Chapter 6

"Well, Carlie, it's time."

He smiled, and leaned over to kiss her forehead. "Good luck, Grandmother."

"I hope I don't need it." Pushing on the armrests with both hands she stood up unassisted and turned toward the door.

They were in the "green room"—the waiting area—of the most popular worldwide late-night holograph show, on which she'd appear within, now, only a few seconds. It was a painstakingly arranged, and widely publicized, appearance. A week earlier she'd called the show's famous host, a quasi-comedian, quasi-pundit named Jerry Tomlinson, from her island home to suddenly offer her presence. Young Igwanda had been obliged to wade through several tiers of Tomlinson's highly protective staff to finally reach the man himself, but after he finally convinced them that the call was legitimate resistance melted away rapidly. Even so many years later, Meiersdottir's name was still gold with the celebrity-doting public, and hence the media.

"Umm ... what are the conditions?" Tomlinson had asked cautiously once she'd made her offer to come on his show.

"Just one," she'd said briskly. "I'll be your only guest that night."

He gave a short laugh. "You'd be a pretty tough act to follow anyway," he'd told her. "But I mean, what are the limits on what we can talk about, what I can ask you?"

"None," she'd answered. "Anything you want. Eden, my life, Carlos, what you like. If you're worried," she'd added perceptively, "I promise not to walk off and leave you high and dry." She and her husband had developed rather a reputation for abrupt departures from holo interviews which didn't meet their exacting standards in a much earlier time. "And I promise not to embarrass you, either."

"Dr. Meiersdottir, I'm ... overwhelmed," Tomlinson had said. "This will be your first appearance in, well, forever. May I ask why now? And why me?"

"Why now? I'm getting old, young man, it's maybe my last time. Why you? That's obvious, yours is the most popular show. So: Are you interested?"

Interested? He was avid to have perhaps the most famous living person in the world in his guests' chair. And in short order it was agreed; she'd appear the following Monday. With her permission the media outlets had been virtually saturated with announcements that the storied Amanda Meiersdottir would be with him then.

Thus it came to be that she stood just beyond the view of the recorders, and the small live audience in the studio, to listen to him finish her introduction.

" ... and so, ladies and gentlemen, I have the immense honor to introduce to you a living legend, the woman who all by herself tamed an entire world, the planet Eden, the person some have called one of the most influential women ever to live, the great and wonderful Dr. Amanda Meiersdottir!"

And she strode proudly out into view—well, "strode" as firmly as she could on 106-year-old legs—and basked in the applause that had needed no cue to prompt. She smiled, inclined her head in acknowledgment, continued to stand still for a moment in the spotlight trained on her, and then, as the applause still roared, turned to walk over to Tomlinson at the desk where he customarily greeted his guests.

As she extended her hand to him he went far beyond his norm; he rose, took it and bestowed a kiss on it. Her head went back in an easy laugh and she was still smiling as she took her seat beside his desk.

"Dr. Meiersdottir," he began as the clapping, now discouraged by a flashing sign calling for silence, began to subside. "I can't tell you how exciting—"

"Amanda," she corrected him. "That's who I was on Eden, you know, just Amanda. If they could say it you can, too, Jerry. Or must I call you Mr. Tomlinson?"

There was an outburst of laughter from the studio audience, again unprompted.

"All right, Amanda, then," he soldiered on stoically. He was unaccustomed to guests taking over so quickly on what was, after all, his show. Still, this, he reminded himself, was Aman­da Meiersdottir. He moved to regain control. "Amanda, it's my great honor to have you here tonight." Applause again erupted, to his annoyance. He continued over it even as the sign again pleaded for quiet. "I'm especially honored that you've chosen my show as the place to break your long silence."

She inclined her head graciously, emboldening him again. "But why is it that you've done so?" he persisted. "Is it because you're getting, well, a little older now? Because you've only recently lost your husband?"

If he'd been trying to steal an advantage he was to be disappointed. "No," she answered quickly. Then she relented, but only partially. "Well, perhaps a little of both of those things," she said. "But mainly it's something a lot more important than me, or either of us, Carlos or me—or you, for that matter."

Taken aback, he still recognized that he was stuck; comedian though he was, he understood that his role for at least this moment was straight man to her lead, she'd put herself in a position where he could only follow. "What?" he asked the inevitable question.

"The Edenites are going to die, all of them, every last one," she said flatly. "And only we, you and I and every one of you here in the studio with us, and all of you viewing this holocast, only we can save them."

In the instant that bombshell dropped Tomlinson could see that he'd completely lost control. It was no longer his show, it was hers, and there was nothing at all he could do short of professional suicide except follow along. Wisely he abandoned all efforts to wrest the holocast back from her, mostly simply sitting back and letting her talk.

She took the audience carefully through the phenomenon of Chen's nova and its uneven effects on surrounding stellar systems. She briefly commandeered the spotlight to illustrate, directing it (tactfully) to illuminate Tomlinson while she sat in partial shadow and continued her narration. In graphic detail she explained how the focused radiation would quickly kill off every living being on Eden, boil off its rivers and lakes and even oceans and leave the planet withered and barren.

"It's going to happen," she said quietly, her subdued voice giving dramatic emphasis to her words. "We even know when, to the day and the hour. It will be exactly eight years, seventy-five days and"—she made a point of looking at her wristwatch—"eleven hours from now. It will be on a Monday, like this one, at somewhere around 7:00 a.m. where I'm sitting right now. The start of the first rush hour of the week here on Earth. Except their rush hour that day will be toward an inevitable death. Unless we, and it can only be we, unless we act."

Timing her monologue carefully to accommodate the holocast's periodic commercial interruptions and leave her audience on tenterhooks at each one, Meiersdottir went on to describe how a rescue mission might be mounted.

"When the great flood came all those millennia ago, we too, we humans, might have perished from this Earth," she reminded them. "All life might have perished. Why didn't it? Because of an ark, a mighty vessel that could sail the seas of that flood with us and all the living creatures of the land on board, an ark that could carry us to safety.

"If ever there was a need for a new ark, it's now. This is the Edenites' time of need for salvation from the deadly forces of nature. They can't build that ark, they haven't the technology, the underlying infrastructure. But we can! We have the opportunity to be the Noahs of their world! And we should, we must, fill that critical role for them."