Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

This proved true, as no one had anything like a skewer thin enough to toast mini marshmallows on. They wound up levitating them over the fire in small groups, which was delicate business—the mass of each individual mini marshmallow was so small that managing them in such a way that they all toasted evenly within the same time period was extremely difficult. Routinely half of them got burnt black while the other half were still only the faintest brown, and finally even Carl had to admit that they weren’t that much better a solution to the s’mores problem then the marshmallow fluff had been.

“Make a note,” Ronan said on being handed first even vaguely viable s’more and regarding it with mild resignation as it started falling apart in his hand, “the next time we go to evacuate an entire planetary population, bring full-sized marshmallows.”

“Not that I want to have to help do this again anytime soon,” Nita said, glancing in Thesba’s general direction with an annoyed look. “But then I can’t imagine this happens all that often…”

“You’d be surprised how often it happens,” Tom said, stretching his legs out. “This is kind of a special situation—it’s rare that a planet has this specific problem with getting its population offworld, or that it has to happen so quickly. Normally planets don’t just haul off and blow up the way Krypton was supposed to have; they tend to give you plenty of warning. But I’d say that the Interconnect Project winds up moving, oh, at least one or two populations a year entirely off their home worlds, ecosystems and all.”

Some of the wizards sitting around the fire exchanged concerned glances at that. “After all, we live in a fairly small, quiet suburb of the galaxy,” Carl said. “In closer to the core, and in the more populous arms, there are tens of millions of worlds inhabited by intelligent species, and of that number a small percentage come under catastrophic threat in any given year—solar disasters, black holes wandering through, local gravitic disturbances… A very small percentage, sure. And wherever possible, Planetaries and resident wizards keep a close eye on things and managed to derail at least some of the conditions that threaten inhabited worlds before they get out of hand. But sometimes there’s just nothing you can do. This is one of those times…” He ran a hand through his hair. “The big projects are always subject to logistical problems: it can’t be helped. It’s the small single-planet projects that’re usually the most successful.”

“And as a result you hardly ever hear about them after the fact,” Tom said. “Atlantis…”

“Well, that was a bit of a mixed result,” Carl said, and sighed.

Tom laughed a short sardonic laugh. “You think?”

“This something happened on Earth?” said Cheleb.

“The Aphthonic Intervention,” Tom said. “It’s in the manual. There was a continent in the planet’s early developmental stages that was one of the first homes of one of several ancestor species—”

Kit smiled, remembering a brief conversation he’d had on this subject with a most unusual pig. “I know four different versions of this story,” he said, “but not which one is true.”

“Only four?” Tom raised his eyebrows at Kit, amused. “I’d have said eight at least. But as for how many of them are true? All of them, of course. You should know by now, though, how different the truth can look depending on what angle you’re examining it from.”

“Oh God,” said Ronan, “it’s one of those Rashomon things, isn’t it.”

“Well, no. What sank the continent isn’t disputed. Atlan Seamount was the biggest underwater volcano this planet has ever produced, and the Atlantis continent lay right on top of it; its main volcanic neck and pre-volcanic basement cone came up straight up through the middle of the Atlan land mass. When the big eruption went off at last, the resulting explosion was like the one they expect to hit Yellowstone some day, except a hundred times worse. It cracked the body of the continent straight through in five places.”

“See, the wizards there had unfortunately tried to throttle the volcano,” Carl said, “and that never works. Then when it went off at last, they initiated a last-ditch backtiming intervention to go back and keep the triggering event from happening.” He shook his head. “Timesliding living beings on a surface is one thing. But timesliding the surface itself, especially when that involves a significant portion of the Earth’s crust—that’s something else entirely. It… tends not to work well. The continent was completely shattered, and the crustal structure underneath it was shredded.”

“And when the timeslide intervention failed,” Tom said, “the backlash saturated the whole area with uncontrolled temporal anomalies. As a result there’s no magnetic data stored in the present crustal record to confirm that any of it ever happened at all. Not that there’s much of that crust material left, anyway, in the upper layers. Afterwards, other continental plates were pushed in over the subducted, damaged plates, and…” He lifted his arms, let them fall. “That was that.”

“But what did work,” Carl said, “was the project put together by some wizards who were intent on getting as much of the unique animal life as possible off Atlan, and onto other continents, before it was destroyed. That worked extremely well—a guided export of breeding stock to environments where they’d prosper. So we still have fireworms and basilisks and a lot of other unique creatures that turn up in fairy tales. Without the Aphthonic Intervention, the only place they’d turn up is fairy tales.”

“Well,” Ronan said, “that’s all very well, as long as the basilisks stay away from me. Not so sure why they went to so much trouble to save that species. Nasty little buggers.”

“Now now,” Tom said, “mustn’t judge.”

“Watch me,” Ronan said. “But I hope we’ve got a bigger action plan in case anything larger goes wrong.”

“Of course we do,” Tom said.

“After all,” Carl said, “it’s not like our Moon isn’t going to do this eventually.”

Almost all the Earth-based participants’ heads snapped up at that—everyone’s except Nita’s, Kit noticed. She merely bowed her head over the s’more she was trying to assemble, smiling an odd little smile.

“It’s moving away from the Earth right now,” Tom said, “a few inches further every year. But that’s not going to go on forever. Sooner or later it’s going to start spiraling back in. It’ll get closer and closer, and start dipping toward the Roche limit, the point where Earth’s tidal forces and gravitation start really messing with anything that gets too close.” He stretched out his legs in front of him, leaned back against his rock. “When it gets down to about eighteen thousand miles over the surface, that’s when the real excitement starts as far as the lunar structure is concerned. At that point the gravitational and tidal forces of the Earth begin actually deforming the Moon, stretching it out of shape. Much closer than that, say around ten thousand miles out, and the Moon simply breaks in pieces like an egg that’s been dropped on the floor.”

Nita was still fiddling with her s’more, wearing that slight smile. “You knew about this before, didn’t you?” Carl said. “Remiss of you not to mention.”

She looked up with mischief in her eyes. “Well,” she said, “it’s maybe half a million years from now this’ll happen, give or take. Might be twice that: no one’s sure. Doesn’t seem to be much point in yelling ‘fire’ when the building hasn’t really even started burning yet.”

Tom smiled slightly. “We know a lot more about what the Moon’s made of these days,” he said, “but if I remember rightly the jury’s still out on what happens after it breaks up. Does it simply fall down on us, or are the pieces shredded by the tidal effects into small enough chunks for us to wind up with rings?”