This probe had been in synchronous orbit, more than twenty thousand miles high, and from out here Lobsang could see it all: a whole hemisphere at a glance, the planet like a dish held at arm’s length. The blanket of air was stained by smoke and steam. Immense auroral displays cupped the world at north and south poles, and Lobsang speculated about a tremendous distortion of the planetary magnetic field as it collapsed. Storms swirled, giant weather systems white and purple and sparking with lightning, lashing the turbulent oceans and pouring on to the land. Still Lobsang could make out the forms of the continents, just – he saw the Americas, North and South, sweep across the face of the globe as the world turned through its final, desperately accelerated rotations. But increasingly there was little difference between land and sea, for rivers of molten rock ran brightly along the spreading fractures of the ocean floors, and filled the tremendous crevices that were opening up on the continents. Briefly Lobsang was reminded of spacecraft views of Io, innermost moon of Jupiter, a world tormented into unending volcanism by its primary’s mighty tides.
But Earth was evolving quickly, and even that comparison was soon lost. With startling speed the continents dissolved, as if fifty-mile-thick granite was no more than a mere skim being burned away by the red-white heat of the interior. Now Lobsang saw raftlike fragments of landscapes rotate, tip up, even grind against each other in collisions that threw up immense mountain ranges that could survive only minutes. Surely, already, nothing could be left alive down there: nothing left of Stan and Sally.
And still the spin-up continued. He could see the growing obliquity of the world as a whole now; the planet seemed to soften, its surface stretching, accommodating. It seemed to him that a new transient geography was forming on the exposed mantle, with rivers of hotter material erupting from the interior and running across the marginally cooler surface, rivers that washed away the last scraps of solid crust. There was even a kind of weather as vast clouds of plasma broke through the surface and spread glowing tendrils across the planet’s face.
Now a new phase began. What looked like a kind of tornado opened up on the equator, directly below Lobsang’s position, a swirling mass with a darker centre – a centre that exploded with stupendous force, spraying fragments out into the dissipating atmosphere. It was a volcano, a massive outlet of mantle energies, on whose flanks even Yellowstone would have been no more than a glowing speck. Looking to the planet’s horizon Lobsang saw more such giant features in profile, blisters visibly rising about the world’s distorted curve, all around the equator. And from this angle Lobsang could see huge bolides thrown out, masses of glowing rock rising above the horizon, for a few moments still falling back to the sea of molten silicate below. But then came one tremendous eruption, and a spray of bolides escaped from the world altogether and sailed off into space, spinning and cooling. Significant chunks of the Earth, already being lost to space.
Now he saw evidence of the beetles, for the first time. What looked like tremendous filmy butterflies, with wings of net that must be hundreds of kilometres across, came sailing down from higher orbit to drift through the gathering ring of cooling rock fragments around the equator, scooping them up. A cynical harvest was beginning.
The world’s shape seemed to deform visibly now. The poles must be sinking at hundreds of miles per hour, the equator distorting at a similar rate, and the big volcanoes became mouths that vomited material continuously into space. The surface was featureless, almost, save for the equatorial volcanic wounds. The world was a drop of liquid, with an almost abstract beauty, Lobsang thought.
Then there was a kind of pause, as if the planet was drawing breath.
And the surface seemed to lift off, all at once, like a tremendous global eruption. Vast amounts of material, a spray of shining rock and clouds of plasma, lifted high into space, some of it flowing in great currents in the sky, perhaps shaped by the remnant magnetic field. Lobsang saw a brighter, inner light – the light of the core itself, perhaps, a mass of compressed liquid iron the size of the moon – shining through the disrupted outer layers, casting straight-line shadows hundreds of miles long.
The net-ships of the beetles fed eagerly.
And as the mass of the Earth dispersed, its gravity field gently began to loose its hold on Lobsang’s vessel, a tiny, unnoticed cork bobbing on the surface of a turbulent cosmic sea, drifting away.
With the wreckage of Earth receding, Lobsang turned his mind to the future. His own future.
He took an inventory of his ship’s systems. This was a hardy little craft; as long as it didn’t get swept up by the beetles itself, it would survive the death of the world. As well as a robust inner power supply it had solar-cell wings to be unfolded, and an ion rocket for manoeuvring: a rocket that would deliver a small but persistent push that could, in time, take him anywhere.
And, he discovered, the craft had a limited but functional self-repair capability. Even a small matter printer. This was no silver beetle, but the probe could manufacture spare parts to maintain itself, even manipulate its environment. He could last indefinitely, as long as he could reach a source of raw materials. He could even build himself a new body.
Where to go, though, to find those raw materials? Off on a comet, perhaps? Or further out into the dark, where ice worlds swarmed far beyond the planets? And if he could get out there, he would not be helpless; there was no end of things he could do. But there was plenty of time for that.