And he went to meet his maker.
* * *
29
T
he cops questioned Christine and me for hours, but they had let the four aliens immediately return to the mother-ship so that Barbulkan’s wound could be treated. I finally took a cab home—thirty dollars, with tip—and was up for another two hours telling Susan all about what had happened.
“My God,” she said, over and over again. “My God, you could have been killed.”
“Hollus saved me. She saved everyone.”
“I’m going to give that great big spider a huge hug if I ever get the chance,” said Susan, smiling.
I smiled, too, and kissed her. But I was exhausted by this point—absolutely bone-weary. My vision was blurring, and I felt lightheaded. “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” I said, “but I have got to get some sleep.”
She nodded, kissed me again, and we headed up to our room.
I slept until 10:00 Monday morning. The shootout had occurred too late to make the morning papers, but Susan told me that both Breakfast Television and Canada A.M. had led with the story. She’d stayed home from the office to be there for me when I awoke. Ricky was already off to school by the time I crawled out of bed.
I finally managed to make it into the ROM by noon. Fortunately, since it was indeed Monday, the museum was closed to the public, giving the facilities division a chance to clean things up; they were still mopping the Rotunda’s marble floor when I got there. Meanwhile, Jonesy and all his preparators were in Garfield Weston Hall, salvaging everything they could from the shattered shales. Several paleontologists were flying up from the Smithsonian, too, to lend a hand; they were expected before the end of the day.
I made it up to my office and collapsed into my chair, rubbing my temples, trying to banish the headache I’d woken up with. Shortly after I sat down, the holoform projector bleeped, and the Hollus simulacrum wavered into existence.
I rose from my chair, my head pounding as I did so. “How are you?” I asked, concerned.
The Forhilnor’s torso bobbed. “Distressed. I did not sleep well, despite medication given me by my ship’s doctor.”
I nodded sympathetically. “I didn’t sleep well, either; I kept hearing gunshots echo through my head.” I frowned and sat back down. “They say there’s going to be an inquest. The cops probably didn’t have to kill Cooter.”
Hollus’s eyestalks moved in a way I’d never seen them do before. “I have limited sympathy for him,” she said. “He injured Barbulkan and tried to kill me.” She paused. “How extensive was the damage to the Burgess Shale fossils?”
I shook my head slowly. “Everything in the first five cases was destroyed,” I said, “including the one you were scanning.” I felt nauseous contemplating the loss; not only were they some of the world’s most important fossils, but they had also been some of the best preserved, hauntingly beautiful creatures, almost extraterrestrial in appearance. Harming them was barbarous, a sacrilege. “Of course, the fossils were insured,” I said, “so there will be a lot of money coming to both the ROM and the Smithsonian, but the specimens are irreplaceable.”
“In a way it is fortunate,” said Hollus. “Presumably they started shooting with the case we were scanning specifically because its glass cover was open. The scans were partially completed, so at least a few of the specimens can be recovered. I will have reconstructions made for you.”
I nodded, knowing no matter how realistic and accurate the reconstructions might be, they would never be the same as the originals. “Thank you.”
“It is a terrible loss,” Hollus said. “I have never seen fossils of that quality on any other world. They were really quite—”
She broke off in mid-sentence, and her simulacrum froze in place, as if the real Hollus, the one in synchronous orbit aboard the mothership, had been distracted by something happening up there.
“Hollus?” I said, not really concerned; one of her shipmates was probably just asking her a question.
“Just a moment,” she replied, the simulacrum moving again. I heard a few songs in the Forhilnor language as she communicated with somebody else, and then the simulacrum froze once more.
I sighed impatiently. This was worse than Call Waiting: you still had the damned simulacrum taking up most of your office. I picked up a magazine off my desk—the latest New Scientist; the departmental copy started its circulation with me and worked its way down through the ranks. I’d only just opened its cover when the Hollus avatar started moving again. “Terrible news,” she said, one word per mouth, her voices oddly attenuated. “I—my God, it is terrible news.”
I dropped the magazine. “What?”
Hollus’s eyestalks were swinging back and forth. “Our mothership does not have to contend with the scattering of light by your planet’s atmosphere; even during daytime, the Merelcas’s sensors can still clearly see the stars. And one of those stars…”
I leaned forward in my chair. “Yes? Yes?”
“One of those stars has begun its conversion to a—what is the word, again? When a massive star explodes?”
“A supernova?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Wow.” I remembered all the excitement around the planetarium back in 1987 when the U of T’s Jan Shelton discovered the supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud. “That’s great.”
“It is not great,” said Hollus. “The star that has begun to explode is Alpha Orionis.”
“Betelgeuse?” I said. “Betelgeuse has started going supernova?”
“That is correct.”
“Are you sure?”
“There can be no doubt,” said the Forhilnor, her two voices sounding quite shaky. “It is already shining with more than a million times its normal brightness, and its luminosity is still increasing.”
“My God,” I said. “I—I should phone Donald Chen. He’ll know who to notify. There’s a central bureau for astronomical telegrams, or some such thing…” I picked up my phone and dialed Chen’s extension. He answered on the third ring; one more and his voice mail would have picked up.
“Don,” I said, “it’s Tom Jericho. Hollus here tells me that Betelgeuse has just gone supernova.”
There was silence for a few moments. “Betelgeuse is—was—a prime candidate to go supernova,” he said. “But no one knew precisely when it would happen.” A pause, and then, earnestly, as if he just realized something: “Did Hollus say Betelgeuse? Alpha Orionis?”
“Yes.”
“Look, is Hollus sure? Absolutely sure?”
“Yes, she says she’s positive.”
“Damn,” said Chen into his phone’s mouthpiece, but I don’t think he was really talking to me. “Damn.”
“What?” I said.
Chen’s voice sounded strained. “I’ve been going over that supernova data Hollus sent down, particularly as related to gamma-ray output. For the last supernova, the one in 1987, we had lousy data; it happened before we had any dedicated gamma-ray observation satellites—Compton didn’t go up until 1991. The only gamma-ray data we had for Supernova 1987A was from the Solar Maximum Mission satellite, and it wasn’t designed for extragalactic observations.”
“So?”
“So the gamma-ray output of a supernova is much greater than we’d thought; Hollus’s data proves that.”
“And?” I said. “What does that mean?” I looked over at Hollus, who was bobbing extremely rapidly; I’d never seen her so upset.
Chen let out a long sigh, the sound rumbling across the phone line. “It means that our atmosphere is going to be ionized. It means that the ozone layer is going to be depleted.” He paused. “It means that we’re all going to die.”
Ricky Jericho was many kilometers north of the ROM, in the playground at Churchill Public School. It was the middle of the ninety-minute lunch break; some of his classmates went home for lunch, but Ricky ate at school in a room where they let the kids watch The Flintstones on CFTO. After he’d finished his bologna san
dwich and apple, he’d gone out into the grassy yard. Various teachers were walking around, breaking up fights, cooing over skinned knees, and doing all the other things teachers had to do. Ricky looked at the sky. Something was shining brightly up there.
He made his way past the jungle gym and found his teacher. “Miss Cohan,” he said, tugging at her skirt. “What’s that?”
She used a hand to shield her eyes as she looked up in the direction he was pointing. “That’s just an airplane, Ricky.”
Ricky Jericho wasn’t one to contradict his teachers lightly. But he shook his head. “No, it’s not,” he said. “It can’t be. It’s not moving.”
My mind was swirling, and my intestines were knotting. A new day was dawning, not just in Toronto, but for the entire Milky Way. In fact, even observers in far-distant galaxies would surely see the growing brightness once sufficient time had elapsed for the light to reach them. It beggared the imagination. Betelgeuse was indeed going supernova.
I put Don on the speaker phone, and he and Hollus conversed back and forth, with me interjecting the occasional worried question. What was happening, I gathered, was this: in every active star, hydrogen and helium undergo fusion, producing successively heavier elements. But, if the star is sufficiently massive, when the fusion chain reaches iron, energy starts being absorbed rather than released, causing a ferrous core to build up. The star grows too dense to support itself: the outward explosive thrust of its internal fusion no longer counteracts the huge pull of its own gravity. The core collapses into degenerate matter—atomic nuclei crushed together, forming a volume only twenty kilometers across but with a mass many times that of Sol. And when infalling hydrogen and helium from the outer layers of the star suddenly hit this new, hard surface, they fuse instantly. The fusion blast and the shockwave of the collision propagate back out, blowing off the star’s gaseous atmosphere and releasing a torrent of radio noise, light, heat, x rays, cosmic rays, and neutrinos—a deadly sleet pouring out in all directions, an expanding spherical shell of death and destruction shining brighter than all the other stars in the galaxy combined: a supernova.
And that, apparently, was happening right now to Betelgeuse. Its diameter was expanding rapidly; within days, it would be bigger than Earth’s entire solar system.
Earth would be protected for a time: our atmosphere would keep the initial onslaught from reaching the ground. But there was more coming. Much more.
I’d tuned the radio in my office to CFTR, an all-news station. As reports started appearing on Earth’s TV and radio stations, some people rushed to caves and mine shafts. It wouldn’t make any difference. The end of the world was coming—and with a bang, not a whimper.
Those Forhilnors and Wreeds currently visiting Earth, perhaps along with a few human passengers, might escape, at least for a time; they could maneuver their starship to keep the bulk of the planet between themselves and Betelgeuse, acting as a shield of stone and iron almost thirteen thousand kilometers thick. But there was no way they could outrun the expanding shell of death; it would take the Merelcas a full year to accelerate to close to the speed of light.
But even if that ship could escape, the Forhilnor and Wreed homeworlds could not; they would soon be facing the same onslaught, the same scourge. The asteroids that hit Sol III and Beta Hydri III and Delta Pavonis II sixty-five million years ago were minor blows in comparison, mere flesh wounds from which the ecosystems rebounded within a matter of decades.
But there would be no rebounding this time. This would be the sixth great extinction, felt equally on all three worlds. And whether biology had started in this solar system on Mars rather than Earth, whether it really had arisen multiple times on the Forhilnor world, whether the Wreeds even knew that it was the sixth extinction, didn’t matter.
For this would also be the last great extinction, the concluding chapter, a wiping clean of the slate, the final turn in the game of Life.
* * *
30
W
hat do you do in the last moments of your life? Unlike most of the six billion humans who had just received a death sentence, I actually had been preparing for my own demise. But I’d expected it to come at a more dilatory pace, with me in a hospital bed, accompanied by Susan, maybe my brother Bill, a few friends, and perhaps even brave little Ricky.
But the explosion of Betelgeuse was utterly unheralded; we didn’t see it coming. Oh, as Hollus had said earlier, we knew Betelgeuse would doubtless eventually go supernova, but there was no reason to expect it to happen right now.
Toronto’s subway system was jammed already, according to the radio reports. People were going down into the stations, into the subway cars, hoping that they would be protected by being underground. They were refusing to vacate the trains, even at the ends of the lines.
And the roads outside the ROM had already turned into parking lots, total gridlock. I wanted to be with family just as much as everyone else did, but there didn’t seem to be any way to manage it. I tried repeatedly calling Susan’s office, but all I got were busy signals.
Of course, death wouldn’t be instantaneous. There would be weeks, or even months, before the ecosystem collapsed. Right now, Earth’s ozone layer was protecting us from the high-energy photons, and, of course, the sleet of bulky charged particles, traveling slower than the speed of light, hadn’t arrived yet. But soon enough the onslaught from Betelgeuse would strip off the ozone layer, and hard radiation both from that exploding star and from our own sun would reach the ground, breaking down living tissue. Surely I would be able to reunite with my wife and son before the end. But for now, it seemed, my company would be the simulacrum of an alien being.
The first blast from Betelgeuse had already disrupted the satellite-based long-distance telephone network, and so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to see the avatar wink in and out of existence periodically, as the electromagnetic cacophony from Orion interfered with the communication between the real Hollus over Ecuador and her holographic stand-in here in Toronto.
“I wish I could be with Susan,” I said, looking at the Forhilnor across my desk, cluttered with unfinished business.
To my astonishment, Hollus actually raised her voices—something I’d never heard her do before. “At least you will likely get to see your family before the end. You think you are far from home? I cannot even contact my children. If Betelgeuse is hitting Earth with this sort of force, it will slam Beta Hydri III, as well. I cannot even radio a goodbye to Kassold and Pealdon; not only is there too much interference, but the radio signal would not reach them for twenty-four years.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“No, you were not,” she snapped again, holographic spittle actually flying from her left mouth. But after a moment, she calmed down a little. “Apologies,” she said. “It is just that I love my children so much. To know that they—that my entire race—is dying…”
I looked at my friend. She’d been away from her world for so long already—out of touch with what was going on back home for years now. Her son and daughter were grown when she left on her grand tour of eight star systems, but now—now, they were likely middle aged, perhaps even biologically older than Hollus herself was, for she had traveled at relativistic speeds during much of her journey.
It was worse than that, actually, come to think of it. Betelgeuse was in Earth’s northern sky; Beta Hydri in its southern one—which meant that Earth was between the two stars. It would be several years before the brightening of Betelgeuse would be visible from Beta Hydri III—but there was no way to get a warning to that world; nothing could reach it faster than the angry photons from Betelgeuse that were already on their way.
Hollus was visibly trying to regain her composure. “Come,” she said at last, her torso bobbing slowly, deliberately. “We might as well go outside and look at the spectacle.”
And we did, taking the elevator down and exiting through the staff entrance. We stood outdoors on the same patc
h of concrete that Hollus’s shuttle had originally landed on.
For all I knew, the Forhilnor and her colleagues were indeed positioning their starship for maximum safety. But the simulacrum of her stood with me, out front of the ROM, in the shadow of the abandoned planetarium dome, staring up. Even most of the passersby were looking up at the cerulean bowl rather than at the weird, spiderlike alien.
Betelgeuse was clearly visible as we looked out over the street toward Queen’s Park; it was about a third of the way up the southeastern sky. It was disquieting to see a star shining during daylight. I tried to imagine the rest of Orion’s splayed form against the blue backdrop but had no idea how it would be oriented at this time of day.
Other staff members and patrons exited the museum, as well, joining the gathering crowd on the side of the road. And, after a few minutes, astronomer Donald Chen, the walking dead, came out of the staff entrance and headed over to join us, more of the walking dead.
The Hubble Space Telescope had, of course, been immediately trained on Betelgeuse. Much better pictures were being obtained by Hollus’s starship, the Merelcas, and these were broadcast down to be freely shared with the people of Earth. Even before the star had started to expand, the mothership’s telescopes had been able to resolve Betelgeuse into a red disk marred by cooler sun spots and speckled with hotter convective patches, all surrounded by a magnificent ruddy corona.
But now that diaphanous outer atmosphere had been blown off in a phenomenal explosion, and the star itself was expanding rapidly, swelling to many times its normal diameter—although since Betelgeuse was a variable star, it was hard to say precisely what its normal diameter was. But, still, it had never before reached anywhere near these proportions. A yellow-white shell of superheated gas, a lethal plasma, was expanding outward from the spreading disk, hurtling in all directions.
From the ground, in the light of day, all we could see was a bright point of light, flaring and flickering.