Nigel realized he must have been concentrating on the Airplane more than he thought, or he would have overheard their chanting. Six men and women were swaying rhythmically, singing monotonously and clapping. Four continued; a man and a woman broke off and came to join the one who had spoken.
Nigel said sourly, “You do keep on, don’t you?”
“Yes, yes,” the man said in a calm, self-assured manner. “We are here today to reach those who have not received the word.”
“I have already.”
“Then you are a believer?”
“Not bloody likely.”
The woman stepped forward. “I am grieved that the word has not manifested itself in the correct light for you. I am sure if you will but listen we can bring you to the Integrated Spirit.”
“Look—”
“Thus we proceed to fullness,” she said grandly. One of the men held up a card on which was circulating, in faxprint,
Universal Law. Absolute Guide. Eternalities. Golden Unity.
“Through the Visitor?” Nigel said with a small smile. If they were going to bother him, at least he could have some fun with them. The Snark was known as the Visitor in the popular media, but luckily, he’d managed to keep his face and name relatively obscure in the foofaraw that followed the Snark’s abrupt departure. Publicly, NASA attributed the whole incident to imponderable alien ways. The story stuck pretty well, because there was no recording of his conversation with Snark—he’d seen to that, by the time he’d left lunar orbit—and Nigel had kept quiet, for a price. The price, of course, was Evers’s head on a gold-trimmed platter, and an impervious position in NASA for Nigel. The official word given the media was that the Visitor made a few obscure comments, complimented mankind on its development, and adopted a tendrils-off policy, lest it interfere disastrously with humanity’s progress. Some people in the scientific community knew the whole story, but there seemed no reason to go public with those tidbits until the moon was thoroughly searched for the Mare Marginis transmitter. Whatever had sent that brief, scrambled signal during his colloquy with the Snark was probably gone, in Nigel’s opinion. Or else they’d gotten a wrong fix on the source location; Mare Marginis was bare of anything artificial. So this New Son now running on about the Visitor— Nigel had tuned him out as soon as the words “transcendent” and “etheric cosmic connection” came into play—knew blessed little of what had gone on. They’d never even caught on to the reason for Alexandria’s resurrection, busy as they were trumpeting a bona fide New Son miracle. Above all else, Nigel did not want them turning her into some grotesque parody of a modern saint, as Our Lady of the Spaceship.
“Do you not agree, sir?”
Nigel, who had been lazily basking in the spring sun, tried to recall what the man had been saying. “Ah, divine origins?”
“It’s really super simple if you look at it right,” the man said.
“How so?”
“That the Visitor
proves
the New Revelation.”
“It predicted the visit, then?”
“Not literally, of course.” The man knitted his brows in concentration. “The Revelation frequently cites the multiplicity of life, however—even though the scientists had given up the idea.”
“Stopped listening for radio signals from other worlds, you mean?”
“Why, yes. Scientists lost faith. The Revelation proved them wrong.”
Nigel wondered idly what they would think when and if they heard the straight story on the Snark. “So life is common?”
“It is the
nectar
of the divine workings. A natural outcome of the universal evolution.”
“And we’re totally natural?”
“We are the fruit of the universe.”
“The Visitor—”
“Was a salute, sir. A real nice gesture. But our evolution hasn’t got
any
thing to do with the Visitor.”
“That’s why you back the social concerns issues and downplay the moon program?”
“The issue is sure tough, but that’s kind of it, yeah.” “Goes along with your two hours extra off each work day, too.”
“Our Order requires us to spend these special hours of the day renewing our
faith
through times of quietness together. Time for
spiritual
tasks.”
“And loafing.”
“We’re real sorry. You must admit faith is more important than—”
“Than getting sandbagged by more efficient economies like Brazil or China or Australia?”
“It is time to put
aside
our gross material past. Not
worship
it. Rise—”
Abruptly the four chanters turned and clapped their hands smartly. Nigel noticed that a flock of tourists was ambling toward them, curious. The New Sons went into their routine.
“Love you not God, sir?” they sang in unison. “Damned un—”
“God is the Father. We love the Father, we were made by his hand,” the melody swung on.
“Fathers don’t make children with their
hands,
” Nigel shouted.
“We love the universe. The universe
is
love!”
“We love you, brother,” the woman sang.
“We love him! We love him!”
They paused. “Can’t we just be good friends?” Nigel said lightly, and turned away.
He slipped into and through the pack of curious tourists and around a tight grove of slender redwoods that bisected the mall. He’d kept matters light, humorous, but if that nit of a New Son followed him…
He saw her, and a hand clutched at his heart. He froze in midstride, studying her jawline, the same sleek hair, pert curved nose, the slight upward turn of the lip—and then she tilted her head to peer into a shop window and the illusion died: she was not Alexandria. He had seen her this way five times now, mirrored in the face of a stranger in a crowd. And it was the only way he would see those features again other than in the frozen memory of photographs. If they had had children it might have seemed different; they would carry some echo of her. Children, yes; sometimes they were only a parody of their parents, but at least they formed some fleeting connection, some bridge across time.
Nigel shook himself and walked on.
He tried to see remnants of the Telegraph he knew. All the world was coming to be like this, new and strange and adrift, somehow, from its past. Perhaps people were trying to forget the crisis years. They harked back to the ’70s and ’80s of the last century and skipped over the stinging memories of the ’00s and ’10s. And, for the other side of the coin, the New Sons, another kind of turning away from reality. Ah, well, the Sons bit had to be a passing phase; the pendulum had to swing. They’d been around for decades, after all.
And so, he thought, thrusting his hands into his pockets and walking faster, had he. Maybe Ichino was right, with his talk of retirement. Nigel knew he probably shouldn’t let himself be so influenced by another’s thinking—Ichino was nine years older, after all, with a different perspective—but the two of them had spent so much time together these last years, after the Snark business. They’d worked together on elaborate computer codes, trying to get a response from the retreating Snark. Long after NASA had given up they’d continued, Nigel certain that if Snark knew it was talking to him personally it might open up, answer. But hopes faded, time blurred…
These moods had come on him more often of late, memories snagging in the brain and refusing to let go. He was damned if he was going to start living in the past, yet in the present he’d lost all momentum. He was drifting, he knew. Even the most intense moments—Icarus, the last weeks with Alexandria, the scorched days of possession in the desert—blurred. It was no use whatever to say: Remember the consuming strangeness, the heady experience. Because those dead years dwindled, the walls that encased them thinned and let in a pale light from the present. Whatever he’d sought became misty.
He shrugged, shrouded in his thoughts. As he was turning a corner something caught his eye.
The sky flickered. He looked north. Above the University buildings and the Berkeley hills a dull yellowish glow seeped through a stacked cloud formation, as though something vastly brighter were illuminating them from behind. Nigel stopped and studied it. In a moment the effect faded. The phenomenon was silent and seemed to possess a kind of ponderous swelling pressure; he felt a sense of unease. He studied the sky. There was nothing else unusual, only a flat vacant blue. A crescent moon hung in the haze and smog above San Francisco.
Commercial satellite 64A, nicknamed High Smelter, happened to see it first. Its orbit, 314 kilometers up, took it over the Pacific north woods. From this height—a mere hair’s width, on an astronomical scale—the earth is a swirl of white clouds, masking mottled brown continents and twinkling oceans. There are no traces of man. No checkerboard farmlands, no highways or cities. They are invisible on this scale.
But the core fuser crew on duty in High Smelter saw the orange egg born in the woods quite clearly. It began as a fat, bright flare. The mottled egg billowed up and out, a scarlet searing wall that boiled away the forest. The blister swelled, orange cooling to red. Cloud decks evaporated before it. The egg fattened into a sphere and at last the chilling signature appeared: a mushroom, vast and smoky. Flames licked at his base. A deep rumble rolled over the forest. On the ground, animals fled and men turned to stare, unbelieving.
The scene played itself out for her again. That afternoon she and Toshi had played
sanshi,
as usual, then quick showers and a drink in a small café nearby. But this time Alicia was waiting for them in the bar and as Nikka looked on she and Toshi unraveled their story of deception, intrigue, snickering assignations in friends’ apartments, all covered with a thin veneer of professed love, it’s-all-for-the-best-Nikka, we’re-all-adults-here, it’s not really the sexual thing at all, you understand, and on and on and on. She came home afterward and carefully, neatly put away her
sanshi
racket and clothes. She took another shower. She drank something warm and alcoholic, she couldn’t remember quite what. Then she thought she would lie down for a moment and she remembered well the sensation of falling onto the bed, of an absolute limitless time involved in the downward flowing toward it, of descending, of seeming to take forever. The falling, that was how she remembered Toshi. That was the end of it, the injured center of the self plunging down to absolute dark oblivion. She had stayed there three days, never getting out even for food or the doorbell or the telephone, sure she was sick, sure she was dying, hating herself for never saying anything in the bar, always being silent and pleasant and smiling. Nodding when they said it all, nodding, understanding, and all the time falling helplessly backward into that swirling black, falling—
“Alphonsus calling Nikka Amajhi. Alphonsus…” Slowly she came out of it. The cobwebs of memory faded. She shook her head. Her leg throbbed and she moved it reflexively, which made it hurt more. She looked down at it and saw a sheared strut jammed against her thigh. The porous elastic mesh of the skinsuit was intact, though, so she probably only had a bad bruise. She fumbled—and the radio monitoring light went on with a reassuring glow.
“Nikka here. I’m down at”—she read the coordinates—“from unknown causes. Something blew the back off my sled.”
“Injuries?”
“Don’t think so.”
“We got your Mayday some minutes ago. There’s no sled near there, but another survey craft has just changed course to reach you. It’s pretty close and I think it can be there in a short while.”
Nikka noticed something on the dash and suddenly froze. “Hold on. I’m checking something.” She worked quickly and silently for several minutes, unbuckled herself from the pilot’s couch and awkwardly, favoring her leg, climbed halfway down the sled to check connections. In a few moments more she was back in the couch.
“I hope that survey craft hurries up.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“I just checked my oxygen reserve. I have about fifty-six minutes.”
“Is that your emergency bottle? What happened to the rest?”
“It wasn’t a very soft touchdown. My wheels blew and the front end pranged.”
“Better check the front.” The voice from Alphonsus had suddenly acquired an edge.
She got down, taking the general purpose tool with her, and worked on the front of the sled for several moments. It was a mass of twisted metal and wire. Nikka could slip her fingers to within a foot of the oxygen bottles there, but no further. Her skinsuit gave her good manual dexterity and she knew she could probably worm a few fingers closer to one of the bottles, but at that angle she still could not remove the seal. Most of the bottles had ruptured on impact but two still might have positive pressure. For several more moments she pried at the front of the sled, rested a moment and then tried again. Nothing moved.
“Alphonsus.”
“Right. One oh five should be there within ten minutes.”
“Good, I’ll need it. I was running on direct air lines from the bottle in front. The line vacced just after landing—the cylinder I was using ruptured. I guess I blacked out. My console switched my line to the emergency bottle behind the couch and I’m running on that. The forward bottles are pinned in by tubing and the bumper. The nose is completely folded back over.” Nikka looked up at the sky. “I should be able to
see
that—”