Greg Bear: The Forge of God

Choose four witnesses. The restatement of the command in their minds was polite but unequivocal. It is the Law.

Clara jerked and stood upright. “You heard that?” she asked.

He nodded. Francine turned to look at Arthur. “They want us to choose four witnesses,” he told her.

“Witnesses to what?” Her voice was small, distant.

“The end,” he said.

“Not the children,” Francine said firmly. Arthur briefly conferred with the voice. Two must be younger, to pass on the memories.

“They want two children,” he said. Francine clenched her fists.

“I don’t want Martin to experience that,” she said. “It’s bad enough if we have to.”

“They want kids for what?” Marty asked, looking between them, wide-eyed.

“It’s the Law. Their law,” Arthur said. “They need some of us to watch the Earth when it’s destroyed, and two of them must be kids.”

Marty thought that over for a moment. “All the other kids are younger than me,” he said, “except one. That girl. I don’t know her name.”

Francine turned Marty to face her and gripped his arms. “Do you know what’s going to happen?” she asked.

“The Earth is going to blow up,” Marty said. “They want us to see it so we know what it’s like.”

“Do you know who they are?” Francine asked.

“The people that talk to Dad,” Marty said.

“He understands pretty well,” Arthur said.

“I’ll say,” Clara agreed.

Francine gave her an angry glance, then focused again on Marty. “Do you want to see?” she asked.

Marty shook his head no. “It would give me nightmares,” he said.

“Then it’s decided,” Francine said. “He—”

“But Mom, if I don’t see, I won’t know.”

“Know what?”

“How mad I’m supposed to be.”

Francine searched her son’s face slowly, and then let him go, wrapping her arms around herself. “Only four?” she asked softly.

“At least four,” he said. “All who wish to see.”

“Marty,” Francine said, “we’ll share nightmares, okay?”

“Okay.”

“You’re a very brave boy,” Clara said.

“Are you going to watch?” Arthur asked Francine.

She nodded slowly. “If you and Marty watch, I can’t chicken out, can I?”

How much longer? he asked.

There will be a gathering in the common viewing cabin in an hour and ten minutes.

He sat on the narrow lower bed beside Francine and Marty. “We’ll be leaving the Earth soon,” he said. “In a few minutes, probably.”

“Can we feel it when we take off, Dad?” Marty asked.

“No,” he said. “We won’t feel it.”

Grant had followed the Gordons’ station wagon to the bay, and waited a hundred yards away, engine idling, as they parked and walked to the pier. Then he had parked his BMW beside the wagon, slung a pair of binoculars around his neck, and followed at a discreet distance, feeling like a fool, asking himself — as Danielle had asked when he left — why he didn’t simply confront them and demand answers.

He knew he wouldn’t do that. First, he could not really believe that Arthur would be part of a government escape into space. Grant couldn’t believe such an escape was contemplated, or even possible. Nobody could travel far enough away to survive the Earth’s destruction — not if such destruction was as spectacular as what he had seen in the movies. And even if they could — traveling out beyond the moon, for example — he didn’t think they would be able to live very long in space.

But he was curious. He believed as firmly as Danielle that the Gordons were up to something. In the curious kind of floating emotional state he now experienced, tracking the Gordons offered a possibility for diversion.

He was otherwise powerless. He could not save his family. He felt what billions of others — all who knew and believed — were feeling now, a deep terror surmounted by helplessness, resulting in a dopey calmness, not unlike what his grandparents must have felt as they were led to the death pits in Auschwitz.

This, of course, was vaster and more final than the Holocaust. Nondiscriminatory. Thinking such thoughts pressed him up against a wall of ignorance; he had never been particularly imaginative, and he could not conceive the means or motives behind what he nevertheless knew was coming.

He stood on the concrete seawall and watched them board the fishing boat. The boat, covered with people, sailed out to the north.

Then he sat on the concrete and rock, buttoning his coat and slipping on a cap to keep away the chill of the breezes off the bay.

Grant had no clear plans, or clear idea what he was doing. If he waited, perhaps an answer would come.

Hours passed. He doubled his legs up on the rock and pressed his knees against his chest, chin on the new denim of his pants. The afternoon passed very slowly, but he stuck with his vigil.

The ground trembled slightly and the water level of the bay rose a foot against the seawall, and then fell until the rocks at the base of the wall were exposed — a drop of perhaps four or five feet. He expected — almost welcomed the possibility — that the water would rise again drastically and drown him.

It did not rise again.

Like a robot, he stood and walked through the unlocked gate to the end of the pier, where he leaned his elbows against the wood rail, staring north. He could barely see Alcatraz beyond the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The water just south of Alcatraz appeared rougher than usual, almost white.

A dark gray shape sat in the middle of the whiteness. For a moment, Grant thought a ship had overturned in the bay and was floating hull-up. But the gray bulk was rising higher in the water, not sinking. He lifted his binoculars and focused on the shape.

With a jerk of surprise, he saw that it was already out of the water, and that it had a flat bottom. He had an impression of something shaped like a flatiron, or like the body of a horseshoe crab, four or five hundred feet in length. It rose above the span of the bridge, lifting on a brilliant cone of blinding green. Across the bay came a teeth-aching high-pitched hissing, roaring sound. The object accelerated rapidly upward and dwindled against the late morning sky. In a few seconds, it was gone. How many others had seen it? he wondered.

Could the government really have had something in the works — something spectacular?

He bit his lip and shook his head, crying now, not knowing why. He felt a peculiar relief. Somehow, a few people were getting away. That was a kind of victory, as important as his parents surviving the death camps.

And for those still condemned…

Grant wiped the tears from his eyes and hurried back along the pier, bumping into an iron pole as he passed through the gate. He ran to his car, hoping he would be in time. He wanted to be home with his family.

The bridge was practically deserted as he crossed. He could not see the spot in the bay where the water had been white.

He did not know how he would explain this to Danielle. Her concerns would be more immediate, less abstract; she would ask why he did not try to find a way to save them all.

Perhaps he would say nothing, just tell her that he had followed the Gordons as far south as Redwood City…and stopped, waited a few hours, and turned back.

She wouldn’t believe him.

The ship, Arthur learned, contained 412 passengers, all boarded in secrecy during the morning and the previous night. The passengers had been divided into groups of twenty, and for the most part would not mingle until several days had passed, and they had grown used to their situation. The only exception would be the witnessing.