It did.
It blossomed bigger and brighter—and angrier—until it filled the room and, just as I was feeling as though I were being swallowed up by that stellar hell, the picture began to break up. I heard Terple moan, “Look at the mirror!” And then I understood what was happening to our image. The little toy PhoenixCorp ship and mirror were being hammered by the outpouring of raw radiation from the supernova. No filters. No cutouts. The PhoenixCorp vessels were blazing bright themselves, reflecting the flood of blinding light that was pouring on them from the gravitational lensing. As I watched, the mirror began to warp. The flimsy sheets of mirror metal peeled off, exploding into bright plumes of plasma, like blossoming fireworks on the Fourth of July. For a moment we saw the wire mesh underneath the optical plates. Then it was gone, too, and all that was left was the skeleton of reinforcing struts, hot and glowing.
I thought we’d seen everything we were going to see of the star. I was wrong. A moment later the image of the supernova reappeared before us. It wasn’t anywhere near as colossally huge or frighteningly bright as it had been before, but it was still something scary to look at. “What—?” I began to ask, but Hypatia had anticipated me.
“We’re looking at the star from the little camera in the center of the dish now, Klara,” she explained. “We’re not getting shipside magnification from the mirror anymore. That’s gone. I’m a little worried about the camera, too. The gravitational lensing alone is pretty powerful, and the camera might not last much” —she paused as the image disappeared for good, simply winked out and was gone — “longer,” she finished, and, of course, it hadn’t.
I took a deep breath and looked around my sitting room. Terple had tears in her eyes. Ibarruru and Starminder sat together, silent and stunned, and Mark Rohrbeck was whispering to his shipmind. “That’s it,” I said briskly. “The show’s over.”
Rohrbeck spoke up first, sounding almost cheerful. “Hans has all the data,” he reported. “He’s all right.”
Terple had her hand up. “Klara? About the ship? It took a lot of heat, but the dish burned pretty fast and the hull’s probably intact, so if we can get a repair crew out there — “
“Right away,” I promised. “Well, almost right away. First we go home.”
I was looking at Rohrbeck. He had looked almost cheerful for a moment, but the cheer was rapidly fading. When he saw my eyes on him, he gave me a little shrug. “Where’s that?” he asked glumly.
I wanted to pat his shoulder, but it was a little early for that. I just said sympathetically, ‘You’re missing your kids, aren’t you? Well, I’ve got a place with plenty of them. And, as the only grown-up male on my island, you’ll be the only dad they’ve got.”
CHAPTER XII
That blast from the supernova didn’t destroy the PhoenixCorp ship after all. The mirror was a total write-off, of course, but the ship itself was only cooked a little. June Terple stooged around for a bit while it cooled down, then went back with what was left of her crew. Which wasn’t much.
Mason-Manley talked his way back into her good graces once Denys wasn’t around anymore; Kekuskian promised to come out for the actual blowup, eighty years from now, provided he was still alive; and, of course, she still had the indestructible Hans, now back in his own custom-designed datastore. The rest of her people were replacements. Starminder went back to her family in the Core, and I paid Ibarruru’s fare to go along with her as a kind of honorary citizen ambassador.
Naturally, Terple invited me to join them for their stint at the neutron star — couldn’t really avoid it, since the new money was coming from the same place as the old, namely mostly me. I said maybe, to be polite, but I really meant no. One look at the death of a world was enough for me. Bill Tarteh’s special show on the Crabbers went on the net within days. He had great success with it, easily great enough so that he didn’t really mind the fact that he no longer had me.
Hypatia kept copies of all the files for me, and those last little bits of data stayed with me on my island for a long time. I played pieces of them now and then, for any of the kids that showed an interest, and for their moms, too, when they did. But mostly I played them for me.
Mark Rohrbeck stayed with me on Raiwea for a while, too, though not too long. That’s the way my island works. When my kids are ready for the world outside, I let them go. It was the same with Rohrbeck. For him it took just a little over three months. Then he was ready, and he kissed me good-bye, and I let him go.