End Time (59 page)

“I couldn't get him out of bed to bury him. I wasn't strong enough. And I knew no one would come. The Good Humor Man lived across the street from me.…” Her voice trailed off. “I don't think anyone is coming for a while.”

Lattimore nodded. “No, I don't think so either, Mildred.”

He and the Cosmo cashier had tucked Walter Nash's body in the café's cold locker amongst frozen ground turkey boxes. Then they cleaned up everywhere so you wouldn't know a man had blown his brains out if you hadn't been there. Still, Clem wasn't about to make a food run to the freezer locker alone anytime soon.

Lattimore's head pounded. He went to the kitchen for a damp dish towel and flopped on the couch without ceremony, completely worn out. Too much had happened today. Dealing with the dead security chief had been the last straw. First Jasper died in his hospital bed, suffocated by government goons for their own security lapses. Then Lattimore fell asleep on a loading dock while a Taker took him to see really ugly stuff in the Pi R Squared complex. Finally, Nash had killed himself in the afternoon. Enough already.

At the library shelf Mildred touched one decanter, then another; the silver labels clinked against the crystal. She settled on the bourbon. “May I?”

Lattimore waved a limp hand toward the bottles on the shelf. “Help yourself.”

The cool damp dishcloth soothed his head but didn't quite cover his eyes. Outside snow was falling, flying sideways. Not so unusual for early November, but Lattimore knew this wasn't merely Mother Nature. Should he click into Jasper's PC again? Look in on the antenna heads at the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Facility; see if all the dials and monitors were flicking into the red? See the real-time data streams of General Winter crawling down from Canada?

Maybe he'd do that later. But for now, let the snow slip across his vision and listen to Mildred padding about the library. “We'll make some plans a little later,” he mumbled, “but right now I think I just have to…” He didn't finish.

As he began to doze, Lattimore felt a new presence in the room. Through half-closed eyes, he saw that Sikh scientist from Escape Velocity sitting in the deep armchair by the couch. Bhakti.
Bhakti Singh.
Of course, reporting for work, the most natural thing in the world.

The man wore dirty khaki slacks, a watermelon-pink polo shirt, and a Brooks' Brothers blazer. He looked calmly at Lattimore even though large bullet holes dotted his chest, his shirt stained with rings of blood. The
Indian
Indian scientist held out his hand. “C'mon, boss. I want to show you something.”

Lattimore knew he was dreaming, but it was an interesting dream. He'd only met Professor Bhakti Singh once, a few years ago at the Van Horn Aerogel manufacturing hangar. Bhakti and his Number Two, Professor Chen, had showed him around, behind the great transparent wall, explaining the tanks, the injection process. Even the Punjabi scientist's wife joined them, rolling along in her wheelchair. Lattimore remembered asking if they liked their new subdivision house, and Mrs. Eleanor Singh, more than pleased, smiled at him and said, “Delighted.”

As he lay on the couch in his living quarters at the top of the bronze-and-glass building, Lattimore's fingers touched the Sikh scientist's hand; the aerospace boss felt himself rise off the cushions, and they went away together.

The next thing he knew—

Heat pounded into him from every side.

Lattimore blinked his eyes. The two men stood on a reddish dirt ridge on the side of a reddish mountain. The blue sky overhead a steaming, blinding cap; sunlight pulsed off the red dirt.

An ancient city of broad streets and narrow alleys lay in the saddle of a valley: empty doorways, roofless brickwork, a bone-dry public bath.… A huge mound rose above the city's ruins, a high hill rubbed smooth by endless winds—some sort of temple mount.

“Buddhists called them stupa mounds,” Bhakti said into Lattimore's ear. “In Sanskrit the word
stupa
simply means ‘heap.' But this mound is far older than Buddha. It has guarded the floodplain of the Indus River for many thousands of years. Behold the ancient city Mohenjo-Daro, known as ‘the Mound of the Dead,' though what they called it in ancient times no one knows. Not even the Pakistanis remember.”

“The Mound of the Dead…,” Lattimore murmured.

He stooped and picked up an odd bit of rock at his feet. A scrap of reddish fused gravel melted to molten glass. Ripples on the stone showed where it had liquefied, sliding down the reddish slope like lava. Lattimore knew the term for this—vitrification: rapid heating and then rapid cooling. Only a few things on Earth could do that. A volcano, and—

Nuclear fission.
Thermonuclear heat
.

Lattimore rubbed the reddish glassy slab with his thumb, feeling its ethereal smoothness.

“Something terrible happened here, didn't it, Bhakti?”

The Punjabi scientist nodded his head, his voice soft and seductive. “Something terrible, thousands and thousands of years ago. Down below there are bodies, ancient bones. Still radioactive. They resist decay. How did the people die? Who killed them? All we know is what the Mahabharata, the Bhagavad-Gita, says. The Song of God tells of giant cities floating above the Earth. And those giant cities were made of gleaming metal and iron. And when those cities went to war against each other, fire rained down on men's heads.” Bhakti seamlessly slipped into verse, quoting what he knew from memory:

An incandescent column of smoke and flame,

Bright as ten thousand suns

Rose in all its splendor.

An unknown weapon,

A gigantic messenger of death …

Bhakti swept an open hand across the ruins below:

The corpses so burned as to be unrecognizable.

The hair and nails fell out.

Pottery broke without apparent cause,

And the birds turned white.…

Bhakti fell silent.

Lattimore gazed down at the reddish brick ruins of Mohenjo-Daro, the Mound of the Dead. As Bhakti's hand passed over the burnt landscape, the ancient city slowly came to life before Clem's eyes. From thousands of years ago, the buildings grew from their broken foundations; water filled the great bath; the great stupa mound gleamed with gold and silver; people walked the streets as mules and camels drew carts from the green countryside laden with fruit and grain. The Indus River sparkled blue and white on the horizon.

“There are no city walls, no defenders.”

“No need,” Bhakti whispered. “They feared no one with the great sky gods in their sky palaces to protect them.”

As the nameless city went about the business of daily life, Lattimore perceived two sharp points of light in the sky moving toward each other from opposite directions. Two gleaming fairy cities hovered on the horizon of east and west like floating castles in children's stories. Shining silver-and-glass towers, pointed spires, and lithe skyscrapers—needles bound together with titanium thread. The faces of the buildings shivered in the air like silver shields and spears. One city came at last to rest over the sacred temple.

From the bright stupa mound's ascension point, the temple spire, figures ascended to the nearest floating city on fluttering strokes of air, and likewise descended on gossamer wings to the golden temple's pinnacle. Shining figures bathed in holy light stepped off the temple mound to walk among the mortals below, an endless stream of up and down, to and from the hovering fairy castle.

The Punjabi scientist's soft voice murmured, “How could our rustic forefathers know that the sky gods in their sky palaces, with their flying horses and flying carpets, might hate each other? Like the immortal angels of the Bible, they went to war.”

“Over us? Over these green valleys?”

Before Bhakti answered, a flash of light like a thousand suns ate the sky in one blast. Lattimore shielded his eyes, turning his face away; he could see the bones in his hand, X-rays lighting him up like a fluoroscope.

The world returned; not incinerated, just a vision. Lattimore had dropped the curious piece of vitrified glass. It lay at his feet in a dozen pieces. His eyes returned to the weathered mound, the temple ruins.

“But who would fight such a war? And why?” Lattimore asked softly.

“Perhaps the war was actually between bad gods and
better
gods,” Bhakti answered. “Between those who wanted Man to reach for the stars, to follow them across the heavens—
and those who did not,
who wanted us only for genetic code and raw materials, who looked at us as mere playthings and a source of spare parts. Selfish gods who never wanted Man to walk on air, or live in floating cities.”

Bhakti's voice kept on. “They fought a death match against better gods who saw mankind as more than breeding stock; benevolent gods who saw us as redeemable, or simply good in and of ourselves. Better gods who left behind legends of great beings, ancient knowledge, and tales of divine souls who reigned in heaven—learned souls in search of morality, ethics, and enlightenment. Causing mankind to venerate their offspring, honor their memories and ideas. Moses, Jesus, Buddha, and nameless others in every corner of the globe, divine beings who kept us on an honest path. Better beings, humble enough to understand an even greater God existed—the One who created us all.”

The Punjabi scientist's voice dropped away to nothing, letting this sink in for a moment. His voice returned, stronger than before.

“Divine beings we honored with pyramids and sacred cities on lost mountaintops, with everlasting foundations of stone and our endless labor. Temple complexes laid out in the shape of constellations—star maps for future generations: in the three great pyramids of Giza, marking Orion's belt. And in Cambodia, Angkor Wat, pagodas match the constellation Perseus. In Mexico's Teotihuacan, great causeways and waterways show the way to the Pleiades. Each ancient culture pointed to the same quadrant, pointing to our origins. Star maps for the Children of the Stars. All in order to show us the way home—where to follow, where to go. Star maps from divine galactic beings who wished us to find them in the immensity of space.”

Bhakti's mythic cosmology hung in the air beside Lattimore's ear. This was a trail of eternal bread crumbs for Hansel and Gretel to follow across the stars. A coherent cosmology sprung from the ancient tales of good and evil: tales of redemption, of this Earth and beyond.

The soft voice explained the ancient struggle. “Call it the birth of planetary morality, if you like. Good aliens versus bad aliens. With their own squabbles, just like us. Immortal beings both
of this Earth, and not of this Earth
. Competitive star peoples in a race war for supremacy over the blue planets and their star children. There were even survivors. We call them fallen angels now. Or the Nephilim, who still roam the Earth among their offspring and descendants. Is that so hard to believe?”

Lattimore realized those immortals, call them Takers or Mind Gliders or the Fallen—call them anything you want—had been hovering over him since boyhood, since he climbed into a tree house to fall asleep, since before his family came to Pennsylvania. Since before the beginning of his life—

Yes, even since Pop Lattimore worked as forced labor in Mittelbau-Dora.

The blinding light over the Indus River and the Mound of the Dead faded away; Bhakti had spirited him to a new place. A dark clammy underground. A tunnel of slaves. The gentle Indian scientist had undergone a subtle change: cold foreboding eyes, the tunnel gloom covering his face like a drawn hood.

“Of course your father's first employers desperately wanted to master the technology of the floating cities. And your father helped them. Not merely with rocketry, but with antigravity. The real secret of our star-wandering ancestors.”

Lattimore peered into the gloom, the underground section of the forced labor facility known as Middle-Block D. The rock walls shuddered and trembled. Dust cascaded through a thousand cracks in the concrete. Lightbulbs in their wire cages flickered, and half-naked men scurried like frightened rats in hell. Fire leapt into the corridor through an open steel door, the metal bent like tin. Technicians in white coats stumbled into the corridor half-burned and screaming.

Lattimore saw his own father emerge choking and gasping, his lab coat on fire. His father, a young man:
not one of the naked slaves at all,
but clean-shaven and well-fed as though allowed regular access to hot water and soap and fresh clothes and food. Pop Lattimore tore off his smoldering coat, threw it away, and pressed against the tunnel wall, eyes wide in fear. Everything had gone terribly wrong.

Inside the testing room, a great bell-shaped instrument vibrated on the edge of sight. The metallic thing appeared visible and then invisible; apparently some kind of antigravity core. The infamous Nazi Bell: electromagnetic weightlessness, fractionating space/time and bending light. A device you'd put in another machine to make it float; what you'd put under a city to lift it from the Earth, to awe the natives and keep the savages in line.

But the Nazis' floating bell caromed out of control. Flying wildly about the inner cavern, it smashed men in white coats and men in uniforms against banks of dials, against concrete walls, and then smashed something else. A great fire of mercury lay in its wake, burning everything in the room—men, machines, cables, and slaves—in a violet radiance of death. Lattimore's father shielded his eyes, beaten back by the violet light; turning away, he stumbled down the corridor, fleeing with the rest.

Panic raged through the underground; technicians ran from the violet fire, and things that were not men fled too. Creatures that were not human: gangly humanoids, like frantic praying mantises, thin gray arms and bulbous heads, flailing as they burned. Exactly like that mutant Chargrove Model-A Lattimore had seen on the operating table, except these were alive and functioning. The familiar “Grays” of ancient and modern legend: the large black soulless eyes, the silent tiny mouths. The panicked mantids' emotionless faces showed nothing, their arms flailing, but the Mittelbau insect-men burned like everything else.