When the latest technology of the world revives a plague of apparent global madness that annihilates urban civilization, a new world is spawned under the sway of the moon and the human race is forever altered.
Empty Cities of the Full Moon, Chapter One
Chapter 1
A Boy and His Dog Who Fell to Earth
2032
Universe A
"Yo-ho, yo-ho, a spacer's life for me!" John Drinan sang to his big mastiff dog and constant companion, Ozymandias. "Drink to that, Oz m'boy?"
Ozymandias cocked his jowly head quizzically at John, who laughed, whipped off his suit gauntlets, and scratched the big dog behind the ears. John brought a half-full bottle of Belgian lambic ale to his lips and drained it. He'd already celebrated enough so that he couldn't tell, without looking at the label, whether the flavor of this particular bottle was peche or framboises. No matter. More of both flavors waited in the pressure locker, anyway.
Taking off his maroon knit cap, he ran his free hand through his longish, greasy dark hair before allowing it to scratch and settle in his thin beard. If he wanted to celebrate around other people, he'd have to clean himself up once he reached the orbital habitat. Bathe once a year, whether I need to or not, he thought with a smile.
Looking at his reflection in the glass of the bottle, he saw a distorted image of a young man with deep-set eyes behind archaic wire-rimmed glasses, his features made all the sharper by the glass's convexity and the gauntness of his face. As always, his thin frame was dressed in bulky gray spacer's coveralls and heavy space boots-the whole uniform overlaid with a Jackson Pollack drip-camouflage of paint and stains.
"This place is a mess," John muttered, shaking his head. Around Oz stood archaeologically stratified clutter. The work area in the cabin of his Solar Harvester Travel-All, the Helios, doubled as a long-time bachelor apartment. "But at least we're a rich mess."
Less than an hour had passed since he cashed out his completion bonus. He'd gotten the robotic asteroid miners trained in time and delivered them to the big mass-driver tug Swallowtail right on schedule. His seldom-seen bosses had to shell out the full amount-good pay, but the time had been lonely, even for a solitary guy.
A flash from the port side caught his eye. Then a second flash. John hunched forward. Fireworks? To celebrate the impending launch of the Swallowtail and the opening of the two new habitats? No, not in the airless void. The location-low Earth orbit-was wrong, too.
Half a dozen bright points of light were flashing into view now, from around the other side of the Earth. Unlike fireworks, those lights were staying on, not guttering and dying.
Voice-activating the main viewing screens, John picked out the distant gleam of the two new space colonies and the shine of the asteroid tug behind him. The first of the orbital habitats shone nearer at hand. Earth stood partly in darkness; those points of light rose away from it. Between Earth and the orbital habitat flashed dimmer glints: the necklace of X-shaped structures he'd heard the media calling X-sats, when he hadn't been too busy to pay attention. He gathered the X-shaped satellites were causing heightened tensions between Earth and its first space colony.
John called up the location of one of the X-sats in its ring-around-the-planet necklace. He sat back as the viewscreen's optics zoomed in on that location. At first he thought it was a wobble in the optics, but he soon saw that something about the X-sat was changing as he watched. The X-shaped satellite was canting over, altering its orientation. It began to slowly separate into halves that reminded John of "greater than" and "less than" signs.
He had the screen pan back until four of the X-sats hovered in his field of view. They too were separating into halves and drawing apart, like chromosomes moving from metaphase to anaphase in some enormous dividing cell.
He zoomed in on the bright points moving up from Earth. Magnified, each of them was a stealthy blue-black above its burning engines-and all of them looked entirely too much like United Nations and Corporate Presidium troop shuttles. The thought occurred to him that they might be ships of an occupation force, perhaps part of an armada headed toward the orbital habitat. He whistled softly.
"Hoo, boy. What have we gotten ourselves into, Oz?"
A brief but intense flash of light made John blink and Oz bark. When John opened his eyes, he found he had not been blasted out of space. The nearer group of half Xs, however, were much closer to each other-and much closer to him. He ordered Helios's navigation computer to plot a track for the divided X-sats. In a moment more, however, even before the ship announced it, John saw that the nearer of the halved X-sats were reeling in, directly toward Helios-a cloud of less-thans pulled along invisible spindles, left-arrows fired along lines of force.
John had only a moment to wonder why his ship was the pole toward which these spindles converged-to wonder who or what might be at the other, "greater than" pole, to wonder who might be behind it all-before paths of light spiked along the spindles and all around him. In his lambic bottle reflection, a lambent knot of flickering fire danced above his forehead until his eyes began jittering so fiercely in his face that he became blind to his immediate environs.
That, however, did nothing to decrease the inner visions flooding through his mind. He saw crowds of people, their eyes remming furiously in their skulls for the instant it took this Light to blast into their heads. He saw Earth from every side clasped in wings bright with a billion billion lightpath pinions. He saw the face of his lost cousin, Jiro, and heard, months after death, that cousin's voice, which he had never heard in life, calling the X-shaped structures information refractors and using even stranger words to describe what was happening.
The boundary between outer and inner vision, between external and internal reality, vanished. The Light seemed to be opening a vortex around him, a whorling ring of light. In it he saw all times at one place and all spaces at one time. Was his ship moving and the vortex standing still, or the vortex moving and his ship standing still? No way to tell. Around him, all time was one time, the standing wave and traveling catastrophe of the present bent round itself into the shape of eternity, of innumerable nearly parallel universes branching off each other at every instant, forming a vast plenum less branched like a tree than webbed and woven like an impossibly complex tapestry-
2032
Universe A Prime
John came back into normal space with memories-dim because of their overwhelming number, yet also deeply interfused with the impression that his cousin, Jiro, had something to do with that Light. But how? Jiro was dead; had been for months. John had been right there in the orbital habitat with Jiro's older brother, Seiji, when the death had been announced in a phone call from Seiji's mother.
He shook his head and rubbed his eyes, then checked his ship's screens. Everything seemed in order. The nearest orbital habitat was still there, the Swallowtail was still there-though they were both receding a good deal faster than they had any right to. Where were the X-sats and troop shuttles? They had disappeared as completely as if they'd never existed.
The ship's optics showed Earth growing-too big and too fast-on the screen before him. Alarms began to sound. John checked his ship's velocity. Nearly 220,000 kilometers per hour? But that was impossible! What could have kicked up Helios's speed this way?
Helios was too near Earth and going far too fast to pull out of Earth's gravity-well without tearing herself apart. John voice-activated all ship's retrorockets and ran the trajectory of a catastrophic braking maneuver. It would cut their speed down, but the ship would not survive. He slammed on his suit gauntlets and took up the space helmet he wore as seldom as possible.
"Into the escape pod, Oz!"
The dog bounded awkwardly away toward the pod's open door and John made his decision. He commanded the ship to initiate the braking maneuver. Helios began to shudder. Locking his helmet over his head, John saw the ship's status readouts come on in the visor's heads-up display. In the next instant he dove into the escape pod, then strapped himself and Oz into their crash couches in the mindless blur of his moving hands.
The shuddering of Helios grew steadily from tic to palsy to spasm. The braking and breaking maneuver appeared to be working, though. Ship's velocity fell to 100,000 clicks, then dropped still farther. Trying to ignore the ship's seismic shuddering, John waited an endless white-knuckled moment longer. Then at the last possible instant, praying he hadn't waited too long for clean separation, he blew the explosive bolts, jettisoning the escape pod.
The escape vehicle departed the dying Helios with a velocity less than one fourth of the speed the lost mother ship was clocking when John sent it into catastropic braking. Good, but not good enough. If they were to survive, he would have to step their velocity down still more, before the atmosphere around them thickened much further.
Less a pod than a smooth-edged isosceles triangle-a lifting body with crash couches in the nose at its apex and stubby winglets at the far ends of the triangle's base-the jettisoned spacecraft plummeted Earthward. And whoever called this thing a "lifting body" was dead wrong, John thought as he fired the craft's all too puny engines. A falling body was all it really was-but hopefully one that would fall slowly enough that he and Oz might survive the impact.
As best he could, John steered the craft in a long, falling suborbital trajectory. The tiled underside of the escape pod began to heat and flare. Orbiting means falling all the while, he reminded himself. The way that walking, too, is falling, and catching yourself from falling. They had taken a giant step. He hoped this falling star caught itself before they stumbled fatally.
The cabin grew hot. Damn! Their speed and angle of entry were right up against the red...
