Now, Morrissey saw, that iron band of urban sprawl was cut again and again by intrusions of dense underbrush. Great patches of orange and yellow foliage already had begun to smother highways, airports, commercial plazas, residential suburbs.
What the jungle had begun, he thought, the earthquake would finish.
On the third day Morrissey saw Hansonia Island ahead of him, a dark orange slash against the breast of the sea, and soon the flitter was making its approach to the airstrip at Port Kato on the big island’s eastern shore. Morrissey tried to make radio contact but got only static and silence. He decided to land anyway.
Hansonia had never had much of a human population. It had been set aside from the beginning as an ecological-study laboratory, because its population of strange life-forms had developed in isolation from the mainland for thousands of years, and somehow it had kept its special status even in Medea’s boom years.
A few groundcars were parked at the airstrip. Morrissey found one that still held a charge, and ten minutes later he was in Port Kato.
The place stank of red mildew. The buildings, wicker huts with thatched roofs, were failing apart. Angular trees of a species Morrissey did not know sprouted everywhere, in the streets, on rooftops, in the crowns of other trees. A cool hard-edged wind was blowing out of Farside. Two fuxes, four-leg females herding some young six-leggers, wandered out of a tumbledown warehouse,and stared at him in what surely was astonishment. Their pelts were so blue they seemed black—the island species, different from mainlanders.
“You come back?” one asked. Local accent, too.
“Just for a visit. Are there any humans here?”
“You,” said the other fux. He thought they laughed at him. “Ground shake soon. You know?”
“I know,” he said.
They nuzzled their young and wandered away.
For three hours Morrissey explored the town, holding himself aloof from emotion, not letting the rot and decay and corruption get to him. It looked as if the place had been abandoned at least fifty years. More likely only five or six, though.
Late in the day he entered a small house where the town met the forest and found a functioning personacube setup.
The cubes were clever things. You could record yourself in an hour or so—facial gestures, motion habits, voice, speech patterns. Scanners identified certain broad patterns of mental response and coded those into the cube, too. What the cube playback provided was a plausible imitation of a human being, the best possible memento of a loved one or friend or mentor, an electronic phantom programmed to absorb data and modify its own program, so that it could engage in conversation, ask questions, pretend to be the person who had been cubed. A soul in a box, a cunning device.
Morrissey jacked the cube into its receptor slot. The screen displayed a thin-lipped man with a high forehead and a lean, agile body. “My name is Leopold Brannum,” he said at once. “My specialty is xenogenetics. What year is this?”
“It’s ‘97, autumn,” Morrissey said. “Ten weeks and a bit before the earthquake.”
“And who are you?”
“Nobody particular. I just happen to be visiting Port Kato and I felt like talking to someone.”
“So talk,” Brannum said. “What’s going on in Port Kato?”
“Nothing. It’s pretty damned quiet here. The place is empty.”
“The whole town’s been evacuated?”
“The whole planet, for all I know. Just me and the fuxes and the balloons still around. When did you leave, Brannum?”
“Summer of ‘92,’ said the man in the cube.
“I don’t see why everyone ran away so early. There wasn’t any chance the earthquake would come before the predicted time.”
“I didn’t run away,” Brannum said coldly. “I left Port Kato to continue my research by other means.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I went to join the balloons,” Brannum said.
Morrissey caught his breath. The words touched his soul with wintry bleakness.
“My wife did that,” he said after a moment. “Perhaps you know her now. Nadia Dutoit—she was from Chong, originally—”
The face on the screen smiled sourly. “You don’t seem to realize,” Brannum said, “that I’m only a recording.”
“Of course. Of course.”
“I don’t know where your wife is now. I don’t even know where I am now. I can only tell you that wherever we are, it’s in a place of great peace, of utter harmony.”
“Yes. Of course.” Morrissey remembered the terrible day when Nadia told him that she could no longer resist the spiritual communion of the aerial creatures, that she was going off to seek entry into the collective mind of the Ahya. All through the history of Medea some colonists had done that. No one had ever seen any of them again. Their souls, people said, were absorbed, and their bodies lay buried somewhere beneath the dry ice of Farside. Toward the end the frequency of such defections had doubled and doubled and doubled again, thousands of colonists every month giving themselves up to whatever mystic engulfment the balloons offered. To Morrissey it was only a form of suicide; to Nadia, to Brannum, to all those other hordes, it had been the path to eternal bliss. Who was to say? Better to undertake the uncertain journey into the great mind of the Ahya, perhaps, than to set out in panicky flight for the alien and unforgiving world that was Earth. “I hope you’ve found what you were looking for,” Morrissey said. “I hope she has.”
He unjacked the cube and went quickly away.
He flew northward over the fog-streaked sea. Below him were the floating cities of the tropical waters, that marvelous tapestry of rafts and barges. That must be Port Backside down there, he decided—a sprawling intricate tangle of foliage under which lay the crumbling splendors of one of Medea’s greatest cities. Kelp choked the waterways. There was no sign of human life down there and he did not land.
Pellucidar, on the mainland, was empty also. Morrissey spent four days there, visiting the undersea gardens, treating himself to a concert in the famous Hall of Columns, watching the suns set from the top of Crystal Pyramid. That last evening dense drifts of balloons, hundreds of them, flew oceanward above him. He imagined he heard them calling to him in soft sighing whispers, saying, I am Nadia. Come to me. There’s still time. Give yourself up to us, dear love. I am Nadia.
Was it only imagination? The Ahya were seductive. They had called to Nadia, and ultimately Nadia had gone to them. Brannum had gone. Thousands had gone. Now he felt the pull himself, and it was real. For an instant it was tempting. Instead of perishing in the quake, life eternal—of a sort. Who knew what the balloons really offered? A merging, a loss of self, a transcendental bliss—or was it only delusion, folly, had the seekers found nothing but a quick death in the icy wastes? Come to me. Come to me. Either way, he thought, it meant peace.
I am Nadia. Come to me.
He stared a long while at the bobbing shimmering globes overhead, and the whispers grew to a roar in his mind.