Clinging to the dirt she sucked orange juice, sharp and cold, from the nipple dispenser inside her helmet, and she found a fruit bar in there and crunched it; when she pulled away a little more of the bar slid out toward her mouth.
She was in shadow right now, out of the sun, and she could see stars. The spin of the asteroid was becoming more apparent; she could see how the stars were wheeling slowly over her. And now here came Earth, fat and beautiful and blue, heavy with light, the most colorful thing she could see. It was just a mote in the sky; it was hard to believe that everything she had known before climbing aboard Bucephalus — the kids, Bill, her family, all the places she had lived, everywhere she had visited — all of it was contained in that pinprick of light.
Something sailed over her head, brilliant white in the sun. Another subsatellite?
But the thing she saw was wriggling. It had arms and legs. And some kind of cloud spreading around it, spherical, misty. Gradually the wriggling stopped. Like a stranded fish, she thought, numbly.
Something had gone wrong.
Then the asteroid shuddered and shook her loose, and she sailed upward into space.
There was a flash, ahead of her, in the direction of Bucephalus.
Now more objects came hailing over the horizon: complex, glittering, turning, moving in dead-straight lines, all in utter silence. Pieces of wreckage.
In that moment she knew she wasn’t going home again.
Emma Stoney:
The three of them were back at the artifact.
There was a shudder hard enough to make Emma cling to her tether. Little sprays of impact-smashed asteroid dust shot up from the ground.
Cornelius looked at his watch, a big mechanical dial strapped to his wrist. He made a clenched-fist, grabbing gesture. “Right on time.”
The tremor, or whatever it was, subsided. Emma looked around. Nothing seemed to have changed. The sun was wheeling slowly over her head. The blue circle protruded from the dust as if it had been there for a billion years, oblivious to the affairs of the humans who squabbled over the asteroid’s battered surface.
Malenfant said, “What have you done, Cornelius?”
“An X-ray laser.” Emma could hear the exultation in Cornelius’ voice. “A little Star Wars toy of my own. Small nuke as the power source… Well. It worked. And we felt it, all the way around the asteroid to here, through three miles of rock.”
Emma snapped, “How many people have you killed?”
Cornelius, clinging to his tether, turned to face her. “They would have killed us. It was us or them. And we couldn’t give them access to the portal.”
“Why not? My God, they represent the government. And besides, there were troopers coming down off that ship. Sliding down a wire to the surface. I saw them. Do you really think you’ll have killed them all?”
“Take it easy,” Malenfant said. “First we have to figure out what’s happened. Did they have time to trash our hab, the O ‘Neilll If not, that’s the only place on the asteroid to survive, the only way any of us can get home.”
“You’re suggesting we can make some kind of deal?” Emma asked, incredulous.
“Emma, you know me. I spent my life making deals—”
And that was when somebody shot her.
June Tybee
June coughed and found she had vomited, orange juice and fruit
bar and other shit spraying over the inside of her faceplate.
She was dangling from a single tether, as if the asteroid had turned to a roof over her head. Another couple of tethers curled around her, ripped free of the regolith. There was only space below her, an infinite place she could fall down into forever.
The ship wasn’t there any more. It looked like it had burst like a balloon. There was just a cloud, slowly dispersing, of fragments: metal and plastic and ripped-off insulation blanket.
There were bodies, of course, fragments in the cloud. Some of them were unsuited, just shirtsleeved: the invalid troopers, maybe the pilots. They had never had a chance.
For some reason that, the merciless killing of those helpless people, made her more angry than anything else, more even than the fact of her own stranding here, the fact that she would never see Tom or Billie again.
She had to get back to the asteroid before her last tether gave way. Cautiously, hand over hand, she pulled herself along the curling rope.
When she got close enough to touch the regolith, she pounded more pitons into the surface.
She broke radio silence, and tried calling. The subsatellites still squirted over her head, darting this way and that like busy metal gnats, unable to comprehend the fact that the giant ship that had brought them here was gone.
No reply.
She had been the farthest from the ship at the moment of the explosion; maybe that was why she had been spared. There might be others, disabled somehow. If that was so there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.
Before she’d left the ship they’d been shown the position of the main squid habitats — since destroyed by the chemical laser — and the humans here, Malenfant and his associates. They had been heading for the far side of the asteroid.
That was where she must go.
The asteroid was a small place. She would surely find the enemy before her consumables expired. Even if not, she must leave enough margin to get back to their ship. If she wasn’t going home, neither were they.
She pulled out her tethers and began working her way once more around the asteroid. She had a positioning system built into a heads-up display in her faceplate, coordinates fed to her by the surviving subsats.
It wasn’t so hard.
She came through the wreckage of a squid bubble habitat.
There was little to see here. The habitat membrane had simply been burst open. Only a few shreds of fabric, a cluster of anonymous machinery, was left here. No squid. Presumably they had all been sent sailing off into space when their world ended, as had her own buddies.
Good. She only hoped the squid had been smart enough to understand death.
A little after that, she found herself coming into view of the blue circle. She pressed herself against the regolith. Such was the tight curvature of the asteroid, the claustrophobic nearness of its horizon, that she was uncomfortably close.
Three figures were standing near the artifact, loosely tethered. They moved to and fro in her sights, gesticulating, talking.
As she’d been trained, she braced her toes in the regolith and fixed her tethers tighter before she raised her weapon. Otherwise the recoil might blow her clean off Cruithne. She aimed. Unlike on Earth, the slug would travel in a dead-straight line, not significantly perturbed by Cruithne’s miniature gravity. She’d trained others for this; now they would never have a chance to put those skills to use.
She fired. And again.
Reid Malenfant:
The invisible slug hit Emma hard in the leg. She was knocked off the surface. The tether attached to her waist reached its full extent, jerked taut, and pulled her back. She came slamming down to the surface, landing on her back. And then she bounced, drifting upward and back along the length of the tether.
“Emma? Emma!” Clumsily, ignoring his own tether drill, Malenfant hurried to her. He hauled her in by her tether, like landing a fish, and picked her up. Her thigh was a bloody ruin. Malenfant could see blood boiling and popping. “We need a tourniquet.”
Regolith splashed at his feet.
Cornelius grabbed his arm. “No time,” he said. “They’re coming for us.”
Malenfant looked around at the pocked landscape. He could see nobody. There wasn’t even any sound to help him tell where the shots were coming from.
Another splash, another new crater.
There was no shelter, anywhere.
The blue circle towered over Malenfant, framing darkness. “This way,” he said. “Into the portal.”
Cornelius pulled back. “It’s one-way. We won’t be able to get back.”
/> “I know.” Malenfant studied Cornelius, wishing he could see his face. “But we’ll be alive. And something might turn up.”
“Like what?”
“Trust me,” Malenfant said.
And, clutching Emma in his arms, he loosed his tethers, braced against the regolith, and jumped.
There was a blue flash, an instant of astonishing pain—
PART FOUR
Manifold
The illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations…
— THOMAS CARLYLE
Maura Della:
Open journal. April 14,2012.
Maybe I’m just getting too old.
I should have expected this, this brush fire of panic that has swept the planet after every TV news channel and Net site carried the pictures of the Blue kids sailing out of a nuclear explosion. After the confusing messages and visions from the sky, a consensus seems to have emerged: that we were shown a false future, that the Carter prophecy is real, that we have just two centuries.
To some extent the human race today seems to react as a single organism to great events. After all, we live in a wired world. Memes — information, ideas, fears, and hopes — spread around the media and online information channels literally at light speed.
It may be that this mass reaction is the greatest single danger facing us.
Anyhow I guess this is what happens when the lead story — all over the TV and radio channels and info Nets of a wired-up humankind — is doomsday…
Atal Vajpayjee:
Atal lay in the undergrowth and focused his binocular corneal implants.
The Pakistani soldiers who guarded this place walked back and forth, weapons on their shoulders, oblivious in the dense sunshine. It gave him a pleasing sense of power to be able to see those soldiers, and yet to know they could not see him.
He had found his spotting position without disturbance. He had followed the Grand Trunk Road between Rawalpindi and Peshawar until he reached a modest track that led into these wooded hills. From here, the buildings of the Topi scientific research institute were clearly visible.
Topi was the place where scientists had developed Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.
Now he need only wait for the command to come through.
The day was hot. He wiped his forehead, and his fingers came away stained with camouflage paint. He wondered if the boy who had come home that day more than ten years ago would recognize him now.
Atal had been just eighteen years old.
He had grown up knowing that Kashmir was India’s most troubled province. Still, he had been happy, his father a prosperous cloth merchant in Srinagar. Even the crackle of gunfire at night, off in the hills, did not disturb him.
Everything changed on the day he came home from his studies — he would have been a doctor — to find his mother crumpled on the step, crying, wailing. And in the house he had found the remains of his father.
Remains. A cold, neutral word. Only the lower half of the body had been identifiable as human at all. His mother had been able to identify it only by a scar on the left foot. The authorities were able to provide no comfort, to produce no suspects.
Atal soon learned the truth.
His father had worked for many years as an agent of the central Indian government. He had striven to maintain the precarious stability of this troubled place. And in the end that cause cost him his life.
Since then, Atal had worked for revenge.
The war had already begun, with skirmishes between troops in the hills, border raids by Pakistani jets, the firing of India’s Agni missiles against military targets.
It was a war that was inevitable because it was a war that everybody wanted. If the strange predictions of the Western scientists were true — if the world really was doomed, if superhuman children had defeated the U.S. Army in the desert and flown to the Moon — then it was important that ancient wrongs be righted before the darkness fell.
He knew he would probably not live through the day. But that did not matter. There would be no future, no world for his children. There was only this, the goal, the taste of victory before the failing of the light.
The radio screeched. Grunting, he gouged the little device out of his ear. It lay on the grass, squealing like an insect.
Electromagnetic pulse.
He looked over his shoulder. Contrails: four, five, six of them, streaking from the east. Ghauri missiles, nuclear tipped. Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta had only minutes to live.
But the returning fire from India was assured.
It was the day, at last. He stood, raised his weapon, roared in defiance.
A movement to his right.
An explosion in his head. Light, sound, smell became confused, whirling.
He was lying on his side. Darkness fell.
Xiaohu Jiang:
Xiaohu opened her window and gazed out at the Beijing night. This tower block was one of a series, well maintained but utterly cheerless, marching like tombstones around the perimeter of the old city. Her mother had told her that the Beijing sky, at this time of year, used to be famous for its clarity. Now, even the sun at noon was sometimes obscured.
Xiaohu was particularly tired this night.
Her work, at the state-run municipal waste-processing plant, was as ever grim and demanding. And — notwithstanding the strange news from America, the bright new spark everyone could see on the face of the Moon — she had no choice but to attend the xuexi hui, the weekly political study session, in the large communal area at the base of the building.
Still, somewhat to her surprise, the materials distributed this week had actually been interesting.
Here, for example, was a new edition of an old pamphlet, An Outline of Certain Questions About Socialism, which dealt with the official Party response to the Carter prediction. It had surprised her. If Carter was correct, the pamphlet claimed, then only misery lay ahead for future generations. If a child never existed, it could not suffer. Therefore the moral thing was to stop producing children, to spare them pain.
The new doctrine was surely designed as a buttress for the Party’s long-standing attempts to control the national population. Everyone was used to official manipulations of the truth — to zhilu weima, to point at a deer and call it a horse, as the expression went.
But still, this resonated in Xiaohu’s tired mind. There was truth here, she thought. Genuine wisdom. But what did it mean for her?
She closed the window and stepped silently into her bedroom. Here was her daughter, Chai, sleeping silently in her cot, her face itself like a tiny round moon, her bud mouth parted.
Chai was not legitimate. Few people knew of her existence, not even her father. Xiaohu had been hatching elaborate plans to provide Chai with a life, an artificial background, a means to achieve respectability, education, a way of life.
Or rather, Xiaohu thought bleakly, a way to get through her life with the minimum pain. But now, the American predictions had made that impossible.
Negative utilitarianism, Xiaohu told herself, reducing evil rather than maximizing good. Perhaps that was all that had ever been possible in this flawed world. She felt enormously tired.
Xiaohu kissed her daughter. Then she took a pillow and set it gently on the child’s placid face.
Bob David:
He had always been good with his hands. By the age of seven or eight he had been stripping down truck engines with his father. By twelve he was building his own stock car from scrap.
The thing he was building now — here in his basement in this drafty tenement block in downtown Cambridge, Massachusetts — was simpler than that.
The key to it was a fancy new stuff called red mercury: a compound of antimony and mercury baked in a nuclear reactor, capable of releasing hundreds of times the energy contained in the same mass of TNT. Thanks to red mercury he would be able to fit his bomb into a b
riefcase.
Bob had grown up here, in Cambridge. He had spent his whole life resenting the asshole nerds who passed him by in class; even as a little kid he’d known that the future was theirs, not his. He’d learned the hard way that there weren’t too many places in the world for a guy who was only good with his hands.
He was glad when they started passing the Blue laws and hauling off the smart little assholes to those prison schools in Nevada and New York.
Ironically, the only paying, legal job Bob had ever gotten in his life had been at MIT, the nest of the killer nerds. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, even the walls bore the names of scientific gods: Archimedes and Darwin and Newton and Faraday and Pasteur and Lavoisier.
Bob worked in the kitchens, just a slop-out hand.
Even so, despite his resentment, he probably wouldn’t have come up with his plan if not for the end-of-the-world news.
He’d listened to what the president had to say. That the doom-soon news was only a prediction, a piece of math. That the Blue children were just children, no matter how strange they seemed. That they mustn’t react negatively; they mustn’t resort to despair and destruction.
Bob had thought about that.
He’d seen the TV shows and followed the chat groups. For sure the world was going to end, it seemed, even if nobody knew how. But there was a whole host of possibilities, from nuclear war to the air going sour to these genetic mutants, the Blues in their silver base on the Moon, taking over the planet.
And every one of these horrors, it seemed to Bob, was caused by science.
After that Bob had known what he had to do.
He had thought it would be hard to get hold of the raw materials. But that hadn’t been hard at all, as it turned out. Just as it hadn’t been hard for him to assemble the clean, beautiful machine that was birthing in his cellar.
Patiently he assembled his machine, testing each part before he added it, whistling.
Maura Della:
In western Europe the birthrate had dropped dramatically, as, it seemed, people tried to spare their unborn children the horror of existence. Conversely, the Japanese seemed to be descending into hedonistic excess. The unborn, who do not yet exist, have no rights; and therefore we are entitled to burn up the world. . .
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