Omega

When the ship was clear, and they were getting ready to leave, Kellie joined him, and for a long minute, put her hands on his arm, held on, but said nothing.

“It’ll be okay,” he told her.

Her eyes were damp. “I have to take the Jenkins out of orbit.”

“I know.”

“That means—”

“—I know what it means.”

There was another long silence. “I won’t ask you not to go, Dig. Just, please, come back.” She looked around at the others, making her request binding on all.

“We will. We’ll be okay.”

“Don’t do anything dumb.”

“Nothing dumb. Check.”

“And make for the high ground.”

“Love,” he said, taking her into his arms, “I’m already on the high ground.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know, Kel. Don’t worry. I’ll be careful. I’ve too much to come back to.”

WHEN THE MOMENT arrived, she gave the word, and they slipped through the airlock, the three of them. They were tethered together, and Julie wore a go-pack. The AV3 was only a short burst away.

It was a big vehicle, but it was all storage space. Digger took a quick look in back to make sure the Falcon was there. The blades had been shortened somehow to save space. Otherwise, the oversize cargo hold was empty.

The cabin was no bigger than the one in the Jenkins’s lander. He climbed into the right-hand seat, Whit sat down in back, and the harnesses slid down over their shoulders. Julie settled in, turned on one of the monitors, and began powering up. Lamps blinked on, and Julie was talking to both Bill and Kellie.

Kellie gave her clearance to go, and she throttled up. “How are we going to do this?” she asked, as they slipped away and began their descent.

Digger explained what he wanted. They dropped through the cloud cover and emerged over the ocean. They were down among electrical storms, west of the isthmus, when Bill’s elderly sea captain image appeared on the overhead. “The Jenkins has left orbit,” he said.

Moments later Kellie was on the circuit. “We’re pulling out to a range of 3 million klicks. I don’t want the ship anywhere near this place when the omega hits.”

“That should be safe enough,” said Julie. Her smooth features were expressionless in the glow of the instrument panel.

Digger twisted around but still couldn’t really see Whit. “May I ask you a question?” he said.

“Sure.”

“Why did you come? You don’t have a dog in this race.”

Whit looked momentarily offended. “I’m as involved as anyone else, Dig. I don’t think I’d want to be on hand for this and have to tell my grandkids all I did was stand in the third row and watch.”

It occurred to Digger that none of them would have been out of the third row had it not been for Whit’s prompting. Digger didn’t think he would have gone back to the Intigo on his own. But it was hard to stay aloof after Whit had made it clear that they were preparing to abandon the Goompahs.

“Hang tight,” said Julie. “Rough weather ahead.”

MOUNTAINS JUTTED OUT out of the clouds. “Mt. Alpha is that way”—Julie jabbed a finger—“and Hopgop over there.” Off to the right. It was late afternoon in Goompah country.

“Do you want to wait until it’s dark?” Julie asked.

“No. Too much to do, and we’re too short on time.”

Mt. Alpha was craggy, snow-covered, probably the tallest peak on the isthmus. It was sheer on the west side, as if something had taken a hot knife to it. The remainder was broken into notches, ridges, slopes, gullies, and buttresses.

Julie brought the hauler down cautiously atop the snow cover at the summit and quickly lifted off again when the ground gave way. “Not too steady up here,” she commented. They made it on the second try.

The mountaintop was flat. A few trees were scattered about, and some bushes. It was about the size of a soccer field, maybe a little larger. A rock chimney rose out of the center, and a massive fissure had been gouged into the northern angle. Everything beyond it looked ready to plunge into the clouds below.

Two landers were parked on either side of the chimney, anchored to it, to a couple of trees, and to a spread of boulders.

“I think,” said Digger, “they’re safe from rising water up here.”

“We thought so,” she said, without a trace of a smile.

They released the cables and tossed them into the vehicles. Digger climbed inside each and uploaded the disk.

The third lander was in the shelter of a buttress, well down the side of the mountain. They were in the weather by then, lightning walking about, rain hammering down. It was secured to five trees. The fourth was in a clutch of forest in a saddle.

They piled out of the AV3 at the saddle and climbed into the lander. Julie activated the vehicle’s lightbender, while Digger inserted the final disk.

They were ready to go looking for broadcast locations.

SANIUSAR WAS EFFECTIVELY isolated in the northwest, and needed a site of its own. They picked out a ridge in a remote area, and Bill started one of the landers forward. It turned out to be an u

They settled on a second site midway across the Intigo, from which they could reach Mandigol and Sakmarung on the west coast, and Hopgop and Roka to the east. It had grown dark when they established a similar location farther south, which provided access to Kulnar, Brackel, Avapol, and Kagly. Finally, in the late evening, they took the AV3 to a mountaintop, where the broadcast range covered Savakol and T’Mingletep.

LONG BEFORE THE landers were in place near Brackel and T’Mingletep, Digger had activated the programs in the north. Unlike Saniusar, which was a sprawling collection of towers and ornate houses and bridges and public buildings spread across several urban areas, Hopgop was a modest town with about a tenth the population and an inclination toward the austere. Where the western city was flamboyant and almost baroque, the New York of its world, Hopgop liked to think of itself as casual, informal, no-nonsense. Another Moscow. Its architecture was purely utilitarian; its literature (as the translators were already learning) was lucid, uncontrived, vigorous. Sometimes lurid. And often powerful. Hopgop was the intellectual center of the Intigo.

When Digger started the transmission, which occurred shortly after the torches were lit in both cities, anyone passing before the cutlery shop on Hopgop’s main avenue, or in any of the major parks of Saniusar, would have been startled to see a luminous apparition appear apparently from nowhere.

Macao had been in Hopgop for three days. She’d been performing, visiting relatives, attending shows. The real reason she was there was that she had not forgotten Digger’s prediction. The timing was incorrect. The previous day had been the ninety-third day, the day it was all supposed to happen. She’d even talked her cousins and her brother into clearing out, into sitting on a nearby ridge under animal skins, while the rain came down and the sky remained in its accustomed place.

Still, she wondered if she might have misunderstood something. Whatever the truth might be, they had clearly fallen on ominous days, and, if Digger turned out to be belatedly right, she wanted to be with her family.

It was impossible to know what to make of events. Suddenly it seemed she lived in a world of zhokas and levitation and lights in the sky. A zhoka had been seen just a few days ago in Avapol. Of course, they had always been observed with some regularity, but that could usually be ascribed to an overabundance of piety or wine or imagination. Take your pick.

She wondered about the three ships, out in the night somewhere, on the wide ocean while terrible things were happening. She tried to console herself with the possibility that they were beyond the sunrise, and beyond the reach of the thing that seemed to be coming at them out of the night.

She was in her brother’s villa on the southern edge of town, near Klaktik Square. They had been at di

They opened the shutters and looked out at the storm, which had consisted only of gray rain all day. But now there was a downpour, and the evening was full of lightning. “I don’t see anything,” said her brother.

But Macao had a feeling, and she remembered Digger Du

Then she went back into the house and told her brother what she’d seen. “It’s hard to see in the storm,” he said. “Maybe it was something else.”

But it had been something not of this world. She knew that as surely as she knew the children were in bed.

AFTER ABOUT AN hour, the rain let up, and the thunder subsided. Macao was still wondering whether she should suggest they get the children and go out into the storm. Repeat the fiasco of the previous night.

Was it even possible the ocean could overflow the shoreline? Could such a thing happen?

She was thinking about it when a fresh commotion started in the street. Voices. Shouts. Ru

They hurried out, into the courtyard.

People were moving past. Toward Klaktik Square. “Miracle!” someone said. And another: “Have mercy on us.”

Klaktik was a large park, with shops and a children’s pool and a meeting house.

The street was full of shouts: “I don’t know, but it’s her.”

“What’s happening?”

“The goddess.”

“Lykonda.”

“Worst weather I’ve ever seen.”

The commotion quieted as they approached the square. There were a hundred people standing in the rain. More than a hundred. And they were coming in from all directions.

Macao stood on her tiptoes, trying to make out what was happening. There was a glow in the trees. People were crowding toward the children’s pool. Toward the light.

She couldn’t make out what it was. The night grew quieter, and everything seemed to be slowing down, the people around her, the rain, the wind. Even the children.

A woman stood within the light. Incredibly, her feet rested on the air, unsupported.

It was hard to breathe.

The woman surveyed the crowd. She seemed utterly serene, sometimes solid, sometimes as insubstantial as the clouds.

She was dressed for the forest, in green leggings and a loose yellow blouse. And she carried a blazing torch.