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and labor that had raised the tower to its full height. Alexios’s mouth tasted of ashes and a bitterness that went beyond human endurance.
    Lara had disappeared. All around him, as far as the eye could see, there was nothing but devastation and the mangled bodies of the dead.
    My fault, he told himself. The sin of pride. My pride has ruined everything, killed all those millions of people. Covered with ashes, his soul crushed along with everything else, he screamed to the vacant sky, “My fault! It’s all my fault!”
    He awoke with a start, covered with cold sweat. In the years since the skytower’s destruction, Alexios had learned that the catastrophe was not his fault, not at all. The soul-killing guilt he had once felt had long since evolved into an implacable, burning hatred. He thirsted not for forgiveness, nor even for the clearing of his name. He lived for vengeance.

Thermophiles

    Victor Molina also dreamed that night as he slept on the airfoam bed in his stateroom aboard Himawari, in orbit around the planet Mercury.
    He dreamed of the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm. He saw himself dressed in the severely formal attire of the ritual as the king of Sweden handed him the heavy gold award for biology. The discoverer of thermophiles on the planet Mercury, Molina heard the king announce. The courageous, intrepid man who found life where all others said it was impossible for life to exist. Lara sat in the front row of the vast audience, beaming happily. Victor reminded himself to add a line to his Nobel lecture, thanking his wife for her love and support through all the years of their marriage.
    Then he began his lecture. The huge audience hall, crammed with the elite of every continent on Earth, fell into an expectant silence. Thermophiles are organisms that live at temperatures far beyond those in which human beings can survive, he told the rapt and glittering audience. On Earth, microscopic thermophiles were discovered in the latter part of the twentieth century, existing deep underground at temperatures and pressures that were, up until then, considered impossible as habitats for living organisms. Yet these bacterial forms not only exist, they are so numerous that they actually outweigh all the living matter on the surface of the Earth! What is more, they survive without sunlight, shattering the firmly held belief that all life depends on sunlight as its basic source of energy. The thermophiles use the heat of Earth’s hellish core to derive their metabolic energy.
    A British cosmologist, Thomas Gold, had earlier predicted that a “deep, hot biosphere” existed far below the surface not only of Earth, but of Mars and any other planet or moon that had a molten core. Scornfully rejected at first, Gold’s prediction turned out to be correct: bacterial life forms have been found deep below the surface of Mars, together with the cryptoendoliths that have created an ecological niche for themselves inside Martian surface rocks.
    While astrobiologists found various forms of life on the moons of Jupiter and even within the vast, planet-girdling ocean of that giant planet itself, the next discovery of true thermophiles did not occur until explorers reached the surface of Venus, where multicelled creatures of considerable size were found living on that hothouse planet’s surface, their bodies consisting largely of silicones, with liquid sulfur as an energy-transfer medium, analogous to blood in terrestrial organisms.
    Still, no one expected to find life on Mercury, not even thermophilic life. The planet had been baked dry from its very beginnings. There was no water to serve as a medium for biochemical reactions; not even molten sulfur. Mercury was nothing but a barren ball of rock, in the view of orthodox scientists.
    Yet the surprising discovery of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons on the surface of Mercury challenged this orthodox view. PAHs are quickly broken down in the high-temperature environment of Mercury’s