“Do you,” she asked, “wish to make any final statement?”
I shook my head.
“I am told that you were a man with great gifts, Oliver Guest,” she went on. “You had the power to do great good, and you did great evil from choice. Your punishment does not begin to match the dreadful nature of your offense. God have mercy on your soul.”
She stepped back to join the ring of people, while I wondered what that was all about. Then I had it. We were just two months away from elections. For Governor Jensen this was just another media opportunity. Her comments made a brief nod to the scientific community, pointed out that she was strong on law and order, and reassured the religious that she was one of them.
It was tempting to speak my thoughts — what had I to lose? But beside her, Carmelo Diaz watched intently. Without Governor Jensen’s blessing, there was no way he could keep his end of the bargain.
On with the show.
• • •
I survey the room. Even without a special reason for knowledge I would be familiar with this chamber. It is a nightmare from everyone’s childhood. I stare at the big clock. One fifty-five. The gray circular wall and the white sky of the ceiling is as distant to me now as the remotest galaxies. Above me, a silver hoop slowly descends to encircle my seated body at midchest. Everything is done automatically, without human involvement.
“He who is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.” So no one will be responsible for what comes next. The cool injection carrying me to the undiscovered country is controlled by the Chamber of Morpheus’s central computer, a device close to human in intelligence but untroubled by human doubts or conscience.
One fifty-seven. Most condemned prisoners, I had learned, close their eyes as the hoop settles into position. I stare, unblinking, as the green syringe extends itself and sits waiting by my upper left arm.
One fifty-eight. Everything can begin, I am ready. But procedure must be followed. I watch the slow sweep of the second hand, marking the countdown to the end of the universe. There ought to be music, the sound of trumpets or perhaps a Dies Irae. But music is not permitted in the Chamber of Morpheus. Instead there is total silence, the audience hushed and rigid.
Twenty seconds. The end of the needle, so fine that it fades to invisibility, touches my arm. I flinch. The descent into judicial sleep is supposed to be painless — but on whose testimony?
The clock readout reaches two o’clock — and moves past it. Five seconds. Ten. I sit a little straighter, convinced that something has gone wrong and the journey to Lethe is delayed.
And then I realize that the injection was made exactly on schedule. I had not felt it, but I am moving, expanding, ascending on pink clouds of glory. The chamber, far below me, fades out of sight.
The forever sleep has begun.
IN THE BEGINNING
First Strike. February 21, 2026; Kimberleys Plateau, Western Australia.
It was evening, but it was not dark. Would darkness ever come again?
Wondjina crawled from the shadow of the rocks and peered north and west. No clouds were in the sky, and the Sun was on the horizon. Soon it should be night, cooling the desert and bringing longed-for relief.
But there would be no night; soon, again, would come the Rival.
Wondjina turned to face south and east. A hint of pink was already on the skyline, warning that the Rival was alive in the heavens and about to rise in the cloudless sky. If Wondjina were to find water it was best to seek it at this time, in the cooler hour before the Rival usurped the Moon and evening turned again to day. It must be done quickly. Thirst was all through him, weakening his muscles and stiffening his joints.
He made his way to the dried-out riverbed and walked along it, seeking patches of sun-seared grass. Under the grass, deep in the gravel, he would find the water that fed their roots. There, and nowhere else.
For twelve days, the Rival had risen as the Sun set.
Between them, Sun and Rival seared the land and drew off every hint of surface moisture. Without dark there could be no night, without night there would be no midnight fall of dew. And the deep waters were running dry.
Wondjina took the trowel from his waist sling and started to dig in the gravel of the watercourse. From time to time he laid down the tool, picked up the hollow reed, and pushed it deep. He sucked hard on the other end.
Nothing, and still nothing. Every day, the reed had to be pushed deeper. Dig again, dig harder. Finally, after ten minutes of hard effort, a few mouthfuls of warm, brackish liquid.
He straightened and stared again to the south. The Rival had lifted above the horizon. Now it was a dazzling blue-white point too bright to look at. There was no circle of light, like the Sun’s disk, but when the Rival was high in the sky it threw down its own intense spears of heat.
This torment could not last. Or if it did, Wondjina’s family would not be here to see it. They would leave, heading away to seek help from lowland strangers.
Wondjina would not leave. He was old, and he would live or die in the homeland. But he could not survive like this. Hunger and thirst gnawed within him. Midsummer was long past, and the Sun was on its annual journey north. Heat should be lessening, rain should carry in on the west wind. But not this year.
Twelve days ago the Rival had appeared in the night sky. Darkness became a memory. The heat steadily increased, a dry wind blew from the south. No animal moved across the red sands. Even the tough, leathery grass had wilted.
Wanderers through the homeland brought word of other changes. Lake Argyle, the great water far to the north, had dried completely for the first time in many years. Far south, the Ord River ran low in its course. The Rival’s presence was felt, north or south, as it was here. You could not run from it, any more than you could escape by flight from the Sun itself.
Wondjina, the family’s living memory of older times, knew what must be done. The answer was not to flee. It was to ask the spirits of cloud and rain to bring relief.
Ask now, ask tonight. The family was determined to leave tomorrow.
He squatted onto his haunches and rubbed the wrinkled skin of his knees. Everywhere was reddish, powdery dust, worse than at any time in his long memory. He opened the woven bag, took out the necklace of dried bones and the bright-stained sections of emu shell. Let the youngsters speak of new ideas, of their belief that the Rival was nothing more than a star suddenly grown great. What did they know? Not one of them could recite a history of the family, not one had learned the modes of address to the spirits of autumn rains.
First, there was the choice of site. Level and high and on the open plateau, where the Rival would always be in sight.
Wondjina began to ascend the course of the dried-out streambed. He climbed slowly and carefully, leaning on his ironwood spear for support. Hunger had weakened his limbs, but he must husband his strength for the ceremony. The Rival lay directly ahead, its southern fire striking matching points of light from sharp-sided pebbles in the watercourse. Was it imagination, or did the intruder tonight flame brighter yet, putting the vanished Sun to shame?
A slender gray-green lizard darted from under Wondjina’s feet, scrambling uphill. Instinct drove his spear, guiding its fire-hardened point through the wriggling body. He leaned and grabbed in one movement.