Anyhow, that’s why I’ll take the job. The Moon, you say?

Maura Della:

And for Maura — who had never been to the Moon, and now never would — the Moon hung in the Washington sky as it always had, the scar of the failed attack invisible to the naked eye. She kept a NASA feed running in her office, compiled from Hubble and lunar satellite cameras, images of the unmarked bubble artifact there on the Tycho surface.

After all, if things had been just a little different, Maura Della might have been up there when the shit hit the fan. She’d have been caught in the crossfire herself, rather than her envoy.

But as the incident on the Moon receded into the past, life went on. The panic subsides even as the data burns, she thought. Cruithne, even the Moon, are after all just lumps of rock a long way away.

Maura tried to concentrate on her work.

Here was a self-justifying report from the Lawrence Liver-more Laboratory on the exotic weapons technology they called FELs, free electron lasers, into which a goodly portion of the federal budget had been sunk, and which had been deployed, to spectacular failure, on the Moon. The basis of a PEL was a cyclotron, a closed ring that could be used to accelerate electrons. Although it was impossible for the electrons to exceed the speed of light there was no limit, it seemed, to the energy that could be piled into them. And that unlimited energy was the big advantage of PEL technology over conventional laser technology, like chemical. The report writers noted with jaunty technocrat-type confidence that a PEL should have been an ideal sword for fighting a war in a vacuum: in Earth orbit, or on the Moon.

But it had failed. The PEL had burned the lunar base and the Never-Never Land dome to the ground. But it hadn’t so much as scratched the droplet of twisted space, or whatever it was, that sheltered the children — and presumably continued to do so, even now, sitting like a drop of mercury amid the rubble of the Tycho battlefield.

All bullshit. The PEL was just another magic sword in a long line of such swords, technical solutions that were supposed to make the world better and safer and that, of course, always failed.

Without finishing the report she consigned it to her incinerator.

Here was an extraordinary handwritten memo from a colleague relaying rumors Maura had already heard, about the president himself. Whittacker had always had a grim religious bent, Maura knew. It had been part of his qualification for election, it seemed, in these fractured times. Now he was sunk in an apocalyptic depression from which — so it was said — teams of e-therapists and human analysts were struggling to lift him. That a man with his finger on the nuclear trigger should believe that the world was inevitably doomed — that life wasn’t worth living, that it may as well be concluded now — was, well, worrying. One beneficial side effect of the Bonfire strictures, oddly, was that you could rely on confidentiality rather more than in the past, so that information and speculation like this gained a wider currency…

There was a soft knock on the door. Bonfire cops. She hastily incinerated the note and let them in.

They came every hour, roughly, at irregular times. This time she had to endure a recording-gear sweep. It was brisk, thorough, humorless.

It was all part of the Bonfire, a massive national — indeed international — exercise in paper shredding and data trashing.

Maura was allowed to keep no records beyond a calendar day. Everything had to be handwritten and incinerated after use; not even carbon copies were permitted. Federal records — anything to do with Bootstrap, the Blues, the Carter phenomena — were being burned or wiped.

Even beyond the bounds of the federal government, tapes and paper archives relating to the various incidents were being impounded and destroyed. Data-mining routines, legal and illegal, were being sent out to trash computer records.

Of course there were stand-alone machines that couldn’t be reached by any of these means. But even these were being dealt with. For instance, there were ways to monitor the operation of computers within buildings, using water pipes as giant antennae. There were even outlandish Star Wars — type proposals coming out of the military, such as to drench the planet in magnetic media-wiping particle beams.

All of this was incidentally doing a hell of a lot of damage to the economy, making the day the Dow Jones burst through a hundred thousand — blowing up all the computer-index stores in the process — seem like a picnic.

The objective was simple, however. It was to remove all records of the Nevada Blue center, of the nuclear cleansing there, of Cruithne, of the battle on the Moon.

The physical evidence would linger for decades. But it was essential that no record remain to contradict the official cover stories concocted by the FBI: the big lie about the rogue army officer; the piece of hostage-taking terrorism in Nevada, the attempted resolution of which had gone horribly wrong; the drastic accidental explosion that had wrecked NASA’s purely scientific Moon base; and so on.

Of course even if every record was expunged, the truth would still exist in the heads and hearts of those involved. And so everybody with any significant knowledge — especially those, herself included, who had actually seen the Nevada center and had witnessed the failed “cleansing” operation — was under special scrutiny. There had been the public trials at which they had been forced to deny the truth of Carter, Cruithne, the Blues, all the rest. Even after that she was searched on entering and leaving the building, and she knew she was under heavy and constant surveillance.

But still, as long as the memories existed, how could it be certain that not one of them, for the rest of their lives, would betray the great lie? Maura, depressed, could imagine an FBI lab somewhere even now cooking up a grisly high-tech mind-cleansing method where respect for the subject would be a lot less important than efficacy. And there was always the simplest way of all: the bullet in the back of the head…

There were, in fact, rumors of “suicides” already. People dying for what they knew, what they remembered.

The Bonfire had two goals. The first was simply crowd control. The extreme reactions to Malenfant’s wild broadcasts of future visions and time-paradox messages and doom-soon predictions had made authorities all around the planet wary of how to handle such information from now on. Bluntly, it didn’t matter if the world was coming to an end a week from Tuesday; for now, somebody had to keep sweeping the streets. So Malenfant’s information was being diminished, ridiculed, faked-up to look like clumsy hoaxes, hi the end, the e-psychologists promised, anybody who clung to the bad news from the future would start to look like a Cassandra: doomed to know the future, but powerless to do anything about it.

Not everybody was going to be fooled by all this. But that wasn’t the real point. Bonfire’s true purpose was to fool the future. It was essential that the balance of evidence bequeathed to future historians was not sufficient to prove that the people of twenty-first-century America had gone to war with their children.

Despite the personal difficulty, the infringement of various rights, Maura supported this huge project. This was, after all, a matter of national security. More than that, hi fact: it was essential to the future of the species itself.

The U.S. government seemed to have fallen into a war with indefinable superbeings of the future. The only weapon at its disposal was the control of the information to be passed to future generations. And the government was pursuing that project with all the resources it could command — attempting to blindside the downstreamers before they were even born.