Heaven's Fall (12 page)

The new one was far outside the city, outside the state, in fact. Whit had grabbed his gear from the dorm and hoofed it back to the metro stop in order to catch the oh-dark-thirty bus to the Henderson node.

There he found a special train heading east . . . past Hoover Dam (which he could see from the window, since he happened to be sitting on the right-hand side of the car), then into the trackless waste of northwestern Arizona.

Well, not trackless . . . this train had tracks, new ones to Whit’s untrained eye.

Dehm squinted past him. “Oh, check this out.”

No sooner were the words out of Dehm’s mouth than the train turned to the left, and Whit was looking out his window at the most fabulous structure he had ever seen in his life.

Far in the distance, sitting on the high desert under a cobalt-blue desert sky, was some kind of termite mound ten stories tall, rising like an ogre’s castle on the north rim of a canyon. It was actually a city in one huge structure—an arcology, to use a term Whit remembered from his reading—but not necessarily a human one. There was no obvious activity, no aircraft or trucks going in and out . . . no ads, no personal touches . . . no color.

Just a squat, intimidating dun-colored structure taking up a huge amount of space and looking as though it had stood for a thousand years.

Detracting from the ancient temple image, however, were two visible rows of slablike power towers—no lines, just the towers themselves—stretching across the landscape from Hoover Dam and nuke plants elsewhere in Arizona, Utah, and California like monoliths.

Surrounding those structures . . . a series of giant flat mirrors on pedestals, all pointing at a common center.

The whole thing looked like Disney World conceived by, say, Attila the Hun.

“How far away are we?” Whit asked.

“Half an hour at least,” Dehm said, which meant the mound was even larger than Whit had thought. “We have to go through a couple of tunnels first.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this. We’re going to live there?”

“And work there. That’s not all . . . the whole top of that canyon, the side away from us . . . Well, just wait. And get used to it, too.” Then, with no apparent concern that he might be overheard—and Whit could see that two girls and a boy in the next seat were listening—Dehm added, “It’ll be the last home you’ll ever know.”

Whit was so alarmed that he forgot to be cautious. “What are you talking about?” He didn’t really believe this Dehm guy, but why would he say something like that?

“This project is entering its final phase,” Dehm said. “That’s why they gave the senior people—like me—one last vacation. To say good-bye.”

“And that’s what they told you.”

“Of course not. They just gave everybody in my section leave at the same time, which had never happened before. But there is a sense of completion and finality.” Dehm smiled and proudly, stupidly displayed four jacks.

“So what? Then it’s on to the next project, right?”

“See, that’s just it.” And here Dehm managed to lower his voice and glance over his shoulder. The eavesdroppers sat back, though to Whit their eyes remained wide and their ears remained tuned. “What I heard a while ago was that this particular project was kind of a terminal one, that when the Aggregates hit the on button, it would leave the facility and maybe North America and possibly even the entire world pretty much dead.”

The train entered a tunnel.

Whit found himself feeling frightened—he wasn’t sure why. He had never been afraid of the dark. And it wasn’t Dehm’s story, because he wasn’t sure he believed it, especially since it had all the signs of some weird THE loyalty test.

Maybe it was the sudden reality of separation from the life he knew . . . the sense that he was moving into a new world.

They emerged into harsh desert light. Blinking, Whit turned away from the window and focused on his fellow passengers.

He had seen earlier that they were mostly his age, about evenly split between guys and girls. Dehm, in fact, who was in his own world for the moment, fumbling with his cards, was the oldest person in the car.

One thing they all had in common . . . they all seemed to be alone. No pairs or groups.

And every one of them wore the same look that Whit did: wide-eyed, unreasoning fear.

The train plunged into another tunnel.

QUESTION:
For Yahvi Stewart-Radhakrishnan, what’s it like growing up on a Near-Earth Object?

YAHVI:
I don’t know how to answer that. I grew up, I guess.

QUESTION:
How do you spend your time?

YAHVI:
I go to school and work at my jobs, what else?

QUESTION:
Would you like to go shopping?

YAHVI:
Is that what teenagers do on Earth?

QUESTION:
Some of them.

YAHVI:
Then sure, I suppose.

QUESTION:
Would you say that growing up on Keanu is different from growing up on Earth?

YAHVI:
How would I know? I just got here.

YAHVI, FIRST INTERVIEW

“Why can’t I see Zeds?”

Yahvi caught up to her mother after the boring conversation in the meeting room.

“He’s in a pressure chamber.”

“I heard. So why can’t I see him?”

The family stretched across the half-lit hallway, Yahvi on the left, Rachel in the middle, Pav on the right. As she frequently did in conversations like this, Rachel turned to Pav, as if to say,
Listen to your silly daughter
.

Which always infuriated Yahvi. “Mom!”

Rachel opened her mouth to tell Yahvi why not, then closed it. “Actually, there is no good reason. Let’s see about Sanjay, then make sure Zeds is okay.”

Yahvi never wanted to come to Earth at all. Leave Keanu someday? Sure, if she lived until the NEO reached a destination. But she wasn’t holding her breath for that; even with all the enhancements her parents and Harley Drake and Sasha Blaine kept talking about—extending the human life span to hundreds of “years”—well, it still wouldn’t be good enough.

Yahvi was ready to admit that having Earth as a target was an improvement over the Architect home world. Earth was a few years distant, at Keanu’s rate of travel.

The Architect home world? Something like five thousand years.

“Humans just aren’t suited for travel between the stars,” Sasha would always say.

“What is it we
are
suited for?” That question came from Nick Barton-Menon, who was the most complete smart-ass in Yahvi’s year at school . . . and as cute as he was smart.

The trouble was, he knew it. The double trouble was, everyone tolerated it. Even Sasha Blaine, the giant red-haired goddess of a mathematician, would put up with snarky comments from Nick that would have gotten Yahvi or anyone else sent to the fields for “readjustment.”

“Humans are great at starting wars,” she would say. (This was not a onetime exchange.) “Lying, cheating, quarreling, poisoning our environments.”

“Go, humans!” one of the others said.

“So we’re essentially like the Reivers,” Nick would say. “Only larger and less able to disassemble ourselves and survive.”

“Those are just our bad traits, some of which turn out to be useful. As in dealing with the Reivers.” Yahvi had never seen a Reiver; none of the yavaki had. They had been exterminated on Keanu before she was born.

Or so everyone said. Obviously, given the terrifying things they heard about these creatures, their varying shapes and sizes, their insane ability to duplicate themselves, their ability to destroy—that is, reshape to their own needs—anything they touched, every human on Keanu hoped they were gone. Every now and then some yavak, or even one of the older HBs, would report a sighting in some tunnel or one of the other habitats (the Skyphoi habitat was notorious for these events), and there would be a lockdown and panic. Even Nick Barton-Menon would pay attention then.

The problem was . . . apparently a whole bunch of Reiver Aggregates had escaped from Keanu. They had made their way to Earth.

Which was surely bad for Earth, but Yahvi had a difficult time imagining the place, even having seen it looming in the
Adventure
view screen for four days . . . and after walking its surface for several hours.

Of course, she had been limited to the sights and sounds of an Indian Air Force base, and one particular building—hardly a representative sample, as Sasha Blaine would say. But even then, she was ready to conclude that while Earth might be a perfectly fine place for those born there and condemned to live their lives there, it seemed too limited, too confined.

For example, Keanu moved. It was
going places
.

Earth moved, too, of course. In a steady rigid orbit around one sun, the same thing it had been doing for four and a half billion years, and, with luck, for another two or three. That was just striking Yahvi as not much fun.

Of course, it probably reflected her anger at having come close to death . . . and her frustration at being cooped up in this awful hospital away from whatever fun Earth had to offer.

She was more frustrated that she and her parents, and for that matter, Xavier and Zeds, weren’t allowed to see Sanjay Bhat, or even to know for sure if he still lived.

Yahvi, Rachel, and Pav went upstairs to the entrance to the intensive care unit only to find Indian Air Force guards and this Wing Commander Kaushal blocking their way. “Your companion is in no condition for visitors,” the round little counselor told them. There were no nurses or doctors around, no one who might listen to an appeal.

“We’d like to know his condition,” Rachel said, in a voice that Yahvi knew well; it meant,
I’m being patient for now, but the explosion will follow shortly
.

Kaushal was deaf and blind to this, however. “You saw the extent of his head injuries,” he said. “He was taken directly to surgery after we arrived here, and no one has emerged to tell me what is going on.”

Rather than cloud up and rain all over Kaushal, Rachel turned to Pav. “Where did Taj go?”

“He and Xavier had to talk about securing our cargo—”

Rachel turned back to Kaushal and actually said, “Thank you. We’ll come back in an hour.”

“Maybe we could get something to eat,” Pav said. Yahvi felt that they had just eaten, and besides . . . she still felt sick from the crazy near-death experience of a landing, and the smells and sights of the intensive care unit.

Yahvi hadn’t gotten to know Sanjay Bhat prior to
Adventure
’s launch—for most of her life, he had just been one of those faceless, humorless, grown-up HBs who spent most of their time in the Temple and hurrying back and forth on Important Work.

Nor had they bonded during the four-day mission. Sanjay had spent most of his time in the lower deck with Xavier, again, likely busy with Important Work. Yahvi could not remember them having a single conversation that went beyond two sentences—and one of them went this: “Don’t be such a yavak!”

Meaning,
Don’t complain, suck it up, be grateful
. It was a Bangalore attitude that Sanjay seemed to glory in. Yahvi had seen her mother rolling her eyes at Sanjay more than once since launch.

Still, Yahvi felt terrible about what had happened to him.

The three of them found two more Indian Air Force guards outside Zeds’s chamber, which was in the back of the hospital building near ventilation equipment that ran so loudly it must have cooled or circulated air for the entire hospital.

This time the guards eagerly stepped aside. Yahvi wondered if they were nervous about the giant four-armed alien at their backs.

The door remained closed; it was thick glass and allowed Rachel, Pav, and Yahvi to show their faces and wave to the Sentry. “How are you?” Rachel shouted.

A speaker on the side of the door burped to life, with Zeds’s calm voice. “Shouting is not mandatory. I can hear you quite well.”

Pav laughed. “Are you being treated well?”

Zeds stepped closer to the door. He had removed the upper torso and helmet of his environment suit, leaving his large head and face pressed against the glass. One of the HBs had long ago compared Sentry heads to “dolphins with no snouts,” which, once Yahvi finally saw a dolphin, made no sense, except for the skin color; there were too many angles and gill-like organs in that head to look like friendly terrestrial sea mammals. “I have the sea, I have nourishment, I am momentarily content.”

Behind Zeds, Yahvi could see a pool of some kind—Sentries had dozens of words for water or aquatic environments in their own language, but fell back on “sea” for everything from bathtub to ocean when using English—as well as a large mat that was probably intended as a bed, and a table on which several large bowls rested. They seemed to be half-filled with some kind of bubbling stew.