“Good. I’ll be with you in twenty minutes, Mister Gray.”

“What the hell happened?”I demanded, fearing that he might cut the connection and leave us in suspense for twenty more minutes. “The onboard sloth is too stupid even to pick up broadcasts.” I was only then absorbing the import of what he’d said. Air Rescue Mombasa?I thought. Reassigned to Canberra?

“Sorry for the delay, Mister Gray, Miss Marchant,” said Steve Willowitch. “Very bad business—major crust fracture. Seabed came open like a zipper south of Guadalcanal, extended for more than a hundred klicks. Seismologists got no warning from tectonic movements—the primary event must have been way down in the mantle, although the plates started shaking fit to burst thereafter. Hell of a blast—like a hundred Krakatoas, mostly a couple of hundred fathoms deep.”

“How many people died?” Emily asked, tentatively.

“Don’t know yet,” said the air rescue man. “More than three hundred million but we hope maybe less than five. Queensland took the worst but, the waves trashed New Zealand, the Philippines, and what was left of Japan and the western seaboard of the Americas after the first sequence of quakes had finished. And the islands, of course. Eight thousand of them.”

Eight thousand of themwas the statistic that reverberated in my head, because I hadn’t quite grasped the fact that 10 percent of the population of Earth was already feared dead, with more to come. I should, of course, have remembered immediately that Papa Ezra was in New Zealand, but I didn’t.

“You were lucky,” the pilot told us. “Must be tens of thousands of life rafts still floating, but millions didn’t even have a chance to get to a pod.”

I looked at Emily Marchant. Her tiny face had always seemed wan in the subdued interior lighting of the raft, and mine must have seemed just as bad, so the mute signal we exchanged through our mutual gaze had no further margin of horror in it, nor any additional sorrow for the hundreds of millions whose deaths we hadn’t dared anticipate.

“Thanks, Steve,” I said. “Get here when you can—we’re okay.”

This time, my finger was far gentler as it closed the transmitter. There was no point in leaving the channel open; it couldn’t be easy flying a copter through all the filth that was still clogging and stirring the lower atmosphere.

It occurred to me almost immediately that an event of the kind that Willowitch had described would have done far worse damage had it happened five hundred years earlier, but I said nothing to Emily. She didn’t seem to mind the silence, so I let my own thoughts run on unchecked.

I knew that if such a crust fissure had opened up while the world was the sole province of the oldOld Human Race—the pre-Crash mortals—it would almost certainly have killed fifty or sixty percent instead of ten and might have done so much damage to the ecosphere that even the survivors would have been precipitated into a downward spiral to extinction. Homo sapiens sapienshad evolved about a million years ago, on the plains of Africa, so five hundred years was only 0.05 of the life span of the species. Had we not renewed ourselves so comprehensively within that geological eyeblink, we would never have had the chance. Thanks to IT and suitskins, Solid and Liquid Artificial Photosynthesis, and our near-total technical control of the ecosphere, Earthbound humanity could and would bounce back, with what might have to be reckoned as minor casualties. We had reached the life-raft pod in time. We were alllucky—except for those of us who had perished.

Not that the casualties could possibly seem “minor” to Emily Marchant, I remembered, as I applied a gentle brake to the train of thought. She had lost all twelve of her parents at a single stroke. I was later to discover that I had not lost a single one—Papa Ezra had been high in the mountains—and would gladly have made her a gift of all eight had they been mine to give, but that could not have healed the breach in her circumstances. There would be no shortage of willing fosterers eager to adopt her, even in a world that had lost 300 million people, but it would not be the same. Her personal history had been rudely snapped in two, and she would be marked by her loss forever—but that moment could not bear sole responsibility for what became of her, and more than it was solely responsible for what became of me. I was already a historian; she had already declared that she wanted to join the Exodus and leave the homeworld behind.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Emily. “I’m sosorry.”

She looked at me very gravely, having made her own computation of the scale of the disaster and her own tiny role within it. “If you hadn’t been seasick,” she said, contemplatively, “I wouldn’t have been able to get the pod out.”

“If you hadn’t been there, neither would I,” I told her.

She didn’t believe it, but she knew that I wasn’t lying—that I honestly meant what I said.

Emily was still hanging on to the inner surface of the wave-tossed raft, but she released her right hand so that she could reach out to me. Solemnly, I took it in mine, and we shook hands for all the world like two businessmen who’d just been introduced.

“Thanks,” I said.

“You too,” she said. Then—and only then—she broke down and began to weep, helplessly and endlessly.

She was still weeping when the helicopter arrived, but she stopped when she realized how difficult it was going to be to winch us aboard. We had to concentrate and cooperate fully with Steve Willowitch’s heroic endeavors.

“It’ll be okay, Mortimer,” she assured me, as the hawser came down from the hovering aircraft, which seemed so very tiny against the vast dark backcloth of the continuing storm. “It’ll be fine.”

“Sure,” I said, as I lifted her up toward the blindly groping cable. “How difficult can it possibly be, for hardened survivors like us?”

FIFTEEN

Emily was by no means the only child in the world to lose an entire set of parents, and I still shudder to think of the number of parents who lost their only children. There was, as I had anticipated, no shortage of people willing to forge themselves into teams of adopters for the sake of the orphaned children, and all of those deprived of parenthood retained the right to return to the banks. The broken links in the chain of inheritance were mended. Tears were shed in abundance and then were set aside.

The cities devastated by tsunamis were rebuilt, and the agricultural lands around them reclaimed. Even at the time it seemed to happen with bewildering rapidity, fueled by an astonishing determination to reassert the dominion of humankind. There had been talk of Garden Earth for centuries, but our capacity to shape and manage the ecosphere had never been subjected to any severe test. After the Coral Sea Disaster, our gantzers and macrobiotechnologists had both the opportunity and the responsibility to demonstrate that they could deal with realDecivilization—and they met the challenge with awesome efficiency. The Continental Engineers were revitalized, if not actually reborn, in those years, and so were the continents themselves.

There is, I suppose, a certain wretched irony in the fact that all our paranoia regarding the precariousness of life on Earth had been directed outward for hundreds of years. We had thousands of artificial eyes scanning every part of the sky for incoming debris, but none looking down. Pride in our accomplishments had caused us to look upward and outward, and it wasn’t merely the promoters of the Exodus who had fallen into the habit of thinking of future history in terms of the kind of calculated expansion into the galaxy and appropriation of other worlds that Emily and I had discussed so earnestly while we were adrift. The breadth of our accomplishments and the height of our ambitions had made us forget how little we knew of the violent core of our own world.