baby, right now.”

“That’s where I
was taking you, ma’am. There’s nothing you can do here.”

“So I see.”

They drove on
and, only hours before the linkage was due to occur, they arrived
at the camp. It was really a village that looked exactly like the
first one—and several others along the way—only this time the
bodies had been removed. But still it smelled of death. Kevin
Wagner was dressed just like Maynard, except he wore a peaked cap
instead of a helmet.

“Good of you to
come, Andy,” Wagner said. They were in the tavern. Carlsberg would
keep their beer monopoly no matter who won the war.

“Did I have a
choice?”

“Not everyone
gets to stop a war, Andy.”

“Cut the crap
and tell me the plan, Kev.”

“In a few
hours, you start out from here to the capital, which is the right
direction for the pilgrimage. They’ll follow you, right into the
capital, and the war will be over.”

“And you’ll be
claiming victory?”

“The rebels
have already claimed victory. Once it was known the pilgrimage was
on, the government troops all ran away. The rumour that you would
be here did the job. Now, it’s just a formality.”

“So, I’m doing
nothing really.”

“You’re doing
what Chrissie did in Italy. Leading the pilgrims to safety.”

“And into the
hands of the rebels.”

“It was a
popular revolution, truly.”

“Yeah, I know.
A whole lot of dead women and children back there told me how
popular it was.”

Wagner looked
tired. He rubbed his eyes. There was no point talking about this.
It was going to happen and nothing could change it. But Andromeda
needed to make someone pay for this, and Kevin Wagner, with his own
little private war, was the only one available to received her
anger.

“How do you
know they’ll follow?”

“There’s about
600,000 pilgrims, out there in the bush, mostly south of here.
Shortly, they’ll be heading north. So will you. So will I. And when
they go, everyone else will follow.”

“I don’t like
this, Generalissimo. It’s a put up job and you know it.”

“No. It’s
genuine. These people see you as a spiritual leader. I made use of
that, I admit, but only because it was there to be done.”

“Are you
telling me they play all my records here?”

“Practically
nothing else. They love it. You are the greatest. Bigger than
basketball players even.”

“Damn you,
Wagner. Damn you. What I did was clean and honest. You’ve dirtied
it somehow.”

“The war will
have stopped. Thousands of lives will have been saved. You can’t
argue with that.”

“That’s the
same justification that you lot used for dropping atom bombs on
Japan. You Yankees just don’t learn, do you?”

“Either you
walk or thousands more will die, Andy. That’s all there is.”

And so, when
the time came, she walked, and the people came out of everywhere in
their thousands, tens of thousands, to tramp the road amid the
soaring dust, ragged and thin with malnutrition, their bony legs
seeming unable to hold them up yet they walked boldly, striding on
with bare feet on the hot dust. As she walked, they crowded about
her, called her name and called her Marava, which seemed to mean
Messiah. Andromeda opened her arms and her heart and walked tall
amidst them and carried on down the road to the capital and they
followed, coming out of the bush on all sides. Ahead, Wagner rode
atop a tank and troops lined the way, looking grimfaced and
battleworn but determined, sharp-eyed, ready for trouble but there
would be no trouble. Andromeda knew the time of danger was past and
so did the population accumulating behind her. The people came out
of hiding and walked the roads everywhere, and the war was
dumbfounded and stopped.

She walked on,
and the people kept coming, their tramping feet on the road
throwing up enough dust to turn the sun orange. The Shastri Effect
was no longer a factor—not for the moment at least—they were
following her because they could not go home and had nowhere else
to go, and because they believed she had somewhere to lead them to,
but most of all because she was who she was. And she regretted her
words then, because she knew Wagner was right. These people did see
her as their spiritual leader. They worshipped her with a simple
reverence that no words could describe. She walked and they
followed, and Andromeda knew that although she had never been here
before, still she had come home.

From every
available vantage point, they came to watch the greatest show on
earth. Every peak in the Santa Monica Hills and the San Gabriel
Mountains was foolishly crowded by those who had not paid
sufficient attention to the warnings and thought themselves safe,
but further out, more prudent and only slightly less foolish soles
crowded the peaks of the San Bernardino Mountains, and the southern
extremities of the Coastal Range and Sierra Nevadas.

As they flew in
the Orion along the coastline offshore from Long Beach, Felicity
Campbell gazed out the window in continuing astonishment and shook
her head in dismay. Everyone had been warned—the Lorna/Andromeda
show had been the highest rating program since the moonwalk. There
had been time, she knew, and every possible warning had been
offered, to ensure the entire evacuation of the endangered area,
but in its last moments of existence, Los Angeles remained the mad
thriving metropolis that it had always been since the movie moguls
first came to town, a hundred years ago.

All along the
coast, from San Raphael to Tijuana, the people had generally heeded
the warnings of the President and packed up their belongings and
headed inland. A lot of diehards remained in San Francisco but even
they had moved across the fault line and those parts of the city
south and west of the Bay area were virtually deserted, as were
most towns in Monterey and all down the coast, and San Diego. Cross
the San Andreas fault and go at least twenty miles inland,
President Grayson warned them. Most people had done just that. And
this despite the official Project Earthshaker assurances that the
disaster would occur offshore from Mexico and there would be no
danger. The Unofficial Project Earthshaker, in the bright-eyed form
of Lorna Simmons, had said goodbye to California, and the President
added that although he believed the Official outcome would prevail,
Harley Thyssen was not a man to be ignored if you valued your
life.