SOLDIER OF LIGHT

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

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Copyright © 1999 by Bill Fawcett & Associates, Inc.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

Produced by Bill Fawcett & Associates, Inc.

ISBN-10: 0-7434-1743-7

ISBN-13: 978-0-7434-1743-3

POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

Dedicated

to

Alexander Thomas Cool

“As I fall, one shall rise, stronger and more true.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank Jim Baen, Bill Fawcett, Carol Greenburg, Steve Lefevre, and Linn Prentis for their contributions to this project. Special thanks to Vernor Vinge for his cosmological inspiration, used with gracious permission.

ONE

AS THE CITY OF OAKLAND CROSSED THE TERMINATOR into night, Owen and Harley Keegan departed the store and entered the street. In the gathering darkness, they heard the first noises of a riot. From around the corner echoed a man’s shout, a shotgun blast, and a child’s wail. Harley muttered a curse. As he and Owen looked up and down the waterfront street, the rioting grew noisier. Men shouted in fighting anger; like a string of firecrackers, dozens of pistol shots popped in quick succession.

“We better get going,” Harley said and headed for the truck, parked next to the nautical hardware store.

Owen grabbed Harley’s arm. He stood, listening to the gunfire. Perhaps it was a trick of sound, but Owen thought he heard gunfire from the hills.

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “We can’t go driving up through Oakland. We better cross over to the island.”

“Alameda?” Harley asked.

“Yeah.”

“What are we going to do there?”

Smiling gently, Owen jostled the arm of his older, bigger brother. “Survive?”

Harley returned the smile. “Survival is good. You drive, then.”

They climbed into Harley’s truck, a midnight blue Ford Bronco with black windows and oversized tires. They dumped the bags of nautical hardware behind the front seats. Owen started the motor and backed the truck out of the lot. Harley popped open the glove box, revealing the flat metallic form of a Glock 9mm pistol. His hand moved toward the pistol, hesitated, then slammed shut the glove box, leaving the weapon inside.

Owen headed west, away from the sounds of the rioting. At first, they encountered no problems and little traffic. In minutes, they put several blocks behind them. Owen stopped behind two cars waiting for a light to change.

“Run the light,” Harley urged.

Owen wrenched the wheel over and drove the truck up onto the sidewalk. The big tires bounded over the curb and over cement parking stops. He cut through a gravel parking lot, tapped the brakes to allow a car to flash past, then pushed through the intersection. Horns blared.

Owen clutched the wheel and upshifted into third gear. He gunned the motor. Moments later, they crossed the old drawbridge over the estuary, tires humming against the steel grid of the bridge platform.

At the farside of the bridge, three men spread out to block the way.

“Go around them if you can,” Harley growled.

Owen glanced at the three men, who now stood, blocking the way, their hands empty. Owen braked, stopping the truck a few meters short of the men. Harley flipped open the glove box, but he didn’t reach for the pistol. Instead, his hand rested atop his knee, very close by.

“Watch them,” Harley said, softly.

One of the three men walked up to the driver’s window. Through the dark window, Owen could see the weatherworn, deeply lined face of a laborer who had worked outdoors all his life.

“Do you need some help?” the man asked. He had sad, rheumy, bloodshot eyes.

“No,” Owen answered.

Through the dark window, the weatherworn man studied Owen’s face.

“Don’t be killing anyone just yet,” he said, with a glance at Harley.

“No,” Owen said.

“We didn’t make this world,” the weatherworn man said. “We just found ourselves in it, just like any mother’s son. So have some consideration.”

“What do you want?” Owen asked.

“I was going to ask for money,” the man said. “But now I wonder what’s the good of that.”

“I don’t know,” Owen said, wondering whether the three men were on drugs.

“Maybe you could explain,” the weatherworn man said. “Maybe you could tell me what’s going on.”

“I don’t know,” Owen said. “All I know is that there’s a riot behind us, and we’d like to get going.”

Puzzled, the man looked up and studied the sky.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It feels like I don’t know the world anymore. Didn’t much like the way things used to be, but I thought I understood them, and now I don’t know what to think.”

Harley muttered at Owen to drive.

“I feel so old,” the man said. “I feel like I’m a million years old.”

He stepped back from the truck and raised one hand to his forehead as if pained. With the other hand, he gestured for his two fellows to step back. Owen gunned the motor, slammed the shift into first gear and roared past them. The truck sped down the decrepit road, past the aluminum-sided warehouses and tool shops.

Harley flipped shut the glove box. “Nuts,” he muttered. “Nice of you to stop to chat with them.”

“What was I supposed to do? Run them down?”

“You tell me, Owen. What if they had had guns in the back of their belts?”

Owen looked over at his brother, disturbed by his unusual bloody-mindedness. Lately people seemed more tense than usual, but his older brother had always been steady in tight situations.

“Haven’t killed anyone yet,” Owen answered. “Don’t know why I should start today.”

“The whole world’s going nuts,” Harley said.

“The world’s been nuts for as long as I can remember,” Owen said. “But I must’ve been sick the day they were handing out the licenses to kill.”

“Christ on a crutch,” Harley said, disgruntled. “Who needs a license?”

Owen looked askance at his brother, trying to determine if he was serious. At first, Harley ignored Owen, but then his eye gleamed, a dimple appeared in his beard-roughened cheek, and he smiled mischievously. Together, the two brothers laughed, as if the riot was a backdrop for a private joke.

Without further talk, they drove down the length of Alameda Island, taking the Bayshore Road, with its scenic view of the San Francisco Bay. By now it was twenty minutes after sunset. Across the bay, the hills of San Francisco had grown dark and shapeless. The highest reaches of the clear sky still held light from the set sun. Reflecting this light, the waters of the bay glowed as brilliantly as if electrified. The water clung to the failing light long moments after the earth had accepted the darkness.

By the time they crossed over to Bay Farm Island and passed the Oakland airport, it was fully dark. Owen drove with the headlights on bright. He was worried about Kate and Constance, alone in the house high in the Oakland hills. He crossed over to a residential street that climbed the hills through a peaceful suburb. Twenty minutes later, they arrived home.

Waiting by the door, calmly, Kate embraced him.

“I was worried,” she said, her voice sounding close to his ear.

“There was some trouble,” Owen answered.

“Half-a-Keegan’s worth, if that,” Harley said. “Two Keegans were overkill.” Then he shouted, “Princess!” and strode past them.

Owen and Kate’s daughter, Constance, was sitting in her playroom off the front hall, studying the patterns of water cascades in an executive office sculpture. It was her favorite pastime. Harley scooped the ten-year-old girl into his arms. “Hello, princess!” he said, too loudly. Constance ignored him in a way that was far more profound than an ordinary child’s distraction. For Constance, it seemed that her uncle simply didn’t exist. Harley kissed her neck. Face averted, Constance struggled until Harley let her down to the floor. She returned to her study of the water patterns as if the interruption had never taken place.

“There’s riots,” Kate said.

“I know,” Owen said. “We had to dodge one. What started them this time?”

“No one knows,” Kate said. Slowly she withdrew from the embrace. She was a solid, powerful woman. Her long and oval face and large dark brown eyes were framed by long, black hair. Her full lips were set now in a serious press. “But something happened a few hours ago.”

“What?”

“The vice president shot himself.”

“The vice president?” Owen asked, in the stupid way of the shocked.

“He went for a walk in his garden and shot himself in the head.”

“What? Why?”

“He mentioned something at a meeting this morning,” Kate said. “He complained about people reading his mind.”

“The vice president lost it! I can’t believe it.”

“It’s just getting too crazy,” Kate said. “We’re leaving just in time. Did you get the parts you need?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to leave tonight.”

“In the dark?”

Kate nodded seriously and leaned against the doorway into Constance’s room. Harley was sitting with Constance, watching the fall of water between the sculpture’s panes of glass. The older brother was larger and more muscular than Owen. He slicked his hair straight back. Today he was wearing a tailored white cotton shirt with a stand-up collar. His pants and his boots were black leather. Harley was maintaining a steady stream of commentary, which Constance didn’t seem to hear. Like many adults, Harley had determined to act as if Constance’s condition did not exist.

“We should take Harley,” Kate said.

Owen felt a jealous twinge.

“Why?” he asked. “Don’t you think I can take care of you?”

Kate shot her husband a look. “No,” she said. “I know you can. I was thinking about Harley.”

Owen leaned through the doorway. “What do you say, Harley?” he asked. “Want to circumnavigate the globe?”

Harley laughed. Lately his laughter held a false note, as if forced. “I’ll leave that to you guys. I own too much of this town to let it go to hell.”

“You should come,” Kate said.

“Nah,” Harley said. “I’m going to wait until they burn down the joint. Then I’m going to buy up the land dirt-cheap. Chaos and war. That’s when real fortunes are made.”

“This isn’t a game, Harley,” Owen said.

“Oh, I think it is,” Harley said. “And it’s just starting to get interesting.”

In lifelong satiation with his older brother’s self-confidence, Owen turned, worked the childproof latch, and stepped into the living room, which was stacked with the supplies for the voyage. He picked up the checklist. Something important was missing.

Shotgun shells, double-ought, two cases. Bang-stick. Compass and sextant. Carpentry tools, the same that I used to build the Nepenthe . . .

Owen saw a flash of himself: a medium-height man, young, fit, brown hair, brown eyes, from the outside so ordinary. He saw himself surrounded by his supplies and he thought himself ridiculous: a paranoid, a garden-variety survivalist. The kind of man who destroyed his family in an absurd attempt to save them. He had a special responsibility, too, toward Constance, but he was about to embark on a circumnavigation because no country met his standards of safety. Because he thought his family would be safer at sea than anywhere ashore.

Then confidence surged up within him. He knew himself. He trusted his eyes to see and his mind to think. The world was deteriorating in a strange and dangerous way. He was a man. He could take the responsibility. They would go. Anyone who tried to harm Kate or Constance would have to go through him.

Owen lifted up the box with his wooden bowls. He had packed five: Thirst for Air, Continuum, AnNautilus, Mourning Star, and Rondulus. Spalted wood turned and carved and polished along the lines of a Zen form. A Japanese collector had offered his agent $15,000 for AnNautilus. Although Owen enjoyed some prestige within the American fine art community, his most ardent patrons were Japanese, who seemed to connect with the simple elegance of his work. In any case, Owen had rejected the offer. Constance sometimes studied AnNautilus for hours. Owen turned it in his hands and gazed at the convoluted shape, which seemed to invert upon itself when seen from different perspectives. As delicate a thread as it was, it was one of the few connections between his world and the world where Constance lived. He would take it with him.

The childproof latch rattled and the door swung open. Kate walked into the room and began to reorganize the medical supplies. She worked in the emergency room of downtown Oakland’s Mercy City Hospital as a nurse. She had helped to save hundreds of lives, including the lives of children with bullet and knife wounds. Owen had never seen her cry, even when the doctors had told them that their daughter would never lead a normal life, when they had labeled her still undiagnosed condition as autism. He had asked Kate why she never cried.

“Someday the world will stop,” she had said. “And then I’ll have all of eternity to cry.”

So Owen believed that deep within her, his wife had enough tears to fill the well of eternity, yet while she was able to fight, she had no time for tears.

Harley joined them. Owen looked at his big brother.

“You should come with us, Harley,” he said. “It’s just getting too nuts.”

Harley laughed with an edge of anxiety that was disturbing to Owen, who had thought his brother was fearless.

TWO

AFTER MIDNIGHT, A BANK OF DENSE FOG ROLLED INTO the bay. When Owen snapped on the high beams, fog-caught light dazzled his eyes. Switching back to the low beams, he could see only the yellow series of reflectors along the shoulder, but at least he could follow the road.

He was worrying about the shotgun, in its case in the back of the truck, and wishing it were within reach to him now. They approached the harbor, wending their way through the warehouse district. On one street corner, under the foggy cone of a streetlight, hooded figures guarded the night. As the truck approached the intersection, one man stepped off the curb and made a hand signal. Owen swerved into the opposite lane and rolled through the red light. He heard laughter as the fog swallowed the group of men.

“A friend of yours?” Kate asked. She sat next to Owen. Constance lay curled asleep, her head upon her mother’s lap. “What, you owe him money?”

“He might think so.”

“So rude to run a red light to avoid an old friend,” Kate said.

“Actually I think he was no friend of ours.”

“Now we’ll never know.”

Owen attempted a shortcut through the waterfront district. They lost their way among huge warehouses. The public roads led to private ways, full of unexpected turns and one-way alleys. In the fog, they followed a one-way alley that led to a chained gate.

While they were lost, Kate said nothing. Calmly she stroked the head of her sleeping daughter. One of the aspects of their daughter’s condition that they prized was her ability to tolerate, even to appreciate, a physical relationship with her parents. As Owen backed the truck past pyramids of barrels of industrial waste, he asked, “What do you think?”

“Turn left back at the intersection,” Kate said quietly.

Owen made the turn. Minutes later, they came across a public road and headed for the marina.

Constance awoke, sat up, looked at the fog beyond the windshield, laughed, and lay back down to sleep.

They arrived at the marina’s entrance. The guard lowered the chain. This late at night, no one was moving about, although Owen could see lights in a few live-aboard boats. Half of the marina was empty. He drove the truck to the head of the pier, close to the gate, got out and walked around to Kate’s side.

“I’ll help you carry the stuff,” Kate said.

“Good, but stay here a moment and I’ll take Constance aboard.”

He scooped up his daughter and hugged her so that her head rested on his shoulder. Almost eleven now, she was heavy. Her complete relaxation made her seem heavier still. Since Constance was warm with sleep, Kate threw a small comforter over her, so the foggy night air would not chill her. Owen walked down the steps to the gate and worked the combination lock with one hand.

The Nepenthe was tied to the far end of the pier. The thick rain-rotted boards of the pier buckled slightly under his feet. With more than half of the lamps burned out, in the dark fog he didn’t see the old woman until he was almost next to her. At first he thought she was a bundle of black rags leaning against a pylon, but then she turned her face and he realized she was a woman.

She looked up at Owen with cataract-grayed eyes. Her withered face, crisscrossed with wrinkles, contorted in a rictus of a mirthless toothless smile.

“Where are you taking the little angel?” she asked.

“To the boat,” Owen said, too surprised not to answer.

“And where is the boat taking her?” the old woman asked.

“Depends,” Owen said.

“On the wind and the rain and the currents in the waters,” the woman said. “On the sky, on things that fall and things that rise up. Take me with you.”

“No, I’m afraid—”

“Take me with you,” the old woman pleaded, laying her bent, arthritic hands on Owen’s arm. “Take me with you, away from the fog and the city and the great fires. I’ve seen the great fires and I’ve seen you, my lord, my strong master, rise up tall in the sky, and even the monsters could not break you. Take me with you, my lord!”

Owen pulled himself away from the old woman. He took several steps backward, but she followed, clutching at his arm. Constance woke up and looked about, paying no particular attention to the old woman.

“Stand back!” Owen finally shouted, his voice hard and harsh and full of command. As if he had struck her, the old woman fell back and cowered next to a rain-soaked pylon.

“Beware the monsters,” the woman sobbed. “They want the little angel. Take me with you, my master.”

Owen turned and strode toward the end of the pier. Muffled with the wet distance and the fog, the woman’s voice followed him. “Who will protect me, master, if you leave me here?”

At the end of the pier, under a strong light, waited the Nepenthe. Forty-five feet in length, wooden-hulled, teak-decked, a substantial beam. An oceangoing boat, a cruiser. Her mainsail lay wrapped under blue tarp along the boom. Owen stepped across, boarding the boat with the surety of its master. He worked the lock on the hatchway and then carried Constance below, rolling her into her berth in the starboard cabin.

Back on deck, he locked the hatchway, with his sleeping daughter alone below. He leaped to the pier and strode briskly down its length, crossing long intervals of darkness between each pool of fog-caught light. He didn’t see the old woman.

At the truck, Kate had pulled the tarp and unloaded some supplies.

“You didn’t see an old woman, did you?” Owen asked.

“No. I didn’t see anyone.”

“There’s an old crazy woman on the pier. Leave that stuff here and come back with me. You can wait on the boat. I’ll carry everything.”

Kate was already running toward the pier. Owen followed, but Kate quickly disappeared into the first dark stretch. He caught of glimpse of her under the next lamplight. Moments later, he stood at her side aboard the Nepenthe. She opened the lock and went down below.

Constance was all right; she was still asleep. “Stay with her,” Owen called, then he locked the hatch with both of them below.

For the next hour, he carried the supplies to the boat. At no time did he see the old woman or any other living creature. Despite the clamminess of the night air, he was soaked in sweat before he finished filling the cockpit with the supplies. He parked and locked the truck, then returned to open the hatch.

“She’s still asleep,” Kate said. “Did you see that woman again?”

“No.”

“I wonder where she went to.”

“I don’t know.”

Owen handed the supplies, one by one, down to Kate, who stored them in the galley and the two-berth cabin they used for guests. When they were done, Owen stood and arched his back.

“I’m not a bit sleepy,” he said.

“Why don’t we just get under way?” Kate asked.

“I should leave a note in the harbormaster’s—”

“Let’s just go, Owen. We can radio him tomorrow.”

“All right. I’ll cast off.”

Kate started the motor, which purred like a satisfied tiger. Owen cast off the lines, leapt into the cockpit, put the wheel over, and engaged the motor. Nepenthe edged away from the pier and nosed into the channel. The foolishness of getting under way at night in dense fog quickly became obvious. He could barely see the channel markers as they passed them alongside. Red and green, the channel-marker lights glowered in the fog as malevolently as the eyes of night beasts. He asked Kate to keep lookout from the bow, where she stood and called out the markers before Owen could see them. With her help, Owen pointed the Nepenthe down the long channel.

Streetlamps, aircraft and ship warning lights, and the headlights of slow traffic clothed the Golden Gate Bridge in swaths of red, golden, and silver fog. The swaths shifted and changed as denser and thinner patches of fog drifted past the structure. Underneath the span of the bridge, they could hear the muffled hum of road noise. Then they were past; the lights of the bridge and the fog-shrouded city were behind them.

Soon the chop of the waters took on the steady swoop of the rollers of the open Pacific. Nepenthe began to pitch strongly, and the mainsail was raised to steady the motion. As the boat pitched her bow into the rollers, saltwater sprayed Kate, who shouted with exhilaration as she retreated further aft. Kate was a brave sailor who loved the rough ocean.

Moments later, they emerged from the fog bank. A rich field of stars spread overhead. They could see some distant running lights of merchant ships, but otherwise the broad Pacific belonged to them. A slight breeze arose from the west. As Kate set the sails, Owen put the boat about and killed the motor in the moment that the sails caught. Now Nepenthe was sailing on a beam reach, shouldering aside the rollers with her port quarter. Kate came aft and laid her hand on Owen’s shoulder.

“Dry sailing back here,” she said.

“Go on below and get some sleep.”

“Yeah, I think I can now.”

She kissed his lips and descended the ladder, closing the hatch behind her. Owen clipped on his safety harness. He didn’t mind sailing at night. The Nepenthe had an autopilot, but Owen felt safer with a pair of human eyes watching over the situation. At the last hour before dawn, his reserve of adrenaline seemed to dwindle. He felt tired and ready for sleep.

As the starlight seemed to fail, Owen suspected they had entered an area of dense ocean mist. The darkness was almost total except for the boat’s own navigation lights.

A shape seemed to form in the darkness under the mainsail near the Zodiac boat. For a moment, Owen imagined that he was looking at the old woman. He thought he could even see her face. He was tired enough that his eyes could play tricks on him. Then she spoke, her voice shocking him.

“I go before you, my master,” the old woman said, then she turned and stepped into the sea. The noise of the ship’s passage obscured the sound of the splash as the sea sucked her under. Instantly her black-wrapped form disappeared.

Owen shouted and put the boat about. Attempting a jibe, he put the Nepenthe in irons, so that she wallowed among the rollers, the sails slapping languidly. Owen screamed for Kate. He found the flashlight and swept the rough surface of the sea with its light. He threw a floating cushion overboard as a marker. When Kate didn’t appear, he put the helm over. The Nepenthe laid over and began to sail again. Owen circled the area, searching for a sign of the old woman. After half an hour, he gave up.

Then he had a hideous thought. If the old woman had been on the boat without his knowing, then what sort of mischief or evil could she have worked below? Had she hurt Kate, or worse?

He set the wheel and scrambled down the ladder. He stumbled toward Constance’s berth and threw back the curtain. Even in the darkness he could see that it was empty. Owen made a brutal sound deep in his chest, turned, and stumbled forward.

There in the forward cabin, he threw aside the curtain. Kate lay, curled fast asleep with Constance in her arms. Owen reached out and touched warm skin. Among the noises of the ship working her way through the sea, he could hear the sound of soft breathing. Amid the salt scent, he could smell the familiar odor of their living presence.

An intense emotion rolled through him. He closed the curtain, turned, walked like a drunken man through the galley, and climbed the ladder. His hand was shaking as he lay it on the wheel and set the course south-southwest. When he remembered the apparition of the old woman, it seemed so strange that he was able to tell himself that it had never happened.

THREE

LANDWARD MOUNTAINS OF CLOUDS BLOCKED THE PREdawn light, so that the clear western sky took light before the east. Eyes gluey with sleep, Owen grew confused. Repeatedly he checked the compass to reassure himself that he wasn’t sailing north.

Then the sun itself topped the hidden horizon, illuminating ruddy flaws in the mountains of clouds. Slowly the direction of east grew more obvious. His hand on the large varnished teak wheel, Owen stood and gazed upon the strange sunrise. The hidden sun worked its rays through the clouds, turning their gray masses into lighter shades, reddened shades, rosy shades. Then it struck with force, sending through rays of clear bright sunlight. In his fatigue, Owen found it strange that the sea had turned emerald green without his noticing.

Underneath his feet, the Nepenthe was sliding through lazy seas with a slippery and easy motion. The mild wind was enough only to keep a headway. Not good sailing, but sailing nonetheless.

He set the wheel and went below. Constance and Kate were still asleep. Owen laid his hand on Kate’s shoulder and shook her gently, then more firmly. She seemed difficult to awaken. Owen called her name.

Kate’s eyes fluttered open. After a moment of disorientation, she smiled.

“What, no breakfast?”

“It was a long night.”

“Anything happen?”

Owen stared at Kate for so long that she seemed unsettled. She disengaged herself from Constance and sat up in the cramped space of the bunk.

“What is it?”

“I thought I saw the old woman last night.”

“What old woman?”

“The crazy old woman I saw on the pier.”

Kate scooted out of the berth. Constance called out, but her mother soothed her with a touch.

“I’m not losing it,” Owen said. “I think she really was on board.”

“Was?”

“I think she jumped overboard.”

Kate shook her head. Her hair was tangled, her eyes soft with sleep, but she seemed her old self-assured self. Her confidence bolstered Owen.

“Don’t go goofy on me,” Kate said. “We need you.”

“All right. It was late. I was tired, and it was dark.”

“That’s right. Now go to sleep. I’ll take a watch until noon or so.”

“All right.”

Kicking off his Top-siders, Owen crawled into his own berth. Its familiar confines were comforting. He plunged into a deep sleep. What dreams may have come were not his to remember.

He awoke to find the boat bounding briskly over easy rollers. Knowing that the Nepenthe had found a good wind, he clambered topside. Constance sat in her customary place, in the corner of the cockpit, looking outward toward the patterns of sunlight striking the backs of waves, the brilliant scintillating ever-changing path of the sun upon the sea. Owen checked to make sure that she was harnessed in, that she was wearing her blue-blockers, and that her nose was painted.

Kate sat aft, one leg settled underneath her. The wind was streaming her hair. She was wearing her sunglasses. She grinned and shouted something to Owen, but the wind snatched her voice and carried it away.

Overhead, the mainsail was hard as a board. Kate had set the genoa, which was billowed out, full and hard. Checking the compass, Owen saw that their course was true toward the south-southwest. Nepenthe was making her best speed with a strong wind and easy seas. He smiled and took his place next to Kate. She left her hand on the wheel and threw her arm across his shoulders.

“Give a sailor a kiss,” she cried.

Her lips were waxy with lip balm, salty from the spray. She was smiling as she kissed him, then her lips softened to a luscious circle and the soft tip of her tongue teased him. Owen pressed forward, but she withdrew her face and laughed at him.

“Nothing like a boy in rude health,” Kate said.

Owen was moving closer to his wife when a sullen thunder pealed across the cloudless sky. With a sailor’s care for the weather, he looked up.

Gold sparkles danced on the top of the blue hemisphere of heaven. As tiny as flaws in his vision, the gold sparkles danced. Then, like the gentle hand of Armageddon, the golden sparkles descended, and all the Earth’s atmosphere, no longer blue, turned golden.

As the goldness passed through Owen’s skull, his brain chimed like a bell. He experienced transcendent clarity: of what, he didn’t know, but he believed that the obscure was now revealed. He barely noticed as gold usurped the color of the sea. The Nepenthe plowed through gold oceans under a golden dancing sky. Owen felt a wonderful sense of completeness and harmony. Every moment until now was dark, he thought. Now there is light to see.

Kate spoke to him. Owen looked down and stared into the face of his wife, the woman he loved, his companion of eleven years, his lover, his best friend, the mother of his child. He saw her clearly; yet, staring into her eyes, Owen had absolutely no idea of the identity of this stranger, nor any firm idea that she was even human.

Kate looked into her husband’s eyes, which had gone strangely vacant. It seemed as if he had disappeared, leaving behind the shell of a man. The empty gaze was too hard to bear. Averting her eyes, Kate looked out upon the blue sky and the deep blue sea. She felt a strong wave of weariness sweep through her. This surprised her, because she had slept so well the night before.

* * *

Next to her parents, yet far beyond their reach, Constance sat stock-still. The world was vibrating. What had been mute had found a voice. Although she did not understand the words, she sat, raptly attentive to the new gift of language.

A glorious strength was rising. An individual more ancient than the bloodline of entire species. For thirty million years, it had dreamed slow dreams, quiescent inside its immortal egg. Riding the currents of the homeworld’s molten core, the egg had absorbed heat for energy and, molecule by molecule, converted the planet’s hot blood into the food needed to sustain it.

It.

The Self.

The One.

Now the time of the quickening had come. Once again the homeworld was penetrating a sphere of being, where the wondrous life of the mind was possible. Now the One was able to awaken.

Strange . . .

It could sense billions of small, hyperactive creatures, their minds able to work outside a sphere of being. Fascinating and disgusting little minds, extremely powerful but miswired. Monsters. They should not be. How aggressive was life, that it sought forms in all environments, no matter how harsh! In lightless cavern pools, underneath polar caps, in the shadows of rocks bathed in volcanic steam. Such was life that it existed wherever it could, always seeking to survive, to thrive, to evolve toward something greater.

Toward something like the One, the crown of creation. Deathless. Able to survive the thirty-million-year desert between spheres of being. What dreams the One had dreamed! Now it realized that its dreams had been disturbed by the quirky minds of these billions of impish monsters, which . . .

Auggghhh . . .

How awful. Their neocortexes simply wrapped themselves like parasites around the old brain, which maintained most of its bestial architecture. How freakish. Worse, most had only rudimentary organs for transcerebral communications. Since the creatures had evolved while the home galaxy crossed the mind-deadening desert between spheres of being, their architectures had evolved haphazardly. Just as fish in lightless cavern pools mated blindly, their descending generations devolving into hideously ugly monsters, so too had the brains of these humans devolved in the desert into something far too ugly to imagine. Accidental architectures for communication. Most couldn’t even receive with clarity. Even twins could sense only the grossest events, such as the violent death of the other. As for sending! Most were unable to communicate, except for symbolic mouth noises and this bizarre adaptation they called literature. They went through life alone, only dimly aware of the minds of others. To the One, the humans were more disgusting than cannibalistic spiders.

And they were technological! How amazing! The One hadn’t known that such advanced technology could arise in a mind-deadening desert. In fact, their technology was capable of destroying the One.

Death? For the One?

Yes. It was possible. Vicious creatures. The One sensed a nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine sliding silently deep beneath the seas. How they had developed mechanisms for wrecking one another! Weapons were their highest art form. They had tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, any one of which could kill the One. How unfortunate. The Earth was the One’s garden; how it yearned to stroll upon the surface once again after long millennia spent dreaming in its egg. But billions of these creatures infesting the planet’s surface, writhing with their horrible weapons, would never allow the One the peace and tranquility it needed and deserved. And look how they were destroying, polluting, ruining, and crowding the garden. How horrible! What obnoxious pests, dangerous and so very hideous. No, the continued existence of such creatures was absolutely unacceptable. As a matter of self-defense and for the sake of beauty, the One would have to exterminate them all.

Nothing like this had happened since the cycle five ago, when the One had emerged a million years late to find that the children had evolved into quick, clever creatures. They had actually challenged the One. What an epoch that had been! A thousand years of mental battle! It . . .

Visions of power, strike and counterstrike, a war with the children, until the One had wiped them out . . .

The death of the children . . . murdered finally by the One. Forget the horrible crime. Forget the guilt. Forget . . . the poor children . . . but the traces lingered, no matter how often the One sought to overwrite them. Why did its many-storied mind refuse to forget the children?

No, the One must concentrate on the present cycle. The humans were five cycles ago. It had taken the One years of battle to destroy them and their nasty weapons. Now it had to concentrate, remember the present war with the surprisingly evolved children.

But these children were all dead. The One had laid them to rest.

It . . . ah . . .

Forget.

The humans were back again. Billions of them. How had the One destroyed them the first time?

Or was it confused? Memory crowded memory. Every neuron used and reused twelve times over, dream overlapping memory overlapping memory art overlapping mental model overlapping dream. What cycle was it? How old was the One now? Three hundred million years?

Ah, yes, there was a plan. It was so difficult waking up this cycle; was it possible to be too old? No, it would feel better once it was deeper into the sphere of being. The humans were the problem now, not the children. The children had died mysteriously some cycles ago. No . . . the One was helping these humans eat themselves. Many of them wanted a paradise after death. The One was happy to raise from the hot sands of death a pleasant mirage that they could seek. And there were so many who were willing to fight and kill the others. What good tools they made!

The One would allow their desires to consume them as fire consumed the burning.

FOUR

FIVE NIGHTS AFTER THE DESCENT OF THE GOLDEN VEIL, the Nepenthe was beating southward against a brisk southwesterly breeze. The night sea air was so clear that the Milky Way glowed from horizon to horizon, a broad bright path of stars, the home galaxy as seen edge-on from one dark small planet.

Owen gazed at stars, white, yellow, blue, red, forming the arc of the zodiac. He knew he was looking also into an infinite abyss of invisible phenomena: quasars, black-hole suns, postnova gas shells, dark matter . . . perhaps phenomena yet stranger, still unknown.

One star, rotating several times a second, blinked green-white-red, green-white-red, green-white-red. It was Sirius, the Dog Star of the Greeks, the Wasp Star of the Maya, a malevolent star in the opinion of both. Owen stared at it. He had always loved it, because it pleased him to think a sun-sized object was subject to the condition of spinning so furiously. To Owen, Sirius was a very human star.

Needle-thin streaks of greenish light, meteorites dashed across the night sky. Having survived the destruction of the fifth planet by billions of years, the iron shards now burned to gas in the upper atmosphere over the Earth’s sea, and only one man bore witness.

Owen dropped his gaze from the combusting meteorites to the gold ring on his finger. Both the iron of the meteorites and the gold of his ring had been forged in the core of a first-generation star that had exploded billions of years ago. In fact, he mused, every atom of the precious stuff of his body—every carbon atom, every oxygen atom, every magnesium and iron atom of him—had been fused in the core of a first-generation star, now long destroyed . . . yet which was in a way, existing still in this new form. He and every living creature were made from the heart of a destroyed star.

As Owen gazed upon the unmasked face of the galaxy, every star seemed like an experiment in nuclear physics, burning thousands of light-years away, thousands of years in the past, but reaching him across space and time with their effects, with the strange workings of their spectrums, this starlight. Sun-stuff had taken the form of a human mind, a mirror in which the hearts of distant stars could gaze upon one another.

Owen remembered seeing the world washed in golden sparkles. It seemed to him since that moment everything had changed. He felt as if he were seeing with new eyes, hearing with new ears, feeling with new skin. It had never occurred to him how incredibly improbable and wonderful was this world. Right now, for instance, as the Nepenthe swung down through a trough and cut her prow against the face of the next roller, her stern slipping slightly to the portside . . . Owen could imagine the entire ocean below him. He could sense its watery vastness and picture its lightless bottom. He was acutely aware that he was sailing a wooden-hulled boat at night with the infinite vastness of the galaxy above and the weighty vastness of the ocean below. Ordinarily he would have been concentrating on something, ignoring everything else, aware of his circumstance only at a practical level. Now he was almost overwhelmed by an acute awareness of his environment and its intense beauty and strangeness.

Beyond the noise of the wash of the water against the hull, he could hear Kate as she clanged steel pots and clattered plastic dishes down in the galley. Owen was able to picture Kate perfectly. In his mind’s eye he was able to watch her as she worked, just by the cues of the sounds that she made.

In those rare moments he and Kate were able to steal, when their daughter was snug asleep in her cabin and the sailing conditions permitted the autopilot, Kate and Owen escaped to their cabin. Their lovemaking took on an overwhelming intensity. The excitement and joy, the exquisiteness of sensations, surpassed the springtimes of romance that long-term lovers experience. Here was an almost obsessive intensity. Owen had the pleasure of discovering his wife over again, his old friend, his long-time lover, made new and strange and thrilling.

Yet sometimes in moments of intimacy, as he felt himself drawing closer to her than ever before, she would disappear into some other mood. He would try to call her back with a kiss or a caress, but she would be far distant.

Long ago, their conversations had taken the strange turns of two old friends in the ten-thousandth hour of good talk. Now, sometimes Kate would say something that would mystify him entirely. He wondered whether he had ever understood how her mind worked, or whether she was changing.

As Kate emerged from the darkness of the ladder, Owen noted the time: a few minutes past midnight. She sat down next to him behind the wheel.

“Gorgeous night, huh?” Owen asked.

“Only if you like stars,” Kate answered, smiling.

“We’re about twenty miles out from San Cristobal,” Owen said. “Do you still want to go in for a grocery run? We won’t stay. I think we’re safer at sea.”

“Sounds fine if we can keep it short. It’s not good to feed Constance out of a can for weeks on end.”

“I’m going to catch a couple of hours, then, so I’m ready when we near land,” Owen said. “Shout when you see the lights. The chart says there’s firestacks from the refinery just north of the harbor.”

“Yes, Captain.”

Owen kissed her, went below, and checked Constance, who had her ear pressed against the hull, listening, fascinated with the sounds of the boat moving through the water. Owen leaned into her cabin, barely reaching to kiss her forehead. Then he retired to his cabin and fell asleep moments after kicking off his Top-siders.

Some unknowable time later, he dragged himself up from a deep sleep. A sense of foreboding would not allow him to continue to rest. Something was wrong with Kate.

Barefoot, Owen scrambled up the ladder. Kate sat in the cockpit, looking aft at black clouds that blocked the starlight. Approaching thunder rolled toward them. Slowly Owen realized that the blackness of the clouds was too absolute. A green star and a red star were too close; they were burning too brightly; they were approaching. The rolling thunder changed into the diesel motors of a huge ship. The black clouds were the hull of the ship, bearing down on them, looming now, all aft, almost overhead.

Kate was staring at the huge ship. Her hand was light upon the wheel, steering for a collision course.

Owen shouted a curse. He leaped to the wheel, grabbed it, and spun it over. The boom came swinging across the cockpit, narrowly missing the small of his back. Owen grabbed the sheet and hauled it in furiously, setting the mainsail so that it took some wind. The Nepenthe had come about, but only in the bow wave of the ship. The bow wave set the Nepenthe over and kicked it away from the ship as the huge ship’s hull came into the Nepenthe with a hideous screech of steel against wood. Bashed in the starboard beam, the Nepenthe sprung away from the ship, but the ship’s own hull was widening as if in pursuit, catching the Nepenthe, sending it scraping and groaning down its long waterline. Owen was knocked from his feet. From a position on all fours, he managed somehow to leap so that he could grab Kate by her ankles and pull her down before she could fall between the two hulls.

Nepenthe bobbed in the wake of the ship. Owen jumped up. The mast and mainsail looked untouched. He found himself on the starboard side, looking down at the hull. He had a moment of disbelief and disorientation as he realized that the hull looked sound. He turned to Kate, who was now sitting on the pilot’s bench. She was gazing forward at the ship, now some distance away and growing smaller. He could see the firestacks of the refineries of San Cristobal. They were much closer than he had realized.

Owen swung down the ladder. Constance was sitting up in her cabin. Owen inspected the hull where she listened to the sea. It looked normal and felt dry to the touch.

Owen realized that he had been mouthing an incessant stream of obscenities. Only now was he calm enough to realize how much the collision had shaken him. He noticed that his hands were trembling as he went topside. Kate was still gazing at the ship.

“What the hell were you doing!” Owen shouted. “What the—”

Something beatific and wholly inappropriate in Kate’s expression caused him to look forward.

The oiler had stood on straight toward the port. Now, as he watched, the oiler ran itself into the refinery terminus. Tortured metal screamed as the pipeline popped upright and twisted itself over and across the oiler. The ship drove forward, folding up the terminus in front of it, as a carpet of flaming oil spread around it as if in welcome of a king to Hell. Flames licked up the sides of the oiler, which began to crack and break up. A flash, a hard wall of air, then black oily flaming smoke towered to the stars. The ship was no longer a ship; it was a wreck, canted to one side, broken, in full flame. A kilometer away, Owen felt the heat on his face and hands. Stunned, he put the boat over and headed for the open sea. Kate stared aft at the burning port.

“What—what were you doing?” he asked.

“Watching the ship.”

“Why didn’t you get out of its way?”

“We . . . we were stand-on, weren’t we?” Kate asked.

Owen looked incredulously at his wife. She was a good, experienced sailor, who knew that no forty-five-foot sailboat insisted on the rules of a road when the other vessel was a big ship in the channel of a port.

“What?”

“We were stand-on,” Kate said. “Besides, it was so beautiful.”

“What?”

“It was so beautiful,” Kate said. “The closer it came, the more its shape changed. I was watching its shape.”

“Its shape?”

“Yes, its shape. It was like a well of darkness that swallowed all the stars.”

“Kate, we were almost killed!”

“No,” Kate said, still calmly, “we were almost swallowed by the black well, down into the darkness where all the stars are drowned.”

Owen stared at his wife, silhouetted by the burning port of San Cristobal. He realized that the same lunacy that had possessed Kate had possessed the crew of the oiler. They had driven their ship straight into fiery disaster. As he felt the Nepenthe slither down a trough, he sensed the weight of the ocean below him. Overhead the stars had dimmed, because the light of the fire had robbed his eyes of night vision.

“The shape of the ship?” he asked. “The well of stars?”

Kate nodded soberly. “I’m tired, Owen. Can you take a watch?”

“Tired? Kate, you almost killed us all.”

Kate shook her head. “Constance is all right?”

“Yes, she’s fine.”

Kate’s voice caught; then she said, “I don’t know what happened to me. I was watching the ship. It was on a constant bearing and a decreasing range. And then while I was watching it, it grew more beautiful and I forgot that I was worried about it. Then these ideas about the stars seemed so important, and it was like I was seeing it but not seeing it the same way—”

Owen put his arm around Kate, who buried her face in his neck. “I don’t know what happened to me,” she said. She sounded weary and confused.

“Go down,” he said. “Go down below and get some sleep. I’ll . . . I’m going to take us further south, OK? We have enough food and water for another few days. Should we call someone?”

“I don’t know, Owen. I don’t know.”

“Go on down and get some sleep. I’ll call someone.”

Heavily, Kate descended the ladder. Owen flipped open the compartment that held their UHF radio and dialed channel 16. Ordinarily, the circuit was silent, kept open for emergencies. Now it was jammed with overlapping hysterical voices.

“—esperando hace seis horas—”

“Told them that they wanted the prince—”

“Fire is spreading to the lower docks—”

“This is Serendipity, Serendipity—”

“—the channel, please—”

“Ella necesita ayuda, te digo—”

“Sam, Sam! Meet me on frequency—”

“—matarlos antes—”

Then he heard a long burst of screaming, followed by more voices jabbering. Owen listened for a few minutes before turning off the radio. Next he tried the satellite telephone. He was able to get a dial tone, but all the emergency numbers were busy. Finally, Owen dialed his brother, Harley.

“Keegan,” Harley answered.

“Harley, this is Owen.”

“Talk to me, Owen.”

“Things are starting to fall apart here—”

“Are you in trouble?”

Briefly Owen told his brother about the events of the past hour and finished by asking, “What’s going on, Harley?”

“I can feel the whole world changing, Owen. Can you?”

“But why would that ship—”

“Owen, planes are falling out of the sky. There’s train wrecks, hundred-car collisions, fires . . . whatever is happening is happening all over the world. People are . . . spacing. Gapping. Has it happened to you yet?”

“What? I—”

“Have you lost your concentration, seen anything unusual?”

“A few days ago, I thought I saw the ocean turn gold.”

“Did it look like gold stardust descending?”

“Yeah.”

“I see it too. It’s . . . beautiful, isn’t it? You’re the only other person I know who sees it.”

“I only saw it once.”

“I see it two or three times a day.”

“What the hell is going on, Harley?”

“I don’t know yet, but I don’t think it’s all bad, Owen. It’s like I look forward to seeing the gold dust. It’s like waking up from a dream. It makes me feel stronger, not weaker. Is that how it feels with you?”

“Yes . . . yes, I think so. But it’s dangerous—”

“You only think it’s dangerous because it’s strange—”

“No, I think it’s dangerous because Kate almost got us killed.”

“You got to take care of her, Owen. Bring the boat in, beach it if you have to. It’s going to get more intense. I know it.”

“How, Harley? How can you feel it?”

“I can . . . hear . . . I can feel things. I don’t know how.”

“All right, Harley. I wish you were here with us.”

“I should’ve gone. I was worried about my buildings. Towers in a dream world. What crap. A boy’s game.”

“It was your life, Harley.”

“It was somebody’s life, anyway. I don’t know anymore if it was mine.”

“All right—” Owen said, before he realized that his brother had hung up. He stared at the telephone in his hand, then he stashed it into its compartment. Owen checked their position in the Global Positioning Satellite. They were west of Mexico, a good deal south of the latitude of Mexico City. They were too far south to consider heading back for the States. In any case, if the chaos was so general, they would be safer heading for an unpopulated beach further south. It would take at least two days of good sailing, but he believed that he and the Nepenthe were equal to the challenge.

Owen steered the boat on a new course toward the relatively unpopulated coastlines of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Chiapas, and Guatemala. Strangely, he felt as if he were still in touch with his brother. It seemed natural that they would go through this together. Although Harley was five years older, the two brothers had always been close. Owen had learned from his older brother the way to be: how to dress, how to talk to women, how to get ahead. Yet when he had fallen in love with Kate, the dynamic with his brother changed. Owen had guarded the very idea of Kate with a jealousy that quickly burst into anger. Having realized this long ago, Harley was usually circumspect.

After an hour, the breeze died down. Owen felt distracted and sleepy. Even the Nepenthe seemed sluggish in the water, wallowing as if weighed down by the events of the evening. Owen went below to check on his family.

At the bottom of the ladder, before his foot touched the cabin sole, it sunk in chilly saltwater. Owen stood ankle-deep in the water for a long moment before he realized that the sea had worked her way into the boat. He stepped over to Constance’s cabin and swung open the door. She was asleep. Her covers felt dry. In his own cabin, he found Kate asleep. Turning back, Owen popped the cover to the engine compartment and found it completely flooded.

Owen wondered how the sea could enter his boat. Then he found himself leaning over the starboard rail and playing a painfully bright flashlight over the side. The brilliant shaft of light swept a column of illumination through the rushing seawater, surrounded by an annulus of dim, dark green water, the annulus in turn surrounded by a blackness of the sea made more absolute by the retina-aching impact of the flashlight, so that the thin shaft of light created an ocean of darkness. Specks of foam flew brilliantly white through the shaft of the illumination. Owen aimed the torch at the hull. For a moment, he believed the hull was sound . . . scraped, scarred, but sound. Then a trough passed along the waterline and he glimpsed the stove-in: two boards smashed in, one buckled out. He realized that the boat was taking in water below Constance’s cabin.

The water within was mingling with the water without. It was a petty consideration. Really, it was the same water. Just that the boat was moving down among the waters. In fact, Owen mused, as he played the flashlight through the waters running alongside the boat, it was not at all a question of water. It was the air. The boat was moving down among the waters, leaving the air behind.

He looked up at the sky. From on high, the goldness had returned. Owen was not afraid. He watched as the goldness descended, the sparkles more beautiful than the Milky Way itself. The gold seemed like the internal view of each thing. Each molecule, turned inside out, reversed, shown now in true form.

With a rush of peace, he felt the goldness pass through him. He could feel it descend to the bottom of the ocean. And now for the first time, Owen heard the voices.

The voices sounded from beyond the horizon, too distant to be understood. There was a woman who was saying something over and over as if reciting a prayer. A man’s voice, yet farther away, seemed to be arguing with another man or woman . . . it was too difficult to hear the voice of the second person. Owen listened attentively and heard someone say:

“—another one.”

“Then we are growing,” a man’s voice answered.

“—one of us.”

The voices seemed to come from a strange direction. He could sense that they were far away from him, two of them closer to one another, there, to the east.

“We will need the strength of him.”

“He reminds me of the other.”

Owen felt like telling them about the boat descending into the waters. He saw that he was aiming the flashlight toward the stars. The shaft of its light illuminated the ocean’s mist, forming a finger of light pointing toward one star, Sirius. Green-white-red, green-white-red. The mainsail luffed and then cracked.

Owen realized that the Nepenthe was not trimmed to take the wind. The sailor within him found this deeply disturbing. He felt that the wind had moved around to the southwest. Owen stood. Their course was toward the southeast. He could set the boat on a beam reach. That might lift the stove-in above the waterline. He might be able to go over the side and make some sort of repair.

Reaching for the wheel, Owen brought the Nepenthe around to its new point of sail. It was a strong wind; the Nepenthe heeled well over. When the sheets were tight, Owen leaned over the side and inspected the stove-in, now raised above the waterline.

“Now the other is coming,” a sweet, wise woman’s voice said in the center of his head. Owen ran his forearm across his brow. It was hard to concentrate.

“Could you help me with this thing?” he asked.

“What is the nature of the thing?” she answered.

“The waters come together,” Owen said. “The boat goes down among them. There are others with me. We must keep the boat up in the air.”

“I see no others with you.”

“My wife, Kate, and my daughter, Constance. They are asleep below.”

“Those two? They are not of us,” the woman’s voice answered, no longer so sweetly. “They are . . . but this is your daughter?”

“Yes . . . ”

Owen had a glimpse of Constance, awakening, still sleepy, sitting up alone in her bunk. She was staring at nothing in the darkness.

“What is wrong with her?”

“Nothing.”

“She is sleeping strangely. And your wife has her face to black. She is turned to the deathway.”

“No.”

“She is of the deathway.”

“No.”

“I must tell the others.” The woman’s voice disappeared.

Owen found himself in the companionway. The deck was slick and canted, with the water deep to the portside. He opened the door to Constance’s cabin. He was not surprised to see her sitting up, staring at nothing.

“Good morning, Angel,” he said.

Constance turned her face toward him, reached out, and touched his cheek. It was one of her few gestures, one that she used only with her parents.

“Love you too,” Owen said. “Go to sleep.”

In the darkness, the way to Kate’s cabin seemed long. He opened the door and shook Kate’s shoulder.

“What?” she asked.

“You’ve got to work the pump.”

“What? Why?”

“We’re taking in water.”

Owen moved aft and set up the bilge pump. He snaked its long hose down into the engine compartment and threw its short hose over the leeward side. He began to pump the seawater out of the hold and back into the ocean. He lost track of time. When his arm began to ache, he roused himself and shouted for Kate. When finally she appeared, she seemed to be avoiding his eyes. Owen set her to work.

He saw that the stove-in was still above the waterline. Harnessed in, he could go over the side and effect a repair. Owen had built the Nepenthe with his own hands. He always took along tools and materials to perfect his boat. He would have liked to replace the damaged boards, but that would take hours. He didn’t trust the wind, or Kate, or himself to stand up that long. No, he would slap some cement and hammer a copper sheet, which would take only minutes. It would leak, but the pump could keep ahead of the leak.

Owen went below to the aft cabin, where he stored his tools and materials. He buckled on his work belt, which already held his favorite hammer and nails. He stuffed in a brush and a can of cement. He pulled a copper sheet from the bottom of the chart drawer.

“This one is a maker,” an old man’s voice said.

Owen tried to ignore the voice. Up in the cockpit, Kate sat, her hands idle upon her lap.

“Kate, you have to pump,” Owen said gently.

She looked up at him without comprehension.

“The water is almost a foot deep. I’m going over the side to make a repair. You have to keep us on the same course, all right?”

Kate opened her mouth to speak. Owen somehow knew she was remembering a cold, snowy night, when she had been a girl in Pennsylvania. Owen remembered the night, too, as Kate remembered it. For him, however, this memory was the gateway to a flood of foreign memories. Some had the stamp of Kate, while others were unconventional: strange patterns, a delight in semantic nonsense, glimpses of meaning where there was none. Gradually Owen realized that he was seeing the world through the mind of his daughter, Constance.

She was sitting in her favorite place. Owen reached out and hooked her harness to the running wire. He fought off the images, memories, and voices that assailed his mind.

Owen buckled on his harness, lay on his belly, and tacked the copper sheet as far down the hull as he could reach, less than a meter above the stove-in.

“The end of an age does not immediately begin a new one,” a woman’s voice said. “The interval is where chaos enters.”

Owen connected his harness to a spare halyard. He grabbed the stays for balance, stepped over and backward, and then stood at a right angle to the hull.

“—not to be trusted with such information,” a man’s voice said.

Carefully Owen walked down the hull, playing out the halyard. After four steps, he stood next to the stove-in. When he squatted, a crest slapped his backside, almost causing him to lose his balance.

“—not in both realms at once,” an old man was explaining. “For them, it’s one or the other. If they choose one, then they are lost to the other. Only the few of—”

“Shut up!” Owen shouted.

Even though the wood around the stove-in was soaked, he grabbed the cement can, pried its lid, and swabbed cement. Done, he dropped the can into the sea. He untacked the copper sheet and slapped it over the stove-in. He nailed the leading edge, then hammered the copper to the shape of the hull. In three minutes, he had the copper sheet nailed in place.

“—the lights are a hallucination. It’s the world that is changing. Not us. It’s just that . . . only some of us have the eyes to see.”

Owen returned to the deck and stored his tools. Back in the cockpit, Kate still sat, staring into the darkness.

“Kate?”

She neither answered nor moved.

“Kate?”

No answer. After leading her into the forward cabin, he started to work on the hand pump. He had a ton of water to put overboard. He knew that Constance should go below, too, but he felt better with her near. His daughter sat, watching Owen work the pump handle.

As the predawn light filled the sky, Owen sat, collapsed over the pump handle. Emptied of water, the Nepenthe sailed on. Owen’s exhausted sleep was dreamless; the voices did not speak.

Constance watched the seas in the wake of the Nepenthe. While her father slept, she noticed that the sail was beginning to slacken. Although she had never touched the sheet before, Constance got up and pulled it taut. She looked up at the mainsail, once again stiff.

The big bright ball they called the sun rose up over the edge of the waters. Bright lights began to dance their happy dance upon the waves. None of the big people were awake to make her wear those blue eye-things. She was able to study the patterns of the happy dance. Once in a while, she thought she understood something. Then the meaning would hide from her. Then the water made a funny joke. Constance laughed.

Owen awoke at his daughter’s laughter. He smiled at her, a picture of pure joy. In moments like this, he sometimes thought that he envied his daughter for her world.

FIVE

THE NIGHT WAS BETTER THAN CARNIVAL, BETTER THAN Mardi Gras, better than Fog City’s best-ever street party. Joy and a dizzying sense of power thrilled Harley. His nervous system thrummed more vibrantly than harp strings. He couldn’t merely stroll down the street; he had to dance. Having glimpsed the powers of the new world, he had decided to take San Francisco as his city to rule. Before, Harley had wanted mere pieces of the city. Now he wanted it all. He knew that in the new world, he could enter other people’s minds, see with their eyes and understand their thoughts; moreover, he could touch their minds, even shock them, change them, knock them out! With these powers, Harley would no longer have to play the old game according to whatever rules the rich and powerful had imposed. No, he could make the rules himself. He could take over the city, dominate all the other bad boys, and rule as king!

He was descending Grant Street, down from Chinatown toward the Financial District. Scarlet-and-gold neon lights in the forms of dragons and Chinese ideograms blazed madly above his head. Fog swirled through the lights, diffusing swaths of gold and red. Harley had a bellyful of black pepper Kung Pao shrimp and Tsing Tao beer. The peppers had burned like a purging flame through his head; the cold silky beer had quenched the flames and slid soothingly down his throat. Harley belched; fire, spice, and malt fumed through his palate and seemingly the lower parts of his brain. So a dragon coughing flames must enjoy his meals.

In the dizzying heights of Harley’s ecstasy, the city dissolved into a matrix of lights, crowded with glowing spheres of else-worldly creatures, then resolved once again into a place of wet brick and fog, people and concrete.

At two in the morning, the streets were crowded with partyers. On the third-story ledge of a bank building, a group of men and women, nude and painted blue, were throwing handfuls of money down into the street. Some people were scrambling to pick up the cash, but Harley, laughing, danced by them. Rectangles of gray and green were to Harley just the confetti of the old world.

From a darkened doorway, a woman lunged at him, giggling, trying to throw her arms around his shoulders and kiss him. Harley shrugged; the woman slid off him, and a weakness passed through her so that she slid to the ground, where she sat, dazed. Harley didn’t know how he did this, but he knew he could do it again. It was one of the powers of the new age.

From across the bay, Harley had sensed that bastard MacPherson. It hadn’t surprised him that MacPherson, the same man who had blocked him in four buyouts, was now one of the few growing in power. The town couldn’t belong to him until he had confronted MacPherson, squelched the bastard, sent him packing so that he could rule over some lesser town. No, Fog City belonged to Harley Keegan. MacPherson could go to Salinas.

The sidewalk leveled out; he had come to the bottom of the hill. Off to his left rose the pyramidal Transamerica Insurance building. Harley glanced upwards at its peak, lost in the fog, and chuckled. Insurance was a safe world hedging its bets against disaster; Armageddon was not covered. When money itself lost its meaning, insurance policies were worth only a dark smile.

Hustling across a wide plaza, he burst upon shocking impressions of torn blouses, pathetic screams for help, tender skin exposed to the night air, brutish laughter. A gang of men was brutalizing three young women. One man was shouting nonsense as he loosened his leather belt. Like a huge wave, a peculiar, never-felt predatory lust struck Harley and washed over him. This strange perversion of normal sexual longing submerged him in a world where such brutish men were masters, all females prey. Robbed of all senses except feeling, he felt as if his genes were corroding, turning him into a perverted animal, the instincts of aggression and procreation miswiring and short-circuiting, infecting him with the rapacious mutation that had succeeded only because it succeeded, just as lampreys or Ebola had succeeded. For a moment, he felt possessed, as if he belonged in this alternative world of bestial power. He felt himself connected to a huge community of such men all across the world, now slaking their hateful lusts. It was like an army of darkness. His mind boggled as sight returned to him. The vision of the helpless young women struggling against the men found the true Harley, returned him more fully to his native self, and ignited righteous rage within him. The mix of neuro-transmitters bathing his brain changed into a more volatile formula. He felt a white-hot power rising up within him.

Harley cried out as the world rang like a bell struck with an iron clapper, vibrating horizontally and shifting from mass to energy. The women became whirlpools of desperation; the men changed into flame-licked demons, shimmering creatures of ultraviolet shot with sickeningly glittering, bright white light. Somehow Harley’s understanding of their wrongness translated itself into a web of connections. Without knowing how, he grounded the one to the other, allowing their own evil energy to feed back upon itself. An explosion flashed and sparks flew, leaving a stink of hot copper and scorched sulfur.

Harley felt dizzy. The darkness of Fog City returned to him. Sobbing women were crawling and scrambling away. Slowly Harley advanced across the plaza, stepping over the bodies of the brutal men, laid low and sprawled on the wet concrete. Harley didn’t care whether they were dead or alive.

“Here is another one,” a voice said in his head.

“He is welcome.”

“We must form an army of light,” the first voice said.

“What?” Harley called aloud, but the voices did not answer him. It was as if they had gone off the air.

A block later, he returned more fully to his senses. He felt surprised that the bank buildings were now towering on all sides. Several minutes of short-term memory had been lost to him. A beggar walked up to him and smiled, showing unkempt, gapped teeth.

“Gave them a-holes hell, didn’t you, Chief?”

Harley nodded and tried to brush past the beggar.

“Watch out for MacPherson,” the beggar called. “He’s waiting for you.”

Harley turned and stared at the beggar.

“How would you know?” he asked.

The beggar cackled. “End of an age, high is low and low is high. Watched you fellows drive by in your limousines, spending more on hookers than I had for food. I was hungry, and would you throw me a quarter? No, not often, anyway. So now you think you’re going to divide the world between you? I don’t think so. You’re walking in your sleep, Harley Keegan. The town’s got no masters, and anyway, it won’t be a town once it finishes burning down, you know. So what are you going to do? Make a throne of soot and bricks?”

“How—”

“Wasn’t a drunk, wasn’t a drunk,” the beggar said. “Just a madman who took a drop, passing the time ’til the world finished its changing. Good luck with MacPherson, Keegan. I’m getting the hell out of town, myself.”

The beggar sneered at Harley, turned, and disappeared into the darkness.

Underneath Harley’s feet, the sidewalk began to turn to gold. Harley ran his forearm across his face, the cotton sleeve of his shirt rasping his skin. Why did he have to confront MacPherson? What was he doing in downtown San Francisco, two thirty in the morning, in the middle of a riot?

Off toward the west, a red light flickered, illuminating the underbelly of the fog. For a moment, he thought it might be the sunrise, but it was too early and in the wrong direction. Then he realized that it was a fire. Off to the west, just over the next hill, a large section of the city was burning.

He turned toward the Fuji Bank building. Down there, in the subbasement, was a vault of stainless steel. Lining the vault were rows upon rows of safety deposit boxes, stuffed with jewelry, secret hoards of cash, gold bars, gems, bearer bonds. MacPherson had mentally overpowered the bank president, forcing him to open the vault. Staring in that direction, Harley could see MacPherson, cowering in a corner. At his feet was a black duffel bag, half-stuffed with stolen goods. He had come to steal but had stayed because he was afraid of Harley. He had sealed the vault door in the hope that it would protect him.

Then Harley was standing in the vault. MacPherson looked up at him, his eyes widening.

“You’re not here,” he said. “You can’t be here.”

“I’m not here,” Harley answered. “Not in the way that you fear. I’m here in the way that you’re too stupid to fear.”

“I’ve done nothing to you, Harley.”

“In which world? This one or the last one?”

“In . . . in this world.”

“Maybe what you did in the last world is enough,” Harley said.

“I’m sorry,” MacPherson said.

Harley shook his head. He still hated MacPherson, but it occurred to him that continuing to hate him was as nonsensical as hating a figment of a dream, once the dream was over.

“What are you going to do with that trash?” Harley asked, nodding at the duffel bag.

MacPherson, a corpulent man with a tall forehead and a cleft chin, puckered his fat lips. “I don’t know,” he said. “Gold is always good, I thought. People always come back to gold, no matter what troubles—”

“Gold is shit,” Harley said. “No one is going to care about gold for a million years.”

MacPherson sat up and took a deep breath. He seemed to think that Harley was going to let him live.

“What is good anymore, then?” he asked.

Harley shook his head. He reached out and touched MacPherson’s mind. Yes, MacPherson was growing stronger, but his mind was heavily canalized: he could think only in terms of deals, profits, money schemes, and tax regulations. The rise of his strength would only make him a better player of a game that was over. Harley withdrew until he stood there, breathing the damp night air. He looked up into the night sky. The fog was glowing with the light of the burning city.

He was a lot like MacPherson. If he had been five years older, he would’ve been too rigid. Maybe old people were prisoners until death in their own mental models of the world. Maybe only young people, to whom everything was new, could accept and bend and adapt to fundamental change.

Harley had spent his life in the old world chasing money. For days, he had known that money was no good, but tonight he had learned that power for its own sake was no good, either. He didn’t want to be king of San Francisco. The mad beggar had been right: the city was too chaotic, too large, and too complex for any man to rule. What should he do, then? What in the new world was worth having?

He thought about the young women he had saved from the rapist brutes, and realized that this rescue had been the only worthwhile thing he had done since entering the new world. Defending those who could not defend themselves . . .

He whiffed the harsh, chemical-poisoned smoke of burning buildings. Down the street, he could see the waterfront, and beyond that, the dark waters of the bay. Into that darkness, the mad beggar had disappeared.

Yes, he would have to start over, first by following the good example of the mad beggar. He would get the hell out of Fog City.

His midnight blue Bronco turned out to be an excellent vehicle for the postholocaust. Jacked up two feet clear of the road, the truck, with its oversize tires and four-by-four traction, allowed him to go over what he couldn’t go around.

He decided to leave the city via the Golden Gate. By the time he reached the Presidio, he knew that he had chosen the wrong way out. The Golden Gate was jammed, cars, trucks, and buses completely covering the bridge span. Apparently frustrated with the jam, people had abandoned their vehicles and were streaming back in the direction of San Francisco.

Harley decided that this traffic problem called for direct action. He cut through the waterfront park, running over bushes, until he arrived at the on-ramp to the great bridge. People shook their fists at him; they waved him back and shouted at him. Harley ignored them and plowed through some sand-filled fifty-five-gallon oil drums, forcing his way back onto the road.

Shifting into low gear, Harley drove the truck up the rear trunk of a Honda Accord, crushing thin Japanese steel underneath his monster tires, popping the rear windshield, rolling over the front hood, dipping and then bounding onto the next vehicle, a BMW, which provided a better surface than the Accord. Harley steered around a Dodge Caravan, because of its wall-like rear deck. The next vehicle was a Corvette, which was a shame, although it did howl gratifyingly in protest as Harley’s truck crushed it. Apparently the Corvette’s owner had activated the burglar alarm before abandoning it, as if he would return later to reclaim his Corvette after the police had cleared the bridge of less important vehicles. The only other car more demonstrative was an Infinity, which, in a loud mechanical braying voice, warned Harley to stand back. Few things in life piqued Harley more than being ordered about by machines. He would no sooner accept direct orders from an imported luxury automobile than he would accept condescension from a toaster. After buckling the Infinity once, Harley threw his truck into reverse and backed over the offensive vehicle, collapsing the roof into the leather-lined compartment. Although the Infinity looked like a sardine can stomped under a boot heel, it still warned him in a loud voice to stand back. Harley had to admire engineering of that quality.

A third of the way across the bridge, he entered a region of darkness where the bridge’s street lamps had failed. The cones of brilliant white and diffused yellow lights thrown by the Bronco’s headlamps and foglamps careened wildly as the truck pitched and rolled over vehicles, spotlighting glimpses of chrome bumpers, harmonies of vertical suspension cables, vanity license plates, and open car doors. Trying to look ahead and ensure that he didn’t crush any vehicle that was still occupied, Harley sensed that someone was waiting in the darkness near the center of the great bridge.

Harley didn’t know how he knew this. Like all people, he had always had hunches, suspicions, and feelings of foreboding. Like most practical-minded people, Harley had discounted these feelings as mental noise. Now, however, he found himself increasingly submerged in another world, where intuitive insight and other cerebral events were more forceful than vision or sound. Harley would have preferred to trust his five familiar senses, but he recognized that he had no choice. The world was changing and he had to change with it. Meanwhile, as he drove the Bronco atop a Toyota van, he reached into the glove box for the Glock.

The headlamps and foglamps illuminated a massive automobile wreck that had choked passage across the bridge. A semitrailer pulling a stainless-steel cylinder had overturned, spilling liquid over the roadway. Cars and trucks had crashed into the overturned semitrailer.

Harley hit the brakes. The Bronco tottered atop the sturdy roof of a classic Chevy Impala. He tried to assess the situation. In the brilliance of the foglamps and headlamps, he thought he could see the Exxon corporate logo on the stainless-steel container. If it was fuel truck, then why hadn’t the wreck ignited into flames?

A fireball erupted from the wreck, swallowing the bridge in fire. Harley saw the fire rush toward him. He ducked just as the explosion hit the windshield. Crouched over, he could see flickering orange and red lights cast into the depths of the compartment, but he felt no heat and heard no noise.

Harley sat up. Calmly, he watched the burning of the midspan of the Golden Gate Bridge. Flames enveloped his own truck, but he was not roasting alive, as far as he could tell. As a matter of fact, he felt quite comfortable.

Now this was strange. Harley sniffed. He didn’t smell any gasoline fumes, petrochemical smoke, burning paint, or hot metal. After a moment, Harley popped open the door and stepped down from the Bronco onto the front hood of the Impala. He stood there, hands on his hips, gazing calmly at the flames like a tourist in Hell. The person he had sensed was behind these false flames. In their chimeral lights, Harley picked his way over and around the wreck.

At the farside of the flaming semitrailer, there, in the back seat of a white stretch limousine, he saw the silhouette of a head. Harley walked up to the limousine; its passenger door swung open for him. Harley ducked inside.

The false flames ceased. A compartment light illuminated the beige leather interior of the limo. In its dim light, Harley studied the stranger who had waited for him.

A boy of nine or ten years, a thin, half-scale man with brownish hair chopped inexpertly, with a roundish head that seemed oversized for the body and thin neck. The boy had large, almondine, deep-brown-irised eyes that sparkled and gleamed. He was smiling mischievously at Harley, revealing a deep dimple in his left cheek.

“You like my fire?” the boy asked. “Made it special for you.”

“Sure,” Harley said. “Nice fire, but it could have used some heat, you know.”

The boy crossed his eyes and blew through his lips, making a blubbering sound. “Yeah, right,” he said. “You’d really have liked it if I’d made it with heat. Sure. You’d really have enjoyed burning alive.”

“I don’t get it,” Harley said. “What was the point?”

“Bunch of losers trying to get over the bridge. Some real freaks and bad guys, too. One of ’em tried to hurt me, just ’cause I’m a kid, but he didn’t know who he was fooling with. I hurt him real bad. I would’a gave him a nice monster too and chased his butt right off the bridge, but the sister taught me that it’s bad to hurt people, even when they’re, like, total jerks and losers. So I let him get away. What do you think? Should’a I chased him off the bridge? Like, ahhhhhh!!!!”

Suddenly the boy was screaming at the top of his lungs, his face contorted into a ludicrous mask of fear, eyes rolled up and tongue lolling out.

“Ker-splat!” the boy screamed, smacking his palms together. “Loser bites the big one, film at eleven. What d’ya think?”

Harley chuckled. “I don’t know,” he said. “Is this your sister or a Catholic sister?”

“No, this was the sister. Sister Josefina.”

“Best to listen to her, then.”

“No, not me, I’m a trouble case,” the boy said. “You know who I am, yet?”

“No.”

“Duh. You’re Harley Keegan, right? Everyone’s got to know you, you’re so important and everything. And what about me, huh? Go ahead and guess.”

“I don’t know.”

“I dunno, I dunno, I dunno,” the boy said in a dopey, singsong voice. “I’m Harley Keegan, I’m so big and important, king of San Francisco, that’s me! Yep, da. Da, da, da . . . ”

Harley laughed as the boy scrunched one eye shut, crossed the other eye, bucked his teeth and smacked himself on the forehead as if his skull were wooden.

“Give me a clue,” Harley said.

“Errrrrrr!” the boy shouted, making a noise like a buzzer. “Time’s up for our loser contestant. The name’s Axel.”

“Axel what?”

“The sisters made up the last name, so who knows? Who cares? Just call me Axel.”

“Well, what’s the story, Axel? Don’t you know that San Francisco is burning down, and you’re keeping people from using the bridge as an escape route?”

Axel sobered as he contemplated this accusation.

“They were trying to hurt me,” he said defensively.

“Why didn’t you get off the bridge, anyway?” Harley asked. “Where are your parents, by the way?”

Now Axel looked withdrawn and morose. “I was waiting for you,” he said accusingly. “And I don’t got no parents.”

“Waiting for me? Why? And when—”

“You’re about the only one who’s got any sense as far as I can hear,” Axel said. “There’s that drunk idiot, but he’s got holes in his head. There’s lots of bad guys, lots of wacked-out weirdoes, lots of spaced-out wimps, so you’re one of the few ones who isn’t a total loser. I thought we could be partners and help each other out.”

“When did . . . what do you mean, you don’t have any parents?”

“Orphan, hello?” Axel said.

“When were you orphaned?”

“Don’t want to talk about it, OK?” Axel said. “It’s my business, OK? I say I’m an orphan, then you say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ then we talk about something else. Get it?”

“All right,” Harley said, realizing that Axel had been orphaned long before the present crisis. “What do you say we get off this bridge?”

“You gotta say you’ll be my partner first.”

“You seem to me like a lot of trouble to take on as a partner,” Harley said, straight-faced.

“Yeah, I was, like, thinking the same about you.”

“And what’s the goal of this partnership?”

“Kick some serious booty,” Axel said, mimicking a macho movie-promo voice. “Axel and Harley. They’re back, and this time it’s personal.”

Harley considered this proposition. His first encounter with evil actors in the new world, the brutal gang of men intent on rape, had turned out successfully, as far as he was concerned: their death or mental destruction suited Harley just fine. But what about other, more powerful criminals? When he had connected with the brutal men, he had sensed a looming army of darkness. What if they attacked him? Who else was out there that he hadn’t even sensed?

Although very young, this boy had demonstrated skills and powers beyond Harley’s own. This proposed partnership might make sense, if he could learn from him. Beyond that, he sensed a lonely desperation in the boy. Harley felt protective of Axel. He couldn’t imagine abandoning him to fend for himself.

“All right,” Harley said. “But you’ve got to teach me that trick with fire.”

“You’ve got to let me drive the monster truck.”

“Ah, now I know why you want to be my partner.”

“That’s right,” Axel said. “The truck. And you got to watch me when I sleep.”

“Why?”

“Because when I sleep, they come.”

“They who?”

“Them,” Axel said sulkily. “The others. They don’t like it when I sleep.”

Harley stared at Axel, for the first time noticing the dark smudges under his eyes. Although he couldn’t guess who these others were, he saw that a fear of them had kept the boy from sleeping for a long time, perhaps for several days.