Which was when her spade suddenly pushed into open air, and she fell forward.
She caught herself, stepped back, took a breath, and looked closer. She’d broken through the wall of the nascent cellar. Beyond was a deep black, like a cave. She knew of no animal that would dig a burrow as big and deep as this looked to be; there were ground-dwelling furballs here, but nobody had seen one much bigger than a cat. Still, just because nobody had seen such a critter didn’t mean it couldn’t exist – and there was a good chance it wouldn’t enjoy being disturbed. She ought to get out of there.
But the day was calm. A couple of her neighbours were chatting over lemonade just a few yards away. She felt safe.
And curiosity burned. This was something new, in the endless unchanging summer of New Springfield. She bent down to peer into the hole in the wall.
Only to find a face looking back out at her.
It was human-sized, but not human. More insectile, she thought, a kind of sculpture of shining black, with a multiple eye like a cluster of grapes. And half of it was coated with a silvery metal, a mask. She saw all this in the heartbeat it took for the shock to work through her system.
Then she yelled, and scrambled back. When she looked again, the masked face was gone.
Josephine Barrow, one of her neighbours, walked over and looked down from above. ‘You OK, honey? Put your spade through your foot?’
‘Can you help me out?’ She raised her arms.
When Cassie was up on the surface, Josephine said, ‘You look like you saw a ghost.’
Well, she’d seen – something.
Cassie looked around at her house, which was almost ready to get its permanent roof put on, and the fields they’d cleared for their crops, and the hole they’d already dug to make a sandpit for their kid to play in some day … All the work they’d put into this place. All the love. She didn’t want to leave this.
But she also didn’t want to deal with whatever the hell was down in that hole.
‘We need to cover this up,’ she said now.
Josephine frowned. ‘After all your work?’
Cassie thought fast. ‘I struck groundwater. No good for a cellar here. We’ll dig a well some day.’ There was a heap of rough-cut timber leaning against the back wall of the house. ‘Help me.’ She started to lay the planks over the hole.
Josephine stared at her. ‘Why not just fill it in?’
Because it would take too long. Because she wanted this hidden for good, before Jeb got back. ‘I’ll backfill it later. For now just help me, OK?’
Josephine was looking at her strangely.
But she helped her even so, and by the time Jeb got back Cassie had spread dirt and forest-floor muck over the timber so you’d never know the hole was there, and had even scraped out the beginnings of a second cellar around the far side of the house.
And by the time they sat down to eat that evening on the porch of their home, Cassie Poulson was well on the way to forgetting she’d ever seen that masked face at all.
And a few years later, in March 2040, Miami, Earth West 4:
It was only a coincidence, historians of the Next would later agree, that Stan Berg should be born in Miami West 4, the Low Earth footprint city where Cassie Poulson had grown up. Cassie Poulson, on whose High Meggers property the primary assembler anomaly proved to be located – an anomaly which, in the end, would shape Stan Berg’s short life, and much more. Strange, but only a coincidence.
Of course, in the very year Stan was born the town began to change dramatically, as the first of a flood of refugees from a Datum America blighted by Yellowstone began to show up. By the time Stan was eight years old an increasingly crowded, lawless and chaotic camp had been taken over by government and corporate interests, and transformed into a remarkable construction site – and by Stan’s eleventh birthday there was a new ‘star’ in the sky, stationary above the southern horizon – not a true star, but the orbital terminus of a nascent space elevator that reached down to the local version of Florida, built by a community of hastily recruited stalk jacks that by then included Stan’s own mother and father.
But whatever the convulsions that would colour Stan’s young life, there was nothing strange about the love that filled Stan’s mother Martha from the moment she first held her child. And she, at least, saw nothing strange in the apparent curiosity with which, eyes precociously open, Stan inspected the changing world from the moment he was delivered into it.