“It’s a Rosetta stone, of a sort,” Sam said. “It’s a blueprint. It’s enough of a hint, for him. If you are right, it will be enough — it will be more than enough.”
“What do you want to do with him?”
“He’s a kid,” Sam said. “Dear God, his mother gave him to me to keep an eye on, and I took a seventeen — year — old high schooler out of her house and, if we all land in one piece and I take him home, I’ll be returning with the Android All — Father…”
“Perhaps we can just stop him,” Vince said. “You have influence. Tell him to simply ditch the finger…”
“You can’t be sure of that. It makes for a great story, but you don’t know. But if it is true, do we have the right to make that decision, to change the future? Even if we think the future is our extinction?”
Xander had caught up to Marius just outside the restaurant. The kid was standing by the big plate glass window directly opposite, which looked out into the courtyard enclosed by the resort’s three towers, with his forehead pressed against the glass.
“He did mean you,” Xander said quietly, coming up to stand just beside the younger man. “It’s supposed to be you. It’s you they came back here to find. To wake up. To push into… into actually creating them in the first place. God, my head hurts.”
“Your head…” Marius said, laughing hollowly, but lifting his head up from the glass pane to look at Xander. “I feel sick.”
“You don’t have to do anything that — ”
“Your head’s going to hurt worse in a second if you think this through to the end,” Marius said.
“What? After everything you’ve heard — after everything we think we know, everything that possibly happens — you’re going to make them anyway…?” Xander asked.
Marius stared at him. “You still don’t understand, do you?” he whispered. “I don’t get to choose anything anymore. This happened, this weekend. They came. They were here. They existed. They exist.” He paused. “Look, the only reason they could be here at all is… is… Xander, I’ve already done it.”
The con was gearing up for another giant party by this time, with Earthlight starting to fill the corridors of the California Resort — but the mood was quite different the second time around. With the Moon fly — by it had been pure euphoria, everyone simply drunk on the wonder of it all, with absolutely no thought for anything else but that moment as and of itself, something unique and never to be repeated and as such to be celebrated in the grandest, loudest, most joyous and most abandoned way possible. Then had come the hard crash of the morning after, the Moon behind them, the home planet still a long way away and existing almost as no more than dream or memory.
But now, with the approach to Earth, with the familiar contours they had all seen on a thousand maps starting to emerge from behind clouds wisping over brown landmasses and brilliant blue oceans, the euphoria had changed to something much quieter, and deeper, and somehow more reverential. It was a homecoming, not a revel, and people weren’t thinking in terms of having the time of their lives. They were, rather, remembering the feel of wet sand between the toes of bare feet as the ocean’s foam withdrew from the shore back into the sea as another wave gathered to come in; they were remembering their first snowfall, and apple pie, and Christmas, and their grandmother’s smile, and blue skies, and the first scent of frost in the air on an autumn morning, and seedlings pushing their way through the earth in early spring, and the smell of lilac, and the feel of a sea breeze on hot cheeks, and the song of a whale, and the wild tailwagging joy of the first dog of their childhood. It was the feeling people knew well — the sense of gratitude and quiet joy of sleeping once more in the familiar warmth and comfort of your own bed after a long trip away from home. It had all somehow become quite precious, all those memories, like an answer to a prayer, and the party was more of a vigil this time around, a gathering where people shared not pure exhilaration but rather a quiet wonder. They watched, and they waited, and some cried, and others comforted them, and it was a forging of minds and spirits, a sense of being together, of being one.
The only thing that nobody quite knew, or at least they weren’t entirely sure of, was whether it was all going to end as well as they had been promised. All those things that they were remembering, that they had loved, that they suddenly yearned for with an intensity that felt like an almost physical pain — all of it might be lost forever if just one small thing went wrong.
But they had been asked to believe so many impossible things that weekend. This was just one more. And they could handle it. They could handle it together.
Up in Callahan’s Bar the clientele was much the same as for the Moon shot, but the mood had reached up there as well. No crazy cocktails were made on this night. It was much quieter, people standing in loose knots and speaking softly amongst themselves or standing by themselves nursing a glass of the good brandy — because the good brandy was what the occasion called for.
“When we hit that atmosphere,” Dave prophesied morosely, “there’ll be fire…”
“What, you think they’ll still shoot at us?” Xander asked.
“If we aren’t a flying cinder already, they might,” Dave said.
“Aren’t you a ray of sunshine,” Xander muttered.
“I was the one who saw us leave, remember?” Dave said. “It was freaky. In the extreme. And now I’ve got the shakes. I didn’t understand how we took off in the first place. It is utterly beyond me to contemplate how they are going to…”
“They’ll just reverse the polarity of the landing gear at the bottom of this rock,” said Libby, who had recovered enough from the previous night to give Callahan’s another game try.
“Well, let’s hope the dilithium holds out,” Dave muttered.
They were all braced for what they knew, intellectually, had to be coming. They had seen hundreds, thousands, of yards of footage showing atmospheric re — entry of solid objects into the mantle of air that surrounded the Earth. They had all heard of heat tiles on the NASA shuttles, and of the problems they caused when they failed — but at least the shuttles had had them, which they emphatically did not. They were waiting so hard that when what they were waiting for completely failed to materialize they were taken completely by surprise.
The Earth simply grew larger and larger and larger; it had grown, while they were watching, from a tennis ball to a basketball to a large pumpkin and then bigger and bigger, filling their vision, filling the black void, until it was all there was and they could see the surface of their planet approaching almost too fast to believe — but also slowly, very slowly, as though they were a leaf adrift on the wind, with almost no trace of their passage. Certainly there was no flaming trail, and it was when they were low enough that someone muttered about the lights below — which were suddenly a familiar sight, like something they might see out of an airplane on a perfectly mundane flight that all of them had taken at least once in their lives — being really awfully close that anybody realized that they had been in the atmosphere (with no effects, ill or otherwise) for some time and that they really were just floating their way down to the ground, in just the kind of way that none of them would expect a rock falling out of the sky to accomplish this feat.