(Part 6 of 8 in "Three Worlds Collide")

Today was the day.

The streets of ancient Earth were crowded to overbursting with people looking up at the sky, faces crowded up against windows.

Waiting for their sorrows to end.

Akon was looking down at their faces, from the balcony of a room in a well-guarded hotel. There were many who wished to initiate violence against him, which was understandable. Fear showed on most of the faces in the crowd, rage in some; a very few were smiling, and Akon suspected they might have simply given up on holding themselves together. Akon wondered what his own face looked like, right now.

The streets were less crowded than they might have been, only a few weeks earlier.

No one had told the Superhappies about that part. They'd sent an ambassadorial ship "in case you have any urgent requests we can help with", arriving hard on the heels of the Impossible. That ship had not been given any of the encryption keys to the human Net, nor allowed to land. It had made the Superhappies extremely suspicious, and the ambassadorial ship had disgorged a horde of tiny daughters to observe the rest of the human starline network -

But if the Superhappies knew, they would have tried to stop it. Somehow.

That was a price that no one was willing to include into the bargain, no matter what. There had to be that - alternative.

A quarter of the Impossible Possible World's crew had committed suicide, when the pact and its price became known. Others, Akon thought, had waited only to be with their families. The percentage on Earth... would probably be larger. The government, what was left of it, had refused to publish statistics. All you saw was the bodies being carried out of the apartments - in plain, unmarked boxes, in case the Superhappy ship was using optical surveillance.

Akon swallowed. The fear was already drying his own throat, the fear of changing, of becoming something else that wasn't quite him. He understood the urge to end that fear, at any price. And yet at the same time, he didn't, couldn't understand the suicides. Was being dead a smaller change? To die was not to leave the world, not to escape somewhere else; it was the simultaneous change of every piece of yourself into nothing.

Many parents had made that choice for their children. The governmen...

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