"So we're drawn to the curious case of the protean pearl, teal or white with ice, inheritor of the rare requirements of autogenesis. A prized circumference in the solar basin, of a sun of long life and mild temper. Strangely indebted to the hyper-violence in her situation: her defining trait, the clear biotic solvent, was introduced by serial violence from the Oort Cloud: comets of water ice. Her awkward formative years were graced by a visitor of extreme violence from which are derived her iron core, dynamic spin, and moon: gravity, atmosphere, equilibrium. Indeed, her entire birthright represents a biophilial balance of the volatile and the serene: seasons; a brisk, businesslike exchange of nights and days; plate tectonics. Continents and continence. All this and the strength to negotiate a dozen extinction strikes; all the requirements and more. An Atlantean lifting of the odds. Auspiciously suited for the formation and propagation of life."

Two wyverns on rescue, parting the ash, the burnt air barely disturbed, having seen better. Fliers committed their eyes and memories to the strange place, trying to outline landmasses, but those were gone, as the waters that define them were gone. Just land, then. Nothing more foreign than an earth made of land. So an obsidian, washed free of offending material, beautiful really, the impenetrable serenity of a wasteland.

Brownlee: "Orkneys gone." For Mucel.

"Saw that."

Their tools were devastatingly few. None to scare up traces in the air. Nothing to break down a spectrum. No land vehicles, no drones. Not a single infrared lens, backscatter lens, any lens for finding the living: metamagical technologies for which they had the skills but which no longer existed. They carried cloddish digging tools plus an AI into the fight.

And Brownlee and his view from the Mercia, dropping in observations and the occasional aside. "You'll find this interesting. Our radius is down two kilometers all around. A billion cubic kilometers, one point eight quadrillion kilotons of crust and all that, you're flying through it, burned and spread around." Rough figures.

"Heat is just parts escaping, and because the parts had nowhere to go but up and out, the heat was a lifting blade, a spade burying the dead in the sky. The ash burned until it was too hot to burn, and then the parts so recently pressed together were pulled apart until they cooled again, a schizophrenia of sublimations, half swept off into the currents, the rest back down the scuppers in concession to the wounded mother gathering in."

"Atmosphere's down about half."

Scrope, one wyvern to the other: "They'll need fire. Look for smoke."

McKelvey: "Looking for smoke in the ash."

Scrope: "Bow camera, Brownlee." Marking the expanse were terraced plateaus at odd intervals, glassy but matte with ash, draped in natural lines like the leaves of a linden tree. "What are we looking at? What is all that?"

Brownlee: "Sub sole aliquid novi est." Dead language.

"That which could liquefy did so as the heat allowed, peaks filling valleys. But the evening would be interrupted as faults were found, and the old and instinctual biohostilities of the place were unearthed: suppurating stone spread like a hard tide, killed what it could, cooled to a suffocating skin."

They had decided without discussing it to share a proximity while flying, so they flew as a pair, keeping a line-of-sight with Cee of course, up and down the meridians as the planet rolled over for them, staying in the sunlight, eyes struggling to secure a promise of life in the lie of the land. Mucel described an academy tour through a Peerage survival complex a furlong under Kew Gardens, complete with bakery and theater. Secret entrance in a tube stop, blast doors an arm's-length thick. The mad sheikh Anketil pieced together a nuclear weapon and, realizing, built a doomsday caravansary deep in the sand near the Crusader fort in Aleppo, where he could entertain in safety. Fountains, seraglio protected by blast doors. It was later used to store sensitive files. They pressed their memories ... and of course there was the crumbling city under the Kremlin. Someone called up a magazine piece profiling an Armageddon cult in Arkansas or Kansas, dug into corn soil and built of old rocket fuselages. That would be quite the encounter. An American beer-making family ... the rest was sadly forgotten. They decided on national capitals -- where the wish for self-safekeeping meshed with the means -- which became something of a map game. London should've been an easy one, Cairo more so. But the melt had topped up gaps, and there were no riverbeds to follow, anywhere. Spelunking, then. They agreed on the flowstone caves of Vietnam, but could not agree on the beginnings and ends of Asia.

Cee could not in a workmanlike manner wrack his brains because for him it was either there or it was not: he could not misplace memories. What interested him now was his ability to discard them as needed. All vessels in low Earth orbit carried comprehensive maps of the place, required; flying out a bit, the obligation was released. After all, maps or any other knowledge could be summoned in minutes from home servers. Nonessential files had a way of being displaced. And over a year ago comedy television had let out a new season, and some crew had requested it all in a lot, so he'd made room in his mind by excising thoughtfully, all the fine features of Earth overwritten in the entire. He recalled that they had scarcely laughed. Memories did not fade for Cee and his ilk. If they were there at all they called up fresh, from however long ago. So as the search for survival turned beneath him he could make it feel like just a moment had passed since the cutting away, and he did, a time or two, in humiliation, a hopeless misery which he would take great pains to remember.

It seemed they'd found the weathered bed of Lake Baikal, against the southern extent of which had once been a deep-bore uranium mine. They bombed the area with penetrating radars, results non-committal. Scrope: "Set us down."

Cee brought them onto some traitless pan. Scrope: "Henry." Burch undid the tether, put on his walking gear, made his way through the lock.

On Earth, the ash in the air was so fine it was a soft focus, and the sun gave moonlight; there was not quite an horizon, a lightly turning line. Minutes spent looking into it, to which he would not acclimate. Directly before him lay a low black slope like an ocean swell interrupted in its stride, whose dimensions he failed to gauge. Whatever compass he had had for his world had no meaning here; he was disoriented or a little frightened, and he took a dozen steps because what else was there. A hundred more; each footfall brought a startled breath of ash. Untraveled ground. They would've gone to mines. He contemplated their chances there, did not consult Brownlee. Perhaps a reliquary had been allowed a mile beneath his feet. Huddled bones, scrap of shitty paperback. If these bequests were there at all they would never be found, and if they would never be found they were never there at all. I'm a dog after spoor. I know that I'm hunting. Not what for. "Head's coming off." Everyone blanched, but they were curious.

He pulled two pins and unzipped his helmet, removing it without pause, and now the full weight of the nullity against his skin. No breeze, not a sigh: no great masses of water to hold heat and release it, moving the air. He pulled a glove off and brought his hand up before him; he closed his eyes, drew them open in a magician's reveal. Is color different now? Because the air that makes it is different. He studied the glove dropping into the powder. Is weight what it was? There is less of the planet that makes weight. He listened: in the distance no dog barked. A dull rush, but that was him: it was so quiet he could hear himself hearing; hearing was falling into a cavity in sound. Had the living world hummed with current, never noticed? Until now. Ash in it made the air seem oddly immaterial. He felt for the temperature and it was neutral. He recalled the old chemistry trifle that said that every lungful of air contains an atom of carbon that once inhabited the body of Aristotle. And all the rest of that lot, I would guess. He let his mouth out into a semi-circle, drew his chest up and drank a toast of the dead.

Tastes like ash. He brought the breath out. There's your wind and your whistle. Turned and couldn't find the wyverns, but his footprints weren't going to be confused with any others. He walked them back but was really following a line of thinking gathered around the observation that his capacity to form the expected reactions had been a casualty to the nullity. And through these thoughts moved another like smoke, and as he approached the first ship he gave it a voice. "I've just had the strangest feeling. Like I've never been here before." They couldn't hear him, but of course he didn't want them to, they might've thought he was trying to be clever. The flight back to the Mercia was taken up by technical talk.

"So Earth had become an amalgam of the real and unreal. Endless plains of pyroclastic glass. Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, London. No sign of life, and no sign of life. Quiet upon quiet, tremulous air, where no thing gleams."