Greg Bear: The Forge of God

The rest of the family soon tired of the vigil and went inside, where they played a noisy game of Scrabble.

After two hours of straining his eyes, Arthur stood up. He felt dizzy. His legs tingled painfully from the knees down. Francine returned to the backyard around ten o’clock and stood next to him, arms folded.

“You have to see for yourself?” she asked.

“You know me,” Arthur said. “It should be visible, but it isn’t.”

“Pretty big thing to lose, a moon, isn’t it?”

“Unheard of.”

“Any idea what it means?”

Arthur looked up at her. “There’s only three. I know I should have seen four by now.”

“What does it mean, Arthur?”

“Damned if I know. Somebody’s collecting moons, maybe?”

“It scares me,” Francine said. “If it’s true.” She looked at him plaintively. He said nothing. “Then it’s true?”

“I suppose it is.”

“Doesn’t it scare you?”

Arthur stretched to relieve cramped muscles and took his wife’s hands in his. “I don’t know what it means yet,” he said.

Francine moved almost as easily and blissfully in the sciences as he, albeit on a more instinctive level. He valued her insights, and the thought of her fear sobered him further. “Why are you scared?”

“A moon is bigger than a mountain, and if a mountain, or the river, disappeared without a trace, wouldn’t you be afraid?”

“I might,” he conceded. He picked up the telescope and replaced its aperture cover. “That’s enough for tonight.”

Francine wrapped her arms around herself. “Bed?” she asked. “Grant and Danielle and the children are asleep. Gauge is with Marty.”

Arthur’s mind raced as he lay next to Francine. The wide bed’s flannel winter sheets hadn’t been changed to the regular percale spring and summer sheets. He was glad for their fuzzy comfort. His emotions had caught up with him.

Europa had been around for billions of years, silently orbiting Jupiter. Some scientists had thought there might be life there, but that had never been proved or disproved.

If a mountain or the river disappears, that’s much closer to home…

Arthur dreamed of fishing with his best friend, Harry Feinman. They sat in a boat on the river, lines trailing in the current, wearing wide-brimmed hats against a sun that was not all that bright. In the dream, Arthur remembered Harry playing with Martin at the house, lifting the boy high in the air and making an airplane noise as he ran around the tree in the backyard. Harry’s wife — tall, stately Ithaca — had watched in this dream memory, her smile carrying a slight edge; she was barren, and had never given Harry the child he wanted. Only occasionally did Harry seem to regret the missed opportunities. I haven’t seen Harry in over eight months, Arthur thought. Yet here he is.

How are you doing, fellah? Arthur asked Harry in the boat. Any nibbles? It was curious to realize that the figure of Harry, sitting with hat slouched over his face, was part of a dream. Arthur wondered what the dream Harry would say. You asleep?

He reached over to lift the hat.

The Earth’s moon lay under Harry’s hat, bright and full. Harry’s face was in the craters and seas of its surface. Wow, Arthur said. That’s really beautiful.

But he worried for the merest instant that he was not dreaming, and awoke with a start.

AP/Home Info Service, September 2, 1996: WASHINGTON, D. C. -Scientists are convening at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Conference to listen to speakers presenting papers on subjects ranging from “Lack of Proof for Supermassive Intergalactic Gravitational Lenses” to “Distribution of Wild Rodent Plague Through Ground Squirrel Fleas (Diamanus Montanus) in Southern California.” Yesterday, one of the most hotly debated papers was presented by Dr. Frank Drinkwater of Balliol College, Oxford University. Dr. Drinkwater maintains that there are no intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations. “If there were, we would certainly have seen their effects by now.” Dr. Drinkwater maintains that one civilization, creating self-reproducing planet-visiting spacecraft, would permeate the galaxy in less than a million years.

No conclusion was reached by conference scientists regarding the recent disappearance of Jupiter’s sixth moon, Europa. Professor Eugenie Cook of the University of Washington, Seattle, maintains that the moon has been displaced from its orbit by collision with a massive and heretofore unknown asteroid. Famed astronomer Fred Accord maintains that such a collision would have “shattered the moon, and we would still be able to see the orbiting fragments.” No such sightings have been reported. Many scientists remarked on public apathy over such an unprecedented event. After a month, the story of Europa has almost vanished from the media. Accord commented, “Obviously, more provincial difficulties, like the U. S. presidential election, loom larger. “.

Camped beside the mountain that should not have been there, wrapped in cold desert darkness, Edward Shaw could not sleep. He heard steady breathing from the still forms of his two companions, and marveled at their ease.

He had written in his notebook:

The mound is approximately five hundred meters long and half as wide, perhaps a hundred meters high, (apparently) the basaltic cinder cone of a dead volcano, covered with boulder- and cobble-sized chunks of dark black scoria and surrounded by fine white quartz sand. It is not on our maps nor in the 1991 Geosat directory. The flanks of the cone are steeper than the angle of repose, as much as fifty and sixty degrees. The weathering is haphazard at best — some parts open to the sun and rain are jet black, shiny, and other areas are only mildly rusty. There are no insects on the mound — specifically, lift any rock and you will not find a scorpion or millipede. There are no beer cans.

Edward, Brad Minelli, and Victor Reslaw had journeyed from Austin, Texas, to combine a little geology with a lot of camping and hiking across the early autumn desert. Edward was the eldest, thirty-three; he was also the shortest and in a close race with Reslaw to lose his hair the fastest. He stood five feet nine inches in his hiking boots, and his slender frame and boyish, inquisitive features made him seem a lot younger, despite the thinning hair. To see objects closer than two feet from his round nose, he wore gold wire-framed round-lensed glasses, a style he had adopted as an adolescent in the late seventies.

Edward lay on his back with his hands clasped behind his head and stared up at the clear steady immensity of the sky. Three days before, dark and gravid clouds had conspired in the flaming sunset to drop a true gully-washer into Death Valley. Their camp had been on high ground, but they had seen basketball-sized boulders slide and roll down freshly gouged channels.

The desert seemed once again innocent of water and change. All around the camp hung a silence more precious than any amount of gold. Not even the wind spoke.

He felt very large in the solitude, as if he might spread his fingers over half the land from horizon to horizon, and gather a mica coat of stars on his fingers. Conversely, in his largeness, he was also a little frightened. This inflated magnitude of self could easily be pricked and shrink to nothing, an illusion of comfort and warmth and high intellectual fever.

Not once in his six-year career as a professor of geology had he found a major error in the U.S. Geological Survey Death Valley charts. The Mojave Desert and Death Valley were the Mecca and Al Medina of western U.S. geologists; they had tramped over the regions for well over a century, drawn by the nakedness and shameless variety of the Earth. From its depths miners had hauled borax and talc and gypsum and other useful, unglamorous minerals. In some places, niter-lined caves wedged several hundred feet into the Earth. A spelunker need descend only twenty or thirty feet to feel the heat; creation still lay close under Death Valley.