Digger found himself thinking about Jack. He’d have been pleased they’d done as well as they had. In fact, he suspected Jack would have been surprised that Digger had come up with a workable plan.
“Problem?” asked Julie, glancing over at him.
“No,” he said. “Just thinking about the ride home.”
THE JENKINS WAS on its way back to Lookout. Kellie reported that a fleet of ships, loaded with supplies, would begin arriving in a few days.
Julie took them to Mt. Alpha, where they traded in the AV3 for one of the smaller landers.
They switched on the lightbender and, at Whit’s request, made for the temple at Brackel.
The city itself wasn’t as severely damaged as they’d expected. A lot of buildings were down and areas flooded, but a substantial number of structures, occupying the wide arc of hills that circled the inner city, had escaped the worst of the water damage.
The temple had also come through reasonably well. A few Korbs were there, wandering through the grounds, looking dazed and battered. The walkways were covered with fallen trees and limbs and an ocean of sludge. A section of roof had been blown off, the interior was flooded, and several statues had been broken. But Lykonda still stood proud, her torch raised. A circle of Korbs stood respectfully around her, and someone had planted a small tree at her base.
ON HER HILLTOP outside Hopgop, Macao pulled an animal skin around her shoulders and tried to smile bravely for the children. Pasak, her cousin, had returned with an armload of cabaros. Ordinarily, cabaros weren’t considered very tasty. But there wasn’t enough fish to go around, and everything else was pretty much depleted. It looked as if it was going to get pretty hungry in the neighborhood over the next few days.
Nevertheless, she would have been ungrateful to complain. She was alive. As was most of her family. A few names were missing, including one of her cousins, but when she thought about the nature of the disaster that had overtaken them, she realized how fortunate they had been. Had they been in their homes when the storm surge came, few of them would have survived.
Everyone was giving thanks to the gods. As if they weren’t equally responsible for the storm that had drowned the land. Yet Lykonda had come to their aid. She’d seen the goddess herself.
It had been a Lykonda who somehow resembled Macao.
Well, that had been a trick of the light. But how did one explain the rest of it?
Behind her, someone threw a few more branches on the fire.
She looked out at the ocean, cold and gray. She had never before thought of it as a monster that could hurl giant waves at them. Who would have believed such things could happen? None among them, not even the oldest, knew of any similar occurrence. Nor was there anything in the Archives.
Yet it was precisely what the zhoka had predicted. Except that he’d had the wrong night.
How was that possible? Why would a demonic creature try to help them? She’d told her story over and over during the last couple of days, while the rains were pouring down, how the zhoka had warned her they needed to get to high ground, that T’Klot was a terrible storm. So many had seen the goddess in the streets that they were now prepared to believe anything. Unlike the audiences that had debated her over her tall tales, people now accepted her story, and assigned everything, good and ill, to celestial powers.
For Macao, the problem went deeper. Her view of reality had been shattered. The world was no longer a mechanical place, a place controlled by physical laws that were accessible by reason. There were gods and demon-storms and a creature called Digger Dunn and who knew what else?
She shuddered, pulled the animal skin close round her shoulders, and leaned nearer the fire.
Avery Whitlock’s Notebooks
Eventually, we will discover that honest communication with the Korbs will be to the benefit of both species. But that day is far off, because it will require more wisdom than we now possess. And more experience than they now have. Meantime, we can take pride in the fact that we have done what we could, and that the Korbs will, one assumes, still be here when that far-off day arrives.
— December 19
chapter 51
Woodbridge, Virginia.
Wednesday, December 24.
THE REPORT FROM Lookout arrived, as it always seemed to, at 2:00 A.M. It was the best possible news: as much success on the ground as they could reasonably have hoped for. There’d been substantial casualties among the Korbs, but an estimated 80 percent of them, thanks to Digger’s inventiveness, had taken to the hills. Of those the vast majority had survived. And her own people had come away with no additional casualties. Hutch never got back to sleep.
The staff came to work knowing that the Academy had a new set of heroes, and emotions ran high through the morning. The commissioner called a press conference, the politicians were delighted, and, because it was Christmas Eve, everyone went home early.
Hutch, of course, was ecstatic. The Korbs would live, and it was possible to assign meaning to the deaths of Jack Markover and Dave Collingdale.
She spent the afternoon toting Maureen through the malls for some last-minute shopping. Then, reluctantly, she went home, knowing the media would be there.
Did it seem like coincidence that the good news had come on Christmas Eve?
Was it true that the Academy teams had violated the Protocol?
No, she replied to both questions. And added not exactly to the latter.
They crowded up onto her front porch. A few neighbors wandered over to see what was happening. Drinks appeared from somewhere. Bells jingled.
What could she tell them about this Digger Dunn? Had he really masqueraded as a god? Wasn’t that—?
Digger was a good man. Pretty creative, wouldn’t you say? Saved tens of thousands of lives.
The porch was big and enclosed, and it turned into a party. Season’s best. Happy Hannukah. Merry Christmas. To us and to the Goompahs. To the Korbs.
“By the way,” asked the UNN representative, “have we figured out yet what those clouds are? Any idea at all?”
“We’re working on it,” she said. They shook their heads and rolled their eyes.
Later, when everyone had gone home, she relaxed with a drink and watched Tor and Maureen trying to get a kite into the air. They weren’t having much luck. Tor, who seemed to have no idea how it was done, charged about the lawn while the kite whipped in circles behind him. Maureen trailed along with all due seriousness, only to break out giggling every time the thing crashed.
In his way, Tor possessed the same innocence as the child. It was part of his charm, his sense that the world was essentially a good place, that if you worked hard and paid attention to business, everything would work out. He’d explained to her that he’d grown up with two ambitions: to become a professional golfer, and to create art for a living. He liked golf because it was leisurely, and you always went to summery places to participate. But the truth was that she had a better swing than he did.
Art, though, was a different matter altogether. Give him a brush, and put him near a passing comet, and he was a genius. When you aim high, she decided, one out of two wasn’t bad.
Actually, he was luckier than most people, and not because he had talent. What he really possessed was an ability to enjoy life on its most basic levels. He loved having Maureen chase him around the lawn, enjoyed slapstick comedy, talked endlessly about his camping experiences with the local Boy Scout troop (where he was an assistant scoutmaster), and he could never get enough ice cream. He was a big kid.
He pretended to be modest about his work, to look surprised when he was nominated for the Delmar Award, or the Fitzgibbon. And when one of the media did a piece on him, he was thrilled.