neck craning to the sky. The slingship was close to gone, a gigantic suppository sliding into the flaccid bottom of the clouds.
“I don’t think so, Dad.”
“What do you know?” His face clenched, eyes blinking furiously.
“It’s what she always says.”
Uh-oh, she thought, as his father began to turn back.
“Like when Farter got flattened by the transport,” the boy added.
“Farter? That mutt you fed our rations to? The one that tried to take your leg off?”
Damn. She had said it, and so said nothing now.
Petey nodded, not missing his former scary pet at all. “That’s why, Dad—that’s why she said it.”
“Said what?” A grimace.
“‘Good Riddance’.”
His father shook his head, clueless but beginning to wonder. Petey stood stretched between them, holding one hand each; she looked over the boy, looked back at his father and gave up nothing. Soon they heard the last moans fading and raised their faces again, to see the cloud’s anal pucker encircling and then sealing over the silver shrinking sack.
Were the clouds around that final swirl, she wondered, already growing lighter? No, not here, not yet, but far above, perhaps. A hundred years of solar light, blasting though the vacuum. The buckyballs' destruction was just beginning, and with too few souls down here to turn back that healing tide. Too few souls, and nothing left to burn.
Unfortunately, as she’d discovered all those years ago, the same solar radiation would degrade every other type of buckyloid—the buckyglass and buckygels and buckalloys, bucklybdenum and buckyluminum and especially the buckytubes—no matter how complex, how semi-metallic, how marvelously lightweight yet strong. The process took the same hundred years, and the ship’s shining alloy prow had been the first thing to go up. A full century, and she’d kept her little secret; only Petey had come close.
She liked to think she wasn’t entirely a monster, in fact had left timed messages—suggestions, really—for the Captain and his darling onboard media. Not all the levels would blow at once, and if the crew and passengers worked together, they could potentially survive. A new hull of patchwork iron, for instance, smelted from the waste that had pulled them aloft. Or a few years of bucky-free nanotube research, which, with luck, could lead to a more resistant cable. Because if that sprung... well. Not pretty. Not pretty at all. But still, she brightened, they might fashion a solar shield, or...
All the theoretically successful back-up scenarios that a billion hurtling humans might need, courtesy of the Arkitect. Providing all the rationalizations she might need, though she’d be too busy down here to obsess. Perhaps as busy, although she doubted it, as they’d be up there.
“Was that the right answer?” the boy asked, “Good Riddance?” Still gazing, as they all were, at the closing sky.
She tousled Petey’s hair.
Wise child.
o:o:o:o:o
For more, please visit:
howtoliveforever.com
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Short Stories:
Dr. Lucky
Casey Travels West
Novels:
How To Live Forever
The Mortalist
Thrilling Romance
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