“What can you see?” she asked.

But Jonathan was not listening to her. He had just seen the spaceship.

16

Dangerous?

The lights were coming on again. There seemed to be no further point in worrying about the Intruders finding Ceres’ neutrino glow; so bit by bit, Bishop was powering up the colony. Crichton had resumed his afternoon naps in the amaryllis garden, the colonists were going home to their ranches, and it was possible to believe, ignoring certain facts, that the yellowing fields might even produce papaya again.

Despite the circumstances, the population had remained curiously sober. There were still sporadic loud parties, still drunks sleeping under the trees— zoned out on a mixture of VR, hallucinogens, and drink—but far fewer than anyone would have expected. Like harbingers of a coming spring, the colonists were starting to spread out again, tidying up, and slowly returning to normal.

Isak and Sargenti sat silently over their pads at his balcony table, scribbling furiously, completely lost in thought, glancing occasionally out into the vast, upcurving tunnel whose ceiling was completely obscured by clouds. Through them, a single bar of light only a few meters wide but thousands of kilometers long tried to banish the Ceran night. The clouds were thicker today than they had ever been in the past, offering no breaks; and the light that filtered through them was soft, yellow-white, reminding Isak during those rare moments when he found the time to look outside of a bright, hazy day on Earth.

There was too much to think about. For Isak there were the Tarter group’s warnings, ignored for decades; yet they had told exactly what to expect. And there was the colossal mistake with the phone system; it seemed such a little error, at first, as did most disastrous choices when viewed with twentytwenty hindsight. And there was his son and Yeon and Sargenti. In the final sum, his whole life was regrets. Sargenti was all that was really left for him; but she had seemed more than enough when he began shutting down the fusion plants, and could plan for years of survival under the Intruders, perhaps even count on escape. But then he had been forced to adjust his thinking to days, and then to hours, and now he suspected that it was getting down to minutes. The effect of growing up in the low gravity of Ceres had produced in Sargenti a wonderful blend of litheness and androgyny; and as he glanced up from his pad, he drew some small satisfaction from the likelihood that she would probably be the last thing he would ever see.

For Sargenti there was the death cry she planned to send out to the universe, louder than the Jackson shout, with the final surge of power from Bishop’s generators. It would go out as a simple binary code, with no concealed levels of complexity. In it she was including all the great works of art, film, music, and literature—everything that gave her pride in her species, everything from Monet to the dancing antelopes of Thera, from Mozart to the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” and Glenn Miller’s “Caribbean Clipper,” from Plato to Guilder, and especially Guilder, who had penned the twentieth century’s greatest poems but went unnoticed in her lifetime because she had insisted on giving them such off-putting titles as “Does Satan Drive a Plymouth Fury?” and “Did Jesus Have a Dog?” And Beavis and Butt-Head, the cartoon figures whose Laurel and Hardy-like stupidity had only grown more endearing with time.