Aftermath Read Free

testimony?
    The clock readout reaches two o'clock—and moves past it. Five seconds. Ten. I sit a little straighter, convinced that something has gone wrong and the journey to Lethe is delayed.
    And then I realize that the injection was made exactly on schedule. I had not felt it, but I am moving, expanding, ascending on pink clouds of glory. The chamber, far below me, fades out of sight.
    The forever sleep has begun.

IN THE BEGINNING
    First Strike. February 21, 2026;
Kimberleys Plateau, Western Australia.
    It was evening, but it was not dark. Would darkness ever come again?
    Wondjina crawled from the shadow of the rocks and peered north and west. No clouds were in the sky, and the Sun was on the horizon. Soon it should be night, cooling the desert and bringing longed-for relief.
    But there would be no night; soon, again, would come the Rival.
    Wondjina turned to face south and east. A hint of pink was already on the skyline, warning that the Rival was alive in the heavens and about to rise in the cloudless sky. If Wondjina were to find water it was best to seek it at this time, in the cooler hour before the Rival usurped the Moon and evening turned again to day. It must be done quickly. Thirst was all through him, weakening his muscles and stiffening his joints.
    He made his way to the dried-out riverbed and walked along it, seeking patches of sun-seared grass. Under the grass, deep in the gravel, he would find the water that fed their roots. There, and nowhere else.
    For twelve days, the Rival had risen as the Sun set. Between them, Sun and Rival seared the land and drew off every hint of surface moisture. Without dark there could be no night, without night there would be no midnight fall of dew. And the deep waters were running dry.
    Wondjina took the trowel from his waist sling and started to dig in the gravel of the watercourse. From time to time he laid down the tool, picked up the hollow reed, and pushed it deep. He sucked hard on the other end.
    Nothing, and still nothing. Every day, the reed had to be pushed deeper. Dig again, dig harder. Finally, after ten minutes of hard effort, a few mouthfuls of warm, brackish liquid.
    He straightened and stared again to the south. The Rival had lifted above the horizon. Now it was a dazzling blue-white point too bright to look at. There was no circle of light, like the Sun's disk, but when the Rival was high in the sky it threw down its own intense spears of heat.
    This torment could not last. Or if it did, Wondjina's family would not be here to see it. They would leave, heading away to seek help from lowland strangers.
    Wondjina would not leave. He was old, and he would live or die in the homeland. But he could not survive like this. Hunger and thirst gnawed within him. Midsummer was long past, and the Sun was on its annual journey north. Heat should be lessening, rain should carry in on the west wind. But not this year.
    Twelve days ago the Rival had appeared in the night sky. Darkness became a memory. The heat steadily increased, a dry wind blew from the south. No animal moved across the red sands. Even the tough, leathery grass had wilted.
    Wanderers through the homeland brought word of other changes. Lake Argyle, the great water far to the north, had dried completely for the first time in many years. Far south, the Ord River ran low in its course. The Rival's presence was felt, north or south, as it was here. You could not run from it, any more than you could escape by flight from the Sun itself.
    Wondjina, the family's living memory of older times, knew what must be done. The answer was not to flee. It was to ask the spirits of cloud and rain to bring relief.
    Ask now, ask tonight. The family was determined to leave tomorrow.
    He squatted onto his haunches and rubbed the wrinkled skin of his knees. Everywhere was reddish, powdery dust, worse than at any time in his long memory. He opened the woven bag, took out the necklace of dried bones and the bright-stained sections of