Thistledown appeared enlarged and in sharp detail, surrounded by a faint corona of even brighter blue. The north pole pointed away from the Earth and all precincts. But the south pole itself glowed now. Concentric and expanding rings of luminous pinspecks formed beyond the south pole, followed by even brighter rings and then continuous halos.

The Beckmann drive engines were cutting in; she was sure of it. Thistledown had not used those drives since the Sundering; now the asteroid starship was pushing itself away from Earth and the precincts.

What had been only an intellectual speculation before was now reality; Thistledown was preparing for its death.

Somehow, she knew Olmy was still aboard, or very near the Thistledown—perhaps in the Way itself.

Ram Kikura, like Olmy, did not have the means to cry. She sat in tense silence, watching as Axis Euclid’s sensors tracked the Thistledown. How long?

The glare from the Beckmann drives increased until the display had to adjust for brightness. The plume of destroyed matter reflected from the south polar crater, forming a long violet brushstroke against the unnatural blue. The colors and the circumstances went against all reason; she felt as if she were watching an artificial entertainment, depicting something remote and beautiful but hardly plausible.

It hurts, she thought, her implants working steadily to handle the emotional overload. I know he’s there. And that’s my home, where I was born and grew and worked—within the Way.

She could hardly bear to watch, yet she did not move.

She owed her past this much, to sit and watch it die.

76

Earth

The ethereal night sky brought people out by the hundreds of thousands. In Melbourne there was religious frenzy and rioting; Karen heard the sounds, like a distant grumbling wave, from the balcony of her hotel room. She had been ordered to take a week’s vacation after her episode in the evacuee camp, a gift she did not appreciate, since it left her with little to do but think.

She looked upon the show calmly. Marvels had multiplied in her lifetime; after the events of the past two weeks, she almost expected them now. She had some vague notion this glow was associated with Thistledown, but the asteroid starship was not visible.

At midnight, however, she did see the violet plume of the Beckmann drives, rising from the northeastern horizon like a spotlight beam. It faded three hand’s-breadths above the horizon, which meant it was huge—tens of thousands of kilometers in length. She did not know what it signified; she thought it might be Thistledown’s death glow, but that was yet to come.

Sitting in a deck-chair on the balcony, wrapped in a sweater against the night chill, she looked across Melbourne’s brightly lit skyline, clutching a ceramic mug, shivering slightly not just with the cold, but with having drunk too much coffee.