“You cannot fix me in amber,” she said.
“Or any of us, damn it,” Carlotta added.
To him Nikka’s face glowed with associated memories, shone in the spare kitchen with a receptive willingness.
“I … suppose you’re right.”
—It was 2034 again and he comes home in the warm Pasadena evening, putt-putting on a scooter. He clicks the lock open and slams the big oak door to announce himself, bounding up the staircase. In the white living room he calls out to her. Something chimes faintly in his ears. His steps ring on the brown Mexican tiles as he walks into the arched intersection of kitchen and dining nook. A woman’s spiked shoe lies on the tile. One shoe. Directly underneath the bedroom arch. He steps forward and the ringing in his ear grows. Into the bedroom. Look to the left. Alexandria lies still, facedown. Hands reaching out, clenched. Arms an ugly swollen red, where the disease was eating at her, would never stop eating—
He knew it then, saw her falling away into nothingness. The ambulance that shrieked through night mists, the antiseptic hospital, the terrible things done to her after—all that was coda to the symphonic life the two of them had shared, had tried to have with Shirley as well, yet the three-body problem had forever remained unsolved—
He saw abruptly that the fear of losing Alexandria had become part of him now. He had never recovered. With age, the fear of change seeped into him and blended with the losing of her. Nikka had now been with him longer than Alexandria had, and a mere hint of danger to her—
Nigel shook his head, letting the old, still-sharp images fade.
“Back with us?” Carlotta asked.
“I expect so,” he said unevenly.
Nikka studied him, understanding slowly coming into her face.
He said, “These things take a bit of time.”
Carlotta said, “I just won’t let you push her around.” She put her arms protectively around Nikka.
“Why does this conversation keep reminding me of the United Nations?”
“Well, it’s true.”
Nikka said to Carlotta, “Still, we each have some power over the other.”
“Not that kind.”
“All kinds,” Nigel said. “Thighs part before me like the Red Sea. Point is, what are the limits?”
“If I don’t stand up to you, you’ll just run right over her,” Carlotta said.
Nikka said mildly, “That depends on the circumstances.”
Nigel smiled. “I’m not the ambivalent type. ‘Do you always try to look on both sides of an issue, Mr. Walmsley?’ ‘Well, yes and no.’ Not my kind of thing.”
“Well, you’d better make it—”
“Oh, come on, you two. The crisis is past,” Nikka said.
“Indeed. Let’s eat. Get back to basics.”
Nikka said, “Some Red Sea later?”
“We’ll negotiate over dessert.”
NINE
The mission team deployed carefully around Satellite A. One-third stayed forty klicks away, with the heavy gear and comm packs. A third scouted the surface. They found nothing special, verified Fraser’s dating and cratering count, and reconned the entrance holes. The last third set up the recon machines, tested the dark openings for sensors and trip lines, and finally decided all was well. No murmur of electromagnetic life came from the holes; nothing responded to their elementary probings.
The machines went in, tentatively and quietly. They were blocked by a sealed passageway thirty-three meters inside the rocky crust. The robots were cramped in the passage as it narrowed down and could not find anything to free the seal. Two women went in to eyeball the situation. They attached monitors to the black ceramic seal and listened for acoustic signatures which might reveal a lock.
The crew standing near the edge of the entrance hole was listening to the two women discuss matters. They felt a slight percussion. At the same instant the two women stopped speaking, forever. Something blue and ice-white came out of the dark hole. A millisecond-stepped scan of the video readback showed only this blue-white fog, and then—next frame—the beginnings of an orange explosion among the three human figures standing nearest the hole. In two more frames the boiling orange had reached the video lens itself and transmission stopped.
The orange moved like a liquid, licking the surface of the satellite clean in seven milliseconds. A tongue of it leaped off the surface, at the point closest to the orbiting mission team. It projected eighteen klicks toward them and then lapped, straining in long fibers, for twenty-two milliseconds. The mission crew had by this time registered only a blur of motion on their monitors. Two-thirds of the crew—all that were on the satellite—were dead.
The orange fibers twisted, coiled, and all but one retracted, fading. One grew, stretched, and struck the mission craft a weakened blow. High-temperature plasma blinded sensors and pitted steel skins. A gigawatt of snapping, snarling death burst over the spider-limbed ships. More died.
The orange thing withdrew, withering and darkening and collapsing down in forty-two milliseconds to a guttering white glow at the entrance hole. The rock of the satellite was now a burnished brown. Within a further fraction of a second, all electromagnetic activity from the satellite ceased. There was no residual radioactivity. The twelve remaining crew members had not yet had time to turn their heads, to see the thing that had come and gone.
Jesus Christ did you
is overloaded I can’t see anything but ejecta
they’re just gone I said no sign anywhere
no there’s that debris, I’m picking it up now in IR but
god-awful, they’re all smashed up, all the modules in orbit, like squashed peas
the camp’s smeared all over the surface like something crushed it dammit launch the two now we’ll get a booster on and follow
the people in orbit, I can’t see much but ferget the others, only survivors are gonna be in the modules an’ not too blessed many a ’em either I’ll bet
