A Pillar of Stars by Night

by Alexis Glynn Latner

Illustration by George H. Krauter

Dozing in his sleeping bag, Mark Willson heard a shrill, faint and unwelcome whine. Culex, as well as Saltmarsh and the Asian Tiger mosquitoes, thrived here, so he pulled the bag’s mosquito hood around his head. Just before he slid back into sleep, he vaguely realized that the sound was not a mosquito at all. It had an unpleasant metallic edge.

Later, a meadowlark singing woke Mark up for good. With a yawn, he turned his mind to the day ahead of him. He had work to do on his doctoral dissertation in ecology: “Restoration of a Coastal Tallgrass Prairie ” This morning he would do a species count in the J-3 plot of his grid of string laid across the grass. Writing up notes and analyzing data could wait for the heat of the afternoon.

His notebook computer trilled at him. The message window said CALL ECOL OFFICE.

Not yet, Mark thought.

urgent, the computer continued.

But it had said “urgent” two days ago, when the new department secretary wanted to know where he’d filed the Lepidoptera reference disk. He would call back later.

Mark walked out onto the porch of the study hut. Not to start work quite yet—he still had to eat breakfast and find his hat, essential under Earth’s frayed ozone layer. A pool of coral glowed in the eastern sky, the Sun rising on the little piece of prairie, silhouetting the warehouses in the large industrial district that started where the prairie grass stopped. A mile to the west, the Clear Lake City rail station gleamed in the early sunlight. Mark breathed deeply of air that smelled damp and green, like a healthy greenhouse. He loved spending the night in the study hut, waking up to mornings in this oasis of hope for life on Earth.

Sunflowers flanked the porch, taller than Mark although he had the advantage of standing on the porch floor. Helianthus giganteus, huge and hairy stalks festooned with sunburst blooms. They were volunteers: unlike most of the flowering grasses, they hadn’t been reintroduced here by ecologists, but showed up on their own. They were a resilient species. Even if the world grew still hotter and ecozones climbed to higher latitudes, with the sea flooding behind, H. giganteus would stalk northward along with its preferred climate.

Inconspicuous in a melee of sunflower leaves, a coffee cup belonging to Annetine van Leeuwen rested on the porch rail. The cup was genuine porcelain with a thin gold rim and a quaint Asian butterfly design. Mark smiled. Anna must have forgotten it before she left for Amsterdam to visit her relatives this summer. An entomologist, Anna had reintroduced butterflies, beetles and other insects to this scrap of prairie. Mark found an accumulation of coffee-tinted rainwater in Anna’s cup. He crouched to empty the water onto the bright blue dayflowers by the porch steps.

A shrill whine, like the mosquito he had thought he heard before he got up, pierced the air. Mark jerked his head up. That definitely was not a mosquito. It was machinery, and closer than the warehouses, hidden from his view by the tall grasses and sunflowers.

Mark ran along the cross-prairie trail toward the strident sound. Grasses whipped his legs.

A huge, orange, hydraulic monster was scything down the grass on the far edge of the prairie. The machine hit a stump and emitted another whine.

Mark dashed to the machine. He stepped in front of it.

The operator stopped it with a thunk and shouted at Mark in Spanglish. Man, are you crazy?!

Mark understood the Spanish-English pidgin. Racking his brain for usable words, Mark explained the situation in Spanglish. This place belongs to the University; for to study flowers and birds and all! Don’t hurt the grass!

The machine operator explained in turn. The tide is high in Galveston, and she is red.

Red tide, the toxic bloom of microorganisms in the sea that had occurred more and more in the Gulf of Mexico as the Earth’s climate warmed. And melting polar ice made high tide on Galveston Island very high indeed.

The streets fill with dead fish and things. Stinking germs come in the houses of the people. People will get sick there. So they come here.

Mark recoiled in horror, realizing that the prairie had been designated as a refugee camp for people fleeing from a disease-ridden fish kill on Galveston Island.

Two uniformed men approached Mark over the carnage of mown grasses. Their uniforms were those of security contractors. “What are you doing here?” demanded one.

Mark fumbled for his identity card. “I work here. This is a university study area, and—”

“Not any more, it isn’t. Maybe you didn’t get the word. This real estate’s been appropriated for a refugee camp.”

Mark protested. “It already is a kind of refugee camp for the plants and animals here! The University—”

Running Mark’s identity license through his pocket computer, the security guard laughed. He flipped Mark’s license back at him. “People come first. And you’re an unauthorized civilian. Leave it, kid.”

“Why here?” Mark screamed.

“It’s the only piece of empty clean real estate in a hundred miles!” the other, older guard retorted. “You’re educated—don’t you know anything about politics?”

The machine operator shrugged at Mark, impassive.

Mark could collect his gear if he did so in five minutes. In ten, Mark stood on a buckled asphalt road outside of the fence around the prairie. Yellow tape strung along the fence said RESTRICTED—DO NOT ENTER. Mark clutched a flimsy computer printout, a trespass warning. If he tried to reenter the area he would be arrested. His hand, holding the printout, shook.

Mark turned away, stumbling on the road’s cracks and potholes. Weeds grew in the broken edges of the asphalt. Dandelions. Ragweed. Pepper-grass. In front of a particularly big and ugly warehouse, the roadside weeds were brown, treated with herbicide, dead, fringing a ditch filled with chalky water. There would be no frogs in the ditch. Frogs breathe with their whole skin, and when their world is poisoned, they die, and the ecosystem fells apart where the frogs should be.

Mark felt unfriendly eyes on him: guards at the front gate of the warehouse, sizing him up as undesirable. Mark avoided their gaze and their gate.

A red tide rose inside of him, echoing the sickness of the sea. It was his blood, and he heard it pounding in his ears. Tears, salty and hot, hurt the skin of his face, already sunburned because he had forgotten to put on his hat.

The Clear Lake railstation was busier and noisier than usual when Mark lugged his gear up the high stairs to the platform. Unloading a train of machinery and supplies in yellow wrappings, workers and a few peremptory officials crowded waiting passengers to the edges of the platform. The morning wind came up. It blew from the south, from the sick sea, and it stank.

The high-speed train took Mark north. The wide, smog-smeared city of Houston, with a beveled crown of an arcology that reared above the smog, flared on the horizon. Houston rapidly swelled and swallowed the train.

Mark got off at the South Main railstation and shuffled toward his home. When he reached the security gate of the graduate student apartment building and thumbed himself in, Mark realized that the red tide inside had receded. He didn’t feel angry any more. Instead, he felt like a beach littered with dead hopes and dreams.

His roommate was seated in an armchair in the living room, contemplating the antique picture on the wall. He waved a hand at the sound of Mark’s entrance without looking Mark’s way. Ev—who was, as of a few months ago when he had successfully defended his own doctoral dissertation in molecular biology, Dr. Evrett Reynolds—seemed preoccupied.

Wretched and dirty, Mark intended to creep wordlessly to his bedroom. But Ev snapped out of his reverie and looked around. “Wait a minute—what are you doing back? And your face is burned! What happened?”

Mark mumbled an explanation.

“Oh, no!” Ev leaped out of the armchair. “It’s probably been in the Netnews, which I have not been watching. I would have called and warned you! Damn it, your department should have!”

“Never mind.” Mark veered toward the kitchen to make the coffee that he never had this morning. His head ached. He fumbled with Ev’s coffeemaker. Following Mark into the kitchen, Ev hovered behind him offering sunburn ointment.

Clumsy and distracted, Mark knocked the coffeemaker over. Wet grounds spilled out of the gold filter cone onto the counter. Maik stared at the mess. It was hard to breathe and harder to speak. “Remember Samantha Berry’s last lecture? The new world?”

Ev leaned against the counter, “Um, yes. Ecology 401. Midway through the semester. ‘A new world,’ ” Ev quoted Samantha Berry. “ ‘Not just a bubble on a moon. And not an inferno like Venus or a frigid, desiccated desert like Mars. A green new world, if human colonists are smart and diligent enough to terraform it properly.’ ” That lecture had been Professor Berry’s way of announcing her resignation. Six weeks later the starship had left, with ten thousand colonists in cryostasis, to be revived hundreds of years in the future at an Earth-like world near a sunlike star. Berry was one of the colonists. Her colleague Annetine van Leeuwen took over teaching the Eco 401 course.

“There’s going to be another terraforming starship,” Mark said. “It’s being built now.”

“I know,” said Ev. “A family friend is the principal contractor, operating out of Luna Prime.”

“This one’s sponsored by the Genesis Foundation. They’ve asked me to go or at least serve as a consultant in the planning process. What they want to do they’re calling creation ecology, and it’s a lot like restoration ecology. I’ve made up my mind to do what I can to help them. And maybe when the ship leaves, I’ll go with it.”

Ev stared at him. “I don’t believe I just heard you say that. It’s the stress of the morning, isn’t it?”

At that moment, a roach crawled out of a cranny in the kitchen counter and ventured toward the spilled coffee grounds, feelers twitching. Mark’s stomach turned at the roach.

The land here had been coastal tallgrass prairie, with a delicate web of naturally evolved species. But prairie was supplanted by the city and the opportunistic species which exploded in that kind of ecological vacuum anywhere in the world. Pigeons, crab-grass, rats, gnats. And roaches. The city teemed with roaches, ubiquitous in the better neighborhoods even in spite of pest control and fastidious housekeeping. In the poorest areas they were a crawling, chitinous plague. The delicate web of species had been blasted. And he, Mark Willson, could not restore it. He slammed a fist down on the counter. The roach scuttled back into its crack. “I can’t stay here and watch the Earth die!” he yelled.

Ev said slowly, “I was thinking about the stars just before you came in.” He gestured toward the framed picture hanging on the living room wall.

The antique print depicted the star cluster called Pleiades shining across the night sky of a distant world. The print was pretty and precious.

Ev would never go to see any distant stars with his own eyes. Ev had everything he wanted here on Earth. And if that wasn’t enough, Ev was a citizen of the Solar System, cosmopolitan and comfortable with the offworld lifestyle in habitats and colonies.

Ev said, “I always thought you were the last man on Earth who’d talk about leaving for the stars.”

“I’m not,” Mark said. “You are.”

Ev smiled. The smile traced the lines of his grin, without any humor in his eyes, which made his expression seem nice a rictus. “I know. Don’t I have a lucrative job with the number-one genetic engineering corporation in the world? And I’m good at what I do. I can get blood out of a turnip. Blood and money. Out of turnips and mice and butterflies.”

Mark recoiled. He ground out the words, “You’ll get used to your job.”

“Should I? You help green things grow. But what I do—should I get used to it?”

Mark could not handle Ev’s problems and, if that was what this was, Ev’s guilt. Not now. Mark turned away.

“I am the taskmaster, living chromosomes are my slaves! Should I get used to that?” Ev insisted, following Mark back into the living room.

“What else?” Mark grated.

“It wasn’t just has-beens like Berry. Thousands of the best and brightest people went on that starship, too. Such as Joseph Norden. As in Norden dogs, Norden sprites, Norden twists. He was the best theoretical molecular biologist of this century. But he went to the stars.”

The Pleiades print, Mark belatedly noticed, had been shifted to a new spot higher on the wall, and Ev’s side-table moved beneath it, with a model of a spaceship and crystal vase on the table and fresh flowers in the vase. The arrangement looked incongruously like a shrine. “I think I need to go to the stars, too,” said Ev.

No, Mark thought. Ev would never do that. Not bright-eyed, mercurial Ev. “You don’t mean it.”

“Well, do you?”

“I said I’m thinking about going.

“And I am,” Mark said. His own voice sounded bleak.

In the middle of the following night, Mark had a nightmare. He woke up in a sweat with his heart fluttering, his limbs semi-paralyzed, his sunburned face hot and hurting.

His small bedroom was full of plants. In the faint night-city light from the window, the plants had dim gray and dreadful shapes. Mark groped for the switch to throw lamplight onto the plants and make them return to green normalcy.

It was the Pleiades. Ev’s picture had gotten to him.

Ev had found the print at an exclusive gallery Uptown a couple of years earlier, fallen in love with it, and purchased it on the spot with his father’s credit and his own good-sporting grin, while Mark boggled at the price. Mark had thought that he had gotten used to it, respecting the fact that it was classic space art though not to his own taste. It had a nice name. Ladies of the Lake. But the picture had finally unnerved him.

He had dreamed about that world with no living green, only ice mountains ringing a blue sea of nitrogen, bitterly cold to all eternity, beneath a night sky radiant with blue starshine. The cold burned. The stars’ irradiance would destroy the delicate molecules of any Earth-like life. Ladies of the Lake told him what the stars were like, the reality of space outside of the fold of the Earth.

Too tired to be fully awake, too disturbed to be fully asleep, Mark twisted in his bed, hagridden by seven sapphire stars.

Ev admired both views. This was a good table by an extraordinary window, beyond which the bright, benighted city of Houston stretched into the distance. The air swarmed with the firefly lights of the aircraft that, in this century, had replaced ground-going automobiles for the travel needs of people wealthy enough to own their private transportation.

The other and more immediate view which presented itself to him was that of Dr. Miraly Fiorenza, seated across the table. She had a thoughtful expression on an intelligent face, and a sapphire-blue blouse cut attractively low.

Miraly seemed interested in his account of disaster on the prairie and the decisions that ensued from it. “That was a year ago? Why aren’t you selling your possessions and living like a monk?”

Bingo, Ev thought. She really was interested. And not just in the story. He felt a pleasant flush of erotic feeling, and answered, “The ship won’t leave for another two years.”

“Carpe diem?”

A dark-clad waiter materialized. This, the Houston Club, was the apex of the arcology that crowned the city. The club was the jewel in the crown and the haunt of the rich and powerful, and fraught with unwritten rules. One rule was that everyone in the party must order a drink. Another and slightly more cryptic rule was that the drink must be something classic. In mid-twenty-first-century America, wealth and power donned the trappings of earlier ages. Ev ordered two Old Fashioneds, and thus obeyed that rule with conscious irony. With a satisfied twitch of expression, the waiter glided away.

“There are more important things to do than curl up and wait for the trip,” Ev told Miraly.

“Such as?”

“Mark is supplying seeds to the Genesis Foundation for the terraforming project. And I’m working hard, and learning all I can, at Pennington Genetech. We may need new organisms in the new world. Organisms that somebody like me can tailor from normal species.”

The waiter returned with the drinks. Ev sipped his. It was perfect, a fine balance of the bitter and sweet and citrus on the base of alcohol. He waved his glass in a circle meant to include the ambiance, the view, and Miraly. “In the meantime—carpe diem ”

Her lips on her glass curled in amusement. “I absolutely cannot imagine you on a frontier world.”

“Oh?”

She made a circular wave to imitate his. “I know a fish in its water when I see one.”

“I grew up on Titan. Dad’s an executive with the Lunar Mining Company, trans-Martian division.” Ev was gratified to see her react with surprise. “Frontier worlds are nothing new for me.”

“Well, well. You don’t seem nearly hardscrabble enough to be an out-planeter.”

“The company pays Dad handsomely. While I was growing up, we vacationed on Mars, Luna, and Earth, first class all the way. I also spent five years at an exclusive boarding school in Europe.”

“Thus the polish,” she mused. “But you, digging in the dirt to make tomatoes grow on a colony world? I still don’t buy it.”

“When the ship finds a new world, the plan is to have it as an orbiting city while the world is terraformed,” Ev pointed out. “The first generations downside will live in domes. Only people like Mark will be digging in the dirt ”

“He sounds sweet.”

From her tone, Ev realized that he must have described Mark in terms that appealed to Miraly. Did that mean she would prefer a man like Mark to one like Ev? No, not necessarily: maybe she liked lost kittens and sadeyed puppies. And maybe she would accept an invitation to go home with Ev just a bit more readily if it involved the occasion to meet and sympathize with sweet Mark. Ev filed the thought in the back of his mind. “He’s not cut out for modern life. Doesn’t quite realize that Earth is like one of those plants of his. Goes to seed and dies.” “Is it that easy to for you think of Earth dying?”

There was a barb in her words. The black-haired rose had a few thorns, Ev thought, intrigued. “Have you observed Earth from space?” he countered. “What with the smog and desertification visible from orbit during the day, and huge splotches of urban light on the night side, it’s obvious that Earth is going to seed.”

“But it’s not natural for Earth to die, like it would be for one of Mark’s plants. It’s things like pollution, war, overpopulation, politics.”

Ev sighed. “I won’t argue that. Pennington reeks with the kind of politics that promote the unfettered exploitation of resources, environment or sustainability be damned. Genetic resources are the big issue—and cash cow—-at Pennington, but the top dogs support the politics that keep the outplanet colonies dependent and feeding Earth minerals and helium-three for industry. I have not breathed a word about my future plans around Pennington. If the corporate climate is one that doesn’t favor independent Solar System colonies, it abhors the idea of a starship that leaves and sends nothing back ”

There was a Netnode on table, discreetly metal-toned so as to blend in with the general decor. Miraly activated it. The miniature computer terminal had a small, jewel-like screen and audio muted so as not to disturb other guests here. Ev could barely hear the locator beeps and buzzes as Miraly pulled up a map of the world.

More eager to watch her than the little screen, Ev admired the graceful lines of her body draped by the blue blouse. Tapping the screen with a fingernail, she linked to a region in Brazil, then a medical update indicated by a caduceus icon. A window in the screen showed a ball-and-stick sketch which Ev recognized as a virus of some kind. “This is a disease of cattle,” she said crisply. “Somehow a section of its DNA crossed into a human respiratory virus. The result is called KAV, and it’s infected hundreds of people in Amazonia.”

For the first time during the whole date, Ev remembered that she was a doctor and professor at the medical school in Galveston; her specialty was virology. He had met her at a genetics conference the week before.

She went on. “Pennington Genetech has invented an antivirus, and patented it. And is waiting for the World Health Organization to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars for it. Until then, Pennington won’t release the antiviral gene sequence to the public health authorities. The death toll stands at—” She fished for the figure, and displayed it. “One hundred fifty-two as of today. It will rise rapidly. But Pennington s chief executives seem to share the belief that seems all too common today—that the answer to overpopulation is disease. As if the suffering doesn’t matter.”

“I know.” Ev studied the screen and her intent face, harder-edged than it had been just minutes before. He said slowly, “Is this why you accepted a date with me?”

“Did you know there’s a joke in the medical community about researchers who work with Pennington? They are a specially genetically engineered strain of human being without the heart. I wanted to find out if you were a typical Pennington clone. And you aren’t.”

“Glad to hear that,” Ev murmured.

“Who do you know at Pennington?”

“Not top people who could spring the virus sequence,” Ev answered, suddenly impatient. “Does this mean you won’t see me again?”

Her wide, elegant lips turned in an ironic smile that surprised him. “No, as a matter of fact, I think I’d like to see more of you.”

Maybe the Old Fashioned was going to Ev’s head. But he knew eros to be as psychoactive for him as alcohol. Ideas were mixing in his brain, crossing over from one domain to another, dangerously recombinant. “I have an idea. The Genesis Foundation hinted at channels for under-the-table contributions to the gene library. The Foundation thinks the same kind of politics that Pennington exemplifies are going to weigh against free access to biological specimens for the starship. Therefore I’m playing with ways to make contributions from Pennington’s gene banks to the starship’s library—without Pennington’s knowledge. I think I could smuggle the virus sequence out. Probably within a week.”

Surprise and dismay flashed across Miraly’s features. She hastily put down the glass. “That would be faster than official deals ever could be—but it’s—I’m not asking for that. Are you sure you don’t know somebody who can make it happen above board?”

“Absolutely. I don’t,” Ev said soberly.

“But you could get into serious trouble.”

“If I do it for the ship, which I probably will, I’ll run the same risk.”

“It’s a game to you, isn’t it?” she said quietly. “Plotting to go to the stars, and if there’s a bit of opposition to outwit, so much the better. What will you do when it’s time to cash the chips and either leave forever or stay?”

“I’m planning to go.”

“I bet you stay. That you don’t get caught if you do smuggle genes out of Pennington, but you stay anyway.”

“Maybe.” Ev kept his tone noncommittal.

Women didn’t usually affect him the way this one did. But then, in his experience, matrons doted on him, while younger ones fawned or flirted. Miraly did neither. Ev felt the way he had when he first saw Ladies of the Lake and met brilliant, hard-edged beauty that he could not live without.

He had two years to persuade her to come along to the stars.

In the three years since the disaster of the prairie. Mark’s life had been, to all outward appearances, normal. He was now a junior faculty member with papers to publish and classes to teach. In secret, he harbored a purpose and a dread that gave him broken sleep and bad dreams. The single worst and most compelling nightmare happened one evening as he napped after dinner. In the dream, Mark beheld a cosmic wake, the Earth in a tattered, dull green death shroud, and passing comets with the wings and the faces of archangels, mourning. Later that same night, he went through the motions of teaching a seminar in a stunned daze.

With his perpetual ache of insomniac fatigue, the afternoon class in introductory ecology was the most difficult part of the day for him. But he prepared methodically, presented thoughtfully, and struggled to get the importance of the subject across to often disinterested young minds.

Early in the semester, Mark had issued each student in Intro Eco a glass ball and the task of filling the ball with water and a balanced population of algae, brine shrimp, and micro-organisms. The balls were then sealed. By now, mid-semester, a variety of initial mistakes in the composition of the microecologies were apparent, in the form of sick and cloudy or dead and slimy contents in the glass eco-spheres.

“The Earth is an ecosphere too.” Mark meant to make one more, conclusive point before the hour was over. “That is, a system closed except for energy, receiving from the Sun a fairly constant amount of electromagnetic radiation. Energy from the outside was necessary but not sufficient for life on Earth; life also had to organize itself into a dynamic yet stable balance.”

“It’s not materially closed any more,” objected a student named Pol—one of the Mark’s least favorite students. “We’ve got space resources now.”

“True. But Earth always had space resources in the form of meteorite and comet impacts, and cosmic rays and dust.” To decisively regain the upper hand, he threw out a testable packet of information. “Life on Earth may have originated with organic compounds formed in interstellar dust clouds. In the early days of the Solar System, there was a continual rain of interstellar dust, some of which contained hydrocarbons, including molecules that may be considered the precursors of amino acids. Thus the dust from interstellar space seeded Earth with the potential for life, if the Cosmic Genesis hypothesis is correct.”

Pol slouched.

“With or without closure of the planetary ecosystem, it’s vital that populations of organisms be in balance, constituting a dynamic, yet stable, system. If an ecosystem is destabilized, you get a runaway degradation of the environment—as in some of your ecospheres. In other words, a partial or total die-off.”

Pol interrupted Mark again. “But space resources mean we can live under domes on Earth even if nature dies.”

“Don’t count on it,” said Ev, who, to Mark’s complete surprise, had appeared in the classroom doorway, startlingly out of place in an expensive business suit. “The out-planets could decide to keep their resources instead of throwing them down into a gravity well.”

Mark introduced Ev to the class. “This is Dr. Evrett Reynolds. A research scientist with Pennington Genetech, who grew up on Titan.” Mark wondered with alarm why Ev was here. It had to be ship business.

Without asking permission, Ev picked up Pol’s ecosphere and walked away to the window’s light, examining it. Then he said, “You botched this one. And no fair opening it to fix it up. So you might as well throw it away.” Ev tossed the ecosphere back to Pol, who bristled as he caught it.

Mark hastily dismissed the class. Pol left muttering. Some of the departing female students giggled and whispered among themselves with backward glances. Resplendent in the business suit, Ev radiated a sardonic intensity which blew the last of the students out of the classroom, including those who might have lingered to ask questions.

With the room cleared, Ev turned to Mark. “Today the Supreme Court upheld the Alaska law. No exports of wild biomatter. Interpretation extended to seeds and other germ plasm.”

Mark felt a surge of consternation, with a sharp and unsettling undertone of relief. He collected his thoughts out of the mishmash of feelings. “It’s ridiculous! The law in Alaska was meant to prevent wild places from being dug up wholesale. Seeds, and germ plasm, which the starship needs, are different! What are a few seeds?”

“They’re seeds of an idea, and the idea is a new world,” Ev said forcefully. “Listen. The Genesis Foundation expected this. The ship leaves tonight.”

“What!” Mark sagged against a counter.

“Everybody won’t make it before the launch, so there’ll be a whole fleet of rocket planes and old Delta Clippers coming up from Earth to meet the ship tonight and in the next few days. It’ll be a mad scramble. The ship will add passengers from the colonies and outworlds all the way to the end of the Solar System. But they’ve asked some of us on Earth-such as biological scientists—to come tonight to maximize the chances of us making it out unhindered.”

“Unhindered?” Mark stammered. “What does that mean?”

“Mark, the court’s decision is going to be a signal flag. It will encourage protestors, corporations, and the government itself to undertake God only knows what actions against people trying to join the ship and against the ship itself. It’s a good bet that the President of the U.S. will declare martial law at midnight tonight.”

Mark’s nerves jangled. “Wait. Wait! The ship can’t possibly have absolutely everything it needs yet for terraforming—”

“The more genes the better,” Ev agreed. “We ought to grab extra seeds on the way out.”

Automatically, Mark led the way toward the reference collection. Mark thought about the little dead eco-spheres. Wrong initial conditions. In some cases, only slightly wrong. End result, the slime of decay. He felt hot and prickly. “They’re sure they’ve got everything to make ecosystems?”

“The planetary ecologists have been running computer models continuously with the species actually in the ship’s freezers. The more diversity and redundancy the better. So, now that the chips are down, the Foundation is grabbing everything it can, be it animal, vegetable, or virus.”

“The Foundation is stealing biota?”

“All over the world.”

Astounded, Mark asked no more questions.

“We have to go by Anna’s office, don’t we?” Ev asked. The ecology department occupied one floor of the ancient biology building. The reference collection was located just down the dusty and crowded corridor from the office of Annetine van Leeuwen. “Does she know you’ve been planning to go?”

“She guesses,” Mark said tersely. He did not elaborate on Anna’s sharp glances, the frosty nod of her head when he asked for specimens for Active research needs, intending to send them to the Foundation for the ship. For years, Anna van Leeuwen had been outspoken in her criticism of Samantha Berry’s decision to leave on the earlier starship. Anna had complained bitterly about having inherited the department chairmanship from Berry. Before the starship, the two middle-aged women had been friends and department allies.

Ev said, “She may have heard about today’s court decision. It’s headlining the news. If she sees the two of us she’ll either talk our ears off or call the campus police.”

But Anna wasn’t in. The door of her office hung ajar, giving Mark a glimpse of the usual clutter within, and her desk, for once, unaccountably, clean.

Knowing that Anna might be no farther away than the women’s restroom, Mark and Ev hurried by. A few minutes later, Mark reached into the freezer for small vials marked with his own neat handwriting.

In her valedictory lecture, Professor Berry had described starship stasis, the cold storage for plant seeds, germ cells, bacterial spores, and people. In a few months Mark would be in the freezer, and in a few hundred years, on the other side of the stars, being pulled out, insensate but alive—if he was lucky. His hand shook.

“Don’t make it too obvious,” Ev advised.

Mark selected Little Bluestem seeds—a keystone species in its native grasslands—then five more vials at random. On impulse, Mark also seized a vial that contained the fat seeds of Helianthus giganteus, the stalking wild sunflowers. He rearranged the vials to obliterate incriminating gaps. Ev leaned casually against the doorjamb to watch the hallway “Not a sight or sound of her yet. Let’s get out of here.”

When they were well away from the reference collection, Ev said, “I have to run next door and pick up something of mine that they’ve been keeping for me. And drop off a letter to Burch, my old advisor. Explaining everything. It’s OK—he’s out of the country and he won’t get back to open the letter until next month.”

Mark should have left a note for Anna. He owed her that much, at least. Too late now. They exited the biology building into the breezeway outside.

The day was gray and muggy, typical of this climate zone of greenhouse Earth. Some of the ancient bricks in the walls of the biology breezeway were molded with intaglio designs, biological ones—stylized scorpion, jellyfish, moth, protozoan, annelid. The intaglios had crumbled at the edges from decades of exposure to the acid air.

The breezeway led to the biosciences building, where some of the bricks were intaglioed with a double helix. “I’ll be back in a minute” Ev bounded through the main doors.

The Rice University campus was old, brick buildings dating from the mid to late twentieth century. Huge and slowly dying oaks lined the sidewalks. There seemed to be an unreal calm here today, like the Jurassic fern swamps on the eve of the great Cretaceous extinction. Mark wondered what obscure plants and animals would inherit the Earth this time.

Ev emerged from biosciences holding a small animal carrier labeled LIVE MICE HANDLE WITH CARE.

“Patented mice?” Mark asked. “You think the new world will need them?”

“You never know,” Ev said vaguely.

It was Ev’s ego showing, Mark thought. He couldn’t take his prized possessions to the stars, but he’d bring something he invented. They crossed the campus together in silence.

Waiting for the train at the South Main Rail Station, Mark started to say “Bluestem—” but he stopped himself. People milled around the station, university types whom he vaguely recognized, and others whom he did not know The Genesis Foundation definitely would not want its plans overheard, today of all days. Mark took his notebook computer out of his pocket. He urgently pecked out the words One grass won’t save the new world. After showing the statement on the little screen to Ev, he erased it.

Ev shrugged.

What if the models are wrong?

Ev took the computer to enter the words, we’ll make it work, I’ll make it work, are you coming or not?

It was hubris enough to attempt restoration ecology on Earth, to mend the gashes that humanity had torn in the planet’s living fabric. But to plan to terraform a whole, strange, undiscovered world—on the basis of hurried models based on familiarity with no living world besides Earth—this went past hubris into the realm of collective, suicidal insanity. On the train, Mark slumped in his seat.

Ev had the notepad. He handed it back to Mark, you still haven’t decided, have you, it accused.

The monorail took them toward the center of the city, first through the highrise residential district with frequent stops, among them the one that Ev would have taken to go to the place he shared with his girlfriend. Thoughts churning, Mark asked, “What about Miraly?”

Ev grimaced. “She understands everything all too well. But she still won’t come.”

Mark was startled. Ev had been so sure that Miraly would go with him to the stars in the end.

“I left everything with her. Including Ladies of the Lake.” Ev settled back in his seat, profoundly pensive.

Mark could not understand how Ev could leave Miraly. Mark loved the Earth. And he did not know whether, loving Earth as he did, he could bear to desert it.

Over the city loomed the shape of the Uptown arcology, a pyramid supported by three pillars—each pillar a skyscraper in its own right, but dwarfed by the pyramid. Mark blinked. Today everything seemed unfamiliar, in the dreadful light of leaving forever, unreal. Uptown reminded him of an ancient motion picture about an invasion of huge long-legged machines from Mars.

Entering the Wards, with no stops for the poor and crowded people who lived there, the train accelerated. Hurtling along its elevated rack, the train arrowed under the skirt of the pyramid, decelerating. When it halted, they exited onto a platform.

Another train would soon come to take them to the airport. Ev had bought tickets for both of them on a commercial flight to Star Field.

The platform stood high enough above the ground to activate Mark’s uneasy fascination with heights. He peered over the guardrail into the dirty and dismal neighborhood below the rail track. Neighborhoods like this stretched for miles in the innermost part of the city, the enormous area called the Wards, crammed with the underclass which was truly, physically under—relegated to the ground beneath the shining bulk of Uptown, in its shadow.

Garish words, both Spanglish and the semi-literate English called Manglish, were scrawled on every wall and sidewalk in sight. A rotten smell drifted up from the Wards, lofted by the heat of the day. It was not the reek of a living compost heap; it was truly foul.

“I see somebody I know,” Ev said. He nudged Mark’s shoulder, indicating a middle-aged man, face obscured by large dark Virtuality glasses, who disembarked from the train farther down the platform. “Pennington company man and very loyal. I do believe he was lurking around the South Main rail station, and now he’s getting out here. He may be following me. So let’s visit Uptown.”

Mark was appalled—less so than if Ev had suggested an excursion into the Wards, but not much less. “No!” he hissed. “I do not want to spend any of my last minutes on Earth in Uptown!”

“Pennington doesn’t like the police becoming involved in its affairs. The company might take rather forceful action on its own, without stopping to consult the police, if it should realize what I’ve done.” Ev pointedly did not indicate the mouse carrier under his arm, draped with his concealing suit jacket. “I don’t want my colleague over there to know where I’m going or guess why. We can lose him in Uptown. Come on.”

Mark followed with great reluctance. Even when he had occasion to go there briefly and in the best of moods, Uptown always made him feel like a gasping fish out of water.

Ev was an amphibian. And he led them to the Uptown escalator at a brisk stroll. Ev leaned against the escalator’s handrail as he turned to talk to Mark, on the next lower step. “This is a world-class Highcity, you know.”

“As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t know,” Mark replied, glum. “I don’t patronize them like you do.”

Ev swept the escalator and the sidewalks below with his gaze. He said cheerily, “It’s in the same league as LA High, the Tower of London and Luna Prime. With a better unifying environmental motif.” Mark snorted in disgust. Ev turned to take a well-timed step off the escalator into the shopping district.

As he followed suit, Mark looked over his shoulder. He thought he saw the Pennington man, the thick black Virtuality glasses bobbing among the other heads of people being conveyed up by the escalator. But Ev led Mark away quickly. Mark lost sight of the glasses in the crowds that filled the lowest, mall level of Uptown.

Throngs of people, the City’s professionals leaving work and its affluent and leisured class coming for entertainment, surged through the pyramid’s thoroughfares in waves, much like corpuscles pumped through broad arteries and narrow capillaries. Except that Uptown had no heart.

The upper levels of Uptown were full of offices. An artificial stream descended from the pyramid’s apex to its base in spectacular indoor waterfalls. Between descents, the cascade flowed through pools and fountains on each level. Lush, well-groomed vegetation fringed the stream. “They did a particularly nice job with that fall,” Ev remarked, wandering toward the pool at the foot of the waterfall that tumbled down to mall level.

Mark glowered back. He loathed the stream. It pretended to be the soul of a forest. Clear and lifeless, a zombie imitation of something natural; it was an only an elaborate exercise in plumbing.

Ev stepped onto the stone path that led behind the falling water. Directly behind the waterfall, its sound absorbed his words. Only Mark heard him. “Mark, have you decided? It’s not a game anymore, not even for me. If we get stopped before the ship leaves, it could be unpleasant for us. You can back out now without having lost much more than a good many nights’ sleep.”

The liquid curtain blurred the crowds and the stores and bright lights of Uptown into a patternless watercolor. But the sharp edges of Uptown’s artificial color in fresh sharp memory pained Mark, as did the foul reek of the Wards, Uptown’s malignant shadow. And the whining sound of a bulldozer hitting a stump still rang in his ears even now, years later. “I want to go to Star Field.”

“For sightseeing, or for a further trip?” Ev asked drily.

“I’m still thinking.”

Ev sighed. “Follow me.” He plunged back into the shopping district.

Minutes later, to Mark’s surprise, they stepped out into daylight high on the pyramid’s side, at the skyport. Ev said, “Interested parties could find out about the airline reservations I made for us, but not that I parked my dad’s jet here. I used an alias.”

A valet wheeled the Merlin out, its silver skin and blue stripes gleaming, freshly washed. Under its forward-swept wings, the two big ducted fans were locked into position for a vertical takeoff. Ev preflighted the Merlin. He cycled its control surfaces and checked the fuel. Mark steeled himself and climbed in, buckling himself into the copilot/passenger’s seat.

Ev peered into the cockpit at Mark. “Usually you say something about how little it looks, and you pace around looking unhappy until time to take off. I guess you mean what you say about going as far as Star Field.”

Grim and impatient, Mark watched Ev, now in the pilot’s seat, finish the preflight checklist, using a string of icons on the glass instrument panel. The jet engines spooled up with a rising whine. “Here we go,” said Ev, commanding takeoff thrust. The ducted fans lifted the Merlin almost straight up from the pyramid into the gray air. The ascent tweaked Mark’s stomach. High over the city, the Merlin’s fans rotated into position for horizontal flight. The Merlin surged forward and merged into the interstate air traffic stream.

The little jet tilted toward its final course, westward. Mark stared out at the horizon that was bloodied by the tag end of sunset. The live animal carrier rested on Mark’s lap. One of the mice inside squeaked.

“Hey, thanks for holding that,” said Ev. “The trip would jolt them more if the carrier was just strapped in the baggage rack, and they’re gentle and insecure by nature. Nice mice.”

Mark glanced at Ev. Tonight—maybe because of the red sky’s light tinting his blond hair weirdly pink—Ev looked strange to Mark. Mark remembered the Reynolds family nickname for their son. According to Ev, from an early age his parents had called him Bern, short for Bright-Eyed Monster.

Ev informed him, “That’s San Antonio off to the right, and the Edwards Plateau, where the land stops being coastal plains and develops interesting wrinkles—see? I can get us an even better view if I drop a wing ” Ev’s hand rested on the slender sidearm control stick. He twisted his wrist.

The earth below lazily tilted. Mark closed his eyes. “Ev, you know how sometimes I don’t tolerate heights too well? Today’s one of those times.”

“Oh. Sorry!” Leveling the jet, Ev asked, “I don’t suppose you’ve thought about how we’re getting up to space?”

“As little as possible,” Mark replied grimly.

Ev flew in silence for a few minutes. Then, “Since this is the last flight—I’m going off the Air Net to do my own flying. OK with you?”

Mark nodded.

“I may even take the scenic route, since we have time to spare. Thanks to Dad,” Ev added, giving credit where credit was due and where the line of credit was extensive: the jet belonged to Ev’s father. “Some private jets can’t get off the Net at all. Dad calls ’em overgrown model airplanes. If you’re feeling vertigo, keep your eyes on the horizon. Hey, look at the sunset, that’s quite a sight! Have you ever seen a sea of red like that? The orange-brown streak at the bottom of the sky, though, that looks a lot like Titan. And for the same reason. Hydrocarbon smog.”

From Titan, Earth was just a blue star beside a brighter white one, the Sun. That must have made it easier for a Titanian like Ev to think about leaving forever. Ev did not seem unhappy, just excited.

Mark hoped that Ev would fly in a straight line with minimal sightseeing. Instead, the Merlin banked again. Mark felt his stomach quiver. “Why’d you do that?” he asked crossly.

“I didn’t,” said Ev.

The Merlin had an elegant, simple-looking instrument panel with dark, blank spaces for everything not in use. Ev tapped the panel with one finger. More of the dark places lit up: gray-green screens contrasted with the spidery graphics traced across them. Small bright icons flashed. The Merlin had more numerous and informative instruments than did a typical personal jet. Scanning the instrument readings, Ev said, “Aha!”

“What?”

“We’re back on the Air Net and San Antonio control is attempting to fly us in their direction. They can do that if a pilot is drunk or disabled.” Ev quickly pushed buttons on a keypad set in the instrument panel. “To regain control from their override requires a complicated response sequence, demonstrating that I am not incapacitated.” The Merlin’s slow curving turn stopped, the jet’s nose swerving back toward the sunset. Ev looked over at Mark, and his face was somber. “I wonder who persuaded San Antonio control to do that.”

The instrument panel flashed an eye-catching, bright red icon. Ev interpreted. “Traffic at four o’clock. No response to my computer’s request that they identify themselves. Move your head so I can see past you.” He studied the night sky beyond the back end of the cockpit’s bubble canopy.

“Is it going the same way we are for the same reason?”

“Maybe, maybe not. He’s bigger than us. Mark, this might be somebody trying to stop us from reaching the starship.”

Mark broke out in a sour sweat. The idea of leaving Earth had given Mark nightmares in plenty, but not even the worst one had included a scenario like this.

An instrument beeped shrilly. Ev muttered, “And that’s a signal from somewhere…” Ev cross-checked the strange signal. “Somebody’s feeding us a false navigational signal. I think it’s our anonymous friend. Well, the Merlin’s smart enough not to buy it ” Ev patted the instrument panel affectionately.

A moment later, the jet dived. Mark clutched the mouse carrier, from which came alarmed squeaks.

Ev cursed. “They’re trying to force-land us!”

“Can they?” Mark almost shouted.

“Get the hell out of my fly wires!” Ev punched in a reprogramming sequence.

Desperately Mark wondered if being forced to land in San Antonio would be so bad. It would mean not having to leave his world after all, and a final end to nightmares and frantic plans, and getting out of the sickening air.

The Merlin leveled off. A radio transmission must have come to Ev through the slender headset he wore. His face looked startled as he listened to whatever was coming through the earphone. With abrupt motions of his hand, Ev changed the radio receiver to a different frequency. “It’s a Pennington corporate jet,” he said to Mark. “I thought we got away from that company spy before we took off. Apparently not.”

Ev sent the Merlin into a climb, a steep one. In their carrier, the hapless mice lost their footing and slid across the carrier’s floor, scrabbling for footing.

“Are you important enough that they’d send a company jet after you?”

“Yes,” Ev said curtly. “So are the mice.”

Urgently Mark asked, “What can he do to us?”

“I don’t know and I don’t want to find out. Sit tight. I’m going into afterburner.”

The climbing Merlin’s nose already pointed toward a star above the red horizon. The engines screamed and the jet leaped toward the star. Its rocketing ascent pushed a load of gravity on Mark. He sank deep into his seat.

Ev grunted, “Ha! Can’t catch us now!”

Mark felt his face sag on its bones.

“Pushover!” Ev’s jet dipped its nose back toward the horizon. Mark’s stomach tried to somersault. A distressed noise escaped from him.

“Swallow to get your innards back on line,” Ev said. “Damn! He’s coming after us—let’s see you do this, you bastard!” Ev’s hand twitched on the sidearm control stick.

Urgently wanting to follow what was happening, Mark looked out the window to his right. He was shocked to see the whole, wide purple sky in that direction. The jet was pivoting on its left wing.

The Merlin bolted toward the southwest. Mark’s stomach settled, squashed, into the wrong internal place. He clamped his teeth against retching. Leveling off, the jet streaked across darkening land with its nose pointed just south of the setting Sun.

“I outmaneuvered him!” Ev crowed. He looked at Mark. “Feeling OK?”

Sweating profusely, Mark snapped, “No! Them either,” Mark added, meaning the mice. “I think they’re dead.”

Ev hastily took the mouse carrier and peered into it. “They’re OK. They just fainted, the climb in addition to the low cabin pressure got to them. Poor mice,” he crooned over them. “If I’d meant you to fly, I’d have given you wings.”

Making a last-ditch fight against airsickness, Mark stared at the horizon with its brilliant puddle of Sun. Shades of red stretched from horizon to zenith, flaming ocher to vermillion to maroon. Mark saw the spectacular sunset as a barrier, forbidding and insurmountable.

The Merlin was a very expensive and capable private jet, but not orbital. They might reach Star Field. But they would never make it past the red sea of air that was the sky.

Mark looked pale but relieved, leaning back with his eyes closed. Ev concluded that Mark was through being sick. “Since I wasn’t replying to him, and since I outmaneuvered him, the Pennington jet gave up and flew back to San Antonio,” Ev told Mark. “We’re approaching the Mexican border now. I don’t think we’ll have any more trouble in the air. That was what pilots used to call ‘yank and bank’! It’s not recommended for this jet, but she turned the trick beautifully, didn’t she?”

“I still don’t like flying with you,” said Mark. It was his first complete sentence in the last fifteen minutes.

“I had to evade that guy. I’m sorry”

Ev was aware that he did not sound sorry. Exuberance had leaked into his tone, for in flying, Ev was very much at home. People on Titan rarely traversed the nitrogen ice fields on the surface of that world, but flew everywhere instead, using blunt-winged craft to ply Titan’s dense atmosphere. Ev clapped a solicitous hand on Mark’s shoulder. “Feel better now?”

“At least we made it to Mexico,” Mark muttered.

“So we did. But since the Desesperacion, the government of Mexico is for most intents and purposes a puppet of the U.S. The U.S. government pulls the strings and makes things happen in Mexico. I won’t be surprised if there’s trouble of some kind later today.”

Mark groaned.

“Don’t worry. The Foundation won’t be surprised either,” said Ev. “We’re more prepared than you realize.”

Below them now was the dammed Rio Grande, a trickle finding its way from one jagged drying lake to the next. Ahead, the setting Sun glared on the Mexican desert. “God damn it all” said Mark suddenly. “I remember the first starship, when we were kids. The videos of the ship under construction and the crew in training, blue uniforms and all. Everything was grand and heroic. Just before they left there was that ceremony, broadcast to the whole Solar System. Flags and music and holo-convocation and all. When Berry left, on the second starship, I guess there were some critics, one political party disapproved of it, but there was still a ceremony. Why do we have to scheme and steal and run away at night?”

Ev pulled a sheaf of papers out of the personal-effects pocket beside the pilot’s seat. He extended to Mark the flimsy netnode printout pages from The Wall Street Journal “Scan that editorial.”

STARSHIP BRAIN DRAIN said the headline.

Mark grunted. “No wonder you printed it out. It’s about your hero, Norden.”

“Read on ” Ev had practically memorized the article. It held that Norden’s departure on the last starship, seven years ago, had constituted an unacceptable loss to science and civilization. Norden exemplified the young scientists who had deserted the Earth for the stars—some of the brightest, best-educated, and most highly motivated minds of their generation. The tap had been left open and irreplaceable brainpower had drained away. This time, the Journal declared, it was the responsibility of government, industry, and citizens to firmly close the tap. The starship should be stopped, the departure of Earth’s best minds prevented. By whatever means necessary to do so.

“I’m no Joe Norden,” Ev said frankly, when Mark seemed to have reached the bottom of the page. “But I’m good at what I do. You’re a very good ecologist. Read the part about disease.”

Mark read aloud. “ ‘If a sudden new disease selectively struck down a comparable fraction of the first-rate talents and first-born achievers in the upcoming generation, an outcry would be raised around the world, and there would be an urgent search for amelioration and cure.’ ”

“Harsh metaphor, isn’t it?” Ev sighed.

Encountering clear-air turbulence, the jet bounced. With slight movements of the control stick in his hand, Ev shepherded the jet through the bumps in the air, into smoother air. Beside him, Mark held on to the carrier with its precious mice, buffering the bounces for them.

Clouds flecked the land below, small ones, as round as dry cotton-balls. Few people still lived in the barren land under the cotton clouds. Half the population of Mexico had pressed into the slightly greener plains of North America, an unstoppable surge of desperate humanity that had been named the Desesperacion.

Mark watched the wasted land unfurl under the jet’s gleaming canard. “Why the hell are we going to look for a world across the stars to try to terraform it? We could restore this one more easily. There’s so much here to work with even now. We can clean up the pollution and rebuild degraded ecosystems. Why not?”

“Politics, religion, war, and overpopulation,” Ev said patiently. After all, the two of them had had this discussion before, with each other and with Miraly. “The mindless horsemen of environmental apocalypse. In my opinion, the worst of them is politics. Or, I should say, politicians to whom their own power and prestige is their first concern, all else be damned.”

Through gritted teeth, Mark said, “I hate politics.”

“I can hardly blame you,” Ev said, remembering the disaster of the prairie.

“Did you see the way the editorial concludes?”

“Yes.”

Mark read it aloud anyway, his tone shocked. “ ‘Mr. Kristeller, the Director of the Genesis Foundation, should return to Mars. There he can contribute to the expansion of Earth’s resource and economic base, rather than organizing the modern-day equivalent of the Children’s Crusade.’ ”

“That’s inflammatory;” said Ev.

“Do you really trust Kristeller?”

“Yes.”

“But he’s a Martian.”

Ev twitched the corner of his mouth disapprovingly. Evidently, Mark was upset enough not to remember—or not to care—that his present company was Titanian. “Actually, Kristeller is a biologist who got blacklisted in the industry here and took a job on Mars four decades ago. I guarantee you he knows how hard terraforming is—and that Mars isn’t the right place for it. He says it would go faster on an Earth-like world, and he ought to know. You’re right in a way, though. Kristeller is a naturalized outworlder. Living away from Earth makes a person develop a certain perspective.” Ev added, “And I’m a Titanian. Compressible tentacles concealed under the suit, remember?” Ev wiggled one eyebrow, a little trick that Ev had discovered when he was the small boy called Bern.

“Compressible wings, maybe,” suggested Mark, with a wan smile. “I’m sorry. I forgot.”

The Sun seemed to move up in the sky. Flying faster than nightfall, the Merlin was catching up with the day. The land below folded up into a mountain range, brown and deeply shadowed. Ragged peaks exceeded the altitude of the jet as it angled through a pass between the peaks. Ev could have flown higher, maybe should have, to conserve fuel; but he did not want to invite radar detection quite so blatantly.

On the other side of the mountains, the jet soared with a lift in altitude. “Updraft,” said Ev, “the wind from the sea hits this range and rises. The Gulf of California is in sight, and so is something else.” Squinting, Ev pointed to a thin dark line above the shining arc of water on the horizon. Perfectly straight and vertical, the line bisected an otherwise irregular, fractal panorama of hills and cloud-studded sky. It was Star Tower, and it went past the top of the sky, all the way to the starship. Ev’s heart beat faster.

“Oh, God, it’s tall.” Mark’s voice sounded strangled.

Ev gave a surreptitious glance toward where the used air-sickness bag had been stowed. “Think of it as a giant beanstalk ”

“No,” Mark objected. “Remember how the fairy tale ended?”

Ev laughed. “It won’t M down. Not yet.”

But as he flew on toward the Tower, Ev sobered. This wasn’t a fairy tale. It was less like a fairy tale than he had ever expected. The back seat of the Merlin was empty. No Miraly.

Ev scanned his instrument panel in a pilot’s crosscheck, an active pattern to avoid instrument fixation. He felt empty inside, like the Merlin s back seat, with an aching void behind the busyness of flying and planning. He could not ever remember feeling this way before. Was this how Mark had felt when they killed the prairie? No wonder Mark had been so distracted and unhappy since then. Emptiness where the heart should be was like a black hole, an ache that bent your fabric of thought and feeling around it.

Now, with his destination in sight, in the lull between the uncertainty of getting this far and the terra incognita that was the future, Ev’s mind returned to last night. His last night with Miraly, and he hadn’t known that was what it was until the end of it.

Miraly had been at work in her hospital all day yesterday, and well into the evening. In the private peace of the home he shared with her, Ev had put on his Virtuality visor and gloves and became a spider on the world’s computer web. He followed electronic links of his own making to visit what interested him most.

Lurking in the Netnews-casts, he saw protestors and their angry hand-lettered signs, listened to learned commentators discuss the impending Supreme Court decision on the law against removal of wild matter from natural areas. He checked the ship’s tome, and saw that the announced departure date was unchanged, two months away. He also found the clue that told him, and anyone else who knew what to look for, that was untrue.

The ship had been christened. Its name was Primordium.

The naming of it meant that it would leave tomorrow. Tonight would be Ev’s last on Earth.

Knowing that, Ev followed the web to his favorite places, Paris, Rio, and Ares City. He gorged himself on the sights of the Seine River and Carnival and the dour red walls of Valles Marineris, heard the woodwind music in the Brazilian streets and the thin Martian wind in the solar arrays of Mars One, and talked to people he knew and did not know, wishing them bon jour, buenos dias, and on Mars with its long year marked by the imperceptibly slow circuit of the Sun in the pale sky, “Bright Day!” Then he left the Web and signed off the Net-node.

Web-decompression always took a while: readjusting to sights and sounds that were given, not chosen, and basically static, not in the poly-sensory flux of the Web. He focused for a while on the subtle blue colors in Ladies of the Lake. Then he went to the kitchen to inhale the lingering aroma of coffee from this morning and chicken cacciatore from last night.

The technology they were taking to the stars was old, Ev reflected. Old and reliable. Space was a terrible place to have a sophisticated black box that might stop working. At the distant star in Sagittarius that was their destination, they’d have computers all right, but not universal, ubiquitous, polysensory access to the Web of so complicated a world as this. Mark would be right at home. Ev would miss the excitement.

Miraly came home from the hospital late due to an emergency. Ev presented her with chocolates—her favorite kind, Swiss confections with hard shells and creamy centers. He began kissing her while her lips still tasted of chocolate. They made love. As much or more than ever before, he thrilled to the feel of her warm breath and cool skin.

At last, she looked at the clock-four a.m. “It’s today, isn’t it?” Her voice was low and serious.

For the first time in his life, Ev was at a loss for something eloquent to say. He tried and finally Med to think of something better than, “It’s your last chance to leave.”

“No, not mine. Ours. To go or stay together.”

“You’re still staying?” he whispered.

“Yes. And you’re going.” It wasn’t a question.

Realization shot through Ev, and left a sudden shaft of hot emptiness in his soul, like the scalded air left behind by a bolt of lightning. “Why?!” he shouted.

“I’ve told you many times!”

“I don’t understand!”

“Don’t yell at me. Stop it!”

Ev clenched his teeth to silence himself. As long as he had deluded himself that Miraly would come with him, it had been easy to plan to go to the stars. Now it was a gaping, awful prospect that he wanted to rail against.

Miraly said, “listen to me. Forever after this, Earth will know there are other worlds with intelligence on them.” Her voice sounded solemn and almost ceremonial, resonating in the room’s semi-darkness as though it were a theater, rather than a bedroom. “Finally, there will be no doubt that there is other intelligent, civilized life in the Universe. Not under our control. I think it will change the politics, the ideas, the whole way civilization is headed. I can tell by how hard they’re fighting it”

Ev shook his head. “Fighting hard and dirty. I can’t see any sense in staying through that”

Miraly sighed. “Dear sweet Mark works on grasses, and you work on genes. Neither of you have a lot to do with generations.”

“You’re being about as clear as the atmosphere of Venus,” he said, with a pained grin which there was just enough soft light from the electric candles for her to see.

“Oak trees generate new oaks. People have children who grow up, and neither oaks or people are like century plants that grow for a long time, go to seed, and keel over dead. Earth is more like an oak or a human”

He groaned. “For God’s sake stop being so Venusian—what do you mean?”

“Some people hoped the outplanet colonies could be like children of Earth who grow up. But the Moon and Mars and Titan never will be full-grown worlds like Earth. Yours will. Ev, people do sometimes try to hang onto their children forever. But having full-grown children who leave you and live out there, apart from you, maybe stronger and wiser than you, makes a difference in how you live. Knowing that other civilizations exist out there will make a difference for the Earth.”

“And that’s why you can stand to stay?”

She nodded. Strands of her dark hair loosely framed her fine-boned face, and made Ev’s heart pound faster at her beauty.

“You never explained it like that.”

“I’ve been thinking very, very hard these last few weeks.”

Ev groaned again. “I understand what you mean now, but I can’t buy it. I can’t accept it.”

“The reason I can, is because I’m not going. You are. You have to have your own truth, and it has to be about the new world, not the old one. Ev, what is it?”

“What?”

“I mean exactly what I asked,” she said crisply. “Why are you going?”

Ev got out of bed, threw on his silk pajama bottoms, and paced in a hot sweat. He was Ev Reynolds, first the boy and later the man could always say something plausible. Not tonight. Tonight, what he said had to be not just plausible, but true.

Mark wanted to husband a new world; he also needed a simpler world than this Earth, even if a harder one. Ev respected Mark’s motivations. Certain other people were not attached to much in this Solar System, and were out for sheer adventure or a clean slate in life—motives that had gotten a great many strange lands explored in the history of human life on Earth, but not Ev’s motives. Then there were the people who gave Ev the general impression of rats leaving a sinking ship. It had to be a better thing than that for him.

“It stopped being a game for you a while back,” said Miraly. “I realized you’d go. But I still don’t know why. I’d really like to know.” She paused. “Ev. I wasn’t going to tell you this. But I think it’s the only way to make you tell me why you’re doing this. And maybe tell yourself. I haven’t used birth control for weeks. And I’m pregnant.”

Stunned, Ev halted his pacing. He couldn’t keep his voice from rising to a near-shout. “To make me stay?”

“No, so that your father and I have part of you to remember you after you’re gone!” She put her arms around herself, not him, and the gesture tore at Ev like a bandage coming off a wound. It was the first motion of her pulling away from him.

In pain, he asked, “What do you want me to do?”

Of all women, only she could have said what she did next with no acid in her tone, just level honesty. “Tell me, what am I going to tell your child?”

Ev could not reply. They held each other in silence for the slender remainder of the night, tightly. In the morning she left for work in the hospital in Galveston. Ev waited for the call from the Genesis Foundation.

Visiting the bathroom, Ev stared at himself in the mirror. He looked haggard. And this morning, of all mornings, he saw the first faint wrinkles of age in his skin.

Ev had always tried to overlook wrinkles in women, and disparaged them in other men. What you get for living too close to the Sun. Gravity’s calling card, he called them. But today young wrinkles stood in his own face to tell him that the irresponsible kid he had been was no more. He had to do something with his life, something more permanent than his physical being.

I know I have to go. But how can I explain to her? And to myself? Waiting, he stared at the Ladies of the Lake, as if to ask the picture or the stars: what is my why?

Ev let himself slide into the wide picture, imagining the scene as if he were the first man to explore that nameless world with new stars in its sky reflected in the nitrogen lake: starry Sisters in their swaddling nebulosity, and the other stars, red and blue and yellow, that belonged to the same young open cluster.

Lost in the painting, Ev imagined climbing one of the sharp islands that ringed the nitrogen lake. He chose the island or peninsula in the left edge of the picture that had a low saddle-back profile, climbable in the world’s relatively low gravity with easy, careful strides. He wore a cold-moon spacesuit. There was the inhalation and exhalation of his own breathing in his ears, and static—the soft radio hiss of atoms of gas in the Pleiades’s nebulosity.

Since this was imagination anyway, he let his boots make footprints in the nitrogen frost. The footprints were dark and graphic—the frost was thin; under that layer, the mountain was sooty with stardust, grains with embedded glassy traces, primitive organic compounds, everything that had been swept out of space by the radiation of the new Pleiades and clotted on the skin of this planet.

At the top of the ridge, Ev turned his face up to the shining skein of stars stretched across the black sky like the bright banner of creation itself. So it was when my own Sun formed, Ev thought. In its day it was one of a cluster of stars. They condensed out of thick dust and gas that had been blown into the Universe when some of the First Stars turned into novas and supernovas.

I started in the stars. I am atoms forged when supernovas died. I am Earth distilled from the dust between the stars. “For you are dust and to dust you shall return ”

Startled so much that his imagination fell back out of the Pleiades print, Ev took a deep breath. His mind, strained with lack of sleep, gingerly cradled the new, sharp idea that it wasn’t exile but homecoming that he was poised on the brink of, return to the once and future glory of the stars.

Then the Netnode trilled, and the contoured tone told him that it was the Foundation calling. His return to the stars had begun.

The Gulf of California flashed beneath the wings, a narrow sea of glare. Mark hardly noticed. His eyes were glued on the base of the gigantic tower that was the axis of Star Field, Baja California.

The Star Tower had been constructed here in case it fell down in whole or in part: it was better for it to fall into shallow sea than onto possibly inhabited land. Mark’s heart fluttered. It hadn’t fallen yet, he reminded himself. It had already launched the two earlier starships on their journeys.

Runways described a geometric pattern around the foot of the tower, buzzing with arriving traffic. Some of the aircraft landed the old-fashioned way, rolling to a stop. Newer types landed vertically, touching down like dragonflies in a whirl of delicate wings.

Listening to the earphone of his headset, Ev frowned. “Control wants us to hold off while they figure out where to let us land. I’d really like to ask for a close-in vector around the Tower, instead of the regular hold, so I can get an eyeful of the thing.”

“Go ahead. I don’t have any lunch left to lose.”

Receiving the vector he wanted, Ev banked the jet around Star Tower. “Reminds me of flying around Titan station, but this is a bigger machine—much, much bigger—in a deeper gravity well. In fact, it shows you just how deep Earth’s gravity well really is.”

Ev tipped the jet’s starboard wing down. Mark looked into the ravines of the tower’s vast buttresses.

With a flip of the wing, Mark’s stricken gaze traveled up—and up—and up. Star Tower lifted past some cumulus clouds toward the edge of the atmosphere.

Swinging away from Star Tower, the jet soared out over the Gulf of California. Green salt water extended far to the south. Shallow, with pale sand underneath, crinkled with waves, the water resembled a celadon glaze. Mark longed to be down there. To glide across the warm shallow sea under his own paddle power, wavelets lapping the prow of his kayak in quick succession. The long dark shadow of Star Tower lay across the water.

Near the edge of the Gulf, some small ships and barges were conspicuous, dark spots on the bright sea. They clustered around the mouth of a narrow channel cut into the desert in the direction of Star Field. With shiny, curly wakes, some of the ships seemed to be circling aimlessly “Now, what’s all that?” Wary, Ev did not take the jet down to look more closely. He snapped on the jet’s Netnode, quickly asking it for a search of HEADLINE NEWS RE TRAVEL, INTERNATIONAL, INTERPLANETARY, INTERSTELLAR.

Ev paged through the headlines. “ ‘Supreme court rules against removing plants, animals’—that we knew about,” he murmured. “ ‘Genesis Foundation to Appeal.’ Sure. In absentia.” Then Ev said, “Damn!”

US PRESIDENT DENOUNCES GENESIS FOUNDATION Through clenched teeth, Ev muttered, “He hates us. He’s an old, powerful politician. He wants to keep the world and the future in his control.” Ev quickly paged on.

The news-node in San Diego, California, reported enormous traffic jams at the U.S.-Mexican border. Mexican customs had initiated vehicle and cargo inspections on an unprecedented scale.

Ev said, “I see. The president leaned sufficiently hard on Mexico to ensure its cooperation in hindering us. That must be the Mexican coast guard down there, having words with ships trying to reach the Star Field canal. Trying to delay them.”

The opposite shore of the Gulf was clearly visible, low brown ridges of dry land. Before they went that far, Ev sent the jet into a high, wide turn to head back toward Star Field.

The Netnode beeped shrilly. BREAKING NEWS: SPACE LAUNCHER MISFIRES.

The La Jolla Launcher had misfired today. The Earth-to-orbit payload launched by the long electromagnetic gun streaked into space on the wrong trajectory, accidentally aimed too low and too for south. The errant payload crossed the restricted space above Star Tower, missing the starship by some seven kilometers.

“That was no accident,” Ev growled. “More like a warning shot across our bow” He turned off the news and increased the Merlin’s airspeed.

Now the Sun was setting in their eyes, again. The Tower loomed, dark and endlessly high, against the red sea of sky. Strobe lights raced up the Tower’s beveled flank toward its heights to warn aircraft against collision.

Ev said, “Damn it, they still can’t give me clearance to land on the field. Too much traffic in line ahead of me. But I’m running out of fuel. The afterburner ate a lot.” Ev fumed. “I could declare an emergency and beg for a slot, but I don’t want to ”

“So land on the desert,” Mark replied.

“Too much loose sand. Landing on it would sandblast the jet and Dad would kill me.”

Mark scanned the terrain. Roads and railways spidered away into the dim dusty distance of the peninsula. There were empty spaces in the interstices between roads and rails. “See that high spot by that dry wash? It’s the closest flat ground that isn’t a storage yard or a runway.”

“And Dad isn’t going to have the chance to kill me, is he?” Ev murmured. He conferred with approach control, speaking into the mouthpiece of his headset. Then he said, “They agree. Here goes ”

The Merlin hovered down toward the landing place. Mark noticed a jagged outcrop and urgently pointed it out to Ev. Ev made the jet skate to one side to avoid the rocks then lowered the jet toward the ground. The jet wobbled unsettlingly in the air. “Lot of convection currents,” Ev said, his words terse. Sand sprayed up past the canopy.

Ev cursed vehemently just as the Merlin settled down with a thump.

“What happened?” Mark demanded. “Did we almost crash?”

Ev snatched off his headset and glared at it. “I was just informed that there’s a one-week customs embargo for plants and animals being taken into Star Tower! My mice are OK. They’re patented. Your stuff—I don’t know. They’ll probably take your seeds away.”

Maik sat still. After the flight, the silence seemed sudden and extreme.

Mark thought, No. The new world should have a chance. The bluestem and Helianthus would help that chance. Opening up the mouse box, Mark poured the seeds into the feeder. The mice squeaked uneasily. “I can tell the seeds apart later,” said Mark.

“Even if they’ve passed through the mice?”

“Mice never digest all the seeds they eat.”

“Good idea.” As an afterthought, Ev said, “They haven’t ever eaten anything but mouse chow. Typically, invented organisms aren’t adventurous enough to try anything new.”

Mark stuffed the labeled vials under his seat. Ev hopped out to inspect the Merlin’s sandblasted underside.

The hot desert air smelled sharp, sandy with fine particles raised by the jet’s landing. They had landed a good two miles away from the Tower: it stood on the other side of a wide dry wash and a storage yard full of cargo containers. According to the Tower control, a Land Rover would come to get them. As soon as one could be spared.

Mark felt better, less queasy and more decisive. “We’ve got to hurry,” he said. “It’s not that long until the deadline. We can walk.”

“And leave the Merlin?”

“We were going to anyway,” Mark pointed out.

Mark’s legs wavered under him. He made them work, aiming himself toward the distant tower. Cacti and stringy succulents studded the barren ground. The sky overhead was not the greenhouse overcast it had been over Uptown Houston. Orange and red flooded the western half of this desert’s sky. To the east, several stars punctured the cloudless purple. Mark imagined a star world with even less ozone than the Earth had now, a climate with more severe extremes, a desert qualitatively different from this one: newer and nowhere softened by life.

The dry wash lay across their route to Star Tower. “That looks rough,” Ev said, sounding reluctant.

“It is.” Mark picked out a trail to the bottom, down a bank sharp with stones. Ev exclaimed in dismay as the stony ground shredded the edges of his expensive shoes. Mark’s light hiking boots, his chosen everyday footwear, fared better. The last few yards were an uncontrolled scramble.

Mark gathered himself up from the sandy floor of the wash. Ev slapped sand from his suit.

A dry wash: but not always dry, and that made all the difference in the world to the organisms here. Glancing around, Mark noted mesquites and acacias on the wash banks, the serrated blades of agave, also several small grasses. lizard and rabbit tracks crisscrossed the rippled sand floor. Plants grew in the wash with its occasional water. Animals lived and foraged here on account of the water, the plants and the shade. This dry wash was a lifeline in the desert.

Go to a new world. No jungles yet, no prairies, no forests. Just empty seas and hot, dry continents, infrequent rains that flash away in floodwaters unchecked by vegetated ground. Find a watercourse. Introduce living things like these. The ecology might creep down the watercourse, and from the watercourse, the green blush of life might spread out into the barren land. With luck and work, terraforming might succeed.

For the first time, Mark felt hope. Halfway across the wash, Mark picked up a stone, water-worn smooth, a pleasing dull green color. On impulse, he put it into his pocket for a talisman, a last touch of Earth. A negligible, maybe-fifteen-gram addition to his personal effects.

Mark enjoyed using his leg muscles on the way up and out of the arroyo, and moved fast. Behind him, Ev commented, “I can tell you’re feeling more like yourself now.”

Mark always felt like himself when he had the chance to walk somewhere. A woman professor—Samantha Berry? No, Anna, of course, in that strident Dutch-accented tone of hers—had once joked that Mark would walk to Mars if there were a way. He now found himself walking to the stars.

Mark had seen pictures of the Star Gate before. Pictures had not prepared him for the reality of the foreboding arch in the immense tower.

Graffiti marred the stone-sheathed wall of Star Gate, including, ABANDON ALL EARTH YE WHO ENTER HERE. “Charming,” said Ev. His collar was open. And he looked wilted.

Inside the tower were crowds of people, a din of activity, jarring after the quiet of the desert. Ev made sense of it before Mark did. Ev muttered, “Looks like Mexican customs gets to screen what’s going through their country to the stars.”

Hundreds of would-be star travelers had arrived by air, land, and sea only to find themselves in the bottleneck of customs. The travelers were angry and agitated.

Mexican Customs was unsure why it was necessary to confiscate and embargo biota, or just how to define “biota,” but had definitely decided to seize live animal carriers and containers labeled as animals or plants. An alarming pile of such containers occupied the back corner of the screening area, living things wanted—needed—by the starship.

Some men and women in plain clothes stood behind the customs checkpoints. Anglo-Saxons or blacks, they wore a uniform air of grim efficiency, and seemed to have a dangerously good idea of what they were supposed to look for and why.

Ev let his breath out between his front teeth in a hiss of dismay. “There’s no velvet glove on the iron fist today. No consideration for the illusion of Mexican sovereignty. Those are the president s men—Federal Marshals. Whatever happens, remember—the marshals’ authority has limits, at least until martial law is declared, which it hasn’t been yet. They can’t arrest us because we haven’t broken any laws.”

Ev shouldered his way to the front of the line like an eel, towing Mark behind him. Mark stepped on toes and bumped into elbows. Ev showed the harassed Mexican Customs agents his mice and the patent documents to prove the mice belonged to him. He offhandedly identified the grass and sunflower seeds as premium mouse chow. Cheerfully he turned his tailored pockets inside out to demonstrate their emptiness. Customs waved him through, mice and all.

But the customs agents checked Mark’s identity license with interest, discussed and doublechecked it. One of the ominous suits, the marshals, gravitated over for a look at the license and at Mark. The marshal gruffly told customs to take Mark aside.

Mark’s stomach knotted. Directed to the back corner of the customs area, he had to wait while the crowd filtered through customs and dwindled. He seethed, but felt no more free to run away than were the confiscated small animals in their cages around him. Then he was escorted to a small featureless room. Oddly, it was not the marshal who interviewed him; the marshal guarded the exit, silent and intimidating. A customs agent directed Mark to empty his pockets onto a table. The agent examined his belongings. “What is this?”

“My notebook computer,” Mark answered, voice choked with tension. The marshal’s eyes bored into his back.

“And this?” The agent picked up the green stone. “An egg?”

“No.” Mark could not keep disgust out of his voice. The customs agent met his eyes with a mild glance that slid over Mark’s shoulder to the marshal.

Despite what Ev had said, Mark expected the marshal to arrest him, to handcuff him. Yet the marshal said nothing.

Mark never wore a watch. He relied on excellent time sense instead. A clock on the wall was conspicuously placed. It was also wrong, at least half an hour slow. Mark suddenly realized that the marshals might have decided that certain kinds of scientists were worth the effort of delaying until they missed the ship. With no legitimate authority to detain him, the president’s men had resorted to trickery.

Mark turned to confront the marshal. The big, hard-featured man glared at Mark. “Your clock’s slow,” Mark announced. “I’m leaving now. You can’t legally keep me here.” His voice shook. “You can keep the things I had in my pockets. Except for this.” He picked up the green pebble on the table. “Which is just a stone. There’s not even any moss on it.”

The marshal scowled. Mark’s insides clenched, but he shoved past the marshal anyway. The marshal shoved back, sent him bumping hard into the doorjamb. Mark ricocheted out into the deserted corridor, and the marshal did not pursue him. Mark hurried toward the heart of the tower.

At the far end of the corridor, Ev paced. Behind him was a large portal. Jerking his thumb into the doorway, Ev yelled, “It’s about to leave! ”

Mark sprinted. The two of them scrambled inside just before the doors closed. Ev turned around and flung an arm around Mark’s shoulders. “Touch-down!”

Buoyantly Ev led the way up an escalator to a spacious room, appointed like a hotel lobby and laid out around a huge column with twelve blank sides. Twelve outer walls echoed the central column . Each wall had a large window.

“Welcome to the televator. This is the observation deck,” Ev explained. “You don’t have to look out if you don’t want to.” Presently there was nothing to observe beyond the widows, just the walls of the tower. Avid to see the sights of the trip up, Ev made a beeline for a soft, deep armchair beside one of the picture windows. He offered Mark the chair. “You’ll be better off sitting down for the ride.”

Mark sat. Once again the mouse box rested importantly in Mark’s lap. Scratching noises came out of it, and Mark peered into the box. “All three are eating.”

“I did a good job with them. They function normally”

It wasn’t that hard to genetically engineer mice that had one or several altered traits, but otherwise were normal. Ev always said mice were easy. “They’re not just patented fancy mice, are they?”

“No.” Ev spoke in an undertone, still secretive, conscious of the increasing crowd of people in the observation deck. “Their chromosomes are artificial, containing a complete set of mouse genes, plus a great deal of surplus DNA and, of course, genes which specify that the surplus remain unexpressed. The unexpressed DNA happens to be that of other species from the company’s gene banks”

“You mean you stole genes?”

Arms crossed, Ev radiated self-satisfaction. “It’s amazing how much DNA can fit into the chromosomes of a mouse’s cell. I filched the genetic code for several hundred assorted species.”

Mark felt a gentle surge of inertia that pushed him into the plush seat. The televator was ascending. The walls of the tower blurred, making the vertical rows of lights turn into beaded strands. Ev settled onto the generously wide arm of Mark’s chair, the better to see out.

The deck had filled up. There was conversation in the background, sporadic exclamations louder than the general conversational buzz.

“We’re the last off the pad,” Ev said, “Look up through the skylight. You can see the next to last.”

Another televator was going up too, higher than their own and on the opposite side of the tower: a twelvesided cylinder with a twelve-sided hole in the middle of it, through which ran a barely visible, vertical wisp of smoke. There were other smoke streams in the tower, a dozen in all. Ev explained, “It’s a vacuum here inside the Tower. Those particle streams are ionized molecules—to be exact, Carbon-60, buckminster-fullerene. The streams flow up to lift the televators or cushion them on the return. There are five televators going up ahead of us tonight to the ship. The streams also keep the ship up. It’s riding on the particle turnaround—on top of the whole thing.”

Mark could see no other televators beyond the one just above their own, only the tower walls, dwindling to an apparent point of closure. It was a horribly long way up, he thought, with four televators and a starship out of sight in the vertical distance.

Ev reflected. “C60. Stardust. We are being lifted up by the same kind of soot that exists in cold dust clouds between the stars. It was also the ion propellent for the Athena series of star probes back in the 2030s and ’40s. Appropriate, isn’t it?”

That other televator rotated. So did their own. Theirs was just like the one just ahead of it, a torus in midair, slowly circling a thin stream of soot. That was why this observation deck was centered on a column with twelve blank walls: the particle stream went through the middle of the televator, and all three stories of it were being lifted up by insubstantiality, up, and up. Little spiders of panic danced along Mark’s spine. “Ev,” Mark choked. “Are we safe?”

“I think so. The president can’t do anything as crude as turning off the particle streams. Or shooting down the ship. It was chartered as an international effort. More likely, he’ll send the Space Force up from the Earth bases—from the White Sands and Cascade bases. That is,” Ev continued, speaking softly, “he’ll so decide and so order, but I don’t think we have to worry about it.”

“No?”

“No.” Smiling slightly, Ev made a hand motion which Mark interpreted as, wait and see.

Ascending at an already terrifying speed while rotating, the televators were still accelerating. The beaded strands of lights on the wall of the tower twisted into helixes. To Mark’s alarmed fascination, the top of the tower was now close enough to appear as a definite circle full of stars.

Ev followed Mark’s gaze. “Ever hear the one about being able to see the stars from a deep enough well?”

The televator rocketed out of the top of the tower. Mark instantly recalled that the Star Tower terminated above the thickest layer of Earth’s atmosphere. The particle streams kept going. So did whatever they carried. From here on up, this machine was called the Space Fountain.

Below, but not quite below them, the edge of the planet glowed crimson with the Sun disappearing behind it, the red rim of the sea of air which they had just crossed.

And now that they were out in the open, somebody could turn the Fountain off. Or shoot the televator down with the La Jolla Launcher. Or—

“Ev! Why’s the televator still spinning? Is it under control?”

“As far as I know, the rotation is just for the view, which is magnificent. Relax and enjoy it. If I were you, though, I wouldn’t look down. Or up,” Ev added, by which time Mark already had.

Above, in unbounded, black, starry space, a square platform hung, suspended. The flanks of the starship Primordium bowed past the platform’s edges. In an inverted bowl under the platform, the Star Tower’s particle streams were magnetically turned around. Only the thrust of the turnaround, only the turning soot, kept the platform up. And ominously, like a loose falling object, the platform and ship parked on it rotated.

It was the televator rotating, Mark reminded himself, trying to clamp down his jumpy nerves.

“Don’t look up. Look outward,” Ev reminded him.

But gazing out stirred up feeling deeper than simple phobia, and more painful. Space was black, with stars, like night. It was eternal night out here. Mark had left blue sky behind, with white clouds, celadon salt waters, and the rosy morning and evening colors of the Earth’s Sun on the horizon—all behind him, in his past and irretrievable. His chest tightened, making it hard to breathe.

Rotating, the televator swung them away from their destination and back over the face of the Earth. Sunlight brightened Asia, but night had fallen over North America. The wide land was plainly fevered. Cities showed up as yellow splotches, connected by glowing trails of electricity like the tracks of a cancer’s metastasis.

Talk in the observation deck quieted. People were clustered by the windows, watching. Some cried, sniffling sounds audible in the absence of chatter.

With thumb and forefinger Mark squeezed the inside corners of his eyes to hold in tears. He whispered, “Life is down there. Green land. Blue sky. Only there. And it’s dying. And, oh, God, everything else is dark. Cold. Lifeless. Ev, we’ve got an impossible job to do. To try to give a world like that back to the Universe.”

Silent, Ev processed what Mark had said. Earth slipped across the window. In the background, conversation built up again, with people pointing out favorite landmarks on the home planet to each other, voices low, as if in attendance at a wake. The televator inexorably rotated back toward the cold bright stars.

Ev said quietly, “The Genesis Foundation was prepared for what happened today. We’re coming away with a tremendous quantity and variety of seeds and animal germ cells, and we’ll—”

“And bug eggs,” said a voice behind them, loud enough to be startling and even more so because it was a very familiar voice. “Efry one forgets to mention much less thank God for the insects!”

Ev whirled toward the thin, blonde, middle-aged woman, with surprise written on his face.

She said, “I saw you perched here like a fine-feathered songbird, and I thought to myself, so! Such a surprise to see him!”

“The surprise is mutual, Professor van Leeuwen,” said Ev. Mark did not recover as smoothly. “Anna!” he gasped. “You?”

She answered simply, “I have finally decided Samantha was not such a fool to go to the stars.”

“Did you bring beetles and butterflies or did customs get them?” asked Mark.

“I did not decide to come just today, so already many of my species are up there. Good ones.” She added, “I smuggled more butterfly eggs through customs just a little while ago. My precious butterfly eggs, disguised as makeup in my purse. To be exact, eyeshadow.”

“You don’t ever wear eyeshadow,” said Mark.

“The customs agent knew that, I think. There he was, a nice-looking gentleman with hair gray around the edges, and I, a forty-eight-year-old lady with some gray hair too, am explaining to him my blue and mauve, some green, and bright yellow eyeshadow. He let me through and said not a word to those people in the suits which were the ones to watch out for. So they did not confiscate the eggs.” Anna saddened. “Oh, Mark. Remember the poor restoration prairie?” Tears leaked onto Anna’s cheeks.

It was a memory etched with the acids of shame and anger. Mark put his arms around Anna’s bony shoulders. In Mark’s own eyes, tears blurred the Earth as it slid by behind Anna with all its burned forests, polluted seas, and blasted prairies. “We’ll try it again,” he managed to say.

“That we will,” said Annetine. Sniffling, Anna turned to Ev. “Here are we two being so emotional, and not you, eh?”

“It won’t hit me until we pass the orbit of Saturn,” said Ev.

“So.” Anna sat down. She fished a tissue out of her handbag and blew her nose. Mark and Ev sat on either armrest of the chair beside her. “Mark Willson, you I suspected maybe to meet on this trip. For months you have been asking for specimens for this and that flimsy reason. And looking every day gloomier than the day before. I have been thinking to myself, maybe Mark is going to the stars. But Dr. Evrett Reynolds, you surprise me!” She regarded Ev with blue eyes that were red-rimmed, yet piercing.

Mark said, “He surprised me, too. Not to mention Pennington Genetech.”

“I would imagine, if today he quit from that high-paying job.”

“I did more than just quit at Pennington.” Ev indicated the mouse carrier. He grinned brilliantly. “Madam, I robbed the Pennington gene bank.”

Annetine laughed, her characteristic, ringing laughter that could splinter the quiet in a small room. It sounded wonderful to Mark. “So how long have we until the docking?”

Ev gestured upward. “The ship is accelerating too. We’re playing catchup.”

“We’re already on our way?” Mark discovered that his battered stomach had one more flipflop left in it.

“Yes. Ship, televators and all, we’re ascending, on the grounds that the authorities will throw everything they have at us if they realize how much genetic material we’ve stolen and how many good scientists are going with us.”

Anna nodded.

Images appeared on the twelve walls of the middle of the deck. One flat video screen showed the Genesis Foundation’s director, Kristeller, in an interview; on another screen appeared the President of the United States, in a news conference. There was sound, the words of the two men, but muted and from here audible only as a murmur. While the cold night of stars wheeled by the windows, Mark watched the other videos—pictures and diagrams of the ship. There was a depiction of the vaults of stasis, ready to receive and freeze thousands of colonists. Mark’s eyes shied away to another screen, showing the greenhouse that would grow for centuries while people stayed in stasis. The greenhouse was crammed with young plants and seedling trees. Mark imagined the trees patiently growing for a century and more, a tangled green heart within the traveling starship.

The televator wheeled around. Below the wide window, Earth receded with the speed of ascent. Sunset, faded to maroon, rimmed the western edge of the planet. Closer and darker was the bulk of North America, detailed by the lights of the power grid. “We’ve got friends in low places,” Ev announced. He pointed down. “Look at the western seaboard.”

The power distribution grid was fading, like a sudden, visible cooling of the continent’s fever. Umbra within penumbra, the center of the brownout was black. The blackout radiated from Star Field.

“The lights are going out down there. And so are the machines,” said Ev. Elsewhere in the observation deck, puzzled voices were raised as others noticed the same thing.

Mark jumped up. “Are they shutting the Fountain down?”

“Just the opposite,” Ev said firmly. “It was risky—interfering with the computer that controls the continental power grid. But a top executive in the power consortium was in on the plan. Look. You can see it happening. Power is being diverted to the Space Fountain, on an unprecedented scale. From which we get one hell of a boost.”

“The executive,” asked Anna, “has he gotten away with us? Do you know?”

“Yes, I do. No, he isn’t coming. He’s over the upper age limit. He stayed, and he’ll probably be in prison for the rest of his life.”

“Prison, for the crime of giving us a head start.” Anna shook her head in dismay.

“And for destroying the Space Fountain.” Anna gaped at Ev, who smiled thinly. “The energy surge will burn out the power plant and disperse the particle streams. So nobody can use the Fountain to come after us. And the North American launchers and spaceports that the authorities might have used against us are dropping out of service. The west coast Space Force bases are blacking out.” Triumph edged Ev’s voice. “Nothing on Earth can stop us now.”

Mark sat down again on his arm of the chair. He felt dizzy.

On one video screen, the President of the United States appeared in a new mood. He was furious. He had been informed of the blackout. And he was telling the nation and world that the blackout had caused a high speed train accident in Nevada, and in California, a midair collision of two planes because the Air Net had been out of operation before emergency power came on. Five people had died. “How sad,” Anna murmured, shaking her head. Ev just stared at the floor. The president’s words were audible to the shocked, soundless audience on the observation deck. Anyone responsible for the blackout could be charged with terrorism. They would face the death penalty.

“That’s bad.” Ev still stared at the floor. “He wants sacrificial lambs ”

The televator turned back toward the stars. This time, Mark recognized the thickest congregation of stars as the Milky Way. He had seen it from lands and seas on Earth, the glowing path across the sky; here it was vertical with respect to the view from the observation deck window.

Apart from the video screens, there were no lights on the observation deck. The Earth below had fallen under the pall of a night without the yellow glow of electricity, and Mark’s eyes had adjusted to the darkened world. The Milky Way seemed like a solid mass of brilliance, a glittering column of bright stars and dust standing over the dark limb of Earth.

Ev said, “Mark, you’re wrong.”

“About something, or about everything?” Mark asked. He felt utterly drained.

“You said the stars are lifeless. They aren’t. Cosmic genesis, remember? Big blue stars forge atoms—iron and oxygen and carbon. And when they turn into supernovas, they throw all the atoms of new stars and* worlds and life out into space. So the Seven Sisters are our sisters. And organic molecules first formed in interstellar dust clouds. In the beginning, they rained on Earth, remember?”

“It was a hell of a long way from organic molecules to life on Earth,” said Mark.

“At the start, Earth was a hard, hostile place. Life changed the water and the land, the air and the weather, slowly and surely, to make a place conducive to life. But, see, what we’re doing is taking life back to the stars, where it came from. This time life will remake a hard world much more quickly.” Ev smiled radiantly, not at Mark or Anna, but at the stars. “Life was exiled on Earth for four billion years. But it belongs to the stars.”

Never had Mark known Ev to be much of a visionary. But what he had said sounded right. Mark nodded with a lump in his throat.

Anna laughed, though not as ringingly loudly as usual for her. Wonder softened her laughter. “That is good, Ev. Don’t forget what you have told us here. When the going gets hard in the future, we will need to think that way about what we are doing ”

Ev stood up and put his hand on the glass, leaning toward Earth. “I won’t forget. Neither will somebody down there. When we get farther out, I’ll be able to talk to Titan and Titan can send a confidential message back here, and I’ll tell her.”

Mark knew who Ev meant. “You can say I love her, too. And that I’ll always remember her no matter what happens.”

Anna reached up to squeeze Mark’s shoulder. “My dear boy, don’t worry. He’s right. It’s meant to be, that we will reach a good new world.”

Mark thought about an unseen world, starstruck and barren. He felt his life point that way like a compass needle that stopped whirling and found its orientation. Mark looked up. Primordium still hung above their heads, and not so far above as before. Now it did not seem altogether like a threat to him. It was a promise, an immense and unbreakable one, the promise he was making to the world he loved: to implant its living soul, its ecosystem, in the soil of a new planet with his own hands.

One by one, the speeding televators caught up with the starship. Sur-face-to-orbit spacecraft, shuttles and spaceplanes, also came and made their rendezvous with the ship, bringing everyone else who had gotten away from Earth, with more of the stolen treasures of living things and seeds, genes and germ cells.

The Space Fountain poured out its final and fullest power, damaging the machinery irreparably. The Fountain pushed the starship to geosynchronous orbit and past that point, cast the starship on its course. The huge engines blazed to life. Primordium hurled itself into the desolation of interstellar space. And in front of the starship, the bright Milky Way stood out in the endless night, marking the direction of the journey that had just begun.

EDITORS NOTE: “A Pillar of Stars by Night” is a sequel to “Chrysalis” in our September 1992 issue.

Content

A Pillar of Stars by Night
by Alexis Glynn Latner