Hell's Gate(90)
The explosions felt like an insignificant series of muffled pops, compared to their ultimate effect. Wolff and S?nger had indeed done their homework, knowing exactly where, with just a few little taps, they could crack a diamond into a thousand pieces.
“Bob!”
Mac and Yanni sprinted along the plateau side of an ever-widening chain of cracks in the ground. It seemed that new crevices were yawning open every second and in every direction—except one.
“Yanni!” It was Bob’s voice and she changed direction, heading into the disintegrating earth.
“Bob!” she screamed, and as she did, Mac grabbed her wrist, yanking it with such force that for a moment he feared he’d dislocated her shoulder.
As if by magic the rumbling stopped and there, in front of them stood Bob Thorne. He was wearing a curious look on his face.
He waved. “Hey, Yanni. Mac.”
MacCready looked across the thirty-foot chasm that separated them, and what he saw was heartbreak.
“Hey, Bob.” I’ll watch after Yanni, he thought of saying.
“I know you will,” Bob replied.
And then, beginning with a disorienting lurch, a section of the plateau, more than a thousand feet tall, cast off like a ship from a pier. Carrying Bob with it, the ship sank slowly into the smoke and dust of Hell’s Gate.
Epilogue
Nostromo Base
April 1946
Only two years had passed, and the forest was already consuming the ruins of Nostromo Base. Vines were racing up the monorail supports, while bushes, some of them more than five feet tall, had sprouted from the elevated trackway itself. But the ancient stone-block road upon which the launch ramp had been anchored would survive long after the rail itself was gone.
During the coming decades, pre-Columbian roads and the vestiges of an entire civilization, hidden between Nostromo Base and the Mato Grosso Plateau, would become archaeological sites, then tourist attractions.
Irrigation canals dating back over a thousand years were about to be excavated and reactivated—supporting the increasingly expansive cattle ranches. Here and there, careless lumber cutting and agricultural practices were beginning to turn forested regions, through which MacCready had walked, into patches of dry savanna.
The submarine Nostromo was being consumed as well—cut apart, hauled away, and sold as scrap. What remained of the boat stood in increasingly open daylight. The Rio Xingu was already dropping, and within two decades it would be reduced to a relative trickle—taking with it the perpetual fog layer that had shrouded the entire valley for millennia.
Though the lack of fog made it easier to haul his heavy welding equipment from town, Hector Uieda hated being out here alone. All of the sheet metal that had covered the labs and other buildings was gone now, leaving only a framework of vine-covered ribs. To Uieda, it wasn’t the skeletal appearance of the buildings that chilled him; it was the sounds they made. Normally the occasional breezes rustling through leaves had a soothing effect, but not here, and not now. Beneath this rustling was a disquieting undertone, more felt than heard. He’d experienced the odd feeling before, but this evening it seemed stronger than ever. Uieda had to admit, however, that the heat and humidity weren’t nearly as troublesome as usual. It’s almost pleasant, he thought.
Brooklyn, New York
* * *
R. J. MacCready and Major Hendry had been able to pull all the necessary strings to expedite the immigration of a war hero’s widow to America, especially as she was a war hero herself, albeit a secretly decorated one. Everything about the “Silverbird Incident” was being kept so secret that nearly a century would pass before the public learned the full story.
At first sight, Yanni Thorne feared that the concrete wilderness of Flatbush Avenue might prove, as she joked to Mac, “tougher than the one growin’ under the plateau.”
As always, though, she adapted quickly. Hendry had arranged living quarters for her near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, on the uppermost floor of a decommissioned factory-warehouse. During the war, the building served as a kind of spare-parts storage box for the navy’s Grumman aircraft. By the time Yanni landed in New York, Hendry’s two sisters had convinced him that their “crazy” idea about buying the suddenly empty and seemingly useless warehouse at the bargain-basement price of a government auction, then repurposing it into large river-view apartments, “might be just crazy enough to be right.”
Yanni was the first to move in, followed by several of the region’s bohemian artists, who admired the skill with which she was transforming her glass and concrete cavern into a living, breathing work of art.
Missing Bob and the little house they had shared at the edge of the forest, she brought the forest itself into her new home. With Mac along for the ride, she had scoured every flower shop and nursery from Brooklyn to upper Manhattan for familiar plants. Yanni’s indoor replica of the Brazilian tropics thrived under huge factory skylights and windows that ran from waist height all the way up to the ceiling. The furnishings were odd, by most people’s standards: a massive rolltop work desk from the 1890s, with a hammock and a little sitting area nearby, all of it surrounded by tropical evergreens and flowering plants. Near what she called her “breathing wall” (a vertical carpet of leafy vines and bromeliads) Yanni had reproduced, as best she could, the kitchen from their home in Chapada.