He was driving into a terrain of arid slopes, rounded and tawny, with the isolated green domes of huge old oak trees standing on them like sentinels, and blue valleys shrouded by shimmering dust shadows. Above the entire scene was a vast and uncompromising sky marked only intermittently by fleecy patches of clouds. The bizarre deluge that had been pelting the Bay Area and the rest of the coastal strip for the last few days would bring no gain to San Francisco’s water supply. The main reservoirs were inland, here in the mountains and foothills; and none of the rain was falling on them, no stores of snow would be locked up in the high country for use later on.
Everything was very quiet out here. Industrial pollution had strangled most of the suburban towns in this part of the Sacramento River Valley, and the depletion of the water table during the years of drought had finished off the agricultural communities beyond them. Still farther east, Carpenter knew, lay the ghost towns of the Mother Lode, and then the awesome, gigantic mountain wall of the Sierra; and on the far side of that was the grim wasteland that was Nevada. Once he crossed the mountains he would be driving through utter desert for a day and a half.
And yet—and yet—
It was beautiful here, if you could find beauty in solitude and aridity. With the death of the suburbs and the farms had come a reversion to an almost prehistoric tranquillity in the Sacramento Valley. This was how it might have looked a thousand years ago, Carpenter thought—except for the Pompeii effect of nineteenth- and twentieth-century building foundations and dry-wall boundary markers scattered all about, a multitude of intersecting shin-high grayish-white lines cutting across the dry grassy fields and hillocks like faint stains on the land, the almost imperceptible traces of the buildings that once had been there. But even those had a certain peaceful antique charm. Footprints of antiquity, clues to a vanished world. And the air out here, still and clear, seemed almost to be the air of some earlier century.
Carpenter wasn’t deceived. This quiet air was as deadly as the air anywhere else. Deadlier, even, because the toxics never got blown away, here in this zone of unvarying atmospheric stagnation, they simply piled up and remained, and if you stayed around here long enough they would rot your lungs right out of your chest for you. You could see it in the trees of this pastoral region, if you took the trouble to look closely. The weird angles of the boughs, the spikiness of the twigs, the sparse and twisted leaves, all manner of genetic deformities induced by hundreds of years of ozone deficits, the buildup of aluminum and selenium traces in the soil, and other exciting forms of environmental bombardment.
The air and soil and water of our world, Carpenter thought, have become a culture medium for antilife: a zone of negative fertility, blighting whatever it touches. Perhaps some new mutant form of un-life would eventually evolve and thrive in the new medium, some fundamentally dead kind of being that would be capable of carrying on its metabolic activities on the far side of existence, reproducing beyond the grave at birth, a creature that breathed corrosive poisons and pumped hyped-up hydrocarbons through its invulnerable veins.
He sat quietly behind the wheel, letting the car do all the work, taking him up and up onto the steadily rising spine of California.
As the hours passed, even the few last traces of civilization began to drop away. He was in the foothill country, now, where people had generally built their houses from wood, and there were hardly any ruins left to see. Fire had taken care of that: the natural succession of forest blazes, sweeping across the uninhabited towns in the dry season year after year, had scoured the land of man’s presence.
Peaceful. An empty world lay before him.
A total contrast to the densely populated turbulence of San Francisco, and all the other nightmare zones of urban life stretching down the coast with hardly a break all the way to the great Belial, the Beast with a Thousand Heads itself, Los Angeles. Even the thought of L.A. made Carpenter wince. That monstrous blemish on the landscape, that pullulating black hole of ineffable ugliness, where uncountable millions of harried souls huddled together in unspeakable heat and air so foul it could be cut and sliced and stacked—
Los Angeles, the city of his birth—
Carpenter could remember his grandfather’s tales of growing up in an unfucked world—sentimental memories of the old Los Angeles of long ago—the late twentieth century, maybe? The early twenty-first? A lost paradise, so the old man had said, a place where the wind was fresh and clear off the ocean and days were mild and pleasant. The parks and lush gardens everywhere, the spacious homes, the sparkling sky, the snow on the mountaintops behind Pasadena and San Gabriel in the winter. Sometimes even now Carpenter would visit that vanished Los Angeles in his dreams: the beautiful unspoiled Los Angeles of the distant past, the remote and unattainable 1990s, say, before the iron sky had closed in on everything. He hoped that it hadn’t all been just some senile romantic fantasy of his grandfather’s invention, that it had really been like that back then. He felt sure that it had been. But it was gone now and would never return.
Onward. Eastward.
Lightning flashed in the empty sun-blasted vault of the sky, a spear-shaft of white brightness crossing the other brightness. A far-off drumroll of thunder. It meant nothing, Carpenter knew. Merely Zeus clearing his throat. The lightning was generated by heat differentials, and rain almost never came with it All that would come was fire, cutting its scalpel path along the grasslands, then widening, widening.
The trees were different, now. Instead of oaks, there were soaring pines and slender creamy trees that might be aspens. Low gnarly clumps of chaparral—manzanita and greasewood, mainly—bordered the old highway. He saw no other cars. He was the last man alive in the world. In some places, where fire had lately been, stands of bare and blackened tree trunks stretched away in all directions for miles, rising above the charred earth.
Fire was pure. Fire was good.
Let it burn everything everywhere, Carpenter prayed. Let it sear away the sins of the world.
How strange, he thought, that the human race had survived the worst of its national rivalries and its religious wars, had put so much of the old cockeyed irrational strife behind it, had entered into an era of actual peace and global cooperation, more or less. And then this: rot and ubiquitous tropic heat and atmospheric degradation and doom. Strange, strange, strange. Nick Rhodes in his laboratory, struggling with his conscience as he strived to turn the human race into something with gills and green blood. Kovalcik out in the Pacific under that brute of a sun, filling her ship with sea monsters for the needs of hungry humanity. Poor shitheaded Paul Carpenter, so eager to haul an iceberg back to a foolish ungrateful city that he forgets what little decency had ever been programmed into him, and allows himself to abandon—
No. Don’t think about that.
What you are doing right now, he reminded himself, is running away from all of that.
Fragments of some old barely remembered liturgy came to him. Miserere. Miserere. Qui tollispeccata mundi Agnus dei. Qui tollis. Peccata mundi.
Dona nobispacem. Pacem. Pacem. Pacem. Pacem.
Onward. Eastward.
The highway climbed and climbed and climbed, until it entered a comparatively straight stretch in a pass cloaked by the gathering darkness of the oncoming night. This was the high country here. Thin air, toothpick forests of slender struggling pines reaching toward timberline, above them bare rock faces like immense granite shields. All around him rose the purple-gray bulks of enormous mountains, the loftiest peaks of the Sierra.