Solstice

Charley smiled. The girl took her hand. 'Be brave, Tina. We all have to be brave.'

'Sure.' Joe moved the tripod a little closer, played with the viewfinder.

'It's on,' he said. 'Don't worry if you make any mistakes. We can edit it on the machine.'

'Yes,' Charley said, and closed her eyes. She wanted to feel the planets whirling in her head. She wanted to see the trails they made through the stars. But they weren't there.

Charley Pascal opened her eyes and said to the camera, 'The earth doesn't belong to us. No one gave it to mankind, no god, no creature from outer space. There are no explicit mysteries, there is no deus ex machina. We are what we have become, we are what we have made ourselves. And the earth is what we have made it too. That's the implicit mystery. The earth is its own spirit. It loaned itself to what we call life, not just man, but the animals, the plants, the birds, the creatures of the seas. And only man betrayed this earth spirit, which we call Gaia. Only man.'

She licked her lips. They were dry. Tina Blackshire's hand squeezed hers nervously. 'This cannot continue. You know this yourself. If you look in your heart of hearts, you understand this world, the world man has made, is unsustainable. We destroy a little more each and every day, and the cycle of that destruction increases each year. We extend our own lives upon the planet unnaturally, and destroy it as we do so. The world is soiled by our presence. We have squandered the gift that Gaia gave us, and for what reason? Greed. Insanity. The thrusting, covetous male principle that has come to live unchecked inside us. We are out of balance, and we have spread that imbalance to the earth.'

Charley Pascal looked into the dead eye of the camera and tried to imagine the world listening to this message, relayed by the TV stations posted across the Internet, stopping the traffic, halting the conversation in bars everywhere.

'We live temporal lives with no view to the future, no appreciation of the past. And if you think about it, you know that we must be reborn in the fire. This isn't a new beginning for our race, we're not butterflies emerging from the chrysalis. Our place is here. On the earth. But as part of a different order of things. We must destroy to create. We must go back to go forward. We must dismantle this false fabric of civilization and return to another time, when humanity was young. I need to open your eyes and I know this will be painful. Some will die. You shouldn't think of yourself, but of your children's children. Of the world they will inherit. Without greed and fear. Without oppression and pollution. The world Gaia granted us, and we, in our foolishness, destroyed.'

She waited, and Katayama closed in with the zoom until nothing but her face filled the lens. Her expression was hard and cold and threatening. 'We have the power of the sun in our hands. Ask your governments. They will deny it, but they know this is true. We have killed the President of the United States, we will give you more signs so that you can prepare. And prepare you must. This is a new era. This can be a new beginning. We will, for a short while, have the chance to throw off the shackles that bind us. On the zenith, when the sun is at its peak, the sky will burn. We will destroy this artificial fabric of your lives. We will raze cities. We will sear the artifice of man from this planet. And in its place we will put truth. Nature. Reality. Don't look to the TV stations and the newspapers to tell you what to do. They won't be there, not for a while. Look to yourselves, your own hearts. And afterwards, when the governments and the dictatorships have no chains around your legs, when the sky is clear and blue, and the air is fit to breathe, you will thank us. You will rebuild humanity, and the world we inhabit, and you will do it well.'

In our memory, she thought. She smiled, then beckoned to Katayama to pan out, move slowly back in the room. 'This is yet to come. There are evil men who will try to seek us out and kill us to prevent this happening. This is pointless. There is no time. And we have right upon our side. They infiltrate their agents in our midst. Thinking we are some kind of god, they try to plant a Judas among us.'

She bent down, awkwardly, toward Tina, felt her hair. The girl looked at Charley, looked nervously at the camera, lost for words.

'This isn't going to happen,' Charley said, and motioned for Joe to cut the video. There was an awkward silence in the room. Tina broke it with a pained smile. 'That was great.'

'No,' Charley said, gazing into her face. 'Are you one of us now?'

'Oh yes!' Tina seemed lost.

'Can you feel Gaia? The mother?'

'I guess so,' she said quietly.

On the other side of the room, Katayama had parked the camera, leaning on the tripod, taking in the whole scene at the sofa, the two women, one still, one crouched awkwardly on the floor. Charley Pascal looked across at him; he nodded. She touched Tina Blackshire's face. The skin was hot and pale and damp.

'This isn't for any reason of betrayal,' she said. 'Not for that at all.'

Tina Blackshire blinked. 'Betrayal?'

'You don't need to say anything, Tina. It doesn't matter. None of us matter as individuals, only as a whole, as a family. And you are a part of that, whatever has happened between us.'

There were tears in the girl's eyes. She didn't know where to look. Joe Katayama was moving across the room, taking care to keep out of the way of the camera.

'I don't know what you mean, Charley. Betrayal? I…' She wiped at her face with her bare arm. Her eyes were glassy. 'I didn't like making it with you, Charley. It was nothing personal. That's all. I didn't really want to do it.'

'Nothing matters any more, Tina. Nothing except the gentle sleep, in the arms of the Mother.'

'Charley,' she sobbed, 'maybe there are things we could talk about. Things I could tell you.'

Joe Katayama stood over her, reached down, and placed his hands on her shoulders. She went quiet on the instant. His thumbs felt like hard sheaths of muscle against the tendons of her neck.

'We all go in peace, Tina,' Charley said. 'How many can expect that?'

'Charley?'

Tina Blackshire's voice was slurred. Joe Katayama's thumbs found the two carotid arteries in her neck, pushed there, insistently, not hurting, just relentlessly, not letting go. Tina Blackshire found that, with the pressure, came something that ran beneath the threshold of pain, a gentle, rhythmic compulsion to close her eyes, relax into the thrumming sound of her own heart beating, trying to keep her alive.

'In sleep there is peace,' Charley said. 'And this peace comes to us all in the end. There is nothing to fear. Making and unmaking are part of the same process. From our bodies springs a new world.'

Tina's eyes were dry now. Her mouth had turned cold and tasted metallic. The room was fading, and the shadows were the colour of blood. 'Mother,' she said, her voice the thin rasp of shrivelled autumn leaves on arid ground.

Joe Katayama bent down, wound his arms around her neck, stiffened his upper body, then, in one single, sweeping movement, twisted hard, snapped the spine. There was a harsh, inhuman breaking noise. The girl died with a grunt, a sudden, animal expulsion of air from her lungs. Katayama relaxed his grip. Her head hung off her shoulders at an awkward, sickening angle. A sudden gush of blood came out of the corner of her mouth, ran thickly down her chin. He let the body slip gently to the floor. A brown stain was spreading down Tina Blackshire's pale shins, underneath the simple floral shift. There was a distinct smell in the room. Katayama walked over and turned off the video.

'Give it to them to edit, Joe,' she said. 'Then tell them about Tina. You did well.'

Katayama nodded, his flat face expressionless, although she was sure something was moving there inside him. He took the cassette out of the video camera and headed for the door.

Charley Pascal looked at the body at her feet, fallen in an odd, unnatural shape, like a rag doll that had been dropped on the carpet. There should have been something to cry for just then, but she couldn't figure out what it was.