“Do you think she’ll sink?” asked the steward.

Another three meters of carpet disappeared as the lake crept toward them.

“Nah!” replied Rothschild. “The ship has row after row of watertight compartments. She’ll settle only so far and stop sinking.”

“Do you see what’s happening here?” Edith asked Jonathan. “They refuse to believe what their own eyes are showing them.”

“Freeze program!” Jonathan shouted.

Edith Russell was about to say something, but stopped in mid-breath. From somewhere far away, a shiver had begun to rim through the deck beneath Jonathan’s feet. An ankle-deep wave was cresting toward him, about to eat up meters more of carpet— but now it stood motionless … waiting.

Jonathan called out new instructions to the computer. For the second time in as many days he began tampering with Edith Russell. He had already softened the tone of her voice. Now he decided that her nose had too much of a hook, so he remolded it. When he had finished, he was only remotely conscious that he had given her his mother’s voice and his mother’s nose; but his subconscious was happy.

About thirty of the crablike Titanic probes were left. One by one, Hollis was replacing their paddles with wings—converting them into ornithopters. And one by one, as Hollis surfaced into the tranquil eyes of hurricanes, she released the mechanical birds. More than a dozen were already following the storms landward, transmitting everything they saw, telling her that the winds blowing over the ocean’s surface were sometimes lethally hot and that all communications from other people had ceased, even from the Moon and as far away as Mars. Every time she surfaced, Hollis signaled with increasing power, until at last her voice should have been received anywhere in Sunspace, even with minimal equipment. Yet her distress calls continued to go unanswered.

Through the eyes of electronic doves, Hollis saw that the atmosphere over Manhattan had cooled sufficiently to allow them brief excursions, even though there was more radioactivity in the air than she had expected to measure. She could survive out there, but she wouldn’t want to spend a week camping in the ruins. What ruins? she asked herself, startled at how her mind invented and clung to even vaguely hopeful images of continuity. There were no archeological traces of the city she had hoped to find, only bodies of water where none had been before, and a featureless landscape in which it was impossible to guess where the Twin Towers and the Empire State Building once stood.

Everywhere the doves looked, the destruction was the same. Penetrating the perpetual cloud cover with their imaging radar, sampling and analyzing the air with their filters, and landing occasionally, they became a gallery of windows on a denuded Earth. In all of Jerusalem, not a single brick lay atop another brick. The Temple Mount was cracked down its center, and springs bubbled forth from the cleft. A stream now flowed from the Mount all the way down to the Dead Sea. Further west, two doves had found pyramid-shaped mounds near the place where Cairo used to be. Perhaps because they had not been directly under an epicenter, together with their combination of resilient geometry and immense bulk, the pyramids had withstood the planetary shocks—just barely. On the entire surface of the Earth they appeared to be the only evidence that mankind had ever existed.