Foreigner

Epilogue

The rest of the starships had left at various times over the last few kilodays. But this last ship hung in orbit above the innermost moon of the fifth planet. Liss extended her forefinger claw and used it to move a selector control. The viewscreen snapped to the image of that moon, waxing gibbous. A vast ocean covered almost everything except the frozen polar caps and the single continent with its archipelago of volcanic islands trailing off to the west, and another, smaller, archipelago in the nearside hemisphere. Many chains of volcanoes had popped up recently along fracture lines in the sub-sea crust. They looked like sutures in the skull of some strange round-headed beast.

Twisting white clouds moved in neat east-west bands as the moon spun rapidly on its axis. Intertwined with these were trails of black volcanic smoke, the dying gasps of this world.

Behind the moon was the massive planet they still called Galat-Jaroob, the Face of God. It, too, spun rapidly, causing its methane and ammonia clouds—gold and orange, brown and yellow—to play out into latitudinal bands. An awesome sight, thought Liss. She could understand how her ancestors, five hundred kilodays ago, had fallen into hypnotic stupor when they first saw it.

Liss would be sorry to leave the Face behind, to never bask in the sight of it again. Soon, very soon, this ship, too, would head off into interstellar space. But it was their job to wait, to actually watch the breakup of the Quintaglio moon.

An alarm sounded. The sensors left on various parts of Land were beaming up signals, warning that the final breakup had begun. At that moment, the door to the instrumentation room opened and in floated Geman. He touched Liss on the shoulder. “The computer can look after the cameras,” he said. “Come on up and watch it with the rest of us.”

Liss checked the controls one last time, then pushed herself off the wall and followed Geman out into the corridor. They soon came to the observation deck. Thousands of green bodies, and hundreds of yellow ones, floated together beneath the vast bubble of the observation dome. Around its edges, ten giant viewscreens showed close-ups from the ship’s external cameras, from free-flying probes, and from cameras left on the surface. Between two of the viewscreens was a glass case, holding the far-seer that had once belonged to Sal-Afsan.

Liss looked at the screens. The volcanoes in the southern part of the great ocean flared first, each in turn, like a chain of lights coming on one by one.

On one of the viewscreens, vast walls of water—waves the height of mountains—crashed against the rocky terrain, smashing the ancient ruins of the old Capital City, then flooding over the damage, sinking it all beneath the waves.

Soon, other volcanic chains, some with cones still submerged beneath the vast worldwide ocean, lit up. The moon Liss had been born on, always somewhat oblate because of its rapid spin, now took on the appearance of a cracked egg, the fissures aglow in red.

Another viewscreen was showing the coastline of Fra’toolar and the blue pyramid that anchored the space elevator. The ground was shaking, and the elevator shaft, an impossibly long blue finger reaching up toward the L3 point, was shifting back and forth. Although from the ground the vibration at first seemed minimal, another viewscreen showed the top of the shaft swinging in a vast arc.

The land was buckling and soon the stone ground beneath the pyramid started to crack. The blue material was virtually indestructible, but slowly the tower’s base began to separate from the rock strata. It didn’t topple, though. Rather, it gently rose up into the sky. The tower had begun to rotate around its midpoint, some 6,600 kilopaces above the surface of the dying moon. Although soon there would be nothing at all left of Quintaglio civilization, the blue tower, a calling card from those strange five-eyed beings who had transplanted life to this and other worlds millions of kilodays ago, would apparently survive the breakup of this moon.

When Liss’s world at last fell apart, it did so with each component trailing glowing red streams of magma, like fiery entrails. The globe split into three large chunks and two smaller ones. Each began to move at a slightly different speed. The same differential tidal forces that had torn the world asunder now caused each piece to find its natural orbital velocity based on distance from the Face of God.

It wasn’t long before the two largest hunks touched together again, silently shattering into hundreds of smaller pieces, the water that had covered them both scattering everywhere, freezing into droplets in space like a trillion new stars, twinkling as they tumbled in the blue-white light of the distant sun.

In successive orbits, the large chunks, tugged this way and that by gravitational interactions with each other and with the remaining thirteen moons, brushed and bounced together, grinding into smaller and smaller fragments. Already the pieces of debris were spreading into a thin band covering a few percent of the circumference of their orbits around the Face of God.

As the process continued, the shattered remnants of the home world would grind into hundreds of thousands of chunks, ranging from flying boulders to gravel-sized pieces, slowly distributing themselves into a vast, flat ring around the orange-and-yellow-banded planet.

The ship’s central computer was an artificial intelligence whose mind simulated that of the greatest Quintaglio thinker of all time. Its neural nets had been configured and reconfigured until they had been trained to give the same responses to the question that the original had, three hundred and thirty kilodays ago, when his words had been recorded by Mokleb, the founder of modern psychological research, who had probed his every thought, every emotion.

The observation deck was crowded, but Liss was close to one of the pairs of glossy black hemispheres that were the computer’s stereoscopic cameras. “Afsan,” she said, “how long until the rubble actually forms a continuous ring around the Face of God?”

The computer’s voice was deep and smooth, reassuring with its quiet confidence and the hints of serenity and wisdom that legend said were the hallmarks of the original Afsan. “I’m afraid we won’t be able to stay for it,” said the voice. “It’ll take at least a hundred kilodays.” And then a little sound effect issued from the speaker, a clicking like teeth gently touching together. “But when it’s done, it will be a glorious sight—a beautiful reminder that, once upon a time, our home world did indeed exist.”

The ship tarried a few days more, taking measurements. Then, at last, with everyone strapped onto his or her cushioned dayslab, the engines were brought on-line. Liss felt something she hadn’t felt for a long time—the first faint sensation of her own weight—as the ship gently nudged out of orbit.

They had tried establishing colonies in this solar system, tried living under pressure domes on the third moon of Kevpel and on the rocky surface of Gefpel, tried living in orbital habitats. But none of those was a proper existence; they wouldn’t do forever.

And so now they were leaving, all of them, green and yellow, Quintaglios and what had once been called Others, looking for a suitable home, a world on which they could run and play and hunt in the open air.

It would be a long voyage, and Liss would be dead well before it was over. But someday the children of the children of the eggs she now carried within her would arrive at their new home.

Their new home.

And their old home.

The monitoring room at the top of the space elevator had shown them pictures of the thirty-one worlds that the ark-makers had seeded, as well as pictures of the original home world, the crucible on which life had originally arisen. An antenna running along the tower’s 13,000-kilopace height had picked up images continually broadcast by self-repairing probes left on those worlds by the ark-makers millennia ago.

Most of the Quintaglio generation ships had gone to new worlds discovered by orbital far-seers; a few had been dispatched to some of the worlds that had life already seeded on them; but this one ship, the last, had a very special mission.

It was going home.

Liss wondered whether the strange tailless bipeds, those long-lost cousins of the Quintaglios, would be glad to see them when they arrived back at their original world.

Time would tell.

The full-acceleration alarm sounded.

And the starship Dasheter surged ahead.