Greg Bear: The Forge of God

A burly fisherman in a black turtleneck sweater struggled to extend a short gangplank to the block’s entrance.

“We are leaving,” Francine said, her voice like a girl’s.

One by one, in silence, they crossed the none-too-stable plank, helped by the fisherman and the young woman. Each person vanished into the block. When his family’s turn came, Arthur went first, then helped Francine lift Marty across, and grasped her hand firmly as she lurched over.

“Oh, Lord,” Francine said in a trembling voice as they descended the steep, narrow spiral staircase.

“Be brave, Mom,” Marty encouraged. He smiled at Arthur, walking before him, their heads almost level.

After descending some thirty feet, they stepped through a half-oval entrance into a circular room with three doorways clustered on the opposite side. The walls were peach yellow and the lighting was even and warm, soothing. When all twenty stood in the room, the young woman joined them. The fisherman and other crew members did not. The half-oval hatch slid shut quietly behind her. A low moan rose from several in the room, and one man about ten years younger than Arthur sank to his knees, hands clasped in prayer.

“We’re inside a spaceship,” the young woman said. “We have quarters farther down. In a little while, maybe a couple of hours, we’ll be leaving the Earth. Some of you know this already. The rest of you should be patient, and please don’t be afraid.”

Arthur clasped his wife’s and son’s hands and closed his eyes, not knowing whether he was terrified, or exalted, or already in mourning. If they were aboard a spaceship, and all the work he and the others in the network had done was coming to fruition, then the Earth would soon die.

His family might survive. Yet they would never again breathe the fresh cold sea air or stand in the open beneath the sun. Faces passed before him, behind his eyelids: relatives, friends, colleagues. Harry, when he had been healthy. Arthur thought of Ithaca Feinman and wondered whether she would be aboard an ark. Probably not. There were so few spaces available, fewer still now that the ships in Charleston and Seattle had been destroyed. A breeding population, little more.

And all the rest…

The younger man prayed out loud, fervent, face screwed up in an agony of concentration. Arthur could very easily have joined him.

A loose group of ten took to the Four Mile Trail in the early morning, Edward and Betsy among them. They hiked through the shadows of Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine, pine pitch tartly scenting the still morning air. The climb was relatively mild at first, rising gradually to the vigorous Sentinel Creek ford some two hundred feet above the valley floor.

By eleven they were on the steep ascending trail cut into the granite facade to the west of Sentinel Rock.

Edward paused to sit and take a breather, and to admire Betsy in her climbing shorts.

“They used to charge to climb this,”’ Betsy said, propping one well-made leg against a ledge to retie her hiking boot.

He looked over the edge at the distance they had already climbed and shook his head. By noon, they had peeled out of their sweatshirts and tied the sleeves around their hips. They stopped for a water break. The ten, by now, were spread along a half mile of the trail like goats in a terraced-rock zoo exhibit. One young man a few dozen feet above Edward had enough energy to beat his chest and let loose a Tarzan cry of dominance. Then he grinned foolishly and waved.

“Me Jane, him nuts,” Betsy commented.

Their good cheer continued as they stood at Union Point and looked down across the valley, leaning on the iron railings. The sky was only slightly smoky, and the air was warming as they ascended. “We could stop here,” Betsy suggested. “The view’s pretty good.”

“Onward.” Edward put on a valiant face and pointed to the goal. “One more heavy climb.”

By one o’clock they had hiked over a seemingly endless series of switchbacks up the bare granite slope, stopping briefly to examine the manzanita growth. They then followed a much more reasonable, comparatively level trail to Glacier Point.

Minelli and his companion Inez had already pitched tents in the woods behind the asphalt paths leading up to the point’s railed terraces. They waved at Edward and Betsy and motioned for them to come over and share their picnic lunch.

“We’re going to take in the view,” Edward called to them. “We’ll be with you in a little bit.”

Leaning on the rail of the lowest terrace, they surveyed the valley from end to end, and the mountains beyond. Birdsong punctuated the steady whisper of the breezes.

“It is so peaceful,” Betsy said. “You’d think nothing could ever happen here…”

Edward tried to picture his father, standing by the railing more than two decades ago, waving his hands, clowning as his mother snapped his picture with a Polaroid camera. They had driven up to the point that time. An hour later, they had been on their way home, ending the last happy time of his childhood. The last time, as a child, he had felt he could have been happy.

He touched Betsy’s arm and smiled at her. “Best view in the world,” he said.

“Grandstand seat,” Betsy agreed, shading her eyes against the high bright sun. They stood near the edge for several minutes, arms around each other, then turned and walked back to the tents to join Minelli and Inez.

The afternoon progressed slowly, leisurely. Minelli had bought a stick of dry salami in the store, and two loaves of bread; Inez had somehow come up with a large wedge of Cheddar cheese. “We had a whole wheel a few days ago,” she said. “Don’t ask how we got it.” Her smile was tough and childish and sweet all at once.

Minelli passed around cans of beer, warm but still welcome, and they ate slowly, saying little, listening to the birds and the hum of the wind through the trees behind them. When they had finished, Edward spread a sleeping bag on the grass and invited Betsy to lie back and doze with him. The climb had not been exhausting, but the sun was warm and the air was sweet, and large fat bees were buzzing in lazy curves around them. They were well fed, and the beer had made Edward supremely drowsy.

Betsy lay beside him, head resting in the crook of his arm. “Happy?” she asked him.

Edward opened his eyes and stared up at white clouds against a brilliant blue sky. “Yes,” he said. “I really am.”

“So am I.”

A few dozen yards away, other campers were singing folk songs and sixties and seventies tunes. Their voices drifted in the restless, warm air, finally melding with the wind and the hum of the bees.

Walter Samshow celebrated his seventy-sixth birthday aboard the Glomar Discoverer , cruising in circles a few kilometers beyond the zone where huge gouts of oxygen had once risen to the ocean surface. The bubbling had stopped three days before.

The ship’s galley prepared a two-meter-long birthday cake in the shape of a sea serpent — or an oarfish, depending on whether you asked the cook or Chao, who had seen several oarfish in his time, but no sea serpents.

At five in the afternoon, the cake was cut with some ceremony under the canvas awning spread on the fantail. Bible-leaf slices of the serpent were served on the ship’s best china, accompanied by champagne or nonalcoholic punch for those ostensibly on duty.

Sand silently toasted his partner with a raised glass of champagne at the stern. Samshow smiled and tasted the cake. He was trying to decide what flavor the peculiar mud-colored icing was — someone had suggested sweetened agar earlier — when the ocean all around suddenly glowed a brilliant blue-green, even beneath the intense sun.