“Japril!” The new blue, green, and red rays around the sunburst on her shoulder told me she’d moved up some in the Web’s hierarchy since we’d last chatted together behind the protective plastic shields on the flame beaches of Shahng-al-Voyard. “Honestly,” I said, “you are not whom I expected to see here.”
“I’m not here, actually.” She turned in her seat, pushed the desk, which drifted aside on silent rails, and crossed her silver leggings.
2.
I SAT ON THE floppy purple thing inflating blobbily behind me. “Just how far away are you?” It firmed beneath me.
“More than nine thousand light-years.” She toyed with something that was gold and thin, black nobs on both ends. (Pencil? Microphone? Letter opener?)
“That’s a rather costly hyperwave projection just to say hello.”
“We have forty minutes’ conference time, Marq. A few seconds out for nostalgia won’t hurt—though I doubt if it will help either. We’ll let it go at that.”
I had some good memories of Japril: her insight, her ambition. I also had reason to wonder if some of her memories of me were not so pleasant. “I’d thought you’d be somebody calling to chide me about my current cargo. But this has got to be about some past crime of mine, if not some crime to come.” Spiders all think industrial diplomacy is a crime; they may be right.
Japril went from smile to grin with those big teeth of hers. “Actually, it’s neither.” Her fingers came together on the golden bar. (Calculator? Energy knife? Water purifier?) “Relax. What do you know of Rhyonon?”
A memory of Clym; and a chill. “Only that no one is supposed to know that much about it.” Funny thing about that chill. It didn’t subside. There’s something permanently scary about an entire world’s death, even in rumor.
“What do you know about the rescue operations? The few thousands we got out, say, or the few colony ships the Web managed to load up in hours and evacuate during the course of the disaster? The survivors we managed to pry out of the peripheral ruins and smoking wreckage once the major conflagration was over?”
The Web is information; it’s silly to lie to a spider, especially one with that many rays rainbowing her sunburst. “Nothing.”
“I know,” she said. “There weren’t any. At least of those.”
See what I mean.
“You want to know where I am.” Japril’s fingers moved absently on the stick. (Sound recorder? Cosmetics case? Musical instrument?) Possibly having something to do with it, possibly not, mirrors blanked out among us; reflections vanished. Behind Japril a wide, indistinct window looked out on a brown landscape, boxed and blotted with architectural oddities, some angular, some freeform, many connected by arching tunnels. The sky was salted with stars. “I’m at a rescue station on the sixth moon of Chyvon, in the Tyon-omega system; Chyvon’s a gas giant one out from Rhyonon. Within an hour of the catastrophe, a rescue station was set up on Rhyonon’s nearest moon and an overflow station here.”
“Then some did get out …?” hearing, as I said it, how ridiculous it sounded. With two years’ planning, you can lift a few thousand women from one world and relocate them on another. How many can you evacuate within minutes?
“The station on Rhyonon’s moon was closed down to a skeleton staff within a hundred hours after the catastrophe.”
“I would have thought that the majority of the refugees—” I felt strange calling the survivors of an entire world refugees—“would have been brought to the nearer station.”
“The reason we maintain the skeleton staff on Rhyonon’s moon is at least to suggest—to those who’re suggestible—the possibility of a small refugee population there.”
“But there isn’t one …?”
“As far as illusions go, it’s pretty paltry. Believe me, I wasn’t in favor of it when it was decided on.”
“Japril,” I said. “Are there any survivors at all?”
She took a long time to say: “Yes.”
“And they’re not on Rhyonon’s moon, but rather on that moon of … Chyvon, with you?”
She took an even longer time to nod—throwing me to all those far-flung cultures where a nod does not necessarily signal affirmation. But they were not Japril’s.
Nonchalantly as I could manage, I asked: “How many?”
One reason Japril became friends with me in the first place is because of her uncanny ability to see through my diplomatic masks. “Why don’t I tell you, instead, your relation to this survivor, Marq?”
“You mean this woman is a factor in my life of an order other than rumor?”
“It’s a notable relation. And don’t discount rumor. It’s the real order of business this evening.” (Where I was, I was thinking of it as afternoon. But no matter.) “I’ve noted that relation—”
“And the Web wants to exploit it. Which is why you’ve called on me to talk about it—across nine thousand light-years.” One reason I became friends with Japril is because of how quickly her ambitious and devious plans open all their exfoliations to my view. “There is a survivor, isn’t there? At least one.” Really, I was thinking of Clym far more than the various suggestions Japril had all but thrown in front of me.
“We’ve had Rat Korga here at the station for …” There was relief in her voice as she said the name to me for the first time; and I got a sense that this was something she had not talked about with many people; and that to talk about it with someone outside a very limited circle was something she had wanted to do for: “—well, for a while now.”
3.
“LET ME TELL YOU about Rhyonon, Marq. Sit back and I’ll catalogue the horrors. I’ve done it in enough reports that I can recite it in my sleep. The flame shell,” Japril said, “where it roared across Rhyonon’s surface, was over fifty thousand feet high—which effectively did in any passing air travel. Most of the actual holocaust was confined to the equatorial areas. So was ninety percent of Rhyonon’s population. The resultant gaseous toxins alone, not to mention the incredible heatstorms that went raging out north and south, pretty well did in the parts of the world that were not directly burned. Winds over the whole planet rose to nearly six hundred kilometers an hour. In ten hours, the major flaming areas had more or less burned themselves out, with twelve percent of the planetary surface fused and the atmosphere radically deoxygenated. How’s the reception over there where you are, Marq? I just got a flicker. No, don’t say anything. Just let me go on. In seventeen hours, there was an average drop in temperature recorded over the general surface down to a hundred degrees Celsius, or even below that, here and there; and the average was falling. Because we have to mark it somewhere, this is now considered the official termination of the catastrophe, though there were still seas of hundred-fifty-degree muck bubbling around, on places that had never seen temperatures above twenty-five degrees celsius before. Choosing the real moment of termination over something the size of a planet is rather like deciding where the edge of an atomic mushroom cloud is with a ten centimeter rule. But less than twenty hours after the disaster’s commencement we were actually flying through that planetary murk. Marta was glum; and Ynn was putting out the forced cheerfulness that only makes the glum get angry. I called myself keeping my mind on the controls; and never have bothered to ask what I looked like to the others in the rescue boat. It only took us half an hour’s flying over thousands on thousands of square kilometers of lava fields, in the midst of which had once been some of Rhyonon’s major civilized cities of millions, to realize it was a pretty useless search. And how many hours was it after that, our scouting ships veered north and south toward the poles? How many scouting ships were there? And why was ours, among the hundreds called down to quarter and requarter the assigned areas, the one to make the strike? Suddenly our radar, peeking through the blackened air, came back with the ruin of a building. You have to understand that in places where a day ago there had been urban complexes as big as Vongle or Rimena—” Japril and I had met in Vongle afloat on Pattuck’s southeastern
seas—“there were only puddles of boiling mud. Large puddles, too. The deserts in the south had just been scorched—which is to say, that for a few hours a wind somewhat above the temperature of boiling water, had raged at several hundred k’s an hour over them, which was enough to do in any but the staunchest surface structures and pretty well all animal life; not to mention plants.
“And there was … a ruin!
“We sat our three-girl boat down beside it. The air was unbreathable—we had to go clomping out through the portal tube in heavy heat suits, because the temperature even here was still in the neighborhood of sixty degrees. Walking across the sand toward the broken walls, Ynn’s boot toe struck a pile of rubble falling away from something which, as we gathered around it and kicked away more dust, was clearly some desiccated transport machine.
“Within the roofless walls themselves, there was sand almost a foot deep over what turned out to be thermoplastic floorplates. There was also almost a complete lack of information about what function the station had served or who its inhabitants had been.
“Only one of us—Ynn—had bothered to learn any of the local Rhyonon languages in the minutes before we’d taken off. You and I, Marq, would have probably considered Rhyonon a fairly primitive place. They didn’t have a General Info system, for what seemed to be essentially religious reasons. They’d even been trying to legislate against the one the Web had set up on their nearer moon and not succeeding. On one of the few strings of cubes lying around that hadn’t melted beyond decipherment, on which they did their hieroglyphic insect-scratchings, Ynn found mention of a hermetically self-sealing underground refrigerator and storage crypt. Should we investigate? (Since the air was too thick to see through, inside what remained of the building, we watched each other in stereo schemata formed of little colored squares, reduced from infrared reflections, on stereo face plates inside our masks.) Why not? Back outside, where everything was scrimmed with dirty gold, and the stereo plates could be raised for simple glass—as long as you weren’t trying to make out details on anything more than a meter away—we hauled out the excavators. The blades dropped, began to churn sand. And that’s when Marta, inside the ship for something, called out that the biodetectors, which till now we’d all but forgotten, were blipping and pinging like mad.
“Something was down there—and alive!
“Marta’s first guess was that it was some kind of plankton farm below—perhaps the bacterial decay that had gotten started on the remains of some par-boiled algae. But the fine-tuning on the detectors told us the major form was almost certainly animal, not vegetable. Mice? was Ynn’s suggestion—they’ve gone with humanity everywhere else. Fleas? Some local paramecia who’d managed to escape frying? We tunneled and delved, furious as banshees, at the same time refusing to believe what the detector—with each ton of sand and slag the excavator’s blade heaved up over the crater’s rim—was insisting. You have no idea what it’s like to come upon something the size of a world where less than a day ago there were a quarter of a billion people, only to discover that now everything even resembling a molecule of ATP has been reduced to salts, gas, and water. Marta was putting up heat screens and clean-air traps as fast as Ynn could push away the rubble with the excavator. Using relay lines to the lunar GI system—the local signal jammers had been knocked out by the catastrophe—we’d all managed to become experts in any number of fancy rescue and medical techniques over the previous three hours. I was darting in and out of our ship, looking over the edge of the pit—swirling with smoke—then running inside again to see it on the screen in infrared, which cut out all the haze and where you had the advantage of being able to vary the focal length. ‘We’re through!’ Ynn called over the earphones; and Marta brought in her last bubble-dome, digging various polyisoprene walls well down in the sizzling sand. (I was out again.) Through plastic panes I saw sand fall inward.
“What came out into the bubble was immediately analyzed and the bubble itself was flooded with a gas mixture five degrees cooler and ten percent richer in oxygen—we figured no matter what was in there in the line of animal life, that would have to be an improvement. Then we were scrambling down ourselves and through the floppy plastic envelopes, with all sorts of suspensor stretchers, medical kits, flares, and stun-guns bobbling along behind us. In our great mittens, we climbed down through the welter of twisted pipes and cracked masonry, shooting cool air around us with super-handy-dandy portable air conditioners. It was over forty degrees in there when we went in. We sent out beams of white, blue, and green light among the collapsed lattices of crumpled supports and broken pipes. It had been seven minutes since we got the first life-reading—but we’d all been working with X 5 time-dilation drugs, which had made it seem to us just over a leisurely half-hour. Yellow, orange, and red beams converged. In the resultant glow, we saw, not moving, under a scatter of rubble, a leg.
“Ynn set loose a handful of diagnostic bugs that attacked our find like killer bees. But even as we were closing in, it was pretty clear that something fairly awful had happened.
“I started to say something was pinning the leg down—
“But, frankly, there wasn’t much leg left. Twenty seconds later (divided by five) the bugs reported, on the little screens flickering on the left sides of our vision plates: our survivor was also blind.
“Other reports were coming back now from the host of analyzers flitting and humming around the crypt, taking their readings and making their correlations: some time in the first few minutes of the catastrophe, one of ten giant refrigeration coils had ruptured and for seconds the space had been flooded with fluorine, before the gas had been removed, a minute later, by the sluggish purifiers, their efficiency hugely reduced by the high heat. Fortunately, for most of that minute, the survivor had not been breathing—otherwise the trauma to the mucous membranes of the respiratory system alone would have been fatal. That minute, by the bye, was to give us a lot of trouble over the next few days.
“But we got our survivor bubbled, sedated, aerated, and suspensored. In the midst of sealing up the plastic shield over the stretcher, there was some ghastly, basso grunt that threatened to topple towers and shatter eardrums—a human groan, but to us, thanks to the drugs, five octaves lower than uttered.
“Then we were pushing the stretcher along and up and between broken ledges. Outside the shield, flying dust had already peppered the transparent plastic with enough grit to blacken whatever we had been able to see before in the gray and mustard mists. And time-compressants were winding us down from the dilation drugs. (More than ten minutes is bad for your heart—and terrible for your kidneys.) In the sealed stretcher tube, the fellow was already being ministered to by threads of light that had pretty well woven around what was left of that right leg, growing a new one for him from the remains of the old. We got the stretcher out of the envelope flap, floated it across the sands (I swear the dunes had been blown into entirely different shapes in the minute we’d been down) and through our ship lock. Bubbles coursed the pale gold liquid that filled the container, carrying newly cloned cells to the proper locations and flushing away the damages. The survivor …”
“Japril,” I said, after moments when she had remained silent, “I’ve heard that term before. Now you’ve said it, I have to say: I can’t believe that over the surface of an entire world, any catastrophe short of the whole planet’s physically blowing up could manage to do in every member of the population with only one exception—”
“The survivor was, by now, being monitored and observed by twelve hundred other rescue workers still searching and quartering Rhyonon’s steaming, storm-scoured surface, looking for others with one added grain of hope lent by our success.” (Yes, I was thinking: You could bring in twelve hundred workers to look for survivors in one undersea magma-mine disaster. A world …?) “Our ship lurched up, and we rose above that noxious desert, bearing what we would soon learn was a hugely ruined creature, healing now in our biotic tubs.”
“And you brought
her here,” I said. “Which is to say—there, where you are. But why are you—”
Japril’s foreknuckles came together on the gold bar. (A work of art? A medical device? A child’s toy?) “We’re talking of this survivor—the survivor that concerns you.”
FIVE
Rescue Continued
1.
“JAPRIL,” I SAID. “I don’t know why I keep asking. But I suppose it’s because the implied answer just always seems wrong. Tell me—or tell me why the Web doesn’t want me to know: exactly how many survivors were there from Rhyonon?”
“Marq,” she said, “you should know if anyone does: it’s your question that’s impossible. Three thousand volunteers in a colonial ship bound for the Mie-t&t VII colony had left Rhyonon’s surface six hours before the holocaust commenced. All of them are alive today; and none of them knows what’s happened to her former home. Were they survivors? There are thousands upon thousands more, born on Rhyonon over the last hundred years, who now live on a moon or a world or an O’n-colony circling some moon or world, having left a day or a year or a decade ago. Are they survivors? Or the how-many from other worlds, other moons, within hours or minutes or days of visiting or returning to Rhyonon, whose flights were then canceled—not to mention the seven hundred and fifty-eight incoming offworld flights that we were able to deflect, within minutes of the disaster’s commencement, to moons or other planets. Were they survivors?”
“What about the five, or fifty, or five hundred you couldn’t?”
Japril got that angry look I’ve always liked her for. “I could give you two answers. First, it’s not my department. Second, there were two-hundred-seven of those. In seventeen cases, the Web was actually able to effect some midair transfers of passengers and crews that, if there’s going to be any excitement about the Rhyonon rescue operations, ought to be at the center of it.”