Stephen Baxter: Stories

Sea Wrack

This short fiction, related to my novel Ark (August 2009) is exclusive to this website.

2025. Sea level rise 200m.

Plotting for the worst case:

‘You know that I work for Eschatology, Inc.,’ Jerzy Glemp said to Patrick Groundwater, walking over. ‘We are an independent company backed by such organisations as the Rand Corporation and the Lifeboat Institute. Our task is to brainstorm ways by which the extinction of mankind can be averted.’

Extinction. That was a dread, heavy word on such a beautiful Denver morning, Patrick thought.

‘We have worked with the LaRei people for some time, hoping to find ways to stimulate the funding of practical solutions by resourceful leaders -’

Edward Kenzie held up a finger. ‘Wait. Sorry, Jerzy. Look, I don’t mean to take over the show. But before we go any further, you remember what I said yesterday, and in my notes to you both. I’m convinced of the need for absolute secrecy concerning this project, right from the off. What is to take place in this room over the next few hours will be life-changing for all of us who take part. Life-defining. Nothing will be the same. And this won’t be something you can walk away from, not ever, any more than you can resign from al-Qaeda.’

Patrick frowned. ‘That sounds threatening.’

‘Not at all. For now we haven’t done anything, I’ve made no record of the meeting yet – if any of you walk out now, it will be as if you were never here at all. But if you stay, you’re in.’ He glanced at the security people.

Patrick, feeling bombarded, wondered if he really wanted to be part of this thing; he suspected working with Kenzie and Glemp wasn’t going to be easy. He looked for Holle. ‘What about the kids?’

2036. Sea level rise 800m.

A montane extinction:

For once it was a beautiful Colorado afternoon of the old kind, the mountain sky deep blue, the surviving trees and fields a vivid green. But the human world was a muddy brown, with the only colour in the Candidates’ gaudy costumes.

In the four years since President Vasquez had spoken to the Ark workers the sea had swept a further three hundred kilometres west across North America, and now lapped across Nebraska. The Rockies still stood tall, but the rising sea had lifted the air and the weather systems with it, pushing the snow line up towards the sky. A town like Aspen now had a climate as Denver’s had once been, with a winter low temperature of only a few degrees below zero, and maybe a metre of snow instead of the seven or eight metres that had once attracted millions of tourists.

And the summits of the Rockies had suffered a subtle extinction event. The rising climate bands had eliminated the upper Alpine-tundra zones, scraped them right off the peaks, leaving no room for the hardy lichen and marmots and ptarmigans that had once lived there.

Crisis and near-cancellation:

Jerzy Glemp said gravely, ‘You know as well as I do that if you walk around Denver or Aspen or Boulder or Gunnison, the project is inspiring a sense of purpose, a sense that as bad as things are getting the government is still working, that we are still trying to come up with a solution. And, Colonel, if you’re so convinced the project is finished - if you’re so sure about what you’re going to recommend to the President - why are we still sitting here?’

Mel Belbruno surprised Holle by standing up. He pushed back his chair, and stood geometrically straight and tall in his crisp uniform. ‘If I may answer that, sir?’

Gordo Alonzo frowned, but nodded.

‘Despite what you’ve said, you’re here to give this project one last chance. To see if the people gathered here can’t yet come up with some way to shove this wayward bird back on course. You’re here to give me one last chance to fly to the stars. And by God, sir, you give me that chance and I’ll take it, and I won’t let you down.’ He sat, his spine so straight it didn’t come into contact with the back of the chair.

There was a stunned silence. Gordo just stared at Mel. Then he burst out laughing. ‘Jesus Christ, boy, who trained you to do that? There ain’t a dry eye in the house.’

Mel stiffened. ‘I don’t know what you mean by that, sir.’

‘Yeah, sure you do.’ Gordo stood before the table, and his fountain pen tapped on the tabletop, chit, chit, chit.

But if it had been some trick of that kind, cooked up by Harry Smith or Magnus Howe or even Edward Kenzie, and despite Gordo seeing through it, maybe it worked anyhow, Holle thought, for the tone of the meeting changed from then on.

2039. Sea level rise 1400m.

Abandoning Denver:

‘My God,’ Holle said. ‘The road’s full, as far as I can see.’

‘A ragged army, armed with pitchforks and knives,’ said a man behind her. He wore a patched AxysCorp coverall; he was aged perhaps fifty, but looked strong, like a farmer, with big, dirt-encrusted hands. ‘Like a medieval army, a crusade – a people’s crusade. Though no crusade, even, amounted to as many souls as this. And as for the defences, they are virtually Iron Age.’ He pointed. ‘The ditch especially. You can see how the attackers will have to run down that slope, exposed to fire from the other side, and then struggle up the steeper side -’

As he spoke, she thought she heard another sound under the distant battle noises, a kind of thrumming that sounded familiar. ‘I don’t know much about the Iron Age.’

‘No.’ He smiled at her. ‘Nor much about concrete mixing, I’ll bet? I was behind you in the line.’

‘And you do?’ she said defiantly. ‘What are you, a professor of history?’

‘No, just a schoolteacher, back when the schools taught more than survival skills.’ He looked at his big hands. ‘But I used to run a smallholding, on the east bank of Back Squirrel Creek. I can use my hands. I can dig a ditch or lay a fence, I think.’

2041. Sea level rise 1800m.

Loading the Ark:

‘We’re archiving, creating vaults, physical and digital, of all the resources we can think of. The Library of Congress records. The big genetic libraries the Mormons built up. We’ve been using hackers to download all they can from the big computer centres as they’ve finally gone offline. Stuff from overseas, that we’ve been dredging up. You’re English, aren’t you?’

‘Half English.’

‘Someone told me once we even got hold of the letter Henry VIII wrote to the Pope saying he was divorcing his wife. Jesus! We’ve five objectives. We’re making this stuff as secure as we can against the day when, I don’t know, when the dolphins learn to read. Two. We’re finding someplace safe for the President and his administration to hide out. The continuity of the nation. That’s Ark Two, and even I don’t know anything about that. Three. Security. Holding the yoogees at bay, on land and on sea. That gets harder as the sea rises, and more of us turn into more of them, but still - Four. Building rafts. And five.’

‘The Ark?’

Launch day:

Mel thrust the pack into her arms. Then he grabbed her, and pressed his naked body against hers. He smelled of bed, and his skin was greasy with sweat. ‘We said it all. We did it all. We had time, didn’t we?’

‘We could have had forever.’

‘Nobody gets that much - not even you, Holle Groundwater.’ He kissed her hungrily, his mouth and tongue hot. ‘Now piss off.’ He grabbed her shoulders, spun her around, shoved her out of the door, and slammed it closed behind her.

She stood in the corridor, stunned. No more arguments, no more goodbyes.

2049. 15 light years from Sol.

Since going to warp, Venus and her team had continued to use the Ark as a mobile telescopic platform for inspecting the nearby stars and their planets, extending the depth and quality of the searches that had been possible from Earth, and indeed from the Ark itself at Jupiter. Holle gazed on beautiful, spectacular images of young stellar systems, a million years old or less, in the throes of formation from an interstellar cloud.

Venus said, ‘It’s like we’re putting together an album of the birth of a solar system, frame by frame. You see how the young star, having collapsed out of the cloud itself, starts to interact with the cloud remnant. A central collapsed disc slices the wider cloud in two ...

‘Look at these pictures. See how these planetary systems start out? Just clouds of rock and ice, nothing acting on them but their own gravity. Yet you give it a few hundred million years to bake, and out pops a solar system and a new star, every one of them as rich in worlds as our own - every one of them different. The universe is more than some mathematical exercise, Holle. It generates complexity, richness, diversity - all of it starting from scratch. And that’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it? But what’s the point of all that richness if there’s no eye to see it?’

2059. Return to Earth.

‘I’ll tell you how I sold this place to the President. OK, we were sending you, Ark One, up and out. Maybe we should also think about a backup plan, I said, think about sending a crew the other way. So I told the President that as we’ve been betrayed by two of the elements, the water that drowns us, the air that is starting to suffocate us, we should turn to the others, earth and fire, the deep ground and the fire within, elements that may have borne life in the first place and have sheltered it since.

‘And that, my friend, is Ark Two. Down and in ... And you can go further.

‘I know Thandie told you about the mantle waves and whatnot she studies, trying to figure out why all the water got released. I’ll tell you what else some of us think we found evidence of down there, even deeper. Life - more life, a very exotic sort in the high pressures and the temperatures, feeding off the most abundant energy flow down there, which is radioactivity. Some of us call them neutron birds. We think we see them flock. And down there, believe me, they never even noticed the flood, never even noticed the great impacts, which affected only the top few per cent of the Earth’s volume.’

Kelly shook her head, bemused. ‘Dad, this is - remarkable. I’m no scientist ... But so what? I can imagine living off the worms and the crabs that live around Thandie’s black smokers. But who cares about the deep stuff, and these neutron creatures, if they exist? What can they have to do with us?’

2059. 42 light years from Sol.

A new universe:

In the cupola’s twilit, humming calm, with the hull of Halivah and the silent stars arrayed beyond the windows, Grace Gray tried very hard to understand what Venus was telling her.

‘I’ll tell you what I’ve come to believe, after eighteen years of contemplating the universe from inside this glass box. I believe we’ll come through this crisis - humans, I mean, life from Earth - one way or another, whether it’s on Earth, Earth II, Earth III. I don’t believe in our own imminent extinction.’ She raised her hands before her face, flexed her fingers. ‘The human experience of the universe is simply too rich for that to be conceivable. Do you know what I mean? Isn’t it true that that climatologist guy you knew predicted that the Earth after the flood, after that great erasing, would actually have a greater biomass than before?’

‘Gary Boyle. Yes, he believed that.’

‘Well, there you go. It’s been the same after every extinction event back to the dinosaurs, so I’m told. I’ll tell you what else I no longer believe in. I don’t believe in the dismal cosmologies that they came up with on Earth before the flood. I don’t believe in the Big Bang, or a universe tearing itself into pieces in a Big Rip. Bullshit. These are juvenile projections of current cosmic trends far beyond any possible range of validity.

‘Look around! We live in a universe of constantly increasing complexity, in which as each successive age passes new features, new phenomena emerge. Consider Earth. Given what it started out as, muddy pools of organic chemicals on a world so battered by impacts the rocks glowed red, could you have ever predicted lungs and wings and eyes, and cellphones and starships? Of course not. Yet all these things were somehow implicit in the fundamental properties of the universe.

‘I see the cosmos as a set of interacting adaptive autocatalytic systems, that is they drive themselves from simple to complex states. This basic creative process is all-pervasive and so overwhelmingly productive that if you ever wanted to call something divine, well, it’s that. And I simply can’t believe that somehow that fecundity of complexifying is going to stop any time soon. The universe just doesn’t feel like that.’

Faint alarm bells rang in Grace’s head whenever anybody aboard this tub used a word like ‘divine’. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘But is it any use?’

2068. 69 light years from Sol.

The Blow-Out Rebellion:

He barely seemed to know where he was. He was gone to some place beyond fear, maybe. He might even be in shock, which Grace had diagnosed for many of the crew, even days after the decompression disaster.

Holle asked, ‘You know why we put you in this cabin? I mean, this particular one?’

‘I dunno.’

‘Because this was where Jenny Turco lived. Did you know her? Probably not. She was a Candidate, like me, like Wilson. Too old for you.’

‘What you want, Groundwater?’

‘But she’s dead now, because of the decompression. One of those who tried to hold her breath.’ Holle shook her head. ‘Funny. She was the only Candidate who died. And because of something that was drummed into us from when we joined the Academy, forty, forty-five years ago. After all that training, and on the Ark since, when the crisis finally came, instinct cut in, and she made the wrong choice, and died for it. She’s got a daughter, you know, born on the ship. And even a granddaughter, a second-generation shipborn -’

‘Not my fault.’

‘What did you say?’

‘It’s not my fault. I know what you’re thinking. I was with Wilson. It was those kids, those insane little bastards who blew us up.’

He was coming out of his shock. ‘Listen to me, Jeb. Things were already tough on this tub, and now they’re going to get even tougher. You worked for me before. You know what my responsibilities were, and still are.’ She saved a hand. ‘Everything inside the hull that keeps us alive – that’s my domain. But I took a battering. We lost a hull-load of air and water. We have reserves, we wouldn’t be alive if we didn’t. But the volumes, in the hull and in store, a down to the bare bones. It’s going to be hard. We’re looking at tough, endless work to keep the systems from failing. And even then I’ll have to impose some kind of rationing.’

‘Rationing?’ His eyes narrowed.

She smiled. ‘You see, you’re not stupid. Nobody likes rationing, do they? But it’s going to be essential. I can’t tolerate any defiance - any theft, any sabotage. That could kill us all. What I need -’

He saw it. ‘You’re offering me a job.’

She leaned closer. ‘It will be just like Homeland. Find some others, five or six. You report directly to me. You’ll secure the life support. Every aspect of it is to be under my control. Totally and exclusively. You understand?’

He grinned. But then a ghost of his fear came back, and he quailed back. ‘Do I get a choice?’

‘No. Not a meaningful one. Nobody else wants you, frankly. Wilson won’t be in a position to protect you. And there will be plenty out looking for revenge -’

‘It’s a deal,’ he said hastily. ‘When do I start?’

‘Now,’ she said immediately. ‘Find your team. Brief them. Be discreet. Set yourself up. I don’t have to tell you how to do that. You worked the systems before. You know what’s necessary. Try not to hurt anybody if you don’t have to.’

‘We had a good life under Wilson,’ he said, resentful, vengeful for one more instant. ‘You can’t blame a man for grabbing what he can.’

‘I wish I could say it will be a pleasure working with you, Jeb. It’s a necessity, that’s all. Screw up, go soft - or go corrupt, I’m not Wilson - and I’ll destroy you. Don’t doubt it for a second. You understand?’

And she pushed her way out of the poky cabin, into the bright light of the arc lamps. There she gave way to a shuddering that shook her to her bones.

2081. 111 light years from Sol.

Earth III:

‘You’ve got a thick blanket of air, plenty of carbon dioxide for greenhouse trapping, that transports the heat around the world. The atmosphere mix is heavy on carbon dioxide and is thicker, heavier surface pressure, but the oxygen content is actually closer to Earth’s than Earth II. Gravity is higher than Earth; we’ll have to live with that. This is a bigger world, an exoplanet of a kind we call a super-Earth. But that’s good, because the bigger the world, the longer plate tectonics last. And we can see that it’s active. We can see the volcano chains, the mountains; we can see volcanic gases in the air. We’ll have time on this planet, all the time we want.

‘Let me show you what else this system offers.’ She tapped her handheld and the image reduced, more planets swimming into view. ‘This is the system’s second planet. But it’s not unique. See this one, and this, further from the sun? More super-Earths, not as easy to colonise as Earth III, but they’re there for our descendants – new homelands just waiting in the sky for them, off in the future.

‘This is the Ark. After a voyage of forty years, here is your Ararat.

‘What happens next is up to you.’

Scrapbook

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This short fiction, related to my novel Flood (June 2008) is exclusive to this website.

From the Scrapbook of Kristie Caistor (2005-2043)

September 2043. Lammockson Raft.

Kristie died.

It was something she ate, something from the sea that wasn't as familiar as it looked. It was a common way to die on the rafts. She was thirty-eight. She had survived on the rafts two years since the sinking of the Ark.

Her son Manco, orphaned aged twelve, was inconsolable.

There had been no peace between Kristie and her aunt. One way or another Lily's captivity had come between them most of Kristie's life, and now it pursued them to death.

That night, when Manco was sleeping, Lily took a look at Kristie's old handheld.

It had a calendar facility, but no satellite or radio link. And it had an extensive database that Kristie called her scrapbook. Lily remembered how she had started this thing, on her mother's dining table in Fulham, with an observation of an old man who couldn't get to the football because of floods in East Anglia. That snippet was still here.

She scanned through more items. Some were snippets from the net, or taken from the records of others, from handhelds or phones, including Lily's own. They were selected judiciously, and recorded verbatim, or written up with a hasty grace. Together they made up a kind of fragmented oral history of the flood. Maybe Kristie could have been a writer of some kind, maybe a journalist, in a more forgiving age.

One of the first entries was a kind of interview with Lily herself, which Lily vaguely remembered giving …

July 2016. London.

At Amanda's insistence Lily stayed the night at the old family home in Fulham, rather than slog back to her hotel.

After the flash floods in the spring, Amanda and her two kids effectively lived on the upper floor now. They had installed sofa beds and foldaway shelves so the bedrooms could double as living spaces, and one spare bedroom had been made over as a backup kitchen. Above that the loft had been made into a kind of refuge, with two-litre milk bottles full of fresh water, tins of food, blankets and spare clothes, torches, a wind-up radio. Amanda's papers, her passport and bank books, the kids' birth certificates and National Health cards were all stored up there in a fireproof iron box.

Lily was to sleep on the floor of Kristie's room. Officially Lily was supposed to have got the bed and Kristie the mattress on the floor. But the girl had looked so distressed at the thought of being turfed out of her bed, a pink nest festooned with teddy bears, that Lily relented. Anyhow she found she couldn't sleep on beds that were too soft; she'd had to ask for a thinner mattress at the Savoy.

It took a while for Kristie to settle. She was full on. She talked fast and hopped around the room and pulled one gadget after another out of her little pink backpack. She'd kept all her old mobiles because of the pictures and videos stored on them; Lily gazed at blurred images of nine- and ten- and eleven-year-olds mugging into the tiny lenses.

And Kristie let Lily try her Angel. The music sounded in her head, as if her skull had been hollowed out and a miniature stage set up inside. But the music, made by boys with guitars and drums just as it had been for sixty years, was surprisingly much to Lily's taste. Kristie showed no real curiosity about Lily and her experiences, and that was fine by Lily; it was the way things should be. And then Kristie crashed, all of a sudden. She kissed Lily on the cheek, rolled up under her duvet, and was gone, her breathing an even tide.

Lily, lying there on the floor, felt warm and oddly safe, probably because that was the way Kristie felt. But she could hear the rain hammering on the roof and gurgling in the drains, and even in this upstairs room the stink of damp plaster was strong.

She slept deeply.

Benj said, 'You missed the Olympics, Aunt Lily. You know, 2012.'

Amanda said, 'He went for the hundred-metres final. It was scrapped when all but one of the finalists failed his DNA test. Actually Benj is keener on the Free Olympics, aren't you?'

'Free Olympics?'

'They let you take drugs,' Kristie said brightly.

'And muck about with your DNA,' added Benj. 'It's well exciting. The hundred-metre record is under eight seconds now. You should see those guys go, especially the ones with augmented legs.' He made a rocket mime with his hand. 'Whoosh!'

'But isn't it dangerous?' Lily asked. 'All those unregulated drugs -'

But Benj just repeated, 'Whoosh!' He smiled at her.

Lily looked down on what was becoming of the south of the river, from Southwark through Waterloo to Lambeth. The river was seeping over the land, an oily black stain that spread visibly over Jubilee Gardens and around the Waterloo train station. From there it was flowing deeper inland along the Waterloo Road, channelled by raised railway embankments, gradually joining with flows along the other main routes that led inland from Central London's bridges, a traffic of water that came to a mighty confluence at the Elephant and Castle, a swirling inland sea that surged around the roundabouts and high-rise blocks of flats and the new glass towers.

Amanda sat with her arms around her children. Kristie had her face buried under her mother's blanket; she had said little since being reunited with Amanda. But she had her handheld in her lap, always recording. Benj, though he submitted to his mother's embrace, was staring at his own gadgets, his angel and his phone. Lily could see screens glowing, and Benj stabbed at keys with his thumb, but his scowl showed he was not getting the response he wanted.

Lily leaned to Amanda. 'You think he's OK?'

'Traumatised,' Amanda said. 'Phone amputation. You know, he handled things well when I was in a panic back at the Dome. I was quite proud of him, he coped better than I did.'

'I know.'

'He's demanding first use of the land line once we get home to Chiswick. Not as good as his mobile but -'

'He might be unlucky,' Lily said. 'I heard the pilots saying the big BT exchange at Waterloo has flooded out. That's half the lines in London gone.'

'Great.' Lily could see her anxiety deepen, new lines creasing her forehead.

May 2019. Dartmoor

Lily told Amanda about the state of Britain as a whole. Amanda, immersed in her local situation, lacked her sister's helicopter view. Kristie listened patiently, trying to understand.

'It's a mess, as you'd expect,' Lily said. 'The north-west coast pretty much drowned. In the east that inland sea that's pushing its way in through the Humber Valley has drowned much of Yorkshire, and is threatening to join up with a similar inundation spreading up through Lincolnshire from the Wash. London - well, you know about that. On the south coast we've lost Ramsgate, Eastbourne, Portsmouth, Bournemouth. Oh, and the poor soggy farmers are reeling from a foot and mouth outbreak. Contaminated water from a vaccine research laboratory was washed the wrong way down a flooded drain, and found its way into the environment …' She ran down. 'It's hard to take in, isn't it?'

'Yes.'

'Well, one must do what one can, I suppose.'

But it wasn't all bad, Amanda thought. Britain still worked as a nation-state. In the north, the great industrial cities around the Pennines like Manchester, Sheffield, Bradford and Leeds still functioned, and were forming a new hub of manufacturing industry and power generation. The government itself had relocated to Leeds from a largely abandoned London. Traffic still flowed on the high roads, unifying the country, even some train lines were still operational, and there was always the river traffic on the new waterways that stretched to the heart of the country. The winters seemed to be mild now, and essential imports of oil and coal kept the lights burning. Though many land lines were down, mobiles worked thanks to constellations of satellites hastily thrown into orbit, and the main TV services were on a few hours a day. There was even a patchy internet coverage.

It wasn't a time when you could order a takeaway pizza or a book via the internet or even expect to find new clothes in the shops, and Amanda did miss all that. It was a time of survival, of massive and ongoing reconstruction on a national scale, as a shrunken, crowded country struggled to ground whole cities of refugees from the lowlands - and to prepare for the further flooding that most people thought likely. Of course there were tensions, flashpoints all over. Thousands had died in the floods, and even more tragically of hunger, a lack of clean water, disease. But the country was still as one, the government still functioned locally and nationally, you got visits from doctors and education advisors and agricultural experts and water engineers. There was much brave talk of how the British would get through an emergency even harsher than the Second World War ...

Lily knew something about the global picture.

'In what's left of the old UN they're coming up with a grand new plan. The average elevation of the continental land above the old sea-level datum was eight hundred metres - although only around a sixth of the global population lived above this altitude. Surely to God the water won't keep rising to a level like that, and even if it did, you're looking at decades before it gets so high to threaten such extreme altitudes. So that's what they're aiming for now, relocating and re-establishing as much as possible above that average line, while we still have the capacity to rebuild. There's feverish activity in western North America, in the Andes, Tibet, Mongolia, China, Afghanistan, the Himalayas. Geopolitics has a new form. But there are wars everywhere, like brushfire. Battles for the high ground.'

'Well, that's predictable,' Amanda said.

'And of course we still have wars of the old sort. Have you heard about Jerusalem?'

August 2041. Ark Three.

'The map is so strange,' Kristie said, looking at the real-time image. 'It doesn't look like America at all. I guess we'd get used to it, if we had time.'

And if the flood ever gave them a chance, Lily reflected. For the relentless rise continued, covering the steep slopes of the world's few remaining scraps of dry land, and forcing the huddled remnants of mankind to retreat further.

Certainly it was an unfamiliar image of land and sea that covered her cabin wall now, all that was left of the western US - indeed, all that was left of the US at all. When the map was stable she was able to recognise the long stripe of the Sierra Nevada, and the high country of Nevada and Idaho surrounding the steel grey of the Great Salt Lake Desert inland sea. Further to the east much of the high ground in the Rockies still survived, from Montana down through Wyoming and Colorado and down to New Mexico. But it was deeply incised by valleys flooded so deeply they had become more inland seas. Even the Grand Canyon was flooded now, and Lily had seen images returned by a low-flying drone aircraft processed and returned to her by Thandie Jones, of the complicated landscape above Lake Mead, the scraps of land that the Sanup Plateau that still protruded above the water that now concealed the Canyon's deep geological drama …

September 2043. Lammockson Raft.

Once the Ark was gone and they were on the rafts, Kristie's access to global news had pretty much vanished, aside from scraps she heard over Nathan's clockwork radios. But her own world widened, oddly, as the raft communities crossing the world's oceans converged and dissipated, and bits of news were passed on among them.

Curious, Lily scanned through the last item Kristie had recorded. It was a report out of what was left of America, relayed by radio, that the horse was believed to be extinct.

Kristie had kept her little pink kid's backpack from London, and Lily went through it. Inside there were a few cheap plastic accessories, her ancient teddy. Lily offered Manco the teddy, but it was too babyish for him. He kept a string of amber-like beads, however. He wore them wrapped around his wrist.

In the morning Lily prepared Kristie's body as best she could. She stuffed the teddy back inside the backpack, and slung the pack around Kristie's neck.

Then she got help carrying the body to the edge of the raft. Aside from her pack, Kristie was sent naked into the sea. They couldn't spare the clothes. They didn't even have anything to weigh down her body. Her grave was the sharp teeth of the ocean.

So Lily and Manco were left alone together. They were from different worlds, like strangers. They fought and cried.

The Full Story of the Firstborn Assault on Mars

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This short fiction, expanded from the account in our novel Firstborn (Feb 2008, with Sir Arthur C Clarke), is exclusive to this website.

She was alone on Mars.

Indeed this was not her Mars. Most of this time-sliced world, for all its cities and canals, was cold, arid. She was not comfortable here. She built herself a shelter at the Martian north pole, a spire of ice. It was beautiful, pointlessly so, for there were none but her to see it.

When she saw the array of symbols burning in the ice of Earth, she was consoled. They gave her a shock of pleasure, a confirmation that though she was cut off from her own kind, mind was here in this new system with her, a mind on some level like her own.

But it was a cold comfort. She was the only one of her kind to have come through the crude time-slicing which had created this sampled copy of her home world. It struck her as an extraordinary misfortune. Or, at times, it seemed to her rather a great fortune, for she was the only one of her kind ever to have viewed this pocket universe, this other solar system with its array of blue worlds.

She was not really a 'she'.

Her kind were not sexual as humans were, though she had been a mother; she was more 'she' than 'he'.

Before her stranding here she had never been alone, for her identity was less sharply defined than a human's. Yes, her body was a community of cells, but her form was unfixed, flowing between sessile and motile stages, sometimes dispersing, sometimes coalescing. She was more like a slime mould, perhaps, than a human. So she was never alone in that she was intimately connected to the tremendous networked communities of single-celled creatures which drenched her Mars. Nevertheless she was a pole of consciousness arising from those communities, and fully self-aware.

There had only ever been a few hundred thousand of her kind, spread across the seas and dust plains of Mars. Though they labelled the phenomena of the world around them, the Martians had never had names for themselves; there were only ever so few that names were unnecessary. She had been aware of every one of her companions, like voices dimly heard in the echoes of a vast cathedral. And she was very aware that they had all gone, all of them.

And the approaching Firstborn weapon, Mars's own Q-bomb, had gone too. That was the other thing she was aware of, from the moment of the discontinuity that had brought her here.

She had been working at the Martian pole, tending the trap of distorted spacetime within which she and her fellow workers had managed to capture the Firstborn Eye. In senses enhanced to 'see' the distortion of space, the coming weapon was very visible, at the zenith, driving straight down from the sky towards the Martian pole.

It had only been a few of Mars's days before the impact had been due. The consequences had been well modelled. It would mean the end of complex life on Mars, the end of all possibilities. Some had already escaped this dread fate, cutting themselves painfully out of the great planetary webs of life. Others scrambled to leave. She had volunteered to stay, to witness the end, and to continue the last project of trying to understand the Firstborn, the motives of those who were inflicting such a devastating blow on a living world.

And then came the time-slicing. The Eye remained in its cage. The Firstborn weapon was gone.

And she was alone. A toy of the Firstborn. Resentment seethed in her.

The symbols scrawled into the ice sheets on Earth, picked out by fire and smoke, were easily visible, and instantly recognisable. But even before the array of symbols was lit she had been fascinated by Earth, or this time-sliced copy of it, and the life forms that swam and crawled and flew there. For her it was like a glimpse into the future, a vision of how life on Earth had evolved in the long aeons after her own kind had succumbed to the intervention of the Firstborn.

And of course every living thing on Earth was a cousin of her own, for life on Earth had evolved first on Mars.

In her time the very young Earth, so much more massive than Mars, was still a water-world, its deep lifeless oceans mud-brown with sediment, its thick air laced with steam, methane and carbon dioxide. Mars, smaller, lacking tectonic activity, and so much further from the sun, had more quickly cooled from the fires of its formation and dried. Very soon there was dry land, and Mars was a more welcoming crucible for life. In warm crater-lakes, and in the complicated environment of lake shores and tidal plains, life was created, stewed from organic material that was scattered over all the young worlds by the comets - or perhaps that first life blew in from some other, still older world; her people had never been able to determine the truth.

From the beginning the harsh caress of impacts blew Martian life into space and shed it over Earth and Venus, where it began independent evolutions. With time the great branches of solar life were still cross-linked by more meteorite transfers, but as the age of massive bombardment passed these transfers became more infrequent. The great sharing was in the beginning, when the worlds were young, and as much as half a tonne per year of material could be transferred from Mars to Earth.

But young Venus and Earth were hot, drowned. It was on Mars that evolution proceeded first, and fast. Soon the first photosynthetic organisms, ancestors of creatures like cyanobacteria, were pumping oxygen into the air, a poisonous cataclysm that caused the planet's first great mass extinction among its methane-breathers - and yet led to the possibility of still more advanced forms of life, fuelled by oxygen's potency. But the Martian environment was full of compounds that would bind the oxygen and so draw it down from the air: volcanic gases, the iron of the crust, and organic sediments, beds of tiny, rotting corpses. These reducing materials had to be used up before oxygen could accumulate in the atmosphere, and soon were. The crust rusted red, the volcanic gases dwindled, and the organic materials were buried in beds of sediments on the bottoms of the lakes and oceans.

On Earth it was different. There continuing tectonic activity churned up the organic sediments, and the endless volcanism spewed up more reducing compounds, that relentlessly removed oxygen from the air. It would take three billion years before sufficient oxygen accumulated for multicelled life forms to appear on the Earth.

On Mars, it took only a thirtieth part of that time.

The great experiments of life on the worlds of Sol ran in parallel, but with different outcomes. On Mars as on Earth there emerged three great domains of life, with equivalents of bacteria, archaea, and the viruses which were parasitical on the others. As on Earth the bacteria diversified into an array of remarkable biochemical machines, and the archaea colonised every environment available to them, even the roiling-hot interiors of the deep rocks. With free oxygen a great new experiment began, as the three domains fused to create a new order of life, called on Earth the eukarya, the grouping which would one day include fish and apes and humans.

When intelligence rose on Mars, there was enough similarity with the Earth of the age of mankind that some features of their civilisation were similar. The Martians manipulated their environment; they lit fires and built cities. But on a more fundamental level Martians were not like people. The Martians had a greater fluidity of form, a deeper interlinking to the underlying communities of single-celled organisms, and more permeable species barriers. When Martians bred, as much genetic information was transferred horizontally between individuals as vertically from 'parents'.

Martian individuals were harder to distinguish from each other and from their progenitors than humans, for they could share body parts. They were long-lived, slow-moving, contemplative. They were wise. For generations human astronomers would think of Mars as a world much older than Earth, inhabited by a race of philosophers. In a sense they were right.

And this fluidity of structure made for a faster evolutionary response to changes in environment. The last Martian understood that Mars would continue to cool rapidly; a mere half-billion years after her time the oceans would have frozen over, the water retreating underground to chill aquifers, or lost to space. The time-sliced Mars contained samples of what the planet had ultimately become, and the last Martian had inspected this relic with dismay: the atmosphere only a thin veneer of carbon dioxide, only traces of frost in the beds of the vanished oceans, and dust storms towering fifty kilometres tall over an arid landscape sterilised by the sun's ultraviolet. But, given the chance, perhaps her kind could have adapted even to these tremendous changes of conditions, learned to live on a Mars reduced to an arid desert.

But her kind were not given the chance. It pained her to study the rest of the Mars she had inherited. In places the cities of her kind still stood, abandoned, their lights burning. But her fellows were gone. And in places where more recent slabs of Mars had survived, when she dug into the arid, toxic dirt, she found only methanogens and other simple bacteria, thinly spread, an echo of the great rich communities which had once inhabited this world. And yet, she thought sadly, these scrapings were her own last descendants.

Of course she understood the implication of the Earth creatures' scraping of the symbol array in the ice. Those on Earth had no wish to submit to the Firstborn's hammer blow. Nor had the Martians.

The last Martian understood. She pondered the signal from Earth, and considered whether she should act. Whether the Firstborn should be thwarted.

The approach of the Firstborn weapon to Mars had stimulated an explosive study of cosmology and cosmogony and spacetime physics, all of which were wrapped up in the Q-bomb. No way had been found to deflect or defuse the bomb. But a rapid mastery of the manipulation of spacetime had been achieved. When the Firstborn's hateful Eyes had appeared, more spacetime artefacts popping up all over Mars so the Firstborn could watch the destruction of a planet-wide culture, that new mastery had been used to trap an Eye. And before the Q-bomb could reach Mars, crystalline arks had lifted from the banks of the canals: ships that cruised on spacetime waves, built by a culture that had never used chemical rockets.

The Martians had not wanted to see their culture go to the fire for the sake of a neurosis born when the cosmos was young. So they fought back, and tried to escape.

Just as the creatures from Earth were trying to fight back now.

There was only one choice to make.

It took her seven Martian days to make the preparations. She believed that by imploding her spacetime cage she might destroy the trapped Eye, or at least cause it severe harm. And since all Eyes were connected to all other Eyes, it could be a way to assist the creatures of Earth in their struggle.

At any rate, it was the best she could do.

Unfortunately the implosion would damage her spire of ice. She began the construction of a new one, some distance away. The work pleased her.

The spire was no more than half-finished when the gravitational cage clutched at the Firstborn artefact, a fist enclosing an eyeball. Mars's gift to Earth.

There was only one Eye, though it had many projections into spacetime. And it had many functions.

One of those was to serve as a conduit of information.

When the Martian trap closed, the Eye there emitted a signal of distress. A shriek, transmitted to all its sister projections.

The Q-bomb heading for Earth was the only Firstborn artefact in the solar system, save for the Eye trapped in its Pit on Mars. And the Q-bomb sensed that shriek, a signal it could neither believe nor understand.

The Full Story of How Chicago Survived the Discontinuity

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This short fiction, expanded from the account in our novel Firstborn (Feb 2008, with Sir Arthur C Clarke), is exclusive to this website.

The FATE Of

CHICAGO

On The NIGHT

The WHOLE WORLD FROZE

JULY 1894

A Production for the Edison-Dixon Kinetoscope

U.S. Patent Pending

A WONDER

TEN CENTS

The travellers reached New Chicago around noon. There was a proper station, with a platform and a little building where you could wait for a train and buy genuine tickets. But the track terminated here; they would have to travel on north to the old Chicago some other way.

Emeline led them off the train and into the town. They were to stay the night here, before pressing on to Chicago itself. She said she hoped there would be room for them to stay at one of the town's two small hotels; if not they would have to knock on doors.

New Chicago was on the site of Memphis, but there was no trace of that city here, and nor was there more than an echo of old Chicago. With wooden buildings, brightly painted signs, horse rails and dirt-track streets, Bisesa was reminded of Hollywood images of the old Wild West rather than of a city of the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. And the main street, such as it was, was overshadowed by an immense statue set on a concrete base. A kind of junior Statue of Liberty, perhaps, it must have been a hundred feet tall, more, and its surface was gilded, though the gold was flecked and scarred.

'Big Mary,' said Emeline, with more than a trace of pride in her voice. 'Or, the Statue of the Republic. Centrepiece of the world's fair, that is the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, just a year before the Big Freeze. When we chose this site for New Chicago Mary was one of the first items we hauled down here, even though we barely had the capacity to do it.'

'It's magnificent,' Abdikadir said, sounding sincere. 'Even Alexander the Great would be impressed.'

'Well, it's a start,' Emeline said, obscurely pleased. 'You have to make a statement of intent, you know. We're here, and here we will stay.'

They were able to take rooms in the small Hotel Michigan, though Emeline and Bisesa would have to share. They left their bags, and Emeline bought them a roast beef sandwich each for lunch, and during the afternoon they went for a walk around the new city. It was nothing but street after dirt-track street of wooden buildings; only one of the bigger churches had been built in stone. But Bisesa saw this must already be a town of several thousand people - perhaps tens of thousands.

As the afternoon wore on they began to tire, but Emeline insisted on taking them to one of the new town's most cherished sites. It looked like just another hastily put together wooden building, but out front was a sign saying, EDISON'S MEMORIAL OF CHICAGO. A WONDER. TEN CENTS.

Bisesa glanced at Emeline. 'Edison?'

'He survived the Freeze - or rather, he happened to be in the city that night. He threw his labours and his ingenuity into helping the city survive. He's an old man now, and poorly, but still alive - or he was when I set out for Babylon.'

Abdi asked, 'And what is this place?'

Emeline smiled. 'You'll see.' She knocked on the door, and handed over thirty cents for the three of them to the bustling woman who answered. The woman led them into the house, which smelled of roast pork and polish, and then into a small back room which was lit only by a flickering lamp behind red glass. Three hard-backed chairs sat facing the wall. The room seemed otherwise empty.

Emeline hung up her coat on a hook on the wall. In the dark-room gloom, she said, 'We need to give our eyes time to adjust.'

Bisesa said, 'I arrived without money. I'll have to find some way of paying you back for all this.'

'Josh wouldn't have begrudged you,' Emeline said. Bisesa thought she could sense a smile. 'I, however, am running a tab.'

After perhaps ten minutes three small hatches opened at about chest height, in front of the chairs, to reveal peepholes. The idea was obvious. Abdi, Bisesa and Emeline sat before the peepholes, eyes pressed to the wall. At first all there was to see was white light. Then with a clattering noise something began to pass before Bisesa's eye, making a kind of flickering. And captions began to roll upwards past her eyes: CHICAGO, On The NIGHT The WHOLE WORLD FROZE, JULY 1894. A Production for the Edison-Dixon Kinetoscope, U.S. Patent Pending...

Then images of old Chicago appeared before Bisesa's eyes. It was like a very jerky cinema show, but there was a sense of motion.

Abdi was intrigued. 'Moving pictures! My father told me of this. How does it work?' And Emeline spoke of a spinning wheel with a narrow slit that allowed a momentary view of the frames passing before the shutter, forty or fifty per second, and Bisesa said something about the persistence of vision.

But then a piano began to play, off in the dark, a jangling sound all but out of tune wafting through the thin walls of the wooden house. They all fell silent, and watched the images.

The unnamed director of this primitive movie began with establishing images of the city before the night of the Freeze. Bisesa glimpsed a city that was already one of the greatest in America, somewhat frowned upon by the older cities of the east, but a pumping commercial heart. Traffic roared past her vision, silently, broughams and phaetons and other carriages, and crowded streetcars that a caption told her were called 'grip cars', for the way they clasped a moving cable that ran beneath the street, and trains roared through the streets, fully laden, apparently within touching distance of the jerkily-pictured pedestrians and cyclists. There were shots of towering skyscrapers, the first in all the world, and the glamorous stores on Michigan Avenue, and of the glimmering Lake Michigan, though Bisesa thought she saw sewage clouding the surface of this natural reservoir, and of the bustling Union Stock Yards at their height. All this took place under a sky that looked pregnant with soot and black smoke. But there were glimpses of poorer districts choked in trash and horse muck - and the corpses of horses, casualties of this horse-driven city, dumped in the street where they had died, in the winter frozen where they fell. The city was growing fast, as was attested by images of gas-lit streetlights hung out over the lines of streets yet to be built, on steaming undeveloped marsh land.

The very year before the Discontinuity the city had hosted the world's fair, the World's Columbian Exposition, mounted at colossal expense to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's voyage. The camera rode an elevated train along Sixty-third Street. Just before entering the fairground itself the camera swung to glimpse from its elevated position the vast arena of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Then the train passed over the fence and descended to its terminal to the rear of the 'Transportation Building'. The viewpoint walked a bit unsteadily through the Building past displays of locomotives, and what looked like a slice of ocean liner, and then out into the fairground itself, where a lagoon was skirted by a whole series of buildings that gleamed white, of classical influence with their pillars and facades but remarkably graceful in their composition and unity. THE WHITE CITY, said a juddering caption. Astonishingly for Bisesa, the delicate form of a Ferris Wheel towered over everything.

And then, a year after the fair, came the night of the Freeze. The moment of disjunction was celebrated with a clash of tinny chords on the piano.

The fairground itself was actually burning that night, after arson by the disaffected unemployed. The kinetoscope show told its story in captions and scattered, stark images, which must, Bisesa reflected, have taken both foresight and courage to capture.

The city was immediately plunged from the deep small hours to a cold dawn; that was the first shock, and Bisesa remembered her own experience of the Discontinuity when the sun had abruptly lurched across the sky of Pakistan. Snow had started to fall too, almost immediately, a tremendous shock as it was, or had been, a July night. The rioters in the White City were quickly subdued, the strikes they had called collapsed.

As morning came, grey and unwelcome early, there was panic in the office of the Mayor and the police departments. The cold was deepening quickly; the summer city was unprepared. Though the city itself seemed to be functioning, with some disruption thanks to the disjunction of the clocks, the trains and carriages that would have been expected to be flowing into the city by now had failed to arrive; Chicago, a great centre of trade in lumber and iron and livestock, was suddenly cut off from its arteries. And trains which tried to set out from the city found they ran out of track, a few miles from the city limits in very direction - it took a few crashes, and the first reported fatalities, to establish that fact. Parties of policemen and volunteers who set out on foot recorded nothing but winter beyond the city. Stevedores, panicking and excited, reported glimpsing icebergs on Lake Michigan. And businessmen in their offices in the upper storeys of the great skyscrapers, the Rookery and the Montauk, looked to the north to see a line of white, dead flat, bone bright beneath a lid of grey cloud.

The snow continued to fall. There were shots of the hospitals, Rush Medical College and Cook County Hospital, were the first victims of the cold were being brought in, the old and the very young, cases of frostbite and hypothermia: people freezing to death in July. The Mayor had been out of town and was nowhere to be seen; his deputy desperately tried to make long-distance phone calls to New York and Washington, but to no avail; if President Cleveland still lived, out there beyond the ice, he could offer no help or guidance to Chicago.

The 'Chicago Tribune' published a late edition, that first day. Its headline became a classic of humour and courage in the strangest of adversities: 'WORLD CUT OFF FROM CHICAGO'.

Things deteriorated quickly in the days that followed. People began to run out of fuel for their fires. An emergency shelter was set up in the city's famous four-thousand-seater Auditorium. The intake valves that drew the city's drinking after from Lake Michigan froze up. There were images of steam-powered dredgers, and workers in overcoats and bowler hats, their breath steaming around their faces, striving to keep the valves open.

And then people began to run out of food. The Mayor's office locked down the food stores and imposed a system of rationing, and called out the National Guard to help control the panicky food riots that broke out everywhere. By now there had been no produce carts or trains for days from Chicago's hinterland. The police and soldiers sent out to explore returned with the shattering, inexplicable news that the great belt of farmland around Chicago had gone - as simple as that, lost under a sheet of ice that looked old.

It was at this point that the deputy Mayor made his best decision. As the city threatened to crumble around him, and the death toll continued to mount up at the freezing homes and overcrowded hospitals and at the food riots, he recognised the limits of his capacity, and formulated an Emergency Committee. With himself as chair, it included a representative of the city's leading citizens. Here were the chief of police and commanders of the National Guard, and top businessmen and landowners, and the leaders of all of Chicago's powerful unions. Here was Jane Addams, 'Saint Jane', a noted social reformer who ran a women's refuge for Hull House. Here was Thomas Alva Edison, the great inventor, forty-seven years old, caught by chance in Chicago by the Freeze and pining for his lost laboratories in New Jersey, but his formidable mind already fizzing with unprecedented solutions for a city with unprecedented problems. And here was Colonel Edmund Rice, a veteran of Gettysburg who had run the 'Columbian Guard', a dedicated police force for the world's fair a year before. The deputy Mayor gladly gave up his seat as chair of the Committee to Rice.

With what seemed to Bisesa remarkable realism, and a good helping of compassion, this Committee began to act to stabilise the present, and plan for the future. Whatever had happened, an act of God or nature, was inexplicable, but it had happened, and that was an end to it. It was no good hoping all this snow and ice and cold and bergs would all just evaporate away; they had to act as if it would not - and as if the outside world, if it could be reached at all, would be no help to Chicago.

Under martial law, the Committee tidied up and locked in place the deputy Mayor's hasty imposition of rationing of food and fuel and medical supplies. They set up a curfew system and established new medical centres, where a brisk triage system was established to save as many of those who could be saved. And, with remarkable foresight, they ordered the halting of the slaughter of the animals in the Union Stock Yards. Like seedcorn, these creatures now had to be preserved to provide breeding stock for the following spring, if spring ever came.

It was a grim time, those first months. As supplies of gas and coal ran down, the city began to consume itself to keep warm, even as the deaths continued in swathes, from hunger and cold, and later from epidemics of cholera and typhoid in a city whose infrastructure had not been designed to withstand these conditions. Eventually the population would stabilise at about half its pre-Freeze levels, though ever since the Freeze, Emeline murmured, every year deaths had outnumbered births.

And meanwhile the explorers had gone out, probing every further over a country suddenly locked in ice, city men and women quickly learning how to survive in these super-Arctic conditions, lessons paid for with lives. In Chicago, as the months turned into years, it became clear that the ice was not receding but advancing.

They had eventually come to understand what Bisesa had learned from the Soyuz photographs taken from orbit: that Chicago was an island of human warmth in a frozen, lifeless continent, stranded in a bit of the nineteenth century surrounded by antique ice. And the cold was only deepening as Mir, stitched together from eras of great climatic diversity, was knitting itself together, and plunging deep into a new Ice Age. The Soyuz had long since fallen from the sky, but scouts from Europe had reported an ice sheet covering the North American continent extending far south of the position of New York, just as in Europe it had reached the latitudes of London and Berlin.

And the gap in the ice where Chicago sheltered by its lake was only temporary, an artefact of the Discontinuity. As far as the ice cap was concerned, Chicago was a wound that had to be healed over. It would not be long before the glaciers, truncated by the Discontinuity, would advance to erase Chicago down to its foundations.

But there was a way out. Clearly you had to travel south, ever south, to find a liveable warmth. But there was a route, of sorts, if you followed the valley of the Illinois down to the site of St Louis, and then went on further south following the Mississippi, eventually you came to the edge of the ice, and then, if you crossed a cold, dusty, windswept desert that appeared to girdle the ice cap, you came to a place where the grass grew, green and open. It wasn't a countryside anybody recognised, and the exporters brought back images taken with their Kodak cameras of mastodons and mammoths and sloths, images nobody could believe. But at least there was a chance of establishing farmland there.

The site of Memphis was chosen as the nucleus of a new settlement, and gradually a transport route was established across the unforgiving terrain between frozen Chicago and its new offspring. Lumber was cut for buildings, and the stock from the Union Yards were driven down in carts and on sleds and on river boats and rafts. A scheme was established to run a rail track up form the new township as far north as it could be sustained, and to convert locos from Chicago's yards to burn wood. It wasn't long before food at last began to filter back from the township of the south to the city in the north. That was the fifth year after the Freeze.

The final decision was hard to make, but inevitable. As the ice closed in, of course Chicago had to be abandoned; already great swathes of the town were empty, lightless and lifeless, looted and burned out. Chicago was dying; the people it sheltered must move to its new twin, New Chicago, south of the ice. The migration would take years, decades to complete, for the tiny nuclei of townships in the south would be overwhelmed if all quarter-million surviving Chicagoans marched on it at once. And besides a gradual evacuation would allow the systematic saving of as many of the city's treasures and resources as was possible. The Committee had no ambition to see those under their charge slip back to primitive conditions; New Chicago would one day rise as grandly as the old, and become the nucleus for a new, retaken America - that was the plan.

The first symbolic act in the epic migration was to haul Big Mary across ice and down river to her new home in New Chicago. The last, still some years hence, would be a procession of the city's final citizens out of the city and to the waiting trains, after which the carcass of old Chicago would be given at last to the ice.

The flickering show ended, and Bisesa sat back. Their hostess took away the screens of stained glass over the room's lamps, and Bisesa blinked in suddenly bright light.

Emeline watched her. 'So that's our story.'

'I'm impressed. More than that.'

'You can see why we're proud of ourselves,' Emeline said. 'Once other towns looked down on Chicago; everybody knows that. But now Chicago is all that's left of America. And we can build it all again. We call it the "Chicago Spirit". We built the White City in just three years'...

'Of course they can,' the phone whispered to Bisesa. 'This was an age of enterprise, of building, building, building. This generation didn't just put up the first skyscrapers in Chicago, they built the Brooklyn Bridge, and laid down Central Park... They laid the foundations of the America that dominated the twentieth century. They did it once. Even dumped alone in an icebound America, of course they can do it again.'

For once Emeline didn't complain about the phone's interjection.

But Bisesa, sadly, thought of what the phone had had to say about the lethal expansion of this cosmos: that Mir, a heroically built New Chicago and all, may only have centuries more of existence before succumbing to a doom even more lethal than the ice.

Pilot

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First published as a Novacon chapbook, 1993; collected in Vacuum Diagrams.

When the Squeem occupation laws were announced, Anna Gage was half way through a year long journey into Jove from Port Sol. She paged through the news channels, appalled.

Human space travel was suspended. Wherever the great GUTship interplanetary freighters landed they were being broken up. The Poole wormhole fast-transit routes were collapsed. Humans were put to work on Squeem projects.

Resistance had imploded quickly.

Anna Gage - shocked, alone, stranded between worlds - tried to figure out what to do.

She was seventy nine years old, thirty eight physical. She was a GUTship pilot; for ten years she'd carried bulk cargo from the inner worlds to the new colonies clustered around Port Sol in the Kuiper Belt.

Since she operated her ship on minimum overheads, her supplies were limited. She couldn't stay out here for long. But she couldn't return to an occupied Earth and let herself be grounded. She was psychologically incapable of that.

Still outside the orbit of Saturn, she dumped her freight and began a long deceleration.

She began probing the sky with message lasers. There had to be others out here, others like her, stranded above the occupied lands.

After a few days, with the Sun still little more than a spark ahead of her, she got a reply.

Chiron ...

She opened up her GUTdrive and skimmed around the orbit of Saturn.

Chiron was an obscure ice dwarf, a dirty snowball two hundred miles across. It looped between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus, following a highly elliptical orbit. One day the gravitational fields of the gas giants would hurl it out of the System altogether.

It had never been very interesting.

When Gage approached Chiron, she found a dozen GUTships drifting like spent matches around the limbs of the worldlet. The ships looked as if they were being dismantled, their components being hauled down into the interior of the worldlet.

A Virtual of a man's head rustled into existence in the middle of Gage's cabin. The disembodied head eyed Gage in her pilot's cocoon. The jostling pixels of his head enlarged, as if engorging with blood; Gage imagined data leaking down to the worldlet's surface.

'I'm Moro. You look clean.' He looked about forty physical, with a high forehead, jet black eyebrows, a weak chin.

'Thanks a lot.'

'You can approach. Message lasers only; no wideband transmission.'

'Of course '

'I'm a semisentient Virtual. There are copies of me all around your GUTship.'

'I'm no trouble,' she said tiredly.

'Make sure you aren't.'

With Moro's pixel eyes on her, she brought the GUTship through a looping curve to the surface of the ice moon, and shut down its drive for the last time.

She stepped out onto the ancient surface of Chiron.

The ice was a rich crimson laced with organic purple. The suit's insulation was good, but enough heat leaked to send nitrogen clouds hissing around her footsteps, and where she walked she burned craters in the ice. Gravity was only a few per cent of gee, and Gage, Mars-born, felt as if she might blow away.

Moro met her in person.

'You're taller than you look on TV,' she said.

He raised a gun at her. He kept it there while her ship was checked over.

Then he lowered the gun and took her gloved hand. He smiled through his faceplate. 'You're welcome here.' He escorted her into the interior of Chiron.

Corridors had been dug hastily into the ice and pressurised; the wall surface Chiron ice sealed and insulated by a clear plastic was smooth and hard under her hand.

Moro cracked open his helmet and smiled at her again. 'Find somewhere to sleep. Retrieve whatever you need from your ship. Tomorrow I'll find you a work unit; there's plenty to be done.'

Work unit?

'I'm not a colonist,' she growled. 'You think we'll be here that long?'

Moro looked sad. 'Don't you?'

She found a cabin, a crude cube dug into the ice. She moved her few personal belongings into the cabin Virtuals of her parents on Mars, book chips, a few clothes. Her things looked dowdy and old, out of place.

There were about a hundred people hiding in the worldlet. Fifty had come from a Mars Saturn liner; the rest had followed in ones and twos aboard fugitive GUTship freighters, like Gage herself. There were no children. Except for the liner passengers mostly business types and tourists the colonists of Chiron were remarkably similar. They were wiry looking, AntiSenescence preserved, wearing patched in ship uniforms, and they bore expressions uneasy, hunted that Gage recognised. These were pilots. They feared, not discovery or death, but grounding.

The drives of some of the ships were dismounted and fixed to the surface, to provide power. The colonists improvised plants for air processing and circulation, for heating and for AS treatments. Crude distilleries were set up, with tubing and vessels cannibalised from GUTdrive motors.

Gage dug tunnels, tended vegetables, lugged equipment from GUTships of a dozen incompatible designs into the ice.

It was hard work, but surprisingly satisfying. The ache in her muscles enabled her to forget the worlds beyond Chiron, places she was coming to suspect she would never see again.

This was her home now, her Universe.

Two years limped by. The Chiron colony remained undiscovered. The grip of the Squeem occupation showed no sign of relaxing.

A mile below the surface the colonists dug out a large, oval chamber. The light, from huge strips buried in the translucent walls, was mixed to feel like sunlight, and soon there was a smell of greenery, of oxygen. People established gardens in synthesised soil plastered around the walls, and built homes from the ancient ice. The homes were boxes fixed to the ends of ice pillars; homes sprouted from the walls like flower stalks.

Each dawn arrived with a brief flicker, a buzz as the strip-lights warmed up, then a flood of illumination. Gage would emerge from her cabin, nude; she could look down the length of her home-pillar at a field of cabbages, growing in ice as old as the Solar System.

It was like being inside a huge, gleaming egg. She missed Mars, the warm confines of her pilot cocoon.

The colonists monitored the news from the occupied worlds. There seemed to be no organised resistance; the Squeem's action had been too unexpected, too sudden and complete. As far as the colonists knew they were the only free humans, anywhere.

But they couldn't stay here forever.

They held a meeting, in an amphitheatre gouged out of the ice. The amphitheatre was a saucer shaped depression with tiered seats; straps were provided to hold the occupants in place. As she sat there Gage felt a little of the cold of the worldlet, of two hundred miles of ice, seep through the insulation into the flesh of her legs.

Some proposed that the colony should become the base for a resistance movement. But if the massed weaponry of the inner planets hadn't been able to put up more than a token fight against the Squeem, what could one ad hoc colony achieve? Others advocated doing nothing staying here, and waiting until the Squeem occupation collapsed of its own accord.

If it ever did, Gage thought morosely.

A woman called Maris Mackenzie released her belt and drifted up to the amphitheatre's focal point. She was another pilot, Gage saw; her uniform was faded but still recognisable.

Mackenzie had a different idea.

'Let's get out of this System and go to the stars,' she said.

There was a ripple of laughter.

'How?'

'One day Saturn or Uranus is going to throw this ice dwarf out of the System anyway,' Maris Mackenzie said. 'Let's help it along its way. We use the GUTdrive modules to nudge it into a close encounter with one of the giants and slingshot out of the System. Then - when we already have escape velocity - we open up a bank of GUTdrives and push up to a quarter gee. We can use water ice as reaction mass. In three years we'll be close to lightspeed -'

'Yes, but where would we go?'

Mackenzie was tall, thin, bony; her scalp was bald, her skull large and delicate: quite beautiful, like an eggshell, Gage thought. 'That's easy,' Mackenzie said. 'Tau Ceti. We know there are iron core planets there, but - according to the Squeem data - no advanced societies.'

'But we don't know if the planets are habitable.'

Mackenzie spread her thin arms theatrically wide. 'We have more water, here in the bulk of Chiron, than in the Atlantic Ocean. We can make a world habitable.'

'The Squeem will detect us when we open up the drives. They can outrun us with hyperdrive.'

'Yes,' said Mackenzie patiently, 'but they won't spot us until after the slingshot. By then we'll already have escape velocity. To board us, the Squeem would have to match our velocity in normal space. We've no evidence they've anything more powerful than our GUTdrives, for normal space flight. So they couldn't outrun us; even if they bothered to pursue us they could never catch us.'

'How far is Tau Ceti? It will take years, despite time dilation -'

'We have years,' Mackenzie said softly.

A bank of cannibalised GUTdrive engines nudged Chiron out of orbit. It took three years for the ice dwarf to crawl to its encounter with Saturn.

The time went quickly for Gage. There was plenty of work to do. Sensors were ripped from the GUTships and erected in huge, irregular arrays over the ice ship's surface, so they could watch for pursuit. Inside the ice cave, the colonists had to take apart their fancy zero gee homes on stalks. One side of the chamber was designated the floor, and was flattened out; squat igloos were erected across the newly levelled surface. The vegetable farms were reestablished on the floor and on the lower slopes of the walls of the ice cave.

The colonists gathered on the surface to watch the Saturn flyby.

Gage primed her helmet nipple with whisky from one of the better stills. She found a place away from the rest, dug a shallow trench in the ice, and lay in it comfortably; vapour hissed softly around her, evoked by her leaked body heat.

Huge storms raged in the flat infinite cloudscape of Saturn. The feathery surfaces of the clouds looked close enough to touch. Rings arched over Chiron like gaudy artifacts, unreasonably sharp, cutting perceptibly across the sky as Gage watched. It was like a slow ballet, beautiful, peaceful.

Saturn's gravitational field grabbed at Chiron, held it, then hurled it on.

Chiron's path was deflected towards the Cetus constellation, out of the plane of the Solar System and roughly in the direction of the Andromeda Galaxy. The slingshot accelerated the worldlet to Solar escape velocity. The encounter left the vast, brooding bulk of Saturn sailing a little more slowly around the remote Sun.

A week past the flyby the bank of GUTdrive engines was opened up.

Under a quarter gee, Gage sank to the new floor of the ice cave. She looked up at the domed ceiling and sighed; it was going to be a lot of years before she felt the exhilarating freedom of freefall again.

A week after that, riding a matchspark of GUTdrive light, the Squeem missile came flaring out of the plane of the System. It was riding a full gee.

The countdown was gentle, in a reassuring woman's voice.

Gage lay with Moro in the darkness of her igloo. She cradled him in the crook of her shoulder; his head felt light, delicate in the quarter strength gravity.

'So we got two weeks' head start,' she said.

'Well, we'd hoped for longer '

'A lot longer.'

' but they were bound to detect the GUTdrive,' Moro said. 'It could have been worse. The Squeem must have cannibalised a human ship, to launch so quickly. So the missile's drive has to be human rated, limited to a one gee thrust.'

The Squeem had evidently been forced to concur with Mackenzie's argument, that pursuit with a hyperdrive ship was impossible; only another GUTdrive ship could chase Chiron, crawling after the rogue dwarf through normal space.

The woman's voice issued its final warnings, and the countdown reached zero.

The ice world shuddered. Gage felt as if a huge hand were pressing down on her chest and legs; suddenly Moro's head was heavy, his hair prickly, and the ice floor was hard and lumpy under her bare back. The crown of her igloo groaned, and for a moment she wondered if it would collapse in on them.

The bank of GUTdrive pods had opened up, raising Chiron's acceleration to a full gee, to match the missile.

If Mackenzie's analysis was correct Chiron couldn't outrun the missile, and the missile couldn't overtake Chiron. It was a stalemate.

Gage stroked the muscles of Moro's chest. 'It's actually a neat solution by the Squeem,' she murmured. 'The pursuit will take years to play out, but the missile must catch us in the end.'

Moro pushed himself away from her, rolled onto his front, and cupped her chin in his hands. 'You're too pessimistic. We're going to the stars.'

'No. Just realistic. What happens when we get to Tau Ceti? We won't be able to decelerate, or the missile will catch us. Although we may survive for years, the Squeem have destroyed us.'

Moro wriggled on the floor, rubbing elbows which already looked sore from supporting his weight in the new thrust regime. He pulled at his lip, troubled.

Gage let herself get pregnant by Moro. The zygote was frozen, placed with a small store of others.

It was only after the storage of her zygote that Gage questioned her own motives in conceiving. How long was she expecting to be here? What kind of future did she think any of them could hope for?

Six months later the missile increased its acceleration to two gee.

The Squeem had been smart, Gage decided; they'd given the missile the ability to redesign itself in flight.

The colonists held another meeting to decide what to do. This time they sat around on the bare floor of their darkened ice cave; their elegant zero gee amphitheatre was suspended, uselessly, high on one wall of the cave.

Some wanted to stand and fight. But they had nothing to fight with. And Chiron, with its cargo of humanity, must be much more fragile than the hardened missile.

A few wanted to give up. They were still only fifty light days from the Sun. Maybe they could surrender, and return to the occupied worlds.

But most couldn't stand the idea; it would be better to die. Anyway, a semisentient Squeem missile was unlikely to take prisoners.

They voted to run, at two gee.

They had to rebuild their colony again. Drone robots crawled over the battered surface of the ice world, hauling water ice to the GUTdrive engines. Shields billowed wings of electromagnetic flux around the ice dwarf; they would soon be running at close to lightspeed, and the thin stuff between the stars would hit Chiron like a wall.

The beautiful ice cave was abandoned. It wouldn't be able to withstand the stress of two gravities. More tunnels were dug through the ice; new homes, made hemispherical for maximum strength, were hollowed out. The colonists strung lights everywhere, but even so Gage found their new warren-world gloomy, claustrophobic. She felt her spirits sinking.

The drives were ramped up to two gee in a day.

Only the strongest could walk unaided. The rest needed sticks, or wheelchairs. Broken bones, failing knees and ankles, were commonplace. Those like Gage who'd grown up on low gravity worlds, or in freefall, suffered the most. The improvised AS units were forced to cope with a plague of failing hearts and sluggish circulations.

It was like growing old, in twenty four hours.

Gage and Moro attempted sex, but it was impossible. Neither could support the weight of the other's body. Even lying side by side, facing each other, was unbearable after a few minutes. They touched each other tenderly, then lay on their backs in Moro's cavern, holding hands.

After three more months Maris Mackenzie came to see Gage. Mackenzie used a wheelchair; her large, fragile, beautiful bald head lolled against the back of the chair, as if the muscles in her neck had been cut.

'The missile is changing again,' Mackenzie said. 'It's still maintaining its two gee profile, but its drive is flaring spasmodically. We think it's redesigning its drive; it's going to move soon to higher accelerations still. Much higher.'

Gage lay on her pallet; she felt as if she could feel every wrinkle in the ice world under her aching back. 'You can't be surprised. It was just a question of time.'

'No.' Mackenzie smiled weakly. 'I guess I've screwed us up. We could have just stayed in our quiet orbit between Saturn and Uranus, not bothering anybody, flying around in that beautiful freefall ice cavern.'

'The Squeem would have found us eventually.'

'We're using up so much of our water. It breaks my heart. My beautiful ocean, thrown away into space, wasted. But we can go faster. We can still outrun the damn thing.'

Gage knew that was true.

Once GUT energy had fuelled the expansion of the Universe itself. In the heart of each GUTdrive Chiron ice was compressed to conditions resembling the initial singularity the Big Bang. The fundamental forces governing the structure of matter merged into a single, Grand Unified Theory superforce. When the matter was allowed to expand again, the phase energy of the decomposing superforce, released like heat from condensing steam, was used to expel Chiron matter in a rocket action.

But none of that made a difference.

Gage sighed. 'We've already abandoned half our tunnels because of tiny gradients we didn't even notice under one gee. We're slowly dying, under two gee, despite the AS units. We can't take any more. I guess this latest manoeuvre of the missile will be the end for us.'

'Not necessarily,' Mackenzie said. 'I have another idea.' Gage turned her head slowly; she had to treat her skull as delicately as a china vase. 'Your last one was a doozie. What now?'

'Downloading.'

It wasn't a universally popular option. On the other hand, the alternative was death.

Eighty chose to survive, as best they could.

When her turn came Gage made her way, alone, to the modified AS machine at the heart of their warren of tunnels. The robot surgeon delicately implanted a sensor pad into her corpus callosum, the bridge of nervous tissue between the two hemispheres of her brain. It also, discreetly, pressed injection pads against her upper arms.

All around her, in the improvised infirmary, people were dying, by choice.

So was Gage, if truth be told. All that would survive of her would be a copy, distinct from her.

The callosum sensor would download a copy of her consciousness in about eight hours. Gage returned to her cavern, lay on her back with a sigh, and fell asleep.

She opened her eyes.

She wasn't hurting any more. She was in zero gee. It felt delicious, like swimming in candy floss. She was in the

ice cave no, a Virtual reconstruction of the cave; the walls and house stalks were just a little too smooth and regular. No doubt the realism of detail would return as their minds worked at this shared world.

Moro approached her; he'd resumed the crude disembodied head Virtual form Gage had first encountered. 'Hi,' he grinned.

'I just died.'

Moro shrugged. 'Tell me about it. We're all stored inside the shelter now.' This was a hardened radiation shelter they'd built hurriedly into the heart of the ice world; it contained a solid state datastore to support their new Virtual existence, what was left of their vegetation, their precious clutch of human zygotes embedded in ice. 'Our bodies have been pulped, the raw material stored in a tank inside the shelter.' 'You've a way with words.'

'... We're up to a thousand gee,' Moro said.

Gage's Virtual reflexes hadn't quite cut in, so she made her mouth drop open. 'A thousand?'

'That's what the missile is demanding of us. All our tunnels have collapsed.'

'I never liked them anyway.'

'And the drones are having to strengthen the structure of Chiron itself; the thing wasn't built for this, and could collapse under the stress.'

At a thousand gee, the time dilation factor they would pile up would be monstrous. Gage found herself contemplating that, her growing isolation from home in space and time, with no more than a mild detachment.

Gage rubbed Virtual hands over her arms. Her flesh felt rubbery, indistinct; it was like being mildly anaesthetized. Perhaps she was, in some Virtual way.

'Come on,' she said. 'Let's see what the food is like here.'

The chase settled down to stalemate again.

Gage sat under (a Virtual image of) the sky, watching starlight bend itself into a bow around the ship. It was a beautiful sight; it reminded her of Saturn's rings.

Their speed was already so close to that of light that time was passing a thousand times as quickly inside Chiron as beyond it. Everyone Gage knew in the Solar System must be long dead, despite AS treatment.

She wondered if the Squeem occupation still endured. Maybe not. Maybe humans had hyperdrive ships of their own by now.

This solitary drama might be the last, meaningless act of a historical tragedy, yet to play to its conclusion.

Most of the eighty had retreated to Virtual playgrounds, sinking into their own oceanic memories, oblivious of the Universe outside, isolated even from each other.

But Gage was still out here.

New problems were looming, she thought.

She sought out Maris Mackenzie.

'We're going bloody fast,' she said.

'I know.' Maris Mackenzie looked lively, interested. 'This is the way to travel between the stars, isn't it? Carrying live, fragile humans through normal space across interstellar distances was always a pipedream. Humans are bags of water, unreasonably fragile. A starship is nothing but plumbing. Humans crap inordinate amounts, endless mountains of '

'Yes,' said Gage patiently, 'but we still can't stop. Where are we going? Tau Ceti is long behind us. And we're heading out of the plane of the ecliptic, remember; we're soon going to pass out of the Galaxy altogether.'

'Um.' Mackenzie looked thoughtful. 'What do you suggest?'

Gage set up a simulation of her old freighter's pilot cocoon; for subjective days she revelled in the Virtual chamber, home again.

But she got impatient. Her control and speed of reaction were limited.

She dismissed the cocoon and found ways to interface directly with the sensors of Chiron, internal and external.

The GUTdrive felt like a fire in her belly; the sensor banks, fore and aft, were her eyes.

It was odd and at first she ached, over all her imaginary body; but gradually she grew accustomed to her new form. Sometimes it felt strange to return to a standard human configuration. She found herself staring at Moro or Mackenzie, still seeing arrays of stars, the single, implacable spark of pursuing GUT light superimposed on their faces.

Gage had been a good pilot. She was prepared to bet she was a better pilot than the Squeem missile. If she learned to pilot Chiron, maybe she could find a way to shake off the missile.

She searched ahead, through the thinning star fields at the edge of the Galaxy. She had to find something, some opportunity to trick the Squeem missile, before they left the main disc.

The black hole and its companion star lay almost directly in the path of Chiron.

The hole was four miles across, with about the mass of the Sun. Its companion was a red giant, vast and cool, its outer layers so rarefied Gage could see stars beyond its bulk.

Gage had found her opportunity.

She summoned Maris Mackenzie. A pale Virtual of Mackenzie's disembodied head floated over an image of the hole and its companion.

The hole raised tides of light in the giant. Material snaked out of the giant in a huge, unlikely vortex which marched around the giant's equator. The vortex fuelled an accretion disc around the hole, a glowing plane of rubble that spanned more than Earth's orbit around its Sun.

Some of the giant's matter fell directly into the hole. The infall was providing the hole with angular momentum making it spin faster. Because of the infall the hole was rotating unusually fast, thirty times a second.

'Hear me out,' Gage said.

'Go on,' said Maris Mackenzie.

'If a black hole isn't spinning and it's uncharged then it has a spherical event horizon.'

'Right. That's the Schwarzschild solution to Einstein's equations. Spherically symmetric '

'But if you spin the hole, things get more complicated.' It was called the Kerr Newman solution. 'The event horizon retreats in, a little way. And outside the event horizon there is another region, called the ergosphere.'

The ergosphere cloaked the event horizon. It touched the spherical horizon at its poles, but bulged out at the equator, forming a flattened spheroid.

'The greater the spin, the wider the ergosphere,' Gage said. 'The hole ahead is four miles across. It's spinning so fast that the depth of the ergosphere at the equator is a hundred and forty yards.'

Mackenzie looked thoughtful. 'So?'

'We can't enter the event horizon. But we could enter the ergosphere, or clip it, and get away safely.'

'Um. Inside the ergosphere we would be constrained to rotate with the hole.'

'That's the plan. I want to flyby, clipping the ergosphere, and slingshot off the black hole.'

Mackenzie whistled. Pixels fluttered across her face, as she devoted processing power to checking out Gage's proposal.' It could be done,' she said eventually. 'But we would have a margin of error measured in yards. It would require damn fine piloting.'

'I'm a damn fine pilot. And we can take a lot of stress, remember.' It's not as if we have to protect anyone living.

'Why do you want to do this?'

'Because,' Gage said, 'the missile will follow me through the ergosphere. But after we've passed through, the hole will have been changed. The missile won't be able to work out how ...'

'We'll have to get consent to this from the others. The eighty -'

'Come on,' Gage said. 'Most of them have retreated into their own Virtual heads. There's hardly anybody out here, still thinking, save you and me.'

Slowly, Mackenzie smiled.

For Gage's scheme to work, the speed of Chiron would have to be raised much higher. When Chiron flew by the hole it would need an angular momentum comparable to that of the hole itself. So the drones ravaged Mackenzie's frozen ocean, hurling the stuff of Chiron into the GUTdrives.

Chiron approached the light-speed limit asymptotically.

By the time the hole approached, Chiron's effective mass had reached about a tenth of the Sun's. For every second passing in its interior, a hundred years wore away outside.

Ahead of her, the radiation from the black hole's accretion disc was Doppler shifted to a lethal sleet. Massive particles tore through the neural nets which comprised her awareness. She felt the nets reconfigure, healing themselves; it was painful and complex, like bone knitting.

Behind her the redshifted emptiness was broken only by the patient, glowering spark of the Squeem missile.

The black hole was only seconds away. She could make those seconds last a Virtual thousand years, if she wished.

In these last moments, she was assailed by doubt. Nobody had tried this manoeuvre before. Had she destroyed them all?

Gage let her enhanced awareness pan through the bulk of Chiron. Years of reaction mass plundering had reduced the ice dwarf to a splinter, but it would survive to reach the lip of the black hole and so would its precious cargo, the awareness of eighty downloaded humans, the canister containing their clutch of frozen zygotes. That canister felt like a child, inside her womb of ice.

Enough.

She reduced her clock speed to human perception. The black hole flew at her face

The misty giant companion star ballooned over Gage's head, its thin gases battering at her face.

Chiron's lower belly dipped fifty yards into the ergosphere. The gravitational pull of the hole gripped her. It felt like pliers in her gut. She was hurled around; she was a helpless child in the grip of some too strong adult. The fabric of Chiron cracked; Solar System ice flaked into this black hole, here on the edge of the Galaxy, flaring x radiation as it was crushed.

Then the gravity grip released. The hole system was

behind her, receding. The pit dug in spacetime by the hole's mass felt like a distant, fading ache.

She watched the patient GUTspark of the Squeem missile as it approached the hole. It matched her path almost exactly, she saw with grudging admiration.

The missile grazed the lip of the hole. There was a flare of x radiation.

The GUTspark was gone.

It's worked. By Lethe, after all these years, it's worked.

Suddenly Gage felt utterly human. She wanted to cry, to sleep, to be held.

Cydonia, her home arcology, was an angular pyramid, huge before her, silhouetted against the light of the shrunken Sun. The ambient Martian light was like a late sunset, with the arcology drenched in a weak, deep pink colour; against its surface its windows were rectangles of fluorescent light glowing a harsh pearl grey, startlingly alien.

Her boots had left crisp marks in the duricrust.

Gage wasn't nostalgic, usually, but since the hole flyby she had felt the need to retreat into the scenes and motifs of her childhood.

Moro and Mackenzie met her on this simulated Martian surface.

'It was simple,' she said.

Mackenzie smiled.

Moro growled. 'You've told us.'

'We took so much spin from the black hole that we almost stopped it rotating altogether. It became a Schwarzschild hole. Without spin, its event horizon expanded, filling up the equatorial belt where the ergosphere had been.'

Chiron had clipped the ergosphere safely. The missile,

following Chiron's trajectory exactly, had fallen straight into the expanded event horizon.

The long chase was over.

'I guess the missile wasn't an expert on relativistic dynamics after all,' Mackenzie said.

'But we're not so smart either,' Moro said sourly. 'After all we're still falling out of the Galaxy even faster than before the hole encounter, in fact. A million years pass for every month we spend in here; we might be the only humans left alive, anywhere.' He looked down at his arms, made the pixels swell absurdly. 'If you can call this life. And we don't have enough reaction mass left to slow down. Well, space pilot Gage, where are we heading now?'

Gage thought about it. They could probably never return to their home Galaxy. But there were places beyond the Galaxy, massive stars and black holes that a pilot could use to decelerate, if she was smart enough.

And if they could find a place to stop, they could rest. Maybe Gage's awareness could be loaded back into some flesh and blood simulacrum of a human form. Or maybe not; maybe the role of Gage and the rest would simply be to oversee the construction of a new world fit for her child, and the other frozen zygotes.

She smiled. 'At this speed, we'll be there in a couple of subjective months.'

'Where?'

'Andromeda ...'