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Page 7.
3. Dawn Plot
 A dark-skinned, white-haired man stood silently in the dark just before dawn on the beach and was a part of Mercury city’s growing weariness. Mercury City was in its autumn orbit. The days were still quite sunny, but there were strange winds, and the wooded hillsides grew quiet.
The watcher on the beach knew of the plot, but could do nothing further now. He had come to witness the death of a leader of nations, and the unraveling of an empire with dark consequences for an entire galaxy. He was an elder, stately man, with heavy eyelids, and a dignified demeanor, yet nothing could veil the look of distress in his features.
Mercury City was a man-made planet, half sea, half land, built on the ruins of a mining station of the Earth Empire. The land was really a single round island in the sea. At land’s center, the Arch of Triumph rose ten miles high and forty miles long over the Old City. Outside the atmospheric bubble covering the Old City lay the full majesty of Mercury City, the City of the Universe, the city of a billion people, the city that ruled the Galaxy. Beyond its central dome, the city tapered all around into suburbs, then the open lands of wealthy plantation owners, finally the sparse settlements along the uninhabitable coast. All this man had made, a five-thousand-mile wide button that made the Galaxy stop and go.
The sea, too, he had made, a blank-faced tumult of waves dotted with some small islands and many rotting archipelagos and bays chewed up by the salty tides.
Summer was over. The man on the beach stood watching. The waves crashed on the sand, and a small bubble-topped underwater skill nudged against the beach, tied with a long rope that stretched to a rock near the man-silhouette.
Autumn, the brief, wistfully beautiful Mercurian autumn, was on. Out on the sea horizon, a long string of lights stood out against a gathering cloud mass. The eyes of the man on the beach were full of rain. For a long time he had stood here watching the lights of the little village fishing boats. A storm was rising out of the sea, close on the heels of the line-of-day-and-night, and the little vessels were rushing among the offshore islands, full sail against the growing winds. Sometimes the wind brought a cry or a splash across the water to the ears of the watcher. The sea worked all night, gurgling and tossing fitfully. The watcher closed his eyes and was miles away, where the fishermen groaned and cursed, periodically hefting aboard their nets heavy with frightened fish and unwillingly receding masses of seething water. Often the fishermen looked from the boiling water to the inky sky and fretted under the drifting clouds. It was a last journey out, to gather up drifting nets, to squeeze the last rich loads of fish out of the sea for winter, before the autumn storms began venting their fury.
Night swung easily around its mid-balance, but gathered a growing tension as it sped toward daybreak, gathering a faint moon and morning stars. Already thunder grumbled far away, muffled by a hundred miles of clouds and fog riding low on the waves.
The eyes of the watcher opened, and a faint light made a jarring discolor in the gathering clouds and tantalized through the translucent, low god, and the sea sang some vague song about eternity and the ocean breezes carried the song inland and shook it off to fall with the dew on green leaf-stubble or stone-faced cliffs washed by spray and foam.
When the sea was empty of nets, the little fishing boats heeled and blossomed out in full sail and strained against their high-water lines to reach shore, a fine spray of rain at their backs.
Day grew, a mixture of sunshine and rolling black clouds. A false twinkling roved over the murky waters of a swampy archipelago that reached out not far from the beach where the man stood waiting for the inevitable.
Small birds twittered in occasional tree clusters on the archipelago. A crane splashed his head in the water, raised his head, tossed it, and made a glittering jewel at the end of his beak disappear. Minor splashes among the slimy, half-submerged tree roots marked the flight of a school of fish.
The sun, struggling against powerful darkness, grew slowly and grudgingly brighter. Clouds grew taller and darker, while the angry colors where the sun was trying to get through were becoming more and more intense. This mixture of (faded beyond recognition) lightening and darkening, it was as though dusk had failed to drown in the summer sea, but instead ran knife-waving and blood-screaming through the halls and chambers of the night to stab and tear and cut and flay the dawn as the sun put its soft white limbs out naked. The man on the beach waited, putting his hands to his hand, and sagged to his knees in the sand.
In the false daylight, the crane on the archipelago fluffed and beat his wings, and slowly rose dripping in the air, and the sea murmured, a frog chirruped, and leaves rustled.
A faint dot of fire dropped out of the sun, arrowplaned out of the sun, dropped into the bright yellow panes and black cloud walls.
“Death of nations,” the man on the beach whispered. “Leader of nations.”
The faint dot of fire grew larger, still too far and too high to be heard from the beach, and the sea murmured still louder, a frog chirruped, and leaves rustled, occasionally slapping a branch in the disturbed wind.
The crane glided at treetop level, eyes half-closed against the rushing wind with its smells of sea water and marshy plants, and its many pinprick droplets of drifting rain-birth. Abruptly, sensing ‘predator,’ the crane stopped at a tree branch and watched the growing sky-thing. It was big. It spewed fire. Its brilliant silver hull, in the sunlight high above the storm clouds, was now visible, and the crane watched it move, slow and silent, first behind one leaf, then another, and through the vacuum where the wind bent a leaf away.
The man kneeling on the beach watched the aircraft intently. Eyes wet, his dark face plastered with sand, he fixed his eyes to the sky.
A hundred miles inland, where it was still night, a small six-armed mammal woke in the trees at the sudden sound of thunder. Shaking off dew, it skittered farther up the tree and hid in a cluster of leaves. There it chattered loudly, surrounded by wet leaves. The roar and the light in the sky increased. ‘Swooping hawk,’ the little mammal sensed as thunder deepened by an octave.
In the richly carpeted control room a quiet voice said probingly: “Flight 1. This is Mercury Tower. What is your trouble?”
The pilot, bracing himself against the instrument board as the floor tilted crazily, cried out helplessly: “I have a working fire. I have a working fire. This ship is out of control.” He finished his sentence and as he drew a breath for the next, the sun rose out of the floor, vaporizing everything.
A death panic frenzied the mammal in its tree. The fire of fifty suns flashed in the moisture of its eyes and in the all-coating dew. The sun-thing rolled overhead loud and hot, trailing miles of fire, and exploded somewhere on the deserted plains further inland.
Leader of nations. The Interior President, Chao, was dead, and on the faraway beach, where little of man’s affairs every broached any significance, the flying crane settled once more and stared inland for a long time.
Watcher and boat disappeared form the beach. Sand and water rose in a great empty whirlwind as the sun faded and a hundred-miles-high wheel of black clouds rolled in out of the sea and broke the trees and gouged out the eyes of the eternal cliffs. For now, an illusion of peace again spread amid all this beauty—a hammer, waiting to drop.
Waiting to change history forever, as of this moment. And the watcher was prepared to do his part to save the world, now that the point of no return had been reached.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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