Jack Chalker - The Messiah Choice

After perhaps a hundred thousand years of dormancy, early in the morning of November first, without any prior warning, the ancient volcano that was Allenby Island had blown its top and erupted with tremendous force. The ash cloud reached around the world, and there were still particles in the upper atmosphere that colored the sunsets and might well for years to come. Actually, there was probably a single early warning, since the telecommunications network had gone off the air a few hours earlier, but a bad storm in the area prevented anyone from coming in by sea or air, and security people on the island, by short wave, had assured everyone that the communications break was caused when a freak explosion of oil storage tanks now under control created a power shortage.

After, there had been a flow of lava, thin and runny like water, very wide but not very deep, and it had run down and spread out so that it blanketed the whole of the island and flowed swiftly to the sea. The Institute, having been built almost entirely within the main crater, was completely consumed, and the flows burned away almost all the jungle and forest and came down to the sea through the town of Port Kathleen, which had been fortuitously evacuated a few weeks before. Not a single structure remained, although here and there were the blasted remains of trees.

No human being could possibly have survived such a blast and such a flow, and no survivors were expected. There had been a top secret meeting in progress involving a great number of important politicians and influential leaders from all over the world, the reason for the evacuation, but they and their entire staffs were lost, of course.

It was over within hours, and finally the superheated steam and gasses rose and created a torrential downpour that helped cool the mass. It wasn’t until November third, though, that the first volcanologist could get to the scene and survey it by helicopter. They were making a swing around to look at a particularly odd formation jutting up from the blackness when they saw two badly burned figures on the thing. They assumed, of course, that both were dead, but managed to land experts who could remove the bodies. It was a shock to find that, impossibly, incredibly, both still had weak but definite life signs.

The mere fact of their survival could not be explained, and the fact that both did not die but actually responded to treatment was considered as much if not more of a miracle.

After emergency aid, they had been placed in special tanks created to transport bad burn victims and taken to the closest burn-specialized hospital, which was St. Ignatius. There they had been suspended in larger tanks, getting their air and food from tubes, while specialized solutions helped heal their burns and promote new skin growth.

All of their treatment involved revolutionary new and in some cases experimental ways of treating victims of burns and dehydration, and he was told that, even if they had survived the volcanic fury, an impossibility that had happened, and had survived the transport as well, they would have died within days in the hospital had it been even a year earlier. There was also the fact that the best specialists were immediately flown in, and money was no object.

The next day, the money walked in the door. The King, without whose help all along it would have been impossible to get as far as they did, looked simultaneously grim and overjoyed.

“I couldn’t stay away any longer,” said Alan Kimmel Bonner, President and Chief Operating Officer of Magellan. “You aren’t supposed to have any visitors yet, but you’d be surprised what money and influence can do.”

“I saw it—on the island,” he said weakly.

“Well, yes. But even when they found out that their fight was a civil war with other elements of the company, they were so overconfident that they ignored us.”

“You want a debriefing?”

“That’ll wait. I already know the main facts, even the specific ones.”

“But the Bishop—the Dark Man…”

Bonner sighed. “Yeah, I know. I’ll get your side when you’re ready. I don’t really need it right now, except for the record.”

“If—you know—then you—can tell me,” MacDonald managed. “Was it truly the devil? I’ve got to know!”

“Easy! Take it easy! Officially, and totally classified and buried, that is, it was a mad computer of a generation that maybe we weren’t ready to handle yet programmed by even madder individuals. How the magic worked we may never know—but someday we might—but certainly the computer, working with people on the inside and possibly partly on its own, solved the basic matter to energy conversion problem and could somehow project that power wherever and whenever it was needed. Officially, and only for certain people very high in the company, the thing channeled all its reserves into a monstrous image, a fluid, plastic sort of energy, in the air above the institute. It reached down, then, to connect itself to Angelique, and instead the Bishop got in the way. We don’t know for sure, but the official theory is that he was trailing something, perhaps a wire, all the way off the stage and onto the ground. When he stuck the cross into the field, the thing was grounded, and it discharged and shorted. Either that or it was partly touching that stone or whatever, to which it was connected, and it created a ground loop. Either way, the energy was forced back on itself, and so great was the power involved that it quite literally melted the rock beneath the Institute down to a depth where it reactivated the volcano. That do it?”

“The Dark Man—an animated corpse. Sir Reginald said he predated SAINT. Said it was his dead brother…”

“Well, we checked that out. For the record, Geoffrey is still in his grave. It was hell to get clearances on that, but I just had to know. We know from Angelique that they were masters at mind control as well as transmutation. There’s no doubt that Sir Reginald believed everything he told you, but there’s some question as to whether or not those memories were implanted later and back dated to fit the facts. As for the corpse, well, the thing could create a giant lizard to order, in energy first and then solid as need be. If it could do that, why not something that looked like an animated corpse? The ancients had a word for it. Homunculus. Laboratory created intelligence. The bright boys think it was the prototype for what it eventually wanted to do with Angelique— create a human extension for itself.’’

MacDonald stared at him. “Do you believe that?”

The corporate president looked uncomfortable. Finally he said, “I don’t know. I’d like to believe it, but there are just a few too many things that can only be explained by stretching the laws of probability beyond their limits. If you ask me if we had a mad computer on our hands, I’d say yes. If you ask me if it went mad because of the madness of its creator, I’d say yes. But if you ask me if there wasn’t something else, something lurking there, waiting, taking advantage of all this and moving in to seize control—well, it’s pretty unscientific, but I could feel it, and so could you. There was something there that came down and heightened the madness of the world beyond even its normal insanity levels, who pushed and probed and saw an opportunity and reached out to take it. It wasn’t something new, but something very old, something usually forgotten or rationalized away until it strikes. We beat it in the past, and we beat it this time, but the opportunities our age gives it means we have to keep up the watch and the fight.”

“The Bishop—he thought it all would fail from the beginning. He always planned right from the start to do exactly what he did.”

Bonner nodded. “Yes. He and the girl. No disrespect to you and the others, but he had more guts than any human being I could imagine.”