The rift in the clouds widened to a pool of gold set in a mass of dark gray murkiness. Painfully bright, the light spilled over the city, refracting from a myriad puddles on rooftops and in the streets. The effect was as dizzying as the potential of Ikaros's-or Charybdis's-proposal. Rodney's vertigo ratcheted up a notch, and it was difficult to tell what had caused it; the giant glitter ball below or the notion of learning everything anyone could possibly want to learn.
That's what ascension meant, wasn't it?
He rolled on his back, stared up at the churning clouds, and tried to steady his breathing. If he ascended, he could go anywhere he liked, see anything he wanted to see… God, there was every chance of actually finding out how quantum mechanics worked and why! He could hover there, exempt from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and watch it all happen. Or maybe he could make music in a way even someone like Glenn Gould could only ever have dreamed of.. Best of all, if he ascended, he'd stay alive. In a manner of speaking. In every manner that truly mattered.
If he ascended, he'd know where his team mates had ended up. He could find them… and look on as they died.
"Ay, there's the rub," he whispered.
What?
"Hamlet."
No interference, no matter what happened. If you interfered, they un-ascended you, though, if Dr. Jackson was anything to go by, the worst thing that could befall Rodney was to end up in pretty much the same situation he was in now: cold, wet, exposed, and with a ripe case of Alzheimer's. Okay, he'd be minus his clothes, too. Given the climate, that might pose a problem…
Of course, in order to avoid that scenario, all he had to do was not to interfere. Everybody in the galaxy might die-would die, provided Charybdis's entropic tendencies continued-but Rodney McKay would live on.
Rodney found that the cost of survival was too high. Even for his strongly developed sense of self-preservation. "No," he said.
Excuse me?
"You heard me."
Are you saying you prefer a pointless death to unlimited opportunities?
"I'm saying I prefer a pointless death to a pointless life."
And it's never occurred to you to consider what I'd prefer has it?
"Feel free to goon ahead."
I can't. Not without you. We're… linked. It's either both of us or neither. Rodney… Dr. McKay, we'll both die!
The kid was sounding-sounding? — panicked. Considering that Ikaros was some ten thousand years old already, Rodney felt the sentiment was slightly on the greedy side. He also, and somewhat to his surprise, felt sorry for the boy. Apparently even an unreasonably long lifespan didn't diminish that teenage conviction that immortality was a God-given right.
"Look, `interference' is my middle name," he said. "I won't stand on the sidelines while Charybdis destroys everything we know, especially if all I've got to look forward to afterwards is eternity consisting of you, me, and-supposing you're right-Charybdis in some sort of primordial vacuum. If the thought of spending eternity in that company doesn't scare you off, watching the universe and everyone in it fall apart should."
I don't care! Everybody I've known is long dead anyway!
"But you did care! How did it feel, watching the Wraith take your family and being powerless to do anything about it, huh?"
The response was a furious jumble of pain and rage and sorrow that petered out into the mental equivalent of a little boy's whimper. Rodney recalled moments when he himself must have sounded-sounded? — exactly like that, and pushed the memories away with a vengeance, hoping against hope that Ikaros hadn't noticed. And maybe he hadn't. The kid was preoccupied with his own grief.
"I'm sorry." Rodney surprised himself again by meaning it.
After what seemed like decades of silence-funny how it bothered him now, seeing that he'd wanted it for so long-Ikaros finally came back.
You're right.
It was all he said, but apparently it was enough.
As though somebody had thrown a switch, that soothing pool of sunlight winked out. Swirling clouds seemed to collide in the sky, their gray thickening to charcoal to black. With a bone-rattling clap of thunder the skies opened again, releasing a deluge that was like nothing Rodney had ever experienced. Cold, hard pellets of rain were hammering down relentlessly, jumping off the floor of the cage, stinging his face and whipping his skin. On the market below, the crowd flew apart, scattering toward the nearest shelter, their screams of terror or dismay scarcely audible over the roar of the rain.
Charybdis is angry.
"Thanks for telling me. I thought it was just mildly irked."
Chapter twenty
"Radek! Leave!" Selena was shouting it out, but she herself wasn't moving from her terminal.
The holographic image that quivered in front of her work station, at the brink of winking out, showed a schematic of the planet's continental plates. Their drift was now visible with the naked eye, not that Radek Zelenka would have needed a computer to demonstrate that fact to him. He briefly tore his attention away from the figures racing across his own holo-screen, escalating rapidly, and projecting a sequence of events nobody would be able to stop now. Even if the planet's scientific facilities weren't being knocked down like houses of cards. Their own laboratory was no exception.
Ceiling tiles dangled at drunken angles, having ripped loose light fixtures and wiring that snaked halfway to a floor strewn with debris and broken equipment. Windows were shattered, with the exception of one pane that stubbornly hung on in defiance of a crack that split it top to bottom. Across the room a whole section of the wall had caved in about two hours ago. Falling masonry had flattened a slew of instruments, including the monitors for their main seismic sensor array, and half buried a young technician, at the very least cracked a few ribs, at the worst caused severe internal injuries. Two others had volunteered to take her to a hospital that was only four blocks away-in other words, the situation there wouldn't be any different from here, but any speculation on the girl's chances of receiving treatment was moot anyway. Her escorts hadn't returned, so Radek couldn't even tell whether the men and their charge had made it to the hospital in the first place. The safest assumption was that they'd lost three more people in addition to the five who had died from carbon monoxide inhalation the previous night.
"Radek! Move!" The project leader still hadn't moved. Knowing her, she probably didn't intend to. It was her lab, her responsibility, and like the proverbial captain, she was going to go down with the sinking ship.
Not as long as he had anything to do with it. "It's too late, Selena! We have to go! And that means you, too! We-"
"Go where?" she shot back. "No matter what the government tells us, there's nowhere safe, and you know it."
He did. In a last ditch effort to appear to be doing something, the planetary government, or what was left of it, had ordered everyone who'd survived so far-few enough, the global population had been decimated-to evacuate to high ground by morning. Morning was now. They should be leaving, but it didn't make sense. High ground was no safer than anywhere else; this was a disaster that impartially struck everywhere, robbing people of the titillating comfort of watching the devastation in some remote corner of the planet on their news screens and donating to the nearest relief fund by ways of paying admission to the spectacle. The evacuation merely was an attempt to keep the pervasive panic at bay and offer the survivors a scrap of hope and the chance to die with a glimmer of optimism in their eye.
And maybe it was his job to justify that scrap of hope and that glimmer of optimism.
It wasn't just time-honored disaster tradition that had prompted the council to send people into the hills above the city. The ruins of the old Atlantis were situated in those hills, and among the ruins still stood the Stargate-the only potential means of mass evacuation. Of course the council had been briefed regularly, and they knew as well as Radek or Selena what the chances were. They'd been trying to get the gate to work for as long as Radek had been here. Twenty-six years. The lab had been established within days of his dropping out of the event horizon, in the hopes that they could duplicate what he seemed to have achieved. He'd told them, time and time again, that he didn't know how he'd done it. All he could say for certain was that, one moment he'd been on Mykena Quattuor, watching Charybdis going active, and the next he'd landed here. On his own. In a timeline that wasn't his. This much at least was definite, because this was Atlantis-at a time when its inhabitants had either not yet reached or somehow lost their technological advantage. Radek had found himself in the bizarre position of knowing more about Ancient technology than the Ancients. He'd been happy to join the research team at the laboratory, not just for the intellectual challenge but also because getting the Stargate to work was his only way home.