Aftermath (2 page)

"Certainly."

I was, in fact, preternaturally calm. In retrospect, a sense of the unreality of events had surely overtaken me. Who can accept the idea, viscerally rather than intellectually, that this is to be the last conscious half hour ever, in a universe destined to endure for tens of billions of years? Carmelo Diaz had promised to do his best on my behalf, but I put no stock in his success—either intellectually or viscerally.

We walked, side by side but far from alone. All the way along the corridor, with its dull gray walls and infrequent locked doors of bright blue, others paced before and behind us.

No one spoke. The whole building was as quiet within as it would be without. Judicial sleep, which killed no one until they expired of natural causes, had ended the long rhetoric about capital punishment. No one would be outside, chanting their scripted slogans.

Actually, I am not sure there would have been any sad songs for me, even in the good old days of Sparky and Slippery Sam. So far as most people were concerned I deserved the electric chair or the lethal injection—probably both. After my capture I had followed the news reports. I was a child killer, the worst one in decades.

All a perversion of reality, and quite unfair.

The door of the Chamber of Morpheus stood open. It was flanked by guards, all unarmed. Should I prove violent, no one wanted to kill me accidentally and destroy the notion that this was a civilized and even kindly proceeding.

I walked forward and sat down on the soft black cushions of the room's single chair. Leg and arm braces clicked into position. Everyone remained at a respectful fifteen feet, until at last one woman moved forward to stand in front of me. Much to my surprise, I recognized the Governor.

"Do you," she asked, "wish to make any final statement?"

I shook my head.

"I am told that you were a man with great gifts, Oliver Guest," she went on. "You had the power to do great good, and you did great evil from choice. Your punishment does not begin to match the dreadful nature of your offense. God have mercy on your soul."

She stepped back to join the ring of people, while I wondered what that was all about. Then I had it. We were just two months away from elections. For Governor Jensen this was just another media opportunity. Her comments made a brief nod to the scientific community, pointed out that she was strong on law and order, and reassured the religious that she was one of them.

It was tempting to speak my thoughts—what had I to lose? But beside her, Carmelo Diaz watched intently. Without Governor Jensen's blessing, there was no way he could keep his end of the bargain.

On with the show.

* * *

I survey the room. Even without a special reason for knowledge I would be familiar with this chamber. It is a nightmare from everyone's childhood. I stare at the big clock. One fifty-five. The gray circular wall and the white sky of the ceiling is as distant to me now as the remotest galaxies. Above me, a silver hoop slowly descends to encircle my seated body at midchest. Everything is done automatically, without human involvement.

"He who is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone." So no one will be responsible for what comes next. The cool injection carrying me to the undiscovered country is controlled by the Chamber of Morpheus's central computer, a device close to human in intelligence but untroubled by human doubts or conscience.

One fifty-seven. Most condemned prisoners, I had learned, close their eyes as the hoop settles into position. I stare, unblinking, as the green syringe extends itself and sits waiting by my upper left arm.

One fifty-eight. Everything can begin, I am ready. But procedure must be followed. I watch the slow sweep of the second hand, marking the countdown to the end of the universe. There ought to be music, the sound of trumpets or perhaps a
Dies Irae.
But music is not permitted in the Chamber of Morpheus. Instead there is total silence, the audience hushed and rigid.

Twenty seconds. The end of the needle, so fine that it fades to invisibility, touches my arm. I flinch. The descent into judicial sleep is supposed to be painless—but on whose testimony?

The clock readout reaches two o'clock—and moves past it. Five seconds. Ten. I sit a little straighter, convinced that something has gone wrong and the journey to Lethe is delayed.

And then I realize that the injection was made exactly on schedule. I had not felt it, but I am moving, expanding, ascending on pink clouds of glory. The chamber, far below me, fades out of sight.

The forever sleep has begun.

IN THE BEGINNING

First Strike. February 21, 2026;
Kimberleys Plateau, Western Australia.

It was evening, but it was not dark. Would darkness ever come again?

Wondjina crawled from the shadow of the rocks and peered north and west. No clouds were in the sky, and the Sun was on the horizon. Soon it should be night, cooling the desert and bringing longed-for relief.

But there would be no night; soon, again, would come the Rival.

Wondjina turned to face south and east. A hint of pink was already on the skyline, warning that the Rival was alive in the heavens and about to rise in the cloudless sky. If Wondjina were to find water it was best to seek it at this time, in the cooler hour before the Rival usurped the Moon and evening turned again to day. It must be done quickly. Thirst was all through him, weakening his muscles and stiffening his joints.

He made his way to the dried-out riverbed and walked along it, seeking patches of sun-seared grass. Under the grass, deep in the gravel, he would find the water that fed their roots. There, and nowhere else.

For twelve days, the Rival had risen as the Sun set. Between them, Sun and Rival seared the land and drew off every hint of surface moisture. Without dark there could be no night, without night there would be no midnight fall of dew. And the deep waters were running dry.

Wondjina took the trowel from his waist sling and started to dig in the gravel of the watercourse. From time to time he laid down the tool, picked up the hollow reed, and pushed it deep. He sucked hard on the other end.

Nothing, and still nothing. Every day, the reed had to be pushed deeper. Dig again, dig harder. Finally, after ten minutes of hard effort, a few mouthfuls of warm, brackish liquid.

He straightened and stared again to the south. The Rival had lifted above the horizon. Now it was a dazzling blue-white point too bright to look at. There was no circle of light, like the Sun's disk, but when the Rival was high in the sky it threw down its own intense spears of heat.

This torment could not last. Or if it did, Wondjina's family would not be here to see it. They would leave, heading away to seek help from lowland strangers.

Wondjina would not leave. He was old, and he would live or die in the homeland. But he could not survive like this. Hunger and thirst gnawed within him. Midsummer was long past, and the Sun was on its annual journey north. Heat should be lessening, rain should carry in on the west wind. But not this year.

Twelve days ago the Rival had appeared in the night sky. Darkness became a memory. The heat steadily increased, a dry wind blew from the south. No animal moved across the red sands. Even the tough, leathery grass had wilted.

Wanderers through the homeland brought word of other changes. Lake Argyle, the great water far to the north, had dried completely for the first time in many years. Far south, the Ord River ran low in its course. The Rival's presence was felt, north or south, as it was here. You could not run from it, any more than you could escape by flight from the Sun itself.

Wondjina, the family's living memory of older times, knew what must be done. The answer was not to flee. It was to ask the spirits of cloud and rain to bring relief.

Ask now, ask tonight. The family was determined to leave tomorrow.

He squatted onto his haunches and rubbed the wrinkled skin of his knees. Everywhere was reddish, powdery dust, worse than at any time in his long memory. He opened the woven bag, took out the necklace of dried bones and the bright-stained sections of emu shell. Let the youngsters speak of new ideas, of their belief that the Rival was nothing more than a star suddenly grown great. What did they know? Not one of them could recite a history of the family, not one had learned the modes of address to the spirits of autumn rains.

First, there was the choice of site. Level and high and on the open plateau, where the Rival would always be in sight.

Wondjina began to ascend the course of the dried-out streambed. He climbed slowly and carefully, leaning on his ironwood spear for support. Hunger had weakened his limbs, but he must husband his strength for the ceremony. The Rival lay directly ahead, its southern fire striking matching points of light from sharp-sided pebbles in the watercourse. Was it imagination, or did the intruder tonight flame brighter yet, putting the vanished Sun to shame?

A slender gray-green lizard darted from under Wondjina's feet, scrambling uphill. Instinct drove his spear, guiding its fire-hardened point through the wriggling body. He leaned and grabbed in one movement.

He ate the lizard whole. The tip of the long tail, hard and scaly and indigestible, was the only rejected fragment. Crunching the delicate bones and allowing cool blood to trickle down his throat, Wondjina felt strength enter his body. He had seen no animal life for three days. This lizard was a clear omen, a gift from the spirits of the rains. It said, the time to begin was here.

He reached the plateau and advanced to its southern margin. The desert land dropped away ahead. Far off, rolling dunes marched to the horizon. On his left the land rose to the distant hills, fading into the continental interior. Above, creeping higher in the sky, the Rival burned in Heaven. It threw the shadow of Wondjina stark behind him.

He laid out the pattern of eggshells and bones, slowly and carefully. The heat was fierce, sucking sweat from his body as soon as it appeared. His grizzled, tight-coiled hair was warm to his touch. The brief respite of evening was over.

Now, then, or never.

He removed his breechclout and pouches and smeared the red ocher and white pipe clay on his body. Then the weaving dance began, turning steadily from right to left, following the line of shells and bones. The chanted invocation to the spirits of rain and cloud came without conscious thought. He had not spoken those words for many years—how many? He did not know—but they came easily.

The Rival rose higher in the sky, moving toward its own noon. The naked figure danced on and on, a solitary black mote on the great plateau. Danced, as his energy slowly faded. Danced, as his legs weakened. There had been a sign that he was to begin. There must be a sign that he was permitted to stop.

Nothing, though his legs were beginning to buckle. The dry south wind blew, and the Rival pierced his body with its daggers of heat. He decided that he would dance until he died. If his life was demanded as the condition of succor, he was willing to give it.

When the change came he at first noticed nothing. It was hot as ever, the wind blew still. Only when he stumbled and fell from sheer exhaustion, then made the effort to regain his feet, did he see it.

A new line of hills rose above the southern horizon. He stared at them for seconds, before his tired brain told him that what he saw was impossible. Not hills. Clouds. As he watched they crept closer, changing from that single indistinct line to lofty mountains and dark feathery canyons.

Not just clouds. Rain clouds.

Wondjina whooped in triumph. Rather than trying to stand up, he fell forward and lay prone. With his left cheek on the dry, gritty ground, he gave thanks. He watched the steady advance until the wonderful moment when a rearing thunderhead swallowed up the Rival's fire. The wind fell to nothing, then came back as veering random gusts. The air was no longer lung-searing hot.

As the first drops of rain spattered the parched soil, he stood up. Now it was time to rejoin the family. Later he would tell them how at his plea the cloud spirits had saved them—even if they did not want to believe it.

He left the eggshells and bones where they lay, a tribute to the spirits. The rain was changing from a shower to a downpour to an astonishing cloudburst. He cupped his hands in front of his mouth, turned his face upward, and drank.

The family would not be where he had left them. When rain came like this after a long dry spell, there was only one place to be. Wondjina hurried toward it. Soon he had left the graveled watercourse and was traversing the side of the hill, still heading downward.

The slope ended at an oval pan of clay, forty yards across and a hundred long. The dry surface of Lake Darnong was a mosaic of deep cracks, half an inch across. Rain hissed down onto the flat clay bed and vanished immediately into the fissures of the thirsty earth.

The whole family, thirteen people plus the four dogs, stood waiting. Everyone was smiling and holding woven collection bags. The cracks in the clay foamed and bubbled.

One of the dogs saw it first. She darted forward. Two seconds later she was back with a muddy frog wriggling in her jaws. And then they were everywhere, the whole soaked surface alive with frogs awakened by water from their estivation and wriggling up to feed and mate.

Family and dogs ran forward together. Wondjina followed, more slowly. As he walked onto the slick clay, already covered by half an inch of water, he turned to stare triumphantly south. The Rival was hidden by dense clouds, but it must still be there. It had lost. Wondjina and the cloud spirits had won.

* * *

Much later, as day followed day of remorseless rain, Wondjina realized his error. The whole landscape was changing, vanishing, washing away in great mud slides and borne off on torrents of rushing water. It became cold, colder than any winter, and white flakes fell from the sky.

Chilled and shivering, Wondjina crouched beneath a useless shroud of cloth. He had been wrong. The Rival had not been conquered. It had been challenged, and now it was showing its strength. The cloud spirits had not brought the rain. The Rival had brought the rain and storm, not to save the family but to destroy it. Stay or go, it made little difference now. Wondjina's world was gone, and it would not return.