But Gurrutu was simply the best Nemoto could do. And soit was heroic. With such equipment, Nemoto had reachedNeptune — thirty times Earth’s distance from the Sun, ten times farther out than the asteroid belt. Only Malenfant himself, unaided by Gaijin, had gone farther — and his mission had been a one-man stunt. Nemoto had sent two hundred colonists.
As she labored over the lashed-up systems, improvising repairs, Madeleine’s respect for Nemoto deepened.
And, while Madeleine worked, the Earth slid liquidly past the windows of the Gurrutu.
Those old environmentalist Cassandras had been proven right, Madeleine learned. The climate really had been only metastable; in the end, after forty thousand years of digging and building and burning, humans managed to destabilize the world, tip over the whole damn bowl of cherries, until it settled with stunning rapidity into this new, lethal state.
Madeleine could see patterns in the ice — ripples, lines of debris, varying colors — where the ice had flowed from its fastnesses at the poles and the mountain peaks. There was little cloud over the great ice sheets — merely wisps of cirrus, streaked by winds that seemed to tear perpetually around immense low-pressure systems squatting over the frozen poles.
The ice covered most of Canada, and a great tongue of it extended far into the American Midwest, reaching farther south than the Great Lakes — or where the lakes used to be. Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, and the other cities were all gone now, drowned. The familiar lobed shapes of the Great Lakes themselves had been overwhelmed by a new, glimmering ocean that stretched a thousand kilometers inland from the eastern seaboard. And to the west, a ribbon of water stretched up from Puget Sound toward Alaska. The land itself was crushed down under the weight of the ice, and seawater had flowed eagerly into the shallow depressions so formed.
Even to the south of the ice line, the land was grievously damaged. Desert stretched from Oregon through Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa — a belt of immense, rippled sand dunes. It was a place of violent winds, for heavy, cold air poured off the ice over the exposed land, and she saw giant dust storms that persisted for days. At night she saw lights glimmer in the vast expanse, flickering: just campfires lit by descendants of midwestern Americans who must be reduced to living like Bedouins in that great cold desert.
South of the ice, Earth at first glance looked as temperate and habitable as it had always done. She could see green in the tropical areas, coral reefs, ships plying to and fro through warm, ice-free seas. But nowhere was unaffected. The great rain forests of equatorial Africa and the Amazon Basin had shrunk back into isolated pockets, surrounded by swathes of what looked like grasslands. Conversely, the Sahara seemed to be turning green. Even the shapes of the continents had changed as glistening sheets of continental shelves were exposed by the falling sea level.
In the southern United States there were still cities: great misty-gray urban sprawls around the coasts and along the river valleys, from Baja California, along the Mexican border, the Gulf of Mexico, to Florida. But New Orleans seemed to be burning continually, great fires blocks wide sending up black smoke plumes that streaked out over hundreds of kilometers. Likewise, there appeared to be a small war raging around Orlando; she made out what looked like tank tracks, frequent explosions that lit up the night.
It was impossible to gather direct news. Presumably all communication was carried out by land lines or with point-to-point modulated lasers; belatedly, it seemed, the inhabitants of Earth had learned the wisdom of not broadcasting their business to the stars. It did appear, though, that some of these wars had been blazing since before the return of the ice.
The most savage conflict appeared to be occurring in northern Africa, where the population of Eurasia — hundreds of millions — had tried to drain into the southern European countries and the new North African grasslands. But any orderly relocation had long broken down. Huge black craters scarred the Sahara, some of them glimmering as if with puddles of glass; and once she made out the telltale shape of a mushroom cloud, rising like a perfect toy from an ochre African horizon.
And — more sinister still — she could see new forms on Earth’s long-suffering hide. They were great sprawling structures, spiderlike, silvery: not like human cities, more centrally organized, the pieces interconnected, like single buildings spanning tens of kilometers. These were Gaijin colonies. There were several of them in the ice-free middle latitudes, with no sign of human occupancy nearby. There were even a handful on the ice sheets themselves, places no human could survive. Nobody knew what the Gaijin were doing in there.
She felt a cold fury. Couldn’t the Gaijin have done something to stop this, to halt the collapse of her world? If not, why the hell were they here?
Ben said he wanted to go to Earth, to Australia, one last time before he left forever. Madeleine quailed at the idea. That’s not my planet anymore. But she didn’t want to oppose Ben’s complex impulse.
An automated ground-to-orbit shuttle came climbing up to meet them. Nemoto had found someone who had agreed to host them, if briefly.
They skimmed through morning light toward Australia, approaching from the south. They received no calls for identification; there was no attempt at traffic control, nothing from the ground. It was like approaching an uninhabited planet.
They drifted over Sydney. The city was still populated, its suburbs scarred by conflict, but there was no harbor; Sydney had been left beached in the country’s drying interior. The rust-red deserts of the center appeared still more desiccated than before. But she saw no signs of humanity. Alice Springs, for example, was burned out, a husk; nothing moved there.
They skimmed low over the great geological features south of the Alice, Ayers Rock and the Olgas. These were uncompromising lumps of hard, ancient sandstone protruding from the flat desert, extensively carved by megayears of water flows. To the Aborigines, nomads on this unforgiving tabletop landscape, these formations must have been as striking as the medieval cathedrals that had loomed over Europe. And so the Aborigines had made them places of totemic and religious significance, spinning Dreamtime stories from cracks and folds until the rocks became a kind of mythic cinema, frozen in geological time. It had been a triumph of the imagination, she supposed, in a land like a sensory deprivation tank.
This had briefly been a center for tourism. The tourists were long gone now, the Western influence vanished in an instant, a dream of fat and affluence. But the Aborigines had remained. From the air she saw slim figures moving slowly over the landscape, round faces turned up to her vehicle, all as it had been for twelve thousand years — just as Ben had once foreseen, she remembered.
Ben peered from his window, silent, withdrawn.
Perhaps a hundred kilometers south of the Alice, they saw a structure of bright blue, a dot in the desert. A tent.
The shuttle dipped, fell like a brick, and skidded to a halt half a kilometer distant from the tent.
Nobody came to meet them. After a few minutes they climbed down to the ground and walked toward the tent.
The land was an immense orange-red table, the sky a sheet of washed-out blue. There was utter silence here: no bird song, no insects. The Sun was high, ferocious, the heat tremendous and dry. They walked cautiously, unused to Earth’s heavy gravity.