Schulz had closed his eyes and asked Mo Sinclair to watch the wires, the Net sites, any source of information she could find, and try to monitor what Charley might be up to as the solar storm began to rise to its peak. Lieberman watched her working, saw the shock in her face, then sat down by her side, began to help, at one point touched her hand, felt good that she returned the pressure. And like this they turned these facts, figures, and pictures into a running report that chilled the blood, and brought home the true nature of the event
that was shaping around them.
This was a global catastrophe by its nature, not a contiguous sequence of discrete occurrences. It moved over the earth slowly, at the speed of the dawn, and breathed its poisonous fire in no particular order, to no discernible pattern. To Mo Sinclair it felt like being trapped in the path of an oncoming hurricane, unable to take your eye off this monstrous thing that was blotting out more and more of the horizon as it approached, and unable to move too. You might as well hope to dodge the footsteps of some fairy-tale giant who was stumbling drunkenly toward you. There was as much chance of salvation in standing where you were as trying to second-guess the program of this crazed, all-powerful leviathan.
There were such reports on the news wires. The storm had broken the precious digital thread that bound together the modern world, tied newspaper to radio station, TV network to the World Wide Web. Suddenly the conduit of information that had been taken for granted was leaking and flaky, and with this went the notion of currency, of validity. This was the digital world at its best and worst. Where the pipes held, the major channels came through with reports that were occasionally flimsy but at least held the promise of some grain of truth inside them. In the absence of fact, rumour raced in to fill the vacuum, and the Net was alive with dubious stories, half-baked theories, tales, and hearsay, multiplying around the world like some feverish digital bacteria. She found herself hating this junk, wishing it would go away. She didn't want to think about some of the crazier theories out there, the ones that said this was the end of everything, that Judgment Day was on us, and it was time for the earth to start cracking, the skeletons to start walking out of the ground.
What the storm did for some people, she realized, was strip away a layer from the outer part of themselves and let the baser, animal side that lay beneath come to the surface, grin insanely at the sky, and get on with the job of being 'free'. Chaos and freedom were close bedfellows and when that veneer of politeness, of community, of sensibility was destroyed, it was difficult to tell one from the other.
What she saw coming in from the sources she could rely on, the sporadic reports from CNN and the BBC running through the Web TV sites, only served to prove this. When the storm struck, people didn't stay inside. There was looting, there were riots. When the human animal was cornered, put into the tight, confined, inescapable space of the city and had the burning light of the sun in its face, not everyone wanted to curl up in a corner and dream of the good times. To some this catastrophe was welcome. It tore down the old world and put something wild and anarchic and new in its place. Which maybe was what Charley had wanted all along. And beneath this newness was something that, when Mo thought about it, was more terrifying than the prospect of cataclysm, of political upheaval, or of wide-scale fatality. Stripped of humanity, out in the open, beneath the feverish fire of the sun, people became something different, something that laughed at the very idea of an organized, decent, caring world. This rolling, teeming wave of fire didn't destroy the planet. What it unmade was the simple, accepted notion of society, and put cruel bedlam and the mindless, heated rage of pandemonium in its place.
The reliable information they could garner confirmed the scale of the devastation, and how ineffectual the measures taken to secure against it had proved. And these, she couldn't help thinking, were just the early reports. There could be much worse to come. According to both BBC and CNN a series of tsunamis that devastated the northern coasts of Japan had stirred some kind of millennial movement, led by local cults. Tokyo's subway had been occupied by sullen, terrified crowds, the red light district of Osaka destroyed by a machete-wielding mob. Secondary earthquakes devastated much of modern Kyoto but left the ancient temples standing, and it was here that the population congregated, scared, angry, vengeful. Martial law was put in place, as it was in most cities that lay in the path of the storm, but it was hard to persuade soldiers and the police to go on the streets to enforce it. These cities remained on a knife edge, even when the sky returned to normalcy. Once the storm was over, the streets became a little calmer. Some kind of amnesty for the rioting was being promised. Still, it was impossible to say when a semblance of normalcy might return.
From the main networks, they were able to gauge the amount of damage in the capitals from Japan through to Eastern Europe. It varied from minor — Moscow seemed to be untouched, if the reports were to be believed — to shocking. The ancient quarters of Tashkent and Samarkand were in flames, destroyed by sporadic fires and local earthquakes. The two remaining active nuclear reactors at Chernobyl seemed to have imploded upon themselves and dispatched into the clear golden sky a cloud of radioactive dust that threatened both Belarus and the Ukraine.
Telecommunications were a mess everywhere now, the chaos extending beyond the path of the storm. The TV people said that most Western governments planned to keep the markets shut until they could invent some way of reopening them without a massive, disastrous collapse of confidence. Stock prices had fallen so deeply that several major financial institutions and multinational corporations were technically bankrupt at the point of suspension.
Beneath the facts lay a churning ocean of rumour and misinformation, and she couldn't turn her face from it, however hard she tried. It was like driving past an accident on the freeway. The rumours ran unchecked and multiplied around the unofficial Web sites set up to monitor the storm. There was no way of verifying them. All she could do was read the snatched, illiterate dispatches, a chill going down the back of her spine, and wonder at the state of the world.
In Islamabad a solar observatory was torched by a chanting crowd of hysterical worshippers from a city mosque, and every one of the staff inside burned to death, some pushed back into the flames when they tried to escape. A mob in a remote village in Armenia destroyed its local church, built a pyre on the bare hillside, and burned everything that could be stripped from the ruin. Afterwards, they crowned a seven-year-old girl with a diadem made from metal foil, paraded her around on their shoulders from sunrise to midday. By then she was covered in burns, her skin peeling, and they ceremonially murdered the child in the village square. The local chief of police wielded the knife that was used to kill her. In Istanbul, the last song played by Bosphorus Rock 101 before the power failed was by U2. Bono sang, in a low, melancholy voice, 'I'm not the only one, who's staring at the sun.' Then the airwave disappeared in a sea of white noise.
With Lieberman working alongside her, Mo patiently stored this rising flood of venom and promised herself that one day the world would recover enough of its senses to sort the wheat from the chaff, tell her how much of this really happened, and how much lived inside the head of the mob.
Finally, some small voice inside chastising her for the order of things, she turned to the academic Net. Here they sifted through what data was still trickling through on the monitoring network that should, in another world, in another time, have leisurely recorded the course of events from apex to apogee, waited a few years, then produced some learned papers.