But, Nadezhda, I have to counsel caution. Are you guys sure you know what you’re doing? You’re going to have sixty-feet tides in those new lunar oceans of yours —

Shit.

Sorry. That was a surface wave, a big one. I think it will be over soon…

The continental cores, the ancient cratons, had resisted the magma plumes for billions of years, and, like knots in wood, were tough to crack. But they were not indestructible.

Even as he watched he could see the last of the African plate — cracking and dissolving like scum — there it went…

Africa had been the oldest continent, most of it formed more than two and a half billion years earlier, surviving for geological ages as the hard, protected core of Pangaea, the world continent. Now it was gone, just a puddle of magma.

Goodbye, Africa. Birth place of man. My God.

And now, where Africa used to be, another huge magma plume was starting. It looked like a solar flare. A fountain of rock blasting straight up, uncurling with perceptible speed…

No, not a fountain. More like a fist, punching out of a sack. A mass the size of a small moon, thrusting out of the Earth.

Henry couldn’t begin to compute the energy behind events like that.

The end must be close now.

Already there had to be significant mixing between the core and the mantle layers. The planet as a whole used to spin at a different speed from its core… Now the whole globe was coupled, structurally. It must be tearing itself apart, like an unregulated motor.

Another pressure wave swept beneath his bunker, cracking the floor. Maybe that was the aftershock of the Africa plume.

He kept to his feet, though.

Now another plate was gone, after five billion years just crumbling away like sugar in water. He thought that was Indo-Australia — the planet was such a mess now it was hard to be sure — and the other plates were starting to slide and crack.

…I know you think I’m crazy to have stayed. I know your new generation of Arks, skimming down from the Moon, had the capacity to take off almost everybody who was left. I know you think I’m like the crazy old fucker who wouldn’t get out of his house when they want to build the highway through it.

Sorry. I guess you don’t know what I’m talking about.

I just didn’t want to leave, is the top and bottom of it. This is my home: here, on the shitty side of the Bottleneck. On the other side is the future, all of the universe, waiting for you.

What would I do on the Moon, except bitch about the processed algae and yack about the old days?

This is my home.

Listen to me. Don’t tip the Moon. Harness the black hole wind. Use it for what it was meant for.