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storm," the mom continued. "We will use neutrino pressure to propel us out of
this system."
"We'll be like a seed in the wind," Jennifer said. "If we hold together, we'll
be blown out into deep space."
"The post-explosion environment will be rich with volatiles from Wormwood,"
the mom continued. "We will gather volatiles even as we are propelled
outward."
"They want to destroy us, but they may save us!" Jennifer said.
"Then why are they doing this?" Harpal asked. "Why give us this gift?"
"Very likely, they will destroy us," the mom said. "But the opportunity
exists, if we are skillful, and very quick. Alert the crew to field
confinement and super acceleration. We will begin in a few minutes."
Martin watched the star sphere. Haze covered Nebuchadnezzar's surface now,
shot through with flashes of intense white light. The neutronium and
anti-neutronium seeds deep within heated the body's surface to plasma; there
would not be sufficient energy released to place any of the planet's material
in orbit about itself, as had happened with Earth; indeed, Nebuchadnezzar
would keep its spherical shape. But for the next few million years, the
planet's surface would consist of cooling magma.
Martin could not exult at this small victory. Assistance in a suicide was no
triumph; self-
immolation designed to trap arsonists was comically absurd. But to have the
fire offer them a chance at life, a chance to move on and finish the Job&
He began to laugh. Jennifer joined him. Harpal grimaced and left the nose to
coordinate the
crew. Hans stared at them as if they were crazy, then shook his head
vigorously, and whooped.
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Theresa would have appreciated this
, Martin thought.
William would have simply loved it
.
They recovered their craft and prepared for the storm.
Wormwood's death-throes took seven hours. The star's magnetic
field restructured to push the solar wind up through the poles whipped about
like hair blown in the wind, clearly visible as the surface layers boiled and
churned and cast up dancing streamers. The star began to resemble a fiery
turnip with leafy top and frantic roots.
Within, billions of neutronium weapons ate through the star's dense inner
layers and ended their unseen, unknown orbits, mated positive to negative,
anti em to matter. The ambiplasma generated by these deadly copulations
marched steadily outward.
The moms timed everything.
Hans ordered the crew into the schoolroom and fell silent, sitting beside the
star sphere, watching with half-lidded eyes as things beyond his command and
control beyond his comprehension began to happen.
Martin sat nearby, his body frightened but his mind too lost in sorrow to care
what would happen next. He watched Rosa Sequoia, who squatted in an awkward
lotus in one corner, rocking gently, eyes closed. He envied her personal
treasure of spiritual solace, her ability to be lost in an inner reality that
did not match the external. What had she found, that Martin would never find?
The images in the star sphere conveyed only an abstract meaning. What were the
energies of a dying star if not incomprehensible? A human life all their
lives could be snuffed with a paltry fraction of the energy about to be
released.
They had climbed to the top of an enormous wave, years before, and now the
wave crashed down, and any slight bubble in that foaming maelstrom would be
sufficient to snuff their candles utterly and completely, forever darkness, no
amens.
The peculiarity of Martin's state of mind was that he did not so much think
these things as feel them, joined to his body's fear like an anatomical
footnote.
Fear made its own opiate. Emotions cannot ride forever at high intensity;
within an hour, terror declined to numbness, with clear and selfless
perception. Certainty of death was replaced by light curiosity, an intensity
of unattached thought impossible only a few minutes before.
Scattered parts of his overwhelmed self made ironic commentary:
This is the dark night of the soul Not hardly, this is just panic carried to
its extreme Look at them they do not experience this the way you do They must
They must
Visceral moans filled the schoolroom as they felt the fields lock down.
Martin's body tingled and all internal motions slowed.
Waves of darkness passed as the fields subdued their eyes, all their physical
senses.
Yet something remained. What could possibly be left to him? Undefined memory,
perhaps an illusion; who could say where that memory began? During their
sequestering, or after, as a balancing of his brain's chemical bookkeeping&
What he later remembered was a fairy tale thread of personal continuity, all
thought reduced to parable, and an extraphysical awareness of the star in its
last stages. That such memory and perception were not possible did not make it
less compelling.
Wormwood blossomed like a daffodil with twin streamers of intense blond hair
and a sigh of neutrinos, phantom particles now in such numbers they blew
millions of times stronger than hurricane winds above the tingling in his
body, the battle of the neutrinos to change his chemistry, pushing denser than
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