I guess. As soon as the sun hit, the plants would begin to die. They’ll be dead by now, all the plants and animals, even the bacteria and such. We’ll have to rebuild it.”
“Maybe,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I think they’ll want to understand what happened to the tracks, and feel they are in a position to stop it happening again. Or else build to a different design. Free the city from its tracks, maybe, and roll over the landscape on wheels.”
“That would require some locomotion,” she pointed out. “As it is, the expansion of the tracks drives the city forward.”
“Well, it will be interesting to see what happens, then.” Wahram hesitated. “It would be pointless to rebuild and then have a recurrence.”
“If it was a low-likelihood accident, then a recurrence wouldn’t be likely.”
“I was under the impression that all such happenstances were already guarded against.”
“Me too. Are you suggesting that it was some kind of attack?”
“Yes, well, I’ve been thinking about that, anyway. I mean, consider what happened to us on Io.”
“But who would want to attack Terminator?” she demanded. “Attack it and yet miss it by a few kilometers, killing the town but leaving the people alive?”
“I don’t know,” Wahram said uneasily. “There’s been talk about the conflict between Earth and Mars, how it could even lead to war.”
“Yes,” she said, “but the talk always goes on to declare this impossible, because everyone is so vulnerable. Mutual assured destruction, as always.”
“I’ve always wondered about that,” Wahram admitted. “What if a first strike is made to look like an accident, and is so successful that no one knows who did it, and meanwhile the victim is mostly vaporized? A scenario like that might make one think there is not any certain mutually assured destruction.”
“Who would feel that way?” Swan asked.
“Almost any power on Earth could make the calculation. They’re safer than any of us. And Mars is notoriously self-absorbed, and also can’t be punctured with a single dart. No, I’m not convinced there can’t be a power out there that harbors a feeling of invulnerability. Or an anger so great they don’t care about consequences.”
“What could that be, though?” Swan said. “What causes that kind of anger?”
“I don’t know… say food, water, land… power… prestige… ideology… differential advantage. Madness. These are the usual motives, aren’t they?”
“I suppose!” She sounded horrified that he could make such a list, as if this were not part of Mercurial discourse, although really it was simply Machiavelli, or Aristotle. Pauline would know the list.
“Anyway,” he went on, “I’ll be very interested to find out what people are saying when we get out of here.”
“Only thirty days to go,” she said grimly.
“One step at a time,” he said gamely.
“Oh please! Take it like that and it’s eternity.”
“Not at all. But I will desist.”
After a while he said, “Interesting how a moment comes when you feel hungry. You didn’t before, and then you do.”
“That’s not interesting.”
“My feet are sore.”
“That’s not interesting either.”
“Each step is a little pain, or every other. Plantar fasciitis, I reckon.”
“Would you like to take a rest?”
“No. They’re only sore, not hurt. And they get warmed up. Then tired.”
“I hate this.”
“And yet here we are.”
The hour of walking passed. The rest period passed. The next hour passed. The rest following that passed. The tunnel stayed always the same. The stations every third night were almost the same, but not quite. They ransacked these places, looking for something different. Up at the top of the elevator shafts in each station lay the surface, exposed to the full Mercurial sun and approaching seven hundred K on surfaces struck by light; there being no air, there was no air temperature. At this point they were under Tolstoi Crater, more or less; Pauline was managing their navigation, such as it was, by a sort of dead reckoning; down here her little radio too was out of touch. The station phones never worked. Swan guessed they were elevator phones only-or else the whole system had broken in the impact, and because of the ongoing situation with Terminator’s population, and the fact that the crushed part of the tunnel was now out in the sun, no one was available to fix it.
H our after hour they walked. It was easy to lose track of days, particularly since Pauline would keep track. The pseudoiterative was less pseudo than ever. This was the true iterative. Swan walked before Wahram, her shoulders slumped like those of a mime portraying dejection. Minutes dragged until each one felt like ten; it was an exponential expansion of time, a syruping of protraction. They would therefore live ten times as long. He cast about for something to say that would not irritate her. She was muttering at Pauline.
“I used to whistle when I was a kid,” he said, and tried a single tone. His lips felt thicker than they had when he was young. Oh yes-tongue higher against roof of mouth. Very good. “I would whistle the melodies from the symphonies I liked.”
“Whistle, then,” Swan said. “I whistle too.”
“Really!” he said.
“Yes. I told you. But you first. Do you do Beethoven, like what we heard at that concert?”
“I do, kind of. Just some of the tunes.”
“Do that, then.”
There had been a period in Wahram’s youth when every morning had had to begin with Beethoven’s Eroica, the breakthrough Third Symphony, announcement of a new age in music and indeed in the human spirit, written after Beethoven learned that he was going deaf. So Wahram whistled the two commanding notes that started the first movement, and then whistled the main line, at a tempo that fit with his walking pace. That wasn’t so hard to do, somehow. As he whistled along he was never sure he was going to remember the passage that came next, yet by the time he got to the point of change, the next one followed inevitably from it, and flowed from him quite satisfactorily. Somewhere in him these things remained. The sequence of long elaborate melodies flowed one to the next, in just the compelling logic of Beethoven’s own thinking. And this sequence consisted of one stirring inevitable song after another. Most of the passages should have been stranded by counterpoint and polyphonies, and he jumped from one orchestral section to another, depending on which one seemed the main line. But it had to be said that even as single tunes, inexpertly whistled, the magnificence of Beethoven’s music was palpable in the tunnel. The three sunwalkers drifted back, it seemed, to hear it better. After the first movement was over, Wahram found the other three movements came as fully to him as the first, so that by the time he was done, it had taken him about the same forty minutes that an orchestra would have taken with the real thing. The great variations of the finale were so stirring that he almost hyperventilated in the performance of it.
“Wonderful,” Swan said when he was done. “Really good. What tunes. My God. Do more. Can you do more?”
Wahram had to laugh. He thought it over. “Well, I think I could do the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Ninth. Also some bits of the quartets and sonatas, maybe. I’d lose the thread in a lot of those, I’m afraid. Maybe not in the late quartets. I’ve lived to those sweet things. I’d have to try and see how it went.”
“How can you remember so many?”
“For a long time that’s all I listened to.”
“That’s crazy. All right, try the Fourth, then. You can take them in order.”
“Later, please. I have to rest. My lips are already destroyed, I can feel them twice as big. They’re like a big old gasket right now.”
She laughed and let him be. An hour later, however, she brought it back up, and sounded like she would be very discouraged if he didn’t do it.
“All right, but you join me,” he said.
