Chapter 34

The paint was peeling from the walls, revealing strata of past decorations stretching back three hundred years. The ceiling wasn’t that old, since it had been replaced several times, but it was still water damaged and ugly. The floor, however, once he was finished with the pressure washer, was a beautiful tile mosaic with very little damage.

What he really wanted this house for was the view. In the salon was a huge window facing out into the depths of Valis Marinaris and at night the Strip along the rim, so tacky when you are walking the streets, shone like a string of Christmas lights and the taxis going between the port, the Strip, and homes in the Valley looked like fireflies back home in Mississippi.

After returning back “home” after a trip to Barnard’s Star, he had discovered that in the five hundred objective years he had been gone, Mars was as close to Mississippi as he was going to get. The world of his childhood, just twenty years ago to him, had been destroyed by a buggy nanophage assembler 352 years ago, so his home, his relatives, the pine trees, and the fireflies, and ever other carbon bearing matter on the Earth’s surface was now part of a large diamond shell, two miles thick, covering the surface of the dead oceans. He took an orbital tour after he got over the shock and the planet looked like a low detail world globe. The continents were flat and scoured and the oceans were dark blue and featureless, like a big glass aquarium.

The phage still lay dormant, so there was a quarantine in effect. Silly, since anyone who landed would soon be dismantled and incorporated into the diamond wall with the leftover bits blown away as dust.