“It’s only for self-defense, Mim,” Bram said. “When we’re sure this crisis is over … why, we’ll just disinvent this bow thing.”
Everybody’s eyes were drawn to the telescopic image hanging in the bolo backplate. “We should have burned them with the photon drive instead of being so finicky about where we aimed it,” Trist said.
“Now who’s being bloodthirsty?” Bram said. “It wouldn’t have made any difference. Their father ship’s dropped bubbles all around the rim, and even if we’d spent a year in orbit around the disk, there’d be other ships, now that they’ve found the way.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Trist said. “The dragonflies are now in possession of the diskworld transmission apparatus. What if some day it occurs to them to use it?”
It was a horrifying thought. “It would take thousands of years to get the disks into operating condition,” Bram said.
“The universe has got thousands of years,” Trist said.
“Before the dragonflies could seed the universe with their kind,” Mim said, “their transmissions would have to reach a race advanced enough to synthesize their DNA. And what race would be that naive?”
“The Nar created us, Mim,” Trist said. “And we gave them Penser.”
“You may be overlooking one thing, Trist,” Bram said. “Before you can induce another species to unriddle your genetic code, you’ve got to be able to communicate with them. And the dragonflies aren’t very good at that. In fact, they may be inherently incapable of it.”
“They won’t need to broadcast their genetic code,” Trist said grimly. “They’ll just spread from star to star. And when their ships are good enough they’ll reach other galaxies the way we did.”
“Don’t be so gloomy, Trist,’ Marg said. “You’ll spoil the party.”
“Sorry, Marg.” He swallowed the last of his elderberry wine. “I think I’ll get myself another drink. Who’ll join me?”
Before he could carry out his intention, Jun Davd came hurrying into the lounge, followed by an assistant. He spoke briefly to. the assistant, who nodded and went to the holo to make some kind of adjustment; then Jun Davd came through the crowd to Bram and his group.
“You’ll want to see this,” he said. “We’ve been tracking the dragonfly father ship for the past few hours. They’ve finished seeding the rim with their spawning bubbles, evidently, and they’re ready to go on to the next diskworld. They’ve been following the rim around, using their fusion engine to build up velocity.”
“Oh, no!” Mim exclaimed.
“They’ve sterilized a swath over ten million miles long so far.”
“Why … they’ll burn their own colonies,” Orris said.
“No, they shut down when they drop one,” Jun Davd said. “They’re not mindless, you know.”
“Not when it involves their own species,” Trist said tightly.
“They’re flying low,” Jun Davd went on, as if he were discussing an abstract problem in ballistics. “The interesting thing is that they haven’t passed under a moon yet. It’s over twenty-two million miles between moons. Ah, here we are. We’re picking them up now.”
The telescopic display at the end of the lounge jiggled and blurred, then centered on a brilliant spark skimming the top of the fantastic wall that stretched across the stars. People stopped their conversation to look.
“They’re awfully close to the rim edge, aren’t they?” Trist observed, his face suddenly alight with interest.
“Yes, aren’t they?” Jun Davd said.
The spark died without warning. Bram could see the ship itself, a tiny splinter that he knew was twenty miles long from end to end. The cluster of bubbles at one end didn’t seem appreciably smaller. It was hard to tell. The few dozen that might have been expended on this world still left hundreds with which to seed the rest of the system.
“They’re not cutting it too fine,” Jun Davd drawled. “They’re about a half million miles from their first colony next to our digs. They’re closing at a hundred miles per second. It won’t be many minutes longer now.”
The ellipsoidal moon hovered, waiting. The dragonfly ship was going to pass under its pointed end. Even at the scale of distance involved, the progress of the bubble-ended splinter seemed swift.
“They’re going to—” Mim said, and bit her lip.
The splinter hurtled onward, its axis aimed obliquely in preparation for the escape orbit that would take it to the next big disk of the outer trio. The angle gave it a wider cross section along its line of flight. That would make matters worse, Bram thought.
At the last moment, a dragonfly eye must have seen a hairline flicker of movement and a dragonfly brain must have made an instantaneous connection. The fusion flame flared in a desperate attempt to push the ship out of the plane of the disk.
“That was a mistake,” Jun Davd said.
The splinter sheared in half, peeling back along its entire length. Hundreds of tiny glistening beads spilled into space. Bram thought that a collision at a hundred miles per second would have smeared the occupants to paste, but—incredibly—he could see chemical jets starting up in some of them as the pilots tried uselessly to save themselves.
Then the primitive deuterium-helium three reactor—smashed, flooded, and compressed all at once—blew.
A ball of terrible fire appeared in an instant, engulfing the spilled bubbles, spreading outward in growing circles across the diskscape, lighting up the underside of the pointed moon.
The moon gave a jerk.
It joggled for a moment, like a balloon being yanked by a child, and then the second set of moonropes on the other side of the rim, weakened by heat and impossibly stressed, parted.
Like a stone released from a sling, the moon flew into space.
Mim gasped. She clutched at Bram’s arm, her fingers digging into his biceps.
“It can’t hit us, Mim,” Bram said softly, watching the moon sail upward, blunt end first. “It left the disk’s orbit on a different tangent than we did.”
Jun Davd heard him. “No, there’s nothing left in the outer system that it can hit. It will probably take up a tilted orbit somewhere between here and the cometary halo.”
Slowly, like ocean billows, the surface of the diskworld collapsed under the place where the moon had hung. A great scalloped depression spread out on either side. Eventually, when that wave of collapse ceased, there would be a forty-five-million-mile bite taken out of the disk between moons.
Throughout the lounge, sobs were heard as stunned people realized that the city of man had tumbled into that abyss.
“It’s all gone, isn’t it?” Mim asked. “Everything we found. Buried, crushed under an earthquake that could have swallowed worlds.”
Bram found her hand. “They’re gone too, Mim. The dragonflies.”
“They’ll be back, though,” Trist said, staring out the curving view wall as the universe outside came tumbling down. “There are billions of them, less than twenty light-years away.”
Bram’s holo, fifty feet tall, stood on the rostrum and looked out across a sea of faces. It always made him feel self-conscious to be magnified this way—you didn’t even dare to scratch your nose—but it was the only way for a crowd this size to have any connection with the speakers. He thanked his stars that the year-captain election was only a few Tendays away. He had resolved not to let his name be entered this time. It was someone else’s turn.
The hall of the tree had been enlarged over the years with the increase in population, until now it could seat more than twenty thousand people. But that still wasn’t enough to handle the crowd that had shown up tonight; the overflow had been consigned to the small adjacent amphitheater, watching the same holos, but without the reinforcing sight of the distant minikin figures whose shadows they were.