Suli Ram Kikura was no longer a ward of the Hexamon. Released from confinement to her apartment, she was a free woman again, free to contemplate the confusion and contradiction of the past few weeks.
She could not help thinking that Olmy was playing some substantial part in all this; perhaps he even knew what was really happening. Nobody else did.
All her anger and frustration was overridden by her sense of duty. First, she had to be sure that the destruction of Thistledown—if it happened—would not jeopardize the orbiting bodies or Earth. She did not have the technical expertise in these matters, even using the full capabilities of her implants, to come to any useful conclusions by herself.
For a moment, she simply reveled in having her lines of communication open and unmonitored. She decided to contact Judith Hoffman.
When she called Hoffman’s terrestrial residence in South Africa, a message awaited her, conveyed by a delegated partial with instructions to speak only to selected people, herself among them. The partial explained that Hoffman had been on Thistledown until the very last moment, and was now on a shuttle returning to Axis Euclid. The partial was willing to arrange a meeting; it was possible, if channels were not closed by the Hexamon, to speak with its primary now. Did she wish to do so?
Ram Kikura, usually reluctant to impose, did not hesitate now. “If you can open a channel, I’ll be very grateful.”
Hoffman’s partial made the necessary arrangements, found that channels were still available, and Hoffman herself appeared in Ram Kikura’s living room, seated in a white shuttle formfit, exhausted and unhappy.
“Suli!” she said, trying to muster a semblance of polite gladness. “It’s a disaster out here. We couldn’t access a third of what we wanted to…. If it all goes, we’ll lose so much…”
“Do you now what’s happening?”
“It isn’t even classified!” Hoffman said, waving her fingers in dismay. “The presiding minister lifted all security measures—”
“I know. I’m free.”
“The re-opening is a disaster. They say there was instability in the Way—but I can’t believe Korzenowski couldn’t take care of that.”
“Mirsky?” Ram Kikura suggested.
Hoffman rubbed her neck with her hands. “We were warned.”
The coloring on her image changed. With raised eyebrows, she peered to her left—where a transparency in the hull might be—and a look of wonder crossed her face. “What is it?” she asked others around her. Ram Kikura caught muffled sounds of other voices.
She glanced through her own window at the arc of darkness visible beyond the edge of what had once been the flaw passage. That region was no longer dark; now it glowed a ghostly blue.
“Something’s happening,” Hoffman said. “Transmission—”
She faded with a silent sizzle of white lines. Ram Kikura called for an image of the precinct’s exterior, and then added, “Where’s Thistledown? Show me that octant.”
A circle of radiant blue appeared in the middle of her living room, enchanting and deeply disturbing. It did not block out the haze of stars visible beyond Earth. “Thistledown,” she ordered. “Show me where Thistledown is.” A projected red line curled snake-like around the bean-sized white object and blinked. The glow was not coming from Thistledown, nor was it limited to the starship’s vicinity; it seemed to come from all space, all directions.
The bean-sized object grew brighter as she watched. “Magnify,” she demanded. Throughout Axis Euclid, she knew citizens by the tens of thousands were asking for the same picture; her own private projector’s image flickered occasionally as the precinct’s signal amplifiers and splitters cut in.
Thistledown appeared enlarged and in sharp detail, surrounded by a faint corona of even brighter blue. The north pole pointed away from the Earth and all precincts. But the south pole itself glowed now. Concentric and expanding rings of luminous pinspecks formed beyond the south pole, followed by even brighter rings and then continuous halos.
The Beckmann drive engines were cutting in; she was sure of it. Thistledown had not used those drives since the Sundering; now the asteroid starship was pushing itself away from Earth and the precincts.
What had been only an intellectual speculation before was now reality; Thistledown was preparing for its death.
Somehow, she knew Olmy was still aboard, or very near the Thistledown—perhaps in the Way itself.
Ram Kikura, like Olmy, did not have the means to cry. She sat in tense silence, watching as Axis Euclid’s sensors tracked the Thistledown. How long?
The glare from the Beckmann drives increased until the display had to adjust for brightness. The plume of destroyed matter reflected from the south polar crater, forming a long violet brushstroke against the unnatural blue. The colors and the circumstances went against all reason; she felt as if she were watching an artificial entertainment, depicting something remote and beautiful but hardly plausible.
It hurts, she thought, her implants working steadily to handle the emotional overload. I know he’s there. And that’s my home, where I was born and grew and worked—within the Way.
She could hardly bear to watch, yet she did not move.
She owed her past this much, to sit and watch it die.