Earth

PLANET

First came a supernova, dazzling the universe in brief, spendthrift glory before ebbing into twisty, multispectral clouds of new-forged atoms. Swirling eddies spiraled until one of them ignited — a newborn star.

The virgin sun wore whirling skirts of dust and electricity. Gas and rocks and bits of this and that fell into those pleats, gathering in dim lumps… planets…

One tiny worldlet circled at a middle distance. It had a modest set of properties:

mass — barely enough to draw in a passing asteroid or two;

moons — one, the remnant of a savage collision, but big enough to tug deep tides;

spin — to set winds churning through a fuming atmosphere;

density — a brew that mixed and separated, producing an unpromising surface slag;

temperature — heat was the planet’s only voice, a weak one, swamped by the blaring sun. Anyway, what can a planet tell the universe, in a reedy cry of infrared?

“This exists,” it repeated, over and over. “This is a condensed stone, radiating at about three hundred degrees, insignificant on the scale of stars.

“This speck, a mote, exists.”

A simple statement to an indifferent cosmos — the signature of a rocky world, tainted by salty, smoke-blown puddles.

But then something new stirred in those puddles. It was a triviality — a mere discoloration here and there. But from that moment the voice changed. Subtly, shifting in timbre, still faint and indistinct, it nevertheless seemed now to say,

“I… am…”

• CORE

An angry deity glowered at Alex. Slanting sunshine cast shadows across the incised cheeks and outthrust tongue of Great Tu, Maori god of war.

A dyspeptic idol, Alex thought, contemplating the carved figure. I’d feel the same if I were stuck up there, decorating a billionaire’s office wall.

It occurred to Alex that Great Tu’s wooden nose resembled the gnomon of a sundial. Its shadow kept time, creeping to the measured ticking of a twentieth century grandfather clock in the corner. The silhouette stretched slowly, amorously, toward a sparkling amethyst geode — yet another of George Huttori’s many geological treasures. Alex made a wager with himself, that the shadow wouldn’t reach its goal before the sinking sun was cut off by the western hills.

And at this rate, neither would George Hutton. Where the devil is the man? Why did he agree to this meeting, if he didn’t plan on bloody showing up?

Alex checked his watch again, even though he knew the time. He caught himself nervously tapping one shoe against the nearby table leg, and stopped doing it.

What have Jen and Stan always told you? “Try to learn patience, Alex.”

It wasn’t his best-known virtue. But then, he’d learned a lot the last few months. Remarkable how it focused your mind, when you guarded a secret that might mean the end of the world.

He glanced toward his friend and former mentor, Stan Goldman, who had set up this appointment with the chairman of Tangoparu Ltd. Apparently unperturbed by his employer’s tardiness, the slender, aging theoretician was immersed in the latest issue of Physical Review.

No hope for distraction there. Alex sighed and let his eyes rove George Hutton’s office one more time, hoping to get a measure of the man.

Of course the conference table was equipped with the best and latest plaques, for accessing the World Data Net. One entire wall was taken up by an active-events screen, a montage of real-time views from random locations across the Earth — zeppelins cruising above Wuhan… sunrise in a North African village… the urban lights of any city in the world.

Original holographic sculptures of mythical beasts shimmered by the entrance to the suite, but nearest the desk were Hutton’s dearest treasures, minerals and ores collected over a lifetime grubbing through the planet’s crust — including a huge blood zircon, glittering on a pedestal just below the Maori war mask. It struck Alex that both objects were products of fiery crucibles — one mineral, the other social. Each denoted resilience under pressure. Perhaps this said something about George Hutton’s personality, as well.

But then, perhaps it meant nothing at all. Alex had never been a great judge of people. Witness the events of the last year.

With a sudden click and hum, the hallway doors parted and a tall, brown man appeared, breathing hard and coated with perspiration.

“Ah! You made yourselves at home. Good. Sorry to keep you waiting, Stan. Dr. Lustig. Excuse me, will you? I’ll only be a moment.” He peeled a sweaty jersey off broad shoulders, striding past a window overlooking the sailboats of Auckland harbor.

George Hutton, I presume, Alex thought as he lowered his outstretched hand and sat back down. Not much for formality. That’s just as well, I suppose.

From the open door to the lavatory, Hutton shouted. “Our game had delay after delay for injuries! Minor stuff, fortunately. But I’m sure you understand, I couldn’t let the Tangoparu team down when I was needed. Not during the finals against Nippon Electric!”

Normally, it might seem odd for a businessman in his fifties to neglect appointments for a rugby game. But the dusky giant toweling himself off in the loo seemed completely unselfconscious, aglow with victory. Alex glanced at his former teacher, who now worked for Hutton here in New Zealand. Stan only shrugged, as if to say billionaires made their own rules.

Hutton emerged wearing a dressing gown and drying his hair with a terry-cloth towel. “Can I offer you anything, Dr. Lustig? How about you, Stan?”

“Nothing, thank you,” Alex said. Less reticent, Stan accepted a Glenfiddich and spring water. Then Hutton settled into a plush swivel chair, stretching his long legs beside the kauri-wood table.

Whatever happens, Alex knew, this is where the trail ends. This is my last hope.

The Maori engineer-businessman regarded him with piercing brown eyes. “I’m told you want to discuss the Iquitos incident, Dr. Lustig. And the miniature black hole you let slip out of your hands there. Frankly, I thought you’d be sick of that embarrassment by now. What did some press hacks call it then? A possible China Syndrome?”

Stan cut in. “A few sensationalists set off a five-minute panic on the World Net, until the scientific community showed everybody that tiny singularities like Alex’s dissipate harmlessly. They’re too small to last long by themselves.”

Hutton raised one dark eyebrow. “Is that so, Dr. Lustig?”

Alex had faced that question so many times since Iquitos. By now he had countless stock answers — from five-second sound bites for the vid cameras to ten-minute lullabies for Senate investigators… all the way to hours of abstruse mathematics to soothe his fellow physicists. He really ought to be used to it by now. Still the question burned, as it had the first time.

“Talk to me, Lustig, ” the reporter, Pedro Manella, had demanded on that ashen afternoon in Peru, as they watched rioting students set Alex’s work site ablaze. “Tell me that thing you made isn’t about to eat its way to China. ”

Lying had become so reflexive since then, it took some effort to break the habit today. “Um, what did Stan tell you?” he asked George Hutton, whose broad features still glistened under a thin gloss of perspiration.

“Only that you claim to have a secret. Something you’ve kept from reporters, tribunals… even the security agencies of a dozen nations. In this day and age, that’s impressive by itself.

“But we Maori people of New Zealand have a saying,” he went on. “A man who can fool chiefs, and even gods, must still face the monsters he himself created.

“Have you created a monster, Dr. Lustig?”

The question direct. Alex realized why Hutton reminded him of Pedro Manella on that humid evening in Peru, as tear gas wafted down those debris-strewn streets and canals. Both big men had voices like Hollywood deities. Both were used to getting answers.

Manella had pursued Alex onto the creaking hotel balcony to get a good view of the burning power plant. The reporter panned his camera as the main containment building collapsed amid clouds of powdery cement. Cheering students provided a vivid scene for Manella to feed live to his viewers on the Net.

“When the mob cut the power cables, Lustig,” the persistent journalist asked while shooting, “that let your black hole out of its magnetic cage. It fell into the Earth then, no? So what happens now? Will it emerge again, blazing and incinerating some hapless place halfway around the world?

“What did you make here, Lustig? A beast that will devour us all?”

Even then, Alex recognized the hidden message between the words. The renowned investigator hadn’t been seeking truth; he wanted reassurance.

“No, of course I didn’t,” Alex remembered telling Manella on that day, and everyone else since then. Now he let go of the lie with relief.

“Yes, Mr. Hutton. I think I made the very Devil itself.”

Stan Goldman’s head jerked up. Until this moment, Alex hadn’t even confided in his old mentor. Sorry, Stan, he thought.

Silence stretched as Hutton stared at him. “You’re saying… the singularity didn’t dissipate like the experts said? That it might still be down there, absorbing matter from the Earth’s core?”

Alex understood the man’s incredulity. Human minds weren’t meant to picture something that was smaller than an atom, and yet weighed megatons. Something narrow enough to fall through the densest rock, yet bound to circle the planet’s center in a spiraling pavane of gravity. Something ineffably but insatiably hungry, and which grew ever hungrier the more it ate…

Just thinking about it put in sudden doubt the very notions of up and down. It challenged faith in the ground below your feet. Alex tried to explain.

“The generals showed me their power plant… offered me a blank check to construct its core. So I took their word they’d be getting permission soon. Any day now, they kept telling me.” Alex shrugged at his former gullibility. An old story, if a bitter one.

“Like everybody else, I was sure the Standard Physical Model was correct — that no black hole lighter than the Earth itself could possibly be stable. Especially one as tiny as we made at Iquitos. It was supposed to evaporate at a controlled rate, after all. Its heat would power three provinces. Most of my colleagues think such facilities will be cleared for use within a decade.

“But the generals wanted to jump the moratorium—”

“Idiots,” Hutton interrupted, shaking his head. “They actually imagined they could keep a thing like that secret? These days?”

For the first time since Alex’s bombshell, Stan Goldman put in a comment. “Well, George, they must have thought the plant well isolated in the Amazon.”

Hutton snorted dubiously, and in retrospect Alex agreed. The idea was harebrained. He’d been naive to accept the generals’ assurances of a calm working environment, which proved as untrustworthy as the standard models of physics.

“In fact,” Goldman went on. “It took a leak from a secrets registration service to set that Manella character on Alex’s trail. If not for that, Alex might still be tending the singularity, safe inside its containment field. Isn’t that right, Alex?”

Good old Stan, Alex thought affectionately. Still making excuses for his favorite student, just as he used to back in Cambridge.

“No, it’s not. You see, before the riot, I was already preparing to sabotage the plant myself.”

While this seemed to surprise Goldman, George Hutton only tilted his head slightly. “You had discovered something unusual about your black hole.”

Alex nodded. “Before 2020, nobody imagined such things could be made in the laboratory at all. When it was found you could actually fold space inside a box and make a singularity… that shock should have taught us humility.

But success made us smug, instead. Soon we thought we understood the damned things. But there are… subtleties we never imagined.”

He spread his hands. “I first grew suspicious because things were going too bloody well! The power plant was extremely efficient, you see. We didn’t have to feed in much matter to keep it from dissipating. The generals were delighted of course. But I started thinking… might I have accidentally created a new type of hole in space? One that’s stable? Able to grow by devouring mere rock?”

Stan gaped. Alex, too, had been numbed by that first realization, then agonized for weeks before deciding to take matters into his own hands, to defy his employers and defang the tiny, voracious beast he’d helped create.

But Pedro Manella arrived first, amid a flurry of accusations, and suddenly it was too late. Alex’s world collapsed around him before he could act, or even find out for certain what he’d made.

“So it is a monster… a taniwha,” George Hutton breathed. The Maori word sounded fearsome. The big man drummed his fingers on the table. “Let’s see if I’ve got this right. We have a purported stable black hole, that you think may orbit thousands of miles below our feet, possibly growing unstoppably even as we speak. Correct? I suppose you want my help finding what you so carelessly misplaced?”

Alex was nearly as impressed with Hutton’s quickness as he was irked by his attitude. He suppressed a hot response. “I guess you could put it that way,” he answered, levelly.

“So. Would it be too much to ask how you’d go about looking for such an elusive fiend? It’s a little hard to go digging around down there in the Earth’s core.”

Hutton obviously thought he was being ironic. But Alex gave him a straightforward answer. “Your company already makes most of the equipment I’d need… like those superconducting gravity scanners you use for mineral surveys.” Alex started reaching for his valise. “I’ve written down modifications—”

Hutton raised a hand. All trace of sardonicism was gone from his eyes. “I’ll take your word for now. It will be expensive, of course? No matter. If we find nothing, I’ll take the cost out of your pakeha hide. I’ll skin you and sell the pale thing in a tourist shop. Agreed?”

Alex swallowed, unable to believe it could be so simple. “Agreed. And if we do find it?”

Lines furrowed Hutton’s brow. “Why… then I’d be honor bound to take your pelt anyway, tohunga. For creating such a devil to consume our Earth, I should…”

The big man stopped suddenly. He stood up, shaking his head. At the window, Hutton stared down at the city of Auckland, its evening lights beginning to spread like powdered gemstones across the hills. Beyond the metropolis lay forested slopes slanting to Manukau Bay. Twilight-stained clouds were moving in from the Tasman Sea, heavy with fresh rain.

The scene reminded Alex of a time in childhood, when his grandmother had taken him to Wales to watch the turning of the autumn leaves. Then, as now, it had struck him just how temporary everything seemed… the foliage, the drifting clouds, the patient mountains… the world.

“You know,” George Hutton said slowly, still contemplating the peaceful view outside, “back when the American and Russian empires used to face each other at the brink of nuclear war, this was where people in the Northern Hemisphere dreamed about fleeing to. Were you aware of that, Lustig? Every time there was a crisis, airlines suddenly overbooked with “vacation” trips to New Zealand. People must have thought this the ideal spot to ride out a holocaust.

“And that didn’t change with the Rio Treaties, did it? Big War went away, but then came the cancer plague, greenhouse heat, spreading deserts… and lots of little wars of course, over an oasis here, a river there.

“All the time though, we Kiwis still felt lucky. Our rains didn’t abandon us. Our fisheries didn’t die.

“Now all those illusions are gone. There’s no safe place any longer.”

The big man turned to look at Alex, and despite his words there was no loathing in the tycoon-engineer’s eyes. Nor even bleakness. Only what Alex took to be a heavy resignation.

“I wish I could hate you, Lustig, but you’ve obviously subcontracted that job quite ably yourself. And so you deprive me even of revenge.”

“I’m sorry,” Alex apologized sincerely.

Hutton nodded. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

“All right then, let’s get to work. If Tane, father of the Maori, could go into the bowels of the Earth to battle monsters, who are we then to refuse?”

• HOLOSPEHRE

There are many ways to propagate. (Such a lovely word!) This late in her long life, Jen Wolling figured she knew just about all of them.

Especially where the term applied to biology — to all the varied means Life used to foil its great enemy, Time. So many were those ways, Jen sometimes puzzled why everyone fussed so over the traditional one, sex. True, sex had its points. It helped ensure variability in a species — a gambler’s game, mixing one’s own genes with another’s, betting that beneficial serendipities will outweigh the inevitable errors. In fact, sex had served most higher life forms well enough and long enough, to become reinforced with many pleasurable neural and hormonal responses.

In other days Jen had plumbed those pathways in vivo and with gusto. She had also mapped those same roads more precisely, in charts of pristine yet still passionate mathematics. Hers had been the earliest computer models to show theoretical bases for feeling, logical rationales for ecstasy, even theorems for the mysterious art of motherhood.

Two husbands, three children, eight grandchildren, and one Nobel Prize later, Jen knew motherhood from every angle, even though its fierce hormonal flows were now only memories. Ah, well. There were other types of propagation. Other ways even an old woman might leave an imprint upon history.

“No, Baby!” she chided, pulling a bright red apple away from the bars dividing the spacious lab in two. A gray tentacle waved between the steel rods, snatching at the fruit.

“No! Not till you ask for it politely.”

From her desk nearby, a young black woman sighed. “Jen, will you stop teasing the poor creature?” Pauline Cockerel shook her head. “You know Baby won’t understand unless you accompany words with signs.”

“Nonsense. She comprehends perfectly. Observe.”

The animal let out a squeaky trumpet of frustration.

Acquiescing, it rolled back its trunk to wind the tip round a mat of shaggy fur, hanging low over its eyes.

“That’s a good girl,” Jen said, tossing the apple. Baby caught it deftly and crunched happily.

“Pure operant conditioning,” the younger woman sniffed. “Hasn’t anything to do with intelligence or cognition.”

“Cognition isn’t everything,” Jen replied. “Politeness, for instance, needs to be ingrained at deeper levels. It’s a good thing I came down here. She’s getting spoiled rotten.”

“Hmph. If you ask me, you’re just rationalizing another bout of PNS.”

“PNS?”

“Post-Nobel syndrome,” Pauline explained.

“Still?” Jen sniffed. “After all these years?”

“Why not? Who said anyone recovers?”

“You make it sound like a disease.”

“It is. Look at the history of science. Most prizewinners turn into either stodgy defenders of the status quo — like Hayes and Kalumba — or iconoclasts like you, who insist on throwing stones at sacred cows—”

“Mixed metaphor,” Jen pointed out.

“ — and carping about details, and generally making nuisances of themselves.”

“Have I been making a nuisance of myself?” Jen asked innocently.

Pauline cast her eyes heavenward. “You mean besides coming here randomly, unannounced, and meddling in Baby’s training?”

“Yeah. Besides that.”

With a sigh Pauline plucked one data plaque from a jumble of the wide, wafer-thin reading devices. This one was dialed to the latest issue of Nature … a page in the letters section.

“Oh, that,” Jen observed. She had come here to the hermetic, air-conditioned pyramid of London Ark, in order to escape the flood of telephone and Net calls piling up at her own lab. Inevitably, one would be from the director of St. Thomas’s, inviting her to a pleasant lunch overlooking the river, where he’d once again hint that an emeritus professor in her nineties really ought to spend more time in the country, watching ultraviolet rays turn the rhododendrons funny shades of purple, instead of gallivanting around the globe poking her nose into other researchers’ business and making statements about issues that were none of her concern.

Had anybody else spoken as she had, at last week’s World Ozone Conference in Patagonia, they would have returned home to more than mere letters and phone calls. In today’s political climate, the gentlest outcome might have been forced retirement. Good-bye lab in the city. Good-bye generous consultancies and travel allotments.

That little Swedish medal certainly did have its compensations. To become a laureate was a little like being transformed into that famous nine-hundred-pound gorilla — the one who slept anywhere it wanted to. Glimpsing her own tiny, wiry reflection in the laboratory window, Jen found the metaphor delicious.

“I only pointed out what any fool should see,” she explained. “That spending billions to blow artificial ozone into the stratosphere isn’t going to solve anything. Now that greedy idiots have stopped spewing chlorine compounds into the air, the situation will correct itself soon.”

“Soon?” Pauline was incredulous. “Decades is soon enough to restore the ozone layer? Tell that to the farmers, who have to fit their livestock with eye covers.”

“Shouldn’t eat meat anyway,” Jen grumbled.

“Then tell all the humans who’ll get skin lesions because…”

“The U.N. supplies hats and sunglasses to everyone. Besides, a few pence worth of cream clears away pre-cancerous—”

“What about wild animals then? Savannah baboons were doing fine, their habitat declared safe just ten years ago. Now so many are going blind, they have to be collected into the arks after all. How do you think we’ll cope with that here?” Pauline gestured into the vast atrium of London Ark, with its tier upon tier of enclosed, artificial habitats. The huge edifice of hanging gardens and meticulously regulated environments was a far cry from its origins in the old Regent’s Park Zoo. And it was only one out of almost a hundred such structures, scattered all over the world.

“You’ll cope the way you have all along,” Jen answered. “By stretching facilities, putting in extra hours, making do—”

“For now! But what about tomorrow? The next catastrophe? Jen, I can’t believe I’m hearing this. You led the fight for the arks from the beginning!”

“So? Am I a traitor then, if I say that part of the job has succeeded? Why, in some places we’ve even made additions to the gene pool, like Baby here.” She nodded toward the furry pachyderm inside the big cage. “You should have faith in your own work, Pauline. Habitat restoration will come off the drawing boards someday. Most of these species should be back outside in only a few centuries—”

“Centuries!”

“Yes, surely. What’s a few hundred years, compared to the age of this planet?”

Pauline sniffed dubiously. But Jen cut in, putting on a touch of Cockney accent for good measure. “Cor, why d’ye take it all so bloody personally, dearie-o? Step back a minute. What’s the worst that can happen?”

“We could lose every unprotected terrestrial species massing over ten kilos!” the young woman replied fiercely.

“Yes? For good measure, let’s throw in the contents of these arks — the protected species — and every human being. All ten billion of us. That’d be some holocaust, to be sure.

“But how much difference would it make to the Earth, Pauline? Say, ten million years from now? Not much, I’ll wager. The old girl will wait us out. She’s done it before.”

Pauline’s mouth was slack, her expression stunned. For a moment Jen wondered if she’d really gone over the top, this time.

Her young friend blinked. Then a suspicious smile spread. “You are awful! For a minute there I actually started taking you seriously.”

Jen grinned. “Now… you know me better than that.”

“I know you’re an unrepentant curmudgeon! You live to get a rise out of people, and someday your contrary habits will be your undoing.”

“Hmph. Just how do you think I’ve remained interested in life this long? Finding ways to keep amused… that’s my secret of longevity.”

Pauline tossed the reading plaque back onto the cluttered desk. “Is that why you’re going to South Africa next month? Because it’ll outrage everybody on both sides?”

“The Ndebele want me to look over their arks from a macrobiological perspective. Whatever their politics and race problems, they are still vital members of the Salvation Project.”

“But—”

Jen clapped her hands. “Enough of that. It has nothing to do with our little project in stirpiculture, right here. Mammut americanum. Let’s have a look at Baby’s file, shall we? I may be retired, but I’ll bet I can still recommend a better neural factor gradient than the one you’re using.”

“You’re on! It’s in the next room. I’ll be right back.”

With a youthful grace that Jen watched lovingly, Pauline hurried out of the lab, leaving Jen to ponder alone the mysterious ways of ambiguity in language.

It was, indeed, a bad habit, this toying with people. But as the years flickered by it grew easier. They all forgave so, almost as if they expected it… demanded it of her. And because she tested everybody, taking contrary positions without prejudice, fewer and fewer people seemed to believe she meant anything she said at all!

Perhaps, Jen admitted honestly, that would be the world’s long-term revenge on her. To attribute everything she said to jest. That would be some fate for the so-called “mother of the modern Gaian paradigm.”

Jen stroked Baby’s trunk, scratching the bulging forehead where induced neoteny had given the elephant-mammoth hybrid an enlarged cortex. Baby’s brow-fur was long and oily, and gave off a pungent, tangy, yet somehow pleasant odor. The worldwide network of genetic arks had a surfeit of pachyderms, even this new breed — “Mammon-telephas” — with half its genes salvaged from a 20,000-year-old cadaver exposed by the retreating Canadian tundra. So many of them bred true, in fact, that there were some to spare for experiments in extended childhood in mammals. Under strict supervision by the science tribunals and animal rights committees, of course.

Certainly the creature seemed happy enough. “How about it, Baby?” Jen murmured. “Are you glad to be smarter than the average elephant? Or would you rather be out on the plains, rolling in mud, uprooting trees, complaining about ticks, and getting pregnant before you’re ten?”

The pink-tipped trunk curled around her hand. She stroked it, tenderly. “You’re awfully important to yourself, aren’t you? And you are part of the whole.

“But do you really matter, Baby? Do I?”

Actually, she had meant every word she said to Pauline — about how even mass extinctions would be essentially meaningless in the long run. A lifetime spent building the theoretical foundations of biology had convinced her of that. The homeostasis of the planet — of Gaia — was powerful enough to survive even great cataclysms.

Many times, sudden waves of death had wiped out species, genuses, even entire orders. Dinosaurs were only the most glamorous victims of one episode. And yet, across each murderous chasm, plants kept removing carbon dioxide from the air. Animals and volcanoes continued putting it back again, give or take a few percentage points.

Even the so-called greenhouse effect that had everyone worried — melting icecaps, spreading deserts, and driving millions before the rising seas — even that catastrophic outcome of human excess would never rival the great inundations following the Permian age.

Jen very much approved of the way everyone marched and spoke out and wrote letters these days, passing laws and designing technologies to “save the Earth” from twentieth-century errors. After all, only silly creatures fouled their own nests, and humanity couldn’t afford much more silliness. Still, she took her own, admittedly eccentric view, based on a personal, quirky, never-spoken identification with the living world.

Out in the atrium, a low rumble echoed off the walls of the glass cavern. She recognized the deep, purring growl of a tiger, her totem animal according to a shaman she’d spent one summer with, before the last century ended. He had said hers was “the spirit of a great mother cat…”

What nonsense. But oh, what a handsome fellow he had been! She recalled his aroma of herbs and wood smoke and male musk, even though it was hard right now to pin down his name.

No matter. He was gone. Someday, despite all the efforts of people like Pauline, tigers might be gone, too.

But some things endured. Jen smiled as she stroked Baby’s trunk.

If we humans annihilate ourselves, mammalian genes are rich enough to replace us with another, maybe wiser race within a few million years. Perhaps descendants of coyotes or raccoons, creatures too adaptable ever to need refuge in arks. Too tough to be wiped out by any calamity the likes of us create.

Oh, Baby’s delicate species might not outlast us, but Norway rats surely will. I wonder what kind of planetary custodians their descendants would make.

Baby whimpered softly. The elephant-mammoth hybrid watched her with soft eyes that seemed troubled, as if the creature somehow sensed Jen’s disturbing train of thought, Jen laughed and patted the rough gray flesh. “Oh, Baby. Grandma doesn’t mean half the things she says… or thinks! I just do it to amuse myself.

“Don’t worry. I won’t let bad things happen. I’ll always be watching over you.

“I’ll be here. Always.”

• MESOSPHERE

To Stan Goldman it was a revelation, watching Alex Lustig hurry from work site to work site under the vaulted, rocky ceiling. You never can tell about some-one till you see him in a crisis, he mused. Take Alex’s familiar gangling stoop. It no longer appeared lazy or lethargic down here, half a kilometer underground. Rather, the lad seemed to lean forward for leverage as he moved, pushing a slow-moving tractor here, a recalcitrant drill bit there, or simply urging the workers on. Air resistance might have been the only thing slowing him down.

Stan wasn’t the only one watching his former student, now transformed into a lanky, brown-haired storm of catalysis. Sometimes the other men and women laboring in this deep gallery glanced after him, eyes drawn by such intensity. One group had trouble connecting data lines for the big analyzer. Lustig was there instantly, kneeling on the caked, ancient guano floor, improvising a solution. Another team, delayed by a burned-out power supply, got a new part from Alex in minutes — he simply ripped it out of the elevator.

“I guess Mr. Hutton will notice when no one comes up for dinner,” Stan overheard one tech say with a shrug. “Maybe he’ll use a rope to lower us a replacement part.”

“Naw,” another replied. “George will lower dinner itself. Unless Dr. Lustig plugs us all with intravenous drips so we don’t even have to stop to eat.”

The remarks were made in good humor. They can tell this isn’t just another rush job, but something truly urgent. Still, Stan was glad necessity forced him to stay by his computer. Or else — age and former status notwithstanding — Alex would have drafted him by now to help string cables across the limestone walls.

Moment by moment, a laboratory was taking shape below the mountainous spine of New Zealand’s North Island.

It was still only the three of them — Stan, George, and Alex — who knew about the lost singularity, the Iquitos black hole that might now be devouring the planet’s interior. The techs had been told they were seeking a “gravitational anomaly” far deeper than any prior scan for trace ores or hidden methane had ever looked. But most of them knew a cover story when they heard one. The leading rumor — exchanged with fleeting smiles — was that the boss had found a map to the subterranean Lost World of Verne and Burroughs and TwenCen B-movies.

They’ll have to be told soon, Stan thought. Alex and I can’t handle the scans all by ourselves. Probing for an object smaller than a molecule, through millions of cubic kilometers of stressed minerals and liquid metal, would be like chasing a hurtling needle through countless fields of haystacks.

As if they’d be able to do anything about it if they did find the taniwha down there. Even Stan, who understood most of Alex’s new equations, could bring himself to believe the terrifying results for only a few seconds at a time.

I have four grandchildren, a garden, bright students with all their creative lives ahead of them, a woman who has made me whole by sharing my life for decades… There are books I’ve saved for reading “later. ” Sunsets. My paintings. Tenure…

Such wealth, modest in monetary terms, nonetheless made George Hutton’s billions seem like no big difference in comparison. It was hard, yet poignant, to be forced at this late date to take inventory and realize that.

I am a rich man. I don’t want to lose the Earth.

Stan’s satchel computer chimed, interrupting his morbid turn of thought. In a small volume above the open briefcase, an image took shape — of a gleaming cylinder whose surface sheen, wasn’t quite metallic, nor plastic, nor ceramic. Rather, it glistened slickly, like a liquid held fast in some tubular constraint of force.

That took long enough, he thought irritably, checking the figures. Good. The main antenna can be built using today’s technology. Nothing complicated, just simple microconstructors. Programming the little buggers, though… that’s going to be a headache. Can’t afford any lattice faults, or the gravity waves it radiates will scatter all over the place.

For longer than he could remember, Stan had heard excited predictions about how nanomachines would transform the world, create wealth out of garbage, build new cities, and save civilization from the dire prospect of ever-dwindling resources. They would also scour your arteries, restore brain tissue to youthful vigor, and mayhaps even cure bad breath. In reality, their uses were limited. The microscopic robots were energy gluttons, and they required utterly well-ordered environments to work in. Even to lay down a uniform crystalline antenna, molecule by molecule in a nutrient-chemical bath, would require attention in advance to every detail.

Carefully, he used Alex’s equations to adjust the design, teasing the cylinder into just the right shape to send delicate probes of radiation downward through those fiery circles of hell below, in search of an elusive monster. It was blissfully distracting work.

When the explosion struck, the initial wall of sound almost knocked Stan off his stool. Booming echoes reverberated down the rocky galleries. A scream followed, and a hissing roar.

Men and women dropped tools, rushing to a bend in the cave where they stared in apparent horror. Alex Lustig plowed past the throng toward the commotion. Stan stood up, blinking. “What… ?” But none of the running techs stopped to answer his question.

“Get a ladder!” someone cried. “There’s no time!” another shouted.

Negotiating a maze of pipes and wires cluttering the floor, Stan finally managed to nudge past a rank of gawkers and see what had happened. It looked at first as if a steam line had broken, jetting hot vapor across a wall festooned with gridlike latticework. But the wind that suddenly hit him wasn’t searing. It knocked him back with a blast of bitter cold.

Is it just the liquid nitrogen? Stan worried, bending into the frigid gale. Or did the helium line break as well? The first would be a setback. The latter might mean catastrophe.

He managed to join a crowd of techs sheltering behind one of the chemosynthesis vats. Clutching flapping work coats, the others stared toward the tangle of scaffolding, where a broken pipe now spewed cutting cold. Meters beyond that impassable barrier, two figures huddled on a teetering catwalk. The shivering workers were isolated, with no visible way to escape or to reach the cutoff valve atop the towering cryogenics tanks.

Someone pointed higher, near the arched ceiling, and Stan gasped. There, dangling from a cluster of stalactites, hung Alex! He had one arm draped through a gap between two of the hanging rock-forms, just above where they fused. It looked like an awfully precarious perch.

“How’d he get up there?.”

Stan had to repeat the question over the roar of frigid, pressurized gas. A woman in a brown smock pointed to where a metal ladder lay crystallized and shattered amid the jetting frost. “He was trying to get past the jet to the cutoff valve… but the ladder buckled! Now he’s trapped!”

From his perilous position, the young physicist gestured and shouted. One of the techs, a full-blooded Maori from George Hutton’s own iwi, started scrambling for pieces of hardware. Soon he was whirling a heavy object at the end of a cable, sending it flying on an upward arc. Alex missed the tool itself, but caught the cable round his left arm. Bits of crumbling limestone rained from his shaky roost as he used his teeth and one hand to reel in a drill with a rock-bolt bit already in place.

How can he find the leverage to…

Amazed, Stan watched Alex throw his legs around the half-column. Hugging the stalactite, he applied the drill to the strongest section, just above his head. The hanging rock shuddered. Cracks appeared, crisscrossing the pillar at Alex’s midriff. If he fell, he would carom off some toppled scaffolding straight into the supercold jet.

Stan withheld breathing as Alex drove the bit, tested it, and quickly passed a loop of cable through the grommet, giving it his weight just as the greater part of the stalactite gave way, falling to strike the debris below with a crashing noise. The crowd shouted. Dangling in midair, Alex struggled for a better grip while everyone below saw what the tumbling stone had done to his inner thighs. Bleeding runnels dripped through the remnants of his tattered trousers, joining rivulets of sweat as he strained to tie a loop knot. Encountering the roaring gas, the bloody droplets exploded into sprays of reddish snow.

Stan breathed again when Alex slipped his shoulders through the loop and let the cable take his weight. Still gasping, the young man turned and shouted over the noise. “Slack!… Pump!”

Two of the techs holding the cable looked puzzled. Stan almost rushed over to explain, but the Maori engineer caught on. Gesturing to the others, he began letting out more cord and then pulled most of it back just before Alex’s feet neared the icy jet. The process repeated, letting out rope, pulling it back. It was a simple exercise in harmonic resonance, as with a child’s swing, only here the plumb was a man. And he wouldn’t be landing in any sandbox.

Alex’s arc grew as the tether lengthened. With each pass he came nearer the supercold shroud of liquefied air, a blizzard of sparkling snowflakes whirling in his wake. He called down to those manning the straining cable. “Fourth swing… release!”

Then on the next pass — “Three!”

Then — “Two!”

Each time his voice sounded more hoarse. Stan nearly cried out as he saw the arc develop. They were going to release too soon! Before he could do anything though, the men let go with a shout. Alex sailed just over the jet, past the two stranded survivors, to collide with the tangled gridwork atop the centermost cryo tank. Immediately he scrambled for purchase on the iced surface. The woman next to Stan grabbed his arm and hissed sharply as Alex began a fatal slide…

… and stopped just in time, with one arm thrown around a groaning pipe.

A sharp crackling noise made Stan jump back as one of the nearby chem-synthesis tanks crinkled, folding inward from the cold. Fiber-thin control lines flailed like wounded snakes until they met the helium jet, at which point they instantly shattered into glassy shards.

“They’ve cut the flow topside,” someone reported.

Stan wondered, was the helium partial pressure already high enough to affect sound transmission? Or was the fellow’s voice squeaky out of fear?

“But there’s too much already in those tanks,” another said. “If he can’t stop it, we’ll lose half the hardware in the cavern. It’ll set us back weeks!”

There are three lives at stake, too, Stan thought. But then, people had their own priorities. Hands took his sleeve again… this time several senior engineers were organizing an orderly evacuation. Stan shook his head, refusing to go, and no one insisted. He kept vigil as Alex worked his way toward the cutoff valve, hauling himself hand over hand. The pipes were left discolored. Patches of frozen skin, mixed with blood, Stan realized with a queasy feeling.

Centimeter by centimeter Alex neared the collapsed catwalk. One wall staple remained in place, imbedded in limestone. Barely able to see, Alex had to hunt for it, his foot repeatedly missing the perch.

“Left, Alex!” Stan screamed. “Now up!”

His mouth open wide, exhaling a dragon’s spume of crystallized fog, Alex found the ledge and swung his weight onto it. Without pausing, he used it to hurl himself at the valve.

After all his struggles getting there, turning the handle was anticlimactically easy. At least that part of the cryo system was built well. The wailing shriek tapered off, along with the icy pressure. Stan staggered forward.

Past him sped rescue teams with ladders and stretchers. It took moments to pull down the two injured workers and hustle them away. But Alex would not be carried. He came down on his own, gingerly. Huddled in blankets, arms locked by those guiding him, he looked to Stan like some legendary Yeti, his bloodless face pale and sparkling under a crystal frosting. He made his escorts stop near Stan, and managed a few words through chattering teeth.

“M-my fault. Rushing things-s…” The words drowned in shivering.

Stan took his young friend’s shoulder. “Don’t be an ass_; you were grand. Don’t worry, Alex. George and I will have everything fixed by the time you get back.”

The young physicist gave a jerky nod. Stan watched the medics bear him away.

Well, he thought, wondering at what the span of a few minutes had revealed. Had this side of Alex Lustig been there all along, hidden within? Or would it come to any man called upon by destiny, as that poor boy obviously was, to wrestle demons over the fate of the world?

• EXOSPHERE

Pleiades dipped its nose, and Teresa Tikhana welcomed back the stars. Hello, Orion. Hello, Seven Sisters, she silently greeted her friends. Did you miss me? As yet, few constellations graced the shuttle’s for-ward windows, and those glittered wanly next to the dazzling Earth, with its white, pinwheel storms and brilliant vistas of brown and blue. Sinuous rivers and fractal, corrugated mountain ranges — even the smoke-stack trails of freighters crossing sunburned seas — all added up to an ever-changing panorama as Pleiades rotated out of launch orientation.

Of course it was beautiful — only down there could humans live without utter dependence on temperamental machinery. Earth was home, the oasis_; that went without saying.

Still, Teresa found the planet’s nearby glare irksome. Here in low orbit, its dayside brilliance covered half the sky, drowning all but the brightest stars.

Vernier rockets throbbed, adjusting the ship’s rotation. Valves and circuits closed with twitters and low chuckles, a music of smooth operation. Still, she scanned — checking, always checking.

One plasma screen showed their ground track, a few hundred kilometers from Labrador, heading east by southeast. NASA press flacks loved ground path indicators, but the things were next to useless for serious navigation. In-stead, Teresa watched the horizon’s tapered scimitar move aside to show more stars.

And hello, Mama Bear, she thought. Good to see your tail pointing where I expected.

“There’s ol’ Polaris,” Mark Randall drawled to her right. “Calculating P and Q fix now.” Teresa’s copilot compared two sets of figures. “Star tracker fix matches global positioning system to five digits, in all nine degrees of freedom. Satisfied, Terry?”

“Sarcasm suits you, Mark.” She scanned the figures for herself. “Just don’t get into the habit of calling me Terry. Ask Simon Bailie, sometime, why he came home from that peeper-run wearing a sling.”

Mark smiled thoughtfully. “He claims it was ’cause he got fresh with you on the Carter Station elevator.”

“Wishful thinking,” she laughed. “Simon’s got delusions of adequacy.”

For good measure, Teresa compared satellite and star tracker data against the ship’s inertial guidance system. Three independent means of verifying location, momentum, and orientation. Of course they all agreed. Her compulsive checking had become notorious, a sort of trademark among her peers. But even as a little girl she had felt this need — one more reason to become a pilot, then astronaut — to learn more ways to know exactly where she was.

“Boys can tell where north is,” other children used to tell her with the assurance of passed-down wisdom. “What girls understand is people!”

To most sexist traditions, Teresa had been impervious. But that one seemed to promise explanations — for instance, for her persistent creepy feeling that all maps were somehow wrong. Then, in training, they surprised her with the news that her orientation sense was far above average. “Hyperkinesthetic acuity,” the doctors diagnosed, which translated into measurable grace in everything she did.

Only that wasn’t how it felt. If this was superiority, Teresa wondered how other people made it from bedroom to bath without getting lost! In dreams she still sometimes felt as if the world was on the verge of shifting capriciously, without warning. There had been times when those feelings made her wonder about her sanity.

But then everyone has quirks, even — especially — astronauts. Hers must be harmless, or else would the NASA psych people have ever let her fly left seat on an American spacecraft?

Thinking of childhood lessons, Teresa wished at least the other part of the old myth were true. If only being female automatically lent you insight into people. But if it were so, how could things ever have gone so sour in her marriage?

The event sequencer beeped. “Okay,” she sighed. “We’re on schedule, oriented for rendezvous burn. Prime the OMS.”

“Aye aye, Mem Bwana.” Mark Randall flicked switches. “Orbital maneuvering system primed. Pressures nominal. Burn in one hundred ninety seconds. I’ll tell the passengers.”

A year ago the drivers’ union had won a concession. Nonmembers would henceforth ride below, on middeck. Since this trip carried no NASA mission specialists, only military intelligence officers, she and Mark were alone up here on the flight deck, undistracted by nursemaid chores.

Still, there were minimal courtesies. Over the intercom, Mark’s low drawl conveyed the blithe confidence of a stereotypical airline pilot.

“Gentlemen, by the fact that your eyeballs have stopped shiftin’ in their sockets, you’ll realize we’ve finished rotating. Now we’re preparin’ for rendezvous burn, which will occur in just under two and a half minutes…”

While Mark rambled, Teresa scanned overhead, checking that fuel cell number two wasn’t about to act up again. Station rendezvous always made her nervous. All the more so when she was flying a model-one shuttle. The noises Pleiades made — its creaking aluminum bones, the swish of coolant in old-style heat-transfer lines, the squidgy sound of hydraulic fluid swiveling pitted thrusters — these were like the sighs of a one-time champion who still competed, but only because the powers-that-be found that less expensive than replacing her.

Newer shuttles were simpler, designed for narrower purposes. Teresa figured Pleiades was perhaps the most complex machine ever made. And the way things were going, nothing like it would ever be built again.

A glitter over near Sagittarius caught her eye. Teresa identified it without having to check: the old international Mars mission — scavenged for components, and the remnants parked in high orbit when that last bold venture had been canceled, back when she was still in grade school. The new rule for harder times was simple — space had to pay for itself with near-term rewards. No pie in the sky. No investment in maybes. Not when starvation remained an all too likely prospect for such a large portion of humanity.

“… checked our trajectory three different ways, folks, and Captain Tikhana has declared that all’s well. Physics has not broken down…”

Overlaid across the constellations were multicolored graphics displaying the vessel’s orbital parameters. Also in the forward window, Teresa saw her own reflection. A smudge had taken residence on her cheek, near where a curl of dark brown hair escaped her launch cap… probably a grease speck from adjusting a passenger’s seat before launch. Rubbing just smeared it out, however, overaccentuating her strong cheekbones.

Great. Just the thing to make Jason think I’m losing sleep over him. Teresa didn’t need any more aggravation, not when she was about to see her husband for the first time in two months.

In contrast, Mark Randall’s reflection looked boyish, carefree. His pale face — demarcated from the white of his spacesuit by the anodized helmet ring — showed none of the radiation stigmata that now scarred Jason’s cheeks… the so-called “Rio tan,” acquired working outside through the sleeting hell of the South Atlantic magnetic anomaly. That escapade, a year ago, had won Jason both a promotion and a month’s hospitalization for anticancer treatments. It was also about when troubles in their marriage had surfaced.

Teresa resented Mark’s smooth complexion. It should have been a confirmed bachelor like him who volunteered to go out and save the peepers’ beloved spy-eye, instead of Jason I’m-married-but-what-the-heck Stempell.

It also should have been some bachelor who signed up to work cheek by jowl with that blonde temptress June Morgan. But once again, guess who raised his hand?

Easy, girl. Don’t get your blood up. The objective is reconciliation, not confrontation.

Mark was still regaling the Air Force men below. “… remind me to tell you how one time she an’ her old man smuggled a homemade sextant on a mission. Now any other married couple might’ve chosen something more useful, such as…”

With her right hand, Teresa made a gesture whose meaning had changed little since the days of Crazy Horse. Spacer sign-talk for cut the crap.

“Um, but I guess we’ll save that story for another day. Please remain strapped in as we make our last burn before station rendezvous.” Randall switched off the intercom. “Sorry, boss. Got a little carried away there.”

Teresa knew he was unrepentant. Anyway, that episode with the sextant wasn’t much compared to the tall tales told about some astronauts. None of that mattered. What was important was that you lived, the ship lived, the mission got done, and you were asked to fly again.

“Burn in five seconds,” she said, counting down. “… three, two, one…”

A deep-throated growl filled the cabin as hypergolic motors ignited, adding to their forward velocity. Since they were at orbital apogee, this meant Pleiades’ perigee would rise. Ironically, that in turn would slow them down, allowing their destination, the space station, to catch up from behind them.

The station’s beacons showed on radar as a neat row of blips strung along a slender string, pointing Earthward. The lowermost dot was their target, Nearpoint, where they’d offload cargo and passengers.

Next came the cluster of pinpoints standing for the Central Complex, twenty kilometers farther out, where scientific and development work took place in free-fall conditions. The final, topmost blip represented a cluster of facilities tethered even higher — the Farpoint research lab, where Jason worked. They had agreed to meet at the halfway lounge, if offloading went well at her end and if his experiments let him get away.

They had a lot to talk about.

All motors shut off as a sequencer by her knee shone zero. The faint pressure on her backrest departed again. What replaced it wasn’t “zero-g.” After all, there was plenty of gravity, pervading space all around them. Teresa preferred the classic term “free fall.” An orbit, after all, is just a plummet that keeps missing.

Unfortunately, even benign falling isn’t always fun. Teresa had never suffered spacesickness, but by now half the passengers were probably feeling queasy. Hell, even peepers were people.

“Commence yaw and roll maneuver,” she said, as a formality. The computers were managing fine so far. Thrusters in the shuttle’s nose and tail — smaller than the OMS brutes — gave pulsing kicks to set the horizon turning in a complex, two-axis rotation. They fired again to stabilize on a new direction.

“That’s my baby,” Mark said softly to the ship. “You may be gettin’ on in years, but you’re still my favorite.”

Many astronauts romanticized the last Columbia-class shuttle. Before boarding they would pat the seven stars painted by the shuttle’s entry hatch. And, while it went unspoken, some clearly thought beneficent ghosts rode Pleiades, protecting her every flight.

Maybe they were right. Pleiades had so far escaped the scrapyard fate of Discovery and Endeavor, or the embarrassing end that had befallen old Atlantis.

Privately, though, Teresa thought it a pity the old crate hadn’t been replaced long ago — not by another prissy model-three job, either, but by something newer, better. Pleiades wasn’t a true spaceship, after all. Only a bus. A local, at that.

And despite all the so-called romance of her profession, Teresa knew she was little more than a bus driver.

“Maneuver completed. Switching to hook-rendezvous program.”

“Yo,” Teresa acknowledged. She toggled the Ku band downlink. “MCC Colorado Springs, this is Pleiades. We’ve finished siphoning external tank residuals to recovery cells and jettisoned the ET. Circularization completed. Request update for approach to Ere—” Teresa stopped, recalling she was talking to Air Force. ” — for approach to Reagan Station.”

The controller’s tinny voice filled her earphones.

“Roger, Pleiades. Target range check, ninety-one kilometers… mark.”

“Yes?” Randall interrupted with a weak smirk. It was a stale joke, which, fortunately, control didn’t hear.

“Doppler twenty-one meters per second… mark. Tangential v, five point two mps… mark.”

Teresa did a quick scan. “Verified, control. We agree.”

“An’ thar she blows,” said Mark, peering through the overhead window. “Erehwon, right on schedule.”

“Ixnay, Mark. Open mike.”

Randall hand signed so-what indifference.

“Roger, Pleiades,” said the voice from Colorado Springs. “Switching you over to Reagan Station control. MCC out.”

“Reagan, shmeagan,” Mark muttered when the line was clear. “Call it peeper heaven.”

Teresa pretended not to hear. On the panel by her right knee she punched the prog button, then tapped 319 exec. “Rendezvous and retrieval program activated,” she said.

Between their consoles there appeared a holographic image of Pleiades itself — a squat dart, black on the bottom and white on top, her gaping cargo bay radiators exposed to the cooling darkness of space. Filling the greater part of the bay was a closed canister of powder blue. The peepers’ precious spy-stuff. Colonel Glenn Spivey’s treasure. And heaven help anyone who laid even a smudge on its wrapper.

Behind the cargo several white spheres held tons of supercold propellants, recovered from the towering external tank after it had fueled the shuttle through liftoff. Dumping the two-million-liter tank into the Indian Ocean had been their preoccupation early in orbital insertion — a routine waste that used to outrage Teresa, but that she no longer even thought about anymore. At least they were rescuing the residuals these days. All that leftover hydrogen and oxygen had countless uses in space.

While Mark talked to Erehwon control, Teresa caused the snare mechanism to rise from the rim of the cargo bay. The stubby arm — sturdier than the remote manipulator used for deploying cargos — extended a telescoping tip ending in an open hook.

“Erehwon confirms telemetry,” Mark told her. “Approach nominal.”

“We’ve got a few minutes then. I’ll go look in on the passengers.”

“Yeah, do that.” Of course Mark knew she had another reason for getting up. But this time he judiciously kept silent.

Unbuckling, then swiveling to use the seat back as a springboard, Teresa cast off toward the rear of the flight deck. Before automation, a mission specialist used to watch over the cargo from there. Now only a window remained.

Through it she surveyed the peepers’ package, and beyond, the cryocanisters. If the coming hook-snatch maneuver worked, they’d save half the hydrazine and dinitrogen tetroxide back there, as well — another valuable bonus to offload. Otherwise, most of the reserve would be used up matching orbits.

She brought her head near the chill window to peer at the snare arm, rising from the starboard platform. It was locked, just as the computer said. Just checking, Teresa thought, unrepentant of her need to verify in person.

She twisted and dove through a circular opening in the “floor.” Five Air Force officers in blue launch suits looked up as she swam into the spacious cabin known as middeck. Two of the passengers looked sick, averting their eyes as Teresa floated by. At least there were no windows here, so they were spared the added misery of horizon disorientation. A third of all first-timers had to adapt several days before their fluttering stomachs allowed them to appreciate scenery, anyway.

“That was a smooth launch, Captain,” the elder sickly one enunciated carefully. He wore two drug-release patches behind one ear, but still looked pretty shaky. Teresa knew the man from other flights, and he’d been ill on those too.

Must be pretty damned irreplaceable if they keep sending him up. As Mark Randall colorfully put it, guys like this never had to prove they had guts.

“Thank you,” she replied. “We aim to please. I just wanted to see how you all were doing and to say we’ll be meeting the Nearpoint snare in about twenty minutes. Station personnel will need an hour to offload cargo and salvaged residuals. Then it’ll be your turn to ride the elevator to Central.”

“That’s if you manage to hook the snare, Ms. Tikhana. What if you miss?”

This time it was the man seated forward on the left, a stocky fellow with eyes shaded by heavy brows, and bright colonel’s eagles on one shoulder. White sideburns offset his roughened skin — a patchy complexion that came from repeated treatments to slough off precancerous layers. Unlike Ra Boys or other groundside fetishists, Glenn Spivey hadn’t acquired his blotchy pigmentation on a beach. He had won the dubious badge of honor the same way Jason had — high over Uruguay, protected by just the fabric of his suit as he fought to save a top-secret experiment. But then, what were a dozen or so rads to a patriot?

They obviously hadn’t mattered to Jason. Or so her husband had implied from his recovery bed after his own encounter with the South Atlantic radiation zone.

“Hey look, hon. This doesn’t change our plans. There are sperm banks. Or when you’re ready, we can make some other arrangement. Some of our friends must have some damn high quality… Hey, babe, now what’s the matter?”

The infuriating density of the man! As if that had been foremost on her mind while he lay in a hospital with tubes in his arms! Later, the subject of children did contribute to the widening gulf between them. But at the time her only thought was, “Idiot, you might have died!”

With professional coolness, Teresa answered Colonel Spivey. “What if the station can’t hook Pleiades midpass? In that case we’ll do another burn to match orbits the old-fashioned way. That’ll take time though. And there’ll be no residual propellant to offload after docking.”

“Time and hydrazine.” Spivey pursed his lips. “Valuable commodities, Ms. Tikhana. Good luck.”

Twice since she had come down here, the colonel had glanced at his watch — as if nature’s laws could be hurried like junior officers, with a severe look. Teresa tried to be understanding, since it did take all kinds. If it weren’t for vigilant, paranoid spy-types like Spivey, always poking and peeping to see to it the provisions of the Rio Treaties were kept, would peace have lasted as long as it had? Ever since the Helvetian War?

“Safety first, Colonel. You wouldn’t want to see us wrapped in twenty kilometers of spectra-fiber tether material, would you?”

One of the younger peepers shivered. But Spivey met her eyes in shared understanding. They each had priorities. It was far more important they respect than like each other.

Back at her console, she watched the bottom portion of the station come into view — a cluster of bulbous tanks and plumbing hanging from a silvery line. Far above, other station components glittered like jewels strung far apart on a very long necklace. Most distant, and invisible except by radar, lay Farpoint Cluster, where Jason worked on things she still knew next to nothing about.

They were passing over the Alps now, a battered, crumpled range, whose bomb craters were only now emerging from winter’s coating of snow. It was an awesome juxtaposition, showing what both natural and man-made forces could do, when angry.

But Teresa had no time for sightseeing. Her attention focused on Nearpoint — hanging like a pendulum bob, closest to the Earth.

Just below the fluid-pumping station hung a boom that flexed and stretched as its operator played out line like a fisherman, casting for the big one.

Teresa’s eyes roamed over her instruments, the station, the stars, absorbing them all. Moments like this made all the hard work worthwhile. Every part of her felt unified, from the hands lightly flexing Pleiades’ vernier controls to the twin hemispheres of her brain. Engineer and dancer were one.

For the present all anxieties, all worries, vanished. Of the countless jobs one could have, on or off the world, this one gave her what she needed most.

“We’re coming in,” she whispered.

Teresa knew exactly where she was.

• CORE

Sitting in front of his holographic display — sole illumination in the deserted lab — Alex recalled George Hut-ton’s performance at the celebration, earlier in the evening, reciting Maori legends to the tired but happy engineers by firelight. Especially appropriate had been the tale of Rangi-rua’s, speaking as it did of fresh hope, snatched from the very gates of hell.

Later, though, Alex found himself drawn back to the underground laboratory. All the machinery, so busy earlier in the day, now lay dark and dormant save under this pool of light, which spilled long shadows onto the nearby limestone walls.

Rangi’s legend had touched Alex, all right. It might apply to his present state of mind.

Don’t look back. Pay attention to what’s in front of you.

Right now what lay before him was a depiction of the planet, in cutaway view. A globe sliced like an apple, revealing peel and pulp, stem and core.

And seeds, Alex thought, completing the metaphor.

The eye couldn’t make out Earth’s slight deviations from a sphere. Mountain ranges and ocean trenches — exaggerated on commercial globes — were mere dewy ripples on this true-scale representation. So thin was the film of water and air compared to the vast interior.

Inside that membrane, concentric shells of brown and red and pink denoted countless subterranean temperatures and compositions. With a word, or by touching the holo’s controls, Alex could zoom through mantle and core, following rocky striations and myriad charted rivers of magma.

Okay. George, he thought. Here’s a pakeha allegory for you. We’ll start by cutting a hole straight through the Earth.

From the surface of the globe, he caused a narrow line to stab inward, through the colored layers. Drill a tunnel, straight as a laser, with mirror-smooth walls. Cover both ends and drop a ball inside.

It was an exercise known to generations of physics students, illustrating certain points about gravity and momentum. But Alex played the scenario in earnest.

Assuming that inertial and gravitational mass balance, as they tend to do, anything dropped at Earth’s surface accelerates nine point eight meters per second, each second.

His ringers stroked knobs, releasing a blue dot from the outer rim. It fell slowly at first, even with the time rate magnified. A millimeter here stood for an awful lot of territory in the real world.

But after the ball falls a good distance, acceleration has changed.

In 1687, Isaac Newton took several score pages to prove what smug sophomores now demonstrated on a single sheet — ah, but Newton did it first! — that only the spherical portion “below” a falling object continues to apply net gravity, until acceleration stops altogether as the ball hurtles through the center at a whizzing ten kilometers per second.

It can’t fall any farther than that. Now it’s streaking upward.

(Answer a riddle — where is it you can continue in a straight line, yet change directions at the same time?)

Now more and more mass accumulates “below” the rising ball. Gravity clings, draining kinetic energy. Speed slackens till at last — neglecting friction, coriolis effects, and a thousand other things — our ball lightly bumps the door at the other end.

Then it falls again, hurtling once more past sluggish, plasti-crystal mantle layers, past the molten dynamo of the core, plummeting then climbing till finally it arrives “home” once more, where it began.

Numbers and charts floated near the giant globe, telling Alex the round trip would take a little over eighty minutes. Not quite the schoolboy perfect answer, but then schoolboys don’t have to compensate for a real planet’s varying density.

Next came the neat trick. The same would be true of a tunnel cut through the Earth at any angle! Say, forty-five degrees. Or one drilled from Los Angeles to New York, barely skimming the. magma. Each round trip took about eighty minutes — the period of a pendulum with the same span as the Earth.

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It’s also the period of a circular orbit, skimming just above the clouds.

Alex soon had the cutaway pulsing with blue dots, each falling at a different angle, swiftly along the longer paths, slowly along shorter ones. Besides straight lines there were also ellipses, and many-petaled flower trajectories. Still, to a regular rhythm, they all recombined at the same point on the surface, labeled PERU.

Of course, things change when you include Earth’s rotation… and the pseudo-friction of a hot object pushing against material around it…

Alex was procrastinating. These simulations were from his first days in New Zealand. There were better ones.

His hands hesitated. The palms were still blotchy from skin grafts after that helium explosion debacle. Ironically, they hadn’t trembled half as much, then, as after today’s astonishing news.

Alex wiped away all the whirling dots and called another orbit from memory cache. This figure — traced in bright purple — was smaller than the others — a truncated ellipse subtly twisted from Euclidean perfection by irregularities in the densely-packed core. It didn’t approach Peru anymore.

This was no theoretical simulation. When their first gravity scans had shown the thing’s awful shadow, horror had mixed with terrible pride.

It didn’t evaporate immediately, he had realized. I was right about that.

It was awful news. And yet, who in his position wouldn’t feel heady emotions, seeing his own handiwork still throbbing, thousands of miles below the fragile crust?

It lived. He had found his monster.

But then it surprised him yet again.

After Pedro Manella’s headlines had made him the worlds latest celebrated bad-boy, it naturally came as a relief when the World Court dismissed all charges on a technicality of the Anti-Secrecy Laws. Alex was seen as the dupe of unscrupulous generals, more fool than villain.

It might have been better had they jailed and reviled him. Then, at least, people in authority might have listened to him. As it was, his peers dismissed his topological arguments as “bizarre, overly complex inventions.” Worse, special interest groups on the World Data Net made him a gossip centerpiece overnight.

“… classic symptoms of guilt abstraction, used by the subject to disguise early childhood traumas…” one correspondent from Peking had written. Another in Djakarta commented, “Lustig’s absurd hints that Hawking’s dissipation model might be wrong mesh perfectly with the shame and humiliation he must have felt after Iquitos…”

Alex wished his Net clipping service were less efficient, sparing him all the amateur psychoanalyses. Still, he had made himself read them because of something his grandmother once told him.

A hallmark of sanity, Alex, is the courage to face even unpleasant points of view.

How ironic then. Here he was, vindicated in a way he could never have imagined. He now had proof positive that the standard model of micro black holes was flawed… that he had been on the right path with his own theories.

Right and wrong, in the best combination of ways.

Then why can’t I leave this cave? he wondered. Why do I feel it isn’t over yet?

“Hey, you stupid pakeha bastard!” A booming voice ricocheted off the limestone walls. “Lustig! You promised to get drunk with us tonight! Tama meamea, is this any way to celebrate?”

Alex had the misfortune to be looking up when George Hutton switched on the lights. His world, formerly confined to the dim pool of the holo tank, suddenly expanded to fill the cavern-lab Hutton’s wealth had carved under the ancient rock.

Alex’s blinking eyes focused first on the thumper, a shining rod two meters in diameter and more than ten long, caged to a universal bearing in a bowl excavation larger than some lunar craters. It resembled the work of some mad telescope maker who had neglected to make his instrument hollow, crafting it, instead, of perfect, superconducting crystal.

The gleaming cylinder pointed a few degrees off vertical, just as they had left it after that final bracketing run. Banks of instruments surrounded the gravity antenna, along with ankle-deep layers of paper, shredded by the ecstatic technicians when the good news had finally been confirmed.

Beyond the thumper, a flight of steps led upward to where George Hutton stood, waving a bottle and grinning. “You disappoint me, fellow,” the broad-shouldered billionaire said, sauntering downstairs unevenly. “I planned getting you so pissed you’d spend the night with my cousin’s poaka of a daughter.”

Alex smiled. If that was what George wanted him to do, he was bound to comply. Without Hutton’s influence he’d never have been able to sneak into New Zealand incognito. There’d have been no long hard search through the awesome complexity of the Earth’s interior, improvising and inventing new technologies to hunt a minuscule monster. Worst of all, Alex might have gone to his grave never knowing what his creation was up to down below — if it was quietly dissipating or, perhaps, proceeding at a leisurely pace to devour the world.

At first, sighting it several days ago on a graviscan display had seemed to confirm their worst fears. The nightmare, reified.

Then, to everyone’s relief and astonishment, hard data seemed to point another way. Apparently the thing was dying… evaporating more mass and energy into the Earth’s interior than it sucked in through its narrow event horizon.

True, it was thinning much more slowly than the obsolete standard models predicted. But in a few months, nevertheless, it would be no more!

I really should celebrate with the others, Alex thought. I should put aside my last suspicions, crawl into any bottle George offers me, and find out what a poaka is.

Alex tried to stand, but found he couldn’t move. His eyes were drawn back to the purple dot, circling the innermost colored layer.

He felt a large presence nearby. George.

“What is it, friend? You haven’t found an error, have you? It is…”

Alex caught Hutton’s sudden concern, “Oh, it’s dissipating all right. And now…” He paused. “Now I think I know why. Here, take a look.”

With a word he banished the model of the Earth, replacing it with a schematic drawn in lambent blue. Reddish sparkles flashed at the rim of the object now centered in the tank. They swept toward a central point like beads caught in water, swirling down a drain.

“This is what I thought I was making, back when His Excellency persuaded me to build a singularity for the Iquitos plant. A standard Kerr-Prestwich black hole.”

Hutton took a stool next to Alex and watched with those deceptive brown eyes. One might guess he was a simple laborer, not one of Australasia’s wealthiest men.

The image in the tank looked like a rubber sheet that had been stretched taut and heated, and then had a small, heavy weight dropped onto it. The resulting funnel had finite width and depth in the display, but both men knew that the real thing — the hole in space it represented — had no bottom at all. The reddish dots represented bits of matter drawn in by gravitational tides, caught in a swirling disk. The disk brightened as more matter fell, until a ring of fierce brightness burned near the funnel’s lip. Below this came a sudden cutoff within which only pitch blackness reigned.

Nothing escapes from inside a black hole’s event horizon. At least, there’s no direct escape.

Alex glanced at George. “Cosmologists say many singularities like this must have been created when the universe began. If so, only the biggest survive today. Smaller ones evaporated long ago, as predicted in the 1970s by Stephen Hawking. A simple singularity — even with charge and rotation — has to be extremely heavy to be stable… to pull in matter faster than it’s lost by vacuum emission.”

[INSERT IMAGE HERE]

He pointed to the outskirts of the depression, where bright white pinpoints flashed independently of the hot ring of accreting material.

“Some distance out, the tight stress-energy of infolding gravity causes spontaneous pair production… ripping particle-antiparticle twins — an electron and a positron, for instance — out of the vacuum itself. It isn’t exactly getting something from nothing, since each little genesis costs the singularity some field energy. And that’s debited to its mass.”

The sparkles formed a halo of brilliance — creation in the raw.

[INSERT IMAGE HERE]

“Generally, one newborn particle falls inward and the other escapes, resulting in a steady weight loss. A tiny hole like this one can’t pull in new matter fast enough to make up the difference. To prevent dissipation you have to feed it.”

“As you did with your ion gun, in Peru.”

“Right. It cost a lot of power to make the singularity in the first place, even using my special cavitron recipe. It took even more to keep the thing levitated and fed. But the accretion disk gave off incredible heat.” Alex felt briefly wistful. “Even the prototype was cheaper, more efficient than hydro power.”

“But then you started having doubts,” George prompted.

“Yeah. The system was too efficient, you see. It didn’t need much feeding at all. So I toyed with some crazy notions… and came up with this.”

A new schematic replaced the funnel. Now it was as if a heavy loop of wire had sunk into the rubber sheet. Still unfathomably deep, the depression now circled on itself.

Again, reddish bits of matter swept into the cavity, heating as they fell. And again, sparkles told of vacuum pair production — the singularity repaying mass into space.

“This is something people talked about even back in TwenCen,” Alex said. “It’s a cosmic string.”

“I’ve heard of them.” George’s dark features showed fascination. “They’re like black holes. Also supposed to be left over from that explosion you pakeha say started everything — the Big Bang.”

“Uh-huh. They aren’t truly funnel-things drawn in circles, of course. There’s a limit to how well you can represent…” Alex sighed. “It’s hard to describe this without math.”

“I know math,” George grumbled.

“Mm, yes. Excuse me, George, but the tensors you use, searching for deep methane, wouldn’t help a lot with this.”

“Maybe I understand more’n you think, white boy.” Hutton’s dialect seemed to thicken for a moment. “Like I can see what your cosmic string’s got that black holes don’t. Holes got no dimensions deep inside. But strings have length.”

George Hutton kept doing this — play-acting the “distracted businessman,” or “ignorant native boy,” then coming back at you when your guard was down. Alex accepted the rebuke.

“Good enough. Only strings, just like black holes, are unstable. They dissipate too, in a colorful way.”

At a spoken word, a new display formed.

The rubber sheet was gone. Now they watched a loop in space, glowing red from infalling matter, and white from a halo-fringe of new particles, showering into space. Inflow and outgo.

“Now I’ll set the simulation in motion, stretching time a hundred-million-fold.”

The loop began undulating, turning, whirling.

“One early prediction was that strings would vibrate incredibly fast, influenced by gravitational or magnetic…”

Two sides collided in a flash, and suddenly a pair of smaller loops replaced the single large one. They throbbed even faster than before.

“Some astronomers claim to see signs of gigantic cosmic strings in deep space. Perhaps strings even triggered the formation of galaxies, long ago. If so, the giant ones survived because their loops cross only every few billion years. Smaller, quicker strings cut themselves to bits…”

As he spoke, both little loops made lopsided figure eights and broke into four tinier ones, vibrating madly. Each of these soon divided again. And so on. As they multiplied, their size diminished and brightness grew — bound for annihilation.

“So,” George surmised. “Small ones still aren’t dangerous.”

Alex nodded. “A simple, chaotic string like this couldn’t explain the power curves at Iquitos. So I went back to the original cavitron equations, fiddled around with Jones-Witten theory a bit, and came up with something new.

“This is what I thought I’d made, just before Pedro Manella set off his damned riot.”

The tiny loops had disappeared in a blare of brilliance. Alex uttered a brief command, and a new object appeared. “I call this a tuned string.”

Again, a lambent loop pulsed in space, surrounded by white sparks of particle creation. Only this time the string didn’t twist and gyre chaotically. Regular patterns rippled round its rim. Each time an indentation seemed about to touch another portion, the rhythm yanked it back again. The loop hung on, safe from self-destruction. Meanwhile, matter continued flowing in from all sides.

Visibly, it grew.

“Your monster. I remember from when you first arrived. I may be drunk, Lustig, but not so I’d forget this terrible taniwha.”

Watching the undulations, Alex felt the same mixed rapture and loathing as when he’d first realized such things were possible… when he first suspected he had made something this biblically terrible, and beautiful.

“It creates its own self-repulsion,” he said softly, “exploiting second- and third-order gravities. We should have suspected, since cosmic strings are superconducting—”

George Hutton interrupted, slapping a meaty hand onto Alex’s shoulder. “That’s fine. But today we proved you didn’t make such a thing. We sent waves into the Earth, and echoes show the thing’s dissipating. It’s dying. Your string was out of tune!”

Alex said nothing. George looked at him. “I don’t like your silence. Reassure me again. The damned thing is for sure dying, right?”

Alex spread his hands. “Bloody hell, George. After all my mistakes, I’d only trust experimental evidence, and you saw the results today.” He gestured toward the mighty thumper. “It’s your equipment. You tell me.”

“It’s dying.” George said, flat out. Confident.

“Yes, it’s dying. Thank heaven.”

For another minute the two men sat silently.

“Then what’s your problem?” Hutton finally asked. “What’s eating you?”

Alex frowned. He thumbed a control, and once again a cutaway view of the Earth took shape. Again, the dot representing his Iquitos singularity traced lazy precessions among veins of superheated metal and viscous, molten rock.

“It’s the damn thing’s orbit.” Equations filed by. Complex graphs loomed and receded.

“What about its orbit?” George seemed transfixed, still holding the bottle in one hand, swaying slightly as the dot rose and fell, rose and fell.

Alex shook his head. “I’ve allowed for every density variation on your seismic maps. I’ve accounted for every field source that could influence its trajectory. And still there’s this deviation.”

“Deviation?” Alex sensed Hutton turn to look at him again.

“Another influence is diverting it. I think I’ve got a rough idea of the mass involved…”

The bigger man swung Alex around bodily. The Maori’s right hand gripped his shoulder. All signs of intoxication were gone from Hutton’s face as he bent to meet Alex’s eyes.

“What are you telling me? Explain!”

“I think…” Alex couldn’t help it. As if drawn physically, he turned to look back at the image in the tank.

“I think something else is down there.”

In the ensuing silence, they could hear the drip-drip of mineral-rich water, somewhere deeper in the cave. The rhythm seemed much steadier than Alex’s heartbeat. George Hutton looked at the whiskey bottle. With a sigh, he put it down. “I’ll get my men.”

As his footsteps receded, Alex felt the weight of the mountain around him once more, all alone.

• EXOSPHERE

“All right, babe. The first elevator heading down will be crammed with cargo, but Glenn Spivey put in a word, so I should be able to hitch a ride on the next one. I may even be in Central before you.” Teresa shook her head, amazed. “Spivey arranged it? Are we talking about the same Colonel Spivey?” Her husband’s face beamed from the telecom screen. “Maybe you don’t know Glenn as I do. Underneath that beryllium exterior, there’s a heart of pure—”

“ — of pure titanium. Yeah, I know that one.” Teresa laughed, glad to share even a weak, tension-melting joke.

So far, so good, she thought. Right now it felt great just looking at him, knowing he was a mere forty kilometers away, and soon would be much closer. Jason, too, sounded eager to give this a try.

Someone had once told Teresa it was too bad about her husband’s smile, which sometimes transformed his intelligent features into those of an awkward puppy dog. But Teresa found his grin endearing. Jason might be insensitive at times — even a jerk — but she was sure he never lied to her. Some faces just weren’t built to carry off a lie.

“By the way, I watched you snag that hook, first pass. Did you take over from the computer again? No machine pilots that smoothly.”

Teresa knew she was blushing. “It looked like the program was stuttering so I…”

“Thought so! Now I’ll have to brag insufferably at mess. It’ll be your fault if I lose all my friends up here.”

The capture maneuver was actually simpler than it looked. Pleiades now hung suspended below the space station, from a cable stretched taut by gravitational tides. When it was time to go, they’d simply release the hook and the shuttle would resume its original ellipse, returning to mother Earth having saved many tons of precious fuel.

“Well, I reckon it’s cause I’m paht Texan,” she drawled, though she was the first in all her lineage ever to see the Lone Star State. “Ergo mah facility with the lasso.”

“It also explains why her eyes are brown,” Mark Randall inserted from nearby.

Jason’s image glanced toward Teresa’s copilot. “I don’t dare comment on that, so I’ll pretend I didn’t hear it.” Then, back to Teresa, “See you soon, Rip. I’ll reserve a room for us at the Hilton.”

“I’ll settle for a broom closet,” she answered, and hang it if Randall took the wrong meaning. Some people just couldn’t imagine that a husband and wife, meeting for the first time in months, might want above all else to make contact, to talk quietly and preserve something neither of them wanted to lose.

“I’ll see what I can arrange. Stempell out.”

After securing the hook, their first task had been to offload tons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Likewise the extra orbital maneuvering propellants Teresa’s careful piloting had saved. Every kilo of raw material in orbit was valuable, and the station offloading crew went through the procedures with meticulous care.

The holo display showed Pleiades suspended, nose upward, just below the bottom portion of the station — Nearpoint — the section closest to Earth. It was a maze of pipes and industrial gear hanging by slender, silvery threads many miles into the planet’s gravity well. Teresa watched nervously as three station operators in spacesuits finished draining the aft tanks. Only when the hoses were detached at last did she release a knot of tension. Explosive, corrosive liquids, flowing only meters from her heat shielding, always made her edgy.

“Crew chief requests permission to commence cargo offloading,” Mark told Teresa.

“Granted.”

From the maze above, a giant, articulated manipulator arm approached Pleiades’ cargo bay. A spacesuited figure waved from the bay, guiding the arm gingerly toward the mysterious Air Force package.

Colonel Glenn Spivey observed from the window overlooking the bay. “Easy does it. Come on, you bastards, it’s not made of rubber! If you ding it—”

Fortunately, the crew outside couldn’t hear his backseat driving. And Teresa didn’t mind. After all, he was charged with equipment worth several hundred million dollars. Some anxious muttering at this point was understandable.

So why do I detest the man so much? she wondered.

For months Spivey had been working closely with her husband on some unspoken project. Perhaps it was her dislike of being excluded, or that nasty word “secrecy.” Or perhaps the resentment came simply from seeing the colonel take up so much of Jason’s attention, at a time when she was already jealous of others.

“Others”… meaning that June Morgan woman, of course. Teresa allowed herself a brief remise of resentment. Just don’t let it cause an argument, she reminded herself. Not this time. Not up here.

She turned away from Spivey and scanned the status boards again — attitude, tether strain, gravity gradient — all appeared nominal.

In addition to the hook-snatch docking trick, tethered complexes like this one offered many other advantages over old-style “Tinkertoy” space stations. Long, metalized tethers could draw power directly from the Earth’s magnetic field, or let you torque against those fields to maneuver without fuel. Also, by yet another quirk of Kepler’s laws, both tips of the bola-like structure experienced faint artificial gravity — about a hundredth of a g — helpful for living quarters and handling liquids.

Teresa appreciated anything that helped make space work. Still, she used remote instruments to examine the braided cables. Superstrong in tension, they were vulnerable to being worn away by microscopic space debris, even meteoroids. Statistical reassurances were less calming than simply checking for herself, so she scanned until she was sure the fibers weren’t on the verge of unraveling.

Overhearing Spivey, clucking like a nervous hen as his cargo cleared the bay, Teresa smiled. I guess maybe we’re not that different in some ways.

The Russians and Chinese had similar facilities in orbit, as did Nihon and the Euros. But the other dozen or so space-capable nations had abandoned their military outposts as costs rose and the skies came increasingly under civil control. Rumor had it Spivey’s folk were trying to cram in as much clandestine work as possible before “secrecy” became as outmoded up here as below.

The crane operator loaded the Colonel’s cargo into an old shuttle tank — now the station freight elevator — and sent it climbing toward the weight-free complex, twenty klicks above.

“Request permission to prepare the airlock for transit, Captain.” Spivey was already halfway down the companion-way to middeck, impatient to join his mysterious machine.

“Mark will help just as soon as the tunnel is pressurized, Colonel.”

One spacesuited astronaut examined the transparent transitway connecting Pleiades’ airlock to Nearpoint. He waved through the rear window, signing “all secure.”

“I’ll see to Spivey,” Mark said, and started to unstrap.

“Fine.” But Teresa found herself watching the spaceman outside. He had remained in the bay after finishing, and she was curious why.

Climbing atop one of the tanks at the aft end, the station crewman secured his line to the uppermost insulated sphere… then went completely motionless, arms half outstretched before him in the limp, relaxed posture known as the “spacer’s crouch.”

Teresa quashed her momentary concern. Of course. I get it.

A little ahead of schedule for once, the fellow was seizing a chance that came all too rarely. He was watching the Earth roll by.

The planet filled half the sky, stretching toward distant, hazy horizons. Directly below paraded a vastly bright panorama that never repeated itself, highlighted topographies that were ever-familiar and yet always startling. At the moment, their orbital track was approaching Spain from the west. Teresa knew because, as always, she had checked their location and heading only moments before. Sure enough, soon the nubby Rock of Gibraltar hove into view.

Great pressure waves strained against the Pillars of Hercules, as they had ever since that day, tens of thousands of years ago, when the Atlantic Ocean had broken through the neck of land connecting Europe and Africa, pouring into the grassy basin that was to become the Mediterranean. Eventually, a new balance had been struck between sea and ocean, but ever since then it had remained an equilibrium of tension.

Where the great waterfall once surged, now diurnal tides interacted in complex patterns of cancelation and reinforcement, focused and reflected by the funnel between Iberia and Morocco. From on high, standing waves seemed to thread the waters for hundreds of kilometers, yet those watery peaks and troughs were actually quite shallow and had been discovered only after cameras took to space.

To Teresa, the patterns proved beautifully, once again, nature’s love affair with mathematics. And not only the sea displayed wave motion. She also liked looking down on towering stratocumulus and wind-shredded cirrus clouds. From space the atmosphere seemed so thin — too slender a film to rely all their lives upon. And yet, from here one also sensed that layer’s great power.

Others knew it too. Teresa’s sharp eyes picked out sparkling glints which were aircraft — jets and the more common, whalelike zeppelins. Forewarned by weather reports on the Net, they were turning to escape a storm brewing west of Lisbon.

Mark Randall called from the middeck tunnel. “The impatient so-and-so’s already got the inner door open! I better take over before he causes a union grievance.”

“You do that,” she answered quietly. Mark could handle the passengers. She agreed with the cargo handler, out in the bay. For a rare instant no duties clamored. Teresa let herself share the epiphanic moment, feeling her breath, her heartbeat, and the turning of the world.

My God, it’s beautiful…

So it was that she was watching directly, not through Pleiades’ myriad instrumentalities, when the color of the sea changed — subtly, swiftly. Pulsations throbbed those very storm clouds as she blinked in amazement.

Then the Earth seemed suddenly to bow out at her. It was a queer sensation. Teresa felt no acceleration. Yet somehow she knew they were moving, rapidly and non-inertially, in defiance of natural law.

It did occur to her this might be some form of spacesickness — or maybe she was having a stroke. But neither consideration slowed the reflex that sent her hand stabbing down upon the emergency alarm. With the same fluid motion, Teresa seized her space helmet. In that time-stretched second, as she spun around to take command of her ship again, Teresa caught one indelible glimpse of the crewman in the cargo bay, who had turned, mouth open in a startled, silent cry of warning.

Back in training, other candidates used to complain about the emergency drills, which seemed designed to wear down, even break the hothouse types who had made it that far. Whenever trainees felt they had procedures down pat, or that they knew the drill for any contingency, some smartaleck in a white coat inevitably thought up ways to make the next practice run even nastier. The chief of simulations hired engineers with sadistic imaginations.

But Teresa never cursed the tiger teams, not even when they threw their worst at her. She used to see the drills as a never-ending exercise in skill. Perhaps that was why she didn’t quail or flinch now, as a storm of noise assailed her.

The master alarm barely preceded the first peal from the shuttle’s backup gyroscope. As she was shutting that down, the characteristic buzzer of the number one hydraulics line started chattering. Station Control wasn’t far behind.

“Gotcha Pleiades, we’re onto it… It looks like… no…”

Voices shouted in the background. Meanwhile, Pleiades’ accelerometers began singing their unique, groaning melody.

Teresa protested — We can’t be accelerating! But her inner sense said differently. Logic would have her shut off the sensors — which were obviously giving false readings. Instead she switched on the shuttle’s main recorder.

Amber lights blazed. She acted quickly to close a critical OMS pressurization line. Then, as if she didn’t already have enough troubles, Teresa’s peripheral vision started blurring! She could still see down a tunnel. But the zone narrowed even as she shouted — “No. Dumpit, no!”

Colors rippled across the cabin, turning the cockpit’s planned intricacy into a schizophrenic’s fingerpainting. Teresa shook her head sharply, hoping to drive out the new affliction. “Control, Pleiades. Am experiencing—”

“Terry!” A shout from behind her. “I’m coming. Hold on…”

“Pleiades, Control. We’re… having trouble—”

A shrill squeal interrupted over the open link from Erehwon_; it made her wince in dread recognition.

“Mark, check the boom!” Teresa cried over her shoulder as she peered through a narrowing isthmus at the computer panel by her right knee. The thing was so obsolete it couldn’t even take voice commands reliably. So more by rote than sight she flipped a toggle over to manual override.

“Pleiades, we’re going blind—”

“Same here!” she snapped. “I’ve got acceleration too, just like you. Tell me something I don’t know!”

The voice fought through gathering static. “We’re also getting anomalous increase in tether tension…”

Teresa felt a chill. “Mark! I said check the boom!”

“I’m trying!” He shouted from the ceiling port. “It… looks fine, Terry. The boom’s okay—”

“… extremely high anomalous electric currents in the tether…”

Two amber blurs switched over to red. “Put your helmet on and get ready to jettison the transitway,” Teresa told her copilot as more alarms whistled melodies she had never before heard outside a simulator. Teresa felt rather than saw Mark slip into his seat as she pushed aside a switch guard and punched the red button beneath. Instantly they heard a distant crump as explosive charges tore away the plastic tunnel recently attached to their airlock.

“Transitway jettisoned,” Mark confirmed. “Terry, what the hell’s going—”

“Get ready to blow the boom itself,” she told him. By touch, Teresa punched buttons on the digital autopilot, engaging the shuttle’s smaller reaction-control motors. “DAP on manual. RCS engaged. When we break off, we’ll hang for a minute before dropping. But I think—”

Teresa paused suddenly as one of the red smudges turned amber. ” — I think—”

Another switched from crimson to yellow-gold. And another. Then an amber light went green.

As quickly as it had arrived, the frightening rainbow began melting away! She blinked twice, three times. Starting in the middle, the visual blurriness evaporated. Acuity returned as warning lights and musical alarms subsided one by one.

“Pleiades…” Station Control sounded breathless.

Buzzers were shutting down over there, as well. “Pleiades, we seem to be retiming—”

“Same here,” she interrupted. “But what about the tether tension!”

“Pleiades, tether tension… is slackening.” Control’s tone was relieved. “Must have been transient, whatever the hell it was. There may be some backlash though…”

Mark and Teresa looked at each other. She felt stretched, pummeled, abused. Was it really over? As more amber lights winked out, they inventoried damage. Miraculously, Pleiades seemed unharmed.

Except, of course, for the million-dollar transit tube she’d just jettisoned. The passengers weren’t going to appreciate being ferried like so many beachballs, in personal survival enclosures. But their resentment couldn’t match that of the bean-counters in Washington, if no justification were at hand.

“Jeez. What if we’d gone ahead and blown the boom?” Mark muttered. “Better put that squib on safety, Terry.” He nodded toward the primed trigger, flashing dangerously between their seats.

“Hold on a sec.” Teresa’s eyes roved the cockpit, seeking… anything. Any clue to the mysterious episode. She tapped her throat mike. “Control, Pleiades. Confirm your estimate that backlash will be minimal. We don’t want to face—”

That was when her gaze lighted on the inertial guidance display, showing where in space their ring laser gyroscope thought they were. She read it like a newspaper headline. The numbers were bizarre and rapidly changing in ways Teresa didn’t like at all!

Eye flicks took in the corresponding readouts of the star tracker and satellite navigation systems. They were in total conflict, and none of them agreed with what the seat of her pants was telling her.

“Control! I’m disengaging, under emergency protocols.”

“Wait Pleiades’. There’s no need. You may increase our backlash!”

“I’ll take that chance. Meanwhile, better check your own inertial units. Have you got a gravitometer?”

“Affirmative. But what… ?”

“Check it! Pleiades out.”

Then, to Mark, “You blow the boom, I’ll handle the DAP. Jettison on count of three. One!”

Randall had his hands on the panel, still he remonstrated. “You sure? We’ll catch hell…”

“Two!” She gripped the control stick.

“Terry—”

Intuition tickled. She felt it — whatever it was — returning with a vengeance.

“Blow it, Mark!”

Before she even felt the vibration of the charges, Teresa activated her vernier jets in translational mode, doing as any good pilot would in a crisis — guiding her ship away from anything more substantial than a thought or a cloud.

“What the hell is going on up here? Have you both lost your minds?”

A sharp voice from behind them. Without turning she snapped, “Colonel Spivey, strap in and shut up!”

Her harried, professional tone worked better than any curse or threat. Spivey might be obnoxious, but he was no fool. She sensed his quick departure and swept him from her mind as reaction jets wrestled the orbiter’s reluctant mass slowly away from the station’s tangle of cranes and storage tanks. On the back of Teresa’s neck all the tiny hairs shivered.

“Pleiades, you’re right. The phenomenon is periodic. Anomalous tension is returning. Gravitometer’s gone crazy… tides of unprecedented—”

A second voice interrupted, cutting off the controller. “Pleiades, this is Station Commander Perez. Prepare to receive emergency telemetry.”

“Affirmative.” Teresa swallowed, knowing what this meant. She felt Mark lean past her to make sure the ship’s datasuck boxes were operating at top speed. In that mode they recorded every nuance for one purpose only, so endangered spacers could obey rule number one of their trade…

Let the next guy know what killed you.

The station commander was dumping his operational status into Pleiades in real time — a dire measure for the chief of a secret military station. That made Teresa all the more anxious to get away fast.

She ignored navigational aids, checking orientation by instinct and estimate. Teresa groaned on realizing that two main thrusters were aimed at Nearpoint’s cryo tanks, risking a titanic explosion if she fired them. That left only tiny verniers to nudge the heavy shuttle. She switched to a roll maneuver, cursing the slowness of the turn.

“Oh, shit! Mark, is that guy still in the cargo bay?”

The creepy nausea was returning, she could tell as she fought the sluggish spacecraft. Nearby, Mark laughed suddenly and a bit shrilly. “He’s still there. Helmet pressed to the window. Guy’s mad, Terry.”

“Stop calling me Terry!” she snapped, turning to get a fix on Nearpoint again. If the tanks were clear now…

Teresa stared. They weren’t there anymore!

Nothing was there. Tanks, habitats, cranes… everything was gone!

Alarms resumed their blared warnings. With her instruments turning amber and red again, Teresa decided Erehwon was none of her business now. She punched buttons labeled x-translational and high, then squeezed the stick to trigger a full-throated hypergolic roar, sending Pleiades where she figured the station and tether weren’t.

Mark called out pressures and flow rates. Teresa counted seconds as the blurriness encroached again. “Move, you dumpit bitch. Move!” She cursed the massive, awkward orbiter.

“I found the station.” Mark announced. “Jesus. Look at that.”

Through a narrowing tunnel Teresa glanced at the radar screen. She gasped. The bottom assembly was more than five kilometers below them and receding fast. The tether had stretched suddenly, like a child’s rubber toy. “Damn!” she heard Mark Randall cry. Then Teresa had difficulty hearing or seeing anything at all.

This time the squidgy feeling went from her eyes straight back through her central sinus. The blaring of new alarms mixed with strange noises originating within her own skull. One alert crooned the dour song of a cooling system gone berserk. Unable to see which portion, Teresa flicked switches by touch, disabling all the exchange loops. She had Mark close down the fuel cells as well. If the situation didn’t improve before they ran out of battery juice, it wouldn’t matter anyway.

“All three APUs are inoperable!” Mark shouted through a roar of crazy noise.

“Forget ’em. Leave ’em turned off.”

“All of them?”

“I said all! The bug’s in the hydraulic lines, not the APUs. All long fluid lines are affected.”

“How do we close the cargo bay doors without hydraulics?” he protested through rising static that nearly drowned his words. “We won’t… able to… during reentry!”

“Leave that to me,” she shouted back. “Close all lines except rear hypergolics, and pray they hold!”

Teresa thought she heard his acknowledgment, and a clicking that might have been those switches being closed. Or it could have been just another weird sensory distortion.

Without hydraulics they couldn’t gimbal the main maneuvering rockets. She’d have to make do with RCS jets, flying blind in a chiarascuro of distortion and shadow. By touch Teresa disengaged the autopilot completely. She fired the small jets in matched pairs, relying on vibration alone to verify a response. It was true seat-of-the-pants flying, with no way to confirm she was moving Pleiades farther from that dangerously overstretched tether, or perhaps right toward it…

Sound became smell. Roiling images scratched her skin. Amid cacophonous static Teresa thought she actually heard Jason, calling her name. But the voice blew away in the noisome gale before she could tell whether it was real or phantom — one of countless chimeras clamoring from all sides.

For all she knew, she was permanently blind. But that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except the battle to save her ship.

Vision finally did clear, at last, with the same astonishing speed as it had been lost. A narrow tunnel snapped into focus, expanding rapidly till only the periphery sparkled with those eerie shades. Screaming alarms began shutting down.

The transition left her stunned, staring unbelievingly at the once-familiar cabin. The chronometer said less than ten minutes had passed. It felt like hours.

“Um,” she commented with a dry throat. Once again, Pleiades had the nerve to start acting as if nothing had happened. Red lights turned amber,- amber became green. Teresa herself wasn’t about to recover so quickly, for sure.

Mark sneezed with terrific force. “Where — where’s Erehwon? Where’s the tether?” A few minutes thrust couldn’t have taken them far. But the approach and rendezvous display showed nothing at all. Teresa switched to a higher scale.

Nothing. The station was nowhere.

Mark whispered. “What happened to it?”

Teresa changed radar settings, expanding scale again and ordering a full-spectrum doppler scan. This time, at last, a scattering of blips appeared. Her mouth suddenly tasted ashen.

“There’s… pieces of it.”

A cluster of large objects had entered much higher orbit, rising rapidly as Pleiades receded in her own ellipse. One transmitted an emergency beacon, identifying it as part of the station’s central complex.

“We better do a circularization burn,” Mark said, “to have a chance of rescuing anybody.”

Teresa blinked once more. I should’ve thought of that.

“Check… check all the tank and line pressures first,” she said, still staring at the mess that had been the core of Reagan Station. Something had rent the tethers… and all the spars connecting the modules, for good measure. That force might return anytime, but they owed it to their fellow spacers to try to save those left alive.

“Pressures look fine,” Mark reported. “Give me a minute to compute a burn. It’ll be messy.”

“That’s okay. We’ll use up our reserves. Kennedy and Kourou are probably already scrambling launchers—” She stopped, ears perked to a strange tapping sound. Another symptom? But no, it came from behind her. She swiveled angrily. If that damned Spivey had come back…

A face in the rear window made Teresa gasp, then she sighed. It was only their inadvertent hitchhiker, the space-suited crewman, his helmet still pressed against the perspex screen.

“Hmph,” she commented. “Our guest doesn’t look as pissed off as before.” In fact, the expression behind the steamed-up faceplate beamed unalloyed gratitude. “He must have seen Nearpoint come apart. By now it may already be in the atmos…”

She stopped suddenly. “Jason!”

“What?” Mark looked up from the computer.

“Where’s the upper tip? Where’s Farpoint!”

Teresa scrabbled at the radar display, readjusting to its highest scale on autofrequency scan — taking in the blackness far from Earth just in time to catch a large blip that streaked past the outer edge of the screen.

“Sweet Gaia… look at the doppler!” Randall stared. “It’s moving at… at…” He didn’t finish. Teresa could read the screen as well as he.

The glowing letters lingered, even after the fleeting blip departed. They burned in the display and in their hearts.

Jason, Teresa thought, unable to comprehend or cope with what she’d seen. Her voice caught, and when she finally spoke, it was simply to say, “Six… thousand kilometers… per second.”

It was impossible of course. Teresa shook her head in numb, unreasoning disbelief that Jason would have, could have, done this to her!

“Kakashkiya,” she sighed.

“He’s leaving me… at two percent of the goddamn speed of light…”

• CORE

The last tremors had ended, but it still took several minutes for the technicians to crawl out from under their desks. Through cascading hazes of limestone dust they peered about, making sure the quake was really over. Some cast awed glances toward the nexus console, where Alex Lustig had remained throughout the unexpected temblors.

One unspoken thought circulated among them — that any bloke who could make the Earth rattle was surely one to reckon with.

Inside, Alex wasn’t quite as calm as he seemed. In truth, exhaustion and sheer astonishment were what had kept him at his station while others dove for cover, far more than bravado or showy courage. This sudden power to cause earthquakes was a completely unexpected side effect of their project, and of trivial importance next to the news he now saw before him.

Unfortunately, they had found exactly what they were looking for.

The cutaway hologram told the story. Where only one purple dot had been depicted before — looping a deeply buried orbit about the planet’s center — now a second object could be seen circling even lower still. What had been only dire suspicion was now reified and horrible.

“It’s down there, all right,” George Hutton’s chief physicist reported, lifting his hard hat to smooth back sparse white hair. Stan Goldman’s hands trembled. “We’ll need data from other listening posts to pin it down precisely.”

“Can you estimate its mass?” Hutton asked. The Maori tycoon sat on the other side of the console, wearing a scowl that would have made the warriors of Te Heuheu proud.

During the quakes he, too, had spurned shelter. But the techs only expected that of him. ,

Goldman pored over his screen. “Looks like just under a trillion tons. That’s several orders heavier than Alex’s… than the first one. Than Alpha.”

“And its other dimensions?”

“Too small to measure on linear scales. It’s another singularity, all right.”

George turned to Alex. “Why didn’t we detect this other thing before?”

“It seems there are more ways to modulate gravity waves than anyone imagined.” Alex motioned with his hands. “To pick any one object out of the chaos below, we have to calculate and match narrow bandwidths and impedances. Our earlier searches were tuned to find Alpha, and picked up Beta only by inference.”

“You mean—” George gestured at the tank — “there may be more of the things down there?”

Alex blinked. He hadn’t thought that far ahead. “Give me a minute.”

Speaking softly into a microphone, he pulled subroutines from his utility library, creating charts and simulations near the hologram. “No,” he said at last. “If there were more they’d affect the others’ orbits. It’s just those two. And my… and singularity Alpha is decaying rapidly.”

George grunted. “What about the big one? I take it that damn thing is growing?”

Alex nodded, reluctant to speak. As a physicist he was supposed to accept the primacy of objective reality. Yet there remained a superstitious suspicion in his heart, that dark potentialities become real only after you have spoken them aloud.

“Seems to be,” he said, with difficulty.

“I agree,” added Start.

Hutton paced through the still-drifting dust, in front of the gleaming gravity-wave generator. “If it’s growing, we know several things.” He held up one finger. “First, Beta can’t be terribly old, or it would have consumed the Earth long ago, neh?”

“It could be a natural singularity left over from the Big Bang, which hit Earth only recently,” Stan suggested.

“Weak, very weak. Wouldn’t an interstellar object be moving at hyperbolic speeds?” Hutton shook his head. “It might pass through a planet on a fluke, but then it’d just fly off into space again, barely slowed at all.”

Alex nodded, accepting the point.

“Also,” Hutton went on, “it stretches credulity that such an object would happen to arrive just now, when we have the technology to detect it. Besides, you yourself said small singularities are unstable — be they holes or strings or whatever — unless they’re specially tuned to sustain themselves!”

“You’re saying someone else has… ?”

“Obviously! Come on, Lustig. Do you think you’re the only bright guy on the planet? Face it, you’ve been scooped. Preceded! Someone beat you to it, by inventing a better cavitron perhaps, or using something different.

“Probably something different, more sophisticated, since this taniwha is worse than your pathetic thing, your Alpha!” George spread a grin absent of mirth. “Accept it, Alex boy. Someone out there whipped you at your own game… somebody better at playing mad scientist.”

Alex didn’t know what to say. He watched the big man’s expression turn thoughtful.

“Or maybe it’s not just a lone madman this time. I wonder… Governments and ruling cliques are good at coming up with ways to destroy the world. Maybe one was developing some sort of doomsday device? An ultimate deterrent? Maybe, like you, they released it by mistake.”

“Then why keep it secret?”

“To prevent retribution, of course. Or to gain time while they plot an escape to Mars?”

Alex shook his head. “I can’t speculate about any of that. All I can do is—”

“No.” George stabbed a finger at him. “Let me tell you what you can do. First off, you can get busy confirming this data. And then, after that…”

The fire seemed to drain out of Hutton’s eyes. His shoulders slumped. “After that you can tell me how much time I have left with my children, before that thing down there swallows up the ground beneath our feet.”

The frightened techs shifted nervously. Stan Goldman watched his own hands. Alex, however, felt a different sense of loss. He wished he too could react in such a way — with anger, defiance, despair.

Why do I feel so little? Why am I so numb?

Was it because he’d been living with this possibility so much longer than George?

Or is George right? Am I miffed that someone else obviously did a bigger, better job of monster making than I ever could?

Whoever it had been, they were certainly no more competent at keeping monsters caged. Small satisfaction there.

“Before we do more gravity probes,” Stan Goldman said. “Hadn’t we better find out why that last scan set off seismic tremors? I’ve never heard of anything like it before.”

George laughed. “Tremors? You want quakes? Just wait till Beta’s grown to critical size and starts swallowing up the Earth’s core. Chunks of mantle will collapse inward… then you’ll see earthquakes!”

Swiveling in disgust, Hutton strode off toward the stairs to climb back to Ao-marama — to the world of light. For some time after he departed, nobody did or said much. The staff desultorily cleaned up. Once, Stan Goldman seemed about to speak, then closed his mouth and shook his head.

A nervous engineer approached Alex, holding a message plaque. “Um, speaking of earthquakes, I thought you’d better see this.” He slid the sheet onto the console between Stan and Alex. On its face rippled the bold letters of a standard World Net tech-level press release:

“Hm, what does this have to do with…?” Then Alex noticed — the Spanish quakes had struck at exactly the same time as the jolts here in New Zealand! Turning to the whole-Earth cutaway, he made some comparisons, and whistled. As nearly as the eyeball had it, the two swarms had taken place one hundred and eighty degrees apart — on exactly opposite sides of the globe.

In other words, a straight line, connecting New Zealand and Spain, passed almost exactly through the planet’s core.

He watched the new singularity, the one called Beta, follow a low, lazy trajectory, never climbing far from the inmost zone where density and pressure were highest, where its nourishment was richest.

It does more than grow, Alex realized, amazed the universe could awe him yet again. It does one hell of a lot more than grow.

“Stan—” he began.

“You’ve noticed too? Puzzling, isn’t it?”

“Mm. Let’s find out what it means.”

So they were immersed in arcane mathematics, barely even aware of the world outside, when someone turned a dial to amplify the breathless voices of news reporters, describing a disaster in space.