Alex still wanted to meet the person or persons responsible — almost as badly as George Hutton did.
I’d like to know how they were able to create such a complex, twisted knot of space. They can’t have used anything as simple as a Witten mapping. Why, even renormalization would have taken—
The airplane’s public address system came to life, interrupting his thoughts. From the seat back in front of him projected the smiling, confident visage of their captain, informing everyone that the Hawaiian Islands were coming into view.
Alex shaded his window against internal reflections and gazed down past layers of stratospheric clouds to a necklace of dark jewels standing out from the glittering sea. Back in the days of turbojets, this would have been a refueling stop. But modern hypersonic aircraft — even restricted by the ozone laws — just streaked on by.
He had seen Hawaii much closer than this anyway, so it wasn’t the chain itself but the surrounding waters that suddenly interested him. From this height he saw patterns of tide and color — resonant standing waves and subtly shaded shoals of plankton luminance — outlining each bead in the nearly linear necklace of islands. Polarized sunglasses, especially, brought out a richness of detail.
Once, Alex would have looked on this phenomenon with pleasure but little understanding. Time spent with George Hutton’s geologists had corrected that. The islands weren’t static entities anymore, but epic, rocky testimonials to change. From the big island westward, beyond the thousand-meter cliffs of Molokai, all the way past lowly Midway, a chain of extinct volcanoes continued arrow straight for thousands of miles before zigging abruptly north toward the Aleutians. That bent path to the arctic circle was also a trip back in time, from the towering, ten thousand cubic mile basalt heap of Mauna Loa, past weathered, craggy elder isles like Kauai, to ancient coral atolls and eventually prehistoric, truncated seamounts long conquered by the persistent waves.
On the big island, two memorable volcanoes still spumed. But most activity had already shifted still further east, where the newest sibling was being born — an embryonic, as yet unemerged isle already named Loihi.
Most of the planet’s volcanoes smoldered where the edges of great crustal plates met gratingly, or rode up over each other — as along this great ocean’s famous Ring of Fire. But Hawaii’s trail of ancient calderas lay smack in the middle of one of the biggest plates, not at its rim. The Hawaiian Islands had their origins in a completely different process. They were the dashed scars left as the Central Pacific Plate cruised slowly above the geological equivalent of a blowtorch, a fierce, narrow tube of magma melting through anything passing over it.
George Hutton had likened it to pushing thick aluminum foil slowly over an intermittent arc welder. Part of George’s wealth had come from tapping power from such hot spots in the mantle.
Oh, yes. Hawaii certainly testified that there was energy down there.
But you can’t generate a laser… or a gazer… from just any lump of hot matter. You need excited material in an inverted state…
There it was again — his thoughts kept drawing back to the problem, just as the taniwha kept pulling in atoms as it orbited round and round the Earth’s core.
At first he’d been certain the amplified gravity waves originated from Beta itself. After all, what bizarre energy levels might lay within the roiling, folded world-sheets of a cosmic knot? In fact, on that night in New Zealand when Alex experienced his moment of drunken inspiration, he had also felt a wave of desperate hope. What if the knot itself was being stimulated to emit gravity radiation? Could Beta be forced somehow to give up energy faster than it could suck atoms from the core?
Alas, scans showed the beast hadn’t lost any weight at all, despite the titanic, Earth-rattling power released in the gazer beam. The only apparent effect on Beta had been to shift its orbit slightly, making it harder than ever to trace its history.
And so Alex still had no idea where the energy came from. Add another gnawing, frustrating mystery to the list. It was one thing to know he and everyone else were doomed to be destroyed. But to die ignorant? Not even having looked on the face of his destroyer? It was not acceptable.
“Mr. Sullivan? Pardon me, sir.”
Alex blinked. By now Hawaii was long gone from sight. He turned away from the blue Pacific to meet the almond eyes of the beautiful ASEAN Air flight attendant.
“Yes? What is it?”
“Sir, you’ve received a message.”
From her palm he took a gleaming data sliver. Alex thanked her. Unfolding his comp-screen, he slipped the chip inside and keyed access. Instantly, a holo of George Hutton frowned at him, sternly, under bushy eyebrows. A short row of block letters appeared.
THIS JUST ARRIVED ON A NET RECEPTION BOARD IN AUCKLAND, UNDER YOUR REAL NAME, MARKED URGENT. THOUGHT YOU’D BETTER SEE IT RIGHT QUICK — GEORGE.
Alex blinked. Only a few people on the planet knew he’d gone to New Zealand, and those obligingly used his cover name. Hesitantly, he touched the screen and instantly a flat-image photograph appeared in front of him, rather smudgy and amateurish looking. It showed a crowd of people — tourists, apparently — looking admiringly at a disheveled, youngish man, lanky and a little underweight. The center of attention was holding another man to the ground — a wild-eyed fellow with flecks of froth at the corners of his mouth.
I should have expected this, Alex thought with a sigh. Tourists loved using their True-Vu goggles. There must have been many records of his minor “heroics” in Rotorua. Apparently a few had made it onto the net.
He looked at his own image and saw a fellow who didn’t really want to be where he was, or doing what he was doing.
I should not have interfered. Now look what’s happened.
He touched the screen again to see the rest of the message, and suddenly a new visage loomed out at him — one he knew all too well.
Talk about looking on the face of your destroyer…
It was Pedro Manella, dressed in a brown suit that matched his pantry-brush mustache. The portly reporter grinned a frozen, knowing grin. Alex read the text below and groaned.
ALEX LUSTIG, I KNOW YOU’RE IN NEW ZEALAND SOMEWHERE. FROM THERE GENERAL DELIVERY WILL GET THIS TO YOU.
ARRANGE A MEETING WITHIN TWO DAYS, OR THE ENTIRE WORLD WILL BE HUNTING FOR YOU, NOT I ALONE.
— MANELLA
That man was as tenacious as a remora, as persistent as any taniwha. Alex sighed.
Still, he wondered if it really mattered anymore. In a way, he looked forward to watching Pedro Manella’s face when he told the man the news.
It was an unworthy anticipation. A grown man shouldn’t covet revenge.
Ah, he thought, but we are legion. I contain multitudes. And some of the people making up “me” aren’t grown-ups at all.
□ Each of the allies had its own reasons for entering the bloody conflict now variously known as the “Helvetian War,” the “Secrecy War,” and the “Last-We-Hope” — perhaps the most bizarre and furious armed struggle of all time.
A leading factor in the industrial north was the laundering of profits for drug merchants and tax cheaters. Overburdened with TwenCen debt, citizens of America and Pan-Europe demanded those groups at least pay their fair share, and resented the banking gnomes for sheltering criminals’ ill-gotten gains.
International banking secrecy was even more hated in the developing world. Those nations’ awesome debts were aggravated by “capital flight,” whereby leading citizens had for generations smuggled mountains of cash to safe havens overseas. Whether honestly earned or looted from national treasuries, this lost capital undermined frail economies, making it even harder for those left behind to pay their bills. Nations like Venezuela, Zaire and the Philippines tried to recover billions removed by former ruling elites, to no avail. Eventually, a consortium of restored democracies stopped railing at their ex-dictators and instead turned their ire on the banking havens themselves.