2312

“It must not have worked?”

“Apparently not!” Again she cried out, a piercing sound in his ear even when damped by his suit’s intercom.

The sunwalkers were chattering among themselves, sounding worried.

“What will we do when we get to it?” Wahram asked on the common band.

Swan stopped groaning and said, “What do you mean?”

“Are there lifeboats? You know-rovers to drive to the nearest spaceport?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Enough for everyone?”

“Yes!”

“And are there spaceships enough at the nearest spaceport? Enough for the whole population of Terminator?”

“There’s shelter in all the spaceports, enough to hold a lot of people. And vehicles to go west to the next ones. And some hoppers can handle being on the brightside.”

As they hurried across the black rubbly plain, Terminator slowly hove up over the horizon. The upper half of the interior of the Dawn Wall was now visible, looking much steeper than it really was, all whitewashed walls and trees. A thick bar of green marked the treetops of the park. Extending forward from the trees were the crops of the farm. A snow globe on silver tracks, headed to its doom. They could see no people in the city, even though it was now looming above them. Certainly no one was on the terraces of the Dawn Wall anymore. It looked abandoned.

And there was no way to get up into it. The platform had been in the impact zone. Everyone who had been at the concert must have been killed. Inside the city they could see a trio of deer: buck, doe, fawn. Swan’s cries pitched up an octave. “ No. No! ”

It was strange to be standing there, looking up at the empty city’s Mediterranean calm.

Swan ran under the tracks to the north side of the city, and the rest of them followed. From that side they could see a little convoy of ground vehicles far to the north and west, rolling away from them through the break in Beethoven’s northwest wall. The cars were fast, and soon over the horizon.

“They’ve left,” Wahram observed.

“Yes yes. Pauline?”

“I suppose we could walk to the spaceport?” Wahram said, worried.

Swan was talking to her internal qube, however, and Wahram couldn’t follow the gist of the exchange. Her tone of voice was utterly caustic.

She broke off that argument and said to him, “The cars aren’t coming back. The city will stop automatically when it hits the break in the tracks. We have to leave. Every tenth platform has elevators that go down to shelters under the tracks, so we have to get to one of those.”

“How near is the closest one to the west?”

“About ninety kilometers. The town just passed one back to the east.”

“Ninety kilometers!”

“Yes. We’ll need to go east. It’s only nine kilometers. Our suits will handle the sunlight for the time it will take us.”

Wahram said, “Maybe we could walk the ninety.”

“No we couldn’t, what do you mean?”

“I think we could. People have done it.”

“Athletes who have trained for it have done it. I do enough walking to know, and maybe I could do it, but you couldn’t. You can’t do it by willpower alone. And this sunwalker is hurt. No, listen, we’ll be all right going into the sunlight. It’s just the corona we’ll be exposed to, and no more than an hour or a little more. I’ve done it often.”

“I’d rather not.”

“You have no choice! Come on, the longer we dither, the longer we’ll be exposed!”

That was true.

“All right, then,” he said, and felt his heart pound inside him.

She turned around, held out her arms up to the city, groaned like an animal. “Oh, my town, my town, ohhhh… We’ll come back! We’ll rebuild! Ohhhhh… ”

Behind the glassy face mask her face was wet with tears. She noticed him watching her and swung a hand back as if to strike at him. “Come on, we have to go!” She gestured to the three sunwalkers. “Come on!”

As they started running east, Swan howled over the common band, a sound like an alarm siren that had done its duty but continued on in the emptiness after a disaster. The figure running before him did not seem capable of generating such a terrible sound, which stuck him like pins in the ears. A lot of animals had no doubt been left behind inside-the whole little terrarium, a community of plants and animals. And she designed such things. And this one was her home. Suddenly her howl made it clear to him that saving the humans of the place was not really enough. So much got left behind. A whole world. If a world dies, its people don’t matter anymore-so the howl seemed to say.

Dawn kept coming, as always.