It didn’t take long to find the teats that secreted fresh water and other kinds of liquid nourishment. By the time I’d sucked in enough to take the taste of brine away, my suitskin had gotten rid of all the surplus water it had accumulated during the escape from Genesis.The interior surface of the life raft was suitskin-smart too, so there was no water sloshing around. The only significant discomfort was the heat. The life raft was well equipped to warm its inhabitants up if they were hypothermie, but no one had anticipated that it might need equally clever facilities to cool them down if they’d just had a hot bath and were still floating on top of one.

“How long will it be?” Emily asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What happened?” she asked.

I didn’t know that either, but I had already formed two suspicions regarding what seemed at the time to be the most likely not-quite-impossibilities.

“Something must have fallen out of the sky,” I said. “It must have hit the sea very violently, as well as being very hot itself. If it were a comet or an asteroid fragment the satellite ring would have given adequate warning, but if it were actually one of the satellites—maybe even a station…”

“Or a bomb,” she said, neatly filling in the not-quite-impossibility that I’d considered unmentionable. “It could have been a bomb.”

Theoretically, there were no nuclear weapons anywhere in the world—but I’d seen the inside of a mountain that had been hollowed out by gantzers in order to serve as a repository for all the artifacts that the world no longer considered necessary—the litter that dared not speak its name. I’d even poked around in a few of the storerooms. I knew that some of what the New Human Race had put away with other childish things really had been merely put away.

Theoretically, of course, there should have been no one anywhere in the world insane enough to use a nuclear weapon even if one still existed, but even in the long interval of apparent near-universal sanity that separated the Moreau murders from the rebirth of Thanaticism we New Humans were not entirelyconvinced that our theories were reliable in their account of the limits of Old Human irresponsibility.

“I don’t think it was a bomb,” I told the little girl. “If anyone was going to start throwing multimegaton bombs around, they wouldn’t aim one at the Coral Sea. They certainly wouldn’t aim one at Genesis—and whatever happened, we must have been very close to the point of impact.”

We were both wrong, alas, as any passably conscientious student of history will have known ever since I specified the date on which Genesisset sail. Had I been in a clearer frame of mind I would undoubtedly have realized that our hypotheses had only covered two of the three relevant dimensions (up and sideways), but I was still ill. I had stopped noticing it, but my seasickness hadn’t actually been cured.I didn’t suppose that I would be able to complete the reconciliation of my head and my guts while the raft kept on lurching, and I was right.

“They are going to come for us, aren’t they?” Emily said. She was putting on a brave face, but the excessive warmth of the raft’s interior hadn’t brought any significant color to her cheeks.

“Absolutely,” I said. “The raft’s lit up outside like a firework display, and its systems will be transmitting a mayday on the emergency wavelength that will be audible all the way from Australia to geosynchronous orbit. If they can’t redirect a ship to pick us up they’ll send a helicopter as soon as it’s safe to fly—but the weather’s pretty filthy. Anything that can turn the sea into a Jacuzzi is likely to stir the atmosphere up a bit.”

“If it was a bomb,” she said, “there might be nobody…”

“It wasn’t a bomb, Emily,” I told her, firmly. “They didn’t even use big bombs in World War Three or World War Four. It has to be space junk falling back to Earth: an accident in orbit. We happened to be right next to ground zero—a million-to-one chance. They’ll send a copter from Gladstone or Rockhampton when they can.”

“But if someone had heard the mayday,” she pointed out, with deadly accuracy, “they’d have replied, wouldn’t they?”

She was right. The raft had to have a voice facility. A hyperspecialized sloth wouldn’t be able to hold a conversation with us, but it would be able to tell us what was happening if anything werehappening. If no one was replying to our mayday one of two things must be true. Either there was no one able to reply, or there were so many maydays filling the airwaves that we were effectively on hold, waiting in a verylong line.

I realized that if it were a very large space station that had come down, the subsequent tidal wave might have taken out Gladstone and Rockhampton as easily as it had taken out Genesis—and flooded every single natural and artificial island west of Vanuatu and south of the Solomons. That was as big a disaster as I could seriously contemplate at the time, but the silence said that even those limits might be elastic.

“They’re all dead, aren’t they?” Emily said, at last. “All of them.”

She meant all twelve of her parents. The three couples and Captain Cardigan’s crew were gone too, but she couldn’t think about them while her own personal tragedy was so immense.

“We don’t know that,” I said. “There must have been other pods. They all have good suitskins and first-rate IT. People are surprisingly hard to kill.” But I knew as I said it that whatever had tipped Genesisover had been more than surprising, it had been unprecedented, and well-nigh unimaginable. I didn’t have to look out to know that the sea was still seething, and the clouds that had risen from it to blot out the stars were still impenetrable.

THIRTEEN

The sea did not become calm that night. When I was sure that the sun had risen I did take an opportunity to peek out, but the cloud was so thick as to be hardly penetrable, and rain was falling more densely than I had ever seen it before—and there are summer days in the Himalayas, even in these days of supposed climate control, when thirty centimeters of rain can fall in a matter of hours. It was no longer hot inside the raft, although the sea was still ten or fifteen degrees warmer than the falling rain.

I managed to take a little liquid nourishment from the teat, but my IT had not yet managed to get the upper hand in the argument with my subconscious, and I still felt nauseous. It was not until noon that the raft’s voice facility finally kicked in and announced that its mayday had been acknowledged.

“Please wait,” the raft said, in the curiously plaintive fashion typical of the most limited sloths. “Help will come. Please wait.” Clearly, it was talking to another AI no brighter than itself—and if it had taken twelve hours even to cement thatlink, I thought, how much longer would it be before our plight became a matter of urgent concern for a high-grade silver or a human being?

I asked what was happening, of course, and begged to be put into contact with a more intelligent entity, but I couldn’t evoke any response other than a simple repetition. I tried to remember how many islands there were in the Coral Sea and Micronesia and how many people lived along the coastal strips of Queensland and New Guinea, but I had no real idea. The only thing of which I could be sure was that the number of people needing help must be at least as many millions as the number of people able to render it—and that most of them would be aggregated in larger and more easily reachable groups than our minuscule microcosm.

“It’s not fair,” Emily whispered, when it became clear that night was going to fall without anyone coming to our aid, “is it, Mister Mortimer?”