Agreed, with random grumbling. Matt consulted the minutes. “Okay… is there a weekly report from the Radio Subcommittee?”

Joey Commoner stood up.

“Radio report,” Joey said.

He cleared his throat. If Mart’s memory served, this was the first time Joey had spoken at a Committee meeting. Joey had dressed up for the occasion: there was nothing on his T-shirt more offensive than a tennis-shoe ad.

“This week we logged thirteen calls. Most of those were Mr. Avery Price from the Boston group or Mr. Gardner Deutsch of Toronto. Plus a few from Colonel John Tyler and some one-time contacts like a woman in Ohio and someone in Costa Rica who I didn’t understand.

“Mr. Price says Boston is leaving town in a convoy, and Toronto is also going to leave tomorrow morning according to plan so the two groups can meet in Pennsylvania and travel together. He says—”

Matt banged the gavel. “Joey, what are you talking about? Boston is leaving Boston?” Damn it, this might be important.

Joey glared at him. “Its all written down. I’d like to just read it.”

“Well—carry on. I suppose we can reserve questions until later.”

Joey cleared his throat again. “The Boston and Toronto people are going to an area along the fortieth parallel, probably in Ohio, which their Helpers say will be safe from storms and where they can establish a town and a radio beacon for people to follow. They say this will attract survivors from all over the continent and they’d like us to join them as soon as we can, because there are about enough people in North America to make one good-sized town. They’re carrying mobile radio equipment and they want us to let them know as soon as possible when we’re going to join them.

“Also, Colonel Tyler is travelling toward the northwest looking for survivors and he’ll be passing through Buchanan in a couple of months, or he can rendezvous with us on the road if we decide to join the Boston-Toronto convoy.

“End of report.”

Pandemonium.

Several people wanted to pack up and leave immediately. Bob Ganish, the ex-car dealer, spoke for the group: “We can beat the damn storm, get across the mountains before it finds us. No offense, people, but I like the idea of seeing some new faces.”

Abby raised her hand. “There are things here we’d all hate to leave… but maybe it’s better if we do. Should we put this to a vote?”

Matt argued that they should stay in Buchanan at least for the time being—wait until the Boston group had a more solid plan, have somebody besides Joey talk to them. Weather the storm, then think about moving. It wasn’t the kind of decision that could be made impulsively.

Privately, the idea terrified him. He didn’t want to abandon Buchanan. Christ, not yet!

It was too soon to give up Buchanan. Everything was still intact, still functional, only a little tattered.

There’s hope, he wanted to say. We can salvage something. It’s not over yet.

Kindle moved to postpone debate until more facts came in—“This is the first I’ve heard of it, and I’m half the damn Radio Subcommittee.” With a long sideways look at Joey Commoner.

The motion passed five to two.

Matt listened numbly through three more subcommittee reports and adjourned the meeting at midnight.

He wanted only to go to bed, to sleep, to table for a few hours all his own private debates.

But Annie Gates was waiting when he pulled into his driveway.

She must have walked here, Matt thought; her own car was nowhere in sight. None of these people seemed to drive anymore. He saw them walking sometimes, a curious light stride, not quite human, as Rachel might have admitted.

The sight of Annie filled him with fear.

He had avoided her for months, avoided her because she was one more component in a problem he couldn’t solve… and because he had slept with her when she was human, loved her when she was human, an equation he didn’t care to balance.

But now she scared him, because she was waiting on his doorstep under the hospitality light, dressed too lightly for the cold night air, looking at him with a terrible sympathy, terrible because it was authentic, because she was waiting to speak.

“Rachel’s gone Home,” Annie said. “Matt, she’s not here anymore. She wants me to tell you that.” Annie’s voice was solemn and very sad. “She says she misses you. She says she loves you, and she’s sorry she didn’t say goodbye.”

Annie was not human, but Matt put his head against her pale shoulder and wept.

Chapter 23

View from a Height

It was the winter the oceans bloomed with strange life.

The Travellers, perceiving the thermal imbalance of the planet and the human desire to restore it, dispatched seed organisms into the Earth’s restless hydrosphere.

The organisms multiplied in the shallow surface waters. Like the phytoplankton they resembled, the new organisms fed on mineral material from the upwelling ocean currents, fed on sunlight, but fed also on the water itself, assembling themselves from atoms of hydrogen and oxygen. The ocean was food, and the Traveller organisms increased their tonnage by the minute.

As they multiplied, they began to avoid the coastal waters rich in natural diatoms. Their role in the oceanic ecology was temporary and there must always be enough phytoplankton to feed the krill. They confined their bloom to less nutrient-rich waters far from land.

They grew so numerous that autumn that in places they covered the surface water in crystalline slicks hundreds of miles in diameter, their opalescent coats bouncing rainbows from the swell.

Then they began their significant work: They began to devour atmospheric carbon and bind it to themselves, as the phytoplankton do, but more efficiently—voraciously.

The oceans combed the air of C0₂.

The population of the Earth plummeted daily.

In the Greater World, a few acts remained malum in se but none were malum prohibitum. The inhibitions of a thousand generations had been swept away by Contact. The last devotees of the flesh celebrated their bodies even as their bodies grew pale and light.

They danced to silent music in abandoned mosques, made love in infinite variation in the shadows of cathedrals. They laughed and embraced and surrendered their bodies by the light of Arab sunsets, Oriental noons, African dawns.

Daily, they vanished into the Greater World; and their abandoned skins, like phantom armies, roamed the streets of Djakarta, Beijing, Reykjavik, Capetown, until they crumbled to dust and the dust was borne off by the rising wind.

Matt Wheeler picked up a school notebook at Delisle’s Stationery—where Miriam Flett used to buy Glu-Stiks and paper cutters before the Observer ceased publication in October—and began a private journal.