'I think,' she said, 'we should get out of the plane. As quickly as possible. Get away from anything that is flammable or liable to attract an electrical discharge.'
The co-pilot’s opaque sunglasses were fixed on her. A line of blood stood hard and red in one of his nostrils. 'You mean we just stand out in the open, ma'am? And wait for this thing to come our way?'
CHAPTER 39
Shared Love
'It's a bad place,' Gunther said. 'It deserves what's coming to it.'
Sundog was primed now, sat in the sky with fire in its belly. The solar cycle was on the rise. Charley felt nervous. All the tests, all the minor experiments they had conducted — everything before had been a prelude to this event. They had learned so much, how inflexible and difficult to control the satellite could be. They had learned too how important it was to monitor the flux of the cycle, to time the moment they captured it precisely so that they stole as much of its energy as possible.
But there was still too much guesswork, and the cycle itself was so unpredictable. Time was running out for them as much as for anyone else. They had to be realistic, they had to accept that there were limits to what they could achieve. This was a gigantic instrument of destruction, but it concerned her that the precise way in which it would manifest itself was still, to some extent, in doubt. In this mix of fire and radiation, this whirring digital demon that slipped into the networks of the world and devoured them from inside, there remained uncertainties. Some experiment, some proof was needed, not just as a sign for the world, but also for her own peace of mind.
'No,' she said, bringing her mind back onto the small circle of figures around her. 'This isn't a time to think of good and bad, Gunther. We're not avenging angels. We're not punishing anyone. This is about a change in direction. A return to a natural order. Equilibrium. Balance.'
She closed her eyes and smiled: It was a bad place all the same. She could remember the gaudy, heartless streets, the phony smiles they met everywhere, the tawdry glamour. Vegas, it seemed to her, epitomized what was false and dishonest and wicked about humankind. That it should present such an opportunity to make the sign gave her no regret whatsoever.
Billy Jo asked, 'What will happen to them? Will they all die?'
'We don't know,' Joe Katayama, sitting cross-legged on the floor, said. 'How can we? Not all of them. Maybe not even many. That's not the point.'
You could think and you could dream and you could calculate, Charley thought, but in the end there was always the mystery. People misunderstood the signs: It was believing that the mystery could be removed that led you into seeking your own petty godhood in the first place.
'We walked in darkness,' she said. 'And then Gaia gave us hope, gave us light. For everything. For the world. Can't you feel it?'
Joe Katayama said, a thin smile starting to crack his face, 'I can feel it.' And someone else too. In a moment, there was laughter in the room, and it was genuine, she knew that. It would be strange if they didn't feel some foreboding, but still there was a close, compelling certainty that drove them forward. They remained a family even in the face of this forced dispersal.
'And you think,' Gunther said, 'that we really will change things? So soon?'
She nodded urgently. 'Of course. Why would we be here otherwise? This is a world ripe for change, Gunther. Like a caterpillar emerging from the chrysalis. Think how much we have achieved already. Closing the markets. Shaking the apparatus of the state.'
'But,' Billy Jo said, 'people aren't exactly changing right now. I've been following what's going on through the Web, on TV. People are scared. But I get the impression that for some of them this is just a way of getting a free day or two off work while they wait for the government to fix it. Like a power outage or an earthquake.'
'What do you expect them to say?' Charley replied instantly. 'That their world really is about to end? Change happens in your heart. Unless it begins there, it means nothing at all. And we will touch their hearts, we will make them look at themselves with fresh eyes.'
Joe Katayama said, 'It's a point, Charley. Maybe we ought to have told them a little more.'
'No,' she said. 'People are blind. People are stupid. They want proof. So we'll give them proof. And when it happens, it will be so big, so unavoidable, they'll know.'
They didn't argue. They never argued these days. 'The proof starts now. In Vegas. And here too. We have to move on. We have to disperse.'
They watched her, hanging on every word. 'We all know, through this shared love we possess, where this leads. We can't inflict this damage, this pain on these people — and that will be real — without showing them that we share it ourselves. This is our shared grief, our common legacy. We all move forward, hand in hand, to this fate.'
There was silence in the hot, airless room. Some were holding hands. Most looked happy. In this state, such closeness between them, it became easy to think with a single mind, she thought. It was when people were separated, moved outside the family, that they ran the risk of becoming lost.
'We will redeem ourselves, like them, in pace with the world. Joe?' He looked up at her from the floor, a thin smile on his face, content, she thought, like all of them. And he would be the last to leave the nest. He was needed to see this final stage to its conclusion.
'Yes?'
'How many of us are there now?'
'Twenty-four.'
'Twice the number as there were disciples,' Charley said, happy, relishing the love in their faces. 'Slowly, over the next eighteen hours, we disperse. You must leave the farm, go back into the outside world. The die is cast here. We've got the programs to prime Sundog. Someone has to stay, see it through. From now on you must start on a new journey. What we've achieved is good and important. But people will kill you for it if they know. Until the awakening, until they see this is a new beginning, we remain silent. We remain apart. We wait.'
Billy Jo put up her hand. There were tears in her eyes. Charley watched them roll down her cheeks. Tears of joy, she guessed. There was, in this fast-diminishing space in front of them, a hard, gripping form of ecstasy that wouldn't let them go.
'You're dying, Charley,' Billy Jo said. 'We won't see you again.'
'We're all dying. I'm no different than any of you, except that I have this knowledge that lets me say goodbye to you now.'
'All the same. I thought I'd be here. I thought I'd hold your hand.'
Charley touched the soft white cotton of her shirt with pale, shaking fingers. 'I wish it could be like that. But we can't jeopardize the very reason we're here. We're smaller than Gaia.'
Gunther nodded. 'Charley's right, Billy Jo. This is the way it has to be.'
'Okay.'
'Only love lies between us,' Charley said, 'and that love survives wherever we are.' She leaned down from the wheelchair, took Billy Jo's hand, and Gunther's too. 'If you like, if Joe is agreeable, you can be the first to leave. Together.'
They looked at each other and smiled.
CHAPTER 40
Trompe l'Oeil
Room 2341 of the Mirage Hotel looked directly south along the Strip, out past Caesar's Palace in the adjoining block, with its marble figures and fake porticoes and colonnades glistening white in the midday heat, past Bellagio, New York New York, and the big gleaming hulk of MGM, with the towers of Excalibur and the peak of the Luxor pyramid in the distance. Somewhere beyond that, Sam Jenkinson dimly recognized, was the airport where they had arrived, jet-lagged and exhausted, from England two days before. But no circling planes marked its location. The emergency had arrived in Vegas.