The Eye of God (42 page)

“How long?”

“I was diagnosed three months ago.”

She stared up at him, showing him that wasn’t the question she was asking. “How long?” she repeated.

“I have another two, maybe three months.”

Hearing the truth was both a relief and a terror. After so long of not knowing, she wanted the truth,
needed
the truth, to be able to put a name to her fear. But now that it was in the open, she could not shield herself with false hope.

Tears rose to her eyes.

He reached and wiped them away. “No tears. That’s why I didn’t want anyone to know. I’ve had a good run.”

“You could have told me.”

“I needed . . .” He sighed again. “I needed this to be my own for a while.”

He shook his head, plainly disappointed he couldn’t explain it better.

But Rachel understood, squeezing his knee. He had to come to terms with his own mortality, its inevitability, before sharing that truth with others.

He then went and gave her more details. Like most pancreatic cancers, his disease was silent, asymptomatic. By the time he felt ill, initially dismissing it as indigestion, it was too late. The cancer had metastasized throughout his abdomen and into his lungs. He opted for palliative treatment only, drugs to stave off the worst of the pain.

“The small blessing,” he said, finding a silver lining amid the darkness, “is that I can still be vital until near the very end.”

Rachel swallowed the lump in her throat, suddenly so very glad she had not restricted him from this trip, one that was likely to be his last.

“I’ll be there for you,” she promised.

“And that’s fine, but don’t forget to live yourself.” He waved a hand along his body. “This is only temporary, a small gift that hopefully leads to a greater glory. But do not waste that gift, do not set it on a shelf for some future use; grab it with both hands and live it now, live it every day.”

She rested her cheek on his lap, shoulders shaking, losing her struggle against her grief.

He allowed it now. He placed a hand atop her head and spoke softly.

“I love you, Rachel. You are my daughter. You’ve always been that to me. I cherish that I got to share my life with you.”

She hugged his legs—not wanting to ever let go, but knowing she must soon.

I love you, too.

3:19
A
.
M
.

Seichan had an arm over her eyes as she lay in bed, holding her own tears in check. She had heard everything below. Her room was directly above the communal space. Every whisper rose to her, amplified by the acoustics of the wooden echo chamber that was this inn.

She had not meant to eavesdrop, but their voices had woken her.

She heard the love in those few words of the priest.

You are my daughter
.

The truth cut her to the core—that although Vigor certainly was not Rachel’s father, the two had forged a family despite it.

As she had listened, she had pictured her mother’s face, now that of a stranger, the two of them separated by a gulf of time and tragedy. Rather than trying to renew their roles as mother and daughter, could they forge something new, to begin again as two strangers who shared a lost dream of another time? Could they take those faded embers and stoke something anew?

Seichan felt a flicker of hope, of possibility.

She rolled to her feet, knowing she would not be able to sleep.

Vigor’s advice also stayed with her.

. . .
do not waste that gift
,
do not set it on a shelf for some future use; grab it with both hands and live it now . . .

She climbed to her feet and slipped a loose shirt over her naked body. On bare feet, she moved silently from her room and down the chilly hall. She found his door unlocked and slipped into the warmer darkness inside.

A few embers glowed in the room’s tiny hearth.

She stepped to his bed, a single like in her room, covered with a thick quilt and soft down pillows. Pulling back a corner, she slipped inside, sliding along his naked hard body, only now waking him.

He reacted suddenly, startled, a hand grasping her forearm in iron fingers, squeezing hard enough to bruise. Recognition softened his grip, but he didn’t let go. His eyes reflected the hearth’s glow.

“Sei—?”

She cut him off with a finger to his lips. She was done with talking, with trying to put into words what she felt, what he felt.

“What are—?”

She replaced her finger with her lips and answered his question.

Living
.

26

November 20, 4:04
A
.
M
. JST

Airborne over the Pacific

Jada jerked her head up as the jet hit an air pocket. Her chin had been resting on her chest, her laptop open before her. She had drifted off as she worked, waiting for some data to collate.

“Push your seat back and get some real sleep,” Duncan recommended, sitting next to her. “Like Monk.”

He thumbed back to the third occupant of the jet’s leather-appointed cabin, who was snoring in a steady drone to match the plane’s engine.

“I wasn’t sleeping,” she scolded, covering a yawn with a fist. “Just thinking.”

“Really?” Duncan lifted his arm, revealing Jada’s other hand clasped to his. “Then may I ask what you were
thinking
about?”

Her face flushed with heat as she jerked her hand back. “Sorry about that.”

He smiled. “I didn’t mind.”

Embarrassed, she glanced out the window and saw a sweep of clouds and water under them. The clock on her laptop said they had been in flight for a little under three hours.

“We just passed Japan,” Duncan said. “Another five hours should have us landing in California.”

As she stared around the cabin, she remembered another plane, another luxury jet. She had begun this adventure in Los Angeles, flown to D.C., then off to Kazakhstan and Mongolia, and now she was headed back to where it all started.

A full circle of the globe.

All in an attempt to save it.

She hoped it wasn’t her farewell tour. If what Duncan saw through the Eye was real, then the entire planet was at risk.

Her eyes drifted to the box on the table. Before departing Ulan Bator, she had sealed the Eye in a makeshift Faraday cage, a box wrapped in copper wiring, to insulate its electromagnetic radiation from interfering with the jet’s electronics. Passing his hands over the box, Duncan had confirmed that her efforts had indeed bottled up the worst of the radiation. But such a cage would have no effect on the Eye’s larger quantum effect.

That was beyond any prison of copper wire.

Noting her attention, Duncan asked, “So why am I the only one who could see the destruction through that Eye?”

Glad for the distraction, she shrugged. “You must be sensitive to whatever quantum effect the Eye manifests. That makes me believe that what happened to the Eye also affected the glass lens of the satellite’s camera, allowing its digital image sensor to record that peek into the near future as light passed through that altered lens.”

“And what about me?”

“As I mentioned before, human consciousness lies in the quantum field. For some reason, you’re more attuned to the quantum changes in the Eye. Whether because you
made
yourself that way with those magnets in your fingertips . . . or because you’re extrasensitive.”

“Like St. Thomas with his cross.”

“Possibly, but I’m not going to go around calling you St. Duncan.”

“Are you sure? I sort of like the sound of that.”

A small alarm chimed on her laptop, as a new folder popped onto her desktop screen. It was the latest update of data from the SMC, sent via satellite.

Finally . . .

“Back to work?” Duncan asked.

“There’s something I want to check.”

Tapping open the folder, she read through the documents. She planned on building a graph of the comet’s path, tracking its corona of dark energy. Something continued to nag at her, and she hoped more information would jar loose whatever was troubling her.

She began collating the pertinent information and plugging it into a graphing program. She also wanted to compare the latest statistics and numbers to her original equations explaining the nature of dark energy. Her equations beautifully married her theory concerning the source of dark energy—the collapse of virtual particles in the quantum foam of the universe—to the gravitational forces it created. She knew that was the crux of the problem at hand. She could summarize it in one word.

Attraction
.

The virtual particles were drawn to each other, and the resulting energy of that annihilation was what imbued
mass
with the fundamental force of
gravity
. It was the fuel of weak and strong nuclear forces that drew together electrons, protons, and neutrons to form atoms. It was what made moons circle planets, solar systems churn, and galaxies spin.

As she worked, she began to note errors in the SMC’s equations, assumptions the head physicist had made that were not supported by this latest set of data. She began to work faster, sleep shedding off her shoulders. With growing horror, the truth began to materialize before her mind’s eye.

I have to be wrong . . . I must be.

Her fingers began furiously tapping, knowing a way to double-check.

“What’s wrong?” Duncan asked.

She wanted to voice it aloud, to share it, but she feared doing so would somehow make it more real.

“Jada?”

She finally folded. “The physicist back at the SMC, the one who did the initial estimates determining when we’d cross the point of no return . . . he made a mistake.”

“Are you sure?” Duncan looked at his watch. “He said we had sixteen hours. Which still leaves us about another nine hours.”

“He was wrong. He was basing his extrapolations on the fact that the comet’s gravitational anomalies were increasing in proportion to its approach toward the earth.”

“And he was wrong about that?”

“No, that part was right.” She tapped to bring up the graph she had been compiling earlier. “Here you can see the comet’s corona of dark energy being pulled earthward as it swings nearer, growing an ever longer reach.

Jada continued, “Likewise, the curve of space-time around the earth is responding to that gravitational effect. That curvature is bending
outward,
the two drawing together, slowly creating that funnel down which that barrage of asteroids will tumble.”

“So if the physicist is right, what’s the problem?”

“He made an error, and I believe the new data supports it.”

“What error?”

“He assumed the growth of the gravitational effect was
geometric,
growing at a set incremental rate. But I don’t think it is. I think it’s increasing at an
exponential
rate.” She turned to him. “In other words, much faster.”

“How much faster?”

“I want to run the data through my equations to be certain, but right now I would say we have only
five hours
until an asteroid strike is inevitable. Not nine.”

“That’s almost half our remaining time.” Duncan leaned back into his seat, immediately understanding the problem. “We’ll be lucky to be touching down in L.A. by then.”

“And considering our past couple of days, I wouldn’t count on luck.”

4:14
A
.
M
.

What the hell . . .

Duncan sat stunned.

Jada urged him to remain calm until she could confirm her estimates. To accomplish that, she was dumping data into an analysis program she had designed based on her equations.

As he waited, Duncan rubbed his temples with his fingers. “Why did that satellite have to crash in the middle of Mongolia of all places? Why not in freakin’ Iowa? We’re losing precious hours flying halfway around the globe.”

Jada’s fingers froze over the keyboard.

“What?” he asked.

“That’s it . . .
that’s
what was bugging me. I’ve been such a fool.” She closed her eyes. “It’s always been about
attraction
.”

“What do you mean?”

She pointed again to the graph showing the comet’s corona of energy being pulled toward the earth. “The physicist at the SMC theorized that there was something on the planet that the comet’s energy was responding to. And I agree.”

“You said before that you believed it might be the cross,” Duncan said. “Because it was sculpted out of a piece of that comet when it last appeared.”

“Exactly. The two—the comet and the cross—are most likely quantumly entangled and drawn to each other, at least energetically. I was hoping that if the cross was ever found, that by studying its energy—or even the energy of the Eye—I might find a way to
break
that entanglement.”