Infinity's Illusion Page 8

  Morag had learned, from Charlie Balakrishnan’s driver and head of security Kai Kaiulani, that the Big Island has no continental shelf; indeed, the western Kona coast, with its beautiful beaches and nice hotels, is little more than a crease in the mountain’s downward-sloping skin. Beneath the bodysurfers, the water-skiers, and the inflatable orange whale-watching boats, the rest of the mountain continues to plunge another three miles, almost vertically in places, before it meets the great drowned Nebraska that is the Pacific abyssal plain.

  That night, when the Architects came to the summit of Mauna Loa and nearly a hundred thousand people got to open their eyes upon the bright-white space that was the infinite (and then got to feel themselves being disassembled, and realized, too late, that they had made an infinite mistake), there was an energy transfer ruled by equations that, coincidentally, had only just been committed to paper for the first time. It created a pillar of fire that was seen in Honolulu as a wall of blinding light and in San Diego as distant lightning; only an automated camera, still diligently at work 24/7 on the abandoned International Space Station, recorded it as exactly what it was: a pencil-shaped column of pure energy less than half a mile in diameter and more than ten miles tall.

  The pressure wave that followed was a much, much more powerful version of the magically expanding goldfish bowl Morag had witnessed at Ararat. It spread down Mauna Loa’s slopes at the speed of sound and spread out toward the edges of the Big Island, wiping the land clean like the blade of an invisible bulldozer. It destroyed the elaborate structures on which Amira Ardalan’s followers had stood. (It did not destroy her, because she was no longer there.) On the neighboring peak of Mauna Kea, it turned the world’s greatest collection of telescopes into a wall of shrapnel, lightly sauced with body parts. Up toward Waimea, on the famous Parker cattle ranch, it moved sleeping cattle sideways with a violence their internal organs could not withstand. And it expanded upward and outward too, in all directions, and since it was night, only seven hapless aircraft—all of them, ironically, carrying more Seraphim to the island—were hammered from the sky and dropped like crumpled soda cans into the Pacific.

  Mauna Loa’s geology is different from Ararat’s, so there was no catastrophic release of pressure and no spectacular, plumelike eruption. Instead, much of the massive jolt was deflected down into the mountain, where it had the effect of a local, shallow, but unprecedentedly violent earthquake.

  At Hilo, on the relatively unpopulated, comparatively tourist-free eastern side of the island, a single huge tremor merely terrified the few people who had survived the pressure wave, caused a landslide or two, and collapsed most of the remaining buildings. But at Kona there was no time for anyone to be terrified. Kona had been built on that fold in Mauna Loa’s skin, a narrow shelf of land a mile wide and a few miles long; in response to the intense shaking, the shelf collapsed.

  If you could have seen it, you might have thought of the way anglerfish, ugly and patient as an abandoned boot, lie motionless on the ocean floor and then, at the right instant, open their mouths so far and so fast that the negative pressure sucks in the passing prey. The prey this time was a five-mile band of coastline. Prime real estate. Heavily populated. Swallowed whole, in an instant, by the dark, wet maw of the ocean.

  Kai Kaiulani was not at Charlie Balakrishnan’s compound that night. After several long days attending to his dying boss, he’d gone over to visit his mother. He felt a little guilty about it, because Mrs. Chaudry was away too, back in Delhi with her grandchildren. Never mind. A nurse and the other security people were there. They had his number. What could go wrong?

  When the pressure wave hit, he was sleeping on the couch at his mother’s house on Hulikoa Drive, not far inland from the airport. He thought it was an earthquake, naturally, but he woke up in a field of rubble to discover that the house, his mother, and most of the neighborhood had vanished like chaff in the wind. Disoriented, and troubled by a persistent roaring sound and a memory of a dream about lightning, he staggered to his feet and moved through the dark and confusion toward where he thought the road should be.

  He could tell he was moving in the right direction because he could see a palm tree and a utility pole that were leaning against each other, shoulder to shoulder, like exhausted drinking buddies helping each other home. But just beyond them, instead of the road, there was a cliff. He was less than six feet from the edge of it when his eyes adjusted, or rather his brain adjusted, to what he was seeing. Below him—how far below, he couldn’t judge—was what looked like a dark beach. Farther out, where the airport lights should have been, there was nothing, but as he peered at the nothing it resolved into a pattern of moving lines, and eventually his brain accepted the impossible. The pattern of lines was moonlight, on wave crests, in a newly expanded Makako Bay.

  Kai had cut his bare feet on something. Just as he was about to sit on the ground and investigate, more of the cliff edge collapsed and both the tree and the utility pole melted away into the darkness. Groaning with pain, he stumbled toward where the house had been, inland. Beyond or behind the pain he could feel the rumble of aftershocks, coming up through his toes. Slumping down, he found that his eyes had adjusted further and he was able to pull out several pieces of embedded glass. There was blood, but no major damage. For him, and the few others on the island who had survived, the worst was over. For others, the worst was about to begin.

  Kai had not felt aftershocks. The phenomenon he’d sensed was another one entirely, and one well-known to the university’s geologists, who had studied, mapped, and dated many past examples. The technical term was catastrophic flank failure. Under the ocean, a mile below where Kona had slipped into its watery grave, a much larger collapse was happening.

  There had been a debate about how this could happen, elsewhere. Geologists had argued that Cumbre Vieja, a volcano in the Canary Islands, was splitting in two. Eventually the western side would collapse, they said, and when it did, the landslide would involve hundreds of cubic miles of rock accelerating into the ocean. An almost unimaginably large tsunami would fan out across the Atlantic. It would be bad in Africa, bad also in France and the UK and Iceland, but on the US east coast it would out-Hollywood Hollywood. Far too soon for any useful warning, walls of water taller than skyscrapers would come ashore along the overpopulated eastern seaboard of the United States. A dozen major cities would be like bugs on the rim of a fire hose. Tens of millions of people would drown. It would be by far the largest natural disaster in recorded history.

  People like a good apocalypse with their morning coffee, so journalists hyped the Cumbre Vieja theory endlessly, with scant regard for the facts—the venerable BBC was one of the worst offenders. Which was a shame, because most geologists thought Cumbre Vieja was junk science. The naysayers, with no respect for a good scare, pointed out that the conditions in the Canary Islands made a full-scale collapse unlikely and a major wave even more unlikely. The island was destined to crumble over thousands of years. New York wouldn’t even get its toes wet.

  Mauna Loa, which no one had worried about, was different.

  Above water, the shape of the island changed little, except for that new nibble out of the western coastline. But the slab that dropped from the steepest part of its underwater slope was bigger than a city, and it had the effect of a single sweep with the blade of a giant’s oar. In Waikiki, thousands of puzzled tourists were looking out of their smashed hotel windows in time to see, outlined dimly in the moonlight, the last thing they would ever see—a vertical wall of water fifty meters tall. It swept over the high-rise buildings downtown, washed far up into the Manoa Valley, and destroyed three-quarters of the city.

  Out in the deep ocean, the surface scarcely rippled, but underwater the pressure wave traveled fast, slipping west and south unnoticed beneath the keels of Korean container ships, Chinese frigates, and handmade Papeete fishing boats. Its progress was noted only by a dozen automatic buoys, and thus by appalled oceanographers, monitoring those buoys at ba
sement desks in Greenwich and Woods Hole, who sent out warnings they knew would come too late.

  Be grateful for small mercies, they thought. Not many major cities in its path. All of them a long way distant. And, as their models predicted, the wave did indeed dissipate to some extent in deep water, more quickly at least than the wave you’d get from a hundred-mile sheer on a subduction fault. So it was a smaller affair by the time it arrived on, say, the sparsely populated north coast of New Guinea. A mere twenty to twenty-five feet in most places—only as big as a house. Only powerful enough to erase every village, and drown almost every person, within a quarter mile of the shore.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE COAST ROAD

  Lorna said they’d have to call for Dog, and hope it would come back with the pack. Kit responded in a low voice, but her tone was decisive. “Absolutely no,” she said. “We make already too much noise. One clue to those guys, maybe is last clue you give. What we do now, we move quietly, and we get as far away from here as possible.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Daniel said. “We—”

  “Voice down, Daniel.”

  “OK.” In a whisper, he started to explain to Kit about the Number. But Morag interrupted him. “It doesn’t matter about that,” she said.

  He was shocked. He thought she meant, It doesn’t matter, because we’re screwed anyway; I give up. “Sure it matters. Without it, we have nothing. With it, we have a chance. You said so yourself. If we can find the Japanese guy—”

  “I know. But what I wrote down, forget it, it’s not a problem—”

  “But—”

  “D, really, it’s OK. I—”

  Kit put up her hands. The palms were strangely pale; they were the only part of her that was clean. “Majka, Daniel, you shut up now both, and listen me, OK? All this yap-yap get us killed. I survive in this forest a long time, but only because I learn to be silent, invisible. It is crawling with people like those three back there, all looking for you. So we do this by my rules. And first rule is, shut mouth and get from area. Only then is talk.”

  Daniel opened his mouth. She glared at him. He closed it again.

  She didn’t hurry them, after that. Just kept them moving at a quick walk, kept turning to them with a hand signal, or stopped for a few seconds with a finger to her lips, listening. Once or twice she stopped for a few beats longer while they caught their breath.

  “So,” she said eventually, “I think we are OK. But is not hundred percent thing until we are getting off the island. So tell quietly. What is problem with Dog?”

  By way of explaining, Daniel turned back to Morag and continued the argument they’d been having.

  “You wrote the I’iwa’s calculations down. The Number. I watched you doing it. And there’s only one copy. It’s in Jimmy’s—in the—”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “There are two copies. One’s in the pack. One’s in my head.”

  “Oh come on. Five thousand digits? That’s impossible.” He looked closer at her. “OK, OK. For you it’s not impossible, I guess. But Jesus. Really? You memorized the whole thing?”

  “I wanted to keep the hard copy, to be totally sure. But I’m pretty confident I have it.”

  “Trouble is, so do they. I attached the beacon to the backpack, remember?”

  “Don’t worry about that. The beacon could be a great decoy—assuming Dog takes it deep into the forest and doesn’t try to follow us. They’ll think that signal is us, and with a bit o’ luck they’ll waste a lot of time hunting for it.”

  “And when they do find it?”

  “I wondered ahead of time about something like this happening. So I, uh, included a second level of security. The hard copy’s wrong.”

  Lorna had been crouched on the ground, quietly sucking wind. She looked up. “Ye put in a deliberate wally?” Wally usually meant someone who was clumsy, rude, or otherwise clueless, but it was also Lorna-speak for a mistake.

  “I put in a whole bunch o’ wallies, Mumma.”

  “An’ how?”

  “It was dead simple. I found the last nine on each page, counted backward nine digits, and added one to that digit. Fifty errors. Even if they figure out it’s wrong, they’ll never figure out how to put it right.”

  Kit had climbed a low branch in order to be a more effective lookout. “Majka,” she said, “the way your brain works, it give me headache.”

  “Tell me about it,” Daniel muttered.

  She grabbed another branch and swung down, landing without a sound. “So. What I understand is: good if they is looking now for Dog, with wrong informations in bag. While they doing that, we have to get to coast, and still is dangerous, and also like, oh-holy-fuck-it of a long way?”

  “Aye, about that far,” Morag said. She consulted her mental map of New Guinea. “Most of it’s dense, trackless forest. Some of it’s nearly vertical jungle. A lot of it’s swamp.”

  “Well I know one thing fer sure,” Lorna said, getting to her feet. “Waggin’ our chins at the horizon won’t be gettin’ us there. So what say ye we save our breath, stretch a leg, an’ get on wi’ it?”

  They did.

  It took ten days.

  Every evening was the same. As the light began to fade, Kit found a protective thicket of trees and held up a hand. “Here,” she’d say. “No noise, no fire.” There was no camp setup to do, but Daniel created crude sleeping pads out of the largest leaves. Morag and Lorna, who’d been in New Guinea the most, knew the plants better than the others, so they disappeared into the forest looking for food, and on the better days, they returned with an armload of roots and odd-looking fruit. On other days they found little or nothing, and then what kept them all alive was the fact that Kit had become an expert, the hard way, at finding beetles, worms, and other sources of protein that no ordinary person would touch. For better or worse, not one of them was an ordinary person any longer. They were so hungry that they took to eating grass as they walked; when Kit found some disgusting live morsel, they closed their eyes and swallowed and tried to be grateful.

  Without fail, just as they were preparing for the night, the air temperature dropped and a blast of evening rain swept across the landscape, soaking everyone to the skin. Then the rain eased, and the nocturnal forest woke up. What had been silent, apart from the rustling of leaves and the occasional squawk, became a cacophony. “Like a school orchestra practicin’, after some eejit’s smashed all the instruments,” Lorna said.

  Nobody slept. They huddled together against the chill, and dozed a little, and listened to each other’s experiences. Lorna’s were the most important, because they contained strange bits of news—or what might be news—gleaned from overhearing random gossip during weeks of captivity. Strange explosions that collapsed large buildings from within, from London to Lima to Lagos. Police firing into a Seraphim demonstration in Paris, only to have the Seraphim respond by essentially taking over the government the same day, with the armed forces too divided to intervene effectively. In Nicaragua, where the army had acted early to arrest and corral all Seraphim supporters, thus keeping the country at peace, a huge “patriotic” massacre at a string of camps beneath the chain of volcanoes that runs along the Pacific coast. A worldwide financial and political crisis caused by all this, and by “instability” generally—the new euphemism for governments waking up to the fact that they and their entire societies were divided from within—“the world’s first global civil war,” as one politician put it. Then the unexpected Mauna Loa event, which had, or had not, resulted in tsunamis. And the greatest, most shocking, most immediately destabilizing thing, the greatest catalyst of pure panic: the satellites failing, and the Internet going patchy and unreliable and falling silent.

  “Has that really happened?” Morag asked.

  “I dunno. Probably, yes. When we was bein’ held, they was arguin’ about whether the Seraphim could be responsible for it. One of the men said, mebbe the Seraphim found a way te take the library-burnin�
�� beyond jes’ symbolism. Some kind o’ monster virus. Jimmy said te me, nae, that doesna make no sense. He said, ye can burn books, but ye canna set fire t’the cloud.”

  “Did he really say that?”

  “Sure he did. Why?”

  “It’s just that Rosko used almost exactly those words. He thought I was making too much of a big deal out of the library fires. ‘Knowledge isn’t under threat,’ he said. ‘It’s not like they can burn down the Internet.’ And I thought, aye, obviously. In the Bronze Age you really could destroy whole cultures, whole written languages, with a few good library fires. But the Internet’s a massively distributed system. No way you could take down the whole thing.”

  “Afterward they was sayin’ somethin’ about Mayo wantin’ te develop a quantum computer. Didn’t follow it really, ’cept they were sayin’ he had infiltrated the Seraphim cos’ he wanted te work out what made the Architects tick, and hey, maybe the Seraphim had done their own infiltratin’. I heard one o’ them say: ‘Shows how powerful they’ve become. Figured it out—and now they’ve set fire to the digital library.’”

  Their progress was slow. Lorna was having a hard time keeping up, partly because she was by far the oldest and partly because she was using far too much energy on grieving and covering up the fact that she was grieving. But it was brutal for all of them. They spent one whole day climbing and then descending a dangerously steep track over a mountain pass, and hiking seven or eight miles up a valley on the other side, only to reach an impassable thousand-foot face of green-clad limestone.

  “Oh, now this is a major pisser,” Morag said. “It’s the Hindenburg Wall. Famous. We flew along it once.” Daniel, the only one who didn’t feel near despair with exhaustion, scanned the surface, looking for a climbing route—something he might have attempted once with Rosko, Iona, and fifty pounds of alpine gear. The vegetation made even that theoretical exercise impossible. He pointed back, and up, toward the pass. “We’ll have to go back. Try the other way.”