Solstice

There was an awkward silence around the table. Clarke gazed stonily at them. 'My, this is an unpopular assignment. Since we don't know the answers to those questions, can someone kindly tell me who the hell these people are?'

'I can give you some background, Mr President,' Barnside said, and hit the presentation panel. Two photos came on the video screen: one of a smiling, attractive woman in her thirties, with long black hair and a pale, intelligent face. The other was of Charley Pascal, as they now recognized her from the recording of her conversation with La Finca. It was possible — just — to believe these were the same woman, but they had to use their imaginations. Something had happened to this woman over the intervening years, something more devastating than mere age.

'Charlotte Pascal,' Barnside said, looking at the screen. 'Age thirty-nine. Born Bordeaux, France, been working in the US on a green card since 1983. Came to California to study at the Lone Wolf Observatory, then got a job directly with the Sundog Project. She left Sundog twelve months ago. She had full security clearance inside the project, so as far as we can tell there's nothing she doesn't know about how it works. She had an apartment in the Bay Area. We got some people checking out various leads. Seems she hung on to the apartment, even though she hasn't been using it. Presumably she's had some contacts with Gaia going back a long time. These people must have some kind of base. Maybe she just visited part-time, then moved in when she felt she had enough to quit Sundog.'

'Why does she look so different in the two photos?' Burnley asked.

'She's sick, physically sick, it's obvious,' Helen said immediately.

Barnside glowered at her. 'The first is her original passport picture. The second is from her brief appearance on the Net this evening. We made some inquiries. It appears that a year or so before Pascal left Sundog she was diagnosed with some form of incurable brain cancer, anaplastic astrocytoma.'

He'd no sooner said the words than Helen Wagner was keying at her palmtop computer.

'I guess that didn't help with the instability,' Barnside continued.

'You can't make assumptions like that,' Helen said quietly. 'There are some nasty symptoms — nausea, fainting, the gradual loss of the use of your limbs — but you can't assume that someone with brain cancer is, per se, irrational. Or incurable.'

'Well, thank you,' Barnside muttered. 'The incurable part comes from her ex-physician, by the way.'

'Where the hell is she?' Clarke asked.

Barnside grimaced. 'Immigration shows she left the US back in January and returned at the end of March. No record of her departure since then, so we think she's still here.'

'So when did she start talking to these Gaia people?' Clarke asked.

'The Children of Gaia. That's the name they use. We don't know,' Barnside answered. 'We only really started monitoring minor cults a couple of years ago, so we had some catching up to do there.'

'Scalable terrorism.' Clarke stared at the CIA and FBI teams assembled side by side at the table. 'Guess you guys took a while coming round to understanding that option.'

'In the beginning, sir,' Barnside replied, 'this wasn't terrorism. The Children of Gaia seemed to have a few people in at the start who were loosely connected with Heaven's Gate in San Diego, the cult that committed suicide over the Hale-Bopp comet. I guess you'd call them fellow travellers. Heaven's Gate swallowed the assumption that Hale-Bopp hid a spacecraft, and the cult members could rendezvous with that by killing themselves, moving from one plane of consciousness to another. The Gaia people didn't go for this space thing. They were loosely associated with a covert ecoterrorist alliance known as Siegfried. This linked various groups — people raiding animal research establishments, targeting the meat trade, the chemical companies, anything to do with hunting.'

'Like Dan said. Tree-huggers.' Levine nodded. 'Militant anti-abortionists and the like.'

'That's not quite correct, sir,' Helen intervened. 'From what I understand, I think you'll find these people get nowhere near the abortion debate. To them, man — at least modern man — is the enemy species. We despoil the planet. We interfere with nature. The idea of abortion is probably neither here nor there to them. They take what they think of as a broader view of the issue.'

'Maybe,' Barnside said. 'But let's stick to what we do know. You're talking serious computer geek territory here. They use the Net to communicate and recruit new members. To them, what they read on the Net is real, and the New York Times is pure fiction. They are separated from most everything we regard as normal life. And as far as we can work out, Pascal is now their leader, maybe has been for some time.'

'This woman designed part of Sundog?' Fogerty asked.

'A big part,' Schulz said from the screen. 'Charley knows this project inside out. She was one of the brightest people we had and she was there right from the beginning, when it was still, on the surface, a solar energy project. She worked on everything, from programming right down to the design of the hardware. We didn't change anything significantly. She knows how we work. If she has the keys, she can do what she likes right up until the moment we take them back.'

'And the people with her?' Clarke wondered.

Barnside shrugged. 'Our guess is thirty, forty at the most, and we're real short on detail. Probably living together now in some kind of commune. We lose track of them after a property in San Diego they vacated around the time Pascal left Sundog.'

Clarke stared across the table and they watched, waited for him to speak. There, at least, Helen thought, he had won a kind of victory. He had the authority, had stamped it on the gathering through his own physical presence, not the badge of office.

'Will someone tell me what kind of people they are? Can we deal with them?'

Helen was there first. 'Smart people. With no lives. No family. From what we know, we think there's ex-programmers from Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, IBM, Netscape… We're not slouches in this area, Mr President. We can match them. Given time.'

'Time. Let's leave that to one side for now, Miss Wagner. What do they want?' Clarke's voice echoed in the silent room.

Fogerty rifled through the papers in front of him. 'In a word, sir,' he said, ' "prepare".'

'What the hell does that mean?' Clarke asked heatedly.

Fogerty shook his head. 'That's all it says on the E-mail we got after Air Force One was lost, Mr President. That's all she said when she made that call to La Finca. We've heard nothing since.'

Levine rapped his hand lightly on the table. 'We need intelligence for this. More than anything.'

'Wagner?' Clarke asked, and he could feel the ripple of resentment in the room.

'We need intelligence, sir,' she agreed. 'But we need understanding too. Maybe if we can find out what drives them, that might help.'

'So what do you think?'

'I'm not a psychologist, Mr President. But if you want a guess… consider Pascal's condition. She's dying. She's surrounded by people who are probably willing to die for her too. And none of them mind. Their own lives — and by extension those of everyone else — are unimportant. That doesn't mean they're out to be mass murderers — '

'She shot down Air Force One, for chrissake,' Barnside grumbled.

'But not without reason, surely. We need to understand their view of the world and what they think it's becoming. My guess is they see themselves as agents, of Gaia, if you like. Of the earth. Of some moving force in nature. If you feel you're unimportant yourself, maybe the entire human race becomes unimportant. And what matters is something bigger. The planet. The universe, maybe. Perhaps they're looking to return us all to some kind of state of grace. It's as fundamental as that.'

Fogerty smiled at her from across the table. It felt distinctly odd. 'If you're right,' he said, 'then surely it's obvious what they want. Not the end of the world. The beginning of it. Eden. A return to the garden before it was spoiled, before we bit into the apple.'