"Yes."

There was a bleep. Alyce pulled a mobile out of her pocket. Its face lit up with bright images, flickers of movement.

A space suit murmured to Joan. "We're approaching the hospital. You're not to be afraid. They have a secure, enclosed entrance."

Joan cradled her baby. "So Lucy, having just passed through one long dark tunnel, is about to enter another."

The space suit hesitated. "Lucy?"

"What better name for a primate gal?"

Alyce managed a smile. "Joan, you aren't the only new parent."

"Huh?"

"Ian Maughan's robot worker on Mars has managed to build a fully working replica of itself. It has managed to reproduce. From the tone of this text, he is very happy."

"He texted you about that that?"

"You know guys like that. The rest of the world can go to hell as long as their latest gadget does what it's supposed to. Oh. The Fourth Worlders killed Alison Scott's pithecine chimera. I imagine they believed she was an abomination. I wonder what she she believed." believed."

"I suppose she only wanted security, as we all do."

Joan gazed down at her new baby. One world had begun, just heartbeats ago, while another was ending.

"We came close, didn't we, Alyce? The conference, the manifesto. It could have worked, couldn't it?"

"Yes, I believe so."

"We just ran out of time, is all."

"Yes. That, and luck. But we must be hopeful, Joan."

"Yes. We must always be that."

The ambulance rattled to a halt. The doors banged open and cooler air gushed in. More space suits swarmed around, pushing Alyce out of the way, seeking to get Joan on a stretcher. They tried to take her baby off her, but she wouldn't let them.

The geologists had long known that Earth had been overdue for a major volcanic incident.

Rabaul 2031 was not the worst eruption known- not even the worst in the historical record. Still, Rabaul had been far more severe than the 1991 eruption of Pinatubo in the Philippines, which had cooled the Earth by half a degree. It was worse than the explosion of Tambora in Indonesia in 1815, which had caused the "year without a summer" in America and Europe. Rabaul was the largest volcanic event since the sixth century after Christ, and one of the largest of the previous fifty thousand years. Rabaul was respectable.

Changes in climate were not always smooth and proportional to their causes. Earth was prone to sudden and drastic alterations in climate and ecology, flips from one stable state to another. The effects of even small perturbations could become magnified.

Rabaul was such a perturbation. But it was not going to be a small one.

It wasn't really Rabaul's fault. The volcano was just the final straw. Everything had been stretched to the breaking point anyhow by the humans' extraordinary growth. It wasn't even bad luck. If it hadn't been Rabaul, it would have been another volcano or a quake or an asteroid, or some damn thing.

But as the natural systems of the planet broke down, humans would discover conclusively that they were still, after all, just animals embedded in an ecosystem; and as it died back, so did they.

Meanwhile, on Mars, the little robots worked on. Patiently they turned the wan sunlight and the red dust and the carbon dioxide air into little factories, which in turn produced copies of the robots themselves, with jointed legs and solar cell carapaces and little silicon brains.

The robots transmitted news of their endeavors back to their makers on Earth. No reply came. But they kept working anyway.

Under the burnt orange sky of Mars, generations passed quickly.

Of course no replication, biological or mechanical, could ever be perfect. Some variants worked better than others. The robots were actually programmed to learn- to retain what worked, to eliminate what didn't. The weaker ones died out. The stronger survived, and carried forward their design changes to the next metallic generation.

Thus variation and selection had begun to operate.

On and on the robots toiled, until the ancient seabeds and canyons glistened, covered by insectlike metal carapaces.

THREE.

Descendants

CHAPTER 17.

A Long Shadow Place and time unknown.

I.

Waking from a cold sleep wasn't at all like a normal waking, in your own bed, with your wife beside you. It was more like surfacing from a deep dunking in a tank of some clinging, deadening fluid.

But now here was a break in the murk, a widening circle of light centered on a blurry face. The face belonged to Ahmed, the splot- the senior pilot- and not to the CO. That was Snowy's first indication that something was wrong.

Ahmed was repeating, "OK? Are you OK?"

Before submitting to the injections Snowy had rehearsed how he was going to respond to his wake-up call. He smiled and raised the middle finger of his right hand. "Any landing you walk away from is a good one." His voice was a rasp, and his mouth was desert dry.

"You aren't walking yet, smart arse," Ahmed said grimly.

"Where's Barking?" Robert Madd, blessed with one of the Royal Navy's less imaginative nicknames, was the unit's CO.

"Later," said Ahmed. He withdrew, letting Snowy see the metal walls of the Pit. He threw a ration pack on the bed. "Get out of there. Help me with the others."

Snowy- Robert Wayne Snow, age 31- was a lieutenant in the British Royal Navy, which had given him at least an inclination to follow the odd order. So he struggled to sit up.

The Pit was just a cylinder of gunmetal gray, the walls unadorned save for instrument and sensor consoles. The light came from low-energy fluorescents that cast a sickly glow over everything. The instruments were all dead, just blank screens. It was like being inside an oil tank. And the Pit was full of bunk beds, twenty of them, stacked up. Plastic carapaces lay over the beds. Ahmed was working his way around the room, opening the carapaces one by one, and reclosing most of them.

Snowy was stark naked, but he wasn't cold. He picked up his ration pack. It was a clear vacuum-packed bag containing dried banana, chocolate, and other goodies. He ripped into it with the only tool available to him, his teeth. The bag popped and air hissed. He dumped out the goodies on his bed and crammed some banana into his mouth. He felt like he'd been running a marathon. He'd been through cold sleep twice before, for training and evaluation purposes, just a week at a time. It was a peculiarity of the process that at no time did you feel cold, but you always woke up ravenous: something to do with your body slowly absorbing its stores to keep itself alive, according to the medicos.

But something was wrong with his bunk. He could see where he had been lying, his body had left a very clear imprint, like the gruesome dead-mother's-bed scene in Psycho. Psycho. He probed at the mattress. It was lumpy and hard. And the sheets on which he had been lying crumbled as he poked at them, like a mummy's wrappings. He probed at the mattress. It was lumpy and hard. And the sheets on which he had been lying crumbled as he poked at them, like a mummy's wrappings.

He felt a gathering sense of dread.

Ahmed was helping a girl from one of the upper bunks. Her name was June, so, naturally, she was known as Moon. She was a cutie, in or out of her clothes; but now, naked, she looked fragile, even ill, and Snowy felt nothing but an impulse to help her as she clambered awkwardly down from her bunk, flinching as her bare flesh brushed against the metal.

With Moon awake, Snowy started to feel self-conscious. He reached under his bunk, looking for his clothes.

But the floor seemed to be on a tilt. He straightened up, expecting his head to clear. But still the bare floor seemed askew, the vertical lines of the bunk frames leaning like drunks. Not good, Snowy thought. He could think of nothing reassuring that would tip up this hundred-ton emplacement.

He reached under his bed again. The cardboard box that had contained his clothes was gone. His clothes were still there, in a heap. But when he grabbed them the cloth just crumbled, like the sheets on his bed.

"Forget it," Ahmed called, watching him. "Get your flight suit. They seem to have lasted."

"Lasted?"

"It's the plastic, I think."

Snowy complied. He found his boots were still intact too, made of some imperishable artificial material. But he had no surviving socks, none at all; that might be a problem.

Snowy helped get some food inside Moon, while Ahmed continued his patroling.

The woken gathered in a circle, sitting on the lowest tier of the bunks. But there were only five of them, five out of the twenty who had been stored here. The five were Snowy, Ahmed, Sidewise, the girl Moon, and a young pilot called Bonner.

For a time they were silent, as they tucked into banana and chocolate and drank vials of water. Snowy knew that was a good idea. If you were dropped into some new situation it always paid to give yourself time to just sit and listen and think, and adjust to the new situation.

Snowy had pressed Ahmed about the CO. Ahmed showed him. Barking Madd's body was shriveled and shrunken, literally mummified, just hardened flesh over the bone. The rest, the other fourteen, were the same.

Sidewise, predictably, couldn't keep his mouth closed. Sidewise was an air warfare officer. He was a thin, intense man, and he had earned his handle for his habit of making sideways crablike moves whenever he got on a dance floor. Now he glanced around at the little group. "Fucking hell," he said to Snowy. "So much for the safety margins."

"Shut it," Ahmed snapped.

Bonner asked Ahmed, "So what was the tally?"

Tally, for tally-ho, was the slang for a wake-up call. "There wasn't one," Ahmed said bluntly. for tally-ho, was the slang for a wake-up call. "There wasn't one," Ahmed said bluntly.

"So if not a tally, what woke us up?"

Ahmed shrugged. "Maybe the Pit has an automatic timer. Or maybe something just failed and it pitched us out."

Bonner was a good-looking kid, though one of the gen-enged plagues had left him hairless from head to toe. Now he ran his hand over his bare scalp. His accent was faintly Welsh. "Maybe we just pushed it too hard. The Pit was supposed to be a cryostore for seeds and animal embryos and stuff. Insurance against the mass extinction. Not for humans-"

"Especially not humans like you, Bonner," Snowy said. "Maybe your farts blew the gaskets."

The bit of low humor seemed to relax the group, as Snowy had hoped.

Ahmed said, "This Pit might have been originally built for elephant embryos or whatever, but it was man rated. We all saw the lectures on the safety parameters, the reliability of the systems."

"Sure," Sidewise said. "But any any system will fail, no matter how well it's designed and built, if you give it enough time." That silenced them. And Sidewise said, "Anybody noticed the clock?" system will fail, no matter how well it's designed and built, if you give it enough time." That silenced them. And Sidewise said, "Anybody noticed the clock?"

Most of the Pit's instruments were dead. But there had been a backup mechanical clock that had drawn on a trickle of thermal energy from deep roots planted in the earth below. Before they submitted to the cold sleep they had all been shown the clock's working- the cogs made of diamond that would never wear out, the dials that spanned the unthinkable time of fifty years, and so on. It had been a not-so-subtle psychological ploy to reassure them that no matter how long they were in the ground, no matter what became of the outside world, no matter what else failed in the Pit, they would know the date.

But now Snowy saw that the clock's hands had jammed against the end of their dials.

Snowy thought of his wife, Clara. She had been pregnant when he had gone into cold sleep. Fifty years? Fifty years? The kid would be born, grown, with kids of its own. Maybe even The kid would be born, grown, with kids of its own. Maybe even grandkids. grandkids. No. He rejected the thought. It made no sense; you couldn't have a human life with a gap of fifty years in the middle of it. No. He rejected the thought. It made no sense; you couldn't have a human life with a gap of fifty years in the middle of it.

But Sidewise was still talking. "At least fifty years," he said relentlessly. "How long do you think it would take for Barking's body to mummify like that, for all our clothes to rot away?" That was the trouble with Sidewise, Snowy thought. He was never shy of saying what everybody else didn't even want to think about. fifty years," he said relentlessly. "How long do you think it would take for Barking's body to mummify like that, for all our clothes to rot away?" That was the trouble with Sidewise, Snowy thought. He was never shy of saying what everybody else didn't even want to think about.

"Enough," Ahmed snapped. He was short, stocky, squat. "Barking is dead. I'm senior here. I'm in charge." He glared around at them. "Everyone happy with that?"

Moon and Bonner seemed to have withdrawn into themselves. Sidewise was smiling oddly, as if he knew a secret he wasn't sharing.

Snowy shrugged. He knew Ahmed had served as a watch chief- the navy equivalent of a sergeant major. Snowy thought of him as competent, oddly thoughtful, but inexperienced. And, incidentally, not popular enough for a nickname. But there wasn't anybody better qualified here, regardless of rank. "I suggest you get on with it, sir."

Ahmed gave him a look of gratitude. "All right. Here's the deal. We've had no tally. In fact, no contact from the outside. I can't even tell how long since we last got a contact of any sort. Too many of the systems are down."

Moon said, "So we don't know what's happening out there?"

Snowy said briskly, "Tell us what we do."

"We get out of here. We don't need protective gear. Enough of the external sensors are working to tell us that."

That was a relief, Snowy thought. He wouldn't have welcomed relying for protection on his NBC suit- nuclear-biological-chemical- if it had been subject to the same ferocious aging as his other clothes.

Ahmed hauled a steel trunk out from under one of the bunks. Inside were pistols, Walther PPKs, each packed in a plastic bag filled with oil. "I checked one already. We can test fire them outside." He handed them around.

Snowy cracked the bag, wiped clean his pistol on crumbling bits of sheet, and tucked its reassuring mass into his belt. He rummaged through more of his surviving kit: helmets, life jackets, survival vests- a pilot's equipment. The plastic components seemed more or less intact, but the cloth and rubber had failed. He took what he thought he would need. He regretted leaving behind his helmet, his venerable bone-dome, even if it was painted United Nations blue. Still, he somehow doubted he would be doing much flying today one way or another.

They clustered before the exit. The door to the facility was heavy, round-edged, and airtight, and operated by a wheel; it was like a submarine's hatch. Ahmed began to break its seals.

They were all shitting themselves, Snowy realized, even if none of them wanted to show it to the rest.

"So what do you think we'll find?" whispered Sidewise. "Russians? Chinese? Bomb craters, two-headed kids? Everybody wearing monkey masks, like Planet of the Apes Planet of the Apes?"

"Fuck off, Side, you twat."

With an uncompromising motion Ahmed turned the wheel. The last seal broke with a crack. The door swung back.

Green light flooded in.