“Considerate. And you always smile at them?”
Clodia shrugged, as if embarrassed. “Why not? I never saw a builder, only pictures of them. But I see those eyes looking at me, and I don’t know what kind of mind lies behind them. I never knew anybody who didn’t feel better for being smiled at, did you?”
“I suppose not…”
Stef was aware of time passing. They had all said resolutely that they didn’t want a countdown, but on this last day Stef couldn’t help have at least a rudimentary sense of the hour. And she knew—
A horn sounded, a signal Earthshine had insisted on.
“Come on. Let’s get back to your father.”
Once again the group gathered beside Earthshine’s spidery enclosure. A fire had been lit, though it wasn’t cold in the dome; its crackling was comforting, and a bowl of water was bubbling to the boil.
Titus was squatting on a bench, with a mug of what looked like beer in his one hand. Stef knew he had been experimenting with home brewing; he said that all legionaries learned such skills on long marches away from home. Stef herself had assiduously avoided any contact with the stuff.
Clodia helped herself to a mug of tea and went to sit by her father, on blankets at his feet, and cuddled up against his legs. Now Stef could see Clodia’s eyes were puffy, her cheeks streaked, as if she’d been crying. Stef cursed herself for not noticing before. Crying over what, the coming end for her father, the loss of her own military dreams? If so, at least she seemed calm now. That was the gardening, Stef thought. Nothing calmed you quite so much as cultivating your garden. Even when it didn’t have eyes to look back at you.
Beth was sitting alone, wrapped in a blanket—no, not alone, Stef realized; she was close to the winking unit of the ColU, her friend from childhood. Beth had seemed unable to move far from the Hatch since it had been closed over Mardina and Chu and Gwen. Stef found it hard to blame her, and nobody was of a mind to force her away. But now Beth was clutching a kind of crude doll to her chest: Mister Sticks, a toy from her own childhood, made for her by the ColU when it still had a body and manipulator arms to do it. This copy had been made from dry Arduan stems by Clodia, under the ColU’s strict instructions.
Stef poured out two mugs of tea, and carried them over to Beth. “May I join you?”
“Why not?” Beth’s voice was bleak, empty. But she responded reflexively when Stef handed her the tea, moved along her bench a little, and let Stef sit down. Stef pulled a blanket over her own shoulders, and reached under layers of cloth until she found Beth’s hand.
“So we are all here,” Earthshine said. “I take it you don’t want a countdown—”
Titus snapped, “No, we do not!”
“Very well. But, Stef, you may wish to have your slate to hand.”
“Damn.” She’d forgotten about that. Just as they’d decided, she and the ColU and Earthshine were going to keep monitoring the science of this event, as long as they could. She had to rummage under her blanket in her capacious pockets until she found the slate, dug it out and wiped its surface clean of bits of lint with a corner of her blanket. Here was another survivor, she thought, another relic of a different universe. She wondered where she’d first picked it up. Mars? The moon? Never imagining that it would still be here with her now, in such a place, in such a time.
The screen lit up with displays: simple counts, graphics. She scanned the material quickly, immediately understanding the most basic implication. “There’s a radiation surge. It’s already started, then.” She felt dismay at the first real physical proof of the end: that it was real after all, just as Earthshine had predicted, despite all their efforts to believe otherwise.
“In a sense, yes,” said the ColU. “Already we’re seeing high-energy radiation, heavy nuclei—rather like cosmic rays. A flood of it coming backward in time. And pretty bad for your health, by the way.”
She had to laugh. “What, we’d all be dead of radiation poisoning in a year? Remind me not to renew my life insurance.”
“It’s going to ramp up from here. Soon we’ll be seeing exotic nuclei, elements nobody ever saw before—or named. Stef Kalinski, you’ll be the greatest discoverer of exotic physics that ever lived.”
“Yeah… So how are you feeling, ColU? Do you understand what is about to happen to you?”
“Yes, Stef Kalinski. I am to be turned off at zero.”
“Well, that’s close enough.”
“It may be easier for artificial intelligences to understand than humans, organic creatures, in fact. The possibility that consciousness may terminate, suddenly: anybody fitted with an off switch knows all about that.”
Beth stroked its shell. “Good luck, ColU. And thank you.”
“Thank you for loving me,” the ColU said, to Stef’s surprise.
The dome lights flickered once, twice, and failed.
Even Stef’s slate went down. She patted its surface, and set it aside. The end of science.
The ColU said, “That’s probably the radiation. Earthshine and I have hardened power units. We should keep functioning a little longer.”
Now the only glow came from the sky, from the sprawl of Andromeda—a tremendous galaxy doomed to destruction just as was her own feeble frame, Stef thought. Her friends were shapes in the dark around her. And as her eyes adjusted Stef began to see the stars above.
Earthshine whispered, “The wolves that have always chased day and night through the sky are catching them at last…”
Under the blanket, Beth’s fingers tightened on Stef’s.
Stef heard Titus take a long, satisfying draft of his beer. Then he said, “You know, this reminds me of a time on campaign when…”
Part Five
75
Earthshine’s protective egg broke open around them, just as it was supposed to, dumping Mardina, Chu and the baby on the floor of the Hatch pit, with all their bits of gear.
But the Hatch lid was open above them. Looking up, Mardina saw a slice of what looked like the roof of a dome—higher, more solid-looking than the one Earthshine had built.
Mardina clutched her baby and stared at Chu. “Alive,” she whispered.
“Alive. But where?”
“Or rather, when?”
Gwen, half asleep, yawned hugely.
“Come on,” Mardina said softly. “Let’s get out of here.”
They had a lightweight, fold-up ladder fabricated by Earthshine for just this instance. They dug it out of the baggage and the shell shards littering the pit, quickly set it up against the wall, and Chu scrambled up. He didn’t look around, Mardina saw; he had eyes only for his family, still in the pit. He reached down. “Pass her up.”
Mardina took a couple of steps up the ladder, and then, clumsily, passed up the bundle that was Gwen. They fumbled the handover, making Gwen squirm and grumble, and they laughed.
“Look at us,” said Mardina. “Two idiots, traveling in time.”
“But we’re here.”
“That we are.”
Once Chu had Gwen safely in his arms, Mardina scrambled quickly out of the pit herself, and took back the baby.
Then they stood together and faced a new world.
They stood on a smoothly finished floor of neatly interlocking tiles. Over their heads soared that dome, and now that she could see it fully, Mardina could make out its scale; it was indeed much wider, taller than Earthshine’s improvised tent. There were smaller buildings, structures under the dome, banks of machinery, some kind of towering monument at the very center of the dome—there was a smell of industry, of electricity, and all of it brilliantly lit by suspended fluorescent lamps.