but there was only so much you could do to coerce someone who was going to die anyway.
So more often than not, they carried away the mother's body with her daughter's, the father with the son.
The survivors, Akon knew, would regret that far more vehemently, once they were closer to the Superhappy point of view.
Just as they would regret not eating the tiny bodies of the infants.
A hiss went up from the crowd, the intake of a thousand breaths. Akon looked up, and he saw in the sky the cloud of ships, dispersing from the direction of the Sun and the Huygens starline. Even at this distance they twinkled faintly. Akon guessed - and as one ship grew closer, he knew that he was right -
that the Superhappy ships were no longer things of pulsating ugliness, but gently shifting iridescent crystal, designs that both a human and a Babyeater would find beautiful. The Superhappies had been swift to follow through on their own part of the bargain. Their new aesthetic senses would already be an intersection of three worlds' tastes.
The ship drew closer, overhead. It was quieter in the air than even the most efficient human ships, twinkling brightly and silently; the way that someone might imagine a star in the night sky would look close up, if they had no idea of the truth.
The ship stopped, hovering above the roads, between the buildings.
Other bright ships, still searching for their destinations, slid by overhead like shooting stars.
Long, graceful iridescent tendrils extended from the ship, down toward the crowd. One of them came toward his own balcony, and Akon saw that it was marked with the curves of a door.
The crowd didn't break, didn't run, didn't panic. The screams failed to spread, as the strong hugged the weak and comforted them. That was something to be proud of, in the last moments of the old
humanity.
The tendril reaching for Akon halted just before him. The door marked at its end dilated open.
And wasn't it strange, now, the crowd was looking up at him.
Akon took a deep breath. He was afraid, but -
There wasn't much point in standing here, going on being afraid, experiencing futile disutility.
He stepped through the door, into a neat and well-lighted transparent capsule.
The door slid shut again. Without a lurch, without a sound, the capsule moved up toward the alien ship.
One last time, Akon thought of all his fear, of the sick feeling in his stomach and the burning that was becoming a pain in his throat. He pinched himself on the arm, hard, very hard, and felt the warning signal telling him to stop.
Goodbye, Akon thought; and the tears began falling down his cheek, as though that one silent word had, for the very last time, broken his heart.
END
(7/8) True Ending: Sacrificial Fire
Standing behind his target, unnoticed, the Ship's Confessor had produced from his sleeve the tiny
stunner - the weapon which he alone on the ship was authorized to use, if he made a determination of outright mental breakdown. With a sudden motion, his arm swept outward -
- and anesthetized the Lord Akon.
Akon crumpled almost instantly, as though most of his strings had already been cut, and only a few last strands had been holding his limbs in place.
Fear, shock, dismay, sheer outright surprise: that was the Command Conference staring aghast at the Confessor.
From the hood came words absolutely forbidden to originate from that shadow: the voice of command.
"Lord Pilot, take us through the starline back to the Huygens system. Get us moving now, you are on the critical path. Lady Sensory, I need you to enforce an absolute lockdown on all of this ship's communication systems except for a single channel under your direct control. Master of Fandom, get me proxies on the assets of every being on this ship. We are going to need capital."
For a moment, the Command Conference was frozen, voiceless and motionless, as everyone waited for
someone else do to something.
And then -
"Moving the Impossible now, my lord," said the Lord Pilot. His face was sane once again. "What's your plan?"
"He is not your lord!" cried the Master of Fandom. Then his voice dropped. "Excuse me. Confessor -
it did not appear to me that our Lord Administrator was insane. And you, of all people, cannot just seize power -"
"True," said the one, "Akon was sane. But he was also an honest man who would keep his word once he gave it, and that I could not allow. As for me - I have betrayed my calling three times over, and am no longer a Confessor." With that same response, the once-Confessor swept back the hood -
At any other time, the words and the move and the revealed face would have provoked shock to the
point of fainting. On this day, with the whole human species at stake, it seemed merely interesting.
Chaos had already run loose, madness was already unleashed into the world, and a little more seemed of little consequence.
"Ancestor," said the Master, "you are twice prohibited from exercising any power here."
The former Confessor smiled dryly. "Rules like that only exist within our own minds, you know.
Besides," he added, "I am not steering the future of humanity in any real sense, just stepping in front of a bullet. That is not even advice, let alone an order. And it is... appropriate... that I, and not any of you, be the one who orders this thing done -"
"Fuck that up the ass with a hedge trimmer," said the Lord Pilot. "Are we going to save the human species or not?"
There was a pause while the others figured out the correct answer.
Then the Master sighed, and inclined his head in assent to the once-Confessor. "I shall follow your orders... kiritsugu."
Even the Kiritsugu flinched at that, but there was work to be done, and not much time in which to do it.
In the Huygens system, the Impossible Possible World was observed to return from its much-heralded expedition, appearing on the starline that had shown the unprecedented anomaly. Instantly, without a clock tick's delay, the Impossible broadcast a market order.
That was already a dozen ways illegal. If the Impossible had made a scientific discovery, it should have broadcast the experimental results openly before attempting to trade on them. Otherwise the
result was not profit but chaos, as traders throughout the market refused to deal with you; just
conditioning on the fact that you wanted to sell or buy from them, was reason enough for them not to.
The whole market seized up as hedgers tried to guess what the hidden experimental results could have been, and which of their counterparties had private information.
The Impossible ignored the rules. It broadcast the specification of a new prediction contract, signed with EMERGENCY OVERRIDE and IMMINENT HARM and CONFESSOR FLAG - signatures that
carried extreme penalties, up to total confiscation, for misuse; but any one of which ensured that the contract would appear on the prediction markets at almost the speed of the raw signal.
The Impossible placed an initial order on the contract backed by nearly the entire asset base of its crew.
The prediction's plaintext read:
In three hours and forty-one minutes, the starline between Huygens and Earth will become