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By Root 634 0

The whole thing was going to come unraveled before Sax or any of the rest of them who counted were ready. Jackie was ranting on cheerily in the living room, organizing a demonstration that might get ten thousand people into the park, maybe fifty, who could say? And if security responded with tear gas and rubber bullets and truncheons, people would get hurt, some killed; killed for no strategic purpose, people who might have lived a thousand years. And still Jackie went on, bright and enthusiastic, burning like a flame. Overhead the sun gleamed through a break in the clouds, bright silver, ominously large. Art came into the kitchen and sat at the table, switching on his AI and sticking his face into it. “Got a note from home Praxis on the wrist.” He read the screen, nose practically touching it.

“Are you nearsighted?” Maya said irritably.

“I don’t think so . . . oh man. Ka boom. Is Spencer out there? Get Spencer in here.”

Maya went to the doorway and signaled Spencer, who came in. Jackie ignored the disturbance and went on talking. Spencer sat down at the kitchen table beside Art, who was now sitting back, round-eyed and round-mouthed. Spencer read for five seconds and sat back in his chair, looked over at Maya with a strange expression. “This is it!” he said.

“What?”

“The trigger.”

Maya went to him and stood reading over his shoulder.

She held on to him, feeling a bizarre sensation of weightlessness. No more staving off the avalanche. She had done her job, she had just barely done it. At the very moment of failure, fate had turned.

Nirgal came into the kitchen to ask what was going on, attracted by something in their low voices. Art told him and his eyes lit, he couldn’t conceal his excitement. He turned to Maya and said, “It’s true?”

She could have kissed him for that. Instead she nodded, not trusting herself to speak, and went to the doorway to the living room. Jackie was still in the midst of her exhortation, and it gave Maya the greatest of pleasure to interrupt her. “The demonstration’s off.”

“What do you mean?” Jackie said, startled and annoyed. “Why?”

“Because we’re having a revolution instead.”

Part Ten

Phase Change

Prologue

They were pelican surfing when apprentices jumping up and down on the beach alerted them that something was wrong. They flew back in to the beach and stuck their landings on the wet sand, and got the news. An hour later they were up to the airport, and soon after that taking off in a little Skunkworks space plane called the Gollum. They headed south, and when they reached 50,000 feet they were somewhere over Panama, and the pilot tilted it up and kicked in the rockets, and they were pressed back in their big g chairs for a few minutes. The three passengers were in cockpit seats behind the pilot and copilot, and out their windows they could see the exterior skin of the plane, which looked like pewter, begin to glow, and then quickly turn a vivid glowing yellow with a touch of bronze to it, brighter and brighter until it looked as if they were Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, sitting together in the fiery furnace and coming to no harm.

When the skin lost some of its glow, and the pilot leveled them off, they were about eighty miles above the Earth, and looking down on the Amazon, and the beautiful spinal curve of the Andes. As they flew south one of the passengers, a geologist, told the other two more about the situation.

“The West Antarctic ice sheet was resting on bedrock that is below sea level. It’s continental land, though, not ocean bottom, and under West Antarctica it’s a kind of basin and range zone, very geothermally active.”

“West Antarctica?” Fort asked, squinting.

“That’s the smaller half, with the peninsula sticking up toward South America, and the Ross ice shelf. The west ice sheet is between the mountains of the peninsula and the Transantarctic Mountains, in the middle of the continent. Here, look, I brought a globe.” He pulled from his pocket an inflatable globe, a child’s toy, and blew it up and passed it around the cockpit.

“So, the western ice sheet,