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  “Abba,” Des said.

  The man spoke angrily, then turned to leave.

  Des grabbed his arm. “Just a minute.” He turned to Anastasia. “What did he say?”

  “He said the beasts will return.”

  “So what? If the beasts return, then we’ll kill them, like we just did. They would be stupid to come back after what’s happened today.”

  “Des, it is not quite that simple. Shrive said he would return and kill all of us to serve as an example for the other tribes. We are not the only ones who work for the beasts.”

  The pale young man’s message alerted Des to a possibility he hadn’t thought about.

  “How many other tribes work for the beasts?”

  “Perhaps twenty,” Anastasia said.

  One group battling the beasts while nineteen others worked submissively for them? Des could have used this information earlier. If the beasts decided to leave them alone, then word got out to the other slaves, the beasts would risk losing total control of their workforce, so it would make sense to kill this group rather than write them off.

  “Shrive will let the other slaves live if the warriors surrender—that includes you and me,” Anastasia told him.

  Des had seen at least eight hundred men released today, maybe a thousand, so the beasts could have as many as twenty thousand slaves.

  “How many beasts are there?” Des asked wearily, only now becoming aware of the sheer magnitude of the problem.

  “I don’t know,” Anastasia replied.

  “More beasts than men?”

  “Abba.”

  “If the beasts return, how many beasts would come?” Des asked.

  “Ten or twenty times as many beasts as today. As many as—”

  “—would be necessary to kill all of us,” Des finished her thought.

  There would be thousands of beasts—maybe tens of thousands—storming the beach, murdering everyone in sight. And they would be regular soldiers, not slave watchers, soldiers who could run faster than the warriors could swing, maybe even quicker than darts could find them.

  Des asked, “How long before the beasts return?”

  “Shrive said we have fourteen days to surrender. I must go to see what has happened in the village.”

  When Anastasia left, the young man followed her. Des realized too late that this had been a shallow victory, perhaps even the beginning of the end.

  The warriors piled wood and dead beasts together. As they stacked them, Des counted forty-two beasts. They would need a forest to burn thousands if they were lucky enough to prevail.

  Anastasia screamed. Des ran towards her voice.

  The muscular man Des had seen being whipped by beasts had Anastasia by the wrist. The man jerked and started dragging her; nobody even tried to stop him.

  “Let go of her!” Des stood in his path, his sword drawn.

  The man looked puzzled, then he laughed. He began to go around Des, but Des moved to stay in his way.

  “Let go of her now!”

  The man laughed again. Dropping Anastasia’s wrist and shoving her to the ground, he motioned for Des to fight.

  Des said, “And leave her alone!”

  The man doubled over with laughter, but when he straightened, he sobered.

  Alée stood next to Des, her war club ready, and Ray-na was pointing a blowgun at him.

  The man spread his legs wide apart and scooped sand through them. He laughed heartily, then sneered and left, with several young men following him.

  Des helped Anastasia to her feet.

  She said, “His name is Rawool. I must go check the other teams.”

  She ran off.

  Des was pretty sure that most everyone was against him now.

  The flames of the beast bonfires had grown. Des’ hatred for the beasts also rose, and he resolved to not flee; he’d stand and fight to the death whomever they sent.

  Anastasia returned with news: “There have been some deaths.”

  “How many?” he asked.

  “Four. And one is missing.”

  Four warriors and forty-two beasts were dead. Even at that rate, four thousand beasts could easily wipe us out. And the next time, the beasts would be prepared. It would be another Alamo. Des realized that he needed to devise a much better battle plan.

  “Des.”

  “Yes?” He studied Anastasia’s face. God, she was beautiful.

  “May-lee had water inside her. She never made it to the beast boat. We found her in the sea.”

  Drowned, Des surmised.

  “And Puma is missing.”

  “Puma is tough, she’ll be all right,” Des replied, hoping he sounded more confident than he felt. He didn’t know the other three dead warriors, but he knew what they had been doing: killing beasts, like all the others.

  “We must go to them,” Anastasia said.

  The procession of men, women, warriors and children passed the museum. Almost the entire village was walking up the mountain path; some were carrying torches, many were chanting. Des realized that nobody was crying—he saw not a single tear. Up ahead, he saw the litters bearing the dead women; four warriors carried each fallen comrade up the mountain while Adeyo beat a slow, low rhythm on his drums.

  In a clearing near the top, wood had been stacked in four biers equally spaced across the meadow. The warriors placed a litter on each one, and white woolen cloths were laid to cover each body. Women with torches surrounded the biers.

  Itar sat in front of the biers. The chanting rose as everyone clustered around him. When he raised his hand, the chanting and drums stopped.

  Itar spoke to the silent multitude. Des didn’t know all the language, but he understood what Itar was saying. Itar spoke about the lives of the dead. He called them brave. He said they gave their lives so others could be free. Funerals were all the same. Des felt an urge to hug the body of each warrior before they were burned. They had died following him.

  Itar finished and bowed his head. The warriors with torches lit the biers, and the fires flared quickly and burned brightly.

  Des sat cross-legged near Oom’s furnace that evening, with Alée next to him.

  Des said to her in Anasazi, “Itar knew that if we did this, the beasts would return in greater numbers. Nobody told me how the beasts could run, or slash with their claws—but then again, I didn’t ask.”

  Alée nodded.

  Des drew a pictograph in the dirt; under it he added a down slash, followed by two horizontal lines.

  “We need this many of these. Can you make them?”

  “Abba,” Alée said.

  “Make them quickly, and make them strong. Take as many warriors as you need.”

  “Abba.”

  Oom emerged from his hut. He laid an intricately woven reed sheath with an exposed handle in Des’ lap and bowed deeply.

  “For me?” Des asked, surprised.

  Oom bowed again.

  Strapped to each side of the tapering sheath was a round iron bar. Des pulled the hilt and the blade ground against iron. The steel sword was a machete sharpened on both edges. Des pulled it out halfway, inspecting the blade, then pushed it back into the sheath. It had been inscribed in English—“Oom” on one surface, “Des” on the other.

  Des hugged Oom.

  “Thank you very much—what a treasure.” He attached the heavy weapon to his belt.

  Oom danced in front of him, pretending he was sword-fighting, but Des was deep in thought.

  Deadly thoughts.

  Chapter 30

  LATITUDE 23° 43’ SOUTH

  LONGITUDE 133° 55’ EAST

  Month 3, Day 10; 0100 UTC, 9:30 AM LTD

  “I said colored chalk—lots of colors! This is not what I ordered,” Anderson thundered, spilling the box of white chalk onto
the grey marbleized floor.

  Across the conference room, John smiled only because Anderson was more animated today. His attitude had been getting oppressive.

  The scientist continued to rant. “And this blackboard! You call this oversized? I say it’s insufficient.”

  The blackboard appeared pretty standard to John, but he nodded at some staffers, who left.

  “I’ve got Bill on the phone. You want to talk to him?” he asked Anderson.

  “Not now.”

  Anderson flipped through books on the table, carefully arranging open pages. He had written most of them. The titles were esoteric: “Applied Philosophical Astronomy” and “Astronomical Kinetics: A Teleological Approach.”

  John told Bill, “Just hold right where you are.”

  After staffers set up a second blackboard and laid colored chalk in neat rows on the table, Anderson picked up two pieces of chalk and wrote furiously on the larger of the blackboards, beginning with Einstein’s “E=MC2.” He covered the rest of the board with formulas, each in a different color. Then he drew two half-meter circles adjacent to each other on the other board—one in blue, one in red.

  “Perfect circles,” Amy observed, raising an eyebrow at John.

  Anderson turned to his captive audience. “You see, there really is nothing. Nothing at all.” He smiled.

  John raised an eyebrow back at Amy.

  Anderson continued: “Nothing but displacement. The initialization of the universe was a moment of inflation. I said ‘moment’, but it took no time at all, because time didn’t exist. For every particle of matter, antimatter effused, and the two will eventually meet again and self-destruct. In the end, there will be coalescence and dissolution.”

  “I think I liked you better when you were tired,” John said.

  Anderson ignored the comment, if he even heard it. “It’s the forth dimension, time, that allows the perception of existence. The universe is still expanding, but in a trillion, trillion, trillion years it will contract into zero mass and infinite density, and time—not relative time, but time itself—will cease to exist. Time cannot stand alone.”

  John said evenly, “Anderson, I know there’s a lot of debate in your field, but we’re here to find a man, not to discuss theory.”

  The scientist countered, “You can’t find the needle if you don’t understand the structure of the haystack.”

  Amy drummed her fingers on the table. “We don’t need to understand your haystack as long as you do. Where the hell is George Barrington?”

  “Down there,” Anderson said, gesturing vaguely.

  John said to Bill on the phone, “We’ve got a fucking madman on the loose up here. Is there anybody sane down there?”

  “Of course not,” Bill replied jovially. “You can’t find anybody sane that would do this job!”

  “Where’s the probe?” Anderson asked.

  John asked Bill, who replied, “She’s out a hundred kilos, at the mouth of the interface, floating like a bird.”

  John relayed the information to Anderson: “It’s in position—and don’t give me any crap about how there are no positions. It’s at the end of the Vent.”

  Anderson appeared injured. “If you would allow me to explain—”

  Amy’s eyes rolled.

  “Ah, Bill, our man’s off into theory again. Just hold where you are.” John turned to Anderson. “All right, if you have something useful to explain, I’m listening.”

  “You need a little background to understand,” Anderson began.

  “Ten minutes, tops.”

  Amy looked at her watch.

  “Here is the Earth.” Anderson pointed to the blue circle, then labeled it with yellow and green chalk: Surface, crust, mantle, outer core and inner core. “That’s how some see it, but I do not. This picture is impossible. Think about that for a minute. At the center is an atom being crushed by all the others. It would literally explode! A nuclear reaction would obliterate the planet. That’s not science, that’s stupidity. The core is not a ball of iron or molten lava or hypertonic plasma. Lava is formed in the mantle. The Earth’s tectonic plates collide and invert, changing land mass through heat and pressure into lava. The lava spews upward, thus renewing the surface. The core is the air we breathe, and the Vents are proof.”

  “Hold on, you lost me there. Why do the Vents prove it?” John asked.

  “Because, in nature, there are no closed systems.”

  “Five minutes,” Amy announced.

  Anderson said, “I’m not trying to confuse you. A biological or ecological system needs dissemination and rejuvenation to exist. Remember several years ago, when some scientists locked some men in an artificial environment, not allowing anything in or out? They had plants they grew for food and oxygen. They exhaled carbon dioxide that was utilized by the plants. Do you remember?”

  John did remember hearing about the experiment. “It was to see if we could send a man into space and have him be self-sustaining.”

  “Exactly! And how long did the men last under glass, so to speak?”

  John shrugged. “Months? Years?”

  “It was six days before the so-called scientists cheated. Of course, no one knew it at the time; only years later did one confess. Seven times in the first month, while observers were not watching, they pumped in oxygen. The experiment lasted sixty-four days before the subjects ran out of food and were officially released.

  “My only point is that the core, being air, cannot be forever sealed from the surface. It has to be circulated and intermixed or it would become stale. The Vents are portals, and I believe this one is sucking in air, while the other is expelling it. If air is being sucked in, where is it going?”

  John thought about that, then spoke into the receiver. “Hey, Bill, do you feel a breeze down there?”

  “A breeze? What do you mean?”

  “You know, wind going by. We haven’t needed extra ventilation while building the platforms.”

  “No breeze, no wind.”

  “Bill says ‘no breeze’,” John told Anderson.

  Anderson sat next to John. “Your platforms are in the way.”

  John thought about that, and said to Bill, “Do me a favor—walk over to the elevator shaft and see if there’s a breeze.”

  “In the way of what?” Amy asked Anderson.

  “Circulation,” he replied.

  “John, you still there?” Bill asked.

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “Strangest thing: I put my head out into the elevator shaft and there is a breeze, along with a kind of whistling. Are you guys up to something I should know about?”

  “No, we’re just talking. Which way is the breeze blowing?”

  “Down. What should I do with the probe?”

  “Leave it right where it is. I’ll call you back soon.”

  “Okay.”

  John cradled the receiver. “Dr. Anderson, you have my undivided attention for as long as you desire.”

  “What’s going on?” Amy asked.

  “Good. Then let’s begin, at the beginning. There really is nothing.”

  “Oh, come on!” Amy said.

  John said to Amy, “Why don’t you go and get us some cold sodas and sandwiches. And don’t hurry.”

  “What the hell?” Amy said as she left, slamming the door behind her.

  “A moody lass,” Anderson observed.

  John asked, “When will the platforms collapse?”

  “That’s not at the beginning.”

  “I’m a fast learner.”

  Anderson sighed. “I didn’t say it was all going to collapse, and I didn’t write these formulas up here for nothing. If you want to understand, you should listen.”

  John acquiesced with a wave.

  Anderson continued. “What I was going
to say is that energy is everything. Without energy, there is nothing.” He checked off the first equation. “Let’s discuss acceleration. Acceleration is energy in motion.” Anderson crossed out the blue Earth with red chalk. With yellow chalk in hand, he pointed at the red circle and said, “This…is reality.”

  He drew a concentric yellow circle inside the red one, with slightly less than half the radius of the first circle. Above the yellow circle he wrote “64%” in blue chalk and “36%” below it. With green chalk, he drew a line that bisected the red circle into halves, and another line tangentially. He then drew two thin circular lines between the yellow and red circles with purple chalk. He wrote “32%” above these lines and another “32%” below them.

  He wrote “the core” in the red circle’s center. Between the two purple lines, he wrote “the interface.” As he was drawing, Anderson said, “There are two points of zero gravity.”

  When he finished, he asked, “What were we discussing?”

  “Acceleration,” John answered.

  “Ah, yes. So, you were paying attention. Good. Acceleration.” He checked off two more formulas. “Acceleration can be strange. Did you know that a feather accelerates at the same rate in a vacuum as a rubber ball? There are a lot of good experiments to demonstrate acceleration.”

  John remembered one from the leaning tower in Pisa.

  “If you had thought about acceleration, you would have realized you don’t need any platforms.”

  “And when did you think about it?” John asked, perturbed. They’d spent millions on these platforms—for nothing?

  “That’s a moot point now, isn’t it? You would merely have to fall to get inside my Earth.”

  Impressive ego, John thought: “my Earth.”

  “Let’s say a man with a parachute was slowly drifting downward through a Vent. Where would he end up?”

  “I give up. Where?”

  “Why, here,” Anderson said, pointing at the interface. “Not good.”

  “Because he’d be floating around in nothing, forever,” John said.

  “Precisely—but falling is good. It’s acceleration and deceleration that gets you there. Your man is here.”

  When he glossed over the red circle with chalk turned sideways, John saw the three-dimensional effect of a globe. On the tangential line outside of the red circle, Anderson wrote “Alice Springs” and under that, he wrote “Anderson Vent One.” Overhead, on the bisecting line, he wrote “Anderson Vent Two.” Again, he changed chalk and followed the tangential line to the yellow circle, where he drew a small red “x.”