The War of Immensities (57 page)

Chrissie Rice
sat on the window sill, in faded jeans and a light top, bare feet
despite the cold stone floors of the convent. Her hair was cropped
short and her head was permanently bowed, as if she had resumed her
former, shy, self. Gone was the saintly robes and celestial glow,
and she clasped her hands in front of her but rested them on her
knees. It was impossible to know what she might have been
thinking.

Lorna Simmons
sat sideways on the other window sill with her shoes kicked off and
feet up, offering a fine show of leg and absolute disrespect for
her short skirt. Her hair was down and her head flopped against the
window glass but when Harley entered she raised it and offered him
a warm reassuring smile. That smile would have been impossible had
she known what he had in mind for her.

And Andromeda
Starlight, now arrayed in African robe and a floral cotton
headband, dozens of bangles and necklaces and dark glasses despite
the dimness of the room, as if she didn’t want to see what was
happening. Of them all, she had voiced the greatest protest at
beginning brought here, for the Malawi pilgrims had passed straight
through the capital and continued marching, northward generally,
and so Andromeda had been obliged to continue leading them. Daily
Wagner’s supply planes parachuted food to that vast swarm of
humanity advancing through Tanzania toward the Congo Republic,
while on the ground Maynard had taken command of the trek.
Andromeda had refused to leave, but Felicity had insisted and so
she allowed herself to be borne off by helicopter and jet to attend
the meeting, and when it ended she would be going right back again.
She allowed her annoyance to show, but still Thyssen was sure he
could count on her support. Not that he needed it because he knew
he had the numbers anyway.

He walked in
and every eye was on him. They had arrived at various times during
the night before but he had deliberately avoided contact with any
of them, remaining in a separate part of the convent, just to be
sure no one could accuse him to trying to influence the outcome. He
took two steps and flopped in a chair, rolling on the castors a few
feet and leaning back, smiling. He was seated lower than everyone
in the room, just to give them every chance. And he spoke
immediately because he knew he needed to.

“Before we
begin,” he said. “you should all know that the word ‘Unofficial’
has been dropped from our name and we are once again the one and
only Project Earthshaker. The UN Security Council voted on it this
morning, their time and we got eighty-two percent support.
President Grayson himself telephoned to tell me.”

All of them
laughed except Jami, whose head swivelled violently as she glared
from one laughing face to another with growing horror. Even the
rigidity of Kevin Wagner cracked, even Felicity Campbell had to
smile crookedly and bow her head and turn away, therefore looking
at Brian Carrick who was chuckling behind her.

“Clean bowled
first ball for a duck, luv,” Brian said.

Solomon slapped
his files closed. “Meeting over. We can all go home.”

“You can’t...”
Jami gasped, overcoming her initial shock enough to finally find
speech.

“No, Jami’s
right,” Thyssen said. “You each have grievances. Let’s get them out
in the open where we can get a good look at them.”

“I assume what
you say is true,” Felicity asked, superbly disguising her
disappointment.

“I wouldn’t lie
to you,” Thyssen said pointedly.

“Yes you
would!” Jami Shastri shrieked.

“No,” Thyssen
said, turning to look at her directly. “No, my beloved and very
heroic student, I would not.”

“Explain
Drongo.”

“You’ve been
studying it for two weeks and know as much about it as I do.”

“It’s just a
bunch of statistics.”

“That’s right.
A little statistical tool I use which seems to work better than
anyone else’s. But it still comes down to an informed guess.”

“But how can
you be so accurate, if that’s the case,” Felicity asked.

“I’m not. It’s
an illusion. I didn’t expect Bakersfield and Fresno to fall within
the Zone—I expected something further out in the Nevada desert—but
it did fall at the limits of my margin of error. And the
consequences for California would have been the same, either
way.”

“But why can’t
anyone else predict as accurately as you do?” Wagner said
bluntly.

“Three reasons,
Kevin,” Thyssen said, wondering if indeed there were three. “First,
as much as my name might be discredited these days, I am still the
top man in the field. My intuition is pretty likely to be better
than anyone else’s. Two, there were other geophysicists who got it
right and agreed with me but they didn’t get any publicity. The
publicity went to those with alternative points of view and axes to
grind—those who wanted to prove me wrong. Three, I always knew the
volcanism and earthquakes were collateral damage. Only the Zone of
Influence counted. From the viewpoint of the project, the recent
event did not take place in Los Angeles nor along the San Andreas
Fault. It happened in Bakersfield. Few people would be able to see
it that way. And you, Jami, were the first to do so.”

“That’s not
enough,” Jami said flatly. “It doesn’t explain it at all.”

“Then perhaps
there are other reasons that even I don’t understand,” Thyssen
said, losing his calm he noticed now, in his desperation to win her
back. “You people have always imagined that I knew more about this
than I did. Every scientist, every person, working on this, has a
point of view. They are going from a certain angle. Geophysicists
see it as a geophysical problem. Volcanologists as vulcanism.
Seismologists look at the Tectonic plates. Spiritualists see it as
divine intervention. Each of you see it differently, from your own
point of view. But I see it entirely as a function of all of you,
as a whole, with none of the outside angles. And that simply places
me closer than anyone else.”

“Harley,”
Chrissie Rice asked quietly from her corner, “do you know when and
where the next events are going to happen?”

“Yes. Within a
scale with a rapidly escalating error possibility, I do.”

“Then why
aren’t you telling anyone?”

“Because of the
danger involved in someone like me engaging in speculation. Suppose
I make statement A and then tomorrow get better data and realise
that it’s B instead. Given the way the media and the world behaves,
there will be no withdrawing A. The consequences of the reaction to
A would be so great that there would be no changing it.”

“God must have
similar difficulties,” Brian remarked.

“Precisely. All
of my pronouncements have become Godlike, which meant I needed to
avoid making public statements and had Lorna reading carefully
prepared announcements. Only those things I could be sure of.”

“Okay,” Joe
said. “But you can trust us, Harley-boy. Tell us, where and when
for the next, say, five events.”

“Jami can do
that.”

“Can you?”
Felicity asked abruptly.

Jami ruefully
nodded her head.

Thyssen pulled
a scrape of paper from his pocket, opened it out and handed it to
her. “You agree with these?”

They all waited
while a flushed Jami read it through. There were tears appearing in
her eyes and she had to pause to wipe them away with the back of
her bandaged hand. She passed the sheet back and swung her wheels
to face away from them all.

Thyssen read
from the list although he hardly needed to look at it—it was firmly
impressed in his memory. “Java, 20 Feb, magnitude 10.1, 3 percent
error margin; Middle East, with all that bloody oil it ought to be
the biggest bang ever, 20 March, magnitude 10.6, ten percent error
margin; somewhere in Brazil, 12 April, magnitude over 11, twenty
percent accurate but it ought to be a real horror; then the Pacific
maybe around Hawaii, 2nd of May, biggest magnitude ever at probably
11.5, forty percent error margin and it ought to cover something
like 6000 square kilometres; then the mid-Atlantic Ocean on the
20th of May maybe around the Caribbean someplace but after that the
error margin grows too large to be realistic.”

Felicity
Campbell stood now, planting her feet and facing him with her hands
on her hips. “Harley, we call a meeting at which you are to explain
your actions. You walk in with a megaton announcement and floor
everybody. And that’s the problem. All the time, you seem to be one
step in front of us.”

“Whereas, in
fact, I’m redundant,” Thyssen pointed out.

“I don’t think
so,” Felicity said, riding the switches and changes deftly.

“Oh no. Think
about it. Each of you has a crucial role to play in the project.
But Lorna does all my talking for me, and Jami all my research. And
now that I’ve directed her to Drongo, she can make the same
predictions I do. I am the only one who no longer serves any
purpose.”

“If you
disregard being our exulted leader who gets direct phone calls from
President Grayson,” Brian pointed out.

“Figurehead
leader only.”

“I know how you
feel, Honey,” Andromeda chuckled.

“Okay,”
Felicity put in. “For the moment let’s accept that you have reduced
yourself to mere ornamental value. Why?”

“Because I was
always the weakest link in the chain. At all times I was vulnerable
to being attacked and discredited by the media or my peers. I was
even in danger of being rolled at this meeting. Those circumstances
are likely to get worse. I had to arrange things so that the
project could precede without me. Which I believe I’ve done.”

They all needed
a moment to take that in and he allowed them that. It sounded
frightening when he spelled it out in such blunt terms, but now, at
least, it was done.

“I guess,” Jami
said finally, with a huge sigh. “But I still don’t understand
it.”

“Nevertheless,
it does make a mess of your arguments of megalomania.”

“Yeah,” Brian
said. “We all shoulda known better than to try and argue with you,
mate.”

“Look,” Thyssen
said, letting go now and he could feel the pressure draining out of
himself. “I admit I did some ducking and dodging, but it was all
with a single purpose and that was to keep you people in charge of
the Project.”

“Why must we be
in charge?”

“Because
everyone else is either a scientist with a theory to prove or a
politician with insatiable power lust or a fanatic with a blind
faith to fulfill or someone with something to sell, and if we are
to see this through, it needed to be kept out of the hands of
national leaders and generals and media barons and people with a
research grant to defend. It is just too big for any of them to
deal with. It is a global problem to be handled globally, and only
you guys have the experience and knowledge to do that.”

“Fine,”
Felicity said, able to recognise a snow job when she heard one. “So
while we are doing all the work, what will you be doing with your
redundancy?”

“Trying to free
myself up and get my mind above everything and see if I can come up
with an answer to this.”

“An answer to
what, exactly?” Jami demanded, her emotions still raw.

“A way to
overcome the Shastri Effect.”

“Won’t that be
impossible?” Brian asked.

Thyssen
shrugged his great shoulders. “We can sit back, assume that the
earth is going to destroy itself and wait for it to happen, or else
we can proceed on the assumption that there is something we can do,
however hopeless it might seem. I favour the latter plan.”

“Don’t we all,
Sugar,” Andromeda said. “But jest how do we go about tacklin’
something so big and inevitable?”

Thyssen rolled
on his casters to the table and spread his hands there as he got it
straight in his mind. It seemed for a moment that all the air had
gone out of the room. He began slowly, making sure of it in his
mind as he proceeded. “Look. Let’s assume there is something going
wrong at the Earth’s core. There isn’t a damned thing we can do
about that. The theory that it’s a singularity devouring us from
the middle outwards like a rotting apple is as good as any, but we
can’t prove it. It fits the known facts best within our very
limited knowledge. But it might equally be a normal change to the
core of some kind, or maybe a change to the earth’s magnetic field
or god-knows what. We have no way of knowing and we aren’t going to
find out. We do not possess the technical means to look and see the
nature of the internal structure of the Earth. The truth is we know
more about galaxies and stars millions of light years away on the
far side of the universe than we do about the stuff that’s anything
over ten miles under our feet. Even the concepts suggesting there’s
an iron-nickel core, surrounded by hot rock called the mantle—which
is the accepted wisdom concerning the inner structure of the
Earth—as all just the best available guess. There is no proof of
any of it.

“So even if we
did know what the problem was in there, we do not have the
technology to invent a super laser or suchlike device and
neutralise the thing. We are never going to be able to identify the
cause of the problem nor do anything about it if we could. So we
might as well forget it and let nature take its course.”

“So it’s
hopeless,” Chrissie groaned.

“Not
completely,” Thyssen said, knowing he was playing his last card.
“There is the matter of the pilgrims, the linkage, the sleepers.
That happens inside our heads and that we can explore. And it has
to have something to do with it.”

“Solve the
question of the linkage, and you can solve the problem,” Jami
supposed.

“Yes. Or maybe
it’s the other way around,” Thyssen said, for it occurred to him
only as he said it.

“What other way
around?” Felicity asked.