And then there was Ben. As far as Joshua could see Agnes and Lobsang were putting the boy through a process of slow, gentle revelation. It was never going to be easy. Of course this day, the day of truth, had to come for their adopted son sometime. But now it was forced on them, in the middle of a wider crisis.
Yes, this twain certainly had a motley and divided crew, Joshua thought. But who else was there to do this? Who was better qualified to handle the problem?
And the reality of the problem was not in doubt. Even as they stood here, the morning sun, a mother-of-pearl disc sporadically visible in the ash-laden air, seemed to Joshua to move perceptibly, the shadows it cast shifting like an accelerated movie of a sundial. The various timers the ship’s science teams had set up confirmed that the rotation of this world had in the last few months sped up to an astounding twelve hours – half the original day. Even the two Lobsangs had given up trying to estimate the energy that was pouring down from the sky, had given up trying to predict the end point.
At last the elevator cage arrived. They gave a ragged cheer.
Joshua Valienté was no fan of enclosure, and he was certainly no friend of the US military.
But it was a relief, this day in early January of 2059, to ride up from the ground of New Springfield at last, to get out of the stinging sunlight and be enclosed in the sterile, womb-like interior of the USS Brian Cowley. Joshua breathed deeply of clean, recycled, humidified, filtered air, air that smelled of nothing but electronics, carpets, and military-issue boot polish – air that did not smell of death, of ash and sulphur and rot and the smoke of burned forests, air that did not make your lungs ache, for the world outside was even losing its oxygen to the continent-wide fires.
The twain itself was interesting to Joshua, a veteran of such vessels. The ‘gondola’ of this Armstrong-class ship, though the crew called its habitable compartment by that name, wasn’t a gondola at all but entirely contained within the body of the thousand-foot-long lift envelope, with observation galleries around the ship’s equator leading back from the bridge at the very prow.
The civilian party from Springfield were brought to one such gallery now, led by Margarita Jha, the ship’s science officer. Waiting for them here was Ken Bowring. The burly seismologist seemed to be enjoying this experience far too much, Joshua thought. A yeoman, a smart young man, passed among them with trays of coffee, soft drinks, water.
Distant turbines hummed, the great ship shuddered slightly as if coming fully awake, and they were lifted smoothly into the air.
‘Anchors aweigh, then,’ Agnes murmured, peering out of the window.
The Irwins, Oliver and Marina, went to stand together close to one of the big viewing windows, peering out into the smoky air.
Ken Bowring stepped forward. ‘I do understand how you feel,’ he said to the Irwins. ‘But look how much has changed, in the years since the bugs started their spin-up. You can see how much damage has been done, even right here.’ He pointed. ‘The basic features of the landscape are still there, of course, and they still bear the names you gave them. Manning Hill, Soulsby Creek. There’s the old Poulson house, as you call it …’ The Poulson house, the beetles’ portal, was now the centre of an intensively observed, heavily guarded military compound, where science crews kept watch day and night on this flaw in the world. ‘But look over where Waldron Wood used to be.’ The slab of dense forest beyond the creek to the north was gone now, a burned-out ruin.
The settlement was quickly lost in the greying forest as the ship lifted higher and sailed smoothly through the sky, heading north-east.
Oliver Irwin said gloomily, ‘Everything’s dying, isn’t it? And what isn’t dying is burning. Or both.’
Bowring said, ‘Pretty much. The serious die-back began, just as we predicted, when the local day dropped below twenty hours or so. This is a world of forest, and all those dead trees are very combustible.’
Margarita Jha, spruce in her Navy uniform, said now, ‘Funnily enough, you know, Ken, as the spin-up approached the current twelve hours, we saw something of a tentative recovery of the wildlife. The local critters seemed to be able to adapt somewhat, treating two half-days as a single day, if you see what I mean. The same for some of the flowering plants. We observed a similar effect at sixteen hours, though clearly the resonance wasn’t so simple.’
‘Interesting,’ Bowring said. ‘There’s probably a paper in that—’
‘You’re so damn cold.’ That was Marina Irwin, her words blurted out. ‘That’s our home out there. A world is dying. And you call it “interesting”.’