Before her he felt weak, immature. He clung to her, burying his face in the soft warmth of her neck.
Nineteen days, he thought. We still have nineteen days. He determined to cherish every minute.
But as it turned out they had much less time than that.
Once again he was woken in the dark. But this time his room lights were snapped full on, dazzling him. And it was the face of Pharaoh Andres that hovered in the air beside his bed. He sat up, baffled, his system heavy with sedative.
‘—thirty minutes. You have thirty minutes to get to Ship Three. Wear your skinsuit. Bring nothing else. If you aren’t there in thirty minutes, twenty-nine forty-five, we leave without you.’
At first he couldn’t take in what she said. He found himself staring at her face. Her head was hairless, her scalp bald, her eyebrows and even her eyelashes gone. Her skin was oddly smooth, her features small; she didn’t look young, but as if her face had sublimated with time, like Port Sol’s ice landscapes, leaving this palimpsest. She was rumoured to be two hundred years old.
‘Don’t acknowledge this message, just move. We lift in twenty-nine minutes. If you are Ship Three crew, you have twenty-nine minutes to get to—’
She had made a mistake: that was his first thought. Had she forgotten that there were still sixteen days to go before the Coalition ships were due? But he could see from her face there was no mistake.
Twenty-nine minutes. He reached down to his bedside cabinet, pulled out a nano pill and gulped it down dry. Reality bleached, becoming cold and stark.
He dragged on his skinsuit and sealed it roughly. He glanced around his room, at his bed, his few pieces of furniture, the Virtual unit on the dresser with its images of Lora. Bring nothing. Andres wasn’t a woman you disobeyed in the slightest particular.
Without looking back he left the room.
The corridor outside was bedlam. A thousand people shared this under-the-ice habitat, and all of them seemed to be out tonight. They ran this way and that, many in skinsuits, some hauling bundles of gear. He pushed his way through the throng. The sense of panic was tangible – and, carried on the recycled air, he thought he could smell burning.
His heart sank. It was obviously a scramble to escape – but the only way off the moon was the Ships, which could take no more than a thousand. Had the sudden curtailing of the time left triggered this panic? In this ultimate emergency had the citizens of Port Sol lost all their values, all their sense of community? What could they hope to achieve by hurling themselves at Ships that had no room for them, but to bring everybody down with them? But what would I do? He could afford the luxury of nobility; he was getting out of here.
Twenty minutes.
He reached the perimeter concourse. Here, surface transports nuzzled against a row of simple airlocks. Some of the locks were already open, and people were crowding in, pushing children, bundles of luggage. His own car was still here, he saw with relief. He pulled open his skinsuit glove and hastily pressed his palm to the wall. The door hissed open.
But before he could pass through, somebody grabbed his arm.
A man faced him, a stranger, short, burly, aged perhaps forty. Behind him a woman clutched a small child and an infant. The adults had blanket-wrapped bundles on their backs. The man wore an electric-blue skinsuit, but his family were in hab clothes.
The man said desperately, ‘Friend, you have room in that thing?’
‘No,’ Rusel said.
The man’s eyes hardened. ‘Listen. The pharaohs’ spies got it wrong. Suddenly the Coalition is only seven days out. Look, friend, you can see how I’m fixed. The Coalition breaks up families, doesn’t it? All I’m asking is for a chance on the Ships.’
‘But there won’t be room for you. Don’t you understand? And even if there were—’ There were to be no children on the Ships at launch: that was the pharaohs’ harsh rule. In the first years of the long voyage, everybody aboard had to be maximally productive. The time for breeding would come later.
The man’s fist bunched. ‘Listen, friend—’
Rusel shoved the man in the chest. He fell backwards, stumbling against his children. His blanket bundle broke open, and goods spilled on the floor: clothes, diapers, children’s toys.
‘Please.’ The woman approached him, stepping over her husband. She held out a baby. ‘Don’t let the Coalition take him away. Please.’
The baby was warm, soft, smiling. Rusel automatically reached out. But he stopped himself cold, and turned away.
He pushed into his car, slammed shut the door, and stabbed a preset routine into the control panel. The woman with the baby continued to call after him. How could I do that? I’m no longer human, he thought.
The car ripped itself away from the airlock interface, ignoring all safety protocols, and began to haul itself on its bubble wheels up the ramp from the under-the-ice habitat to the surface. Shaking, Rusel opened his visor. He might be able to see the doomed family at the airlock port. He didn’t look back.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Andres’s Virtual head coalesced before him. ‘Sixteen minutes to get to Ship Three. If you’re not there we go without you. Fifteen forty-five. Fifteen forty…’
The surface was almost as chaotic as the corridors of the hab, as transports of all types and ages rolled, crawled or jumped. There was no sign of the Enforcers, the pharaohs’ police force, and he was apprehensive about being held up in the crush.
He made it through the crowd and headed for the track that would lead through the Forest of Ancestors to Ship Three. Out here there was a lot of traffic, but it was more or less orderly, everyone heading out the way he was. He pushed the car up to its safety-regulated maximum speed. Even so, he was continually overtaken. Anxiety tore at his stomach.
The Forest, with the placid profiles of the Ancestors glimmering in Sol’s low light, looked unchanged from when he had last seen it, only days ago, on his way to meet Lora. He felt an unreasonable resentment that he had suddenly lost so much time, that his careful plan for an extended farewell to Lora had been torn up. He wondered where she was now. Perhaps he could call her.
Thirteen minutes. No time, no time.
The traffic ahead was slowing. The vehicles at the back of the queue weaved, trying to find gaps, and bunched into a solid pack.
Rusel punched his control panel and brought up a Virtual overhead image. Ahead of the tangle of vehicles, a ditch had been cut roughly across the road. People swarmed, hundreds of them. Roadblock.
Eleven minutes. For a moment his brain seemed as frozen as Port Sol ice; frantic, bewildered, filled with guilt, he couldn’t think.
Then a heavy-duty long-distance truck broke out of the pack behind him. Veering off the road to the left, it began to smash its way through the Forest. The elegant eightfold forms of the Ancestors were nothing but ice sculptures, and they shattered before the truck’s momentum. It was ugly, and Rusel knew that each impact wiped out a life that might have lasted centuries more. But the truck was clearing a path.
Rusel hauled at his controls, and dragged his car off the road. Only a few vehicles were ahead of him in the truck’s destructive wake. The truck was moving fast, and he was able to push his speed higher.
They were already approaching the roadblock, he saw. A few suit lights moved off the road and into the Forest, to stand in the path of the lead truck; the blockers must be enraged to see their targets evade them so easily. Rusel kept his speed high. Only a few more seconds and he would be past the worst.