Greg Bear - The Forge of God

Out of their group of twenty, nine had volunteered, two children, three women, and four men, including Arthur, Francine, and Marty. The nine followed the stocky copper robot through the chamber at the end of the curved hall.

They walked along a narrow black strip in a cylindrical corridor. Arthur tried to make a map in his head, not entirely succeeding. The ship apparently had compartments that moved in relation to each other.

Passing through a hatch ahead of them, the robot rolled abruptly to take up a new vertical. They found themselves doing likewise, with a few moans of complaint and surprise. In a cabin about a hundred feet long and forty or fifty feet deep, they faced a broad transparent panel that gave a view of bright steady stars. Marty kept close to Arthur, holding his arm tightly with one hand, the other clenched into a fist. The boy had sucked his lips inward over his teeth and was making small smacking sounds. Francine followed, tense and reluctant.

Arthur looked down at his son and smiled. “Your choice, fellah,” he said. Marty nodded. This was no longer a youngster playing patsy to a pretty blond cousin; this was a boy feeling his way to manhood.

More people entered through a hatch in the opposite side of the cabin in groups of four or five or six, children among them, until a small crowd faced the darkness and stars; Arthur estimated seventy or eighty. He seemed to recognize some from his time on the network, though that was hardly likely; all he had heard were their inner voices, which almost never matched physical appearance. He thought of Hicks’s inner voice, robust and young and sharp, and of his white-haired, grandfatherly presence. I’m going to miss him. He could have helped us a lot here.

Arthur flashed on Harry, desiccated, decaying, buried deep in a coffin in the Earth; or had Ithaca had him cremated? That seemed to suit both of them better.

A tall young black man stood behind Arthur and Francine. Arthur nodded a greeting and the man returned the nod, cordial, dignified, terrified, his neck muscles taut as cords. Arthur examined the other faces, trying to learn something from the mix, how they had been chosen. Age? There were few older than fifty; but then, these were just the ones who had chosen to witness. Race? All types found on North America were represented. Intelligence? There was no way to tell that…

“We’re in space, aren’t we?” the tall young man asked. “That’s what they said, I just didn’t believe them. We’re in space, and we’re going to join with other arks soon. My name’s Reuben,” he said, offering his hand to Arthur. They shook. Reuben’s hand was damp, but so was Arthur’s. “This your son?”

“This is Martin,” Arthur said. Reuben reached down and shook Marty’s hand. Marty looked up at him solemnly, still sucking his lips. “And my wife, Francine.”

“I don’t know how to feel,” Reuben said. “I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t anymore.”

Arthur agreed. He did not feel like talking.

Something flashed against the stars, turning in the sunlight, and then steadied and approached them. Francine pointed, awed. It was shaped like a huge, rounded arrowhead, flat on one side, contoured to a central ridge on the opposite side.

“That’s Singapore,” said a woman behind them. Not all of the network received information at once, Arthur decided; that made sense. It would have flooded them.

“Singapore,” Reuben said, shaking his head. “I’ve never even been there.”

“We have Istanbul and Cleveland,” said a young man at one end of the cabin, hardly more than a boy.

The gray ship passed out of view above them. There was still no sensation of motion, nor any sound except for the murmurs and shuffling of the cabin’s occupants. They might have been standing in an exhibit hall waiting for some spectacular new form of entertainment to begin.

The stars began to move all in one direction; the ark was rotating. Arthur searched for constellations he knew, and for a moment saw none; then he spotted the Southern Cross, and as the rotation continued, Orion.

The white and blue limb of the Earth rose into view and the occupants of the cabin gave a collective gasp.

Still there. Still looks the same.

“Jesus,” Reuben said. “Poppa, Momma, Jesus.”

Danielle, Grant, Becky. Angkor Wat, Taj Mahal, Library of Congress. Grand Canyon. The house and the river. Steppes of central Asia. Cockroaches, elephants, Olduvai Gorge, New York City, Dublin, Beijing. The first woman I ever dated, Kate — Katherine. The bones of the dog who helped me come to grips with the world and become a man.

“That’s the Earth, isn’t it, Dad?” Marty asked quietly.

“That’s it.”

“It’s still there. Maybe we can go back and nothing will happen.”

Arthur found himself nodding. Maybe so.

The woman who had known about Singapore said, “They’re still in the Earth. They’re the last of the planet-eaters. They can’t leave because we’ll get them.” Arthur glanced nervously at her, as if she were a dangerous sibyl; her face was pale and convulsed.

“Rock of a-a-a-ges…”

The singing had taken a slightly frantic tone, sharper, higher, more disturbing. The column of smoke from the Ahwanee had risen above the Royal Arches; the hotel was almost consumed, and sparks from the blaze threatened to ignite the surrounding woods. From their vantage, they watched park fire trucks spraying water on the flaming ruins.

Spend your last few minutes trying to save something, Edward thought. Not a bad way to go. He envied the fire fighters and park rangers. The fire took their minds away from the inevitable. Up on Glacier Point, people had nothing to do but think about what would happen — and sing very badly.

The rock beneath them shifted the merest fraction. Betsy returned from the rest room, sat firmly beside Edward on the lowest terrace, and placed her arm through his; they had not been separated for more than a few minutes the last hour. Still, he felt alone, and looking at her, sensed she felt alone as well.

“Do you hear it?” she asked.

“The grumbling?”

“Yes.”

“I hear it.”

He imagined the lumps of neutronium and anti-neutronium, or whatever they were, meeting at the center; perhaps they had already met, minutes or even an hour before, and the expanding front of raging plasma had just begun to make its effects known on the Earth’s mantle and thin crust.

In high school, Edward had once tried to draw a scale chart of the layers of a section of the Earth, with the inner and outer cores, mantle, and crust outlined in proportion. He had quickly found that the crust did not show up as more than the thinnest of pencil lines, even when he extended his drawing to an eight-foot-long piece of butcher paper. Using his calculator to figure how large the drawing would have to be, he had learned that the floor of the school gymnasium might suffice to hold a drawing that gave the crust a line one third the width of his little finger.

Hidden volumes and surfaces again.

Insignificance.

Geologists dealt with insignificance all the time, but how many applied it directly to their personal lives?

“…cleft for meeee…Let me hiiide myself in theeee …”

“The air is getting hotter,” Minelli said. The neckband of his black T-shirt was soaked and his hair hung down in black ribbons. Inez sat farther back, on the upper terrace, sobbing quietly to herself.

“Go to her,” Edward commanded, nodding in her direction.

Minelli gave him a helpless look, then climbed up the steps.

“People are all that matter,” he said softly to Betsy. “Nothing else matters. Not in the beginning, not in the end.”