Down we fell as flames rose all around us. The surging water devoured us and then released us while innumerable humans screamed piteously for help. We were in a street which had become a roiling river of the drowning. The water was sucked away from us and again we tumbled as if into a fathomless abyss. Towers were melting, entrapping thousands of tiny faceless humans in the glistening sluggish liquid that had been the luracastria--thousands around me splashing and screaming for help when there was no help. Broken furniture, tables, chairs, traveling pods, and debris covered the waters--battered and broken trees. We were caught in a whirlpool. The planet itself had cracked beneath us. Down we went in darkness, only to rise to the surface once more.
Then I saw Amel, saw him silhouetted against an endless wall of flame. Where we stood, where we were, I could not tell. But there was Amel.
"Atalantaya," he cried, but how I could have heard him, or heard anyone cry out any words, I don't know. "Atalantaya!" he roared over and over again. He shook his fists at the Heavens. "Atalantaya," he cried again and again.
The oozing luracastria was molten gold on the surface of the water as if it were burning. Boats, thousands of them, it seemed, surrounded us, but desperate people were capsizing them and pulling them under as they sought to climb on board.
Amel was gone. Derek and Garekyn were gone.
Welf held me, cradling my head with his hand. The rain stung my arms, my neck, my face. We were riding the surges of the water helplessly, and I saw the dead around me--lurid faces with vacant eyes, bodies stripped naked, and some headless, infants bobbing on the surface, lifeless limbs.
Beams of light pierced the thick mist, and loud voices called out to people to seek the tunnels. I heard the word "tunnel" again and again. But how could we seek the tunnels? We had no idea where they were. I called frantically for Derek and for Garekyn. Welf did the same.
A mass of struggling humans was swept against us by a fierce current, and masses of debris, of mingled wood and stone, raced past us with people atop these masses as if they were ships.
A great white ferryboat rose in front of us with people high on the deck above waving and dropping ropes for those below. But the boat vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. Then came another, like the ghost of a boat in the water, monstrous in size and fading into nothingness as the storm raged.
Another explosion stunned us and deafened us, and then came another and another. Belching smoke, caustic burning smoke, and the flickering blaze of flames were all I could see.
The stench of the smoke suffocated us. The current tossed us up and then tried to swallow us but we kept riding it, rising again and again no matter how deeply we'd been drawn down.
Finally we realized we were in the open sea.
Atalantaya had opened up and broken apart and expelled us into the sea. We could see her distant fires blazing but the waves were of immeasurable size, and though we never stopped calling out, we knew we had lost Derek and Garekyn.
We were never to see them--or Amel--again.
The cries of the desperate and the dying were gone.
The rain drenched us as surely as the sea. Yet no matter how dense the veil of the rain, we could still see the distant spectacle of Atalantaya--the immense blazing island shaken still by one eruption after another--growing ever more distant as a great silence and darkness engulfed us in which we couldn't even hear one another, or even see one another, our bodies pressed together, our arms tight around one another as the hours passed.
Hours. It is wrong to speak of hours. There was no time. Once in a while a small craft would pass us, broken and empty, or a massive tree would slam against us, its giant tangle of roots like a huge multifingered hand reaching vainly for help. We were alone, perfectly alone. But we had each other and my soul ached for the panic and the horror of those who had no one, those who had perished in this maelstrom without another soul to embrace, to hang on to, without loving arms around them, those who were truly alone. Was Derek alone? Was Garekyn alone?
Dawn never came. No sun ever broke through the torrent of rain that descended on us without cease. The acrid stench of smoke or fire was gone. And the water grew icy cold, and the world was white and blinding, and we climbed out of the water and we trudged through a featureless world of snow.
What had become of the Wilderness lands? Where were the verdant jungles and forests? Where were the fields of high grass and wild grain? Where were the thousands who had lived in the villages and settlements?
Our garments were in shreds. And the cold hurt us but it could not kill us. It numbed us. It robbed us of stamina. It closed down on our minds.
Sometime or other, and for a little while, we found the shelter of a cave from which we saw fire on the horizon, the sky beautifully illuminated by this fire with streaks of gold, and red and even green. How indifferent seemed this beauty, how unconscious of witness, yet it touched me and calmed me and I dozed watching it--and then th
e earth beneath us was shaking violently once more, and terrified of being buried alive, we tried to run again.
Up and up we climbed through what must have been mountains, and soon we saw nothing but whiteness, and the spectacle of fire was no more. Gone forever, it seemed, was anything remotely like fire, and all was lost in a blizzard and in that blizzard we struggled until life itself was nothing but struggle, nothing but seeking for shelter when there was no shelter--until finally I remember wrapping my arms around Welf, holding him as tightly as I could possibly do it, and saying, "I can go no farther," and the last thing I heard was Welf whispering my name as my eyes closed.
You know now that the four of us survived. You know that we eventually emerged from our frozen graves, and you know how we found one another. But there are other stories someday to be told.
Welf and I opened our eyes many centuries after the destruction of Atalantaya on a later barren and wintry world. We lived a lifetime among the tribes of hearty humans who struggled against the snow and ice eternally as the very conditions of life, with no memory of the great temperate Wilderness lands that had once covered so much of Earth and no memory of such a thing as Atalantaya, though their legends told of ancient gods and goddesses and fallen worlds. The first time we came to consciousness we survived perhaps for three or four human generations before retreating, exhausted and discouraged and broken, to the ice to freeze again.
And there was another awakening after that in a time of simple villages and towns where once again the inhabitants knew nothing of a great metropolis that had once ruled the world.
Derek can tell you stories of the lives he lived, and what drove him in each instance to retreat to the high mountain caves of the Andes to sleep once more. Garekyn alone slept through the long aeons until awakened by his mentor and discoverer Prince Brovotkin, who was then laughed at by his colleagues and his fellow European noblemen for tales of the immortal man found in the Siberian ice.
You know most of my history. You know I have worked for years for Gregory's great company, and you can easily imagine how I sought to use his immense resources to study my own body and Welf's body to better grasp our own physical makeup, with its self-sustaining resilience and mysterious organization which had never been explained to us by those who made us.
But be assured, I never cheated Gregory Duff Collingsworth. I helped develop medicines that added to his great wealth and benefited immensely by his profit-sharing programs, bonuses, and salary increases, building wealth of my own. I helped develop an artificial skin marketed by Collingsworth that has been of great help in treating burn victims. I've also contributed mightily to research on a rejuvenation drug that shows tremendous promise. I have developed sophisticated techniques for cloning that will contribute to the work in that area.
But for all the hours I've worked alone and with Welf in the sanctum of laboratories under Gregory's roof, I have never discovered the actual formula for luracastria, or come close to reproducing a thermoplastic or polymer like it. I have not, contrary to your suspicions, ever grown a Replimoid whole and complete and animated, though I have certainly struggled towards this goal for many years. I have been unable to discover whether our bodies do in fact contain a toxin that can destroy the planet if we are destroyed. I do not know whether our bodies contain explosives of some unimaginable power that can reduce the world to its primal purity once more. My hope, of course, has been to develop my own technological complex of laboratories where I can take my own personal research to new heights. And whatever I have taken from Gregory, well, I hope I've somehow repaid.