A new lifetime, a new age, and still I think of you. It doesn’t flatter me to think my emotions may be as frozen as this world of ice. There, I’ve done it again, said something wrong. Something to upset you, as so often and so easily I used to do. But certainly the fate of our Earth must be of greater interest than these faults of mine.

“How?” you ask —I imagine your quizzical look— “how have you put it all together?” Well, my dear, after all, I was a stringer for the Post-Gazette. (I can hear you laughing even now, a sound I seem to remember more clearly than your voice.)

I’ve found there are still records. The scholars of the Ayelsford found them, too. And I was lucky enough to uncover an entire library in a frozen city on a hill, sitting at the edge of the world. Call it Ultima Thule if you will; its citizens called it Uzzel.

And so I learned of the Great Change. The day the sky fell.

I remember my own journal of that day was filled with rationalizations and recriminations about our parting. A pall had come over my thoughts, a darkness no talk of doomsday could brighten.

All about me filtered the trickle of speculation. On the news and the net, there came the murmurs that would lead, first to full-voiced concern, then to the eventual roar of panic.

To me, these were nothing more than distractions outside my walls. Literally, they were beyond the basement sanctuary in which I had ensconced myself. I had stopped rising for work. Stopped taking calls. My greatest interest, as I recall, lay in rationing what remained of the whiskey. Those few bottles that stood tall and lean upon my shelves.

I remember feeling grateful that even my friends had things other than me to worry about. No one called or stopped by, and hour by hour I visualized only our last moments together at the airport, when you turned away and I began to cry.

That doomsday was upon us seemed no more important than reports of a fire in Malibu or a twister in Kansas. Real as they were, disasters always happened to other people, in other places. Not to me. Even concerns for your safety escaped me. It was all nonsense, after all.

Then, as Maya is fond of saying, “the sky fell,” and all our self-importance was burned away.

Afterwards, when I awoke in the new world, I found that I was an insect and little more. An insect in the shape of a man. Or how I’ve always thought of insects: unconscious biological circuit boards with limbs, driven to the next task by their ancient programming. At first, self-awareness meant nothing. Though I could think, I could not act. My free will was but a memory. I was one in a tide of thousands, the mass of us swept along by a will outside our own.

Freedom was to come later and scholarship later still. But I felt I owed you the story, or that you were the only one who might understand. You always knew they were out there, those others beyond the stars. And this tale of tangled improbabilities is in part my plea and supplication. It’s the only act of love left to me. You were right and I was wrong.

Here then is what I know of the day the sky fell.

Ages past, before the formation of our own solar system was complete, another technical people grew up along the rim of the Milky Way. Their identity and history are unknown, their culture and beliefs forgotten. Of consequence only is a single technical achievement, one made at the height of their powers.

Having journeyed across the stars and listened patiently to the depths of heaven for century after century, it became apparent to these creatures that life beyond their own world was a rare phenomenon, often limited to lichen and remote kingdoms of bacteria.

Where space was vast, time proved vaster still, and it seemed the universe had yet to call any other actors forth with which they might share the stage. (As best I can tell, our own sun had yet to catch fire, nor would it shine for ages yet to come.)

As they matured, these others developed both the capability and temperament to seed the universe with life.

In time, they set automated and autonomous systems into motion. Probes were sent out to travel the galaxy, to find suitable worlds and then transform them. Of concern to us is but one such alien Probe, a single device which must have malfunctioned deep in space and countless millennia after its creators had faded from the spotlight of existence. (For no species lives forever.)

At some point during the probe’s endless journey, a defect took hold in the heart of the device. Components both critical and of immense power began to malfunction. These were the smallest of things, the nano-machines and directed matter, the microscopic and subatomic payload whose very mission was to transform worlds. As the problem grew, what had once taken the form of an interstellar craft began, ever so slowly, to disintegrate.

In much the way an uncontrolled cancer invades the body and produces chaotic and deadly growth, so the hive of little things within the probe began to multiply in a heedless manner, first increasing to absorb the probe, then reaching out to engulf any stray resource at hand, from interstellar dust to meteoroids, from cometary matter to asteroids of ice and iron.

In time, the probe came to resemble a vast amoeba, a shape of darkness moving from solar system to solar system. At other times it took on the appearance of a comet as the winds of a passing star shaped it into streamers, the sun and the probe dancing like partners in a waltz until the alien device spun away again into the formless dark.

Always at the probe’s core there remained a self-directed program, a stubborn mind of sorts trying futilely to regain control. It lost a little more influence with each passing century, yet never abandoned its mission: looking for the perfect world to sculpt into the form its masters had decreed. To make of one world a nursery for life. Life the intelligent; Life the indomitable; Life the powerful.

Then came Earth.

In the Age of Discovery

Maya

The girl who rides the wind.

Maya stood at the doorway to the outside world, her breath, flesh, and blood frozen by crisp blasts of glacial wind. A statue of icy hue, even the folds of her amber dress had become as unmoving as stone.

Her gaze was snow flecked. Unblinking.

Anyone wandering through the storm would have seen a silhouetted figure. A statue standing motionless beneath a ragged vertical slit in the mountain, backlit by light rising up from a tunnel, a tunnel only recently opened up in the rock. They might have imagined the figure to be a small sculpture abandoned in the snow: a veiled Madonna whose dark skin and dark eyes had taken on the fierce blue color of the ice.

But for her part, Maya was but lost in thought and more than a little afraid.

Skye and Erok had been gone too long and she could neither sense them nor hear the slightest whisper of their thoughts. She was alone

For companionship she had tried —once again— to bring Bear back to life, but what had stirred beneath her most determined touch was not Bear, but something else, something new that looked nothing like Bear and roamed the caverns all unknowing, fierce, loud, and wild.

For the moment, Maya did not have the patience to try again and she let the new thing wander as it would.

Until Bear’s valiant stand, Maya had had no idea the world beyond her sanctuary survived at all. Until a band of violent men found themselves deep in Maya’s palaces of gold and light, she knew nothing of the humans who still walked the earth. And yet, as astounding as their arrival proved to be, there was no room to give or accept welcome in the eyes of the raiders who had found her home.

They had come to take, not to talk.

Where Bear had fallen to their axes, not one of the intruders withstood the blow of Erok’s mighty paws, not with the cat maddened at the sight of Bear’s tortured frame and Maya screaming, lost to them in her grief. Even gentle Skye, panicked by the violation of their underground asylum, had tossed more than one of the raiders into an unmoving heap upon the rocks.

Before the last bloodied raider fell, Maya had withdrawn, falling like a tear into the deepest well of her sanctuary, hiding where neither her voice nor her sobs could be heard for a time. Only later would she return, sending both Skye and Erok out into the greater world they had never seen, first to remove the stink of corpses from their subterranean home, then to explore what had become of the world beyond their home.

Now they were gone, and Maya stood alone.

“Stay inside, dear. It’s too warm out today.”

The voice came coaxing, emanating sweetly from the opening in the rock behind where Maya stood. It belonged to her mother. The first new rush of wind erased it, but then it could be heard again. “Have you done your lessons today? Your favorites are on in the video room, but only…” Again the voice faded.

There would be no warm touch to draw Maya back into her sanctuary, and if the sterner tones of her father were to follow, they too would be no more than the memories Maya had given up for the stones to speak. Comforting memories from long ago.

She did not allow the stones to argue as her parents had. For in her last memories of them they had been angry, grappling at each other with words before she entered the room.

###

Watching from the doorway near the kitchen, Maya saw her father looking out through the large, slanting windows of the sunroom, examining the sky in the way he often did at the approach of a storm.

“What a morning. Look how bright that sky is!” he said. But Maya’s mother, pretending to care for plants nearby, lowered her head as if the words had been a blow.

“We should have gone, Jim. Don and Sue found a place in Adelaide. They would have taken us in.”

With that precious, secretive feeling she got when overhearing the exchange of others, Maya kept to the shadows, holding in the crook of one arm her favorite toys: a velvet bear, a die cast metal man, and the plastic figurine of a saber-tooth tiger. As she listened, the sounds of traffic began to rise above the sound of water being poured from her mother’s watering can. Somewhere in the distance an ambulance siren wailed.

Her father grunted, making a silly incongruous thing of the words her mother had spoken. “Australia?” He laughed. “Do you know what it’s like in Australia? More poisonous plants, bugs, and snakes down there than all the rest of the world combined. Besides, they’ll be back by the time we could get down there. All this nonsense will be over by noon, and I don’t see Don and Sue taking up opal mining.”

“I said we should have gone.”

“'Should have’ doesn’t help now, Terria. Just drop it! You know, you never seem to think the P.E. after my name means anything. I’m an engineer, for chrissakes; I can do the math. I understand what these guys are saying and how full of crap they are. And what about your friend, Devesh? He’s aerospace and doesn’t buy a word of it.” Her father paused, taking in a deep breath before resuming his vigil at the window. “Look, the sun’s been up for a while now. Not a cloud in the sky.”

“What about Maya?’

“What about Maya, Terr?”

A slight tremor ran the course of Maya’s arms, shivering along her spine. When her mother voiced her name it was in fear; her father had followed by saying it in anger.

“Could we send Maya?” Her mother looked up, forgetting the plants. “She’s been on planes before, and she likes Sue. I could pack her toys. That’s all she needs. She’ll be back before we know it. The airport isn’t that far. I know they’re really busy, but we could…” With each phrase Maya’s mother grew more agitated, her voice becoming a stream of words both fast and tremulous.

Maya watched her father turn to grasp her mother, now weeping, by the shoulders.

“Terria. Terria! You can’t get to the airport now. It would be insane.” He drew his wife close, his words changing, his tone meant to comfort and soothe. “Listen. It’s over. The sun is shining. This nonsense —like all the nonsense that ever came before it— is over. If they weren’t waiting for the comet, they’d be on the lookout for the Rapture, a plague, or an asteroid. The world doesn’t end. Global warming, Y2K, dozens and dozens of second comings. It’s never true.”

“But what about Maya?” her mother asked, her voice shaking, her cheeks newly wet with tears.

No longer comfortable in her surreptitious position, Maya entered the sunroom with a string of questions, more to interrupt than to gain any real response. “Mom, are you OK? Where’s Nanny today? Can I go outside for a while?”

Her father turned and smiled.

Clearing her cheeks with the back of her hand, Maya’s mother blinked back tears and sniffed, but something in her stiffened and took on the mantle of a parent with long practiced ease.

“Mom’s OK,” she said. “I was just thinking of something sad. Ms. Allison isn’t feeling well, so no nanny this weekend, but you can think of some nice way to welcome her back, Monday or Tuesday. I’m sure she’ll be back then.”

“Is she afraid of the comet?” Maya asked, keeping her eyes downcast. It was hard not to be aware of what had been the media’s preoccupation for months now, or that today was the day that the sky was supposed to fall.

“Just not feeling well,” came her father’s answer. Another siren sounded outside, this one closer than the last. “Now I told you not to worry about that comet nonsense. Look how clear the sky is.”

“Can I play outside?”

It was easy to notice her father’s hesitation, turning as he did to the windows and back, wrapped up in her question far more deeply than usual. “How about later? After lunch maybe? Since Nanny’s not here, I’ll go out with you.”

Lips pressed together in disappointment, but never one to argue, Maya bowed her head. Before she could think of the next thing to say, her mother was plucking Bear and the other toys from her arms, placing them on the sunroom floor.

“You spend too much time with Bear, young lady. You're getting too old for these toys. You have other friends, you know.”

“Not really…”

“Of course you do,” her mother interrupted. “Now, have you finished your school work for Monday?”

“No,” Maya answered, as confused as her many classmates had been by the conflicting signals of comfort and crisis, of continuity and dissolution. Was she really supposed to study if the sky was going to fall? She hesitated, her eyes on Bear and Skye and Erok at her feet. “Am I going to school on Monday?”

“Of course you are,” her father insisted. “Why wouldn’t you be?”

It was almost as if he expected an answer, and knowing the trouble she would bring upon her head by toying with the truth, Maya breathed deeply and looked about for a place of a moment into which she could disappear. Instead, her mother rescued her.

Having stepped outside the sunroom momentarily, and following up on the concern about class work, Maya’s mother returned with an electronic tablet. It was her daughter’s prImer, a well-worn device that had replaced the books and backpacks of previous generations. She placed the long strap of the prImer over Maya’s head and broke the spell of her father’s inquiry with a glance.

“Your history is keyed up. Math too. Don’t forget your dad wants to see an A next time.” For a second, Maya looked up to catch her mother’s eyes, but she wished she hadn’t. Behind the words, something was trembling. If the sky had not fallen yet, there was a fear in her mother’s eyes that even worse might be only moments away. “When you’re done with homework, you can queue up a movie. And I’ll come and check on you. We’ll make some popcorn. OK?”

Maya nodded without saying anything in return. Before turning to go, she quickly fell to one knee and scooped up the velvet bear, as well as the jointed metal man and his saber-toothed companion.

“And no going outside,” her mother called after her, the tears beginning to flow back into her voice more quickly than she could hide them. “Study in the vid room, where it’s quiet! No movies until you’re done, and no news!” As Maya trod away, her mother added, “And put on some shoes,” an admonition so routine as to give comfort and bring a smile to Maya's lips.

But with each footfall away from the sunroom, Maya thought more about how she wanted to understand what was going on outside, to see it for herself without parents or others telling her what to think about the way people were behaving or how there was or was not anything to see. The movie room, she knew, had no windows, and walls so thick there would be nothing to hear from the voices and horns and sirens drifting everywhere about.

Hugging Bear and keeping Skye and Erok close, Maya feigned obedience by reaching the movie room and setting some background music to play, but after a moment, when no footfalls echoed in the hall and she determined that neither her mother or father were following, Maya conspired with her inanimate companions to take the briefest of tours outside.

It was not unusual for Maya to reach the patio door with silent steps, or to have a feel for opening doors and screens with noiseless resolve. She could even do so one- handed, slipping through as easily with her toy companions as without. Having forgotten however about her electronic PrImer, let it swing against the door as she made her furtive exit, banging with an unwelcome sound.

Standing stock-still and thinking of excuses, Maya waited, holding her breath but, after a moment in which no one seemed to notice, she continued on with slow and careful steps, making her way outside.

The scene seemed strange, divided. One part was as still as Maya had been after her PrImer banged on the door, and like her, waiting for something to happen. The other part was far away, invisible from here, out toward the highway where horns sounded and a moving siren could still be heard. There were voices, all jumbled together and indistinguishable, but so many as to roll across the land like a distant thunder.

Close by, all seemed serene. Maya could see the clear blue sky, the big elm a dozen feet away, the loose hedges a few yards beyond that. A gray squirrel chattered behind a concealing bough. Not far from Maya’s bare feet, a robin canted its head to better see or hear the worm it was about to take.

Their house being on a hill, Maya could see over the hedge, usually catching the neighbor’s children at play near their pool, but today the water stood motionless and dappled with leaves.

When no one came to investigate the noise she had made, Maya ventured onto the patio, then out to the newly-mowed lawn, walking toward the elm tree.

She looked to the sky, because it was that great blue expanse, high above, that everyone had come to fear. It was supposed to fall, or a comet was to crash against it, or a big rock bounce off its heights. Some talked of a dark tail that was supposed to make it night, like the eclipse Maya remembered from just last summer.

But what Maya did not know, and few enough on Earth could precisely understand, were the complexities with which their planet spun and fell through the curving fabric of space. At once swiftly turning, pirouetting at more than 1,000 miles per hour near the equator, the Earth all the while fell about the sun, moving in orbit more than five dozen times faster still. And the sun was hurtling too, the entire solar system caught up in the inexorable rush of the Milky Way. A highway of stars.

Like a vehicle approaching from the opposite lane, the alien Probe came on. That darkness first detected by radioscopes from beyond the moon had a momentum all its own. Swifter than 150,000 miles per hour it came, barely slowed by the solar winds, rushing headlong toward a collision only the moon might shield, for all the powers of man —weapons, engines, gravitic wells, and endless prayer— had proven as dust against a grievous wind. And in the end, the timorous moon was to offer no shield.

So little of the universe, men learned too late, operates in terms of human scale and sensibilities. There would be no dramatic pall to hang across the sky, no storm front to warn those who watched and waited for its coming.

The probe and its vast cloud of directed matter —the cancerous comet it had become— lived on sunlight, absorbing its energies so efficiently as to leave no reflections behind. It was all but invisible, coming out of the darkness. Never passing between Earth and the sun.

In its last moments, the probe fell upon the swelling globe of Earth. Parts of the malfunctioning device were conscious still, watching as the terminator, that line between night and day, swept across a surface of blue sea and white cloud. It knew the energies about to be released and prepared as best it could to survive.

There was no trail of light, no fall through cascading halls of air. Meeting at such dramatic and opposed velocities, probe and planet drove together. A drum beat, a single blink would have seemed an eternity by comparison.

For Maya, glancing westward on a clear, blue morning, a glint of light low on the horizon stopped her breath. She could not have known where she stood. Where fate had placed her. That her bare feet, her brown eyes, her armful of toys, the simple pink computer dangling by a strap from her shoulder— that all this, but most importantly her mind and imagination, were centered so exactly that the core of the probe and her own young thoughts merged in one millionth of a millionth of a second. And then…

The northern hemisphere of Earth exploded in a vast holocaust more terrible than any war. All the weapons of man combined could not compete, and —had they released all their lethal energies at once— would have paled by comparison with the jet of deep earth rock and molten core thrown up from a thousand miles beneath the shoulder of the continent. Lightning cracked along the length and breadth of the rising explosion, vast bolts that, by comparison with the molten jet itself, flickered like dying candles beneath the sun.

A volcanic cloud shot heavenward, reaching up, unstoppable until its hot, burning tip reached orbit and began to spread out, to fall about the world like a great umbrella of superheated embers.

Within hours, what had not burned in the fires of this holocaust fell victim to the first chill of an icy dark. The cloud blocked out the sun. And what remained of Earth, poor Earth, had yet to pass through the comet’s tail!

The black snows, the infecting snows of nano-machines and directed matter, were still days away.

In the vast scheme of things, it was just a malfunction. A big mistake. An experiment in the terraforming of worlds gone wrong.

Even in the midst of such destruction, the nano-machines of the probe were little affected. They rose on the burning columns of magma as they might ascend on a summer breeze. There was still some sensibility in the little things and, even having lost contact with their core, they knew. They recognized life and the terrible stress under which it had come, and they set about to use the resources and energies they had gathered in their journeys through the stars. They set about to save life, to transform it and assure its survival. No matter the heat or the cold. No matter the dying or the dead.

In time, new balances would be struck, new rules obeyed. In the absence of commands from the probe’s core, the dust from space found other wills to obey, the wills of microbes, animals, and man.

Soon, without knowing why, a child might walk naked into the cold and live, lift up her hand and command a tree to bear fruit, and all would happen as she willed. But of course it was not for everyone, and not in every way done with such innocence. Nor did the enchanted few stop at demands for food and warmth.

But that world was not Maya's world. For her, it had all ended in the first millionth of a second. For her, the years would pass with no more care than a lazy, mid-morning dream. Centuries would pass, but for Maya only dreams remained. She had no memory of her first awakening after the event, no knowledge of how her sanctuary came to be.

As if they had always been alive, Bear, Skye, and Erok came to share her palaces of light and stone beneath the ice. Forever young, Maya’s time passed without burden, an endless fantasy undisturbed but for the occasional longing, the wondering after her parents and the world that she little remembered and had long ago left behind.

###

Now, having lost her companions, her flesh frozen by blasts of glacial wind, Maya looked out upon a world transformed beyond anything her memories could bring forth.

“Bless us, Oh Lord, and these Thy gifts…” As inappropriate as the words were, they were the only ritual Maya could bring to mind, the only blessing she knew to steel her spirit and strengthen her wavering resolve.

Sky and Erok were out there, somewhere, lost in the shifting snow and lowering clouds. Maya realized she was afraid to leave, fearful of the unfamiliar world the outside had become. It was fear that had frozen her in place as surely as the biting cold. But the time had come to move.

Like heated stones, her eyes began to glow, cracking the ice which had drawn its crystal veil over her sight, melting the cold of her cheeks into a semblance of tears. The melting did not stop with a few drops of water, but continued on. The entirety of Maya began to dissolve in place, flowing not as water, but as rivulets of dark matter. Black as iron filings, the dust Maya had become held its place against the wind. She had turned from a frozen statue into a stubborn shadow the howling glacier could not erase.

And then, with a glance over her shoulder, Maya blinked and allowed the wind to take her. Her form was abruptly stolen away on the next current of air. Down and away. Down and away.

Maya wandered along with the wind for some time. She was not herself, of course, truly aware. What existed of her drifted like smoke over the landscape, dispersed here and there as cold gusts raced with her across long falls of ice, then took her up high, on currents which touched the black ribs of mountains and then went higher still.

Parts of Maya rose to the heights of the clouds, while below her the long, flowing rivers of ice gave way to mossy greens and frosty mud flats, eventually turning into melt-water rivers and young forests of northern pine.

All the time a fragment of her was listening. Dreaming, but with an eagerness to hear the thoughts of Skye and Erok, if only they were near. Yet, all the spirits of plant and animal below her were silent, as if none could talk.

Too dispersed to be seen, even as smoke, Maya fell across the landscape: her blood given up to the earth, her body a part of the vast ocean of the air. What creatures walked beneath the trees breathed her in, held her deep for a moment, then exhaled her back into the forest air.

In this way, Maya came upon massive beasts of hoof and horn, whose great hearts beat too loudly for her to bear. Lesser forms too sniffed her in and out, lean and hungry creatures that watched from shadow to shadow and howled to their brethren across the forest floor. Still others slumbered in the darkness of their dens and grottos, while a myriad of smaller hearts beat all too quickly, holding fast among the roots, heights, and hollowed spaces of the trees. And the trees themselves embraced her, sweeping Maya up in their endless branching dance with the air. She controlled nothing, but was swept everywhere. Like a dream blown wide across a world struggling beneath the torment of the ice.

After a while, when nothing Maya touched could speak to her of Skye and Erok, when the cold, hard earth revealed only the tracks of a hundred other forms, she began to reconnect. The many parts of Maya, the windblown dust she had become, called itself together. She did not do this consciously; some part of her being knew that it was time.

A breath at a time, she left the trees and the beasts and the cold ground to coalesce slowly upon the forest floor.