“Already, I feel I’ve come home,” Jon Foy, the first official Kronian governor, who would be taking over from her, replied.
* * *
There was a reception that evening in the former general mess room and cafeteria, now enhanced into being something of a social center. It was both a welcoming party for Foy and his administration, and a delayed celebration of Earth’s consolidation as an extension of Kronia. For some reason, an overt display of victory and jubilation before Saturn’s ascendancy was formally ratified would not have felt right. Now it seemed that everyone was making an extra effort to make good the lost time.
Of course, there were impromptu speeches and toasts. Naarmegen proposed one to “Landen Keene, Robin Delucey, and Jansinick Wernstecki, the three people who saved Earth and the Aztec, and brought about the Pragmatist downfall.” Keene objected that they couldn’t have done it without Charlie Hu and Kerry Heeland, and Sariena and Shayle . . . and then added Reese, Yarbat, and others not present, finally throwing out his arms and exclaiming, “Hell, it was all of us!” which earned him cheers. Later in the evening, Adreya steered Vicki aside to learn more about the latest ideas on Earth’s origins, and he finally got a chance to talk with Vorse and Foy.
Apparently, the motion of Athena was still uncertain.
“It’s not over,” Vorse told him. “We’ve been getting better information now that we can coordinate observations from Saturn and Earth. The period we’ve just been through could turn out to be the end of a lull. Athena is causing another wave of disruption among the Asteroids. Kronia could be facing more danger yet.”
“How bad?” Keene asked.
“Nobody can say.”
Foy elaborated. “But it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that the culture we’ve brought into being out at Saturn could be rendered nonviable—at least, for some time. And even pulling everyone back to Earth wouldn’t necessarily eliminate all the risks. Things could get bad again here too. Suppose Venus were sent into a repeating resonant pattern in the way that Emil Farzhin says happened five thousand years ago with Mars.”
It didn’t come as a total surprise. That had been one of the reasons for sending the Varuna back to reconnoiter the situation on Earth, after all, and for the rush in sending the equipment that the Aztec had brought. The problems entailed in being forced to begin again on Earth should be straightforward enough to deal with compared to those of surviving in airless, lifeless space environments, and all the other things the Kronians had already learned to regard as normal. But as a first essential they would need safe refuges to retire to during periods of meteorite storms, floods, or other generally bad times. Not flimsy frameworks thrown up to maximize short-term rental returns on investment, like those that had constituted most of the cities now swept away or buried, but massive, non-corroding structures in high places, virtually embedded in and forming extensions of the earth itself.
“We’ve been giving it top priority,” Keene said. “Jan and his people are having a great time. They’ve got half a mountain out there cut into play blocks. It looks like the Nursery of the Gods.”
“We saw it on the way down from orbit,” Vorse said. “Very impressive. We’ll be going out tomorrow to see it.”
“It was just as well that we scheduled a further consignment,” Foy said.
“Very fortunate,” Keene agreed. He eyed Vorse. “Your idea, Mylor?”
Vorse shook his head. “No, it was Jon. Always the optimist.”
“Optimism pays off,” Foy told them.
The Gallian had brought a further consignment of the latest litho-tech equipment from Titan. After its departure from Saturn, more survivors had been found in parts of Asia and both North and South America. Accordingly, more shelter construction was being planned for bases to be sited at highland locations in Tibet, Bolivia, and the Rockies. A contact party put down by a lander from the Varuna had reported that the latter group, incredibly, included individuals that Keene himself had known and had last seen leaving in the last plane out from Vandenberg, heading for the Air Force survival fortress beneath Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. Pressures of other things had so far prevented him going there personally.