Age of Miracles

by John Brunner

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

When suddenly all the fissionable material on Earth was exploded, Earthmen had their first notice of the aliens' arrival. And by the time the panic, death and chaos had been sorted out, reports were coming in about mysterious cities scattered across the face of the planet - huge areas of flickering light and awesome free energy, disorienting to human senses and impregnable to attack. The question was: were they alien bases . . . or something else?

Release date: March 18, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 294

Sample

Like needles thrust into a wax doll, images stabbed him.

During the summer there was plenty to eat. The fox avoided the place where his world was being invaded: the clanking mysteries, the smoky smells, the bellowing bipeds. Summer ended. For a while there was mud. Rain soaked his coat and sharpened the edge of the wind. By frost there was a hard place and a succession of stinking roars and flashes. The fox turned aside, slinking back into the long grass and the bushes. The grass became dry and yellow, the bushes stood out bare as an engraving against the sky.

Snow brought scarcity.

The fox grew resigned to the new thing in his world. It was not a change he understood, but neither could he control it. Printing his traces in the snow, breaking through the thin frozen crust although lack of food was lightening him daily, he came to the borderline and paused—not for reflection, but because a complex balance of instinctual drives was seesawing between hunger here and unknown there.

A roar began. Automatically the fox ran forward. It was his last action but one.

Afterwards, when they had cleared away the wreckage and the bodies—including the fox’s—men came with guns and searched the area. His vixen and his last litter of cubs were shot. On the new road cars went cautiously as winter spread the concrete with a glaze of ice.

He moaned in darkness. Wet, clammy, unpleasant, something slimy on his face, his chest, the front of his legs. Lying in the dirt he battled ghosts.

The man—something familiar about him—in a place lit by candles, windowless, the door locked and barred against intruders … working. But pausing every few seconds to look around him nervously.

We know very little about them. A sardonic curl of the lip, here. We know beyond a doubt that they can set off fissionables at an indefinite distance because we learned that the hard way.

(No, it wasn’t funny.)

Another nervous glance, and back to work. Knowledge is the first weapon. People generally say we’re fighting in the dark, but you can’t call it fighting when you don’t know what your enemy is or even whether he regards you as his (?) enemy. We must find that out!

(Was that a noise? A footfall? Nothing to be seen … of course.)

After a petrified pause, the conclusion that it was a trick of overactive imagination. Something found now, something to claim all attention and generate pulse-pounding excitement. Could it possibly …?

He lay alone in the darkness, soaked with thin wet mud, and writhed as violently as if the blow had been physical in this instant of time.

Blasphemy! The howl came, the blow followed, then the laughs of triumph. (Shalt not suffer a witch to live.) Seek to probe the secrets of what is hidden not in knowledge but in faith! Blasphemer!

Spittle on his face. Like maddened animals all around. A snag-toothed mouth grown to enormous size, stretching from horizon to horizon and speaking the dogmas. If you would enter the holy city among the shining angels go in humility not arrogance, blasphemer and upstart!

After that, boots: kicking again and again.

He tried to crawl away, and his eyes opened. For a little he could not see and thought he must be blind. Then he rolled over, the mud plopping; its sour taste was in his mouth. Man the crown of creation (irony) lying in dirt like a hog in its wallow.

Anger burst out and bloomed in him like a fireball, lighting the landscape of his mind with a beautiful and deadly brilliance. Who put him here in the dirt? Who threw him down in a ditch like a dead dog? He did.

The man began to pick himself up, clawing at the sides of the trench for a purchase. He felt the horrible clay fill the space between his nails and his fingertips, foul as feces. His limbs were like wooden rods, uncontrollable. He was about three-quarters dead, but his mind was alive with hate.

Dark—night—dark—night…

Over the lip of the ditch he saw lights and thought of lights he had seen before. He desired to go towards them. Clawing, scrabbling, thrusting, he tried to force himself up and out. Failed, and fell back. Like a man handcuffed in a cell awaiting the torturers’ return, he railed against the slippery clay, his weak body, his powerlessness. White-hot, the hate crumbled his humanity as lava can crumble a peasant’s hut on the slopes of Etna.

Inhuman, he found neither time nor space so impassable a barrier as the sides of this deep trench.

When the figure appeared in the restaurant, everything stopped. Only for one moment was a man’s high-pitched voice raised into the appalling silence, closing a bargain with a woman for the night. And then nothing. The remembered sound of chattering and music hung in the air like dust.

His mere presence was a slap in the face. To look at him was to realize what he was, and recall that all humanity had been disgustingly insulted. Not the mask of the Red Death, not Naaman white with leprosy, could have chilled the company as this man did.

Ripped, his clothes hung from him like the bannering rags on a scarecrow made of poles. Dirty brown mud glistened wet on his face, chest and legs. He left smeared footprints as he lurched across the restaurant’s floor.

Seconds passed. There were a few half-hearted screams, but it was clear from the focused intensity of the man’s burning glare, from the straight-line course he was following, that he was concentrated on one individual among those present. For what? Vengeance? You could not be sure. In this Age of Miracles, you could not be sure of anything.

He’s after someone, Den Radcliffe thought. It seemed a vaguely silly idea, like the delusive insights of a dream full of surreal absurdities. Me. He’s coming directly towards me.

The tick-tock of heartbeats told him that time was passing; so did the foot-dragging approach of the stranger. Nothing else did. As though sunk in a block of transparent plastic he sat rigid beside his companions at the table. The width of the table, at least, was between himself and the intruder.

The distance narrowed to twelve paces, ten, eight. Suddenly the girl on his left—he knew her only as Maura—screamed and leaped to her feet, and others imitated her. The spell broke. Den Radcliffe could move, do something to drive away this horror, break it, smash it, this obscenity walking like a man!

He snatched up what his hand encountered on the table: a heavy glass pitcher full of water. He hurled it, and it struck the man’s shoulder, making him check his stride for a second while its contents slopped some of the mud from his cheek.

A bottle, caught around the neck for a club. On his feet now, Den Radcliffe felt all his nerves sing back to life, stinging as a limb stings when circulation returns after tourniquet-like cramp. Bottle raised, liquor spouting from its neck and flowing down his sleeve, he waited in the vain hope of help.

The man spoke. His nauseous screeching voice filled the room like air rushing into a punctured vacuum. “Damn you!” he howled. “Damn you damn you damn you! You did this to me, you bastard!”

Superstition, against his will, shattered the self-control which Radcliffe had already weakened with drink. He swung the bottle and let it go. It broke on the man’s forehead, gashing the skin, scattering with a tinkle across the floor, and then there was the long-repressed panic.

Chairs crashed over, tableclothes were dragged unheeded by scrambling fighting crazy-milling men and women, shedding cutlery and plates ringing and breaking. The waiters went with the rest; so did the musicians from the band, using their instruments as clubs, and a hundred people were rushing the yard-wide exit door before the manager turned on the ceiling panic sprays and oblivion came sifting down like snow.

Still the ghastly figure stood facing Radcliffe. He hurled things at it like wooden balls at a cockshy—bottles, glasses, what his hands chanced on. The tableknifes would not throw; their handles were too heavy. A plate caught the air and swung aside, like a badly aimed discus.

He heard the hissing of the panic sprays, and terror seized him. For all he knew, the other confronting him might not breathe, might now draw in air and be immobilized by the anesthetic. He snatched his own last lungful before the gas came down, hooked his hands under the table’s edge and lifted it with insane violence from the floor. As it came up, he somehow got another purchase on its underside so that he leaned forward into it and turned it, brought it slamming down on the impassive, hate-auraed figure, and fell forward, triumph coloring his slide into unconsciousness. After him tumbled and clattered his past and his hopes for the future.

“The history of the last years of the twentieth century,” Waldron said under his breath, “is going to be the story of how nothing happened.”

“What was that?” Across the desk Canfield—suspicious, touchy—stiffened, sure he was being snidely insulted.

“Nothing,” Waldron said. “Go on.”

That is, he added without even moving his lips, if anyone bothers to write history again.

Canfield was still glaring at him, his dark face full of hostility. Abruptly unable to bear that scowl any longer, Waldron snapped, “Go on, damn it! You came to give a report, so spit it out.”

Canfield grunted and turned back the leaves of his notebook. He said, “I took a crew down to the City of Angels as soon as the call came. It was a shambles, but the manager had turned on the panic sprays. According to him, the weirdo just appeared, on the dais inside the entrance by the hat-check booth, and walked straight across the room towards one particular table. He watched it happening from a sealed armor-glass compartment on the—”

“I know the City of Angels,” interrupted Waldron. And, as he saw self-righteous disapproval gather in Can-field’s mind, added, “I go there all the time! When I can afford to, anyhow.”

He made no attempt to interpret Canfield’s reaction in words, but the latter pursed his lips hard for several seconds, as though forcibly blocking off a sharp retort, before he continued.

“Of course, it’s ridiculous to say that the weirdo just appeared. I brought in the doorman and the bouncer, naturally, and questioned them on the way—they missed most of the gas because they were right next to the exit. Either they’re lying or they panicked and don’t want to admit it.”

Leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes, Waldron said, “What state was this weirdo in when you picked him out from under the table?”

His train of thought broken, Canfield hesitated. “Filthy,” he said at last. “Smeared with wet mud, ragged, bruised—but some of that was due to things being thrown at him, I guess.”

“A man in that state wouldn’t be let into the City of Angels through the main entrance,” Waldron said. “I’m not asking you to speculate. Just tell me what you found when you arrived.”

Canfield shut his notebook and rose to his feet, his mouth working, his Adam’s apple bobbing on his stringy neck. He said, “What the hell are you trying to do—make me angry enough to give you an excuse for throwing me off the force?”

“Shut up and sit down,” Waldron said. “Or if you don’t want to go on, give me your notebook and I’ll pick the details out of it myself.”

Canfield took another few heartbeats to boil over. Then he threw the notebook on the desk in front of his chief—it made a noise like an open-handed slap—and strode out, slamming the door. The ill-fitting windows rattled in their frames; the pencils on the desk rattled against each other.

It seemed suddenly very dark in the room, although the high swinging lightbulb was new and free of dust. Waldron sat a while without moving, looking at the black cover of the notebook.

The story of how nothing happened…

That was what was going to break James Arnott Waldron: the hysterical pretense that it was still the same old world. One day he was going to scream at some idiot like Canfield and say, “How the hell dare you claim that you are Man, the lord of creation? You’re a rat, you’re an insect, you’re a dirty little crawling louse scavenging after the angels—a dung-beetle butting at your ball of muck and fooling yourself that you’re trundling the sun!”

Why do I hang on here? What’s the point? Why don’t I simply quit?

His eyes drifted from the oblong of the notebook to the oblong of a map on the wall—not the city map, the hemisphere map. That bore handmade additions and amendments; you couldn’t buy a commercial or even a government-issue map which showed the world as it really was. Consequently he was not altogether certain his was accurate. But it was as truthful as he could make it. Not from masochism, as Canfield and so many other of his colleagues seemed to think. From honesty.

Why can’t they understand it’s necessary?

The pockmark gaps in the neat mesh of human symbols—the devastated areas, the fallout zones, into which the lines of highways and railroads led like footsteps over precipices—had to be included on the printed map; it would be beyond anybody’s powers of self-deception pretend that Omaha, for instance, still existed. (Though of course you didn’t have to keep stating aloud that the city had gone.) But the heavy black border isolating a tongue-shaped area in the center of North America, the other similar border surrounding a kidney-shaped zone in Western Brazil, and the patches of silver foil like distorted pentagrams which indicated the alien cities—those, Waldron had applied himself the day after he grew tired of the popular fiction that governments in Washington and Ottawa still held sway over the whole of their former territories.

“One day,” Waldron declared to the uncaring air, “I’ll wire up a bell and some flashing lights and stick a sign under the map saying DON’T KID YOURSELF. And fix it so it comes on when the door is opened.”

But he knew he wouldn’t go that far. It was all very well to insist that people must face the facts; it would take more than words, whether written or spoken, to bring the result about.

He was as scared as anybody else. He was as ready to hide from reality as anybody else. All he had as margin was a kind of shame. He could easily lose it. Maintaining its original force was straining his nerves. Otherwise he wouldn’t have snapped at Canfield.

He drove himself to pick up the notebook at last and flip through its pages, seeing the familiar shorthand it was filled with, as clear and as easy to read once you had the context as ordinary print.

Is that symptomatic? So many of us now seem to need to do small things perfectly, as though we’re resigned to giving up the big things … for good and all.

He hoped not. He thought of his own laborious attempts to perfect Beethoven’s Opus III, first without a wrong note or shaky time-value, then without a flaw of expression. He didn’t want to write that off as mere compulsiveness.

All right! The symbols danced on the page. He froze them by an effort of will. At the City of Angels—the name was a gesture of timid defiance, of course, on a par with a boy thumbing his nose at an adult whose back was turned—there had been this extraordinary intrusion. Words like “extraordinary” were losing their force. Lately you didn’t even hear people say as they had used, “The Age of Miracles is not past.” Now they said, with a wry shrug, “A of M!”—and that was its own explanation.

Canfield had arrived and found people jammed, physically jammed, in the exit doorway, and sprawled all over the low dais leading to it, dropped where the panic sprays caught them. And crushed under a table, the weirdo. And on top of the table, the man the manager believed to have been the target of the weirdo’s interest. And on the floor nearby two girls and a man who had completed this particular party.

The man lying on the upturned table was called Dennis Radcliffe.

Waldron frowned. The name rang a distant bell. But he couldn’t place it immediately. He wasted no time trying to puzzle it out—he could have the records checked easily enough.

The manager said Radcliffe had gone wild and started to hurl things: bottles, knives, crockery. But he hadn’t seen what happened after that because of the rush for the exit and the need to turn on his gas-sprays.

So Canfield had closed out the place, of course, and taken all the hundred and forty names of clients and waiters and other staff by a slow process of searching pockets and purses for identity papers, and had brought here the people most directly involved: the manager, the bouncer and doorkeeper he suspected of lying, Radcliffe and the rest of his party, the weirdo himself, and half a dozen people picked at random to give corroborative evidence. A thorough job. Now it was three-ten A.M., and Waldron felt his vitality at such a low ebb he hated the prospect of sifting through the data Canfield had meticulously assembled.

But it was going to have to be done.

Where the hell do you start on a thing like this?

He shut the notebook and thumbed switches on his desk intercom in the hope that it might have started working again by itself. It hadn’t, and no one would be in to fix it before nine. He repressed the urge to throw it at the wall and got out of his chair.

The basement, white-tiled and forbidding, always put him in mind of a public toilet. There was something of the same stench about it, too, when the cells were full. Under harsh lights some of those arrested tonight moaned in their sleep; others, thinking even trying to sleep was futile, sat on hard benches and stared at nothing, eyes rimmed red with weariness. The people from the City of Angels were still unconscious for the most part, and lay like morgue-delivered corpses on the benches and floors in the end three cells.

At Waldron’s appearance the men at the desk facing the cells glanced up. There were Rodriguez, the duty sergeant, Dr. Morello, one of the regular police surgeons, and Canfield, who glowered and bared his teeth.

Controlling his movements deliberately, Waldron descended the last few steps and held out the notebook. “I’m sorry I snapped at you, Canfield,” he said. “Tired, I guess.” He planted an elbow on the corner of the desk.

Canfield accepted the notebook and said nothing.

“Well, doc?” . . .