2061: Odyssey Three (21 page)

Midnight in the Plaza

The famous building, towering in solitary splendour above the woods of central Manhattan, had changed little in a thousand years. It was part of history, and had been reverently preserved. Like all historic monuments, it had long ago been coated with a microthin layer of diamond, and was now virtually impervious to the ravages of time.

Anyone who had attended early meetings of the General Assembly could never have guessed that more than a thousand years had passed. They might, however, have been intrigued by the featureless black slab standing in the Plaza, almost mimicking the shape of the UN building itself. If - like everyone else - they had reached out to touch it - they would have been puzzled by the strange way in which their fingers skittered over its ebon surface.

But they would have been far more puzzled - indeed, completely overawed - by the transformation of the heavens.

The last tourists had left an hour ago, and the Plaza was utterly deserted. The sky was cloudless, and a few of the brighter stars were just visible; all the fainter ones had been routed by the tiny sun that could shine at midnight.

The light of Lucifer gleamed not only on the black glass of the ancient building, but also upon the narrow, silvery rainbow spanning the southern sky. Other lights moved along and around it, very slowly, as the commerce of the Solar System came and went between all the worlds of both its suns.

And if one looked very carefully, it was just possible to make out the thin thread of the Panama Tower, one of the six umbilical cords of diamond linking Earth and its scattered children, soaring twenty-six thousand kilometres up from the equator to meet the Ring around the World.

Suddenly, almost as swiftly as if it had been born, Lucifer began to fade. The night that men had not known for thirty generations flooded back into the sky. The banished stars returned.

And for the second time in four million years, the Monolith awoke.