Well, the world may be heading for the iceberg, but the dead hand of old Darwin is still on the tiller.

What am I talking about? Just this: If most people stop breeding, the handful of people who love kids and want to have them — people like me — are, within a generation or two, going to outnumber everyone else. Simple math.

And that’s exactly what is happening.

Friend, I’m your neighborhood representative of a new species: Homo philoprogenitus, which means “lover of many children.” As you can see, or maybe hear.

I pay my UN fines. For me they are worth it. A happiness tax. What’s money for?

Sure, if Carter is right, these kids are not going to live to a ripe old age. But it’s better for them to have existed and been happy than not existed. What are we here for except to add to the sum total of human happiness-days? Right?

And besides, I plan to be around to usher in Carter Day too. We’ll probably have one hell of a party. By then there will be nobody left around but us Hphils, and we’re a friendly bunch.

You’ll be invited. Bring the wife and kids. Oh, they’re e-kids? Yes, I know, a comfort. Never worked for me. Bring the dog, then. He’s not an e-pooch too, is he? Hey, you still up for poker Tuesday night?

springs, and then the final winter will descend on us all, leaving us without hope.

Where, then, is the relevance of the Christian mythos for us, whom God has abandoned?

The relevance is in the character of Mary, Mother of Jesus.

Mary stood and mourned at the foot of the Cross. Even as Her Son gave His life for humankind, so He abandoned His Mother.

So, today, we reject the grandiose and selfish ambitions of the Son, and embrace the grief of Mary, the Mother He abandoned.

For we, too, have been abandoned. We draw strength from Mary’s dignity in betrayal. We are no longer Christians. We are Marians.

Let us pray.

A.D. 2207:

It is the best of times, and the worst of times. Who wrote that?… It does not matter. We have been drawn together by the tragedy; that is clear. Those of us who have a glimmering of understanding — who see that even the awesome destruction to come is merely a stage in the endless evolution of life and mind, as regrettable but inevitable as the death of an individual, just as the Blues tried to teach us — are consoled, even if we cannot comprehend it fully. And we do not condemn the Ocean Children, who have fled into the bright comfort of mindlessness. The world spins on, full of heroism and selfishness and despair, just as it always has. The children have been a comfort, of course. A preliminary perusal of history shows that, and the happy lack of any Blue births after the Nevada event… I apologize. Even now I am more prepared to analyze history than to talk about myself, about us! Well. There is no more to say. We are here together. We choose to end it now, rather than to submit to the arbitrariness of history. Good-bye, my darling, good-bye.

AD. 2208:

Where were you on The Night?

If you’re reading this, it must be over, and you survived. Right?

As I’m recording this there are twenty-four hours to go.

I can tell you where I’ll be: in orbit around the Moon.

For two centuries people have been probing and prodding and cracking at that damn energy bubble up there. Of course they’ve had no success. But that hasn’t stopped them trying. And it won’t stop me now, right to the end.

I might even meet my uncle and aunt, Tom and Billie Tybee, up there. My grandfather, Bill Tybee, left me this diary, which he kept from the day he first married, and even the gadget, the little plastic Heart, that taught us all so much about our Blue cousins. Hell of a guy, my grandfather. Lost his wife, lost two kids to the Blue hysteria, survived a war on the Moon, and still built a life: married again, more kids — none of them Blue — and died in his bed.

People tell us we’re at peace. We’re all just waiting, praying if we choose to, otherwise just turning out the lights. Calm, dignified acceptance.

Yeah, right.

For me, I mean to go out of this world the way I came in: dragged out headfirst, kicking and screaming.

Anyhow this will probably be the last entry. I’m burying the diary in hardcopy a hundred feet down in a disused mine. If it gets to survive anywhere, it will be there.

Godspeed.

Michael:

Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon. It s starting—

Emma Stoney:

A bolt of light streaked vertically down from the gray dome sky above. It headed straight for the degenerate matter, merged with

it unerringly.

The children made sounds like it was a firework display: Ooh, aah.

Anna’s gaze was fixed on the Tinkerbell nugget in its cage; Emma saw its light sparkling in her clear eyes. And the Tinker-bell was getting brighter.

“How long?”

“A few minutes,” Anna whispered. “This is what we were born to do. It is what you were born for—”

A wave of pain, unexpected, pulsed from Emma’s leg, and she gasped.

Billie Tybee pulled away from her, eyes wide.

Emma made an effort to calm down. She deliberately smiled. Billie crept slowly back to her, and Emma laid a hand on her head.

They may be about to kill you. Even so, don’t frighten the children. It surely isn’t their fault.

“Vacuum decay,” she said to Anna.

“Yes.”

“Will it be quick?”

Anna thought that over. “More than quick. The effects will spread at light speed, transforming everything to the true vacuum state.” She studied Emma. “Before you know it’s happening, it will be over.”

Emma took a deep breath. She didn’t understand a word; it was so abstract it wasn’t even frightening. Thank God I’m no smarter, she thought. “Okay. How far will it reach? Will it engulf Tycho? The Moon?”

Anna frowned. “You don’t understand.”

And the droplet exploded.

Emma flinched.

The cage held. Light flared, a baseball-sized lump, dazzling Emma, bathing the faces of the watching children, as if they were planets turned to this new sun.

Billie was cuddling closer, wrapping her arms around Emma’s waist. Emma put her hands on the child’s head and bent over her to shelter her. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay to be frightened.”

The light got brighter.

“Nearly, now,” Anna said softly.

“ Why, Anna? Revenge?”

Anna turned to her. “You don’t understand. You never will. I’m sorry. This isn’t destruction. This isn’t revenge. This is—”

“What?”

“It’s wonderful”

Emma felt heat on her face; a wind, hot air pulsing out of the cage, fleeing the heat of theTinkerbell.

Now more children came creeping closer to Emma. She reached out her arms and tried to embrace them all. Some of them were weeping. And maybe she was weeping too; it was hard to tell.

At last even Anna came to her, buried her face in Emma’s neck.

She thought of Malenfant: Malenfant on Cruithne, defying fate one last time. She might easily have been with him, up there, sharing whatever had become of him. Even at their worst times, the depths of the divorce, she had expected, in her heart, to die with him.

But it hadn’t turned out like that, for better or worse.

In the years after Mojave, after Malenfant, Emma had had relationships. She’d even inherited some children, from previous broken relationships. None of her own, though. Maybe this was as close as she had ever come.

But the children around her seemed remote, as if she touched them through a layer of glass. She felt incomplete. Maybe she was spread too thin over the possibilities of reality, she thought.

The light grew brighter, the heat fiercer. The wind was beginning to howl through the loose, shuddering framework of the cage.