about that, and remained in a room in the Rilke spaceport, interviewing witnesses. A big flash of light. Ah, thank you. Time to put in a heads-up to Wang, perhaps, to run some feasibility studies on Genette’s solution to the mystery.
News came that two more refugees had been plucked off the brightside, and one of them turned out to be Alex’s granddaughter, the artist Swan Er Hong. To be rescued out in the middle of the brightside seemed odd, and the inspector went to see them at the hospital in Schubert.
Swan lay in a bed hooked up to a couple of IVs; very pale; apparently recovering from radiation sickness, caused by a coronal flare that had struck just before she and her companions had gotten underground.
Genette climbed onto the chair next to her bed. Dark rings around red-rimmed brown eyes. Wahram, having accompanied her in her trek in the utilidor system, was sitting on the other side of the bed. Apparently he had not gotten as sick. He did look quite weary.
Swan registered Genette’s presence beside her. “You again,” she said. “What the fuck.” She glared at Wahram, who blanched a little to see it, even raised a hand to ward off her gaze. “What are you two up to?” she demanded.
Genette turned on Passepartout, a qube like an old wristwatch, and said, “Please don’t be upset. I am inspector general of the Interplanetary Police, as I told you when we met before. I was worried to learn of Alex’s unexpected death, and although that appears to have been a natural event, I have been continuing to look into a number of untoward events that may be connected. You were close to Alex, and you were there to witness the assault on Io, and now you were here again when Terminator was attacked. It may be a coincidence, but you can see why we continue to run into each other.”
Swan nodded unhappily.
Wahram said, “Did you ever find out anything out about the remains of the figure that fell into the lava on Io?”
“Let’s discuss that later,” Genette said with a warning look at Wahram. “For now we need to focus on the destruction of Terminator. Do you two mind telling me what you saw?”
Swan sat up and described the strike, then their return to the city, and their realization that they had missed the evacuation; then their run east to the nearest track platform, and their descent into the utilidor. Wahram merely nodded in confirmation from time to time. This took a few minutes. After that Swan’s account of their time in the utilidor was very brief, and Wahram did not elaborate or nod at anything. Twenty-four days could be a long time. Genette looked back and forth between them. Neither of them had seen much at the time of the blast, it was clear.
“So… is Terminator still burning?” Swan said.
“Strictly speaking, the burning is done. It is now incandescing.”
She turned away, face scrunched in a knot. In their final transmissions, the cameras and AIs left behind in Terminator had recorded the city igniting in the sunlight-burning, melting, exploding, and so forth, until the recording instruments had failed. It had not been a general inferno but rather a patchwork of smaller fires, starting at different times. Some heat-resistant AIs were still transmitting data, documenting what happened as everything heated to seven hundred K. A collage of all those images gave a good impression of the incineration, though it seemed pretty clear that Swan would not want to see it.
But in fact she did. When she composed herself, she declared, “I want to see it all. Show me everything. I need to see it. I intend to make a penance somehow, a memorial. For now, tell us what you know! What happened?”
The inspector shrugged. “The city’s tracks were impacted by something. The site itself is still out on the brightside, and until sunset arrives a thorough investigation can’t be made. The impactor was invisible to your meteor defense systems, which should not be possible, as it massed many thousands of kilograms. Some people are saying it must have been a comet strike. I prefer to call it the event. It still isn’t established for sure that it wasn’t an explosion from below.”
“Like a mine planted under it?” Wahram asked.
“Well, some satellite photos do make it look more like an impact event. But then questions arise.”
The inspector’s wristqube spoke in a clear singsong: “You’ve got a visitor named Mqaret.”
“Tell him where we are,” Genette said to it. “Ask him to join us.”
Swan’s cheeks had turned hectic. “I want to see Terminator,” she announced.
“It might be possible to visit briefly in a protected vehicle, but little can be done there now. The crews on-site are mostly taking shelter in the shade of it. Sunset reaches that longitude in about seventeen more days.”
Then Mqaret came into the room, and Swan cried out his name and reached out for a hug.
“We thought you were dead!” Mqaret exclaimed. “That whole concert party disappeared, and we thought you were with them, and then the evacuation was chaos, and we thought you were killed.”
“We got down into the utilidor,” Swan said.
“Well, people checked down there, but they didn’t see anyone.”
“We decided to hike east, to get it over with faster.”
“I can see how you would do that, but you should have left a note.”
“I thought we did.”
“Really? But never mind-you’re so thin! We need to get you to the lab to have a really thorough look at you.” Mqaret circled the bed and gave Wahram a brief hug too. “Thank you for getting my Swan home. We hear you took care of her down there.”
Genette saw that Swan did not look entirely happy at this description.
Wahram said, “We all helped each other. Indeed we look forward to seeing the young sunwalkers we were down there with.”
Mqaret said, “They’re in the process of retrieving them now, and I hope they’ll be fine. A fair number of sunwalkers have been picked up.”
“Ours were very helpful,” Wahram said, although Swan snorted to hear it.
Mqaret seemed unaffected by the destruction of the city; as it came on the heels of Alex’s death, he no doubt felt that it didn’t really matter. With Terminator gone, however, the Mercurials were now reduced to staying in underground shelters scattered all over the planet, in a way not that different from how people occupied Io. Which was not the optimal position from which to rebuild. But they could do it, and in fact work had already started, using heat-resistant shelters and robots. Very soon after sunset came to the burned city, they would fix the tracks and have the city’s frame moving again; then they could rebuild in the safety of darkness, as they had the first time.
Meanwhile they were still in emergency mode, and their influence elsewhere in the system correspondingly reduced. So now Mqaret said to Swan, but with a look to Genette and Wahram, “We’ll rebuild and we’ll be all right. The people who talk about our fatal criticality have different criticalities of their own. We’re all vulnerable in space. There isn’t a single off-Earth settlement that couldn’t be destroyed, except for Mars.”
“Which is part of what makes Mars insufferable,” Genette noted.
“I will create a monument to our loss,” Swan declared, struggling as if to leave her bed. Tugging dramatically at her IV lines-“I will perform an abramovic in the ruins, to express the city’s grief. Perhaps a period of crucifixion would be appropriate.”
“Burning at the stake,” Wahram suggested.
Swan shot him a poisonous look. Mqaret objected more tactfully, pointing out that Swan was not yet recovered enough to use her body as a canvas. “It’s always so hard on you, Swan, you can’t.”
“I will! I most certainly will.”
But Swan’s qube spoke from the right side of her neck: “I must inform you that you have given me instructions to oppose any abramovician artworks when your health is not optimal. These are your own instructions to yourself.”
“Ridiculous,” Swan said. “Sometimes circumstances demand a change in plan. This is an overriding life event, a catastrophe. It demands a response in kind.”
“I must inform you that you have given me instructions to oppose doing an abramovic when your health is not optimal.”
“Shut up, Pauline. I don’t want you to speak now.”
Mqaret had moved to block Swan from leaving her bed; now he said, “Dear Swan, your Pauline is right.
