By one o'clock, the Lacerta waves had strengthened to a hundred times their old power level. There was no point any more in waiting for data to arrive from two or three of TERAGO's scattered detectors in order to eliminate interference from other sources; the feed now came straight from Bullialdus in real time, and Lac G-1's racing pulse was loud enough to drown out everything else in the sky. The waves were visibly "chirping," each one clearly narrower than its predecessor; the latest two peaks were just 15 minutes apart, which meant the neutron stars had crossed the 200,000 kilometer mark. In an hour that separation would be halved, then in a few more minutes it would vanish. Yatima had been clinging to a faint hope of a shift in the dynamics, but the gleisners' ever-steeper extrapolation had kept on proving itself right.

The seat wobbled. A half-naked child was tugging on the side, trying to get vis attention. Yatima stared at ver, speechless, wanting to wrap vis invulnerable polymer body around the child's exposed skin. Ve looked about the deserted playground for an adult; there was no one in sight.

Yatima stood. The child abruptly started crying and screaming. Ve sat, stood, tried to sweep the child up in vis single arm, failed. The child banged its fist on the vacated seat. Yatima obeyed.

The child clambered onto vis lap. Yatima glanced nervously at the TERAGO scape. The child stretched vis arms out and held the ropes, then leaned back slightly. Yatima imitated the motion, and the seat responded. The child leaned forward, Yatima followed.

They swung together, ever higher, the child screaming with delight, Yatima torn between terror and joy. A few sparse drops of rain descended, and then the clouds around the sun thinned, and parted.

The sudden clarity of the light was shocking. Looking across the sunlit playground—with a viewpoint gliding smoothly through this world, at last—Yatima felt an overpowering sense of hope. It was as if the Konishi mind seed still encoded the instinctive knowledge that, in time, the darkest stormclouds would always clear, the longest night would always yield to dawn, the harshest winter would always be tempered by spring. Every hardship the Earth forced upon its inhabitants was bounded, cyclic, survivable. Every creature born in the flesh carried the genes of an ancestor who had lived through the most savage punishment this world could inflict.

No longer. Sunlight breaking through the clouds was a lie, now. Every instinct that proclaimed that the future could be no worse than the worst of the past was obsolete. And Yatima had long understood that, outside the polises, the universe was capricious and unjust. But it had never mattered, before. It had never touched ver.

Ve didn't trust verself to halt the swing safely, so ve froze and let the motion die away, ignoring the child's complaints. Then ve carried ver shrieking to the nearest building, where someone seemed to know where ve belonged, and snatched ver away angrily.

The stormclouds had closed in again. Yatima returned to the playground and stood motionless, watching the sky, waiting to learn the new limits of darkness.

The neutron stars made their last full orbit in under five minutes, 100,000 kilometers apart and spiraling in steeply. Yatima knew ve was witnessing the final moments of a process that had taken five billion years, but on a cosmic scale was about as rare and significant as the death of a mayfly. Gamma-ray observatories picked up the signature of identical events in other galaxies, five times a day.

Still, Lac G-1's great age meant that the two supernovae which had left the neutron stars behind predated the solar system. Supernovae sent shockwaves rippling through surrounding clouds of gas and dust, triggering star formation. So it was not inconceivable that G-1a or G-1b had created the sun, and the Earth, and the planets. Yatima wished ve'd thought of this when Inoshiro was talking to the statics; renaming the neutron stars "Brahma" and "Shiva" might have carried the right kind of mythic resonance to penetrate their mythic stupor. The vacuous metaphor might have saved a few lives. Other than that, whether Lacerta giver-of-life was about to show the hand that takes, or whether it was preparing to rain gamma rays on the accidental children of another dead star altogether, the scars inflicted would be equally painful, and equally meaningless.

The signal from Bullialdus climbed, peaked at ten thousand times the old level, then dived. In the orbit scape, the two arms of the inward spiral twisted into perfect radial alignment, and the narrow cones of uncertainty flaring out from each branch of the orbit shrank and merged into a single translucent tunnel. Each neutron star made a microscopic target for the other, so a succession of near misses granting five or ten minutes' reprieve would not have been unthinkable, but the verdict was that all sideways motion had vanished to the limits of measurement. The neutron stars would merge at the first approach.

In twenty-one seconds.

Yatima heard a voice wailing with anguish. Ve looked away from the scapes and swept vis robot gaze across the playground, for a moment convinced that the flesher child had escaped vis parents and returned, that search parties were out beneath the threatening sky. But the voice was distant and muffled, and there was no one in sight.

Ten seconds.

Five.

Let all the models be wrong: let an event horizon swallow the blast. Let the gleisners be lying, faking the data: let the most paranoid flesher be right.

An auroral glow filled the sky, an elaborate dazzling curtain of pink and blue electrical discharges. For a moment Yatima wondered if the clouds had been seared away, but as vis eyes desaturated and adjusted their response ve could see that the light was shining right through. The clouds made a faint grubby overlay, like smudges of dirt on a window pane, while ethereal patterns edged in luminous white and green swirled behind them, delicate wisps and vortices of ionized gas tracing the flows of billion-ampere currents.

The sky dimmed then began to flicker, strobing at about a kilohertz. Yatima instinctively reached for the polis library, but the connection had been severed; the ionized stratosphere was radio-opaque. Why the oscillation? Was there a shell of neutrons outside the black hole, ringing like a bell as it slipped into oblivion, Doppler-shifting the last of the gamma rays back and forth?

The flicker persisted, far too long for the burst itself to be the cause. If the remnants of Lac G-1 weren't vibrating, what was? The gamma rays had deposited all their energy high above the ground, blasting nitrogen and oxygen molecules apart into a super-heated plasma, and the electrons and positive ions in this plasma had a billion terajoules to dispose of before they could recombine. Most of this energy would be going into chemical changes, and some was clearly reaching the ground as light, but powerful currents surging through the plasma would also be generating low frequency radio waves, which would bounce back and forth between the Earth and the now-ionized stratosphere. That was the source of the flicker. Yatima recalled the C-Z analysis stating that these waves could do real damage under certain conditions, though any effects would he highly localized, and insignificant compared to the problems of UV and global cooling.

As the auroral light behind the clouds faded, a blue white spike flashed across the sky. Yatima had barely registered this when a second discharge forked between the Earth and the clouds. The thunder was too loud to be heard; the gleisner's acoustic sensors shut down in self-defense.

The sky darkened suddenly, as if the hidden sun had been eclipsed; the plasma must have cooled enough to start forming nitric oxides. Yatima checked the tags from vis skin; the temperature had just dropped from 41 to 39, and it was still falling. Lightning struck again, close by, and in the flash ve saw a layer of dark, wind-streaked cloud moving overhead.