The police had stopped Marlon’s house from spinning, he realized, for safety reasons. With centrifugal “gravity” pressing everything to the hull—or out through the holes the energy beam had punched in it—there would be a risk of flung debris or even outright disintegration of the house, like a merry-go-round whose bolts had all come undone.
“You’ve despun it,” Bruno said to one of the Shiaos, and though the Shiao was “below” or “behind” him and had no direct cue that he was the one being spoken to, the reply was immediate. “Yes, sir. To facilitate docking. Watch your step, please.”
This exchange of words had a soothing effect on Bruno, who hadn’t realized he was in need of soothing, hadn’t realized quite how difficult and uncomfortable and not-a-game this business was going to be. He wondered if it mightn’t be easier to disengage the boot grapples and simply launch himself up the tube, to rise like a soda bubble through the hole in Marlon’s floor. But probably, if that were easiest, they’d have told him to do it. There was of course the problem of stopping.
Her Majesty’s first robot walked up the side of the tube and around its upper lip as if this were the most natural thing in the worlds, and then Tamra herself did likewise, and then the other robot. Bruno, when his turn came, found the maneuver less difficult than it looked. Really, it was a matter of ankles and calf muscles, of letting the boots pull flat against whatever surface was handy, and of keeping ones leg—and with it the rest of the body—aligned. He marveled again at how supple these suits were. Thick enough to feel sturdy and safe as two winter coats with a suit of armor in between, they nonetheless flexed and twisted quite readily, as if shrinking away from the areas under compression—such as the insides of joints—and in turn rushing to the areas under tension, somehow adding length there, so that the fabric needn’t stretch or tighten.
Marlon’s house, alas, was a mess inside. Power had failed, leaving the interior dark save for starlight streaming in through one gaping hole, and sunlight tinting the edges of the other, and between them the wandering flashlight and headlight beams of white-space-suited evidence technicians, a dozen of whom swarmed the wreckage like bizarre creatures of the deepest ocean. Where a few hours ago there’d been marvels here, or at least architectural curiosities, now there were simply floating debris and the stubs of pillars and the empty foundations of buildings.
It looks more like Athens than ever, he thought suddenly. He nearly said it out loud, to God knew what effect on Marlon, but keeping the observation inside made it seem all the more insistently true. The real Athens, the contemporary one, preserved its temples and Acropolis forever in their twenty-first century state of ruin, lighting them up at night with floodlights and search beams…
Well, in an earlier age, at least. Bruno hadn’t been to Athens in more than eighty years, almost before the Queendom’s founding, and hadn’t heard even the slightest news of it since moving up to his little planet in the Kuiper Belt. By now, he supposed the city could look like anything: a dome or a beehive or a forest of sky-scraping towers, perhaps even a restoration of its dusty classical grandeur. There was no limit to what people could do these days, or at any rate there shouldn’t be.
“Wow,” Vivian said as she clambered up beside Bruno. “Look at this place. What a terrible shame.”
“You should have seen it before,” Marlon, who was right behind her, said. The words came slowly, and the bitterness fell away from his voice in midsentence, leaving only surprise and regret and, it seemed, finally some giddy realization that he was lucky to be alive.
Time doubled back on Bruno for a moment; he recalled the Sabadell-Andorra event, ninety-two seconds of explosive shaking that had toppled trees and structures throughout the Ter valley. There’d been so much fear, so much damage, so much injury and death, a whole population battered out of its smug, suburban complacency. He remembered his neighbors standing on broken alley pavement, bitterly arguing and complaining about this and that crack in their house’s foundation until a man from across the street—whose name they had never known—walked over and handed them a peach.
“Bruised,” he said. “Won’t last an hour. Better eat it quick.” And then he’d walked back to his own house, a pile of shattered brick, to continue shoveling for anything salvageable. Then his neighbors had noticed Bruno looking at them, and had turned away with a funny kind of shame or guilt in their faces. Guilt at having survived. Bruno, overcome with quiet, unfocused affection, forgave them for it immediately.
That was how it had gone: the ones who lost everything, whose lives were separated completely from the material possessions that had seemed to define them, were the ones who somehow managed to take it in stride. Himself included, in a way, although it took some time to realize that Enzo and Bernice were not disgraced or somehow forgotten by his pursuit of happiness. That had been a terrible year—being a fifteen-year-old University student without parents, without a home—but by the following spring it had begun to seem like they’d simply stepped back, giving him the room he needed to grow.
He doubted there would ever be another disaster of comparable scale, on Earth or anywhere else—the Queendom was simply too safe a place for that. But perhaps, one way or another, there’d always be this scene: a man surveying the ruins of his home with sudden, passionate equanimity.
“You should have seen it,” Marlon said again, now with pride. He raised an arm to point. “I had olive trees over there. All down through here was running water and marble walls. Actual marble; I had it shipped up from Earth.”
“We’ll rebuild it,” Tamra promised, laying a purple-gloved hand on Marlon’s shoulder. “I’ll send my finest architect.”
Marlon managed a laugh that was only partly hollow. “There are no backups, Majesty—no complete record of the structure anywhere. Some photographs were published in my last biography, but that’s all. I didn’t want it duplicated, you see. Imitated, perhaps, but never duplicated. Even I don’t remember every detail. Ah, damn it, I’ll miss this place.”
And then his eyes misted with tears, and Bruno suddenly remembered that from the earthquake as well. Equanimity could be a fragile thing.
“We’ll build something different, then,” Tamra said gently.
“Yes. I suppose we will.”
Tamra’s hand still rested on Marlon’s thick shoulder padding; he probably couldn’t feel it, but certainly he could see it in his rearview mirrors. He knew it was there, and indeed something seemed to pass between the two of them, using that arm as a conduit. Bruno was uncomfortably reminded that Marlon Sykes had been Philander before him, and had, cumulatively, spent decades longer in Tamra’s presence than Bruno ever had.
“Come,” Bruno said softly, bending close to little Vivian as if to whisper in her ear. “Let’s, ah, examine the area, the two of us.”
One can’t whisper over an open frequency, though, not to one person. Marlon and Tamra both looked sharply at him, annoyed about something. Well, humph, what was he supposed to do? It seemed like a private moment, one they were certainly both entitled to, but was he to pretend he didn’t exist? To ignore their business here and stand around quietly until they were finished?
“Switch to Police Five,” Vivian said, in a tone that echoed Bruno’s murmur but was simultaneously commanding and self-conscious, as if she were covering or apologizing for a mistake he’d made.