by Ian Stewart
Okay, so it made them feel better. So what? They'd die all the same, if that's how the dice fell.
She took another slug from the three-thousand-year-old Minoan goblet. All around her were priceless artifacts, the collection of a lifetime, fruits of the labors of seven obscenely rich husbands.
Seven good men. She had loved them all. A tear trickled down her cheeks. She raised her goblet in a silent toast to Henry, Jean-Louis, Osborne, Yoshiki, Maddison, Humphrey, and Mikhail.
Then she refilled the goblet and sat, lost in private thoughts.
Xi Ming-Kuo was fast losing faith in the powers that arranged the universe. They had lost him the black child, they had lost him the most promising Hunter he had ever recruited, they had placed unwarranted power in the hands of his enemies, and now they had arranged for a comet and a moon to seek and destroy. They were out to get him! China was no longer a good place to be—the White Dragon Gang was in the ascendant. Ecotopian medicines were available on every street corner, sales of traditional remedies were falling through the floor, and Xi was losing his fortune almost as rapidly as he had acquired it.
He called for Delicate Blossom, for he desperately needed her advice.
"Excellency, two nodal intersections stand out from the remainder in glowing aural colors," she told him. "Both in Ecotopia. It will be wise to relocate to one of them."
Xi was hoping for more definitive advice. "Which is best?"
"The portents do not permit further distinction, Excellency. The wise man will make his own judgments based on the knowledge available."
Hmmm. "Tell me these places."
"The first is a small island at the southernmost tip of Soumerica. Isla Homos, part of Tierra del Fuego." She looked demurely at her toes. "Better known as Cape Horn."
"And the second?"
"Central Borneo. Preferably in the foothills of the Pegunungang Muller, a mountain range in the center of the island."
"Why these two?"
"Excellency: the source of my knowledge is unknown even to me. All I can say is that the auspices for these two locations are exceptionally favorable. I have cast the yarrow stalks repeatedly, and all is in concurrence." She reached into the folds of her robe and extracted a small jade pot. "Excellency, there is one further precaution you may choose to take. The auspices also favor the use of this salve. When you arrive at your destination, it can be rubbed on your skin as a protection against bad luck."
Xi would much have preferred to have Delicate Blossom rub it on his skin, but that was not an option. He accepted the salve. Her advice about the choice of destination was more enigmatic ... He weighed the possibilities. Both places were reachable in his private jet-copter. In both, he could land unobserved. Borneo was considerably closer, but Cape Horn was less populous. One was inland, the other . . ."Delicate Blossom, is it not the case that a comet, or a fragment, is most dangerous if it lands in the sea?"
She forbore to point out that if the comet hit the Earth at all, it would scarcely matter where. Xi Ming-Kuo wanted advice on where to relocate, not on whether there was any point in doing so. "Your Excellency is most perceptive. An ocean impact can create tsunamis."
"In which case, a coastal area is unwise, whereas a mountainous inland region . . . Tell me, why do the auspices favor a tiny island on the edge of the two largest oceans in the world?"
The feng-shui maiden blushed prettily "Excellency, the auspices concern themselves with matters of the spirit world and the dragon lords. They do not take account of the physical world."
"I see. But the wise man can make use of knowledge about the physical world?"
"Indeed."
"Then it is settled. You are dismissed."
The girl bowed, turned, and left the room. Xi instructed his 'node to ready his jet-copter for a one-way trip to Borneo. As she had known he would.
Angle Carver manipulated her remote handset to tilt one of the rooftop security cameras skyward. With difficulty she brought the image into sharp focus.
The scene was dominated by the horns of the crescent Moon. A muttered command set the image processor to dim the moonlight and enhance the stellar background. Now the streaming tail of the comet came into view, pointing away from the dark gap between the crescent's horns. The pallid lemon glow of lo was now only a few lunar diameters away from the comets head. Behind it stretched an irregular smoky trail.
They would miss the Moon, but would they miss the Earth? lo was still catching up on the comet, and a lot depended on how reliable the wheelers' automated equipment was. When lo got within repulsor range of the comet, its Diversion Engines could start to push . . . Well, that was Charles's bright idea, and it might just work.
Her giant vidivid screen depicted harrowing scenes from around the globe. Riots in Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Novosibirsk . . . Mass religious ceremonies in Birmingham, Alabama, Rio de Janeiro, New Delhi, Jakarta . . .
Other channels showed darker things. Mass orgies in Tasmania. An outbreak of human sacrifice in Tahiti. Satanic worship, black masses, for heaven's sake, in—of all places—Boston. Blazing city blocks, looters, sundry apocalyptic madmen . . .
A terrorist bombing in Beersheba—as if petty nationalism had any meaning now Pathetic.
The usual stony silence from the Democratic Republic of Free China. Even now, most of their people had no idea that they were in danger. Nobody had told them, and they had no way to find out. Rumors were spreading, nonetheless.
And in more and more places, people just stood in the streets, the piazzas, and the parks, with pleading looks in their eyes— and waited.
The W continued to broadcast wildly optimistic predictions. The latest calculations, they claimed, showed that lo would deflect the comet away from Earth, while pushing itself safely aside as well. But they'd hardly say otherwise, would they? The eXtraNet told a more equivocal tale. The T Wrecks Xsite was even running a sweepstake on where the comet would hit, not that the winner would ever get to collect.
In his Washington office, Uhlirach-Bengtsen stared out of the window at the night sky. The attempt to replace Dunsmoore had backfired—but it was starting to look as if military intelligence had underestimated Charles after all. With hindsight, enrolling the skydivers on their side may have been the only sensible decision. If there was ever an inquiry, that's what he would tell them. As for Halberstam's death . . . people were entitled to defend themselves against lunatics with weapons.
Soon they would know, if only for an instant. lo was visibly larger now. So was the comet, its tail fanned out like a peacock's—a blazing semicircle of cold beauty, and a daunting reminder of nature's powers.
Every few seconds, the control complex shuddered as yet another ioquake struck. Much more of this and the moon would start to shake itself to pieces, even though it was two thousand miles across. The symbiautic machinery, though, was of rugged construction, and most of the real damage was near the satellite's surface. At the appointed moment. Reliant Robin brought the Diversion Engines back to life.
A beam of force linked lo and the comet. As the Engines' power surged, the two bodies began imperceptibly to move apart. The stresses increased the number and size of the seismic shock waves that surged back and forth through lo's interior, bouncing off the surface, refracted at the boundary between core and magma. The compacted ice of the comet, riddled with cracks and holes where hot gases had boiled off, began to shift and fracture. The Engines drew more power and the forces doubled and redoubled in intensity.
The comet split. Two huge fragments, a dozen smaller ones, a myriad pebbles, countless dust motes. The symbiautic controller subdivided the repulsor field, snared the two main fragments, and did the best it could with the remainder. The Engines drew more power, nearing their design limits. They had not been intended for such rapid adjustments, and the whole system was becoming overwhelmed. Nevertheless, the trajectories of the comet's fragments began to bend, by bare fractions of a degree. lo's path and the comets began to diverge, bracketing the Earth
.
An Engine broke loose from its mountings and smashed itself to smithereens against the wall of its cavern. The controller, running out of options, removed one fragment of comet from further consideration. A second Engine suddenly turned white hot and melted—its confinement baffles had broken down. Then the floor of the control center chamber shattered as a torrent of magma burst up from the moon's liquid layers. Seconds later, a new volcanic plume decorated lo's shattered landscape.
Despite numerous warnings, hundreds of thousands of people crammed the southwestern Soumerican coastline, exclaiming in awed wonder as the fiery ball of ice passed across the dawn sky. Its gauzy trail slanted seaward across the red streaks of the rising Sun. Forty minutes later, when the tsunami hit the coast, most of the people were still there. Less than one in twenty survived.
This was one of the small fragments.
A second small fragment collided with the Moon. The impact, on the far side, was invisible from Earth, but a vast cloud of dust could be seen spreading across the lunar surface, obscuring its maria and craters. The Buddhist Moonbases were jolted with shocks and aftershocks, but no lives were lost on the Moon. The Belters' lunar mass-drivers shot down three of the smaller fragments, pulverizing them into a cloud of dust and pebbles. Earth's skies began to give the appearance of an aerial dogfight as assorted debris smashed into the upper atmosphere.
The rest of the smaller fragments passed harmlessly by. Before the Diversion Engines had been destroyed, Reliant Robin had succeeded in pushing one of the two large fragments clear of the impact window. The sole remaining dangers to the Earth were that one large fragment of comet and the onrushing hell-world of lo. If Dunsmoore's idea failed, the Earth itself might be obliterated, and not just its human population.
Thirty minutes behind reality, the Cuckoo watched the drama unfold. Seen from the Way of the Wholesome orbital monastery, it was a textbook exercise in celestial mechanics—geometric dynamics on the grand scale. From that vantage point, all the bodies concerned were partially illuminated, balls of solid black cupped by glittering crescents. The Earth was a large lapis and alabaster crescent, the errant Jovian moon a fuzzy lemon one at the tip of a wriggling brimstone contrail. The two main fragments of Jaramarana shone like tiny diamonds and changed shape as they spun end over end. Each vented its own tail of roiling gas. The rest of the comet was a faint smudge in the telescope's lenses. The moon, now milky and inscrutable, had no further role to play.
One sliver of diamond slid past the crescent's edge, seemingly just avoiding impaling itself on a gleaming horn. The second disappeared against the lapis and alabaster background. The lemon bead touched the edge of the black ball cupped by the blue-white crescent and began to slide behind it.
One large comet fragment was still on target. As it dipped into Earth's upper atmosphere it began to change color, a streak of fire with a crimson tinge slicing the sky in a dead straight line. The tail rippled and broke. A massive sonic boom, ten minutes behind, flattened forests, demolished houses, and toppled tall buildings. Tens of millions were deafened by the shock wave. The massive remnant of the main body of the comet carved a deepening gouge in the Earth's troposphere. Never more than a loosely knit conglomerate of ice and dust, the fragment began to break up. With a small telescope you could make out six major pieces and a cloud of smaller ones.
From Lagos, the six main pieces formed an irregular patch of light twice as bright as the Sun. The city's assembled inhabitants watched in horror while the fireball grew ever larger, as if it were falling directly toward them. In sudden panic the crowds surged this way and that, hoping vainly to outrun Armageddon. People screamed, fell, and died in the crush. Only after several minutes did some semblance of sanity return, when those still standing saw a diminishing streak in the sky. It moved toward the horizon and vanished beyond it.
In Nairobi the booming passage of one piece of the comet wrecked a dozen shoddily built skyscrapers, killing hundreds and trapping twice as many, buried alive in a tangled heap of concrete and bars of steel reinforcement. People were impaled, crushed, or miraculously preserved in a cave with no exit, as the hand of fate made its random choices.
A second piece hit the ground in a remote mountain region of the Namib Desert.
A third piece of the comet totally destroyed most of the northern suburbs of Canberra, starting fires over an area the size of Tasmania.
A small piece, a mere fifty tons or so, steepened its angle of attack and plunged into the thicker atmosphere at lower altitudes, becoming a ball of heated plasma. It exploded in an air-burst just above the forests of Central Borneo, felling a gigantic swath of forest and terrifying the wildlife.
On the side of the planet that the Cuckoo could not see, lo loomed large in the sky as it sped from night into day For a few hours. Earth had a new moon, and this one was so close that it raised huge tides. Easter Island was completely submerged, and when the water subsided, all of the ancient statues had been washed away, along with just about everything else. By the time the tides reached the more populated regions of Polynesia and Austrazealand, the new moon was already heading back out into space and the damage was limited. A few hundred townships were destroyed, a million square miles of farmland flooded, and countless sheep and cattle were swept away and drowned, along with tens of thousands of people. The waves raced around the globe several times before they subsided, but most of the damage was done during their first passage. Clouds of sulfurous oxides, billowing from the tortured moonlet, polluted the Earth's atmosphere—there would be acid rain for months to come, and heaven alone knew what else.
For the last four hours, as Xi Ming-Kuos jet-copter fled due south from Guangxi Province, nothing had been visible below except streaky clouds and the rippled steel of the South China Sea. Now, the greenery of northern Borneo broke the monotony and warned him that his destination was less than an hour away He wondered again why Delicate Blossom had chosen such a curious location, for Borneo was an Island Eco-Reserve and the only officially sanctioned approach was through the smaller island of Pulau Laut at its southeast corner. The ways of feng-shui were arcane indeed! On the other hand, his covert approach would likely go unobserved, as long as his pilot took care to get the clouds that were now piling up over the central spine of mountains between him and any watching survsats.
As if he'd been reading the merchant's mind, the pilot dropped the jet-copter in a steep dive, pulling out only when the peaks of Pegunungang Iran threatened to slice the craft apart like an antique can opener. He began to weave between the peaks, flying close to the mountainside, minimizing the chance that one of the sideways-radar installations or a wandering game warden might spot the aircraft and wonder what its business was.
Borneo was now a jungle island, home to nine-tenths of the world's orangutans. It had not always been so. Even before the Pause, much of the animals' evergreen forest habitat had been burned to the ground by farmers and logged for timber. By the end of the Pause, decades of primitive slash-and-burn agriculture had turned most of the island into near-desert, and the great primates had either been slaughtered or allowed to die of starvation and disease. The new political order that eventually became Ecotopia kicked out the few remaining farmers, replanted the forests—step by tentative step, starting with grass and shrubs to trap rainfall, working back to trees. It was difficult managing an ecosystem when nobody really understood the dynamics of natural ecologies, but the conservationists did their best and learned from their mistakes. As the forests began to mature, the smaller fauna began to rebuild their populations, and finally the great apes themselves were reintroduced from breeding groups elsewhere in Eastasia and captive groups in urban conservation facilities. Orangutans need a lot of territory to survive, and by now a population explosion had spread them over most of the island—from the mountain rain forests to the forested swamplands of the south and east. The few towns that still existed were dotted around the coast, and the main method of travel to the interior was by boat along t
he island's extensive network of rivers.
The peaks of Pegunungang Iran merged into those of Pegunungang Muller, and the pilot edged over the watershed toward the southeast, heading for the foothills near the Murung River. According to the jeng-shui maiden, this was where the auspices were most favorable.
The jet-copter made a safe landing in a small clearing at the foot of a rocky cliff, not far from the trickle of a high waterfall. Xi climbed out, and the pilot helped him unload a backpack, crates of provisions, and a tent. His duty complete, the pilot clambered back into the jet-copter and took off, heading back to China. When the comet had passed and the political dust had settled— if the comet passed, but Xi did not believe in his own mortality as long as he followed the advice of the feng-shui maiden—Xi would radio for the pilot to return and pick him up. While the crisis lasted, he was going camping in a tropical paradise, with only the occasional orangutan for company. It would be a time to meditate and to plan new ventures. A trade in primate bones, perhaps, if he could stimulate demand . . .
It was warm and humid. He slipped off his clothes and hung them on a bush. Following Delicate Blossoms advice to the letter, he took the jade pot of salve and rubbed it vigorously all over his body. He dressed, and tossed the empty pot into the bushes—the jade was of poor quality and the carving was distinctly ordinary. He hid the tent and provisions behind some rocks and shrugged into the backpack, which held all he would need to survive for many weeks if he was careful. The tent and provisions were luxuries. He wanted to find a suitable location to pitch camp: when he found it, he would return for the rest of his equipment. Navsats gave him his position to the nearest foot, and he had no fear of getting lost.