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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] Himalayas, he could clearly make out glaciers pouring off the sides of the mountains, clawing their way toward the lower ground. The Sahara, meanwhile, had not remained a desert, not entirely. Here and there new oases had sprung up, patches of green that could be fifty kilometers on a side, bordered by straight-line segments. Similarly he observed bits of desert somehow stuck into the green expanses of the South American rain forests. The world was sud- denly a clumsy patchwork. But those odd patches of green in the desert were already fading, he observed as the days wore on, the greenery browning, visibly dying. If the effects of the changes on the physical world were rela- tively subtle, the impact on humanity was dramatic. By day the cities and farms had always been hard to make out from orbit. But now even the great roadways that had once spanned the red center of Australia had vanished. Britain, its shape easily rec- ognizable, seemed to be covered from the Scottish borders to the Channel coast by a thick blanket of forest: Kolya recognized the Thames, but it was much broader than he remembered, and there was no sign of London. Once Kolya made out a bright orange-yellow glow in the middle of the North Sea. It appeared to be a burning oil rig. A great black plume of smoke rose from it and feathered out over Western Europe. As their radio footprint crossed over, Musa tried desperately to make radio contact. But there was no reply, and no sign of ships or planes coming to the aid of the stricken rig. And so on. If the day side of the world was transformed, the night side was heartbreaking. The city lights, once glowing necklaces around the necks of the continents, were gone, all extinguished. Everywhere he looked it was the same save for a few, a very few exceptions. In the middle of a desert, he would make out the spark of a campfire, though he had learned he could be fooled by lightning-struck blazes. There was a denser scattering of fires in Central Asia, near the Mongolian border. There even seemed to be a Clar_0345452488_2p_02_r1.v.qxd 11/10/03 10:09 AM Page 78 7 8 " C L A R K E & B A X T E R city in what had been Iraq, but it was small and isolated, and at night its glow was flickering, as if from fires and lanterns, not electricity. Sable claimed she saw some signs of habitation at the site of Chicago. Once the Soyuz crew was excited by the glimpse of an extensive glow along the western seaboard of the continental United States. But that turned out to be a tectonic fault, rivers of lava pouring from a ruptured ground, soon obscured by great billows of ash and dust. To a first approximation, humanity was gone: that was all you could say about it. And as for Kolya s own family, Nadia and the boys, Moscow had vanished; Russia was empty. The crew cautiously discussed what could have caused this tremendous metamorphosis. Perhaps some great war could have left the world depopulated; that seemed the most likely hypothesis. But if so, surely they would have heard the military commands, seen the sparks of ICBMs rising, heard desolate cries for help seen cities burn, God help them. And what possible force could pick up blocks of ice or tracts of green, dozens of kilometers on a side, and plant them so out of place? These discussions never went very far. Perhaps they all lacked the imagination to deal with what they saw. Or perhaps they feared that by talking about it they would somehow make it real. Kolya tried to be analytical. The Soyuz s external sensor pod was functioning well. Designed to photograph the Station s exte- rior, the pod had a virtually unlimited electronic capacity for stor- ing images. It had been easy for Kolya to reconfigure the pod so that it pointed downward at the Earth. The Soyuz s orbit, a shadow of the vanished Station s, did not cover the whole planet, but it did loop far from the equator, and as the Earth turned beneath them so new segments of the planet were brought into the cameras view. Kolya would be able to create a photographic record from orbit of the state of Earth, covering a great swath to north and south. Patiently, as the lonely Soyuz circled, Kolya tried to put aside preconceptions, to control his emotions and his fears, and simply to record what he saw, what was there. But it was strange to think that somewhere in the pod s vast electronic memory were stored the images of the Station they had taken just after separation images Clar_0345452488_2p_02_r1.v.qxd 11/10/03 10:09 AM Page 79 T I M E S E Y E " 7 9 of a Station now somehow vanished, its loss a grace note in the unfolding symphony of strangeness around them. Sable demanded to know what was the point of this patient recording. Her ham radio project, by comparison, was aimed at establishing communications that could enable them to survive; what use were all these images? Kolya didn t feel the need to justify himself. There was surely nobody else in a position to do it and Earth, he felt, deserved a witness to its metamorphosis. And besides, as far as he knew, his wife and boys were gone. If that were true, then what was the point of anything they did? The climate seemed restless: great low pressure systems prowled the oceans, and pushed their way toward the land, spinning off huge electrical storms. Seen from space the storms were wonders, with lightning flickering and branching between the clouds, releasing chain reactions that could span a continent. And at the equator clouds stacked up in great heaps that seemed to be straining toward him, and sometimes he imagined the Soyuz might plunge into those thunderheads. Perhaps the sea and the air had been as churned up as the land. As the days wore by the seeing slowly worsened. But, oddly, the increasing obscurity made him feel better about his situation as if he was a child, able to believe that the badness had gone away if he couldn t see it. When it got too hard to bear Kolya would turn to his lemon tree. This tree, bonsai small, had been the subject of one of his experi- ments on the Station. After the first day in the Soyuz he had dug it out of its packaging and now kept it in the little space under his seat. One day, aboard great liners sailing between the worlds, people would have grown fruit in space, and Kolya might have been remembered as a pioneer in a new way of cultivating life beyond the Earth itself. Those possibilities were all gone now, it seemed, but the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |