What’s happening? Stan wondered. Why doesn’t it get on with it?
The terrible refraction jigged toward them, hesitated, drew back a little. Then it shivered, as if letting out a sigh — or shaking off a dream.
That was when Stan heard the words.
His head rocked back. Several of the others fell to their knees. The voice reverberated within them, gently. Not apologetically, but with a soothing kindness.
To their amazement, the shimmering shape changed before their eyes. Squinting, Stan saw a shift in its topology, like an origami monster folding away its claws, retracting and transforming its cutting scythe and then dimpling outward in a myriad of multihued, translucent petals.
Stan inhaled a sudden fragrance. The aroma was heady, all-pervading, full of hope and promise. It lingered in the air even as the transformed angel seemed to bow in benediction. Then it drifted off across suddenly serene waters.
Together, he and the others watched as it greeted the joyful, splashing whales and passed on. Even after it disappeared beyond the far headlands, they all knew somehow it would be back… that it would be with them always.
And in its presence, they would never again know fear.
PART XI
PLANET
In a large enough universe,
even unlikely things can happen.
As unlikely as a tiny ball of star-soot
taking upon itself, one day,
to say aloud,
to one and all,
“I am.”
□ Hello. Hello? This circuit appears to be working. The top sub and reference hyper levels seem okay, though there’s no twodee or holo yet. Looks like it’ll have to be crude voice and text for a while…
I’m going to take a chance, since a lot of other groups seem to be reactivating too. Well, here goes—
Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group [□ SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546]…
This is SIG vice-chair Beatrice ter Huygens. In response to the U.N. plea for help in restoring order, we invite all members who haven’t other responsibilities to log in and…
And what? This SIG doesn’t exactly specialize in disaster relief. Our members are best at speculation and creating what-ifs. So I thought we might start by sieve-searching through our huge library of “solutions” scenarios. In the past these often seemed like pie-in-the-sky or doom-and-gloom self-diddles, but now some may even prove useful in this new world.
In particular might we come up with an explanation for what has happened to the Net? Amid all the death and destruction, changes have been taking place minute by minute. Nobody in government can seem to grok it, but maybe someone in our group can come up with a notion outlandish enough to be true.
But first, though I dread the bad news, I guess a head count is in order. On my mark, please send your acknowledgment chops to nexus 486 in our administrative…
Just a nano. Ah! Holo’s coming back! Good pigment, too. Maybe we’ll be able to use spread-spec access after all.
Now back to that head count…
• BIOSPHERE
From the topmost tier of the life ark, Nelson watched Earth turn slowly against the Milky Way. It was the only splash of real color in a drab cosmos, and at this distance one might never imagine what chaos had just reigned on that peaceful-looking globe. Even the continent long palls cast by still-smoldering volcanoes weren’t visible to the naked eye from here — though scientists were already predicting a rough winter ahead.
Until recently, Nelson had been too busy just keeping himself and the majority of his charges alive. Now, though, as the ark settled gradually toward a dusty, gray-brown plain, he could at last spare a moment to look up in wonder at the ocean-planet, swathed on its sunlit side with streamers of cottony clouds. Leftward, on its night side, city lights testified to humanity’s narrow escape — though gaping dark patches also showed what a terrible price had been paid in mankind’s final war.
That conflict was over now… guaranteed with more certainty than any peace treaty ever signed. All across the world, men and women still argued over what insured this. But few doubted any longer that a presence had made itself known, and from now on nothing would be the same.
“Ark four, we’re at three kilometers altitude. Descent under control with five minutes to landfall. Confirm readiness please.”
Nelson turned away from the blue-green world and sought northward across the starscape. There it was, the shuttle, hovering over the mountains rimming Mare Crisium. It was a battered-looking hulk, like something hijacked out of a neglected museum. And yet it flew more powerfully, with more assurance, than anything else made before by human hands. He lifted his belt-phone. “Yeah… uh, I mean, roger, Atlantis. I guess we’re as ready as ever.”
He lowered the phone, thinking, Sure. But just how ready can you be when you’ve been volunteered as the first permanent residents of another world?
He felt a tug at his pants leg. Shig, the little baboon, squeaked and demanded to be picked up. Nelson grinned. “So? You were all over the place when we were weightless. But now a little gravity makes you lazy again?”
Shig clambered from his arm onto his shoulder, perching there to look across their new home, one even drier and emptier than the savannas of Africa, to be sure, but theirs nonetheless, for better or worse. From the railing nearby, Shig’s mother glanced at Nelson in unspoken question. He shrugged. “I don’t know where the nearest water hole is, Nell. They say they’ll send some ice our way in a while, along with the first bunch of people. Don’t ask me how they’ll manage it, but we’ll be fine till then. Don’t worry.”
Nell’s expression seemed to say, “Who’s worried?” Indeed, after what they’d been through together, they couldn’t be faulted for a little team cockiness.
Uprooted from the soil of Africa and hurled into high orbit, Kuwenezi’s experimental ark four went through hours, days, during which disaster kept missing them by seconds. For instance, if certain circuits had failed during those first critical instants, Nelson wouldn’t have been able to order most of the hurtling pyramid sealed against hard vacuum. Nor could he have shifted fluids from one vast storage tank to another, gradually damping out the unwilling satellite’s awkward tumble.
As it was, fully a third of the biosphere’s life habitats were dead — their occupants having asphyxiated or been crushed against adamant glass-crystal barriers, or simply having succumbed to drastically altered circumstances.
He’d never have managed saving the rest without Shig and Nell, whose nimble grace in free fall made them invaluable at fetching floating tools or herding panicking creatures into makeshift stalls where they could be lashed down and sedated. Even so, the job had seemed utterly hopeless — a futile staving off of the inevitable — until that weird moment when Nelson felt something like a tap on his shoulder.
Whirling about in shock and exhaustion, he had turned to find no one there. And yet, that hallucinatory interruption had been enough to draw him back from a tunnel-torpor of drudgery . . far enough to let him notice that his belt-phone was ringing.
“H-hello?” he had asked, unable to believe anyone knew or cared about his plight, cast from the Earth, bound for oblivion aboard a glass and steel Flying Dutchman.
There had been a long pause filled with static. Then a voice had said, “nelson…”
“Uh… yeah?”
“I wanted you to know — help is coming. i haven’t forgotten you.”