The Coming

in December

An unprecedented heat wave scorched Australia and New Zealand, thousands of people and millions of cattle and sheep dying in the heat and drought. Canada and Alaska and northern Europe all suffered protracted blizzard conditions, which took hundreds of lives.

The war in Europe entered into an uneasy truce, the peace talks moving from Warsaw to sunny Rome, as troops on various borders scraped ice and snow off their war machines, and then went back to huddle around fires. The peace was partly due to logistics—no one was really prepared to fight in an unrelenting blizzard—and partly due to apocalyptic suspense as the calendar counted down to the Coming.

Preachers and priests and even a cautious pope saw a connection between the hellish weather and the Coming. The aliens had not denied a connection with God and Jesus, and there were appropriate prophecies in the Bible, as well as a lesser authority, Nostradamus. In his prophetic quatrains, the farthest in the future where he had predicted a specific year was 2055, the year the aliens were going to land. Writing in 1555, he said:

One “ornament of his time” was Nostradamus’s contemporary Thomas More (“for five hundred years more…”), who wrote Utopia. To some, this was proof positive that the aliens were going to bring about a heaven on earth. Of course that word “more” doesn’t appear in the French—“De cinq cents ans plus compte l’on tiendre”—but the people who write for the tabloids probably didn’t know about that, and certainly didn’t care.

A musical group that had renamed itself 55 Alive went to the top of the charts with a convoluted song, “We’re Coming,” that used all of the words of the Nostradamus message recombined into a message of hope, which could be interpreted in either secular or religious terms.

The survival stores came back, and merchants who didn’t overstock for the two-week wonder made a quick and large profit. It did take a pessimistic kind of optimism, or vice versa, to assume that the aliens would leave humanity alone, but humanity would turn on itself.

The United States launched its killer satellite in a state of total secrecy, which lasted less than a day. An international coalition of scientists and engineers came forth with absolute proof that the deed had been done. They demanded that the weapon be destroyed in place. President Davis called their documents “a bucket of bullshit,” saying it was just a weather satellite, and God knows we could use a few.

A gallup showed that 62 percent of French citizens considered the launch an act of war. In America, only 18 percent believed the president was telling the truth, but 32 percent “stood behind his actions.”

During the month of December, the leading cause of death in the United States was suicide.

Aurora and Norman felt conspicuous in their flight; almost all of the trains were nearly empty, most of the nation staying home glued to the cube. There were plenty on the Miami-to-Key West “Havana Special,” though; people hoping to lose themselves in that island’s peculiar attractions.

Of all possible points of exit from the United States, Key West was probably the best one for people who didn’t want to be identified. The same fine old Italian families who controlled gambling and prostitution in Havana owned the boats that made the ninety-mile trip, as well as the dock where people stepped aboard the boats, in total anonymity, safe even from overhead orbital surveillance. Some patrons bragged about their “Havana weekends”; others claimed to have had a great time at Disney World.

Aurora and Norman bypassed the fleshpots of the capital city and found a modest apartment in the nearby fishing village Cojímar. Norman rented a keyboard and MIDI recorder and continued to refine his composition. Aurora had her own research project, which took her all over the island. Fortunately, travel was dirt cheap compared to America.

By December 21, orbital telescopes were able to form an image of the approaching spacecraft. It looked like a cross with a gamma-ray star in the center, which made some people rejoice, but their joy was premature. The next day it was obvious that the image was of four tail fins surrounding the exhaust of a very hot engine. The aliens were coming in tail first, braking, the way a human spaceship would.

The gamma-ray beacon disappeared on the twenty-fourth, as the ship abruptly changed course, detouring toward Mars with a profligate waste of fuel. It swung around the red planet, as promised, and cracked Phobos in two. Hubble III gave a tiny image of the ship passing close, and a bright flare. Then the two halves of the small moon tumbled apart.

No word of warning or welcome. They just kept coming, decelerating.

On the morning of the thirty-first, when they were about a half-million miles away—twice the distance to the Moon—four large satellites were disintegrated in the course of one second. One of them was Davis’s weapon. The aliens broke silence long enough to apologize, saying they couldn’t tell which one it was, hoping none of them were inhabited.

Rory saw the news when she got off the Mafia boat in Key West. She was about to retrace their circuitous route. Norm had obeyed her request that he stay in Cuba for the time being.

There were things she had to know.