He tried to beg Gretana to run for the nodal point and save herself, but the words died in his throat as he looked beyond her and saw the monstrous, glowering countenance of Ceres now filling an eighth of the sky.
For a moment he tried to resist as Gretana swung herself round to the back of the chair and began pushing him in the direction of Vekrynn and the node, then he realised she was not going to let go and that his suicidal perversity was threatening her life. He urged the chair forward, and Ceres swelled hugely, rushing to meet them, completely outlining the motionless figure of Vekrynn.
Hargate felt Gretana’s left hand close on his. Obeying her unspoken command, he snatched for Vekrynn’s hand, but a shrilling, gibbering voice told him it was already too late…because the whole sky was a convexity of falling rock…
Within twenty seconds of skording to the Bureau’s nearby habitat, Gretana had positioned the wheelchair at one of the solid-image projectors which were providing the Mollanian engineers with a magnified view of the Moon.
But by that time Ceres had already kissed the surface of the Sea of Storms, and had half-exploded, half-blossomed into a spray of whirling fragments which were racing on divergent courses towards the outer darkness of the solar system.
And, although it was not immediately apparent, the Moon had been jolted out of its aeons-old quiescence, and had begun to spin. Destructive stresses were sundering ancient geological strata as they sped towards the Moon’s core.
Hargate watched the spectacle in silence, rediscovering the meanings of words like awe and blasphemy and pride, then he looked up at Gretana. “Do you think Lorrest is right?” he said. “Is this the start of a new age?”
“I don’t see how anybody can hold it back,” she murmured. “Not now. Not on Earth. Not on Mollan.”
“In that case maybe I’d like to go back to Earth, after all,” Hargate said reflectively. “Just for a while.”
Epilogue
It was late afternoon in mid-winter, and a hard clear darkness had moved in over Carsewell and the neighbouring borough of Star City.
Gretana paused on the steps of the Mollanian Embassy to button up the collar of her overcoat, her gaze drifting across the electrically-jewelled architecture of the diplomatic and trade buildings of more than thirty worlds. They were arranged in sweeping crescents around a park containing the low hill which had once been known locally as Cotter’s Edge. In some respects it would have been more convenient to have Star City close to Washington, D.C., but new priorities had dictated that it be built around a major east coast node. Gretana found the ambience of the scene reassuring and, as always, she was prompted to look for a moment at the sky.
The stars were only faintly visible through the wash of urban radiance, but the swarms of irregular moonlets that formed the horizon-to-horizon band across the heavens shone with undimmed lustre. Dissolution of the old Moon had been accelerated by enlightened U.N. policies—all companies to whom mining franchises were awarded had to assist in equalising the orbital distribution of the lunar mass. As a result, even a Mollanian with Gretana’s perceptiveness could sense no real disturbance in the matrix of third-order forces. It was now possible for embryos to grow in peace, for babes to be born in peace.
She turned up her collar against the cold and was about to go down the remaining steps when she saw a figure in a grey one-piece heatsaver ascending towards her. For an instant she thought he was an exceptionally tall Terran, then—with a tingling shock of recognition—she noticed the lean, beard-shadowed face and the sculpted black hair. She stopped abruptly, taken unawares by a conflict of emotions.
“Gretana!” Lorrest’s face registered surprise and pleasure. “I was hoping to get here before you left. How are you?”
“That’s an Earth-style greeting,” she said, with greater coolness than she had intended. “You know a Mollanian is always in peak condition. You’re supposed to say ‘Fair Seasons’.”
“I thought you might have gone native by this time.” He gave her a candid stare, his expression changing to one of seriousness. “Gretana, I’ve just arrived on Earth, and I’ve got to get this out of the way first—do you know the murder charge against me was dropped? My cerebric deposition showed I acted only to save you.”
She avoided his gaze. “I heard that. It was just that actually seeing the…Can’t we forget all about it?”
“Please do. That’s what I had to do to live with myself, and it wasn’t easy. I’ve been doing four decades of rather boring community service on Mollan for my other misdeeds—and there weren’t too many distractions.”
“I knew you’d been sentenced.”
Lorrest shrugged. “I was lucky enough. It would have been ten times as long if Vekrynn’s case hadn’t set off all the changes back there.”
“I haven’t been back to Mollan even once,” Gretana said. “With one thing and another, I haven’t even considered it.”
“Very cosmopolitan,” Lorrest said, looking impressed. “What sort of work do you do?”
“Emigration counselling mostly. Now that we’re pumping longevity agents into the biosphere the population problem is going to get worse for a while. The birth rate is dropping like a stone, as you would expect, and most of the people born here within the last forty years have the ability to skord out—but there’s a lot of work to do.”
“I can imagine,” Lorrest said. “It’s going to be funny to see these people spreading out to other worlds.”
“Funny?” Gretana thought about the way in which the Terrans had been moving out into space for only a few decades, and the demands they had already begun to make, starting with the Earth-type world Vekrynn had found far inside the Attatorian sector. “They’re already a bit restless with the sector system.”
“That’s all right—all systems must adapt to change.”
“Yes, but nobody knows how it’s going to end.”
“That’s good, too.”
“This isn’t a good place to talk,” Gretana said, shivering slightly. “The cafeteria here has quite acceptable Eyrej dewberry juice, if you’ve got time.”
“You remembered my favourite!” Lorrest gave an exaggerated leer. “Does that mean…?”
“It means I’ve got a good memory,” she cut in, indicating the way to the cafeteria at the rear of the building, and wondering why it was that Lorrest was able to disturb her composure with the most casual remark. When they were seated in a booth, with beakers of hot amber-coloured juice before them, she resolved to take a less passive part in the conversation, to give Lorrest less chance to be disconcerting.
“I see,” she said, glancing at him over the rim of her beaker, “that you haven’t had reversal surgery.”
Lorrest toyed with his glass. “I was offered it, but I said no, mainly because I knew I’d be coming back to Earth, and I really want to work with these people. Anyway, things are really changing on Mollan—you can quite often see a Terran on a city street and hardly anybody stares at him. How about you?”
“I had the offer, too, but by then I’d proved to myself that the Lucent Ideal is a parochial concept.” Gretana stared down at the vapour patterns swirling on the surface of her drink. “Besides, I didn’t want a certain character calling me Big-head.”
“I doubt if he’d have been as polite as that.” Lorrest’s face became solemn, childishly wistful. “I’ve got to find out about Denny. How long did…?”
“He lived almost another three years.”
“Did you stay with him?”
“Yes. In fact, we got married. When he came out with the suggestion I was so astonished that I said yes before I realised what was happening.” Gretana tried to smile. “You should have heard the proposal—he ended up by saying he wouldn’t be able to consummate the marriage, only he didn’t put it as delicately as that, but it shouldn’t matter to somebody from a race of undersexed bean-poles.”