Two words: posthumous publication. (Manuscript enclosed.)
Mayor? Oh, this is just a fun position to be in right now. "Thanks for nothing, boss," they'd say if they dared. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it's, "You first, boss."
Why'd the toasters have to land on my scorching term? And why couldn't we just go the way of Sa Akane or Drachenscheisse, so everyone doesn't have this stupid idea to go out with a blaze of glory?
Deliberately opening the seals? That's sick. More sick to elect a child to do the final job, but that's what they decided. A child is more fitting, they said. It sends a message. What message, that we're sick in the head? The children will die anyway, so why not let them do the honors? Take vengeance on the adults for letting them down.
Damnit, I want all of us to survive. If not that, at least the kids. Or at least one of them, to tell Earth what has happened to us when he's rescued. For there to be a hope of any of them being rescued!
I have to go find my daughter. She's five. She'll never see six.
Damnit...
Don't sink into despair, I told them in one of my stupid stirring little speeches. Great advice, but rather hypocritical...
She shut down the archive and looked away at the gray, metal bulkhead. She was sitting in the arbor. Some of the murals had indeed survived. Perhaps some of them were Reveka's. Perhaps some other artist she had not yet come across in her reading.
The scratches on the walls were thinner here, as though the seven survivors had elected not to disturb the paintings.
She ran her hand over the archive's interface panel, reactivating it.
She had finished the translations of the plain-text files, which only took a few days. The pictures, the sounds, those would take awhile. A long while.
At least now that she read some of the diaries, she was able to see the dead of this place as real people, with real lives.
Whether that was better than the cold, impersonal aura of undifferentiated Death remained to be seen...
Typing away on the outdated, battered old machine that was Sa Thauri's mainframe, she managed to write the program that she needed to change the corrupted sound files to something the Banshee computers could recognize. She wished she could just use the Venusian computers, but while the main interface and computational systems were operational, the self-diagnostics were fried and there was no way the machine would be able to repair the corrupted files.
Its fast interface and CPU made it ideal for the multitasking that was required. The multi-redundant "Oberwindows" operating system was easy to use and easy to rescue when it crashed, which unfortunately it did regularly.
She shut down the last open iframe and watched the screen collapse into a pinpoint then wink out. Sounds, at last: music, haunting compositions of heart-wrenching pain, on every imaginable instrument plus a number she suspected were made up. But at least it was no longer silent.
As she followed the soft cry of a single violin down to a quiet fade, she looked back at the screen. They always said Venus was the home of some of the best artists in the solar system. The isolation and gloomy off-duty hours between work and sleep, combined with the hellish, ill-lit twilight, stimulates something in the imagination. It was generally not a very positive stimulation, and Venusian arts were known for their dark, melancholy atmosphere. But they were powerful, and touched places in the heart the brighter and less-emotional Terran arts rarely reached.
This piece was, according to the ID3 tag embedded in the sound file's header, written two years after the death of the last other arcology. Sa Thauri saw its doom then, in the demise of one of its neighbors, Kaze. The composer, one Adrianne Matsui, had died less than a week after finishing the piece, according to the attached data file. The cause of death was listed as "suicide, passive" which she interpreted as losing the will to live. She had completed her art, passed it on to the winds, and faded away secure in the knowledge that one day, someone would hear it and appreciate it.
She set the composition to repeat once more, then leaned back in her chair. As the piano and bass began the first movement, she wondered what the reaction on Earth would be when "Ashes in the Wind" hit the Omniweb. If Terra had any heart left in her, the reaction would be a long, echoing silence.
The beginning of the new year marked one month since she had finished repair on the dispertion tower and pumped fresh atmosphere in to flush out the sulfur and carbon dioxide. Now, she had the main arbor, the command center, and several of the gas conversion towers online. She had decided not to reactivate any of the city's residential systems just yet: she had already disturbed the graveyard city more than she was comfortable with. One day, probably hundreds of years hence, when humans returned to Venus and found this partially-restored city, they would wonder. And seeing half of it rebuilt would make it easier on them to reactivate it the rest of the way as the Sa Thaurians had asked.
And when they reentered the command center, "Ashes in the Wind" would be playing. She had tied a regenerative power source in to the control room's main computer system, and it could last for a thousand years barring any major mishaps.
As she sat against the warm bulkhead in one of the gas-conversion towers, hearing the soft hum of incoming carbon dioxide and outgoing oxygen, she thought of Earth.
It would be awhile yet before Petresun became Emperor, perhaps ten years. She had challenged the idea from the start, when the Brotherhood leader proposed it on the 'nets and began playing with popular opinion again. The idea of "one ruler" turned her stomach: such things never led to good, only sorrow. She protested openly at the Brotherhood council meeting, along with several others including her sister Rosalia.
After the death of the war hero Gierling, and the subsequent "accidents" among members of the Brotherhood who had challenged Petresun, she had approached the old man and demanded an explanation. The cold stare that answered her, potent even though Petresun's decaying body gave him a frail, weak appearance, told her all she needed to know. And the anger in those eyes told her that her fate had been decided as well.
She located Rosalia later that evening, on the way home from Nova Alexandria. She had a lot of difficulty, since she had recently taken up the habit of taking unscheduled, unplanned, and unwise transportation. She got in touch with her via her commlink, after half an hour of trying. Rosalia was in Monaco, and had arrived via a cargo submarine. She took the first flight she could get to Roma, then switched to a connecting flight for the final leg of the trip.
Rosalia had beeped her and told her not to board that craft.
So she waited and rented a hoverskimmer instead. Somewhere over the bay, she heard the announcement on the news that her flight had collided with an unscheduled flight out of the Alps, and had gone down with no survivors somewhere over southern France.
An accident, it was called.
She met Rosalia in Monaco, and they exchanged a look. "Petresun is insane," Rosalia said.
"Indeed. He will lead us to ruin."
"We dare not challenge him yet."
"It is too risky. We have no support base."
"In two hundred years perhaps we will."
"If he does not destroy us first."
"We must go into hiding at once."
"If we don't we'll suffer the same fate as Gierling."
"You can bet that Gierling is not truly dead."
"Petresun is probably keeping the brain for future use."
"That would be just like him."
"As would killing us to ensure his rule."
"Therefore we must flee."
"But he could find us anywhere on Earth."
"Therefore we must leave Earth altogether."
"No one would think to look for us in the colonies."
"Who in their right mind would go to the colonies anyway?"
"They're mostly in ruins and the residents may not appreciate us being there."
"Unless we do what we can to help them."
"Or find a place where there are no survivors."
"Venus."
