Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [11]
Minutes passed and nothing happened. She heard something fall and strike the invisible floor. They grew restless. In their experience, explosions were supposed to happen when they were triggered.
The first signs of stress showed up at zero plus eighteen minutes and change. Bright lines appeared around Alpha Maxim’s belt. The chromosphere became visibly turbulent. Fountains of light erupted off the solar surface.
At zero plus twenty-two minutes the sun began to visibly expand. The process was slow: it might have been a balloon filling gradually with water. Enormous tidal forces started to overwhelm the spherical shape, flattening it, disrupting it, inducing monumental quakes.
At twenty-six minutes, eleven seconds, it exploded.
It was often possible to make a reasonable guess at a person’s age from the physical characteristics his or her parents had selected. Different eras favored different skin tones, body types, hair colors. Concepts of beauty changed: women from one age tended to be well developed, their centers of gravity, as Solly Hobbs had once remarked, several centimeters in front of them; another era favored willowy, boyish women. Men’s physiques ranged from heroic to slim. The current fashion was to consider bulk as somehow in poor taste. Males born during the next few years were going to resemble a generation of ballet dancers.
During the eighties, parents of both sexes had opted for classic features, the long jawline, eyes wide apart, straight nose. Teenage girls now looked by and large as if they’d stepped down from pedestals in the Acropolis. Kim had come from an earlier time when the pixie look was in vogue. She tried to compensate by maintaining a straightforward no-nonsense attitude, and by avoiding a programmed tendency to cant her head and smile sweetly. She also adapted her hair style to cover her somewhat elvin ears.
Solomon Hobbs was from an age that had favored biceps and shoulders, although he had allowed things to deteriorate somewhat. Solly was one of the Institute’s four starship pilots. Kim had come to know him, however, not through an official connection, but because of their mutual interest in diving. Solly had been a member of the Sea Knights when Kim joined.
He had clear blue eyes, brown hair that was always in disarray, and a careless joviality that contrasted with a culture that thought of having fun as serious business, something one did to maintain a proper psychological balance.
After the lights came on and her guests had drifted away, Kim caught a cab which deposited her at the foot of Solly’s pier. The dive on the Caledonian was to be their way of welcoming the new year. They’d been looking forward to it for weeks, but as they rounded Capelo Island, riding a cold wind, Kim began to describe her conversation with Sheyel. It wasn’t a story she enjoyed telling, because it cast her former teacher as a crank. Yet she felt driven to talk about it. When she finished, he asked gently how much confidence she had in Tolliver.
“If you’d asked me two days ago—” she said.
“People lose touch as they get older.” Solly squinted at the sun. The sloop rose and fell. “It happens.”
They listened to the sea.
“I almost feel,” said Kim, “as if I owe it to Emily to do something.”
“Emily would tell you to forget it.”
Kim laughed. That was funny. Emily was by no means a mark for every weird idea, but there had been something in her that wanted to get beyond the merely physical universe. Given a choice between daylight and darkness, she’d have opted for the night every time. “No,” she said. “Emily would have wanted me to do something. Not just let it go.”
“Like run up to Severin?”
She made a face. “I know. It’s dumb even to think about it.”
Solly shrugged. “Turn it into a vacation.”
“I’m going to have to get back to him. To Sheyel. I don’t like the way we left things.”
“And you don’t want to call him and tell him—”
“—Right. That I didn’t bother to check