but people were throwing back their chairs and starting for the exits.
Breia, middle-aged, dark-haired, a teacher on vacation, had looked out the window, trying to see what was happening. His angle was bad so he couldn’t see much, but his hair stood straight up when she gasped and whispered Run in a terrified voice. Without another sound she threw back her chair and fled.
Outside, a wall of snow appeared and bore down on them. It had been smooth, rhythmic, almost choreographed, a crystal tide flowing down the side of the mountain, engulfing trees and boulders and, finally, the heavy stone wall that marked the perimeter of the chalet’s grounds. As he watched, it swept over someone. Man or woman, it happened too quick to be sure. Somebody trying to run.
Wescott had sat quietly, knowing there was no place to hide. He took a sip of his coffee. It was as if time had stopped. The desk clerk, a simulation, blinked off. So did the host and one of the doormen. The skiers near the front door scattered.
Wescott held his breath. The rear and sidewalls blew into the dining room and there was a sharp pain and the sensation of falling.
Somewhere, doors slammed.
Something wet was running down his ribs. Tickling him, but he couldn’t reach it.
Breia hadn’t gotten out of the dining room. She was probably within a few meters. It was hard to speak. He didn’t seem to have much air in his lungs. But he whispered her name.
He heard a voice, far away. “Over here.” But it was a male voice.
And then there were boots chunking through snow.
“See if you can get him out, Harry.”
Somebody was digging.
“Hurry.”
No answer though from Breia.
He tried to cry out, let them know where he was, but he was too weak. No need anyhow. Margaret knew he was in trouble, and she was surely out there somewhere, with the rescue workers, trying to find him.
But a deeper darkness was coming. The rubble on which he lay was fading, and he stopped caring about the secret that he and Margaret shared, stopped caring about the timber that pinned him down. Margaret was okay. Had to be.
And he slid away from his prison.
ONE
. . . But what provided the truest sense of the antiquity of (the Egyptian tomb) was to see graffiti scrawled on its walls by Athenian visitors, circa 200 C.E. And to know the place was as old for them, as their markings are for me.
—Wolfgang Corbin,
The Vandal and the Slavegirl, 6612 C.E.
1429, THIRTY-ONE YEARS LATER
The station was exactly where Alex said it would be, on the thirteenth moon of Gideon V, a gas giant with no special characteristics to recommend it other than that it circled a dead star rather than a sun. It was in a deteriorating orbit, and, in another hundred thousand years, according to the experts, it would slip into the clouds and vanish. In the meantime it was ours.
The station consisted of a cluster of four domes and an array of radio telescopes and sensors. Nothing fancy. Everything, the domes and the electronic gear and the surrounding rock, was a dark, patchy orange, illuminated only by the mud brown gas giant and its equally mud brown ring system. It was easy enough to see why nobody had noticed the station during several routine Survey visits. Gideon V had just become only the third known outstation left by the Celians.
“Magnificent,” Alex said, standing by the viewport with his arms folded.
“The site?” I said. “Or you?”
He smiled modestly. We both knew he wasn’t good at being humble.
“Benedict strikes again,” I said. “How did you figure it out?”
I hesitate to say Alex ever looked smug. But that day he was close. “I am pretty good, aren’t I?”
“How’d you do it?” I’d doubted him all the way, and he was enjoying his moment.
“Simple enough, Kolpath. Let me explain.”
He had done it, of course, the way he always did things. By imagination, hard work, and methodical attention to detail. He’d gone through shipping records and histories and personal memoirs and everything else he could lay hands on. He’d narrowed it down, and concluded that Gideon V was an ideal central location for the exploratory operations then being conducted by the Celians. The planet, by the way, was given the Roman numeral not because it was the fifth world in the system. It was, in fact, the only one, the others having either been swallowed whole or torn from their orbits by a passing star.