11
Waveland
I
Needless to say, in the eyes of most human people the great Kilauea tsunami was an overpoweringly awful cataclysm. The mere thought of it made human blood run cold. Even the Heechee considered it regrettable.
The disaster had not been unexpected. Human scientists had seen it coming even without the help of the Heechee, though the Heechee helped a lot with the details. They were good at that sort of thing. They knew a lot about tectonic troubles, from their experiences of moving planets around inside the great black hole they lived in, and they had no trouble predicting that at some point the Big Island of Hawaii would split in two and splash that great tsunami all across the Pacific Rim. Even the Heechee didn't have any idea of what to do about it, though.
When it did come, in all its violence and terror, the size of that wave wasn't like that of any other tsunami, ever. Even the very biggest historic tsunamis had been not much more than a hundred meters high. This one was a whole other thing. When it struck the beaches all around the Pacific coasts, the curl at the top of the wave was nearly half a kilometer above the shoreline. When all that irresistible mass of water came battering down on the land tens of millions of human beings were killed at once.
It wasn't just people who died. Their works went with them. Whole cities were erased out of existence by that wave, as though they had never been. The world mourned.
That is, most of the world did. There was one particular human person, a minister by the name of Orbis McClune, who took a quite different view of the incident.
Reverend McClune didn't mourn at all because, in his view, the devastation of the Kilauea tsunami wasn't all that bad. It had its good points. One of the best of them was that the wave had obliterated large chunks of Southern California.
It wasn't merely that McClune didn't think the tsunami was bad. He didn't think it was an accident at all. Quite the contrary. In Reverend McClune's view that annihilating wave was nothing more nor less than the manifestation of God's terrible, pitiless vengeance, smiting sinners where they stood. The great wave struck on a Saturday. On that Sunday morning the Reverend McClune got down on his knees before what was left of his congregation in Rantoul, Illinois, and thanked his God and his Savior for mercifully cleaning out the cesspits that had been Southern California, the purulent home of the so-called entertainment industry with its sinful vids and VRs, the vile font of lewdness and nudeness and blasphemies of all kinds.
Not to mention that he had a personal reason for wishing misfortune to that part of the world.
McClune's sermon didn't mention that personal reason. He didn't have to; the congregation knew all about it. He also didn't mention the obliterated cities of Hilo and Honolulu, Shanghai and Tokyo, Auckland and Papeete and a hundred others, all around the Pacific Rim and on the islands dotting the sea. To the extent that McClune thought about those cities at all, he presumed that they must have been pretty wicked, too. That went without saying as far as McClune was concerned, because why else would God have chosen to destroy them? But McClune didn't take much of an interest in those other places. Godless California had been on his mind for a long time, and, he assumed, therefore on God's mind as well. So he was pretty sure that California had been God's main target. If other communities happened to get themselves obliterated while He was punishing the Californians, well, that was the kind of collateral damage that history was full of.
So, as McClune addressed the tiny remnant of what once had been a flourishing congregation, he tearfully thanked his God for wiping America's Pacific Coast clean again. That was the sermon that finally cost him his job.
On the morning of that unforgettable Sunday there had been fewer than thirty people remaining in McClune's church, the rest of his Hock long driven away by his diatribes against pretty much everything that had happened in the last century. By noontime there were even fewer, because this time he had gone too far even for the loyalest of those few remaining loyalists. The most common word heard among them as they glumly exited the church was, "Nutcase," along with, "All right, we all know he had a tough break, that business with his wife, but for God's sake!" and most of all, "Never mind the business with his wife. He's gone too far this time. We really have to do something." So the leaders of the congregation were on the phone to the bishop before their Sunday dinners were on the table, and by Monday morning Orbis McClune no longer had a church.
That didn't mean that he was defrocked. He kept his status as an ordained minister. He was dehoused, though, because the parsonage went with the church. As an act of charity, the bishop called to offer him thirty days' grace to find another place, but McClune said, "Don't bother. I'll be out of here tomorrow."
The bishop regarded him on the screen. "You know," he said tentatively, "I didn't want to have to take your church away. I don't like to interfere in local matters, but, good heavens, Orbis, you know you didn't give me much of a choice. It was bad enough before, when you went on the comm circuits to call the Heechee demons from Hell—"
"What other name can you call demons by?" McClune asked.
The bishop groaned. "Please, Orbis, we don't want that argument again. I only want to say that when you say things that sound like you're, well, really almost rejoicing in all those terrible deaths from the tsunami, it hurts us all. It certainly doesn't give the right impression of what our faith is all about."
When McClune didn't respond, the bishop sighed in resignation. He hadn't really expected any retraction from McClune, and he certainly didn't want another of those interminable theological arguments—no, diatribes—that had punctuated McClune's tenure in his church. It was only residual politeness, not actual concern for McClune's welfare, that made him ask, "Where will you go, Orbis?"
"Why, I'll go where I'm needed, Bishop." Then McClune smiled. He had a nice smile. You could even call it a heartwarmingly kindly smile. It had deceived many a person who was astonished to find himself moments later labeled a hopelessly hell-bound sinner, since the smile was not at all in keeping with the harsh denunciations that followed. The bishop, who knew McClune well, tensed when he saw the smile, expecting the worst. But all McClune said was, "When you come to think of it, Bishop, that could be pretty nearly anywhere, couldn't it?"
No matter what he had told the bishop, McClune knew perfectly well where he intended to go.
The next morning, first thing, he rented a storage locker for what was worth saving of his household goods. There wasn't much. He put the few remaining necessities in a backpack and caught a railbug for the big airport at Peotone.
Peotone International Airport was a madhouse. Planes were coming in from all over the stricken California coast, landing with scant loads of stunned, scared refugees, and immediately refilling with rescue workers and supplies for the return. The outgoing rescue workers were neatly dressed, the refugees less so. McClune nearly stumbled over a man, woman and child sprawled by a doorway. All were deeply suntanned. The child's face was buried in a VR game simulator; his parents wore the perplexed expression of people who had never been seriously worried before; all three were still wearing pajamas, in the wife's case nearly transparent ones.
Actually, it was just as McClune had expected it would be. As he had counted on its being, in fact, because he had been confident that everybody would be too involved in the task of getting relief to the survivors to be vigilant. He was pretty sure that all he would have to do was display his clerical collar and say, "The survivors are going to need spiritual counseling, too." Say it he did, sufficient it was. The load bosses had more urgent things on their minds than worrying about the credentials of one more volunteer. With hardly a glance, they waved McClune onto the plane that was already loading.