The Signature of God (Volume One)

By John Dalmas

Hope in a World Torn Apart

Following Ngunda Aran’s assassination, a devastating asteroid smashes into the earth, setting off a global tsunami. In a blink of an eye, humans are given another chance to rebuild and reset, using the lessons that Dove taught. Dove’s followers now have a chance at building a better world. But can humanity change its ways, even following irrefutable proof of a Messiah?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sky Warrior Book Publishing/ Sky Warrior Books
• Release date: Apr 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301687565

Book preview

THE SIGNATURE OF GOD

(Book 2 of Millennium)

Volume One

John Dalmas

Sky Warrior Book Publishing, LLC.

Smashwords Edition

© 2013 by John Dalmas.

Published by Sky Warrior Book Publishing

PO Box 99

Clinton, MT 59825

www.skywarriorbooks.com

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people is purely coincidental.

Editor: Carol Hightshoe.

Cover art by William R. Warren Jr.

Publisher: M. H. Bonham.

Printed in the United States of America

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Murphy’s Law states: Whatever can go wrong will go wrong. That is incorrect. It should be: Whatever can go wrong may go wrong. Of course, if you persist in walking through mine fields…

From Epigrams of Lor Lu

Pyotr heard the motor rev, and glanced up. A vehicle, perhaps a van, passed slowly in the night, headlights off. Getting to his feet, he went into the house, and from a closet took a scarred old Mauser, a souvenir of the Great Patriotic War. A folding tubular stock had been added, and a night scope, both illegal, incriminating. They and the silencer in his jacket pocket. He checked the action, then seated a clip.

His wife watched, arms and lap occupied by suckling twins. Pyotr Ivanovitch, she said, are you going out with that?

For a few minutes.

To do what?

There is a street lamp.

Clearly he’d say nothing further on the subject. Don’t…get in trouble, she murmured.

He stepped over to her, kissed her forehead. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.

She watched him leave, the door closing behind him. Why must he have anything to do with that criminal? she wondered. Pilferage she understood, and smuggling, and the black market. In hard times, people had to get by, make a living. But someone like Leonid Peshkov? She didn’t know what it was he did, but it was evil.

Contents

Dedication

Preface

About this Story

Prolog—Yakovskii Zaliv

PART ONE—THE TIME OF SCATHING

01 Santa Fe de Bogotá

02 The Raveled Sleeve of Care

03 Emergency Meeting

04 Summer Rain

05 Refugee Camp

06 Steven Buckels

07 Prodigal Autumn

08 Winter

09 Prelude to Spring

PART TWO—THE SUN, THE BLESSED SUN

10 The Cardinal

11 Incident at the Hebron Baptist Church

12 Rescue at Four-Bit Creek

13 Brotherhood

14 Sting

15 Highjacking

16 La Barranca de las Tres Virgens

17 Showdown

PART THREE: ALL IN GOD’S NAME

18 The Holy Father

19 A Man of Duty

20 Lor Lu at the Vatican

21 Merrrry Christmas!

22 The First Church of Dove

23 Interview with Bernard Seligman

24 Conference

25 News Item

26 Briefing a Cardinal’s Envoy

27 A Stirring in Islam

28 Diplomacy under the Gun

29 In Chamber

30 The Rome Center

31 Akademgorodok

32 Fire Fight

33 The First Couple

34 The Chronicle of a Mahdi

PART FOUR: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS REBORN

35 2017 Manhattan Interlude

36 2017 The Yellow River

37 2017 Father Jaime Smells a Rat

38 2017 Wild Card

39 2017 Marrakech

40 2017 The UN General Assembly

41 2017 Man from the East

42 2017 2018 Events

43 2018 The Shoreffs

44 2018 Novosibirsk

45 2019 Leonid Peshkov

46 2019 Medniy Ruchey

47 2019 Agreement

48 Sept 2019 Interlude: the State of the Game

49 late Sept 2019 China Briefing

50 Oct 2019 Dorji Matveev

51 Nov 2019 Arthur Cummings

52 Dec 2019 Dorji Matveev Again

53 Feb 2020 Developments in Ulan Ude

54 Apr 2020 Lor Lu on India

55 May-June 2020 A War Begins

56 June 2020 Once You Have Found Her

57 July 2020 Lor Lu in Ulaanbaatar

58 July 2020 Dodge City, Mongolia

59 Oct 2020 Executive Meeting

60 Mar 2021 Sabotage!

61 Apr 2021 Psi Nought

62 Apr 2021 Evolving Perception

63 late June 2021 Casting the Dice

64 July 2021 Loaded and Cocked

65 July 2021 Invasion

66 July 2021 Improvising

67 Jan 2022 Lor Lu’s Farewell

Wrap Up

Acknowledgments

Caveat

Preface

Ngunda Aran, to General David Hunter

May 27, 2013

Culture provides structure, coherence and meaning to human life, and can be rigid or flexible to varying degrees. To the extent a society accommodates cultural differences, it deals with change less destructively; and societies less hostile to new ideas and attitudes evolve new formats more successfully.

Thus features that add cultural flexibility—for example open-ended, non-autocratic education—help cultures and societies deal constructively with new or difficult conditions. This is part of Millennium’s role in the evolution of our planet and our species.

About This Story

In some respects this novel differs from most. It focuses not on a person or family or group, but on a pivotal and defining period, the bridge between two eras—forming a sort of fictional, near-future history. Neither adventure nor romance (though both are part of it), it explores transformative ideas and adaptive modes, set in a virtual future, and is told through the viewpoints of fictional persons experiencing and contributing to that future.

To give this story the scope it needs, I’ve created a number of subplots and word sketches, illustrative or definitive, set pretty much in calendar order in different parts of the world. They tend to feature different characters with different purposes. The result resembles a collection of related novelets. Some of the subplots and sketches share characters, and interweave. Others do not. And when that bridge, that pivotal period, arrives on the threshold of the envisioned new era—the story ends.

The product is a tapestry of words, characters and ideas. Call it an open-ended tapestry novel. They are uncommon, and have their own virtues.

Prolog

Yakovskij Zaliv

Reality is far broader, and far richer, than the views yet provided by science. All descriptions of reality, even mathematical equations, are metaphor, and metaphor invariably falls short of the truth. Meanwhile it is stimulating to explore what may lie behind your realities. But whatever you come up with, you have a better sense of the cosmos between lives than during them.

While incarnate, your task, or game, is to live the life you are in!—and from it learn. Choose, learn and evolve. And as we evolve, the Tao itself evolves."

From Collected Observations of Lor Lu

The mayor of Yakovskij Zaliv put aside his wrench, and wiped his hands on a piece of shirt. Simeon Narezhny was not a paid official. He derived his living from a fishing boat he owned, and operated with his son and two nephews. The problems of the village he addressed according to their urgency and available time. And resources, which in small Kamchatka fishing villages were mostly the ingenuity, strength and patience of their people.

This morning he’d needed to change the head gasket on the diesel-powered generator that provided the village’s electricity. To economize on fuel, it operated only at certain hours, varying with the season. Mainly in the evening, but also at noon, so people could hear the midday news from Petropavlovsk.

He was reaching for the starter—and facing the open door—when a sleeting flash of light and heat seared him. Too late he raised a forearm, as if to shield his eyes.

War! was his first thought. But who would waste a nuclear bomb on this part of the world?

The glare died quickly, and he stepped—staggered out onto the stoop. Even damaged, his eyes, looking eastward over the Pacific, made out a miles-long wall of—something—steam condensing into water—climbing the sky. At the institute he’d majored in fisheries science, but had been required to take courses in the Earth Sciences as well, and he’d always read. So it seemed to him he knew what this was, what it had to be. Not a bomb; not any kind of bomb.

Warn the village! he thought, then realized how badly damaged he was. Start the generator! The radio station in Petropavlovsk will warn them! He turned to step back inside, and fell to his knees, heavily. Nausea seized him, and and he vomited violently.

Time seemed suspended, his sense of urgency alive but paralyzed. He couldn’t see at all now. Outside, he told himself. His hands found a doorjamb, and with a great and desperate effort, he pulled himself to his feet. His body felt on fire, but the pain was remote, separate from him. Staggering he sprawled again, down the steps, into the dirt.

Simeon! Simeon!

Who was calling? The voice wakened him again to his responsibilities, and he struggled to rise. Tsunami! His intended bellow was a croak. Tsunami! He lay gasping like a beached fish now. How many minutes did they have? Tsunamiii! he croaked again, sure now his skin was peeling off.

Miraculously the pain stopped, and he looked around, able to see again. He recognized his body lying in the dirt. There were no flames on it. Saw his cousin Natalya collapsed on her stoop like a puppet with the strings cut. Dear Natalya, he thought fondly, everyone’s friend.

Then the wave hit. Not the tsunami; the shock wave. He saw his body flung twenty yards, and all eighteen of Yakovskij Zaliv’s frame buildings knocked flat.

Part One:

The Time of Scathing

When the Infinite Soul assumed the identity of Ngunda Aran, relatively few human beings were aware of it, and fewer, at first, were aware of what it was.

Over subsequent months, however, a sizeable percentage became aware of it, and a still larger percentage chose to act in accordance with what it meant to them—aware or not.

The world thereby became a significantly different place.

From Collected Observations of Lor Lu

Chapter One

Santa Fe de Bogotá

Senior Lieutenant Juan Enrico Lopez, 1st Lancero (Ranger) Battalion of the Colombian Army, was walking across the quadrangle to his quarters when his phone beeped, once. Not its usual brief warble, just a single distinctive beep, quiet enough someone passing might easily miss it. He glanced around without breaking stride—no one was near or approaching—then took the instrument from his belt and held it to his face.

Lieutenant Lopez, he said, 1st Lanceros.

"Juan, this is Carlos, and I’m in a hurry. Mother called. I’m needed at home, at once—and I don’t expect to be back." This last was emphasized slightly. Check CNN when you can. Scary news! Then the caller disconnected.

Between himself and his contact, Mother was code for Langley. As for at once, and don’t expect to be back?—Lopez wasn’t fond of enigmas. So. He’d check CNN.

Even as he thought it, he was thumbing on Bogotá Cable, then CNN. It was just breaking for commercials, so he returned the phone to his belt, speeding his pace. At the barracks he went directly to his room, turned on his television and keyed CNN. Some idiot was selling Saabs. Juan grunted; even drug lords could hardly afford Saabs in this depression.

It was the final commercial in the break, which cut to CNN Hispanic America, where the news anchor sat facing the camera.

In case you haven’t heard, at twenty-one thirty-three Greenwich Time, Australia’s Yaigooma Observatory reported a rogue asteroid on a course intercept with Earth. A rogue asteroid previously undetected. The sighting and data have since been verified by other observatories. The predicted time of impact is twenty-two fifty two Greenwich Mean Time, about one-half hour from now.

The familiar face was as calm as usual. "It is not the doomsday collision that’s been speculated on for some unknown date in our future—the sort of cosmic collision that wiped out the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago—but it will be far greater than anything earlier in the recorded history of humankind. It is almost certain to cause great loss of life—how great will depend on where it strikes—and it will severely disrupt weather worldwide.

"The mass of the potato-shaped asteroid, which is more than three hundred meters long, is estimated at thirty million tons. It was presumably knocked out of its orbit in the asteroid belt by a collision with another asteroid, and is thought to have been further diverted and accelerated by a close flyby of Mars. It is now approaching at some thirty-four thousand kilometers per hour, far faster than a rifle bullet.

"It might have been reported months—even years ago—but damage done to our space surveillance satellites by last year’s solar storms, and cuts in NASA’s budget have delayed their replacement or repair.

"The odds of all this happening were minuscule, but happening it is, and scientists say there is little chance it will miss us.

Some bloggers have suggested this impending event is connected with the murder of Ngunda Aran, earlier this afternoon, by the late Governor Marius Cook, of the American state of Arkansas. CNN’s Atlanta staff has called up excerpts from speeches by Mr. Aran, in which he predicted the assassination of a new incarnation of the Infinite Soul,’ a term generally treated as equivalent to ‘the Second Coming.’ To be followed by a major geophysical event."

The anchor glanced away from the camera. I believe we’re ready.

Lopez stared at the screen, and for just an instant, reality seemed to shift, to flutter—not the TV images but reality itself—as if adjusting. Then he settled in to listen and watch the inevitable, hurriedly arranged video interviews with experts and pseudo-experts.

Chapter Two

The Raveled Sleeve of Care

I’ve said there is no destiny, only vectors. But there can be an appearance of destiny. Off-stage essences—the hearts of your souls—can act toward agreed-upon ends. At strategic moments those essences can nudge their players—any of us, you and me. The players then respond as they see fit, free to ignore the nudges. The essences, however, know whom and when, thus intended vectors tend to converge.

From Collected Observations of Lor Lu

The charter bus tunneled through the Arkansas night, an unreal-feeling night, Lee Shoreff thought. A science-fiction bus, diving through a wormhole to an unknown future, an unknown world. The glow of the instrument panel lit the driver’s face. His eyes were fixed forward, reflected dimly and unreadably in the windshield.

Lee glanced at Lor Lu, beside her in the front seat.

So it was destiny, she said. Preordained.

Not at all, Lor Lu answered. There is no ‘destiny,’ in the usual sense. There are causes, and effects, and agreements. And vector momentum. And of course, chaos and fuzzy dynamics apply, though not quite as usually understood. Or looked at a bit differently, there are simply events, including choices freely made, from which grow sprays of potential action vectors, some more likely than others to establish and eventuate.

He looked aside at her, smiling slightly. Tiredly, she thought. Even Lor Lu was tired. Hardly surprising.

It was an ability to perceive and evaluate vectors that enabled Ngunda Aran to foresee, he went on, and thus do much of what he did. On the other hand, the Infinite Soul’s ability to perceive and evaluate vectors is infinite. Had Marius Cook not chosen to play the role of messiah assassin, someone else would have, and we would have been there instead. As would the cameras.

And the meteor?

"Asteroids are mechanistic; they don’t have choice, as we think of it. Thus, given adequate information, they are far easier to predict. But they are not absolutely predictable. The universe has laws of operation, one of which is ‘uncertainty,’ which goes beyond what is understood by statisticians, chaos physicists, and fuzzy engineers.

"So even this afternoon, it wasn’t known just where, after its long trip, the asteroid would impact.

Meanwhile, the human species continues to evolve, along with all of life, the universe, and the Tao.

Lee Shoreff sat quietly registering his words, his meanings, and staring out the windshield at the lights of an approaching town. No fires there, apparently. What were its people feeling? Fear? A sense of unreality? I think I need to sleep on it, she said.

Good idea. Sleep knits up not only ‘the raveled sleeve of care,’ to quote the Bard, but sometimes the diverse threads of understanding.

She reclined her seat and closed her eyes. The diverse threads of understanding! Dreams moved in softly, vaguely, seeming part of her, adjusting to the needs of now—and she slept.

Chapter Three

Emergency Meeting

It was still afternoon. The President of the United States sat at her command board, looking at an array of rectangles on her wall screen. Most showed the face of someone on her conference call: the director of homeland security; director of the Federal Emergency Management Administration; and General Alvarez of the army’s Continental Command; and of course her cabinet. Her White House Chief of Staff sat to her left, the vice president to her right.

Ordinarily she preferred face-to-face meetings, but this was ultra urgent and on-going. She’d mustered it within four minutes of the asteroid splash-down. (She hadn’t waited for splash-down to declare martial law.) Her attorney general was still in her bathrobe, hair wrapped in a towel, a sort of terry cloth turban. Despite the meeting being shown live, as a nationwide emergency broadcast.

President Florence Elaine Big Mama Metzger was nothing if not bold. And, typically, decisive.

The D.C. evening was mellow, cool for July. But without birdsong, as if the enormous impact had triggered some subtle planetary resonance, stilling wildlife and most domestic animals. Instantaneously. Although over most of the world, the atmospheric shock wave hadn’t arrived yet.

But those were not things the president was consciously aware of; her attention was on the emergency. General Alvarez, she asked, how did the governors react?

"About as you’d expect, Madame President. On the west coast, from Alaska to California, they called out the National Guard at once. And because mobilization takes awhile, they called on the police to evacuate low-lying coastal areas. When Ferreiro asked how big the tsunamis might be, I told him bigger than anything he could imagine. The emergency broadcast system is making sure everyone’s informed. Everyone with a radio or TV on.

Work on the refugee camps is already underway—the marshalling of troops, equipment and material, the selection of sites…

The attorney general interrupted: We’re seizing sites for the camps under martial law; the locals are selecting them off the cuff, without even checking ownership. We’ll use existing structures where suitable.

Alvarez didn’t even frown at the attorney general’s interruption, simply nodded and went on. "Some of the armories are in the zone of possible tsunami damage, so we’re moving their equipment out as fast as we can. That’s top priority, right up there with commandeering and conserving aircraft fuel. The tsunamis are expected to take out all—all!—Pacific coast harbors, and the odds are, rail and highway and river transportation will be disrupted by floods and landslides. Everywhere. So we’ll depend very heavily on air transport. Military flights are already restricted to emergency-related."

He recited relentlessly on, his words terrible but somehow reassuring, implying the situation would be dealt with. So far as time permitted. And not just the Pacific coast governors. Every governor had ordered their National Guard mobilized, along with other emergency organizations. Ngunda Aran’s televised murder had already triggered irrational hotspots of civil disorder everywhere.

The president went down the line of officials, getting further reports. Thank god for contingency plans, she thought. There’d even been a sizeable file for a large meteor impacting in the Pacific. The tsunamis would be monsters. Harbors were being evacuated, and coastal waters and estuaries cleared of ships, which were heading for deep water where the tsunami wouldn’t create a steep wave front. The Coast Guard, assisted by naval units, was making sure no shipping continued inbound. Meanwhile hundreds of ships would need added fuel to reach harbors not wiped out. Naval refueling ships in port were already leaving. Those not in port, or not restocked, were authorized to commandeer bunker-quality fuel from tankers at sea, regardless of whose flags they flew.

On land, detection systems for sensitive infrastructure damage were being tested, and some reservoirs already being drawn down to accommodate run-off from the prolonged heavy rains expected. Washouts and landslides were a certainty, and state and county road departments were checking the likeliest trouble locations. Not that there was much time for corrections. Bridge, pipeline, and railway track inspectors were on standby. Air Transport Command was loading supplies of all sorts for delivery to refugee and National Guard camps. Some would be in the air before 1700 Pacific Time; once the expected super-storm front arrived, flying would be tricky. Dangerous!

The conference was being forwarded to governments worldwide. On the president’s order, there wasn’t even a 30-minute—or 30-second!—delay for security editing. As she’d pointed out: the Rock was redefining security.

* * *

The shock wave reached Seattle with a resounding boom, four hours and forty-nine minutes after impact. It was still audible—a dull thump—when it reached D.C. after nightfall, somehow removing the sense of science fiction. This was real.

It would, the president told herself, get a lot more real when the first tsunami arrived, all too soon. And the rains! which unlike the tsunami, would not be restricted to the coast.

Chapter Four

Summer Rain

In the half-burned-down campfire, a partly consumed fir branch popped sharply, startling the children, and for a moment their father paused.

And then, he said, "then there was a straaange spooky sound, like this. Arnold Nelsen did his best impression of a ghost, a throaty moaning wail, tremulous but loud, growing in volume, then tailing off. Alice and Margo listened avidly; Carlos, who was eleven, smiled with tolerant amusement. And Robert realized…, Arnold’s voice had turned soft, tinged with foreboding… he realized the Hoggey-Boggs, a whole army of them, were coming up from tunnels deeep down in the earth. Freddy had wakened them when he’d been down in the old well and cut his thumb; they’d smelled the blood, huuuman blood…and they wanted some."

Ahem. Myrna pretended to clear her throat, and looked at him meaningfully. Their daughters giggled. It’s time to call off these stories, or the girls won’t be able to sleep tonight.

Oh mom, let daddy finish just this one! Margo had addressed her mother, but it was her father she looked at.

It’s up to mom, he said. Mom’s are the boss.

Myrna nodded with pretend severity. All right. Just this one. Then we’re all going to bed.

Okay. Where was I now?

The Hoggey-Boggs were coming up the well, Margo said.

They weren’t either. Alice, eight years old, spoke with seniority. There were too many of them. They were coming up through tunnels they made.

Huh! Who’s story is this, anyway?

Yours, dad.

Good. He paused. "They were coming up the well and through tunnels they’d made. He looked at Myrna, stalling, hoping for inspiration. Are you sure it’s all right to finish this?"

I suppose.

He nodded thoughtfully. And then… This pause was long, five seconds or so. Margo was about to urge him on, when he spoke again. "It turned out that over all those damp years underground—they’d shrunk! Way small. And as they came out of the ground, or climbed out of the well, Goober grabbed and ate them one by one, until he’d eaten them all. By then he was the fattest beagle in the state of Washington: 651 pounds! His belly was so big; his feet no longer reached the ground. He had to roll home!"

Oh daddy! Alice said. The ending had spoiled the spookiness. Margo said nothing. She was more accepting, less critical than Alice, and just now was visualizing a comically swollen dog rolling across a lawn.

Their father got to his feet. "Now you girls get ready for bed, muy pronto."

Yes daddy. They clambered into the camper, followed by their mother, while their brother stepped into the forest’s edge to urinate behind a fir. They were roughing it—avoiding regular campgrounds. Dad preferred roads marked on the map by a broken gray double line, roads with signs that read caution, primitive road. Travel at your own risk. Also no camping allowed. This particular road had been built decades earlier as a minor logging road. It was maintained, barely, for fire crew access, and used mostly by berry pickers, when the huckleberries were ripe.

The boys slept in an umbrella tent across the road from the camper. When Carlos was in his sleeping bag, Arnold left to relieve himself behind another tree, his tree. The pee trees were well away from the quietly gurgling brook half a dozen yards behind the tent.

Off to the west, thunder muttered at the edge of hearing. Real thunder, faint but unmistakable, not like the dull distant whoomp they’d heard when they’d camped at Nolan Lake. Myrna had said thunder then, and he hadn’t disputed it, but he was sure it hadn’t been. A sonic boom, he’d decided.

The new noises meant lightning. He hoped there’d be enough rain to wet down any resulting fires. He was tempted to get in the cab and turn the radio on, quietly, just long enough to hear a weather report. But it was July, and he was the one who’d made the no radio rule, and he wasn’t going to cheat.

He went back to the fire and seated himself on a camp stool. A minute later, Myrna emerged from the camper with two opened bottles of beer. Warm beer; the ice in the chest was three days melted, and he’d forgotten to put the bottles in the brook. But when camping, warm beer was fine. Briefly they sipped without talking, then thunder muttered again. Myrna gestured toward the cab, this time only murmuring: Shall we check on the weather?

He shook his head, his answer barely more than a whisper: We’ll be heading home after breakfast anyway.

Taking their time and not talking much, they finished their beers in the peaceful mountain silence, then stood. Both looking upward at what sky was visible in the narrow gap provided by the road. The stars were hidden by high overcast; the clear weather they’d been blessed with seemed over. They kissed good night, then Myrna climbed back into the camper. Arnold put the empty bottles in the green recycling bag, then took the top off the nearly empty eight-gallon water can. With the dipper, he ladled water onto the embers, which hissed and died. He wouldn’t depend on the weather to do the job; not in July, the driest month in the North Cascade Mountains.

* * *

Bumping and rumbling, thunder wakened Arnold. Much nearer now;