Aftermath Read Free Page B

the family. Later he would tell them how at his plea the cloud spirits had saved them—even if they did not want to believe it.
    He left the eggshells and bones where they lay, a tribute to the spirits. The rain was changing from a shower to a downpour to an astonishing cloudburst. He cupped his hands in front of his mouth, turned his face upward, and drank.
    The family would not be where he had left them. When rain came like this after a long dry spell, there was only one place to be. Wondjina hurried toward it. Soon he had left the graveled watercourse and was traversing the side of the hill, still heading downward.
    The slope ended at an oval pan of clay, forty yards across and a hundred long. The dry surface of Lake Darnong was a mosaic of deep cracks, half an inch across. Rain hissed down onto the flat clay bed and vanished immediately into the fissures of the thirsty earth.
    The whole family, thirteen people plus the four dogs, stood waiting. Everyone was smiling and holding woven collection bags. The cracks in the clay foamed and bubbled.
    One of the dogs saw it first. She darted forward. Two seconds later she was back with a muddy frog wriggling in her jaws. And then they were everywhere, the whole soaked surface alive with frogs awakened by water from their estivation and wriggling up to feed and mate.
    Family and dogs ran forward together. Wondjina followed, more slowly. As he walked onto the slick clay, already covered by half an inch of water, he turned to stare triumphantly south. The Rival was hidden by dense clouds, but it must still be there. It had lost. Wondjina and the cloud spirits had won.
    * * *
    Much later, as day followed day of remorseless rain, Wondjina realized his error. The whole landscape was changing, vanishing, washing away in great mud slides and borne off on torrents of rushing water. It became cold, colder than any winter, and white flakes fell from the sky.
    Chilled and shivering, Wondjina crouched beneath a useless shroud of cloth. He had been wrong. The Rival had not been conquered. It had been challenged, and now it was showing its strength. The cloud spirits had not brought the rain. The Rival had brought the rain and storm, not to save the family but to destroy it. Stay or go, it made little difference now. Wondjina's world was gone, and it would not return.
    Wondjina, cold and despairing, died on the sixth day of the rains. He never knew that the Rival, burning fierce above the clouds, had yet to reveal its full power.
    * * *
    Second Strike. March 14, 2026; Suborbital
    The weather on takeoff from LA was as freakish and wild as Tom had ever seen it. Strong gusts at random, from every direction. Blame events in the Southern Hemisphere for that. But once you were above the atmosphere, the weather problems all went away. The six-passenger ship flew itself—or rather the automatic pilot made the decisions. Human pilots were a passenger courtesy, about as necessary to this flight as feathers. Which was fine with Tom Wagner, because it left him free to entertain his special VIP, the woman who had been brought aboard incognito and at the last moment.
    "No, ma'am. You won't see the supernova from here." She was sitting next to him, and he leaned across her to point south. "It's thataway. But we're flying a great circle suborbital between LA at thirty-four degrees north and Washington at thirty-nine degrees. What you want to see is down at sixty degrees south. To get a peek at it we'd have to go a lot higher than a suborbital flight."
    Janet Kloos stared south anyway, taking her cue from his pointing finger rather than his words. She looked to be in her late thirties, but Tom knew she was a fair bit older than that. As he recalled it from the last campaign, the Vice President was pushing fifty. Apparently political life agreed with her.
    "And it can have these terrible effects on the weather," she said. "Even from so far away."
    "Yes, ma'am. It certainly can." Her words confirmed his first