“Hey!” Swan said on the common band, and they looked up and saw them approaching. One waved. Swan and Wahram joined them a few minutes later.
“How are you?” Swan said.
“Happy to be alive,” said the one holding an arm. “I got hit on the arm!”
“I can see. Let’s get back to the city.”
“What happened?”
“A meteor hit the tracks, it looked like.”
“How could that be?”
“I don’t know. Come on!”
Without further discussion the five of them began walking at speed toward the tracks, striding along in a Martian lope that made the best of the local g. Wahram was all right at it because of his time on Titan, which was about half as heavy as this, but similar enough. Together they bounded down the mild slope, angling eastward to intercept the city as soon as possible. There was a strange keening in Wahram’s ear, an animal moan of distress; at first he thought it was the hurt sunwalker, but then realized it was Swan. Of course it was her city, her home.
They came over a rise that gave them a view of the top half of the city’s dome, bulging over the horizon like the blue bubble of a pocket universe. The city appeared to be moving still. “The tracks ahead of it are damaged,” he said.
“Yes, of course!”
“Is there a way for it to get past a section of broken track?”
“No! How would that work?”
“I don’t know, I’m just… wondering. It seems like most support systems try to avoid criticalities.”
“Of course. But the tracks are protected, there’s an anti-meteor system!”
“It must not have worked?”
“Apparently not!” Again she cried out, a piercing sound in his ear even when damped by his suit’s intercom.
The sunwalkers were chattering among themselves, sounding worried.
“What will we do when we get to it?” Wahram asked on the common band.
Swan stopped groaning and said, “What do you mean?”
“Are there lifeboats? You know-rovers to drive to the nearest spaceport?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Enough for everyone?”
“Yes!”
“And are there spaceships enough at the nearest spaceport? Enough for the whole population of Terminator?”
“There’s shelter in all the spaceports, enough to hold a lot of people. And vehicles to go west to the next ones. And some hoppers can handle being on the brightside.”
As they hurried across the black rubbly plain, Terminator slowly hove up over the horizon. The upper half of the interior of the Dawn Wall was now visible, looking much steeper than it really was, all whitewashed walls and trees. A thick bar of green marked the treetops of the park. Extending forward from the trees were the crops of the farm. A snow globe on silver tracks, headed to its doom. They could see no people in the city, even though it was now looming above them. Certainly no one was on the terraces of the Dawn Wall anymore. It looked abandoned.
And there was no way to get up into it. The platform had been in the impact zone. Everyone who had been at the concert must have been killed. Inside the city they could see a trio of deer: buck, doe, fawn. Swan’s cries pitched up an octave. “ No. No! ”
It was strange to be standing there, looking up at the empty city’s Mediterranean calm.
Swan ran under the tracks to the north side of the city, and the rest of them followed. From that side they could see a little convoy of ground vehicles far to the north and west, rolling away from them through the break in Beethoven’s northwest wall. The cars were fast, and soon over the horizon.
“They’ve left,” Wahram observed.
“Yes yes. Pauline?”
“I suppose we could walk to the spaceport?” Wahram said, worried.
Swan was talking to her internal qube, however, and Wahram couldn’t follow the gist of the exchange. Her tone of voice was utterly caustic.
She broke off that argument and said to him, “The cars aren’t coming back. The city will stop automatically when it hits the break in the tracks. We have to leave. Every tenth platform has elevators that go down to shelters under the tracks, so we have to get to one of those.”
“How near is the closest one to the west?”
“About ninety kilometers. The town just passed one back to the east.”
“Ninety kilometers!”
“Yes. We’ll need to go east. It’s only nine kilometers. Our suits will handle the sunlight for the time it will take us.”
Wahram said, “Maybe we could walk the ninety.”
“No we couldn’t, what do you mean?”
“I think we could. People have done it.”
“Athletes who have trained for it have done it. I do enough walking to know, and maybe I could do it, but you couldn’t. You can’t do it by willpower alone. And this sunwalker is hurt. No, listen, we’ll be all right going into the sunlight. It’s just the corona we’ll be exposed to, and no more than an hour or a little more. I’ve done it often.”
“I’d rather not.”
“You have no choice! Come on, the longer we dither, the longer we’ll be exposed!”
That was true.
“All right, then,” he said, and felt his heart pound inside him.
She turned around, held out her arms up to the city, groaned like an animal. “Oh, my town, my town, ohhhh… We’ll come back! We’ll rebuild! Ohhhhh… ”
Behind the glassy face mask her face was wet with tears. She noticed him watching her and swung a hand back as if to strike at him. “Come on, we have to go!” She gestured to the three sunwalkers. “Come on!”
As they started running east, Swan howled over the common band, a sound like an alarm siren that had done its duty but continued on in the emptiness after a disaster. The figure running before him did not seem capable of generating such a terrible sound, which stuck him like pins in the ears. A lot of animals had no doubt been left behind inside-the whole little terrarium, a community of plants and animals. And she designed such things. And this one was her home. Suddenly her howl made it clear to him that saving the humans of the place was not really enough. So much got left behind. A whole world. If a world dies, its people don’t matter anymore-so the howl seemed to say.
Dawn kept coming, as always.
N ow this was an interesting matter: could he modulate his fear, rein it in and use it to impel him at the optimum pace for the quickest arrival at the platform out there to the east, in the raw light of daybreak? And did that pace match the pace that was going to be set for him by the person he was following? For Swan was moaning still, crying and cursing, keening in a rhythm that was keyed to her running; she bounced forward on the impact of her strides, perhaps helpless to go slower; and yet she was moving faster than he could match. He had to give ground and keep to his own pace, and hope that he would at least be able to keep the distance close enough that he wouldn’t lose her over the horizon. Although of course the tracks would lead him right to the platform, so even if she disappeared over the horizon, that should not matter. And yet he did not want to lose sight of her. The three sunwalkers were already a considerable distance ahead of her, even the one with the hurt arm. So maybe the unhappy noise she was making was in fact slowing her down.
The land dipped and rose here in such a way that he could see many kilometers to the north, and the highlands in that direction were now all ablaze with sunlight. That lit part of the landscape threw light over the shadowed terrain they ran in, and Wahram saw the rumples in the land, and the rubble on it, better than he had ever seen anything before, not just on Mercury but anywhere. Everything looked coated by a layer of friable powder, no doubt the result of the daily bake and freeze.
