Nadia’s heart leaped when she heard that word, she couldn’t help it. But Arkady had a lot of friends and followers, and none of them seemed to know where he was. Still, she found herself unable to sleep that day, her stomach again tied in a knot. That night at sunset she was happy to return the planes and take off. The rebels in Bakhuysen sent them on their way so laden with hydrazine and gases and freeze-dried food that their planes had a hard time getting off the ground.
Their night flights had taken on a strangely ritual aspect, as if they were in the process of inventing a new and exhausting pilgrimage. The two planes were so light that they were buffeted hard by the prevailing western winds, sometimes bouncing wildly ten meters up or down, so that it was impossible to sleep for long even when one was not flying; a sudden drop or lift and one was awake again, in the dark little cabin, staring out the window at the black sky and stars above, or the starless black world below. They spoke hardly at all. The pilots hunched forward, expending their energy on keeping a visual fix on the other plane. The planes hummed along, winds keening over their long flexible wings. It was sixty degrees below zero outside, the air only 150 millibars and poisonous; and there was no shelter on the black planet below, for many kilometers in every direction. Nadia would pilot for a while, then move to the back, and twist and turn, and try to sleep. Often the click of a transponder over the radio, combined with the general aspect of their situation, would remind her of the time she and Arkady had ridden the storm in the Arrowhead. She would see him then, striding red-bearded and naked through the broken interior of the dirigible, tearing away paneling to throw overboard, laughing, fines floating in a nimbus around him-then the 17D would jerk her awake, and she would twist with the discomfort of her fear. It would have helped to pilot again, but Yeli wanted to as much as she, at least for the first couple of hours of his watch. There was nothing for it but to help him watch for the other plane, always a kilometer to the right if all was well. They had occasional radio contact with the other plane, but microbursted the calls, and kept them to a minimum; hourly checks, or inquiries if one fell behind. Everything had taken on ritualistic qualities, and in the dead of night it sometimes seemed this was all any of them had ever done, it was hard to recall what life had been like before the revolt. And what had it been, twenty-four days? Three weeks, though it felt like five years.
And then the sky would begin to bleed behind them, high cirrus clouds turning purple, rust, crimson, lavender, and then swiftly to metal shavings, in a rosy sky; and the incredible fountain of the sun would pour over some rocky rim or scarp, and they would search anxiously as they ghosted over the pocked and shadowed landscape, looking for some sign of an airstrip by the piste. After the eternal night it seemed impossible that they would have navigated successfully to anything at all, but there lay the gleaming piste below, which they could land on directly in an emergency. And the transponders being all individually identifiable, and pegged to the map, their navigation was always more sure than it seemed; so every dawn they would spot a strip down in the shadows ahead, a welcome blond pencil strip of perfect flatness. Down they would glide, thump against the ground, slow down, taxi to whatever facilities they could find; stop the engines, slump back in the seats. Feel the strange lack of vibration, the stillness of another day.
That morning they landed at the strip by the Margaritifer station, and were met at their planes by a dozen men and women who were extravagantly enthusiastic in their welcome, hugging and kissing the six travelers countless times, and laughing as they did so. The six clumped together, more alarmed by this than by the wary greeting of the day before. Their welcomers did not neglect to run laser readers over their wrists to identify them, which was reassuring; but when the AI confirmed that they were indeed receiving six of the first hundred, they burst into cheers, and carried on in the very highest of spirits. In fact when the six were lead through a lock into a commons, several their hosts went over immediately to some small tanks, and breathed in hits of what proved to be nitrous oxygen and an pandorphin aerosol, after which they laughed themselves silly.
One of them, a slender fresh-faced American, introduced himself. “I’m Steve, I trained with Arkady on Phobos in 12, and worked with him on Clarke. Most of us here worked with him on Clarke. We were in Schiaparelli when the revolution began.”
“Do you know where Arkady is?” Nadia asked.
“Last we heard he was in Carr, but now he’s out of the net, which is the way it should be.”
A tall skinny American shambled up to Nadia, and put his hand on her shoulder and said, “We’re not always like this!” and laughed.
“We’re not!” Steve agreed. “But it’s a holiday today! You haven’t heard?
A giggling woman scraped her face off the table and cried, “Independence Day! Fourteen the Fourteenth!”
“Watch, watch this,” Steve said, and pointed at their TV.
An image of space flickered onto the screen, and suddenly the whole group was yelling and cheering. They had locked onto a coded channel from Clarke, Steve explained, and though they could not decode its messages, they had used it as a beacon to aim their station’s optical telescope. The image from the telescope had been transferred onto the commons TV, and there it was, the black sky and the stars blocked at the center by the shape they had all learned to recognize, the squared-off metallic asteroid with the cable extending out of it. “Now watch!” they yelled at the puzzled travelers. “Watch!”
They howled again, and some of them began a ragged countdown, starting at one hundred. Some of them were inhaling helium as well as nitrous oxide, and these stood below the big screen singing, “We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz! Because, because, because, because, because of the wonderful things she does! We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz! We’re… off to see the wizard!…”
Nadia found herself shivering. The shouted countdown got louder and louder, reached a shrieked “ Zero.”
A gap appeared between the asteroid and the cable. Clarke disappeared from the screen instantly. The cable, gossamer among the stars, dropped out of view almost as fast.
Wild cheers filled the room, for a moment at least. But it caught, as if on a hitch, as some of the celebrants were distracted by Ann leaping to her feet, both fists at her mouth.
“He’s sure to be down by now!” Simon cried to Ann over their din. “He’s sure to be down! It’s been weeks since he called!”
Slowly it got quiet. Nadia found herself at Ann’s side, across from Simon and Sasha. She didn’t know what to say. Ann was rigid, her eyes bugged out horribly.
“How did you break the cable?” Sax asked.
“Well, the cable’s pretty much unbreakable,” Steve replied.
“You broke the cable?” Yeli exclaimed.
“Well, no, we separated the cable from Clarke, is what we did. But the effect is the same. That cable is on its way down.”
The group cheered again, somewhat more weakly. Steve explained to the travelers over the noise: “The cable itself was pretty much impervious, it’s graphite whisker with a diamond sponge-mesh gel double-helixed into it, and they’ve got smart pebble defense stations every hundred kilometers, and security on the cars that was intense. So Arkady suggested we work on Clarke itself. See, the cable goes right through the rock to the factories in the interior, and the actual end of it was physically as well as magnetically bonded to the rock of the asteroid. But we landed with a bunch of our robots in a shipment of stuff from orbit, and dug into the interior and placed thermal bombs outside the cable casing, and around the magnetic generator. Then today we set them all off at once, and the rock went liquid at the same time the magnets were interrupted, and you know Clarke is going like a bullet, so it slipped right off the cable end just like that! And we timed it so that it’s going directly away from the sun, and twenty-four degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic as well! So it’ll be damned hard to track it down. At least we hope so!”