The Omega Point

26. THE LAST BREATH

Across the world, as the gigantic event reached its climax, all the treasures and wonders of history were being swept away. Some of the boulders that had broken off the moon were the size of islands, and they had begun striking Earth mercilessly. Those that hit the oceans generated waves unlike any that had been seen even during the climax of the Ice Age, black mountains of water that were now sweeping away whole nations.

London and Rio and Tokyo and Amsterdam were among the first to disappear in the maelstrom. A boulder the size of Bermuda slammed into the central Ukraine, releasing the equivalent energy of a billion hydrogen bombs and instantly vaporizing every living thing from St. Petersburg to the Black Sea.

The shock waves of the meteor impacts were so great that they completely disintegrated cities from Casablanca to Paris, and the gigantic explosions they generated made millions instantly deaf.

Whole species of animals died in an instant, herds upon the prairies, fish in the sea, and the bodies of great schools drifted to the ocean floor where they would become fossils. In millions of years, very different hands would raise them as human hands had raised the mats of fish skeletons that had died exactly the same way in the Permian extinction over two hundred million years before.

There is, indeed, nothing new under the sun.

Everyone who was not near a portal was afflicted with the stain, and they had come to understand their fate, and they cut themselves to pieces and burned themselves and ripped at themselves to remove the stain, but they could not remove the stain, and in their billions they lay writhing from their mutilations, or they ran in doomed streets, or tried to end their agony with suicide, only to discover that the death of the body was what sprung the trap. Their darkness also grew and grew, until they were reduced to a state that is darker than darkness itself, for this new skin reflected no light at all. They were shadow people now, sweeping through the streets in despairing packs, their cries like the wind wailing on a winter night.

A series of more than fifty objects struck the Pacific, including one that sent a tsunami slamming into the coasts of Washington and Oregon, drowning Vancouver and Seattle and Portland, inundating San Francisco, and sweeping across the entire Los Angeles basin with such energy that it gushed through the mountain passes to the east, finally expending itself a hundred frothing, foaming miles into the high desert.

The people who had come to the Acton Clinic were streaming into the portal in a more orderly manner, as the members of the class moved among them, urging them forward.

Mack had dragged Caroline into the leafy shambles of some trees, and David had gone with them.

“We’re going through together,” Mack said. “The three of us.”

“Mack, it can’t work.” Mack’s body was almost entirely a shadow now, as if he was becoming a living darkness.

“Then I rip her throat out.”

Surely he could not be deceived another time. Surely he understood that the portal would not let him through.

David did the only thing he could, which was to lead Mack to the portal, which was now busy with people crossing, moving easily and quickly, ten and twenty at a time walking into what was becoming a great, wondering crowd on the other side.

There came a rumbling sound that quickly deepened, soon trembling the ground.

“Hurry,” Mack said.

David pushed a pregnant mother through. Until every one of them was safe, he would not himself go through.

On the distance, the horizon began shimmering.

“Hurry, goddamn you!”

“Go without me,” Caroline shouted against the rising thunder of the oncoming tsunami.

David pulled at people. “Everybody,” he shouted, “GO GO GO!”

As he cried out, yet another enormous light appeared in the north, this time striking the ground below the horizon. Immediately a great, bright swarm of objects rose from where it had fallen—and David thought that this was ice dislodged from the polar cap just as it had been dislodged twelve thousand years ago by a strike on the Laurentian glacier. The icebergs would probably fall as far south now as they had then, when they had hit from the Carolinas to New Mexico, leaving, among other artifacts, the hundreds of thousands of craters of the Carolina Dells.

Finally, the last of the people were through, except for Mike and Del and Glen, who stood with him and with Caroline.

“So how do I do it?” Mack asked. Embracing Caroline tightly, he moved toward the portal. “If I burn, she burns,” he cried against the enormous, echoing thunder of the onrushing water.

David did the only thing he could think of, he exploded into Mack’s back, throwing himself against the larger man—and Del and Mike and Glen joined him, kicking him and shoving him—and then, suddenly, he was lighter and David saw, on the other side of the portal, that Caroline had come free and crossed.

Slowly Mack turned. He no longer had the blade. In fact, he no longer had the hand that had held it, but his open wrist did not pump blood. David could see in the eerie wells of his eyes the reason for this: Mack was dead. He was still moving and still thought himself alive, but this was not a living creature anymore, this dark, shifting form was a corpse.

The air began to scream and to suck them back, and even the edges of the portal trembled.

Glen turned and jumped through it, followed by Del and Mike, and Mack groaned to see them do it, and gargled deep rage in his throat, and if a corpse could utter a sound, this was what it would be like.

Mack’s remaining hand grabbed David’s throat—but David managed to twist away and half jump through the portal. Mack still held him, though, and began to pull him back, and he felt moving through the part of his body that was between the future and the past a churning coldness, as if the absolute waters of death were flooding into him.

Laughing now, Mack dragged at him, and the coldness turned to fire, and he knew that he was being sliced apart—but then felt hands grab the arm that was flailing on the far side of the portal, and felt himself being pulled.

Mack’s eyes, a moment ago empty with death, now sparkled with hatred. Despite his injuries and the shadow that had enveloped him, he remained strong. In fact, his grip was like iron, and David thought, This is what a demon is. He struggled with all his might, but he could not overcome Mack’s steel strength.

Behind Mack, though, he saw what appeared to be a great, dark cliff, and he knew that this was the wave, and it was here, now.

They were both swept up in it and smashed as if by the fist of a giant against the portal—and suddenly, there was silence.

David scrambled to his feet. The wave was hitting, and he braced himself. He did not understand why this had happened to him. Was there some sort of mistake? He had not judged himself evil, had not marked himself… for it is always a choice, to accept the mark of the beast. We are our own judges, but we always choose correctly.

David now found himself face-to-face with something that was no longer even a human form. Mack had disappeared entirely, into the deepest darkness he had ever seen or known possible, a darkness as deep as all the sins of the world, radiating evil like brutal heat. Embedded in it he could see the billions of faces of those who had lost their souls, the faces distended by what must have been truly terrible screams, but the screams were silent.

They seemed to be taken up, somehow, into the wave, but it wasn’t affecting him, he was watching it as if through glass—and then he understood: he was looking back in time, through the portal.

Then he was racing through the portal, and the old Earth, the ruined Earth, was becoming smaller and smaller, dwindling faster and faster, disappearing so totally that it was as if it had never been.

What had hit the portal was not only a gigantic tidal wave, it was also a wave in hyperspace, capturing in its dark waters all who had made the commitment to evil. Him, it had simply pushed away—and through the portal.

And then he saw a face appear, much closer than the others, the eyes terrible in their desperation, the mouth distorted by great agony, the hands clawing through time, clawing and burning, and despite all his effort and the will of a demon, Mack the Cat became outlined with fire and then became fire, but still the face screamed, still the agony went on.

As David watched in sorrow and loathing, Mack transformed from the dark-cloaked figure he had been on the roof of the clinic into another person entirely, a man wearing the uniform of some sort of officer, black, the chest spread with medals. And then David saw the red armband with the black swastika, and then the body changed again, this time wearing the splendid suit of a wealthy nineteenth-century businessman, and then it wore the flowing robes of a cardinal, and then the changes flickered past so fast that it was impossible to see anything except that David knew that he was actually watching Mack’s whole time on Earth move past, lifetime after lifetime of evil.

Seeing this caused stirrings of memory from his own long-past time, but the memories were not evil, they were haunting and wonderful and full of nostalgia, loves, and hard work; they were lives he would be proud to live again.

Mack was washed away into the blackness then, a spark instantly absorbed into what was at once a tidal wave containing a whole ocean, and a wave of purest evil.

The darkness itself began to recede, until there was nothing left of the past in the portal, which itself shuddered, then faded, and slipped into memory.

David found himself looking out across a broad meadow that ended in trees, and beyond the trees, the vine-choked pink debris of a city, its ruined towers glowing in the dawn.

The ruins were very, very old, and they looked dark and haunted with the terrors of the last cycle. But they must be filled with useful materials, even with shelter.

But where was everybody else? In fact, where was he?

“David?”

Her! He’d come through the portal backward, that was all, and he whirled around and there she stood, her body framed by the golden light of dawn, as the sun, now placid again, rose behind her.

All across the meadow, sitting silently and watching the new sun rise, were the people they had rescued, and more; in fact, there were thousands upon thousands in this verdant new world.

There was a man with her, and they were hand in hand, and a knife cut to the frightened heart of David’s love.

“David, don’t you remember your old teacher?” the man asked.

Flushed with relief, then with the joy of meeting again after all these years, he took the shoulders of Charles Light, looked into his eyes, and the happiness of those days came flooding back, and with it all the memories that had remained lost, not the important things, which he had already remembered, but the less important ones, the way the desks were arranged, how exciting it was to understand the marvels they were being taught. And, above all, he remembered Caroline.

They had not been lovers in any adult sense, but in an instant he recaptured all the innocent happiness he had known with her, and remembered the promises they had made.

She stood before him, her eyes cast down, the sunlight flaming in her hair, a picture of dizzying sensuality and innocence all mixed together, and in that moment he truly understood how perfectly the human spirit is paralleled by the personalities of the old gods, and he saw her as the Lady of the Starry Skirt, at once an earthy, sweaty, soft woman and a star keeper, her body belonging to youth and the promise of the womb, her soul to the heavens.

He could not speak. He was beyond speech.

She came into his arms, and when he embraced her, she felt as soft as a cloud. Her eyes regarded him, looking in amazement at his face, then fluttering closed in the cathedral of their kiss.

For a moment, the kiss was the center of the universe—and then there came a hand to his shoulder.

They slipped away from one another. Charles Light was smiling, but then his expression became more serious.

“We have to organize them,” he said. “We have to get this thing rolling.”

Arm in arm, he and Caroline headed back toward the great crowd, where children were now running and dogs cavorting, and people were relaying down to the nearby river to get water.

“There’s a lot of work to do,” David said.

“That’s why we’re here,” a voice replied. It was Del, and he and Mike were arm in arm with a third soldier. They had found Tim.

Tim was appalled by the magnitude of the situation. All these people without food, without shelter.

“I don’t know where to start!”

Caroline squeezed his hand. “Of course you do.”

Which, he realized, was true. All of them did. They knew in their blood why they were still here on Earth, because they had wanted to participate in the building of the next great cycle.

But they weren’t the sort of people who were likely to think on such things. If you put one of them in a room, they would clean the room. Give them a file, and they would organize it, or an empty field on a summer morning and they would think ahead to winter, and start a house.

They were already stirring among themselves, seeking aim and direction, looking for work to do.

The immeasurably conscious presence that is the ascended wing of mankind was never wrong and could not be wrong. These were the ones who would put their shoulders to their task, and create the foundation of a new and better world, that would emerge out of the compassion that was common to all of their hearts, and it would be better than the old world, because in it there would be no more souls devoted to greed and all its cruelties. The last phase of history had been designed to cause them to reveal themselves, so that they could be removed forever. Mankind was not going to experience another cycle of evil and ruin, but this time would work on ecstasy, so that, somewhere along the vast halls of time, when this age ended, everyone would ascend and the species, finally, would leave the physical world entirely behind.

Eventually, other earthly species would gain intelligence, but that would not be for a billion and a half years, and by then even the least trace of human works would be gone, and mankind would have joined the journey into ecstasy which, like heat, has no upper limit.

In the deep redoubts that Mack had striven so to save, death had been slow, for they had been built to last, and to the people imprisoned within there came bitter hatred and violence, and finally madness, and they all sank away, all of those people, into the same darkness that had consumed Mack.

The god with whom David had been identified from his childhood, the great plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl, manifested in him not as a grand presence, but rather as a practical one, concerned less about the mysteries of time and the grandeur of its cycles, and more about making sure the water was fit to drink and shelter could be found, and food gathered during the plenitude of summer.

As some got water, others were already scouring the shrubs for berries, others heading in groups toward the ruined city, to find what might be of use there.

From across a far hill, another group appeared, people waving, and here and there joyous reunions took place, wife running to husband, child to mother. Over the whole of the restored Earth of all those thousands of years in the future, this same scene was being repeated.

But it would not be all joy. There would be struggle and suffering here. This was going to be hard.

David would do his best at his job, and become famous among them for his tirelessness, but time would wear on him as it does on us all, and one day he would leave them, and his beloved Caroline, and the family that they would make in a small house that was yet to be built, in a village that was not yet, on this first day, even an idea.

The secret of Quetzalcoatl’s power is that he is a humble god.

In many stories and religious traditions, and even in the science of the lost world, this time had been predicted. But there was one statement about it that turned out to be the clearest and the most profoundly true, which had been made over two thousand years before the old cycle had ended.

It had been uttered on a little hill in Palestine, by a tired man with a matted beard, the last public practitioner of the lost science. He was an itinerant Jewish carpenter and sometime preacher who had met an old Egyptian priest, who had given him white powder gold of the true form, confected at one of the great time temples, all of which were dedicated to Hathor. This one was in the Sinai, and it was here that he was taught the secret laws of reality, which enabled him to raise the dead and heal the sick, and see clearly along the dim halls of time.

He had gone far in his studies, and seen much. And so it was that there came a day when he saw a chance to speak a sermon that would contain the deepest human meaning that there is. So he set forth, in a few hoarsely shouted verses on a hot afternoon, the whole journey of the human soul, and the inner meaning of mankind.

In that sermon was contained the most important prophecy ever made—ten words shouted out while people ate and chatted, and listened with the same casual wonder they might give to a bird of surpassing voice, or a street-corner mountebank with a deck of cards.

After he had been speaking for a while, he saw that he was not gaining their undivided attention, and he therefore tried this: “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” He had shouted it at them, but still there was little attention paid. What did it mean, anyway? They did not understand that he spoke not of the spiritually impoverished, but of those who share in spirit the suffering of the poor, and give of themselves to lift others.

He tried again, crying out, “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.” This had immediately regained the attention of the crowd. In that hard era, when the Jews were chained to the Roman yoke, there was not one of them who did not have reason to mourn.

So he had what he needed, the crucial moment of attention into which he would utter words that would define a future that was still over twelve thousand years away.

He then cried out, “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.”

That had brought silence and questioning glances, then a confused murmur.

Soon after, he had gone down and taken a meal of bread and oil, and some thick wine. Nobody had recorded the words, but they had stayed in many hearts, and, in time, were given to the ages.

Today, though, those of whom they had been spoken had no time to think on them. And they weren’t thinkers, anyway, most of them. They were workers, and the sun was full up and the day was growing warm, and there was a very great deal to be done.