the melt closer and closer to the surface. At the bottom of the display, the Peacer bobble floated, serene and untouched. On this scale, its motion towards the surface was imperceptible.
Wil pulled his attention from the display and looked beyond the amphitheater. There was no change: the northern horizon was still haze and pale blue. The rescue site was fifteen hundred kilometers away, but even so, he'd expected something spectacular. The minutes passed. A cool breeze swept slow around the theater, rustling the almost-jacarandas that bounded the stage, sending the perfume of their large flowers across the audience. A family of spiders in one tree had built a for-show web in its upper branches. The web silk gleamed in rainbow colors against the sky.
The elapsed-time clock on the display showed almost four minutes. The Korolev pattern of bomb bursts was still thousands of meters short of the surface.
President Fraley rose from his seat. 'Madame Korolev, please. There is still time to stop this. I know you've rescued all types, cranks, joyriders, criminals, victims. But these are
Yelen Korolev glanced down at Fraley but didn't reply. The New Mexican stiffened, then waved abruptly to his people. One hundred men and women-most in NM fatigues-came quickly to their feet. It was a dramatic gesture, if nothing else: the amphitheater would be almost empty with them gone.
'Mr. President, I suggest you and the others sit back down.' (t was Marta Korolev. Her tone was as pleasant as ever, but the insult in the words brought a flush to Steve Fraley's face. He gestured angrily and turned to the stone steps that led from the theater.
Wil was more inclined to take her words literally: Yelen might use sarcasm and imperious authority, but Marta usually meant her advice only to help. He looked again to the north. Over the jungle slopes there was a wavering, a rippling. Oops. With sudden understanding, Wil slid onto a nearby bench.
The ground shock arrived an instant later. It was a soundless, rolling motion that took Fraley's feet right out from under him. Steve's lieutenants quickly helped him up, but the man was livid. He glared death at Marta, then stomped quickly-and carefully-up the steps. He didn't notice Wil till he was almost past him. The Republic of New Mexico kept a special place in its fecal pantheon for W. W. Brierson; having Wil witness this humiliation was the last straw. Then the generals hustled their President on. Those who followed glared briefly at Brierson, or avoided looking at him entirely.
Their departing footsteps came clearly from beyond the amphitheater. Seconds later they had fired up the engines on their armored personnel carriers and were rumbling off to their part of town. All through this, the earthquake continued. For someone who had grown up in Michigan, it was uncanny. The rolling, rocking motion was almost silent. But the birds were silent too, and the spiders on the for-show web motionless. From deep within the castle's stonework there was creaking.
On the transect, magma red had nearly reached the surface. The tiny lights that represented bombs flickered just below ground, and the last yellow of solid earth just... evaporated.
Still the nuking continued, carving a wide red sea.
And finally there was action on the northern horizon. Finally there was direct evidence of the cataclysm there. The pale blue was lit again and again by something very bright, something that punched through the haze like a sunrise trying to happen. Just above the flashes a band of white, almost like a second horizon, slowly rose. The top had been blown off the northern foothills of the Kampuchean Alps.
A sigh spread through the audience. Wil looked down, saw several people pointing upwards. Faintly purple, barely brighter than the sky, the wraith extended almost straight overhead from north to south. A daytime aurora?
Strange lightning flickered on the slopes below the castle. The air in the amphitheater was charged with static electricity, yet all was unholy silent. The sound of the rescue would conic loud even from fifteen hundred kilometers around the earth, but that sound was still an hour away, chugging across the Kampuchean Alps towards the Inland Sea.
And the Peacer bobble, like flotsam loosed from ice by a summer sun, was free to float to the surface.
TWO
Everyone agreed with Marta that the show had been impressive. Many didn't realize that the 'show' wouldn't end with one afternoon of fireworks. The curtain calls would go on for some time, much more dismal than impressive.
The rescue blasting had been about a hundred times as energetic as the nineteenth-century Krakatoa blow-off. Billions of tonnes of ash and rock were pumped into the stratosphere that afternoon. The sun was a rare sight in the days that followed, at best a dim reddish disk through the murk. In Korolev, there was a heavy frost on the ground every morning. The almost-jacarandas were wilted and dying. Their spider families were dead or moved to burrows. Even in the jungles along the coast, temperatures rarely got above fourteen degrees now.
It rained most of every day-but not water: the dust was settling out. When it came down dry, it was like gray-brown snow, piling obscene drifts on houses and trees and the bodies of small animals; the New Mexicans ruined the last of their jetcopters learning what rock dust does to turbines. Things were even worse when it came down wet, a black fluid that changed the drifts to mud. It was small consolation that the bombs were clean, and the dust a 'natural product.'
Korolev robots quickly rebuilt the monorails.
