Earth

PLANET

Portrait of the Earth at night.

Even across its darkside face, the newborn planet glowed. Upwelling magma broke its thin crust, and meteor strikes lit the shaded hemisphere. Later, after the world ocean formed, its night tides glistened under the moon’s pearly sheen. For most of the next two thousand million years, ruptures glowed beneath the broad waters, and lightning offset the glistening phosphorescence of emerging life.

The next phase, lasting nearly as long, featured growing continents traced by strings of fiery volcanoes. Eventually, huge convection cells slowed the granite promenade. And yet. Earth’s night grew brighter still. For now life draped the land with vast forests, and the air was rich with oxygen. So flamelight illumined a valley here, a meadow there… sometimes an entire plain.

Within the very latest time-sliver, tiny campfires appeared — minuscule threats to evening’s reign. Yet sometimes curving scythes of grassland blazed as hunters drove panicky beasts toward precipices.

Then, quite suddenly, dim smudges told of the next innovation — towns. And when electrons were harnessed, man’s cities blossomed into glittering jewels. Nightside brightened rapidly. Oil drillers flared off natural gas just

to make easier their suckling of deep petroleum. Fishing lights rimmed shorelines. Settlers lay torch to rain forests. Strings of strobing, pinpoint brilliance traced shipping lanes and air corridors.

There were dark wells, also. The Sahara. Tibet. The Kalahari. In fact, the black zones grew. The methane flares flickered and went out. So did the fishing lights.

Cities, too, damped their extravagance. While their sprawl continued to spread, the former neon dazzle passed away like a memory of adolescence. The effervescent show wasn’t quite over, but it seemed to be waning. As night moved back in, any audience could tell the finale would come soon.

But turn the dial. Look at the planet’s surface, at night — in radio waves.

Brilliance! Blazing glory. The Earth seared. It shone brighter than the sun.

Perhaps it wasn’t over yet, after all.

Not quite.

• CRUST

Crat’s weighted boots were so hard to lift, he had to shuffle across the ocean bottom, kicking muddy plumes that settled slowly in his wake. Occasionally, a ray or some other muck-dwelling creature sensed his clunking approach and took off from its hiding place. Still, all told, there was a lot less to see down here than he’d imagined.

Of course this wasn’t one of the great coral reserves or shelf fisheries, where schools of hake and cod still teemed under the watchful eyes of UNEPA guardians. One of Crat’s instructors told him most of the ocean had always been pretty empty. And yet there was another obvious reason he met so little life down here.

What a junkyard, he thought while moving at a steady pace. I never figured a place so big could turn into such a sty.

He’d seen so much man-made garbage in just the last hour… from rusting buckets and cans and a corroded mop handle to at least a dozen plastic bags, drifting like trademarked jellyfish, advertising discount stores and tourist shops thousands of miles away.

And then there was that kilometer-wide spew of organic refuse looking like a half-digested meal some immense creature had recently voided. Crat knew who that creature was — the Sea State floating town, which had passed this way only a little while before. Despite their nominal agreement to abide by UNEPA rules, clearly the poor folk of the barges had more urgent things to worry about than where their rubbish went. After all, the ocean seemed willing to take everything dumped into it, with nary a complaint.

The towns must leave trails like this everywhere, Crat realized. It was gross. But then, what choice did they have? The rich may worry about garbage disposal, but when you’re poor your concern is getting food.

Which raised another curious question. Why was the barge-city sticking around in this area when the fishing was so poor? Crat suspected it had to do with the Company, which seemed intensely interested in this bit of continental shelf and presumably wanted to keep the floating town around as a base of operations.

Or as a cover? Crat wondered. But he had no idea how to follow up on that thought. Anyway, presumably the company men paid well for the privilege. Hard currency was hard currency, and curiosity generally a waste of time.

“Okay Courier Four. Now take a heading of niner zero degrees.”

“Roger control,” he answered, checking his compass and changing course. “Niner zero degrees.”

Crat liked talking like an astronaut to the company comm guys. Sure, the smelly suit must have been retired as unfit for human use long ago. And it was hard work just lifting your feet to take each step. But the job had its moments. Like when the trainers actually seemed pleased and impressed with his education! That was a complete first for Crat.

Of course countless Sea State citizens were innately smarter, and some had much better learning. But few of those were likely to volunteer for such dangerous work. The company men spoke of his being “uniquely well qualified” for the job.

Imagine that. He’d never been well qualified for anything in his life! I guess lots of good things can come your way, if you don’t give a damn how long you live.

“Courier Four, cut respiration rate to thirty per minute. Slow down if you have to. Site Thirteen needs your cargo for backup, but they don’t expect you early.”

“Aye aye.” He measured his pace more carefully. Crat had decided he wanted this job after all. And that meant getting known as a team player. Another milestone for him.

During his first week they’d put him through exhaustive and exhausting tests… like barochambers, flooding in different gases and examining his hand-eye coordination under pressure. Then there were chem-sensitivity exams and psych profiles he was sure he’d fail, but which, apparently, he passed.

The company was engaged in a big enterprise here in the ocean southwest of Japan. Crat found out just how big when he was moved to an underwater base bustling with tech types — Japanese, Siberian, Korean, and others. There was talk of surveying and tapping nearby veins of valuable ores, a much more ambitious enterprise than just collecting manganese nodules from the open seabed. Obviously, the company was planning ahead for when nodules became scarce and therefore “protected.”

Crat didn’t understand most of what he overheard the engineers saying. (That was probably among the reasons he’d been hired.) But one thing was clear. If nodule harvesting was dangerous, working in deep mine shafts under half a kilometer of water would be doubly so! Not that Crat really cared. But maybe this explained the tight relationship between the corporation and this particular Sea State town — so close the floating city had even stayed put through a recent nasty storm, instead of taking shelter downwind of Kyushu. The Albatross Republic couldn’t afford to abandon jobs and cash.

It was weird, working as an expendable flunky so near others who were obviously high-priced tech types with fat, company-paid insurance policies. He’d expected to be treated like a dog or worse, but actually they were a lot more polite than the bosuns on the fishing boats had been, and smelled better, too.

Only why, when they were supposed to be working on digging a mine in the ocean, was everybody so excited this morning, jabbering over maps of the moon, for Gaia’s bleeding sake?

None of my dumpit business, I guess. And that was that.

Right now Crat was supposed to deliver his package to a company outpost ten kilometers from the main base. Apparently, it was a site so secret they didn’t even visit it often by submarine, in case competitors might track the boats with satellites. Single couriers like him, slogging back and forth on foot, minimized that risk. He had no idea what lay on the carry-rack across his back, but he’d get it there on time or croak trying!

Crat reached up and tapped his helmet. A high-pitched squeal had been growing louder for the last minute or two. So? More shitty equipment. What d’you expect?

“Hey, Control. Can you guys do anything about the dumpit—”

“Courier Four… we’re having…” Static interrupted, then surged again. “… better… ort this… ssion…” Crat blinked. What the hell were they talking about now? He decided to play it safe. If you don’t understand what the bosses are saying, just keep working hard. It may not be what they wanted, but they sure can’t fire you for that!

So he checked the helmet’s gyrocompass and adjusted his heading a bit before moving on, counting breaths as he’d been told. There were miles to go yet, and what mattered was delivering the goods.

As he slogged, the keening in his headphones grew more intense and oddly musical. Tones overlay each other, rising and falling to a puzzling rhythm. Could this be another test, perhaps? Was he supposed to name that tune? Or were they just having fun at his expense?

“Hey, Base. You guys there? Or what?”

“… ort and… back, Courier! We’re exper… ouble…”

This time he stopped, feeling rising concern. He still had no idea what the controller was saying, but it sounded bad. Crat’s glove collided with his helmet as he instinctively tried to wipe away the perspiration beading his nose. He wanted to rub his eyes, which had started itching terribly.

Suddenly it was important to remember all the warning signs he’d been taught in cram sessions. Nitrogen narcosis was one danger they’d warned of repeatedly. The suit’s monitor lights showed an okay gas balance… if you could trust the battered gauges. Crat checked his pulse and found it fast but steady. He squeezed his eyes shut till they hurt, then opened them and waited for the speckles to go away.

Only they didn’t. Instead they capered and bobbed as if a swarm of performing fireflies had gotten into his helmet. Their movements matched the eerie music surging through his headphones.

Oh, this is too squirting weird!

A flash of gray hurtled past him. Then another, and two more. Crat blinked. Dolphins! The last one paused to whirl around him, catching his eye and nodding vigorously before streaking after its fellows. Crat got the eerie impression the creature had been trying to tell him something, like maybe, You better hurry, Mac, if you know what’s good for you.

“Shit. If something down here’s got them scared…”

Crat found himself scurrying after them, running as fast as he could through the bottom muck. Soon he was panting, his heart pounding in his chest. I’ll never keep up! Whatever’s chasing them will catch me easy!

He tried to glance backward as he ran, but only managed to trip over his own feet. The slow motion fall was unstoppable, ending in a skid that plowed up streamers of turbid sediment. As he lay there, wheezing for breath, his entire world consisted of the whining aircompressors, that gor-sucking music, and some crawling thing in the mud that bumped against his faceplate, leaving a trail of slime across the glass before disappearing into the ooze again.

Maybe I can burrow under here and hide, he thought.

But no. Cowering from a fight stuck in his craw. Better to turn and face whatever it was. Maybe dolphins are cowards, anyway.

Something occurred to Crat. It might be some other company, wanting to hijack the thing I’m carrying. Hey! That explains all the noise! They’re jamming my comm, so I can’t call for help when they find me! Obstinately, he decided, Well, if my cargo’s that important, they sure as fuck aren’t gonna get it off me!

Crat managed to stand, raining gunk from his harness and shoulders. If the enemy were close, they’d surely pick out the noise his suit gave off and zero in on him. But maybe he could find a place to stash his cargo first! Awkwardly, he pulled the bulky package off its carry-rack. One of the tech types had called it a “cylinder gimbal bearing,” or whatever. All he knew was it was heavy.

Maybe… Crat thought as he looked around… maybe he could bury it and… hurry off, leading the bad guys away from it! But in that case he’d better put it under some landmark, so he could find it again. In a burst of slyness, he set off away from his former heading, so as not to point the way to the company’s secret lab. Meanwhile Crat peered about for any useful landmark, wary for a sudden black shape — the sleek minisub of some mercenary corporate privateer.

Hurrying across the muddy plain, he caught a flicker of motion to his left. He turned, just in time to be halfblinded by a sudden shaft of brilliance that seemed to split the sea. A searchlight! They’re here!

He sighed in frustration. Too late to bury his cargo, then. There was only one chance now. To pretend to surrender, and then, at the last moment, maybe he could destroy what he carried. Of course the only object hard enough to smash it against would be the side of the sub itself… Maybe Remi or Roland could have thought up something better, he reflected, but this was the best he could come up with on short notice. Crat started walking toward the light. It was terribly bright.

Too bright, in fact. He’d never seen such a searchlight before.

Moreover, it was vertical, not horizontal. Could it be someone up above, casting about down here from the surface? But that didn’t make sense!

Then Crat noticed for the first time… the brightness seemed to throb in tempo with the strange music flooding his helmet. It’s too big to be a searchlight, he realized when he saw the dolphins again, cavorting around the luminous perimeter. The column was nearly a hundred meters across.

They weren’t running away, after all. They were headed toward this thing! But what is it?

There was no shadow of a vessel on the surface. The brilliance had no specific source. It just was. Shuffling nearer the dazzling pillar, Crat’s foot caught on something bulky in the mud. A large, black, roughly egg-shaped object. Ironically, it was one of the nodules he’d expected to be sent after when he was hired. To a Sea State citizen, it was a fabulous find. Only right now that didn’t seem to matter as much as it might have only minutes ago.

The music grew more intricate and complex as he ap-proached the beating column. Crat pictured angels singing, but even that didn’t do it justice. The dolphins cried peals of exhilaration, and that somehow made him feel less afraid. They swooped, executing pirouettes just outside the shaft of brightness, squealing in counterpoint to its song.

Crat approached the shimmering boundary and stretched out one arm. He felt his blood drawn through the vessels in his hand by strange tides, returning to his heart changed with every beat. The fingertips met resistance and then passed through, tingling.

His black glove glowed in the light. He watched, dazed, as fizzing droplets hopped and danced on the rubber before evaporating in tiny cyclones. So. Within the glow there might be air… or vacuum… or something else. For sure, though, it wasn’t seawater.

He felt his arm nudged. A dolphin had come alongside to watch, and the two of them shared a moment’s soul-contact, each seeing glory reflected in the other’s eye. Each knowing exactly what the other one saw. Crat couldn’t help it,- he grinned. Crat laughed exultantly.

Then, gently, the dolphin nudged his arm again, pushing it out of the shining beam.

Breaking contact tore at him instantly, as if something had ruptured inside. Crat sobbed at a sudden memory of his mother, who had died when he was so young, leaving him alone in a world of welfare agents and official charity. He tried to go back, to throw himself into the embrace of the light, but the dolphins wouldn’t let him. They pushed him away. One thrust its bottle nose between his legs and lifted him bodily.

“Let me go!” he moaned, reaching out. But even then he heard the music climax and begin to fade. The brilliance turned golden and diminished too. Then it ended suddenly with a clap that set the ocean ringing.

In the rapid dimness, his irises couldn’t adapt fast enough. He never saw water rush in to fill the empty shaft, but he and the dolphins were taken by a spinning, tumbling chaos that yanked them like bits of weed in the surf. Crat grabbed his air-hose and just held on.

When, at last, the tugging currents let him go, for a second time Crat shakily picked himself up from the muddy bottom. It took a while to look around without everything spinning. Then he realized the dolphins were gone. So too were the light, the music. Even the ringing in his ears. The stinging afterimages faded till at last he heard an insistent voice yammering.

“… you need help? We had our comm messed up for a while. Some think maybe we were near one of those boggle things people are talking about. What a coincidence!

“Anyway, Courier Four, our telltales show you’re all right. Please confirm.”

Crat swallowed. It took some effort to relearn how to speak. “I’m… okay.” He looked around quickly and found the cargo — only a few meters away. Crat picked it up, shaking off more muck. “Want me to start back on course?”

The voice at the other end interrupted. “Good attitude, Courier Four. But no. We’re sending a sub that way anyway with some bigwigs to inaugurate Site Six. It’ll pick you up shortly. Just stand by.”

So he was going to get there after all… and Crat found that now he didn’t care a bit. Standing there waiting, more than ever he wished his fingers could pass through the glass faceplate as they had briefly penetrated that shining boundary. For those few moments, his hands had sought and found his life’s first real solace. Now he’d settle for just the memory of that gift, and a chance to wipe his streaming eyes.

• CORE

The Maori guards wouldn’t let Alex go to Hanga Roa town to meet the stratojet, so he waited outside the resonator building. The afternoon was windy and he paced nervously.

At one point, before the incoming flight was delayed yet again, Teresa came by to help him pass the time. “Why is Spivey using a courier?” she asked. “Doesn’t he trust his secure channels anymore?”

“Would you? Those channels go through the same sky everyone else uses. They were secure only because the military paid top dollar and kept a low profile. These days, though?” He shrugged, his point obvious without further elaboration. If this messenger carried the news he expected, it would be worth any wait.

Teresa gave his shoulder an affectionate shove. “Well, I’ll bet you’re glad who the courier is.”

Teresa’s friendship was a fine thing. She understood him. Knew how to tease him out of his frequent dour moods. Alex grinned. “And what about you, Rip? Didn’t I see you eyeing that big fellow Auntie sent to cook for us.”

“Oh, him.” She blushed briefly. “Only for a minute or two. Come on, Alex. I told you how picky I am.”

Indeed, he kept learning new levels to her complexity. Last night, for instance, they had spent hours talking as he handed her tools and she wriggled behind Atlantis’s panels. If things went as expected, they’d be off to Reykjavik tomorrow or the next day, to testify before the special tribunal everyone was talking about. Alex thought it only fair to give her a hand tidying up the old shuttle before that.

Back in the caves of New Zealand, it had been concentration on something external — survival — that first eased the tensions between them. Even now, Teresa found it easier to talk while straining to tighten a bolt or giving some old instrument its first taste of power in forty years. So for the first time, last night, Alex heard the full story of her prior acquaintance with June Morgan, his part-time lover. It made him feel awkward — and yet Teresa said she liked June now. She seemed glad the other woman was coming back, for Alex’s sake.

And happier still because of what everyone assumed June would be carrying with her — Colonel Spivey’s surrender.

It had been hinted in George Hutton’s latest communique and confirmed in action. Since Alex’s demonstration yesterday — blasting a mountain of ice all the way to the moon — there had been a sudden drop in aggressive activity by other gazer systems worldwide. The Nihonese still pulsed at low “research” levels, and there were brief glimmers from other locations. But the big new NATO-ANZAC-ASEAN resonators were silent, mothballed, and the original four now obeyed Alex’s steady program unperturbed — pushing Beta gradually out of the boundary zone, where those intricate, superconducting threads flickered so mysteriously.

The number of pulses could be reduced now, and each beam targeted more carefully. Few additional civilian losses were expected, and diplomatic tension had been falling off for hours. Even the hysteria on the Net had abated a bit, as word went out about the new tribunal.

Maybe people are going to be sensible after all, Alex thought as he paced in front of the lab. After staying with him for a while, Teresa left again to resume her chores aboard Atlantis. Alex could have worked, too. But for once he was content just to look across grassy slopes toward the little, crashing baylet of Vaihu and a rank of Easter Island’s famed, forbidding monoliths. Beyond the restored statues, cirrus clouds streaked high over the South Pacific, like banners shredded by stratospheric winds.

This place had affected him, all right. Here earlier men and women had also struggled bitterly against the consequences of their own mistakes. But Alex’s education on Rapa Nui went beyond mere historical comparisons. Because of the nature of the battle he had waged here, he now knew far better than before how those winds and clouds out there were influenced by sunlight and the sea, and by other forces generated deep below. Each was part of a natural web only hinted at by what you saw with your eyes.

Jen was right, he thought. Everything is interwoven.

One didn’t have to be mystical about the interconnectedness. It just was. Science only made the fact more vivid and clear, the more you learned.

A touch of sound wafted from the direction of Rano Kao’s stern cliffs — first the whine of a hydrogen auto engine and then the complaint of rubber tires turning on gravel. He turned to see a car approach the Hine-marama cordon, where big, brown men paced with drawn weapons. After questioning both driver and passenger, they waved the vehicle through. Its fuel cells whistled louder as it climbed the hill and finally pulled up near the front door.

June Morgan bounded out, the wind whipping her hair and bright blue skirt. He met her halfway as she ran to throw her arms around him. “Kiss me quick, you troublemaker, you.” He obliged with some pleasure, though Alex sensed a tremor of tension as he held her. Well, that was understandable of course.

“You put on some show, hombre!” she said, pulling away. “Here Glenn and his people spend weeks studying gazer-based launching, and you yank the rug right out from under him! I laughed so hard… after leaving the room of course.”

Alex smiled. “Did you bring his answer?”

“Now what other reason would I have to come all this way?” She winked and patted her briefcase. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

Alex asked the driver to go fetch Teresa as June took his arm and pulled him toward the entrance. There, however, the way was barred by a massive dark man with crossed arms. “Sorry, doctor,” he told June. “I must inspect your valise.”

Alex sighed. “Joey, your men sniffed her luggage at the airport. She’s not carrying a bomb, for heaven’s sake.”

“All the same, tohunga, I have orders. Especially after last time.”

Alex frowned. The first sabotage attempt still had them perplexed. Spivey vehemently denied involvement, and the saboteur himself seemed to have no links at all to NATO or ANZAC.

“That’s all right.” June laid the briefcase flat in the arms of one big guard and flipped it open. Inside were several pouched datacubes, two reading plaques, and a few slim sheets of paper in a folder. Auntie Kapur’s men ran humming instruments over the contents while June chattered animatedly. “You should have seen George Hutton’s face when he heard Manella had shown up here! He started out both angry and delighted, and finally settled on plain confusion. And you know how George hates that!”

“Indeed I do, madam. ”

June and Alex turned as a figure approached from within. Nearly as tall as the Maori guards, and much heavier, Pedro Manella came into the sunlight holding out his hand. “Hello, Doctor Morgan. You bring good tidings, I assume?”

“Of course,” she replied. “And aren’t you a sight, Pedro! Wherever you’ve been hiding yourself, you’ve certainly eaten well.”

The second guard returned June’s valise. Alex said, “Let’s go to my office and play the message.”

“Why such privacy?” June pulled the other way. “We’ll use my old station. Everyone should hear this.”

The huge perovskite cylinder looked like some giant artillery piece, delicately balanced on its perfect bearings. It towered over what had once been June’s console — back when a dozen or so fatigued workers first set up here on the flank of a rocky, weather-beaten isle, searching desperately for a way to beard a monster in its den. The tech who had been working at that post cheerfully made room.

“Here it is,” June said, pulling a cube from its pouch and tossing it to Alex playfully. She insisted he take the seat. A semicircle of watchers gathered as he slotted the cube. Someone from the kitchen handed out cups of coffee, and when everyone was settled, Alex touched the PLAY toggle.

A man in uniform appeared before them, seated at a desk. His hair had grown out, softening somewhat those harsh, scarred features. Glenn Spivey looked out at them as if in real time. He even seemed to track his audience with his eyes.

“Well, Lustig,” the colonel began. “It seems people keep underestimating you. I’ll never do it again.” He lifted both hands. “You win. No more delays. The president met with our alliance partners. Tonight they hand over control of all resonators to the new tribunal—”

The technicians behind Alex clapped and sighed in relief. After all these wearing months, a heavy weight seemed lifted.

“ — gathering in Iceland, headed by Professor Jaime Jordelian. I think you know him.”

Alex nodded. As a physicist, Jordelian was stodgy and overly meticulous. But those could be good traits in such a role.

“The committee hasn’t formally met, but Jordelian urgently asked that you attend the opening session. He wants you in operational charge of all resonators for an initial period of six months or so. They also want you center stage for the first news conference. If you’ve been watching the Net, you know what an all-day session that will be! The hypersonic packet that brought Dr. Morgan has orders to wait at Hanga Roa for your convenience.”

“Lucky bastard,” one of the Kiwis muttered in mock envy. “Iceland in winter. Dress warm, tohunga.” Alex broke into a grin. “Hey, what about me?” June complained. “You take my transport and I’m stuck here!” The others made sounds of mock sympathy.

Spivey’s image paused. He cleared his throat and leaned forward a little.

“I won’t pretend we haven’t been surprised by events these last few weeks, doctor. I thought we could finish our experiments long before word leaked out. But things didn’t go according to plan.

“It wasn’t just your little demonstration, yesterday, which nearly everyone in the Western Hemisphere got to witness by naked eye. Even neglecting that, there were just too many bright people out there with their own instruments and souped-up ferret programs.” He shrugged. “I guess we should have known better.

“What really disturbs me, though, is what I hear people saying about our intentions. Despite all the innuendo, you must believe I’m no screaming jingoist. I mean, honestly, could I have persuaded so many decent men and women — not just Yanks and Canadians, bat Kiwis and Indonesians and others — to take part if our sole purpose was to invent some sort of super doomsday weapon? The idea’s absurd.

“I now see I should have confided in you. My mistake, taking you for a narrowly focused intellectual. Instead, I found myself outfought by a warrior, in the larger sense of the word.” He smiled ruefully. “So much for the accuracy of our dossiers.”

Alex sensed the others’ silent regard. Eyes flicked in his direction. He felt unnerved by all this talk centering on him personally.

“So, you might ask, what was our motive?” Spivey sighed. “What could any honest person’s goal be, these days? What else could ever matter as much as saving the world?

“Surely you’ve seen those economic-ecological projections everyone plays with on the Net? Well, Washington’s had a really excellent trends-analysis program for two decades now, but the results were just too appalling to release. We even managed to discredit the inevitable leaks, to prevent widespread discouragement and nihilism.

“Put simply, calculations show our present stable situation lasting maybe another generation, tops. Then we all go straight to hell. Oblivion. The only way out seemed to demand drastic sacrifice… draconian population control measures combined with major and immediate cuts in standard of living. And psych profiles showed the voters utterly rejecting such measures, especially if the outcome would at best only help their great-grandkids.

“Then you came along, Lustig, to show that our projection missed some critical information… like the little item that our world is under attack by aliens!

“More important, you showed how new, completely unexpected levers might be applied to the physical world. New ways of exerting energy. New dangers to frighten us and new possibilities to dazzle. In another age, these powers would have been seized by bold men and used for better or worse, like TwenCen’s flirtation with the atom.

“But we’re growing up… that’s the popular phrase, isn’t it? We know new technologies must be watched carefully. I’m not totally against the science tribunals. Who could be?

“Tell me, though, Lustig, what do you think the new committee will do when they take authority over the new science of gazerdynamics?”

Obviously, the question was rhetorical. Alex already saw the colonel’s point.

“Except for one or two small research sites, they’ll slap on a complete ban, with fierce inspections to make sure nobody else emits even a single graviton! They’ll let you keep vigil on Beta, but outlaw any other gazer use that hasn’t already been tested to death. Oh sure, that’ll prevent chaos. I agree the technology has to be monitored. But can you see why we wanted to delay it for a while?”

Spivey pressed both hands on his desk. “We hoped to finish developing gazer-based launch systems, first! If they were already proven safe and effective, the tribunes couldn’t ban them entirely. We’d save something precious and wonderful… perhaps even a way out of the doomsday trap.”

Alex exhaled a sigh. Teresa should hear this. She despised Spivey. And yet he turned out to be as much a believer as she. Apparently the infection went all the way to the pinnacles of power.

“Our projections say resource depletion is going to kill human civilization deader than triceratops — this poor planet’s gifts have been so badly squandered. But everything changes if you include space! Melt down just one of the millions of small asteroids out there, and you get all the world’s steel needs for an entire decade, plus enough gold, silver, and platinum to finance rebuilding a dozen cities!

“It’s all out there, Lustig, but we’re stuck here at the bottom of Earth’s gravity well. It’s so expensive to haul out the tools needed to begin harnessing those assets…

“Then came your gazer thing… Good God, Lustig, have you any idea what you did yesterday? Throwing megatons of ice to the moon?” A vein pulsed in Spivey’s temple. “If you’d landed that berg just ten percent slower, there d have been water enough to feed and bathe and make productive a colony of hundreds! We could be mining lunar titanium and helium-3 inside a year! We could…”

Spivey paused for breath.

“A few years ago I talked several space powers into backing cavitronics research in orbit, to look for something like what you found by goddam accident! But we were thinking millions of times too small. Please forgive my obvious jealousy…”

Someone behind Alex muttered, “Jesus Christ!” He turned to see Teresa Tikhana standing behind him. Her face was pale, and Alex thought he knew why. So her husband hadn’t worked on weapons research after all. He had just been trying, in his own way, to help save the world.

There would be some poignant satisfaction for her in that, but also bitterness, and the memory that they had not parted in harmony. Alex reached back and took her hand, which trembled, then squeezed his tightly in return.

“… I guess what I’m asking is that you use your influence with the tribunal — and it will be substantial — to keep some effort going into launch systems. At least get them to let you throw more ice!”

Spivey leaned even closer to the camera.

“After all, it’s not enough just to neutralize some paranoid aliens’ damned berserker device. What’s the point, if it all goes into a toxic-dumpit anyway?

“ But this thing could be the key to saving everything, the ecology… ”

Alex was rapt, mesmerized by the man’s unexpected intensity, and he felt Teresa’s flushed emotion as well. So they both flinched in reflex surprise when somebody behind them let out a blood-chilling scream.

“Give that back!”

Everyone turned, and Alex blinked to see June Morgan waging an uneven struggle with… Pedro Manella! The blonde woman hauled at her briefcase, which the Aztlan reporter clutched in one meaty hand, fending her off with the other. When she kicked him, Pedro winced but gave no ground. Meanwhile, Colonel Spivey droned on.

“… creating the very wealth that makes for generosity, and incidentally giving us the stars…”

Alex stood up. “Manella! What are you doing!”

“He’s stealing my valise!” June yelled. “He wants my data so he can scoop tonight’s presidential speech!”

Alex sighed. That sounded like Manella, all right. “Pedro,” he began. “You’ve already got an inside story any reporter would die for—”

Manella interrupted. “Lustig, you better have a—” He stopped with a gulp as June swiveled full circle to elbow him sharply below the sternum, then stamped on his foot and snatched the briefcase during her follow-through. But then, instead of rejoining the others, she spun about and ran away!

“S-stop her!” Pedro gasped. Something in his alarmed voice turned Alex’s heart cold. June held the valise in front of her, sprinting toward the towering resonator. “A bomb?” Teresa blurted, while Alex thought, But they checked for bombs!

At another level he simply couldn’t believe this was happening. June?

She leaped the railing surrounding the massive resonator, ducked under the snatching arm of a Maori security man, and launched herself toward the gleaming cylinder. At the final instant, another guard seized her waist, but June’s expression said it was already too late. People dove for cover as she yanked a hidden lever near the handle.

Alex winced, bracing for a sledgehammer blow…

But nothing happened!

In the stunned silence, Glenn Spivey’s voice rambled on.

“… so with this message I’m sending a library of all the surface-coupling coefficients we’ve collected. Naturally, you’re ahead of us in most ways, but we’ve learned a few tricks too…”

June’s face flashed from triumph to astonishment to rage. She cursed, pounding the valise until it was dragged from her hands and hustled outside by some brave and very fleet security men. It was Pedro, then, who finally wrestled her away from the resonator and forced her into a chair. Alex switched off the sound of the colonel’s words, which now, suddenly, seemed mockingly irrelevant.

“So this was all a hoax, June? Spivey holds our attention while you sabotage the thumper?” His pulse pounded. To be deceived by the military man’s apparent sincerity was nothing next to the treachery of this woman he thought he knew.

“Oh Alex, you’re such a fool!” June laughed breathlessly and with a note of shrill overcompensation. “You can be sweet and I like you a lot. But how did you ever get to be so gullible?”

“Shut up,” Teresa said evenly, and though her tone was businesslike, June clearly saw dark threat in Teresa’s eyes. She shut up. They all waited silently for the security team to report. It seemed better to let adrenaline stop drumming in their ears before dealing with this unexpected enormity.

Joey came back shortly, bowing his head in apology. “No bomb after all, tohunga. It’s a liquid-suspension catalyst — a simple nanotech corrosion promoter — probably tailored to wreck the thumper’s piezogravitic characteristics. The stuff was supposed to spray when she pulled the lever, but the holes had been squished shut, so nothing came out. A lucky break. Lucky our reporter friend’s so strong.” Joey gestured toward Manella, who blinked in apparent surprise.

“His hand print covers the holes,” Joey explained. “Broke the hinge, too. Don’t nobody challenge that guy to a wrestling match.”

June shrugged when they all looked at her. “I got the idea from those scrubber enzymes Teresa keeps asking for, to clean her old shuttle. Your guards grew used to me bringing chemicals in little packages. Anyway, just a few drops would put you out of business. It takes days to grow a new resonator — all the time my employers needed.”

“You’re not trying to hold back much, are you?” Teresa asked.

“Why should I? If they don’t get my success code soon, they’ll assume I failed and shut you down by other means… a lot more violent than I tried to use! That’s why I volunteered to do this. You’re my friends. I don’t want you hurt.”

The murmuring techs obviously thought her statement bitterly ironic. And yet, at one level Alex believed her. Maybe I have to believe someone I’ve made love to cares about me… even if she turns betrayer for other reasons.

“They agreed to let me say this much if I failed,” June went on intensely. “To convince you to give up. Please, Alex, everybody, take my word for it. You’ve no idea who you’re up against!”

Someone brought a chair for Alex. He knew he must look drawn and unsteady, but going passive would be a mistake right now. He remained standing.

“What’s your success code? How would you tell them you’d succeeded?”

“You were planning to phone Spivey after hearing his pitch, no? I was to slip in a few words, to be overheard by my contact there—”

“What? You mean Spivey’s not your real boss?”

June’s eyes flicked away before returning to meet his. “What do you mean?” she asked a little too quickly. “Of course he’s…”

“Wait,” Pedro Manella interrupted. “You’re right, Alex. Something’s fishy.” He moved closer to glower over June. “What did you mean when you said, ‘You have no idea who you’re up against’? You weren’t just speaking figuratively, were you? I think you meant it quite literally.”

June attempted nonchalance. “Did I?”

Pedro rubbed his hands. “I spent two months interviewing that kidnapper-torturer in London. You know, the one who called himself the ‘father confessor of Knightsbridge’? I learned a lot about persuasion techniques, writing that book. Does anyone have any bamboo shoots? Or we’ll make do with what’s in the kitchen.”

June laughed contemptuously. “You wouldn’t dare.” But her uncertainty grew apparent when” she met Manella’s eyes.

“What do you mean, Pedro?” Teresa asked. “You think Spivey was telling the truth? That he’s as much a dupe as — as we’ve been?”

Alex appreciated her use of the plural. Of course, he deserved singling out as paramount dupe.

“You’re the astronaut, Captain,” Manella answered. “Did the colonel’s purported passion for new launch systems make sense? Given what you know about him?”

Teresa nodded grudgingly. “Y-e-e-s. Of course, maybe I want to believe. It makes Jason’s last work more noble. It means our leaders aren’t just TwenCen-style, nationalist assholes, but were trying a plan, however misguided—” She shook her head. “Glenn sounded sincere. But I just can’t say.”

“Well, there’s something else a lot less subjective, and that’s the question of why? What motive could Spivey and his bosses have to put this site out of business, if everything comes under international jurisdiction tonight anyway?”

“There’s only one reason possible,” Alex answered. “If taking us out was part of a scheme to stop those controls. Spivey admitted he didn’t want them.”

Teresa shook her head again. “No! He said he wanted them delayed, till gazer space launching was proven. But remember, he accepted the principle of long-term supervision.” Her brow furrowed. “Alex, none of this makes sense!”

He agreed. “What could anyone gain by causing turmoil now? If the president’s speech doesn’t disclose all, the Net will explode.”

“Not just the Net,” Manella added. “There will be chaos, strikes… and a gravity laser arms race. Poor nations and major corporations will blow city blocks out of their rivals’ capitals, or set off earthquakes or—” He shook his head. “Who on Earth could profit from such a situation?”

“Not Glenn Spivey,” Teresa affirmed, now with complete certainty.

“Nor any of the space powers,” Alex put in.

One of the techs asked, “Who does that leave, then?” They regarded June Morgan, who scanned the circle of nervous faces and sighed. “You’re all so smart, so modern. You’ve got your info-plaques and percomps and loyal little ferret programs to go fetch data for you. But what information? Only what’s in the Net, my dears.”

Alex frowned. “What are you talking about?”

She glanced at her watch, nervously. “Look, I was supposed to report in well before this. At any moment, my — masters — will know I’ve failed, and move to settle things more dramatically. Please, Alex. Let me finish my job and call them—”

She was interrupted by a sudden, blaring alarm from one of the consoles. A technician rushed over to read its display. “I’m getting hunt resonance from two — no, three — large thumpers… in the Sahara, Canada, and somewhere in Siberia!”

June stood up, pulling when a guard grabbed her arm. “Too late. They must be getting nervous. Alex please, get everybody out of here!”

Teresa pushed close to the blond woman. “Who do you mean, they? I say we let Pedro do it his way…” She glanced to one side, but Alex was no longer there.

“Give me a projected resonance series for that combination!” he demanded, throwing himself into his work seat, slipping the subvocal device over his head. “Zoom onto the mantle-core boundary under Beta. Show me any likely power threads.”

“Putting it on now, tohunga.”

The recorded message had frozen on its last frame — depicting a hopeful-looking Glenn Spivey smiling into the camera. That image now vanished, replaced by the familiar cutaway Earth, resplendent in fiery complexity. From three northern points at its surface, pulsing columns of light thrust inward toward a rendezvous far below. The dot where they converged wavered as the beams kept sliding off each other.

“I’ve never seen those sites before,” one Tangoparu scientist said. But another commented, “I… think I might’ve. A couple of quick pulses yesterday, just after we hit the glacier. But the traces looked like those strange surface echoes we’ve been getting, so I assumed…”

To a trained eye, the intruder beams could be seen hunting for alignment in the energized, field-rich lower mantle. The Beta singularity, still orbiting through the enigmatic electricity of those zones, obliged by serving as their mirror, focusing the combined effort. The purple dot shimmered.

“They’re less experienced,” somebody near Alex muttered. “But they know what they’re doing.”

“Extrapolating now… Gaia!” The first tech cried out. “The amplified beam’s going to come this way!”

Alex was too busy to turn his head, which would throw off the subvocal anyway. Using the delicate input device was a lot like running full tilt along a tightrope. Ironically, it was easier to order up a simulated image of his face than to use his own voice to shout a warning.

“Rip!” the imitation self cried out as he worked. “Get everyone but the controllers out of here. Take them west, you hear? West!”

Someone else might have had some romantic impulse to argue, but not Teresa. She’d evaluate the situation, decide there was little she could do here to help, and obey without hesitation. Sure enough, Alex heard her voice of command driving the others outside leaving his truncated team to work in relative peace.

The peace of a battlefield. Alex sensed the big, cylindrical resonator swing about at his command and begin throbbing its own contribution to a struggle being joined thousands of kilometers below. There followed something like a gravitational fencing match — his own beam countering and parrying the opposing three as they attempted to unite. Bouncing off Beta’s sparkling mirror, they passed through threadlike filigrees of transient superconductivity, which of late had taken on new orders of intricacy, rising from the core boundary in gauzy loops and splendid, shimmering bows.

Some time ago, Alex had likened the loops to “prominences” — those arcs of plasma one saw along the sun’s limb during an eclipse, which drove fierce currents from the star’s surface into space. Similar laws applied near the Earth’s core, though on vastly different scales. The comparison would have been interesting to contemplate if he weren’t busy fighting to save their lives.

Thousands of the mysterious strands vibrated as fingers of tuned gravity plucked them, stimulating the release of pent-up energy. Some rays scattered off Beta, sending augmented flashes spiraling randomly. There was no time to wonder how his opponents had learned to do this so quickly, or even who they were. Alex was too busy fending off their beams, preventing them from combining to create something coherent and cohesive and lethal.

Alex watched more and more shimmering filaments pulsate in time to his rhythms. Other flashes sparkled to the melodies of his unknown foes. Each flicker represented some great expanse of semimolten rock, millions of tons altering state at the whim of entities far above.

“We can’t hold them much longer!” One of the techs cried out.

“Wait! We have to work together,” Alex urged. “What if—”

He stopped talking abruptly as ripples flowed across the display, and the subvocal sent his amplified speech throbbing deep into the Earth’s interior. Alex switched to communicating with slight tremors in his larynx, letting the machine transmit a message to the others.

Take a look at this! He urged, and caused the Easter Island resonator to suddenly draw back from the acherontic struggle.

His opponents’ beams floundered in the abrupt lack of resistance, momentarily discomfited in overcompensation. Then, as if unable to believe the way was now clear, the three columns came together again tentatively.

Everybody else… out! He commanded. I’ll take it from here!

He heard chairs squeak and topple as his assistants took him at his word. Footsteps scrambled for the door. “Don’t wait too long, Alex!” someone shouted. But his attention was already focused as it never had been before. The enemy beams touched Beta, hunted, and at last found their resonance.

At that same moment, though, Alex felt a strange, fey oneness with the monster singularity. No matter how much the enemy must have learned — no doubt by snooping his files — he still knew Beta better than any living man!

If I wait till the very last millisecond…

Of course no human could control the beam with such fineness. Not in real time. So he chose his counterstroke in advance and delegated a program to act on his behalf. There was no chance to double-check the code.

Go! He unleashed his surrogate warrior at the last possible moment. Behind him, the resonator seemed to yowl an angry, almost feline battle cry.

It was already too late to flee. Alex quashed the adrenaline rush — a reaction inherited from ancient days when his ancestors used to seek out danger with their own eyes, meeting it with the power of their own limbs and their own tenacious wills. The last of these, at least, was valid still. He forced himself to wait calmly through the final fractions of a second, as fate came bulling toward him from the bowels of the Earth.

• EXOSPHERE

They stopped running a kilometer or so to the west, but not because it was safe. No amount of distance offered protection against what might now be hurtling their way.

No, they halted because sedentary intellectuals could only run so far. Teresa took some satisfaction watching June Morgan pant, pale and winded. The woman was in pathetic shape. Serves her right, she thought, rationing herself a small dollop of cattiness. Since she was in charge, Teresa counted heads and quickly came up short.

Manella. Damn! She turned to the Maori security chief, “Keep everyone here, Joey. I’m going after Pedro. The jerk’s probably recording it all for posterity!”

She finished the thought as she ran downhill. Recording what it’s like to be at ground zero. The only ones to view his tape may be ETs at some distant star!

Halfway to the resonator building, she saw a dozen men and women suddenly spill into the late-afternoon sunlight, tripping and scrambling as they fled her way. Good. Alex shouldn’t have stayed in the first place.

Then she realized that neither Pedro nor Alex was among them. “Shit!”

Now she sprinted, rushing past the fleeing technicians so quickly they seemed to blur. But then, the blurring wasn’t entirely an effect of motion. A tingling in her eyeballs and sinuses barely preceded a sharp ringing in her ears, which grew until church carillons seemed to boom around her. Even the dry grass bent and swayed to the pealing notes. Her feet danced of their own accord across the shifting surface.

The next thing Teresa knew, she had tumbled to the ground and was having a terrible time figuring out which way was up. It felt as if the earth had dropped away beneath her. Strong winds whipped at her clothes.

Is it my turn to go, then? The way Jason did?

Maybe I can stay conscious long enough to see the stars. To see my ultimate trajectory before I pass out.

She drew a deep breath, preparing to meet the sky.

But then the whirling seemed to settle. Teresa felt sharp-stemmed blades of grass cut her fingers as she clutched the stony soil. Her next hasty breath felt no thinner. Lifting her head despite a roaring vertigo, she saw a tipped slope, a patch of sea… and a great horrible face!

One of the giant statues, she realized in an instant. She’d fallen near some of the aboriginal monuments. More monoliths came into view as her visual distortions shifted from focus over to color.

Now everything was clear, crisp, but tinted in a flux of unaccustomed hues — eerie shades that surged and rippled across a much enlarged spectrum. Somehow, Teresa knew she must be seeing directly in the infrared, or ultraviolet, or other weird bands never meant for human eyes. The effect encouraged illusions… that the row of statues were trembling, shaking, like ancient sleeping gods answering an Olympian alarm.

It was no illusion! Four of the massive sculptures wrenched free of their platform. Soot blew away as they vibrated free of centuries’ accumulated dross. Gleaming now, they rotated toward her.

Teresa shivered, remembering Alex’s description of his own fey insight under a lightning storm, when he first realized that other hands than human might have crafted Beta’s malign intricacy. Could that be it? she wondered. Could June be working for our alien enemies? If they’re here in person, what chance did we ever have?

In the bizarre pulse-bunching that characterized some gazer beams, the giant statues seemed to pause, circling round a common center. But even as they did a languid dance, she sensed another, more powerful beat gathering below. Teresa tried to move her arms and legs to flee, but sud-denly she was pressed to the ground as if by a giant’s hand. Tides coursed her innards, pressing her liver against her pounding heart. A cry escaped her open mouth like a soul prying its way out.

That force passed just before she thought she might burst. Teresa blinked through nausea and saw that the statues had disappeared. Into their hasty absence, a cyclone of angry air blew, just as the gravitational pulse tail left her abruptly with no weight at all.

The familiar sensation might have felt pleasantly like spaceflight, but she quickly saw where the wind was tossing her… toward a deep cavity where the stony gods had formerly stood! She clawed at the dirt and grass, grabbing at any purchase as a midget hurricane dragged her toward the pit — deep and gleamingly oval. Her feet passed over empty space, then her legs, her hips. Desperately she cried out as her fingers lost contact…

Suddenly she flapped like a flag in the gale — but did not fall. At the last moment, one outstretched arm had caught on something.

Or something had caught her! Twisting, she saw a beefy hand clamped round her wrist. The hand led to an arm and massive shoulders… merging with the head and face of Pedro Manella.

The storm ended as quickly as it had started. Aerodynamic lift vanished like a bed dropping out from under her, releasing her to fall in a horrible arc. The glass-smooth wall struck her a blow, setting off dazzling waves of pain.

Consciousness wavered, but the insults didn’t end there. Her arm was yanked again and again, in rhythmic heaves that hurt like hell as she felt herself drawn upward, slowly upward, to the precipice, over the glazed, cutting edge, and then finally onto the rough basalt-gravel surface of Rapa Nui.

At last, somehow, she and Pedro lay next to each other, gasping in exhaustion.

“I… saw Lustig succeed… diverting their beam,” Manella explained. “He couldn’t push it all the way to sea… so I came outside to watch.

“Then I saw you falling…”

Teresa touched the big reporter’s arm. He didn’t have to explain further. “So—” She inhaled deeply a few more times, blinking away blurriness. “So Alex did it.”

Then, with more enthusiasm, she rolled over onto her stomach and laughed, hitting the ground. “He did it!” Pedro commented. “Yeah. I’m sure sorry—” Teresa sat up. “Sorry! What are you sorry about?” Manella stared at the pit he’d just pulled her from. “That wind tore off my True-Vu. I wonder how far down this thing…” He shook his head and turned to face her. “But no. What I meant was that I’m sorry for the other guys. They’re in for a rough time, I bet, now that it’s Lustig’s turn to fight back.”

Teresa glanced toward the resonator building where Alex labored on all alone. Just uphill though, she saw a cascade of Tangoparu engineers, running to rejoin their tohunga, looking mortified at having left his side during a battle. Teresa doubted it would ever happen again.

In the rear, security guards escorted June Morgan, who stared about in mute surprise, much to Teresa’s satisfaction. “Come on, Pedro,” she told the big reporter, offering her hand. “You can search for your recorder later. First let’s see if we can be of any use.”

• HOLOSPHERE

As time passed, it was only the outline — the warp and weft — that remained hers alone. As for the rest, it be-came a collage, a synthesis of many contributions. Though Jen’s daring model of the essential processes of thought grew more complicated with each added ele-ment, most of its newest pieces now came bobbing out of the capacious well of the Net itself. Some bits were brought home by her ferrets. But lately, the little software emissaries kept getting lost in the worried maelstrom surging through the world’s data hubs. The help she got now came mostly in real time, from real men and women — co-workers and colleagues who knew her access codes and had begun by merely eavesdropping on her work, but soon, intrigued, started offering suggestions as well.

Li Xieng of Shanghai had been first to speak up — after watching her model build for hours before making his presence known. Apologetically, he pointed out a flaw that would have stymied her if left uncorrected. Fortunately, he had a convenient solution ready at hand.

Old Russum of the University of Prague logged in next with a recommendation, and then Pauline Cockerel in London. After that, rumors spread with the eager pace of electrons, drawing attention from specialists across the globe. Helpful suggestions began arriving faster than Jen could scan them, so she deputized to surrogates — both living and simulated — the job of culling wheat from chaff.

Of course this was no more than a ripple in the tide of anxious comment right now sweeping the Net. Jen knew she and the others were being self-indulgent. Perhaps they oughtn’t to be concentrating so single-mindedly on an abstract model while all channels crackled with angst over matters of planetary survival. They should pay attention to the pronouncements of presidents and general secretaries and all the multichanneled pundits.

And yet, moments like this came so seldom in science. Mostly, a researcher’s work was a daily grind no less than the toil of a baker or grocer. Now and then though, something glorious happened — a paradigm shift, or theoretical revolution. Jen and the others were caught in the momentum of creative breakthrough. No one knew how long the burst of synthesis would last, but for now the whole was far greater than the sum of its parts.

… PRECONSCIOUS CULLING OF SEMI-RANDOM MEMORY ASSOCIATIONS cannot be too strict, Li Xieng commented in a line of bright letters to her upper left, after all, what would CONSCIOUSNESS BE WITHOUT THOSE SUDDEN LITTLE MEMORIES AND IMPULSES, APPARENTLY SO RANDOM, BUT…

Li’s comment wasn’t particularly important in itself. But the software bundle accompanying them was. A quick simulation test showed it wouldn’t hurt the big model, and just might add to its overall flexibility. So she spliced it to the growing whole and moved on.

A contribution from one of the Bell Labs arrived, bearing Pauline Cockerel’s chop of approval. Jen was about to evaluate it for herself when a sudden swirl of garish color drew her attention to the screen on the far left.

It was that bloody tiger again! Jen couldn’t figure out what the thing represented or why it persisted so. Or why it looked more battle worn each time she saw it. A while ago she had assigned the symbol to serve as an icon for her protection-sieve program, guarding this computer nexus from any outsiders trying to interfere without permission. But by now her data domain was so much larger, it seemed in retrospect a trivial precaution.

The tiger really was looking rather the worse for wear. It’s fur even smoked along one flank, as if seared by some terrible flame. Bleeding wounds seemed to trace the recent work of raking talons. And yet it rumbled defiantly, turning now and then to glare at something lurking just off screen.

The metaphorical meaning struck Jen even in her distracted state. Somewhere, out in the pseudoreality of the Net, something or someone was trying to get in, and it wasn’t one of her colleagues.

Who, then? Or what?

As if answering her query, the tiger raised a paw. Impaled on one claw shimmered what looked like a glistening lizard’s scale…

Jen shook her head. She hadn’t time for trivialities. Her model kept growing, building impetus. It took all her attention now just to ride along, guiding here, adjusting there…

“ — have to ask you to return the memory and processors you’ve borrowed, Dr. Wolling. Do you read me? This is a crisis! We’ve heard from Alex that—”

The new voice was Kenda, yammering by intercom. Irritably, she wiped the circuit. Of all times for that bloody man to interrupt! Jen had far too little computer memory as it was! She’d even taken advantage of the Ndebele and appropriated space in Kuwenezi Canton’s city computers. Thank heavens it was nighttime outside. By morning it might all be finished, before she had to deal with swarms of irate administrators.

Somewhere in the real world, she vaguely heard Kenda and his crew shouting at each other, struggling to bring their big resonator on line with abrupt speed. But Jen was barely of the real world anymore. Through her subvocal and with delicate finger controls, she created hungry little programs — surrogates designed on the spur of the moment to go forth and get more memory, wherever it could be found, commandeering it on any pretext and hang the ultimate expense! Any storage and computing charges would be recouped a million times over if this worked!

This was no job for mere ferrets or hounds. She needed something tenacious that wouldn’t take no for an answer. So the new surrogates she pictured as tiny versions of herself, and laughed at the image her computer drew from memory — an old book-jacket photo depicting her in an earth-colored sari at some Gaian ritual, wearing a smile of maternally patient, absolute determination.

The self-icons were intimidating, all right. A crowd of unstoppable old ladies gathered in the central holo near the main cluster, ready to go forth and find more room for the growing model.

Then, just as she was about to unleash them, the bottom fell out.

If there really had been such a thing as direct mind-to-machine linkage, Jen might have died at that moment. Even connected by mere holo screens and subvocal, she felt it as a physical blow. In the span of three heartbeats, everything in her console was sucked out and sent streaming along high-rate data lines toward… heaven only knew where!

Her breath caught as she watched in utter dismay. Her surrogates, her subroutines, her colleagues’ comments — the whole damned model poured away like bath water down a thirsty drain! The intricate, interlaced patterns that only moments ago had surrounded her now whirled and vanished into an awful hole.

Nearly last to go was her tiger. Yowling in complaint, it dug in its claws, laying phosphor trails across one screen after another as it was dragged toward the abyss.

From the far left, another simulated creature entered into view as the tiger left — this one larger and even more stunningly formidable. In an instant’s numb understanding Jen knew this to be the software entity her cat had been fighting — a thing that had gotten in at last, only to be swept along with everything else into the void. The fearsome dragon hissed and roared at her, waving a glittering scorpion’s tail as that bizarre suction hauled it, too, into oblivion.

Jen blinked. In a half moment it was over. She punched reset keys, and instantly her displays came alight again, but not a shred of her own work remained. Instead there shone great glowing swathes of the Earth’s interior — the cutaway view used by the resonator team.

So this was no power failure. It hadn’t struck the Tangoparu group’s programs, only hers!

“Kenda!” she screamed. “What have you done!”

Memory. She vaguely recalled Kenda demanding back the computer caches she’d borrowed. Why, the awful man must have taken it on himself to seize it, sending her model straight to Hades in the process!

“You bastard, Kenda. When I get my hands on you…”

For the first time in hours she drew her eyes away from the screens and peered around the console toward where the others kept watch over mere magma and mantle, crust and core. The big resonator glistened, suspended in its friction-less bearings. Lights shone at all the other stations.

But there was no one in sight. No living human being.

“Kenda?… Jimmy?… Anybody?” She swept off the subvocal and was suddenly immersed in real sound again. Foremost came a loud whoop-whoop she recalled hearing once before, back when she and the Kiwis had first set up in these abandoned mines, when Kenda had insisted on running all those bloody drills.

The evacuation alarm.

She found it hard to think, having been ripped so untimely out of a deep and glorious meditative state. Jen mourned her beautiful model. So it was only with passing seconds that she managed to concentrate on more immedi-ate concerns… like why Kenda and the others had departed so abruptly.

Everything looked peaceful enough. She smelled no smoke…

Jen’s gaze roved the empty chamber, stopping at last on the holo in front of her — now depicting Earth’s innards rife with glowing traceries and arcane symbols. In another moment she understood why the others had run away.

A gazer pulse packet… heading this way. Seconds ticked down inevitability with four nines’ probability.

Even in her distracted state, Jen had had enough experience watching Kenda’s operation to perceive how three previously unknown resonators had banded together, taking the Kiwis by surprise, overcoming their belated resistance. It didn’t take many blowups to see where the gargantuan output would strike once whoever-it-was found just the right resonance.

In fact, gravity waves were coursing through this space even as she sat here! They weren’t coupling with ordinary surface matter yet — only a few frequencies and impedances did that. But soon a matching would be found. No wonder Kenda and the others had departed!

Jen watched loops and spires flicker three thousand kilometers below, where minerals and metals mixed and separated at the planet’s most violent interface. In the holo tank, great molten-electric prominences took on gauzy textures. Threads of ephemeral superconductivity throbbed and Beta’s brittle gleam waxed and waned in tempo to this arrogant human meddling.

Jen grunted at the irony. That’s where all my work went… Kenda must have taken everything in the computer and just poured it down the resonator all at once, in a vain attempt to stop them.

When that failed, he ordered everyone out.

She chuckled suddenly. Even a near miss by those unknown enemies should collapse these tottering mine shafts. Kenda and the others might escape in time, but it was clearly too late for her now.

I guess in all the panic, no one bothered with that irritating old woman in the corner, the one always making a nuisance of herself. See, Wolling? I told you bad habits can be fatal!

The resonator hummed, apparently still linked to all the furious activity below.

Well, I might as well get the best seat in the house, she thought, and picked up her subvocal again. Let’s see just what kind of a finish Mother has in store for me.

• BIOSPHERE

Nelson worried about the termites.

Specifically, for several days the hives inside the ark had been acting strangely. Instead of sending forth twisty files of workers in search of decaying organic matter, the insects scurried near their tapered mounds, frantically reinforcing them with fresh mud from countless tiny mandibles. It was the same on all levels of ark four. Nelson had reported first signs on Thursday, then had to wait for Dr. B’Keli’s scientists to analyze his samples. Finally, as he came on shift today, one of the departing day workers told him. “Termites, like fire ants, are very sensitive to electric fields,” the young woman entomologist told him. “They can feel variations you or I would never notice without instruments.

“Tomorrow we’ll go looking for a short circuit,” she added with a smile. “Want to come early and join us? I’m sure you’ll find it interesting.”

Interesting might be one word for it. She was young, pretty, and Nelson felt suddenly awkward. “Uh, maybe,” he answered, imaginatively.

During his nightly rounds with Shig and Nell, he kept wondering about that look in her eyes. Looks can deceive, of course, even when interpreted truly. Still, he decided he would come in early tomorrow.

One thing he knew the lady entomologist was wrong about though — humans could detect whatever was affecting the insects. He felt it in his soles and in prickled hairs at the back of his neck. And Shig walked across the savannah enclosure as if each crackling grass stem gave off sparks. Finally, Nelson had to carry the youngster so Nell could get some rest.

There was a dusty odor in the air, even after they entered the rain forest biosphere. A glance through the windows showed desert hazes carried by the dry north wind. “Close all external air ducts,” he commanded the ever-listening computers, and his ears popped as the system went over to full recirculation. That was what an enclosed ecosystem was all about anyway. Nelson thought it almost cheating to let ark four purge some of its wastes outside and take in occasional doses of water and air.

“Increase hourly mist ten percent, upper canopy level,” he added, rubbing some leaves. He felt more comfortable using his “knack,” now that book learning was taking some of the edge off his ignorance. From a catwalk he looked across the branches of the miniforest, smelling rank aromas of fecundity and death. Heavy, interlaced branches bore rich humus layers on top, where whole communities of epiphytes lived out cycle after cycle, never touching the ground. Tangled vines sheltered crawling, slithering things whose nocturnal habits made Nelson their only regular human contact.

Most probably preferred it that way. This habitat recreated a bit of the long-lost jungles of Madagascar, where whole orders of primates had once dwelled in splendid isolation, until canoes from the distant east only a few scant centuries ago brought the first human invasion. In that brief time those forests vanished, along with so many of man’s strange cousins — the lemurs and other prosimians. Some “lost” species still lived, barely, in enclaves like this one, sheltered in care by the descendants of ax wielders, forest slashers, and road builders.

The contrast seemed so great, one might think two distinct species had invented the chain saw and the survival ark. But then. Nelson thought, even in ancient times, there was Noah.

A pair of eyes much too large for daylight blinked at Nelson as he wandered by. History is so strange. Once you start really feeling for people long ago, it’s like a drug. You can’t stop thinking about it.

He remembered his epiphany on that fateful day in the baboon enclosure — eons ago — when he first realized that a life without others to care for wasn’t worth living. That same afternoon he had also glimpsed something else… what the struggle for survival must have been like for men and women during most of the ages of humankind.

Nelson stopped where the catwalk neared a bank of sloping glass-crystal. Beyond the ark’s perimeter, the haze-shrouded Kuwenezi foothills shone under an opal moon. It was a beautiful night, in a sere, parched sort of way. His modern mind could look across the expanse with little emotion but aesthetic appreciation… or maybe sadness over the land’s unstoppable deterioration.

But for most of the lifespan of his race, the night must have been more intense — a time of lurking shadows and unseen, mortal dangers — even with the companionship of fire and long after Neolithic hunters had become the most fearsome creatures around. Nelson thought he understood why.

Poor Homo sapiens, doomed to die.

That much people shared with other beasts. But with mortality early humans acquired the added burden of a wild, untamed, magnificent new brain, an organ offering skill and planning by day, but also capable of crafting demons just beyond the flickering firelight, enabling you to imagine in detail tomorrow’s hunt or the next day’s injury or your neighbor’s secret deceit. A mind capable of knowing death… of helplessly watching its conquest over a comrade’s courage, over a wife’s withered youth, over a babe’s never-to-be-known passion… and seeing in those moments the spoor of a foe worse than any lion. The last implacable, undefeated enemy.

What do you get when you mix utter ignorance and a mind able to ask, “Why”? Early human societies grasped at so many superstitions, pagan hierarchies, and countless bizarre notions about the world. Some folkways were harmless, even pragmatic and wise. Others were passed on as fierce “truth”… because not to believe fiercely opened the way to something far worse than error… uncertainty.

Nelson felt a poignant sadness for his ancestors — generation after generation of women and men, each filled with a sense of self-importance as great as his own. Thinking about them made his life seem as ephemeral as the rippling savannah grass, or the moonbeams illuminating both the wheat fields and his mind.

Back when humans roamed in small bands, when the forest seemed endless and night all-powerful, the common belief was that other creatures were thinkers too, whose spirits could be bribed with song and dance. But eventually, the scary woods were pushed back a little. Mud-brick temples glistened, and bibles began saying, “No, the world was made for man to use.” Soulless, animals were for his disposal.

Later still came a time when farmland and city surpassed the forest’s span. Moreover, nature’s laws were at last unfolding before curious minds. Principles like momentum kept the planets on course, and sages perceived the universe as a great clockwork. Humans, like other creatures, were mere gears, thrall to insuperable physics.

The pace of change sped. Forests grew rare and a fourth attitude was born. As Earth groaned under cities and plows, guilt became the newest theme. Instead of peer, or master, or cog in the cosmic machine, Homo sapiens’ best thinkers came to view their own species as a blight. The vilest thing that ever happened to a planet.

Nelson saw these unfolding worldviews the way his teacher had shown them to him, as a series of steps taken by a strange, adaptable animal. One gradually — even reluctantly — taking on powers it once thought reserved for gods.

Each Zeitgeist seemed appropriate to men and women of its time, and all of them were obsolete today. Now humanity was trying to save what it could, not because of guilt, but to survive.

Moonlight brought to mind the pretty young entomologist, who had smiled so provocatively while talking about termites and who then, before saying goodnight, had asked shyly to see his scars.

He recalled how his chest had expanded, how the blood in his veins warmed noticeably as he rolled up his sleeves to show her that the stories she had heard were true. That he, unlike other youths she knew, had actually fought for his life “in the wild” and won a victory, in honor.

Nelson remembered hoping, wanting. He wanted her, and in ways that over millions of years had fundamentally to do with procreation. Oh, sure, today that part of it was optional. It had better be, if humans were to control their numbers. But in the end, love and sex still had to do with the continuance of life, even if just in pretend.

The ancient game. Within him burned a desire to hold her, to lie down with her, to have her welcome his seed and choose him, above all other males, to share her investment in immortality.

And so it goes, on and on:

competition—

cooperation—

It was of some solace to Nelson that every one of his ancestors had wrestled with adolescence and gone on to find, however briefly, union with another. Presumably, if he had descendants, they too would do likewise.

But what for? They say it just happened… a fight of selfish genes. If so, though, why do we feel so much pain thinking there might not be a purpose?

In his own heart Nelson felt that strange mixture — hope and despair. A philosopher was what he was working to become. His teacher had said it was his true knack. But that didn’t help one damn bit against the fluxions of youth, its hormone rush, or the agony of being alive.

Worse, just when he most wanted to talk to Jen, she had abandoned him.

Don’t exaggerate, Nelson chided himself. It’s only been a few days. You’ve heard what’s happening on the net. fen’s probably up to her ears.

Still, he wished there were someone he could talk to about all this. Someone who had answers to offer, instead of endless questions.

If only—

Shig tugged at his leg and coughed a bark of dismay, looking up at him wide-eyed. Shaken from his thoughts, Nelson started to speak, then blinked and wondered what it was that suddenly felt wrong. He touched the metal railing nearby and felt an odd vibration. Soon a low rumble caused the grillwork beneath his feet to shudder, gradually working its way up to audibility. The sound reminded him of the low, infrasonic growls the elephants used in calling one another, and sure enough, several of the captive creatures began trumpeting in reply. The walkway began to shake.

Earthquake! he realized, and suddenly thought of all those people down in the old mine shaft. “Computer!” he shouted. “Connect me with Dr. Wolling in—”

Nelson cut short abruptly as a terrible wrenching seized his gut. He doubled over, moaning as the catwalk heaved violently. The baboons shrieked in panic, but he could do nothing for them. It was agony just to breathe and a labor of sheer will to keep from tearing at the metal plates, trying to bury himself under them.

• NOOSPHERE

Jimmy Suarez grabbed Dr. Kenda’s arm, halting the wheezing physicist’s flight across the dusty wheat field. “Look!” Jimmy cried, pointing in the direction they had been running. The technicians stumbled to a halt. Fleeing an expected calamity behind them, they looked up at another one taking place before them! Their goal had been the nearby bio-ark… the only shelter in sight once they finally tumbled out of that horrible, creaking elevator. Now they felt grateful not to have made it that far. For the pyramidal structure glistened, reflecting Luna’s pale light amidst coruscating showers that looked like an aurora brought to earth. Dripping sparkling droplets of electric fire, the edifice lifted out of the ground and rose into the sky, accelerating.

“Hot damn, the bastards missed,” Jimmy shouted hoarsely. “They missed!”

Dr. Kenda’s eyelids fluttered. “It’s not possible. The projection…” He shook his head. “They won’t miss next time.”

“But the thread domains below us won’t replenish right away!”

“If they’re behaving like they used to,” another operator cautioned. “They were changing so fast…”

“How?” Kenda interrupted, utterly perplexed. “You saw the simulation. How did they miss?”

“Only one way to find out,” Jimmy answered. “I’m going back. Anybody coming?”

Kenda turned away, motioning now to the east, where the lights of Kuwenezi Canton shone in the distance. When Jimmy tried to grab his arm the physicist tore free and shouted. “It’s over! Can’t you see that? The minute we come back on line, they’ll do to us what they did to that ark!”

“But they missed—”

Jimmy watched them go, feeling his resolve waver. He almost followed. But curiosity was a flame that could not be quenched, even by fear. It drove him to turn around, climb back into that awful, rusty elevator and descend once more into the dreadful old mine.

His head whirled. Why had that beam missed?

He found part of the answer when he saw who had taken over the resonator in their absence. Jimmy stared at what had become of Jennifer Wolling.

“My God!”

She had undergone a physical transformation… as if devils from some medieval torture squad had taken weeks to work her over on a rack. Stretched out of shape like an india rubber man — nevertheless, she was still alive.

Moreover, a strange light seemed to glisten from those eyes, blinking slowly, still conscious. Jimmy hurried to where she lay slumped against one wall. But as he reached to cut her link to the towering gravity antenna, she jerked her queerly elongated head, knocking his hand aside.

“Not yet …” came her hoarse whisper. Then she smiled and added, “… child.”

Jimmy had a queer feeling as he watched her die… that her consciousness seemed to seep away down pathways beyond his ken. Cradling her head, Jimmy listened to the resonator mumble low mysteries into the Earth.

•

At that same moment, Mark Randall was far too busy to stare. Too many bizarre things were happening, and only pure professionalism saved him from stupifaction.

“Elaine! Go to the bay and uncover the scopes. I’m turning the ship!”

“But we aren’t even in orbit yet,” his copilot complained. “You can’t open the doors this soon. It’s against regs.”

“Just do it!”

He felt Intrepid around him, still creaking as the shuttle shook off the hot stresses of insertion burn. Officially, they were still in the atmosphere. But that was just a technicality. Air molecules were sparse this high up. And anyway, there wasn’t a moment to lose.

Hands dancing across the controls, he shouted orders to the literal-minded, voice-actuated processors. Mark avoided looking through the forward windshield. It was far more important to unleash the ship’s automatic optics than to play tourist with his own eyes… even if it was a spectacle out there.

Things were flying off the planet. Bits of this and that too far away to discern clearly, but each dazzled as it passed beyond Earth’s shadow to bathe in Sol’s bare illumination. Astronaut’s intuition gave him some idea how distant some of the objects were, their spin rates, even their approximate size-albedo product.

Too big, he thought. They’re too damn big! First chunks of ice. Now this?

What in hell’s going on? Is the whole world breaking up?

When images began pouring in through Intrepid’s unleashed instruments, Mark began thinking that might be the very answer.

The sky lit up with the debris of battle.

•

Sepak Takraw didn’t have an astronaut’s professionalism to buffer him. He simply stared at the great hole where New Guinean hills had formerly sheltered a vast network of secret caves. Now a lake of pulverized dust lay in a broad oval between the slopes… dust so fine the faint breeze made undulating ripples in it, as if across water. Gusts wafted glittering tendrils into the air like spindrift.

Sepak wasn’t the only one staring. The soldiers who came running from their guard posts stopped to gape as well. For days they had played hide-and-seek, his jungle savvy against their high-tech sensors, they in blur-weave armor, he in loincloth and feathers. Now, however, they stood nearby like predator and prey stunned by the same sudden cataclysm, their quarrel instantly forgotten. Side by side he and a soldier gazed across the bowl, brimming with matter so fine it might have been the same primordial stuff that formed the sun and planets long ago.

“I surrender,” Sepak told the soldier numbly, dropping his bow and quiver. The commando looked at him, then, without blinking, unstrapped his own gleaming weapon and let it fall to earth beside Sepak’s. There seemed no need for words.

The wind picked up, wafting powder like fog to coat their clothes and faces, getting into their eyes, making them blink and tear. Sepak and the soldier backed up and then turned away. In retreat they kept glancing back nervously over their shoulders, unlike the forest animals, most of whom had already resumed their normal serious business of living, unburdened by anything as useless as memory.

•

Stan Goldman’s view of events wasn’t impeded by trees or jungle or hills. He and a few others shared a privileged vantage point several kilometers from the Greenland resonator. That was where the local commander had ordered “nonessential personnel” when Alex Lustig’s warning came. Those who fit aboard the encampment’s tractor and Malus crane fled even farther, putting as much distance as possible behind them.

Unable to prevail on the commander to let him stay, Stan insisted on at least departing on his own two feet. As well as NATO support staff, the walking exodus comprised men and women from the Hammer Dig, who by this time needed little persuasion that their obscure corner of the world had grown entirely unwholesome. With their background studying long-ago catastrophes, the paleogeologists knew just how small and fragile humans were, in comparison.

Still, by consensus everyone stopped where a gentle rise offered their last view back the way they came. Temblors swept the pebbly moraine. Fortunately, the horizon was nearly flat all the way to the distant coastal clouds, so if anything was going to harm them, it would have to reach right out of the Earth to do so.

Which, of course, is entirely possible, Stan thought. In fact, these minor tremors were only superficial symptoms of a battle taking place far below, as volunteers back at the dome helped Alex’s team on Rapa Nui try to fight off these mysterious new foes. “Any luck, Ruby?” he asked a woman seated cross-legged before a portable console.

“I’m linking up now, Dr. Goldman. Just a nano, while I tap a status update.”

Stan peered over Ruby’s shoulder at a miniature version of the familiar globe hologram. As before, the most furious activity took place where the plasti-crystalline mantle met the molten outer core, especially right below Greenland site. Filaments and twisting prominences glowed with energy drawn from the planet’s whirling dynamo, flickering lividly each time slender rapier probes lanced down from the surface, tickling and inciting the most inflamed. Those glimmering threads pulsed hypnotically in rhythms Stan compared to a multipart fugue, beating countertime to Beta’s imperious metronome. The combination spun off beams of warped space-time.

It was a stygian, multidimensional fencing match, and Stan knew his side was now badly outnumbered. New Guinea’s gone completely dark, he saw. And halfway around the globe, another familiar pinpoint glowed wan amber. The African resonator’s barely on idle, probably damaged and out of action.

Those had been early targets of the enemy’s surprise onslaught. The foe had taken them out in quick gazer strikes, like the one Alex had barely warded off. Or maybe they were sabotaged, as had been tried here — an attempt foiled only when last-minute security shakedowns revealed several well-placed limpet bombs. Since then it had been open warfare at long range, with the outnumbered side just beginning to learn the rules.

In an ironic way it actually gladdened Stan to see the innocent incompetence of Spivey’s people. The American colonel’s goal nust never have been terror weaponry after all. Or else his officers would surely be better geared for such a fight. All their gazer programs were scaled too small — to lift objects rather than blast them willy-nilly to oblivion. It would take time to bypass all the safeguards put in place to cut civilian damage, readjusting the cylinders to throw deadly force on command.

Time was exactly what Spivey’s people clearly didn’t have.

After the first wave of temblors, earth movements ceased, and Stan knew why. Triggering quakes might in principle offer a bludgeon against big targets like cities. But even a major jolt to this level plain might leave the Greenland resonator intact, ready to strike back. The enemy weren’t taking their advantage for granted. They had to keep the NATO crew occupied parrying thrusts until an opening was found to take them out decisively, once and for all.

“The bogeys,” Ruby said, referring to their unknown foes. “They’re uniting on a lambda band now, fourteen hundred megacycles… with what looks like a Koonin-style metric-impedance match. Beta’s responding! Damn, will it — no! Alex came in from below and blocked ’em. Yeah! Bought us some time. Take that, assholes!”

Stan appreciated the young Canadian’s colorful commentary. It lent those abstract symbols verve and emotion appropriate to combat. Stan balled his fists and tried for the adrenaline rush one expected in a situation like this. Only what is a situation like this? Maybe if there were bombs going off, or visible foes …

The sky was so peaceful and blue though, with a bracing, wintry breeze coming off the continent of ice. He felt incongruously comfortable and calm with gloved hands jammed into his jacket pockets.

“Uh-oh… Alex has run out of excited states along any path between Rapa Nui and us. I see nothing in reach for ten minutes!”—

“Ten minutes?” Someone nearby sighed. “Might as well be forever.”

Stan read the display. Sure enough, the gleaming filaments along one entire sector had gone dim — still pulsing, but now exhausted, banked back, almost contemplative compared to the glittering ferment going on elsewhere. Until they replenished, Alex’s team would be unable to render any help warding off attacks on Greenland.

“Lustig signals he’s going onto the attack meanwhile… Says good luck and godspeed… Now he’s gone.”

Stan nodded. “Same to you, Alex. Don’t worry about us. Go get ’em.”

He and the other evacuees turned their attention to the distant white dome they had left just a little while ago. Even this far away they were still in danger. In this new, terrifying type of warfare, the ground beneath you might suddenly turn liquid with color, or vanish in a titanic flash, or propel you toward far galaxies. Whatever happened, he wanted to share jeopardy with those brave technicians over there across the moraine valley. He planned on staying when the crane-zep returned for another pickup.

All my life I believed science was a revelation co-equal to scripture. A more advanced text — the Infinite offering us His very tools, now that we’re older, like apprentices learning their Father’s craft.

So isn’t it only right to stand watch over what I helped create with those tools?

Ruby exclaimed, grabbing her headphones. She laughed. “I don’t believe it!”

“What is it?”

“Alex. He’s taken out the Siberian machine!” she announced in triumph. “Vaporized ’em! That’s one enemy down and two to go. Oh eh? Oh no!”

Stan felt the others gather even closer. Ruby’s gleeful expression turned to despair. “What now?” he asked.

“Another one’s come on line to replace it! A new one! Joined in soon as Siberia blew out. It’s… in the Sea of Japan. Damn, they must’ve been holding it in reserve. Where’d all these bastards come from!”

In the display, Stan saw a new triggering beam replace the one Alex had just destroyed, making a total of three foes once more.

“They’re still after us!” she cried, reading the traces.

“Sometimes it’s smarter to take out the weaker opponent first,” he commented. “If they knock Greenland out, Alex’s crew will have to face them all alone.” The Danes and others sighed and nodded. They didn’t have the full picture. (Who did?) But some things were obvious.

“The gor-suckers have hooked a really good band this time,” Ruby said. “Lots of energy. Beta’s responding, and twelve… fifteen threads are active… Beam on target!”

Stan looked around for any sign that coherent pencils of gravitational radiation were hurtling through the Earth nearby. But no symptoms could be perceived. It wasn’t likely there would be any, not until their assailants found a proper coupling with surface matter.

“They’re hunting for a contact resonance. Our guys are trying to parry…” Then Ruby groaned as her instruments flashed fateful crimson. “No good. Here it comes!”

“Everybody down!” Stan shouted. “Lie flat and turn away!”

But even as the others dove to the ground, Stan ignored his own advice. He watched the NATO buildings and knew the very instant the beam matched frequencies with the rock-air boundary. Oval patches of tundra seemed to throb like tympani. Then, within one of those boundaries, the encampment suddenly sank into the ground, like an express elevator called down to hell. It was over in an eyeblink.

At least, the first part was over. Stan mourned good people who had become friends. Dr. Nielsen got up and moved next to him. Together they listened to the continuing rumble of a new tunnel boring straight into the Earth. The growling continued for some time, vibrating their soles.

“Maybe we’d better try to get out of here,” the paleogeologist suggested at last. “The magma in these parts is far below a heavy plate, but it’s not very viscous. Even on foot, a little distance could make a lot of difference right now.”

Mankind had passed yet another milestone today, Stan thought. But then, maybe Nielsen was right. He didn’t have to be exactly at ground zero in order to bear witness when molten rock flooded up that new channel from deep, high-pressure confinement. Watching from further away wouldn’t lessen the spectacle much at all.

•

Like everyone else aboard the company ship, Crat watched and listened to the hurried, frantic reports. He soon tired, though, of trying to follow events he didn’t understand.

And so he left them all in the comm room and went out on deck alone to wait for sunrise.

Partly, he was still numb. His adventure with the underwater shaft of light hadn’t worn off yet — the enchantment of that strange music, the transient contact with something warm and accepting, or so it seemed at the time. He hadn’t expected his bosses to believe his story when he emerged from the water. But they had, questioning him about every detail, testing his blood and other fluids, putting him next to machines that tugged at his limbs as the light had, though not as pleasantly. At one point as they worked on him, Crat had felt his sense of smell enhance out of all proportion. The company execs’ fine colognes bit into his sinuses and made his nose itch.

That had seemed to satisfy them. He’d been released to rest and perform easy chores aboard a company support ship while the wary tech types hurried back to their secret labs. Crat had wondered how they could be so concerned about such matters at a time like that… and even more so two days later, when people spoke of whole chunks of the planet being blasted into space! Such dedication seemed far beyond him.

Still, all seemed peaceful on deck. From the railing he saw the gangly towers of the Sea State town. Soon the muezzin would be calling Muslim citizens to first prayer, dawn kites would rise to catch the stratospheric winds and solar arrays would catch even the reddish dawn.

Tepid currents lapped the cruiser’s hull, leaving the usual faint scum of surface oils and powdered styrofoam in a pebbly sheen. Phosphorescent, dying plankton gave off iridescent colors. Crat sighed as moonlight broke through the ragged overcast to brighten some obscure patch of sea. That bright beam reminded him of another. It made him hope with the focused intensity of a prayer that he might be lucky again. Maybe next time he met that special light, or heard that music, he wouldn’t be too dumb, too tongue-tied to reply.

“Yeah,” he said, in bittersweet sureness that he had been both blessed and abandoned. “Sure you would, boy-oh. Ever’body’s waitin’ in line just to hear what you have to say.”

•

To Logan Eng, the chaos in the Net felt like having one of life’s underpinnings knocked out. What had been a well-ordered, if undisciplined, ruckus of zines, holochannels, SIGs, and forums had become a rowdy babel, a torrent of confusion and comment, made worse because in order to be noticed each user now sent out countless copies of his messages toward any node that might conceivably listen. A million hackers unleashed carefully hoarded “grabber” subroutines, designed to seize memory space and public attention. Even “official” channels were jammed half the time with interlopers claiming their right to comment on the crisis facing the world.

“… it is a plot by resurgent Stalinist elements and pamyat mystics…” claimed a ham operator who had been listening to one mysterious site in Siberia.

“… No, it’s schemes by money-grubbing polluters…”

“… eco-freaks…”

“… little green men…”

Normally, the weirdest scenarios would have stayed ghettoed in special interest forums. But that unspoken consensus broke down as bizarre fantasies suddenly seemed no less reasonable than the finest science punditry.

Then, adding to the overload, worried governments suddenly began pouring forth reams — whole libraries — of information they’d been hoarding, stumbling over themselves to prove they weren’t responsible for the sudden outbreak of gravitational war. Each denial met fresh suspicions, though. Accusations flew in the halls of diplomacy and on ten thousand channels of comment and opinion.

The largest chunk of raw disclosure came from NATO-ANZAC-ASEAN — a spasm of data that stunned already dizzy Net traffic handlers. Suspicious voices accused Washington and its allies of masking culpability under a tidal wave of bits and bytes. But Logan was shocked by the extent of this sudden candor. To demonstrate their innocence, Spivey’s bosses had spilled everything, even his own first conversation with the colonel, in the big limousine! This tsunami of forthrightness swamped normal channels and flooded into unusual places. Classified studies of knot singularity physics got dumped into a channel normally reserved for cooking hobbyists and recipe exchanges. The secrets of gazerdynamic launching systems filled corridors meant for light opera, situation comedies, and golfing.

The cat’s out of the bag now. Even if the present crisis waned, the world would never be the same.

Despite disclosure, however, despite scurrying arms inspectors and tribunes, events sped ahead of all governance. Paranoia notched up with each strange tremor, each awful disappearance. Caroming rumors spoke of national deterrence weapons being wheeled out of storage — of peace locks being hammered off ancient but still deadly bombs. Sneezes were heard in Budapest — and someone decried bioplagues. Hailstones struck Alberta — and someone else proclaimed the wrath of God.

A winking light dragged Logan from the latest report, in which one of the brighter pundits cited new evidence pointing away from the bad old nation states, toward some new, unknown power… Logan blinked at the intruding lines of text crossing his portable holo — a priority override using his personal emergency code. Not even Glenn Spivey knew that one.

The words manifested with shocking, glacial slowness. One by one, they seemed to pry their way through the panicky crush. He read the message and then brought up his hand to cover his eyes.

• EXOSPHERE

Teresa wished she could help Alex. But all her skills were useless in this battle, a conflict as intricate as a Nō play, fought with the deadly delicacy of weaving, bobbing Siamese fish.

At least she could help watch the prisoner, freeing some security boys to stand guard against saboteurs. And she’d see to keeping Pedro out of Alex’s hair. Fortunately, those two jobs coincided as the big Aztlan reporter eagerly questioned June Morgan. He forced her to look toward the holo display, where each thrust and parry translated into more deaths, more local catastrophes. “It wasn’t supposed to go this far,” the blonde traitor answered miserably. “They never intended all-out war.”

“They hardly ever do,” Manella commented. “Big, destructive hostilities nearly always used to come about when one side thought it knew just how the other would react to a show of force, and miscalculated their opponents’ resolve.”

Teresa watched June wince as roiling changes lit up the many-layered Earth. Nearby, Alex Lustig tapped rapid commands with a keypad-glove, adding muttered amendments quicker than speech with his subvocal device. Others hurried about their tasks with similar crisp efficiency… the only trait that might help the last Tangoparu team in its desperate, one-sided struggle to survive.

“It’s all my fault,” June said with a despairing sigh. “If I’d only done my job, they wouldn’t have had their bluff called. Not yet, at least. Now, though, all their plans are messed up. They’re in a panic. Far more dangerous than if they’d won.”

The patent rationalization made Teresa want to spit. “You still haven’t said who they are!”

Earlier June had refused to answer, as if the direct question terrified her. Now she seemed to decide it didn’t matter anymore.

“It’s kind of hard to explain.”

“Try us,” Manella urged.

With a sigh, June regarded them both. “Pedro, Teresa, haven’t either of you ever wondered? I mean, why do people assume the Helvetian War put an end to the world’s oldest profession?”

Teresa blinked. “Are you being snide?”

June laughed without mirth. “I don’t mean prostitution, Terry. I’m talking about parasites, manipulators who thrive on secrecy. There have always been schemers and plotters — since before Gilgamesh and the pyramids.

“Come on, you two. Who do you think poisoned Roosevelt and had the Kennedys shot? Or arranged for Simyonev’s plane to crash? What about Lamberton and Tsushima? Are you sure those were accidents? Didn’t they work out rather conveniently for those profiting in the aftermath?

“Teresa and I are too young, but Pedro, you remember how things were during the weeks before the Brazzaville Declaration, don’t you? Back when delegations started flying in spontaneously from all over the world to declare the an-tisecrecy alliance? How many people died of mysterious accidents before the delegates overcame all the obstacles and ideological distractions and at last built a momentum that was unstoppable? Then how many world leaders had to be deposed before the masses had their way and the Alps were finally put under siege?”

“Half the presidents and ministers had secret bank accounts to protect,” Pedro replied. “So naturally they tried to obstruct. But in the end they failed—”

“They didn’t fail. They were used. Used up in delaying actions.” June’s eyebrows lowered. “Why do you think the war lasted so damn long, hmm? The Swiss people sure didn’t want to take on the whole damn planet! They never imagined all those generations spent digging tunnels and bomb shelters had a purpose beyond mere deterrence.

“And even when it ended at last, you don’t actually think the bank records that U.N. forces finally dug out of the rubble were the real ones, do you?”

Manella shook his head. “Are you implying whole levels of conspirators we missed? That all the drug lords and bribe takers and commissar billionaires we caught—”

“Were just expendable flunkies, thrown down to appease the mob. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying, Mr. Reporter.” June’s voice was bitter. “The real manipulators wanted Helvetia completely destroyed. The war had to cost so many lives, so an exhausted world would exult in victory and desperately want to believe it was over.”

“This is ridiculous,” Teresa told Pedro. “She’s sounding like a bad Lovecraft novel now. What’s next, June? Dark Unspeakable Unnameable Horrors from Before the Start of Time? Or how about something out of those wonderful, paranoid Illuminati books? Who are your bosses, then? Freemasons? The Trilateral Commission? Jesuits? The Elders of Zion?” Teresa laughed. “How about Fu Manchu or the Comintern… ?”

June shrugged. “Those were useful distractions in their day — glitter and window dressing designed to attract fools, so conspiracy theories in general would get a bad odor with normal, honest folk.”

To her dismay, Teresa found herself drawn by June Morgan’s frankness. The woman clearly believed what she was saying. And she’s right in a way, Teresa thought, suddenly aware of her own reaction. Look at me now. Refusing to believe, even as proof tears the world down around me.

Pedro chewed one end of his moustache. “You aren’t referring to the aliens are you? The makers of Beta? Are they your—”

June looked up quickly. “Oh heavens no!” She gestured at the big display. “Do the assholes who sent me here seem that competent to you? Look how badly they screwed up their attempted coup. Would Beta’s makers have let Alex jerk them around like he has?”

As they all looked that way, a trio of yellow rays caused Beta’s purple dot to throb with incipient power, but once again they were foiled by a slender rapier from Easter Island, sending their pent-up force spiraling off uselessly in some other direction.

June shook her head. “No, humanity is able to breed predators all on its own, Pedro. Talented parasites with lots of experience tapping the innovations of others. You don’t need much brains for that, just certain manipulative talents and lots of arrogance.”

“The illusion of omniscience,” Pedro said, nodding.

“Oh yes. I’ve seen them, gathered in their halls with all their money, giving each other circle-jerks — telling each other how smart they are just because thirty years ago they managed to preserve some of their old power, because people were too tired and relieved at war’s end to peel back the last layer.

“Only now, at last, they know how stupid they really were all along. You got it right, Pedro. They miscalculated this latest move and are going to die soon. For that part at least, I’m truly grateful.”

The admission took Teresa aback. All this time she had assumed June was acting out of loyalty to some group or cause. Clearly the woman feared her veiled masters, but now Teresa saw how much she also loathed them.

Glancing at the great display, Teresa intuited what June meant. All over the world, in national capitals and command posts and even hackers’ parlors, there were other Earth-holos like this one. Perhaps cruder, but growing better by the minute. Especially now that Glenn Spivey’s group and others were spilling all they knew in sudden, panic-driven spasms of openness. On every one of those displays, the enemy resonator sites must shine like angry pirates’ emblems… standing out for the simple reason that no one claimed ownership over them. That lack of candor in these hot, tense hours was an indictment worse than any smoking gun.

Right now every security alliance, peacekeeping force and local militia with the means was probably sending units toward those mystery sites. Their weaponry might be paltry compared to TwenCen arms — their unpracticed reflexes might be slow — but those soldiers would certainly make short work of June’s employers when they arrived.

No, her bosses can’t have planned for this. They must have counted on taking the Tangoparu tetrahedron completely by surprise, wiping out the original four and all the newer resonators with sabotage or gazer strikes. Then, in sole possession of the ultimate terror weapon, they could hold the world hostage. They came damn close to succeeding.

But even as she saw the logic, Teresa had to shake her head.

In which case… so what? It’s an insane plan even if it worked! They couldn’t have gotten away with it for long. The result would have been just too unstable.

Teresa saw that a lull had fallen since Alex’s last successful parry. He was sipping through a straw from a glass held by one of the cooks. She wanted to go over and rub his shoulders and maybe whisper some encouragement, but she also knew Alex too well for that. Those shoulders were Atlas’s right now. And a lot more than the lives in this room rode on his train of thought. It mustn’t be interrupted.

“You’re describing an act of sheer desperation,” Pedro surmised, still talking to June. “These conspirators of yours… even in victory, they couldn’t hope to hold onto what they’d won!”

June answered with a tired shrug. “What did they have to lose? The status quo was deteriorating from their point of view. Everything they had rescued from the ashes of Helvetia was slipping through their hands like smoke.”

“I don’t get it. What threatened them?”

June motioned toward the consoles, toward Teresa’s data plaque, toward the phone on Pedro’s belt. “The net,” she said succinctly.

“The net?”

“That’s right. It was getting to big, too open and all-pervading… too bloody democratic to manipulate much longer. They were growing more desperate every year. Then this gravity amplification business came along—”

“ — which you leaked to them! “Teresa accused.

June nodded. “They had other sources. As you’ve said so often, it’s awful hard to keep secrets these days… that is, unless you own the system.”

“Own the net?” Teresa sniffed incredulously. “Nobody owns the net.”

“Well, bits of it. Special, strategic pieces. Think about when the original fiber cables and data hubs were laid. Someone could always be bought out, bribed, blackmailed. Computer nodes were designed with ‘back door’ entry codes, known only to a few…”

“Why? To what end?”

June laughed. “To always be first hearing about the latest technical advance! So your ferrets will get that split sec-ond priority advantage, letting you cache away items before others see them. To manipulate the mail—”

“Preposterous!” Teresa objected. “People would notice!”

June nodded. “Oh, now we know that. But then? The net was supposed to be their baby. Their tool! It would replace big banks as an instrument of control, above nations and governments. Above even money.

“After all, didn’t old sci-fi stories picture it that way? ‘He who controls the flow of information controls the world’? That was to be their answer to Brazzaville and Rio.” June’s voice stung with biting irony. “Only it didn’t quite work out that way. Instead of being their tame instrument, the Net kept slipping free like something alive. So they—”

“They, they!” Pedro smacked a fist into his palm, making Teresa wince. The man should remember where they were.

“Who are they?” Manella demanded. “Who the hell are you talking about, woman!”

Another shrug. “Do names matter? Picture all the powerful cabals of egotists cluttering the world at the turn of the century. Call them old or new money… or red cadres… or dukes and lordships. Historians know they all spent more time conniving with each other than waging their supposedly high-minded ideological struggles.

“The smart ones saw Brazzaville coming and prepared. They saw to it that all the reasonable Helvetian and Cayman ministers were assassinated or drugged and that every attempt at compromise, even surrender, was rejected.”

That rocked Pedro back. “Do you mean… ?” But June hurried on.

“Actually, do you want to know what their worst problem was? It’s afflicted them since early TwenCen — a worse threat to power elites than mass education, news media, even the personal computer. It was defection.”

“Defection?” Teresa asked, captivated despite herself.

“Each successive generation found it harder to hold onto its own children! World culture was so enticing, even to rich kids with the chance to live like rajahs. The best and brightest were always being tempted away into so-called bourgeois careers — in the arts or sciences — because those are intrinsically more interesting than sitting around clipping coupons and bullying the servants—”

“Wait a minute!” Teresa interrupted. “How do you know all this?” Then she saw something in the other woman’s eyes. “Oh—”

Teresa felt a sudden, unwelcome wash of empathy for June Morgan. The blonde geophysicist smiled wryly. “Family ties, you see. Our little branch made its break when Dad ran off to play music and do fund-raisers for wildlife. Naturally, the cousins cut us off from information, though we never lacked for money.

“Anyway, Dad didn’t want to know about their schemes. He called my uncles ‘dinosaurs.’ Said their way of thinking would die out naturally.” June snorted. “Ever hear how the dinosaurs died though? I wouldn’t want to be underfoot when it happened.”

“So you figured on playing along. Let them have their way—”

“ — till they dried up and blew away. Yeah, that was part of it. That and—” June looked down. “Well, they can be persuasive. You don’t know them.”

But Teresa figured she really did. If not as individuals, then the type — one needing stronger tonics than satisfied ordinary men and women. Their inner hunger seemed to crave money and power, but was, in fact, insatiable by anything this side of death.

Anyway, details hardly mattered. June’s dinosaur analogy matched the geological scale of the drama portrayed on the great display. Teresa could read some of those livid trails of human meddling. So many ghostly phenomena were taking place far beneath her feet, whose repercussions would reverberate long after the last blows were struck.

One recent consequence of battle was clear. Nearly every excited energy state under Easter Island was depleted from hours of ceaseless stimulation. All the filaments and prominences and delicate webs of electricity now glowed dull red and wouldn’t serve as gazer sources again until their former blue intensity returned. That could take anywhere from minutes to hours. Meanwhile, it was hard to see how the enemy could strike at them here.

As she watched, Alex’s final beam lanced along the core’s fiery rim to catch a distant bright thread in a carom off Beta’s glittering mirror. One of the enemy probes quavered and then toppled off scale. That resonator would take some time recovering, she knew.

Meanwhile, the world was converging on the bastards. How long until the clumsy, unready, uncoordinated U.N. posse finally got to them? Alex has won the advantage back. Time’s running out for the enemy. So what’ll they do now?

An answer wasn’t long in coming.

“The other two are firing up again,” the watch officer announced.

A technician protested. “But they can’t reach us past that dead zone for at least—”

“They’re not aiming at us!” The first voice answered. “Look!”

Teresa blinked as the Saharan and Japan Sea sites sent new beams to tickle the planet’s core. Beta answered with glowing counterpoints, now completely out of reach by Alex and his crew. The Tangoparu team watched, helpless to interfere.

Beta throbbed. Nearby tendrils coiled with pent-up energy. Then something actinic and mighty flashed, striking like a fist toward the heart of a great land mass.

North America.

“They’re talking!” The communications operator announced. “Blanketing all channels… it’s an ultimatum. They’re saying all national forces must back off within two minutes or…”

The young woman didn’t have to finish. A continent was visibly ringing like a hammered girder, the object lesson apparent to all.

Silence reigned. Finally Teresa asked, “What now?”

For the first time, Alex looked up from his console. Tiredly, he pulled off the subvocal, leaving red streaks where the instrument had rubbed him raw. He met her eyes. “I don’t know, Rip. I guess it depends on what they’re trying to accomplish.”

All eyes turned to the comm operator, whose specialty it was to sieve the noisy airwaves. A myriad of rapid images flickered across the woman’s face. As she pieced together the story, she slowly smiled in realization.

“That last punch was a negotiating move,” she said. “But what they say they really want is… to surrender!”

All over the room, tired workers slumped in their chairs with sighs of relief. Someone let out a whoop and threw open the double doors, letting in a fresh breeze that drove before it the stale tang of fear.

Teresa and Alex met each others’ eyes, each seeking reassurance there, and reason to accept hope.

• CORE

“Could it be a delaying tactic?” Alex worried aloud. “All the military forces are holding back till the Security Council can meet. During that time…” His voice trailed off as he shook his head in worry. Teresa worked one shoulder, rubbing it with real strength and an uncanny knowledge of where to find the tight knots in his muscles. Her voice offered a steadiness he felt much in need of.

“They know they can’t keep the whole world at. bay forever, Alex. Didn’t Nihon just offer to put their experimental resonators under your command? And there are those mothballed machines of Spivey’s. They’ve recalled the technicians. In a few hours—”

Alex nodded. “In a few hours, a day at most, I’ll have the resources to counter anything they try. Wipe them off every frequency. They won’t be able to shake a tree branch, let alone a continent.”

He tried not to listen to the tinny voice in the background — a BBC World Service reporter telling of widespread damage in the American Midwest. That was only a taste of what the desperate foe promised if any moves were made against them without a full parole. And so the cautious militias had withdrawn to wait.

No one knew how earnest June Morgan’s secretive masters were about the threat. How serious had the Helvetians been with their cobalt bombs? Or Kennedy and Khrushchev, back in 1962? Men caught in the momentum of events sometimes think the unthinkable.

The resonator watch officer called. “They’re pulsing again…”

Everyone turned. All three enemy probes once more glowed with induced gravitational energy. “What are they up to now? I thought they’d agreed to wait.”

Narrow pencils of yellow speared downward toward the purple dot — Beta’s flickering mirror.

“Could it be another demonstration?”

The comm operator interrupted. “They’ve come on-line again, all channels. They claim it isn’t them at all!”

Alex turned. “What d’you mean, ’it isn’t them’?”

“It isn’t them!” The woman pressed her headphones.

“They swear their resonators all just went off by themselves!”

Teresa asked, “Alex, is that possible? What are they trying to pull?”

But he only watched, transfixed, as the three beams passed through several roiling cells of superconducting electricity, struck Beta, and… disappeared.

“Ikeda! Clambers!” Alex shouted. “Scan parallel frequencies.” He reached for his subvocal. “They may be trying to sneak up on a side band!”

It seemed unlikely. There were only a few mode-combinations which coupled strongly with surface rock, especially the topmost crust. And he felt sure those were all covered. Still—

“There is something, Alex,” one of the techs yelled across the room. “Take a look at fifty-two gigahertz, on a one point six meter amplitude p-wave—”

“Got it!” he shouted back. Fresh dotted lines showed what had been invisible — thin trails of gazer radiation shining from Beta’s glittering maw.

“But those beams are headed—” He didn’t have to finish. Everyone stared in shock as the concentrated rays flew straight back to their points of origin, striking direct hits on all three enemy resonators.

“They shot themselves!” someone cried in amazement. Alex scanned but found no signs of damage. No earth tremors. The foe’s resonators still shone on-line, as dangerous as ever. This was weird.

“Effects!” he demanded. But the question stayed unanswered — why would the enemy have fired beams at themselves? Beams which apparently did nothing?

“Do they say anything?”

Comm ops scanned. “Nothing. They’ve gone dead.”

This is too strange, Alex thought. Something bizarre was going on.

“Alex!” Teresa cried out.

Jesus, she’s strong! He winced at her sudden grip on his shoulder. Turning around, he saw her blinking, shaking her head. “It’s happening again. I’m sure of it, Alex. Can’t you feel it?”

He remembered their long passage together in New Zealand, down twisty avenues of Hadean darkness, relying on her fey sensitivity to find a way back to the world of light.

That memory left no room for doubt. “Battle stations!” he cried as he reset the instruments, searching.

There! On yet another side band — Beta seemed to throb angrily. “Load all capacitors! Give me a counterpulse at—”

He was interrupted as somebody screamed. Only a dozen meters away, a man went goggle eyed, tore at his hair — and blew up.

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t an explosion. The poor fellow stretched, still screaming, till he shredded like gooey taffy. In sound there was little more than a wet pop, but the colors … a rainbow of brilliant liquid shades spilled forth as the skin peeled back, gobbets of flesh flying in all directions.

An aura of shimmering lambency seemed to hang midair even as the ruin of meat fell to the floor. That man-sized apparition hovered for a moment and then began moving rapidly in a horizontal spiral.

Men and women yelled in dismay, scrambling to avoid it. But the terrible focus accelerated, striking two cooks who chose that unlucky moment to leave the kitchen carrying lunch. Their tureens flew as arms and heads ripped from their bodies, spraying those nearby with scalding soup and crimson blood. They never knew what hit them before the disturbance swept on, catching victim after victim.

“Everybody out!” Alex cried redundantly amid a panicky rush for the exits. He paused only to grab his plaque and Teresa’s hand before joining the stampede. Halfway to the open doors, however, she braked and suddenly wrapped her arms around him. “Wha — ?” He cried, struggling. But she held on, fiercely immobile as something horrible and barely visible brushed by them, passing through space they would have occupied.

“Now!” she cried when it swept on. Alex needed no urging.

Outside he saw no order to the evacuation. The Tangoparu crew were excellent and brave. They had faced dangers more powerful than any warriors had since time began. But courage is a useless abstraction when the mind recoils to a primitive state. Men and women ran pell-mell, scattering across the windblown hillsides, some running straight for the seaside cliffs. In one blinking instant, Alex saw a technician touched glancewise by something no more visible than a pocket of air. She whirled, screaming as some tide seemed to suck her into a roughly man-shaped refraction. Her horror ended in a shuddering gasp, and she crumpled to the ground hemorrhaging from purpled, blistering skin.

“This way!” Teresa shouted, dragging Alex’s arm. They fled westward, though Alex had no idea why.

Several more times Teresa suddenly veered right or left. On each occasion Alex obeyed at once, following her zigs and zags like they were commandments from God. Close brushes with death grew too numerous to count, and he stopped wondering how Teresa knew which way to dodge. Sometimes he noted a close passage only by the sudden shiver down his back or by a threatening rise in his gorge. Then, before he could respond to the horror, it passed and they were off again.

There wasn’t time to react to the sight of friends and colleagues being horribly murdered in broad daylight, under azure Pacific skies… no effort to waste on anything but flight. Numbly, he felt the crunchy unevenness of grassy slopes suddenly give way to the harder pounding of shoes on concrete. There “were blurry images of parked jets and zeppelins. Was she going to try to grab one of those… ?

But no. Teresa yanked him past the waiting aircraft and toward another object — black on the bottom, white on top, and streaked with dross. Up a set of rusted, rickety stairs they clambered, to fall at last inside a dank, dusty chamber.

The space shuttle, he realized dimly as he fell to the deck, wheezing. So Teresa hadn’t any plan after all. Blind instinct must have driven her as much as the others. Only in her case the compulsion had been to seek out “her” spacecraft — a totem of safety and her own sense of control.

“Come on, Alex.” Sudden, sharp pain lanced his shoulder as she kicked him. “Move it!” she shouted. “The thing could pass through here any minute!”

That was true enough. So why hadn’t they stayed outside, where her acute senses might be helpful, rather than hiding in this useless coffin?

He let her drag him to his feet, though, and stumbled after her through the fetid airlock, tripping over the high sill. She virtually threw him the last few meters into the shuttle’s dim, cavernous cargo bay, where he stumbled to his knees under the glitter of two small spotlights. The beams converged in a pool of brilliance where he met his own dumbfounded reflection, as if staring into a magic pool.

Alex blinked once. Twice. And then he understood.

It was a perfect sphere which glistened his own image back at him, sweeping around into infinite concave vistas. He cried an oath. He’d forgotten about the other resonator!

Alex looked down at his left hand, tightly gripping his portable plaque. And he still wore the subvocal! Maybe…

But no. “Damn!” he cried. “We haven’t got power. The idea’s no damn goo—”

He cut short as the sphere’s gimbals suddenly hummed, rocked back and forth, and then steadied at a prim angle. Microprocessors chuckled and clicked.

“What do you think I’ve been doing since you saddled me with that great beast?” Teresa asked. Alex stared at her, so she shrugged. “Well. It helped pass the time. Now, come on! Here’s a display unit I ripped off a while back. No holo, just flat screens. But you can plug in there.”

Alex knew his jaw gaped open. Shutting it, he could only say — “I love you.”

“Damn straight.” She nodded quickly. “If you save our lives we can talk about that. Now stop fucking off and get to work!”

He turned around to face the archaic control unit, plugging in and loading his control software, using the subvocal to begin a startup sequence, sparing only a moment to shoot one final look her way. “Bossy wench,” he muttered affectionately.

She said nothing, but her eyes offered more confidence in him than he’d ever had in all his life — so he decided he had better try his best.

• LITHOSPHERE

“Daddy, thank God you came!”

Claire was in his arms before Logan got fully out of the taxi. He squeezed his daughter tightly. “I’m here. Yeah. Hey, come on, sunshine. Don’t cry.”

“I’m not… crying,” she protested through snuffles. But she didn’t draw back until she’d wiped both eyes on his shoulder. When he finally got a chance to look at her, they were red but dry. It had been months since he’d last visited chez McClennon, when summer’s humid, scented air made for long, lazy evenings lit by lightning bugs. Now there was a bite of winter in the stiff gulf zephyr that whipped the fringe, of cypress trees. From Claire he sensed a quivering, over-wrought tension.

He turned to pay the driver, but the man ignored Logan’s proferred credit card. He bent over, covering one ear, listening intently to some news flash coming over his button earpiece, then suddenly cried out in dismay, gunned his engine and took off! Almost instinctively, Logan’s hand reached into his pocket for his own receiver.

But no, he had resigned from the struggles of the world. While his family needed him, the universe could fend for itself.

“What’s all this about your mother locking herself into her room?” Logan turned and asked his daughter.

The wind whipped Claire’s reddish-brown hair. “It’s worse than that, Dad. She’s electrified her whole wing of the house.”

“What?”

“She won’t even answer the intercom, though I can tell she’s busy working in there—” Claire cut short as a yell of pain echoed round the corner of the house.

“That’s Tony,” she explained, taking Logan’s arm. “He was going to try prying a window.”

“Sounds like that worked great,” Logan commented as he was dragged along. “Be nice,” she chided back. “Tony’s good. He’s just never taken on Daisy before.”

Logan came around the corner to see a lanky, black-haired teenager holding one arm and sucking singed fingers. On the ground a screwdriver still smoked around the extra insulation that must have saved the boy from even worse burns. “Hullo, Mr. Eng,” Tony said.

“Hi, yourself,” Logan answered, thinking, So he’s never taken Daisy on before? I’ve got news for both these kids. Neither have I. Not really.

When you come right down to it, I’m not sure anybody ever has.

• NOOSPHERE

Somewhere in the background Alex heard voices and thought other refugees must have come aboard. But that couldn’t be. By now he and Teresa must be the only ones left alive on Easter Island, protected by the thin, passive field of his little resonator. It had to be some news channel then, frantically reporting this horrible new endeavor in extinction.

In parts of Eurasia, the Americas, Africa, the effects were straightforward — no earthquakes, nothing hurled into space. Just death, simply death.

Death of human beings.

It’s actually a rather simple combination, he pondered as his device built a finely meshed picture of events on the gravitational bands. He worked cautiously, so as not to be detected by the enemy network. They’re using parameters that couple perfectly with human flesh, in pocket standing waves shaped to match, tidally, the human figure. I never even thought of that, though it’s obvious enough from earlier data. The clues were there in all those effects Teresa and others felt. It just took a certain mindset to see it.

Wave a beam like that around and you can kill millions. It depletes interior fields so little, it’s potentially self-sustaining.

The first strikes had been surgical, precise, taking out the world’s centers of gravitational research… all possible points of opposition. That included Colonel Spivey’s former resonators, for instance, and the Russian and Japanese and Han stations, too. Most of those were off-line now. Some flickered on idle, with no one at the helm. And two or three appeared even to have been hijacked, joining the original rebel cylinders in spewing beams of death.

It was too horrible to grasp, of course. If he let the full meaning penetrate it would numb him to uselessness, and Alex couldn’t afford that right now.

He tried some tentative pulses to get the feel of the sphere. It was touchy, delicate, like a wild beast. As it spun, it gave off the queerest, brief half images — subtly warped reflections of the spotlights, the looming shuttle cargo bay, his own face.

He hadn’t any chance to get familiar with the resonator since it was lifted, dripping, out of the nanogrowth tank many days ago. Now he had to leap straight into the saddle, without benefit of practice or simulation, from the gazerdynamic equivalent of a dray wagon straight to a rodeo horse.

What he wanted to do was give the bastards a taste of their own medicine. But without diagnostic backup, that would take too long. Meanwhile, thousands were dying in Tokyo and other places. Something had to be done about that first.

“All right—” he said aloud.

The subvocal mistook his words as commands and sent the sphere precessing in its housing. It took several seconds of concentrated effort to settle it back down again. Jen used to warn him about using the temperamental input device when emotions were running high, but what choice did he have?

All right, Alex thought with silent, iron discipline. Here goes nothing.

•

Alex rocked back in dismay. For an instant the whirling sphere had conveyed a sudden, vivid illusion of slitted lizards’ eyes! Only by quickly switching channels, sending his machine spinning along a new axis, did he make that looming presence vanish from the glistening globe.

He breathed raggedly for a moment. All right. Don’t let it shake you!

But it was impossible to escape the sense of loneliness. Always, before, he’d had scores of skilled workers to help him. True, they called him “wizard” and “tohunga.” But press flacks and Nobel committees to the contrary, no scientist with a grain of honesty ever claims he “did it all alone.”

And yet, that’s exactly what I’ve got to do now.

With a shuddering sigh, Alex pictured the Earth’s involute interior, now livid with convecting magnetism, strung and laced with man-modified channels of surging current. Those currents had grown more finely filigreed every day since his first, tentative scans so long ago, in search of Alpha and then Beta. Now they were a jungle of connections through which he must find a way to do battle.

No more delays. You’ll have just one chance to take them by surprise.

And so, with desperate determination, he triggered his best shot.

Again, for the briefest instant he thought he saw a glitter of scales sweep across the spinning sphere, which were chased off by a ripple of tawny orange and black. In an eye-blink the apparitions were gone and the battle joined.

•

Sweat nearly blinded Alex as the near miss swept past. For an instant he’d felt as one might if Beta itself were nearby — yanked by tides so strong the fluids in his head surged like the Bay of Fundy. He shuddered to imagine what the surface of Rapa Nui must look like now, outside the narrow, frail zone of protection he’d erected. He hoped silently it was large enough to include Teresa, elsewhere aboard tiny Atlantis.

Then Alex was too busy even for hope. He parried another blow, reflecting the beam directly back to its point of origin. That had no effect of course — not on these bands. By now he knew all those sites were being operated by remote control.

Actually, this antihuman resonance is simple. Given a little time, I could easily devise a counter…

Unfortunately, there was no time. Warding off increasingly furious attacks took nearly everything he had, though at one point he grabbed a spare instant to send forth another remise, narrowly missing the Saharan site, knocking its resonator out of alignment before having to pull back and duck a fresh four-way assault.

This can’t go on, he thought. His new sphere was nimbler than any other machine, and he could tell he was better than his opponent — somehow it felt like a single opponent. But the enemy could attack from many sides at once, while sparing other resources to continue the horrible program of mass murder.

•

“I can’t hold on!” Alex cried out, parrying blow after buffeting blow. Knowing full well there was no one to offer any aid, he prayed nonetheless. “God help me!”

Then, in a foxhole conversion—

“Mother… help us!”

It was an involuntary shout. But the subvocal made no such fine distinctions. It amplified his words in focused gravitational waves, pouring reverberating echoes toward the core of the world.

•

Alex screamed as sudden, unimaginable pain tore at his temples.

“Jen!” he cried, and then collapsed, arms cradling the housing of a sphere whose song rose in pitch as it spun faster, faster, faster…

•

Teresa was reminded of an old riddle—

“The last man on Earth sits alone in a room. There is a knock on the door …”

At the unexpected sound, she dropped her tools and ran to the hatch. There, peering through the little, round, double-reinforced window, she gasped on seeing the familiar, absurd mustachioed visage of Pedro Manella. Teresa swore and yanked the hissing door release. “I thought you were a ghost!” she cried as he stepped inside.

“I might be, had I not taken shelter under your wing, so to speak. I only just gathered the nerve to try the stairs.”

“Are there any others? I mean—”

Pedro shook his head with a shiver. “It’s too horrible for words.” He looked around. “Is Lustig here? I assume so, since you and I are still alive.”

“He’s in back, fighting whatever it is. If only there were some way to help him—”

She cut short as the ship suddenly moaned around them. The deck rocked left, throwing her against Manella. Then Atlantis swayed the other way.

“Quakes!” Pedro cried. “I thought we’d finished with such simple-minded stuff.”

His wit wasn’t welcome. Teresa pushed him away and moved with a wide, catlike stance across the rocking deck. “Got to check on Alex. He could be…” Then she stopped, blinking. “Oh, no.”

The colors. They were back with a vengeance.

Teresa screamed over her shoulder at Manella. “Find a place to tie yourself down!” As the shaking grew in intensity, she fought her way through the airlock to find Alex slumped over at the resonator. She barely had time to strap him down before all hell broke loose.

•

Instinct took over amid the dazzle and roaring noise. Somehow she made it up the quivering ladder to the command deck, where she launched herself into the pilot’s seat and began flicking switches by pure rote. “Oh shit!” she cried, hearing the fateful prang of metal bolts popping free under strain. The ancient shuttle’s fractured spine complained with a horrible shriek as Teresa felt a sudden surge of acceleration — the seat-of-the-pants sensation of being airborne.

It can’t be! This ship can’t fly this ship can’t fly this ship can’t fly

The wings couldn’t bear launch loads. She’d seen X rays of the shuttle’s broken back — the reason Atlantis had been abandoned on a forlorn island in the first place.

An island that no longer existed, from what little she could see as she strained to turn her head. Atlantis rose atop a pillar of flame, but there was no rocket. Instead she hurtled just ahead of a towering volcanic plume, reawakened and roaring where only moments ago a tiny Polynesian islet had quietly defied the waves.

Grimacing from g-forces, Teresa nevertheless gripped the cockpit control sticks and felt a strange joy. Perhaps, in some corner of her mind, she had suspected all along it would come to this. Suddenly she feared nothing. After all, wasn’t this the best of all possible ways to go? Flying? In command of a sweet old bird that should never have been left corroding on a pedestal, but should only die in space?

Even the visceral sensations were grand. She felt as she had as a little girl, when her father used to throw her into the air, and she had known, with utter certainty, he would be there to catch her. Always there to sweep her out of harm’s way.

Out of harm’s way—

The words seemed to resonate inside her. And as she blinked, tears of happiness washed away those splashy colors, which thinned and merged and finally spread aside to resolve a black cosmos, overlain by a soft blanket of unwinking stars.

Teresa sobbed in sudden realization. It felt exactly as if gentle arms were carrying Atlantis home again. The instruments she had carefully restored now chuckled and hummed around her, glowing green and amber. She looked out through a windshield that had been cleansed by fire and saw the moon rise over Earth’s soft, curving limb.

•

At the bottom of the old Kuwenezi gold mine, Jimmy Suarez knew he was a privileged observer. Not only could he watch the battle of two metaphors, which dominated every major holo channel, but he could also use the instruments of this abandoned facility to follow something of the real struggle, down below.

For instance, he saw the exact moment when four resonators fired all at once to blow Rapa Nui completely out of the South Pacific. Another force seemed to precede that driving gazer beam by mere moments, but it might have been just a shadow, cast ahead of the decisive bolt.

From that instant, in fact, the tide began to turn. More and more filaments and finely meshed channels seemed to come under control of the force he now recognized as the enemy. The turn of events was horrifying to watch.

It would probably be wiser not to. Just sitting here was risky. Although Kenda’s thumper lay inactive now, only a few meters away, even using it on passive detector mode was taking an awful chance. What if the horror — whoever it was — picked up the machine’s faint echo? The fate of Easter Island could be his, any time.

Was it curiosity, then, that kept him here instead of smashing the cylinder and fleeing? Or had it been the old lady’s last request… to leave it turned on till she died? Well, she’s been dead some time, he thought. The body lay under a tarp behind him as he’d found it, twisted and disfigured, still connected to her console. I don’t owe her anything now. I should take a hammer to the thumper and…

And what? The surface world was certainly no safe place. Kenda and the others might be dead even now, if this part of Southern Africa had already been targeted for culling. Unlikely, since teeming cities and military bases seemed to be the principal victims so far. Still, it was only a matter of time.

Stay down here, then? If I wreck the machines, the death angels might miss me altogether. It was a depressing thought, though. Oh, there was food enough for months. Other isolated snippets of humanity might be as “lucky,” holding out in nooks and crannies for some time after the dragon won. But at this point, Jimmy wondered if he should have taken his chances with Kenda and the others after all.

So mired was he in self-pity, it took some moments to harken to a new sound, a gentle humming that added layers as machines throughout the abandoned hall began coming to life. He looked up, staring blankly as the towering crystal resonator swiveled in its bearings, giving off a rising tone. “What the hell?” he asked, standing up. Then, in full, terrified realization, “No!”

He ran to the master control station where the main cutoff switch lay. But as he reached for it, a voice quietly said to him,

What really made him halt, however, was the brief, almost tachistoscopic image of a face that flashed before him and then was gone again.

“But I thought you were dead!” he whispered hoarsely. Then, when there was no answer to that, he blurted, “Let me help, at least!”

As the dormant machines warmed up around him, that momentary visage returned, and he knew this both was and was not the woman whose former body lay covered just a few meters away.

In real life they had exchanged maybe a hundred words, total. And yet, right then Jimmy didn’t even wonder why her approval filled him so with joy. All he did was leap to his old work station. Rushing through all the diagnostic checks, he fine-tuned the tool she needed — her link between the worlds above and below.

Soon the humming reached a steady pitch. Then, with a twang of tidal force, it fired.

•

“Daddy!” Claire cried as tremors shook the house. Her feet slipped out from under her and she slid along the roof tiles. Logan barely managed to hold on himself, by grabbing one of Daisy’s many antennas as the temblor made trees and canefields sway. Horrified, he saw his daughter slip toward the edge.

In a blur the boy, Tony, launched himself face-first, arms and legs splayed for friction. His slide halted short of the brink, just in time to seize Claire’s wrist and help her hold onto a groaning rain spout.

The quake continued for what seemed forever — the worst in Logan’s memory — until at last subsiding to the staccato rhythm of debris hitting the concrete walk below. Fortunately, those crunching sounds didn’t involve Claire. Somehow, she and Tony held on. “I’m coming!” Logan cried.

•

Logan had to find a way to help the kids. So on impulse, he grabbed one of the antenna cables, yanked it free of its staples, and used the loop to lower himself toward the straining teenagers. At last he could reach out and grab Tony’s ankle. “I’ve got you,” he grunted. “See if you can—”

He didn’t have to give detailed instructions. Anyway, Claire was a better mountaineer than he’d ever been. She swung one leg over the gutter and clambered up their makeshift human ladder, passing first over her boyfriend, then her father. From the peak she turned and grabbed Logan’s leg. Then it was Tony’s turn to writhe about and climb.

The last staple holding the cable popped just as the boy reached the flat part of the roof. Staring at the loose end, whipping in his hand like an electrified snake, Logan felt himself start to slide… and was stopped at the last second as the kids grabbed him. Soon they were all leaning on one of the dish antennas, panting.

“What the hell was that?” Tony asked. Clearly he meant the quake. But his use of the past tense was premature. Again, without warning, the shaking returned — with a shuddering, infrasonic intensity that made them cover their ears in pain. This time at least, they managed to stay on the pitching roof.

When it finally ended, Claire looked at her father, sharing his thought. This had been no ordinary temblor. “We’ve got to get to Mother, fast!”

They recklessly took the obstacle course of electronic gear and solar panels. At one point Logan glanced northward toward the line of backup levees which the Corps of Engineers had erected long ago, to reassure a trusting public that all eventualities were predictable and controllable, and would be forever, amen. In the distance, a new sound could be heard, not as deep or grating as the quakes, but just as frightening. It felt like vast herds of wild beasts on the rampage.

That was when Logan knew with utter certainty the corps had been wrong… that all things must come to an end. The concrete prison, forged by man to control a mighty river, had finally cracked. And a crack was all the prisoner needed.

The father of waters was free at last.

Long delayed, the Mississippi was coming to Atchafalaya.

•

Claire cursed, straining on the attic hatch. “I can’t budge it!” Tony and Logan helped, heaving with all their might. Daisy had used good contractors to build her citadel. Logan ought to know, having referred her to the best. If only he’d known…

They pounded on the latch. He yanked a heavy chunk of antenna from its mooring to use as a pry bar. Between heaves, blinking away sweat as his heart pounded from the effort, he glanced up to see suddenly that there was no more time left at all. A muddy brown wall hurtled across the cane fields with awesome, complacent power, tossing trees and buildings aside like kindling.

Logan grabbed the kids and threw them down. Wrapping loops of cabling around them, he cried, “Hold on for your lives!”

$

Telltale alarms blare of phone lines disrupted and microwave towers toppled — all the local infrastructure she depends on to control her far-flung resonators collapsing in a shambles. And as the data-links snuff out in succession, her dragon staggers like a beast suddenly hamstrung, bellowing in agony. Daisy stares as the other software metaphor — the tiger — leaps atop the crumpling fire lizard to deliver a decisive blow. The cat rears back in triumph as its opponent begins evaporating in smoke.

“You win, bitch,” Daisy mutters. “But you better take care of the place or I’ll come back from hell to haunt you.”

One wall caves inward as a liquid locomotive shatters every barrier to interruption. Water shorts out the expensive electronics in crackling explosions of sparks and spray. But in that final instant, what Daisy realizes with surprising calm is that, perhaps, she never really had been qualified for the job she’d sought.

I never really wanted to be a mothe—

•

Meanwhile, a quarter of the way around the Earth’s quivering arc, a small party of refugees finished crossing a final stretch of lichen-covered tundra to reach the sea’s edge. There they stopped, clutching each others’ hands in fear at what they saw.

In the distance, smoke rose from a burning town and horrible, twisted forms showed that this was one of the places they had heard about — where so-called death angels had emerged from the ground to wreak terrible judgment on humanity. So their exodus from volcanic disaster had only brought them to face something even worse.

It had been an eerie journey, fleeing upwind on foot across the ancient moraine of Greenland, with magma heat at their backs, bereft of every crutch or comfort of civilized society save one — the portable receiver that let them listen to the world’s agony in stereophonic sound and real time. So it was that Stan Goldman and the others recognized what confronted them as they slumped together in sooty exhaustion, watching a shimmering fold in space migrate toward them, apparently sensing new victims to reap.

Strangely, Stan felt calm as the thing moved placidly their way. Instead of staring at it like some transfixed bird hypnotized by a snake, he purposely turned away to take one last look out across the bay, where fleet white forms could be seen nearby, streaking underwater then rising briefly to exhale jets of spray.

Beluga whales, he thought, recognizing the sleek shapes. They were cetaceans with smiles even more winning than their dolphin cousins’. To him they suddenly seemed symbols of primordial innocence, untainted by all the crimes committed by Adam and Adam’s get since man’s fall from grace.

It was good to know the creatures were immune to the approaching horror. That much was clear from the muddled jabber coming over the Net. Except for chimpanzees and a few other species, most animals were left untouched.

Good, Stan thought. Someone else deserved a second chance.

But humankind had already used up number two. After all, hadn’t God already let us off once before with a warning? Remember Noah? Stan smiled as he saw the perfect irony. For there, stretching across the western horizon, was a rainbow — the Almighty’s sign to humankind after the Flood. His promise never again to end the world by drowning.

We might go by fire of course, or famine, or by our own stupidity. Not much of a promise, actually, when you get right down to it. But when dealing with wrathful deities I suppose you take what you can get.

And as promises go, it is an awfully pretty one.

One of the women squeezed his hand fiercely, and Stan knew it was time to face the terrible, vengeful spirit he’d unwittingly helped create. So he turned. It was near, approaching too quickly to flee.

Oh, they could scatter. Delay it a bit. But somehow it seemed better to confront the deadly thing here, now, together. They all gathered close, holding each other. Hakol havel, Stan thought. All is vanity. At the end of all struggles, there comes a time to let go and accept.

And so, with a certain serenity, he faced death’s angel.

Though Stan knew it had to be an illusion, the lethal space-folding actually seemed to slow as it neared. Was it capable of savoring cornered prey, then? He wondered about the strange sensation he was feeling while watching it waver and then come to a stop. It was an odd sort of empathic communion that conveyed… confusion? uncertainty?

The deadly thing hovered only meters from the humans. They already felt the draw of its ferocious, devouring tides.

What’s happening? Stan wondered. Why doesn’t it get on with it?

The terrible refraction jigged toward them, hesitated, drew back a little. Then it shivered, as if letting out a sigh — or shaking off a dream.

That was when Stan heard the words.

His head rocked back. Several of the others fell to their knees. The voice reverberated within them, gently. Not apologetically, but with a soothing kindness.

To their amazement, the shimmering shape changed before their eyes. Squinting, Stan saw a shift in its topology, like an origami monster folding away its claws, retracting and transforming its cutting scythe and then dimpling outward in a myriad of multihued, translucent petals.

Stan inhaled a sudden fragrance. The aroma was heady, all-pervading, full of hope and promise. It lingered in the air even as the transformed angel seemed to bow in benediction. Then it drifted off across suddenly serene waters.

Together, he and the others watched as it greeted the joyful, splashing whales and passed on. Even after it disappeared beyond the far headlands, they all knew somehow it would be back… that it would be with them always.

And in its presence, they would never again know fear.