Charles Sheffield: Aftermath

The Rival rose higher in the sky, moving toward its own noon. The naked figure danced on and on, a solitary black mote on the great plateau. Danced, as his energy slowly faded. Danced, as his legs weakened. There had been a sign that he was to begin. There must be a sign that he was permitted to stop.

Nothing, though his legs were beginning to buckle. The dry south wind blew, and the Rival pierced his body with its daggers of heat. He decided that he would dance until he died. If his life was demanded as the condition of succor, he was willing to give it.

When the change came he at first noticed nothing. It was hot as ever, the wind blew still. Only when he stumbled and fell from sheer exhaustion, then made the effort to regain his feet, did he see it.

A new line of hills rose above the southern horizon. He stared at them for seconds, before his tired brain told him that what he saw was impossible. Not hills. Clouds. As he watched they crept closer, changing from that single indistinct line to lofty mountains and dark feathery canyons.

Not just clouds. Rain clouds.

Wondjina whooped in triumph. Rather than trying to stand up, he fell forward and lay prone. With his left cheek on the dry, gritty ground, he gave thanks. He watched the steady advance until the wonderful moment when a rearing thunderhead swallowed up the Rival’s fire. The wind fell to nothing, then came back as veering random gusts. The air was no longer lung-searing hot.

As the first drops of rain spattered the parched soil, he stood up. Now it was time to rejoin the family. Later he would tell them how at his plea the cloud spirits had saved them — even if they did not want to believe it.

He left the eggshells and bones where they lay, a tribute to the spirits. The rain was changing from a shower to a downpour to an astonishing cloudburst. He cupped his hands in front of his mouth, turned his face upward, and drank.

The family would not be where he had left them. When rain came like this after a long dry spell, there was only one place to be. Wondjina hurried toward it. Soon he had left the graveled watercourse and was traversing the side of the hill, still heading downward.

The slope ended at an oval pan of clay, forty yards across and a hundred long. The dry surface of Lake Darnong was a mosaic of deep cracks, half an inch across. Rain hissed down onto the flat clay bed and vanished immediately into the fissures of the thirsty earth.

The whole family, thirteen people plus the four dogs, stood waiting. Everyone was smiling and holding woven collection bags. The cracks in the clay foamed and bubbled.

One of the dogs saw it first. She darted forward. Two seconds later she was back with a muddy frog wriggling in her jaws. And then they were everywhere, the whole soaked surface alive with frogs awakened by water from their estivation and wriggling up to feed and mate. Family and dogs ran forward together. Wondjina followed, more slowly. As he walked onto the slick clay, already covered by half an inch of water, he turned to stare triumphantly south. The Rival was hidden by dense clouds, but it must still be there. It had lost. Wondjina and the cloud spirits had won.

Much later, as day followed day of remorseless rain, Wondjina realized his error. The whole landscape was changing, vanishing, washing away in great mud slides and borne off on torrents of rushing water. It became cold, colder than any winter, and white flakes fell from the sky.

Chilled and shivering, Wondjina crouched beneath a useless shroud of cloth. He had been wrong. The Rival had not been conquered. It had been challenged, and now it was showing its strength. The cloud spirits had not brought the rain. The Rival had brought the rain and storm, not to save the family but to destroy it. Stay or go, it made little difference now. Wondjina’s world was gone, and it would not return.

Wondjina, cold and despairing, died on the sixth day of the rains. He never knew that the Rival, burning fierce above the clouds, had yet to reveal its full power.

Second Strike. March 14, 2026; Suborbital.

The weather on takeoff from LA was as freakish and wild as Tom had ever seen it. Strong gusts at random, from every direction. Blame events in the Southern Hemisphere for that. But once you were above the atmosphere, the weather problems all went away. The six-passenger ship flew itself — or rather the automatic pilot made the decisions. Human pilots were a passenger courtesy, about as necessary to this flight as feathers. Which was fine with Tom Wagner, because it left him free to entertain his special VIP, the woman who had been brought aboard incognito and at the last moment.

“No, ma’am. You won’t see the supernova from here.” She was sitting next to him, and he leaned across her to point south. “It’s thataway. But we’re flying a great circle suborbital between LA at .thirty-four degrees north and Washington at thirty-nine degrees. What you want to see is down at sixty degrees south. To get a peek at it we’d have to go a lot higher than a suborbital flight.”

Janet Kloos stared south anyway, taking her cue from his pointing finger rather than his words. She looked to be in her late thirties, but Tom knew she was a fair bit older than that. As he recalled it from the last campaign, the Vice President was pushing fifty. Apparently political life agreed with her.

“And it can have these terrible effects on the weather,” she said. “Even from so far away.”

“Yes, ma’am. It certainly can.” Her words confirmed his first impression. Janet Kloos was a certified pilot, qualified to fly a ship like this one. Her naive questions about the suborbital jump had been for Tom’s benefit. She wanted him to feel comfortable, and the easiest way was to make it clear that in spite of her status, he, not she, was in charge here.

Which was fine with him. Know-it-all passengers on the flight deck were the hardest of all to deal with.

“It will get worse before it gets better,” he went on. “According to the forecasts that I’ve seen, the effects should peak in another couple of weeks. After that it will gradually dim, and then things ought to head back to normal.”

“Not in some places.” She stopped staring south and leaned back in her seat. During this portion of the suborbital trajectory the ship was close to a free-fall condition. “I see the State Department reports, and I’m not giving away secrets when I tell you that we’ve been lucky. There are major storms crawling up and down South America from Tierra del Fuego to Panama. Australia is waterlogged. South Africa’s being washed away into the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, fifty percent of the topsoil already gone. There’s never been anything like it since they started keeping records. The East Indies, too. The Sulawesi trade delegation back in LA were just telling me that they cannot possibly make their export shipments. They can’t even feed themselves.”

Tom nodded, but he was hardly listening. He cast his eye quickly over the banks of instruments — all normal — and then stared north. If there was nothing to see to the south, there was plenty to look at in the opposite direction. It was an aurora, and like none that he had ever seen. He checked their height. Eighty miles, close to maximum and right in the middle of the main altitude of auroral activity. Soon they would reach apogee and begin their downward glide. That was a shame, because the display was worth watching from this vantage point for as long as you could.

He caught her attention and pointed to the left. In the north, the sky was on fire. Streamers of pink and red and yellow-green trailed across the starlit heavens.

“Aurora borealis,” Tom said. “Northern lights. The strange thing is, I’ve heard nothing from the solar observatories about a big flare.”