“Hello, Siri,” I say. The tomb door is closed.
“I am sorry I cannot share our Seventh Reunion, Merin. I looked forward to it.” Siri pauses and looks down at her hands. The image flickers slightly as dust motes float through her form. “I had carefully planned what to say here,” she goes on. “How to say it. Arguments to be pled. Instructions to be given. But I know now how useless that would have been. Either I have said it already and you have heard or there is nothing left to say and silence would best suit the moment.”
Siri’s voice had grown even more beautiful with age. There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain. Siri moves her hands and they disappear beyond the border of the projection. “Merin, my love, how strange our days apart and together have been. How beautifully absurd the myth that bound us. My days were but heartbeats to you. I hated you for that. You were the mirror that would not lie. If you could have seen your face at the beginning of each Reunion! The least you could have done was to hide your shock … that, at least, you could have done for me.
“But through your clumsy naiveté there has always been … what?… something, Merin. There is something there that belies the callowness and thoughtless egotism which you wear so well. A caring, perhaps. A respect for caring, if nothing else.
“Merin, this diary has hundreds of entries … thousands, I fear … I have kept it since I was thirteen. By the time you see this, they will all have been erased except the ones which follow. Adieu, my love. Adieu.”
I shut off the comlog and sit in silence for a minute. The crowd sounds are barely audible through the thick walls of the tomb. I take a breath and thumb the diskey.
Siri appears. She is in her late forties. I know immediately the day and place she recorded this image. I remember the cloak she wears, the eelstone pendant at her neck, and the strand of hair which has escaped her barrette and even now falls across her cheek. I remember everything about that day. It was the last day of our Third Reunion and we were with friends on the heights above South Tern. Donel was ten and we were trying to convince him to slide on the snowfield with us. He was crying. Siri turned away from us even before the skimmer settled. When Magritte stepped out we knew from Siri’s face that something had happened.
The same face stares at me now. She brushes absently at the unruly strand of hair. Her eyes are red but her voice is controlled. “Merin, they killed our son today. Alón was twenty-one and they killed him. You were so confused today, Merin. ‘How could such a mistake have happened?’ you kept repeating. You did not really know our son but I could see the loss in your face when we heard. Merin, it was not an accident. If nothing else survives, no other record, if you never understand why I allowed a sentimental myth to rule my life, let this be known—it was not an accident that killed Alón. He was with the Separatists when the Council police arrived. Even then he could have escaped. We had prepared an alibi together. The police would have believed his story. He chose to stay.
“Today, Merin, you were impressed with what I said to the crowd … the mob … at the embassy. Know this, Shipman—when I said, ‘Now is not the time to show your anger and your hatred,’ that is precisely what I meant. No more, no less. Today is not the time. But the day will come. It will surely come. The Covenant was not taken lightly in those final days, Merin. It is not taken lightly now. Those who have forgotten will be surprised when the day comes but it will surely come.”
The image fades to another and in the split second of overlap the face of a twenty-six-year-old Siri appears superimposed on the older woman’s features. “Merin, I am pregnant. I’m so glad. You’ve been gone five weeks now and I miss you. Ten years you’ll be gone. More than that. Merin, why didn’t you think to invite me to go with you? I could not have gone but I would have loved it if you had just invited me. But I’m pregnant, Merin. The doctors say that it will be a boy. I will tell him about you, my love. Perhaps someday you and he will sail in the Archipelago and listen to the songs of the Sea Folk as you and I have done these past few weeks. Perhaps you’ll understand them by then. Merin, I miss you. Please hurry back.”
The holographic image shimmers and shifts. The sixteen-year-old girl is red-faced. Her long hair cascades over bare shoulders and a white nightgown. She speaks in a rush, racing tears. “Shipman Merin Aspic, I’m sorry about your friend—I really am—but you left without even saying goodbye. I had such plans about how you would help us … how you and I … you didn’t even say goodbye. I don’t care what happens to you. I hope you go back to your stinking, crowded Hegemony hives and rot for all I care. In fact, Merin Aspic, I wouldn’t want to see you again even if they paid me. Goodbye.”
She turns her back before the projection fades. It is dark in the tomb now but the audio continues for a second. There is a soft chuckle and Siri’s voice—I cannot tell the age—comes one last time. “Adieu, Merin. Adieu.”
“Adieu,” I say and thumb the diskey off.
The crowd parts as I emerge blinking from the tomb. My poor timing has ruined the drama of the event and now the smile on my face incites angry whispers. Loudspeakers carry the rhetoric of the official ceremony even to our hilltop. “… beginning a new era of cooperation,” echoes the rich voice of the Ambassador.
I set the box on the grass and remove the hawking mat. The crowd presses forward to see as I unroll the carpet. The tapestry is faded but the flight threads gleam like new copper. I sit in the center of the mat and slide the heavy box on behind me.
“… and more will follow until space and time will cease to be obstacles.”
The crowd moves back as I tap the flight design and the hawking mat rises four meters into the air. Now I can see beyond the roof of the tomb. The islands are returning to form the Equatorial Archipelago. I can see them, hundreds of them, borne up out of the hungry south by gentle winds.
“So it is with great pleasure that I close this circuit and welcome you, the colony of Maui-Covenant, into the community of the Hegemony of Man.”
The thin thread of the ceremonial comm-laser pulses to the zenith. There is a pattering of applause and the band begins playing. I squint skyward just in time to see a new star being born. Part of me knew to the microsecond what has just occurred.
For a few microseconds the farcaster had been functional. For a few microseconds time and space had ceased to be obstacles. Then the massive tidal pull of the artificial singularity triggered the thermite charge I had placed on the outer containment sphere. That tiny explosion had not been visible but a second later the expanding Swarzschild radius is eating its shell, swallowing thirty-six thousand tons of fragile dodecahedron, and growing quickly to gobble several thousand kilometers of space around it. And that is visible—magnificently visible—as a miniature nova flares whitely in the clear blue sky.
The band stops playing. People scream and run for cover. There is no reason to. There is a burst of X rays tunneling out as the farcaster continues to collapse into itself, but not enough to cause harm through Maui-Covenant’s generous atmosphere. A second streak of plasma becomes visible as the Los Angeles puts more distance between itself and the rapidly decaying little black hole. The winds rise and the seas are choppier. There will be strange tides tonight.