One crater so large that it by rights was a sea now occupied the lower quarter of the disk like an eye, and the mountains cast up in the center were a beady pupil. It overtopped the exact spot Tycho Crater once had occupied, as if some base or fortress there had been obliterated with a six-mile-wide meteor, or some other weapon yielding a ninety-teraton blast. Tiny ring arcs of dust and gravel orbited the moon, perhaps residue from the blast.
Menelaus was shocked—nay, offended—that the ancient body and the mysterious seas which had haunted so many love songs and images of his youth were now forever gone.
“It’s … it’s rotating,” he told Del Azarchel, unable to heterodyne into any tone of voice the infinite sense of loss and rage he felt. The globe would now turn its dark side once every two weeks toward her primary.
Del Azarchel was also enraged. “The print of my hand is gone. Look here, instead. This.”
In the vast crater that covered a quarter of the surface were the angles and sinewaves, arranged in dizzying, eye-defeating spirals and concentric ranks, an imprint of the Monument notation.
Montrose said, “They left us our own Monument? Can we translate it?”
“Not without considerably more calculation power than this ship currently…”
“Nope. We are not waking up your poxy monster brain. Let’s ask the survivors.”
That there was technological civilization still on Earth was not in doubt: in addition to the moon, two sails, nearly as broad as the main sail of the Emancipation, were orbiting at a half-geosynchronous rate. The Earth was not seen as the normal blue crescent astronauts approaching it tangentially to the sun would see: like a moving continent, a circle of light cast from the farside mirror was passing over the night of the world, and, equal and opposite, a circle of darkness hid the noonside of the world. The crescent of the Earth looked almost like a curving letter w, but only if the w were dotted like a small letter j.
Earth herself was shockingly unrecognizable: she had slowed her rate of spin, and the change in centrifugal force, imperceptible as it was, no longer created as large a bulge along her equator; therefore, Canada and Alaska and half of Russia were submerged in the polar sea, the Great Lakes basin was mingled with salt water. The Gulf of Mexico, on the other hand, was now an inland sea, for a second isthmus, of which Cuba and the Caribbean Islands were but hills, joined Florida to Northern Brazil.
Baja California was now the highest elevated of three peninsulas reaching into the Pacific like a hand whose fingertips dripped archipelagoes. India was now connected by an isthmus to Madagascar, making the Arabian Sea an inland lake larger than the Caspian.
A belt of the ocean severed South Africa from a combined Euro-Northafrican continent, and the Mediterranean basin, dry for many ages, had been flooded once more, lapping the slopes of the White Mountains and the Italian Alps. The higher elevations of Egypt and Libya were no more than large islands in this combined Mediterranean and Saharan sea; Mount Gibraltar and Mount Abyla were smaller islands, as was the lonely peak of Malta.
In the East, Australia and Indochina were now part of the Asian supercontinent, and the Sea of Japan was a dry and deep valley between the high plateaus of what had once been Manchuria, Korea, and Japan. In the West, a new land mass shaped like a snake had emerged from the mid-Atlantic ridge, an old fable of Plato now true, if in reverse. Antarctica was entirely submerged.
The ice caps were gone. The amount of water vapor in the air was far lower than it should have been. The sea level was lower by scores of meters than it should have been, even with the other catastrophic climatic changes.
“The orbit is more eccentric than it had been,” announced Del Azarchel. “Much hotter summers and much cooler winters. The ice caps return in winter, I suppose, and reach far down toward the temperate zone. The angle of interaction between the Earth’s magnetosphere and the surrounding solar environment should make aurora borealis and aurora australis visible year round and from every latitude. Other than that, from the surface this new orbit would provoke no obvious difference in the appearance of the skies. They even pointed the pole at the pole star, and imparted the exact same precession of the axes.”
“The South Pole,” grunted Menelaus dourly. “You’d think they’d get that detail right. But why did the Varmints move the Earth to a new orbit? What would be the point? And where are they now? Why aren’t they shooting at us?” At her current parabolic orbit approaching Earth, the Emancipation with sail deployed would have been remarkably visible. Everyone on Earth, even without binoculars, would have seen caught in her sails the bright image of a smaller and colder second sun rising in the east, getting a little bigger every day.
Del Azarchel said, “I don’t think the Virtue did this. Look at these figures.” And he sent as text a few thousand lines of Monument notational math, showing the type of electromagnetic impulse that would have been necessary to move an object the size of the Earth to a new inclination.
Menelaus was able to take in the whole equation at a glance, but did not see the significance at first. He paused, divided his mind into several subsections working at different subjective speeds and organizing the information in different patterns and data-groupings before he saw the point. He rejoined his mind into one frame, and sent a low whistle of astonishment along the audio channel.
Del Azarchel must have noticed the pause. “You could have asked.”
“I like reckoning things out for myself. Besides, if we are both thinking what I’m thinking we’re thinking, that’s independent confirmation. You think the Potentate died, wiped clean by the electromagnetic pulse.”
“Crippled rather than died, depending on electrically inert backups and failovers, but yes. And I think that such a pulse happened before the new orbit. We can reconstruct the order of events. The Hyades Virtue connected the Earth and sun with a flux tube. For what reason, I don’t know. That wiped the data out of the core mind. The whole mass of iron was aligned by the shock, and there was a line of plasma connecting the Earth to the sun. The Swans took advantage of it—I cannot tell if the flux tube lasted a second or lasted a decade—to maneuver the Earth into a new orbital inclination, at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic. Again, for what reason, I cannot fathom.”
A flux tube was a cylindrical region of space where the magnetic field at the side surfaces is parallel to those surfaces. The sun had many such tubes rising from its surface and falling back again in vast arches, paths of least resistance followed by solar flares. Jupiter and Io were connected by a complex dance of flux tubes, carrying heavier and lighter cargoes of cold plasma, either buoyantly expanding away from the giant planet, or massively sinking toward its storm-filled atmosphere.
Since Jupiter was Del Azarchel’s personal playground, the headquarters of the most massive project he, or any of the human race, had ever attempted, no doubt he was quicker to recognize the phenomena than Montrose.
Montrose said, “If we hadn’t been kicked off the planet by the damnified critters we created…”
“You created.…”
“… that got created somehow-or-’nuther, we would have been here to see the shindig.”
Del Azarchel sighed. “I am wondering where the aliens are. The Monument indicated that they were coming here to rule us. It would bring order and peace.”
“Peaceful as a pigsty. Farmer makes sure his swine don’t fight each other. And all he asks in return is pork, bacon, and ham.”
Del Azarchel said sardonically, “I can pick out human shapes occupying villages and towns, and the instruments show energy use along the seabeds, so the Melusine are not extinct. Our old friend the horse is still around, regrown from your Tomb archives. And … look at this image. Do you think it is a sporting event?”