Part 73 (1/2)

”Do you?”

”I love this place,” Morrissey said. ”I can't bear to see it all smashed apart.”

”Then why didn't you go home to Earth with the others?”

”Home? Home? This is my home. I have Medean genes in my body. My people have lived here for a thousand years. My great-grandparents were born on Medea and so were _their_ great-grandparents.”

”The others could say the same thing. Yet when earthquake time drew near, they went home. Why have you stayed?”

Morrissey, towering over the slender little being, was silent a moment. Then he laughed harshly and said, ”I didn't evacuate for the same reason that you don't give a d.a.m.n that a killer quake is coming. We're both done for anyway, right? I don't know anything about Earth. It's not my world. I'm too old to start over there. And you? You're on your last legs, aren't you? Both your wombs are gone, your male itch is gone, you're in that nice quiet burned-out place, eh, Dinoov?” Morrissey chuckled. ”We deserve each other. Waiting for the end together, two old hulks.”

The f.u.x studied Morrissey with glinting, unfathomable, mischievous eyes. Then he pointed downwind, toward a headland maybe three hundred meters away, a sandy rise thickly furred with bladdermoss and scrubby yellow-leaved anglepod bushes. Right at the tip of the cape, outlined sharply against the glowing sky, were a couple of f.u.xes. One was female, six-legged, yet to bear her first litter. Behind her, gripping her haunches and readying himself to mount, was a bipedal male, and even at this distance Morrissey could see his frantic, almost desperate movements.

”What are they doing?” Dinoov asked.

Morrissey shrugged. ”Mating.”

”Yes. And when will she drop her young?”

”In fifteen weeks.”

”Are they burned out?” the f.u.x asked. ”Are they done for? Why do they make young if destruction is coming?”

”Because they can't help -- ”

Dinoov silenced Morrissey with an upraised hand. ”I meant the question not to be answered. Not yet, not until you understand things better. Yes? Please?”

”I don't -- ”

” -- understand. Exactly.” The f.u.x smiled a f.u.xy smile. ”This walk has tired you. Come now: I'll go with you to your cabin.”

They scrambled briskly up the path from the long crescent of pale blue sand that was the beach to the top of the bluff, and then walked more slowly down the road, past the abandoned holiday cabins toward Morrissey's place. Once this had been Argoview Dunes, a bustling sh.o.r.eside community, but that was long ago. Morrissey in these latter days would have preferred to live in some wilder terrain where the hand of man had not weighed so heavily on the natural landscape, but he dared not risk it. Medea, even after ten centuries of colonization, still was a world of sudden perils. The unconquered places had gone unconquered for good reason; and, living on alone since the evacuation, he needed to keep close to some settlement with its stores of food and materiel. He could not afford the luxury of the picturesque.

In any case the wilderness was rapidly reclaiming its own now that most of the intruders had departed. In the early days this steamy low-lat.i.tude tropical coast had been infested with all manner of monstrous beasts. Some had been driven off by methodical campaigns of extermination and others, repelled by the effluvia of the human settlements, had simply disappeared. But they were starting to return. A few weeks ago Morrissey had seen a Scuttlefish come ash.o.r.e, a gigantic black-scaled tubular thing, hauling itself onto land by desperate heaves of its awesome curved flippers and actually digging its fangs into the sand, biting the sh.o.r.e to pull itself onward. They were supposed to be extinct. By a fantastic effort the thing had dug itself into the beach, burying all twenty meters of its body in the azure sand, and a couple of hours later hundreds of young ones that had tunnelled out of the mighty carca.s.s began to emerge, slender beasts no longer than Morrissey's arm that went writhing with demonic energy down the dunes and into the rough surf. So this was becoming a sea of monsters again. Morrissey had no objections. Swimming was no longer one of his recreations.

He had lived by himself beside the Ring Ocean for ten years in a little low-roofed cabin of the old Arcan wingstructure design, that so beautifully resisted the diabolical Medean winds. In the days of his marriage, when he had been a geophysicist mapping the fault lines, he and Nadia and Paul and Danielle had had a house on the outskirts of Chong on Northcape within view of the High Cascades, and had come here only in winter; but Nadia had gone to sing cosmic harmonies with the serene and n.o.ble and incomprehensible balloons, and Danielle had been caught in the Hotlands at doubleflare time and had not returned, and Paul, tough old indestructible Paul, had panicked over the thought that the earthquake was only a decade away, and between Darkday and Dimday of Christmas week had packed up and boarded an Earthbound s.h.i.+p. All that had happened within the s.p.a.ce of four months, and afterward Morrissey found he had lost his fondness for the chilly air of Northcape. So he had come down to Argoview Dunes to wait out the final years in the comfort of the humid tropics, and now he was the only one left in the sh.o.r.e-side community. He had brought persona-cubes of Paul and Nadia and Danielle with him, but playing them turned out to be too painful, and it was a long time since he had talked with anyone but Dinoov. For all he knew, he was the only one left on Medea. Except, of course, the f.u.xes and the balloons. And the scuttlefish and the rock demons and the wingfingers and the not-turtles and all of those.

Morrissey and Dinoov stood silently for a time outside the cabin, watching the sunset begin. Through a darkening sky mottled with the green and yellow folds and streaks of Medea's perpetual aurora, the twin suns Phrixus and h.e.l.le -- mere orange red daubs of feeble light -- drifted toward the horizon. In a few hours they would be gone, off to cast their bleak glow over the dry-ice wastelands of Farside. There could never be real darkness on the inhabited side of Medea, though, for the oppressive great sullen bulk of Argo, the huge red-hot gas-giant planet whose moon Medea was, lay just a million kilometers away. Medea, locked in Argo's grip, kept the same face turned toward her enormous primary all the time. From Argo came the warmth that made life possible on Medea, and also a perpetual dull reddish illumination.

The stars were beginning to come out as the twin suns set.

”See there,” Dinoov said. ”Argo has nearly eaten the white fires.”

The f.u.x had chosen deliberately archaic terms, folk-astronomy; but Morrissey understood what he meant. Phrixus and h.e.l.le were not the only suns in Medea's sky. The two orange-red dwarf stars, moving as a binary unit, were themselves subject to a pair of magnificent blue-white stars, Castor A and B. Though the blue-white stars were a thousand times as far from Medea as the orange-red ones were, they were plainly visible by day and by night, casting a brilliant icy glare. But now they were moving into eclipse behind great Argo, and soon -- eleven weeks, two days, one hour, plus or minus a little -- they would disappear entirely.

And how, then, could there not be an earthquake?

Morrissey was angry with himself for the pathetic soft-headedness of his fantasy of an hour ago. No earthquake? A last-minute miracle? The calculations in error? Sure. Sure. If wishes were horses, beggars might ride. The earthquake was inevitable. A day would come when the configuration of the heavens was exactly _thus_, Phrixus and h.e.l.le positioned _here_, and Castor A and B _there_, and _there_ and _there_, and Argo as ever exerting its inexorable pull above the Hotlands, and when the celestial vectors were properly aligned, the gravitational stresses would send a terrible shudder through the crust of Medea.

This happened every 7,160 years. And the time was at hand.

Centuries ago, when the persistence of certain apocalyptic themes in f.u.x folklore had finally led the astronomers of the Medea colony to run a few belated calculations of these matters, no one had really cared. Hearing that the world will come to an end in five or six hundred years is much like hearing that you yourself are going to die in another fifty or sixty: it makes no practical difference in the conduct of everyday life. Later, of course, as the seismic tickdown moved along, people began to think about it more seriously, and beyond doubt it had been a depressive factor in the Medean economy for the past century or so. Nevertheless, Morrissey's generation was the first that had confronted the dimensions of the impending calamity in any realistic way. And in one manner or another the thousand-year-old colony had melted away in little more than a decade.

”How quiet everything is,” Morrissey said. He glanced at the f.u.x. ”Do you think I'm the only one left, Dinoov?”

”How would I know?”

”Don't play those games with me. Your people have ways of circulating information that we were only just beginning to suspect. You know.”

The f.u.x said gravely, ”The world is large. There were many human cities. Probably some others of your kind are still living here, but I have no certain knowledge. You may well be the last one.”

”I suppose. Someone had to be.”

”Does it give you satisfaction, knowing you are last?”

”Because it means I have more endurance, or because I think it's good that the colony has broken up?”

”Either,” said the f.u.x.

”I don't feel a thing,” Morrissey said. ”Either way. I'm the last, if I'm the last, because I didn't want to leave. That's all. This is my home and here I stay. I don't feel proud or brave or n.o.ble for having stayed. I wish there wasn't going to be an earthquake, but I can't do anything about that, and by now I don't think I even care.”

”Really?” Dinoov asked. ”That's not how it seemed a little while ago.”

Morrissey smiled. ”Nothing lasts. We pretend we build for the ages, but time moves and everything fades and art becomes artifacts and sand becomes sandstone, and what of it? Once there was a world here and we turned it into a colony. And now the colonists are gone and soon the colony will be gone and this will be a world again as our rubble blows away. And what of it?”

”You sound very old,” said the f.u.x.

”I am very old. Older even than you.”

”Only in years. Our lives move faster than yours, but in my few years I have been through all the stages of my life, and the end would soon be coming for me even if the ground were not going to shake. But you still have time left”

Morrissey shrugged.

The f.u.x said, ”I know that there are stars.h.i.+ps standing fueled and ready at Port Medea. Ready to go, at the push of a b.u.t.ton.”

”Are you sure? s.h.i.+ps ready to go?”

”Many of them. They were not needed. The Ahya have seen them and told us.”

”The balloons? What were they doing at Port Medea?”

”Who understands the Ahya? They wander where they please. But they have seen the s.h.i.+ps, friend Morrissey. You could still save yourself.”

”Sure,” Morrissey said. ”I take a flitter thousands of kilometers across Medea, and I singlehandedly give a stars.h.i.+p the checkdown for a voyage of fifty light-years, and then I put myself into coldsleep and I go home all alone and wake up on an alien planet where my remote ancestors happened to have been born. What for?”