The Omega Point

Then it hit his brain in an explosion of darting sparks, each of which seemed filled with information, and in the next instant he saw beyond words, beyond thought, beyond language itself, into the pure, wordless mathematics of hyperspace.

Which he understood—and with it, also understood more of himself than ever before, that they were, in one sense, right about him, that he contained an enormous past stretching across eons among the living and eons among the dead. He saw, also, that a living man and a dead man are simply two aspects of one creature. The living form moves through life in an active state; a dead man is the same creature in its contemplative form, looking at what has been done, and in so doing seeing the truth of the self.

There came next a burst of pure physicality—bodily sensation in its purest form, the agony of pleasure and the agony of pain mixed together.

“Oh, God, God, I’m… I think I’m having a stroke. You’re giving me a stroke!”

“No,” Caroline said. Her hand on his forehead was cool and firm, and the tears in her eyes gleamed.

Then something happened that he had not expected and could not expect. The rich, vivid sensation of his body seemed to concentrate until it was a single, burning point—and then his head, for want of a better word to explain total annihilation, exploded.

He had no eyes to see with, no ears to hear with, no sensation of the world around him.

He thought, They killed me. They’re all crazy and they killed me. This was a blood sacrifice.

But the black that had enveloped him was not like the abyss he had glimpsed earlier. This darkness was vividly alive, and also changing, and it changed by degrees through all the colors that were on the Tiffany lamp, until it was a radiance, and suddenly he was no longer in a void, but back in his office.

He saw also within him another being who was not him but who occupied a place in hyperspace that was at once everywhere and was deeply, profoundly specific. He saw that this being, who had been called Osiris, who had been called Christ, who had been called Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha, who had been called so many different names, was right here, right now, and he understood why the preflood ritual that was now known as communion, the sharing of the flesh, had been preserved, because to accept Him into your body was to accept Him into your soul.

He was looking up into a face. He reached up, and Caroline smiled, and kissed the tips of his fingers.

Around him was his class, his deep friends, his companions in the Great Work.

“I remember,” he said, his voice faint. He tried again, attempting to speak more strongly. “I remember. I remember how I love you.”

At first, he’d been afraid and embarrassed.

Dad had driven him into a world of Lamborghinis and Bentleys in an ’88 Chevy Caprice. He had not understood then what he understood now, that he had been chosen not because his grandfather had happened to own a certain piece of land, but because he was, himself, exactly right for the role he was to perform.

“Mr. Acton didn’t only see the future,” he said, his voice faint. “We weren’t chosen because of our lives, but because of our past lives. Nothing was an accident.”

He had been a general, an admiral, he had led men and nations, and was an ancient being full of wisdom, and he could perform the role being offered to him. In fact, he was the only one who could do it, the good leader.

“I saw you,” he said to Caroline, “you…” She’d been perhaps ten, he twelve, but she had shone like a child made of sunlight.

He remembered sitting side by side with her under the apple tree—for there was such a tree in the garden of every house of the Acton Group, including his own. The color of the apple blossom, he knew now, was a memory trigger. When that red blush came to the sky, it would be time.

The color of the new star was no longer frightening to him, for it was the color of the highest energy, and the auroras combined with it to make the sky the subtle pink of apple blossom.

He looked at Caroline again, and, softly, secretly, his heart opened—and he saw at once how necessary this had been. Without love, there was no reason to continue the species at all, and there was a great plan and there were rules, and without love they could not fly through time.

“I remember my promise to you, Caroline.”

She met his eyes with the warmest gaze he could ever remember, and at once for him everything changed. They had held innocent hands as kids, but there had been a deeper bond, the entwining love of souls that has carried humanity across so many perils and divides.

They came together and he enfolded her in his arms, and it felt good, it felt so very, very good.

An instant later, he broke away. In his new role, he had new responsibilities.

“The painting,” he said. “Who’s guarding it?”

Glen and Sam looked at each other.

“Nobody? Is it nobody?”

“David, we didn’t think that—”

He didn’t listen to the rest, he didn’t need to. He was already running.

Please, God, that he not be too late.

17. THE TOWNSPEOPLE

“For God’s sake, Glen, she’s been dismembered! My dear God!” David felt as if he was watching himself from a distance as he stared down at the body of Marian Hunt. He knew that he was experiencing stress-induced dissociation, a symptom of shock. Claire Michaels, who had found her, sat slumped in a chair, her face in her hands.

If they had not needed to take the time to inject him, perhaps this wouldn’t have happened.

Katrina said in a dull voice, “We need a blanket, David.”

“Yes, of course. We need, uh, a body bag—Glen?”

“I’ll get a couple of men to pull her out of here and clean up the blood. But we’ve got no communications, so this all has to be done with runners and my first priority is to locate and secure the person who did this, and I have to tell you that we’ve got perimeter issues. We had an incursion attempt earlier today, and there was one intruder injured.”

“Where is he? Is he being treated?”

“They carried him off. I’m hopeful that it taught them a lesson.” But then he stopped, listened.

David heard it, too, a chugging noise.

“What is it?”

Glen had gone pale.

“Automatic weapons fire,” he said. “South wall.”

“Ours?”

“That’s an older-model machine gun, probably a Browning. The townies are back and my guess is that somebody’s opened that back gate for them again.”

There followed a sharp, rushing whisper.

“That’s us. HK G40.”

Then three cracking booms, sounding like a small cannon.

“Forty-five automatic. Civilian again. I need to get down there.”

Cries echoed through the building. More chugging followed, and upstairs, glass breaking, followed by horrific screams.

“Somebody took a hit through the window,” Glen said. The initial fear in his voice had been suppressed. In its place now was professional calm.

“We need to get everybody to safety,” David said. “We need to bring the whole security team inside the building.”

“David, begging to differ, you are telling us to begin our defense by retreating to our place of last refuge.”