Ivy had said goodbye to the Maternal Organism several days earlier, immediately before the Morg had swallowed her government-issue euthanasia pill. The one person on Earth she was still in touch with was Cal, aboard his submarine, keeping station on the surface offshore of the Norfolk Naval Base, out where the water got blue enough to facilitate a deep dive when the time came. In those days Ivy’s main link to her family came through music. For the Morg had given five-year-old Ivy a choice between becoming the best pianist in Southern California or the best violinist in Southern California, and Ivy had opted for the violin. She had never become the best in Southern California, or even close to it, but she had played in various youth orchestras and developed some familiarity with the classical orchestral repertoire. She had a violin aboard Izzy, which she would tune up and play from time to time.
When the Bolide Fragmentation Rate shot up through a certain level on Day 701, marking the formal beginning of the White Sky, a number of cultural organizations launched programs that they had been planning since around the time of the Crater Lake announcement. Many of these were broadcast on shortwave radio, and so Ivy had her pick of programs from Notre Dame, Westminster Abbey, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, Tiananmen Square, the Potala Palace, the Great Pyramids, the Wailing Wall. After sampling all of them she locked her radio dial on Notre Dame, where they were holding the Vigil for the End of the World and would continue doing so until the cathedral fell down in ruins upon the performers’ heads and extinguished all life in the remains of the building. She couldn’t watch it, since video bandwidth was scarce, but she could imagine it well: the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, its ranks swollen by the most prestigious musicians of the Francophone world, all dressed in white tie and tails, ball gowns and tiaras, performing in shifts around the clock, playing a few secular classics but emphasizing the sacred repertoire: masses and requiems. The music was marred by the occasional thud, which she took to be the sonic booms of incoming bolides. In most cases the musicians played right through. Sometimes a singer would skip a beat. An especially big boom produced screams and howls of dismay from the audience, blended with the clank and clatter of shattered stained glass raining to the cathedral’s stone floor. But for the most part the music played sweetly, until it didn’t. Then there was nothing.
Paris is gone, she texted. Through the military systems, which were patched in with NASA’s, she could still communicate with Cal.
Dive bbs, he answered. Which by itself was pretty enigmatic, but she knew its meaning: the submarine had to dive below the surface for a little while, to avoid some danger, but he expected he’d be back soon.
But he might be wrong about that. She might never hear from him again. She decided it was long past time. She texted him a message that he would find waiting when and if his boat returned to the surface: I release you from your vow.
Then she felt a strange wave pass through her body, almost as if she were in a submarine in the Atlantic when a pressure wave rolled through from some distant meteor strike. She assumed it was an emotional reaction to what she had just done. But then she noticed that every loose floating object in her workspace was drifting in the same direction, toward the wall against which she had braced her back. Pops and creaks and groans propagated through Izzy. The space station was accelerating gently, at just a fraction of a gee. The thrusters must be firing.
The lights had turned red. The PA speaker in her module emitted a slight pop as it came on. “Alert,” said a synthesized voice. “All personnel should now be awake and at stations for urgent swarm maneuver. This is not a drill.”
So it had happened. They had been practicing this for months. But this was the first real Streaker Alert. It meant that a bolide had been detected by SI—the Sensor Integration team—on an unusual trajectory that might pose a danger to Izzy unless the course was corrected slightly.
Her first, nervous impulse was to look out the window toward Amalthea. The big rock was still there. The maneuver hadn’t caused it to snap off.