Richter 10

Chapter 14 AFTERSHOCKS

Mohammed Ishmael’s condor glided gently on the thermals high above Constitution Avenue, following Crane and his motorcade as it tracked through the ghost town of Washington, DC, toward the Capitol building.

Much had changed during the past year—and each change brought surprises. When Li Cheun had told the President of the United States in February of ’25 there would be no quake on the Mississippi, he could not have guessed that he would be dead within thirty-six hours. And by his own hand.

The cataclysm on the Reelfoot had been so devastating in so many areas—and so much more so because of Mr. Li’s connivance—that within a day it had been obvious Liang Int America would show a loss for calendar 2025, a first in its North American history.

Upon seeing the financial projections and being a man of honor, Mr. Li had doused himself in Sterno, stepped within his beloved diorama, and set himself ablaze. Most considerate of Mr. Li, Mui Tsao thought. His death made it possible to carry on without having to change much of anything. Had Mr. Li gone into exile or been imprisoned, company rules would have compelled a change of every code.

Mr. Mui then survived a corporate inquisition by bringing forth all the records he had sent to the home office in Beijing concerning what he had termed Mr. Li’s “increasingly foolish” behavior. He also accused the dead man of “egotism and intractability” in his business dealings and vowed to be a more levelheaded, compromising manager who would put Liang America back in the black within a year. That last part was, of course, a lie and everyone knew it, but optimism is fundamental in business theory.

Mr. Mui immediately acquired his own Harpy, a young and ambitious corporate man named Tang. The new Harpy was pushing hard for Liang to compete with Yo-Yu in the mind chip business, an area in which he had great interest as he himself was a double-ported chippy.

Truth of the matter was, the Liang Int empire was slowly collapsing under its own weight and the Reelfoot quake, along with its associated eight hundred aftershocks, simply had accelerated the process.

In 2011, Liang had bought up all of America’s debts, all its chits. Basically, it owned the country, with most of the taxes collected going to interest payments on the huge debt owed to Liang, although a small amount of tax dollars had to be applied to various programs for the people. Liang Int not only owned and exploited America, but also didn’t want to maintain its investment. Since the company was the de facto government, however, it was left holding the bag when Reelfoot hit.

Reelfoot had been big enough to fell a giant. The main shock was an 8.5 on the scale, about as high as the scale measured. Memphis never got out from under the Mississippi, though the river continued to change course for three months after the quake. It was simply the memory of a city now, a place for divers to search for lost treasure.

Little Rock and Paducah were rendered all but uninhabitable. Nashville was severely damaged, as were Louisville and Evansville and Carbondale. In St. Louis, the river swamped the city under a huge wave, knocking the Arch onto the city itself and leveling buildings. In Kansas City, the Quay River left its banks and drowned more people than were directly affected by the quake. Lake Michigan also overflowed, and flood waters along with aftershocks in Chicago toppled the twin black Liang office towers on Dearborn.

Knoxville, Lexington, Frankfort, Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, both Springfields (Missouri and Illinois), Jefferson City—all towns suffered Mercali VII or VIII damage.

Four dams in the TVA system collapsed, flooding Tennessee and cutting off hydroelectric power to a region of the continent that still used it. Levees in Mississippi and Louisiana crumbled.

The death toll reached nearly three million; a staggering ten million were left homeless. Damage ran into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Liang was a streamlined operation that matched production to natural resources. Hundreds of chemical plants, paper mills, auto factories, food processors and distributors, focus factories, and shield manufacturers went down with the quake, to say nothing of the retail outlets Liang owned to sell their products. People turned to their government for financial help, and Liang Int was put in the unenviable position of demanding restitution from itself.

They couldn’t afford it. Neither could their insurance carriers.

Corporate decided simply to try and get the flow of goods and services moving back through the area and rebuild slowly. To that end the company declared the quake region a total loss and walked away from it, leaving the Midwestern United States a poverty-and-disease-ridden dead zone of collapsed buildings and broken dreams. Revenue loss was staggering, public relations destroyed.

President Gideon had become the most hated man in America. He refused to step down because he needed the paycheck, and he was unable to put the blame on Mr. Li, where it rightfully belonged, because that would be admitting that Mr. Li had told him what to do in the first place. Gideon had become a prisoner in his own White House.

Brother Ishmael’s condor dropped to treetop level for close-ups of the motorcade as it pulled up to the Capitol. Its occupants hurried out of their vehicles and into the building.

The edited version of Jimmy Earl’s viddy, The Last Best Hope, had been the most watched show in the world in 2025, bringing him awards and fame and, parenthetically, turning Lewis Crane into the most beloved and recognizable man in the country.

Then there were the Zoners who had escaped the cataclysm in Memphis. They’d gone south and taken military control of a small town named Friars Point, Mississippi. Renamed New Cairo, the city had attracted fifty thousand refugees.

The Mississippi had always run right by the town. Now it was several miles away, but it had left behind the richest silt on the face of the planet. Quickly enough, the initial fifty thousand had been joined by a million others, disaffected southern Africks, escapees from the Zones, or any Muslim wanting a start on a new life. The original boundaries expanded, taking in more and more land, pushing out the previous landowners until finally Mr. Mui was forced to step in.

Mui regarded the spread of Islam as an inevitability. Besides that, he was not about to undertake the expense of a full-scale war to roust them from the land. What he did, in effect, was create another War Zone, larger than any other. Immense, in fact. He built a wall seventy feet high that completely surrounded New Cairo, though several miles from its front lines and not a direct threat. People were allowed to travel freely, unarmed, in and out of the walled area.

NOI set up immediate contacts with other Islamic States worldwide that supplied them with food and materials while they got on their feet. Soon after, Brother Newcombe went to Yo-Yu and struck a trade deal that gave NOI enough shields to cover the delta crops it would need to raise to allow New Cairo to become self-sufficient.

It worked. What also worked was violence, ever-escalating guerrilla and economic warfare with unrelenting confrontations with the FPF and threats or actual boycotts of Liang Int products. In the deepest inner sanctum of NOI leadership the split was more profound than ever. Martin Aziz and Dan Newcombe versus Mohammed Ishmael … neither side able to prove itself conclusively. Stalemate.

Sumi Chan sat on her lofty perch in the Senate chamber and presided over the bumptious gladhanders who called themselves congressmen. Currently they were “debating” whether or not to pass a nonbinding resolution that would, in a miracle of complex rhetoric and dazzling illogic, blame the Yo-Yu Syndicate for the tragedy at Reelfoot Rift.

“Mr. President,” said the congresswoman from New York. “I would like to allot three minutes of my time to the Honorable Senator from Arkansas/Oklahoma.”

“Noted,” Sumi said automatically. “You have the floor, Mr. Gerber.”

“Thank you,” said the gentleman, with the aplomb of a snake oil salesman.

As he began to speak Sumi drifted. She had yet to completely figure out why she was here. And the only man who could tell her was long dead. She had managed to avoid Mr. Li from the time she had taken the job until his death because she’d feared him sexually. Now here she sat, bored and alone, symbol of American political leadership since Gideon had hidden himself away in the White House.

“Mr. President!” The voice startled her. A Senate page tugged on her sleeve. “Someone wants to see you. He says it’s important.”

“Who?”

“Lewis Crane.”

“Crane’s here?” she said loudly enough to be heard in the chamber.

“He’s waiting out in the corridor, sir.”

“My God,” Sumi said. She’d had no personal contact with Crane since Reelfoot. She turned to the page, a pimply-faced federal judge’s son, and said, “Put him in the old Supreme Court downstairs. I’ll meet him in a moment.”

The page hurried away, Sumi fully alert now and excited. Crane may have been many things, but he was never boring. She turned the gavel over to the sergeant at arms to call the majority leader, and slipped out of the chamber and into the hollow, echoing halls.

She’d heard that once six million visitors a year had come here to listen to proceedings and see democracy in action. No one came now. They were all anachronisms, living out their lives in a two-hundred-year-old building that was crumbling because of George Washington’s nepotism in choosing his own inferior rock quarry for the materials to build the damned thing.

Lewis Crane had come to her territory. He must want something. But then, Crane always wanted something. Now he wanted something before Yo-Yu took power. In a government where the votes were purchased, Liang’s rival had more purchasing power. Yo-Yu could get control of the government without taking one seat in an election. She’d even been approached with bribes … and had considered the possibility. America tended to have that effect on people.

Crane waited with Lanie in the gallery of the tiny preserved eighteenth-century courtroom while the rest of his entourage toured the entire facility. The room was an incongruously small space for producing the big decisions that had been handed down there—

Dred Scott, Marbury vs. Madison—remarkable precedents in jurisprudence. Modern American society had been formed in this place, then deconstructed in the large faux Greek building across the street.

Lanie put her hand over his. “Don’t worry,” she whispered as if she were in a Cosmie church. “It’s going to work out.”

“We haven’t seen Sumi for a long time.”

“I have faith in you,” she said. “You’re coming to the right place at the right time.”

Crane hoped she was correct, but was skeptical—and, he felt, appropriately cynical about politics. He would make his judgments about Sumi after they’d talked. His bad arm ached terribly. There was going to be a major quake this afternoon on the Cocos Plate where it met the Caribbean Plate. Later tonight, in Africa, the Great Rift would separate a little bit more as part of it pulled away from itself, creating grabens and opening huge fissures. There would be mudslides tomorrow in California. Evacuations of the affected areas were already underway, thanks to the Crane Report, his monthly newsletter about the state of the Earth. He gave populations a two-month lead time on any impending quake.

“Crane!” came a voice from the doorway. He turned to see Sumi Chan, in black silk pajamas, standing with arms outstretched, smiling broadly.

Crane jumped up to hurry over and give Sumi a bear hug. “You’re looking well.”

“Looks can deceive,” Sumi said, walking past Crane to greet Lanie. “Congratulations on your impending marriage. I hope I will be invited to the ceremony.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Crane said, as Sumi kissed Lanie on the cheek. “We wanted to invite you personally.”

“Right,” Sumi replied, turning back to Crane and smiling. “And maybe do a little business while you’re at it?”

“I can always do business,” Crane said, the three of them taking seats. Crane noticed a slackness to Sumi’s features. The man needed a challenge. He pulled a magazine out of his back pocket and gave it to Sumi. “Here, the new Crane Report, hot off the presses.”

“I’ve already got one. Required reading for any acting head of state. When is the big day?”

“July twenty-third,” Lanie said. “At exactly two thirty-seven in the afternoon.”

“In the Himalayas,” Crane added.

“The Himalayas.” Sumi smiled. “Your fortunes have risen since last we met, my friend.”

“As have yours.”

“No. I am simply doing what I did when you first met me, hype and PR, only I’m doing it in another place. I feel like a caretaker, just watching the office until the real Vice President shows up.”

“Then it’s true what we’ve heard about Yo-Yu?” Lanie asked.

“Probably more true than you realize,” Sumi replied. “The Syndicate scored big with new chips that I hear are better than dorph. People want Yo-Yu. Once they started their ozone regeneration project I knew Liang was finished. Yo-Yu has managed to replace five percent of the ozone layer this year alone. People like that. They vote for that.”

“Is your power completely gone?” Crane asked.

“Not completely,” Sumi said, her eyes already sharpening. “How’s Dr. Newcombe?”

“Haven’t seen much of him in person the last few months,” Crane replied. “He’s on a sabbatical, trying to fine-tune his EQ-eco to better fit soil liquefaction. We see him on the teev all the time though.”

Sumi nodded. “He’s in Washington more than I am. New Cairo is still news to people and he’s the NOI spokesman. I think his public conversion has had a lot to do with the people’s greater acceptance of the Nation of Islam.”

“He’s a geologist, not a politician,” Crane said, not troubling to hide his contempt. “He needs to spend more time on the important things.”

“Have we hit a sore spot?” Sumi asked.

“Dan’s talented.” Crane shrugged. “Wasting his talent on nonsense is incomprehensible to me … no disrespect intended to you.”

“There are those who find the notion of an Islamic State in America something other than ‘nonsense,’ ” Sumi replied. “I know the people at Liang look at it as a top priority.”

“The people at Liang can—”

“Crane,” Lame interrupted as she pointed to her wristpad.

He nodded, then smiled, surprised to find himself nervous. “Have you wondered why I haven’t tried to contact you for so long?”

“I assumed you were angry with me,” Sumi said, bowing slightly.

“Oh, Sumi, no. Think about it. Who better than I to understand how one can be pressured, tormented, ultimately coerced to do things he does not really want to do? Who better than I to understand the rationalizations that lead one to conclude the end justifies the means?” He shook his head, an expression both wise and compassionate on his face. “I have put the past behind us. Please believe me, and do not think of it again.”

Sumi and Crane looked intently at each other. They connected and there was understanding and forgiveness between them.

Crane cleared his throat. “I’ve spent the last year working on a special project, something really big. But to put it over, I need your help.”

“It pains me to admit it, Crane, but government R D money is pretty tough to come by these days. Sadly, someone in Beijing will have the final word on any funding—”

“I don’t want funding. I want permission and sanction. The Foundation’s rich. That three-billion-dollar bet, you know. Also, we started publishing the Report and the world has paid—for the Report itself, for the EQ-eco in predicted areas, for the core assessment of possible damages, and for general advice. We are prosperous beyond my dreams.”

“No funding?” Sumi asked, frowning. “But what can you want from me, if you’re off the teat? What could I possibly have to offer a man who has all the money he needs?”

Crane’s mouth was dry. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny disk. “Take a look at this,” he said, handing it to Sumi. “It will explain a lot.”

Sumi slipped the disk into her wristpad, then looked around for a screen. “May I borrow your goggles, please?”

Lanie handed Sumi the extra goggles from her tote bag, what she called her everything-Crane-needs-to-survive-on-the-road bag. Lanie took a deep, nervous breath, her eyes wide. This was it.

“Try it on the L fiber,” Crane said as Sumi pulled down the goggles and padded on.

“Once you’re through with this job, I could use a good public relations man,” Crane joked.

“Bribery, Crane?” Sumi asked with echoing humor. “This must really be important.”

“It is. But, seriously, a job is always open to you. I hope you know that.”

“The globe,” Sumi said, smiling.

“Yes,” Crane said like a loving father. “We’ve missed you at the Foundation, Sumi.” The globe was spinning quickly. If Sumi only knew, Crane thought, what had transpired with the globe during this past year! It had evolved at an astonishing rate into something beyond his wildest imaginings when he had hired Lanie all those months ago. The globe’s cognitive function was beyond reproach, but more, it was developing awareness and—He forced his attention back to the image of the spinning globe. Its spotlight found and highlighted California as the rotation slowed.

They were staring at California, the view filling their entire vision in the goggles. The world was green and brown, the oceans blue, the cities vibrating in pale, friendly yellow.

“Okay,” Crane said, “you remember where the San Andreas Bumper is?”

“Just South of Bakersfield, right? Mount Pinos.”

“Yes.”

The San Andreas Bumper was an S shaped bend in the Fault Line, a flangelike protuberance or kink where the northbound Pacific Plate and the westbound North American Plate were stuck. Inexorable movement continued, the Plates monstrous, unstoppable Titans shoving against each other, the pressure squeezing ever tighter on the Bumper, straining the rock ever harder.

“There,” Crane said. “Do you see the red zone opening up on the base?”

Bright red blinked just south of Bakersfield and began creeping through a fault line that ultimately encompassed a huge slab of the Pacific Plate, all the way to the Philippines. Los Angeles was on the wrong side of the ripping fault. So was San Francisco. The tear went all the way south, into Mexico, cutting off the Baja Peninsula at the northern end of the Gulf of California.

“The red spot is so large at the Bumper,” Sumi said.

“That’s because the entire Bumper is getting ready to come apart. Watch.”

Sumi gasped.

The entire flange was now throbbing red, straining. Then it simply crumbled as all the strain was relieved at once. The Pacific Plate moved. There were no people pictured on the globe, but as the yellow cities began pulsating in ugly red, any human watching could have heard the screams of hundreds of thousands of hurt and dying people.

“What we’re looking at is the true detachment of Southern California from the North American Plate,” Crane said. “It is becoming an island, containing the carcasses of two of the world’s major cities, not to mention that all of oceanside California, so heavily developed, becomes a cadaver. See? A new mini-continent is born, pushing north.”

The chunk of continent slowly crept toward eventual subduction beneath the northern ridge of the Plate.

“Amazing,” Sumi whispered. “And the year?”

“Keep watching.”

Crane tapped Lanie who yanked her goggles up to stare at him. He shrugged, she returned the shrug, then blew him a kiss before jerking her goggles back into place.

He pulled his on again just as the numbers 6-3-2058 came up on the screen. “I want to remind you, Sumi,” he said, “this is no simulation or set of speculations. You are looking into a crystal ball and gazing directly into the future, the real future.”

“Thirty-two years.” Sumi pressed the pad to pause the disk. They all raised their goggles. Sumi’s face was strained and pale. “What a sadness it must be to watch such horror all the time, to know how inescapable it is.”

“But is it inescapable?” Crane asked, watching Sumi’s eyes narrow.

“You just told me we were gazing into a crystal ball.”

“A crystal ball that shows a future that is real only when it arrives.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Turn your disk back on. I want to show you another future.”

The globe relit inside the goggles. Time rewound. “Look farther south on the Fault, down in the Imperial Valley. Watch for a small red zone to open up.”

As he spoke a small spot along the San Andreas Fault’s southern arm blazed red for several seconds. Then it was gone.

“What was that?” Sumi asked.

“Watch,” Crane said. “The globe is going to pick up speed.”

It spun wildly, chasing the years, finally stopping on California. The numbers 6-3-2058 again, but everything appeared whole and placid. The show ended; its viewers removed their goggles.

Sumi stared at Lanie, then back at Crane.

“All right. What happened … what made the difference?”

“I asked the globe,” Crane said, pausing dramatically, “if it were possible to avoid the destruction of California by fusing the plates.”

“How do you fuse tectonic plates, Crane?”

“Heat. Heat so intense it would melt solid rock and bond it together.”

“And how would you produce such intense heat?”

“A thermonuclear reaction is the only way I can think of. In this particular case a five gigaton explosion along a six-mile stretch of underground twenty miles beneath the Earth’s surface right on the spot indicated by the globe.”

“You’re talking about an explosion thousands of times more powerful than anything previously detonated.”

Nodding vigorously, he said quickly, “But deflected downward, into the thermonuclear core. It wouldn’t even cause a ripple on the surface. We’ve simulated it. It works.”

“But how could you know it would result in anything other than a major break in the fault and the hastening of catastrophic destruction?”

“Sumi, didn’t you tell me that the Crane Report is required reading for heads of state? Well, the Crane Report is based on the globe’s functions and it hasn’t been wrong yet. We’re just using it here in a slightly different way. Think about this: Fusing the plates farther down the fault where there is no strain at the moment will take all the pressure off the Bumper. In fact, this one weld actually slows down the rate of continental drift by joining the two plates back together. For fifty years after the event, we show an eighty percent decrease in drift in these two plates, with a concurrent decrease in EQ activity.”

Sumi jumped up and started to pace. “You’re sure the strain doesn’t come out some place else? Maybe we’d be destroying South America to save LA.”

“I went forward 250 years on the globe and found no activity that wasn’t already destined to happen. Perhaps farther on there might be, but how much insurance do you want? We’ve learned that this one weld decreases worldwide temblor activity by seven percent.”

“You mean it?”

“I mean it.”

Sumi walked out of the rows of seating to stand at the end of their aisle. She pointed at Crane. “This is bigger than California with you, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Crane said simply. “The globe has shown me fifty-three weld spots that, when completed, will halt continental drift completely, along with their associated EQs, volcanoes, and tsunamis. I figured that talking the world into doing it will be one hell of a lot easier once we’ve shown it works in one place.”

“Thirty-two years is two lifetimes for a politician! That presents problems.”

“It’s tougher than that,” Crane said. “We’ve got only a five-year window, at the most, on the San Andreas weld. By September of 2033 the pressure will have increased enough all along the fault that the weld won’t be possible without starting a major quake.”

Sumi moved along the aisle and sat beside him, staring up at the justices’ bench. “And what would you need, exactly, from the government?”

“A lot of things except money. First off, we’d have to figure out a way to get around the ban on detonating nukes. I’d need the right permissions to dig down into the Imperial Valley in the Salton Trough. And, of course, I’d need access to nuclear stockpiles.”

“Maybe,” Sumi said, “it wouldn’t be quite so difficult as you think.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re an expert on nukes,” Sumi answered. “Do you remember the development of the first atomic bomb?”

“The Manhattan Project,” Crane said. “So what?”

“It was done in utmost secrecy, the government treating it as a national security measure, not telling anyone about it until it was dropped on the Japanese.”

“Are you suggesting we could do this whole thing secretly?” Lanie asked.

Sumi nodded, then looked at Crane, and touched his arm. “I’ve always had faith in you. If you say to me, this is possible, then I believe it is possible. You’re a gracious man. I’ve wronged you badly and I owe you, and you know I do. It’s an obligation.”

“No, Sumi, I’d never—”

Sumi put her hand up for silence. “Please. Allow me to retrieve my honor and gain face. Liang Int has suffered a severe blow. They would ultimately approve the project if we could run it right near the next election and succeed—especially if it won’t cost them anything. That’s the ringer here.”

“I understand,” Crane said.

“It would be in absolutely no one’s interest to let this leak to the world. I can just hear the outcry now, especially with the Masada Cloud circumnavigating the globe every seventeen days to remind people of the nuclear terror. This may be an historic period for you, the chance at last to realize your dream. I assume this is what you’ve been aiming for all this time?”

“You assume correctly.”

“It will be the greatest sell job in the history of the world, but I’m ready to undertake it. The aspects are as good as they’ll ever get. I’ll need more from you than this disk to sell the program, though. You’ll fund it all, every cent?”

“I’m prepared to do that.”

“Then I only have to convince the right people of its feasibility. Get it all on paper. I assume you’ve red-teamed it?”

Crane nodded. “That’s what I’ve spent the last year doing. I know every argument against it and each counterargument.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out another disk. “It’s all on here.”

Sumi took the disk. “You are a feared and respected man at Liang Int. They landed on your wrong side once and paid the price. They’ll want to listen.” She pocketed the disk and stood. “I’ll get on it right away.”

Crane also stood. “You’ll do it, really do it?”

“Absolutely. It may be why I was put on this planet … solely to do this job.”

Lewis Crane, hard as rock and focused as an epicenter, fell back in his seat, stupefied. “I-I don’t know how to thank you, I—”

“No,” Sumi said, shaking her head vigorously. “It is I who thanks you. I may recoup my honor now.”

She bowed and hurried out of the chamber. Crane was shaking, nearly delirious.

Lanie squealed and threw her arms around his neck. “You did it! You … did … it! How do you feel?”

Crane wiped his eyes and kissed his bride to be. “I feel like the weight of five billion years has been lifted from my shoulders.”

Abu Talib, also known as Daniel Newcombe, stood in a huge cotton field with representatives from the Islamic republics of Algeria and Guatemala. Daily, Islamic dignitaries came to pay their respects or to negotiate trade deals with New Cairo. Right now, cotton was king.

Upon conversion to Islam, Newcombe had taken the name of Abu Talib. It was the name of Mohammed’s uncle and greatest lifelong supporter, who also had not believed in the prophet’s mission, as Newcombe/Talib did not believe in the tenets of Islam or in the philosophy of Brother Ishmael. It was the godless man’s way to embrace religion.

The field stretched out for hundreds of acres, the Yo-Yu screens, ten feet overhead, casting a slight bluish glow over everything. In the far distance Liang’s wall split the horizon. Hundreds of people worked in the field around them. Right now the cotton plants resembled small dead bushes, but the earth was black and rich, the spring rains mere weeks away.

Ali Garcia, the trade rep from Guatemala, was kneeling by a plant, frowning at it. “This will be American Upland cotton?” he asked, his fingers playing with a twiggy branch.

“Best in the world,” Brother Talib said. “It doesn’t look like much now, but the flowers will start forming after the rains come. Once they wither, the boll forms and matures in a couple of months. You’ll be able to take delivery in mid-August.”

“What can you produce from a field like this?” asked the Algerian, Faisal ben Achmed.

“We got eight hundred thousand bales of cotton from these fields last year without knowing what we were doing. This year we’ll double that. Interested?”

“Of course we’re interested,” Garcia said. “What are you looking for in return?”

“Investment capital, farm machinery, livestock, and building materials,” Talib said.

“We’re digging in, entrenching until the rest of our people are welcomed to the homeland. We want to establish a strong base from which to grow.”

“Kwiyis.” Faisal nodded. “Your people are strong, your soil blessed. You will make a good addition to our international family.”

“We must go,” Garcia said, standing, “if we wish to catch the shuttle to Belize.”

“Sure you can’t stay and have a meal with me?” Talib asked. “The food is delicious, and all raised right here in New Cairo. Let me extend my full hospitality.”

“Alfshukre,” Faisal said. “But no, and with regrets. Abu Talib’s hospitality is renowned.”

Talib nodded, then led them toward the main road through the fields, the three of them climbing, under a fat, warm sun, into the vehicle waiting there.

“How large are the occupied territories?” Garcia asked as the driver opened the focus and sped off.

“We are the northwestern corner of the territories,” he said. “The Mississippi divides us from Arkansas and Louisiana, and provides us a natural boundary all the way south to the Gulf of Mexico. We will extend east to the Atlantic Ocean. There will be enough room.”

“For now,” Faisal said, all of them laughing.

“Will the Americans capitulate?” Garcia asked.

“I hope so,” Talib answered. “I truly hope so.”

They drove through the cotton fields, then the soybean fields … the rice fields … past the dairies … past the chicken farms. Housing was mixed throughout the fields, workers living close to their jobs. The housing came in the form of three-story blocks of apartments made from brick fired in New Cairo. Building was a major concern and always on full throttle. Lacking the proper equipment early on, the building industry was nearly biblical in its methods, something Talib wanted to rectify as quickly as possible.

He loved the respect with which he was treated these days. With Crane he had lived in the shadows. Here, he cast the shadow, and it was a large one. Most everyone thought of him, not Brother Ishmael, when the Islamic State was mentioned. It put the two men on a strange footing, especially since Talib didn’t regard Ishmael as his spiritual leader.

Dead magnolia trees and live people lined the roadway leading up to the pre-Civil War plantation house that served as the governmental and religious headquarters for New Cairo. Yo-Yu had been given permission to build a shield plant in the walled state and in exchange they were designing tree shields so that regeneration of the thousands of magnolia and cottonwood trees in New Cairo could get underway.

He wished his guests sahbah innoor, had the driver move them along, then began to push his way through the crowd thronging the front entrance to the government house. There were always crowds, either people complaining or, most often, refugees seeking asylum. As soon as he was able to put up another building, he was going to have Immigration moved to the farthest geographical point in New Cairo from where he was standing.

The people parted for him the moment they recognized him. He was a Presence, thought of as Ishmael’s word made flesh, and was treated accordingly. And he was NOI’s only statesman. Brother Ishmael refused to assume that role and refused, even, to visit New Cairo until, as he said, “all my brothers are free to journey home.”

So, to the citizens here, it was Abu Talib who ruled New Cairo. To date no request of his had been denied, so his overlord status was unchallenged. New Cairo’s first year had been full of hardship, emotional, physical, financial. But they had survived and the colony was succeeding, and he had been a large part of it.

It had made sense, when he’d decided to go on sabbatical, to come here. He was close to the action and respected, and he could work with the very soil that had thrown his EQ-eco out of synch to begin with. Also, Crane and Lanie were far away. He was working hard to forget both of them—with little success.

His lab had been a large bedroom with a wide veranda. He worked and slept there, leaving the French doors open to the breeze all night. Now he coded in and locked the door behind him.

“Assalamu ahlaykum,” came a voice from amidst his computers and seismos.

He turned in surprise. Khadijah was staring at him.

“Wiahlaykum issalam,” he said, crossing the distance between them to kiss her on both cheeks. “What brings you down here to Africktown? You’re a long way from the city, girl.”

“My brother has sent me. He wants me to ‘get used to the alluvial plain.’ Is it always this hot?”

“Most of the time,” he said and laughed. “I hate to say it, but it’s good to see you.”

“Thank you. I’m actually glad to be here.”

“Well, if you intend to stay for a while,” he said, “remember to wear a veil when you go outside. This is an Islamic state.”

She smiled. “I found out the hard way. Someone threw a rock at me when I was coming in.”

“What did you do?”

“Threw it back.”

He chuckled. “You’ll have to be put to work, too,” he said. “That’s the rule here. You gotta work.”

“In the fields?” she asked, horrified.

“Or construction, or plumbing, or shield maintenance—”

“Enough. Let’s talk about it tomorrow.” She pointed into the liquefier. “What’s that do?”

“When I’m finished inputting data,” he said, “I’m going to duplicate last year’s EQ. This is an exact geologic map of this area. I’ve filled it with tiny sensors to read changes. With luck, the river will alter its course and ultimately end up where it is today. If it does, it means I’ve calculated correctly. If it doesn’t, it’s back to the basics.”

“How many times have you tried this?”

He raised his eyebrows. “A dozen or so. There’s no instant gratification in science. But I’m getting closer.”

She put her hand over his mouth. “I hear the white woman is going to marry the earthquake man.”

He shook his head, freeing his mouth from her hand. “I like your subtle approach, Khadijah. Yes, it’s quite true that Lanie and Crane will marry,” he said, adding sardonically, “next week as a matter of fact and at a lodge in the Himalayas with a superb view of Mt. Everest. I’m sure Crane chose the location. He’s nothing if not dramatic.”

“The tone of your voice makes me believe you are free of her.”

Talib merely shrugged.

“She will not be yours?” Khadijah persisted.

“No.”

“Then I have a proposition for you.”

What now, Talib wondered, smiling wryly. “Does a proper Muslim woman proposition a man?”

She made an exasperated sound. “Look, you have no woman. I have no man. I am of the right blood. It’s a perfect political alliance.”

“What is?”

“Our marriage! What do you think I’m talking about?”

He laughed loudly. “Our marriage? Are you joking with me?”

“Oh, do shut up and listen to me,” she said angrily. “This is hard enough for me to do without you making fun. I know you are a … good man. You would be kind to me.”

“And keep you near the top of the power curve, huh?”

“What’s wrong with that? If you haven’t noticed, it’s kind of genetic … anyway, traditional with me and my brothers. I like excitement as much as the next person. I’d also make you a good wife and keep an Islamic home. I could give you children; I’m strong.” Her voice lost its power and she stared down at the floor. Speaking in almost a whisper, she added, “You would have my heart and my dedication forever.”

“Stop,” he said, quietly but sternly, taking her shoulders.

“Don’t … do this. We can’t marry. We won’t. I’m flattered and you’re wonderful. Soon, some man will—”

“I’m too headstrong for Islamic men.”

“Well, yeah … there’s that.”

“You will need to wed and father children. We’ll make future leaders together. Don’t you understand how right this is, how destined?”

“Khadijah, I don’t love you.”

“We’re not talking about love,” she said. “I could never love an egotist like you. Marry me. Your woman belongs to someone else.”

“That doesn’t mean I can just stop loving her!”

“Love again. What is this? Life goes on, Abu Talib, with or without you.”

His hands were trembling on her arms. “Leave me alone,” he said. He turned from her and walked through the French doors. He leaned on the veranda rail and looked at the bustle below, a neverending river of people snaking into history. He had accomplished so much. God, why did he feel such pain?

Khadijah was at his arm, touching lightly. “I’m still a virgin,” she said. “I will give that to you right now, if you’d like. I know I can please you.”

“It would please me,” he said, “if you would forget this discussion ever took place. Don’t sacrifice yourself on the altar of Dan Newcombe.”

“Abu Talib,” she corrected, stepping very close and pressing her body to his, “that is your name. And I am your future.”

Slowly, she pushed away, turned and, head erect, strode from the veranda. He watched her go through the room and out into the hall, then looked back over his domain, a blue sea of shields stretching in all directions as far as he could see. And he thought about Lanie.

It was bad enough that she was marrying Crane so fast, and when he’d heard the rumor she was pregnant, it had been a true punch in the gut. Marrying and having a family had been a major issue between him and Lanie for so many years—but with Crane, she’d been instantly ready for full commitment.

He cursed and slammed his fisted right hand into his left palm. This was stupid, stupid of him. He was internationally famous—revered, even—and he couldn’t get past the fact that Elena King had thrown him over for Crane. He smiled self-derisively. He’d sent them the finest, most exotic and most appropriate wedding present he could find: a Chang Heng earthquake weathercock from the second century A.D. It was a large vase, the outside affixed with eight golden dragons, their bodies pointing downward. Below each dragon sat an openmouthed frog. A bronze ball rested in the mouth of each dragon, and should a tremor occur, the affected dragon would drop his ball into the mouth of his frog, setting off an alarm. The positioning of the dragon would determine the direction of the quake. In 138 A.D. that very urn had measured a quake four hundred miles away. Messengers, riding pell-mell to the capital city of Loyang to deliver the news, had discovered that their information already had been announced by the vase.

It was a delicate instrument, a beautiful gift. And it was all he could give them. He certainly could not give the gift of his presence at their wedding which, he suspected, both Lanie and Crane wanted for the closure, the reconciliation, the continuity of the relationship between all three that it would signify. But, Talib knew, watching them marry would tear him to emotional shreds, unman him. No, the ceremony would have to proceed without him. Talib shivered with emotion. Was it love, race, ego, or competitiveness that drove his engine of jealousy and self-pity? He didn’t know. He did know, however, that he did not want to spend his life alone and childless. There was Khadijah…

Chapter 15 ENDINGS/BEGINNINGS

Alone, wearing a full-length cream-colored satin slip, Lanie stood at the teak-framed window of the old British lodge and gazed out in wonder at the twin peaks of Everest and Kanchenjunga. She hugged herself. In less than an hour she would become Lewis Crane’s wife, in less than seven months she would bear their child. Her cup runneth over.

Crane had brought her to the roof of the world for their wedding, a place as high as the happiness they shared in each other, in their work, in their life together. The setting perfectly mirrored the way she felt, as Crane had promised it would. She was dazzled and amazed. The peaks she was staring at were nearly thirty thousand feet high, almost six miles up, and the range from which they soared, the Himalayan range, was nearly two hundred miles wide at certain points and stretched over fifteen hundred miles in length. All, of course, had originated in earthquakes. And today, this very afternoon, there would be the first quake since 1255 in this region.

Another boom shook the lodge, and Lanie felt plaster dust sprinkle her bare shoulders. She laughed aloud. Only Crane would choose this day, this place for their wedding. It was perfect.

She felt as if she hadn’t been truly alive until she knew Crane had realized they loved each other. And she knew it was the same for him. Lord, he told her often enough. Perhaps even more importantly, he showed her … in every conceivable way. He treated her as an equal partner in their work and day-to-day lives; he treated her as the other half of his self in all things emotional, sexual… She’d never dreamed she could feel so understanding of and understood by another human being.

Below, guests gathered in the front lawn under the politically correct Liang Int sun-shield. A small but distinguished group of scientists and heads of state were gathering for the wedding, as well as their colleagues from the Foundation, supporters, and friends. The lawn turned into forest that rolled up the hillsides. They were at twelve thousand feet, the highest altitude where trees can grow. Farther up the mountains only grasses, lichens, and moss survived the cold, dry air. And higher than that, snow. Everyone, Lanie knew, was as affected as she by the awesome grandeur of the setting.

Turning away from the window, she caught sight of her gown, newly pressed and hanging in the open closet. She smiled and sat in one of the two leather chairs, separated by a small, delicately carved table, that was ideally placed to take advantage of the view through the window. Splendid Everest rose majestically into the clouds. Another foreshock hit. An incredible sensation, Lanie thought, so different from Sado, from Memphis. She had to laugh at herself. Being a thoroughly happy bride and mother-to-be must make her giddy.

Feeling awkward in his tuxedo, Crane stood in a tiny bathroom just off the kitchen on the main floor of the lodge. Three other men were crowded in with him, and blue jamming lights arced all around them. They were passing the keypad, finalizing their arrangement. President Gideon sat on the closed commode; Vice President Sumi Chan was wedged into the corner in front of Gideon’s legs. Crane and Mr. Mui were face-to-face, Mui leaning against the washstand.

“Will you begin the project soon?” the Liang boss asked, pressing his thumb to the keypad. The light registered green, indicating that his print had been identified.

“Right after the wedding,” Crane said.

“No honeymoon?” Gideon asked. “That’s a pretty little woman you got yourself there.”

The concept had never occurred to Crane. “There’s too much to do,” he said. “We have only five years before it will be too late to make the weld. No time to waste.”

Mui handed him the key pad. “Security around the site will have to be intense.”

“We’ll be operating as a deep drilling operation called Northwest Gemstone. Our avowed business purpose will be exploration primarily for focus crystals.” Crane placed his thumb on the black metallic plate. It registered within a second. “We’ll put up a security building called Gem Processing and work the nuclear materials in there. We’ll assemble the devices on site. I’ve already contacted my weapons researchers to do the job.”

“What about deliveries of the nuclear material?” Gideon asked.

“I’ve purchased several trucks, sir,” Crane said, handing the man the pad, “which we are now retrofitting in order to haul atomic contraband. They’ll have Northwest Gemstone logos painted on both sides and appear to be equipment haulers.”

Sumi took the pad from the President, affixing her own thumbprint to complete the circle. An agreement had just been forged.

“Done,” Sumi said, smiling as the machine registered a bindable contract, albeit a private one. “Your dream is online, Crane. How long before delivery?”

“Two years,” Crane said, taking back the keypad and interfacing with his wristpad to get his copy. The two machines sang together, then bleeped their satisfaction.

“Crane!” came a voice from the hallway. “Dammit, Crane! There’s a party going on without you. Where are you?”

“It’s Stoney.” Crane smiled, disconnecting and giving the keypad back to Mui, who pocketed it.

“Does he know?” Mui asked.

Crane shook his head. “Outside of this room, only Lanie knows. Even the people I’ve hired to dig the tunnels don’t know. They think we’re making an underground vault to store records. The pyro guys who’ll build the bomb think it’s a secret U.S. mission leading to the renewal of underground testing, and were chosen for their security clearances.”

“Crane!”

“In here, Stoney,” Crane called, opening the door.

Twenty feet down the hall, Stoney smiled when he saw four of them coming out. “When I was a kid,” he said, hobbling over to them, his cane the only reminder of his near brush with death in Memphis, “four men coming out of a bathroom together usually would have been followed by a cloud of smoke.”

“Where’s Lanie?” Crane asked.

“With the rest of the guests,” Stoney said, waving to the other men as they hurried on. “She’s attempting to keep from going crazy looking for you.”

“Be a good guy,” Crane said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Go back and tell Lanie I’ll be right there.”

“Your show,” Whetstone said and shook hands with him. “Congratulations, old man. You know, I looked my entire life and never found a woman like Lanie.”

“Thank you, Stoney,” Crane said, hugging him. The man hobbled off then, leaning heavily on his cane made from Tennessee poplar.

Lanie. Crane had no idea of what he’d done to deserve her. He had orchestrated every other aspect of his life, but suddenly she had shown up and changed it all. It was the most wonderful thing that ever had happened. As far as he was concerned Lanie was the only woman in the entire world. And she loved to work as much as he did! His entire life had come together, all the pieces falling into place. Dreams, and dreams beyond dreams.

He savored the moment. He’d known too few of its kind.

His bad arm throbbed painfully, the quake nearly upon them. He supposed some would think him odd for celebrating his wedding amidst the devastation of an EQ, but he looked at it as a tragedy averted, a cause for celebration. There’d be homelessness and suffering, but nothing like what would have happened had no one been alerted.

He walked out onto the wide wooden porch. A hundred chattering guests silenced immediately. All eyes had turned toward him. A canopy hung above the wide lawn. Lanie, in white taffeta and sheer veil, stood fifty feet away, smiling calmly. She held a bouquet of white orchids. A red-cloaked Cosmie minister stood at her left, Kate Masters, also carrying flowers, was at her right. Stoney awaited Crane at the porch steps.

“Ready?” he asked.

Lightning crackled overhead, leaping between the mountains and the sky. The celebrants looked somewhat nervous.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Crane said loudly, opening his arms. “Trust me!”

They laughed then, relieving the tension.

Crane looked at Stoney. “Now, I’m ready. Got the ring?”

“What ring?” Stoney laughed. “Bad joke. Sorry. Of course I have the ring.”

To Wagner’s traditional wedding march from Lohengrin, they walked down the red carpet toward Lanie. Crane surprised himself by being more nervous now than when he’d been affixing the agreement with Liang.

He reached Lanie’s side and was trapped immediately in her luminescent hazel gaze. Her eyes were wide with love and inquisitiveness. “God, you’re beautiful,” he whispered to a loud rumble. He grasped her hands.

“Never mind that,” she whispered. “How did it go?”

“It’s done,” he whispered in return. Lanie threw her arms around his neck.

“Perhaps we’d better get on with it,” the minister said, looking around suspiciously at the quivering lawn furniture, the trembling ornamental plants and flowers.

Crane padded the time—2:36:30. He smiled at the man. “Your show, Padre.”

“The name’s Al,” the minister said. “Just Al.”

“Quickly, Al,” Crane said, the ground shaking laterally beneath their feet.

“Brothers in Oneness!” the minister began. “As all life is made from the same molecules, so, too, do these beings who stand before us wish to become One through the pair bonding institution of—”

The rest of his speech was mercifully drowned out by the rumbling quakes, originating from a twenty-five-mile-deep hypo-center near Dhangarhi as the Indian Plate finally relieved its slippage. It was a monster quake, its likes not seen for almost sixty years, since the big Alaska quake in 1967.

As the minister pronounced them “co-beings in Oneness,” the ground had begun rolling like waves on the sea, the shelf creaking above them. Crane kissed the bride and hoped the dams would stand despite his predictions, but he knew they wouldn’t.

The sky had darkened now, lightning a continual fireworks show halfway up the peaks that towered over everything. Everyone walked out from under the canopy to watch the display as a section of Everest, large as a city, sheared off the side of the mountain and fell to the valleys far below.

“What a wonderful wedding present,” Lanie said, her arms around Crane as they watched the spectacle. “It’s amazing.”

“Our child’s first EQ,” Crane said.

“What do you do, Crane,” Lanie asked, “when you’ve finally achieved your dream and ended all this?”

“I don’t know.” He grinned. “Take up accounting?”

The valleys screamed all around them, whined—the sound like fingernails on a chalk board amplified billions of times. Crane almost could hear voices in it. Wailing. Forlorn and frightened.

The guests were bending over, hands covering their ears to shut out the din as the wind picked up, blowing wildly into their faces, whipping dresses and hair in swirling frenzy. The inferior Liang sunscreen collapsed in on itself, but fortunately no one was beneath the thing.

And then it happened, right before their eyes. Everest, amidst the howling wind and the cries of dying rock, shook like the old man it was, large bits of it cracking loudly just as the trees breaking in the forest and falling off were creaking loudly. And then it grew. As if rising to walk away, the six-mile mountain abruptly jutted upward, rising higher into the clouds, eating the slippage and growing—young again, a new mountain.

The whole process took three minutes to accomplish. Three minutes to change the topography of the planet. Three minutes to grow the world’s tallest mountain fifty feet taller. The next man to climb it would be climbing higher than Sir Edmund Hillery did in the same spot.

Out of destruction, birth.

Sumi Chan stood with Burt Hill who was wearing a too-small tuxedo. He looked like a monkey without an organ grinder as he watched the reception tangle all around them. The lodge’s main hall was filled to bursting, wedding presents lining the walls and filling the small conference room next door. Professional talkers talked all around them, drinking synth before a fireplace so large it consumed whole treetrunks as its logs.

“Nine on the Richter,” Hill said. “Higher than they could really measure precisely.” He shook his head and took another sip of the dorphed booze in his glass. “Folks are calling it a miracle. The death toll’s still under five hundred. It should have been hundreds of thousands. The four busted dams flooded out fifty cities.”

She shook her head. “A massive cleanup.”

“Yeah. But Liang’ll spend the money here. They’re busy fighting with the Moslems for control of all this. That’s a lot of consumers.”

Sumi sipped her own dorph blend, the only thing that got her through social occasions these days. “Does Crane know about the results of the quake?”

“Naw,” Hill said, pointing to Crane, who was dancing with his new wife. “For once in his life, the man is thinkin’ about something other than quakes. A wonderful sight, ain’t it?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen him happy before.”

“Buddy,” Hill said, “that’s ’cause he ain’t ever been happy before. It’s a scary idea.”

“Scary … how?”

Hill got thoughtful. “When you get happy,” he said, lowering his voice, “you forget to look behind you. You start trusting people. You make mistakes.”

“Then, I guess,” Sumi said, “I’ll not make any more mistakes.”

The man stared hard at her. “I’m talkin’ about Crane,” Hill said, finishing his drink. He looked at the glass. “I’m going for more refreshments.”

She watched him leave, realizing he didn’t trust her. Of course not, why should he? It didn’t matter anyway. Soon, she would be exposed for more of a fraud than any of them thought. She hoped it wouldn’t interfere in any way with Crane’s dream. She’d wanted to give that to him, to make up for everything she’d done.

“I hate to drink alone,” Kate Masters said from beside her. “How about you?”

Sumi smiled wanly. “I enjoy your company very much.”

“Good. How about your dorph recipe?”

“My secret.”

A group of Nepalese Sherpas had come out from their hidey-hole and were doing a vigorous display of acrobatics, tumbling and diving in syncopation over one another to the delight of the crowd.

“You have a lot of secrets, I think.”

Sumi’s body jerked involuntarily. “How so?”

“You really want to talk about this?”

“Yes.”

“Well, first off, you’re not who you say you are.”

Sumi’s heart was pounding. She could feel it in her throat as her face flushed. “You are mistaken, I—”

“I knew your mother,” Masters said. “The Women’s Political Association was in a limited partnership with your parents in a business deal. We all took a beating on that deal, your folks most of all. Your mother spoke of you constantly. It always bothered me that you dishonored her name by remaking your past.”

“It would have been a greater dishonor had I not,” Sumi replied, eyes cast down. “You knew, yet you said nothing?”

“I’d hoped we were friends. Are we?”

“Outside of Crane, I never had a friend.”

“And look what you did to him.”

Sumi was surprised again. “How—”

“I figured it out. I’m a smart girl.”

“Yeah,” Sumi said. “Me, too.”

Masters just stared at her, but her eyes were different. They were studying, dissecting. “You mean that literally?”

Sumi nodded. “Mr. Li knew and forced me to change my ancestry. To keep the world from discovering my parents’ deception I went along with him.”

“Does anyone else—”

“Only you.”

“Why are you telling me?”

Sumi took a deep breath. “I’m in trouble. I-I’m not sure what to do. I need … help.”

Masters fell forward, as if she’d tripped, her hand swinging out, touching Sumi’s crotch, pulling back immediately as she straightened. “Sorry, hon,” she said. “I’m from Missouri, still the ‘Show Me’ state. What sort of trouble?”

“By law,” Sumi said, “the President and Vice President must take a physical once a year. I’ve managed to avoid it far too long. The White House physicians are getting contentious about it. People are wondering why I’m avoiding it. Believe me, that kind of wondering will lead to terrible trouble for me.”

“Why trust me?”

“Somehow I’ve always felt you were trustworthy. I don’t know if I completely trust you, but I do not trust the White House physicians.”

“Do you have to use them?”

Sumi shook her head. “I could demand my own doctor.”

“Okay,” Masters said. “We’ll start there.”

“You’ll help me?”

“Hey, I represent the Women’s Political Association, remember. Welcome to the club, sister.” She hugged Sumi.

“Thank you,” Sumi said, tears welling.

Kate Masters’ eyes twinkled. “Thank me when you’re President,” she replied.

Chapter 16 COMPRESSIONAL STRAINS

“The proposal has some merit, and I’ll certainly consider it,” Mohammed Ishmael said.

Abu Talib sank farther down in his chair. “Brother Ishmael,” he said. “I gave Mr. Tang my word on this.”

“Tang,” he said scornfully. “A flunky. Mui Tsao’s harpy who is nothing but a double-ported chippy. And who were you speaking for, Talib?” Ishmael’s expression was serious as he stared across the table at Talib.

They were in a bunker that was small, claustrophobic, the long, glowing table taking up most of it. Somewhere under the Zone, it was a redoubt that Talib hadn’t seen before. The walls were lead, the door heavy and airtight like ones found in submarines.

Metal bunks folded out from the walls. Storage lockers and shelving covered every available space and were crammed with bottled water, canned food, and staples in sealed jars. A classically designed and supplied bomb shelter and bunker.

Ishmael walked around the table and leaned low, his face only inches from Talib’s. “I asked you who you were speaking for,” he said loudly. “Because it sure wasn’t for me—and it sure wasn’t for my people!”

Talib bristled and jumped up, his chair overturning and clattering to the floor. Martin Aziz darted around the table and placed himself between the two men.

“My brother,” Aziz said to Ishmael, “Talib’s agreement with Tang gets us almost everything we want, and in return all we have to do is to agree to stop the violence. Do you understand?”

“What I understand,” Ishmael said, pushing his brother aside to face Abu Talib, the two men eye to eye, “is that my methods have brought us this far—a foothold in our Homeland, the whites sucking up to us, asking for favors. If these methods have brought us this far, why should we abandon them now?”

“Have you forgotten the focus buildings?” Talib asked. “Liang Int knows, and threatens to shut them all down.”

Ishmael raised his hands in exasperation. “The focus buildings,” he said. “Always the focus buildings.” He arched an eyebrow. “You weren’t around then, Brother, but we survived just fine before we had focus buildings to give us power. Damn!”

He walked away from Talib, squeezing past Martin Aziz to stand at the head of the table, fifteen feet distant. He slammed his hands, palm down, on the tabletop and stared fire at Talib. “And has it ever occurred to your rock head that if they were to shut down the focus buildings we’d probably respond with a massive exodus to New Cairo? Imagine that, if you will. Imagine the Memphis exodus multiplied by fifty with no earthquake to cover it. Imagine the fights. Imagine the bloodshed. Imagine the public relations.”

Talib felt suddenly stupid. “I never thought of that.”

“Well, your white friend Mr. Tang certainly did! And, so, for an end to the violence that’s got us this far, what do we really get in return? Only a promise that they would keep doing what they’re doing now—nothing. If they’d figured an advantage to be gained by shutting down the focus buildings, believe me, they wouldn’t have consulted us about doing it.

“The reason they haven’t fought it out with us is simple: We are a part of this … this landscape, part of the fabric of this country. If everybody else sees them going after us, it’ll get them thinking about themselves. Case in point. The G was called off the Zone fighting in Memphis almost immediately for PR reasons and Liang made sure the teev was full of pictures of the quake, not the exodus.”

“Leonard,” Aziz said softly. “Can’t we use this as an opening, though? Can’t we try and follow through? If they’re willing to let us coexist now, why fight them? Already over a thousand of us, mostly children, have died in clashes with the G.”

“Martyrs,” Ishmael said. “And I know how many have died.”

Talib drew himself up to his full height. He’d resigned from the Foundation and now he was about to resign from NOI. What was he to become: A man without a job, without even a place to call home? “Brother Ishmael,” he said officiously, “given the nature of your lack of trust in me and the worthlessness which will attach to my work from now on, I respectfully submit my resignation as spokesman for Nation of Islam.”

“Would you sit down, Abu?” Ishmael sighed. “I respect your opinion and the job you do. You’re irreplaceable. We’ll work something out with this Tang thing, all right?

I told—asked—you to sit down.”

Talib sat. “I’ve been working in New Cairo,” he said. “A mass exodus isn’t feasible. There’s not enough housing. The people we displace will destroy much in order to keep it from us. People, especially city people, have to be taught how to farm, to work with their hands. Drop twenty million people into that situation and you’ll have food and water and sewage problems you never even dreamed of.”

“I know,” Ishmael said. “We’re not ready yet. That’s why I’m considering the deal you’re negotiating with Tang.” Ishmael looked over at Aziz. “Would you sit down, too? You make me nervous.”

“I simply ask,” Ishmael said, “that no one presume on my authority. May I have general agreement on that?”

Nods around the table.

“Good. I agree that movement to New Cairo will be slow. Let us get the first settlement entirely on its feet and we’ll expand from there. Meanwhile, Brother Talib has done us the greatest service in bringing the news of Crane’s ultimate goal: to use nuclear weapons to fuse the Continental Plates. Crane will be our focus.”

“Why?” Talib asked. “He will not be able to get the nuclear material or the authority to do such a thing.”

Ishmael looked at Talib as if he were a child. He smiled beatifically, sitting back in his chair, fingers steepled. “I continually wonder how it is possible,” he asked softly, “for you to have worked so closely with this man and not recognized his power?”

“His power is in his madness,” Talib said.

“His power resides in the clarity of his vision,” Ishmael returned. “The same place my power resides.”

“He’s dead in the water,” Talib said.

“He will find a way,” Ishmael said. “And it will be up to us to stop him. Crane is my Satan, Abu. I want no misunderstanding. He is the greatest battle I will ever fight. Like Mohammed with the Meccans, ‘Though they gave me the sun in my right hand and the moon in my left to bring me back from my undertaking, yet will I not pause till the Lord carry this cause to victory, or till I die for it.’ Promise me that if I do not live to see this through, the rest of you will continue after me.”

“I swear,” Talib said, “that I will not stop dogging Crane if there is breath in my body.”

“And I,” Martin Aziz said.

“Good. It is Crane who will ultimately provide the key to our Homeland. I don’t know how yet, but I can see it just as surely as I can see my own death calling out to me. Is there any other business from the outside world?”

Talib looked at the tabletop, then cleared his throat. “With all due respect and humility,” he said, voice choked, “I would like to ask your permission for your sister’s hand in marriage.”

“An alliance,” Ishmael said. “You don’t want Crane’s woman any longer?”

“I was a fool,” Talib said.

“Yes, you were,” Brother Ishmael responded. He stood and walked around to Talib. “But you are a fool no longer.” Talib got up; the two men embraced. “Welcome to our family. We will be real brothers now.” He kissed Talib on each cheek. Smiling, he said, “Let me go to find Khadijah and bring her to you. We must celebrate.”

In truth, Mohammed Ishmael could have sent someone to fetch his sister, but he needed time alone. He knew that Talib was a good man who was becoming a good Muslim, but the convert hadn’t yet begun to grasp the proper attitude when dealing with the Infidel. Ishmael knew he’d have to watch his new brother carefully—especially since Crane was drawing Talib and him into the web that would ensnare the three of them and shape their fate. Ishmael could feel it drawing around him now. Tears formed in the corners of his eyes. Like Moses, he’d see the promised land, but not live long enough to enter it.

Out in the hallway, facing the wall so none could see, he cried for himself, then cursed his weakness. Only the words of the Prophet brought him any solace. “Be in the world like a traveler, or like a passerby and reckon yourself as of the dead.”

So be it.

Sumi Chan watched her security monitor as Kate Masters’ helo glided gently onto the pad, disgorging the woman and an older man carrying a medical case. Lights around the pad blazed, catching the sequins of Masters’ bright red body suit, lighting her up like the Chinese opera on festival nights.

Sumi saw the figures approach the house elevator. She felt great trepidation, for she’d never trusted anyone with her secrets, not even Crane, and now she’d see what price she would pay for indulging in trusting Kate Masters.

The visitors disappeared from the screen and she switched to a shot inside the elevator. The doors opened and Masters and the doctor stepped in. Finding the camera immediately, Kate used its lens as a mirror and fixed her hair. “Hope these pictures look good in the archives,” she said, pulling her low neckline down a touch and winking.

The Vice President’s quarters were located in Silver Spring, Maryland, minutes from the Capital. The entire house was underground and electronically secured, leaving her protected without the expense of bodyguards. Sumi already had figured out a dozen ways in which the security could be breached here, but it didn’t matter. No one in the history of the United States had ever gone after a Vice President. They were too powerless and easy to replace.

Sumi hit the door activation button and hurried through the small but elegant traditional Chinese house whose windows looked out at holo projections of the Henan Province where she’d grown up—rolling farmland, workers tilling the fields, the Huang He River flowing gently from west to east in the distance. Over the course of a year, she’d watched the planting, growing, and harvesting of two crops, complete with typhoons in the spring and killing frost in the winter.

The elevator doors opened into her living room. Masters bounced into the room and gave Sumi a hug. “All this secrecy is very exciting.”

“I’m getting cold feet,” Sumi whispered into Masters’ ear. “This doctor, how do you know we can trust him?”

Masters smiled and straightened. “Vice President Chan, I’d like you to meet my father, Dr. Ben Masters.”

“Pleased to know you,” the man said, shaking a relieved Sumi’s hand. She should have known Masters would handle things impeccably. “Katie tells me you’ve got yourself something of a gender problem here.”

Sumi nodded. “I don’t want them to know I’m a woman,” she said and the words sounded odd coming out of her mouth.

“I’ll just give my report on your health,” the man returned, his wrinkled face relaxed. “I’m not a census taker. How long since you’ve had a physical?”

“Not since I left China ten years ago.”

“Okay, then,” the doctor returned. “Where can I set up?”

“There’s a guest room at the end of the hallway,” Sumi replied. “Will that do?”

“Fine. Give me a few minutes to prepare.” The man walked off, Sumi turning to Masters.

Reaching out, Kate tousled Sumi’s severely combed back hair, bringing it down on the sides and making bangs. She smiled with satisfaction when she was done as if, only now, could she truly accept Sumi as a woman.

“I’m ready back here!” Masters called from the guest room.

“Coming!” Sumi said.

Kate stopped her. “Sit for a second. I want to ask you something personal.”

“About sex, right?” Sumi said, feeling herself tighten up involuntarily. “I’ll tell you what I told Mr. Li. I have had to suppress those urges in order to maintain my charade.”

“Are you asexual?”

“No.”

“Do you like girls or boys?”

“I’m not attracted to women. Why are you asking me these things?”

“Okay. What kind of man do you find attractive?”

“Kate,” Sumi said, nervous, “what are you getting at here?”

“Just answer my question. What kind of man attracts you—young stud? Muscleman?”

“No.” Chan laughed. “This is silly. A game.”

“Play. What kind of man?”

“I don’t know … intelligent. Someone who’ll give me a mental challenge. Middle-aged … past all that young man’s nonsense. Strong but vulnerable. Sure of himself but open to interpretation…”

“You’re describing Crane.”

“What?”

“This is Crane you’re talking about.”

Sumi flinched, a hand coming to her mouth.

“You’re in love with him, aren’t you?”

Sumi gasped and turned away. Now Masters knew all her secrets. The woman hugged her from behind, resting her head on Sumi’s shoulder.

“I’m so sorry, honey,” she said, then gently turned Sumi to face her.

“I’ve got something for you,” Kate said and held up a small metal slot with double sets of three-inch-long sensors sticking out the end.

“A chip port?”

“My Dad can have one of these in your skull in five minutes. Trust me. It will help you with your sexual problems.”

“Who said I had a problem?” Sumi asked sharply. “I’m not a chippie, Kate.”

“Neither am I.” Kate flipped up her red hair directly above her left ear, revealing her own port. “I’m a simple gal. If it’s bad, I do it. If it’s fun, I do it. Usually they’re the same thing. Trust me, honey. I can fix you up so that you can lead a full sexual life without ever knowing a man. Five minutes of your time. Under the hair, where no one will see it unless you want them to.”

Sumi Chan stared at her with wide eyes.

The holorain fell hard on Henan through Sumi’s bedroom window, a cool, damp, fragrant breeze blowing in with it. Her lights were turned out. Occasional flashes of lightning brightened the room.

A slight ache in her head reminded her of the chip sitting in its little case beside her on the night table. The checkup had gone well and the surgery had, indeed, taken only five minutes, most of that spent shaving the inch-long spot on her head where the port was to be buried. An anesthetic had been administered, then a small incision made, the sensors put right into the cut. The sensors were very sharp. Ben Masters used a small hammer to tap them through muscles and bone. Once he was through the skull, one shove jammed the sensors deeply into her brain.

It had been painless.

Lightning flashed again, and Sumi turned to look at the chip box and the small tweezers attached to it on a chain. There was no reason for her not to use it right away, Kate had said.

She sat up, her silk pajamas slithering along the covers as she swung her feet to the floor and picked up the box. She opened it and tweezed out the chip. She felt for her new port with her little finger, then homed in with the chip. It slid effortlessly into the driver and engaged with a whirring sound only she could hear.

She waited for a moment, then looked around the room. Nothing was happening, no hallucinations, no bright colors, no altered states. She lay back down, disappointed, drew the covers over herself, and watched the shadows on the ceiling.

Then, a sound. Tapping. Someone was knocking lightly on her door. She pulled the covers up around her chin. “Who’s there?” she called.

The door opened, and a man walked in carrying a candle. “I brought some light,” he said in Chinese. “I thought the storm might frighten you.”

Her heart was pounding as he walked closer, her hand edging toward the security alarm, though it would be too late to save her. How had he gotten in?

“I’ve been here all the time,” he said in answer to her unasked question.

“Who are you?”

“Who or what?” He set the candle beside them on the nighttable, then sat beside her on the bed. She could feel their thighs touching as he stared innocently down at her. She reached out to the candle, could feel its heat.

“Start with who.”

“I don’t have a name. You name me.”

“What, then. What are you?”

“I am your ideal man, I guess,” he said. “I’ve been living in your brain ever since old Doc Ben put the driver in. It appears to me that I am a combination of Lewis Crane, your father, and a secondary school teacher you had a crush on named Mr. Weng.”

“Mr. Weng,” she said, burying her face in her hands, her face reddening in embarrassment. “I haven’t thought of him in—”

“You thought of him today, when Kate asked you about the kind of man you liked.”

“Why are you here?”

“I’m here to be your lover, Sumi, if you want. Your friend if you don’t want a lover—though I must say, you’d be missing some incredible stimuli. This is a very good chip. I feel very much alive.”

“But you’re not … really here. I mean not physically.”

“Your brain thinks I am. That’s good enough for me.”

He put out a hand to lightly stroke her thigh. Her tension began to ease. Somehow, knowing she was creating her lover made it much easier. No fears. No need for fears.

“I’m going to call you Paul,” she said.

“Okay.” His hand moved up to her face, his touch setting off electric jolts all through her body. “But, why Paul?”

She looked at him with wide eyes. “Because I don’t know anyone named Paul,” she said. Both of them laughed.

His arms went around her and pulled her close. She could smell his aftershave, feel the coarse texture of his curly hair.

“I love you, Sumi,” he whispered into her ear.

“I know,” she replied, tears running down her cheeks. “I know.”

Abu Talib sat in the back of the large briefing room with Khadijah, his feet out in front of him, his head flung back. He was tired, bone weary. Five months ago he had completed negotiations with Tang for a deal that made him proud—and nervous as hell. In return for NOI’s agreement to cease violent protests, Liang Int had promised a national referendum on giving NOI a homeland. And tonight was the night, election night.

About thirty people filled the room, lining the walls, watching large teevs. They were monitoring the voting in cities that had War Zones. At the front of the room, the one Talib had been brought to his first night underground a million years ago, both Mohammed Ishmael and Martin Aziz stood, black robe and white robe, day and night, two men absolutely united in cause and diametrically opposed in method. They were looking at a huge screen that filled the front of the room. Khadijah sat with Talib, her head on his shoulder, cuddling tiredly. Talib kissed her forehead.

He wondered what Brother Ishmael was going to do if the vote didn’t go their way. For these last five months Martin Aziz had confronted Ishmael on a daily basis about the issue of violence in the occupied territories. For five months, day after weary day, his brother had convinced Ishmael anew not to restart the riots and content himself, instead, with the “public education” phase that Aziz masterminded and Talib led. Talib’s job consisted of making speeches and Net appearances on anybody’s show who’d ask him, selling the fact that Nation of Islam was a peaceful organization simply dedicated to the formation of an Islamic state and common brotherhood among all people.

He’d gone nonstop for the full five months, casting science aside completely, his dance card full. Even his diplomatic duties in New Cairo were getting too little attention. It had become disorienting, never knowing what city he was in, always saying the same things. It had worn him out completely, and was a damn poor way to start a marriage.

Aziz had concurrently begun peaceful demonstrations from the Zone, “informative riots” he’d called them. Aziz’s thinking throughout was that Ishmael had gotten everyone’s attention with the real riots, now it was time to get their sympathy and, hopefully, their vote on the homeland issue with education and PR.

“Why are you and my brother so worried?” Khadijah asked. “Aren’t we winning?”

“For the moment,” Talib said. “You’re not used to the voting process, but what happens is that very few people vote during the day of an election. Most everyone waits until they get home from work and get on the teev to see the pols’ last-minute speeches and promises. They look at voting as another entertainment medium.”

He felt rather than heard Khadijah take a shuddering breath. She pointed to a teev at the side of the room, and he turned to look. Crane and a hugely pregnant Lanie filled the screen, the bottom of which indicated audio on fiber M. He padded on and got the tail end of what Crane was saying.

“—and that is just one of the reasons why my wife and I support the cause of the Nation of Islam. We have voted for a homeland. We hope you will, too.”

Surprised almost to the point of shock, Talib sat rigid, then quickly padded off. Beyond e-mailing a thank you for the support to Lanie and Crane, how was he supposed to react? Crane was a triumphal hero these days, and his slightest move was on the teev. The wedding in the Himalayas had garnered hours of coverage. Beyond those gossipy sorts of features, though, there’d been little on Crane and Lanie—their work, their new projects. Even the scientific community had been fairly quiet, although Talib had heard there was something afoot, some new area Crane was developing, but he’d been too busy to follow up … not that he was worried. It couldn’t be the plate fusion scheme. Crane was rich enough since the wager to put such an effort together, but he’d never be able to get the approvals for digging that he’d need, much less the nuclear material. Still—

Khadijah was vigorously shaking his arm. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked sharply. “You’re upset. Does it bother you to see the white woman so large with Crane’s child?”

“No,” he lied. “That’s all in the past.”

“But you would like to have children … sons, right?”

He tilted her head from his shoulder and looked into her eyes. “Yes,” he answered, “very much so.”

“Good,” she replied, matter-of-factly. “Because you’re going to have one. I’ve made you a son to rule New Cairo.”

“What?”

Her eyes were playful. “You heard me,” she said. “You shouldn’t be surprised. We’ve been trying hard enough.”

He hugged her, flooded with a feeling of bittersweet euphoria. “That’s wonderful. When?”

“June,” she said. “Next June.”

“You know it’s a boy? You’ve tested?”

“I don’t have to test,” she said. “I have made a male for Islam. We are very strong-willed in my family.”

“Talib!” Ishmael shouted. “Turn on your damned aural!”

Abu kissed Khadijah, his stomach fluttery, and padded on the V fiber.

“Khadijah is pregnant!” he announced to anyone on the fiber.

A cheer went up from the assembled.

“We pray for a manchild,” Ishmael said. “Now will you please look at the screen?”

Talib looked and wasn’t surprised. On one side of the screen was a shot outside the walls of the War Zone in LA. Zoners, adults and children, stood in a large group, each holding a candle. They were singing. On the other side were the running tallies of the vote. NOI was losing.

“We are losing and my brother has our people singing negro spirituals!” Ishmael said, raising his arms to heaven. “A minstrel show!”

“Remember,” Talib said. “We knew there would be setbacks and regions we’d lose.”

“We’re down one percentage point in Seattle,” interrupted one of the poll watchers. “Down two points in Phoenix.”

“We’re losing our lead in New York!”

“That’s it,” Ishmael said low.

Talib looked at the overview board. The votes were swinging against the cause.

“Who’s running the Detroit screen?” Ishmael called into the confusion.

“I am, sir!” answered a man standing near Talib, who was on his feet now, Khadijah rising, too.

“No!” Aziz said, grabbing Ishmael’s arm. “You cannot do this.”

Ishmael jerked his arm away and spat on the floor. “This is the result of my listening to you,” he said. Then he asked the poll watcher, “Is Brother Elijah running the action in Detroit?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell him to turn on the heat, Brother.”

“Yes, sir.”

Aziz had already moved the Detroit War Zone to the big screen, Talib watching as Ishmael’s order reached the crowd. They broke from their singing immediately, throwing their candles at the FPF guard lined up fifty yards distant.

They charged the edge of the Zone screaming, “God is great!” They threw rocks, but when the nausea gas hit the blacktop, the real artillery came out.

“Guns!” Aziz yelled. “What are you doing?”

“What I should have done all along!” Ishmael returned. “At this point, this is the only way. Perhaps we can draw enough viewers to keep them away from their voting buttons. Maybe we can hold our lead. Get Miami on the horn!”

“The bottom’s dropping out of Detroit!” the poll watcher called. “We’re down five percent now.”

“Tell them to hold,” Ishmael said, pacing furiously. He pointed to a man working a small monitor. “What’s the screen comparison breakdown?”

“We’re still winning in cities where we have no presence,” the man returned over the aural.

“Brother,” Aziz said, intruding softly in the aural. “About Detroit…”

“Abort Detroit immediately,” Ishmael said. Frowning deeply, he strode into the midst of the action. People were furiously working their screens and downloading stats. “Cease all operations!” Ishmael commanded. The room suddenly quieted, all eyes on him.

The word went out quickly, the Zones breaking their candlelight vigils, the Detroit rioters already escaping back behind their walls.

“Now what?” Aziz said.

“You have the nerve to ask me that?” Ishmael put a finger right in his brother’s face. “We are going to lose, and I blame you.” He then pointed to Talib. “And I blame you.”

“Violence is not the answer. I’m begging you to keep peace,” Aziz said.

“No!” Ishmael shouted. He whirled away from his brother and shoved through the crowd, exiting through the side door without a backward glance.

Chapter 17 THE SALTON TROUGH

Lewis Crane took the eggbeater up into the puffy clouds, bright white against a hard blue sky, then dipped quickly down. Charlie, two days shy of eighteen months of age, clapped his hands and giggled. He was sitting on his mother’s lap, a huge, yellow plush elephant in his own little lap.

“You know what clouds are, Charlie?” Crane asked as he banked south, headed for the Project. “They’re water.”

Charlie made a gurgling noise. He seemed to adore his parents, and delighted them by listening intently to every word they spoke to him, responding often with a profound string of gibberish.

“And how much does a cloud weigh?”

The child’s eyes, hazel like his mother’s, opened wide. As if he could understand everything his father said, he looked out at the sky. He was just learning to speak. He pointed a pudgy finger and said, “Coud … coud.”

“That’s right, pal. Cloud,” Crane said. “Bet you think those clouds don’t weigh a thing … like spiderwebs. But a really big cloud weighs a lot. Ten million pounds maybe. Big. Big, huh?”

“Big,” Charlie repeated, opening his arms wide. He held up his stuffed animal. “Ellypant.”

“Yeah,” Crane said, excited. “Maybe two elephants.” Beaming, he looked over at Lanie. “Did you hear that? Two new words—cloud and elephant—and he got the point about size!”

Lanie chuckled, smoothing Charlie’s hair while resisting the temptation to tease Crane. What the heck, though, Charlie was bright, probably not ready to make an acceptance speech in Stockholm, but Crane was justified in the pride he took in their son. How he loved Charlie. And what a terrific father he was. Most important of all, though, Lanie thought, was that Charlie was sweet-tempered, curious, and affectionate. Almost as if he could read her thoughts, Charlie twisted around and planted a wet kiss on her jaw. She was laughing as they spotted the Project hundreds of feet below.

As usual, there were protesters around the outer gates of the Project compound. They’d been there since groundbreaking, which had occurred just a few days after Charlie’s birth. Mohammed Ishmael had enlarged the scope of NOI protests while escalating their violence. Their avowed purpose in picketing Northwest Gemstone was to stop Crane from pursuing what they called “his mad schemes to wreak nuclear havoc to stop earthquakes.” That, Lanie and Crane knew, had come from only one source—Dan Newcombe. Well, Abu Talib, as he called himself now.

They’d feared when Dan had resigned from the Foundation that he’d go public with what he knew about Crane’s dream; they were only surprised he’d waited so long … or that it had taken him such a time to learn about Northwest Gemstone and put two and two together. So far, they hadn’t lied to the public. In fact they hadn’t made any public statements at all. But they didn’t have to lie, because the public was disinclined to believe NOI. After the loss of the referendum on a NOI homeland, Mohammed Ishmael had become much more prominent, often eclipsing Dan in the number and apparent importance of speeches, appearances on teev, and before their people.

And it was no doubt that it was Mohammed Ishmael who had returned the NOI to a warlike regimen of terrorist attacks.

The War Zones had rioted all at once, then moved farther out into the cities themselves—suicide bombers, cars full of gunmen shooting anyone unfortunate enough to be on the streets, full-scale urban warfare.

And every time another shooting, another bombing occurred, Mohammed Ishmael immediately claimed credit and said that the terror would stop the moment that NOI got a homeland—and Crane was stopped.

Liang Int continued to back the project, mainly because they couldn’t afford to lose face to Yo-Yu, whose new logo, the letters YOU done in blood red seemed to speak directly to the common man. Yo-Yu had been a phenomenon. Their chips had become remarkably sophisticated, able to create effects in which the brain couldn’t differentiate between reality and illusion. They’d gotten so good, in fact, that Mr. Tang’s attempts at competing with a similar product were failing miserably due to inferior quality. There was simply too large a technological gap, and Yo-Yu guarded its secrets very carefully.

Then there was the Mississippi Valley. Yo-Yu, flush with chip capital, for chips were indeed superseding dorph in the marketplace, had made an offer for the entire area which Liang had accepted. It had made Mr. Mui happy, since it enabled Liang America to show a profit for calendar ’27. Yo-Yu then had pumped money into the entire midwest, which had energized the area. It had become a frontier boomtown, the disenfranchised moving in from all over, taking the places of those who’d left after the quake and its persistent aftershocks.

Boisterous and beyond the law, the people of the Mississippi Valley had turned it into the hot spot for fast money and easy deals—and that had given Yo-Yu the foothold it needed in basic areas—land ownership, timber, chemical plants, agriculture—so it could make a real run at breaking Liang America.

And they’d gotten the people. The best public relations project the world had seen was the ozone regeneration project, an idea they’d stolen from Liang. Yo-Yu’s project had replenished twenty-seven percent of the atmosphere’s ozone supply, helping everyone without cost. People were once again going out in the sun with no fear of skin cancer. Trees thought long dead were regenerating. In the off-year elections in ’26, Yo-Yu had taken eighty-nine seats in the House of Representatives, so many that a kind of political balance had been established, and actual debate on real issues was heard once more in Congress.

Crane buzzed the protesters, padding to his outside loudspeaker as a small sea of faces cursed and shook their fists up at him. “You are trespassing on private property,” he said, Charlie laughing and clapping again when he heard his father’s booming voice. “Leave the area immediately. We are going to begin riot exercises with a deadly chemical spray. Leave immediately.”

He banked up, watching them scatter below him. He padded onto Project Control. “Turn on the sprinklers,” he said, all of them laughing as the plain water hoses came on, spraying the people. The protesters ran, stumbling and choking, gasping for breath—brought to their knees by the power of suggestion. Crane changed the joke every few days so that word wouldn’t get around.

They cleared the ten-foot fence, their small FPF contingent waving as they passed. For all his bluster, Brother Ishmael had never attacked the compound directly, perhaps afraid to wander too far from a core War Zone. Or he might have been afraid he was right about unstable nuclear material being worked in the compound.

“He said the machines won’t dig?” Lanie asked as they cleared the fence to take the last five miles to the compound.

“Mr. Panatopolous is very upset and wants to change the finish date.”

“So, what’s new? He bellyaches more than any ten people.”

“That’s Mr. Panatopolous’ forte, my love. Our Pany’s creative contribution to the world. I’d kind of miss it if he changed.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him I’d have my wife look into it,” he answered, wiggling his eyebrows. “You will look into it, won’t you?”

She nodded. “It sounds like a calibration problem again. The diggers go off line after awhile and nobody notices until they stop working.”

They bullseyed the two-story containment building, its windowless, domelike construction a concrete wart on the flat desert of Bombay Beach. The site was on the eastern shore of the Salton Sea, several miles from a large retirement community. Farther east were the San Bernardino Mountains. Salton gleamed like diamonds under the bright morning sun. Thirty miles long and ten miles wide, it had sprung into being in 1905 when the Colorado River broke through irrigation headgates and flooded the area. Though called a sea, Salton was actually a shallow saline lake. The Project pulled water from it for its reactors.

But that wasn’t why they’d built here. Salton was 232 feet below sea level, so they could dig from a low point. More importantly, the Salton Trough sat squarely atop California’s most important fault convergence. Just beneath the Sea, the San Andreas and Imperial Faults became one, the Imperial Fault the final tear all the way to the Gulf of California. The joined faults then moved north, interconnecting with other faults and inactive volcanoes. Not only was the Salton Sea the place to bottle up San Andreas, but also to coldcock at least three other faults at the same time. The globe showed how important it was to get at these other faults, because, it demonstrated that by 2070, thirteen years after Southern California would become the island of Baja, the rest of the state would crack right up through the Salton from the Mexican border to Oregon, turning California into a jutting peninsula, the shores of the Pacific lapping against Arizona and Nevada.

Crane was planning to stop all of that in one bold action two weeks hence.

He landed on the blacktop next to the containment building, where workers were hosing it down after a Masada pass over the night before. Masada was finally beginning to dissipate and would be gone in the next few years. Endings and beginnings. Three months earlier a group of forty Jewish scientists had braved the still intense radiation of Israel to set up a closed-environment settlement in the leveled city of Jerusalem. Their dome abutted the remnants of the western wall, all that was left from Solomon’s temple built three millennia previously. The Islamic world complained mightily and made threats. The Jews stayed in Jerusalem. Two babies already had been born in the land of their forefathers.

Turn of the wheel, Crane had thought at the time. Take that, Brother Ishmael.

They set down next to Containment, climbing out and walking toward the profusion of small buildings scattered across the flat plain. There were barracks for the permanent troops, a cafeteria and amusements building, equipment sheds, and the motor pool area where all of Mr. Panatopolous’ bizarre anthropomorphic digging machines lived. In the distance on the salt flats, a two-hundred-foot hill of excavated rock and dirt stood as the highest point in the immediate area.

The elevator to the cavern looked just like another building. Three stories tall, it also had no windows. Yellow dust blew through the camp on the hot desert air. They hurried to the entryway, Lanie carrying Charlie. She pulled his brimmed cap down over his face to keep the dust out of his mouth, he pushed it back up. Charlie took naturally to the desert.

They voiceprinted into the entry, then walked the fifteen feet in darkness to the inner door, equally large to get heavy equipment in and out. Here all three went through optical scan and fingerprint.

The elevator doors came open with a hydraulic whoosh, and they stepped into a plain metal cylinder twenty feet high with a thirty-foot radius. It could carry a hundred people or sixty tons of equipment. The elevator was a giant electromagnet that used the earth’s own magnetic field as propulsion. The elevator hovered at the top of a twenty-mile abyss with no external apparatus to hold it in place and with no brakes. There were two buttons just inside the door—an up arrow and a down arrow.

The center of the cylinder was carpeted, comfortable seating and amusements awaiting guests for the twenty-minute ride down. Lanie plopped heavily onto a couch. Charlie went right for the holobuilder, a handheld projection machine that created blocks that could be stacked and arranged to construct almost anything. Charles Crane enjoyed stacking them up to the top of the room, then knocking out the bottom one to see them tumble.

Crane watched his son, doting only the way an older father could. At forty-one, he didn’t feel especially old, but he’d led an eventful life, enough for any ten people, and his recent mellowing had made him glad he was seeing his dream through now. He feared losing the manic energy that had driven him before. This was too important to the world to take off the pressure. He was becoming damned civilized; and soon, he suspected, would come acceptance … then complacency … then the death of creativity.

“Are you going to have to put back the date?” Lanie asked as Charlie’s tower of blocks toppled into their midst, much to the boy’s glee.

“We’ll be fine,” Crane answered from an easy chair, Charlie zapping his blocks and beginning again, this time with pyramids. “I’m just glad we’re getting this done before the next elections.”

“Maybe all that horrid violence will stop then, too.” She stretched out on the sofa. The elevator moved soundlessly except for a small contact point clack every ten seconds.

“Are you all right?” Crane asked.

“It’s nothing … I’m a little tired. I didn’t sleep well last night.”

“Bad dreams?”

“It’s nothing, I said.”

“Lanie…”

She sat up, on the edge of the couch, tensed.

“Do you remember that dream I used to have?”

“The Martinique dream? Sure. It went away after your memory returned.”

“It’s back,” she said. “I had it last night.” She shook her head. “So … real. I could feel the fire burning my legs, and the screaming and—”

“It’s just a dream, Lame,” he said, moving to the sofa to sit next to her. He put his arms around her and held her tight.

She melted against him. “The crazy part is … the place, the place where it happens in the dream looks a lot like where we are right now.”

He kissed her on the cheek. “Your brain is simply putting what you know into the dream, that’s all.”

“No,” she said, stiffening in his grasp. “It hasn’t changed. It’s always looked like that in the dream.”

He turned her face to his. “What are dreams?” he asked.

“Random electrical impulses in the cerebral cortex. The brain interprets them as it chooses.” She held his gaze. “So how come I saw this place in a dream four years ago?”

“Coincidence,” he said. “One cavern’s pretty much like another.” The Project had been a strain on everyone, and he’d be glad when this was done. When he sold the package to the world, it would be with someone else as coordinator. He was ready to rest, to spend some time enjoying his family.

“Maybe.”

They were getting closer. Crane could feel the deceleration in his stomach. The elevator disgorged them in a large lobby of concrete walls and steel supports, well lit. Several hallways ran off the lobby, going to different parts of the Project. They took the administrative hallway past visitor reception/processing and down to the computer room.

They stopped at the doorway, Lanie handing Charlie to Crane. “Here, go with your daddy to visit Mr. Panatopolous while Mommy puts the big project back on stream.”

“Come on, pal,” Crane said. “We’ll go watch the diggers.”

“Dig-gers!” Charlie said, excited.

The hallway ended at a set of metal stairs, an Authorized Personnel Only sign tacked beside it. They took the stairs and entered the cavern.

It was huge, over fifteen hundred feet across. The natural cave’s ceiling was one hundred feet overhead. Branching out on either side of the main cavern were Mr. Panatopolous’ caverns. Wide enough for trucks and equipment, they stretched for three miles in either direction. Brilliant lighting made the place glow, though it stayed cool at the natural sixty-nine degrees of the earth’s underground.

The computer room, large and glassed-in, overlooked the cavern. “Wave to your mother, pal. She expects it.”

Crane and Charlie waved up to the window, Lanie smiling warmly and returning the wave. They were symbiotic, Crane and Lanie, meshing perfectly in every aspect of their lives. They shared the duties of caring for Charlie, worked when they wanted to or needed to. More than anything, they understood and respected what drove the other. Neither was subservient. For the first time in his life, Crane understood the saying, “Man was not meant to be alone.”

He put Charlie on the floor. The boy made a beeline for the three-wheeled carts used in the caverns. Crane hurried after him and they climbed in. “Call Mommy,” he said, holding his wrist pad out to Charlie, who immediately reached over and hit the P fiber. Lanie came over Crane’s aural. “Hey, we’re working up here.”

“Yeah, yeah. Would you tell me where Panatopolous is?”

“Corridor A,” she replied. “All the way down.”

“Thanks, love. Bye.”

He padded off and keyed the focus, the vehicle jerking off to purr along the poured concrete floor. As they made their way through the cavern toward corridor A, the power came into view. Holes the size of swimming pools and spaced every thirty feet were cut straight down into the rock. They were surrounded by rails. Each hole went down four miles, and running up its center was a tube with a one-foot diameter, packed with nuclear material. There were one hundred tubes.

The cart veered to the left, taking A corridor, which twisted and turned by the holes with their packed tubes meant to weld the widely divergent faults that crisscrossed the area. They were so far beneath Salton now, the lake so shallow the explosions below would barely ripple the water.

Large readouts posted every half mile kept track of the radiation in the chamber. There were occasional small leaks, easily plugged in a system not meant to last beyond the week after next. With the amazing amounts of radioactive material they’d been using the last eighteen months, it was remarkable they’d never had a real problem. It was what enabled them to finish ahead of schedule and before the elections, which, it was universally expected, would result in a Yo-Yu sweep victory and, since word about the Project was spreading and gaining credence with the public, it might mean the cancellation of the Project.

The corridor kept twisting, fault stress, shearing, and compression fractures evident everywhere on the rock walls, a geological treasure trove of Nature’s possibilities. This entire landscape would become molten rock when the devices were triggered.

They hit a straight stretch of corridor, and spotted Mr. Panatopolous’ rockeater about one hundred feet ahead at the end of the line. The little man paced back and forth angrily, as always. True to his word, Crane had thought of the man who’d helped them dig through the alluvial mud in Reelfoot when it came time to award the digging subcontract, hiring Panatopolous for the entire job and offering him a fifty percent incentive if he brought it in by the end of March.

“It’s about time you got here,” Pany said as they drove up, relaxing into a smile the moment he saw Charlie.

“Hey, there’s my big boy,” Panatopolous said, pulling him out of the cart to hold him in the air. Charlie laughed but his eyes were fixed on the ten-foot digger that looked like a praying mantis. “You’re growing every day.”

Charlie was the unofficial mascot of the Project, having literally grown from a sprout to a toddler under the watchful eyes of sixty employees.

Crane walked to the machine, its snout dipped down into the half-dug hole, the hole’s terminus too far below to see. A man-size cage hung just inside the lip of the hole. These cages were designed to carry a worker down to check for leakage in the core, and eventually to trigger the thousands of pounds of plastique built into the tube that would begin the nuclear reaction.

The digger had a powerful drill bit on the end that literally chopped up the rock below. The rubble was then sucked back up the tube and into the machine’s innards, a long, cylindrical chamber that powdered the rock to dust with ultrasound, then spewed it into the back of a waiting dumptruck for transport to the man-made mountain aboveground.

Panatopolous carried Charlie over to his father. “I could’a been finished with this if I wasn’t tied in to your damned computers. A hole’s a hole. Why do you have to check my holes?”

“You know a great deal about holes,” Crane said. “I know about what’s in them.”

“There’s nothing in a hole. It’s empty.”

Crane smiled at him. “How much does a cloud weigh?” he asked.

“What?”

Crane’s pad bleeped on Lanie’s fiber. He tapped on. “I’m looking at a non-op digger,” he said. “Talk to me.”

“Don’t you dare let Charlie down on the floor near that open hole,” she returned in his aural.

“Roger.”

“Tell our unhappy friend that he has to recalibrate his digger point oh nine five centimeters at twenty-three degrees…”

“Point oh nine five centimeters at twenty-three degrees,” Crane said, Panatopolous cursing, then excusing himself to Charlie.

“…he’s making the fault part of his tunnel. The computers won’t deal with the inherent incongruity of a moving tunnel.”

“Got it. Anything else?”

She was silent for several seconds.

“Lame?”

“There are two groups here for a scheduled tour.”

“So?”

“One of them is a small group from the Nation of Islam.”

“What? I never authoriz—”

“I’m sorry, Crane,” she said softly. “Sumi called me yesterday and asked if we could do this as a personal favor, a way, perhaps, of curtailing the violence. You weren’t available; I was up to my ears … I said, yes, then forgot to tell you.”

“Don’t let anybody past reception. I’m on my way,” Crane said, already moving to take Charlie from Panatopolous. Crane was so famous that he commanded great attention. At the onset of digging, people had clamored to come to the site to meet Crane. The best public relations, they’d decided, was to accept a few groups for limited tours focusing on the geology of the cavern. All part of the cover, too, to keep the project secret.

“Crane,” Lanie said. “Dan’s part of the team.”

Anger burst inside him. “I can’t believe he’d have the nerve to come here.”

“I’m looking right at him,” Lanie said.

Abu Talib stood uneasily in the locker-filled visitors’ lounge with Khadijah, who was pregnant with their second child, and Martin Aziz. He could feel the hatred for Crane that he knew now he had felt from the first, but had suppressed totally in the early days.

Here, in the caverns of Crane’s insanity, he knew the structure of Evil. A gaggle of fifth graders from Niland Elementary charged around the room, chased by their teacher trying to calm them down. Talib noticed none of it. He listened to the sounds: mechanical sounds, workers’ voices, the drone of the circulation systems. They were the sounds of an online operating system, the reality of Crane’s exercise in playing God. If he’d had the slightest doubt about his suspicions before, it was gone now. He didn’t even have to look around. He knew there would be shafts below, many of them, and all packed with nuclear explosives.

Though godless himself, Talib was very sensitive to the notions of natural law. The Earth was good, a product of all that had gone before. Its processes were sacrosanct. Study them, certainly, try to live in harmony with them, absolutely. Control them? Blasphemy. He thought about Newton’s laws of motion—every action causing an equal and opposite reaction. How would the Earth react to Crane’s assault?

Abu Talib felt rage rise in him. He carried the weight of righteousness on his shoulders. He had to do what no one else could: stop the madman before he destroyed the planet.

“I can’t believe you’d actually come here.”

Talib’s head snapped in the direction from which Crane’s voice had come. Crane was flanked by two G, Lanie hung back somewhat, holding her child, her white child. “And I can’t believe you’re actually going to do this,” he said.

Lanie shoved through the G to enter the room. “Hello, children,” she said to the fifth graders, who had stopped playing when they’d heard the exchange between the two men. “I’d like to ask all of you to choose a locker and remove any communication equipment you may be wearing. Turn off your aurals. Remove your pads and put them in the lockers.”

They did as they were told. “Thank you,” Lanie said. “Now please go with the policeman, who will give you a tour of the rocks and gems room.”

The children filed out behind one of the blank-faced security guards. Crane and the other G moved into the processing room to circle the three people.

“So how many people have you killed today, Dan?” Crane asked. “Have we topped the three-thousand mark yet?”

“Leave him alone,” Khadijah said. “We fight a war of liberation. People die in wars.”

“You must be the wife,” Crane said, moving close to her.

“I will ignore all that, Crane, as NOI is not the issue,” Talib said. “I’m here to give you one last chance to come to your senses. Please stop this insanity now. Walk away from it.”

“You know me one hell of a lot better than that,” Crane returned.

“But I do not know you at all, Dr. Crane,” Martin said.

Crane stared at the man’s white robes. “And who might you be?”

“Someone who abhors violence as much as you,” Aziz returned.

“Then you’re associating with a bad crowd.”

Lanie stepped forward with the baby, Talib’s insides tightening up. “Hello, Dan,” she said softly, and he folded his arms to keep his hands from shaking.

“So you’re Lanie,” Khadijah said, stepping between the woman and Abu. “I am Khadijah, the wife of Abu Talib. You have a beautiful son.”

“Thank you,” Lanie said, her eyes still fixed on Talib. “I hear you have a daughter?”

“And a son on the way,” Khadijah said, patting her stomach. “Did your son inherit his father’s insanity?”

“I hope so,” Lanie said coldly, still looking at Talib. “Why can’t you leave us alone, Dan? What have we done to you?”

He broke the eye contact as he felt his resolve crack. “You don’t understand,” he said. “Lanie, this may destroy the planet!”

“Okay,” Crane said. “I want you out.”

Talib had never known Crane to hate anyone, but he could feel it now, pulsing from the man in agonizing waves. The enemy. Talib did not protest Crane’s order.

They returned to processing from the computer room, where a janitor was sweeping just outside. As Talib passed beside the man, a disk was slipped into his jacket pocket.

They reached Processing, and Talib slipped the disk from his pocket, fed it into the slot in his pad and copied it. He coughed to cover the copy completion bleep, then palmed the disk, slipping it into the trashcan by the door as the janitor moved into Processing to sweep.

Crane and the FPF led them back to the elevators, the fifth graders charging down the hall to join them within minutes. As they walked into the massive lift, Crane grabbed Talib by the arm to stare furiously at him. “I don’t know what you’re doing here after all this time,” he said, “but make it the last time. I don’t ever want, or intend, to see your face again.”

“Take your hand off of me,” Talib said, jerking free as the door closed between them.

Crane’s last view of the man was his eyes, bright as lava with hatred. The pipeline of negative emotion worked both ways.

“Crane!” Lanie called, charging down the hall, Charlie happily riding on her back. “Crane!”

She reached him, out of breath, frowning at the closed doors of the elevator. “They’ve gone,” she said.

“Immediately. Of course. Did something happen?”

“We’re missing a disk.”

“Which one?”

“Basic design schematics, blueprints, structural analysis.”

“Show me,” he said, already heading down the hallway. “If they took something, we’ve got time to stop them aboveground.”

They rushed to the computer room, dark and cool, hewn out of bare rock.

“I’d pulled it,” she said, “to check Pany’s alignment problems, then set it right—”

“Here?” Crane said, picking up a small disk from the other side of the keyboard and holding it up for her.

“That’s it!” she said, taking it from him to stick in the disk lockbox. Then she turned and looked hard at him. “I didn’t put it there.”

“Are you sure?”

She nodded, Crane staring straight up at the ceiling as if he could see Talib right through solid rock.

Chapter 18 HIDDEN FAULTS

Harry Whetstone’s voice echoed down the cavern as he spoke from the small podium set up in the main cavern to the cadre of associates who’d worked the Project. Crane watched him with a strange sense of calm, of demons conquered.

“We stand this evening at a crossroads of history,” Stoney said, looking frail, looking old. “I never thought that I’d stand inside of a bomb, much less the biggest bomb in the history of the world. I never thought I’d want to see a bomb explode, but in this case I can’t wait. We stand on the brink of mankind’s next step—the taming of our own environment for the good of not only everyone alive, but of everyone yet to be born. And I’m proud to have played a small part in its realization.

“I say a small part because only one person is primary in the achievement of this great goal, a man whose insight and tireless devotion alone has made this gargantuan leap possible—Lewis Crane!”

Cheers and applause broke out from the seventy people present, sounding louder because of the echo. The attendees included the Project laborers, plus the power brokers and supporters who’d given themselves to Crane’s dream—Sumi Chan, Kate Masters, Stoney, Messrs. Tsao and Tang, Burt Hill, and the key personnel from the Foundation.

Crane waved to the crowd, and Whetstone raised a glass of champagne. “To you, Crane!” he called. “You have challenged impossible odds with indomitable courage!”

Everyone drank, Lanie moving up beside him to hug his good arm tightly. “You did it,” she said and kissed him on the cheek. “You really did it.”

“We all did it,” Crane said. “Everyone here has helped make it happen… especially you.”

“You’re the fulcrum, Crane.”

“Are you okay?” he asked. He’d been wondering about her all day. She was there physically, but seemed to be deep in thought, thoughts she wasn’t expressing in words.

“I’m feeling strange,” she said. “This has been a hell of a haul.”

“Yeah,” he returned, hugging her close, drinking in her feel, her smell. “I love you so much.”

“Oh, Crane,” she said, kissing him deeply on the mouth, then smiling up into his eyes, “you’ll never know … never understand the magic you’ve made in my life.”

“Can I ever understand,” he whispered. “I never had a life until I met you. A wife … a family—I never thought these things were possible for me, I—”

She silenced him with a kiss, then said something quite odd. “Never forget the moments we’ve had,” she said in deadly earnest. “They’ll keep me with you always.”

There was something about how she said those words that chilled him to the bone. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.

“Congratulations, Crane,” said Mr. Mui, bowing formally. “You’ve delivered early, within budget, no labor problems, no scientific problems. You paid for it yourself and have pledged to return the area to its natural state when you leave. You are a man of your word, sir. I appreciate that.”

“And I appreciate Liang Int’s commitment to our goal.” Crane also bowed. “You didn’t buckle, even under pressure.”

Again Mr. Mui bowed. Smiling, Lanie said, “Well, in just about twelve hours we will have the culmination of the project—and my husband’s dream. You gentlemen will have to excuse me. I seem to have misplaced my son.”

She left them then, though Charlie had been merely an excuse. She knew exactly where her son was. She was doing everything she could to hold herself together tonight. While everyone else was celebrating, she’d drawn inward, fearful. The nightly dreams of death were more intense than ever and all day today she’d felt a cloud of doom floating about her. She’d been unable to shake it and spent most of her time trying to hide her apprehension from others.

Kate was lugging Charlie around. He was a boy whose feet very rarely touched the ground. Kate and Sumi were talking by the buffet table, Charlie leaning out to sneak canapés, which he promptly threw at anyone walking past.

Lame made her way through the excited crowd to join them, grabbing Charlie’s arm just as he was about to launch a food missile on a low trajectory right at Whetstone’s head.

“So who’s handling whom?” she asked, taking the boy who was beginning to look tired and irritable. It was way past his bedtime.

“I’ll take aunt duty anytime to motherhood,” Kate said, realigning her sequins. “Play with ’em, wear ’em out, then give ’em back to mama.”

“You have a very wonderful child,” Sumi said, turning to her left and speaking to empty air. “Don’t you think, Paul?”

“Paul?”

“I’m sorry,” Sumi said, shaking her head. “Let me introduce you. Paul, this is Elena King Crane.”

“C-call me Lame,” she said, narrowing her eyes and looking at Kate.

“Paul is Sumi’s chipmate,” Kate said. “A friend from Sumi’s own mind. Someone to talk with, share with.”

“You mean like an imaginary friend?” Lanie asked.

Sumi laughed with Paul, her gaze on thin air. “Imaginary to you,” she said. She looked at Lanie. “To me he’s my better half. He’s intelligent, wise … loves to do things: to travel, go to parties, hiking. In fact, we were wondering if it would be all right if Paul and I did a little exploring down here?”

“Well, sure,” Lanie said. “Take one of those carts parked beneath the computer room overlook. Go wherever you want, but watch out for the nuke ports. Fall down one and it’s four miles nonstop to the bottom.”

“Thanks.” Sumi smiled, then turned to Paul. “Let’s go.”

They wandered off, Lanie looking at Masters. “Is Sumi all right?”

“Yeah.” Kate smiled. “It’s a Yo-Yu thing. The chip draws directly from the subconscious, but it also stores previous load, like an extra brain, enabling each experience with your ‘friend’ to be recalled and built upon. You’ve been locked up underground too long or you’d have seen this with many people. The chip is a way for basically lonely people to have companionship. Better than that, older people who are not only lonely, but alone, find a whole new world of attachment and happiness in a relationship that doesn’t tax them or judge them.”

“But Sumi’s Vice President of the United States,” Lanie returned. “Does he always go out in public that way?”

“Not always,” Kate said, “but a lot. I think that Paul is relatively aggressive in not wanting to miss anything.”

“You better be sure to warn me when Paul’s around. I don’t want to step on his toes or anything.”

“The chip is very agile. It avoids contact with others.”

“You act as if we’re talking about a real person.”

“As real as Sumi, I suppose,” Kate said. “What about you? You don’t look as excited as I would have expected you to be on the most important night of your life.”

“It’s that obvious?”

“In fact you look scared, honey. What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” Lanie said, holding Charlie close to her breast, nuzzling him with her cheek. “This cavern has begun to feel like a crypt, or something. When this is over, I never want to go in another cave as long as I live.”

“You’re the second person I’ve heard say that tonight.”

“Who’s the other?”

“Burt Hill.”

Burt Hill was at the bottom of Tube #33, systematically searching for conspirators. He had climbed out of the cage and was walking around the nuclear core, a journey of ten seconds’ duration. He’d felt danger all over him, the way he used to before Doc Crane had taken him out of the hospital and given him a job. Like a sudden chill descending and enfolding him, he could feel the icy grip of betrayal strangling his heart.

He looked up to see faint light, a glowing spot four miles above, a giant eye looking down at him. He climbed back in the cage and hit the lever. The cage zipped silently upward, markers on the wall indicating how far he’d risen. The wall was paved with explosives. He could never check all hundred tubes tonight. He’d have to think of something else. Then an idea hit him.

Crane sat with Whetstone in the computer room. For once, Stoney was more drunk than Crane. Although, Crane thought, that wasn’t quite true. Since Lanie had stepped into his soul, he scarcely drank. They watched the party through the window, its sound muffled.

“Do you find it like a dream sometimes?” Whetstone asked, his skin pale, nearly translucent, his lips tinged purple.

“All this?” Crane asked. “Not a dream, actually. Hell, I was here for every shovelful of dirt that came out of that stinking desert ground. It’s too real to me. But … there is something … I don’t know how to put it.”

“Let me help you.” Stoney smiled. “You’ve devoted your entire life to one thought, one goal. Now that you’re on the verge of achieving it, you feel disconnected somehow, maybe even useless.”

“You’ve been there, haven’t you?”

“That’s where I was when I met you, dear boy. A man can make only so much money before its pursuit loses its fire. You and your wild notions put the fire back in my life. And, with this, I feel like my life has been worthwhile.”

“So, what do we do now?”

“I die now, Crane.”

“Oh, come on, Stoney. This isn’t the night to—”

“No,” Whetstone said. “It’s true. My life of drive and dissipation has finally caught up with me.”

“Isn’t there anything to be done?”

Whetstone shrugged. “They have all these extraordinary machines for keeping rich folk alive for decades after we should have died. That’s not for me. Too ghoulish. I lived as a man. I’ll not die as Suction Valve A-57 of some damned machine.”

“How long have you got?”

The man looked wistful. “How long does it take a leaf to detach itself from a tree in the fall and float to the ground? It’s fall, Crane.”

Crane looked him in the eye without pity or anguish. They were both men who knew what death was and weren’t afraid of it. “I’m going to miss you,” he said.

“You and my ex-wives.” Stoney laughed feebly. “They’ll have to find a way to support themselves now. I’m leaving everything to the Foundation.”

“The Foundation doesn’t need your money.”

“I know you, Crane. I know how you think, how you live. Your life will have to go on beyond tomorrow morning. You’ll have to think of what to do next. The Foundation, at this point, pretty well runs itself. You’ll be at a loss.”

“I’ve thought about that.”

The man set his drink on the floor and reached out for Crane’s good hand. “You’re a wise man, Crane,” he said, “but age also brings its own wisdom. Listen to me: Dedicate your life to something new, something positive. You’re a special human being and have dreams to contribute that no one else has. Don’t lose sight of yourself. Work as hard on the last day of your life as the first. You taught me the value of dedication. I’m giving it back to you now. Remember our three-billion-dollar bet?”

“Remember it? It made all this possible.”

“Well, sometime you’re going to want to take another three-billion-dollar gamble and my old bones will dance with joy in my grave if I am the one who can make it happen.”

“Thank you, Stoney. For everything. You’ve been like a father to me.”

“It’s been my most extreme pleasure to have known you, to have shared your dreams,” the man said, standing, leaning heavily on his Tennessee poplar cane. He started for the door, then stopped and turned back. “Except for that plane you gave away that time.” He shook his head. “Lost a wife over that one. It had been a birthday present.”

“Are you talking about Yvette … the wife who was playing hide the stick with every delivery boy who walked in the front door?”

“Yeah. I guess there was that about her. I find as I get older, I only remember the good things.” He stared at Crane for a long moment, then raised his cane, pointing it. “I’ll see you in hell, boy.”

Crane watched him go, and knew he’d never see Stoney again. Man’s bodily functions moved only toward death, but the mind could continue to enrich itself even as everything else embraced entropy. It was dignity that Stoney exemplified tonight, and Crane hoped he was half the man Harry Whetstone was.

Suddenly, Burt Hill replaced Whetstone in the doorway. “Boss, we gotta talk.”

“All right,” Crane said. He moved over to the radiation monitoring station, a hundred green lights blinking there. “What do you want to talk about?”

“How long would it take to blow this thing?” Hill was pacing, wringing his hands.

“I don’t know … an hour or so to get everything set, then the time to get out, get some distance. Remote trigger, you know.”

“Let’s get everybody out of here and do it now.”

“May I ask why?”

Hill walked closer. His eyes peered wildly at Crane. “Because they’re watching us, is why. They’re just hangin’ back, waiting. Waiting. Waiting for us to let our guard down.”

“Who is?”

“Them!” Hill said loudly. “Can’t you feel them? Their eyes crawling over us?”

“You’re off your medication, aren’t you, Burt?”

“I been off my medication for three years, Doc,” he said loudly. “I’m telling you that if we’re going to blow this thing, let’s get everybody out of here and blow it now!”

Hill had been a strong right arm for ten years, but the strain down here was getting to all of them, Crane decided. He’d hired Burt for his paranoia. Maybe it was time to listen to it. “Okay, let’s do it,” Crane said. “I’ll start moving the party out of here, while you take the service shaft up to ground level. Check around up there. Search the barracks and the other buildings. Tell the G to do a security sweep. When you’re satisfied, get back down here. You and I will set up. We’ll trigger when we get the urge. Fair enough?”

“Now you’re talkin’,” Hill said. “I’m on my way.”

The second Burt left, one of the panel lights went to red with a quiet buzz, Crane bringing up the status report on the screen. Tube #61 in B Corridor was leaking a small amount of radiation, nothing serious, but a good enough excuse to clear the place out.

He found himself liking the idea, anxious now to get on with it, excited, in fact.

Abu Talib stood next to a Joshua tree. Through infrared binocs strapped to his head he watched the G moving around the outer perimeter fence of Crane’s project three miles away. There were forty men with him, tucked in the San Bernadino foothills unseen, waiting for the right moment.

An avalanche of thoughts tumbled through his head. Lanie, her child, Crane, the Foundation—all producing a jumble of conflicting emotions. God, if only it could have been otherwise. Right. Wrong. Love. Hate. Loyalty. Abu Talib had no idea of what these words even meant anymore. The thrust of his life had become simple forward momentum, a ball rolling down an inclined plane.

He pulled off the binoculars and hung them on a Joshua branch. Strange how this desert tree, small and skeletal with clumps of leaves on the ends of the branches, reminded him of immature cotton plants. Or was the comparison farfetched, and he thought of the cotton because he’d much rather be in New Cairo preparing for harvest than here preparing a military action?

They were protected in a small gully, their three trucks, affixed with cattlecatchers, nearly invisible beneath desert camouflage.

Brother Ishmael walked up, handing him a cup of coffee. “Anything?” he asked.

“No,” Talib said. “The guests are still there; the protesters have gone home; the G isn’t alert.”

“Good. Let’s check the aerial view, then do the last briefing.”

They moved back to their men who were dressed in black and had on pulldown masks peeled up now to rest on their foreheads. The desert night was clear and cold with a brilliant full moon; the men, sitting on the ground, huddled together for warmth. A small screen that leaned against one of the Joshuas received its feed from Ishmael’s condor, sweeping lazy circles in the sky over the Imperial Valley Project.

They saw a quiet compound with a parking lot full of cars and helos. Most of the permanent workers lived a few miles away in Niland. When they left tonight, all the cars would go with them. A lone man seemed to be methodically going through the outbuildings and speaking with the guards.

“Who is that?” Ishmael asked.

“His name’s Burt Hill. He’s Crane’s ramrod and security chief. Only doing his job.”

“Good. Allah guides our path tonight.” Ishmael turned to the others. “As soon as the guests leave the party, we move in,” he announced. “Put on your goggles and turn to the G fiber.”

There was a groan from a platoon of men who’d gone through these steps many, many times in the last two weeks. They dutifully put on their goggles, Talib juicing the disk he had copied the day he’d inspected the underground abomination.

A virtual layout of the cavern appeared on the screen. The view moved past the computer room and down the stairs to the main room.

“Remember, there are carts at the bottom of the stairs,” Talib said. “You are to use them. Red Team will take the corridor to the left … see it? That’s A corridor. This was not a structure meant to stand for long, so it’s unstable. Red Team will plant the satchel bombs on all the pillars in that corridor. Blue team will do the same in B corridor. The rest of you will carry three satchels each, everything set to blow in an hour. You’ll drop your satchels down the tubes containing the bombs.”

“And you’re sure that throwing the satchels won’t set off the nukes?” Ishmael asked.

Talib sighed. “You’ve asked that question a dozen times, and I have told you a dozen times that it takes a huge effort to set off a nuclear bomb, Brother. Our little bombs won’t accomplish that. What they will accomplish is radiation leaks. Once we bring the place down, we want it to be so hot in there that no one would or could go back—ever. I’ll get us in and handle the computer room. The truck bomb will take care of the shaft once we’re done. Remember, if we handle this right, nobody gets hurt.”

“The guests should leave very soon.” Ishmael walked over to the tan-and-pale-green camouflage cover and lifted it from one of the trucks. He got into the back and emerged with two heavy suitcases. He set them down and opened them. Weapons. Weapons he began to distribute to the Fruit of Islam.

“What is this?” Talib asked, following Ishmael to the back of the truck where a crate of ammo sat on the edge.

“You told me there’d be no violence,” Talib whispered harshly.

Ishmael went back to the suitcase and pulled out a small submachine gun which he slung over his shoulder. “Brother Abu,” he said. “We’re getting ready to blow up an entire underground complex, and you set it up. That’s violence in my dictionary.”

“But the guns,” Talib said. “We made a deal that no one would get hurt, that we’d only do this when the place was cleared.”

“Do you hear that, my friends?” Ishmael said loudly. “Our brother wants us to fight a war with no casualties.”

“Me, too!” someone shouted. “At least no casualties for us!”

Everyone laughed as they filled the ditty-bags hanging on their belts with extra clips of ammunition.

“Wait!” Talib said, grabbing Ishmael’s arm. “This wasn’t the deal we made.”

Ishmael jerked his arm out of Talib’s grasp. “You’re a dreamer, Abu, without the guts to see your dreams through. How the hell do you expect us even to get on the grounds, eh? Ask the nice G if they’ll invite us in for tea?”

“I just thought, I … don’t know what I thought.”

“Right,” Ishmael said, donning a bandolier full of shotgun shells to go with the sawed-off weapon he carried in his free hand. “Remember, Brother Talib: Thinkers prepare the revolution; bandits carry it out.”

He addressed his men. “Once we’ve committed, there’s no turning back. We either succeed or die trying. We fight the Great Satan himself tonight and if we have to, we fight to the last man. Shoot to kill anyone or anything that gets in your way. We probably won’t all make it back. If I get to Paradise first, I’ll prepare the way for you by trying out the houris!”

The men cheered, holding their weapons in the air. Confusion paralyzed Talib. The event was suddenly upon him, happening fast. It wasn’t talk anymore.

Ishmael jammed a pistol into his hand. “Here,” he said. “You’ll probably need this.”

Talib looked morosely at the gun, then stuck it into the waistband of his black drawstring trousers.

Crane and Charlie waved good-bye to partygoers as they climbed onto the elevator, calling out their final congratulations. The radiation alert bleated gently in the background. As the doors closed, Lanie walked down the hall from computer control. She took Charlie from Crane. The boy immediately rested his head on his mother’s shoulder and closed his eyes, thumb in his mouth.

“Sure you don’t want to go with them?”

Crane asked. “I may be a couple of hours here.”

She shook her head. “Charlie can sleep in the computer room,” she said. “I’ve got plenty of work there to prepare for tomorrow.”

He nodded. “We’re thinking along the same wavelengths. Burt and I decided to go ahead and rig the detonation now, no reason to wait. I’ll get to it as soon as I check that leak in #63.”

“It’s a good-sized bleed-off,” she returned. “Enough to be dangerous in a few hours time. Did you tell anyone to send the elevator back down once they reached the top?”

“Burt’s up there,” Crane said, shaking his head. “He’ll ride it down.”

“You’re going to trigger it tonight?” she asked, slowly rocking back and forth with Charlie.

He smiled. “Yeah.”

“What made you decide to do it now?”

“Burt’s antsy … I trust that,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “You’re turning claustrophobic. And the thing’s as ready as it’s ever going to be. Why wait?”

They started walking back down the hallway toward the computer room. “It’s fine with me,” she said, “but I’ve got a feeling there’s a ton of inspectors and officials—”

“And demonstrators, and terrorists. If anyone’s unhappy with this, they can sue me.”

Both of them laughed, Lanie giving him a lingering kiss when they reached the computer room door. “You seem happier already,” he said.

“Are you kidding? You can’t imagine how happy I’ll be to get out of this place. I’m going to walk in that room, pack up my personal items, shut down the systems, arm the plastique, and kiss this place’s ass goodbye. Where do you want to trigger it?”

He pressed her up against the door. “At home … while we’re making love. We’ll make the earth move.”

“You already know how to do that, honey,” she said, kissing him again. “Let’s fly back to the Foundation tonight. Do we, uh … have another house somewhere?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Maybe we should think about buying one. Charlie’s going to need to know at some point soon that he’s not the only child in the world.”

“Noted,” he said. “In fact, there’s a lot of things we can do now that we’re finished here. Let’s take a vacation. We can go tomorrow. What’s to stop us? We’ll toss our wristpads and return to nature.”

“How long has it been since you’ve been on a vacation?”

“I’ve never been on one,” he said. “Thought it might be fun to try.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“You will see it. I promise.”

Chapter 19 DANSE MACABRE

Abu Talib’s insides were in knots as he watched the guests emerge from the elevator tunnel and head toward their vehicles. He felt even worse than when he’d learned about Northwest Gemstone, understood it for the ruse it was, and forced himself to go public with scathing attacks on Crane.

Several helos belonging to guests leapt into the night sky, flying northward; cars lined up to move down the strip from the parking lot to the front gates.

“This is it,” Ishmael said. “They’ll hit us with nausea gas and disorienting soundwaves.” Years of rioting had taught him and his Fruit of Islam well. “The rebreathers in your masks will protect you. If any of you have aurals, turn them off. They’ll broadcast the sound right into your head if you don’t. Know your assignments and keep the deafeners in your ears. They’ve got electric water cannons, but we’ll be grinding them under our tires before they have the chance to turn them on. You know your jobs. Get to your vehicles!”

Yelling and cheering, getting themselves up for battle, the men hustled to their trucks. Frozen in place, Talib could only watch.

“If you don’t have the strength of your convictions, stay here.” Ishmael sneered at him.

“Crane’s helo is still sitting in the yard,” Talib said, pointing at the screen.

“Really?” Ishmael looked at the helo on the teev. “Allah blesses us. We can take care of the blasphemy and the blasphemer at the same time. Are you coming?”

His paralysis suddenly broken, he shouted, “Damn right I am.” He hurried after Brother Ishmael to the deuce and a half. “We agreed: no killing.”

Talib climbed into the passenger side of the heavy vehicle; Ishmael slid behind the wheel. In the distance, the line of headlights had snaked away from the gates of Crane’s compound and was moving southward.

Brother Ishmael’s mask still sat atop his head; his eyes glinted hard in the starlight. He opened the focus, and the truck shot forward, its cowcatcher zeroed on the gates three miles distant. Ishmael’s jaw was set, his teeth bared. “They won’t even see us until we’re on top of them,” he said low.

“Please,” Talib whispered. “Promise me you won’t hurt Crane if you find him.”

“I won’t hurt him,” Ishmael said. “I will kill him.”

“Ishmael—”

“Savor it,” Ishmael said. “You are about to see justice in its purest form.”

Ishmael reached up and hit a switch that activated all the cams they’d brought with them, including one in the truck. Both Ishmael and Talib, their faces exposed, were already flashing through the Net.

The three speeding trucks were abreast now, separated by thirty yards, bouncing on the uneven ground as the perimeter warning lights flared brilliantly white, lighting them to daylight. Added to this visual excitement was a prerecorded, carefully crafted speech by Ishmael explaining the objective and purpose of the holy mission they were undertaking.

“Here we go!” Ishmael yelled. He activated the sound blockers in his ears, pulled down his mask, and jerked up the hood of his burnoose.

Talib fumbled with his gear, his mind numb, heart racing, sweat pouring off him.

Gas!

They were driving blind, through roiling clouds of noxious gas, both men pulling down their goggles and going to infrared. Talib was shaking uncontrollably, his mouth dry. What was he doing here? What madness had put him in this truck?

They hit the razored fence with a loud clang, chain link hooking on the catcher, then whipping back to smash their windshield, turning it into a kaleidoscope of spider webs in the thick smoke.

He turned to Ishmael, who’d picked up his shotgun and set it against the windshield, then pulled the trigger and blew out the vestiges of the windshield. Suddenly a man stood before them. The catcher hit him at knee level, cutting him in two. His torso bounced onto the hood: his head punched through Talib’s side of the windshield. The still-living man bled through the eye and mouth holes of his smiling FPF mask as his arms flailed wildly on the other side of the shattered glass.

Talib was screaming inside his own skull.

Burt Hill had just gone into the equipment shed to return a shovel he’d found on the grounds, when he heard gunfire popping like fireworks. He cautiously looked through a small window in the door to see three trucks in the compound.

The perimeter guards went down within seconds, their defensive systems useless against such a savage, surprise attack. One truck veered toward the barracks; the other two headed straight for the elevator building.

Explosions wracked the barracks. The first truck to reach the elevator plowed through the concrete covered walkway leading to it. Chunks of concrete flew in all directions; screams mixed with the sounds of gunfire at the barracks.

Burt’s finger went to his pad to hit Crane’s emergency fiber, then froze. They’d be scanning for transmissions. If he communicated with Crane, they’d know Crane and his family were down there. They’d know where he was. There was nowhere to hide below except in the tubes themselves. Silence was his ally right now. He’d take the shaft service elevator down and make his stand in the tubes.

Shovel still in hand, he moved to the back of the equipment room and voiceprinted into the small elevator that serviced the shaft coils for the main lift. He climbed in, grimly determined, and hit the down button. This elevator wasn’t as fast as the main lift, but it would get him there soon enough.

Abu Talib jumped out of the truck, yanked up his mask, and vomited. The G who’d come through the window had finally died, but not before pumping most of his blood through the carotid artery onto Talib. The dead man still lay on the hood of the truck. Talib shimmered with blood, dark heart blood, his clothes heavy with it.

Smoke drifted through the compound, and alarm horns blared. Automatic weapons fire finished off the rest of the G in the barracks. Talib was in shock.

The masked men, loaded down with satchels and weapons, poured out of the back of the truck into the thick of the rubble in the elevator entryway. At Ishmael’s signal, everyone with an aural deactivated his sound blocker.

“God is great!” Ishmael shouted. “And we are His instruments!”

Ishmael grabbed Talib by the arm and pulled him to the entry security controls. “What does it take?” he asked. “Quickly!”

“Eye scan,” Talib said. “Uh … uh … fingerprints. Sorry, I’m—”

“Bring the prisoner!” Ishmael called. The third truck screeched to a halt and a G was dragged to the big sliding door.

Ishmael ripped off the smiling mask on the G to reveal a woman, her lips moving soundlessly, her eyes listless. Blood bubbled out from under her slick white uniform. Ishmael slammed her face against the scan screen as Talib stuck her right thumb on the plate. The controls went green; the big door popped open to cheers from the Fruit of Islam.

Ishmael heaved the woman aside. She slid down the wall to a sitting position, and he kicked her body into the doorway to keep it from closing.

“Bring in the bomb truck!” Ishmael yelled. The truck eased forward, men walking next to it through the wide doorway. Talib entered slowly, moving as if in the grip of a dream.

The bomb truck drove into the center of the elevator, knocking furniture aside, the rest of the men rushing in. It was meant to take out the elevator shaft, to seal the works below into a sarcophagus.

Ishmael shoved the G’s body out of the way, the door closing immediately. He walked over to Talib.

“Pull yourself together, Brother,” he said. “Be a man.”

“If Crane’s down there,” Talib said. “It’s possible that his wife and son are down there, too.”

Ishmael smiled in satisfaction. “We could clean out the whole nest of vipers,” he said, then turned to the man sitting in the driver’s seat of the truck. “Hit the timer on the truck charge. Brothers, we have exactly one hour until the shaft blows.”

Talib felt the elevator jerk to a start, then begin its slow descent into the precinct of Hell.

Lanie Crane heard the elevator’s arrival bell from the computer room, followed by a lot of voices. For a moment she thought the guests had returned for some reason. Then Mohammed Ishmael’s booming voice told her it was the end of the world.

She grabbed Charlie from where he slept on a blanket on the floor and raced into the hallway to the stairs.

Charlie awoke and began to cry. She covered his mouth with her hand and turned right at the bottom of the stairs, darted past the line of carts there and ran to the shaft maintenance elevator. She hit the button.

“I’m sorry,” the pleasant computer voice said, “but the shaft maintenance elevator is in use.”

She could hear them now in the computer room, hear their gunfire and the crashing of blasted items onto the concrete floor. Large shards of glass exploded out of the observation glass, showering her and Charlie, who screamed in terror.

She charged back to the carts and grabbed one, tearing off down B Corridor, her child held tightly in her right arm. She fled because she had to … knowing there was nowhere to go.

Three and a half miles down Tube #63, Crane stood in his sealed elevator cage inspecting the leak. Minimal. It wouldn’t interfere with the blast. He shouldn’t have worn his burn suit. It made maneuvering too difficult. The suit was large and hot, its hard-shelled exterior designed to protect the wearer from falling debris. Even a pebble dropped four miles could be deadly.

Above he thought he heard a small clicking sound, like the rat-a-tat-tat of a stylus being tapped on a table. He looked around and saw nothing close to him that could produce it.

He looked upward into an infinity of tubing. If the sound was coming from the cavern, it would have to be damned loud to reach him at this depth. A chill went through him.

He turned up his bulky helmet’s aural apparatus, amplifying the sounds. Hollow, echoing booms. Explosive booms. They were coming from the cavern.

His pad was beeping in his ears. He tapped to hear Lanie’s anguished voice. “Crane! Please answer!”

“What’s happening? Lanie!”

“Men … with guns! They’re destroying the place, they’ve already shot at me, I—”

“They’re scanning!” Crane said, “Get off the fiber! Hide!”

“But wh—”

He cut her off and levered up, the cage swiftly starting to glide along its track. “Hurry,” he whispered, holding the lever down, trying futilely for more speed. “Hurry.” The cage’s top speed was about thirty miles per hour, over six minutes to the top. Anything could happen.

He knew it was NOI. He knew it was Newcombe, come to finish their danse macabre. His only hope lay in reaching the cavern and offering his life in exchange for Lanie and Charlie.

He hit “open signal” on his pad. “Whoever’s listening,” he said, the helmet’s mike transmitting through the pad, “this is Crane. I will surrender myself to you, do whatever you ask. Please, let my wife and son live. They are innocents.”

“Everyone is innocent,” came Ishmael’s voice in return, “and no one. Life is cruel. God is great.”

He could hear explosions as he passed the two-mile marker. They were bringing down the whole cavern! Something came falling down his tube, passing him in a blur.

Ten seconds later, the bottom of Tube #63 exploded, the light flashing, followed seconds later by the sound. The tube rumbled, his cage strained against its rail. Fire burned below, thrown everywhere, phosphorous eating through the lining of lead shielding that covered the hot material.

His cage kept creaking upward, threatening to jump its rail in the last mile. He finally reached cavern level to see carts retreating around the snaky bend in the distance, back toward the main cavern. At that moment, an explosion went up at the far end of his corridor. Supports tore, hunks of the ceiling fell as a rush of dust and stone fragments blew down the corridor.

His cart was still parked against the corridor wall. He stumbled to it, feeling his way, protected by his helmet. He jumped in and opened the focus as the next explosion went, shaking the chamber, rock powdering down on him from above, bouncing off his helmet as more dust obscured his vision.

He raced forward by memory, bumping the right wall to avoid running into the tubes as another explosion went, the entire chamber behind him collapsing as he made an S turn into another corridor.

Focus open full, he raced through the weaving corridor even as tubes exploded to his left. Crane’s world and his life were disintegrating all around him. None of it mattered except Lanie and Charlie. He had to get to them.

He hit the main cavern at full throttle, men in black charging toward the stairs, fire pluming out of the computer room, main room tubes rumbling, belching smoke and fire. The whole cavern was shaking, rock shearing from the ceiling to explode on the concrete floor.

It was perdition, hand-delivered by Brother Ishmael. He drew gunfire as he sped toward B Corridor, slamming his cart into a man running out, hearing distant explosions as that corridor collapsed in on itself from the far end.

The radiation warning horns were blowing loudly, the wall monitors flashing at the top end of the red zone. His cart popped into a clear space and he saw a full picture of destruction in an instant. A man in a cart was laughing, aiming a weapon down Tube #21. The rail had been knocked away; a cart had fallen in the tube and blocked the descent of the service cage.

He had only one shot and took it instantly. Foot to the floor, he broadsided the gunman’s cart. The blow knocked man and machine into the tube as Crane turned hard to keep from going in with the enemy.

And the man exploded.

Crane jumped out of the cart and ran to the tube. Burning phosphorous was strewn over the cavern floor. Two burning carts were jammed between the tube side and the middle post; fire everywhere threatened to set off the plastique. A cage had torn loose from the track and was balanced precariously atop the wreckage of the two carts five feet down, all of it threatening to lose its fragile wedge and fall the tube’s length. Lanie and a hysterical Charlie were in the cage, fire all around them. Lanie had a death grip on the boy as she crouched fetally within the cage, staring up through its torn back.

“Climb up!” he called, reaching down. “Grab my hand.”

“I-I can’t!” she called back. “I’m dizzy … my knees won’t … God, help me, Crane.”

The word hit him. Vertigo. She was frozen, out of the game. He went to his stomach, leaning into the hole, reaching. Her eyes widened in horror. And Crane realized she was living her dream.

She reached up with her left hand, Charlie in the crook of her right arm. She couldn’t stand and was shaking uncontrollably. The mass of wreckage creaked loudly, then jerked, Lanie screaming as everything moved.

He leaned way out and grabbed her wrist with his good hand. The wreckage screeched loudly on the inner tube, then broke free and fell. Crane’s arm jerked hard, and nearly dislocated at the shoulder. Lanie was dangling above the abyss. Fire clung to the surface of the tube and flared out to burn her.

“Hang on!” he yelled, but she couldn’t hear him through the helmet. He tried to pull her up, but the weight was too great and he had no leverage. Sweat was pouring from him, dripping on his faceplate, fogging it.

He had nothing to anchor to. He tried to rise enough to get to his knees, but he couldn’t. She screamed as flames bit her leg.

“Take Charlie!” she yelled, trying to raise the boy within the embrace of her right arm.

The sound was loud in the suit, rumbling round and round Crane’s head. He brought his bad arm around, dangled it in the tube. “I can’t!” he shouted in response to the question in her eyes. “My arm! My bad arm!”

“Take him!’ she screamed. “Please, take him!”

“I can’t!” An explosion farther down the corridor rocked them, and she started to slide from his grasp, his hand cramping as he tried to hold on. Lanie squirmed, trying the impossible—to hand her screaming child up.

“Oh God, Lanie … Lanie!”

She slipped.

Just like that. He watched her fall, clutching Charlie. In his mind’s eye, she froze in that position, forever hanging in midair like the imprint on the event horizon of a black hole. Forever pristine. Forever alive. He had a single goal: to follow Lanie and his son into the well of death.

“So,” came a voice behind him, and Crane turned. Mohammed Ishmael kicked him down and stood over him with a shotgun. “The seed is gone. Now we must uproot the weed from which it sprang.”

“Thank you,” Crane said, for he understood that, finally, this man would give him lasting peace.

Then Ishmael half turned. Crane saw Burt Hill running toward them, his eyes crazed, his shovel already half through its slashing arc.

He caught Ishmael on the back with the sharp edge of the shovel, the man going down hard, his body vibrating wildly.

Hill raised the shovel again, high over his head.

“No!” Talib shouted from behind. Hill swung around to go after him. “Don’t, Burt!”

Burt charged. The gun in Talib’s hand coughed twice, scored twice. Hill stumbled, collapsed face forward as another explosion, very close by, rocked the chamber, a support beam crashing down between Crane and Newcombe.

“Are you satisfied?” Crane screamed, rising to his knees, thick dust blowing through the chamber, Newcombe trying to cover his face with his free hand. “You’ve killed her! You’ve killed the baby.” Crane broke down, bending at the waist, crying, his face buried in his hands.

“Crane,” Talib said, moving closer. “I never meant … for this … I never—”

“Kill me!” Crane screamed, looking up at him. “Would you have the human decency to spare me this pain?”

“Crane,” Talib whispered.

“For God’s sake, kill me! Kill me!”

Talib raised the gun, his lips sputtering. His hand began to shake uncontrollably and his breath came in sobbing gasps. He dropped the gun. Tears running down his face, he grabbed Ishmael by the collar and dragged him into the thick dust clouds blowing through the corridor.

Crane quavered on his knees, crying. As he turned to jump into the tube he heard the moans.

A dust-and-blood-covered Burt Hill grabbed his shoulders.

“C-Crane,” Hill said in a rasp. “We’ve got to … got to …” He stumbled, fell to one knee.

Crane stared down the tube, then turned reluctantly from it. “Damn you for being alive,” he muttered. Tearing himself from the lip, not selfish enough to force Burt to die with him, he cursed before he climbed over the fallen beam, got to Burt, and levered him to his feet.

“C-can’t hardly breathe,” Hill said.

“Dust,” Crane said, knowing the man couldn’t hear him. “You’ve probably got a punctured lung.”

Somehow he got Hill in his cart, negotiated the crossbeam in their path. He took off, the area of Tube #21 collapsing behind them, burying his entire life for all time.

He got them back to the shaft service elevator, large chunks of cavern wall and ceiling crashing to the ground. He clumsily unbolted his helmet and carried Hill to the elevator, stumbling inside with him.

The door closed. He hit the Up arrow as the cavern ceiling gave way completely. They were moving.

Crane didn’t remember the trip up. Hill had a sucking chest wound and a superficial wound in the forearm. The sucking sound meant the wound had to be closed quickly.

He removed the burn suit’s plasteel gloves, using one to cover the wound. A container of lead putty was in his utility bag. He used it around the edges of the glove to seal it to Hill’s skin and create a vacuum. Then he rolled Burt onto his injured side to ease the breathing in his good lung. If he were to survive, he’d need help quickly.

He sat with the groaning man, cradling his head, crying. It was over. Everything. Over. What kind of a fool had he been to think he could change the course of history? What arrogance. Life was pain and nothing else. His mind held one image only—Lanie and Charlie frozen on their event horizon, his wife’s eyes filled with a kind of celestial disappointment.

He heard a bell and realized they’d reached topside. The door slid open into the equipment shed. As he rose, dragging Burt with him, a massive explosion blew them both out of the elevator, collapsing the shaft completely, the equipment shed shaking to rubble all around them.

He stared into the night. The sound of distant sirens provided music. Helos overhead danced spotlights all around him. Beauty in the midst of horror. He stared up at a starfield that was startlingly brilliant and cold … and wondrous through the haze of his tears. The Moon was round, full, the letters YOU printed on its surface in blood red. You. YOU.

The mausoleum was very old. It was marble with pillars like the Parthenon and decorated with cherubs whose faces were dark from years of exposure to the elements. There was some lateral fracturing near its base, and a couple of large jagged cracks on the vault itself indicated some seismic meandering in the area. Crane had chosen this mausoleum because it was directly across from the memorial graves of Lanie and Charlie, and he could sit scrunched up on its steps below ground level without being seen. He sat perfectly still, like one of the cherubs, wearing sunglasses and a mild sunblock.

The funeral for Lanie and Charlie had been large and ostentatious. Crane saw to that. Their bodies were lost, of course, so empty coffins had been ceremoniously paraded through town and brought here for burial before a large gathering. People felt as if they knew the Cranes, so public had been their lives. Thousands had turned out. All camheads, of course. Even a Yo-Yu representative had given a eulogy that had rivaled Liang’s for sheer triteness and empty condolence.

Lanie would have hated every minute of it just as Crane did, but he was putting on a show for one, and if it worked, the sham funeral and all the agony it had caused him would have been worthwhile.

NOI had gotten away. Talib and his ilk apparently rat-holed in their maze of underground passageways, sitting out the furor. And quite an amazing furor there was. Brother Ishmael had miscalculated public reaction to his savage attack on the compound; the viddy of the G being cut in half and going through the windshield of Ishmael’s truck was replayed over and over around the world. But worse, a cam attached to Brother Ishmael showed him standing happily by as Lanie and Charlie died. Everyone’s heart, regardless of their position on the Imperial Valley Project issue, went out to the baby. The public was clamoring for Liang to mete out the most severe justice to the “holy” man and his henchman, Abu Talib, the only two faces the public had seen.

Crane crept slowly up the stone stairs and looked at Lanie’s and the baby’s memorial graves fifty feet away on the gently rolling hills of Forest Lawn. In the far distance, he could see a figure moving slowly in his direction, constantly checking over his shoulder.

The dead, hollow shell that had once been Lewis Crane felt a spark ignite within. Hatred, pure and simple. He was surprised that he still could feel any emotion.

He padded the P fiber and wished the answering voice a belated happy Independence Day. Then he padded off and climbed the stairs.

The figure reached the graves and stood, head bowed. He was dressed in the green coveralls of the cemetery’s groundskeepers. A wide-brimmed hat was pulled down over his face, but Crane would recognize Abu Talib/Daniel Newcombe if the man were covered with fur and barking like a dog.

Talib looked up, his eyes betraying no emotion as Crane stopped in front of him.

“I’ve never in my whole life wished anyone dead before,” Crane said. “But you I could kill with my own hands.”

“I loved her, Crane,” Talib said, tears filling his eyes. “I wouldn’t have hurt her … or your child for the world. I’m so sorry.”

“I’ve been waiting for you, you know.”

“I knew the risk when I came here. I-I just couldn’t stay away. Maybe I’m weak … I don’t know.”

“If it was me you wanted, you could have killed me any time. Why did you have to do it the way you did?”

The man looked at the ground. “We felt it was important to stop your work, not just you.”

“To stop science, Dan, is that what you were trying to do?”

“What difference does it make?”

“It makes a difference to me!” Crane screamed. “You’ve taken my life from me.” He grabbed the man’s coveralls with his good hand. “You’ve got to tell me why … you’ve got to!”

Talib’s lips moved, but no sound emerged. Finally, he said, “I don’t have any answers for you. I don’t know anything anymore. I’ve got this b-blood on my hands and I … I don’t know what to do to make it go away. You ask me how it all came to this? I don’t know. I keep trying to put it together, to … figure out … why. But it’s like I can’t think anymore, can’t g-grasp hold of a concept without it slipping away. I shot Burt. I-I shot him. Me! Is he … is he…”

“He’ll live,” Crane said, noticing helos overhead, white-clad G making their way through rows of headstones to reach them. “Where’s Ishmael?”

Newcombe grimaced. “Burt’s shovel did major damage to his spinal cord, paralyzed him. Martin Aziz decided it was time to step into Ishmael’s shoes. I presume that means our leader is now expendable…”

“That makes you expendable, too.”

“You warned me about politics. I should have listened.”

The G were on top of them, surrounding Talib, who looked up at each smiling facemask one at a time as if he could tell differences between them. They had stunners in their hands, “I’m not going to resist,” he said.

“That’s a most mature decision,” one of them replied, friendly. The G reached out a hand to take his arm. “You’ll come with us now.”

Crane watched them lead Newcombe away.

“Why?” Crane screamed to the receding figure. “Why?”

He’d wanted to say something to Talib, to somehow confront the madness of it all. But when the time had come, there’d been no words, no deeds that could possibly matter or help assuage his terrible sense of loss. For a fleeting time he’d had everything and now it was gone forever. There was no why.

He looked at the ground, at the phony headstones over the phony coffins. There certainly was no comfort here.

A helo dipped down at the edge of the cemetery. Talib was put aboard and whisked away.

And just like that it was over, wrapped in a neat package to be filed away and quickly forgotten as the world went on with its business.

Lewis Crane was alone again.

Chapter 20 SHIMANIGASHI

Abu Talib began what would be the most extraordinary day of his life the way he had begun every day for the last decade—by deciding not to kill himself.

He’d stared at the rope they’d left him, the hangman’s noose already formed. He felt its contours. The smooth nylon fibers slid easily through his palm. It was compelling, that notion of suicide, that control over his life, but it was not the option he would entertain today.

Every day for ten years he’d taken the noose out of the small drawer in his room—he hesitated calling it a cell since it had no bars—and held the rope, feeling the pull toward death. Every day for ten years he’d denied the pull, though sometimes it was stronger than other times.

At his trial—or the sham they’d called a trial—he’d been sentenced to an indefinite time in Shimanigashi. Isolation. The prisons and the FPF and the courts were run by private enterprise. There’d been no witnesses at his trial, no jury, no spectators, no lawyers. There’d only been an unidentified man in a business suit, the viddies of the attack on the Imperial Valley Project, and, of course, himself. He remembered signing some papers in triplicate.

The man in the business suit had been the last human being he had seen for ten years.

He’d been knocked out with some sort of gas and had awakened here, in this room with beige metal walls but no windows, a bed, a table and chair, a single light. And the rope, of course. There was also a very nice shower stall that ran for exactly sixty seconds a day, and a toilet that flushed by pushing a button on the wall. There were no mirrors.

He had no books, no teev, no music, no paper—except in the toilet—or pencils. His prison uniform consisted of a black jump suit made of a flimsy plastic material. At the end of the day he’d throw it in a disposal hole in his wall, and a new one would appear during the night. If he didn’t toss it at night, he didn’t get a new one.

As far as he knew, he was the only prisoner in this place. No guards ever walked by to check on him, no other sounds except his own kept him company. His food showed up twice a day through a slot in his door. The meals did not vary. Rice and broth. In the last few years, though, there had been an occasional meal of beans and pita bread, which made him think changes were occurring in the outside world … or in the management of his prison.

His hair and beard had grown for ten years. He’d discovered he had gone gray when his beard got long enough for him to pull it up and look at it. His hair hung almost to his elbows.

He’d been expected, of course, to go crazy, and had accommodated his captors by losing his mind more than once. Each time he went crazy he hoped that it would lead to human contact, an exchange of some kind. But it never had, and he was always left to confront his own mind again. Even the time he’d gotten extremely ill, sick to his stomach, there had been no contact. The room had filled with gas. When he awoke, he was on his bed with a scar where his appendix had been.

But it had been a start. It meant someone was watching him. If he talked, it meant someone was listening. It was reassuring in a strange kind of way.

Getting a fix on time and keeping track of it had been his first and most difficult challenge, especially during the time he’d been “out” with the appendectomy. Not knowing day or night, he’d had nothing to relate to; but it had occurred to him during the initial days of his imprisonment that if he lost all awareness of time, he’d only have the rope. That was when Abu Talib, born Daniel Akers Newcombe, began exercising his mind.

He’d counted out the seconds—one Mississippi, two Mississippi—for days on end until he had the internal rhythm of a day. He’d considered trying to lengthen his nails, instead of biting them as he’d always done, to scratch a mark for each day somewhere into the metal of the room. Then he decided against it, reasoning that they’d repaint the walls to thwart him. If he was going to be a human clock, he’d have to go all the way.

And, so, having nothing else to do, he’d become a human clock. He chose to believe that in the ten years he had counted, he wasn’t more than a week or two off. Once he’d gotten comfortable with his clockhood, he’d found that he could sublimate it and think about other things.

He’d remembered reading once—why hadn’t he read more?—about a man isolated in a prisoner-of-war camp who’d survived by playing chess in his head, visualizing the board and the movement of the pieces. Talib found that after several weeks of futile effort, he was able to play chess in his mind and passed many hours that way.

He’d dealt with sleep-time by simply calculating how many hours of sleep he usually needed each night to feel rested, how many his body would take on its own. Seven seemed to have been his ideal number when he’d lived in the real world, so seven it became. He never took naps and made sure he was awake seventeen out of every twenty-four hours.

Having nothing else except physical exercise to keep him occupied, he would explore his mind—sometimes happily, sometimes not so happily. He had good powers of concentration and was able to recreate people and events vividly in his mind’s eye, to relive his past. Much of it was embarrassing to him, though what bothered him the most was the realization that he’d wasted an immense amount of time in his life that could never be recovered.

Of course, he dwelled a great deal on why he’d chosen every morning to live under such a ludicrous regimen rather than simply use the rope. He never had come up with a real answer except an ingrained competitiveness with those who sought to break him. It was not a satisfying answer.

What he had discovered in himself, though, was a core notion that redefined his thinking processes. He used his isolation metaphorically by isolating his mind, separating his thoughts from each other and from their emotional/egotistical components. He dealt with his thoughts and feelings indifferently, the way people do to relieve anxiety, examining them as he would earthquake data.

He didn’t much like the skull he’d seen beneath the skin. It seemed to him that too much of his time had been spent following the commands of his gonads and his emotions. Too little time had been spent thinking reasonably. It was difficult to be angry with those who’d imprisoned him since he felt he deserved the sentence. Without sustaining anger, he’d managed to get beyond the human barrier of rationalization and see himself for what he was—an animal, acting out animal passions. Once that particular pathway was traversed, it became impossible to go back to blissful ignorance. He’d learned to accept responsibility as a human being. People had learned less in ten years, he figured.

Then there’d been the “episodes,” the bouts with insanity. Each time he’d gone nuts, it had been after a particularly dark journey within himself, when he’d let a slow psychosis creep in that could overcome his reasoning processes.

One time he’d decided that he had been killed during the raid on the Project and was living in a hellish afterlife, that he would batter around in this room for an eternity of loneliness and silence. He went hysterical and starved himself for three days until they’d gassed and force-fed him. He’d awakened feeling much better, after an unknown number of days unconscious. He could conclude only that his jailers would not permit him death by such a passive method as not eating. Was his sole option the active one of using the hangman’s noose?

In another episode of insanity he’d fantasized that he was free and could come and go at will from his cell. He chose to stay because, as he’d loudly told himself over and over, “It was all for the best.” They’d ultimately had to gas him that time, too.

Now he feared it was happening again.

After he’d finished his morning ritual with the rope, he’d retrieved his rice and broth from the slot in the door and sat down to eat. He hadn’t taken three bites before he’d heard an unfamiliar clicking sound from within the door, followed, seconds later, by the door creaking open halfway. It had never done that before.

He’d stared at it for a long time. There was a hallway on the other side of the door, he could see that much. Painted blue, the hallway had a pale yellowish light spilling down its length.

That had been quite an extraordinary amount of data to receive all at once. He’d gone back to eating his breakfast and dwelled on it for a while. Between every bite, no utensils, only hands, he’d look up at the door to see it still open, to see that marvelous blue running to washed-out green under the fuzzy yellow light. The colors seemed alive, organic, breathing, interacting.

He finished the meal and took the tray back to the door slot, the door opening even farther when he touched it. He looked down the hallway, which traveled on for a hundred yards in either direction, the yellow ceiling bulbs spaced twenty feet apart. Doors filled the hallway on both sides and there were numbers on the doors.

As he stood there with the tray in his hands, he realized he was supposed to walk through that open door. It was the worst moment of his incarceration. He didn’t want to go. The fear flashed so strong that he physically recoiled from the door, the tray flying out of his hands and clattering onto the floor.

He wanted to think about that open door, to reason out its existence for several days, but the fact that it hung wide made its immediate use impossible to avoid. He took a deep breath and strode out into the hall.

He felt the fear for only a second, then pride welled within him. He’d done it, walked into the outside world.

There was a door on each end of the hallway. Which to choose? Suddenly the notion of a choice other than suicide excited him. Being right-handed, he decided that his natural inclination was to go to the right. He went that way.

As he passed other doors, he wondered who, if anyone, was on the other side of each. He’d never heard any sounds from outside his room save the mechanical sounds of the foodcart grinding down the hallway.

It was strange to walk so far in a straight line. When he finally reached the door at hall’s end, he once again overcame his inner fears and pulled it open. He stepped through.

He was standing in a room that was about twenty feet square. The room was beige and bare except for a metal chair bolted to the floor on one side and a metal bench bolted to the floor on the other. The door he’d come in was near the chair. There was another door by the bench. He sat in the chair and waited.

In due course it opened, and an attractive woman and two children walked in. The woman’s eyes opened in horror when she saw him and the children stepped back a pace. “Abu?” she said.

It was then he recognized her. “Kh … Khadijah,” he said, his voice hoarse. He hadn’t used it in a long time. “Is that really you?”

He stood and moved toward her. She put up her hands to keep him back. “No physical contact,” she said. “It’s one of the terms of the visit.”

“What are the … other terms?” he asked quietly, reseating himself.

“I can’t give you anything,” she said. “I can’t tell you where you are. I must leave when they say.”

He nodded. “I see.”

“You look … like a wild man,” she said. “Your hair … your beard. Haven’t they cut your hair at all?”

“No,” he answered. “Are these the children?”

She nodded, taking the bench, a boy sitting on one side of her, a girl on the other. “Najan?” he asked the girl, bright-eyed above her veil. “Do you remember me?”

“No, sir,” Najan answered quickly. “But I know you’re my father.”

“And what’s your name?” he asked the boy, about nine by his calculations.

“Abu ibn Abu Talib,” the boy said, standing. “I was named after you.”

“And I’m very proud. You look like a fine young man. And that shirt you’re wearing … does that change colors?”

“Yes, sir,” his son said. “Everybody wears them.”

“Do you get any news here at all?” Khadijah asked.

He shook his head slowly. “Nothing,” he said, then pointed at her. “March 13, 2038.”

“It’s April 24th,” she replied, narrowing her eyes.

“Close,” he said triumphantly.

“You must have a million questions,” she said, leaning forward as if to study him better.

“Not so many. I gave up asking questions. You’re looking wonderful, though. You’ve rounded out.”

“Childbirth had its advantages.” She smiled, and he smiled in return, but his cheek muscles tired immediately.

“Are they going to release me?”

He’d been afraid to ask the question, tears coming to his eyes as he said the words. He choked them back.

“No,” she said. “They’re too afraid of you.”

“Afraid … of me?”

She nodded. “Once Ishmael joined the long and distinguished list of assassinated—”

“Assassinated? No! When … how?”

Her brows rose. “Of course. You wouldn’t know. A few years back. Assassin unknown, never caught.”

She took a breath. “You, then, were the only visible symbol of the movement. Martin took over. He’s a good administrator, but no one knew him. To keep the flame of rebellion alive we made you our cause. We began demanding your release as a political prisoner. You became the glue that held the Islamic State together in the War Zones, a worldwide symbol of an imprisoned people. You got the Nobel Peace Prize last year. Your influence is global.”

“Well, imagine that,” he said without enthusiasm. “It sure sounds like I’ve been having a good time.”

“I want to show you something,” she said excitedly, sliding a disk into her wristpad. It was half the size of the pads he remembered and was smooth without symbols.

A viddy came up on the beige wall. It showed the War Zone emptying of people, huge groups migrating southward as the Islamic State was opened.

“When?” he asked.

“Last year,” Khadijah said. “President Masters signed the Partition Order on Thanksgiving Day of 2037.”

“President Masters?”

“Kate Masters? I think you know her.”

“I thought I did,” he said enigmatically. “How did they work it?”

“The government and the YOU-LI Corporation have been quietly buying people out for years in those states. The earthquake in Memphis helped a lot. Most of the whites wanted to go anyway.” She pointed to the screen, house-to-house fighting in a small southern town, race against race. “Those who didn’t want to leave held out for a tune, but we eventually got rid of them all.”

“Got rid of them? There’s an Africk army?”

The kids giggled, Talib cocking his head.

“That term isn’t used much anymore,” Khadijah said, smiling.

“Why not?”

“Our African Islamic brothers didn’t think many of us were black enough to call ourselves African.” She smiled. “They started calling us ‘mestizos.’ The name stuck.”

“It’s not a complimentary title,” he said.

“We’ve made it one.” She sat up straighter, regal all of a sudden. “So the country is now called the United States of America and Islam. New Cairo encompasses Florida, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi.”

“Why did they give in after all this time?” he asked. “It must have been damned expensive to buy out that many people.”

“They had no choice,” she said. “The world is seventy per cent Islamic. The Chinese Syndicates are dying fast because they no longer control trade. Africa is the seat of economic power right now. Ultimately, the Chinese cut a deal with us to funnel trade to the rest of America through our back doors at preferred prices. It keeps both countries alive.”

The wall now showed Martin Aziz waving to crowds and making speeches. “He is in charge,” Khadijah said. “But you are the heart of the people. We wouldn’t accept a settlement with the whites until they agreed to either let us see you or see your body. Nobody knew if you were alive or dead. Now that we know, I promise you, Abu, we won’t rest until you are free.”

“Why do I have the feeling this has very little to do with me?”

“You’re a symbol. You’re Abu Talib, larger than life. The people of New Cairo need a figure to look up to in these difficult days. When the whites left after partition, they burned everything behind them. We’ve been building from scratch. Your example is their strength.”

“My example,” he said, smiling again, the muscles hurting again. “I have set no example. I’ve been surviving like an animal here. I want you to know it hasn’t been easy. I’ve … changed quite a lot. To be even more honest, I haven’t thought much about the movement since I’ve been in here. Instead, I’ve thought about smelling real air again, or seeing the sky.” He held his hand out, slowly forming it into a fist. “I’ve thought about grabbing rocks out of the ground and knowing everything about an area there is to know through its rocks … a whole history through rocks to the beginning of time! I’ve thought about sex…”

She looked down instinctively, every gesture reading like a roadmap to him. “It’s all right,” he said. “Ten years is a long time. You didn’t know if I was alive, I—”

A loud buzzer went off; Khadijah immediately stood up. “It’s time to leave,” she said. “Is there anything you want to say to the people?”

He laughed. “Today’s the first day I’ve heard a voice other than my own in years.

I don’t even live in the same world you live in.”

She shrugged. “I’ll make up something.”

Her door clicked and popped open. The children moved toward it. So soon. How could it be over so soon? This was worse than the isolation. “Crane,” he said as she hustled the children out the door. “What’s Crane doing?”

Her brittle laugh startled him so much that his body twitched.

“How the mighty do fall. A pariah, that’s what Crane is. An outcast. Reviled … for planning to set off nuclear bombs. The tide turned against him when his insane plan was fully revealed. Then for years he was ranting and raving all over the teevs about some terrible disaster coming in California. Nobody listened to him. And I haven’t heard anything about him in a long time.” Halfway out the door, she turned back and said, “We’re going to get you out of here.”

“Come back for more visits,” he said, but she was gone. The door closed quickly, he heard the lock snap. “Tell them I must have access to information!” he shouted. “For God’s sake, do something!”

He slouched in the chair. His door clicked and popped open. Slowly, he got up, then trudged back to his cell. He’d live from visit to visit now, in the hinterlands of hope. He had lost the ability to track time … and he never would get it back.

Lewis Crane sat in the back seat of the Moonskimmer with Burt Hill. The all-terrain vehicle’s bulbous helium-filled underbelly made it feel as if they were floating over the stark lunar landscape. The stars were brilliant pinpoints above, the crown of Earth just passing over the horizon behind them. The real estate man talked nonstop, continually forcing internal adjustment of the cabin’s carbon-dioxide monitors. A pale trail of light from the Earth’s corona illuminated the landscape, this band of surface getting ready to enter a two-week period of “night.”

“We don’t get a lot of Darksiders up here,” the real estate man, named Ali, said. “People want the good property lightside, where you get the view of Earth.”

“That’s exactly what I don’t want,” Crane said, turning to the windows. They were skimming the Southern Sea, Galileo’s Mare Australe, on their way to YOU-LI’s defunct titanium mining operation in the Sea of Ingenuity. The Jules Verne Crater rose majestically on their left. The mare was dust, though, not water as Galileo had surmised, powdered rock and glass and asteroid scum.

“I don’t know why you want to look at places on the darkside,” Burt said, wheezing. “A man likes a little sunshine from tune to time.”

“They get as much light over here as on the other side,” Crane said. “You just don’t have to look at the Earth, that’s all.”

“I got’s lots good property over there,” the salesman said. “Prime Earthrise.”

Crane ignored the comment. “Now, anything I buy here is mine, right?”

Ali turned to him, black moustache arching over a wide smile. He formed his fingers into a circle with his thumb. “Absolute sovereignty,” he said, snapping his fingers open. “Many groups buy lands for their religious freedom, you know? Or for their politics. No Earth governments involved, see? It’s good system if you like ’a take care of yourself.”

“How about access to water?” Hill asked.

“How about it?” Ali returned. “You make whatever deals you can make to get what water you can. The consortium up here charge a lot, you know? Most people, if they can afford it, truck it up from Earth.”

Crane grunted. Earth wasn’t the place to find water nowadays. Oh, it was better in a number of respects. The atmosphere was ozone-regenerated, people living in the sun again the way he’d remembered from his childhood, and Masada had disappeared completely five years ago with barely any notice. Everyone was too busy worrying about the amount of radioactivity in their water supplies to care about too much else. The fallout from Masada had contaminated more than water. Waste products had leaked through their safety containments all over the world because nobody was willing to look at the problem until it had become a catastrophe. Tainted water was everywhere.

He’d begun working it out on the globe at the Foundation, simply inputting rate of leakage data and the presence and speed of movement of underground water supplies. The hope was for a prediction, well ahead of time, as to where and how the disease would spread itself to the body of the planet, so that mankind would know where to entrench to fight the invader. But to some, the poisoning of the Earth’s water supply seemed like a reasonable perdition. Every age has its optimists.

The globe was a wonder, his wife’s living legacy. Many issues like the radioactivity project had been run through its cogitative senses and resulted in real conclusions. But it had broken down in some ways, which he knew would not have happened had Lanie lived. The result was disappointments, unpredicted quakes, for example, including one in California. Until now, the globe had seemed infallible.

It always made him think about Lanie’s theories of swimming pools dug in Rome starting quakes in Alaska. In fact, two of the unpredicted quakes had finally been attributed to lakes being dug, one as far as five hundred miles away, water filling the lake, filtering down into the cracks in the rocks and lubricating hidden faults. He wondered if one day, though, it would be possible to know enough to tell people where not to dig lakes … or swimming pools.

“Here we go, Misters,” Ali said, pointing through the windshield at a glowing area several miles distant. “I had them turn the lights on for you.”

Crane wondered what Lanie would think of this—him buying a piece of the Moon with Stoney’s three-billion-dollar endowment. Stoney had told him to use it to buy another dream; now, ten years later, he was taking the man at his word.

Ali reversed the thrust fans to slow them, the skimmer bumping rudely into the middle of a small ghost town of interconnected domes and square, metal prefab buildings stacked like the holoblocks Charlie had used to play with on the elevator ride in the Imperial Project.

“Are the mine shafts still open?” Crane asked as he looked at a series of abandoned restaurants with familiar names.

Ali hesitated. “We can discuss the shafts. I’m not sure how much happiness it will bring YOU-LI to come in and fill—”

“I want the shafts,” Crane said. “I’m going to tap the core for heat and power.”

“You want shafts,” Ali said happily, twirling his hand in the air. “You got shafts. They’re everywhere … all over this damn place. The man wants shafts. He wants them!”

Ali eased them to the lock, bumping up, magnetic clamps catching and sealing tight. “You’ve got to put on the helmet,” he said. “I can’t afford to turn on the life support in here just to show the place.”

“How much space does the entire operation cover?” Crane asked, as Ali put on his helmet, then pointed to Crane’s.

Crane let Burt help him into the helmet. “Think of these constructions as the center point,” Ali said. “The operation extends for a thousand square miles all around us. You’ll own the Van de Graaff Crater, the Leibnitz Crater and the Von Karman Crater. The Sea of Ingenuity is yours, all of it.”

“The price?”

“Three point two billion,” Ali said. “Now, I know that’s a whole lot’a money. I got smaller plots on the lightside that—”

“Make it three billion even and you’ve got a deal,” Crane said.

“You’ve got that kinda collateral?” Ali asked. “Not to be blunt, sir.”

“We’ll be paying cash.”

“My friend!” Ali said. “You have made an old camel trader very happy. Nobody wants the darkside.”

“I insist on it. Shall we tour the facility?”

The tour lasted less than an hour, Ali anxious to get back to the lightside and Crane not all that interested in the accommodations. The YOU-LI camp had been a typical mining operation, spartan and barely supported from corporate. Crane would be tearing down the buildings in due time, constructing his own. But the existing construction would house the initial planners and engineers whose task it would be to turn a darkside mining camp into a new civilization. It would be a long and difficult project, but Crane had undertaken many such projects before.

Later, back at the Moonbase Marriott, Crane and Hill sat at a table in the bar, Crane’s back to the magnificent Earthrise shining through the huge, thick windows. The hotel was full, the area around the hotel beginning to look like a small city of domes and skydecks. The Moon was new territory, optioned for quick sale by YOU-LI, the previous owners. The Chinese were consolidating their holdings and the Moon didn’t figure in their future. So, a piece at a time, it was being developed by the people who always open new territories and settlement—rogues and heroes. Crane wasn’t sure which category he fit into.

Hill, frail and quiet since being wounded years before, raised a beer. “I guess this is to you,” he said. “I’m not sure what you did, but congratulations.”

“We’re taking advantage of an opportunity while we can,” Crane said, touching his glass of Scotch to the beer bottle, then sipping. “I always wanted to run my own government.”

“Bullshit,” Hill said. “All you ever wanted to do was kill EQs. All of a sudden we’re buying up the Moon.”

“It’s not sudden. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time … years. It was never feasible until now. I don’t tell you everything on my mind, Burt.”

“That’s a fact. You never told me Sumi was a woman.”

“I figured that if you were dumb enough not to know,” Crane said, “I wasn’t going to be the one to tell you.”

It was an old joke between them. Truth to tell, neither of them had had the vaguest idea about Sumi. Her story had been fascinating and most nearly tragic. So much had happened over the years.

Barely a month after the attack on the Imperial Project, President Gideon had slipped on a bar of soap in the bathtub and promptly died—at least that was the story released by the White House. Sumi had become President, immediately appointing Kate Masters as her VP. Because Liang Int and Yo-Yu had split the electorate, Sumi was able to beat both companies’ tickets and get elected President without affiliation in the November ’28 elections.

It was Sumi who’d laid the groundwork for what had ultimately resulted in the Islamic State. Because of what she termed “health reasons” she chose not to run again in ’32, even though she’d been a balanced and respected Chief Executive during her term in office. Then, at the same news conference, she’d revealed her true gender, saying she could “no longer pretend” to be a male.

Kate Masters had run and won big, leapfrogging from her already huge power base and cashing in on anti-Chinese sentiment. The economy continued to falter because of a barrage of sanctions imposed upon Chinese business interests by a worldwide Islamic movement whose global view was ethnocentric, to say the least.

The reasons for Sumi Chan’s declining to run again then became immediately apparent when she was checked into a mental institution. Paul, the lover devolved from her chip, had managed to take over her life completely, making all her decisions, choosing her advisors, and drawing her into an ever-downward spiral of xenophobia and closed-mindedness. She’d become the entire loop of humanity all within herself. No one else was allowed in by Paul.

Crane had maintained a loose contact with her through this period, buying from YOU-LI, at Kate’s insistence, Sumi’s ancestral lands, which he then leased back to her at the price of one dollar per year in perpetuity. Sumi needed—and was granted—a legal divorce from Paul. So strong was his presence that he was even there when the chip was removed. She wasn’t the only one with a problem. Millions had become addicted to Yo-Yu’s chips, and an entire branch of medicine called Personality Replacement had sprung into existence to deal with the fallout.

Sumi Chan spent four years locked away, Yo-Yu doling out billions in hospital and damage payments for addicted chippies, taking enough of a hit that it was forced into a worldwide merger with its struggling rival, the YOU-LI Corp. The Companion Chip went the way of the dinosaur, even as educational chip implants were increasing in popularity. Crane, himself, was ported in ’35 and found the device invaluable for research.

Kate Masters, meanwhile, had been re-elected in ’36 and was now serving out the last two years of her second term. Sumi lived quietly on her ancestral lands in China.

Stoney had died within a year of the Imperial catastrophe.

For Crane, though, the last ten years had been a waking nightmare. Shortly after Talib’s arrest and imprisonment when the story was out about the Imperial Valley Project, public sympathy turned sharply. Quickly, he, Crane, became the villain for daring even to think of detonating nuclear devices … for daring even to believe he could change the very substructure of the Earth or had any right to do so.

His became the voice crying in the wilderness. Over and over again through the long years he tried to warn his countrymen of the terrible catastrophe to come in California. Worse than the insults, worse than the laughter greeting his recorded, written, and live messages was the deafening silence with which his warnings were met. And, finally, he had given up hope.

And he had become more hollow … and more hollow still.

Then the Moon had gone up for sale and he’d felt something down in the pit of his stomach, a spark. He’d pounced on it.

“You’re really going to put in… buildings and stuff up here, huh?” Hill asked.

“Plan to,” Crane said, “I want to build a whole city up here, Burt. A place where people would want to live.”

“You gonna be livin’ up here, too?”

Crane smiled. “No, friend. I think we’re both a little too long in the tooth and cantankerous for this kind of pioneering.”

Hill sat back and sighed heavily. “That’s a relief. I just couldn’t imagine myself in one of those damned helmets all the time. What happens if you gotta sneeze, or blow your nose?”

“We will visit sometimes, though. There’s a lot of work to be done, decisions to be made.” Crane took a sip of the Scotch, watching a crew of construction workers in their muscle exo’s walking into the bar and sitting at a back table. “I don’t like the idea of being dependent upon Earth for my water supply,” he said. “Wonder if we could dredge permafrost on Mars and ship it here ourselves? Whoever controls the water, controls the environment.”

“How many people you want to put out there?”

“A few thousand at least, I’d say.”

“You’ve been all fired up about this project for months. It seems crazy to me. Why do it? What’s the point?”

Crane grimaced, finished his drink. He held up the glass and got the bartender’s attention, the man nodding and going for the Scotch bottle. “It’s all that money Stoney left me,” he said. “I couldn’t find anything worthwhile enough … lasting enough, to spend it on. Then this opened up.”

“Why this?”

“I had an aquarium once … well twice actually, but the one I’m thinking about I had when I was a kid living with my aunt,” Crane said. “I’d saved up for it myself. I had a lot of different kinds of fish in it over the years, but once I put a shrimp in, a delicate, beautiful little thing. I couldn’t find anything to feed it that it wanted to eat. After a while it began eating itself, day after day, a piece at a tune just to stay alive. Eventually it hit a vital organ.”

He turned then and looked at the Earth, huge and blue and cloud-shrouded through the viewports. He pointed to it. “That’s what I think they’re doing, eating themselves alive. They murder in the name of God and blindly destroy the very ecosystem that sustains them.”

“People are people.” Burt shrugged.

“What you’re really saying is that people are animals,” Crane replied. “And I say to you, it doesn’t have to be that way. We can make a civilization, a real civilization, built on real understanding of ourselves and our universe. I bought property on the darkside because I don’t want my people seeing the Earth die before their eyes. My … city may be the last best hope for the human race, Burt. That’s why I’m doing it. Is that dream enough for you?”

“You couldn’t save the Earth, so you want to make a new world?”

“I’ll accept that interpretation.”

“What’re you gonna call this place?”

“Charlestown. I’m going to call it Charlestown.”

Burt nodded, his eyes misting. “I think that’s real nice, Doc. Real nice.”

Chapter 21 FIRESTORM

From the air, the Shirahega firebreak was impossible to miss, even in the world’s largest city. It was an apartment building, or rather a length of apartments, designed to cut off the firestorm resulting from a major quake, designed to protect the northernmost districts from the poorer southernmost ones. It was the Great Wall of Tokyo.

Crane and Burt Hill were riding in the passenger section of a Red Cross relief helo, a dozen or so white-garbed medtechs, young people mostly, filling the benches beside and across from them. They didn’t know who Crane was, had no connection to the aging countenance that had once held a world in thrall with his exploits and his tragedies.

The techs were gaping as they looked out the large ship’s bubble ports. The sight of Tokyo spread out beneath them would take anyone’s breath away. The buildings of a major city dominated the landscape, yet it was the surrounding city, the ramshackle dwellings of thirty-three million people, that commanded the attention. Wooden houses jammed together along narrow streets made it look like a patchwork quilt. Millions of wooden houses. More houses than the human mind could truly imagine. Only seeing was believing.

But what was worse were the huge propane tanks sitting beside the dwellings, sometimes dwarfing them. They still used gas here. When the quake started—and it would start soon—the fires would ignite quickly. Within fifteen minutes a third of Tokyo would burn to the ground, a half million buildings destroyed. Crane’s arm hurt.

“You’re a damned fool to come out here,” Hill said, “chasin’ after EQs like you ain’t done since ’28. Somebody ought to get you to a psychiatrist.”

“You are the most disagreeable man I’ve ever known,” Crane said. “Why I put up with you is a mystery to me.”

“You need me, because you’re too much of a baby to look out for yourself. Hell, you’d’a been dead twenty times over if it wasn’t for me. And I’m here to tell you now, that this may be the twenty-first time. I’ll bet you Doc Bowman didn’t give you the okay for this.”

“Didn’t tell him,” Crane said. He hadn’t been able to shake Bowman since his brush with colon cancer the year before. It had been caused by radiation exposure during the fight at Imperial Valley. The cancer was why he was here, wanting to experience a massive earthquake once more. It had been seventeen years since he’d allowed himself to visit a quake site—he was flagellating himself; Burt was right about that—yet as great as his pain and loathing for the Beast, so too was the exultation and excitement. The Beast provoked an exquisite enmity.

He’d been at Moonbase Charlestown, supervising the unending small details of a project so massive and in such unlivable conditions as to overpower anyone, when he’d gotten sick. He’d never really been sick before. The cancer was advanced when they discovered it. They’d treated him chemically, then told him his body would do the rest. What they didn’t tell him was the terrible price he’d pay physically. The war his body waged had gone on for eight excruciating months. When it was finally over he was cancer-free, in fact, immune to most forms of the disease, but he was weak; he tired easily. He couldn’t drink anymore and felt like an old man at fifty-eight. And this day he was going to witness a quake the likes of which he’d never seen.

Tokyo sat at the juncture of four plates: the Philippine, the Pacific, the Eurasian, and the trailing edge of the North American, by way of the Japan and Isu Trenches. A major subduction quake was getting ready to occur at the Japan/Izu Trench conjunction, and it would destroy most of Tokyo.

An eerie scenario had developed around the Crane Report in recent years. Discredited by many, respected by others, the Report was used by a few to plan their adventures and their deaths. Whenever a major EQ was predicted, hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people showed up to test themselves against its power. Like running with the bulls, men used it as a proof of manhood. Others planned it as a dramatic suicide.

The firebreak loomed below, a jagged gash of buildings butted together, cutting the city in half. Their steel shutters were already locked down tight, huge water cannons at the ready. Ironically, it was September 1, traditionally Earthquake Day in Japan since September 1st, 1923, when forty thousand people burned to death in the firestorm that leveled Edo, as Tokyo had been known then. All told, one hundred and fifty thousand people died that day.

The helo stalked Shirahega. There was a crowded observation station built atop one of the central buildings, a helopad right alongside. The pilot banked them in and bullseyed the pad, the young techs jumping out of the machine no sooner than it had set down. They were there to help with the survivors—for besides the gatecrashers, there were always people who refused to evacuate.

Crane and Hill climbed out last, Crane waving Hill off when he tried to help him. “I may be a cripple,” he said, grunting as he took the long step down, “but I’m not a damned cripple.”

He had only been on the roof for a number of seconds when he experienced the first tremor. “Do you feel it, Burt?”

“Sir?” Hill mumbled.

Crane was feeling the temblors up his leg, shaking his whole body, vibrating it like a tuning fork. “I think you’d better position yourself. It will only be moments now.”

Sway belts were connected to the metal front wall of the firebreak. Hill helped him belt in. He picked up a pair of binoculars hanging beside the belt. Below, groups of people on the surrounding streets were still partying, many dressed alike. There was a group in black shiny suits with bright red stripes shoulder to ankle. There was another group of young men, and a few women, who were naked except for shoes, their clothes tied in bundles they carried on their shoulders. Another group dressed in clown outfits. All young, foolish people. They were called Rockers because they challenged geology on its own terms.

The suicides he could see farther back in the city, all ages, all looking for a shaky building to scale, for some large structure beneath which they could wait. The Rockers stayed close enough to the firebreak to run. The suicides wandered aimlessly, but far enough away from Shirahega that they couldn’t reach it in a firestorm. Those who simply refused to believe in the quake were, he presumed, in their homes or offices, doing whatever they normally did.

“Got a moment for an old friend?” came a voice from behind. He turned to see Sumi Chan. Her hair was shoulder length, her eyes made up with pale blue shadow.

“Oh my,” Crane said. He reached out as Sumi hurried to hug him. “Let me look at you.”

She stepped back from their brief embrace. She wore a black jumpsuit and hiking boots and looked sexy. She had aged well: A lifetime of controlling her emotions had left her with a remarkably unlined face. In fact, Crane realized, Sumi was beautiful—all the more so because her eyes were friendlier than he’d ever seen them, more intimate in their gaze. He nodded, once he was able to discern that she was healthy and quite comfortable with herself.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, as she moved to hug an already-strapped-in Burt Hill.

“I heard you were coming, so I popped over,” she said. “We’re practically neighbors.”

A loud rumble bellowed out of the earth. The building began shaking, and Crane grabbed Sumi. He pulled her to the wall to help her strap in.

“Hang on!” he yelled. “It’s going to be a rough one!”

The building shook violently from side to side, S waves, big ones shivering the mantle. It didn’t stop, it intensified, P waves joining the assault, up-and-down waves making the earth heave.

Crane grabbed the facade before him with a still-strong right hand, his gaze locked on the city twenty stories below. People were scattering, everyone forgetting mock heroic plans in the face of catastrophe. They ran, falling, back toward the firebreak. Huge rumbling fissures opened in the streets and the whole group of naked Rockers disappeared into the bowels of the Beast.

The shaking intensified, entire blocks of buildings simply falling over where the ground turned liquid. The smashing of glass and concrete as buildings fell mixed with the rumble of the EQ in an overpowering wall of noise. A cloud of dust rose from demolished structures and spread across the city.

The explosions started, the temblor only thirty seconds old. Bridges and overpasses fell, dumping cars full of last-minute evacs into empty space, spilling people and automobiles across the crumbling cityscape.

And then the fires began.

Ninety seconds passed and still the ground rolled and pitched, the firebreak creaking beneath them. Thirty feet away, the helo that had brought them bounced itself to the side of the building, then pitched over the edge.

“I told you, Crane,” Hill said. “We’re right in the damned middle of it again.”

“And it’s great,” Crane said low, his insides burning, alive! He could feel himself surge with the Beast’s power, his enemy putting life back into him. He hadn’t felt this good in years.

“Look at Tokyo Bay,” Sumi said, taking his bad arm, grasping hard.

The Bay was drained, empty, the ugly jagged scar of the trench evident several miles out in the mudhole.

“That wind,” Hill said.

“The firestorm’s creating a vacuum, consuming all the oxygen around it,” Crane said loudly, above the noise. “That wind is just the air rushing back in to fill the space.”

The shaking had slowed. But the firestorm was moving closer to them, eating Tokyo a block at a time.

“Feel the heat?” Sumi said, her hands in front of her face, the fire now an unbroken line ten miles long and two miles wide. It roared toward them, a mile and closing, as an aftershock jerked them sideways.

The smoke was thick, Crane’s blood hotter than the inferno he faced. The fire, huge and unrelenting, rolled like an ocean in shimmering waves that crashed and broke, leaping up like bright orange surfspray.

They were sweating, all of them, as the water cannons came on, pumping sea water under pressure, a wall of water to match the wall of fire. A thick spray of water refracted the bright orange, producing countless minirainbows in the midst of conflagration. One of the cannons was pointed straight up, the water spraying over the top of the building, cooling them, drenching their legs before hitting drainholes and arcing back out toward the fire. The same drama was being enacted along the entire firebreak. Shirahega was the city’s only hope.

The temperature was up, way up. Burt ripped off his mask and coughed. “Are you okay?” Crane called into the man’s ear.

Burt hacked and spit. “Hell, I told you I could never go around in a space helmet … didn’t I? But I can take it as long as you can!”

Sumi was giddy with it, laughing. “You’re high octane one hundred percent!” she screamed, water streaming out of her hair, eye makeup running down her face.

“I didn’t invent it … I just predicted it,” he called in return, feeling the heat on his clothes. Everyone’s face was bloodred.

There were exclamations farther down the line. People looked up. Crane followed suit. The sky was orange above him, the fire attempting to leapfrog completely over the break to pick its targets on the other side.

“The trees’ll go like candles!” Crane said, unbuckling and sloshing away from the southern view to watch the building’s north side, Sumi and Burt right behind him.

He looked north, half the city already rubble there, many small fires burning off into the smoke-shrouded horizon. Below, the evacuation park was jammed with people who’d somehow survived the temblor and the firestorm. Two trees were already blazing from airborne embers, and people lay huddled on the ground to escape the smoke. It was the same way everyone had died on Edo a hundred and twenty years earlier.

He looked back at the firebreak. Most of the water cannons jutted from the edifice of the building itself, but three large ones, the size of howitzers, were buttressed on the roof. He looked at Hill. “Think you can handle one of those things?” he asked.

“If it’s mechanical, I’m its daddy,” Hill responded, ripping off his mask to spit again.

“Take the southeast cannon,” Crane said. “Turn it around, onto the park. Go! Now!”

Sumi followed him dutifully to the southwest cannon, the one pointed straight up. It was massive and heavy enough to not buckle under the intense water pressure. Two large handles jutted from the back of the machine. Crane and Sumi each took a handle and jerked, slowly bringing the cannon down and around, arcing the water over the facade to spray the park.

The Japanese on the roof ran to the north wall and gazed over. Then they turned around and politely applauded.

A tired Crane and Sumi Chan leaned over the wall and stared down into the park at medtechs smoothly working triage and giving emergency care. Hill was off somewhere, trying to arrange transport out of the damage zone since they’d lost their helo.

“How long since we’ve seen each other?” Crane asked. It was fascinating to him, but he had no problem accepting Sumi as a woman.

“I don’t know … fifteen years, or so. I was still living as a man then.”

“With Paul.” Crane smiled. “We all assumed you were homosexual. You see Kate anymore?”

“She came out to visit a few months ago. Stayed a week. Same old Kate. She was in the process of divorcing her fourth husband and acquiring her fifth.”

“The one fixed point in an everchanging universe,” Crane said, wondering why Sumi really had come to see him.

“How is the worldwide water situation?” she asked. “I assume the Foundation is still involved in the radiation cleanup projects.”

“We provide daily updates after receiving word of what’s being done, then counterbalance with suggestions for the next day. Some of it is quite remarkable. There’s a fellow in Colorado, America, and one in Argentina who are diverting underground rivers, bringing them to the surface and controlling their flow to avoid hot areas. Things are still bad, obviously, and rationing is still necessary, but I think we may hit turnaround in a half dozen or so years.”

“How about the Mideast?”

“Still hot as lava,” he returned. She was good, professional. “Now tell me why the hell you’re really here.”

“Sure,” she said, smiling. She patted his hand. “I have two propositions for you.”

“Kate Masters’ visit wasn’t just a vacation, was it?” he said. “She was lobbying you, wasn’t she? Successfully, I guess.”

“Correct on all counts,” Sumi answered, the smile leaving her face. “Crane, right now America is on the verge of a race war. There’s fighting all along the border with New Cairo. The issue of Abu Talib has dwarfed everything—logic, life itself.”

“I don’t want to hear this,” Crane said. “And when Burt walks back over here, he’s not going to want to hear it, either.”

“Burt will hear exactly what you want him to hear,” she said.

“Was that supposed to be offensive?”

“No, truthful. He idolizes you. You know that. He’d listen to me if you’d tell him to.

Let me make my pitch before you throw me out. For old times’ sake, huh?”

“I find this entire discussion unsettling,” Crane said. “Make it fast.”

“Okay. The remnants of leadership in Washington have no idea of what they’ve got in their jail. Kate should have pardoned Talib years ago, but she didn’t because of her respect for your feelings. Now she regrets it. The people in charge think he’s some sort of monster who’ll lead New Cairo on an Islamic bloodbath across America. The Muslims think America is holding Talib as an affront to them, an attack on their religious leader.”

“Newcombe … religious?”

“His wife is the only one who talks to him. She keeps bringing all these messages, the NOI religious protocol, back from her visits. She’s very powerful and persuasive. People believe her.”

“And Kate wants to force it into the open?”

“She’s got a lot of pull still, even though she’s retired from politics.”

“Yeah, I see how she’s retired.”

“Just listen. She wants both you and Burt to testify. People who really knew Talib. Your voice would be the loudest in the country raised in favor of his release. We both know that Dan wouldn’t lead any revolts or anything.”

“I watched him shoot Burt. He fronted the raid that killed my family. I believe he’s capable of anything.”

“I’ve gone through all the disks, all the history of the event,” Sumi said. “From everything I’ve seen he went on that raid to try to stop you, but also to prevent bloodshed. His shooting Burt was pure self-defense. He’d have gotten his head bashed in if he hadn’t.”

“Don’t you understand,” he said slowly, sounding out each word, “that however many people died in this mess today, however much damage was done, it wouldn’t have happened if Newcombe hadn’t led those people into the Project? By this point in time, the planet would have been earthquake-free.”

“You’re only speculating,” she said. “You have no idea if the rest of the world would have gone along with your scheme.”

“I hate him,” Crane said.

“This is bigger than you and him. People’s lives—”

“I’m not in the lifesaving business anymore,” he interrupted.

“Then what were we doing with that water cannon?” she asked.

He looked at her, wishing he could share with her, somehow let her feel the pain that still ate him alive every time he saw a toddler, every time he saw a husband and wife holding hands. The tears came unbidden. “He ruined my life, S-Sumi,” he choked out. “I don’t want to s-stir it up. I don’t want to th-think about it. Can’t it just be left alone to work itself out without me?”

“No. It can’t be worked out without you. And you’re the one who doesn’t understand. Facing this won’t just release Abu Talib. It will release Lewis Crane also.”

“Release me to what?”

“Maybe peace … finally.”

He looked at her for a long moment. “You said you had two propositions.”

She held his gaze. “I want you to marry me,” she said without inflection.

“What?”

“Paul was a substitute for you,” she said, “the years I spent living with, then trying to get rid of, him were hard, destructive. I’m fifty-two years old and have no understanding of how to meet or approach men.”

“Are you saying you’re in love with me?” Crane asked.

“I always have been … for almost twenty-five years now.”

Crane sighed and slid down the wall to a sitting position, sloshing right into the water still pooled there. “It’s been so long since I even thought that way,” he said. “Since Lanie, there’s been … there’s been nobody.”

“Are you ready for the grave then?” she asked. “Are you already dead? Because if there’s the least spark of life in you, you’ll think seriously about my offer. I understand your work and I understand you. I know this is difficult. You’ve always thought of me as a man. But I’m not. I never was. I was an actress playing a role. I love you, Crane. And I’m so damned scared of getting old and dying without sharing my life with you that I’m willing to sit here in the water and make a fool out of myself to be near you. I’m not ashamed of it.”

Crane leaned his head back against the wall, the wail of sirens a ubiquitous reminder of their location. Yesterday he would have been horrified by Sumi’s suggestion, but that was yesterday. Before today. Before he’d discovered there was still something inside of him that wasn’t hollowed out.

“So, when would we set all this up?” he asked “Kate’s hearing?”

“No,” he said, smiling at her. “Our wedding.”

Crane sat with Sumi on a hard bench outside the hearing room in the drab, colorless jail-house, listening to Joey Panatopolous, Mr. Panatopolous’ grown son, getting excited in his aural.

“Crane … it’s working. Do you hear me? It’s working!”

“The generators are up?”

“Up and running! We are running entirely on thermal power as of right now. The turbines are singing, the heat is channeling through the domes. We no longer need solid fuels or focus. Charlestown is now energy self-sufficient.”

“The moon is feeding us,” Crane said. “It’s working with us, not against. You’ve done a great job, Joey. Your Dad would have been proud.”

“I wish he could have been up here to see it.”

“Yeah … me, too. He’s the only other man besides you who I would have trusted with tapping the core.”

“He was my teacher.”

“I know. My regards to everyone in Charlestown.” He began to sign off, then added, “Make this a citywide holiday. We have attained our independence today. Let’s celebrate it every year.”

“Done,” Joey said. “Talk to you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow it is.” Crane looked at his pad, then said, “Off,” the line clearing, the comlink shutting down.

Sumi wrapped her arms around him. “Good news?”

He smiled at the love in her eyes. “We have successfully tapped the core and are using its power.”

“I never doubted you’d succeed.”

“You’ve never doubted anything I’ve said,” he returned, leaning down and kissing her on the end of her nose. “That’s why I always wanted you to work for me.”

“That’s because you haven’t been wrong yet,” she said.

“Just once,” he returned, feeling even the happiness of Charlestown’s good news drain out of him. “And now maybe twice.”

“Don’t torture yourself,” she said, pointing a finger in his face. “You’ll get yourself all upset. And you do know that you’re doing the right thing.”

He frowned. “Am I, Sumi? I trusted him and he abused my trust on all levels.”

She shrugged. “You took his girlfriend away and he got jealous.”

“Don’t make it sound that crass and petty. It’s not—”

“You’re the one who’s reduced it to the level of who hurt whom.” She hugged him quickly, then cradled his face between her palms. “Crane, I love you, but you’re bull-headed and blind when you want to be. You preach tolerance, politeness, but you do the same thing everyone else does—you try and build some cumulative tally of pain and loss, then compete to see who got hurt more. You can’t base your relationship with the world on that.”

“Sumi, I—”

She put her finger over his lips. “Listen to me: No one is asking you to forgive Newcombe. Your pain scorecard is your own business. But, my God Crane, that man’s been in solitary confinement for seventeen and a half years. What I’m asking you to do is realize that justice has been done and say so, then talk about the Dan Newcombe you knew before.”

“He was a hell of a scientist.”

She smiled at him. “Then tell them that. That’s all. Be bigger than your feelings. Tell the truth.”

Crane nodded, enjoying her hug. He wondered how it was going inside right now. Burt was giving testimony. Others, mestizos, were walking up and down the hallway, waiting. From tune to time they’d glance nervously at Crane, then look away when he’d catch them watching.

It was so odd to see them, supporters, he supposed. They all desperately wanted Newcombe freed—but why? They were too young to know the man or care about him as a person. It was something else they wanted from him, something more fundamental.

He realized it was unity they were after, a closed nurturing circle of beliefs and ideas, a well from which to drink. It’s what everyone wanted, really. It was what Charlestown was all about. And Newcombe was their elder statesman, just as Crane was Charlestown’s. The faucet through which the ideas poured.

“Please tell me you haven’t testified yet,” came Kate Masters’ voice from down the hall. “Tell me I haven’t missed it.”

Masters never so much walked as swept into a room. She was even able to make the drab hallway hers as she glided up to them, wearing diaphanous chiffon, not looking a day older than she had twenty years ago.

“Hello, hello,” she said, kissing Crane on the cheek. “How’s the happy couple?”

Sumi jumped up and hugged her. “We go next,” she said. “I’m glad you made it.”

“Made it? This is the biggest thing I’ve ever put together.” Masters sat beside them, leaning out so she could speak with both. “Believe me, if this doesn’t go today, you may as well pack up your stuff and move to another country, cause things are getting rough out there. We’re looking at military and militia buildup on both sides of the border with New Cairo. This whole country could go.”

“I’ve heard worse notions,” Crane said.

“What’s with you?” Masters asked him.

“He’s just grumpy, that’s all,” Sumi said. “He’s still having a problem with T-A-L-I-B.”

“I can spell, dammit,” Crane said. “And we’re calling him Newcombe, remember?”

Masters put her hand on his arm. “You’re not going to turn into a headjob on me, are you?”

“Leave me alone, Kate.”

“I will not. You have a responsibility to go in there and settle this issue before things get out of hand.”

“Why? Why is it my responsibility?”

“You already know the answer to that,” Masters said coldly, standing. “I’ll see you inside.” She stalked toward the hearing room.

“Now you’ve got her all upset.” Sumi made a clucking noise of disapproval.

“Do you ever do anything but negotiate?”

“No. It’s my best skill.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Crane said, smiling. “Last night you showed me a few tricks.”

“Stop,” she whispered, slapping his shoulder. “Someone might hear you.”

The hearing room door swung open again, Burt Hill walking out, shoulders slumped, head down. Hill had agreed to testify from the start, and Crane, for his part, had refused to influence him in any way. The two had never discussed what they felt, what they would say.

“Are you all right?” Crane asked as Sumi said, “What happened?”

“I’m a damned fool, that’s what.”

Crane grabbed his arm. “Burt…”

“I was gonna burn him,” Hill said. “I was gonna burn him to the ground. Hell, I ain’t been half a man since he shot me. But … but I walked in that door…” Burt looked confused, hurt even.

“What happened?” Sumi said loudly. “Burt, if—”

Crane stopped her with a raised hand. He turned and nodded. It was coming.

“I walked in there,” Hill said again, “and I … I saw him. Oh God, it tore my heart out. It was Doc Dan, but it was … it was—oh my.” He put a hand to his chest. “I’ve got to sit down.”

The man collapsed onto the bench, staring at nothing, shaking his head. He took deep breaths.

The door swung open and a veiled woman stuck her head into the hallway. “Lewis Crane,” she said, then motioned him in when he waved to her.

“Will you be all right out here?” Sumi asked.

Burt mumbled a “yes,” and Sumi and Crane entered the hearing room hand in hand.

As many as fifty people stood in one end of the room. There was no seating. The crowd was a mixture of aging camheads and citizens of New Cairo. Camming was rapidly turning into a pastime for the middle-aged, chip technology far enough advanced that the younger generation found a raison d’etre within the confines of their own skulls. The tech kids who’d been raised on nothing but the pad were at the forefront of the giant Plug-in.

Crane recognized Khadijah in the crowd of people wearing colorful robes, her stance straight and tall, fire in her eyes. On either side of her stood two young adults, Newcombe’s children, he supposed. Little Charlie flashed unbidden through his mind. He didn’t see Martin Aziz in the gallery. Intriguing.

At the other end, the room was bisected by a yellow line over which no one crossed. There was a desk there, a simple gunmetal-gray plastic desk. A man in a dark suit sat behind it. He wore a red-and-white-checked ghutra on his head, the fashion of the clerical class. Behind him stood a Chinese, probably a representative of YOU-LI Corp. Beside the desk was a chair bolted to the floor.

And then he saw Newcombe. Shackled to the wall. The man’s hair was bright white, his long beard also snow white. He was wan and emaciated, his eyes dark, empty. Four G surrounded him, as if he could possibly escape, their new black exo’s and menacing faceplates making them look like storybook monsters, trolls from under the bridge. Crane realized then that the G had lost a lot of personnel at the Imperial Valley Massacre, as it was now called, and probably felt as if they, too, had a personal stake in the hearing.

“Dr… Crane?” the man at the desk said, using a stylus as a pointer as he read directly from a screen on his desk.

“I’m Crane.”

“Step forward.”

Crane complied, moving to stand before the desk, ready to be sworn in.

“Are you a consumer?” the man asked.

Crane nearly laughed. “Well, of course I am. Everyone is.”

“Excellent,” the man said, nodding judiciously. “Please take a seat.”

Crane sat. The man slid a pressure pad toward him on the desk. “This is the standard agreement,” he said, “stating that you came here of your own free will and that LOK-M-TITE Security Service, Inc., owns all intellectual property rights connected with this hearing and that you will not be reimbursed for this appearance. If you accept the agreement, press your thumb to the pad.”

Crane did, then sat back. He turned to look at Newcombe again. It was hard to hate the pitiful, all-but-broken, man who was chained like an animal. Their gazes met. Held. He saw sorrow in those sunken eyes, but he saw something else, too. Despite the horror Newcombe’s life had become, his eyes still held pride.

Crane looked at Sumi. She was nodding to him, but seemed worried, nervous.

“The floor is yours, Dr. Crane,” the nameless man behind the desk said.

Crane cleared his throat, having no idea of what he was going to say. His feelings were in turmoil. He opened his mouth and just let it out. “My wife … er, excuse me, Madame President Emeritus, reminded me before I came in here that all I had to do was tell the truth,” he said. “The question is: Whose truth? My truth? Or is there a greater truth beyond mine? I’m a man of science, like Dr. Newcombe was. We became men of science because we hate the burden of subjectivity. I’ve always tried to gear myself to the higher truth of science, the knowledge; but I fail. If you want to know my truth, I will tell you that I hate that man over there. I still can’t believe he violated me in so many ways. He took my dreams.”

He shook his head. “That’s my subjective truth. But what’s my analytic truth? My analytic truth is that this is a man I once loved very much who made a mistake that led to tragic consequences. His mistake was that he traded gods, science for Allah, and hence, traded goals without knowing it. He is as much a manufactured product of his religion as I am of mine, and as much a victim of it. But this is not about victims. Everybody’s a victim. That’s what Kate Masters prompted me to remember. Before it’s done, we all lose everyone and everything that was ever important to us, and then we lose ourselves. We’ve got to get beyond our own victimhood and take the long view, the view to what we leave behind and what follows us.”

He felt his voice rising on its own, realizing that this wasn’t about Newcombe, and Sumi already understood it. This was about Charlestown and the true art of community. “It’s so easy to justify committing violence and inflicting pain. It’s always the first, and most natural reaction. I must ask myself, what is the right thing to do?” Crane looked squarely at the man behind the desk. “May I ask the prisoner some questions?”

The bureaucrat nodded.

Crane stood and walked to Newcombe, the man’s face wrinkling into a posture of near amusement. “Have you paid society’s debt for the crimes you committed?”

“The bill plus change,” Newcombe said immediately, imperious. Crane smiled when he realized the man’s body was broken but not his mind. He sounded sharp.

“Did you intend to kill anyone when you went to the Imperial Valley Project that night?”

“No.”

“Are you remorseful for what occurred?”

“I am remorseful for the loss of life. I always have been. That’s not the way.”

“I agree. Are you a violent man by nature?”

“I’m a scientist.”

“Yes,” Crane said. “And a very good one, sir,” he added for the benefit of Mr. No Name.

“Thank you,” Newcombe said. “You’re not bad yourself.”

“Do you consider yourself civilized, Dr. Newcombe?”

“The name is Talib, and yes, I consider myself civilized.”

“Even after spending nearly a third of your life in jail?”

“I’ve already answered your question.”

Crane moved within inches of his face. “Do you accept responsibility for the death of my wife and my son?”

“No,” Newcombe said, and his voice caught slightly. “The death of your wife and son was my punishment for everything else I’d done.”

Crane backed away from him, a hand to his mouth. He’d been so caught up in his own pain and loss he’d never considered that Dan’s love for Lanie could have been as great as his own.

He looked at the man, really looked at him, and saw a mirror of his own soul, his own feelings. They saw it in each other, Newcombe nodding acknowledgment of a great truth. Crane reeled, staggering back several paces.

There was a commotion in the gallery. Khadijah was pushing her way through the spectators to get out of the room. She was followed quickly by his children.

Crane swallowed hard and faced Newcombe again, the feelings charging through him, pulsing like pressure waves. “I think,” he said quietly, “that I can be man enough to set you free without forgiving you, and that you can achieve freedom without asking my forgiveness. And I think that’s what’s called civilization.”

He turned and looked at Sumi. Tears were running down her cheeks.

He looked at the bureaucrat at the desk.

“Sir,” he said, in almost a whisper, “I believe we have come to a crossroads in society. Two great nations are grinding against each other, tearing at each other like the strike-slip fault that is ripping California apart. Mr. N … Talib is the pressure point on the plate, the bumper, that is keeping both societies from moving forward. Everything compresses on this point and if the pressure isn’t relieved, the fault will rupture completely, destroying much for no reason.”

Crane looked down at the floor. “I’ve hated earthquakes all my life because of what they took from me and I’ve hated Mr. Talib for the same reason. What a stupid … stupid fool I’ve been.” He stared out at the gallery. “Hatred, I’ve realized, accomplishes nothing positive. It is only destructive. It is the active agency of fear. What does it get us? What good does it do us? I implore you to set this man free, no matter how much you may hate or fear him. Ease the pressure on the fault for the good of all. Talib is no danger to anyone, surely you can see that. He’s merely a man who made a mistake, and that is all. Let him go home, and we’ll all put this behind us.”

He walked immediately out the door without looking at Newcombe. The pain was still there, but more than anyone, he had always known that life was pain.

In the hallway he shared a look with Newcombe’s wife, the woman hating him despite his positive testimony. Khadijah seemed a person of deep and abiding anger. Too bad. She turned abruptly and moved into the protective circle of the mestizos in the hall.

He sat down beside Burt, the man taking one look at him and nodding. “You didn’t burn him either, did you?” Crane shook his head. “We’re both a couple of old fools, that’s what.”

“Ah, what the hell,” Crane said, letting his head fall back against the beige metal wall. “Life goes on. You can’t live for hatred, not really live.”

The door swung open, and Sumi came out, a huge smile on her face. “You did it!” she said, hurrying to him to throw her arms around him.

Within a second, people exploded through the doorway, cheering, a confused Newcombe being swept along on a tide of love and support. Neither man looked directly at the other. Crane’s gut clenched when he saw the royal treatment Newcombe was getting, but it didn’t clench as much as it would have yesterday.

And that was called progress.

Chapter 22 RICHTER TEN

Crane could pinpoint the time when he had known his life was over: the spring of 2055. One day he’d started going through storage cubes, dragging out all the testimonials and awards and service medals he’d received in over half a century of trying to slay the beast within. He’d framed the most significant honors and hung them on the walls of his office at the Foundation until there wasn’t any more wall space. And he’d looked at them, reflecting. It was then he knew he was living in the past, not the future. It was then that he began planning for today.

He sat with a young man named Tennery in his office, embarrassed that the display on the wall seemed gaudy, ostentatious. He spoke simply to hold Tennery’s attention and keep him from looking around. “Why do you want to join our little colony?” he asked.

“I’ve heard that it’s… different,” Tennery said, curly red hair falling to his shoulders. He was twenty-four years old. “I heard that you’re trying to build a world where logic speaks loudly, where people think before they act.” He laughed. “I’ve always wanted to live in a world like that, because it seems to me I’m surrounded by maniacs.”

“True enough,” Crane said, his gaze drifting to the view of the globe in the main room. It was turning slowly, lights and whistles signifying geologic movement on San Andreas. “You’re a botanist?”

“No,” the man said. “A farmer. Just a plain, simple farmer. I do have my agricultural degree, but—”

“But it’s useless as far as real farming goes?”

The man nodded. “Getting up at 5:30 in the morning takes something more than a degree. Besides, I’m interested in Moondust.”

“Yes. I know. Sterile soil, totally devoid of any organic compounds. Yet, when mixed with regular dirt…”

“The Sea of Ingenuity dust I’ve been receiving from Charlestown has increased my corn production by nearly fifteen percent. I also hear you have a mix.”

Crane smiled again. He liked this one a lot. “Yes. Delta dirt, Ganges dirt, Amazon dirt, Himalayan dirt. We’re mixing up to fifty different soils, looking for the best pH and natural nutrient balance. Interested?”

“Am I?” The man looked at his hands, then back at Crane. “My wife wanted me to ask you something. We’ve been hearing there’s a lot of problems with water supply on the Moon—”

“Not at Charlestown,” Crane said. “When the Islamic consortiums got control of all the shipping of water Moonside, they started using it as a blackmail device, rationing, threatening to cut it off if the Moon didn’t become an Islamic State. We had already anticipated such an eventuality and had been secretly mining Mars for permafrost. We now have a permanent, dependable shipping system from Mars, new water arriving every six weeks. We’re hoping we’ll have enough to sell to the other colonies to make some money and keep the region autonomous.”

“Good luck.”

“I should wish it to you. You’re the one who is going to live in Charlestown.”

“You’re not going to be there?”

“Not like you think.” Crane smiled. “Welcome aboard.”

“So I’m accepted?”

“You and your wife, Mona, and your two children.” He thought for a minute. “Lana and Sandy. We need people like you in the colony. I think eventually it will be the last refuge for humanity. As such, it should be represented by people who are decent, honest.”

“We know very little about Charlestown.”

“Intentional,” Crane said. “We’re not advertising. The right people tend to seek us out. In that way we’re kind of like a lighthouse.”

“What are the rules?”

“Be polite,” Crane said, “and live your life. We have no police, no jails, no courts. It’s been set up as a large family unit. Whatever earnings we generate go to the maintenance of the city itself. Whatever’s left is divided up. People seem satisfied with it. I don’t know, to tell you the truth. The city seems to be self-perpetuating, evolving its own way of life. I learned a long time ago that I don’t have all the answers. I meet the applicants. If I like them, they go up. If I don’t, they don’t. You’re the last.”

“The last applicant?”

Crane nodded. “The last that I’ll screen. You will bring the total to five thousand citizens. I’ve thrown the stew together. It’s up to you to cook it.”

“You’ve got schools?”

“All the comforts of home, though our schooling tends to be very old-fashioned. We teach kids to work their brains, not their pads. And I don’t know that religion plays a very large part in Charlestown life.”

“My religion’s always been self-reliance,” Tennery said, standing. “When do we leave?”

“Tomorrow,” Crane said, “From my complex in Colorado Springs. Pack as much as you can carry.”

Burt Hill filled the doorspace. “Dammit, Crane. You haven’t packed a blinking thing yet.”

“All in good time, Burt. Meet our newest citizen of Charlestown, Jackson Tennery.”

“It’s on the darkside, you know,” Hill said, shaking hands with the man.

“I know.”

Hill cocked his head. “You’re as crazy as the rest of them up there,” he said, then looked again at Crane. “If you want to do that stupid teev show, we have to leave now.”

“Good,” Crane said, standing also. “We’ll accompany Mr. Tennery to his helo.”

They walked out of the office. The Foundation was a beehive of activity as scientists and workmen hurried around carrying boxed equipment and personal belongings. Mendenhall was evacuating. Within several hours, the debris of the Foundation would be part of Baja Island, a new addition to the map of the Pacific.

They moved through the globe room, Crane stopping for one last look at the machine that encompassed all his dreams and all his frustrations. It had been Lanie’s. It had belonged to many others since then, including Sumi, who’d died two years ago of a genetically created cancer virus. The virus had been unleashed by the Brotherhood, the terrorist arm of the Religion of Cosmic Oneness—the Cosmies—who were seeking their own State free of the religious persecution of the world’s Moslems. The plague had killed nearly forty million people worldwide before mutating into a common cold germ, to which Crane had been immune because of his earlier experiences with the disease. Brother Ishmael inadvertently had saved his life.

Sumi… It was Sumi, ultimately, who’d made today possible with her work on the globe. It was Sumi who’d made him understand he didn’t have all the answers and that the pain of life wasn’t his alone to command. It was Sumi who’d come up with the idea that synthesized his entire life, that made today—3 June ’58—the culmination of all his dreams and hopes and expectations. If Lanie had been his great love, then Sumi Chan Crane had been his great teacher. She’d made his life, and his death, worthwhile.

He’d completely rethought Charlestown because of Sumi’s forcing him to testify. He’d realized he was no smarter than anyone else when it came to telling people what to do. It had made all the difference.

Their years together had been the best, the happiest of his life, and he felt doubly blessed for having known two women of remarkable character and insight, two women he’d loved dearly and had to let go of reluctantly.

It was difficult to imagine sometimes that he had known Sumi for nearly fifty years and Lame for less than five. Years compress like fault lines in the mind. While everything else changes, the mind remembers exactly what it wants to remember. A decade can be lost and a year seem like forever. When love is abruptly taken, love remains active.

He’d learned, finally, how to relax under Sumi’s tutelage. He’d learned to sail and they’d taken up oceanography together. He’d seen Charlestown to completion, happily turning the running of it over to its citizens. He’d seen the radioactive cleanup of the water systems finally complete itself when Crane freighters hauled all the waste into a Moon orbit, then slingshot it toward the Sun. The things he’d seen, the things his mind had held, filled him up. No man could have asked for more and no longer did he feel plagued by the failure at the Salton Sea—only one of many things that had happened to him. One of many dreams.

The years had passed quickly, but had left a million memories behind, enough for a king’s lifetime. What more could anyone ask?

The globe was still operating and would continue to operate until the forces of Nature pulled it apart. The Foundation itself was being split between his Cheyenne Mountain headquarters and the Isle of Wight globe station, good, trained people left behind to carry on.

They moved out of the mosque to stand on the flat plain of the Mendenhall Ledge, a continual surge of helos filling airspace around the Foundation. One thing he’d learned in life in seventy-one years was that no matter how far in advance a person knew about something, he would still wait until the last minute to take care of it.

“Is all this really going to be gone later today?” Tennery asked, as they walked him to his rented helo.

“Yes, it is,” Crane said, and a lifetime swept through him like a wave. “Gone but not forgotten. Life changes whether we want it to or not.”

The man, excited, not giving a damn about California, climbed into the helo. “I can’t wait to talk to Mona. She’s really going to sky out. Is there anything you want me to tell them when I get up there? Any messages?”

“Yeah,” Crane said. “Tell them to do the right thing.” He shut the man’s door and smiled at him. Then he turned and walked away, Hill hacking beside him.

“You know you didn’t leave yourself enough time to pack,” the man said, leading Crane toward a passenger helo in the midst of the swarm.

“That’s all right,” Crane said casually. “There’s nothing I need to hold on to.”

“You’re in a hell of a good mood today. I figured today would be a bitch for you, was wonderin’ how I’d keep you glued together when you knew your dream was really over.”

Crane put his arm around the big man’s shoulder. “Nothing’s ever over, Burt. The circles just spin smaller. Besides, I did everything I could to avert this catastrophe—everything.”

“You’re crazy, you know that?”

“Yes!” Crane answered emphatically, “Gloriously crazy. Today is just the beginning, Burt.”

“The beginning of what?”

“Stage two.” Crane winked.

Hill shook his head. “I’ll get somebody to pack your stuff up while we’re gone,” he said, reaching the sleek, bulbous ship, climbing in to help Crane up.

“Whatever.”

The seats were plush, and Crane sank back into his, eyes still fixed on the Foundation compound, the chalets on the hills, the covered walkway from Lanie’s level to his. He’d never see these places again, yet felt no remorse. They’d live on in their own way.

The ship rose smoothly into the air, its props silent as they angled toward Los Angeles. The sky was full of ships, hundreds of thousands of people getting out, heading to refugee camps in Oregon and Arizona. No matter how many times it was explained to the population that everything from the Imperial Valley north to San Francisco would be gone, most people still thought in terms of a quake they’d bounce back from, in terms of returning to their homes after the temblors were done.

He wasn’t sure what the fate of Baja was to be. Cosmies in huge numbers were pouring into the area even as so many others left. They intended to declare Baja a free nation the moment it broke from the continent, an island republic belonging to them. It was even possible they could pull it off. There was no power structure in America that would try and stop them and the Islamic world was already crumbling under its own puffed-up weight as the remaining non-Islamic world forged defensive and economic alliances against them. New, streamlined power brokers were emerging from such places as Stockholm and Toronto. Islam had always been as much an emotional issue as an economic one. Once it had reached the limits of its fierce domination of the world, its members immediately began to squabble among themselves and wither as a group. He loved to watch the wheel turn.

New Cairo was feeling the burn, too. Its relationship with the rest of America had soured as soon as America was able to forge non-Islamic alliances, and they’d had the expense of two costly wars with Central American Islamic States over trade issues.

Abu Talib had taken religious and political control over New Cairo within a year of his release, following the assassination of Martin Aziz. As in the case of Ishmael Mohammed, Aziz’s murderer was never found. Talib’s path hadn’t crossed Crane’s since the hearing in which he’d been freed. The times Crane had seen the man on the teev, Talib had been quiet and soft-spoken, talking of unity and brotherhood. His wife seemed to do the lion’s share of the political work, Talib content to stay in the background. Crane thought about Newcombe—not Talib—a lot these days. And he regretted that he hadn’t contacted the man and made peace with him. His next project was one that would probably appeal a great deal to Dan.

The helo passed above the old War Zone, a regular part of the city again, and moved toward Sunset Boulevard and the KABC studios where he was supposed to give his interview, direct from the heart of the conflagration. Cars and helium floaters clogged the roadways both in and out of town, Crane wondering if those escaping had enough time at this point, for even as the helo set down in the parking lot, he knew the compression on the fault near Mt. Pinos was straining on the edge of rupture, the Imperial Fault also rupturing, beginning the process of rending California in twain from the Gulf of California through the Salton Sea and the San Jacinto Fault all the way to San Francisco. Meanwhile, the Emerson Fault near Landers would tear under the Salton Sea and begin a rupturing process that would stretch six hundred miles to Mt. Shasta, beginning the clockworks that would put Nevada and Arizona on the shores of the Pacific in the next few years. He wouldn’t be around for those. He’d had his shot and was more than ready to leave the world to—what had been Tennery’s word?

—maniacs. He liked that. The maniacs.

They stepped out of the helo and into the madness of an open city. All around them, looters smashed store windows. Those too poor or stupid to get out were having a party to celebrate their inheritance of the city. Sirens were sounding, but no authority figures could be seen. The city was sitting on the cusp of its own eternity.

“You really wanted to come here,” Hill said, “to see this?”

“I want to wallow in it,” Crane said, walking toward the building. A car out of control careened past them to smash against a brick wall, throwing the driver into the windshield. “My whole life has been tied to this day.”

“You don’t have nothin’ nuts in mind, do you?” Hill asked as Crane moved through the doors.

“Depends on your definition of nuts.”

They entered into the cool darkness of the small, one-story building. Crane was pumped up, excited. Ever since the day Sumi had died, he’d been counting down until today. She’d have been proud of him.

A man with a cam-eye where a real one should have been hurried up to them in the empty lobby. He wore a shiny, lime-green plastic suit with ruffled shirt and gold ascot.

“You’re Crane, right?”

“That’s correct.”

“My name’s Abidan. Quite a show you’ve cooked up here.” He was sweating and seemed nervous, shaky.

“I don’t make them,” Crane said, “Are you staying behind?”

“That’s what journalists do, sir. They stay behind.”

“That’s what geologists do, too, son. Let’s get on with it.”

“We’re going to broadcast from back here,” Abidan said, leading them through a ghost studio, devoid of people, full of bleeping equipment. “This is a main news webset. We have uplink capabilities here to forty-seven hundred news distribution points worldwide and I’m going to be juicing to all of them.”

He opened the door for them into a small studio, a living room setup surrounded by black curtains. The lighting was somber.

Hill gasped when they walked into the room. “Son of a bitch,” he said. Seated at one of the chairs in the livingroom set was an ancient-looking Abu Talib, dressed in his usual black suit, minus the fez. Talib stood up.

“Just because we’re old, boy, don’t mean we can’t whip you,” Hill said, Crane putting out a hand to silence him.

“It’s all right, Burt. In fact, it’s perfect. Like old times.” His excitement grew. It was coming together—and without him even having to work at it. Dreams really did come true.

He moved across the empty floor to the set. Hand extended, Abu Talib, seeming hundreds of years old, stood and smiled warmly. “It is good to see you, old friend,” he said, shaking Crane’s hand.

“It’s good to see you, too… What do I call you? Your Eminence or Mr. Talib or—”

“Call me Dan.” He smiled. “I think it’s the most comfortable thing for both of us.”

“Here it is, ladies and gentlemen,” Abidan said, his cam-eye glaring at them, “the meeting between two great enemies. One man who wanted to save California. One who was willing to kill to stop him.”

“Not very cordial,” Talib said, shaking his head at Abidan as if he were a naughty child. “We’ve been had, Crane.” He nodded in acknowledgment at the figure several feet away. “Burt.”

“Dr. Crane,” Abidan said, goading, “how does it feel to be standing here on the eve of the cataclysm with the man who destroyed your life?”

“If Mr. Abidan wants a fight, I think he’s going to be very disappointed.” Crane laughed; smiling, Hill applauded softly.

Newcombe’s brows knit deeply. “Mr. Abidan has already been less than gracious,” he said quietly. “I would think that if he wanted any kind of interview at all, he’d shut up and let us talk. Don’t worry.” He grinned at Abidan, the wrinkles in his weathered face folding upon one another like accordion pleats. “We’ll be through soon enough.”

“Why did you come here?” Crane asked Talib. “You have a country to run.”

“That we’ll talk about after the camera’s off. May we sit, please?” he asked, motioning to a chair on the set. “My back’s not what it used to be.”

“My everything’s not what it used to be,” Crane said, sitting down. “And I’m dying to talk to you. I have a proposition for you.”

Newcombe sat back, his deep, sunken eyes lighting up. “A proposition,” he said. “I’m intrigued.”

Abidan started for the third seat, Newcombe waving him off. “Burt, come up here and sit with us. Let that young man stand … though I bet he won’t be standing when the EQ hits.”

The three of them laughed. Crane pointed at Abidan. “Know how to save yourself, boy?” he asked, then glanced at Burt and Dan. “Look at him, he’s already sweating. He’s shaking so much, the picture’s probably wobbly. I can already hear it, down in the Imperial Valley, the fault howling like a wounded animal as it rips apart, pushing farther west, yanking that kink right out of Mount Pinos. Do you understand the immensity of what you have so blithely undertaken, young man? Those people on the streets … they’re ignorant, or out of control, or crazy, or ready to die. The men who sit before you have no fear of death. Do you?”

Mute, Abidan shook his head.

“You’re going to get to witness first hand,” Crane continued, “a monster tsunami east of LA as the Pacific rushes in to fill the mammoth tearing gouge in the body of the Earth. Do you know you’ll see your streets explode before your eyes? Afterward, when the quake is over, you have to live with the consequences. Fresh water runs out first. Then, as you return to a prehistoric environment, diseases are rampant. Are you prepared to bury a couple million bodies? That’s what you’ll have to do to keep the diseases and the smell away as your own sweat makes you smell like death, and your house and your friends and everything else are gone.”

“Do you think,” Newcombe said to Abidan, “that this cataclysm will be like a gentle push of a raft away from a riverbank? Try to imagine the strength of forces that can level and raise mountains as easily as you turn your eye on. Do you realize that Los Angeles stands zero chance of surviving as the Elysian Park Fault fissures up the whole city, dropping entire blocks miles down into the ground, never to be seen again? California is going to be ripped asunder. There will be a conflagration the likes of which hasn’t been seen on this planet in millions of years. Is it really important that you die in California, at this time?”

Abidan gulped and shook his head, the cam-eye not moving with his head. “Good,” Newcombe said. “ ’Cause I want you to let us finish our say, then I want you to get on your horse and get the hell out of here. You’ve got some good years ahead of you. Try and stay alive for them. Don’t be like those idiots on the streets.”

“T-thank you,” Abidan whispered.

“I’m surprised,” Crane said to Newcombe. “You’ve learned how to use power.”

“And you’ve learned to keep your mouth shut occasionally,” Newcombe replied. “We’ve both changed.”

“Oh, boy,” Hill said, rolling his eyes. “Here we go.”

Crane leaned toward the cam, pointing to Newcombe. “This man dogged me from the day I hired him in ’23. This man never went along willingly with me on anything in his damned life.”

“It’s because you were a dictator.” Newcombe laughed. “And you had a hidden agenda.”

Crane threw his hands in the air. “I guess today we can see why I kept it hidden.”

“Neither one of you would have done anything without me to keep you off each other’s throats.” Hill said. “It’s me you ought to be thankin’.”

“Thanks, Burt,” they said in unison.

“You’re welcome. I didn’t have nothin’ else to do anyway.”

Crane turned back to the cam. Abidan was shaking visibly, his real eye opened wide in near panic as a small foreshock rumbled through, shaking the set and causing a bank of lights to crash to the floor. The three of them laughed as Abidan hit the deck.

“Not going to be safe here for long,” Hill said.

“Let me do this.” Crane got out of his chair and walked over to Abidan, who was lying in a fetal position on the floor, covering his head.

“Roll over and look at me, son,” Crane said.

Abidan unwrapped himself slowly and rolled onto his back. The red light on his cam-eye stared up at Crane. “I want to get out of here,” Abidan said.

“I’ve got a helo waiting in the parking lot,”

Crane said. “I’ve saved a seat for you. Just let me say my piece first.” He looked straight at Abidan’s cam-eye. “Ladies and gentlemen, the things we are saying are not exaggerations. If you live west of the San Andreas Faultline, you are in deadly peril. Don’t take for granted that you will be safe anywhere.”

Crane took a deep breath, preparing to launch into the familiar litany and hoping against hope that there were people out there listening to him who would heed his advice.

“If you can’t get east of the line in the next hour or so, do not go into your homes. They are deathtraps. Avoid large trees. Get to as much open ground as you can find. This advice will save some of you, some it won’t. I’ve personally witnessed five dozen quakes in my lifetime and been on site at hundreds more. Believe me. Los Angeles: gone. San Francisco: gone. Santa Barbara, San Bernardino, San Diego, Tijuana, any large city from Baja to San Francisco is probably going to die today. If you don’t want to die with it, listen to me. You can’t control this with your mind or your rationalizations. It’s going to happen and it’s going to happen to you unless you do something now! Now!”

Crane stood back. “That’s it. Cut it off. Let those people go.”

He helped Abidan to his feet. “The helo’s in the parking lot,” he said. “Get in it.”

Abidan ran.

“We need to talk,” Newcombe said, joining Crane in the front of the set.

“You have a helo waiting?”

The man shook his head. “Interesting,” Crane said. “You’re welcome to mine.”

“Thank you.”

“Come on,” Hill said. “Let’s put some miles between us and this damned place.”

He led them out into the parking lot, Abidan already strapped in and holding tight in one of the ten passenger seats. Hill climbed in and reached for Crane.

“You go ahead,” Crane said, shaking his head.

“You ain’t comin’,” Hill said in sad resignation. “I knew something was up.” He looked at Newcombe.

“Me either.” He smiled.

Hill’s face went slack, and he searched for words.

“You’ve helped me say the final farewells to two wives, Burt,” Crane said, moving to the loading bay to embrace him, without tears, without remorse. They had both done as well as they could have and there was no sadness in that. “You helped me through the death of a son. You helped me when I was so down I thought I’d never laugh again. You’ve saved my life a thousand times in a thousand ways. Thank you.”

“I-I can’t come with you on this trip.” Hill sniffed. Pulling away, he hacked, then spit. He looked from Crane to Newcombe and back. “I’m not ready for it yet.”

“I didn’t expect you to be,” Crane said. “Besides, I’ve got to learn to do something for myself. Sit down, Burt. You understand I have to close the circle?”

Hill nodded, then sat. “I’m gonna miss you, Doc.”

Crane nodded, smiling, then slapped the side of the machine, pointing up with his thumb for the pilot, who took to the air immediately.

They had about an hour.

“Care to take a walk?” Crane asked Newcombe.

“Sounds good.” He leaned close to Crane and whispered, “You know, what I’d really like is a drink.”

“It’s not Islamic.”

Newcombe smiled wide. “I think Allah will understand, given the circumstances.”

“Good. Let’s find a rooftop restaurant somewhere, a really tall one where we can feel the whiplash.”

They walked into the guts of the city, destruction and anarchy reigning all around them. So much had changed in Crane’s time on Earth; so much had stayed the same. There were the looters, the Rockers, who were now called Seismos, the suicides, and the Cosmies dressed in white robes with the Third Eye emblazoned in red on their chests. Today Crane was one of them and maybe he’d always been. Part of the city was burning. Looters helping the EQ. Thoughtful.

They moved along unmolested. The suicides always had the look about them, and people automatically granted them privacy for their demise.

After several blocks of brilliant sunshine and a warm wind in the city of angels, they found a shaky-looking tower of steel and lots of glass on Wilshire that had a working elevator up to its rooftop restaurant. It was whiplash material if Crane had ever seen it.

The restaurant had a marvelous view of the city in all directions. They smashed through the glass door to get inside, then chose a table with a view to the west. Crane went behind the bar to grab a bottle of good Scotch. The sky was full of hovering helos, thick, like swarming flies—curiosity-seekers there to watch one world die and another come painfully into being.

“Why are you doing this?” Crane asked as he found a couple of clean glasses. He hadn’t had a drink in nearly fifteen years.

“It completes my circle, too. I spent years thinking about this moment in prison … my own punishment, I suppose.”

“You’ve served your time, Dan.” Crane came back with the bottle and glasses and poured them each a highball glass full. “Let it go.”

“If you were me, could you let it go?”

Crane raised his glass. “I don’t know. Pick up your drink. To you, old friend.”

“To both of us,” Newcombe said, toasting, then grimacing at his first taste of alcohol in decades. “You seem awfully happy, considering this is the last day of your life.”

“Endings and beginnings,” Crane said. “You seem pretty happy yourself.”

“Are you kidding? I’m ecstatic. This is the first real decision I’ve made on my own in nearly thirty years. For seventeen years, I woke up with a hangman’s noose every morning. Death certainly holds no fear for me.”

“I died years ago,” Crane said, watching his glass of Scotch shake and shimmer, reacting to the vibrations running through the ground. “Then I came back. I realize now that life and death are only words. I don’t hate EQs anymore either. Funny how everything changes.” He took a long drink, his stomach already burning. “I’m going to get snookered.”

“Me, too,” Newcombe said. “And it’ll take about five minutes.”

Crane nodded. “I still don’t get you. My business here is long finished. I can’t wait to move on. But you … you’ve got a wife, a family, social and political responsibilities.”

“Let’s set the record straight about my responsibilities,” he said, opening his eyes wide and grinning. “It’s a funny story, but this is what I discovered after getting out of prison. My wife, who was sleeping with every man whose pants she could get off, personally killed her brother Ishmael, to get him out of the way. She had his murder passed off as an assassination and used it for propaganda purposes. Then she worked behind the scenes against her other brother, Martin, until I was set free. At that time she had her loyalists kill Martin Aziz so I could assume the position of public demigod and private servant.”

“I… I would never have guessed, never.”

“I’m not finished,” Newcombe said, taking another drink. “Prison changed me. I had no desire for power or fame on any level. I would have given anything to go back to geology, but there I was, stuck, the symbol of Islamic unity for millions of people. My wife said, ‘make the speeches.’ So I made the speeches she wrote. I was just her mouthpiece. I put my time in for the good of the people. Boy, there’s a loaded term. But Khadijah’s ambitions know no boundaries. There have been three attempts on my life. I was able to trace all three back to my loving wife, the last time aided by my loving son, who is apparently what this is all about. Trust me. Khadijah will rule New Cairo through Abu ibn Abu. She’s been ruling through me long enough. I’m happy to get the hell out.”

“That’s a damned poor way to live, Dan.”

Newcombe shook his head. “I didn’t want any of that. In the sixty-seven years of my life, my happiest—my best—years were spent with you, working on EQ-eco and running around the world chasing your damned demons. My work with you was the single best human gesture of my entire life.”

“My testimony at your hearing was mine,” Crane said. “It finally made me question myself. It humanized me. Lewis Crane was able to stop playing God. I thank Sumi for that. She was a hell of a woman.”

“To Sumi,” Newcombe said, raising his glass again.

Both men drank.

“You said something at that hearing I’ve never forgotten,” Newcombe said, both of them watching the ocean in the distance, slight smoke from a dozen different fires making the view hazy. “You said that you could free me without forgiving me and that I could go on with life without asking for forgiveness.” He shook his head. “I can’t. I want your forgiveness now, Crane. I don’t want to … move on without it.”

“I forgave you years ago, Dan,” Crane said. “I had to in order to go on with Charlestown, in order to put it behind me.”

“But you never told me.”

“No … I never did. And for that, I apologize. Seeing you today has been my chance to rectify that error in what I hope will be a profound way.”

They both drank, then refilled their glasses.

“Is Charlestown that Moon colony you’re tied up with?”

“Yeah,” Crane said, leaning close to Newcombe. “Do you have any money?”

“In my pocket, you mean?”

“No. Money, money.”

“I’m filthy with it,” Newcombe said. “Rulers of countries do quite nicely. I’ve managed to sock away several hundred million.”

“I want you to give it to me,” Crane said, “and I think we need to hurry.” He nodded out the window, buildings were swaying. The ground vibrations from the Imperial Valley quake were being felt this far north.

“What do you want it for? You’re getting ready to die, too.”

“Are you ported?” Crane asked, his voice slurring just a touch.

Newcombe nodded quickly.

Crane took a small chip out of his pad with tweezers from his pocket. He passed the tweezers to Newcombe, who was weaving, a touch high, missing the port at first, then hitting the slot and sitting back.

Crane smiled as Newcombe closed his eyes. The chip was a distillation of Charlestown, an optical/vid tour of the place overlaid with Crane’s emotions concerning it. And then there was The Plan.

The experience was designed to hit the brain like a thought stored lifelong, everything Crane knew and felt and believed about Charlestown soaking through osmosis into Newcombe’s mind in an instant—Crane’s feelings, his feelings. The speed of thought.

“Oh, yes …” Newcombe said, smiling, nodding. “This is nice. I understand.”

He tweezed the chip out. “This is amazing,” he said, passing it back to Crane, who slotted it into his pad, transmitting it for the first time to the Moon’s systems. “You can really do this?”

“Sumi thought it up,” he said. “Spent her last years working on it. We’re all a part of that globe, Dan.”

“Are you…”

“Asking you to join us? Yes! Will you?”

“Crane, you son of a bitch!” He laughed. “You’ve beat the system after all. Better believe I’ll join you. It’s the offer of a lifetime.”

“Good. Let’s get all your money first,” Crane replied. “I don’t think your wife and children need it.”

The rumble began then, loud, louder than Tokyo, the buildings outside shaking violently. They shook violently. Newcombe pointed to the floor, at rats charging out of the walls.

“You can’t escape it even in the nice places!” he called over the clatter of breaking glass and crockery. Crane grabbed the bottle just as their table fell over.

“Bank accounts,” Newcombe said, his pad automatically entering his accounts.

“Charlestown account,” Crane said to his pad. “Accept ID funds transfer.”

The building swayed, the glass of their windows popping out to plummet thirty stories to the ground. Huge structures collapsed all around outside. The ocean was throbbing and churning in the distance. It was beautiful, exciting.

“Transfer all funds,” Newcombe said, both men reaching out to place their thumbprint on the other’s pad.

“Transactions complete,” the pad returned in both aurals.

“Good man,” Crane said, pulling out another chip. “Now, hurry, put this in your port.”

“What is it?”

“I’m going to copy your mind and put it into the computers. That chip is blank.”

“Give it to me!” Newcombe yelled. A chair hurtled past. Newcombe went down hard, but protected the Scotch in his hand. The EQ roared all around them.

“Here!” Crane shouted.

Newcombe reached up to grab the chip and port it.

“Do it … hurry!” Crane said.

The chairs and tables were bouncing across the floor even as the entire structure moaned and danced. Crane reveled in experiencing whiplash first hand. Another violent jolt or two and the restaurant was going to be first-floor property.

Newcombe ported, his head twisted as the chip sucked his mind into an inch-square sheet of clear plastic. The building was bellowing as it swayed dangerously. Crane, on his knees now, took a quick drink.

Newcombe pulled the chip out of his port.

“I’m ready to go,” he said, handing it to Crane who quickly fed it into his pad and transmitted. “God, am I ready to go.”

A wild spasm caught them, both men tossed across the room, slamming into the bar which was bouncing in their direction. And, then, the Beast began to scream in earnest as the rending agony built.

“It’s the craziest thing,” Crane shouted over the roaring, “but my arm… it doesn’t hurt!”

The building began to crumble, bits of ceiling falling in on them. And the world tumbled then. Lewis Crane jerked a chip out of his own head and jammed it into his pad, even as he felt himself falling … falling …

… the image pulling away. Distant. A city collapsing, a house of cards built in a wind tunnel, swept away in an instant.