"I wonder what that one is," Julia said after the grey globe left the shaft. "It can't be a metal, not with that albedo."
The spindle bearing ring had cleared the top of the crater, with the globe a kilometre behind. A second globe emerged from the shaft, a light metallic blue this time.
"You mean they're all going to be different?" Greg asked.
"Absolutely, yes. Minerals and metals all separated out, with a purity our large-scale refineries can't match. That's something else which will save me a bundle."
A third globe was emerging, another metal one, its mirrorbright surface reflecting warped constellations.
Greg watched the alien disgorging globes for over three hours. Fatigue only affected his body, shutting it down. His mind remained alert, fascinated at the slow carnival of elements riding by outside. The majority of globes were either iron or silica, three hundred metres in diameter. But there were smaller globes, the rarer minerals, dark greens and yellows and blues. Eight batches of them had emerged in clusters at the same time as the ordinary globes, like satellite moons swarming round a gas giant.
It took a while for the end of the procession to register. The last globe, a brick-red colour, which Julia said was probably zircon, had travelled halfway up the crater before he noticed the alien flesh dilating out from the rim to recover the shaft.
"Is that it?" Maria asked.
"This is the last phase," Julia said. "The cells will be regrouping; they've been spread pretty thin around the second chamber for the mining and refining. It's a big area to cover, I'm glad half of it was complete before the alien started."
"Last phase?" Victor queried.
"Departure."
Greg wondered if it was fate again that put New London over the middle of the Atlantic while Europe was still in darkness, awaiting the dawn. The asteroid would be visible from four continents: Europe, Africa, and North and South America. All of them with perfect viewing conditions.
Did people make the era, or did the necessity of the time throw up the right people? Either way, Greg thought, God had singled out Julia, and no messing.
They had listened to some of the channels while the globes had risen out of the crater. The whole world knew something was going on up at New London, that the Co-Defence League's geosynchronous Strategic Defence platforms had been used for the first time, that Julia Evans herself was up there, that she'd ordered an evacuation.
She told Sean to plug the asteroid back into the communications net, mainly to try and reassure people that the emergency wasn't life-threatening. The Globecast franchise office had been transmitting pictures of the refined globes back to Earth ever since. Greg could taste a sweet irony in that. What would Clifford Jepson be thinking?
Maria turned the Falcon again, pointing its tail at the northern hub. Greg could see the seemingly infinite line of sunlit globes stretching towards Polaris, like multicoloured stars raining down from heaven.
A bulge rose in the middle of the alien flesh, quickly distending, lengthening. It formed a conical spike six hundred metres high, then stopped. The tip began to lean over, tracing a widening spiral as the asteroid's rotation carried it round.
Greg could sense the anticipation flooding out of the alien, a mix of excitement and fear. Julia's personality had given it emotions, it could feel, and it was scared, nerving itself up.
Nothing lasts for ever, he told it sorrowfully.
The alien jumped. A vast spasm rippled down its flanks, hitting the base of the crater wall, and it let go. It was changing shape almost at once, contracting into a sphere four hundred and fifty metres in diameter.
Greg reckoned it was travelling a lot faster than any of the globes; its trajectory taking it away from New London's rotation axis and the line of globes. When it slipped above the crater rim and into the direct sunlight the flesh changed colour, darkening to ebony.
"Do you want to follow it?" Maria asked.
"No," Julia said. "We can see from here."
New London was seven kilometres behind it when the alien began its metamorphosis. The flesh flowed again, flattening out into a lentoid shape. Greg saw a circular silver stain emerge at the centre and split into six arms, spreading out to the rim.
"That looks like metal," he said.
"It is," Julia agreed. "Titanium motes that are only a few atoms in diameter. The cells can manipulate them to form a surface coating quite easily."
Greg gave her an uneasy glance, wondering again just how much of a union existed between them.
The alien was still expanding, a disk two kilometres wide now, the titanium completely covering one side, facing the sun full on, painfully bright to look at.
"I did the right thing, didn't I, Greg?" Julia asked.
"Yeah, both ways. I've had to sit back and endure what happened between you and Royan, my friends. That hurt, Julia. And this thing," he waved a hand at the windscreen. The alien was retreating from New London, still growing, ten—fifteen kilometres across now, at least. That made it hard to believe it was leaving. It was such an overwhelming presence, breaking down his conviction of a neatly completed deal. "Look at it. We couldn't have let that loose in the solar system. It's too powerful. You can't ignore it; either it would have engulfed us, or we would have abused it, little people twisting it to serve parochial needs. And there are a lot of little people in the world, Julia. Maybe that's why you stand out so much."
"Maybe."
Size was the killer, forcing him to accept his own insignificance. New London was big, but the asteroid was something that had been tamed, he could admire that. But now he could finally appreciate Royan's internal defeat, his broken soul. Royan had known what was at stake, that was why he'd been prepared to use the gamma mines.
The alien had become two-dimensional, a veil of titanium atoms that lacked the substance of a mirage. He guessed there must be a net of cables to support the sail and provide some degree of control. But they were probably no thicker than a gossamer thread. Invisible and irrelevant.
A hundred and twenty kilometres in diameter, and it didn't even seem to be slowing down. A flat white-hole eruption.
Maria backed the Falcon eighty kilometres away, a leisurely thirty-minute manoeuvre. When they stopped, the alien was two hundred and sixty kilometres in diameter.
The measurement had to come from the Falcon's sensors, its dimensions defeated the human eye. Such vastness perturbed his comfortable visual references, cheating him into believing the sail was down. In his mind it had become a featureless silver landscape; not an artifact or a living creature. Logic warring with belief. He was truly in alien country now.
Four hundred kilometres in diameter. The sail engulfed half of the universe; powerful waves of sunlight would roll across it, washing over the Falcon and dazzling Greg before the windscreen's electrochromic filters cut in.
He experienced the figment kiss as the sail reached five hundred kilometres in diameter. A strand of thought spun out from the knot of cells at the centre of the sail, the one he couldn't see, but knew was there. Julia's teasing lips brushed his.
And he was standing on a beach of white sand with the deep blue ocean before him, stretching his arms wide in primal welcome to the rising sun, soaking his naked body with its warmth. He dived cleanly into the water, striking out for the shore beyond the far horizon, abandoning the past with giddy joy.
The ghost haze of solar ions gusted against the alien sail, beginning the long push out to the stars.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The Frankenstein wasp crawled round the metal bar of the conditioning grill, and poised on the cliff-like edge of copper paint facing into the office. Greg could make little sense of what it saw, just smeared outlines, as if he was wearing a glitched photon amp. But the wasp was aware of the empty space ahead, and somewhere out there were flowers, pollen. Sugar tugged at it like a tidal force.