LATE in the afternoon of the longest day of the year a solitary man drove a sleek electrically-powered sports car southward from the city of Lima. Once past the growling snarl of urban traffic the car lifted off its four wheels and began skimming across the glass-smooth road surface on a layer of invisible energy that held it suspended a few centimeters above the ceramic-coated concrete highway.
A cruel joke of nature had placed the Earth's driest desert between the surging expanse of the Pacific Ocean and the snowcapped peaks of the Andes. The car sped down the curving coast road past the high sand dunes that heaped along the restless ocean shore, a shining silver projectile alone on the empty road. A late springtime mist clung to the huge ridges of sand, cold gray tendrils sliding in among the rugged seaside cliffs like the ghosts of long-forgotten ancestors.
The man, middle-aged, balding, plump, wore a strange expression on his round, mustachioed face: as the slanting light of the afternoon sun flickered in through the fog he seemed at one moment to be utterly serene, completely at ease with himself, yet a moment later totally intense, concentrating with almost superhuman determination upon a task that he alone could understand.
Hour after hour he drove, the speeding car tearing through the clinging fog as a bullet tears through living flesh. The car's motor was as silent as death itself; the only sound the driver heard in all his long journey was the whisper of the wind rushing by. The road swung inland and the dunes dwindled behind him. The car climbed through passes carved into bare rock, higher, always moving higher as deep gorges of river valleys fell away from the twisting road's edge. The sky cleared into a perfectly cloudless cobalt blue. Past fields already green he sped; past long irrigation canals dug a thousand years earlier.
Up onto the altiplano the car surged, into a barren flat world where fields of bare pebbles stretched endlessly out to the dimly-seen masses of the mighty Andes, their great bulk a hazy violet in the distance, their snow peaks shimmering on the horizon as if floating disconnected from the world.
The stony desert of reddish brown seemed utterly lifeless. Completely barren. Not a blade of grass, not a hint of green. Like the planet Mars, nothing but stones and pebbles and the empty sky overhead. For kilometer after kilometer. For eternity, it seemed.
Finally the man brought the car to a stop near the foot of a steep bare rocky hill. Its wheels came down crunching on the stony ground. Then silence, except for the eternal keening wind.
He got out, shivering slightly as he realized that the breeze was cold; the night was coming on. Zippering up the light windbreaker he wore over his corduroy slacks and thin cotton shirt, he slowly, patiently began to climb the hill. The loose scrabble of dark pebbles slipped and clattered beneath his suede boots. He dropped to all fours and doggedly made his way to the crest, some sixty meters above the roadway.
At the top he straightened and looked out across the waterless plain. Despite himself, his breath caught in his throat. As far as the eye could see stretched the lines and figures, hundreds of them, thousands of them, extending in every direction across the stark plain of Nazca. Animals, birds, triangles, circles, an enormous rectangle, all crisscrossed by lines as straight as any modern surveyor could draw. The work of countless centuries ago, the only sign that life had ever existed beneath this empty copper sky.
With eyes that went beyond normal human vision the man saw the drawings with perfect clarity in the last rays of the dying sun. The giant spider, the monkey, the frigate bird with its puffed-up throat, the killer whale.
He sought one particular line, as straight as the division between good and evil. In the dying golden light of sunset he found it, bright as silver against the darker rocky desert. It stretched out toward the flat emptiness of the western horizon.
The man felt his pulse racing as he waited. Slowly, with the dignity of a god, the sun came down and touched the horizon. Exactly where the line touched it.
The man breathed a long sigh of contentment. Midsummer's day. He could sense two of his brothers, each of them half a world away, sharing this moment of serenity and cosmic understanding. We have done well, my brothers, he said silently. And he felt their answering smiles in his soul.
It was hard to believe that only a year ago he had never heard of the man Stoner. Only a year ago he had been an ordinary human being, no better or worse than billions of others. But then Stoner had changed him. And the whole world.
