Shaped by her encounter with the Intruders, her picture of the universe, if extrapolated over many centuries, became a never-ending story of civilizations hunkering down and watching and waiting, interspersed with occasional loud bangs and shrieks in the cosmic night. And if this were all that eight thousand years of civilization had been leading up to, that small sour grapes part of her was glad to be done with it.

Isak, who had been monitoring distress calls and scribbling instructions, suddenly pulled back his hand from his pad.

The ceramic panel was going soft.

“Mine’s going, too,” Sargenti announced.

Anger flashed in Isak’s eyes. “Bastards! They’ll see! If we survived this long, so might others. They’re not infallible. Somewhere out there, a warrior waits to teach them a lesson they will not live to learn from.”

“Or the horse may talk?” asked Sargenti.

“Or the horse may talk,” Isak replied.

The house shuddered, and then from above came a long, drawn-out series of cracking noises, as if the sky were falling—which in a very real sense it was. Suddenly in the distance a slab of rock nearly a half kilometer long peeled away from the tunnel ceiling and came crashing out of the clouds in the slow, frightful majesty that only low gravity could produce. An ocean of water seemed to trail behind it, a foaming, greenish-white column that could only have come from a demolished reservoir on the level above.

Crichton, awakened by the commotion, was padding cautiously in the direction of the downpour, and Sargenti’s curiosity was momentarily aroused by a peculiar pattern that the Coriolis force was etching into the water. For the first hundred meters, the column fanned out evenly in every direction, forming ghostly white veils; then, as it neared the plain, it began to curve westward, lagging behind Ceres spin.

“We’d better get out into the open,” Sargenti said. “This house isn’t safe anymore. I expect it’ll collapse in a few minutes. The whole colony soon after.”

Isak broke out in sweat and felt a tingling creeping up his arms from his hands, and wondered if somehow the template had already contaminated his blood. He turned to Sargenti and found her gazing at him with a clear, caring smile; and his foremost sensation was not one of fear or regret over failed tactics but of a heartfelt sorrow that life was so full of doors that closed when you were not looking and rooms that you could not reenter.

“How much time do you think we have?” he asked.

She reached out and took his hand. “Enough,” she said.

II

Theory of Catastrophism

Behold the pale horse. The man who rides it is death. And hell comes with him.

— Revelation

Paranoids are sometimes right.

— Jim Powell

17

The Resurrectionists

“The King’s Horse” was the story of an animal that never spoke. Delay was the point of the tale. But there was a longer tradition of animals and unlikely objects talking, dating back past the thunderstorm that spoke to Job, past Balaam’s donkey, to the serpent in the Garden of Eden. The saddest of all these stories had originated in Africa, and was made all the sadder now, for all that a bold electronic shout to the galaxy had wrought.