The War of Immensities (83 page)

Fabrini, the
customary Uzi tucked under his arm, stood on a rock, the only high
ground for miles around. Away in the distance on the barren plain,
he saw what might have been a dust storm. Through binoculars, he
studied the cloud. There was no doubt about it—it was a large force
of men moving toward them and somehow he could see plainly their
menacing intent. The raiders, closing in for the kill. He glanced
toward the sun, as it inched toward the horizon. In less than an
hour after dark they would be upon these helpless people—heavily
armed and with murderous intent.

He hurried down
from the rock to where he had parked his jeep. On the radio, he
spoke to Captain Maynard, and reported what he had seen.

“We need to get
helicopter out there. We must see what they are up to. It don’t
look no good to me.”

Captain Maynard
smiled thinly as he listened to Fabrini’s garbled report. “All
choppers are grounded, Mr. Fabrini. And you better get yourself
back here right away.”

He was
appreciative of Fabrini’s warning, but really it only allowed him
to feel more secure. When the choppers had been flying earlier,
they had already reported the advancing ground-force, and Fabrini
only assured him that they would not arrive in time.

In time for
what? He had his troops deployed, but Thyssen had instructed him to
take no action against them.

“Let them
come,” Thyssen smiled. “They’re within the zone. They add to our
strength. The more the merrier.”

Maynard shook
his head. It was rare enough that an enemy invasion was welcomed.
Strange times indeed. His own troops were positioned and ready if
needed, but by the minute Maynard was becoming surer that they
would not be.

When the
screens dropped out to static, it hit Glen Palenski like a physical
blow. He had expected it, of course, but that didn’t make it shock
him any less. There in the final frame was Thyssen and the others,
positioned on a slight hillock at the centre of their magic city,
smiling and happy, and Glen wanted more than anything to be with
them. It didn’t matter what happened now, whether they lived or
died. He knew he should have been there, and that was all.

Because he had
to say something, do something, he turned to the operator nearest
him and asked: “How long before transmission can be restored?” He
asked not for the information—he ready knew that—but out of
anxiety, and out of an even more desperate need to show that
anxiety—to show he cared, to show he was still human, to himself if
no-one else.

“Just as soon
as we can get a working camera in there. All those in the zone had
burned out circuits and are stuffed. The most likely is camera H3.
That one. They could be to the edge of the camp within a few
minutes. They’ll overfly it and… we’ll…”

But the
operator didn’t want to say what they would see and what they would
not see. Nothing, everything, it no longer mattered. The game was
played out, and Thyssen had won, whatever happened from here. And
Glen knew he was condemned to the role of Judas for eternity.

Alone in a
roomful of advisers, President Grayson sat on a couch in the oval
office, the First Lady at his side, with his head in his hands
throughout the entire period of the transmission blackout. At one
point, a junior officer, in the next room, could be heard to
murmur—”Eleven minutes to estimated restoration of signal…” One of
the white house staffers went to tell him to be silent.

Brian Carrick
sat with the others on the slight rise, comfortable in a director’s
chair, a bundle of nerves in this place—the focal point—where the
anxiety was supposed to end. In a few minutes, they would know and
it was the knowledge of that which contented him—the outcome was
less important. This would be the beginning of the war of
immensities, as Thyssen had termed it. The conflict of mind and
matter. If they survived, it would all be plain, not just Thyssen’s
plan but the whole thing—the very purpose of human existence. It
would be a journey to the end of the universe and when they arrived
they would be there to stop it from happening. Simple as that. And
the journey began here, now, this coming minute.

And now that he
knew where he was going, Brian was anxious to get underway. Of
course, another possibility was that he might be dead, but who
could care about that? For sure he wouldn’t be caring about star
warriors nor anything else. All that mattered was that they had got
here and it was ready to happen. What followed was simply
formality.

Andromeda
Starlight stood on the mound with her arms uplifted to the
horizontal, her great robe billowing even in this slight breeze.
Now that she was here, she realised it was her fulfilment. The vast
sea of faces before her, to the horizon in every direction, was
breathtaking to see, and she responded. Not just to her own
supporters, those she had brought so far, but to all of them. This
would be the last time, whatever happened. Never again would she
have so massive an audience, and she relished it. This was what
mattered, where it had all been leading, and tomorrow—if there was
a tomorrow—there would be a new dream to pursue, perhaps a new
image to evolve. She was beginning to weary of being Gaia anyway.
She had played the role to the hilt, to its ultimate point. Now it
was time to move on. But this final performance would be the one to
remember, for all time to come. And she sang not a word to the
biggest audience anyone had ever experienced. All she needed to be
was there, and there she was in all her glory.

In the end,
Lorna, who had been the eyes through which the world saw these
events, could not look. She couldn’t stand lest she would fall and
there was nowhere to sit, so in the end she knelt beside Thyssen’s
legs and rested her face in his lap. His great hand closed about
her face, caressed her cheek and she felt safe, felt fulfilled,
felt it had all been worth it.

Often she had
reflected on how far she had come these recent months—from humble
Kiwi receptionist-typist to global media superstar and it
astonished her and made her proud beyond all reason but somehow it
all seemed natural to her as well, as if it would have happened
anyway. But now she knew that was not the real journey she had
taken, that it was all just life and could be over in a few minutes
and she was terrified.

Worst was to
think that she didn’t need to be here. She was the one pilgrim who
had already been cured and who could say what effect a third dose
would have on her. But all attempts to get rid of her had
failed—this was where she belonged. If it killed her, if it made
her a pilgrim again, if it did some other horrible thing to her, it
didn’t matter. This was where she belonged. Everyone else had come
from somewhere else to be here—she was at the centre of her world.
She wrapped her arms around Thyssen’s legs and hung on with
everything she had.

Thyssen was
calm. The moment was at hand. There would be the irrevocable
posterity, of course, but he didn’t care so much about that. In a
few seconds, he would be the man who saved the planet, or else the
madman who led thirteen million people to their deaths. But really,
in the end it didn’t make a lot of difference. They could say what
they would—all Thyssen really wanted to know was if he was right,
if his theory would be vindicated by the facts. For that was the
horrible truth—he had never really believed it. All the way as he
swept events along before him, he had never completely believed it.
In a continual state of doubt, he went forward because forward
seemed the only way he could go. But he never believed.

Now, finally,
one way or the other, the agony of doubt would end, and he would be
at rest.

There was a
blinding, devastating flash, an earth swallowing, planet bursting,
mind scattering crunch, and then silence.

People lie
everywhere. All over the Plain of Confrontation, bodies are strewn.
It is like the outcome of a primitive battle—they lie every which
way, beside each other, across each other, curled in the foetal
position, stretched out, twisted. Every way you look there are more
and more of them, all still and silent. No primitive battle was
ever so great as this.

On for mile
after mile, a great carpet of humanity covers the earth, away in
all directions to the horizon. Like leaves fallen from the trees in
autumn, like the sea weed thrown up along the beach, like the rows
and rows of derelict cars in an eternal junkyard. Passing over them
for mile upon mile, it is possible, just for a moment, to
understand exactly how populous this planet was, to see so many
people, from all nations, in all attires, of every age and every
kind, all strewn like the litter of civilisation upon the
earth.

The wind blows
amongst them, flapping this garment, swirling some dust, then
darting away as if disturbed by the lack of animation. The sky
breathes upon them, as if expecting them to respond as they always
have, but not now. Nothing happens.

And still the
sea of bodies, reminiscent of those forests flattened by the
volcanoes that have roared and thundered in the past. But no
volcano roars. There is only the gentle breeze, and the
stillness.

The minutes
pass, like an eternity and perhaps it is. Perhaps all existence
lies between this moment and the next, in the hiatus of existence
that has befallen humanity—brave, foolish, inadequate humanity, a
species still in its childhood, cut off from all time and memory.
They came from nowhere, for no reason, and set out to stamp their
mark on the universe but now were struck down, devastated, dashed
on the very earth upon which they were forged.

Minutes pass
elsewhere, here there is no time. This death of multitudes is
beyond conception, beyond measure, beyond time. The sun has now
sunk completely below the horizon and the darkness begins to cast a
forbidding shadow over the scene. In the half light, child lies
with its arm over their still parent, lover face to face with
lover, the solitary within the aura of strangers, all still
and…

Then there is a
voice, but it is a radio voice, that of Professor Harrington in
some distant safe location, fading in and becoming louder, a voice
over as we fly across the ocean of bodies and tents and belongings,
motionless but for the swirling dust and the wind…

“So they came
with their hopes and dreams, as so many had come before them—the
Seventh Day Adventists, the Children of Allah, and all those other
credulous hordes all down through history, to the chosen place at
the chosen time, as spoken by the words of their so-called
prophets, to meet their maker, to watch the apocalypse… So too came
the millions of the children of the false prophet Harley Thyssen,
to gather at the end of the world at the place the fire and
brimstone would burst forth, where the planet-eating monster of
Thyssen’s insane nightmares would show its face to them. So they
came in their pathetic hopes, like some many before and yet more
numerous than all the others put together, to the Plain of
Confrontation, in the heat beside the muddy waters of Lake Chad.
They came and they waited and the moment of destiny arrived, with
the setting of the sun, as their false prophet had told them. They
lifted their eyes to heaven, and waited for this the greatest of
all miracles, the gullible in their last moment of belief. And what
happened, as the moment of judgment passed. Nothing happened.

Nothing
happened at all. The moment passed, the sun set on the plain of
Chad, and not one thing moved. All around the world, there was not
a flicker on the seismographs. There were no great fires in the
skies. The earth did not crack with fire and lava, nor did the face
of doom emerge from its subterranean lair. Nothing happened.

And they, like
all the gulled masses before them, this time knew the truth, that
they had been deceived, that they had come all that way and
gathered for nothing. They saw only the falsity of their prophet
and knew only the lies they had been told…

Then,
Harrington’s voice is cut off. Somewhere, there is a cry. Of a
bird, perhaps. No, it extends. A continuous, unabating cry that few
animals can maintain. Where is it coming from? Where amongst all
this scattered, discarded flesh. This desert of human flesh…
There.

It is a child,
a toddler, sex indeterminate, standing in the wind and the dimness,
clutching its mother’s arm.

Then others,
far across the field of bodies, other older children sit quietly,
or play, smiling at each other. Here a man raises himself on his
elbows, shakes the dust from his face, and sits up, looking around.
There an elderly couple reach out and hug one another. The mother
sits up as if summoned, to comfort her crying child.

And now there
are people awakening everywhere, all looking around, puzzled,
smiling, greeting one another. They are standing, walking, moving
to help those still sleeping, always looking around and
wondering.

On the hillock
at the centre, Lorna was the first awake. She remained with her
head resting on Harley’s thighs, but her eyes were open and there
was a smile on her lips. Then Harley’s hand moved to enclose her
cheek and run through her hair.

Andromeda
Starlight lifted herself, raising herself to her full height,
gazing away across the multitude where hundreds of those rose as
she did. She lifted her arms and they raised theirs, and a mighty
roar of jubilation began to rise from their multitudinous
throats...

Brian Carrick
shook his head to clear it, and then looked toward Thyssen, his
grin firmly fixed on his face. Thyssen pretended not to notice him.
Brian reached and punched the old man playfully on the shoulder,
but Thyssen rocked exaggeratedly from the blow, and could not avoid
the slight flicker of a smile on his face.