Solstice

'I guess we were stupid,' Schulz said. 'Look for someplace within range where they could site a dish, Michael. The angle on the receptor at the dome is fairly shallow. My guess is they must have the last antenna at three thousand feet or more. Which means they probably have a line of dishes running back to their control centre. No one's going to find a place to build a base at that altitude without us knowing.'

Lieberman scanned the horizon through a pair of binoculars and glanced at the chart. The seaward side of the range had to be out. There was no obvious place for a base, and the forest was too thick. But on the landward side, the terrain ran away into a complex formation of sharp, dramatic valleys and long, bare headlands, tumbling all the way down to a plateau at around a thousand feet.

'Think about it,' Davis said, holding the helicopter in hover. 'We know they're not on the seaward side. We know they can't be on the island plain — that would be too public and the distance would probably be too great.'

'So they're somewhere in that mess,' Lieberman said, looking at the rolling, tumbling landscape in front of them. The machine dropped suddenly, lurching to one side. Davis struggled with the controls, brought it back to straight and level.

'Sorry. Turbulence.'

'My.' Lieberman stifled a gastric burp. Then he put the glasses to his eyes once more and surveyed a rocky spur that stood a good eight hundred feet beneath the summit of Puig Roig. 'Close in on that.'

The helicopter moved forward, starting to descend. 'Got it,' Davis said, and Lieberman found himself envying the pilot's eyesight. Even with the glasses, it still looked like a grey blur to him.

The machine moved swiftly to close the gap, then Davis put it into hover thirty feet away from the rock face. The dish had been disguised, a little half-heartedly, with some brushwood. Lieberman pulled out the videophone, pointed the lens out of the front of the helicopter.

'This look right, Irwin?'

'Yeah,' the remote voice replied. 'Where is it?'

'About half a mile southwest of the dome.'

'Got to be more in the line, Michael. There's nowhere to run a base close to there. Look for the receptor antenna. It's like a smaller dish, with a rectangular box in it. Where that's fixed on the thing, that's lining up with the next link in the chain.'

'There,' Davis said instantly. It was to one side of the main antenna, pointing down, back into a narrow valley. The helicopter turned away from the mountain and began to descend through the huge cleft in the rock.

'You know where we're going?'

'Just like a treasure hunt, old man.' Davis grinned. 'One clue leads on to the next.'

They watched the dark, narrow valley come up to greet them. The shadows embraced the little metal machine as it fell. Abruptly, the interior of the aircraft felt cold. Lieberman turned round, watched Bevan mutely hugging the weapon, Mo holding Annie in her arms.

'You two okay?' he said. They nodded.

'Don't throw up, Michael,' Annie said.

'Hadn't even occurred to me.'

'There!' Davis was pointing to another dish, half-hidden in a small clump of scrubby pine.

'We're still nowhere near something that looks like a base,' Lieberman said. The helicopter bounced up to the rock face, stopped ten feet from the dish, Davis peering at the thing, looking for a pointer.

'Like I said.' Davis smiled. 'It's a treasure hunt.' And then the Squirrel dived again.

'Why not?' Joe Katayama wouldn't let this one go. He was annoying her, there was no escaping the fact.

'Because I said so.'

'Eve just left. Everyone else is gone now. It's just you and me. If something goes wrong, if they do find us, they could turn this around.'

'Joe, Joe.' The dope was in her head, she could feel it, but that didn't make her weak or crazy. If anything, it strengthened her, made her sense what was happening more effectively than ever. 'Have you forgotten why we're doing this? Not to harm people. Not to harm the world. For Gaia. And she's with us. You can't feel that, I know. But you have to believe me. It's so.'

'I believe we risk jeopardizing everything by leaving this system open. Give me the code, Charley. Let me set the program in stone, then destroy the dish link. That way no one can touch it.'

'And no one gets to see this through, correct any errors along the way.'

He made a sour face, sat down next to her wheelchair, and folded his arms. 'Charley, if this is about being scared…'

She closed her eyes and let out a long, pained sigh. 'Scared? Joe. I am the woman who's turning the world on its head. I don't know how much blood is on my hands. Do you think this is because I'm scared?'

'I need the code. Please. Give me the code.'

'It's time for you to leave,' she said icily. 'I don't need you any more, Joe. Go. With my love. With my respect. Don't push this any further. I wouldn't want those things put in jeopardy.'

And you don't know how to do it without me, Joe, do you? she added silently.

It was suddenly plain to her. For all his skill, for all the work he put into setting up the fake dome, getting hot-wired into the real one, Joe was lost on the network. Without her, he could only watch.

'No. You're not a god, Charley. You're not always right. There's something happened in your head that means you don't see straight any more, and I can't allow that. We have to go through with this, all the way, and we have to make sure no one stops us.'

'You have no faith. You have strength, Joe. You have a terrible strength, like men do. But you have no faith. And in the end you're as stupid as the rest of them. You should go now. You don't understand those figures coming in about the storm. It's erratic. It's changing. I can't just leave it alone.' His cold Asian eyes watched her. He was quiet, and in this silence Charley Pascal tried to remember: Where did Joe appear from? And failed. Her head was running down into oblivion, like a clock unwinding, like a child's toy with a failing battery.

'Yeah,' he said unpleasantly. 'Stupid.' Then got up and walked for the door.

'It's your time, Joe!' she yelled.

Katayama walked over to the corner of the room. 'What the hell are you doing?' Charley screamed. 'Something you can't, Charley.' Rage, red rage.

'Fuck you, fuck every last part of you!' He stopped, looked back at her over his shoulder, and for a brief moment she felt afraid. 'You crazy bitch,' he said quietly. 'Just stay there, dying. If you want a shit from now on, crawl to the can on your own. I don't carry you any more. Understand?'

'Joe?' The old Charley, good Charley, scared Charley, watching the last person she would ever see in this world walk out of the room, a fog of seething anger around his head. 'Touch that fucking system, Joe, and I'll see you in hell, I promise that. You leave those things alone.'

'Yeah,' he grunted, going out the door. 'You come make me.' And was gone.

Charley Pascal wanted to scream, wanted to curse this iron frame that trapped her. But her thoughts felt messed up, the world wouldn't stay upright. Her head began to spin.

Somewhere overhead, soft and repetitive, was the beating of rotor blades, getting louder, getting nearer, falling from the clear blue sky like ghostly rain.

It looked like a miniature version of La Finca. When they got to the end of the line of dishes, down in the heart of the valley, still a good fifteen hundred feet above sea level, they found Yasgur's Farm — the real one, Lieberman knew that immediately. It was accessible only through a single dirt track and stood in a meadow of parched yellow grass, the odd poppy waving blood-red out of the soil. Golden stone, a four-square barn of a house, with a few farm buildings at its periphery. And no sign of life. No sign it was anything but deserted.