The flawship twirled in the outrushing atmosphere. The iridescent nullity had almost completed its task; it seemed to take them forever to approach the rapidly shrinking blackness and crescent Moon.

Chunks of soil rose from the walls and shimmied up the fresh, nacreous boundary. The boundary eclipsed the Moon.

"Oh, God," Lanier said. He clasped his hands and closed his eyes.

Epilog - Four Beginnings

Epilog - Four Beginnings

One - 6 P.D.

And all the king's horses, and all the king's men. . . 

The phrase occurred to Heineman often as he piloted a blunt-arrowhead flyer from point to devastated point around the globe. What the Death itself had not incinerated or poisoned, the Long Winter had ravaged; it had seemed for a time that even the ingenuity, technology and power of the New Hexamon itself could not make the situation right.

Yet, as Lenore—his wife of four years—reminded him during his worst, most discouraged moments, "They managed to climb back up even without our help—our presence has to make things move faster."

But even hope and the prospects of a brighter future could not take the edge off, or reduce the bitter gall of what he saw in the course of a single day's surveying.

India, Africa, Australia and New Zealand and much of South America had emerged from the Death with minor damage. North America, Russia and Europe had been practically sterilized. China had lost a quarter of its population in the nuclear exchange; another two-thirds had died of starvation during the Long Winter, which was subsiding only now, with help from the orbiting precinct. Southeast Asia had crumbled into anarchy and revolution and genocide; the destruction there was almost as complete.

Ashes, barren plains, snow-covered valleys and hills soon to become glaciers; scudding gray, snow-thick clouds casting black shadows over fallow earth; continents given over to bacteria and cockroaches and ants, and among these new ecologies, a few scattered animals who had once called themselves human beings, who had once lived in comfortable houses and known the basics of electrical wiring and taken newspapers and subscribed to provincial points of view about reality. . .

Who had once had time for the luxury of thought.

It was heartbreaking. Heineman came to think of his kind—the engineers and scientists and technicians of the Earth—as the very tools of Satan himself. His latent Christianity returned with a vengeance. He knew he severely tried Lenore's patience, but from his meandering visions of apocalypse and angels and resurrection he could at least take some solace, find meaning, and search for destiny and God's plan. If he had once been an agent of Satan, now—without switching occupations—he was an agent of the angels, of those who would transform Earth into paradise. . . .