“Is it going to blow up?” Marty asked.
Arthur shook his head, unable to speak.
Despite the growing distance between the ark and Earth, the globe visibly expanded, but again with clockwork slowness.
Arthur checked his watch. They had been viewing for fifteen minutes; the time had passed in a flash.
Again the Earth took on the appearance of a jewel, but this time a great bloated fire opal, orange and brown and deep ruby red, shot through with spectral patches of brilliant green and white. The crust melted, turning into basaltic slag adrift in slowly spinning patches on a sea of brown and red. There were no discernible features but the colors. The Earth, dying, became an incomprehensible abstraction, horribly beautiful.
Already, with the appearance of long spirals of white and green, intensely bright, the final fate became obvious. The limb of the world no longer made a smooth curve; it had visible irregularities, broad low lumps distinct against the blackness. From these lumps, jets of vapor hundreds of miles high lanced through the turbid remnants of the atmosphere and cast pale gray fans into space.
Such volcanoes might have been seen in the early ages of the Earth’s coalescence, but not since. New chains of released fire and vapor emerged across the face of the distorted globe. Slowly, a spiraling snake of white plasma shot chunks from its interior coils outward, the projectiles traveling at thousands of kilometers an hour but still falling back, being reabsorbed.
No single piece of the Earth’s crust had yet been flung out with a velocity equal to or greater than eighteen thousand miles per hour, orbital, velocity, much less escape velocity. But the trend was obvious.
Countless island-sized bolides pocked the face of the Earth with a churning effervescence. These bolides rose hundreds, even thousands of miles, then fell, scattering broad trajectories of smaller debris. At the limb, the increased altitude of these molten projectiles was apparent. Energy rapidly built sufficient to toss them into orbit, and even to blow them free from the bulk of the globe.
Home. Arthur connected suddenly with all that he saw; the abstraction took on solidity and meaning. The stars behind the glowing, swelling Earth suddenly filled with menace; he imagined them as the glints of wolves’ eyes in an infinite night-bound forest. He paraphrased what Harry had said on his tape:
There once was an infant lost in the woods, crying its heart out, wondering why no one answered, drawing down the wolves…
He was past tears now, past anything but a deep blunt suffocating pain. Home. Home.
Marty faced the panel with eyes wide and mouth open; almost the same expression Arthur had seen when his son watched Saturday morning cartoons on television, only slightly different: tighter, with a hint of puzzlement, eyes searching.
The Earth bloated horribly. Beneath the swelling crust and mantle, the spirals and fractures of white and green light widened into vast canals and highways running crazy random courses through a uniform dull red landscape. Huge bolides exited in long graceful curves, arcing thousands of miles — entire Earth radii — out in space, and not falling back to the surface, but tracing glowing orbits around the stricken planet.
Twenty-five minutes had passed. Arthur’s legs ached and he had drenched his clothes in sweat. The room filled with an awful animal stench, fear and grief and silent agony.
Virtually everyone he had ever known was dead, their bodies lost in the general apocalypse; every place he had ever been, all of his records and the records of his family, all the children Marty had grown up with. Everyone on the ark was cut adrift in nothingness. He could distinctly feel the separation, the sudden loss, as if he had always known the presence of humanity around him, a psychic connection that was no more.
The brilliant highways and canals of the revealed plasma energy sphere now stretched thousands of miles, vaulting the molten, vaporized material of the Earth outward in a rough ovoid, the long axis at right angles to the axis of rotation. The tips of the ovoid spun away huge globules of silica and nickel and iron.
Against the dominant light of the plasma, the twisted remains of mantle and compressed streamers of the core cast long shadows into near-Earth space through the expanding dusty cloud of vapor and smaller debris. The planet resembled a lantern in fog, almost unbearably bright. Inexorably, the ovoid of plasma pushed everything outward, attenuating, blasting, diminishing all that was left, scattering it before an irresistible wind of elementary particles and light.
Two hours. He glanced at his watch. The moon shined through the vapor haze, a quarter of a million miles distant and seemingly aloof. But tidal bulges would relax, and even though the moon’s shape had been frozen by ages of cooling, Arthur thought the relaxation would at the very least trigger violent moonquakes.
He turned his attention again to the dead Earth. The plasma glow had dimmed slightly. Distinct ethereal pinks and oranges and grayish blues gave it a pearly appearance, like a child’s plastic ball illuminated from within. The diameter of the plasma ovoid and the haze of debris had expanded to well over thirty thousand miles by now. The ovoid continued to lengthen, spreading the new belt of asteroids into the stubby beginnings of an arc.
The transparent panel became mercifully opaque.
As if released from puppet strings, fully half of the witnesses collapsed on the floor. Arthur hugged Francine and gripped Marty’s shoulder, unable to speak, then walked among his fellows, seeing what could be done to help them.
The copper-colored robot appeared at the end of the cabin and floated forward. Behind it came dozens more survivors, bearing trays and bowls of water, food, and medicines.
It is the Law.
The words echoed again and again through Arthur’s thoughts as he helped revive those who had fallen.
It is the Law.
Marty stayed by his side, kneeling with him as he elevated a young woman’s head and held a metal cup of water to her lips.
“Father,” the boy said, “where are we going now?”
AGNUS DEI
The child, ravaged by wolves, falls quiet in the forest, and the long darkness is filled with an undisturbed silence.
New Mars Gazette, December 21, 2397; editorial by Francine Gordon:
The screen for today’s edition is filled with news from the Central Ark. Four hundred more of us, most from the Eurasian arks, have been revived from deep sleep, and prepared for their arrival on New Mars by the Moms. (Does anybody remember who first called the robots Moms? It was Reuben Hordes, then nineteen, revived eight years ago and now on the New Venus Reconnaissance Mission.) Our population today hit the mark of 12,250; the Moms say we are doing well, and I believe them.
New Mars today celebrates its first year of autonomy. The Moms no longer exercise what my husband has called zookeeper’s authority. Already we begin to factionalize and squabble; but these are the signs of a reborn planetism coming once again to maturity. Does that bring us much cheer? Not the politicians, bracing for the arrival of more Marxists.
But what we really celebrate, of course, is the four hundredth anniversary of the Ice Strike that began New Mars. This world has already become home to most of the human race. I feel a stronger connection to New Mars now than to Earth, blasphemous as that might seem; in our hearts I think we must acknowledge that the ten years since most of us came out of sleep have blurred the pain of Earth’ s death. Not banished, just subdued…