impossibility-and would require more energy than existed in the entire universe. Impossibilities notwithstanding, there was a definite bulge in the visual distortion at the center of the crater.
The basilisk! King thought in a sudden panic. Maybe the explosion hadn’t killed it after all. Maybe he’d failed to destroy the quantum computer network with the IED.
Suddenly, the event horizon erupted. It was not the black mass of the basilisk that burst forth, but rather a gray-brown column that shot like a geyser into the air above the crater. The crown of the plume was lost in the dark night, but in the space of a few seconds, King saw particles of fine dust precipitating from the cloud.
As the fallout intensified into a choking miasma, he hastily tugged free a shirttail and fashioned an impromptu mask as the gritty rain began to cloud his vision.
In the darkness that followed, he heard Fiona’s voice, still speaking the strange language. Then, after a few minutes, she stopped, coughed twice, and fell silent.
50
King pulled Fiona and Sara close. He could see them now, though just barely. It had taken nearly twenty minutes for most of the dust to settle, but the finest particulate would probably remain suspended in the air for hours. King didn’t need to see the aftermath to know that the threat of the black hole was gone. The Earth had stopped shaking, there was no longer the sound of matter from the accretion disk being crushed into the event horizon, and the sense of disorientation and heaviness that had accompanied the alteration in gravity was gone.
King’s mind burned with questions about what had happened, but for a few minutes, he was content to simply hug the pair-his family.
Twenty feet above them, Alexander gave a tremendous roar as he lifted the section of wall that had pinned him, and shoved it aside. Then, as if merely recovering from a stumble on the sidewalk, he brushed himself off and glissaded down into the crater where he greeted Fiona like she were a long lost relative.
“You did it, child!” He exclaimed. “When my grip failed, I feared all was lost, but you succeeded.”
King managed to keep his expression neutral as he regarded the big man. There was something disingenuous about Alexander’s praise.
He let them fall…but why? King shook his head. That didn’t make any sense. He was allowing his natural distrust of Alexander Diotrophes make him paranoid.
“Tell me,” Alexander continued. “How did you accomplish it? The language you were speaking…that was the Siletz dialect, was it not?”
Fiona nodded. “Dad told me to just start talking, and it came to me. I thought, if anything can stop this thing from destroying the world, it would be the story of the creation of the world. My grandmother taught it to me. Then I sang the healing blessing. As I said the words, I just kept telling myself to believe that everything would be fixed. That we would all be okay.”
Alexander nodded approvingly and King detected no trace of deception in his dust-streaked face. King saw that Julia had also joined them on the side of the pit, and at the mention of ‘healing,’ she took something from her pocket and inspected it in the dim light. King saw that it was a film badge dosimeter, similar to the kind used on nuclear submarines to alert the wearer to possible exposure to dangerous levels of radiation.
The disk was uniformly white.
That surprised King. The destruction of matter at the event horizon of a black hole released intense gamma ray bursts, and it was believed that the effect would be even more pronounced with micro black holes. But the dosimeter had not changed color; apparently, they had dodged that bullet. Julia must have been thinking the same thing, because as she held the badge up for the others to see, they all broke into unfettered laughter.
The triumphant moment soon passed and King finally asked the question that was foremost in his mind. “Sara, what in God’s name are you and Fi doing here?”
Sara’s story was only part of the greater chronicle of the night’s events, and before long, Fiona and Julia…and even King himself, added to the narrative. Alexander offered a few insights, but discreetly avoided mentioning anything that might reveal his immortal nature to Julia. King however didn’t bother with secrets. Julia had questions about Suvorov, and he felt the best way to honor the man’s sacrifice was to tell her the truth.
“So what happened to the black hole?” King asked when all the stories were told. He directed this inquiry to Alexander who was inspecting the center of the crater.
Alexander blew grit away from a gritty stone-just another chunk of debris that had settled at the bottom of the crater. He held up the dark chunk of rubble, inspecting it. His face soured and then he seemed to notice that all eyes were on him. After a quick search of his memory, he shrugged and looked to Fiona for the answer. “Ask her.”
The girl seemed surprised by the question and spread her hands in a gesture of ignorance. “How should I know?”
“It responded to you,” Alexander supplied, brushing off his hands and standing up. “You took control of it. What did you tell it to do?”
“I don’t remember telling it anything,” Fiona said, but a thoughtful look came over her. “I remember though, when I was singing the creation story, I kept thinking how the black hole was the opposite of creation, and what the universe must have been like before the Old-Man-in-the-Sky made everything.
“I think maybe I told it to un-create itself,” she finished, saying it almost like a question.
King recalled how Fiona had slipped into a trance-like state; whatever she had been saying during that time, it hadn’t been her native Siletz language. “Well, it’s gone now,” he said, giving her another hug.
“It may be gone, but there’s going to be a hell of a mess to clean up,” Julia intoned. “How are we going to explain all this?”
“An earthquake,” Alexander said. “Rare for this part of the world, but not unheard of. The seismological record will confirm that. As to the exact nature of the damage…” He shrugged.
“Why not just tell the truth?” Sara asked, matter-of-factly.
“That a crazy man managed to figure out a way to turn on a black hole?” King replied, a hint of good-natured sarcasm in his words. “And a teenaged girl sang it a lullaby, and saved the world.”
“Well, when you put it that way…”
“An earthquake then,” Julia agreed. “But how will we explain those?”
She pointed to the two towering objects that dominated the center of the crater. King had never seen these massive carvings, hadn’t even seen pictures of them, but he had no trouble recognizing them.
Emerging from the spot that once been obscured by the event horizon of the black hole, and rising more than a hundred feet into the Parisian night above the ruins of the Louvre, untouched by the ravages of time and the intolerance of terrorists, stood the Bamiyan Buddhas.
EPILOGUE
Two days later
King stretched his legs out on the plush hotel bed-appropriately, a king-sized mattress-and propped his head up on a double-thickness of pillows. He could just make out the sound of water running in the suite’s bathroom, and while Sara was showering, he decided to catch up on the latest news out of Paris. She had firmly forbidden him from watching the nearly constant coverage of the situation there, especially in Fiona’s presence, and King understood her reasoning. Fiona probably felt a little like the biblical prophet Jonah-an unlucky magnet for trouble on an epic scale-and the last thing she needed was to be reminded of what they had gone through.
While the quake had rocked every corner of the city, most of the structural damage was confined to the area around the Louvre, and thankfully, the loss of life was minimal. And while the former palace-turned-museum had suffered catastrophic damage, only a few of the irreplaceable works of art had been damaged beyond repair. Julia Preston would certainly be busy. As curator-at-large for the Global Heritage Commission, she would be instrumental
