Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds

VAINGLORY

OFFICIALLY IT’S Ruach City but everyone calls it Stilt Town. I’ve never liked the place. The amount of time I’ve spent there, it really ought to feel like home. But Stilt Town never stays still long enough to get familiar. Raised above Triton’s cryovolcanic crust on countless thermally insulating legs, it’s a quilt of independent domed-over platforms, connected by bridges and ramps but subject to frequent and bewildering rearrangements. It’s like a puzzle I’m not meant to solve.

Still. A drink, a bar, a half-way decent view. There are worst places.

“Loti Hung?”

I turn from the window. I don’t recognise the woman who’s just addressed me, but my first thought, strangely, is that she must be Authority. It’s not that she’s wearing a uniform, or looks like any Authority official I’ve ever dealt with. But it’s something in the eyes, tired and pink-tinged as they are. A calm and lucid watchfulness, as if she’s used to studying faces and reactions, taking nothing at face value.

“Can I help you?”

“You’re the artist? The rock sculptor?”

Since I’m sitting in the Cutter and the Torch, surrounded by images of rock art and with my own portfolio still open before me, it’s not a massive deductive leap. But she knows my name, and that’s worrying. I’m nowhere near famous enough for that.

I tell myself that she can’t be Authority. I’ve done nothing to merit their attention. Cut some corners, maybe. Bent a few rules. But nothing they’d consider worth their time.

“You haven’t told me your name.”

“Ingvar,” she says. “Vanya Ingvar.” And she conjures up a floating accreditation sigil and it all falls into place.

Vanya Ingvar. Licensed investigator. Not a cop, not Authority, but a private dick.

So my instincts weren’t totally off-beam.

“What do you want?”

Her hair is short and gingery and squashed into greasy curls, as if she’s just removed a tight-fitting vacuum helmet. She runs a hand over her scalp, to no avail. “While your ship was in repair dock, I paid someone to run a deep-level query on its navigation core. I wanted to know where you were at a particular time.”

I almost spill my drink. “That’s totally fucking illegal.”

She shrugs. “And totally fucking unprovable.”

I decide I may as well humour this woman for a few more seconds. “So what were you after?”

“This and that. Mainly, a link to the Naiad impactor.”

I blink. I’m expecting to hear that she’s tied me to some civil infringement not covered by any statute of limitations. Failure to follow proper approach and docking procedure, that kind of thing. But when she mentions the Naiad impactor, I know she’s got the wrong woman. Some mix-up of names or ship registrations or something. And for a moment I’m almost, almost, sorry for her. She’s rude and she’s had someone snoop around Moonlighter without my permission. That pisses me off. But she looks as if she could use a break.

“I’m sorry to break it to you, Ingvar. I was nowhere near Naiad when it happened. Matter of fact, I remember watching it on the newsfeeds from a bar in Huygens City, Titan. That’s the other side of the system, in case you didn’t realise. Whoever dug into my nav core didn’t know what they were doing.”

“I’m not talking about your whereabouts at the time of the collision. That was twenty-five years ago. My interest is in where you were twenty-seven years before that. Fifty-two years ago, at the time the impactor’s course was adjusted, to place it on a collision vector for Naiad.” Then she pauses, and delivers her coup de grâce, the thing that tells me she’s not just making this up. “According to my investigations, it wasn’t long after you’d met Skanda Abrud.”

It’s a name I’ve tried hard not to think about for over half a century. And managed, most of the time. Except for that one occasion when a bright new star shone in Fornax and Skanda forced himself back into my consciousness.

Now it hurts to say his name.

“What do you know about Skanda?”

“I know that he paid you to cut a rock. I also know that when the Naiad impactor hit, one hundred and fifty-two innocent people died. The rest…I think I’d like to hear it from you.”

I shake my head. “Nobody died on Naiad. Nobody lived there.”

“That,” Ingvar says, “is only what they want you to think.”

“They?”

“Authority. It was their screw-up that allowed those settlers to build their camp on that little moon in the first place. Claim-jumpers. They should have been moved on years earlier.”

She suggests we leave the Cutter and the Torch, because she doesn’t want anyone listening in on our conversation. At this point there are a number of possibilities open to me. I could tell her to fuck off. She hasn’t arrested me, doesn’t even have powers of arrest. She hasn’t even threatened to turn me over to Authority, and what good would it do her if she did? I’ve done nothing wrong. I am Loti Hung; I am eighty years old, a middlingly successful rock cutter. That’s all.

But she’s right about Skanda, and it did happen when she said. And that worries me. I tell myself that nothing bad can happen in Stilt Town. And besides, I do want to hear what she has to say.

So we exit, into the domed-over night. Ingvar walks stiffly, with a lopsided gait. It’s hard to tell but I doubt that she’s any younger than me. Both of us wear heavy coats and boots, but Triton’s cold still insinuates itself up the stilts, through the city’s floor, into our ancient bones.

And I tell her about the day I met Skanda Abrud.

IT WAS HERE, under Neptune. I’d come out to Triton chasing a possible client. Early in my rock-carving days, but not so early that I wasn’t building a small but respectable reputation. Neptune was further out than I’d ever been before, but I figured it was worth the time and the cost.

I’d been wrong. An upstart rival had undercut my offer and stolen the prospective customer. Moonlighter, meanwhile, needed fuel and repairs. While bots swarmed over the ship, and my bank account trickled down to single digits, I shuttled to Triton to drown my sorrows. That was when I ended up in the Delta Vee Hotel.

I’ve never been there since; too many ghosts. Like the Cutter and the Torch is now, the place was a popular hang-out with artists and their sponsors. The walls, floor and tables were covered with images and solid projections of work both good and gaudy: asteroids and ice-teroids, boulders and rocks, transformed into pieces of art, from the geometric abstracts of Motl and Petit to the hyper-realistic portraiture of Dvali and Maestlin. I knew some of these people; had even worked with some of them back when they trimmed payloads for the big combines.

My star was on the rise, modestly, but even then I sensed that the bubble couldn’t last. Too much money was changing hands. On my way in, I’d passed Ozymandis, a kilometre-sized rock put into Triton orbit. It was the work of Yinning and Tarabulus, the latest hot properties. I didn’t think much of it. It was a face, shattered and time-worn, with great clefts in the cheeks and deep black craters for eyeholes. Everyone went mad for it but all I saw was various superficial gimmicks used to conceal a profound absense of technique.

Yinning and Tarabulus hadn’t come up through the combines; they’d never worked with rock and ice in any other context. Lacking that core of experience, they had to make their work look damaged and ancient because that was the only way to disguise their screw-ups. They worked against the rock, not with it: couldn’t see the weaknesses in the stone, the planes of failure.

Fucking amateurs.

I vowed that if anyone was ever crazy enough to let me loose on a piece of rock that big, I’d cut it perfectly. And I knew I could.

What I didn’t expect was that I was about to get the chance.

“Beautiful, isn’t it.”

He—whoever he was—meant Neptune. I’d been staring into its face, locked overhead like a vast ceiling ornament. The giant’s purple-blue gloom had turned out to be a perfect match for my funk.

“If you say so.”

“I mean it. Look at it, Loti. Barely a ring system worth mentioning, no metastable storms in the atmosphere. Winds, yes. Transient features. But nothing that lasts. Triton’s the only moon of any consequence; the rest are snowballs. Yet it has its own understated magnificence. An undemonstrative grandeur.”

I still had no idea who was talking, and by that point in the evening even less interest. But when I turned around I found my interest notching up slightly. He was elegant, well-dressed, exceedingly handsome—and definitely not someone I’d seen in the Delta Vee Hotel until now.

“Do I know you?”

“Not yet. But I’m hoping we can get to know each other. Work together, I mean. My name is Skanda Abrud. I have a proposition, a proposal for a commission. Are you interested?”

“That’ll depend on the pay and the duration.”

He smiled tightly. “I’d have thought you’d have jumped at work. As it happens, the pay will be excellent—at least twenty times what you’ve ever received before, if my suspicions are correct. I’ve also selected my own rock. It’s on a high inclination orbit, but easily reachable. Would you like to see it?”

This was all too good to be true. I’d been stitched up before, led to think I was on the verge of a life-changing commission.

“If you feel you must.”

He made precise right angles of his thumbs and forefingers to frame an image. The space between his hands darkened. It clotted with blackness and a near-black lump. The lump was contoured with dim sunlight on one side, picking out craters and ridges in purple-browns. He pulled his hands apart to swell the image. “It’s large, about a kilometer across, but easily within your capabilities. Do you think you could do this for me?”

I studied the rock, studied his face. I imagined his head fitting inside the rock, waiting to be revealed like a mask in a mould. This, after all, was what most of my clients wanted. Their own face, tumbling around the Sun for the rest of eternity.

“I’d need to run some scans,” I hedged. “But if there are no nasty surprises, I can probably make you fit.”

This seemed to throw him. “No. It’s not me that you’d be doing. Good grief, no. Can you imagine the absolute vanity of that?”

“So who else do you want?” Already I was thinking loved one, lover, heroic ancestor: the usual self-aggrandizing bullshit.

“That’s easy.” He made another image. It was a male face, that of a young man. Classically proportioned. I guess I’d have recognised it, if my education hadn’t been so patchy.

“I don’t know it.”

“You should. What I want, Loti, is for you to carve me the head of Michelangelo’s David.”

INGVAR HAS LED me to the public ice-rink on the western cusp of Stilt-Town. It’s perverse, really. Massive layers of insulation buttress the city from the surface of Triton, and now they go to all this trouble to create another little square of frozen ground over the city’s floor. Granted, it’s not cryo-cold, it doesn’t need to be, but I still feel an extra bite to the air. Our breath jets out in comet tails. Ingvar keeps stomping her feet and flapping her arms.

“You had another career once,” she says. “You weren’t always an artist.”

“Since you seem to know all about me…what’s the point of this talk, Ingvar? Seeing as there’s nothing to stop me walking away right now.”

“Be my guest. But you know I know something. Those people really died, Loti; I didn’t just make them up. They were claim-jumpers. Not only shouldn’t they have been there, but Authority screwed up in not protecting them when the impactor came in. It’s true there wasn’t much warning, and the planetary defenses were not at maximum readiness. They sent ships at the last minute, tried to deflect the impactor…” Ingvar shakes her head. “Didn’t work; not enough time. But the point is I can tie you to the impactor, and show that it was no accident that it hit Naiad. Skanda meant it to happen. And that makes it a crime, not some random accident of celestial mechanics. And also makes you an accomplice.”

“Fine. Prepare a dossier for Authority. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to hear from you.”

“I could do just that. May well do so, in fact.” From across the square, on the other side of the ice-rank, an amateur band is rehearsing on the platform of a white pavilion. Their frostbitten fingers strike a series of duff notes. Ingvar raises her voice over the brassy dischord. “Did you like your old line of work?”

“It paid.”

In fact it was good work, and I was better than good work. I used to shape ice for the bulk carriers. Take a splinter of comet a couple of kilometers across, chisel it with lasers and plasma and variable yield shaped charges until it had exactly the right profile, the right symmetry and center of gravity, to be converted into a one-shot payload.

Handing over a chunk of ice that I’d trimmed, watching as the pusher engines were fixed on at one end, a spiderlike control nexus at the other, witnessing the start of its long, long cruise to the hungry economies of the inner system, there was some satisfaction in that.

“But then everything changed,” Ingvar said. “Not overnight, obviously, but harder and faster than you’d been expecting. New technologies, new ways of doing things. Decided by people who didn’t know you, didn’t care about you. Men like Skanda Abrud.”

“I moved with the times.”

The skaters execute lazy ellipses on the ice. Most of them aren’t very good, but on Triton even the clumsiest achieve a measure of elegance. It occurs to me that I’ve never come to the rink when there are skaters out. A girl launches herself into the air, tucks her arms and executes maybe twenty rotations before her skates touch ice again.

Sometimes, high above the ecliptic, I’d turn Moonlighter’s main dish away from the system’s hum and bustle and tune in to the cosmic microwave background. The hiss of creation. That’s what the skaters sound like: an endless and spiralling cosmic hiss.

Above the quadrangle, Neptune surveys proceedings with serene indifference. I’d sooner forget about Neptune and Naiad. But it’s not easy with that hanging overhead.

“You just took to art? It was that easy?” Ingvar asks.

I wonder why she cares. “That or starve. I guess I did all right. Made a living.” I watch an excursion craft slide across the bisected face of Neptune, lit up like a neon fish. “Was making a living, until you interrupted me.”

“But you’ve had your share of disappointments. Dreams and ambitions that didn’t work out.” The way she says this, I can’t help but wonder if she isn’t, on some level, alluding to the private trajectory of her own career. Licensed investigator: hardly the most glamorous or remunerative profession in the system. Maybe Ingvar had higher hopes than that, a long time ago.

Sympathy? Not exactly. But a flicker of recognition, nonetheless.

“We all make the best of things,” I say. “Or try to.”

“It’s not a bad life, is it? I mean, look at us. We’re on Triton, under Neptune. Watching ice-skating.” Ingvar shivers in her coat. “It’s cold, but we can get warm if want to. There’s food and company when we need it. And it’s like that everywhere. Lovely things to see, places to explore, people to meet. Hundreds of worlds, thousands of towns and cities. Why would anyone not find that enough? Why would anyone want more from life than the system can give them?”

I can see where this is leading.

“You mean, why would anyone ever want to leave?”

“I just don’t understand. But I’ve been there. I’ve been to Jupiter, seen the skydocks, seen the voidships being built. There’s no end of them, no end of volunteers rich enough to buy a slot. Even after what happened.” Ingvar pumps her feet against the ground. From the white pagoda, the amateur band mangles another passage. “What’s wrong with those people?” she asks, and I can’t tell if she’s complaining about the band, or the voidship sleepers, or both.

SO I TOOK Skanda out to meet his rock.

The orbit was high-inclination, the rock a long way from the ecliptic. I’d seen the images, but the first up-close viewing was always special.

“You like it?” I asked him.

“It’s good. Better than good. It’ll do, won’t it?”

“It’ll have to.”

But it was much better than that. I’d swung Moonlighter around the rock a dozen times, mapping it down to thumbnail precision, and scanning deep into its heart. I’d dropped seismic probes to echo-map its core. None of these readings had given the slightest cause for real concern. I could see David’s head in my mind’s eye, visualise exactly where the first cuts would have to go.

“I didn’t think it would seem so big,” Skanda said. “It’s one thing to see it as an image, another to be here, to feel the dead pull of all that mass. It’s a mountain, falling through space. Don’t you feel that?”

“It’s a rock.”

Skanda pushed a hair from my eyes. “You’ve no romanticism,” he chided gently.

Honestly, I hadn’t meant it to happen this way. I don’t, as a rule, end up sleeping with my clients. When Skanda insisted on accompanying me out to the rock, I’d hit him with my usual terms and conditions. My ship, my rules. There wasn’t much privacy on Moonlighter, but it would be strictly business all the way out and all the way back home.

So much for that. In truth, Skanda made it too easy. He was charming, effortlessly easy on the eye and knew exactly what he wanted. It was that last quality that I found most attractive of all.

He’d already had a certain rock in mind. And he needed to be out here, witnessing. Who was I to quibble?

Very soon the work was underway.

Bots did my bidding. They peeled away from Moonlighter in eager droves. Some carried lasers and plasma cutters. Some were tunnelling machines, designed to sink boreholes, down which other bots would pack detonation charges. Meanwhile, as the bots toiled, huge cutting arms unfolded from Moonlighter’s flanks. The arms were tipped with various sampling and cutting instruments. Slaved to my telepresence rig, the bots let me work the rock as if it was clay beneath my fingers. That was the part I liked the best. Dirt under my nails.

Sculpting like Michelangelo.

If I’d been prepared to cut corners, the way Yinning and Tarabulus worked, I could have shaped that rock in weeks. But doing it the hard way meant months of patient work. Months of just the two of us, stuck in my ship hundreds of light-minutes from civilisation.

I loved every second of it.

Skanda had been as good as his word. He’d paid up front. With the money now in my account, I wouldn’t need to work for years. He’d even picked up the tab on Moonlighter’s repair bill.

Did I dare wonder where all this wealth was coming from?

Sort of. But then again I didn’t really care. Obviously, he was rich. But then there were millions of rich people in the system—who else was paying for the voidships?

When I was working, deep into it, Skanda would retire to Moonlighter’s bridge and conduct long-range business. He didn’t seem to mind whether I listened in or not. Only slowly did I get any kind of inkling into the kind of work he was involved in, and what it meant for me.

Meanwhile, layer by layer, the face of David unmasked itself. Even as the work progressed, I knew there was never a time when it couldn’t all end in ignominy. The best probes and surveys weren’t infallible, and nor were my tools and methods. The rock was riddled with the usual number of weaknesses, the scars and fractures of ancient collisions. Some of these were obligingly close to the planes and contours where I meant to cut anyway, as if the rock was trying to shed itself of everything that wasn’t the head of David. Others were at treacherous opposition to my plans. A slight misalignment of a shaped charge, a misdirected laser blast, and I could shatter David’s cheek or brow beyond repair.

Sure, I could fix that kind of damage easily enough. But I’d never stoop so low. That was for hacks like Yinning and Tarabulus. And I doubted Skanda would settle for second best. If he was going to create the head of David, it had to be as flawless as Michelangelo’s original.

And it would be. Gradually the scalp and face came free. David’s chin and jaw were as yet still entombed in rock; the effect was to give the youth an old man’s beard. That wouldn’t last. I was chipping the beard away in house-sized chunks, a curl at a time. Another month, I reckoned, and then we’d be done with this crude shaping. Three months, perhaps, to bring David to completion. Four or five at the longest.

And it would be magnificent. No one had done such a thing as this. I imagined some future civilisation stumbling on this painstakingly shaped rock, a million or billion years from now, as it tumbled around the Sun. What would they make of the blank-eyed visage? Would they have the faintest inkling of the eager little creatures who had brought it into being?

Even with the bots, the work took its toll. Between cutting stints, when I was too tired to supervise the machines, I’d float with Skanda in the observation bubble. We’d be goggled up, our naked bodies intertwined.

I’d seen my share of the system but Skanda had been places I’d only dreamed of visiting. I kept telling myself not to worry about the future, just to enjoy the moment, this time we had together. When the rock was done, there’d be nothing to keep Skanda with me. Even with the money in my account, I was just a rock cutter.

But Skanda made me wonder. With the goggles on, he’d show me things. Industrial flows; streams of processed matter on their way from launcher to customer. “That one,” he’d say, directing my eye to a tagged procession of cargo pellets, shot out from a catapult on some iceteroid. “That’s on its way to Mars. Slower than shipping it bulk, but cheaper in the long run. No engines, no guidance—just celestial mechanics, taking it all the way home.”

“You own that flow?”

He’d kiss me as if to say: don’t trouble yourself with such matters. “In a tediously complicated sense, yes.”

“People like you,” I said, “put people like me out of work.”

Skanda smiled. My face bulged back in the mirrored globes of his goggles. “But I’m putting you in work now, aren’t I?”

It wasn’t just industry and economics. Orbits lit up, coloured bands arcing away like the racetracks of the gods. Worlds flowered in the darkness. Not just the major planets, of course, but the minor ones: Ceres, Vesta, Hidalgo, Juno, Adonis, dozens more. In turn each world had its gaggling court of fellow-travellers. We watched moons, habitats, stations, shuttles and ships. The goggles painted designations, civil registrations and cargo summaries.

“I’ll take you to Venus Deep,” he said. “Or Ridgeback City on Iapetus. I know a great place there, and the views…have you ever seen the skimmers plunge through Jupiter’s spot, or the reef cities under Europa?”

“I’ve never even been to Europa.”

“There’s so much to see, Loti. More than one life could ever encompass. When we’re done with this…I hope you’ll let me show you more of the system. It would be my privelege.”

“I’m just a rock cutter from Titan, Skanda.”

“No,” he said, firmly enough that it was almost a reprimand. “You’re infinitely more than that. You’re a true artist, Loti. And you have a gift that people aren’t going to forget in a hurry. Take my word on that.”

Stupid thing was, I did.

BY THE TIME Ingvar steers me to another part of the quadrangle, the band has given up for the night. Most of the skaters have surrendered to the cold. There are only a couple left, perhaps the best of them, orbiting each other like a pair of binary pulsars.

“They say they aren’t dynamically stable,” Ingvar comments, looking up through the dome. “Something to do with Triton’s influence, I think. The rings of Saturn aren’t stable either, not on timescales of hundreds of millions of years. But they’ll outlast these many times over. I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

“You should be happy. Something wrong will be put right.”

“Well, yes. But Naiad was destroyed to make this happen. And those people, too. Given their deaths, I’d rather the end result was a bit more permanent.”

“It’ll outlast us. That’s probably all that matters.”

Ingvar’s head bobs in the fur-lined hood of her coat. “Maybe by the time the rings start to dissipate, we’ll have decided we like them enough to want to preserve them. Sure we’d find a way, if we felt it mattered enough.”

I look at them now. Try to see them through fresh eyes.

The rings of Neptune.

They bisect the face of the world like a knife slash, very nearly as magnificent as the rings of Saturn. There always were rings here, I tell myself, but they were little more than smoky threads, all but invisible under most conditions. The ghostly promise of rings yet to come.

Not so now. The resonant effects of Triton, and its lesser siblings, conspire to divide and subdivide these infant rings into riverine bands. In turn, these concentric bands shimmer with a hundred splendid hues of the most ethereal blue-white or pastel green or jade. There’s a lot of ice and rubble in a moon, even one as small as Naiad, and enough subtle chemistry to provide beguiling variations in reflection and transmission.

Skanda should have seen this, I think. He’d have known that the rings would be beautiful, a thing of wonder, commanding the awe of the entire system. But he couldn’t have begun to predict their dazzling complexity. The glory of it.

But then who could?

“Does it anger you, that he did this to your greatest work?” Ingvar asks. “Let you create the head of David, let you think this would be the thing that made your name, all the while knowing it was going to be destroyed?”

“I did what I was paid to do. Once my part in it was over, I forgot about David.”

“Or rather, you forced yourself not to dwell on it. For obvious reasons, in light of what happened. But you always believed it was still out there, didn’t you? Ticking its way round the Sun, waiting to be found. You clung to that.” Ingvar’s tone changes. “Would he have taken credit, do you think? Was that always his intention?”

“He never said anything about it to me.”

“But you knew him a little. When the voidship reached the Oort cloud, when he was scheduled to be woken…would he have declared himself responsible? Would he have basked in the fame, knowing he was untouchable, beyond the reach of solar law, or would he have preferred to leave the mystery unsolved?”

“What do you think?” I ask snidely.

“From what I’ve gathered of his profile,” Ingvar says, resuming her curious lopsided walk, “he doesn’t strike me as the kind to have settled for anonymity.”

I’VE LIVED A good and full life since the day he left. I still cut rock. I’ve had many lovers, many friends, and I can’t say I’ve been unhappy. But there are days when the pain of his betrayal feels as raw as if it all happened yesterday. We were nearly done with David—just a couple more weeks of finishing-off, and then the head was complete. It already looked magnificent. It was the finest thing I’d ever touched.

Then Skanda returned from the bridge, where he’d been conducting business dealings. Nothing about his manner suggested anything untoward.

“I’ve got to go for a little while.”

“Go?”

“Back to the main system. Something’s come up. It’s complicated and it would be a lot easier to resolve without hours of timelag.”

“We’re nearly done. I don’t usually abandon a piece when it’s this near to completion—it’s too hard to get back into the right frame of mind.”

“You don’t have to abandon anything. My people…they’re sending out a ship to get me. In fact it will be here very shortly. You can stay on station, finish the work.”

He’d made it seem like some unscheduled crisis, something that had blown up at short notice, but deep down I knew that couldn’t be that case. Not if that little ship of his had already been on its way out here for what must have been days.

I watched it arrive. It was a tiny thing, a beautiful jewelled toy of a spacecraft, porpoise-sleek and not much larger. “An extravagance,” Skanda said, as the craft docked. “It’s just that sometimes I need to be able to move around very quickly.”

I bottled my qualms. “You don’t have to apologise for being rich. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be paying for the head of David.”

“I’m glad you see it that way.” He kissed me on the cheek, forestalling any objection. “I wish there was some alternative, but there isn’t. All I can promise is that I won’t be long. My ship can get me there and back very quickly. Two weeks, three at the most. Keep on working. Finish David for me, and I’ll be back to see the end result.”

“Where are you going? You were so keen on being here. I understand timelag, but it hasn’t held you back until now. What’s so important that you have to go away?”

He touched a finger to my lips. “Every second that I’m here is another that I’m not on my way, doing what has to be done. When I’m back, I’ll tell you everything you want to know—and I guarantee you’ll be bored within five minutes.” He kissed me again. “Keep on working. Do that for me. Remember what I said, Loti. You have a gift.”

What was the point in arguing further? I believed him. All that talk of the places he’d show me, the things we’d share together—the glamour and spectacle of the entire system, ours for the taking. He’d fixed that idea so firmly in my head that it never once occurred to me that he’d been lying the entire time. I never thought that we’d have a life together; I wasn’t that naïve. But some good months, was that too much to ask for? Venus Deep and the reef cities of Europa. The two of us, the artist and her wealthy lover and sponsor. Who wouldn’t turn that down?

“Be fast,” I whispered.

From the observation bubble, I watched his little ship drop away from Moonlighter. The drive was bright, and I tracked it until it was too faint to detect. By then, I had a handle on his vector. It didn’t mean much—he could easily have been heading to an intermediate stopover, unrelated to his true destination, or just travelling in a random direction to throw me off the scent.

Both of those things were possible. But so was the third possibility, which was that the vector was reliable, and that Skanda had business around Jupiter.

And even then I didn’t guess.

“HOW LONG WAS it before you found out about the voidship?” Ingvar asks.

“A while. Weeks, months. Does it really matter now?”

“When he left Moonlighter…was that the last contact you had with him?”

“No.” The admission is difficult, because it takes me back to the time when I was foolish enough to believe Skanda’s promises. “He called me from Jupiter. Even mentioned the voidship: said a relative of his was being frozen, put aboard for the voyage. That was the emergency. He wanted to be there, to give whoever it was a good send off.”

“Whereas the relative was really his wife, and Skanda would soon be joining her. They’d both paid for slots on the voidship. Off to establish a human bridgehead in the Oort cloud. But he hadn’t finished with the head of David, had he? He still had instructions for you. It was still important that the work be finished.”

“I’d been paid, and I had no reason to doubt that he’d be back.”

“Other than the completion of the head, what were the instructions?”

“When his little ship docked, it came with a marker beacon. I was told to fix it onto the head.”

“And the…function…of this beacon? You never questioned it?”

I look down. I wish I had something to say.

Ingvar continues. “The beacon was also a steering motor. Skanda had programmed it to make an adjustment to the rock’s orbit. An impulse, to kick into a collision course for Naiad. He’d calculated everything. The binding energy of the moon, the kinetic energy of the impactor. He knew it would work. He knew he could shatter that moon and turn it into a ring system around Neptune. The ultimate artistic statement, a piece of planetary resculpting to dwarf the ages.”

I think things over for a moment. The conversation has been as lopsided as Ingvar’s walk. She’s been asking all the hard questions; now it’s my turn.

“What’s in it for you? What made you decide that you had to solve this mystery? The entire system thinks the rings were made by accident. What made you think otherwise?”

Against expectation, Ingvar seems pleased rather than annoyed. “I saw it.”

“Saw what?”

“The head of David. With my own eyes, just before it hit.”

“You were there?”

All of a sudden, Ingvar looks tremendously old and weary, as if this is the end of some enormous and taxing enterprise, something that has swallowed decades of her life.

“I was Authority. Pilot of one of the quick reaction ships we sent up to deflect the impactor, as soon as we saw it coming in. I got close enough to see your handiwork, Loti. Too close, as it happens. We were hitting the rock with weapons, trying to adjust its vector or shatter it to rubble. There was an impact, near David’s right eye. My ship was caught in the blast. I lost control; nearly died.” She takes a breath. “My ship was badly damaged. So was I.”

“What happened to you?”

“Oh, they patched me up well enough after my ship was recovered. More than they could do for my partner. Still, lucky as I’d been, I was never much good to Authority after that. Hence the change of profession.”

“But you always knew about the head.”

“So did everyone involved. That couldn’t come out, though. No one could know that people had died on Naiad, because that made us look bad. And no one could know that the impactor had been sculpted because that made it a crime, not an accident—and if that had come out, it wouldn’t have been long before the rest of it was public as well. Our multiple screw-ups.”

“Skanda never meant for people to die. He just wanted to do something outrageous.”

“He succeeded. But as of now, only two people are aware of that. You and me. The question is, what do we do with our knowledge?”

I wonder if there’s a trap I’m missing. “You’ve spent years putting this together, haven’t you. Tracking down the truth. Finding me, and establishing my involvement. Well, congratulations. You’re right; I was his accomplice. So what if I didn’t know what I was getting into? Authority won’t care about that. Especially as there isn’t anyone else left to blame. You could hand me over now.”

“I could. But would that necessarily be the right thing to do?” Ingvar studies her boots. “My second career…it’s not as if it’s anything I need to be ashamed of. I’ve worked hard, had my share of successes. Minor cases, in the scheme of things. But I’ve not failed. So what if I’ve done nothing anyone will ever remember me for?”

“Until now. Turn me in…it could make your reputation.”

“And yours,” Ingvar nods. “Think of it, Loti. Everything you’ve done, every rock you’ve cut, the entirety of your art, it’s as nothing against the head of David. And the head of David is as nothing against the rings of Neptune. You created something marvellous, a thing of wonder. Beyond Yinning and Tarabulus or anyone else. It was the one time that your life was touched by greatness.” A sudden reverence enters Ingvar’s voice. “But you can’t tell anyone. All you’ll have is the rest of your art, in all its middling obscurity, until the day you die. No fame, no notoriety. And all I’ll have is a limp and the dog days of my second career. The question is: could either of us live with that?”

“What if I chose not to?”

“I’d make your name.”

“As a convicted criminal, locked away in some Authority cell?”

Ingvar’s shrug suggests that this is no more than a trifle. “Some would make the trade in an instant. Artists have killed themselves for a stab at immortality. No one’s asking that much of you.”

“And you?”

“I’d have solved the mystery of the Naiad event. Brought its last living perpetrator to justice. There’d be a measure of acclaim in it for me.”

“Just a measure?”

“Some trouble as well. As I said, not everyone would welcome the truth getting out.”

I shake my head, almost disappointed with Ingvar, that she should give in now. “So you’re saying I have a choice?”

“I’m saying we both have one. But we’d have to agree on it, I think. No good one of us pulling one way, the other resisting.”

I look at Neptune again. The rings, the storms, the brooding blue vastness of it all. And think of that temporary star, shining for a few seconds in the constellation Fornax. The light of a voidship, dying in a soundless eruption of subatomic energy. They say they were pushing the engines, trying to outrun the other voidships. Trying to be the first to stake a claim in the Oort clouds. Going for victory.

They also say no living thing saw that flash; that it was only machines that witnessed it, but that if anyone had been looking toward Fornax, at the right time…

“It would be something, to be known for that,” I tell Ingvar.

“It would.”

“My name would ring down the ages. Like Michelangelo.”

“That’s true,” she agrees. “But Michelangelo’s dead, and I doubt that it makes much difference to him now.” Ingvar claps her hands against her body. “I’m getting cold. I know a good bar near here, and there are no rock cutters. Let’s go inside and talk it over, shall we?”