Greg Bear: The Forge of God

“Look,” Betsy said, pointing to the east. Clouds were racing across the sky, not billowing but simply forming in streamers at very high altitude. The air smelled electric and was oppressive, tangible, thick and hot. The sun seemed farther away, lost in a thin milky soup.

Edward looked down from the clouds, dizzy, and tried to orient on the valley. He searched for a familiar landmark, something to give him a fixed perspective.

The Royal Arches, in slow motion, slipped in huge curved flakes down the gray face of granite onto the burning hotel. Tiny trees danced frantically and then fell on their own isolated chips of rock, limbs raised by the passing air. The roar, even across the valley, was deafening. The scythe-shaped flakes, dozens of yards wide, crumpled like old plaster on the valley floor, extinguishing the Ahwanee, the fire trucks, fire fighters, and tiny crowds of onlookers in a blossoming cloud of dust and debris. Boulders the size of houses rolled through the forest and into the Merced River. New slopes of talus crept across the valley floor like an amoeba’s pseudopods, alive, churning, settling, striving for stability.

Betsy said nothing. Edward glanced apprehensively at the crack in the terrace nearby.

Minelli had given up trying to hold on to Inez. She fled from the rim, her breasts and arms and hips bouncing as she leaped up steps and over rails. He grinned at Edward and held out his hands helplessly, then descended to sit beside them.

“Some folks ain’t got it,” he said over the declining rumble of falling rocks. He looked admiringly at Betsy. “Guts,” he said. “True grit. Did you see those concentrics come apart? Just like in school. Hundreds of years in a second.”

“We aare chiiildren in youuur haaands…” The hymn singers were self-absorbed now, paying no attention to all that was going on around them. Entranced.

To each his own.

“That’s how the domes are formed, that kind of concentric jointing,” Minelli explained. “Water gets into the joints and freezes, expands, splits the rock away.”

Betsy ignored him, staring fixedly into the valley, her and still locked in Edward’s.

“The falls,” she said. “Yosemite Falls.”

The upper ribbon of white water had been blocked, leaving the lower falls to drain what had already descended. To the right of where the upper Yosemite had once been, the freestanding pillar of Lost Arrow leaned several hundred feet of its length slowly out from the cliff face, broke into sections in midfall, and tumbled down the brush- and tree-covered slopes below. More rock spilled from the northeastern granite walls above the valley, obscuring the floor with disintegrating boulders and roils of brown and white dust.

“Why not us?” Minelli said. “It’s all on that side.”

A superstitious something in Edward wanted to shut him up. Pretend as if we’re not here. Don’t let it know.

The rock beneath them quivered. The trees beyond the hymn singers swayed and groaned and splintered, limbs whipping back and forth. Edward heard the hideous crack of great leaves of granite shearing away beneath the point. Three thousand feet below — he didn’t need to look to know — Camp Curry and Curry Village were being buried under millions of tons of jagged rock. The hymn singers stopped and clutched each other to keep their balance.

“Time to get away,” Edward said to Betsy. She lay flat on her back, staring up at the twisted, malevolent overcast painted on the sky. The air seemed thinner; great waves of high and low pressure raced over the land, propelled by the minute shifting of continents.

Edward reached under her arms and dragged her away from the lowest terrace, up the steps. The game now was to stay alive as long as possible, to see as much as they could see — to experience the spectacle to their last breath, which could be at any moment.

Minelli crawled after them, face wrapped in a manic grin. “Can you believe this?” he said over and over.

The valley was alive with the echoes of falling sheets of granite. Edward could hardly hear his own words to Betsy as they stumbled and ran down the asphalt path, away from the rim.

A scant yard behind Minelli, the rock split. The terrace and all that was beneath leaned away, the gap widening with majestic slowness. Minelli scrambled frantically, his grin transformed into a rictus of terror.

To the east, like the great wise head of a dozing giant, Half Dome nodded a few degrees and tilted into a chasm opened in the floor of the valley. In arc-shaped wedges, it began to come apart. Liberty Cap and Mount Broderick, on the south side of the valley, leaned to the north, but stayed whole, rolling and sliding like giant pebbles into the mass of Half Dome’s settling fragments, diverting, and then finally shattering and sending fragments through miles of the valley. Somewhere in the obscurity of dust were the remnants of the Mist Trail, Vernal Fall, Nevada Fall, and the Emerald Lake.

The silt of the valley floor liquefied under the vibration, swallowing meadows and roads and absorbing the Merced along its entire length. The fresh slopes of talus dropped their leading edges into snakelike fractures and began to spread again; behind them, more leaves of granite plummeted.

The air was stifling. The hymn singers, on their knees, weeping and singing at once, could not be heard, only seen. The death-sound of Yosemite was beyond comprehension, having crossed the border into pain, a wide-spectrum roaring howl.

Edward and Betsy could not keep balance even on their hands and knees; they rolled to the ground and held each other. Betsy had closed her eyes, lips working against his neck; she was praying. Edward, curiously, did not feel like praying; he was exultant now. He looked to the east, away from the valley, beyond the tumbling trees, and saw something dark and massive on the horizon. Not clouds, not a front of storm, but—

He was past any expression of awe or wonder. What he was seeing could only be one thing: east of the Sierra Nevada, along the fault line drawn between the mountains formed by ages of wrinkling pressure, and the desert beyond, the continent was splitting, raising its jagged edge dozens of miles into the atmosphere.

Edward did not need to do calculations to know this meant the end. Such energy — even if all other activity ceased — would be enough to smash all living things along the western edge of the continent, enough to change the entire face of North America.

Acceleration in the pit of his stomach. Going up. His skin seemed to be boiling. Going up. Winds blew that threatened to lift them away. With the last of his strength, he held on to Betsy. He could not see Minelli for a moment, and then he opened his tingling eyes and saw against a muddy blue sky filled with stars — the atmosphere racing away above them — saw Minelli standing , smiling beatifically, arms raised, near the new rim of the point. He receded through walls of dust on a fresh-hewn leaf of granite, mouth open, shouting unheard into the overwhelming din.

Yosemite is gone. The Earth might be gone. I’m still thinking. The only sensation Edward could feel, other than the endless acceleration, was Betsy’s body against his own. He could hardly breathe.

They no longer lay on the ground, but fell. Edward saw walls of rock, great fresh white revealed volumes on all sides — thousands of feet wide — and spinning trees and disintegrating clumps of dirt and even a small flying woman, yards away, face angelic, eyes closed, arms spread.

It seemed an eternity before the light vanished.

The granite volumes enclosed them all.

From ten thousand miles, the Earth seemed as natural and peaceful and beautiful as it had over thirty years before, when Arthur had first seen it in full-frame pictures from space. That view — a clouded jewel, opal and lapis marbled with rich whorls of cloud — had entranced him, made him more than ever before feel a part of some cosmic whole. It had changed his life.