As they multiplied, they began to avoid the coastal waters rich in natural diatoms. Their role in the oceanic ecology was temporary and there must always be enough phytoplankton to feed the krill. They confined their bloom to less nutrient-rich waters far from land.
They grew so numerous that autumn that in places they covered the surface water in crystalline slicks hundreds of miles in diameter, their opalescent coats bouncing rainbows from the swell.
Then they began their significant work: They began to devour atmospheric carbon and bind it to themselves, as the phytoplankton do, but more efficiently—voraciously.
The oceans combed the air of C02.
The population of the Earth plummeted daily.
In the Greater World, a few acts remained malum in se but none were malum prohibitum. The inhibitions of a thousand generations had been swept away by Contact. The last devotees of the flesh celebrated their bodies even as their bodies grew pale and light.
They danced to silent music in abandoned mosques, made love in infinite variation in the shadows of cathedrals. They laughed and embraced and surrendered their bodies by the light of Arab sunsets, Oriental noons, African dawns.
Daily, they vanished into the Greater World; and their abandoned skins, like phantom armies, roamed the streets of Djakarta, Beijing, Reykjavik, Capetown, until they crumbled to dust and the dust was borne off by the rising wind.
Matt Wheeler picked up a school notebook at Delisle’s Stationery—where Miriam Flett used to buy Glu-Stiks and paper cutters before the Observer ceased publication in October—and began a private journal.
According to Rachel, everyone started fresh at Contact. Basically, they entered a new state of being. It’s not the Last Judgment—no sins are punished. It’s not the Judeo-Christian paradise at all. More like the ancient Greek idea of the Golden Age, when men were so pious they socialized with the gods.
“Everything is forgiven,” Rachel said. “Nothing is forgotten.”
I try to believe this. It sounds noble. But what does it really mean? It’s hard to imagine guys who wore Cartier watches joined in spiritual union with Third World sharecroppers. Or, much worse, men who battered their infant children to death allowed to live forever. Nirvana for mass murderers. Terrorists surviving their victims by a millennium or more.
Unless they’ve changed, it isn’t just. And if they’ve changed so radically—it isn’t human.
Rachel admitted as much. The human baggage is too unsavory to carry into a new life.
She claimed the real punishment for such people is to understand what they were—to truly understand it.
I suppose this is possible, though it beggars comprehension. For her sake, of course, I want it to be true.
He chewed on the end of his pencil and decided he might as well ask the big questions: There was nothing to be lost by honesty, not at this late hour.
But what about those of us who stayed behind? What made it possible or necessary for us to turn down immortality? Why are we here?
None of us seems extraordinary in any outward particular. The opposite, if anything.
What is it we have?
What is it we lack?
The next morning, Beth Porter phoned and said she wanted to be a nurse and would Matt be willing to help her?
He asked her to repeat the question. He hadn’t slept much the night before… these days, his eating and sleeping habits didn’t encourage a lucid state of mind. He’d lost fifteen pounds since November. His reflection in mirrors took him by surprise: Who was this skinny, hollow-eyed man?
“I think you should teach me how to be a nurse,” Beth said. “I’ve been thinking about this. You’re the only doctor in town, right? So maybe you need an assistant. At least somebody who knows what to do in an emergency. This storm that’s coming, for instance. Say a lot of people get hurt. Maybe I could at least put on a bandage or stop some bleeding.”
He closed his eyes. “Beth… I appreciate what you’re saying, but—”
“This is not a come-on. Jesus, I hope you don’t think that.” Pause. “I’m serious. Maybe I can save somebody’s life somewhere down the road.”
“Beth—”
“I mean, I feel so useless just sitting here in this room all by myself.”
He sighed. “Do you know CPR?”
“I’ve seen it on TV. But I don’t know how to do it, no.”
“You should.”
Joey Commoner used the handicam he’d stolen from the Newcomb house to videotape Buchanan.
Joey had heard all this talk about the weather. If half the talk was true, there might not be much left of Buchanan in a month or so. He didn’t love this ugly little bay town, but he liked the idea of saving it on videotape while it was still intact. Joey Commoner, the town’s last historian.
So he drove up and down the main streets and some distance into the suburbs, guiding his motorcycle with one hand and running the camcorder with the other. He drove slowly in order to capture all the detail.
The images he played back on his basement VCR were unnerving and strange: empty streets bouncing when the Yamaha bumped over buckled asphalt; empty storefronts, empty sidewalks, empty buildings in whitewashed ranks all the way to the Marina and the cold winter sea. Empty everything.
It made him feel peculiarly alone. It was the feeling you might get, Joey thought, if you were locked inside some big mall at night with the mannequins and the mice.
It made him want to ride over to Tom Kindle’s place and work the radio. But that was probably a bad idea; since the big cities began their migration, Joey had been edged off the radio by Kindle and Bob Ganish and that asshole Chuck Makepeace. Gimme the microphone, this is important. Well, fuck it. He was tired of the radio. He had better things to do than DXing foreigners who couldn’t even speak English.
He videotaped some important personal places. His basement. His street. The street where Beth Porter used to live. The motel she’d moved into.
Hidden behind a highway abutment where she couldn’t see him, he videotaped Beth climbing into a white Volkswagen and driving north.
Beth didn’t have a driver’s license. She had only started driving since Contact, and it was funny how she drove, a clumsy jerk-and-stop. He wondered where she was going.
Where was there to go?
He watched the car bump out of sight.
She might be shopping. Idly curious, or so he told himself, Joey waited a prudent few minutes and then followed on his Yamaha. He checked the empty mall lots along the highway for her car, but it wasn’t there.
Visiting somebody?
So who was to visit?
Slow suspicions formed in Joey’s mind.
Not that he cared what she did. He hadn’t seen her much lately. He wasn’t sure what Beth meant to him or used to mean to him. A few good Friday nights.
But he remembered the way she used to undress for him, shy and bold at the same time. He remembered her shrugging out of an old sleeveless T-shirt in a dark room, unbuttoning her pants with one hand while she watched him watch. The memory provoked a knot of tension in his belly. Not desire. More like fear.
He rode past Kindle’s house, past Bob Ganish’s ugly little ranch house.
No Volkswagen.
Then he drove past the hillside house where Matt Wheeler lived. Her car was in the driveway.
Joey parked his motorcycle in a garage half a block away. He approached the house along a line of hedges and used the camcorder’s zoom to spy on the doctor’s house. But the blinds had all been pulled.