Aftermath Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Now, then, or never.

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

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

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

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

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

  Not just clouds. Rain clouds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

  Wondjina, cold and despairing, died on the sixth day of the rains. He never knew that the Rival, burning fierce above the clouds, had yet to reveal its full power.

  * * *

  Second Strike. March 14, 2026; Suborbital

  The weather on takeoff from LA was as freakish and wild as Tom had ever seen it. Strong gusts at random, from every direction. Blame events in the Southern Hemisphere for that. But once you were above the atmosphere, the weather problems all went away. The six-passenger ship flew itself—or rather the automatic pilot made the decisions. Human pilots were a passenger courtesy, about as necessary to this flight as feathers. Which was fine with Tom Wagner, because it left him free to entertain his special VIP, the woman who had been brought aboard incognito and at the last moment.

  "No, ma'am. You won't see the supernova from here." She was sitting next to him, and he leaned across her to point south. "It's thataway. But we're flying a great circle suborbital between LA at thirty-four degrees north and Washington at thirty-nine degrees. What you want to see is down at sixty degrees south. To get a peek at it we'd have to go a lot higher than a suborbital flight."

  Janet Kloos stared south anyway, taking her cue from his pointing finger rather than his words. She looked to be in her late thirties, but Tom knew she was a fair bit older than that. As he recalled it from the last campaign, the Vice President was pushing fifty. Apparently political life agreed with her.

  "And it can have these terrible effects on the weather," she said. "Even from so far away."

  "Yes, ma'am. It certainly can." Her words confirmed his first impression. Janet Kloos was a certified pilot, qualified to fly a ship like this one. Her naive questions about the suborbital jump had been for Tom's benefit. She wanted him to feel comfortable, and the easiest way was to make it clear that in spite of her status, he, not she, was in charge here.

  Which was fine with him. Know-it-all passengers on the flight deck were the hardest of all to deal with.

  "It will get worse before it gets better," he went on. "According to the forecasts that I've seen, the effects should peak in another couple of weeks. After that it will gradually dim, and then things ought to head back to normal."

  "Not in some places." She stopped staring south and leaned back in her seat. During this portion of the suborbital trajectory the ship was close to a free-fall condition. "I see the State Department reports, and I'm not giving away secrets when I tell you that we've been lucky. There are major storms crawling up and down South America from Tierra del Fuego to Panama. Australia is waterlogged. South Africa's being washed away into the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, fifty percent of the topsoil already gone. There's never been anything like it since they started keeping records. The East Indies, too. The Sulawesi trade delegation back in LA were just telling me that they cannot possibly make their export shipments. They can't even feed themselves."

  Tom nodded, but he was hardly listening. He cast his eye quickly over the banks of instruments—all normal—and then stared north. If there was nothing to see to the south, there was plenty to look at in the opposite direction. It was an aurora, and like none that he had ever seen. He checked their height. Eighty miles, close to maximum and right in the middle of the main altitude of auroral activity. Soon they would reach apogee and begin their downward glide. That was a shame, because the display was worth watching from this vantage point for as long as you could.

  He caught her attention and pointed to the left. In the north, the sky was on fire. Streamers of pink and red and yellow-green trailed across the starlit heavens.

  "Aurora borealis," Tom said. "Northern lights. The strange thing is, I've heard nothing from the solar observatories about a big flare."

  "It's absolutely gorgeous. I've seen the aurora before, on transpolar flights. But nothing like this.

  "Ahhh!" She had suddenly gasped. Tom came close to doing the same. Overlaid on the trailing wisps of the aurora the whole sky had lit with an intense flicker of blue.

  "What is it?" Janet Kloos had been leaning over Tom for a better look at the aurora, but now she sat straight. "It's everywhere, in front and behind and overhead. What's causing it?"

  Tom did not answer. When the flash of blue came he had felt a tingle through his whole body. In the next moment he thought that he had gone blind. He was staring at the instrument panels, and seeing nothing. At the same moment as he stabbed the controls for a general systems reboot and circuit breaker reset, he heard a warning whir of gyros.

  "What is it?" Janet Kloos said again. He noticed a harder note in the Vice President's voice.

  "I don't know. But we've lost the computers, main and auxiliary. I'm trying to bring them back up."

  Trying, and failing. All the lights on the panel and in the cabin had died, that was why he had at first thought that his sight had failed. But lights were not the worst problem. Tom knew every control, even in the dark. He was working the correct switches. The trouble was, nothing responded. Lights would not come on, servos sat lifeless. When he pulled on the control stick it responded sluggishly. It felt as though the hydraulics were working, but every electric amplifier had failed.

  The ship was slowly turning, dipping at the nose. Tom knew the cause—there had been a slight forward pitch at the moment when the controls failed, and it was continuing. He would have to correct it manually.

  "Can you fly it like this?" Janet Kloos, thank God, had her fear under control. Tom was not sure that he could say the same for himself.

  "Sure. But I may need you to take the dual controls and give me a hand. I'm feeling a lot of resistance."

  For the moment that didn't matter. The problems would start in another few minutes. At that point they would be flying at more than four thousand miles an hour, returning to the atmosphere. The angle for reentry had to be just right. The automatic pilot normally took care of that, but it was dead.

  How could it fail, with triply redundant logic and servos at every stage? But it had. The flight had become his responsibility, to work the hydraulic controls himself with no power-assist.

  The door in the rear of the cabin opened. "What the hell are you doing up here?" It was a male voice, slightly intoxicated. "You've switched all our goddam lights off. Oops." He was peering at the turned face of Janet Kloos, pale and greenish in the glimmer of the aurora. "Ms. Vice President? I'm sorry. I hadn't realized that you were on board. Can we get lights back there?"

  His smug expression suggested that he had known very well who was in the cabin. He had come forward to complain on a dare or a boast—"See, I went up there, and I told the Veep . . ." He had no idea that there was real trouble.

  "Return to your seat, please." Tom guessed that the seat belt sign was not working, along with everything else. "We have an electrical problem. Tell everyone to buckle up until we're sure it's fixed."

  As he spoke he was working the attitude controls, getting a feel for the level of resistance of the mechanical gyros. He could correct their attitude, with a good deal of physical effort. But that was only the beginning. For a landing—any landing, anywhere—he needed engine power. Without thrust the suborbitals had the gliding angle of a lead brick. He had already tried for a preliminary one-second engine burn, without success. He couldn't ask for ground assistance on possible landing points, because the communications circuits were dead.

  The ship's enviro
nment was still close to free fall, but the nose was steadily turning farther downward. Tom hauled on the control to work the gyros and begin to bring them level. As he did so he caught sight of the forward view. The ship had tilted far enough that he could see the Earth beneath. They were past the midpoint of their high arc.

  It would be ten o'clock at night below, local time. They should be seeing, even at this altitude, the scattered patches of light that signaled urban development. Tom saw nothing below but total darkness.

  "Where are we?" Janet Kloos was working the controls with him. She knew, thank God, exactly what to do. "The last time I looked at the locator display we were over Nebraska."

  The locator display was dead, along with everything else. But Tom understood the implied question. Nebraska still had lots of wide-open spaces where you might not find a city for a hundred miles.

  "We're past Nebraska, ma'am. We're over Iowa, or maybe Illinois."

  "So where are the cities? There must be a large-scale power failure down there."

  Before Tom could answer—and what could he answer?—a pinprick of bright orange suddenly blossomed below, then as quickly died.

  An explosion—of an aircraft, out of control and smashing into the ground at high speed?

  In silence, he and Janet Kloos worked the controls together, bringing them back to an even keel. When the angle of attack felt right and he sensed a faint hint of atmospheric lift from the ship's stubby wings, he turned again to the instrument panels. The computers refused to come back on-line. The communications circuits were dead. There must be plenty of fuel—they had started from LA with full tanks—and the ship's reactor was presumably still working, since it did not depend on electrical power. But all that became irrelevant when the engines would not fire. The ship was a dead lump of metal and plastic, racing through the upper atmosphere.