Equilateral (17 page)

Point A is hushed. Other men lie awake in their camp beds, attending the silence and wondering what the following night will bring, provided it comes. Mars hasn’t risen yet. Saturn, Cronus, stares cold and unblinking in the west. Ballard scans the horizon to the south. He will recall later that he saw something there, but that belief may be retroactive, influenced by the following events.

Δ

The military intelligence received from the Sudan neglects to mention that in the fiery dark eyes of the Mahdists the greatest insult to the Mohammedan faith is the pitch factory. Perhaps it’s the building’s kilned-brick construction that offends them,
or there’s some obscure non-Mohammedan feature in the tower’s simple lines, or they believe it’s a church; perhaps it’s the bottomless blackness of the pitch itself. The grounds for their anger are unknowable, but it’s a lucky stroke, because the Mahdists spend their initial fury on the structure, which is about to be abandoned anyway, giving the Europeans time to organize their defenses.

The Mahdists number about fifteen hundred rifles, the same size as Point A’s military detachment, but they’re faster, stronger, better shots, and better led, and fanatics besides. They’ve crept north from the Sudan in uncanny silence; they enter Point A in a thundering onslaught. In their furious drive at the factory, they discharge their weapons blindly, slaying European and native alike.

The Nubian guards are not entirely worthless, save for those who go over to the Mahdists. Their captain organizes a defensive cordon around the tea room, where the Europeans secure themselves.

Ballard rides out with the Nubians, seeking to bag a few of the invaders himself. It’s a difficult skirmish, for there’s little cover and the Mahdists are practiced in desert warfare, as the Concession’s force is not. Having wrecked the pitch factory, the Mahdists proceed to attack the hammam, the women’s dormitory, the machine shop, and the administrative quarters. A single clapboard building, foreign and enigmatic, is left untouched. Bombs fly. Ballard takes his shots carefully, noting with approval whenever another mount flees riderless from the melee.

The Europeans mill within the tea room. Daoud Pasha has disappeared from his post behind the bar. A few of the men
itch to join the fight, but most are scientists and engineers who have never seen combat. They shudder at every shot, shout, and cry outside.

Thayer stands in the tea room with Miss Keaton, apart from their colleagues. She doesn’t speak, showing admirable sangfroid, and perhaps more confidence in the Nubians than is warranted. Thayer’s response to the assault, the largest Mahdist action staged in North Africa since Khartoum, is characterized initially by peevishness. He grimaces at every rifle’s report. He mutters, “Idiots,” to no one in particular. As the fighting around the tearoom intensifies, his annoyance is replaced by disquiet. Then he falls into a daze, as if to deny the violence beyond the room’s walls, through which bullets occasionally pass. It lasts until the instant when Miss Keaton cries out and he tears from the tea room unarmed.

Ballard catches sight of him briefly, before being set upon by a Mahdist with a jeweled cutlass, as the astronomer runs with his head down across the field of battle, where the cries of men killing and dying, the womanish moans of falling camels, and the sweet stench of the petroleum are at their most powerful. Allah’s being beseeched; also, in some quarters, no less urgently, is our Savior. Now purposing their fire fully on the destruction of the Concession’s troops, the raiders push them back toward the Vertex, over which a black pool of oil spills several miles wide. In the dark of the night fumes refract the starshine. Dispatching the Arab, Ballard reflects that he’s been in scrapes worse than this, but not much worse.

The single man responsible for Christianity’s greatest affront to Islam (since the previous), Thayer goes unseen by the
Mahdists as he sprints to the female quarters. He dashes among the girls who have fled the building. They’ve been reduced to insensate terror. Some wail and beat their chests.

The weather station in Alexandria fixes this moment within the thirty-sixth minute past the twenty-third hour at the local meridian, later corroborating it with observations from Royal Navy ships off the Egyptian coast, as well as with several stopped clocks that will be found among the debris. In this moment one of the Mahdists, or perhaps one of the Nubians, flings a torch at the combatants. Ballard sees it himself as it arcs through the dense, mephitic air, and he knows then that the terms of the contest are about to be radically altered.

In that same capacious instant, short of twenty-three hours, thirty-six minutes, fourteen seconds only by the duration of the missile’s flight, Thayer discovers Bint, not outside the dormitory, which he never reaches, but near the remains of the hammam. Unlike the other Arab girls stranded on the battlefield, she doesn’t cower in terror. On the contrary, she stands serene, observing the warfare as if it’s elsewhere, someplace distant. She’s wrapped in her crimson shawl. When the astronomer descends from the tumult she allows him her usual small shy smile. He makes her no acknowledgment, charging across the sand like a locomotive, and when he reaches her he puts his arms around her diminutive torso, the first time they’ve embraced, and he hurls her to the sand. She cries in surprise. He smothers her body with his.

Elaborate precautions, approved by the Concession, have been observed throughout the pumping of the petroleum. Ballard knew, of course, that the atmosphere, saturated with hydrocarbons,
would become flammable. He has accurately predicted the local effects of the Flare and he put into place safety measures to be performed during the Equilateral’s illumination. The signal to Mars was to have been ignited by multiple electrical charges after his personnel were removed to a safe distance. As he will later declare to the Parliamentary committee, he could never have foreseen the ignorance and recklessness of the Mahdists.

The pool ignites, either in direct contact with the missile or because the air has become inflamed. The first sound is a kind of thump, like a tremendous chest falling from a tremendous wagon, followed by a hissing, hushing roar. In a moment Point A is more brightly lit than it is at brutal noon, as if another sun has risen from the Vertex. The figures of the men are rendered no less two-dimensional than their looming, knife-edged shadows. A screaming wall of flame streaks across the desert along Sides AB and AC, jumping the gaps, toward the Equilateral’s other two oil-filled vertices.

Toward the eastern end of the Equilateral, on Side AB, where the men are still excavating the dunes and laying pitch, taking advantage of the cooler nighttime temperatures, some witness the oncoming rush of predatory light, but they’re unable to run for safety. Thousands of fellahin perish at once and thousands more receive burns too serious to be treated. Once the vertices at Point B and Point C catch fire, the fatal rays are straight-ruled along Side BC, where they meet at its midpoint; call it Point I. Incendiary scraps of matter, mostly canvas and flesh, rise in the fire’s draft. Roosters in villages on the Nile greet the man-made dawn. Ships in the Mediterranean observe the
unnatural glow, which is recorded as far away as Palermo. The Flare is fully lit, but the Earth’s spin has not yet brought Egypt into the view of Mars. The signal instead flashes out to the distant stars, whose astronomers will debate what it means centuries hence.

At Point A most of the immediate casualties lie near the edge of the Vertex, where they’re engulfed in the conflagration. Ballard leaps off his horse and goes to the ground with his rifle. He keeps it cocked as he watches men with their bodies inflamed roll in the sand, crying for help. The bakery is on fire too, as is nearly every other structure attacked by the Mahdists. Ballard believes he’s safe, but he hasn’t reckoned on the blaze’s appetite for oxygen.

He witnesses the effects on other men first: they clutch their throats. As his lungs fill with the products of combustion, he’s soon compelled to do the same.

He blacks out, either for a moment or for a few minutes.

Δ

When he recovers, the chief engineer finds himself transported to a crepuscular landscape of abject desolation, surrounded by the stinking, smoking, charred remains of men, camels, and horses, lit orange by the subsiding flames. Flickering, living shadows play among the dunes. The other survivors are no less dazed than he is, with most of them unaware of how they’ve been scorched. They can no longer tell attacker from defender, and in the aftermath they can’t recall why they are there or the nature of the prize they have so savagely contested.

Point A is silenced now. A dense brimstone haze hangs over
the settlement. Ballard picks himself up and, with his rifle lowered, he returns to the still-standing tea room, from which his colleagues emerge intact, looking about in hushed wonder. Thayer isn’t among them. But the Earth continues to turn and once North Africa comes around, Mars will observe the Equilateral all but completed, a figure some thinking mind has carved and burned into the surface of the terraqueous third planet.

Twenty-Eight

News of the Equilateral’s realization grips the capitals of Europe with the force of a royal engagement or the threat of war. The Sunday supplements populate continents of newsprint with firsthand accounts of the desert excavations, the Mahdist attack on Point A, and the premature ignition of the Flare. Telescopes great and small turn again to the Red Planet, which steadily draws near. Professional astronomers cable long descriptive letters to the papers. Astronomy is taken up by leisured gentlemen, who compete to provide their friends with the freshest and most revealing sketches of the planet’s surface.

Returning to London, Ballard is honored at a Downing Street banquet by the prime minister, the Earl of Rosebery, who speaks of his pride in the Equilateral and his tempered regret for the failure of the Flare. He himself has installed a six-inch Newtonian refractor at his estate in Mentmore. Ballard soaks in the glory, which is so abundant that there is more than enough to share with Thayer. The astronomer’s likeness is in every newspaper, on posters in shop windows, on biscuit tins, on candy boxes, on soap boxes, and on the covers of biographies rushed into print, usually accompanied by the illustration of an equal-sided
triangle. The Royal Astronomical Society names after Thayer a newly discovered minor planet that travels within the orbits of Earth and Mars, but nearer to Mars. Buckingham Palace has set into motion the mechanisms that will generate a peerage.

The Flare’s undoing is not lost on anyone, but we allow it to diminish neither our spirits nor our expectations. The compromise of Thayer’s designs truly reflects the division of our world, between progress and reaction, and between light and dark. Every misadventure reminds us against what we struggle.

Δ

The hyenas have returned to 25 degrees 40’ 26” north latitude, 25 degrees 10’ 6” east longitude. They nose in the sands for buried refuse, of which there is too much to fight over. They’ve grown lazy, especially after the few Europeans who remain at Point A stopped shooting at them. The settlement’s inhabitants have consolidated their quarters into a single defensible outpost and are satisfied to watch the surrounding heaps of ash, bricks, and rubbish be buried by sand or blown away. Nomads have taken some of the light unusable equipment, as well as many of the oddly shaped pieces of crystal that the fire forged from the sands. The glass inexhaustibly splashed around the Vertex—twisted pillars, glowing beads, chamber-riddled boulders, translucent cylinders, glittering rhombohedrons, purple, pink, and green—will become an enduring component of the Near East’s folk art. Equilaterals, they’re called. The men give the hyenas wide berth and avoid more intercourse than is necessary with the two silent, hooded figures that dwell in the site’s shadows.

When the Flare was ignited, one of the accompanying fireballs engulfed Thayer and the Bedouin girl. Immersed in light, they were nuzzled and licked by the flames and were rocked by its updrafts. They held tight. They sucked in the sweet, rarefied air and found something cool and emollient in the core of the holocaust. After the fire extinguished itself and the settlement fell quiet, save for the strangled cries of the dying, the astronomer and the girl rose from the vitrified sand stripped of every article of clothing, their skin glowing pink. The scouring fire had reduced them to a state of nature. Even though they were unharmed, their figures were markedly altered. Their skulls were smoothly bald and every hair, every eyebrow, every cilium, and each pubic tuft were removed from their bodies. Not a single strand will grow back. They observed their hairlessness with wonder, as if truly seeing each other for the first time.

Miss Keaton came out of the tea room shaken but intact, looking for Thayer and knowing he’d be found with the girl. She remarked their nakedness and discovered that she expected that too. In the next few weeks, with help from the Europeans and the fellahin left at Point A, she assembled new quarters for the astronomer, whose desk, notebooks, sketches, calculations, and maps of Mars were destroyed in the attack. They traded with passing caravans for their coarse cotton robes, a white galabiya for Thayer and a new crimson robe for the girl. Before taking his leave, Ballard ensured that the line to Alexandria was restored. Miss Keaton now operates the cable equipment herself, occupying nearly every daylight hour in the telegraphic bureau, attentive to every jot and dash pouring in from distant lands. She dispatches her own in return, at great length.

Daoud Pasha is gone, either abducted or incinerated or as rich as Croesus: the Concession’s historians will discover vast, astronomical inconsistencies in the tea room accounts.

As for the girl, she has remained no less a mercurial, spectral presence than she was before, attending Thayer while he studies the new cables and manipulates figures on scraps of precious foolscap. She continues to bring him his tea. He smiles absently and sometimes when she’s not there he picks up his smooth, highly reflective head to listen for her approach.