Time

And even some politically advanced parts of the world might not find the children’s proposals quite as instinctively repelling as Americans. The French, for example, have an instinct for centralization that dates back to Colbert in the seventeenth century. As a visiting American I have been bemused to observe how their senior people work, top managers trained in the grandes ecoles gliding between positions as ministerial advisers and captains of industry.

Not in America, though. America was after all built on the belief that centralized control is in principle a bad thing. And what about democracy? In fact I would be deeply suspicious of anybody, any stern Utopian, who advocated handing over power to any elite, however benevolent.

But I suspect there is a still deeper fear, even an instinct, that lies buried under the layers of rationalization. Even in my own heart.

It may be that these children are in some sense superior to the Homo sapiens stock from which they emerged. Maybe they could run the world better than any human; maybe a world full of Blues would be an infinitely better place, a step up.

Maybe. But as I was elected to serve the interests of a large number of Hsap — and as a proud Hsap myself — I’m not about to sit around and let these Blues take my planet away.

If this final solution is turned down now, presumably further military options will be discussed, rehearsed, tried out, in escalating severity. Maybe we will, in the end, come back to this point again, the unleashing of the fire. But by then it could be too late.

Time is the key.

But all this is rationalization. I have to decide whether to destroy eleven American children. That is the bottom line.

I did not enter politics to be involved in this kind of operation. But who did? And I have learned that leadership is, more often than not, the art of choosing the least worst among evils.

Always assuming we still have a choice.

Learning to live with myself after this is going to be interesting.

She turned off her shower. The steam dispersed, the air cleared, and she was instantly cold.

Once again she stood with Dan Ystebo in the C Cubed center. But the place was silent now save for the soft hiss of the air-conditioning, the whirr of the cooling fans of the equipment.

The various instruments monitoring the children’s physical state, their heartbeat and respiration and temperature, and measuring the temperature and air composition, and the electromagnetic fields and particles crisscrossing the rebuilt physics lab — all of this was ignored. Everybody was watching the softscreens, the visual images of the center’s exterior, the children in their cage.

And the moment came unexpectedly, softly.

There was an instant of blinding light.

Then it was as if a giant metal ball had dropped out of the sky. The center — the buildings, the drab dormitory, the fence, a few abandoned vehicles — seemed to blossom, flying apart, before they vanished, their form only a memory. A wave passed through the ground, neat concentric pulses of dirt billowing up, and it seemed to Maura that the air rippled as a monstrous ball of plasma, the air itself torn apart, and began to rise.

The sensor burned out. The screen image turned to hash, and the bunker turned into an electronic cave, sealed from the world.

The bunker was well protected. She barely felt the waves of heat and sound and light and shattered air that washed over it.

“A backpack nuke,” she said to Dan Ystebo.

“Cute name.”

“About a kiloton. They buried it in the foundations, weeks ago.”

A wall-mounted softscreen came back online, relaying a scratchy picture.

It was an image of the center. Or rather, of the hole in the ground where the center had been. A cliche image, the stalk of a mushroom cloud.

The camera zoomed in. There was something emerging from the base of the cloud. It was hard, round, silvery, reflective, like a droplet of mercury. It was impossible to estimate its size.

There was utter silence in the bunker, the silver light of the droplet reflected in a hundred staring eyes.

The droplet seemed to hover, for a heartbeat, two. And then it shot skyward, a blur of silver, too rapidly for the camera to follow.

“I wonder where they are going,” Dan said.

“The downstream, of course,” she said. “I hope…”

“Yes?”

“I hope they’ll understand.”

The mushroom cloud swept over the sun.

Emma Stoney:

And on Cruithne, Emma prepared to explore an alien artifact.

The continual shifting of the light, the slow wheel of the stars and the shrinking of her shadow, lent the place an air of surre-ality. Nothing seemed to stay fixed; it was as if craters and dust and people were swimming back and forth, toward her and away from her, as if distance and time were dissolving.

Somehow, standing here on the asteroid’s complex surface, it didn’t seem so strange at all that the “empty” space around her was awash with trillions of neutrinos — invisible, all but intangible, sleeting through her like a ghost rain. If she was going to hear echoes from the future anywhere, she thought, it would be here.

But nothing seemed real. It seemed wrong that she should be here, now; she felt like a shadow cast by the genuine, solid Emma Stoney, who was probably sitting in some office in New York or Vegas or Washington, still struggling to salvage something of Bootstrap’s tangled affairs.

But here was Malenfant’s voice crackling in her headset, barking orders in his practical way. “Make sure you’re attached to at least two tethers at all times. Do you all understand? Cornelius, Emma, Michael?”

One by one they answered — even Michael, in his eerie translated voice. Yes. I won ‘tfall off.

“Let’s get on with it,” Cornelius murmured.

Malenfant led them to a pair of guide cables. They were made of yellow nylon and had been pinned to the dirt by the fireflies.

Looking ahead, Emma saw how the tethers snaked away over the asteroid’s tight, broken horizon. Malenfant said, “Clip yourself to the guide cables. We’ve practiced with the jaw clips; you know how to handle them. Remember, always keep ahold of at least two cables…”

Emma lifted herself with her toes, tilted, and let herself fall gently forward. It was like falling through syrup. The complex, textured surface of the asteroid approached her faceplate; reflections skimmed across her gold visor.

She let her gloved hands sink into the regolith. She heard a soft squeaking, like crushed snow, as her gloves pushed into the dust.

This was the closest she had come to Cruithne.

On impulse, she undipped her outer glove, exposing her skin-suited hand. She could actually see her skin, little circles of it amid the orange spandex, exposed to vacuum, forty million miles from Earth. Her hand seemed to prickle, probably more from the effects of raw sunlight than from the vacuum itself.

She pushed her half-bare hand into the asteroid ground. The surface was sun-hot, but the regolith beneath was cold and dry. She felt grains — sharp, shattered, very small, like powder. But the dust was very loose, easily compacted; it seemed to collapse under her gentle pressure, and soft clouds of it gushed away from her fingers.

When she had pushed her hand in maybe six inches, the dust started to resist her motion, as if compacting. But her probing fingers found something small and hard. A pebble. She closed her hands around it and pulled it out. It was complex, irregularly shaped, the size of her thumb joint. It was made of a number of different rock types, she could see, smashed and jammed together. It was a breccia, regolith compacted so the grains stuck together, analogous to sandstone on Earth.

She rolled the pebble in her fingers, letting dust flake off on her skin, relishing the raw, physical contact, a window to reality.

She tucked the pebble back in its hole. She rubbed her fingers over each other to scrape off a little of the dust that clung to her skinsuit glove, and put back her outer glove. Snug in its layers of cooling and meteorite-protection gear, her hand tingled after its adventure.

When they were done, clipped to the cables in a line, Malenfant stood briefly to inspect them, then let himself fall back to the surface. “Here we go.” And he crawled away, toward the horizon.

Emma dug her gloved hands into the regolith and pulled herself along the ground. She could see the feet of Michael ahead, was aware of Cornelius bringing up the rear behind her. It was like skimming along the floor of a swimming pool; she just paddled at the regolith with one hand, occasionally pushing at the ground to keep up.

They covered the ground rapidly. Fireflies ghosted alongside them, scrabbling over the surface in a blur of pi tons and tethers, making this an expedition of scrambling humans and spiderlike robots.

Her perspective seemed to swivel around so that she no longer felt as if she were sailing over a sea-bottom floor but climbing, scrambling up the face of some dusty cliff. But this cliff bulged outward at her, and there was nothing beneath her to catch her.

And now the world seemed to swivel again, and here she was clinging to a ceiling like a fly. She found herself digging her gloves deep into the regolith. But she couldn’t support her weight here, let alone keep herself pinned flat against the roof. Her heart thumped, so loud in her ears it was painful.

A hand grabbed her shoulder.

It was dark, she realized. Without noticing she’d sailed into the shadow of the asteroid. She flipped up her gold visor, and now Malenfant loomed, a fat, ghostly snowman. There were stars all around his head. “You okay?”

She took stock. Her stomach seemed to have calmed, the thumping of her heart slowing. “Maybe moving around this damn rock is harder than I expected.”

She looked back. Cornelius came clambering along the guide ropes after her, paddling at the regolith like a clumsy fish. Despite the darkness of the asteroid’s short “night,” Cornelius wouldn’t lift his sun visor.

Malenfant grinned at Emma and made a starfish sign in front of his face, a private joke from their marriage. The poor sap has barfed in his suit.

Somehow that made Emma feel a whole lot better.

“Anyhow it’s over.”

“It is?”

Malenfant helped her to her feet. “We’re here.”

And she found herself facing the artifact.

It was just a hoop of sky blue protruding from the asteroid ground, rimmed by stars. It sat in a neat craterlike depression maybe fifty yards across.

She could see the marks of firefly pitons and tethers, the regular grooves made by scoops as the robots had dug out this anomaly from the eroded hulk of Cruithne. The fireflies had fixed a network of tethers and guide ropes around the artifact. They looked, bizarrely, like queuing ropes around some historic relic.