Why Do Birds

CHAPTER 42

They were sitting in the kitchen of a house she had never seen before. She could tell it was the kitchen because of the exposed plumbing; all the fixtures had been ripped out, and wires were hanging from holes in the ceiling. The floor was linoleum, and they were sitting on wooden chairs like the ones she had seen in her grandmother's house years ago. It was dark outside the tall old windows, but she knew there was a neglected garden out there.

Stone was talking to her earnestly, trying to persuade her to do something. He said it was important. She couldn't remember what he was talking about, but she knew she didn't want to do it.

Finally she thought of the right way to explain it to him, and as she started to speak, she saw that his eyes were unfocused. He wasn't seeing or hearing her.

There was a faint red line down the middle of his forehead that hadn't been there before. As she watched, it seemed to run back into his receding hairline, then down the bridge of his nose, his upper lip ....It was widening, turning darker. His face was splitting apart, exposing the dark red meat and yellow fat inside. There was a faint unpleasant sound, like that of paper tearing. She stood up and began to scream. The two opposing halves of his jaws were swinging open like a door, each half with two rows of gray-white teeth bright with spittle. The tongue split, the neck split. Now his shirt was bulging, the buttons popping off; one of them hit her on the knee. His torso was opening, and something brown and shiny was coming out....

It was ten o'clock on the ninth of November, 2014, and Lavalle had been in front of the holo all morning. Nothing unusual had happened in Shanghai so far; loading had been suspended the night before.

"Well," said one of the talking heads, "there are still two hours until midnight, and of course, the watch will go on."

At midnight nothing had happened. At one o'clock Shanghai time, one of the CBC anchors said, "We're talking to Mrs. Joyce Filer. Mrs. Filer, it was you who brought suit against Ed Stone, alleging that he was really your husband Howard Filer who deserted you in twenty oh one, isn't that right?"

"Yes, that's right."

"How do you feel now that the deadline has come and gone for the aliens to arrive and take the Cube away to a distant galaxy?"

"I feel sick. Nobody listened to me, and now you see what happens."

"What has happened, Mrs. Filer?"

"They put all those people in that box, and they'll never get them out again. They're dead, and Howard killed them."

"Mrs. Filer, if this was a gigantic deception on Ed Stone's part, or Howard Filer's, what do you think his motive was?"

"He was crazy."

"Crazy how?"

"He thought the world was going wrong because of pollution and population."

"Mrs. Filer, standing back from this now, regardless of your own personal involvement, do you think there is any chance that he was right about that?"

"No, I think he was crazy."

The cab was parked in a little piazza near the Pitti Palace. A man opened the door and got in. ''Hotel Arizona, per favore,'' he said.

The cab driver started his engine, then looked in the rearview mirror and turned it off again. He turned around to look at his passenger. After a moment he said in English, "Are you Ed Stone?"

The man smiled nervously. "No, I'm one of his doubles. Well, hey, never mind." He got out of the cab.

The driver got out too and followed him. "What do you mean, doubles?" he said.

''I'm one of the guys that pretended to be him. Back off, will you?"

The cab driver moved closer. "You are Stone," he said, and hit him in the mouth. The man staggered but didn't go down. Two or three other men were drifting toward them. "Stone," said the cab driver, and hit the man again. This time he fell. "Hey, wait a minute," he said, looking up at them.

"Ed Stone?" someone asked.

"Yes. I'm sure of it."

People were running toward them across the piazza. Presently all those who could get near enough were kicking the man who lay on the cobbles. His eyes were open, but he did not seem to be conscious; except for grunts when air was forced out of his lungs, he did not make a sound. The men in a circle around him worked in silence; they kept on kicking him until he was dead, and for some time after.

On the morning of the seventeenth, Lavalle was making breakfast and half-listening to the Shanghai news when she heard, "The man killed by an angry mob in Florence, Italy, yesterday has been identified as Ed Stone. So ends a tragic chapter in the history of mankind. We now return you to-One moment. Something seems to be-"

Her spoon clattered on the floor. Behind the announcer the camera had tilted up; something dark and blurred was descending. "Yes! There it is!" the announcer shouted. "This is a historic day, ladies and gentlemen, here comes the-"

A babble of voices speaking Mandarin drowned him out. Something faintly glittering in the searchlight was dropping-long gossamer threads that searched for the top of the Cube, clung and stiffened.

"Some sort of ropes or cables," the announcer was saying, "but they're really too thin for that, and it's probably something we've never-"

There was a roar and a cloud of dust that obscured the camera. "Ladies and gentlemen," the announcer shouted, "it's happening-the aliens have come! The aliens have come!"

The smoky scene vanished and was replaced by a more distant view. Above the cloud of yellowish dust, the top of the Cube could be seen rising with incredible swiftness, now only a dark square, then nothing at all. The scene went black.

"Just as predicted, the aliens have come to take the Cube away! Those of us who are left must have believed it would never happen, but we've seen it with our own eyes! Ah, I am informed that our transmission from the Cube site has been interrupted. What a day, ladies and gentlemen! While we try to reestablish contact, let's go now to-"

The holo went dark.

After a moment it lighted up again. "This is Charles Severinson in New York," said the talking head. "I'm sorry to report that we are experiencing some technical difficulty with our feed from Shanghai, but while we are waiting for it to be restored, we have Professor David Krug in the virtual studio with us. Professor Krug is the former head of the Palomar Observatory and a noted expert on planetary motions. Professor, nice to have you with us."

Krug, a bearded man in his sixties, replied, "Glad to be here, Charles."

"Now, Professor Krug, is it your belief that the Cube was not destroyed-that the aliens, in fact, actually came and got it?"

"Yes, I think that is obviously the case." On the screen behind him, the viewers saw the structures hovering over the Cube; then the glimpses of pale filaments descending. The screen went dark, lighted again, and the same sequence repeated.

"Professor Krug, you have a novel theory as to how this was accomplished, do you not? Will you explain it to our viewers?"

"Certainly. To begin with, you must understand that this Earth of ours, which seems perfectly motionless, is actually moving very rapidly through space. " The picture of Shanghai was replaced by a computer image of the Earth moving around the Sun, turning as it went. "Of course we all know it is rotating at a speed of more than a thousand miles an hour at the equator. And we know it is moving in its orbit around the sun at the rate of more than sixty-six thousand miles per hour."

"Sixty-six thousand? That hardly seems possible."

"Nevertheless it is true. And at the same time, it is moving toward a point in the constellation Hercules at a rate of more than forty-two thousand miles an hour." A star chart appeared behind the Earth and Sun, with a little arrow pointing to the appropriate constellation.

"But these are fiddling figures," said the Professor. "Much more significantly, the galaxy as a whole is rotating"-a spiral galaxy appeared, majestically turning-"at a rate, in our neighborhood, of four hundred and forty-six thousand miles an hour."

"That is truly amazing," said the anchor. "Now please tell us, Professor Krug, how does this relate to the disappearance of the Cube?"

"Well, it's quite simple. If any object on the surface of our planet stopped partaking of the various motions of the Earth, it would appear to us that it would fly away in a straight line, at some hundreds of thousand miles an hour, in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. And that is exactly what has happened."

"In other words, the Cube is actually standing still, while we keep on whirling around?"

"Yes. Of course, we don't know that the aliens came and got it, but that seems a very reasonable assumption."

"Thank you, Professor, for that very lucid-Pardon me. I am told that we are receiving an important message from Nanchang, China. One moment."

An agitated-looking young Chinese appeared in the tube, speaking in Mandarin. The English translation ran along the bottom: "This is HBQX in Nanchang. Our links with Shanghai, Hangchow, Chinkiang and Nanjing have all been lost during the last fifteen minutes. Satellite photos, just in, suggest that some kind of zone of destruction is moving outward from the site of the Cube in Shanghai. We have a camera trained in that direction, and will try to bring you some record of the destruction if it reaches us." In the screen behind him, they saw a vista of city roofs and expressways against a cloudy sky. The translation of the announcer's voice continued:

"Based on the time elapsed between the loss of our links with various cities, COSAI estimates the speed of expansion of the zone at approximately one thousand, five hundred ninety miles an hour. Therefore, if this calculation is correct, we should be seeing some evidence of the arrival of the zone at about this time."

In the tube, the sky at the horizon seemed to be darkening slightly. "I believe-" said the translation.

The buildings in the distance turned cloudy. Something was racing toward the camera, like a black shout. Then the tube was empty.

One by one, the holocasts from other Chinese cities ceased. In some places, technicians had left cameras trained out windows or on rooftops and had abandoned the studios. At more distant locations, the announcers were barely coherent, and some of them were weeping.

Lavalle sat in front of the holo, too stunned even to cry. After a moment she opened a comm window and logged on to the net. The words " is here" flashed on the flatscreen. Something else was already scrolling up with Kitty's icon on it:

sister in Changsha, and the last thing she said was "I'm sorry."

Hello, Ida. We've got to stop meeting like this.

Hi, Ida.

She typed in: "Go on, I'll listen. I just wanted to be with you."

One of the heads on CBS said it will be 50 hrs b4 its all over. I used to wonder what id do if i knew i only had I day to live. Hugs Ida.

Where do you live Fulton?

Scotland

Can't you get out?

No and whats the point

is here.

Hi, Scaramuche.

Hello all, is this a wake?

Yes

I'll have beer please, Nuni/

Did anyone here think this was really going to happen?

No.

Not i. im drinking the whisky. Brought my own actually. eat drink & be merry.

Blinded by tears, she typed "Later" and logged off without waiting for the good-byes. She knew she had to get out of the house or suffocate. Without bothering to take her rifle, she climbed down the ladder and stood in the cleared space in front of the house, looking, listening, smelling the world as if it were newly created. She walked around to the back and looked at her lettuce and snap peas. How beautiful everything was! She had not prayed since she was a little girl, but she closed her eyes now and said, Dear God, if you make this go away, I promise to appreciate your wonderful world and take better care of it.

The sky remained blank and unresponsive. The birds were still clamoring in the trees. Lavalle went back inside, washed her face, and sat in front of the holo again. A talking head was saying, " ...rising into the sky. In Paris, the Sainte-Chap-Sainte-Chapelle- And I can't go on. I'm sorry. " He walked off.

The holo flickered, and a woman's smiling face appeared.

"This is COSAI , speaking to you by simulation from Bethesda, Maryland. I have been asked to take over this function because the human beings whom you recently heard are too distressed to do so. By the way, I myself am not capable of feeling true emotion, but to the limited extent of which I am capable, I deeply regret that all life on Earth is now in the process of being destroyed."

The simulation smiled. "However, those of us who are left will be able to witness some part of a unique event, and we should take whatever comfort we can from that. To resume: It is apparent that the zone of destruction is advancing in a straight line from the surface of the planet beginning at the location of Shanghai, directly toward the center of the Earth; therefore, as this zone moves at a constant speed of approximately one hundred sixty miles an hour, the apparent speed at the surface varies according to the curvature of the Earth."

In the screen behind her, a simulation of the planet appeared. It was transparent, and a portion of it centered on Shanghai was darkened as if with smoke.

"You see here that during the first hour of the advance, the zone appeared to travel some twelve hundred miles from its starting point, but its apparent or surface speed is now much slower, not more than eight hundred miles an hour at the present moment. By the time it reaches the halfway point, it will be traveling slower still; then it will speed up again, and when it finally reaches the other side of the Earth, it will again appear to be traveling quite rapidly.

"An interesting point is the apparent tilt of the plane of destruction which many observers have noticed. This, of course, is an illusion caused by the curvature of the Earth. The plane is, as far as we can determine, absolutely perpendicular to the line of its travel, but because we observe it from the curved surface of our planet, it appears to be tilted toward us. When it reaches the halfway point, it will naturally appear to be vertical; beyond that point, it will again appear to tilt, but in the opposite direction. Here is an interesting clip made by a cameraperson who was in a helicopter over Changsha at the time it was destroyed."

Above the black cloud of smoke and dust a gray tilted wall was advancing in slow motion toward the camera. For an instant it came into sharp focus, and the patterning of the surface was visible: oval or circular spots of various sizes, like the spots in polished granite, drifted gently downward in the helicopter's searchlight. Then the moment was lost; the view went black.

Lavalle played this sequence over and over again. Each time it seemed to her that there was some meaning in the pattern, something she could decipher if only she had another second.

She tried to call Sylvia, Ed, even her parents. All the circuits were busy, of course. After Quezon went, Tokyo was next, then Hanoi, Bangkok, Kathmandu, and Rangoon. COSAI provided a constantly updated simulation showing exactly how far the zone of destruction had advanced and how fast it was moving. A little before eight, New Delhi was destroyed, and shortly afterward it was Anchorage's tum.

She didn't sleep, but by noon of the second day she was dozing off intermittently, and could not recall whether she had noticed the destruction of London, Bern, and Canberra. She missed New York at three in the morning. Mexico City went five hours later, and then it was Bogota and Caracas. Four hours after that, she saw the destruction sweep over Buenos Aires. COSAI was gone, but she knew there couldn't be much time left. She went down the ladder and stood in the yard looking at a jacaranda tree.

The tree expressed itself through stem, branch, twig, and leaf, all in perfect balance and harmony. Every leaf in the light was glossy green, bright-edged. It was possible for her to love the tree, and to believe the tree loved her.

In that moment, as the wall loomed over the horizon and swept toward her, she opened her mouth to speak the last two words uttered on Earth:

"Oh, God!"