Mercury Rises (17 page)

"I don't suppose we're going to get any goat-burgers out of this deal," Christine said, as the meat began to sizzle and pop.

"'Fraid not," said Finch. "The goat is a sacrifice to the gods."

"Seems to me," Christine reflected, "there's a fine line between a sacrifice to the gods and a nice mountaintop barbecue."

"True enough," said Finch. "But unless you want to be sacrificed next, I recommend we stay on the right side of that line."

Christine stood sadly by, her stomach growling, as the goat burned to a crisp. It seemed unfair that after she had already made the sacrifice of rescuing the goat and watching it drained of its fluids she wasn't even allowed to eat any of it. "Stupid gods," she muttered, as the smoke wafted toward the heavens.

A sudden flash of lightning streaked from the clouds, striking the rim of the crater with a deafening BOOM! Christine immediately began apologizing profusely to gods she had scorned mere seconds earlier. As the saying goes, there are no atheists on mountaintops during thunderstorms.

The gods responded by pelting the mountaintop with rain.

"Are we safe here?" Christine asked worriedly, once she had done her best to appease the gods.

Finch snorted. "The odds of being struck by lightning are---"

Lightning tore through the sky again, blasting a nearby boulder to pieces. BOOM!

Christine ran. After a moment's hesitation, Finch followed. A glance backward indicated that the elders remained transfixed on the altar. The rain was now coming down in torrents.

As she approached the crater's edge, there was a third BOOM!, even louder than the first two. The earth shook beneath Christine's feet and she fell forward onto her palms. She was showered by a blast of hot air and fiery debris. After a moment, a flaming goat head crashed into the ground in front of her and rolled several feet before coming to a halt. It stared vacantly at her, its eyes filled with orange flame. She had to hand it to these primitive African gods: that was one of the creepiest things she had seen in a while.

Brushing the ashes from her hair, Christine turned to see what had happened. It was a grisly sight: the third lightning bolt had struck the altar, exploding it and electrocuting the Tawani elders. Their corpses lay face-up on the ground surrounding the charred altar site, their arms and legs splayed widely so that they looked like paper dolls arranged neatly in a circle. At the center of the circle was a charred impression in the ground---a crater within a crater. A wisp of smoke arose from its center.

As Christine made to get to her feet, the ground shook again and a narrow crack that ran through the center of the crater floor began to widen. A sudden blast of smoke shot up from below.

"Get up!" yelled Finch. "Mbutuokoti is erupting!"

Christine staggered to her feet. "Erupting?" she protested. "I thought it was dormant!"

They moved as quickly as they could across the shaking ground to the edge of the crater. The split in the crater floor continued to widen.

"That's how these things work," Finch said. "They're dormant until they erupt. Then they're not dormant anymore."

Seconds after they reached the crater wall, the entire crater floor began to collapse, massive chunks of earth and rock simply disappearing into an abyss below. As each piece fell, a blast of sulfurous hot air shot up from below. Christine and Finch climbed frantically toward the crater rim.

"Mbutuokoti hasn't erupted for over seven thousand years," Finch went on in between breaths. "But in geological terms that's nothing. The odds that it would erupt---"

"Oh yes," snapped Christine. "
Do
tell me the odds. You have no idea how reassuring that was with the lightning."

They reached the rim of the crater just as the entire floor collapsed.

"The heat of the magma is liquefying the rock," Finch explained, as they began their uneasy descent down the rocky slope.

"Magma?" Christine asked. "Is that like lava?"

"Same thing," Finch replied. "It's called magma until it..."

A massive jet of bright orange lava suddenly shot upward from the crater. It must have been a hundred feet tall.

"...erupts," Finch finished. "Run!"

But Christine was already running as fast as she dared. She was taking giant strides down the hillside, her eyes locating a solid footing a tenth of a second before each leap. The rain persisted, impairing her vision and making the rocks slippery. Finch was right behind her, so that if she slowed down he would careen into her, knocking both of them down. Softball-sized globs of semi-hardened lava began to strike the rocks all around them, breaking into oblong, orange-hot splatters on the steep ground. One hit by one of those, Christine thought, and I'm as dead as that goat.

About halfway down Mbutuokoti, just when Christine began to think she might just survive this little adventure, her foot slipped and she tumbled headlong down the slope.

TWENTY

Circa 2,000 B.C.

By the time Mercury was back in Babylon, his luck had apparently changed: the rain had stopped and the sun was shining. It appeared that the flooding, if not exactly over, was not going to get any worse. Even more remarkably, Tiamat appeared to be in a good mood.

"Mercury!" she exclaimed. "Perfect timing. I need you to get started on the plans for the next ziggurat."

Mercury was dumbfounded. "The next...You realize that most of Babylon is underwater, right? We've lost tens of thousands of people, and most of the survivors are either starving or sick or both. Maybe we should take some time to regroup before starting another ziggurat."

"No!" Tiamat snarled. "I want the plans ready so that as soon as this one is done, we can start making bricks for the next one."

"You want to finish this one?" Mercury asked. "I thought it was in the wrong place."

"I'm fairly certain it is," said Tiamat. "But there's no way to know for sure until it's done."

"Great," replied Mercury. "I'll mention that in my next pep talk to the guys."

"Excellent," replied Tiamat, oblivious to his sarcasm. "But first, I need you to go find Nabu. Or the raft, at least. I can't deal with any more whining about people being hungry. We need to find some food."

"Still no word from Nabu, eh?" Mercury asked.

"Nothing," grumbled Tiamat. "It's been six days. That was our best raft, too. Nabu better be dead, or he's going to be in big trouble. If he ever comes back, I'm going to tie a brick around his neck and throw him off the ziggurat."

Mercury thought for a moment. "Couldn't we, you know, just
make
food?"

"Mercury, you know that's against the rules. We're not allowed to use miracles to interfere in a society's development."

"Really?" asked Mercury dryly. "You're going to start quoting the rules now?"

"Look, I can't just start miraculously providing food to people. It sets a bad precedent. Now stop arguing with me and go find Nabu before I lose my temper."

Mercury bit his tongue and walked away through the huddled masses who begged him for a scrap of bread. He was tempted to bring a few loaves into being, but Tiamat was right: you couldn't just start doing miracles for people. Where would it stop? He reached the edge of the ziggurat and made his way down to the water, some twenty feet below. He glanced up to make sure no one was watching, and then used a small amount of interplanar energy to warp the sunlight around his frame, making himself near invisible. He leaped into the air toward the mountain peaks in the distance.

He skimmed low and fast across the water's surface, just a barely noticeable variation in the current. Once he was too far out to be identifiable from the ziggurat, he dropped his camouflage and soared higher into the sky. It took him less than an hour to reach the foothills, and only a few minutes longer to spot Nabu and his crew picking berries on a hillside.

He alighted a few hundred yards away and walked up.

"Nabu!" he exclaimed. "What a surprise!"

"Mercury?" Nabu said incredulously. "How did you...?"

"Got lost," said Mercury. "I was looking for my dog, and I wound up here."

"I didn't know you had a dog."

"Well, that would explain why I can't find him. So, how goes the food hunt? About to head back?"

Nabu shook his head sadly. "We've barely found enough to keep ourselves alive. Mostly berries, a few nuts. We saw a deer yesterday, but couldn't get close enough to spear it. It's bad, Mercury. Real bad."

"Hmm." Mercury said. "Don't worry; we'll figure something out." He clambered up the hillside a few hundred yards and stepped out onto a narrow outcropping from which he could see most of the way around the peak. Except for a few other hilltops and the mountain range in the distance, water covered the land as far as he could see. The hillsides didn't look very promising as far as food was concerned.

Casting his eyes out across the sea, he spied something unexpected: a boat of some kind. As he watched, it grew gradually larger: it was moving slowly toward him.

"Hey, Nabu!" Mercury called down the slope. "Get up here!"

Nabu and his men clambered up after Mercury.

"Check it out," Mercury said. "A boat. Come on!"

He scrambled down the hillside in the direction of the boat. It looked like it would make landfall on a shallow slope about a half mile away. They sprinted most of the way, with Mercury in the lead, but when they got there they realized the boat was still several hundred yards out. It was bigger than they had realized: it was nearly five hundred feet long, with a pitched roof covering most of the boat.

Mercury whistled. "Holy crap, that's a big boat."

Nabu and his men mumbled agreement. None of them had ever seen a boat even a quarter of that size. As it drifted closer to the shore, they saw a man with long, gray hair standing on the deck, peering out at the hilltops.

"Hey!" called Mercury. "Over here!"

The man waved and yelled something to someone else on the boat. Another man, burlier and brown haired, appeared and hurled what appeared to be an anchor over the deck railing. There was some more movement on the boat, and Mercury realized they were lowering a small rowboat to the water. When the rowboat was afloat, the two men climbed down some sort of rope ladder into it and began to row toward Mercury.

After some time, the rowboat neared the shore, and the younger, brown-haired man leaped out, guiding the boat to dry ground. The older man stepped gingerly onto the hillside.

"Hey, dudes," said the old man. "I'm Noah, captain of the
Rainbow Warrior
. This is my son, Japheth. What's happening?"

"Hi," said Mercury. "I'm Mercury. Nice boat. How many people you got on that thing?"

"People?" asked Noah. "Just eight adults, plus the grandkids. Immediate family only, man."

"Eight people?" asked Mercury, incredulous. "You could carry a small city in that thing."

"Yeah, most of it is taken up with the animals," said Noah.

"Animals? What animals?"

"Well," said Noah, frowning a bit, "like, all of them."

As Noah spoke, a large raven sailed quietly out of the sky and alighted on his shoulder. In its beak was a leaf.

"Shoo!" Noah barked at the bird, waving it off with his hand. "Get back on the boat, you stupid bird! Man, if I ever have to do this again, I'm leaving the damn ravens off the boat."

"You think something like this is going to happen
again
?" asked Mercury.

The raven, circling in the air above them, cawed at them in response.

"Shut up!" yelled Noah, waving his arms wildly. "Back. On. The. Boat!"

"Seems pretty unlikely we'd ever have a flood like this again," Mercury went on.

"Maybe," said Noah. "Never say never."

"Caw-caw-CAW!" cawed the raven.

"Is that bird
saying
something?" asked Mercury.

"Yeah," said Noah, glaring at the bird. "He's telling me to
leave the damn ravens behind next time
."

"Caw-caw-CAW!" cawed the raven.

"I swear he's trying to say something," said Mercury. "Like 'here's the shore.'"

Japheth shook his head. "Sounds like 'where's the boar?' to me."

Noah began screaming and running in circles, trying to scare off the bird. Finally the raven gave up and flew back to the
Rainbow Warrior
. "Level four!" it seemed to caw.

Japheth smiled weakly. "My dad is a bit eccentric," he said. He glanced at Noah, who was bent over with his hands on his knees, panting wildly. Japheth surreptitiously held his thumb to his lips and tossed his head back, sticking his tongue out and rolling his eyes wildly.

"We're on a mission," proclaimed Noah, when he had recovered. "We're saving the animals. You see, God is fed up with humanity's violent ways, so he sent a flood to wipe us out. I mean, not us. You."

As he spoke, another bird---this one a pigeon---landed on his shoulder. In its beak was some sort of branch.

"
Et tu
, pigeon?" cried Noah, slapping crazily at the bird.

"Woooooooo!" said the pigeon, dropping the branch on the ground and flapping into the air.

"Seriously, I think those birds are trying to tell you something," said Mercury. "Maybe they want you to know that the flood waters are receding, and that it's safe to land the
Rainbow Warrior
."

"Woooooooo!" said the pigeon, as it flew off.

"Idiot birds," grumbled Noah. "They don't know shit. Obviously the flood can't be over yet, because every living thing hasn't been wiped from the face of the Earth. I was promised the flood waters would cover the mountains to a depth of fifteen cubits."

"Fifteen cubits!" exclaimed Mercury. "Wow. You know, I'm pretty sure there isn't enough water on Earth for that. Are you sure God didn't say that the water was going to rise fifteen cubits altogether?"

"Well, that wouldn't kill every living thing on the face of the Earth, would it?" asked Noah, sneering at Mercury. "So we're staying on the
Rainbow Warrior
until I get a definite sign the flood is over."