The War of Immensities (82 page)

“If you pull
that gun, Captain,” Andromeda said, stepping between the two men.
“You’ll have to shoot me first. Here. In front of all these
children.”

Maynard closed
his eyes as if not wanting to see that possibility, and then opened
them again. “You can’t get to Sierra Leone from here. We talked
about this.”

“We can get
there, Captain,” Andromeda replied assuredly. “Downriver, where we
can find ships and sail to the Land of my Fathers.”

Maynard shook
his head in dismay. “There aren’t those sorts of ships
available.”

“Captain, after
all the hardship we been through together and all the obstacles
we’ve overcome, I’m mighty surprised to hear your negative
view.”

Maynard, in
frustration, gazed away into the distance. He was seriously
contemplating overpowering her—if indeed he could—and looked toward
the fleet behind them to see what chaos this manoeuvre was causing.
He cocked his head, making sure he was seeing what he saw.

“Not just me,
Andromeda. You’ll have to persuade them too.”

She turned,
regarding the vessels back there with a frown. None of them had
turned. They were all carrying on straight across the river.

Andromeda threw
up her arms in what had become the signal to her flock. When they
responded, it was, all of them, to point out the way they should
go, for plainly, to all of them, she had missed the turn.

“They aren’t
following,” Andromeda said, in complete horror, to the world in
general.

“Apparently
not. Maybe they misunderstood your signal.”

“But they
followed me so far,” Andromeda continued in sheer grief. “Why won’t
they follow me now?”

“Because you
are no longer going the right way.”

When Lorna
landed, Brian was there to greet her. Lorna came off the plane with
a look of annoyance, spluttering dust and her hand lashing at
insects. She would, eternally, hate these hot and fly-blown
places.

“Welcome to the
end of the world,” he grinned at her.

“Am I the last
to arrive?”

“Are you
kidding? Word is there’s millions of people on your tail, coming
this way, and more getting ready to leave. This is just the
beginning.”

“Goodness,
Brian. What a organisational nightmare you must be having.”

“Done it all
before,” Brian grinned. “Piece of piss.”

He took her on
a little guided tour of his operation, after which she realised
just exactly how profound his abilities to understate the
circumstances were.

By that time, a
huge city was beginning to grow on the Plain of Confrontation.
Shuttled in from twenty international airports in all directions
from the focal point, the biggest fleet of C-130s and similar
aircraft in the world landed, disgorged their human cargo and flew
away again immediately. The runway was now equipped with landing
lights that were rarely extinguished, and they kept coming day and
night.

Once landed,
the people and their belongings were herded by troops, registered
by the Red Cross, and set walking through the rows of tents in
various directions until they reached the perimeter where they set
up their own camp. Buses and trucks were available only for those
who could not walk the distance. So the city continually grew as
the able-bodied were given instructions on how to dig latrines and
lay water pipes and erect prefabricated structures. Notice boards
carried maps of the city that changed daily, indicating food supply
areas, hospital facilities, police stations.

It was decided
that all materials were brought in by road—all available aircraft
were needed to ferry the people. The city grew of its own accord,
until the distance to the outskirts could not be walked in a single
day, and then not in two days. Able-bodied people removed
themselves further out to make room for way-stations and further
facilities to be made along each roadway.

It was not the
most pleasant place. The heat in the day and extreme cold at night
afflicted many, insects plagued everyone all the time. The dust
from hundreds of thousands of feet blew about the tent flaps, and
if it rained, which was not impossible, the whole place would
become a giant quagmire.

Anyone could
leave, any time they wanted. They had only to board one of the
outgoing aircraft which carried only garbage but otherwise flew
back empty. Apart from emergency illnesses, no one did leave.

On the plain
most people knew that whatever hardship they faced, it would be
over within a week, and that thought seemed to make it bearable for
everyone.

They were
fortunate that this was a region that the lake flooded annually but
which at this time of year was baked hard mud. Once the airfield
for the C-130s was completed, the workers immediately began a
longer parallel runway, and they had only to smooth out the surface
of the baked mud and it was firm enough and long enough to take the
severe impact of 747s coming in as direct flights from around the
world. The ground was hard enough to withstand them, on a short
term basis at least.

Thyssen flew in
on one of the first, sleeping all the way. Debbie the nurse awoke
him only as they circled the tent city, so that he might see the
broad panorama of his work. He grunted and went back to sleep.

For he could
finally sleep, for the first time in about a decade. No longer did
he need the assistance of alcohol—which was presently denied him by
the medical profession anyway—or sedation to bring on sleep. The
terror and the remorse had been evicted from his dreams. He no
longer had to decide anything. It was out of his hands now and all
he had to do was await the results. As such, he was more relaxed
than he had ever known himself to be before.

Debbie rolled
him off the plane in a wheelchair, into the blazing sun.

“It’s very
hot,” she said.

“It’ll get
hotter,” Thyssen replied

So they
gathered, coming from everywhere now, facing possible death but
determined to fulfil their belief.

Andromeda was
the last to leave. Maynard had sent back a long-range helicopter
which could fly her in directly and she stepped down onto the
airstrip to be swamped by her followers. A great roar went up and
they swarmed around her, chanting and cheering despite the heat and
dust

“They wouldn’t
disperse until you got here to lead them,” Brian had to shout in
her ear. He looked ridiculously calm and unharried when such
prodigious chaos reigned all about him.

“Well, I’m here
now, Brian. Which way would you like me to go.”

“We’ve reserved
a set of prefab huts with a hospital for your lot over there. Most
of them are under nourished and need medical attention.”

“It was a tough
journey, Brian. But here we are.”

“The Promised
Land?” Brian asked with raised eyebrows.

Andromeda
surveyed the scene grimly. “Hardly that! But I guess it’ll have to
do.”

On the Plain of
Confrontation the great tent city had grown at an astonishing rate.
Two days after Maynard’s troops cleared the area, it had exceeded
the population of Lagos in Nigeria and Addis Abba in Sudan, the
largest cities in the region. Two more days and the 1.5 million
population of Casablanca had been surpassed. By the end of the
first week, the largest city in Central Africa—Kinshasa—was
exceeded. Three days before the event, it had passed Cairo and had
become the biggest city in Africa.

The Red Cross
and UN groups struggled to keep count of the numbers as the city
began to double in size, and then doubled again. It was one of the
ten most populous cities in the world on the day the sun dawned,
perhaps for all of them for the final time. They came and kept on
coming, carrying their tents and blankets and food parcels while
all around, armies dug pits for hygiene and pumped in water from
the lake.

In the end it
was a small piece of foolish bureaucracy that tripped him up. It
was always the way. You could soar to the heights, trade in
billions of dollars, chat with presidents and captains of industry,
and fool everybody all the time. But all such men fell in the end
and it was some little man, faceless and insignificant, who just
would not let go on some tiny fragment of the structure, bringing
the whole dizzy construct crashing down.

Joe Solomon had
no idea who his mentor was, and in the end, did not care. Someone,
somewhere, had noticed that they were about to take a man out of
the country when he was sub judice and refused to sign the
appropriate paper or stamp the appropriate stamp. Whatever. Of
course Joe tried to explain it.

“But I have to
be there. Otherwise it will throw the whole focal point out of
position and ruin everything.”

No one seemed
to know what he was talking about. He wasn’t sure he knew himself.
I had no idea of what arrangements Thyssen might have made to
ensure the focal point stayed right where he wanted it. Maybe every
pilgrim in the world was there except him, or perhaps, knowing
Thyssen, there were groups positioned precisely around the world to
ensure it locked in. Maybe he was within the circle, maybe not.
There was no one he was allowed to talk to who could understand the
problem.

Of course, as
usual, they had arranged to move him when the linkage time came.
His guardian agents assured him of this, every time he protested.
The usual run in his motorised wheelchair escorted by two agents on
bicycles or maybe a stretch limo heading aimlessly in the direction
he chose, as had been the options in the past. That the agents
understood and were prepared for. The rest was beyond them. They
were sure that arrangements would be satisfactory.

“I want to
speak to the President!” Joe raged at them.

“Yeah, sure
Joe.”

Joe sat in his
room at the hotel as the linkage came on and his desperation grew,
until suddenly he realised he didn’t care anymore. He had done
enough. All that was needed. He had certainly done Thyssen enough
favours. Far too many in fact. He thought it through and realised
that he wasn’t really thinking anything at all. There was just the
pain and the anxiety and who needed that?

He had no
thoughts at the end. They found him in his room, overdosed on the
painkillers he took constantly. Beside him was a note. “I have
never believed in Thyssen. Whether he is proven right or I am
vindicated, I have no wish to be around to see it. Also pressures
in Washington have left my run too late, and I am stuck here. This
way, I will not distort the position of the pilgrims. No matter
what the outcome, I am guilty of fraud on a massive scale. It was
all my own idea and all my own guilt. My physical pain, also, has
become too much to bear. I am too tired to fight any longer.”

“Do we tell the
President?” the secret service agents who found him asked each
other. They did not until it was over.

In the control
room in Washington, the visual display offered a countdown to
sunset at Lake Chad, and before it John Cornelius mused on the
ironies of life. Here, in the moment of greatest crisis, he found
one of his few times of peace. In the next few minutes, fate would
decide the future course of his life. One outcome would take him in
the direction of the champion of Thyssen’s cause, and who was to
say that didn’t lead all the way to the White House. The opposite
outcome would see him as the man who stood up to Thyssen, who tried
and failed to save all those unfortunate souls. Where that would
lead was less clear, but he was ready for the months and years of
inquiries and media attention—all of the documents prepared or
shredded, all his speeches to senators or journalists already
written.

Cornelius had
it covered, whatever the outcome, and now, in these last minutes
when there was nothing else to do, he suddenly discovered he had
reached the end of his mission. It had all worked out fine, and
there was nothing else to be done. He sat in the control room,
watching the screens with detached interest. In this one time in
his life when there were no more deceptions, there was no more
pressure, in that blissful moment between the time when what went
before ended, but what followed had not yet begun.

Judy Carrick
watched it all on television. To her it all looked rather like a
country carnival, a barbecue in the bush, with thousands and
thousands of people gathered, playing together, talking, drinking,
eating, reading, doing all the things that gathered people do amid
the random scatter of tents and vehicles and beach umbrellas and
director’s chairs and rugs laid on the ground. She saw that the sun
shone down upon them brilliantly, and if you turned the commentary
off, you would have thought there was nothing wrong, that these
people were happy to be together, enjoying their day. Only the
commentary told her that this was their last day, that these people
were facing up to doom.

“There’s
Daddy,” Lou cried.

“Yes, darling.
That’s Daddy.”

There were
shots from helicopters but as the sun crept toward the horizon, the
camera crews took themselves onto the ground and roamed amongst the
public. There seemed to be every kind of human imaginable, and they
were interviewed by the crews in every language. But then the
reporters hurried away and only stationary, remote cameras
remained. The interviews ceased.

We’ll stay on
the air right to the end, they said, and only those crews who were
already pilgrims remained, sticking it out to the last.

“Are you
afraid?” was the most common interview question. Most answers were
non-committal. Well maybe a little but I wouldn’t be here if I
thought…. Do you really think that…? Oh yes, I really believe.

They stayed and
the sun descended and the tension became unbearable. Judy knew that
when the moment came, the images would cease, the cameras and
communications would go blank, and she couldn’t wait for that. She
went outside where the children were playing shuttlecock on the
lawn. Neighbours, relations, others were watching. They would tell
her what happened.