“Does he know?” Mui asked.
Crane shook his head. “Outside of this room, only Lanie knows. Even the people I’ve hired to dig the tunnels don’t know. They think we’re making an underground vault to store records. The pyro guys who’ll build the bomb think it’s a secret U.S. mission leading to the renewal of underground testing, and were chosen for their security clearances.”
“Crane!”
“In here, Stoney,” Crane called, opening the door.
Twenty feet down the hall, Stoney smiled when he saw four of them coming out. “When I was a kid,” he said, hobbling over to them, his cane the only reminder of his near brush with death in Memphis, “four men coming out of a bathroom together usually would have been followed by a cloud of smoke.”
“Where’s Lanie?” Crane asked.
“With the rest of the guests,” Stoney said, waving to the other men as they hurried on. “She’s attempting to keep from going crazy looking for you.”
“Be a good guy,” Crane said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Go back and tell Lanie I’ll be right there.”
“Your show,” Whetstone said and shook hands with him. “Congratulations, old man. You know, I looked my entire life and never found a woman like Lanie.”
“Thank you, Stoney,” Crane said, hugging him. The man hobbled off then, leaning heavily on his cane made from Tennessee poplar.
Lanie. Crane had no idea of what he’d done to deserve her. He had orchestrated every other aspect of his life, but suddenly she had shown up and changed it all. It was the most wonderful thing that ever had happened. As far as he was concerned Lanie was the only woman in the entire world. And she loved to work as much as he did! His entire life had come together, all the pieces falling into place. Dreams, and dreams beyond dreams.
He savored the moment. He’d known too few of its kind.
His bad arm throbbed painfully, the quake nearly upon them. He supposed some would think him odd for celebrating his wedding amidst the devastation of an EQ, but he looked at it as a tragedy averted, a cause for celebration. There’d be homelessness and suffering, but nothing like what would have happened had no one been alerted.
He walked out onto the wide wooden porch. A hundred chattering guests silenced immediately. All eyes had turned toward him. A canopy hung above the wide lawn. Lanie, in white taffeta and sheer veil, stood fifty feet away, smiling calmly. She held a bouquet of white orchids. A red-cloaked Cosmie minister stood at her left, Kate Masters, also carrying flowers, was at her right. Stoney awaited Crane at the porch steps.
“Ready?” he asked.
Lightning crackled overhead, leaping between the mountains and the sky. The celebrants looked somewhat nervous.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Crane said loudly, opening his arms. “Trust me!”
They laughed then, relieving the tension.
Crane looked at Stoney. “Now, I’m ready. Got the ring?”
“What ring?” Stoney laughed. “Bad joke. Sorry. Of course I have the ring.”
To Wagner’s traditional wedding march from Lohengrin, they walked down the red carpet toward Lanie. Crane surprised himself by being more nervous now than when he’d been affixing the agreement with Liang.
He reached Lanie’s side and was trapped immediately in her luminescent hazel gaze. Her eyes were wide with love and inquisitiveness. “God, you’re beautiful,” he whispered to a loud rumble. He grasped her hands.
“Never mind that,” she whispered. “How did it go?”
“It’s done,” he whispered in return. Lanie threw her arms around his neck.
“Perhaps we’d better get on with it,” the minister said, looking around suspiciously at the quivering lawn furniture, the trembling ornamental plants and flowers.
Crane padded the time—2:36:30. He smiled at the man. “Your show, Padre.”
“The name’s Al,” the minister said. “Just Al.”
“Quickly, Al,” Crane said, the ground shaking laterally beneath their feet.
“Brothers in Oneness!” the minister began. “As all life is made from the same molecules, so, too, do these beings who stand before us wish to become One through the pair bonding institution of—”
The rest of his speech was mercifully drowned out by the rumbling quakes, originating from a twenty-five-mile-deep hypo-center near Dhangarhi as the Indian Plate finally relieved its slippage. It was a monster quake, its likes not seen for almost sixty years, since the big Alaska quake in 1967.
As the minister pronounced them “co-beings in Oneness,” the ground had begun rolling like waves on the sea, the shelf creaking above them. Crane kissed the bride and hoped the dams would stand despite his predictions, but he knew they wouldn’t.
The sky had darkened now, lightning a continual fireworks show halfway up the peaks that towered over everything. Everyone walked out from under the canopy to watch the display as a section of Everest, large as a city, sheared off the side of the mountain and fell to the valleys far below.
“What a wonderful wedding present,” Lanie said, her arms around Crane as they watched the spectacle. “It’s amazing.”
“Our child’s first EQ,” Crane said.
“What do you do, Crane,” Lanie asked, “when you’ve finally achieved your dream and ended all this?”
“I don’t know.” He grinned. “Take up accounting?”
The valleys screamed all around them, whined—the sound like fingernails on a chalk board amplified billions of times. Crane almost could hear voices in it. Wailing. Forlorn and frightened.
The guests were bending over, hands covering their ears to shut out the din as the wind picked up, blowing wildly into their faces, whipping dresses and hair in swirling frenzy. The inferior Liang sunscreen collapsed in on itself, but fortunately no one was beneath the thing.
And then it happened, right before their eyes. Everest, amidst the howling wind and the cries of dying rock, shook like the old man it was, large bits of it cracking loudly just as the trees breaking in the forest and falling off were creaking loudly. And then it grew. As if rising to walk away, the six-mile mountain abruptly jutted upward, rising higher into the clouds, eating the slippage and growing—young again, a new mountain.
The whole process took three minutes to accomplish. Three minutes to change the topography of the planet. Three minutes to grow the world’s tallest mountain fifty feet taller. The next man to climb it would be climbing higher than Sir Edmund Hillery did in the same spot.
Out of destruction, birth.
Sumi Chan stood with Burt Hill who was wearing a too-small tuxedo. He looked like a monkey without an organ grinder as he watched the reception tangle all around them. The lodge’s main hall was filled to bursting, wedding presents lining the walls and filling the small conference room next door. Professional talkers talked all around them, drinking synth before a fireplace so large it consumed whole treetrunks as its logs.
“Nine on the Richter,” Hill said. “Higher than they could really measure precisely.” He shook his head and took another sip of the dorphed booze in his glass. “Folks are calling it a miracle. The death toll’s still under five hundred. It should have been hundreds of thousands. The four busted dams flooded out fifty cities.”
She shook her head. “A massive cleanup.”
“Yeah. But Liang’ll spend the money here. They’re busy fighting with the Moslems for control of all this. That’s a lot of consumers.”
Sumi sipped her own dorph blend, the only thing that got her through social occasions these days. “Does Crane know about the results of the quake?”
“Naw,” Hill said, pointing to Crane, who was dancing with his new wife. “For once in his life, the man is thinkin’ about something other than quakes. A wonderful sight, ain’t it?”