And God walked upon the water.
They gawked, all of them. Coral walked across the lake, her pace determined but not hurried, her face serene. The pink soles of her bare feet just touched the surface.
/ didn't believe her, Elin thought wildly. She saw Father Landis begin to cross herself, her mouth hanging open, eyes wide in disbelief. Halfway through her gesture, the Jesuitical wet ware took hold. Her mouth snapped shut, and her face became cold and controlled. She pulled herself up straight.
"Hans," the priest said, "push the button."
"No!" Elin shrieked, but it was too late. Still hooked into the intercom, she saw the funny little man briskly, efficiently obey.
For an instant, nothing happened. Then bright glints of light appeared at all of the condenser units, harsh and actinic. Steam and smoke gushed from the machinery, and a fraction of a second later, there was an ear-slapping gout of sound.
Bits of the sky were blown away.
Elin turned, twisted, fell. She scrambled across the ground and threw her arms around Tory.
The air was in turmoil. The holes in the dome roof-small at first-grew as more of the dome flaked away, subjected to stresses it wasn't designed to take. An uncanny whistling grew to a screech, then a scream, and then there was an all-encompassing whoomph, and the dome shattered.
Elin was flung upward, torn away from Tory, painfully flung high and away. All the crater was in motion, the rocks tearing out of the floor, the trees splintering upward, the lake exploding into steam.
The screaming died-the air was gone. Elin's ears rang furiously, and her skin stung everywhere. Pressure grew within her, the desire of her blood to mate with the vacuum, and Elin realized that she was about to die.
A quiet voice said: This must not be.
Time stopped.
Elin hung suspended between moon and death. The shards and fragments of an instant past crystallized and shifted. The world became not misty, exactly, but apositional. Both it and she grew tentative, possibilities rather than actual things.
Come be God with me now, Coral said, but not to Elin.
Tory's presence flooded the soupy uncertainty, a vast and powerful thing, but wrong somehow, twisted. But even as Elin felt this, there was a change within him, a sloughing off of identity, and he seemed to straighten, to heal.
All around, the world began to grow more numinous, more real. Elin felt tugged in five directions at once. Tory's presence swelled briefly, then dwindled, became a spark, less than a spark, nothing.
Yes.
With a roaring of waters and a shattering of rocks, with an audible thump, the world returned.
Elin unsteadily climbed down the last flight of stone stairs from the terraces to the lake-front. She passed by two guards at the foot of the stairs, their facepaint as hastily applied as their programming, several more on the way to the nearest trellis farm. They were everywhere since the incident.
She found the ladder up into the farm and began climbing. It was biological night, and the agtechs were long gone.
Hand over hand she climbed, as far and high as she could, until she was afraid she would miss a rung and tumble off. Then she swung herself onto a ledge, wedging herself between strawberry and yam planters. She looked down on the island, and though she was dizzyingly high, she was only a third of the way up.
"Now what the hell am I doing here?" she mumbled to herself.
She swung her legs back and forth, answered her own question: "Being a piss-ass drunk." She cackled. There was something she didn't have to share with Coral. She was capable of getting absolutely blitzed and walking away from the bar before it hit her. It was something metabolic.
Below, Tory and Coral sat quietly on their monkey island. They did not touch, did not make love or hold hands or even glance at one another-they just sat. Being gods.
Elin squinted down at the two. "Like to upchuck all over you," she mumbled. Then she squeezed her eyes and fists tight, drawing tears and pain. Dammit, Tory!
Blinking hard, she looked away from the island, down into the jet-black waters of the lake. The brighter stars were reflected there. A slight breeze rippled the water, making them twinkle and blink, as if lodged in a Terran sky. They floated lightly on the surface, swarmed and coalesced, and formed Tory's face in the lake. He smiled warmly, invitingly.
A hand closed around her arm, and she looked up into the stern face of a security guard. "You're drunk, Ms.," he said, "and you're endangering property."
She looked where he pointed, at a young yam plant she had squashed when she sat down, and began to laugh. Smoothly, professionally, the guard rolled up her sleeve, clamped a plastic bracelet around her wrist. "Time to go," he said.
By the time the guard had walked Elin up four terraces, she was nearly sober. A steady trickle of her blood wound through the bracelet, was returned to her body cleansed of alcohol. A sacrilegious waste of wine, in her opinion.
In another twenty steps, the bracelet fell off her wrist. The guard snapped it neatly from the air and disappeared. Despair closed in on her again. Tory, my love! And since there was no hope of sleep, she kept on trudging up the terraces, back toward Hans's rathskeller, for another bellyful of wine.
There was a small crowd seated about the rock that served Hans as a table, lit by a circle of hologram-generated fairy lights. Father Landis was there, and drinking heavily. "Tomorrow I file my report," she announced. "The synod is pulling out of this, withdrawing funding."
Hans sighed, took a long swig of his own wine, winced at its taste. "I guess that's it for the Star Maker project, huh?"
Landis crossed her fingers. "Pray God." Elin, standing just outside the circle, stood silently, listening.
"I don't ever want to hear that name again," a tech grumbled.
"You mustn't confuse God with what you've just seen," Landis admonished.
"Hey, come on!" Hans said. "She moved time backwards or something. I saw it myself. This place exploded-doesn't that prove something?"
Landis grinned, reached out to ruffle his hair. "Sometimes I worry about you, Hans. You have an awfully small concept of God." Several of the drinkers laughed.
He blushed, said, "No, really."
"Well, I'll try to keep this"- she leaned forward, rapped her mug against the rock, "fill this up again, hey?-keep it simple. We had analysts crawl up and down Coral's description of the universe, and did you know there was no place in it anywhere for such things as mercy, hope, faith? No, we got an amalgam of substrates, supraprograms, and self-metaediting physics. Now what makes God superior to us is not just intellect-we've all known some damn clever bastards. And it's not just power, or I could go and buy an atomic device on the black market and start my own religion.
"No, by definition God is my moral superior. Now I myself am but indifferently honest-but to Coral, moral considerations don't even exist. Get it?''
Only Elin noticed the haunted, hopeless light in Landis's eyes or realized that she was spinning words effortlessly, without conscious control. Deep within, the woman was caught in a private crisis of faith.