The War of Immensities (24 page)

He established
himself in King’s Cross in Sydney where he knew all the weirdest
and most extreme people lived. There he took a flat from which he
could range out, trying everything, doing everything. Money was no
problem. He had sold off his house and other interests in the
States, and of course there was the insurance…

At first Lorna
Simmons, that silly girl, tagged along with him rather like a stray
dog, but he was already bored with her. She seemed to be taking the
relationship at rather a slower pace than he, and was anyway a very
conventional girl. She wanted monogamy without the slightest regard
for the fact that he was no longer a family man. He had placed
pictures of his dead wife and children everywhere for her to
see.

“You have to
get over it,” she told him.

Insensitive
little bitch, seeking domestic attachments in a purely sexual
relationship.

“I’ve got over
it,” he answered. It wasn’t really true. He had never for a moment
mourned them. It was rather that he had died with them, and
reawakened in a new dimension, a new life, from which they were
absent. The universe they belonged to went out of existence. He
hardly even remembered them, and only thought about them in
unguarded moments.

But Lorna was
sure he needed to grieve, and that they needed to be replaced. Her
persona as a sexual adventuress was a lie. One day she was gone and
he hardly even noticed. His daily regime was by then completely
established and he was absorbed in it. He needed to prepare himself
for what was to come in every way.

Each morning he
rose and went to the gym for a three hour workout. He had a map of
his body and worked every muscle systematically, discussing himself
with the trainers to the most intimate detail. He took himself to
the speedway where, he learned, you could pay crews to allow you to
take the cars out for training runs. He joined a parachute club and
jumped every Sunday. On Mondays he sought out a new peak to scale
up and abseil down. On Tuesdays he went sailing on the harbour in
every kind of craft in every sort of conditions. On Wednesdays he
ran over places—The Razorback and all sorts of rugged places in the
Blue Mountains. Thursdays he relaxed with a bit of bungy-jumping
from increasingly high places. Friday was diving day, at places
further and further up the coast. Saturday he liked to join teams
of those people who enjoyed running rapids down through steep
chasms with their broiling cascades.

He found a
rugby team he could train with on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and
although they pleaded, he never turned up on Saturday for the
game—there was a limit. It made him feel cowardly for all that
body-armour he had worn when he played American football in his
youth.

His diet never
varied and every calorie and vitamin was carefully counted. Once
Lorna was discarded, he soon attracted fit young women to test out
his sexual skills. His body grew hard and spectacular and he
allowed them to admire it. They traced their fingers along his
scars and asked about them. He told them he was injured in various
war zones—no one doubted it. He didn’t forget his brain—there was a
forced two hours every day at the library, reading on the latest
scientific and technical subjects, and current US and European
politics and social conditions in Third World countries.

He needed to
become the perfect man in body and mind, or as near to it as he
could humanly manage. If he was participating in the next great
step in the chain of evolution, he wanted to give it the best
possible circumstances in which to flourish.

“You’re crazy,
Kevin,” Lorna had told him, sometime shortly before she left.
“You’re absurdly self-obsessive.”

So he told her
his plan.

“You’re just
running away from your grief,” she deduced as a result.

It was
disappointing, but still he told her what he believed.

“Is that all
you think this is,” she said, shaking her head sadly. “That this is
just evolution in action.”

“It’s all
around us, all the time.”

“And we are
some sort of superior humans in development?” she chided.

“It has to
happen sooner or later. And you have to admit...”

“There was a
bloke called Adolf with similar delusions, Kevin. They thought they
were the Master Race but they were really just stodgy old
Germans.”

“Not Master
Race, Lorna. Master Species.”

“The result
could be the same. The Germans needed to prove their superiority.
They needed to conquer the world and kill off the competition.
Really, they were insecure and afraid.”

“Forget about
goddamned Germans,” Kevin muttered grimly, sorry he’d started
this.“A superior breed of human wouldn’t have to prove a thing.
They wouldn’t need to conquer the goddamned world. They would have
nothing to fear. They would take control simply because they were
best people for the job. Just a simple natural progression.”

Lorna stood her
ground, the flaming hair a match for the fire in her eyes.

“You aren’t
taking me seriously, Lorna. I knew you wouldn’t.”

“I don’t have
anything to prove, Kevin. I don’t need to feel superior to anyone.
I’m afraid your argument runs up its own arsehole.”

Come to think
of it, that was the last time he saw her before she left.

It was the most
amazing thing she had ever seen. To witness the initial eruption of
Ruapehu was a remarkable achievement, but the stygian vista that
lay stretched out before her now was almost impossible to grasp.
Yet grasp it she must. She sat on a boulder on the top of a hill
that had no name, her lap-top perched on her knee as she tried to
describe the scene to Glen which she would soon dispatch by email,
if she could find somewhere in this godforsaken place to plug in
her modem.

She was rugged
up like an Arctic explorer from behind where a chill wind bit into
her but in front she had unbuttoned her parka and jacket and
dragged the scarf from her face and neck. The effect was like
sitting too close to a fire while a fan blew iced air on your back,
goosebumps behind, sweat bubbling at the front and maybe blisters
too. Yet that fire was more than three kilometres away.

The valley
below was a vision of hell, mostly in varying shades of black. Here
was a volcano without a mountain—a rare sight indeed. The lava had
spread freely across the valley floor and solidified while still in
the form of giant waves such that it reminded her of the lake that
had once occupied this place in a moment frozen in time. The actual
lake—Oz Baykal, once five hundred kilometres in length although
somewhat shorter now—was visible on the horizon, the water black as
crude oil, hazy with a fog that was really seething steam. To left
and right in the distance, low mountains rose in orderly fashion,
their tops and slopes still green with tundra—the blight that had
destroyed the valley had not quite reached that far.

But the valley
was an astonishing scene. The waves of basalt lava with the crests
running in long rows seemed to have polished sections but that was
just where the heat had melted it in the form of hot mud.
Everywhere, pockets of red glowed but mostly it had encrusted
except in three main sections. Each of these were wide bands of
lava, flowing outward in fine red and orange ribbons while down the
middle, straight as a rail, was a line of fire bursting upward,
looking rather like the spines along the back of a dinosaur. The
fire seethed up out of the fissure, belching white smoke into the
sky which mostly dissipated as the wind carried it off toward the
mountains. The crest of each black wave, she knew, was itself a
long, straight fissure, newly sealed over as the fire
extinguished.

It wasn’t
Mongolia at all. The border of that country lay about one hundred
kilometres to the south and west, but the Buryat people who
inhabited this region of the former Soviet Empire were culturally
Mongolians. There was once a sizeable town down there
somewhere—Slyudysanka on the banks of the southern end of the
lake—now not a trace of it remained and the lake had moved ten
kilometres away. Through here, the Trans-Siberian railway had
passed—now they were already laying new track on the other side of
the ridge for it would be a decade or more before the ground here
would once more be hard enough to bear the weight of a train.

It was a
nightmare scene of destruction, yet there was creation too. The
lava that filled the valley would become the finest soil in the
world in a few decades, once it cooled and eroded. In total, the
lava bed stretched two kilometres across and ten kilometres long,
dotted by fire-breathing fissures all the way.

The US
Geological Survey sent a team of twenty in, of which she pretended
to be a part. She knew this was not a country where it was wise to
play at deception. The team busied themselves, setting up to study
the effects, and this data Glen would be able to freely access. If
she doubted why she was there, Harley made sure such doubt was
quickly eliminated.

Bloody Harley.
What the hell was he up to? The story made news everywhere, mostly
as a novelty item. But Harley offered quotes and interviews and
even, holy Moses, made predictions. There will be a new eruption on
the 19th of May, give or take a day. Very brave, his colleagues
declared. There were about 1500 eruptions on Earth annually, but
usually an average of only eight big eruptions each year and they
had already had four, before May began. Somewhere in the Indian
Ocean or thereabouts, Harley had boldly told the media, although
that, unlike his date, was just a guess. He really was an
embarrassing man to work for.

But she knew
his madness. Obviously, he had made no impression in his mission to
Washington and so went public to scare them into funding him. The
prediction closed their options—he was the top expert in the world
and they could not afford to ignore him, no matter how silly he
sounded. And it did explain the lemmings of Gran Canaria.

She was being
roasted alive, sitting there, and so turned away, walked away,
immediately pulling her warm clothing about her. Off to follow
Harley’s instructions and seek out the Red Cross folk and ask about
sleepers, as they had come to be called. No one knew anything, but
that was typical of this place.

“People who
were in a coma for eight days and then recovered completely?”

The Red Cross
people were frantically busy as always and in no mood for idiotic
questions, but she had persisted. There were none that anyone knew
of. But it was hard to tell.

“Half the
population of the region have simply left, and will never return,”
the Portuguese administrator told her. “And those that intend to
stay have gone to the mountains until things quieten down. There’s
over five hundred people missing for those reasons and most will
stay that way.”

“But these
would have been unconscious for the first eight days.”

“It was three
weeks before they let us in,” the man said helplessly.

He promised he
would let her know if he learned anything. But outside, a Turkish
nurse caught up with her.

“It’s not
official but some of the locals think there has been a camp
established in the next valley and a lot of people were taken there
under guard. But no one seems to know if it’s true.”

“How many
people?”

“Two hundred
maybe. But no one knows.”

Harley, she
knew, hated it most when people didn’t know things.

`What made him
think of the Indian Ocean?’ she typed to Glen.

`Sequential by
oceans was your theory, remember?’ Glen replied.

`You got any
idea how far I am from an ocean right now?’

`That’s what
you get for making bold predictions.’

`I’m not sure
whether I want Harley to be right or wrong.’

`Harley’s
always right, even when he’s wrong.’

Psychiatrists
were a breed apart—they came from another planet. They seemed like
pleasant friendly people but they were not—they were very strange.
To begin with, they seemed to listen to what you said—not a common
human trait in most circumstances. And, odder still, they always
let you finish what you were saying without interrupting, which
never happened when real humans conversed.

But he was
getting used to it. The important thing, he knew from the outset,
was to avoid trying to right the wrong that had brought him here.
He raged no rage, put up no fight, tried to remain as docile as
possible. The various shrinks talked to him and he chatted as
lightly as he could, which wasn’t easy when the interlocutor didn’t
reply in accordance with whatever you said. Instead, they nodded
thoughtfully and asked: `Yes, and how do you feel about that,
Brian?’ or, if he had already told them how he felt, said, `that’s
interesting, go on’. It was really like a monologue of his entire
life and he rather enjoyed being able to talk about himself. It was
a pity, though, that the psychiatrists didn’t know how to talk
back. Once they taught computers to talk, nothing would be quite so
easy to replace.

Of course, the
one thing he never mentioned was the Shastri Effect and Professor
Thyssen. Had he done so, he knew there would have been no hope of
proving himself sane and getting out of here.

But otherwise,
he was polite and friendly to everyone and co-operated with
everything. `What do you think about that, Brian?’ they would ask
when one of the group had broken new ground and reduced themselves
to tears or rage.

“Since I’m sane
and here by mistake, I really don’t think it would be healthy for
me to comment,” was the sort of answer he gave.

He told them,
all the time, that there was nothing wrong with him, but he never
insisted. He just made sure they were informed. No one seems madder
than someone trying to convince another that they are sane.