Swan registered Genette’s presence beside her. “You again,” she said. “What the fuck.” She glared at Wahram, who blanched a little to see it, even raised a hand to ward off her gaze. “What are you two up to?” she demanded.
Genette turned on Passepartout, a qube like an old wristwatch, and said, “Please don’t be upset. I am inspector general of the Interplanetary Police, as I told you when we met before. I was worried to learn of Alex’s unexpected death, and although that appears to have been a natural event, I have been continuing to look into a number of untoward events that may be connected. You were close to Alex, and you were there to witness the assault on Io, and now you were here again when Terminator was
attacked. It may be a coincidence, but you can see why we continue to run into each other.”
Swan nodded unhappily.
Wahram said, “Did you ever find out anything out about the remains of the figure that fell into the lava on Io?”
“Let’s discuss that later,” Genette said with a warning look at Wahram. “For now we need to focus on the destruction of Terminator. Do you two mind telling me what you saw?”
Swan sat up and described the strike, then their return to the city, and their realization that they had missed the evacuation; then their run east to the nearest track platform, and their descent into the utilidor. Wahram merely nodded in confirmation from time to time. This took a few minutes. After that Swan’s account of their time in the utilidor was very brief, and Wahram did not elaborate or nod at anything. Twenty-four days could be a long time. Genette looked back and forth between them. Neither of them had seen much at the time of the blast, it was clear.
“So… is Terminator still burning?” Swan said.
“Strictly speaking, the burning is done. It is now incandescing.”
She turned away, face scrunched in a knot. In their final transmissions, the cameras and AIs left behind in Terminator had recorded the city igniting in the sunlight—burning, melting, exploding, and so forth, until the recording instruments had failed. It had not been a general inferno but rather a patchwork of smaller fires, starting at different times. Some heat-resistant AIs were still transmitting data, documenting what happened as everything heated to seven hundred K. A collage of all those images gave a good impression of the incineration, though it seemed pretty clear that Swan would not want to see it.
But in fact she did. When she composed herself, she declared, “I want to see it all. Show me everything. I
need
to see it. I intend to make a penance somehow, a memorial. For now, tell us what you know! What happened?”
The inspector shrugged. “The city’s tracks were impacted by something. The site itself is still out on the brightside, and until sunset arrives a thorough investigation can’t be made. The impactor was invisible to your meteor defense systems, which should not be possible, as it massed many thousands of kilograms. Some people are saying it must have been a comet strike. I prefer to call it the event. It still isn’t established for sure that it wasn’t an explosion from below.”
“Like a mine planted under it?” Wahram asked.
“Well, some satellite photos do make it look more like an impact event. But then questions arise.”
The inspector’s wristqube spoke in a clear singsong: “You’ve got a visitor named Mqaret.”
“Tell him where we are,” Genette said to it. “Ask him to join us.”
Swan’s cheeks had turned hectic. “I want to see Terminator,” she announced.
“It might be possible to visit briefly in a protected vehicle, but little can be done there now. The crews on-site are mostly taking shelter in the shade of it. Sunset reaches that longitude in about seventeen more days.”
Then Mqaret came into the room, and Swan cried out his name and reached out for a hug.
“We thought you were dead!” Mqaret exclaimed. “That whole concert party disappeared, and we thought you were with them, and then the evacuation was chaos, and we thought you were killed.”
“We got down into the utilidor,” Swan said.
“Well, people checked down there, but they didn’t see anyone.”
“We decided to hike east, to get it over with faster.”
“I can see how you would do that, but you should have left a note.”
“I thought we did.”
“Really? But never mind—you’re so thin! We need to get you to the lab to have a really thorough look at you.” Mqaret circled the bed and gave Wahram a brief hug too. “Thank you for getting my Swan home. We hear you took care of her down there.”
Genette saw that Swan did not look entirely happy at this description.
Wahram said, “We all helped each other. Indeed we look forward to seeing the young sunwalkers we were down there with.”
Mqaret said, “They’re in the process of retrieving them now, and I hope they’ll be fine. A fair number of sunwalkers have been picked up.”
“Ours were very helpful,” Wahram said, although Swan snorted to hear it.
Mqaret seemed unaffected by the destruction of the city; as it came on the heels of Alex’s death, he no doubt felt that it didn’t really matter. With Terminator gone, however, the Mercurials were now reduced to staying in underground shelters scattered all over the planet, in a way not that different from how people occupied Io. Which was not the optimal position from which to rebuild. But they could do it, and in fact work had already started, using heat-resistant shelters and robots. Very soon after sunset came to the burned city, they would fix the tracks and have the city’s frame moving again; then they could rebuild in the safety of darkness, as they had the first time.
Meanwhile they were still in emergency mode, and their influence elsewhere in the system correspondingly reduced. So now Mqaret said to Swan, but with a look to Genette and Wahram, “We’ll rebuild and we’ll be all right. The people who talk about our fatal criticality have different criticalities of their own. We’re all vulnerable in space. There isn’t a single off-Earth settlement that couldn’t be destroyed, except for Mars.”
“Which is part of what makes Mars insufferable,” Genette noted.
“I will create a monument to our loss,” Swan declared, struggling as if to leave her bed. Tugging dramatically at her IV lines—“I will perform an abramovic in the ruins, to express the city’s grief. Perhaps a period of crucifixion would be appropriate.”
“Burning at the stake,” Wahram suggested.
Swan shot him a poisonous look. Mqaret objected more tactfully, pointing out that Swan was not yet recovered enough to use her body as a canvas. “It’s always so hard on you, Swan, you can’t.”
“I will! I most certainly will.”
But Swan’s qube spoke from the right side of her neck: “I must inform you that you have given me instructions to oppose any abramovician artworks when your health is not optimal. These are your own instructions to yourself.”
“Ridiculous,” Swan said. “Sometimes circumstances demand a change in plan. This is an overriding life event, a catastrophe. It demands a response in kind.”
“I must inform you that you have given me instructions to oppose doing an abramovic when your health is not optimal.”
“Shut up, Pauline. I don’t want you to speak now.”
Mqaret had moved to block Swan from leaving her bed; now he said, “Dear Swan, your Pauline is right. Meaning that you yourself are right, and speaking from a larger perspective in yourself. Don’t be hasty here. There are better ways for you to exert yourself during our time of troubles. There’s work to be done.”
“It’s
work
to express Terminator’s fate in
art
.”
“I know, and for you especially. But you are one of our biome designers, and so you’ll be very much needed in that capacity. We can seize this opportunity to renovate the park and the farm.”
Swan looked alarmed. “Surely we’ll just replace them? No one will want anything changed—I know I won’t.”
“Well, we’ll see about that. But you must be available to the city.”
Swan glowered. “I will be no matter what. Can we at least take a hopper around into the brightside and look at it?”
“I think so. I’ll ask for seats on one of the daytrippers as soon as I can. But you need to finish your recovery first.”
A
few days later they all went out in a hopper, following the tracks east into daylight and the wreckage of Terminator. The land below as seen through heavy filtering was the white of paper, marked by black rings and a few wavering lines, resembling all together some alphabet written with compasses. The tracks themselves were a narrow band of glowing white wires.
Then over the horizon reared Terminator. The dome frame glowed as white as the tracks. The interior was a black mass, which as they got closer resolved to smaller masses of clinkers and gunk and ash, black blobs, black powder. Some metal surfaces glowed red. It was reminiscent of old photos of Terran cities destroyed by firestorm.
Mqaret shook his head at the sight. “You can see why we need to stay on the nightside.”
Swan stared down, seeming not to hear. No theatrics this time, Genette noted. Grim desolation in an empty face. Looked like she was somewhere else. Wahram was watching her unobtrusively.
The glowing ruin of the city was dominated by the still-standing Dawn Wall. Its east-facing exterior was as silvery and pure as ever, but its inside was now a mess of curving black terraces. Some of the rooftops made of royal-blue ceramic tiles had remained intact, and even now held their color. The Great Staircase still cut down through black strip after black strip, the imported marble of the steps nacreous in the heat. The glowing white spans of the dome frame curved up at the sky like the framework of the dome in Hiroshima.
“It was so beautiful,” Mqaret said.
“Still is,” said Swan.
Mqaret said, “We’ll import some mature trees and grow the rest from seed. Although I have to tell you, the arrangements with
insurance don’t seem to be working out very well. They’re arguing about the definition of ‘full replacement.’ Also it isn’t clear yet whether it was an act of God or an act of war. The council lawyers think the insurance is there for us either way, but who knows. It’s going to be expensive, that’s the main thing. We’ll need help. Luckily the Accord will have our back. And replacing the animals will be easy, as the terraria are well above capacity.”
He glanced at Wahram, cleared his throat. “I hear the Vulcanoids are also anxious to help. Naturally they’re worried down there.”
“They need us,” Swan said. “That’s why they took Alex up on her proposal to help them in the first place.”
“Well, this will be a test of how much they think they need us.”
Swan shook her head like a dog. Genette saw that she did not want to think about the Vulcanoids right now. She was annoyed perhaps at Mqaret’s move to the next step, even as they were staring down at the glowing ruins.
Wahram was more attentive to her mood. “ ‘Remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.’ ”
Swan scowled at him. “More fortune cookies, oh deep one?”
“Yes.” A tiny smile; he still had the capacity to be amused by her, Genette saw, even after their confinement together. Maybe he had even learned it there. It was striking how little they had said about their time in the tunnel.
Now Swan said, “I want to join Inspector Genette’s investigation, if that’s all right, Inspector? I’d like to be the Mercurial liaison to your investigation.”
“We can always use help,” Genette said diplomatically. “This incident is of grave concern to everyone, but of course for Mercury it goes right to the heart of things. I was assuming you would therefore want someone to join the investigation.”
“Good,” Swan said. “I’ll keep in touch with the design team,”
she told Mqaret. There was no more talk of some kind of self-mortifying art performance; although it occurred to the inspector that the investigation itself might eventually be seen as such.
W
hen they got back to the spaceport, Wahram nodded and took his leave of Genette. Then he turned to Swan, bowing very slightly, with hand on heart.
“I must return to Saturn and attend to business I missed. We’ll meet again soon, I’m sure. Terminator will rise like a phoenix, and then there will be all kinds of unfinished business for us to complete.”
“There most certainly will,” she said. Suddenly she hugged him, put her head briefly against his broad chest. She stood back. “Thank you for saving me. I’m sorry I was so messed up down there.”
“Not at all,” Wahram said. “
You
saved
me
. And we got through.” And with another awkward bow he left.
the Vesta Zone, a cloud of terraria forming a single cooperative
Aymara
, an amazonia with an interior completely overgrown with cloud forest
Tatar Soul
, a steppes grassland where people speak a resuscitated Indo-European
The Copenhagen Interpretation
, a canal town with a gift economy
The Zanzibar Cat
, an anarchist savanna with thousands of big cats and no interior buildings at all
Arabia Deserta
, a desert occupied by British travelers
Aspen
, a skiing paradise
unnamed prison asteroids with robot guards
Hermaphrodite
, where all permanent residents are gynandromorphs and androgyns
Saint George
, a social terrarium in which the men think they are living in a Mormon polygamy, while the women consider it a lesbian world with a small percentage of male lesbians
asteroids hollowed not into cylindrical terraria but rather warrens, hives, caves, pits, hotels, etc.
The Maldives
, an aquarium recreating the drowned islands;
Micronesia
, likewise;
Tuvalu
, likewise; all the drowned islands of Earth are reproduced in this fashion
Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem 34
, the last of thirty-four terraria using versions of the template of this great biome
extremophile terraria, deadly to humans but hospitable to growth of organisms creating medicines and inoculants