Meaning that you yourself are right, and speaking from a larger perspective in yourself. Don’t be hasty here. There are better ways for you to exert yourself during our time of troubles. There’s work to be done.”
“It’s work to express Terminator’s fate in art.”
“I know, and for you especially. But you are one of our biome designers, and so you’ll be very much needed in that capacity. We can seize this opportunity to renovate the park and the farm.”
Swan looked alarmed. “Surely we’ll just replace them? No one will want anything changed-I know I won’t.”
“Well, we’ll see about that. But you must be available to the city.”
Swan glowered. “I will be no matter what. Can we at least take a hopper around into the brightside and look at it?”
“I think so. I’ll ask for seats on one of the daytrippers as soon as I can. But you need to finish your recovery first.”
A few days later they all went out in a hopper, following the tracks east into daylight and the wreckage of Terminator. The land below as seen through heavy filtering was the white of paper, marked by black rings and a few wavering lines, resembling all together some alphabet written with compasses. The tracks themselves were a narrow band of glowing white wires.
Then over the horizon reared Terminator. The dome frame glowed as white as the tracks. The interior was a black mass, which as they got closer resolved to smaller masses of clinkers and gunk and ash, black blobs, black powder. Some metal surfaces glowed red. It was reminiscent of old photos of Terran cities destroyed by firestorm.
Mqaret shook his head at the sight. “You can see why we need to stay on the nightside.”
Swan stared down, seeming not to hear. No theatrics this time, Genette noted. Grim desolation in an empty face. Looked like she was somewhere else. Wahram was watching her unobtrusively.
The glowing ruin of the city was dominated by the still-standing Dawn Wall. Its east-facing exterior was as silvery and pure as ever, but its inside was now a mess of curving black terraces. Some of the rooftops made of royal-blue ceramic tiles had remained intact, and even now held their color. The Great Staircase still cut down through black strip after black strip, the imported marble of the steps nacreous in the heat. The glowing white spans of the dome frame curved up at the sky like the framework of the dome in Hiroshima.
“It was so beautiful,” Mqaret said.
“Still is,” said Swan.
Mqaret said, “We’ll import some mature trees and grow the rest from seed. Although I have to tell you, the arrangements with insurance don’t seem to be working out very well. They’re arguing about the definition of ‘full replacement.’ Also it isn’t clear yet whether it was an act of God or an act of war. The council lawyers think the insurance is there for us either way, but who knows. It’s going to be expensive, that’s the main thing. We’ll need help. Luckily the Accord will have our back. And replacing the animals will be easy, as the terraria are well above capacity.”
He glanced at Wahram, cleared his throat. “I hear the Vulcanoids are also anxious to help. Naturally they’re worried down there.”
“They need us,” Swan said. “That’s why they took Alex up on her proposal to help them in the first place.”
“Well, this will be a test of how much they think they need us.”
Swan shook her head like a dog. Genette saw that she did not want to think about the Vulcanoids right now. She was annoyed perhaps at Mqaret’s move to the next step, even as they were staring down at the glowing ruins.
Wahram was more attentive to her mood. “ ‘Remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.’ ”
Swan scowled at him. “More fortune cookies, oh deep one?”
“Yes.” A tiny smile; he still had the capacity to be amused by her, Genette saw, even after their confinement together. Maybe he had even learned it there. It was striking how little they had said about their time in the tunnel.
Now Swan said, “I want to join Inspector Genette’s investigation, if that’s all right, Inspector? I’d like to be the Mercurial liaison to your investigation.”
“We can always use help,” Genette said diplomatically. “This incident is of grave concern to everyone, but of course for Mercury it goes right to the heart of things. I was assuming you would therefore want someone to join the investigation.”
“Good,” Swan said. “I’ll keep in touch with the design team,” she told Mqaret. There was no more talk of some kind of self-mortifying art performance; although it occurred to the inspector that the investigation itself might eventually be seen as such.
W hen they got back to the spaceport, Wahram nodded and took his leave of Genette. Then he turned to Swan, bowing very slightly, with hand on heart.
“I must return to Saturn and attend to business I missed. We’ll meet again soon, I’m sure. Terminator will rise like a phoenix, and then there will be all kinds of unfinished business for us to complete.”
“There most certainly will,” she said. Suddenly she hugged him, put her head briefly against his broad chest. She stood back. “Thank you for saving me. I’m sorry I was so messed up down there.”
“Not at all,” Wahram said. “ You saved me. And we got through.” And with another awkward bow he left.
Lists (5)
the Vesta Zone, a cloud of terraria forming a single cooperative Aymara, an amazonia with an interior completely overgrown with cloud forest Tatar Soul, a steppes grassland where people speak a resuscitated Indo- European The Copenhagen Interpretation, a canal town with a gift economy The Zanzibar Cat, an anarchist savanna with thousands of big cats and no interior buildings at all Arabia Deserta, a desert occupied by British travelers Aspen, a skiing paradise unnamed prison asteroids with robot guards Hermaphrodite, where all permanent residents are gynandromorphs and androgyns Saint George, a social terrarium in which the men think they are living in a Mormon polygamy, while the women consider it a lesbian world with a small percentage of male lesbians asteroids hollowed not into cylindrical terraria but rather warrens, hives, caves, pits, hotels, etc. The Maldives, an aquarium recreating the drowned islands; Micronesia, likewise; Tuvalu, likewise; all the drowned islands of Earth are reproduced in this fashion Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem 34, the last of thirty-four terraria using versions of the template of this great biome extremophile terraria, deadly to humans but hospitable to growth of organisms creating medicines and inoculants doomed biomes, established with odd parameters and then sealed off like test tubes The Little Prince, an outie terrarium, tent-bubbled with its atmosphere bluing its edges The Whorl, whose inhabitants keep watch for an outsider Miranda, the smashed-together moon of Uranus, now a Trojan freely orbiting the sun, completely tent-bubbled, its deep canyons and stupendous ridges filigreed with snow drifting down in the low g, all Swiss architecture, a dream of the Alps Icarus, a fliers’ world, lit by a sunline in its floor to keep the air clear Source of the Peach Blossom Stream, a Tang dynasty recreation that looks like a Chinese landscape painting come to life Miocene terraria, Cretaceous terraria, Jurassic terraria, Precambrian terraria Water Drop, an aquarium filled entirely with water and ocean creatures Sequoia Kings Canyon, an infolded Sierra Nevada of California — and so on. Estimated nineteen thousand occupied asteroids and moons
SWAN AND MQARET
Back at the spaceport between Schubert and Bramante Craters, Swan sat in a corner, filled with a regret for something she couldn’t name. Surely it was impossible that it should be regret for the utilidor; already she was forgetting that. Let Pauline remember that. Never look back, why should she? Although there had been something there-as if she had been on the border of something important. What had he said? That the tunnel was no different from anywhere else? She would never concede that, never.
