The Omega Point

23. THE RISING OF THE SOULS

Mike and Tim Pelton and Delmar Twine were in terrible trouble because their general had gone crazy, and in just a minute, it was going to be Timmy’s turn to get himself burned alive in that damn mirror or whatever it was.

The three of them had been friends all of their lives, growing up on the same street in Sandusky, going to the same schools, finally joining the army together, all three intent on getting the education they could not otherwise afford. Mike and Tim were identical twins, and they had joined up on the condition that they would stay together.

But instead of the training they’d hoped to get, they’d come out the other end of boot camp as infantrymen, and spent two years in ’Stan. Then, as the U.S. withdrew from that country, they had been reassigned to General Wylie’s specialist brigade, guarding some sort of supersecret underground facility deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The guard unit hadn’t been allowed inside, but instead had been billeted in tents near the entrance. They’d seen the people coming, though, famous faces glimpsed as they got out of their vehicles and went through the thick steel doors into what appeared to be a luxurious interior. For weeks they’d come, the masters of the world—congressmen and senators, big-time preachers and Catholic hierarchy, TV personalities, movie stars, hundreds of them. Some of them had the black spot disease big-time, with the weird pigmentation almost covering their skin. Others, you couldn’t see if they had it or not.

Mike and Tim and Del didn’t have it, and they wouldn’t bunk with people who did. You didn’t want that, no way.

There were burned bodies all around the portal now, the remains of guys they’d worked with in the unit for the better part of a year. Behind them there was just Colonel Manders with his pistol, and at his feet the bodies of the seven men who had refused even to try.

Mike and Timmy and Del had talked about this thing. Whatever it was, it belonged to that man and woman who that CIA guy and the general had tried to kill.

The point was, those two people were the ones who knew how to make the sucker work right and stop burning guys. Everybody in the unit knew they were from the Acton Clinic, which was another secret installation of some kind.

“Okay, look,” the general said. “You—” He pointed at Timmy. “You just make one smooth, easy movement. The problem is, guys keep trying to pull back—”

Timmy vomited.

“Shit!” The general thrust his gun into Timmy’s face. “Do it!”

Timmy gagged and raised his hands flat against the sublime view of an orchard, its trees dripping with tiny, blushing red apples.

“Do it!”

And then the next thing Mike knew, the gun was in his face.

“Do it,” the general shouted at Timmy, “or I blow your fuckin’ brother’s fuckin’ brains out right now!”

Timmy went to the portal. He stood before it.

“I love you,” he said without turning around. The tears in his voice broke his brother’s heart. He was gonna burn, Timmy was gonna burn, and Mike and Del, they would be next. What a shitty goddamn way to go, how stupid was this?

“Sir,” Del said frantically, “we need to take this thing up to the clinic. That’s a secret installation! They know how it works, they can tell us.”

“Move!”

There was a click. The cold of the gun barrel nestled against Mike’s neck.

Suddenly Timmy just very smoothly stepped forward and went right into the thing. He seemed to walk forward, but also to get smaller and smaller, until finally he just disappeared.

Silence. Nobody moved. “Jesus…” the general whispered.

Then he seemed to climb out of something, and there he stood as clear as day in the grass on the other side, facing away from them. He bent down on one knee and ran his hands through the grass. Then he stood up and raised his eyes to what looked like a summer sky, floated with soft white clouds. Mike could practically hear the birds singing.

“Timmy,” Mike shouted.

“Shut the fuck up!” The general removed the gun from Mike’s neck and stepped closer to the portal. “Can you hear me?”

Timmy came close to the portal. Inclining his head to one side, he peered back at them. Could he see in this direction?

“Come back, Timmy,” Del shouted. “Come on back, man!”

“Stuff it, soldier!”

“Yessir. But, Sir—”

Timmy held out a hand. He flattened it against his side of the portal—and instantly pulled it away.

Then Timmy was looking past the portal, seemingly into the sky above his side of it, or maybe at the portal itself, it was hard to be certain.

His face changed, moving into a wide-eyed expression of disbelief, then amazement.

He turned and went the other way, disappearing in among the trees of the orchard.

“TIMMY!” Mike went toward the portal. “TIMMY!” But as he tried to follow his brother, the general shoved him aside.

“Get outta there,” he said.

“Where’s my brother?”

“Eating goddamn apples, looks like to me.”

“He was running. Something was wrong.”

“Yeah, what’s wrong is he’s a fucking dumbass not to come back.”

General Wylie stepped into the portal, using exactly the same decisive motion that Tim had used. Except… he stopped. For a moment, there was silence. This was followed by a stifled cry that quickly became a howl of agony as flames burst through the fabric of his uniform, accompanied by a sound as if of frying bacon.

“Help him,” Colonel Manders shouted, shielding his eyes as he tried to get near the general, who was flopping like a fish, his body enveloped in flames.

Then, just as the others had done, he fell backward off the portal and lay kicking and spinning on the ground in burned agony.

Aside from the colonel, Mike and Del were the only members of the unit near the portal—alive, at least. Most of the ones who hadn’t gone up into that machine or been killed like the general was being killed, had deserted by now. Maybe someone was still hanging in a Humvee here and there, but nobody who was willing to come anywhere near the portal.

Overhead, another meteor roared past, a thick streak of light accompanied by an ominous rumble. Somewhere below the southern horizon, it exploded in a flash.

“Fuck this,” the colonel muttered. He swung into a Humvee, started it, and went back down the road, heading out toward the interstate and the Blue Ridge.

Mike and Del watched him go.

“Well, shit,” Del said into the silence that had enveloped the convoy. “Anybody home? HELLO?”

Mike went to the portal.

“Timmy,” he shouted into it. “Timmy!”

What was in there that had so upset him? Timothy Pelton did not scare easily, and Mike was in a position to know that. Even as kids, Tim had always been the bold one, the first one up the tree, the first one to ride the Top Thrill Dragster in Cedar Point, the first one to ask a girl out, the first one in to save Momma that time they had the fire.

Mike slumped. He felt Del’s arm come over his shoulder.

“Del, I feel like he’s on the other side of the moon. Farther.”

“What the hell is this thing?”

“Some kinda classified stuff, has to be.”

“They ain’t got no problems over there,” Del said, “ ’cept them crab apples don’t look real worth eating.”

“He’s not eating crab apples! He run scared, man.” A sudden burst of pure hate overcame Mike, and he kicked the blackened rubble of the general hard a few times. “Fuckin’ bastard! BASTARD!”

“Hey. HEY!” Del pulled him away. “That ain’t gonna do nothin’. That guy was headed for a court-martial, anyhow, the way he’s killing people. I mean, I saw about five murder ones go down here today.”

“Time of war.” He went close to the portal. “Timmy! TIMMY, damn your eyes, come back here!”

Then he saw, across a far hill, a small dot in motion. For some moments, he watched it as it moved steadily up the grassy hillside. Del also watched.

At some length, he said, “Could be him.”

“Or some caveman who ate him. We gotta find out how this thing works.”

Del went to a Humvee and opened the door. Inside was Ken Freitag, a gun in his mouth and the back of his head spread across the cab.

“Occupied,” Del muttered.

He went to the next one down the line and got in. There was a click, then the engine started. Hardened military electronics were not so quick to fry, fortunately, but there was going to be more than one vehicle in this convoy that wasn’t gonna move. “Got forty miles left in this,” Del said.

Without speaking—they didn’t need to bother, the three of them always understood one another’s thinking—Mike picked up the portal and slid it into the back of the Humvee, where it fit nicely… or had it gotten smaller when Mike tried to put it in?

Everybody knew the way the image in it changed as you moved it, and Mike didn’t want to lose the spot where Timmy had gone in.

“We get this thing working right, we need to bring it back right here,” he said.

“It’s a countryside over there. If we get through safely, we’re gonna find him sooner or later. Looks like southern Ohio, matter of fact.”

“Southern Ohio is God’s country.”

“So is the rest of the world.”

They were silent for a moment, each contemplating in his own way the enormity of what was happening.

“Why don’t we just go in now?”

“You think we should?”

They both looked at it, then at each other. At last Mike said, “I think we need to find out more about it.”

“I hear you,” Del said. He pulled the Humvee out of the line and proceeded toward the town square. Plasmas so intense that they outshone the dismal sun now flashed across the sky without ceasing. Instead of the empty streets that had followed the passage of the penitents, they soon found that Raleigh was crowded with people who were pushing and pulling anything they could that was on wheels, trying to take supplies with them as they headed west toward the interstate. It looked like something out of a World War II movie.

People stared hard at the Humvee as it trundled east. They’d been shot at one too many times when trying to approach the convoy. They gave the soldiers their distance.

Up and down the street, buildings were burning. Molten insulation was dripping off overhead wires. “Spontaneous electrical fires,” Del said. “Must be a whole lot of solar juice in the air to cause this.”

Mike knew that the sun’s energy would concentrate in wires if it became intense enough. There were weapons that could do that, too.

Up and down Main Street, the same street lamps from which the victims of the penitents were hanging were now exploding, sending sparks down into panicky crowds of refugees. Sheets of fire flared along electric lines, and columns of smoke rushed up from the roofs of buildings.

“It’s everywhere,” Mike said. “The whole world is burning.”

When Del was forced to slow down, people began coming up to the Humvee. “This could get ugly,” he said, and jammed the gas to the floor.

“Easy on the clutch, man.”

“I know it, but I gotta not hit these folks.”

In the sky, a huge plasma danced, a long electrical body writhing, its appendages sweeping the horizons like great snakes.

Soon, they were through the town and onto the highway that led to what had been the convoy’s original destination. Like the town, the road was filling with refugees, a few on horseback, more on bikes, most on foot. Mike held a weapon in sight, making sure it was visible to the angry eyes and the mad eyes that watched them pass.

These poor damn people—somebody had to save them. If this darn portal would work, they could go through. Given enough time, maybe the whole darned country could go through.

What a damn miracle it was, but probably not for ordinary folks. Only people like the ones in the Blue Ridge would be allowed to use a thing like this, you could bet on it.

His heart just literally felt like it was tearing in two. He could feel his twin wanting to be with him. He could feel Tim being scared and being alone, and maybe knowing that the portal was in motion, that it was disappearing like a summer cloud or whatever it looked like on that side.

The farther they got from town, the fewer people there were on the road, and Del began to run the Humvee harder—until he saw someone ahead of them.

“Damn,” he said as they drew near the person standing in the middle of the road. It was a woman with a baby stroller filled with fishing equipment, rods, reels, poles, hooks and lines in packets. She wasn’t going anywhere, either. She held her ground right in the middle of the two-lane blacktop.

Del stopped, leaving the Humvee idling.

She came around to the window. “We’re moving our stock,” she said, “and I’d be willing to pay you twenty dollars for an hour of the truck.” She glanced around. “There’s looting. The cops are gone.”

“Lady, we’ll all be dead in a few days.”

“What in the world is the matter with you? How dare you say such a thing.”

“This is the Last Judgment, lady,” Del said. The Twines were Church of Christ, big-time. Not the Peltons. Their dad had steered clear of religion altogether. But Mike knew about the Last Judgment, of course, and from where he sat, Del could damn well be right. What if that black stuff on people was sin showing up right through their skin?

“I need to move my stock. We’re in hard times and we’re planning a sale next week. We need inventory.”

Mike leaned over to Del. “She’s blown,” he said. “Totaled.”

“Christians can’t just leave people,” Del snapped.

“So let me drive. I ain’t one. Anyway, you left all those people back there.”

“Yeah, they weren’t askin’ for help.”

Mike had to get this portal working. He had to get over into wherever the hell it was and find Tim. Mom and Dad were gone now, but this is what they would’ve wanted him to do, and it was what his blood wanted him to do. You lose your twin, you lose half your soul. But how to convince Del?

“Lady,” Mike said, “we need to get on. We got a mission.”

“There’s no mission, Mike!”

“My brother is my mission!”

“Fellas, if you need to go—”

“We need to go!”

Del did not move, and it shocked Mike to realize just how strongly he felt about this. He was going to push Del out of that seat and drive away without him if he didn’t get this vehicle moving again.

But, in the end, Mike had to admit that he couldn’t bust up with Del, let alone make him eat a fist or something. So the next thing he knew, he was loading fishing tackle into the Humvee.

They did six miles to a just plain pitiful little house, sad and tired and full of kids. An older boy and his dad came out and quickly unloaded the Humvee. Helping them and seeing the way they treasured this stuff that nobody would ever buy, Mike was almost moved to tears. It reminded him of being in Afghanistan and having cold families come up to camp in the night, to huddle against the warm sides of tents and fill them with their ripe stink and the reek of ’Stan food.

Guys would kick the shit out of them through the canvas, but Mike and Tim didn’t, and Del would go out and feed them, which would draw more, and he’d feed them until he ran out of damn loaves and fishes or whatever.

These were Americans, though, but it no longer felt much different.

They finished, then Del went out and got their well going by osmosis using garden hoses, which is the kind of thing he always knew how to do.

Mike let the boys look at his weapon, but not fire it. Who knew if those rounds would be needed. He kept the portal covered. No use in having to explain that damn thing, and he knew as well as any soldier that desperate people can turn nasty real fast, if they see something they think might save them.

When he had a chance, though, he looked into the portal. He was sort of hoping to see Tim, but he only saw the day over there getting slowly older, just like it was here.

Del reappeared. “Done and done,” he said, satisfaction in his voice.

“Let’s just get rolling, man. It’s already sunset damn near, so it’s sunset over there, too, and my bro is gonna be feeling mighty needful.”

The first thing they saw of the Acton Clinic was a big wall topped with razor wire. There was a huge iron gate that was wide open, and as they went through it, there appeared what Mike knew at once was the most beautiful house he’d ever seen. But as they drew closer, he saw that it was partially burned out. Windows were broken. There was an ugly silence of a kind he knew all too well.

And now, as the sun set, the violet star that Colonel Manders had told them was a supernova appeared low in the northeastern sky, flooding the world in its creepy light.

When they arrived at the front of the house, Del stopped the Humvee and cut the engine. He turned to Mike. “What now?”

Mike had no idea what now. The windows of the old house were dark. It looked pretty ruined in there. But it didn’t look real classified. No government warning signs, a wide-open gate, and no lights or guard units didn’t exactly suggest this.

“What now is, we take a look around.”

“Weapons?”

“You carry and cover, I’ll take the portal.”

“We can’t leave a weapon uncontrolled.”

“Then we pull the ammo outta mine and I’ll hold on to the bolt.”

“We might need that firepower.”

So Mike strapped on his rifle and carried the portal. The thing wasn’t heavy, and from the back it looked like a piece of canvas. But on the front, it was as slick as glass and you could go in it and run off in there, which Mike did not have the guts to do. He wanted his brother, though, and worse every minute.

The darker it got, the brighter the light from the portal appeared. Now it was looking over a glade full of grazing horses. The sun was a glow in the west, the sunset rich with gold at the horizon, then orange and yellow above it, and finally pale green fading into the blue of night. You could see plenty of stars, and Mike knew a fair amount about stars, thanks to their dad, who had a Celestron and had taught them the sky.

“How weird,” he said. He held the portal directly overhead and looked up into it, then brought it slowly down to the eastern horizon.

“The constellations are out of place.”

“Useful to know. Let’s go inside and see if we can find out why.”

Mike was transfixed. “Let me tell you… this sky is not right.”

“Okay! Now let’s move our asses. This can’t be safe out here, man.”

He kept moving the portal, trying to find north based on the glow on the western horizon. From the foliage he had seen when it was light there, he knew that the season was the same—early summer. So…

“What the hell is Draco doing there?”

“Dray-who doing where?”

“The constellation Draco… it’s way north. There’s Eltamin, and… Thuban. Thuban is the North Star!”

“Goddamn it, will you get your ass in gear?”

He lowered the portal. “Del,” he said, “this is just a damn amazing thing.”

“Well, duh!”

“No, you don’t understand what this is. Because this isn’t just some kind of window, like, into China or somewheres. Some kind of wormhole or whatever. Del, the polestar in that sky—” He tapped the edge of the portal, being careful not to touch its lethal surface. “The polestar is not Polaris, it’s Thuban. Thuban, man!”

“Look, do you remember how interested I was in the telescope, which was not at all? So I am not going to know what the fuck that means, am I?”

“What it means is that this thing is a damn time machine!” He held it up. “Thuban won’t be the polestar for another twenty thousand years. When Timmy went into that thing, he crossed thousands of years into the future, Del. It’s the future in there!”

“Oh, yeah, what about the little matter of the fact that Earth is gonna be a burned-out cinder in the future?”

“The dinosaurs got torched, and we’re here. So it’s not gonna stay, like, a cinder forever.”

“Oh, man, somebody is gonna be very pissed off at us, because this thing is unbelievably classified, it has to be. The general was taking it back to the Blue Ridge for, you know, the Family, the politicians, all those rich people, the senators—”

“I know who’s down there, I seen ’em go in same as you.”

“Okay, then, we are criminals. Big-time. The whole fucking army is gonna be after us, plus the FBI, the CIA, and all’a that shit.”

“Except that doesn’t matter a shit anymore and I am not gonna stop until I get my brother back, and that is the line in the sand here, Del, so if you want to go back, that’s fine by me. Personally, I wouldn’t sell those scumbags shit on a platter, much less give ’em this thing. Find me some good folks—decent, you know—and let’s get ’em through. And get us through, and find my brother.”

Del ran a hand along the top edge of the thing, which now gleamed purple as the supernova spread its rising light.

“It’s gonna be a brave fucking guy goes through this thing first. I mean, it’s a damn miracle your brother didn’t do like the rest of ’em.”

“Drop the gun and step away from it, please.”

Del did exactly as the voice from inside the house instructed. To Mike he mouthed the words “told you.”

“Now face me. Come up onto the porch, please.”

Mike started to lift the portal, but the unmistakable snicker of a bolt being thrown on a very proficient-sounding weapon froze him. Turning slowly, he held up his hands. Side by side, he and Del walked onto the porch. After a moment, a flashlight shone in their faces. It lingered on their patches. Whoever this was wanted to identify their unit, obviously.

“PFC Twine, please come forward.”

Del took another step closer to the door. Behind them, Mike heard movement. Somebody was taking the portal! He reacted immediately, turning to stop them.

“Freeze!”

Which Mike did. But he had seen a woman in the violet light, her long legs striding, her hair flowing back, carrying the portal like the damn thing was her own personal possession. But Tim was in there. He had to get his brother back!

“Hey, look, we come here to bring it to you,” he said. “But you gotta understand, my brother’s in it. He’s lost in there!”

There was no reaction. He could hear the woman’s footsteps fading away. He dared not try again to look. He focused his attention on the flashlight.

“We’re twins, see. So we are real close and I gotta get him outa there or go in—go over—with him. That’s what I gotta do.” He said nothing about the time machine part of it. That was probably the most secret thing about it. Guys were getting shot right and left these days. Forget the court-martial, the brig. Nowadays, you got your head blown off by a psycho general and nobody gave the slightest shit.

“Okay, Specialist Pelton, please come forward.”

Del was shaking like a terrified Chihuahua or something, which was not like Del Twine, who could chew the beard of a Taliban for lunch.

“Now what’s going to happen is I want you to come into the building. I am going to be standing aside. You will not see me. Then you will go where you’re directed.”

Del was shaking so much he looked drunk, and Mike was about to wet his pants. Maybe there was another Blue Ridge here, full of even more rich shitkickers, and they were gonna end up getting their asses tortured.

Then a match was struck ahead of them, and Mike saw that they were in a ruined hall that had once been really, really beautiful, with a sweeping staircase that led up to a mass of blackened beams where part of the roof had come in. Delicate fingers touched the match to a candle, and Mike saw a beautiful girl in the yellow light, with big eyes that looked him over dispassionately and frankly.

“Hello,” he said.

She turned and went through a dining room full of upended tables and toward a big black door. So this was it, the inner sanctum.

The windows were draped with blankets, and there were many candles. And, in their light, many faces.

Mike’s first thought was, These are civilians. His second was that they were hurt, some of them. Then that there were a whole lot of them, maybe over a hundred, and they had to be the quietest people he had ever seen in his life.

Then, from the back, the woman who had taken the portal came in. Del sucked an awed breath, and even in flickering candlelight, Mike could see why. There was just very little question—this was about the most beautiful woman in the world. She carried the portal, which was glowing softly with starlight from the other side, and put it on an easel.

Mike said, “Lady, my brother is in there. I want you folks—” He looked around the room, tried to smile, but his smile collapsed and he was all of a sudden not a soldier. That all just went out of him, all the hardness, the long, cold nights ducking Taliban mortar shells and hating the bastards, all of that and all the misery he had endured as a virtual slave guarding the Blue Ridge, and the terror of this day—all of it just melted away.

What was left was his truth—he was a scared nineteen-year-old boy in an impossible situation, who had lost his twin brother and with him half of his own soul. He let out a long sob, then choked it back.

A man came to him, a guy in his thirties, the kind of guy who was born to command. When the guy’s arm came around his shoulder, he wasn’t embarrassed, not even in front of all these people. He was just tired and scared and alone.

“Come on, you two, I want to introduce you to our head of security. There’s work for you here.”

The two young soldiers went with David Ford, watched by many eyes, and in the candlelight, there gleamed many tears. Before them, the portal, back where it belonged, glowed with soft and beautiful light.

From his careful place of hiding, Mack also saw this. As he calculated his odds, he fingered the safety on his gun. He was sick and his burn hurt like nothing else he had ever known, but mostly he was filled with a rage that was beyond any emotion he had ever felt, a great, fiery darkness that boiled up from the center of his soul, and would drive him, he knew, both to feats even beyond his own great skill, and to death if it was necessary to fulfill his aim, which had become very simple.

Alone, he could not get the portal to Blue Ridge, which meant that the people who deserved it were not going to get it.

So nobody else would, either.