“And when the timeslide intervention failed,” Tom said, “the backlash saturated the whole area with uncontrolled temporal anomalies. As a result there’s no magnetic data stored in the present crustal record to confirm that any of it ever happened at all. Not that there’s much of that crust material left, anyway, in the upper layers. Afterwards, other continental plates were pushed in over the subducted, damaged plates, and…” He lifted his arms, let them fall. “That was that.”
“But what did work,” Carl said, “was the project put together by some wizards who were intent on getting as much of the unique animal life as possible off Atlan, and onto other continents, before it was destroyed. That worked extremely well—a guided export of breeding stock to environments where they’d prosper. So we still have fireworms and basilisks and a lot of other unique creatures that turn up in fairy tales. Without the Aphthonic Intervention, the only place they’d turn up is fairy tales.”
“Well,” Ronan said, “that’s all very well, as long as the basilisks stay away from me. Not so sure why they went to so much trouble to save that species. Nasty little buggers.”
“Now now,” Tom said, “mustn’t judge.”
“Watch me,” Ronan said. “But I hope we’ve got a bigger action plan in case anything larger goes wrong.”
“Of course we do,” Tom said.
“After all,” Carl said, “it’s not like our Moon isn’t going to do this eventually.”
Almost all the Earth-based participants’ heads snapped up at that—everyone’s except Nita’s, Kit noticed. She merely bowed her head over the s’more she was trying to assemble, smiling an odd little smile.
“It’s moving away from the Earth right now,” Tom said, “a few inches further every year. But that’s not going to go on forever. Sooner or later it’s going to start spiraling back in. It’ll get closer and closer, and start dipping toward the Roche limit, the point where Earth’s tidal forces and gravitation start really messing with anything that gets too close.” He stretched out his legs in front of him, leaned back against his rock. “When it gets down to about eighteen thousand miles over the surface, that’s when the real excitement starts as far as the lunar structure is concerned. At that point the gravitational and tidal forces of the Earth begin actually deforming the Moon, stretching it out of shape. Much closer than that, say around ten thousand miles out, and the Moon simply breaks in pieces like an egg that’s been dropped on the floor.”
Nita was still fiddling with her s’more, wearing that slight smile. “You knew about this before, didn’t you?” Carl said. “Remiss of you not to mention.”
She looked up with mischief in her eyes. “Well,” she said, “it’s maybe half a million years from now this’ll happen, give or take. Might be twice that: no one’s sure. Doesn’t seem to be much point in yelling ‘fire’ when the building hasn’t really even started burning yet.”
Tom smiled slightly. “We know a lot more about what the Moon’s made of these days,” he said, “but if I remember rightly the jury’s still out on what happens after it breaks up. Does it simply fall down on us, or are the pieces shredded by the tidal effects into small enough chunks for us to wind up with rings?”
Nita leaned back against her own rock and sighed. “It is still out,” she said. “But more on the yes-to-rings side than the other way. Seems there are density anomalies that may make the shredding easier.”
“Assuming there are any human beings left on Earth at that point,” Ronan said. “And not just gone because we’ve destroyed our environment, or evolved into something different, or simply left.”
Carl nodded. “Half a million years is a good while yet,” he said. “Anything can happen…”
Everyone got quiet. But Kit was for the moment lost in another vision. “Imagine what that would look like, though,” he said. Gradually he became aware of the others looking at him strangely. “But seriously. When we look up at that moon from home, it’s nearly a quarter million miles away. Imagine how it would look at twenty thousand miles away. It would fill half the sky.”
A lot of eyes went up to the darkly burning, lowering presence that was easily taking up a third of the sky here. “And then,” he said, “rings…”
Kit realized that Nita’s gaze was fixed on him, and when their eyes met, the look he saw there said something he’d occasionally seen there before: you see this vision, too. And you see what it would be like. I thought I was the only one…
“But it still leaves us with a problem,” Tom says. “Or rather, it leaves somebody with a problem. Not me, not any of you; this won’t happen on any of our watches. But when that inward spiral starts, assuming there are people left, and you’re Earth’s Planetary… what do you do? Do you allow nature to take its course? Do you start the process of stabilizing the Moon’s orbit so that doesn’t descend any further? Granted, the choice becomes a bit simpler if there’s nobody left but the Planetary, or the small group of wizards who’ve been left behind as caretakers. Oh yes,” Tom said, putting his hands behind his head and leaning against them, “there are worlds where that’s exactly what’s happened. The dominant species has moved away, or changed beyond their need to keep that world any longer—yet they feel sentimental about it, and so they keep it exactly as it was before they left.”
“Kind of like keeping somebody’s room just like it was when they died,” Ronan said. “Little bit creepy, if you ask me.”
“I wouldn’t argue,” Tom said. “Nonetheless, it happens. Attachment’s a strange thing. Sometimes a being, or a species, will get very attached indeed. And the urge towards inertia, towards preservation as opposed to the urge towards change, is very common.” He looked out across the plain toward the gating complex. “So is the urge towards nostalgia.” He looked at their campfire. “But is allowing entropy to have its way with physical matter always necessarily an evil choice? Might there not be examples of entropically-grounded change that aren’t negatively connoted—that don’t necessarily mean the Lone Power is standing somewhere in the background going ‘Nya-ah-ah’ at us like Dishonest John?”
This produced some confused looks among the audience. Carl, who’d settled himself crosslegged across the fire from Tom with his back to another rock, raised his eyebrows and said, “You’re dating yourself again.”
“Hardly,” Tom said, smiling slightly and taking a drink of his Guinness. “It’s widely known my personal history reaches back to at least the Pleistocene. No one’s going to care if I reference the Saturday morning cartoons we had back then.”
He gave absolutely no sign of noticing Nita’s sudden red-hot blush. “I’ll grant you, at this end of time and causality it’s hard to imagine what the form of change and growth that the Powers that Be originally intended would have looked like in operation. Impossible for us to tell, of course; before the other Powers got their version of change fully up and running, the Lone Power installed its own more toxic version over the top, and that’s what we’re stuck with. But the rest of the Powers seem to have accepted some of Its forms of change, at this end of time, as part of nature. Must we keep entire ecosystems running past the time at which they’d have relatively gracefully expired, merely out of the urge to stick it to the Lone One? If everything must die, can’t we allow some of it to die with dignity?”
Kit saw that some of the group around the campfire were looking at Tom rather strangely. “I know,” Tom said. “You’re young in your practices yet… used to fighting the Lone One tooth and nail, and even winning. Which is as it should be. That’s why wizardry was given into your hands, into all our hands, when young. Yet even when you’re young, you have to learn to pick your fights. Then you start learning to leverage your experience against your power levels.” His glance rested on Dairine for a moment. “Some of us learn that earlier than others. There are people who waste time feeling sorry for wizards whose power levels took a dive after they come off their Ordeals, never suspecting how much smarter and more effective those wizards are now they’ve realized how to make the most of what they’ve got.”