“We must stop the Gaijin — and whoever follows them,” Nemoto said bleakly. “What else is there to do?”
They would have to spend a month in Earth orbit, working on
The colony craft was decades old, and showing its age.
Big, fragile-looking, solar-cell wings had been fixed to the exterior. But reconditioned fission reactors provided power in the dimly lit outer reaches of the Solar System. These were old technology: heavy Soviet-era antiques of a design called Topaz. Each Topaz was a clutter of pipes and tubing and control rods set atop a big radiator cone of corrugated aluminum.
There was a docking mount and an instrument module at one end of the core booster, and a cluster of ion rockets at the other. The ion thrusters were suitable for missions of long duration: missions measured in years, to the outer planets and beyond. And they worked; they had ferried the Yolgnu to Triton. But the ion thrusters needed much refurbishment. And they, too, were old technology. The newest Lunar Japanese helium-3 fusion drives were, Madeleine learned, much more effective.
It wouldn’t be a comfortable ride out to Neptune. The toilets never seemed to vent properly. There was a chorus of bangs, wheezes, and rattles when they tried to sleep. The solar panels had steadily degraded so that there was never enough power, even this close to the Sun. Madeleine soon tired of half-heated meals, lukewarm coffee, and tepid bathing water.
But forty people had lived in this windowless cavern slum for the five years it had taken
Madeleine found scratches on an aluminum bulkhead that recorded a child’s growth, the image of a favorite uncle tucked into the back of a storage cupboard.
The ship could have been built in the twenty-first century — even the twentieth. Human research into spaceflight engineering had all but stopped when the Gaijin had arrived. Madeleine thought of the Gaijin flower-ships that had carried her to the Saddle Point radius and beyond: jewelled, perfect, faultless.
But
As she labored over the lashed-up systems, improvising repairs, Madeleine’s respect for Nemoto deepened.
And, while Madeleine worked, the Earth slid liquidly past the windows of the
Those old environmentalist Cassandras had been proven right, Madeleine learned. The climate really had been only metastable; in the end, after forty thousand years of digging and building and burning, humans managed to destabilize the world, tip over the whole damn bowl of cherries, until it settled with stunning rapidity into this new, lethal state.
Madeleine could see patterns in the ice — ripples, lines of debris, varying colors — where the ice had flowed from its fastnesses at the poles and the mountain peaks. There was little cloud over the great ice sheets — merely wisps of cirrus, streaked by winds that seemed to tear perpetually around immense low-pressure systems squatting over the frozen poles.
The ice covered most of Canada, and a great tongue of it extended far into the American Midwest, reaching farther south than the Great Lakes — or where the lakes used to be. Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, and the other cities were all gone now, drowned. The familiar lobed shapes of the Great Lakes themselves had been overwhelmed by a new, glimmering ocean that stretched a thousand kilometers inland from the eastern seaboard. And to the west, a ribbon of water stretched up from Puget Sound toward Alaska. The land itself was crushed down under the weight of the ice, and seawater had flowed eagerly into the shallow depressions so formed.
Even to the south of the ice line, the land was grievously damaged. Desert stretched from Oregon through Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa — a belt of immense, rippled sand dunes. It was a place of violent winds, for heavy, cold air poured off the ice over the exposed land, and she saw giant dust storms that persisted for days. At night she saw lights glimmer in the vast expanse, flickering: just campfires lit by descendants of midwestern Americans who must be reduced to living like Bedouins in that great cold desert.
South of the ice, Earth at first glance looked as temperate and habitable as it had always done. She could see green in the tropical areas, coral reefs, ships plying to and fro through warm, ice- free seas. But nowhere was unaffected. The great rain forests of equatorial Africa and the Amazon Basin had shrunk back into isolated pockets, surrounded by swathes of what looked like grasslands. Conversely, the Sahara seemed to be turning green. Even the shapes of the continents had changed as glistening sheets of continental shelves were exposed by the falling sea level.
In the southern United States there were still cities: great misty-gray urban sprawls around the coasts and along the river valleys, from Baja California, along the Mexican border, the Gulf of Mexico, to Florida. But New Orleans seemed to be burning continually, great fires blocks wide sending up black smoke plumes that streaked out over hundreds of kilometers. Likewise, there appeared to be a small war raging around Orlando; she made out what looked like tank tracks, frequent explosions that lit up the night.
It was impossible to gather direct news. Presumably all communication was carried out by land lines or with point-to-point modulated lasers; belatedly, it seemed, the inhabitants of Earth had learned the wisdom of not broadcasting their business to the stars. It did appear, though, that some of these wars had been blazing since before the return of the ice.
The most savage conflict appeared to be occurring in northern Africa, where the population of Eurasia — hundreds of millions — had tried to drain into the southern European countries and the new North African grasslands. But any orderly relocation had long broken down. Huge black craters scarred the Sahara, some of them glimmering as if with puddles of glass; and once she made out the telltale shape of a mushroom cloud, rising like a perfect toy from an ochre African horizon.
And — more sinister still — she could see new forms on Earth’s long-suffering hide. They were great sprawling structures, spiderlike, silvery: not like human cities, more centrally organized, the pieces interconnected, like single buildings spanning tens of kilometers. These were Gaijin colonies. There were several of them in the ice-free middle latitudes, with no sign of human occupancy nearby. There were even a handful on the ice sheets themselves, places no human could survive. Nobody knew what the Gaijin were doing in there.
She felt a cold fury. Couldn’t the Gaijin have done something to stop this, to halt the collapse of her world? If not, why the hell were they here?
Ben said he wanted to go to Earth, to Australia, one last time before he left forever. Madeleine quailed at the idea.
An automated ground-to-orbit shuttle came climbing up to meet them. Nemoto had found someone who had agreed to host them, if briefly.
They skimmed through morning light toward Australia, approaching from the south. They received no calls for identification; there was no attempt at traffic control, nothing from the ground. It was like approaching an uninhabited planet.
They drifted over Sydney. The city was still populated, its suburbs scarred by conflict, but there was no harbor; Sydney had been left beached in the country’s drying interior. The rust-red deserts of the center appeared still more desiccated than before. But she saw no signs of humanity. Alice Springs, for example, was burned out, a husk; nothing moved there.
They skimmed low over the great geological features south of the Alice, Ayers Rock and the Olgas. These were uncompromising lumps of hard, ancient sandstone protruding from the flat desert, extensively carved by megayears of water flows. To the Aborigines, nomads on this unforgiving tabletop landscape, these formations must have been as striking as the medieval cathedrals that had loomed over Europe. And so the Aborigines had made them places of totemic and religious significance, spinning Dreamtime stories from cracks and folds until the rocks became a kind of mythic cinema, frozen in geological time. It had been a triumph of the imagination, she supposed, in a land like a sensory deprivation tank.
This had briefly been a center for tourism. The tourists were long gone now, the Western influence vanished in an instant, a dream of fat and affluence. But the Aborigines had remained. From the air she saw slim figures moving slowly over the landscape, round faces turned up to her vehicle, all as it had been for twelve thousand years — just as Ben had once foreseen, she remembered.
Ben peered from his window, silent, withdrawn.
Perhaps a hundred kilometers south of the Alice, they saw a structure of bright blue, a dot in the desert. A tent.
The shuttle dipped, fell like a brick, and skidded to a halt half a kilometer distant from the tent.
Nobody came to meet them. After a few minutes they climbed down to the ground and walked toward the tent.
The land was an immense orange-red table, the sky a sheet of washed-out blue. There was utter silence here: no bird song, no insects. The Sun was high, ferocious, the heat tremendous and dry. They walked cautiously, unused to Earth’s heavy gravity.
Madeleine felt overwhelmed. Save for a few space walks, it was the first time she had been out of a cramped hab module, out in a landscape, for years.
Ben touched her arm. She stopped. Through the heat haze of the horizon, something moved, stately, silent.
“It looks like a lizard,” she whispered. “A komodo dragon, maybe. But—”
“But it’s immense.”
“Another Gaijin experiment, you think?”
“I think we ought to keep still,” he said.
The lizard, a Mesozoic nightmare, paused for long seconds, perhaps a minute, a tongue the length of a whip lashing out at something unseen. Then it moved on, turning away from the humans.
They hurried on.
Their host was a woman: an American, small, compact, stern-faced, her thick black hair tied back severely behind her head. She was dressed in a silvery coverall. She was called Carole Lerner.
Lerner looked them up and down contemptuously. “Nemoto told me to expect you. She didn’t tell me you were two babes in the wood.” She eyed them with hard suspicion. “I have a hoard.”
Ben frowned. “What?”
Lerner said. “I’m not about to tell you where. If I die my caches will self-destruct.”
Madeleine understood quickly. Medicine had collapsed, along with everything else, when the ice had come. So no more antiaging treatments. Such supplies had become the most precious items on the planet. She held up her hands. “We’re no threat to you, Carole.”
Lerner kept watching them.
At last, sternly, she brought them into the tent, which was blessedly cool, the air moist. She dug out a couple of coveralls, indicated they should put them on. “These are priceless. Literally. Therm-aware clothing, all but indestructible. Nobody makes them anymore. People hand them down like heirlooms, mother to child. Be careful with them.”
“We will,” Madeleine promised.
The tent had no partitions. Ben shrugged, stripped naked, and climbed into his coverall. Madeleine followed suit.
Lerner began to boil water for a drink, and she gave them food: a rehydrated soup, its flavor unidentifiable. She looked about sixty. She was in fact much older than that. She turned out to be
Ben glanced around, at piles of rock samples, data discs, a few old-fashioned paper books, heavily thumbed, their pages dusty and yellowed.
“My work,” Lerner growled, watching him. “I’m a geologist. No previous generation has lived through the onset of an Ice Age.”
