‘Sure do,’ said Amy. ‘Matter of fact, I’m doing it right now.’
‘We’re getting news back from some of the others who’ve already got to the Lunar Array,’ said Lester. ‘They got detained at first, but then they were allowed through to Da Vinci, along with almost everyone from Copernicus City. From what we’re hearing, it looks like most of whoever they want to bring through from Earth is already through.’ His expression became troubled. ‘But I can’t stop thinking about those millions of refugees back in Florida. It makes no damn sense, just leaving them there to die like that. Couldn’t they at least save some of them?’
‘I don’t know,’ Saul admitted.
‘Oh, it makes sense, all right,’ said Amy, ‘in a twisted, callous kind of way. The colonies haven’t been around all that long, and most of them can only sustain small populations, as it is – especially places like Newton, with the sealed biomes. They’d be hard pushed to cope with even a small increase in their populations.’
‘You’re sure of that?’ Saul asked.
‘Think about it,’ she said, her tone flat. ‘It’s what they call a cold equation. There just isn’t enough food, water and air to go round. It’s the logic of the lifeboat: if you’ve got a lifeboat big enough for six people but seven hundred are drowning all around you, there’s no way you can get more than a tiny fraction of that number into the lifeboat without sinking it and drowning everyone.’
She reached over the back of her chair to touch Saul’s arm. ‘You did a good thing getting those files here, son. There’s nothing we can do for those people back there, much as it makes me sick to admit it, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do our damnedest to make sure the ones responsible for all this will pay for what they’ve done.’
Saul came to a decision and pulled himself into the seat directly behind Amy’s. ‘There’s something I need to tell you both. When we get to the Moon, I’m going to try and shut the Array down – collapse every one of the wormholes.’
‘St it
down
?’ said Lester, a confused look on his face. ‘Is that even possible?’
‘Maybe Lester and Amy have got enough on their plates right now,’ interrupted Mitchell, pulling himself through from the lander.
Saul jerked his head around in surprise. ‘You’re awake.’
‘No,’ insisted Amy, ‘I want to hear what Saul has to say.’
Saul turned back to her. ‘Take a look at the files I just sent you. Particularly the video sequences listed under “Copernicus”.’
Amy stared sideways at a bulkhead, as Mitchell floated down to join them, with a look of disapproval on his face. ‘Okay, I’ve got it.’ She frowned. ‘Hey, it looks like—’
‘Like something’s completely devastated the entire city. Is that what you’re seeing?’
She stared in silence at the bulkhead for several more seconds. ‘Shit,’ she said at length. ‘That’s just about right.’
‘Whatever’s about to happen on Earth is going to happen to Copernicus as well, and it’s going to be soon. So I need to shut the gates down before the same thing can happen to the colonies. I’m telling you this so you’ll understand why you can’t hang around once we get up there. You have to find your way through a gate as soon as possible, or you’ll be stranded.’
‘How sure are you that you need to do this?’ Lester demanded.
‘All I know,’ Saul said truthfully, ‘is that I’ve seen what’s going to happen to the Moon, and the only way it could have got there is via the Array.’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Lester. ‘It had to have come through the Array on the way to Earth, right? Maybe they had more of those artefacts stored up there in Copernicus, somewhere. Maybe they caused it?’
‘He’s got a point,’ said Mitchell. ‘You can’t deny it’s a possibility.’
‘Jesus, Mitch,’ Saul rounded on him, ‘don’t you think you’re clutching at straws?’
‘But it’s at least a possibility,’ said Lester, his expression pained.
Amy reached out and touched her husband’s shoulder. ‘No, Lester, what Saul’s saying makes sense. We can’t put our hope on a distant possibility. We have to think for the rest of the human race.’
‘Not all of our people have made a landing yet,’ Lester insisted, suddenly looking all of his years. ‘We already lost Ginny. What if the rest of them couldn’t get through in time?’
‘I’ve seen what’s happening back home – just like you have,’ she said, her voice gentle now. ‘Way I see it, we have a moral obligation to do everything we can to help Saul. I just wish we had a name for the thing causing all of this. Otherwise everything feels so . . .’ She shrugged ‘. . . so
random
.’
Saul glanced at Mitchell in time to see him shake his head, and push himself back up towards the tunnel leading into the lander.
‘If no more people are being allowed through the Array,’ said Saul, ‘then maybe you’re right, Amy. There’s too many of them for the colonies.’
Amy looked at him with old eyes. ‘Just tell me you don’t
want
to be the one to have to do this.’
‘I don’t want to be the one to have to do this,’ affirmed Saul, with all the feeling he could muster.
Saul made his way through to the lander, where he found Mitchell waiting.
‘What the hell was all that about?’ Saul demanded. ‘They’ve got every right to know what we’re intending to do.’
‘I just thought they’d been through enough,’ Mitchell replied mildly. ‘You didn’t really need to tell them you were planning on triggering a shutdown.’
‘They got us this far, they
deserve
to know.’
‘I don’t know, Saul. Sounded to me more like you were making a confession.’
There was just enough truth in what Mitchell had said to hit home. ‘Listen,’ Saul was angry now, ‘something happened to you that I can’t even begin to understand. I saw the footage of you falling into that pit, then being pulled out of it. I read reports that said you’d died and come back. How is that even
possible
?’
‘It depends,’ said Mitchell, ‘on your definition of life and death.’
‘Is all of that why you’re acting so different? You said, just before we launched, that none of this was going to be as bad as I might think. What the hell did that mean?’
Mitchell shook his head and sighed. ‘I shouldn’t have said it.’
‘Give me,’ Saul insisted, ‘an explanation.’
‘Look, when they pulled me out of that pit, I was changed. That’s true. I . . . I knew things. Things about the Founder races, about how the network came into existence, where they went to after they disappeared.’
Saul could hardly believe what he was hearing. ‘How?’
‘I don’t know how. I just woke up and it was all there, swirling around inside my head. But when I said what I said back then, I was trying to tell you something for which I seriously doubt there are words – something so far outside of my own experience or that of any other human being that I’m still struggling to comprehend it. Once I do, assuming I ever do, I’ll try and choose my words more carefully. I’m sorry.’
Saul hesitated. After all, his worries stemmed from a single unfinished statement from Donohue, hardly a man he felt he could trust at the best of times. But, then again, something had put Olivia on edge as well.
‘There’s still something you’re not telling me,’ said Saul. ‘I don’t know what, but I’ve been in my job long enough to know when someone’s not being straight with me.’
‘I’m sorry you don’t trust me,’ said Mitchell, ‘but what happened to me isn’t my fault.’
Saul stared at him, feeling even more frightened than he cared to admit to himself.
Saul had already found that time on board the spacecraft became strangely elastic in the absence of any clear evidence of day or night. Amy and Lester appeared to have run out of minor maintenance checks for either himself or Mitchell to perform and, although he had little else to do, he didn’t have the stomach to keep watching the slow march of death as it continued to spread across the face of the planet. He dozed intermittently, but both module and lander were filled with constant creaks and rattles that did little to soothe his nerves. At one point he awoke to find Mitchell zipped into a sleeping bag across the lander from him, apparently asleep. Yet Saul could see, from the way the other man’s eyes moved under their closed lids, that he was watching or reading something via his contacts.
When Saul awoke a few hours later, he unzipped himself from his bag and ventured back through to the command module. He sat down next to Amy while her husband was sleeping, securely strapped across the three rear passenger seats and apparently oblivious to the tormented rattle of metal under stress, or even to his wife’s description of endless technical details about fuel mixes and delta vees. All that she said meant little to Saul, but was oddly comforting when delivered with that effortless confidence with which she was imbued. Finally, he let his head sink back and closed his eyes, linking once more into one of the few satellite-feeds still transmitting out of Earth orbit.
Much of Brazil had already slid beneath those flickering clouds and disappeared forever.
Goodbye, São Paolo
, thought Saul with infinite sadness;
goodbye Rio de Janeiro, rain forests and macaws
. All places and things he’d never set eyes on, but now found himself missing with bottomless remorse.
He discovered a few static-ridden broadcasts still coming out from other parts of the South American continent, and listened to people who knew death was approaching them. He saw a jerky handheld video shot in Venezuela, taken within the hour, that showed black clouds like thunderheads slowly spreading outwards to choke out the sunlight, those familiar twists of light dancing high in the stratosphere.
One by one, the voices faded into the hissing static, never to be heard again, until all that was left was a single audio transmission of a man alternately praying in Spanish and weeping. Saul listened for a few moments before cutting the link, unable to bear any more of it. There was, by contrast, no news coming out of Copernicus whatsoever, and Saul remembered Amy telling him that most if not all of Copernicus’ population had already been evacuated.
‘That’s us officially past the halfway point,’ Amy informed him when Saul opened his eyes again. ‘Less than two days before we touch down.’
‘What about the VASIMRs?’
‘The last of them already touched down. They’ve got a far more efficient burn ratio than an old-style bird like this.’ She glanced round towards him. ‘You know, if you’d told us about your plan to shut down the gates back there before we took off, we might have tried to get you on board one of the VASIMRs instead.’
‘Sorry,’ said Saul. ‘I guess I wasn’t sure if you’d want to take me up, if I told you that first.’
She barked a laugh. ‘You thought maybe we’d just leave you behind? Can’t say the thought mightn’t have crossed my mind, if I thought you were crazy. But I don’t, more’s the pity.’
He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, feeling momentarily dizzy.
Amy’s face had creased in a frown, when he opened his eyes once more. ‘When was the last time you ate?’ she asked.
‘Why?’
‘Amateurs,’ she sighed. ‘You need to eat at regular intervals.’ She placed her hands on the steel bars on either side of her acceleration couch, and levered herself upwards until she floated free. ‘Zero gee screws up your body’s internal signals, makes you think you ain’t hungry when you are. Here.’ She pulled a tinfoil-wrapped package out of a cupboard and pushed it into a microwave oven bolted to one of the bulkheads. It dinged after a couple of seconds, and she retrieved it.
‘I’m not hungry,’ Saul protested, and it was true.
‘Bullshit.’ She unwrapped the tinfoil and pushed the tray of steaming hot food at him. ‘Chicken Surprise.’
Saul sniffed at it. ‘What happened to all that dried food?’
She shrugged. ‘Strictly speaking, that’s for the tourists. Can’t feel like they’re being authentic if they’re eating the decent stuff.’
‘It smells okay,’ he said, regarding the contents doubtfully. ‘Doesn’t look anything like any chicken I’ve ever seen, though.’
‘That’s the surprise,’ she said. ‘Now eat. Can’t save the universe without eating.’
‘I guess.’
Saul felt suddenly ravenous, as if a switch had been thrown somewhere inside of him. He wolfed the contents down, Amy watching him the whole time, a vacuum tube held ready in her hand, but Saul didn’t spill even a drop.
‘Hey, check the board,’ said Lester, loosening his restraints and hauling himself upright, before yawning loudly. ‘We’ve got incoming. Transceiver Two.’
‘You’re kidding,’ said Amy, her eyes becoming unfocused. ‘Hot damn, it’s that girl Olivia.’
Saul stared at them both in shock.
‘All the way from the Jupiter platform?’ said Lester. ‘How the hell did she manage that?’
‘Data looks like it’s been routed through a couple of surviving satellite networks, from what I can see,’ said Amy. ‘Bob’s VASIMR relayed it back to us.’
‘Clever girl,’ said Lester, in a tone of appreciation.
‘It’s addressed to you,’ said Amy, turning to Saul. ‘And it’s marked private,’ she added, raising an eyebrow. ‘Want me to patch it through?’
‘Please,’ Saul replied, and a
message received
icon appeared before him a few seconds later. ‘Excuse me,’ he added, handing the empty tray back to Amy.
His heart beat wildly inside his chest as he pulled himself back through to the lander. Mitchell looked like he was genuinely asleep, eyes closed and mouth hanging half open in the dimmed light.
Olivia’s message turned out to be a pre-recorded video file. He noticed her eyes were red with fatigue, as she sat at a terminal in what looked like a busy operations room, men and women he didn’t recognize hurrying past or talking together in tight groups behind her.
‘Saul,’ she began, ‘I hope you made it okay. It took me a lot longer than I’d have liked to figure out how to route this to you, so here’s hoping you still get to see it.’
He watched her take a moment to gather herself. ‘Before anything else, I want you to know we’re all fine here. We shut down the Inuvik–Jupiter gate without any major problems, except there just wasn’t enough room for everyone wanting to come through. So we . . .’ She paused for a moment ‘. . . We drew straws, basically. And some of those who stayed behind helped to make sure the wormhole collapsed.’
Saul studied the lines in her face: she looked like she’d aged ten years since he’d last seen her. Then he wondereled himsw he would look to her, if she were able to see him. Just as bad, probably.
‘You asked me to find out anything I could about Mitchell,’ she continued. ‘And I’m going to have to tell you now I don’t think it’s good news – assuming you even believe what I’m about to say.’
Here it comes
, he thought. His fingers tightened around the hand-grip secured to a bulkhead.
‘You know how I already said you didn’t exactly give me much to go on, except that there’s some link between Mitchell and that shipment? I talked to the others here, Bob Esquivaz and the rest, and told them everything I know. I guess it’s no surprise that there are other people here who’ve had some knowledge of the Founder Network. Some of them have higher clearance than I ever did, which means they can get deeper inside the ASI’s security records than I could. That made things a lot easier than they would have been otherwise.’
She licked her lips, her expression nervous. ‘Assuming the records are correct, we now know the precise time Mitchell recovered consciousness after they brought him back to Earth from Tau Ceti. It’s the
exact
same moment the plane carrying your missing shipment fell off the radar.’
Saul felt a chill spread through his bones, as he listened intently.
‘Now I don’t know what the hell that means,’ Olivia continued. ‘I can speculate certainly, say that somehow Mitchell’s waking triggered the artefacts inside that shipment into becoming the growths, or maybe it was the other way round and something inside that shipment caused
him
to wake up.’ She sighed. ‘But if you asked me to go with my gut, after seeing how much he’s changed and knowing what happened to him . . . then I can’t help wondering if that really
is
him, no matter how much it looks or acts or sounds like him.’
She then went on, Saul listening but not really hearing as she told him their plans for the future. There were three hundred of them on board the Jupiter platform, with stockpiles enough to survive for decades yet, and perhaps even centuries, if their agricultural programme took off.
Saul felt that same bottomless sadness he’d experienced when he’d last spoken to her directly, knowing that if he survived this day then this would be his one remaining memory of her, sitting bleary-eyed and haggard in front of a terminal, while all those strangers hurried past.
She started to finish up, but he stopped the file, unwilling to hear her say goodbye a second time. He saw Mitchell peering at him across the lander, and once again Saul felt a familiar chill settle beneath his skin.
‘I heard the three of you talking through there in the command module,’ he said. ‘You’ve heard from Olivia?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And?’
Mitchell nodded. ‘I’m glad to hear that. Can I see it? The message?’
Saul felt his throat tighten. ‘I’d rather not.’
‘Any reason why?’
‘It’s . . . personal.’
He frowned. ‘Can’t be that personal, surely? I—’ A look of enlightenment crossed his face, and he nodded. ‘Do you know, I actually forgot, for a moment there, about you and Olivia.’
‘You were out of the loop for a couple of years back there. It’s understandable.’
‘You two . . .’ Mitchell traced a loop in the air with the forefinger of one hand. ‘I know you met up while Jeff was still on the run. Did you . . . ?’
‘No, all that was over a long time ago,’ Saul replied, unable to hide a hint of regret.
‘Right,’ Mitchell nodded, ‘if it’s private, it’s private.’
‘Thanks for understanding.’
Saul tried not to show his relief that Mitchell was not being more insistent.
More time passed, the seconds ticking by interminably slowly, and Saul drifted into a kind of reverie. It was a half-awake, half-dreaming state, aided greatly by his feeling of weightlessness. Sometimes he slept, or scanned more of the records from the Tau Ceti base. Instead of feeling bored, his mind was occupied by a kind of unrelenting nervous tension. At one point, Saul re-entered the command module and noticed, through one of the tiny angular windows, how the Moon had expanded enormously. He gazed down on its craters and billion-year-old lava plains.
Lester was now in charge again, while Amy lay curled up on the rear three seats with a pair of large black ear-muffs strapped over her head. She yawned, her eyes flickering open, as Saul floated past her and landed gently in the seat next to Lester.
‘What’s the latest?’ asked Saul.
‘No news.’ Lester shook his head. ‘I’ve been scanning regularly for live feeds, and can’t find a damn one.’
‘You mean everything’s gone?’ Saul felt a spasm of shock. ‘Have the clouds reached Florida yet?’
‘Not yet,’ Lester reassured him. ‘There’s still some patches left untouched, but those damn clouds are scrambling signals all over the place, is my guess. Even if there’s any people left to talk down there, we won’t be able to hear them.’
‘How long before we touch down?’
Lester blinked at the empty air for a couple of seconds. ‘Another four or five hours. I’m calling that a personal best.’
Saul couldn’t contain his surprise. ‘I thought we had at least maybe a day to go?’
‘Depends on how much fuel you burn,’ said Lester, ‘particularly during your initial acceleration. Faster you take off, the faster your escape velocity is, the faster you get to your destination. I forgot to mention that we used most of the fuel we’d normally use for the return trip on take-off, for that added velocity.’ He nodded towards the lander, keeping his voice low. ‘Is Mitchell okay?’