'I don't want to see this,' Charley Pascal said. She grabbed the wheels of the chair, tried to push, and lacked the strength.
'Where to?'
'Over there. My bedroom.'
He pushed her slowly toward the door, and recognized the white, plain room and the part it had played in the deadly little drama he'd watched in horror on the Web. She wheeled herself inside, turned round, and watched him reach for the door. Charley's face was bloodless. Her eyes were wet.
'Don't hate me,' she said.
Lieberman looked at her, then turned round without speaking.
The monitor was dead and grey. The job was done. Somewhere high above them in space those giant wings were wheeling into a new position, opening their eyes to stare the sun straight in the eye without blinking. And whether it worked or not was really beyond him. This was the final act. Time and the storm growing in the sky had taken everything else away from them.
He left Yasgur's Farm, strode out into the burning sun. The day was like a furnace, no wind, no oxygen in the air. You could be on another planet, he told himself. You could be in hell.
He walked over to Mo Sinclair, a still form in the blazing heat, the red on her chest drying to a dust-caked ochre that moved almost imperceptibly with each faint breath.
'We need the medics right now,' Davis said, and looked at the sky. It was the colour of gold and empty. Bevan was scanning the horizon desperately. 'We can't just wait out here like this. I think we ought to get her out of this heat.'
Annie touched her mother's hand. It was dry and cold. Lieberman bent down, picked up Mo's body in his arms, lifted her off the ground, and began to walk, slowly, carefully across the dusty ground, letting the thoughts run out of his head like water overflowing from a pail. Davis and Bevan watched and stood beneath the sun, waiting for the sound of blades to cut through the day.
In the darkness of the barn, the air hot and swimming with flies, he laid her on a bed of straw, not looking anywhere except her face (which is where the soul resides, a stubborn memory told him that; the rest of you, the blood, the physical mechanics of your body were all, somehow, irrelevant).
They sat down next to her on the soft, brittle straw, watched the world outside through the stone doorway, a rectangle of burning light, getting brighter, more intense by the minute. Annie touched his hands, held both of them together, in a shape that was so close to prayer. The air grew thin; the buzzing of the insects gave it a febrile, relentless power.
Zenith.
An odd word, he thought. Like an incantation from some occult rite, or the secret name of God. Too small, too weak to describe this celestial alignment that stood above the head of the world, bore down on it with all the dead, heavy weight of the stars. There were no words for this, only the relentless, surging beat of the universe, pumping through your blood, hammering on the walls of your skull.
In silence, clutching each other for comfort, they watched the day turn to fire.
TWO MONTHS LATER
CHAPTER 58
The City
Lieberman remembered so clearly the last time he walked into the St Francis Hotel. It was for the small, uncomfortable reception after the wedding, with relatives and people from Lone Wolf standing around, sipping warm wine, looking at each other, and saying, without speaking, 'This won't last, this won't last.' And he had gazed at Sara, so happy, not letting this thought get anywhere near her head, knowing they were right.
It sat on Union Square, like a beached ocean liner, the shoppers and the tourists mingling around outside, blocking the sidewalk, tripping over each other. Except that this time there weren't so many. He walked across the square unobstructed. The change in the economy that followed the storm had rolled through into everything. There weren't so many buskers, playing bad jazz and blues, waiting outside the Gold Coast Bar for the spare dollars of people wondering whether to brave the queue for Planet Hollywood.
Recovering.
That was the word of the moment. It popped into his head the first time he went to see Sara, still in bed at home, taking longer to mend than anyone had expected, looking as if her colour was returning, slowly. In a month or so, she'd be back at work, trying to put this strange event behind her, trying to forget the occasional pains, the memories (trapped inside a falling shell that looked like a giant insect's eye, and that bright searing light, gold and fire, that seemed to accompany everything to do with Sun dog).
People are good at forgetting, he thought. They have to be. No one can walk through life feeling the scars of existence — of death and personal loss, the constant round of interior agony — every day. We all need somewhere to put this legacy of grief out of sight, not quite forgotten, just hidden, for the times when it's needed as a reminder of just how fragile this daydream really is.
Recovery wasn't just an idea for Sara. The world was adjusting to the notion too. The solstice had scarred the earth and its people, not in the way Charley Pascal had hoped, but there was pain and there was injury all the same. The sky had ceased to be something anyone could trust. A fissure had opened beneath the solid rock of certainty that underpinned the human state.
The damage had been real and unmistakable. The most dramatic part had been in Asia, before the storm rose to its full height. Thanks to the odd team that had assembled at La Finca, the livid power of the syzygy had been leached by the time the zenith rose in earnest, somewhere past the Prime Meridian. It had been spiralling downward when it reached the East Coast of America with the break of dawn, and dwindled almost to the level of a bad solar storm when it reached California. There had been serious damage to telecom networks. The financial system had stayed in disarray for weeks. People saw their pride dented, found it hard to accept that the world wasn't as firm and certain and controllable as they had hoped.
But there had been no more ball lightning after Vegas — this was truly Charley's creation, and, he guessed, she'd been saving it for America all along. The casualty toll ran to tens of thousands, but few were in nations where the native language was CNN, and Lieberman knew (in that old, cynical part of him that he tried to keep quiet these days) what this meant. It all lost some of its importance. Before long, some statistician was wheeling out the numbers from the last flood in Bangladesh, the last earthquake in China, and saying, Hey, in the great swing of things it doesn't add up to much at all. There weren't many dead in West Kensington or Gramercy Park, Nob Hill didn't catch fire, there was no earthquake in the seventeenth arrondissement. They'd even reopened part of Vegas and started to promise the new Strip would be so much better than the old one. What's the problem?
He went up to the twenty-first floor using the old elevators at the front of the building, stepped out almost straight into the arms of a big man who looked as if he were made of rock. Grey suit, grey face, the earphone of a walkie-talkie shoved in his ear, a bulge in his jacket pocket. And peering into Lieberman's face with a curious look that could almost have passed for jealousy. 'Professor Lieberman?'
'Yeah.' He felt out of place in his jeans and faded denim shirt. It had been cool outside, a touch of rain. That was nice. He'd walked through the rain all the way from his apartment, almost twenty-five minutes, and was conscious of looking a mite bedraggled. He didn't care. It felt good to be damp from that delicious rain.
'Miss Wagner is waiting for you.'
They went down the corridor, the plush red carpet giving way beneath their feet like the pelt of some dead animal, then walked into a suite. She sat on her own at a big table in the centre of the room, shuffling through some papers. When he came in she stood up, smiling wanly, and he knew right away what both of them were thinking.