mysterious emergency cleansing, had unleashed death in the chamber.
But she had not.
1129.56
The fire cleared, leaving a smell of ozone and something twisting lens-like in the air over the cot.
The cot was empty.
1130.00
CHAPTER FORTY FOUR
Suzy felt the queasiness and put down her plate. “Is it now?” she asked the empty air. She pulled the cloak tighter. “Kenny, Howard, is it now? Cary?”
She stood in the middle of a smooth circular arena, the gray food cylinder behind her. The sun was moving in irregular circles and the air seemed to shimmer. Cary had told her about what would happen the night before, while she slept; told as much as she would understand. “Cory? Mother?”
The cloak stiffened.
“Don’t got!” she screamed. The air grew warm again and the sky seemed covered with old varnish. The clouds smoothed into oily streaks and the wind picked up, driving between the pillar-covered mound on one side of the arena and the spiked polyhedron on the other. The polyhedron’s spikes glowed blue and quivered. The polyhedron itself sectioned into triangular wedges; light leaked from between the wedges, red as molten lava.
“This is it, isn’t it?” she asked, crying. She had seen so much in dreams the past week, had spent so much time with them, that she had become confused over what was real and what was not. “Answer me!”
The cloak shivered and moved up in a hood over her head. The hood sealed itself under her chin and wrapped her forehead in a thin, translucent white layer. Then it grew around her fingers and formed gloves, down to her legs and feet, wrapping her tight but allowing her to move as freely as before.
The air smelled sweetly of varnishes, fruits, flowers. Then of warm fresh bread. The cloak slapped around her face and she tried to scratch at it with her fingers. She rolled on the ground until the voice in her ears told her to stop. She lay flat in the middle of the arena, staring upward through the transparency.
Be quiet. Be still. It was her mother’s voice, stern but gentle. You’ve been a very willful young girl, the voice said, and you’ve refused everything we’ve offered. Well, I might have done the same. Now I ask one more time, and decide quickly. Do you wish to go with us?
“Will I die if I don’t?” Suzy asked, voice muffled.
No. But you’ll be alone. Not one of us is staying.
“They’re taking you away!”
What Cary said. Did you listen, Seedling? That was Kenneth. She struggled to tear the cloak away.
“Don’t leave me.”
Then come with us.
“No! I can’t!”
No time, Seedling. Last chance.
The sky was warm electric orange-yellow and the clouds had thinned to tangled ragged threads. “Mother, is it safe? Will I be afraid?”
It’s safe. Come with us, Suzy.
Her mouth was paralyzed, but her mind seemed to crackle and come apart. “No,” she thought.
The voices stopped. For a time all she saw was racing lines of red and green, and her head hurt, and she felt like she would vomit.
The air glittered high above. The ground of the arena shrunk beneath her, the surface crazing and breaking up.
And for a dizzy moment, she was in two places at once. She was with them—they had taken her away, and even now she spoke to her mother and brothers, to Cary and her friends…
And she was in the crumbling arena, surrounded by the tattered remnants of the pillared mound and the spiked polyhedron. The structures were falling apart, as if made of sand at a beach, drying and collapsing under the sun.
Then the feeling passed. Her queasiness was over. The sky was blue, though bits and pieces of it hurt to look at.
The cloak fell away from her and was indistinguishable from the dust of the arena.
She stood and brushed herself off.
The island of Manhattan was as level and empty as a cookie sheet. To the south, clouds billowed thick and dark gray. She turned around. Where the food cylinder had been, dozens of open boxes haphazardly filled with cans now rested. On top of the nearest box was a can-opener.
“They think of everything,” Suzy McKenzie said. In minutes, the rain began to fall.
TELOPHASE
February, the Next Year
CHAPTER FORTY FIVE
The winter of burning snow had hit England hard. This night, the velvet-black clouds obscured the stars from Anglesey to Margate, scattering luminous blue and green flakes on land and sea. When the flakes touched water, they were immediately extinguished. On land, they piled in a gently glowing cloak that pulsed like bellowsed coals when trod upon.
Against the cold, electric heaters, thermostats and furnace regulators had for months proven unreliable. Catalytic heaters burning white gas were popular until no more could be had, and then they were at a premium, for the machines that made them proved equally unreliable.
Antique coal stoves and boilers were resurrected. England and Europe slipped quickly and quietly back to an earlier, darker time. It was useless to protest; the forces at work were, to most, unfathomable.
Most houses and buildings simply remained cold. Surprisingly, the number of people sick or dying continued its decline, as it had throughout the year.
There were no outbreaks of virulent disease. No one knew why.
The wine, beer and liquor industries had not fared well. Bakeries radically altered their product lines, most switching over to production of pasta and unleavened breads. Microscopic organisms the world around had changed with the climate, as unreliable as machinery and electricity.
In eastern Europe and Asia, there was starvation, which put paid to (or confirmed) ideas about acts of God. The world’s greatest cornucopias no longer existed to spill forth their groceries.
War was not an option. Radios, trucks and automobiles, planes and missiles and bombs, were just not reliable. A few Middle Eastern countries carried on feuds, but without much enthusiasm. Weather patterns had changed there, too, and for a period of weeks, burning snow fell on Damascus, Beirut and Jerusalem.
Calling it the winter of burning snow summed up everything that had gone wrong, was going wrong; not just the weather.
Paulsen-Fuchs’ Citroen sputtered along the rugged single-lane macadam road, snow chains grinding. He carefully nursed it, prodding the accelerator, braking gently on a slippery incline, trying to keep the machine from giving up altogether. On the bucket seat next to him, a bag of paperback mystery novels and a smaller bag wrapped around a bottle had been stuffed into a picnic basket.
