With vision limited, his other senses are more acute. The night smells of ozone lingering from the lightning that moved off to the east, ozone and wet tree bark and the sodden earth under the grass. The rain has many voices: hissing through a canopy of tender leaves; rattling off limbs, like the seeds in dozens of maracas; pattering softly in the grass . . .
A new smell and strange sound come to him simultaneously: a faint, bitter aroma similar to vinegar and a barely audible purring. The scent is constant, but when he slips off his hood, the better to hear, the sound fades. No, that’s not quite correct. If he actively listens for it, the purr seems to be less a noise than a pressure that he feels in his ears, as if he’s a diver under several fathoms of water; breathing becomes marginally more difficult, and he feels a weight over his heart, as if he were lying down with a heavy book on his chest.
He is overcome by the peculiar conviction that an object of considerable weight is hovering above the apple trees. He tilts his head back, peers up. Even if something is up there—which it isn’t, because what could it be?—he can’t see it through the branches. However, the sensation doesn’t relent, and he decides to get up and move between trees, where maybe he’ll be able to see something—
—and then a presence speaks to him, not out of the wind and rain, but within his head. It is not a loud voice, but one of great power and authority, that of his father, Turner Optime, cardiologist and surgeon. “Your hour has arrived. All that you have envisioned will soon come to pass. Your noble sacrifice, the forsaking of your own seed and the family you might have brought forth, now bears the very fruit for which you rightly yearn—the eradication of your kind from the Earth.” Asher understands this is not really his father. A power unknown chooses to speak to him in the voice of Turner Optime, to make the intrusion less disturbing, to soothe him through this revelation. “There are fearsome new weapons on platforms in space, intended for the defense of one nation against another, but I will turn each system against the nation that made it and against all others. Furthermore, they believe their nuclear missiles can’t be hacked and launched because there’s no internet connection, but I will send them flying, thousands all at once. Earth will recover in a few centuries, but not one human being will exist to resuscitate the species, for I will hunt the last of them to extinction.” The certainty with which this speaker speaks is thrilling. This is how Moses might have felt when he heard the voice of God. Of course, Asher, forever freed from ignorance by a series of wise mentors, knows that Moses was nothing but a mythological figure and God doesn’t exist, but the analogy is nonetheless apt. He tries to respond to the presence that has come upon him, tries to get to his feet, but he has no control of his body. This might frighten him under other circumstances, but the voice reassures him, calms him. “Be still, my son. Be still and listen. Be still and learn. Be still and know.”
Asher remains sitting with his back against the tree, facing the lake, so that he sees the three slow pulses of blue light that come from those depths, perhaps from the bottom, hundreds of feet below the surface. After the third bright throb, the darkness swells once more within the water. A new voice speaks to Asher, and he knows this one, too. Xanthus Toller, founder of the Restoration Movement, declares, “Humankind enslaves the planet itself, steals its bounty, gouges and claws and rips at it for minerals, bores ruthlessly into its substance for the evil that is oil, steals the light of the sun and the strength of the wind to sustain cities that are cesspools of violence, greed, and lust. Humanity is a voracious, billion-headed hydra of hatred. This faction hates that faction, while that one hates this one even more virulently. Humanity once lived by the billions on Mars, by many millions on the moon, and you see what ruin was brought to those worlds, which are now barren, airless, and bleak. The only hope for Earth is that we smother our babies, breed without seed, and wither away.”
Now the presence spoke in the throaty, seductive voice of a famous actress who championed the rights of rivers and mountains, of meadows and forests, of fishes and finches, of vipers and viruses. “Asher Optime, you and I dream of the day when this despoiled world is once more pristine park land, a place free of competition and greed. We’ve lived with the melancholy prospect that our vision can’t be fulfilled for a century or two, or even longer. But I am here to tell you that the cure for the plague that is humanity will begin tonight. Three months from now, perhaps sooner, not one of us will remain in even the most remote of caves or secret lairs. We will have been completely purged from Earth, and it will begin its healing.”