glass-and-acrylic edifice was incongruously lapped by a sea of grass. Its first three floors housed those elements of the Starflight administration which the supreme executive had transported from the Two Worlds, and the top floor was her private residence.
On this evening, the guards who patrolled the perimeter fence were distinctly uneasy. They had heard that a maniac of a flickerwing captain was going to try to crash his vessel through the aperture at interplanetary speed, and the rumour had even quoted an exact minute for the event to occur — 20.06 Compatible Local Time. As the moment grew nearer each man felt a powerful urge to fix his gaze on the distant scattering of buildings, just below the upcurved horizon, which was Beachhead City. They had been told that most of the city had been hastily evacuated to escape the promised pyrotechnics, and nobody wanted to miss the spectacle.
At the same time, however, their eyes were frequently drawn upwards to the transparent west wall of the Presidential suite. Elizabeth Lindstrom herself could be glimpsed up there, screened only by sky reflections, her silk-sheathed abdomen glowing like a pearl — and it was well known that she sometimes kept watch on her guards through a magnifying screen. None of the men relished the idea of being dismissed from Starflight service and sent back to the crowded towerblocks of Earth, and yet the compulsion to stare into the west grew greater with each passing minute.
The suspense was also making itself felt on the top floor of the Octagon, but in the case of Elizabeth Lindstrom it was a pleasurable sensation, heady and stimulating, akin to pre-orgasmic tension.
“My dear,” she said warmly to Aileen Garamond, “do you think you are wise to watch this?”
“Quite sure, My Lady.”
“But the boy…” “I’m positive my husband knows what he is doing.” Aileen’s voice was firm and unemotional as she laid her hands on her son’s shoulders, forcing him to face the west. “Nothing will go wrong.”
“I admire your courage, especially when the chances are so…” Elizabeth checked herself just in time. The common, characterless woman beside her appeared genuinely to believe that a ship could run into a solid wall of air at a speed of a hundred kilometres a second and not be destroyed on the instant. Elizabeth was girded with the mathematics which showed how incredible the idea was, but she knew the equations would mean nothing to her guest. In any case, she had no desire to break the news in advance — she wanted to watch Mrs Garamond’s face as she saw her husband’s funeral pyre blossom on the horizon. Only then would she receive the first payment against the incalculable debt which the Garamond family owed her.
The concept of grief cancelling grief, of pain atoning for pain, was one which few people could properly understand, Elizabeth had often told herself. Even she had not appreciated the logic of it until days after Harald’s small body had been cast in sun-coloured resin and stood in its place in the Lindstrom chapel. But it was so true!
There were no flaws in the system of double entries — anguish against anguish, love against love — and this realization had given Elizabeth the strength to go on, even when it appeared that the Garamonds had chosen to die in the black deeps of space. That episode had been nothing more and nothing less than God’s way of telling her that he was simply building up the Garamond’s credit to the point at which it could be used to wipe out all their debts. In retrospect, it had been fortunate that she had not been able to extract payment immediately, because there would still have been an imbalance and she would never have found her heart’s ease. A child is a focus, a repository of love which is added to in each year of its life, and it was crystal-clear that the death of a boy of nine could never be compensated for by the death of a boy of…
“I have the latest computations for you, My Lady.” The projected voice of Lord Nettleton broke in on Elizabeth’s thoughts. “The impact will occur in exactly three minutes from… now.”
“Three minutes,” Elizabeth said aloud, knowing that the accurately beamed sound would not have reached the other woman’s ears. Without giving any sign that she had heard, Aileen picked her son up and her face was screened by the boy’s body. Elizabeth moved quietly to the other side, as was her due, and waited.
She waited through eons and eternities.
And the ribbed canopy of the sky ceased to turn.
Time was dead…
The lightning bolt came first. An arrow-straight line of hell, searing upwards at an angle into the heavens, isolated for the first perceptible instant, then joined by writhing offshoots, tributaries and deltas of violet fire which flickered and froze on the retina. Faint shadows fled across the sky as the air above Beachhead City was hurled outwards by the fountain of energy. Appalling though the general display was, there existed at its core — on the threshold of vision — a sense of even greater forces in the shock of opposition. There was a feeling of cataclysmic upward movement, then a bright star burned briefly and dwindled in the south-west. The day returned to normalcy, but seemingly darker than it had been before.
Elizabeth drew a deep quavering breath — no other death she had ever witnessed had been so final. She turned her gaze on to Aileen Garamond’s face, and was shocked to see there a look of serenity.
“It was to be expected,” she said. “I know.” Aileen nodded contentedly, and hugged her child. “I told you.”
Elizabeth gaped at her. “You
“Your husband is dead,” Elizabeth announced when silence was restored to the room, “but because you are the widow of the most distinguished of all my S.E.A. captains, you will remain here as my guest. No other arrangement would be acceptable.”
Aileen faced her, pale but immovable. “My Lady, you are mistaken. You see — I
Elizabeth shook her head incredulously and a little sadly. She had been planning to spend perhaps a year in a game of subtleties and suggestions, watching the other woman’s slow progression from doubt to certainty about her son’s eventual fate. But it was obvious now — in view of Aileen Garamond’s mentality, or lack of it — that such strategies would be ineffective. If the full payment were to be extracted, as God had decreed it should be, she would have to speak plainly, in words a child could understand. Elizabeth touched a beautiful micro-engineered ring on her left hand, ensuring that no listening devices could remain in operation nearby, and then explained the accountancy of retribution which demanded that Christopher Garamond should be allowed another three years. He was to have the same lifespan as Harald Lindstrom — but not a day longer.
When she had finished she summoned her physician. “Captain Garamond’s death has left Mrs. Garamond in a state of hysteria. Give her suitable sedation.”
Aileen opened her mouth to scream but the physician, an experienced man, touched her wrist in a quick movement which did not even disturb the boy she was holding in her arms. As the cloud of instant-acting drug sighed through her skin Aileen relaxed and allowed herself to be led away.
Alone again, Elizabeth Lindstrom stood looking out across the western grasslands and was aware — for the first time in over a year — of something approaching happiness. She began to smile.
thirteen
The integrity of the
Every available man and woman had been co-opted on to the teams which had welded into place a new computer-designed structure, creating load paths which actually utilized the forces of the impact to give the shell enough strength to survive. Until only a matter of minutes before the hellish transit, other gangs had swarmed on the outside of the ship, adding hundreds of sacrificial anodes to those which were already in place serving as focal points for the ion exchange which would otherwise have eaten away the hull during normal flight. The new anodes, massive slabs of pure metal, withstood the brief but incredibly fierce attrition of the lightning which wreathed the ship as it passed along the atmospheric tunnel created by its electron gun. On emerging from its
