“Let’s go out and have a look,” Steve suggested with a guilty glance at Ann and Simon. A lot of them suited up and went outside. The travelers contented themselves with a video image piped in from the exterior camera, alternating that with video clips gleaned from the satellites. Clips shot from the night-side surface were spectacular; they showed a blazing curved line, cutting down like the edge of a white scythe that was trying to chop the planet in two.
Even so they found it hard to concentrate, hard to focus on what they were seeing and understand it, much less feel anything about it. They had been exhausted when they had landed, and now they were even more exhausted, and yet it was impossible to sleep; more and more video clips were being passed along, some from robot cameras flying in drones on the day side, showing a blackened steaming swath of desolation— the regolith blasted to the side in two long parallel ejecta dikes, banking a canal full of blackness, black all studded with a brecciated mix of stuff which got more exotic as the impact became more severe, until finally a drone camera sent along a clip of a horizon-to-horizon trench of what Sax said must be rough black diamonds.
The impact in the last half hour of the fall was so strong that everything far to north and south was flattened; people were saying that no one close enough actually to see the cable hit survived it, and most of the drone cameras had been smashed as well. For the final thousands of kilometers of the fall, there were no witnesses.
A late clip came in from the west side of Tharsis, from the second pass up that great slope. It was brief but powerful: a white blaze in the sky, and an explosion running up the west side of the volcano. Another shot, from a robot in West Sheffield, showed the cable blasting by just to the south; then an earthquake or sonic blast struck, and the whole rim district of Sheffield fell off the rim in a mass, dropping slowly to the caldera floor five kilometers below.
After that there were any number of video clips bouncing around the fragmented system, but they proved to be only repeats, or late arrivals, or film of the aftermath. And then the satellites began to shut down again.
It had been five hours since the fall began. The six travelers slumped in their chairs, watching or not watching the TV, too tired to feel anything, too tired to think.
“Well,” Sax said, “now we’ve got an equator just like the one I thought the Earth had when I was four years old. A big black line running right around the planet.”
Ann glared at Sax so bitterly that Nadia worried she would get up and hit him. But none of them moved. The images on the TV flickered, and the speakers hissed and crackled.
• • •
They saw the new equator line in person, the southern-most one anyway, on the second night of their flight toward Shalbatana Vallis. In the dark it was a broad straight black swath, leading them west. As they flew over it Nadia stared down somberly. It hadn’t been her project, but it was work, and work destroyed. A bridge brought down.
And that black line was also a grave. Not many people on the surface had been killed, except on the east side of Pavonis, but most if not all of those on the elevator must have been, and that in itself meant several thousand people. Most of whom had probably been all right until their part of the cable hit the atmosphere and burned up.
As they flew over the wreckage Sax intercepted a new video of the fall. Someone had already stitched up a chronological montage from all the images that had been sent onto the net live, or in the hours immediately afterward. In this montage, a very effective bit of work, the final clips were of the last section of the cable, exploding into the landscape. The impact zone was never anything but a moving white blob, like a flaw in the tape; no video was capable of registering such illumination. But as the montage continued the images had been slowed down and processed in every way possible, and one of these processed images was the final clip, an ultra-slow motion shot in which one could see details that would have been impossible to spot live. And so they could see that as the line had crossed the sky, the burning graphite had stripped away first, leaving an incandescent double helix of diamond, flowing majestically out of a sunset sky.
All a gravestone, of course, the people on it already dead at that point, burned away; but it was hard to think of them when the image was so utterly strange and beautiful, a vision of some kind of fantasy DNA, DNA from a macroworld made of pure light, plowing into our universe to germinate a barren planet. . . .
Nadia stopped watching the TV, moved into the copilot’s seat to help spot the other plane. All that long night she stared out the window, unable to sleep, unable to get the image of that diamond descent out of her mind’s eye. It was the longest night of their trip so far, for her. It seemed a kind of eternity before dawn came.