The Hawks and the Monument-Makers. And the human race. It was hard not to dwell on what might have been, had they been allowed to sit down together, to pool their knowledge and their speculations. To cooperate for the general good. To become allies in the great adventure.
As has happened with the Monument-Makers, a few individual Hawks had survived. But their civilization was gone. Their racial memory consisted only of a cycle of myths.
Kellie Collier had been there, had been first to board the Hawk starship, and had complained later to Hutch about the cost imposed by the existence of the clouds. There had been tears in her eyes when she described what she’d seen.
KELLIE AND THE broken cities and the clouds were never far from Hutch’s mind. The chilling possibility that they were about to experience another wipeout had kept her awake these last two nights. It would be the most painful of ironies if they had finally found a living civilization, someone other than the Noks, that they could actually talk to, just in time to say good-bye.
The cloud in question was at a substantial distance, more than thirty-one hundred light-years. Nine months away. The Bill Jenkins was enroute, diverted from its survey mission by the station at Broadside. But they’d need a month to get there. Add another week for the report to reach her. It would be April before she knew whether she had a problem.
Prudence, and experience, suggested she expect the worst.
She arrived at the Academy bleary-eyed and in a foul mood. She’d talked it over at home with Tor, but all he could think of was to suggest she ease the pressure on herself by quitting. We can live comfortably on my income, he’d suggested. He was a commercial artist, and the money was decent, although they weren’t going to wind up with a chalet in the Rockies and a beach home on Sea Island.
She needed to talk to somebody. The commissioner wasn’t the right person either, so she put in a call to Harold as soon as she arrived at her desk. He wasn’t in yet, his watch officer explained, but they would contact him. Five minutes later he was on the circuit. Just leaving home.
“Harold,” she asked, “have you had breakfast yet?”
“No,” he said. “I usually eat in the Canteen.”
“How about eating with me this morning? My treat.”
“Is there a problem?” he asked cautiously.
“I need your advice.”
“Okay. What did you have in mind?”
“Meet me at Cleary’s,” she said. “Twenty minutes okay?”
CLEARY’S WAS THE small, posh coffee shop overlooking the Refuge, the alien habitat that had been hauled in from the Twins and reconstructed on a platform at the edge of the Potomac in Pentagon Park. The sun was warm and bright, and the sky full of lazy clouds. When Harold walked in, Hutch was sitting in a corner booth, stirring coffee and staring out the window, her mind gone for a gallop. She didn’t see him until he slid in across from her.
“This is a pleasant surprise, Priscilla.” He smiled shyly.
She knew that she intimidated him, but didn’t know why. She’d noticed it years before when she’d provided transportation for him on a couple of occasions. It didn’t seem to be all women, just her. “It’s always good to get away for a bit,” she said. She asked him a few questions about Weatherman, and the tewks, to put him at ease.
Cleary’s used human waiters. A young woman brought more coffee, and some orange juice.
“So what did you actually want to talk to me about?” he asked.
She told him about the report from Broadside that a cloud was changing course. Heading insystem.
His eyes dropped to the table. “That’s unsettling.” He picked up his spoon, fiddled with it, put it back down, gazed out at the Potomac. “Well,” he said finally, “with any kind of luck, it’ll be a false alarm.”
She looked at him.
“Priscilla,” he said, “it doesn’t matter. Whatever it turns out to be, there’ll be nothing you can do.”
“There might be somebody out there.”
“—In its path. I understand that.” He tasted his coffee, patted his lips with a napkin, shrugged. “If there is someone there, they’ll have to look out for themselves.”
He was trying to be detached, but she heard the resignation in his voice. “To be honest, Hutch,” he continued, “it’s not worth worrying about. Not if we can’t intervene. Anyway, at most it will probably turn out to be more ruins. That’s all they ever find out there anyhow.” The waitress was back. “Bacon and eggs,” he said. “Home fries and toast.”
She’d heard that he was supposed to be on a diet, egg whites and bran flakes, that sort of thing. But she said nothing, and ordered French toast. What the hell.
When the waitress was gone, he sat back and made himself comfortable. She liked Harold. He got the job done, never complained, and on Family Day had made a big fuss over Maureen. “Is that why you asked me here?” he said. “The omega?”
Hutch nodded. “Assume the worst happens. Somebody’s in the way. Is there really nothing we can do to disable this thing? Blow it up? Scatter it? Something?”
It was a lovely morning, crisp and clear. The Potomac, which had risen considerably during the last century, and was still rising, was not unlike a small inland sea. The Capitol, the White House, most of the monuments, were islands now. Hutch had been around long enough to remember when Rock Creek Park could be reached on foot, when you didn’t need a boat to get to the Washington Monument. You could stand out there now on one of the piers, and watch the river, and look out toward Sagitta, which was where the local cloud was, the one with Arlington’s number on it, and you got a sense that despite everything, despite the extended life spans and the superluminals and the virtual disappearance of organized violence on the planet, civilization was still losing ground.
“If it had a physical core of some sort,” Harold was saying, “a vital part, then yes. We could go after it. Take a hammer to it. But it seems to be holistic. Throw as many nukes at it as we like and it simply seems to pull itself back together.”
“We don’t know how it does that?”
His jaws worked. “It’s not my field. But no, as far as I’m aware, we have no idea. The technology is well beyond anything we know about. It uses nanos, but we haven’t been able to figure out how they work, what they do, even how they guide the cloud.” He took a long sip of orange juice. “I look at what those things can do, and I look at the fact they seem to be only dust and hydrogen, and I feel as if I should be sitting off somewhere beating a drum. It’s a whole new level of technology.”
Their food came. Harold dumped a substantial amount of catsup on his potatoes.
“Of course,” he continued, “the real problem is that we can’t seem to penetrate the cloud. Ships don’t come back. Probes disappear. Even scans and sensors don’t give us much.” He sampled the eggs, smiled with satisfaction, covered his toast with strawberry jam, and bit off a piece. “Good stuff,” he said. “This where you normally eat?”
“Usually at home,” she said.
“Yes.” He studied her. “You survived one of those things, Hutch,” he continued. “You were actually inside it, weren’t you? When it came down on Delta?”
Hutch had been with Frank Carson that day. Thirty years ago—my God, had it really been that long? — when they’d deliberately baited a cloud, had structured some plateaus to look artificial, and had watched with horror as the monster came after them. “Yes,” she said. “I was there.”
“You survived it.”
“Heaviest weather I’ve ever seen. Lightning. Tornado winds. Meteors. Not the way you’d want to spend a weekend.”