Greg Bear: The Forge of God

Samshow was reminded of his youth, standing on the beach at Cape Cod on the night of the Fourth of July, waiting for fireworks and tossing his own firecrackers into the surf just as their fuses burned short. The firecrackers had exploded below the surface with a silent puff of electric-green light.

The crew on the rear deck fell silent. Some looked at their shipmates in puzzlement, having missed the phenomenon.

In rapid succession, from the northern horizon to the southern horizon, more flashes illuminated the ocean.

“I think,” Samshow said in his best professorial tone, “we are about to have some mysteries answered.” He knelt to put his plate and glass of champagne down on the deck, and then stood, with Sand’s help, by the railing.

To the west, the entire sea and sky began to roar.

A curtain of cloud and blinding light rose from the western horizon, then slowly curled about like a snake in pain. One end of the curtain slid over the sea with amazing speed in their direction, and Samshow cringed, not wanting it all to end just yet. There was more he wanted to see; more minutes he wanted to live.

The hull shuddered violently and the steel masts and wires sang. The railing vibrated painfully under his hand.

The ocean filled with a continuous light, miles of water no more opaque than a thick green lump of glass held over a bonfire.

“It’s the bombs,” Sand said. “They’re going off. Up and down the fractures—”

The sea to the west blistered in a layer perhaps a hundred meters thick, scoured by the snaking curtain, bursting into ascending and descending ribbons of fluid and foam. Between the fragments of the peeled sea — the skin of an inconceivable bubble — rose a massive, shimmering transparent of superheated steam, perhaps two miles wide. Its revealed surface immediately condensed into a pale opalescent hemisphere. Other such bubbles broke and released and condensed from horizon to horizon, churning the sea into a mint-green froth. The clouds of vapor ascended in twisted pillars to the sky. The hiss and roar and deep churning, gut-shaking booms became unbearable. Samshow clapped his hands to his ears and waited for what he knew must come.

A scatter of calved steam bubbles broke just a few hundred meters to the east, with more on the opposite side. The turbulence spread in a high wall of water that caught the ship lengthwise and broke her spine, twisting her fore half clockwise, aft counterclockwise, metal screaming, rivets failing like cannon shots, plates ripping with a sound curiously b’ke tearing paper, beams snapping. Samshow flew over the side and seemed for a moment suspended in froth and flying debris. He felt all that he was a part of — the sea, the sky, the air and mist around him — abruptly accelerate upward. A much larger steam bubble surfaced directly beneath the ship.

There was of course no time to think, but a thought from the instant before lingered like a strobed image, congealed in his mind before his body was instantly boiled and smashed into something hardly distinguishable from the foam around it: I wish I could hear that sound, of the Earth’s crust being spread wide.

Around the globe, wherever the bomb-laying machines had infested the deep-ocean trenches, long sinuous curtains of hot vapor reached high into the atmosphere and pierced through. As the millions of glassy columns of steam condensed into cloud, and the cloud hit the cold upper masses of air and flashed into rain, the air that had been pushed aside now rushed back with violent thunderclaps. Tsunamis rolled outward beneath corresponding turbulent expanding concentric fronts of high and low pressure.

The end had begun.

Below San Francisco Bay, hours after boarding the ark, the young woman who had guided them on the fishing boat — her name was Clara Fogarty — went among the twenty in the waiting room and spoke to them, answering questions, trying to keep them all calm. She seemed none too calm herself; fragile, on the edge.

Help her , Arthur was ordered. He and several others immediately obeyed. After a few minutes, he circled back through the people to Francine and took her hands. Marty hugged him fiercely.

“I’m going to visit the areas where we’ll be staying,” he said to Francine.

“The network is telling you this?”

“No,” he said, looking to one side, frowning slightly. “Something else. A voice I’ve not heard before. I’m to meet somebody.”

Francine wiped her face with her hands and kissed him. Arthur lifted Marty with an oomph and told him to take care of his mother. “I’ll be back in a little while.”

He stood beside Clara Fogarty at the middle hatch on the side opposite where they had entered. The hatch — little more than an outline in the wall’s surface — slid open and they passed through quickly, before they had a clear impression of what was on the other side.

A brightly illuminated broad hallway, curving down , stretched before them. The hatch closed and they regarded each other nervously. More hatches lined both sides of the hallway.

“Artificial gravity?” Clara Fogarty asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said.

At a silent request, they stepped forward. They remained upright in relation to the floor, with no odd sensations other than the visual. At the end of the hallway, another open hatchway awaited them; beyond was a warm half darkness. They entered a chamber similar to the waiting room.

In the center of this chamber rose a pedestal about a foot high and a yard wide. On the pedestal rested something that at first examination Arthur took to be a sculpture. It stood about half as tall as he, shaped like a hefty square human torso and head — rather, in fact, like a squared-off and slightly flattened kachina doll. Other than an abstracted and undivided bosom, it lacked any surface features. In color it was similar to heat-treated copper, with oily swirls of rainbow iridescence. Its skin was glossy but not reflective.

Without warning, it lifted smoothly a few inches above the pedestal and addressed them both out loud:

“I am afraid your people will soon no longer be wild and free.”

Arthur had heard this same voice in his head just a few minutes ago, beckoning them through the hatches.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I am not your keeper, but I am your guide.”

“Are you alive?” He did not know what else to ask.

“I am not biologically alive. I am part of this vessel, which will in turn soon become part of a much larger vessel. You are here to prepare your companions for me, that I may instruct them and carry out my own instructions.”

“Are you a robot?” Clara asked.

“I am a symbol, designed to be acceptable without conveying wrong impressions. In a manner of speaking, I am a machine, but I am not a servile laborer. Do you understand me?”

The object’s voice was deep, authoritative, yet not masculine.

“Yes,” Arthur said.

“Some among your group might panic if exposed to me without preparation. Yet it is essential that they come to know and trust me, and come to trust the information and instructions I give them. Is this understood?”

“Yes.” They answered in unison.

“The future of your people, and of all the information we have retrieved from your planet, depends on how your kind and my kind interact. Your kind must become disciplined, and I must educate you about larger realities than most of you have been used to facing.”

Arthur nodded, his mouth dry. “We’re inside one of the arks?”

“You are. These vessels will join together once we are all in space. There are now thirty-one of these vessels, and aboard twenty-one of them, five hundred humans apiece. The vessels also contain large numbers of botanical, zoological, and other specimens — not in most cases whole, but in recoverable form. Is this clear?”