The War of Immensities (54 page)

After all,
Lorna’s argument harboured the rather dubious assumption that
Project Earthshaker—that was, the Unofficial Project Earthshaker
since apparently the official one lacked the imagination to think
of another name—was indeed a great benefit to humanity. Certainly
not if humanity was blown to smithereens before the year was out.
Certainly not if Thyssen was in error. And grave doubts were
arising from all quarters concerning the big man.

Joe had been
suspicious all along. Others weren’t sure but he had never been in
any doubt. Thyssen was too good to be true, organised the
impossible too easily, had dubious friends. Maybe the CIA
connection and the sinister Mr. Cornelius were nonsensical but you
simply could not take a man like Thyssen at face value. He was too
powerful, and too complex. Like a tame grisly bear—just because he
hugged you affectionately today didn’t mean he might not crush the
life out of you tomorrow.

Thyssen knew
that Joe had buried the slush fund and made no objection. A man you
could trust would have at least commented. Thyssen was dishonest to
that degree, and told lies about his data or so he had heard. Not a
man to be trusted. And Thyssen was Joe’s third and biggest
justification of his own actions.

‘Grab all the
money you can get hold of, Joe, but any means you can,’ Thyssen had
told him. ‘We are going to need every penny you can raise.’ ‘Any
means?’ Joe had asked. ‘Any means your conscience can handle,’
Thyssen replied pointedly. Fine, and the money was rolling in.
Andromeda’s concerts and Lorna’s soaring media career and donations
from the followers of Christine Rice and just general public
generosity from true believers. There was plenty of money, enough
to bankroll the private war Kevin Wagner was waging in Africa.
Heaps of the stuff.

And now, Joe
had a new project, for Thyssen had passed the message down the line
and as soon as he heard it, Joe knew what to do. He rolled his way
through the convent and got on the Internet and faxed every
property dealer he could find in California and Nevada. His request
was simple. He had a client who was interested in buying up any
property available on the eastern side of the San Andreas
fault.

Then, as the
first days of the new year began, Chrissie discovered that she had
lost her faith. It was hard to say how it happened—maybe it had not
been there all along, only presumed, and she had failed to notice.
She had been to Rome for an audience with the Pope, a man from the
Jurassic period whose hand, when she kissed his ring, was cold and
reptilian. He had murmured a few words in Latin that everyone later
translated differently and gave her a blessing and she walked away
from what was plainly another failed attempt at the greatest moment
in her life.

He was just an
old man, senile and incapable, who could barely sit on his throne.
Her sense of disappointment, despite the pomp and media coverage of
the occasion, could not have been more pronounced.

All along, she
knew she was playing a role, keeping up appearances, faking it.
Perhaps that was when her faith began to dissolve.

No, not really.
She’d never really been much of a Catholic anyway, disgusted by the
church’s money grabbing ways and its general failure to uphold the
fundamentals of Christ. She had known it was all bullshit all
along—her experience in Rome did not change anything.

In an attempt
to get real, she rushed off to Africa to try and help but never
even got close. Malawi and the neighbouring regions were in utter
chaos and the disaster had precipitated a full-scale war with
several sides and even the news reports had little idea of just
exactly what was happening in there. The borders were all closed,
even to her, and she got no closer than Salisbury.

Although she
could have. Kevin Wagner had arrived in full force, his two huge
transport planes full of men and equipment. They would be going in
the next week if she wanted to wait. But she looked at the combat
ready troops and their guns and fierce expressions and decided that
it was not the sort of company she wanted to keep. Felicity
Campbell, who had been there before her and been similarly
frustrated, had already headed for home.

The only truly
Christian thing Chrissie found to do there was visit Jami in the
hospital. It meant she also had to visit all the other patients and
chat with them, followed around by the media crews, but the price
for that was that she got to talk to Jami in private.

It was
immediately apparent that while she might have suffered extensive
physical injuries, Jami was undiminished. Admittedly, her hair was
ungreased and unspiked because ‘you need two hands for that’ and
the ring through her nostril—and presumably any others she wore—had
been removed for fear of infection. Her greatest trouble seemed to
be that her favourite tattoo had been obliterated by third degree
burns—it was the one on her bum. Jami, all in all, looked strangely
normal.

“Sometimes
there’s something you’ve just got to do, Chrissie,” Jami said by
way of explanation. “It doesn’t matter if its silly or dangerous.
You gotta do it. If you don’t, the rest of your life will be wasted
regretting that you passed up the chance.”

“Yes, I
understand that,” Chrissie smiled, trying to get into benign mode.
“It probably explains why most women undergo the horrors of
pregnancy and childbirth.”

“Yes. That’s
it. I just had to do it, just once, to see what it was like.”

“Even if it
killed you.”

“If it did, it
did. But if I got away with it, then Wow!”

“So this is the
joyous state of ‘Wow!’ Laid up in hospital wearing more plaster
than the walls?”

“It’ll come
off. I’m doing wheelchair practice already and I’m out of here in
two days. Kev is going to fly me to his convent. His planes have to
go back to get more equipment anyway.”

“What do you
want to go there for?”

“First because
Joe has a fulltime nurse who can also look after me. Second because
a full set of Earthshaker monitoring equipment has been established
there. Third because with the way the tourists are flooding New
York for the last New Year’s Eve, I’d rather not go back there just
yet. And fourth, because I want to avoid Harley until I’m ready for
him.”

Chrissie
blinked. “I missed on that last point.”

“He lied to us,
Chrissie. God damned Harley, he rigged the data so only he could
make the proper sense of it.”

“Are you
sure?”

“Yes. He’s got
something called Drongo buried away under a ton of electronic
safeguards and Drongo is some sort of system which is the reason
why his predictions are right and everyone else is just
guessing.”

“Drongo?”

“It’s
Carrickspeak for fuckwit.”

“Yes. We have
the expression in New Zealand. But why?”

“I don’t know
why. To prove he’s smarter than everyone else or something... To
maintain his power over us and the project...”

“But what is
it?”

“I don’t know,
but when I get to the convent I’ll be hacking furiously until I
find out.”

It was too much
to take in at one gulp. Chrissie backed off, thinking it through
and trying to get to the more essential aspects.

“You say,
everyone else is just guessing. Explain that.”

“Perturbations
in the movements of the Earth, and the Sun and Moon, mean that the
configuration is never quite right. We can get the longitude
reasonably—because the time period between each event is the same
number of days, less about ten percent, each time. Trouble is that
they can only get the ten percent bit accurate within one hour—but
that hour means 1670 kilometres as the earth spins. Drongo
eliminates that hour of give or take. The latitude is always in the
quadrant opposite the previous event and then its a configuration
of the positions of the Earth, Sun and Moon, taking any major bumps
and wobbles in their orbits into account. Again, Drongo can do that
more accurately than anyone else can.”

“So the data is
useless without Harley.”

“Yes, because
there’s some other factor that only Harley has thought of. Anyone
can work out the zone of influence within an area about 1500
kilometres by 5000 kilometres. After that, they look at the fault
lines and such like and guess. Harley can get it to an area a few
hundred kilometres each way.”

“And he won’t
tell anyone how he does it?”

“No. The
bastard. But I’ll find out.”

Perhaps it was
all the fault of Jami, whose loss of faith in her god—Harley—had
contaminated Chrissie’s faith in her own God. Although that was
hardly likely—her own faith was slipping before she knew of Jami’s
apostasy. And anyhow, Harley had provided her with a CD that she
carried to Rome which she was eventually able, in a plush office in
the Vatican with Valerno and several other red robed cardinals
peering over her shoulder, to plug into a computer and show them
the way to the Project Earthshaker data.

“There it is.
Best of luck.”

Of course, she
hadn’t known about Drongo.

She returned to
the tranquility and sanctity of the convent and the small chapel
that had, more or less, become her own, and as the world began
counting down to the end of human history, she knelt and tried to
pray. But her faith was gone and she could not catch God’s
attention. Instead she began to weep and, as far as she knew, she
knelt there, sobbing, all night.

So they had
come to the final New Year’s Eve. And simply because it would have
been so appropriate, an inordinately large number of people decided
that this might well be the end of the world. Chrissie knew better,
but she spent the long night in prayer, just in case.And when the
rising sunlight stretched long hazy fingers of light through the
stained glass windows, she dried her tears and rose, staggering on
ruined knees, and made her shuffling way to the door and threw it
open. She walked out onto the steps, pale and shaking and deathlike
in her pallor. The beautiful, radiant, magnificent planet she lived
on was still there in all its glory. There just wasn’t any way that
she could believe that it would ever be any different.

In the café in
Paris as the sun rose, and the staff were packing up and hosing
down the footpath, Lorna lowered the boom on Brian Carrick. It
might have been a sad occasion, had Brian not been so bloody stoic
about it.

“And there I
was thinkin’ we’d be together until the end of the earth,” Brian
chuckled.

“It isn’t
funny, Brian. I feel like such a bitch.”

“Well, don’t.
If I’d got the chance, I’d of shot back to Judy and left you in the
lurch without a second thought.”

“I know,” Lorna
said, smiling but forced to dab a tear from her eye while she did
so. “But I did think I might have stuck it out until that
happened.”

“Oh I see. You
wanted to be the one who got dumped.”

“It is my usual
role.”

“Okay, you’re
dumped.”

“You just can’t
take this the least bit seriously, can you?”

“No hope. Look,
Lorna, you are a truly wonderful young woman. I had the time of my
life with you. And I am sad it’s over, but you gotta face reality.
You’re an international superstar. I’m a solid family man. While
you hit the high spots, I’d rather be at home in front of the telly
with a beer and the wife cookin’ in the kitchen and the kids
playin’ in the yard. There was no future in this. We were the
original odd couple.”

“I’m not the
high flyer you think I am, Brian. I’m just a simple suburban girl
at heart.”

“Yeah, sure.
But one who has managed to turn her simple suburbanness into a
global icon. There’s no going back from there.”

And, for the
first time in their relationship, they had run out of things to
say. Then the obvious occurred to Lorna. “So how are things with
Judy, anyway.”

“I rung her on
New Year’s Eve. To speak to the kids. After which, unusually, she
wanted to speak to me.”

“What
about?”

“Nothing at
all, which I think was the point. Apparently, Larry was out getting
drunk with his mates and left her abandoned with the kids, just the
way I usta. I reckon there’s a bit of reality being faced down that
way at the moment.”

“Kids
good?”

“They still
call me Daddy. Although Larry seems to have graduated from uncle to
‘pop’.”

Again there
seemed to be nothing to add to that, but Lorna was brightening, and
finally the obvious did occur to her. “Don’t you want to know
why?”

“Why what?”

“Why I’m
dumping you.”

“You mean
there’s a reason.”

“Yes, there’s a
reason.”

“Somehow I knew
I couldn’t have been getting it right the way I thought I was.”

“No, silly. You
were the perfect man. If only they were all like you. The reason
has nothing to do with you at all.”

“So why tell
me?”

Lorna bowed her
head in dismay. “Do you have to be so fucking practical all the
time?”

“Sure. After
all, I am twenty years older than you. It’s my job to be the
practical one.”

“Older doesn’t
matter.”

“Maybe not, but
it probably is time you played with someone your own age.”

“That isn’t
quite what I’ve got in mind…”

“Okay. So you
can tell me, if you really must.”

“Well,” Lorna
said, finding the words hard the way she rarely did these days. “I
wanted you to know in advance. It was only fair.”

“Know
what.”

“I’m going
after Harley,” Lorna murmured embarrassedly.

“Oh I see. So
impressed with us forty year olds, you thought you might up it
another twenty.”

“He isn’t that
old!”

“Alright, only
about fifteen. Still, I can’t say I’m not losing out to a better
man.”