David Brin - Earth

Sound became smell. Roiling images scratched her skin. Amid cacophonous static Teresa thought she actually heard Jason , calling her name. But the voice blew away in the noisome gale before she could tell whether it was real or phantom — one of countless chimeras clamoring from all sides.

For all she knew, she was permanently blind. But that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except the battle to save her ship.

Vision finally did clear, at last, with the same astonishing speed as it had been lost. A narrow tunnel snapped into focus, expanding rapidly till only the periphery sparkled with those eerie shades. Screaming alarms began shutting down.

The transition left her stunned, staring unbelievingly at the once-familiar cabin. The chronometer said less than ten minutes had passed. It felt like hours.

“Um,” she commented with a dry throat. Once again, Pleiades had the nerve to start acting as if nothing had happened. Red lights turned amber,- amber became green. Teresa herself wasn’t about to recover so quickly, for sure.

Mark sneezed with terrific force. “Where — where’s Erehwon? Where’s the tether?” A few minutes thrust couldn’t have taken them far. But the approach and rendezvous display showed nothing at all. Teresa switched to a higher scale.

Nothing. The station was nowhere.

Mark whispered. “What happened to it?”

Teresa changed radar settings, expanding scale again and ordering a full-spectrum doppler scan. This time, at last, a scattering of blips appeared. Her mouth suddenly tasted ashen.

“There’s… pieces of it.”

A cluster of large objects had entered much higher orbit, rising rapidly as Pleiades receded in her own ellipse. One transmitted an emergency beacon, identifying it as part of the station’s central complex.

“We better do a circularization burn,” Mark said, “to have a chance of rescuing anybody.”

Teresa blinked once more. I should’ve thought of that .

“Check… check all the tank and line pressures first,” she said, still staring at the mess that had been the core of Reagan Station. Something had rent the tethers… and all the spars connecting the modules, for good measure. That force might return anytime, but they owed it to their fellow spacers to try to save those left alive.

“Pressures look fine,” Mark reported. “Give me a minute to compute a burn. It’ll be messy.”

“That’s okay. We’ll use up our reserves. Kennedy and Kourou are probably already scrambling launchers—” She stopped, ears perked to a strange tapping sound. Another symptom? But no, it came from behind her. She swiveled angrily. If that damned Spivey had come back…

A face in the rear window made Teresa gasp, then she sighed. It was only their inadvertent hitchhiker, the space-suited crewman, his helmet still pressed against the perspex screen.

“Hmph,” she commented. “Our guest doesn’t look as pissed off as before.” In fact, the expression behind the steamed-up faceplate beamed unalloyed gratitude. “He must have seen Nearpoint come apart. By now it may already be in the atmos…”

She stopped suddenly. “Jason!”

“What?” Mark looked up from the computer.

“Where’s the upper tip? Where’s Farpoint!”

Teresa scrabbled at the radar display, readjusting to its highest scale on autofrequency scan — taking in the blackness far from Earth just in time to catch a large blip that streaked past the outer edge of the screen.

“Sweet Gaia… look at the doppler!” Randall stared. “It’s moving at… at…” He didn’t finish. Teresa could read the screen as well as he.

The glowing letters lingered, even after the fleeting blip departed. They burned in the display and in their hearts.

Jason , Teresa thought, unable to comprehend or cope with what she’d seen. Her voice caught, and when she finally spoke, it was simply to say, “Six… thousand kilometers… per second.”

It was impossible of course. Teresa shook her head in numb, unreasoning disbelief that Jason would have, could have, done this to her!

“ Kakashkiya ,” she sighed.

“He’s leaving me… at two percent of the goddamn speed of light…”

□ It was Atē, first-born daughter of Zeus, who used the golden apple to tempt three vain goddesses, setting the stage for tragedy. Moreover, it was Atē who made Paris fall for Helen, and Agamemnon for Breises. Atē filled the Trojans’ hearts with a love of horses, whose streaming manes laid grace upon the plains of Ilium. To Ulysses she gave a passion for new things.

For these and other innovations, Atē became known as Mother of Infatuation. For these she was also called Sower of Discord.

Did she realize her invention would eventually lead to Hecuba’s anguish atop the broken walls of Troy? Some say she spread dissension only at her father’s bidding… that Zeus himself connived to bring about that dreadful war “… so its load of death might free the groaning land from the weight of so many men.”

Still, when he saw the bloody outcome, Zeus mourned. Gods who had supported Troy joined those backing Hellas, and all agreed to lay the blame on Atē.

Banished to Earth, she brought along her invention, and its effects would prove as far-reaching as that earlier boon — the gift of Prometheus. Indeed, what could Reason ever accomplish for mankind by itself, without Passion to drive it on?

Infatuation spread, for well and ill. Life, once simple, became vivid, challenging, confusing. Hearts raced. Veins sang with recklessness. Wild gambles paid off fantastically, or tumbled into memorable fiascos.

There came to Earth a thing called “love.”

Infatuation forever changed the world. That is why some came to call it the “Meadow of Atē.”

The last tremors had ended, but it still took several minutes for the technicians to crawl out from under their desks. Through cascading hazes of limestone dust they peered about, making sure the quake was really over. Some cast awed glances toward the nexus console, where Alex Lustig had remained throughout the unexpected temblors.

One unspoken thought circulated among them — that any bloke who could make the Earth rattle was surely one to reckon with.

Inside, Alex wasn’t quite as calm as he seemed. In truth, exhaustion and sheer astonishment were what had kept him at his station while others dove for cover, far more than bravado or showy courage. This sudden power to cause earthquakes was a completely unexpected side effect of their project, and of trivial importance next to the news he now saw before him.

Unfortunately, they had found exactly what they were looking for.

The cutaway hologram told the story. Where only one purple dot had been depicted before — looping a deeply buried orbit about the planet’s center — now a second object could be seen circling even lower still. What had been only dire suspicion was now reified and horrible.

“It’s down there, all right,” George Hutton’s chief physicist reported, lifting his hard hat to smooth back sparse white hair. Stan Goldman’s hands trembled. “We’ll need data from other listening posts to pin it down precisely.”

“Can you estimate its mass?” Hutton asked. The Maori tycoon sat on the other side of the console, wearing a scowl that would have made the warriors of Te Heuheu proud.

During the quakes he, too, had spurned shelter. But the techs only expected that of him. ,

Goldman pored over his screen. “Looks like just under a trillion tons. That’s several orders heavier than Alex’s… than the first one. Than Alpha.”

“And its other dimensions?”

“Too small to measure on linear scales. It’s another singularity, all right.”