*Translation.*
Suddenly the rings of fire exploded into darkness, and his breath erupted in a gasp so violent that it sent a stab of pain through his chest. He lurched up against seat restraints, then fell back, panting, against a headrest. He blinked in confusion. He sensed the dark shape of a cockpit around him, and heard the hiss of life support. He was alive, and not in silence-fugue. He glimpsed instruments, and a window. Out the window, he could see blackness, space, and a sprinkling of stars. He blinked again, trying to focus. It looked different somehow.
He remembered suddenly, sharply, what had happened. EineySteiney. The comet. Attacking it like a suicidal cue ball. And Charlie dying before he could see the ending . . .
The ice floe came unstuck. Memories came tumbling loose in dizzying numbers, cascading backward through space and time, the dive toward the sun, the stolen ship, Triton, Julie.
Julie!
He glimpsed her face, her eyes, her kiss . . . and then she was gone, leaving him with only the memory, the emptiness, the knowledge that he had left her forever.
Through the cascade of pain and emptiness, he remembered an aching truth: In leaving her, he might have preserved a living Earth for her to return to.
If he had succeeded.
Annihilation . . .
The word sprang again into his mind. Meaning what? That Earth was annihilated, or the comet? Or was this all still part of some cruel death-hallucination?
Charlie? he thought—and remembered again, Charlie had died.
He did not think this was a hallucination, though he wished it were. He thought of the passage he had just been through; and he felt a sudden icy wind blowing through his thoughts, and a certainty that he had left his past irrevocably behind, not just in space perhaps, but in time, as well. The thought made him tremble at the edge of tears. Was he eons from Earth now, centuries from Julie? He found himself weeping at the thought, gasping, unable to stop the bitter tears that were suddenly rushing down his cheeks.
He felt a stab in his wrists, and glanced down. Something was flashing—the translator-stones. The white diamond was pulsing, with unmistakable urgency. /What do you want?/ he thought, with no real hope that it would answer him. /Charlie?/ he whispered, with no greater hope. The quarx was gone, his life spent saving his human host, in order that Bandicut could do . . . whatever he had just done.
The stone pulsed insistently.
/Stone,/ he thought, resting his head back, staring out the window through his tears. /Can you tell me, did we succeed? Did we destroy the comet? Or was all this . . . for nothing?/
He cursed quietly, bitterly—not so much for the loss of his past life, as for the terrible loneliness that had come to take its place.
Neptune Crossing Page 76
