Earth

PLANET

In the new world’s earliest days, there was no-one to speak ill of carbon dioxide, or methane, or even hydrogen cyanide. Under lightning and harsh sunlight those chemicals merged to stain the young ocean with amino acids, purines, adenylates… a “primeval soup” which then reacted still further, building complex, twisting polymers.

Mere random fusings would have taken a trillion years to come up with anything as complex as a bacterium. But something else was involved beyond just haphazard chemistry. Selection. Some molecules were stable, while others broke apart easily. The sturdy ones accumulated, filling the seas. These became letters in a new alphabet.

They, too, reacted to form still larger clusters, a few of which survived and accrued… the first genetic words. And so on. What would otherwise have taken a trillion years was accomplished in a relative instant. Sentences bounced against each other, mostly forming nonsense paragraphs. But a few had staying power.

Before the last meteorite storm was over or the final roaring supervolcano finally subsided, there appeared within the ocean a chemical tour de force, surrounded by a lipid-protein coat. An entity that consumed and excreted, that made true copies of itself. One whose daughters wrought victories, suffered defeats, and multiplied.

Out of alphabet soup there suddenly was told a story.

A simple tale as yet. Primitive and predictable. But still, a raw talent could be read there.

The author began to improvise.

• EXOSPHERE

They were still pumping out Houston from last week’s hurricane when she got into town. Teresa found it marvelous how the city had been transformed by the calamity.

Avenues of inundated shops rippled mysteriously just below floodline, their engulfed wares glimmering like sunken treasure. The towering glass office blocks were startling vistas of blue and white and aquamarine, reflecting the summer sky above and bright-flecked waters below.

Limp in the humidity, rows of canted trees marked the drowned borderlines of street and sidewalk. Their stained trunks testified to even higher inundations in the past. Under fluffy clouds pushed by a torpid breeze, Houston struck Teresa like some hypermodernist’s depiction of Venice, before that lamented city’s final submergence. A wonderful assortment of boats, canoes, kayaks, and even gondolas negotiated side streets, while makeshift water taxis plowed the boulevards, ferrying commuters from their residential arcologies to the shimmering office towers. With typical Texan obstinacy, nearly half the population had refused evacuation this time. In fact, Teresa reckoned some actually reveled living among the craggy cliffs of this manmade archipelago.

From the upper deck of the bus she saw the sun escape a cloud, setting the surrounding glazed monoliths ablaze. Most of the other passengers instantly and unconsciously turned away, adjusting broad-brimmed hats and polarized glasses to hide from the harsh rays. The only exceptions were a trio of Ra Boys in sleeveless mesh shirts and gaudy earrings, who faced the bright heat with relish, soaking in it worshipfully.

Teresa took a middle path when the sun emerged. She didn’t react at all. It was, after all,, only a stable class G star, well-behaved and a safe distance removed. Certainly, it was less dangerous down here than up in orbit.

Oh, she took all the proper precautions — she wore a hat and mild yellow glasses. But thereafter she simply dismissed the threat from her mind. The danger of skin cancer was small if you stayed alert and caught it early. Certainly the odds compared favorably with those of dying in a helizep accident.

That wasn’t why she’d avoided taking a heli today, skipping that direct route from Clear Lake, where the NASA dikes had withstood Hurricane Abdul’s fury. Teresa had used a roundabout route today mostly to make sure she wasn’t being followed. It also provided an opportunity to collect her thoughts before stepping from frying pan to fire.

Anyway, how many more chances would she have to experience this wonder of American conceit, this spectacle that was Houston Defiant? Either the city moguls would eventually succeed in their grand, expensive plan — to secure the dikes, divert the water table, and stabilize everything on massive pylons — or the entire metropolis would soon join Galveston under the Gulf of Mexico, along with large patches of Louisiana and poor Florida. Either way, this scene would be one to tell her grandchildren about — assuming grandchildren, of course.

Teresa cut off a regretful twinge as thoughts of Jason almost surfaced. She concentrated on the sights instead as they passed a perseverant shopkeeper peddling his soaked fashions from pontoons under a sign that read, “preshrunk, guaranteed salt resistant.” Nearby, a cafe owner had set up tables, chairs, and umbrellas atop the roof of one of their bus’s stranded, wheeled cousins and was doing a brisk business. Their driver delicately maneuvered past this enterprise and the cluster of parked kayaks and dinghies surrounding it, then negotiated one of the shallow reefs of abandoned bicycles before regaining momentum on Lyndon Johnson Avenue.

“They ought to keep it this way,” Teresa commented softly, to no one in particular. “It’s charming.”

“Amen to that, sister.”

With a momentary jerk of surprise, Teresa glanced toward the Ra Boys and saw what she had not noticed before, that one of them wore a quasi-legal big ear amplifier. He returned her evaluation speculatively, touching the rims of his sunglasses, making them briefly go transparent so she could catch his leer.

“Water makes the old town sexy,” he said, sauntering closer. “Don’tcha think? I love the way the sunlight bounces off of everything.”

Teresa decided not to point out the minor irregularity, that he wore no sign advertising his eavesdropping device. Only in her innermost thoughts… and her lumpy left pocket… did she have anything to hide.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she answered, giving him a measured look he could take as neither insult nor invitation. It didn’t work. He sauntered forward, planted one foot on the seat next to her, leaned forward, and rubbed the close-cropped fuzz covering his cranium.

“Water serves the sun, don’t ya know? We’re supposed to let it come on come on come. It’s just one of His ways o’ lovin’, see? Coverin’ Earth like a strong man covers a woman, gently, irresistibly… wetly.”

Fresh patches of pink skin showed where over-the-counter creams had recently cleared away precancerous areas. In fact, Ra Boys weren’t many more times as likely to develop the really deep, untreatable melanoma tumors than other people. But their blotchy complexions heightened the image they desired — of dangerous fellows without respect for life. Young studs with nothing to lose.

Teresa felt the other passengers tense. Several made a point of turning toward the young toughs, aiming their True-Vus at them like vigilant, crime-fighting heroes of an earlier era. To these the boys offered desultory, almost obligatory gestures of self-expression. Most of the riders just turned away, withdrawing behind shadow and opaque lenses.

Teresa thought both reactions a bit sad. I hear it’s even worse in some cities up north. They’re nothing but teenagers, for heaven’s sake. Why can’t people just relax?

She herself found the Ra Boys less frightening than pathetic. She’d heard of the fad, of course, and seen young men dressed this way at a few parties Jason had taken her to before his last mission. But this was her first encounter with sun worshippers in daylight, which separated nighttime poseurs from the real thing.

“Nice metaphors,” she commented. “Are you sure you didn’t go to school?”

Already flushed from the heat, the bare-shouldered youth actually darkened several shades as his two friends laughed aloud. Teresa had no wish to make him angry. Dismembering a citizen — even in self defense — wouldn’t help her now-precarious position with the agency. Placatingly, she held up one hand.

“Let’s go over them, shall we? Now you seem to be implying the rise in sea level was caused by your sun deity. But everyone knows the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are melting because of the Greenhouse Effect—”

“Yeah, yeah,” the Ra Boy interrupted. “But the greenhouse gases keep in heat that originates with the sun.”

“Those gases were man-made, were they not?”

He smiled smugly. “Carbon dioxide and nitrous oxides from cars and TwenCen factories, sure. But where’d it all come from originally? Oil! Gas! Coal! All buried and hoarded by Her Nibs long ago, cached away under her skin like blubber. But all the energy in the oil an’ coal — the reason our grempers dug and drilled into Old Gaia in the first place — that came from the sun!”

He bent closer. “Now, though, we’re no longer enslaved to Her precious hoard of stolen fossil fat-fuel. It’s all gone up in smoke, wonderful smoke. Bye-bye.” He aimed a kiss at the clouds. “And there’s nowhere else to turn anymore but to the source itself!”

Ra worshippers were backers of solar energy, of course, while the more numerous Caians pushed wind power and conservation instead. As a spacer, Teresa ironically found her sympathies coinciding with the group whose appearance and style were the more repulsive. Probably all she had to do was let these fellows know she was an astronaut and all threat and bluster would evaporate. Honestly, though, she liked them better this way — loud, boisterous, reeking of testosterone and overcompensation — than she would as fawning admirers.

“This city ain’t gonna, last long anyway,” the Ra Boy continued, waving at the great towers, up to their steel ankles in Gulf waters. “They can build their levees, drive piles, try to patch the holes. But sooner or later, it’s all goin’ the way of Miami.”

“Fecund jungle’s gonna spread—” one of the others crooned through a gauzy, full-backup mouth synthesizer. Presumably it was a line from a popular song, though she didn’t recognize it.

The growling motors changed pitch as the bus approached another stop. Meanwhile, the leader leaned even closer to Teresa. “Yessiree, blistery! The Old Lady’s gonna brim with life again. There’ll be lions roaming Saskatchewan. Flamingoes flocking Greenland! And all ’cause of Ra’s rough lovin’.”

Poor fellow, Teresa thought. She saw through his pose of macho heliolatry. Probably he was a pussycat, and the only danger he presented came from his desperate anxiety not to let that show.

The Ra Boy frowned as he seemed to detect something in her smile. Trying harder to set her aback, he bared his teeth in a raffish grin. “Rough, wet loving. It’s what women like. No less Big Mama Gaia. No?”

Across the aisle, a woman wearing an Orb of the Mother pendant glared sourly at the Ra Boy. He noticed, turned, and lolled his tongue at her, causing her fashionably fair skin to flush. Not wearing True-Vus, she quickly looked away.

He stood up, turning to sweep in the other passengers. “Ra melts the glaciers! He woos her with his heat. He melts her frigid infundibulum with warm waters. He…”

The Ra Boy stammered to a halt. Blinking, he swept aside his dark glasses and looked left and right, seeking Teresa. »

He spotted her at last, standing on the jerry-rigged third-floor landing of the Gibraltar Building. As the waterbus pulled away again, raising salty spumes in its wake, she blew a kiss toward the sun worshipper and his comrades. They were still staring back at her, with their masked eyes and patchy pink skins, as the boat driver accelerated to catch a yellow at First Street, barely making it across before the light changed.

“So long, harmless,” she said after the dwindling Ra Boy. Then she nodded to the doorman as he bowed and ushered her inside.

She had one stop to make before her meeting. A walk-in branch of a reputable bank offered an opportunity to unload her burden.

Usually a cash transaction would cause raised eyebrows, but in this case it was customary. The smiling attendant took her crisp fifties and led her to an anonymity booth, where Teresa promptly sealed herself in. She took a slim sensor from one pocket and plugged it into a jack in the side of her wallet, which then served as a portable console while she scanned every corner of the booth for leaks. Of course there were none. Satisfied, she sat down and disconnected the sensor. As she was doing that, however, her hand accidentally stroked the worn nub of the wallet’s personal holo dial, causing a familiar image to project into space above the countertop.

Her father’s eyes crinkled with smile lines and he looked so proud of her as he silently mouthed words she had long ago memorized. Words of support. Words that had meant so much to her so often since he first spoke them… on every occasion since when she found herself bucking the odds.

Only none of those other crises was ever nearly as dire as the business she’d gotten herself into now. For that reason she held her hand back from touching the sound control or even replaying his well-remembered encouragement in her mind.

She was too afraid to test it. What if the words wouldn’t work this time? Might such a failure ruin the talisman forever, then? Uncertainty seemed preferable to finding out that this last touchstone in her life had lost its potency, that even her father’s calm confidence could offer no security against a world that could melt away any time it chose.

“I’m sorry, Papa,” she said quietly, poignantly. Teresa wanted to reach out and touch his gray-flecked beard. But instead she turned off his image and firmly turned her attention to the task at hand. From her pocket she drew one of two data spools, inserting it into a slot in the counter. Picking a code word from the name of a college roommate’s pet cat, she created a personal cache and fed in the contents of the spool. When the cylinder was empty and erased, she breathed a little easier.

She was still embarked on a dangerous enterprise that might cost her her job, or even lead to jail. But at least now she wouldn’t become a pariah for the modern sin of keeping secrets. She’d just registered her story — from the Erehwon disaster to her recent, surreptitious orbital data collection for Pedro Manella. If any of it ever did come to trial, now she’d be able to show with this dated cache that she had acted in good faith. The Rio Treaties did allow one to withhold information temporarily — or try to — so long as careful records were maintained. That exception had been left in order to satisfy the needs of private commerce. The treaties’ drafters — radical veterans of the Helvetian War — probably never imagined that “temporary” might be interpreted to be as long as twenty years or that the registering of diaries like hers would become an industry in itself.

Teresa sealed the file, swallowing the key in her mind. Such was her faith in the system that she simply left the empty spool lying there on the countertop.

“I wish you hadn’t done that.”

“Done what, Pedro?”

“You know what I mean. What you did when you got back to Earth.”

Manella regarded her like a disapproving father. Fortunately, Teresa’s own dad had been patient and understanding — and thin. In other words, nothing like Pedro Manella.

“All I did was refuse to shake hands with Colonel Spivey. You’d think I’d have slapped him across the face or shot him.”

Looking down at the blue lagoons of Houston, the portly newsman shook his head. “In front of net-zine cameras? You might as well have done exactly that. What’s the public to think when a shuttle pilot steps out of her spacecraft, accepts the thanks of all the other astronauts, but then pointedly turns away and spits when the mission supervisor steps up for his turn?”

“I did not spit!” she protested.

“Well it sure looked that way.”

Teresa felt warm under the collar. “What do you want from me? I’d just verified — at least to my satisfaction — that the bastard must have had a black hole on Erehwon. He recruited my husband into an illegal conspiracy that caused his death! Did you expect me to kiss him?”

Manella sighed. “It would have been preferable. As it is, you may have jeopardized our operation.”

Teresa folded her arms and looked away. “I wasn’t followed here. And I got you your data. You asked nothing else of me.” She felt put-upon and resentful. As soon as she had arrived, and Manella’s assistants scurried off with her second spool, Pedro had launched into this Dutch uncle lecture.

“Hmph,” he commented. “You didn’t actually say anything to Spivey, did you?”

“Nothing printable or relevant. Unless you count commentary on his ancestry.”

Manella’s scowl lifted slightly. Much as he disapproved of her actions, he clearly would have liked to have been there. “Then I suggest you let people assume the obvious — that you and Spivey had been having an affair—”

“What?” Teresa gasped.

“ — and that your anger was the result of a lovers’—”

“Dumpit!”

“ — of a lovers’ tiff. Spivey may suspect you’re on to his activities, but he’ll not be able to prove anything.”

Teresa’s jaw clenched. The unpalatability of Manella’s suggestion was matched only by its inherent logic. “I’m swearing off men forever,” she said, biting out the words.

Infuriatingly, Manella answered only with a raised eye-brow, economically conveying his certainty she was lying. “Come on,” he replied. “The others are waiting.”

A chart projection hung over the far end of the conference room. It wasn’t holographic, merely a high-definition, two-dimensional schematic of the multilayered Earth. A nest of simple, concentric circles.

Innermost, extending from the center about a fifth of the way outward, was a brown zone labeled SOLID INNER CORE — CRYSTALLINE IRON + NICKEL … 0-1227 KILOMETERS.

Next came a reddish shell, about twice as thick. LIQUID OUTER CORE — IRON + OXYGEN + SULFUR … 1227-3486 KILOMETERS, the caption read.

The beige stratum beyond that took up nearly the rest of the planet. MANTLE, the legend stated. OXIDES OF SILICON, ALUMINUM, AND MAGNESIUM (ECLOGITES AND PERIDOTITES IN PEROVSKITE FORM) … 3486-6350 KILOMETERS.

All three great zones featured subdivisions marked by dashed lines, tentative and vague lower down, with captions terminating in question marks. At the outermost fringe Teresa discerned a set of thin tiers labeled: ASTHENOSPHERE, LITHOSPHERE, OCEANIC CRUST, CONTINENTAL CRUST, HYDROSPHERE (OCEAN), ATMOSPHERE, MAGNETOSPHERE. Outlining that final zone, curving arrows rose from near the south pole, to reenter in Earth’s far northern regions.

The speaker at the front of the room was a trim blonde woman who pointed to those arching field lines.

“We were especially interested in the intense high-energy region astronauts call the ‘South Atlantic devil,’ a magnetic dip that drifts westward about a third of a degree per year. These days it hovers over the Andes…”

Using a laser pointer, she traced the high, diffuse fields that were her specialty. The woman obviously knew a thing or two about space-borne instrumentation.

She ought to, Teresa thought.

As a consultant transferred to Houston two years ago, June Morgan had become friends with several members of the astronaut corps, including Teresa and her husband. In fact, Teresa had been glad, at first, when June was assigned to work with Jason on a recent Project Earthwatch survey. Now, of course, Teresa knew her husband had been using that assignment to cover other work for Colonel Spivey.

That hadn’t kept him from getting to know June better, though. A whole lot better.

When Manella had brought Teresa in to introduce to everybody, June barely met her eyes. Officially, there was no grudge between them. But they both knew things had gone farther than any modern marriage contract could excuse. The one Teresa had signed with Jason made allowances for long separations and the planetbound spouse’s inevitable need for company. Their arrangement was no “open marriage” stupidity, of course. It set strict limits on the duration and style of any outside liaison and specified a long list of precautions to be taken.

The agreement had sounded fine four years ago. In theory. But dammit, Jason’s affair with this woman had violated the spirit, if not the letter, of their pact!

Perhaps it had been Teresa’s fault for following her curiosity, for checking who Jason had seen while she was away on a long-duration test flight. She had been shocked to learn that it was a NASA person… a scientist no less! A groupie, even a bimbo, would have been okay. No threat there. But an intelligent woman? A woman so very much like herself?

She recalled the feeling of menace that had flooded her then, creating a horrible tightness in her chest and a blindness in her eyes. For hours she had walked familiar neighborhoods completely lost, in a cold panic because she had absolutely no idea where she was or in what direction she was heading.

“You want me to give her up?” Jason had asked when she finally confronted him. “Well, of course I’ll give her up, if you want me to.”

His infuriating shrug had driven her crazy. He’d managed to make it sound as if she were the one being irrational, choosing this particular case to get jealous about all of a sudden. Perhaps illogically, she didn’t find his blithe willingness to go along with her wishes calming, for underneath his acquiescence she fantasized a regret she could not verify in any way.

His sojourns aloft were generally longer than hers. She had spent many more long days alone on Earth between missions, surrounded all the time by overtures. She’d seldom availed herself of those dubious comforts, whatever the freedoms allowed by their contract. That he’d been less reticent when he was home alone hadn’t bothered her till then. Men were, after all, inherently weasels.

She’d tried to remain civilized about it, but in the end Teresa let him go to space that last time with barely an acknowledgment of his farewell. For weeks their telemetered messages were terse and formal.

Then came that fatal day. As she was docking her shuttle, unloading her cargo and preparing to send Spivey’s peepers across the transitway, Teresa had been emotionally girding herself to make peace with Jason. To begin anew.

If only—

Teresa pushed away memory. It probably wouldn’t have worked out. What marriage lasted these days, anyway? All men are pigs. She missed him terribly.

One glance told Teresa she wasn’t alone in mourning. Meeting June Morgan’s eyes in that brief moment, she knew the other woman’s pain was akin to her own. Damn him. He wasn’t ever supposed to fling with anyone he liked. Especially someone like me! Someone who might compete for his love.

That instant’s communication seemed to cause the blonde scientist to stumble briefly in her address. But she quickly recovered.

“… so for… for most of the twentieth century, Earth’s total magnetic field weakened at an… average rate of four hundredths of a percent per year. And the decline has steepened recently. That, combined with a greater than expected drop in the Earth’s ozone layer, leads to a growing suspicion we may be about to experience a rare event — a complete geomagnetic reversal.”

The man across from Teresa raised his hand. “I’m sorry, Dr. Morgan. I’m just a poor mineralogist. Could you explain what you mean by that?”

June caused the display to zoom in upon a long, jagged, S-shaped range of undersea mountains, threading the middle of the sinuous Atlantic Ocean. “This is one of the great oceanic spreading centers, where older crust is pushed aside to make room for new basalt welling up from the mantle. As each fresh intrusion cools and hardens, the rock embeds a frozen record of Earth’s magnetism at the time. By studying samples along these ridges, we find the field has a habit of suddenly flipping its state… from northward to southward, or vice versa. The change can be quite rapid. Then, after a long period of stability, it flips back the other way again.

“Way back during the Cretaceous, one stable period lasted almost forty million years. But in recent times these flip-flops have taken to occurring much more rapidly — every three hundred thousand years or so.” June put up a slide showing a history of peaks and valleys crowding ever closer together, ending with a slightly wider patch near the right-hand edge. “Our latest stable interval has exceeded the recent average.”

“In other words,” Pedro Manella suggested, “we’re overdue for another flip.”

She nodded. “We still lack a good explanation of how geomagnetism is generated, down where the core meets the mantle. Some even think sea level has something to do with it, though according to the Parker model…” June stopped and smiled. “The short answer? Yes, we do seem overdue.”

“What might be the consequences, if it flipped today?” Another woman at the table asked.

“Again, we’re not sure. It would certainly impair many navigational instruments—”

Teresa’s nostrils flared. She’d known this. Yet hearing it said aloud felt like a direct challenge.

“ — and it might eliminate some protection from solar proton storms. Space facilities would need shielding or have to be abandoned altogether.”

“And?” Manella prompted.

Isn’t that enough? Teresa thought, horrified.

The speaker sighed. “And it might wreck what’s left of the ozone layer.”

A murmur of consternation spread among those assembled. Pedro Manella loudly cleared his throat to get their attention. “Ladies, gentlemen! This is serious of course. Still, it’s only background to our purpose here today.” He turned to regard June. “Doctor Morgan, let’s get to the point. How might your geomagnetic data help us track down any illegal black hole singularities on or near the Earth?”

“Mmm, yes. Well it’s occurred to me there’ve been some recent anomalies, such as this new drift in the South Pacific…”

Teresa listened attentively. Still, she couldn’t help wondering. Why did Manella insist I come here today? I could have sent my data by courier.

Not that she had anything better to do. Perhaps Pedro wanted her to tell the others about the subjective sensations she’d experienced during the catastrophe, or to recite the story of Erehwon’s destruction one more time.

No matter. Teresa was used to being a team player. Even in a quasi-illegal band like this one, most of whose members she didn’t even know.

Damn it, she thought. I just want to know what’s going on.

For now that meant cooperating with Manella, and even June Morgan, putting aside personal feelings and helping any way she could.

• CORE

It was a laser.

He still couldn’t get used to the idea. A gravity laser. Imagine that.

I wonder where the power comes from.

“Mr. Sullivan? May I freshen your drink, sir?”

The flight attendant’s smile was professional. Her features and coloration clearly Malay. “Yes, thank you,” he replied as she bent to pour, her delicate aroma causing him to inhale deeply. “That’s a lovely scent. Is it Lhasa Spring?”

“Why… yes sir. You are perceptive.”

She met his eyes, and for an instant her smile seemed just that much more than perfunctory. It was a well-measured look that fell short of provocative, but also seemed to promise a little more than mere professionalism during the long flight ahead.

Alex felt content as she moved on to serve the next passenger. It was nice flirting amiably with an exotic beauty, without the slightest temptation to ruin it by trying for too much. The last few months had left his libido in a state of suspension, which had the pleasant side effect of allowing him the freedom to appreciate a young woman’s smile, the fine, well-trained grace of her movements, with-out flashing hormones or unwarranted hopes getting in the way.

It had been different during his first year of graduate school, when he temporarily forsook physics to explore instead the realm of the senses. Applying logic to the late-blooming quandaries of maturity, he had parsed the elements of encounter, banter, negotiation, and consummation, separating and solving the variables one by one until the problem — if not generally solved — did appear to have tractable special solutions.

The mapping wasn’t exact, of course. According to Jen, biological systems never translated exactly onto mathematical models, anyway. Still, at the time he acquired certain practical skills, which garnered him a reputation among his classmates and friends.

Then, curiosity sated, his interests changed trajectory. Companionship and compatibility became desiderata more important than sex, and he even aspired for joy. But these proved more elusive. Seduction, it seemed, contained fewer variables and relied less on fate than did true love.

Disappointment never banished hope exactly, but he was persuaded to shelve aspiration for a while and return to science. Only at Iquitos did hope suffer truly mortal wounds. Compared to that loss, sex was a mere incidental casualty.

I know what Jen would tell me, he thought. We moderns think sex can be unlinked from reproduction. But the two are connected, deep down.

Alex knew most of the time he was in denial about the coming end of the world. He had to be, in order to do his work. In such a state he could even enjoy studying Beta, the elegant, deadly monster in the Earth’s core.

But denial can only rearrange pain, like a child re-sorting unloved vegetables on his plate, hoping a less noticeable pattern will deceive parental authority. Alex knew where he’d quarantined his bitter outrage. It still affected the part of him most intimately tied to life and the propagation of life.

Alex imagined how his grandmother might comment on all this.

“Self-awareness is fine, Alex. It helps make us interesting beasts, instead of just another band of crazy apes.

“But when you get right down to it, self-awareness is probably overrated. A complex, self-regulating system doesn’t need it in order to be successful, or even smart.”

Thinking about Jen made Alex smile. Perhaps, after the hard work of the months ahead was done, there’d be time to go home and visit her before the world ended.

Stan Goldman had been left in charge in New Zealand, continuing to track Beta while Alex went to California on a mission to beg, wheedle, and cajole ten years’ raw data from the biggest observatory in the world. This was a mission he had to take on himself, for it required calling in many old favors.

From a small building on the UC Berkeley campus, his old friend Heinz Reichle ran three thousand neutrino detectors dispersed all over the globe. The planet was almost transparent to those ghostly particles, which penetrated rock like X rays streaming through soft cheese, so Reichle could use the entire worldwide instrument round the clock to track nuclear reactions in the sun and stars. For his part though, Alex hoped the disks full of data in his luggage would show a thing or two about the Earth’s interior as well, perhaps helping the Tangoparu team track the awful Beta singularity to its source.

Alex still wanted to meet the person or persons responsible — almost as badly as George Hutton did.

I’d like to know how they were able to create such a complex, twisted knot of space. They can’t have used anything as simple as a Witten mapping. Why, even renormalization would have taken—

The airplane’s public address system came to life, interrupting his thoughts. From the seat back in front of him projected the smiling, confident visage of their captain, informing everyone that the Hawaiian Islands were coming into view.

Alex shaded his window against internal reflections and gazed down past layers of stratospheric clouds to a necklace of dark jewels standing out from the glittering sea. Back in the days of turbojets, this would have been a refueling stop. But modern hypersonic aircraft — even restricted by the ozone laws — just streaked on by.

He had seen Hawaii much closer than this anyway, so it wasn’t the chain itself but the surrounding waters that suddenly interested him. From this height he saw patterns of tide and color — resonant standing waves and subtly shaded shoals of plankton luminance — outlining each bead in the nearly linear necklace of islands. Polarized sunglasses, especially, brought out a richness of detail.

Once, Alex would have looked on this phenomenon with pleasure but little understanding. Time spent with George Hutton’s geologists had corrected that. The islands weren’t static entities anymore, but epic, rocky testimonials to change. From the big island westward, beyond the thousand-meter cliffs of Molokai, all the way past lowly Midway, a chain of extinct volcanoes continued arrow straight for thousands of miles before zigging abruptly north toward the Aleutians. That bent path to the arctic circle was also a trip back in time, from the towering, ten thousand cubic mile basalt heap of Mauna Loa, past weathered, craggy elder isles like Kauai, to ancient coral atolls and eventually prehistoric, truncated seamounts long conquered by the persistent waves.

On the big island, two memorable volcanoes still spumed. But most activity had already shifted still further east, where the newest sibling was being born — an embryonic, as yet unemerged isle already named Loihi.

Most of the planet’s volcanoes smoldered where the edges of great crustal plates met gratingly, or rode up over each other — as along this great ocean’s famous Ring of Fire. But Hawaii’s trail of ancient calderas lay smack in the middle of one of the biggest plates, not at its rim. The Hawaiian Islands had their origins in a completely different process. They were the dashed scars left as the Central Pacific Plate cruised slowly above the geological equivalent of a blowtorch, a fierce, narrow tube of magma melting through anything passing over it.

George Hutton had likened it to pushing thick aluminum foil slowly over an intermittent arc welder. Part of George’s wealth had come from tapping power from such hot spots in the mantle.

Oh, yes. Hawaii certainly testified that there was energy down there.

But you can’t generate a laser… or a gazer… from just any lump of hot matter. You need excited material in an inverted state…

There it was again — his thoughts kept drawing back to the problem, just as the taniwha kept pulling in atoms as it orbited round and round the Earth’s core.

At first he’d been certain the amplified gravity waves originated from Beta itself. After all, what bizarre energy levels might lay within the roiling, folded world-sheets of a cosmic knot? In fact, on that night in New Zealand when Alex experienced his moment of drunken inspiration, he had also felt a wave of desperate hope. What if the knot itself was being stimulated to emit gravity radiation? Could Beta be forced somehow to give up energy faster than it could suck atoms from the core?

Alas, scans showed the beast hadn’t lost any weight at all, despite the titanic, Earth-rattling power released in the gazer beam. The only apparent effect on Beta had been to shift its orbit slightly, making it harder than ever to trace its history.

And so Alex still had no idea where the energy came from. Add another gnawing, frustrating mystery to the list. It was one thing to know he and everyone else were doomed to be destroyed. But to die ignorant? Not even having looked on the face of his destroyer? It was not acceptable.

“Mr. Sullivan? Pardon me, sir.”

Alex blinked. By now Hawaii was long gone from sight. He turned away from the blue Pacific to meet the almond eyes of the beautiful ASEAN Air flight attendant.

“Yes? What is it?”

“Sir, you’ve received a message.”

From her palm he took a gleaming data sliver. Alex thanked her. Unfolding his comp-screen, he slipped the chip inside and keyed access. Instantly, a holo of George Hutton frowned at him, sternly, under bushy eyebrows. A short row of block letters appeared.

THIS JUST ARRIVED ON A NET RECEPTION BOARD IN AUCKLAND, UNDER YOUR REAL NAME, MARKED URGENT. THOUGHT YOU’D BETTER SEE IT RIGHT QUICK — GEORGE.

Alex blinked. Only a few people on the planet knew he’d gone to New Zealand, and those obligingly used his cover name. Hesitantly, he touched the screen and instantly a flat-image photograph appeared in front of him, rather smudgy and amateurish looking. It showed a crowd of people — tourists, apparently — looking admiringly at a disheveled, youngish man, lanky and a little underweight. The center of attention was holding another man to the ground — a wild-eyed fellow with flecks of froth at the corners of his mouth.

I should have expected this, Alex thought with a sigh. Tourists loved using their True-Vu goggles. There must have been many records of his minor “heroics” in Rotorua. Apparently a few had made it onto the net.

He looked at his own image and saw a fellow who didn’t really want to be where he was, or doing what he was doing.

I should not have interfered. Now look what’s happened.

He touched the screen again to see the rest of the message, and suddenly a new visage loomed out at him — one he knew all too well.

Talk about looking on the face of your destroyer…

It was Pedro Manella, dressed in a brown suit that matched his pantry-brush mustache. The portly reporter grinned a frozen, knowing grin. Alex read the text below and groaned.

ALEX LUSTIG, I KNOW YOU’RE IN NEW ZEALAND SOMEWHERE. FROM THERE GENERAL DELIVERY WILL GET THIS TO YOU.

ARRANGE A MEETING WITHIN TWO DAYS, OR THE ENTIRE WORLD WILL BE HUNTING FOR YOU, NOT I ALONE.

— MANELLA

That man was as tenacious as a remora, as persistent as any taniwha. Alex sighed.

Still, he wondered if it really mattered anymore. In a way, he looked forward to watching Pedro Manella’s face when he told the man the news.

It was an unworthy anticipation. A grown man shouldn’t covet revenge.

Ah, he thought, but we are legion. I contain multitudes. And some of the people making up “me” aren’t grown-ups at all.

• EXOSPHERE

Pedro insisted they change vehicles three times during their roundabout journey from the Auckland aerodrome. At one point he bought them both new clothes, straight off the rack in a tourist clip joint in Rotorua. Changing at the store, they abandoned their former at-tire on the off chance someone might have planted a tracking device on them.

Teresa went along with these measures stoically, absurd and melodramatic as they seemed. Without appropriate experience or instincts to guide her, she could only hope Manella knew what he was doing.

Strangely, the Aztlan reporter appeared to grow calmer, the closer they neared the arranged rendezvous. He drove the final kilometers of winding forest highway with a peaceful smile, humming atonal compositions of dubious lineage.

Teresa’s contribution was to work away silently at her cuticles and rub a hole in the thin carpet with her right foot each time Pedro tortured the little rental car’s transmission or took a curve too fast. It didn’t help that they still drove on the left in this country, putting the passenger in a position she normally associated with having control. She had never found it easy letting someone else drive — even Jason. She was close to snatching the wheel out of Pedro’s hands by the time bright signs began appearing along the side of the road.

WAITOMO CAVES. JUST AHEAD. COME SEE THE WONDER OF THE WAIKATO.

One of the billboards depicted a family of happy spelunkers, helmet lamps glowing as they pointed at astonishing sights just offstage.

“We’ve entered their security perimeter, by now,” Manella said. To seem more relaxed, he’d have to close his eyes and go to sleep.

“You think so?” Teresa knew he didn’t mean the tourist concessionaires. She frowned at the blur of conifers rushing past her window. Manella glanced at her and smiled. “Don’t fret. Lustig isn’t a violent type.”

“How do you explain what happened in Iquitos then?”

“Well, I admit he is… highly accident prone.” When Teresa laughed bitterly, Pedro shrugged. “That doesn’t release him from responsibility. Au contraire. Unlucky people should exercise special caution, lest their bad luck come to harm others. In Lustig’s case—”

“His message hinted he knew something about the destruction of Erehwon. Maybe he caused it! He might be working with Spivey, for all we know.”

Manella sighed. “A chance we’ll have to take. And now we’re here.”

Signs pointed left to public parking. Pedro swooped down, around, and into a slot with a display of panache Teresa could have lived without. She emerged to a syncopation of crackling vertebrae, feeling more respect than ever for the pioneers of Vostok, Mercury, and Gemini, who first ventured into space crammed into canisters approximately the. same size of the tiny car.

She and her companion crossed the highway to the ticket booth, paid for two admissions, and joined other tourists passing under one of the ubiquitous carved archways that seemed a New Zealand trademark. Teresa glanced at those gathering for the two o’clock tour, a sparse assortment of winter travelers that included hand-holding Asian newly-weds, retirees with Australian accents, and local children in quaint woolen school uniforms. For all she knew, any of them might be agents for the mysterious organization they’d tracked to this place.

The meeting had been set up with delicacy and circumlocution, each side taking precautions against a possible double cross. It all struck Teresa as anachronistic, and hopelessly adolescent.

Unfortunately, adolescents ran the world. Big, irresponsible adolescents like Jason or this Lustig fellow, whose dossier read like the biography of a high-tech Peter Pan. Even worse were serious, bloody-minded types like Colonel Spivey, whose games of national security were played with real multitudes serving as pawns. She recalled how intensely the man had worked during the recent space mission. Spivey was driven, all right. Sometimes that could be a good thing.

It could also make some people dangerous.

“You’re sure these people will keep their word?” she whispered to Manella.

He looked back with amusement. “Of course I’m not sure! Lustig may be nonviolent, but what do we know about his backers?” Again, he shrugged. “We’ll find out soon enough.”

Ask a foolish question… Teresa thought.

Their tour guide arrived at last, a dark-haired, dark-skinned young man with broad shoulders and a pleasant smile. The guide cheerfully beckoned them to follow him along a wooden walk that hugged the steep hillside, and soon had them traversing along mist-shrouded waterfalls. Teresa kept close to Manella at the end of the queue.

She caught herself glancing backward to see if anyone was sneaking up behind them, and made herself stop doing it.

The vegetation changed as they passed under a rain forest canopy. Exotic birds flitted under moist foliage that looked so healthy you might never imagine how many other places like this were withering elsewhere on the planet. Here even the smells seemed to convey strength, diversity. This jungle felt as if it were a long way from dying. Inhaling felt like taking a tonic. That calmed her a bit. She took deep breaths.

They turned a corner and suddenly the cave entrance yawned ahead of them. The gap in the mountainside was appropriately dark, foreboding. Steps proceeded downward between slippery metal banisters, with bare bulbs spaced at intervals apparently calculated to maximize eerie shadows, to thrill visitors with an illusion of creaking decrepitude and mystery. ,

Teresa listened idly as the guide recited something having to do with great birds, cousins of the legendary moa, who used to get trapped in caves like these during prehistoric times, leaving their bones to be discovered by astonished explorers many centuries later.

As they descended, he used a beam to point out features of the grottoes, carved over thousands of years by patient underground streams, then embellished with fluted limestone apses by centuries of slow seepage. In places the ceiling gave way to shafts and chimneys that towered out of sight or dropped into total blackness, lined with soda-straw draperies and crystalline, branchlike helicites. Curling galleries curved out of view, hinting at an interminable maze that would surely swallow anyone foolish enough to leave the wooden walkway.

It was, indeed, quite beautiful. Still, Teresa felt little true surprise or awe. It was all too familiar from prior exposure on TV or in net-zines. She nodded familiarly at stalactites and stalagmites, acquaintances already encountered in the past by proxy. Rather than eerie or strange, they were neighbors she had learned a lot about over the years, long before ever meeting them in person.

The good side of the world media village was the sense it gave ten billion that each of them had at least some small connection with the whole. The bad side was that no one ever encountered anything, anymore, that was completely new.

Perhaps that was why I became an astronaut, in hopes of someday seeing some special place before the cameras got there.

If so, lots of luck. The vast mountain ranges of the moon were still unclimbed. And at present rate, they probably never would be. Likewise the steep canyons, ice sheets, and red vistas of Mars.

Teresa scanned craggy terraces, shaped over millennia by the slow drip-dripping of carbonate-rich water. No doubt she and Pedro were already being watched by Alex Lustig’s mysterious organization. Their instructions had been to keep to the rear. If Pedro knew anything more, he hadn’t told her.

“Now we’ll be going down another set of stairs,” their guide announced. “Hold onto the rail because the lights grow dimmer, to let our eyes adapt for the Grand Cave.”

The visitors’ voices grew hushed as they descended plank steps, put there to protect the limestone floor from the erosive rub of countless feet. Once, Teresa caught a white flash of teeth as Manella turned to grin at her. She ignored him, pretending not to see.

Soon it was hardly pretense. Colliding with Pedro’s broad back was her first warning the descent had ended. Whispers diminished to an occasional giggle as people bumped awkwardly. A cough. A faint, familiar hiss as someone in the crowd took oxygen from a hip flask, followed by a mumbled apology.

Listening carefully, Teresa made out rhythmic thumping sounds and a faint splash. The tour leader spoke from somewhere to her left. “We’ll divide the group now and continue by water. Each boat will have a guide, standing in the prow, who will pull you along by hauling on ropes arrayed along the ceiling.”

As her eyes adapted, Teresa soon made out smudges here and there — the edge of the dock and several small vessels moored alongside, with a man’s or woman’s silhouette at the bow. She even thought she could trace a webbery of cables draped across the rock overhead.

“Interesting mode of transport,” Pedro commented as they watched the first boat depart. More tourists were helped into the next one and the queue moved forward.

“As each boat rounds the bend ahead,” the chief guide continued. “You’ll leave behind the last illumination. Your pilot will be operating by memory and touch alone. But don’t worry, we only lose one or two boatloads a year.”

A poor joke, but it touched off nervous titters.

“A few more turns and you’ll arrive at the main grotto, where our famous worms will perform their unique show for you — the centerpiece of Waitomo Caves. Then, by another route, you’ll be returned here to the landing. We hope you enjoy your visit to the wonder of the Waikato.”

Some wonder. So far Teresa hadn’t seen anything particularly impressive. Much bigger caves were regularly featured on the National Geographic net-zine.

The tourists just ahead of them boarded a boat. There was room remaining at the back, but their guide held out a hand to stop Manella. “You, sir, look just a bit heavy to add here. I’ll take you two in the last one myself.”

As Pedro sniffed indignantly, the guide helped them into the final boat. Then he moved to the bow and cast off. The dim remaining light disappeared behind them as he pulled the ceiling-spanning ropes hand over hand and they passed around a bend into pitch darkness.

Teresa tried using biofeedback to speed her adaptation to the dark and found it disconcerting how little training helped. You couldn’t amplify what doesn’t exist.

By now there were no signs of the other boats. They might have drifted over a cliff, for all Teresa knew. Or perhaps some stealthy monster waited just ahead, plucking each group silently and swiftly from their stygian barges.

The waters were chill to her fingertips when she dragged them alongside. They also seemed to have a faint oily quality. Bringing a few drops to her lips, she tasted minerals. It wasn’t unpleasant though. The underground river was slow but clear and fresh. It tasted timeless.

“Some years the water rises too high to let boats pass,” the guide told them in a soft voice. “And during droughts they can be stranded.”

“Are there eyeless fish, down here?” Teresa asked.

The native’s low, disembodied laughter seemed to dance along the sculpted rocks. “Of course! What sort of buried river would this be without such? They live on seeds, pollen, and insect larvae carried down here from ki waho, the outside world. Some of those larvae survive to become flies, which in turn feed…”

Teresa grabbed the gunnels quickly as she sensed something massive approach from the left — moments before their boat grated against rock, tipping slightly. “Just a second,” the voice told them. “I have to step out to guide us around this column. Hold on.”

She traced the faint scrape of a boot on a sandy bank. Without any sight at all, not even the dark eclipse of Manella in front of her, she sensed only vague movement as their vessel scoured along a limestone verge and then emerged round a corner into a starry night.

Teresa gasped. Stars? Sudden disorientation left her staring at the brilliant vault overhead, amazed.

But it was early afternoon when we arrived. How ?

Automatically, she sought her friends, the familiar constellations, and recognized none of them. Everything had changed! It was as if she’d passed through some science fictional device, to a world in some distant galaxy. The swirl of stellar clusters arced overhead in vast, regal, and totally alien splendor.

Teresa blinked, suffering from acuity of senses. Hearing told her she was underground. Her internal gyroscope said she was less than two kilometers from the car. And yet the clinquant stars screamed of open sky. She shook her head. Wrong. Wrong. Readjust. Don’t make assumptions!

All this happened in a narrow instant, the time it took for her to notice that every one of these “stars” shone the same exact shade of bright green. In half a second Teresa settled the sensory clash, seeing how this artful hoax was perpetrated.

The boat rocked as a figure occulted the false constellations, stepping back into the bow. The guide’s silhouette eclipsed bright pinpoints as he hauled away at a line of blackness overhead. “Our cave worms make their homes along the roof,” his voice echoed softly. “They produce a phosphorescence that lures newly hatched flies and other insects whose eggs and larvae were swept here from the outside world. The bright spots lead those insects not outside, not back into Te Ao-marama, but onto sticky snares.”

Something was wrong. Teresa sat forward. She whispered. “Pedro, his voice…”

With uncanny accuracy, Manella grabbed her hand and squeezed for silence. Teresa tensed briefly, then forced herself to relax. This must be part of the plan. With effort she sat back and made the best of the situation. There was nothing else to do, anyway.

Now she felt sheepish for even momentarily mistaking the lights overhead for stars. Their slow passage let her estimate parallax… ranging from one and a half to three meters above them. She’ could, in fact, follow the rough contours of the ceiling now. Anyway, there was no twinkle from atmospheric distortion. Some of the “stars” were, in fact, large oblong shapes.

Still… She blinked, and suddenly rationalization departed once more. For another thrilling moment Teresa purposely enjoyed the illusion again, looking out on an alien sky, on the fringes of some strange spiral arm with fields of verdant suns — the mysterious night glitter of a faraway frontier.

Their guide’s shadow was the black outline of a nebula. The nebula moved. So, she suddenly noticed, did a regular, straight boundary. A rectangular blackness, free of green, passed over them as if demarking a gate. Soon Teresa heard a low rumble of motors and sensed a barrier roll behind them. The emerald starscape vanished.

“Now, if you’ll please cover your eyes,” the shadow said. She felt Manella move to comply, but only shaded hers. To close them completely would demand too much trust.

A sharp glow suddenly grew ahead of them. Perhaps it was only a dim lamp, but the glare felt intense enough to hurt her dark-adapted retinas. It quickly drove out all remaining trace of the worm phosphors. Teresa bade them farewell regretfully.

The boat bumped once more and stopped. “Come this way please,” the voice told them. She felt a touch on her arm and Teresa let herself be led, blinking, out of the swaying craft. Her eyes tearing somewhat from the brightness, she had to squint past rays of diffraction to see who had replaced their original guide. It was a brown-haired man, lightly freckled, who clearly owned no Polynesian ancestry at all. Right now he regarded Pedro with an expression she couldn’t read, but obviously carrying strong emotion.

“Hello, Manella,” he said, apparently making an effort to be polite.

It was Teresa’s first chance to scrutinize Alex Lustig in person. In photographs he had appeared distant, distracted, and some of that quality was present. But now she thought she perceived something else as well, possibly the expression of one who has sought strangeness, and found much more than he had ever bargained for.

Pedro used a kerchief to wipe his eyes. “Hello yourself, Lustig. Thanks for seeing us. Now, I hope you have a good explanation for what you’ve been up to?”

Here they were deep underground, out of contact with any of their own people or, in fact, any legal authority — and sure enough, old Pedro was slipping right back into the role of paternal authority figure.

“As you wish.” Alex Lustig nodded, apparently un-fazed. “If you two will follow me, I’ll tell you everything. But I warn you, it will be hard to believe.”

Of course Pedro wouldn’t let someone else get the last word in, even with a line like that.

“From you, my boy, I expect no less than the completely preposterous and utterly calamitous.”

An hour later Teresa wondered why she only felt anesthetized, when she really ought to loathe the man. Even if he hadn’t made the monster eating away at the Earth’s heart, he was still the one who had brought this thing to her attention.

Then there was his role in triggering the burst of coherent gravity waves that drove Jason and nine others on their one-way journey to the stars. That, too, should be reason enough to despise Alex Lustig. And yet the only emotions she felt capable of right now were more immediate ones… such as the wry pleasure of seeing Pedro Manella for the first time at a loss for words.

The big man sat across from Lustig, hands folded on a table of dark wood, his notepad completely forgotten. Pedro’s eyes kept flicking to a large holographic cutaway of the Earth, more vivid and detailed than anything their group had been able to construct back in Houston. Delicately traced minutiae cast orange, yellow, and reddish shades across one side of Manella’s face, lending false gay overtones to his bleak expression.

There were only the three of them here in a sparsely furnished underground chamber. After providing his guests with refreshments, Lustig had launched into his briefing without assistance, though twice he had lifted a headset to consult someone outside. Naturally, the man had help. Despite his “solitary wizard” reputation, there was no way he could have figured all this out by himself.

The possibility of a hoax occurred to Teresa several times, but she recognized that as wishful thinking. Lustig’s calm thoroughness bespoke credibility, however insane or horrible his conclusions.

“… so it was only this week, by combining gravity scans with neutrino observations, that we were able to pin down at last where the energy is coming from… the elevated state powering the gazer effect. It’s at the base of the mantle, where the geomagnetic field draws on currents in the outer core…”

Technically, the story wasn’t hard to follow. While searching for his Iquitos black hole, Lustig and his associates had stumbled across a much more dangerous singularity al-ready present at the center of the Earth. They tried using tuned gravity waves to trace that one’s trajectory and history, but that touched off internal reflections, amplifying gravitons much as photons are between the mirrors of a laser. In this case the “gazer mirrors” consisted of the mysterious Beta itself plus the experimental black hole onboard station Erehwon. What blasted forth was a great wave of warped space-time, spearing in the general direction of Spica.

Lustig was a good teacher. He kept his math to low-level matrices and used figures to graphically lay out this tale of catastrophe. It sounded all too plausible — and she wouldn’t have believed a single word if she hadn’t witnessed so much firsthand. The sudden, horrible stretching and contraction of Erehwon’s tether, for instance. Or the relativistic departure of the Farpoint lab. Or those colors.

What had Teresa becalmed in an emotional dead zone was the realization that all her concerns were over. What point was there in worrying about internal politics at NASA, or her next flight itinerary, or her failed marriage, if the whole world was coming to an end soon?

The mystery singularity — Lustig’s “cosmic knot” — must have started small. But Beta had grown till now it teetered near a critical threshold. She read the accretion rate off a side screen. Clearly the thing was poised for a voracious binge that could have only one conclusion.

One conclusion … So far he had spared them an explicit simulation of what would happen when matter began flowing into Beta’s maw in megatons per second. Teresa figured it would start with shock waves disrupting the planet’s deep, ancient convection patterns. Earthquakes would roll and volcanoes spume as great seams opened in the crust. Then, undermined from within, the outer layers would collapse.

Ironically, little would happen to things in orbit, like the moon or satellites. Earth’s total mass below would stay the same, only converted into a far more compact form. If she happened to be on a mission at the time, she’d get to watch the whole show… until the singularity revealed its bare glory and seared her spacecraft out of existence in a blast of gamma radiation.

Teresa shook herself. This was no time for a funk. Later, at home, she could climb under the covers, curl in a ball, and hope to die.

“… that one of our problems was finding the inverted energy distribution that’s being tapped by the gazer beam. Where does all the power come from?” The Englishman ran a hand through his hair. “Then it all made sense! The Earth’s magnetic dynamo is the source. Specifically, discrete superconducting domains where—”

Teresa started, sitting upright. “What did you say?”

Alex Lustig regarded her with pale blue eyes. “Captain Tikhana? I was referring to current loops, where the lower mantle meets the liquid core—”

She interrupted again. “You spoke of superconductivity. Down there? We still have trouble cooling rapid transit lines on a summer day, but you say there are superconducting areas thousands of miles below, where temperatures reach thousands of degrees?”

The British physicist nodded. “Don’t forget, pressures at the base of the mantle exceed ten thousand newtons per square centimeter. And then there’s a delightful coincidence one of my colleagues noticed only recently. The bottommost mineral state, before mantle gives way to metallic core, seems to consist of various oxides pressed into a perovskite structure—”

“Per… ovskite?”

“A particularly dense oxide arrangement that forms readily under pressure.”

“I still don’t get it,” she said, frowning.

He spread his hands. “Relatives of these same perovskites happen to be among the best industrial superconductors! This coincidence led us to consider a weird notion… that there are places, thousands of kilometers below us, where electric current flows completely free of resistance.”

The very idea made Teresa close her eyes. Once upon a time, superconductivity had been associated only with utter cold, near absolute zero. Only in recent decades had “room temperature” superconductors joined a few other breakthroughs to help salvage the hard-pressed world economy. Now she envisioned loops and titanic circuits, flowing in perfect, resistance-free fire. It was a startling notion. “These superconducting domains… they’re the excited zones you tap with the gravity resonator?”

“We think so. Energy levels drop each time, but are quickly pumped up again by convection.”

Silence held. When Manella spoke again, he shook his head. “So many wonderful discoveries… all made under the shadow of an angel of death. Okay, Lustig, you’ve had your fun. Now tell us what we need to know.”

“Know for what?”

Pedro pounded the tabletop. “For revenge! Who released this thing? And when? Where do we find them?”

From the other man’s countenance, Teresa guessed this wasn’t the first time he had heard that request. “I don’t know the answer yet,” he replied. “It’s hard to trace its trajectory back, taking into account friction and accretion and inhomogeneities in the core…”

“You can’t even begin to guess?”

The physicist shrugged. “By my calculations the thing shouldn’t even exist.”

“Of course it shouldn’t exist! But somebody made it, obviously. You said you understood the basic principles.”

“Oh, I do… or thought I did. But I’m having trouble seeing how anyone could make such a large knot with any energy source available on Earth today.”

“Wasn’t it smaller when it fell?”

“Surely. But remember, practical cavitronics is only about eight years old. When I extrapolate that far back from Beta’s present size and growth rate, it’s still too bloody heavy. No structure on Earth could have supported it.”

Manella glowered. “Obviously you’ve made some mistake.”

Teresa saw something flash briefly in Alex Lustig’s eyes — an anger that quenched as quickly as it came. With surprising mildness, he nodded. “Obviously. Perhaps it is eating faster than my theory predicts. This isn’t an area anyone has much experience in.”

At that moment Teresa felt the weight of the cave around her, as if all the tons overhead were pressing on her chest. Partly to overcome faintness, she spoke the critical question.

“How…” She swallowed. “How much time do we have?”

He blew a sigh. “Actually, that part’s fairly easy. However rapidly it grew in the past, the asymptotic threshold remains the same. If it continues sucking in matter, faster and faster… I’d say we have about two years until major earthquakes begin. Another year before volcanic activity chokes the atmosphere.

“Then of course, things accelerate rapidly as the singularity’s growth feeds on itself. Ninety-five percent of the Earth won’t be swallowed till the last hour. Ninety percent in the final minute or so.”

Teresa and Pedro shared a bleak look. “My God,” she said.

“That, of course, is what will happen if it continues along the path now marked out for it.” Alex Lustig spread his hands again. “I don’t know about you lot. But personally, I’d rather not leave the thing to do its job unmolested.”

Teresa turned and stared at the physicist. He glanced back with raised eyebrows.

“Do you mean .-…?” she began, and was unable to speak.

He answered with a shrug. “Surely you don’t imagine I agreed to meet with you two just to satisfy my arch nemesis and his craving for headlines, do you? We’ll need your help, if we’re to stand a chance of getting rid of the damned thing.”

Manella panted. “You… have a way?”

“A way, yes, though it doesn’t offer very good odds. And it’s going to take more resources than I or my friends have at hand.”

He looked back and forth between his two stunned visitors.

“Oh now, don’t take it like that. Look at it this way, Pedro. If we pull this off, you and my friend George can spend many fine years, forever if necessary, arguing how to find and punish the brainy bastards responsible for this thing.”

His expression then turned darker and he looked down. “That is, if this works.”