Space

At the center of the Galaxy there was a cavity, blown clear by the ferocious wind from a monstrous black hole. The cavity was laced by gas and dust, particles ionized and driven to high speeds by the ferocious gravitational and magnetic forces working here, so that streamers of glowing gas crisscrossed the cavity in a fine tracery. Stars had been born here, notably a cluster of blue-hot young stars just a fraction away from the black hole itself.

And here and there rogue stars fell through the cavity — and they dragged streaming trails behind them, glowing brilliantly, like comets a hundred light-years long.

Stars like comets.

He exulted. I, Reid Malenfant, got to see this, the heart of the Galaxy itself, by God! He wished Cassiopeia were here, his companion during those endless Saddle Point jaunts to one star after another…

Again, at the thought of Cassiopeia, his anger flared.

But the Gaijin were never our enemy, not really. They learned patience among the stars. They were just trying to figure it all out, step by step, in their own way.

But it took too long for us.

It was after all a long while before we could even see the rest of them, the great wave of colonizers and miners that followed the Gaijin, heading our way along the Galaxy’s spiral arm.

The wave of destruction.

Chapter 24 Kintu’s Children

Two hundred kilometers above the glowing Earth, a Gaijin flower-ship folded its electromagnetic wings. Drone robots pulled a scuffed hab module out of the ship’s stringy structure and launched it on a slow, precise trajectory toward the Tree.

Malenfant, inside the module, watched the Tree approach.

The bulk of the Tree, orbiting the Earth, was a glowing green ball of branches and leaves, photosynthesizing busily. It trailed a trunk, hollowed out and sealed with resin, that housed most of the Tree’s human population. Long roots trailed in the upper atmosphere: There were crude scoops to draw up raw material for continued growth, and cables of what Malenfant eventually learned was superconductor, generating power by being dragged through Earth’s magnetosphere.

The Tree was a living thing twenty kilometers long, rooted in air, looping around Earth in its inclined circular orbit, maintaining its altitude with puffs of waste gas.

It was, Malenfant thought, ridiculous. He turned away, incurious.

He had been away from Earth for twelve hundred years, and had returned to the impossible date of A.D. 3265.

Malenfant was exhausted. Physically, he was, after all, more than a hundred years old. And because of the depletion of the Saddle Point links between Zero-zero-zero-zero and Earth, he had been forced to take a roundabout route on the way back here.

All he really wanted, if he was truthful, was to get away from strangeness: just settle down in his 1960s ranch house at Clear Lake, Houston, and pop a few beers, eat potato chips, and watch Twilight Zone reruns. But here, looking out at all this orbiting foliage, he knew that wasn’t possible, that it never would be. It was just as Dorothy Chaum had tried to counsel him, before they said their good-byes back on the Cannonball. It was Earth down there, but it wasn’t his Earth. Malenfant was going to have to live with strangers, and strangeness, for whatever was left of his long and unlikely life.

At least the ice has gone, though, he thought.

His battered capsule slid to rest, lodging in branches, and Malenfant was decanted.

There was nobody to greet him. He found an empty room, with a window. There were leaves, growing around his window. On the outside.

Ridiculous. He fell asleep.

When Malenfant woke, he was in some kind of hospital gown.

He felt different. Comfortable, clean. He wasn’t hungry or thirsty. He didn’t even need a leak.

He lifted up his hand. The skin was comparatively smooth, the liver spots faded. When he flexed his fingers, the joints worked without a twinge.

Somebody had been here, done something to him. I didn’t want this, he thought. I didn’t ask for it. He cradled his resentment.

He propped himself up before his window and looked out at Earth.

He could see its curve, a blue-and-white arc against black space. He made out a slice of pale blue seascape, with an island an irregular patch of gray and brown in the middle of it, and clouds scattered over the top, lightly, like icing sugar. He was so close to the skin of the planet that if he sat back the world filled his window, scrolling steadily past.

Earth was bright: brighter than he remembered. Malenfant used to be a shuttle pilot; he knew Earth from orbit — how it used to be anyhow. Now he was amazed by the clarity of the atmosphere, even over the heart of continents. He didn’t know if Earth itself had changed, or his memories of it. After all, his eyes were an old man’s now: rheumy, filled with nostalgia.

One thing for sure, though. Earth looked empty.

When he passed over oceans he looked for ship wakes, feathering out like brush strokes. He couldn’t see any. In the lower latitudes he could make out towns; a gray, angular patchwork; a tracery of roads. But no smog. No industries, then.

And in the higher latitudes, toward the poles, he could see no sign of human habitation at all. The land looked raw, fresh, scraped clean, the granite flanks of exposed mountains shining like burnished metal, and the plains littered with boulders, like toys dropped by a child. His geography had always been lousy — and now it was a thousand years out of date — but it seemed to him the coastlines had changed shape.

He wondered who, or what, had cleaned up the glaciation. Anyhow, it might have been A.D. 1000 down there, not 3265.

Two people came drifting into his room. Naked, all but identical, they were women, but so slim they were almost sexless. They had hair that floated around them, like Jane Fonda in Barbarella.

They were joined at the hip, like Siamese twins, by a tube of pink flesh.

They hadn’t knocked, and he scowled at them. “Who are you?”

They jabbered at him in a variety of languages, some of which he recognized, some not. Their arms and shoulders were big and well developed, like tennis players’, but their legs were wisps they kept tucked up beneath them: microgravity adaptations. Their hair was blond, but their eyes were almond shaped, with folds of skin near the nose, like the Chinese.

Finally they settled on heavily accented English.

“You must forgive stupidity.” “We accommodate returning travelers—” “ — from many time periods, spread across a millennium—” “ — dating from Reid Malenfant himself.”

When they talked they swapped their speech between one and the other, like throwing a ball.

He said, “In fact, I am Reid Malenfant.”

They looked at him, and then their two heads swiveled so that blank almond eyes stared into each other, their hair mingling. For these two, he thought, every day is a bad hair day.

“You must understand the treatment you have been given,” one said.

“I didn’t want treatment,” he groused. “I didn’t sign any consent forms.”

“But your aging was—” “ — advanced.” “We have no cure, of course.” “But we can address the symptoms—” “Brittle bones, loss of immunity, nervous degeneration.” “In your case accelerated by—” “ — exposure to microgravity.” “We reversed free-radical damage with antioxidant vitamins.” “We snipped out senescent cell clusters from your epidermis and dermis.” “We reversed the intrusion of alien qualia into your sensorium, a side-effect of repeated Saddle Point transits.” “We removed various dormant infectious agents that you might return to Earth.” “We applied telomerase therapy to—”

“Enough. I believe you. I bet I don’t look a day over seventy.”

“It was routine,” a Bad Hair Day twin said. They fell silent. “Are you truly Reid Malenfant?” one asked then.

“Yes.”

The twins gave him food and drink. He didn’t recognize any of the liquids they offered him, hot or cold; they were mostly like peculiar teas, of fruit or leaves. He settled on water, which was clean and cold and pure. The food was bland and amorphous, like baby food. The Bad Hair Day twins told him it was all processed algae, spiced with a little vacuum greenery from the Tree itself.

The twins pulled him gracefully through microgravity, along tunnels like wood-lined veins that twisted and turned, lit only by some kind of luminescence in the wood. It was like a fantasy spaceship rendered in carpentry, he thought.

There were a few dozen colonists here, living in bubbles of air inside the bulk of the Tree. They were all microgravity-adapted, as far as he could see, some of them even more evolved than the twins. There was one guy with a huge dome of a head over a shriveled-up body, sticks of limbs, a penis like a walnut, no pubic hair. To Malenfant he looked like a real science fiction type of creation, like the boss alien in Invaders from Mars.

The people, however strange, looked young and healthy to Malenfant. Their skin was smooth, unwrinkled, unmarked save by tattoos; his own raisinlike face, the lines baked into it by years of exposure to Earth’s weather and ultraviolet light and heavy gravity, was a curiosity here, a badge of exotica.

They all had almond eyes, folds of yellow skin.

As far as Malenfant could make out this was a kind of reverse colony from the near-Earth asteroids, which had been settled by descendants of the Chinese. Out there, it seemed, there were great bubble habitats where everyone had lived in zero gravity for centuries.

Sometimes he thought he could hear a low humming, sniff a little ozone, feel hair-prickling static, as if he was surrounded by immense electrical or magnetic fields that tweaked at his body. Maybe it was so. Electromagnetic fields could be used to stimulate and stress muscles and bones, and even to counter bone wastage; NASA had experimented with such technologies. Maybe the Tree swaddled its human cargo in electricity, fixing their bones and muscles and flesh.

But maybe there was no need for such clunky gadgetry, a thousand years downstream. After all the Tree provided a pretty healthy environment, of clean air, pure water, toxin-free foods: no pollutants or poisons or pathogens here. And even natural hazards like Earth’s naturally occurring radioactivity in soil and stone could be designed out. Maybe if you gave people a good enough place to live, this was how they turned out, with health and longevity.

And as for adaptation to microgravity, maybe that came naturally too. After all, he recalled, the dolphins and other aquatic mammals had had no need of centrifuges or electro stimulation to maintain their muscles and bones in the no-gravity environment they inhabited. Maybe these space-dwelling humans had more in common with the dolphins than the bony dirt-treaders of his own kind.

The Tree itself had been gen-enged from giant ancestors on the Moon. Humans used the Tree for a variety of purposes: port, observation platform, resort. But the Tree’s own purpose was simply to grow and survive, and there seemed no obstacle to its doing so until the Sun itself flickered and died.

There was more than one Tree.

In 3265, Earth was encased in a spreading web of vegetation, space-going Trees and spidery airborne tendrils, reaching down from space to the surface. And, slowly, systems were evolving the other way. One day there might be some kind of unlikely biological ladder reaching from Earth to space. It was a strategy to ensure long-term access from space via stable biological means. Nobody could tell Malenfant whose strategy this was, however.

The colonists in this Tree seemed to care for returning travelers like him with a breed of absent-minded charity. Beyond that, the twins’ motive in speaking to him seemed to be a vague curiosity — maybe even just politeness.

The Bad Hair Day twins’ variant of English contained a fraction of words, a fifth or a quarter, that were unrecognizable to Malenfant. Linguistic drift, he figured. It had, after all, been a thousand years; he was Chaucer meeting Neil Armstrong.

“Where did you travel?” they asked.

“I started at Alpha Centauri. After that I couldn’t always tell. I kind of bounced around.”

“What did you find?”

He thought about that. “I don’t know. I couldn’t understand much.”

It was true. But now — just as Madeleine Meacher and Dorothy Chaum had sought him out, saved his life on that remote Cannonball world without asking his by-your-leave — so the Bad Hair Day twins had thrust unwelcome youth on him. He felt curious again. Dissatisfied. Damn it, he’d gotten used to being old. It had been comfortable.

There were no other travelers here.

He soon got bored with the Tree, the incomprehensible artifacts and activities it contained. Lonely, disoriented, he tried to engage the Bad Hair Day twins, his enigmatic nurses. “You know, I remember how Earth looked when I first went up in Columbia, back in ’93 — 1993, that is. In those days we had to ride these big solid rocket boosters up to orbit, you know, and then, and then…”

The twins would listen politely for a while. But then they would lock on each other, mouths pressed into an airtight seal, small hands sliding over bare flesh, their hair drifting in clouds around them, that bridge of skin between them folded and compressed, and Malenfant was just a sad old fart boring them with war stories.

If he was going back to Earth, where was he supposed to land?

He asked the Bad Hair Day twins for encyclopedias, history books. The twins all but laughed at him. The people of A.D. 3265, it seemed, had forgotten history. The Bad Hair Day twins seemed to know little beyond their specialty, which was a limited — if very advanced — medicine. It was… disappointing. On the other hand, how much knowledge or interest had he ever had in the year A.D. 1000?

He got frustrated. He railed at the twins. They just stared back at him.

He would have to find out for himself.

He still had the softscreenlike sensor pack Sally Brind had given him centuries ago, when he set off for the Saddle Point to the Alpha Centauri system. It would work as a multispectral sensor. He could configure it to overlay the images of Earth with representations in infrared, ultraviolet, radar imaging, whatever he wanted; he could select for the signatures of rock, soil, vegetation, water, and the products of industrialization like heavy metals, pollutants.

Alone, he found a window and studied the planet.

Earth was indeed depopulated.

There were humans down there, but no communities bigger than a few tens of thousands. There were no industrial products, save for a thin smear of relics from the past, clustered around the old cities and strung out along the disused roads. He couldn’t even see signs of large-scale agriculture.

Malenfant studied what was left of the cities of his day, those that had somehow survived the ice. New York, for example.

In A.D. 3265, New York was green. It was a woodland of birch and oak, pushing out of a layer of elder thicket. He could still make out the shapes of roads, city blocks, and parking lots, but they were green rectangles covered with mosses, lichens, and tough, destructive plants like buddleia. On Manhattan, some of the bigger concrete buildings still stood, like white bones poking above the trees, but they were bereft of windows, their walls stained by fires. Others had subsided, reduced to oddly shaped hummocks beneath the greenery. The bridges had collapsed, leaving shallow weirs along the river. He could see foxes, bats, wolves, deer, feral pigs. And there were more exotic creatures, maybe descended from zoo stock.

Some of the roads looked in good condition, oddly. Maybe the smart-concrete that was being introduced just before his departure from Earth had kept working. But the big multilane freeway that ran up out of Manhattan looked a little crazy to Malenfant, a wild scribble over grassed-over concrete. Maybe it wasn’t just repairing itself but actually growing, crawling like a huge worm across the abandoned suburbs, a semisentient highway over which no car had traveled for centuries.

Once Malenfant saw what looked like a hunting party, working its way along the coast of the widened Hudson, stalking a thing like an antelope. The people were tall, naked, golden haired. One of the hunters looked up to the sky, as if directly at Malenfant. It was a woman, her blue eyes empty. She had a neck like a shot-putter. Her face was, he thought, somehow not even human.

When Malenfant had left Earth, a thousand years ago, he had left behind no direct descendants. His wife, Emma, had died before they had had a chance to have children together. But he’d had relatives: a nephew, two nieces.

Now there was hardly anybody left on Earth. Malenfant wondered if anybody down there still bore a trace of his genes. And if so, what they had become.

For sentimental reasons he looked for the Statue of Liberty. Maybe it was washed up on the beach, like in Planet of the Apes. There was no sign of the old lady.

But he did find a different monument: an artifact kilometers across, a monstrous ring, slap in the middle of downtown Manhattan. It looked like a particle accelerator. Maybe it had something to do with the city’s battle against the ice. Whatever, it didn’t look human. It was out of scale.

There was other evidence of high technology scattered around the planet, but it didn’t seem to have much to do with humans either. For example, when the Tree drifted over the Pyrenees, the mountains on the crease of land between France and Spain, he could see a threading of light — perfect straight lines of ruby light — joining the peaks like a spiderweb. His screen told him this was coherent light: lased. There were similar systems in other mountainous regions, scattered around the planet. The laser arrays worked continuously. Maybe they were adjusting the atmosphere somehow: burning out CFCs, for instance.

And he observed flashes from sites around the equator, on Earth’s water hemisphere. A few minutes after each flash the air would get a little mistier. He estimated they must be coming every minute or so, on a global scale. He remembered twenty-first century schemes to increase Earth’s albedo — to increase the percentage of sunlight reflected back into space — by firing submicrometer dust up into the stratosphere: Naval guns could have done the job. The point was to reduce global warming. But the dust would settle out: You would have needed to fire a shot every few seconds, maintained for decades, even centuries. Back then the idea was ridiculed. But such dust injections would account for the increase in global brightness he thought he’d observed.

This was planetary engineering. All he could see from here were the gross physical schemes. Maybe down on the planet there was more: nanotechnological adjustments, for instance.

Somebody was fixing the Earth. It didn’t look to Malenfant like it was anybody human. It would, after all, take centuries, maybe millennia. No human civilization could handle projects of that duration, or ever would be able to. So, give the job to somebody else.

Not every change was constructive.

In southern Africa there was a dramatic new crater. It looked like a scar in the greenery of the planet. He didn’t know if it was some kind of meteorite scar or an open-cast mine kilometers wide. Machines crawled over the walls and pit of the crater, visibly chewing up shattered rock, extracting piles of minerals, metals. From space, the machines looked like spiders: dodecahedral bodies maybe fifty meters wide, with eight or ten articulated limbs, working steadily at this open wound in the skin of Earth.

Malenfant had seen such machines before. They were Gaijin factory drones, designed to chew up ice and rock. But now they weren’t off in the asteroid belt or stuck out on the cold rim of the Solar System billions of kilometers away. The Gaijin were here, on the surface of Earth itself. He wondered what they were doing.

He looked farther afield, seeking people, civilization.

The most populous place on the planet, it appeared, was some kind of mountaintop community in the middle of Africa. It was, as far as he could remember his geography, in Uganda.

And there was something odd about its signature in his sensor pack. From a source at the center of the community he plotted heavy particles, debris from what looked like short half-life fission products. And there were some much more energetic particles: almost like cosmic rays.

But they came from a source embedded deep within Earth itself.

The only other similar sources, scattered around the planet, looked like deep radioactive-waste dumps.

The Ugandan community wasn’t civilization, but it was the most advanced-looking technological trace on the planet. Population, and an enigma. Maybe that was the place for him to go.

The Bad Hair Day twins showed him a wooden spaceship. It was, good God, his atmospheric entry capsule. It was like a seed pod, a flattened sphere of wood a couple of meters across. It was fitted with a basic canvas couch and a life support system — just crude organic filters — that would last a couple of hours, long enough for the entry. The pod even had a window, actually grown into the wood, a blister of some clear stuff like amber. He would have to climb in through a dilating diaphragm that would seal up behind him, like being born in reverse.

He spent some time hunting out the pod’s heat shield. The Bad Hair Day twins watched, puzzled.

They kept him on orbit for another month or so, giving him gravity preparation: exercise, a calcium booster, electromagnetic therapy. They gave him a coverall of some kind of biocomposite material, soft to the touch but impossible to rip, smart enough to keep him at the right temperature. He packed inside the sphere his sole personal possession: his old shuttle pressure suit, with its faded Stars and Stripes and the NASA logo, that he’d worn when he flew through that first gateway, a thousand AU from home, a thousand years ago. It was junk, but it was all he had.

He enjoyed a last sleep in weightlessness.

When he awoke the Tree was passing over South America. Malenfant could see the fresh water of the Amazon, noticeably paler than the salt of the ocean, the current so strong the waters had still failed to mingle hundreds of kilometers offshore.

He climbed inside his capsule. The Bad Hair Day twins kissed him, one soft face to either cheek, and sealed him up in warm brown darkness.

He was whiplashed out of the Tree by a flexing branch. A sensation of weight briefly returned to Malenfant, and he was pressed into his seat. When the castoff was done, the weight disappeared.

But now the pod was no longer in a free orbit, but falling rapidly toward the air.

At the fringe of the atmosphere, the pod shuddered around him. He felt very aware of the lightness and fragility of this wooden nutshell within which he was going to have to fall ass-first into the atmosphere.

Within five minutes of separation from the Tree, frictional deceleration was building up: a tenth, two-tenths of a g. The deceleration piled up quickly, eyeballs-in, shoving him deeper against his couch.

The pod shuddered violently. Malenfant was cocooned in a dull roaring noise. He gripped his couch and tried not to worry about it.

As the heat shield rammed deeper into the air, a shell of plasma built up around the hull. Beyond the amber windows the blackness of space was masked by a deep brown, which quickly escalated through orange, a fiery yellow, and then a dazzling white. Particles of soot flew off the scorching outer hull of the pod and streaked over the window, masking his view; now all he could see were extreme surges of brightness, as if fireballs were flying past the craft.

From the surface of Earth, the ship would be a brilliant meteor, visible even in daylight. He wondered if there was anybody down there who would understand what they saw.

The oaklike wood of the hull made for a natural heat shield, the Bad Hair Day twins had told him. All that resin would ablate naturally. It was a neater solution than the crude, clanking mechanical gadgets of his own era. Maybe, but he was an old-fashioned guy; he’d have preferred to be surrounded by a few layers of honest-to-God metal and ceramic.

The glow started to fade, and the deceleration eased. Now the windows were completely blacked over by the soot, but a shield jettisoned with a bang, taking the soot away with it and revealing a circle of clear blue sky.

There was another crack as the first parachute deployed. The chute snatched at the pod and made it swing violently from side to side. He was pressed against one side of his couch and then the other, with the cabin creaking around him; he felt fragile, helpless, trapped in the couch.

Two more drogue chutes snapped open, in quick succession, and then the main chute. He could see through his window a huge canopy of green leafy material, like a vegetable cloud against the blue sky. The chute looked reassuringly intact, despite its vegetable origins, and the swaying reduced.

Malenfant glimpsed the ground. He could even track his progress, with maps in his sensor pack. He’d come down over the island that used to be called Zanzibar, on the east coast of Africa. And now he was drifting inland, to the northwest, toward Lake Victoria. Forest lay like thick green cloth over mountains.

Malenfant felt his couch rise up beneath him. Collapsing sacs pumped compressed carbon dioxide into the base of his seat, preparing to act as a shock absorber on landing. He was pressed up against the curved roof of his pod, with only a small gap between his knees and the roof itself. He felt hemmed in, heavy, hot. Gravity pulled at him, tangibly.

The pod hit the ground.

The parachutes pulled the capsule forward, so Malenfant was tipped up onto his face, and then the pod started to careen across rocky ground, rocking backward and forward, spinning and rattling. His head rattled against his couch headrest.

Finally the pod slithered to a halt.

Malenfant found himself suspended on his side, with daylight pouring through the window behind him. The shock absorber was still pressing him against the roof, so he couldn’t see outside. He lifted his hands to his face. There was blood in his mouth.

The pod wall dilated, releasing a flood of hot sunlit air into the capsule, so rich in oxygen and vegetable scents it made him gasp.

He began the painful process of climbing out.

His pod had come down on a low pebbly beach. The beach ran in a sinuous light-gray line between the darker gray face of a lake and the living green of a banana grove. From the margin of the lake to the highest hilltop, all he could see was contrasting shades of green, spreading like a carpet.

This was the northern coast of Lake Victoria. It was the closest place to that population center, with its odd radioactivity signature, that the Bad Hair Day twins would deliver him.

Once he got his balance, he didn’t have any trouble walking. He didn’t feel dizzy, but oddly disoriented. He could feel his internal organs moving around, seeking a new equilibrium inside him. And he seemed to be immune to sunburn.

But it was odd to be walking around without his pressure suit. Disconcerting. And the sense of openness, of scale, was startling. After all his travels, Malenfant had become an alien, uncomfortable on the surface of his home world.

There was no sign of humanity.

Malenfant made camp in the inert, scorched shell of his pod. He used the bubble helmet of his old NASA pressure suit to collect water from a brook, a little way inland. He ate figs and bananas. He figured if he was stuck here for long he’d try to fish that lake.

The days were short and hot, although there was usually a scattering of cloud over the blue sky. He set up a stick in the sand and watched its shadow shifting and lengthening with the hours. That way he figured out the time of local noon, and he reset his astronaut’s watch. If he was stuck here long enough he might find the equinox and start filling out a calendar.

The sunsets were spectacular. All the submicrometer dust.

The nights were cold, and he would wrap himself up inside the Beta-cloth outer layers of his pressure suit, there on the beach. But he stayed awake long hours, studying a changed sky.

The crescent Moon glowed blue.

The crescent’s edge was softly blurred by a band of light that stretched partway around the dark half of the satellite. There was a thick band of what looked like cloud, piled up over the Moon’s equator. On the darkened surface itself there were lights, strung out in lines: towns, or cities, outlining hidden lunar continents. The Moon had a twin light: a giant mirror that orbited it slowly, shedding light on the Moon’s shadowed hemisphere, which would otherwise languish in the dark for fourteen days at a time, probably long enough for the precious new air to start snowing out.

And in the center of the darkened hemisphere that faced him was a dazzling point glow. The point source was Earthlight, reflecting from the oceans of the Moon.

Even a slim crescent Moon, now, drenched the sky with light, drowning out the stars and planets. The wildlife of Earth made use of the new light: He heard the croak of amphibians, the growl of some kind of cat. No doubt this changed Moon was working on the evolution of species, subtly.

The Moon was beautiful, wonderful, its terraforming one heck of an achievement. But to Malenfant it was as unreachable as before Apollo, a thousand years ago. And, even from here, Malenfant could see Gaijin craft orbiting over the lunar poles.

When the Moon set, taking its brilliant light with it, the full strangeness of the sky emerged.

Huge objects drifted against the blackness, green and gold: Trees, spectral patches of green life; and Gaijin flower-ships, their open ramscoop mouths tangles of silvery threads, like dragonflies. There was a chain of lights clustered around the plain of the ecliptic, sparkles in knots and clusters, almost like streetlights seen from orbit. They were Gaijin asteroid-belt cities.

The shapes of the constellations were mostly unchanged, the stars’ slow drift imperceptible in the mayfly beat he’d been away. A bright young star had come to life in Cassiopeia, turning that distinctive W shape into a zig zag. But many more stars had dimmed, to redness or even lurid green — or they were missing altogether, masked by life. This was the mark of the colonization wave, pulsing along the Galaxy’s star lanes, an engineered consumption of system after system, heading this way.

And in one part of the sky, loosely centered on the grand old constellation of Orion, stars were flickering, burning, sputtering to darkness. It was evidence of purposeful activity spread across many light-years, and it made him shiver. Perhaps it was the war he had come to fear, breaking over the Solar System.

In the deepest dark of the nights he made out a huge, beautiful comet, sprawled across the zenith. Even with his naked eye he could see the bright spark of its nucleus, a tail that swept, feathery, curved, across the dome of the sky.

Comets came from the Oort cloud. He wondered if there was any connection between this shining visitor, flying through the heart of the inner Solar System, and the sparkling lights he saw around Orion, the remote disturbance there.

One morning he crawled out of his pod, buck naked.

There was a man standing there, staring at him.

Malenfant yelped and clamped his hands over his testicles.

The man — no more than a boy, probably — was tall, more than two meters high. His skin was copper brown, covered by a pale golden hair so thick it was almost like fur, and his eyes were blue. He had muscles like an athlete’s. He was wearing some kind of breechcloth made of a coarse white material. He was carrying a sack. There was a belt around his waist, of some kind of leather. It contained a variety of tools, all of them stone, bone, or wood: round axes, cleavers, scrapers, a hammer stone.

His neck was thick, like a weightlifter’s. He had a long low skull, with some kind of bony crest behind. And he had bony eyebrows, a sloping forehead under that blond hair. He had a big projecting jaw — no chin — strong-looking teeth, a heavy browridge shielding his eyes, a flat apelike nose. He didn’t, Malenfant thought, look quite human. But he was beautiful for all that, his gaze on Malenfant direct and untroubled.

He grinned at Malenfant and emptied out the sack over the sand. It contained bananas, sweet potatoes, and eggs. “Eat food hungry eat food,” he said. His voice was high and indistinct, the consonants blurred.

Malenfant, stunned, just stood and stared.

His visitor folded up his sack, turned, and ran off over the sand, a blur of golden brown, leaving a trail of Man Friday footsteps on the beach.

Malenfant grunted. “First contact,” he said to himself. Curiouser and curiouser.

He went to the tree line to do his morning business, then came back to the food. It made a change from fruit and fish.

He settled down to waiting. Man Friday and his unseen compadres surely didn’t mean him any harm. Even so, he found it impossible not to stay close to his pod, glaring out at the tree line.

He wondered what he could use for weapons. Discreetly, he got together a heap of the bigger stones he could gather from the beach.

When his next visitors came, it was from the lake. He heard the voices first.

Six canoes, crowded with men and women, came shimmering around the point of the bay. Malenfant squinted to focus his new, improved eyes.

The crew looked to be of all races, from Aryan to Negro. Malenfant spotted a few beautiful, golden-haired creatures like his Man Friday. He saw what looked like the commander, standing up in one of the canoes. He was dressed in a bead-worked headdress adorned with long white cock’s feathers, and a snowy white and long-haired goatskin, with a crimson robe hanging from his shoulders. To Malenfant he was a vision out of the Stone Age. But he was hunched over, as if ill.

Empty-handed, Malenfant went down the beach to meet them.

The canoes scraped onto the shore, and the commander jumped out and walked barefoot through shallow water to the dry sand. He stumbled, Malenfant saw, on legs swollen to the thickness of tree trunks. His face was burned black, and patches of hair sprouted from his scalp like weeds. But his gaze was alert and searching.

He reached out. There was a stench of rotting skin, and it was all Malenfant could manage not to recoil in disgust. To Malenfant, it looked like an advanced case of radiation poisoning. Something, he thought, is going on here.

The commander opened his mouth to speak. His lips parted with a soft pop, and Malenfant saw how his mucous membranes were swollen up. He began talking to Malenfant in a language he couldn’t recognize. Swahili or Kiganda, maybe.

Malenfant held up his hands. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

The commander looked startled. “Good God,” he said, “a European… I never expected to see another European!” His English was heavily accented.

“Not European. American.”

“You’re a deep traveler.”

“Deep?”

“Deep in time. Like me. I left Earth the first time in 2191. You?”

“Earlier,” said Malenfant.

“Listen, I’m a kind of ambassador from the Kabaka.”

“Kabaka?”

“The emperor. Among other duties, I meet travelers. Not that they come often.” He noticed Malenfant reacting to his condition. He smiled, his mouth a grisly gash that exposed black teeth. “Don’t worry about this. I fell out with the Kabaka for a while. Most people do. My name is Pierre de Bonneville. I used to be French. I went to Bellatrix with the Gaijin: Gamma Orionis, three hundred and sixty light-years away. A remarkable trip.”

“Why?”

De Bonneville laughed. “I was a writer. A poet, actually. My country believed in sending artists to the stars: eyes and ears to bring home the truth, the inner truth, you see, of what is out there. I rode one of the last Arianes, from Kourou. Vast, noisy affair! But when I got home everyone had left, or died. There was nowhere to publish what I observed, no one to listen to my accounts.”

“I know the feeling. My name’s Malenfant.”

De Bonneville peered at him. He didn’t seem to recognize the name, and that suited Malenfant.

The golden-haired crewmen poked curiously around the charred husk of Malenfant’s reentry pod.

De Bonneville grinned. “You’re admiring my golden-haired crewmen. The Uprights. Kintu’s children, I call them.”

“Kintu?”

“But then, we are all children of Kintu now. What do you want here, Malenfant?”

Travelers and emperors, history and politics. Malenfant felt his new blood pump in his veins. He’d been among aliens too long. Now human affairs, with all their rich complexity, were embracing him again.

He grinned. “Take me to your leader,” he said.

Chapter 25 Wanpamba’s Tomb

Pierre de Bonneville, with his crew of humans and golden-haired hominids, spent a night on the beach where Malenfant had fallen from orbit. By firelight, the human crew ate dried fish and sweet potatoes. The Uprights served the humans, who didn’t acknowledge or thank them in any way.

De Bonneville started drinking a frothy beer he called pombe, of fermented grain. Within an hour he was bleary eyed, thick tongued, husky voiced.

When they were done with their chores the Uprights settled down away from the others. They built their own crude fire and cooked something that sizzled and popped with fat; to Malenfant it smelled like pork.

The boy Malenfant had dubbed “Friday” turned out to be called Magassa.

De Bonneville told Malenfant how he had traveled here along the course of the Nile, from where Cairo used to be. Like Malenfant, he’d been drawn, on his return from the stars, to the nearest thing to a metropolis the old planet had to offer. The Nile journey sounded like quite a trip: In A.D. 3265, Africa was a savage place once more.

“Listen to me. The ruler here is called Mtesa. Mtesa is the Kabaka of Uganda, Usogo, Unyoro, and Karagwe — an empire three hundred kilometers in length and fifty in breadth, the biggest political unit in all this pagan world. Things have… reverted… here on Earth, Malenfant, while we weren’t looking. The people here have gone back to ways of life they enjoyed, or endured, centuries before your time or mine, before the Europeans expanded across the planet. You and I are true anachronisms. Do you understand? These people aren’t like us. They have no real sense of history. No sense of change, of the possibility of a different future or past. The date, by your and my calendars, may be A.D. 3265. But Earth is now timeless.” He coughed, and hawked up a gob of blood-soaked phlegm.

“What happened to you, de Bonneville?”

The Frenchman grinned and deflected the question. “Let me tell you how this country is. We’re like the first European explorers, coming here to darkest Africa, in the nineteenth century. And the Kabaka is a tough gentleman. When the traveler first enters this country, his path seems to be strewn with flowers. Gifts follow one another rapidly, pages and courtiers kneel before him, and the least wish is immediately gratified. So long as the stranger is a novelty, and his capacities or worth have not yet been sounded, it is like a holiday here. But there comes a time when he must make return. Do you follow me?”

Malenfant thought about it. De Bonneville’s speech was more florid than Malenfant was used to. But then, he’d been born maybe two hundred years later than Malenfant; a lot could change in that time. Mostly, though, he thought de Bonneville had gotten a little too immersed in the local politics — who cared about this Kabaka? — not to mention becoming as bitter as hell.

“No,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

De Bonneville seemed frustrated. “Ultimately you must pay back the Kabaka for his hospitality. If you have weapons with you, you must give; if you have rings, or good clothes, you must give. And if you do not give liberally, there will be found other means to rid you of your superfluities. Your companions will desert, attracted by the rewards of Mtesa. And one day, you will find yourself utterly bereft of your entire stock — and you will be stranded here, a thousand kilometers from the nearest independent community.”

“And that’s what happened to you.”

“When I stopped amusing him, the Kabaka dragged me before his court. And I… displeased him further. And, with a kiss from the katekiro — Mtesa’s lieutenant — I was sentenced to a month in the Engine of Kimera.”

“An engine?”

“It is a yellow-cake mine. I was put in with the lowest of the low, Malenfant. The sentence left me reduced, as you see. When I was released, Mtesa — in the manner of the half-civilized ruler he is — found me work in the court. I am a bookkeeper.

“Here’s something to amuse you. From my memories of Inca culture I recognized the number recording system here, which is like the quipu — that is to say, numerical records made up of knotted strings. The Kabaka has embraced this technology. Every citizen in this kingdom is stored in numbers: the date of her birth, her kinship through birth and marriage, the contents of her granaries and warehouses. I was able to devise an accounting system to assist Mtesa with tax levies, for which he showed inordinate gratitude, and I became something of a favorite at the court again, though in a different capacity.

“But you see the irony, Malenfant. We travelers return from the stars to this dismal posttechnological future — a world of illiterates — and yet I find myself a prisoner of an empire that lists the acts of every citizen as pure unadorned numbers. This may look like Eden to you; in fact it is a dread, soulless metropolis!”

The Uprights were laughing together. Malenfant could hear their voices, oddly monotonous, their jabbered speech.

“Their talk is simple,” Malenfant said.

“Yes. Direct and nonabstract. Sweet, isn’t it? About the level of a six-year-old human child.”

“What are they, de Bonneville?”

“Can’t you tell? They make me shudder. They are physically beautiful, of course. The women are sometimes compliant… Here. More pombe.”

“No.”

They sat in the cooling night, an old man and an invalid, stranded out of time, as in the distance the Uprights clustered around their fire, tall and elegant.

Malenfant agreed to travel with Pierre de Bonneville to Usavara, the hunting village of the Kabaka, and from there to the capital, Rubaga. Rubaga was the source of those radiation anomalies Malenfant had observed from orbit.

The next day they rowed out of the bay. De Bonneville’s canoe was superb, and Magassa, the Upright, drummed an accompaniment to the droning chant of the oarsmen.

Malenfant, sitting astern, felt as if he had wandered into a theme park.

About two kilometers along the shore from Usavara, the hunting village, Malenfant saw what had to be thousands of Waganda — which was, de Bonneville said, this new race’s name for members of their tribe. They were standing to order on the shore in two dense lines, at the ends of which stood several finely dressed men in crimson and black and snowy white. As the canoes neared the beach, arrows flew in the air. Kettle and bass drums sounded a noisy welcome, and flags and banners waved.

When they landed, de Bonneville led Malenfant up the beach. They were met by an old woman, short and bent. She was dressed in a crimson robe that covered a white dress of bleached cotton. De Bonneville kneeled before this figure and told Malenfant she was the katekiro: a kind of prime minister to the Kabaka.

The katekiro’s face was a wizened mask.

“Holy shit. Nemoto. ” It was her; Malenfant had no doubt about it.

When she looked closely at Malenfant, her eyes widened, and she turned away. She would not meet his eyes again.

De Bonneville watched them curiously.

The katekiro motioned with her head and, amid a clamor of beaten drums, Malenfant and de Bonneville walked into the village.

They reached a circle of grass-thatched huts surrounding a large house, which Malenfant was told would be his quarters. They were going to stay here a night, before moving inland. Nemoto left as soon as she could, and Malenfant didn’t get to speak to her.

When Malenfant emerged from his hut he found gifts from the Kabaka: bunches of bananas, milk, sweet potatoes, green Indian corn, rice, fresh eggs, and ten pots of maramba wine.

Reid Malenfant, cradling his NASA pressure suit under his arm, felt utterly disoriented. And the presence of Nemoto, a human being he’d known a thousand years before, somehow only enhanced his sense of the bizarre.

He laughed, picked up a pot of wine, and went to bed.

The next day they walked inland, toward the capital.

Malenfant found himself trekking across a vast bowl of grass. The road was a level strip two meters wide, cutting through jungle and savannah. It had, it seemed, been built for the Kabaka’s hunting excursions. Some distance away there was a lake, small and brackish, and beyond that a range of hills, climbing into mountains. The lower flanks of the mountains were cloaked in forest; their summits were wreathed in clouds. The domelike huts of the Waganda were buried deep in dense bowers of plantains — flat leaves and green flowers — that filled the air with the cloying stink of overripe fruit.

Malenfant heard a remote bellowing.

He saw animals stalking across the plain, two or three kilometers away. They might have been elephants; they were huge and gray, and tusks gleamed white in the gray light of the predawn sky. The tusks turned downward, unlike the zoo animals Malenfant remembered.

He asked de Bonneville about the animals.

De Bonneville grunted. “Those are deinotherium. The elephant things. Genetic archaeology.”

Malenfant tried to observe all this, to memorize the way back to the coast. But he found it hard to concentrate on what he was seeing.

Nemoto: God damn. She’d surely recognized him. But she’d barely acknowledged his existence, and during this long walk across Africa, he couldn’t find a way to get close to her.

After three hours’ march, they came into view of a flat-topped hill that cast a long shadow across the countryside. The hill was crowned by a cluster of tall, conical grass huts, walled by a cane fence. This hilltop village, de Bonneville said, was the capital, Rubaga; the hill itself was known as Wanpamba’s Tomb. Rubaga struck Malenfant as a sinister, brooding place, out of sympathy with the lush green countryside it ruled.

In the center of the hilltop cluster of huts stood a bigger building. Evidently this was the imperial palace. To Malenfant it looked like a Kansas barn. Fountains thrust up into the air around the central building, like handfuls of diamonds catching the light. That struck Malenfant as odd. Fountains? Where did the power for fountains come from?

Broad avenues radiated down the hill’s flanks. The big avenues blended into lower-grade roads, which cut across the countryside. Malenfant saw that much of the traffic — pedestrians and ox carts — was directed along these radiating roads, toward and away from the capital.

Two of the bigger roads, to east and west, seemed more rutted and damaged than the rest, as if they bore heavy traffic. The eastern road didn’t ascend the hill itself but rather entered a tunnel cut into the hillside. It looked like it was designed for delivering supplies of some sort to a mine or quarry inside the bulk of the hill, or maybe for hauling ore out of there. In fact he saw a caravan of several heavy covered carts, drawn by laboring bullocks, dragging its way along the eastern road. It reminded Malenfant of a twenty-mule team hauling bauxite out of Death Valley.

They proceeded up the hill, along one of the big avenues. The ground was a reddish clay. The avenue was fenced with tall water-cane set together in uniform rows.

People crowded the avenues. The Waganda wore brown robes or white dresses, some with white goatskins over their brown robes, and others with cords folded like a turban around their heads. They didn’t show much curiosity about de Bonneville’s party. Evidently a traveler was a big deal out in Usavara, out in the sticks, but here in the capital everyone was much too cool to pay attention.

There wasn’t so much as a TV aerial or a Coke machine in sight. But de Bonneville surprised Malenfant by telling him that people here could live to be as old as 150 years.

“We have been to the stars, and have returned. Rubaga might look primitive, but it is deceptive. We are living on the back of a thousand years’ progress in science and technology. Plus what we bought from the Gaijin, and others. It is invisible — embedded in the fabric of the world — but it’s here. For instance, many diseases have been eradicated. And, thanks to genetic engineering, aging has been slowed down greatly.”

“What about the Uprights?”

“What?”

“What life span can they expect?”

De Bonneville looked irritated. “Thirty or forty years, I suppose. What does it matter? I’m talking about Homo Sapiens, Malenfant.”

Despite de Bonneville’s claims about progress, Malenfant soon noticed that mixed in with the clean and healthy and long-lived citizens there were a handful who looked a lot worse off. These unclean were dressed reasonably well. But each of them — man, woman, or child — was afflicted by diseases and deformities. Malenfant counted symptoms: swollen lips, open sores, heads of men and women like billiard balls to which mere clumps of hair still clung. Many were mottled with blackness about the face and hands. Some of them had skin that appeared to be flaking away in handfuls, and there were others with swollen arms, legs and necks, so that their skin was stretched to a smooth glassiness.

All in all, the same symptoms as Pierre de Bonneville.

De Bonneville grimaced at his fellow sufferers. “The Breath of Kimera,” he hissed. “A terrible thing, Malenfant.” But he would say no more than that.

When these unfortunates moved through the crowds the other Waganda melted away from them, as if determined not even to glance at the unclean ones.

They reached the cane fence that surrounded the village at the top of the hill. They passed through a gate and into the central compound.

Malenfant was led to the house that had been allotted to him. It stood in the center of a plantain garden and was shaped like a marquee, with a portico projecting over the doorway. It had two apartments. Close by there were three domelike huts for servants, and railed spaces for — he was told — his bullocks and goats.

Useful, he thought.

The prospect from up here was imperial. A landscape of early summer green, drenched in sunshine, fell away in waves. There was a fresh breeze coming off the huge inland sea. Here and there isolated cone-shaped hills thrust up from the flat landscape, like giant tables above a green carpet. Dark sinuous lines traced the winding courses of deep tree-filled ravines separated by undulating pastures. In broader depressions Malenfant could see cultivated gardens and grain fields. Up toward the horizon all these details melted into the blues of the distance.

It was picture-postcard pretty, as if Europeans had never come here. But he wondered what this countryside had seen, how much blood and tears had had to soak into the earth before the scars of colonialism had been healed.

Not that the land wasn’t developed pretty intensely: notably, with a network of irrigation channels and canals, clearly visible from up here. The engineering was impressive, in its way. Malenfant wondered how the Kabaka and his predecessors had managed it. The population wasn’t so great, it seemed to him, that it could spare huge numbers of laborers from the fields for all these earthworks.

Maybe they used Uprights, whatever they were.

Anyhow, he thought sourly, so much for the pastoral idyll. It looked as if Homo Sap was on the move again — building, breeding, lording it over his fellows and the creatures around him, just like always.

In this unmanaged biosphere, immersed in air that was too dense and too hot and too humid, Malenfant had trouble sleeping; and when he did sleep, he woke to fuzzy senses and a sore head.

There was no way to get coffee, decaffeinated or otherwise.

The next afternoon Malenfant was invited to the palace.

The katekiro — Nemoto — came to escort him, evidently under orders. “Come with me,” she said bluntly. It was the first time she’d spoken directly to Malenfant.

“Nemoto, I know it’s you. And you know me, don’t you?”

“The Kabaka is waiting.”

“How did you get here? How long have you been here? Are there any other travelers here?”

Nemoto wouldn’t reply.

They approached the tall inner fence around the palace itself. He wasn’t the only visitor today, and a procession drew up. The ordinary Waganda weren’t permitted beyond this point, but they crowded around the gates anyhow, gossiping and preening.

There was a rumbling roll of a kettle drum, and the gate was drawn aside; they proceeded — chiefs, soldiers, peasants, and interstellar travelers — into a complex of courtyards.

There was a wide avenue inside the fence, and at the fence’s four corners those spectacular fountains thrust up into the air, rising fifteen meters or more. The water emerged from crude clay piping that snaked into the ground beneath the palace. Maybe there were pumps buried in the hillside.

Malenfant approached the nearest fountain. He reached out to touch the water. Christ, it was hot, so hot it almost scalded his fingers. Nemoto pulled his arm back. Her hand on his was leathery and warm.

The drums sounded again. They passed through courtyard after courtyard, until finally they stood in front of the palace itself.

It was only a grass hut. But it was tall and spacious, full of light and air. Malenfant, who had once visited the White House, had been in worse government buildings.

The heart of the palace was a reception room. This was a narrow hall some twenty meters long, the ceiling of which was supported by two rows of pillars. The aisles were filled with dignitaries and officers. At each pillar stood one of the Kabaka’s guards, wearing a long red mantle, white trousers, black blouse, and a white turban ornamented with monkey skin. All were armed with spears. But there was no throne there, nor Mtesa himself. Instead there was only what Malenfant took to be a well, a rectangular pit in the floor.

Malenfant, Nemoto, and the rest had to sit in rows before the open pit.

Drums clattered, and puffs of steam came venting up from the well mouth, followed by a grinding, mechanical noise. A platform rose up out of the well, smoothly enough. Once again, Malenfant wondered where the energy for these stunts came from. The platform carried a throne — a seat like an office chair — on which sat the lean figure of Mtesa himself. Mtesa’s head was clean-shaven and covered with a fez; his features were smooth, polished and without a wrinkle, and he might have been any age between twenty-five and thirty-five. His big, lustrous eyes gave him a strange beauty, and Malenfant wondered if there was Upright blood in there. Mtesa was sweating, his robes a little rumpled, but was grinning hugely.

Nemoto, as the katekiro, and Mtesa’s vizier and scribes all came forward to kneel at his feet. Some kissed the palms and backs of his hands; others prostrated themselves on the ground. Malenfant found it very strange to watch Nemoto do this.

Through all this, a girl stood at Mtesa’s elbow. She was tall, dressed in white, her hair dark, but she had the broad neck and downy golden fur of an Upright. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen. She moved like a cat, and — thought Reid Malenfant, dried-up hundred-year-old star voyager — she was sexy as all hell. But she looked troubled, like a child with a guilty conscience.

The main business of the afternoon was a bunch of petitioners and embassies, each of which Mtesa handled with efficiency — and, when he was displeased, with brutality. In such cases the “Lords of the Cord” were called forward: big beefy guards whose job was to drag away the source of Mtesa’s anger by ropes about the neck. It was, Malenfant thought, a striking management technique.

Nemoto was heavily involved in all this: the presentation of cases and evidence, the delivery of the verdict. And each sentencing was preceded by Nemoto placing a dry kiss on the cheek of the terrified victim — a kiss of death, Malenfant thought with a shudder, planted by a thousand-year-old woman.

At last Mtesa turned to Malenfant. Through an interpreter, a dried-up little courtier, the Kabaka asked questions. He showed a childlike curiosity about Malenfant’s story: where and when he had been born, the places he had seen in his travels.

After a while, Malenfant started to enjoy the occasion. For the first time in a thousand years, Reid Malenfant had found somebody who actually wanted to hear his anecdotes about the early days of the U.S. space program.

Mtesa, it turned out, knew all about the Gaijin, and Saddle Point gateways, and, roughly speaking, the dispersal of humanity over the last thousand years. He wasn’t uncomfortable with the idea of Malenfant having been born a millennium ago. But these were abstractions to him, since the Gaijin didn’t intervene in affairs on Earth — not overtly anyhow — and Mtesa was more interested in what profit he could make out of this windfall.

Malenfant reminded himself that people were most preoccupied by their own slice of history; Mtesa was a man of his time, which had nothing to do with Malenfant’s. Still, Malenfant wondered how many more generations would pass before only the kings and courtiers knew the true story of mankind, while everyone else subsided to flat-Earth ignorance and started worshiping Gaijin flower-ships as gods in the sky.

Mtesa offered Malenfant various gifts and an invitation to stay as long as he wished, then dismissed him.

Nemoto got away from Malenfant as soon as she could.

That evening, alone in his villa, Malenfant started to feel ill.

He couldn’t keep down his food. He felt as if he was running a temperature. And his hand hurt: there was a burning sensation, deep in the flesh, where the fountain water had splashed him.

In the bubble helmet of his EMU, he studied his reflection. He didn’t look so bad. A little glassy about the eyes, perhaps. Maybe it was the food.

He went to bed early and tried to forget about it.

He pursued Nemoto. He tried everything he could think of to break through to her.

Eventually, with every evidence of reluctance, Nemoto agreed to spend a little time with Malenfant. She came to his hut, and they sat on the broad, wood-floored veranda, by the light of a small oil lamp and of the blue Moon.

She brought with her a Buddha, a squat, ugly carving. It was made, she said, of fused regolith from the Mare Ingenii: Moon rock, worn smooth by time. The wizened little Japanese looked up at the blue-green Moon. “And now the regolith is buried under meters of dirt, with fat lunar-gravity-evolved earthworms crawling through it. We have survived to see strange times, Malenfant.”

“Yeah.”

They talked, but Nemoto was no cicerone. The only way he could get any information out of her was to let her rehearse her obsession with the Gaijin — not to mention her former employers, Nishizaki Heavy Industries, whom she thought had betrayed the human species.

He was astonished to find she’d traveled here, through a thousand years of history, the long way around: not by skipping from era to era as he and the other Saddle Point travelers had done, but simply by not dying. She gave him no indication of what technology she had used to exceed so greatly the usual human life span.

A thousand years of consciousness: no doubt this was dwarfed by Cassiopeia and her mechanical sisters, but such a span seemed unbearable on a human scale. He wondered how well Nemoto could retrieve the memories of her own deep past, of her first meeting with him on the Moon, for instance; perhaps she had been forced to resort to technology to reorder and optimize her immense recollections. And, listening to Nemoto, he wondered how much of her sanity, her personality, had survived this long ordeal of life. She hinted at dark periods, slumps into poverty and powerlessness, even a period — centuries long — when she had lived as a recluse on the Farside of the Moon.

However she had been damaged by time, though, she had retained one thing: her crystal-clear enmity of the Gaijin, and the ETs who were following them.

“When I found the Gaijin I imagined we were destined fora thousand-year war. But now a thousand years have elapsed, and the war continues. Malenfant, when I still had influence, I struggled to restrict the Gaijin. I recruited the people called the Yolgnu. I established Kasyapa Township—”

“On Triton.”

“Yes. It was a beachhead, to keep the Gaijin from expanding their industrial activities in the outer system. I failed in that purpose. Now there are only a handful of human settlements beyond the Earth. There is a colony on Mercury, huddling close to the Sun beyond the reach of the Gaijin… If it survives, perhaps that will be our final home. For the Gaijin are here. ”

A moth was beating against the lamp. She reached up and grabbed the insect in one gnarled hand. She showed the crushed fragments to Malenfant.

Flakes of mica wing. The sparkle of plastic. A smear of what looked like fine engine oil.

“Gaijin,” Nemoto said. “They are here, Malenfant. They are everywhere, meddling, building. And worse are following.” She pointed up to the stars, in a sky made muddy with light by the low Moon. He could pick out Orion, just. “You must have seen the novae.”

“Is that what they are?”

“Yes. There has been a rash of novae, of minor stellar explosions, like an infection spreading along the spiral arm. It has been proceeding for centuries.”

“My God.”

She smiled grimly. “I’ve missed you, Malenfant. You immediately see implications. This is deliberate, of course, a strategy of some intelligence. Somebody is setting off the stars, exploding them like firecrackers. The stars selected are like the Sun — more or less. We have seen the disruption of Castor and Pollux in Gemini. Castor is a binary of two A-class stars some forty-five light-years away, Pollux a K-class thirty-five light-years away. Then came Procyon, an F-class eleven light-years away, and, more recently Sirius—”

“Just nine light-years away.”

“Yes.”

“Why would anybody blow up stars?”

She shrugged. “To mine them of raw materials. Perhaps to launch a fleet of solar-sail starships. Who knows? I call them the Crackers,” she said darkly. “Appropriate, don’t you think? The spread seems to have been patchy, diffuse.”

“But they are coming this way.”

“Yes. They are coming this way.”

“Perhaps the Gaijin will defend us.”

She snorted. “The Gaijin pursue their own interest. We are incidental, just another victim species a few decades or centuries behind the general development, about to be burned up in an interstellar war between rapacious colonists.”

Just as Malenfant had seen among the stars, over and over. And now it was happening here.

But there was still much mystery, he thought. There was still the question of the reboot, the greater cataclysm that seemed poised to sweep over the Galaxy and all its squabbling species.

What were the Gaijin really up to, here in the Solar System? Nemoto’s blunt antagonism seemed simplistic to Malenfant, who had come to know the Gaijin better. They were hardly humanity’s friends, but neither were they mortal enemies. They were just Gaijin, following their own star.

But Nemoto was still talking, resigned, fatalistic. “I am an old woman. I was already an old woman a thousand years ago. All I can do now is survive, here, in this absurd little kingdom…”

Maybe. But, he reflected, if she’d chosen to retire, she could have done that anywhere. She didn’t have to come here, to this dismal feudal empire, and serve its puffed-up ruler. The grassy metropolis — and the radiation signature, that trace of technology — had drawn her here, just like himself.

Testing her, he said, “I have a functioning pressure suit.”

She scarcely moved, as if trying to mask her reaction to that. She was like a statue, some greater Moon-rock Buddha herself.

There is, he realized, something she isn’t telling me — something significant.

He was woken before dawn.

De Bonneville’s ruined face loomed over him like a black moon, the sweet stink of pombe on his breath. “Malenfant. Come. They’re hunting.”

“Who?”

“You’ll see.”

A sticky, moist heat hit Malenfant as soon as he left his hut. He walked down the broad hill, after de Bonneville, working through a hierarchy of smaller and more sinuous paths until there was savannah grass under his feet, long and damp with dew. Wagandans were following them, men and women alike, talking softly, some laughing.

The blue Moon had long set. There were still stars above. Malenfant saw a diffuse light, clearly green, tracking across the southern sky: it was a Tree, a living satellite populated by posthumans, floating above this primeval African landscape.

De Bonneville cast about and pointed. “There’s a track — see, where the grass has been beaten down? It leads toward the lake. Come. We will walk.” And, without waiting for acquiescence, he turned and led the way, limping and wheezing, his pains evidently forgotten in his eagerness for the spectacle.

Malenfant followed, tracking through the long damp grass. They passed a herd of the elephant analogs, the deinotherium. They seemed unaware of the humans. From a stand of trees, Malenfant saw the scowl of a cat — perhaps a lion — with long saber teeth protruding over its lower jaw. De Bonneville said it was a megantereon. And he almost tripped over a lizard hiding in the undergrowth at his feet; it was half a meter long, with three sharp horns protruding from its crest. It scampered away from him and then sat in the grass, its huge eyes fixed on him.

They passed a skull, perhaps of an antelope, bleached of flesh. It had been cracked open by a stone flake — little more than a shaped pebble — embedded in a pit in the bone. Malenfant bent down and prised out the flake with his fingers. Was it made by the Uprights? It seemed too primitive.

De Bonneville grabbed his arm. “There,” he whispered.

Perhaps half a kilometer away, a group of what looked like big apes — muscular, hairy, big-brained — was gathered around a carcass. Malenfant could see curved horns; maybe it was another antelope. In the dawn light the hominids were working together with what looked like handheld stone tools, butchering the carcass. A number of them were keeping watch at the fringe of the group, throwing rocks at circling hyenas.

“Are these the hunters you brought me to see?” Malenfant asked.

De Bonneville snorted with contempt. “These? No. They are not even hunters. They waited for the hyenas or jackals to kill that sivatherium, and now they steal it for themselves… Ah. Look, Malenfant.”

To Malenfant’s left, crouching figures were moving forward through the grass. In the gray light, Malenfant could make out golden skin, flashes of white cloth. It was Magassa, and more of his people, moving toward the apelike scavengers.

“Now,” de Bonneville hissed. “Now the sport begins.”

“What are these creatures, de Bonneville?”

He grinned. “When the ice was rolled back, the Earth was left empty. Various… experiments… were performed to repopulate it. But not as it had been before.”

“With older forms.”

“Of animals and even hominids, us. Yes.”

“So Magassa—”

“ — is a once-extinct hominid, recreated here, in the year A.D. 3265. Magassa is Homo Erectus. And there are tigers once more in India, and mammoths in the north of Europe, and roaming the prairies of North America once more are many of the megafauna species destroyed by the Stone Age settlers there… Quite something, isn’t it, Malenfant? I’m sure you didn’t expect to find this on your return to Earth: the lost species of the past, restored to roam the empty planet, here at the end of time.”

It sounded, to Malenfant, like characteristic Gaijin tinkering. Just as they had poked around with Earth’s climate and biosphere and geophysical cycles, so, it seemed, they were determined to explore the possibilities inherent in DNA, life’s treasury of the past. Endless questing, as they sought answers to their unspoken questions. But still, here was a hunting party of Homo Erectus, by God, stalking easily across the plains of Africa in this year A.D. 3265. “Is anyone studying this?”

De Bonneville looked at him curiously. “Perhaps you don’t understand. Science is dead, Malenfant. These are only Uprights. But…” He looked more thoughtful. “I sometimes wonder if Magassa has a soul. Magassa can speak, you know, to some extent. His speech mechanism is closer to nonhuman primates. Still, he can make himself understood. Look into Magassa’s eyes, Malenfant, and you will see a true consciousness — far more developed than any animal’s — but a consciousness lacking much of the complexity and darkness and confusion of our own. Is there still a Pope or a mullah, somewhere on Earth or the Moon, concerned with such issues, perhaps declaring Magassa an abomination even now? But Magassa himself would not frame such questions; without our full inner awareness, he would lack the ability to impute consciousness in other beings, and so could not envisage consciousness in nonhuman animals and objects. That is to say, he would not be able to imagine God.”

“You envy him,” Malenfant said.

“Yes. Yes, I envy Magassa his calm sanity. Well. They make good laborers. And the women — Wait. Watch this.”

Magassa stood suddenly, whooped, and brandished a torch, which burst into flame. The other Uprights stood with him and hollered. Their high, clear voices carried across the grassy plain to Malenfant, like the cries of gulls.

At the noise, the primitive scavenging hominids jumped up, startled. With bleating cries they ran away from the Uprights and their fire, abandoning the antelope. One of the hominids — a female — was a little more courageous; she reached back and tore a final strip of flesh from the carcass before fleeing with the others, flat breasts flapping.

But now more Uprights burst out of the grass before the fleeing hominids. It was a simple trap, but obviously beyond the more primitive hominids’ mental grasp.

At this new obstacle the scavengers hesitated for a second, like startled sheep. Then they bunched together and kept on running. They forced their way right through the cluster of Uprights, who hailed stones and bone spears at them. Some of the weapons struck home, with a crunching violence that startled Malenfant. But as far as he could see all the hominids got through.

All, that is, except one: the female who had hung back, and who was now a few dozen meters behind the rest.

The Uprights closed around her. She fought — she seemed to have a rock in her clenched fist — but she was overwhelmed. The Uprights fell on her, and she went down in a forest of flailing arms.

Her fleeing companions didn’t look back.

De Bonneville stood up, his blackened face slick with sweat, breathing hard.

The Upright Magassa came stalking out of the pack with a corpse slung over his shoulder. He had blood on his teeth and on the golden fur of his chest.

The body he carried was about the size of a twelve-year-old child’s, Malenfant guessed, coated with fine dark hair. The arms were long, but the hands and feet were like a modern human’s. The brainpan was crushed, a bloody mess, but the face was prominent: a brow ridge, a flat apelike nose, the jaw protruding, big front teeth. That tool was still clutched in the female’s hand; it was a lava rock, crudely shaped.

The head, in life, had been held up. This was a creature that had walked upright.

Magassa dumped the corpse at de Bonneville’s feet and howled his triumph.

“And what is this, de Bonneville?”

“Another reconstruction: Handy Man, some two million years vanished. Even less conscious, less self-aware, than our Upright friends.”

“Homo Habilis.”

“Malenfant, every species of extinct hominid is represented on this big roomy land of ours. I was pleased to see the prey were habilines, this morning — the Australopithecines can run, but are too stupid for good sport—”

“Get me out of here, de Bonneville.”

De Bonneville’s ruined eyes narrowed. “So squeamish. So hypocritical. Listen to me, Malenfant. This is how we lived. Sometimes they rape before the kill. Think of it, Malenfant! You and I have traveled to the stars. And yet, all the time, we carried the Old Men with us, asleep in our bones, waiting to be recalled…”

The Upright took a rock from his belt and started to hammer at the back of the dead habiline’s skull. He dug his fingers into the hole he had made, pulled out gray material, blood-soaked, and crammed it into his mouth.

Reid Malenfant knew, at last, that he had truly come home. He turned away from the habiline corpse.

Chapter 26 Kimera’s Breath

Soon after the Upright hunt, de Bonneville disappeared. Nemoto warned Malenfant not to ask too many questions.

On his own, Malenfant wandered around the court, the streets outside, even out into the country. But he learned little.

He found it hard to make any human contact. The Waganda were incurious — even of his sleek biocomposite coverall, a gift from the Bad Hair Day space twins, an artifact centuries of technological advancement ahead of anything here.

Most definitely, he did not fit in here. Madeleine Meacher had warned him it would be like this.

Anyhow, he tired quickly, and his hand still ached. Maybe those Bad Hair Day twins hadn’t done as good a job on him as they thought.

The days wore on, and his mind kept returning to de Bonneville. When he thought about it, Pierre de Bonneville — for all he was an asshole — was the only person in all this dead-end world who had tried to help him, to give him information. And besides, de Bonneville was a fellow star traveler who was maybe in trouble in this alien time.

So he started campaigning, with the Kabaka and Nemoto in her role as the katekiro, to be allowed to see de Bonneville.

After a few days of this, Nemoto summoned Malenfant from his villa. Impatient and reluctant, she said she had been ordered to escort Malenfant to de Bonneville. It turned out he was being held in Kimera’s Engine, the mysterious construct buried in the hillside at the heart of this grass-hut capital.

“I do not advise this, Malenfant.”

“Why? Because it’s dangerous? I’ve seen de Bonneville. I know how ill he is—”

“Not just that. What do you hope to achieve?” She looked at him out of eyes like splinters of lava; she seemed sunk in bitterness and despair. “I survive, as best I can. That’s what you must do. Find a place here, a niche you can defend. What else is there? Hasn’t your hop-and-skip tour of a thousand years taught you that much?”

“If that’s what you believe, why do you want my pressure suit?”

She coughed into a handkerchief; he saw the cloth was speckled by blood. “Malenfant—”

“Take me to de Bonneville.”

Accompanied by a couple of guards, Nemoto led Malenfant from the palace compound, and out into Rubaga. They followed streets, little more than tracks of dust, that wound between the grass huts.

After a while the huts became sparser, until they reached a place where there were no well-defined roads, no construction. The center of the plateau — maybe a kilometer in diameter and fringed by huts — was deserted: just bare rock and lifeless soil, free of grass, bushes, insects or bird song. Even the breeze from Lake Victoria seemed suppressed here.

It looked, he thought, as if a neutron bomb had gone off.

They marched on into this grim terrain. Nemoto was silent, her resentment apparent in every gesture and step.

Malenfant had been ill during the night and hadn’t gotten much sleep. He was feeling queasy, shivering. And the landscape didn’t help. The ground here was like a little island of death in the middle of this African ocean of life.

At last they reached the heart of the central plain. They came to a wide, deep well set in the ground. There were steps cut into the rock, spiraling into the ground around the cylindrical inner face of the well. In the low light of the morning Malenfant could see the steps for the first fifty meters or so, beyond that only darkness.

Nemoto began to clamber down the steps. She walked like the stiff old woman she had become, her gaudy court plumage incongruous in the shadows. Malenfant followed more slowly.

He wished he had a gun.

Within a few minutes they’d come down maybe thirty meters — the open mouth of the well was a disc of blue sky, laced with high clouds — and Nemoto rapped on a wooden door set in the wall.

The door opened. Beyond, Malenfant saw a lighted chamber, a rough cube dug out of the rock, lit up by rush torches. At the door stood one of the Kabaka’s guards. He was a pillar of bone and muscle, overlaid by fat and leathery skin. Nemoto spoke briefly, and the guard, after a hostile inspection of Malenfant, let them through.

The room was surprisingly large. The heat was intense, and the smoke from wall-mounted torches was thick, despite air passages cut into the walls. But the smoke couldn’t mask the sweet stenches of vomit, of corrupt and decaying flesh. Malenfant grabbed a handkerchief from his pocket and held it over his face.

Pallets of wood and straw, covered by grimy blankets, were arranged in rows across the floor, and Malenfant had to step between them to make his way. Maybe half of the pallets were occupied. The eyes that met Malenfant’s flickered with only the dullest curiosity.

The invalids all seemed wasted by the disease that had afflicted de Bonneville, to a greater or lesser degree. Patches of skin were burned to blackness, and there were some people with barely any skin left at all. Malenfant saw heads free of hair — even eyelashes and eyebrows were missing as if burned off — and there were limbs swollen to circus-freak proportions, as well as broken and bleeding mouths and nostrils. There were attendants here, but as far as Malenfant could see they were all Uprights: Homo Erectus, reconstructed genetic fossils, tall and naked and golden furred, moving between the sick and dying. There seemed to be no real medical care, but the Uprights were giving out water and food — some kind of thin soup — and they murmured comfort in their thin, consonant-free voices to the ill.

It was like a field hospital. But there had been no war: and besides there were women and children here.

At last Malenfant found de Bonneville. He lay sprawled on a pallet. He stared up, his face swollen and burned beyond expression. “Malenfant — is it you? Have you any beer?” He reached up with a hand like a claw.

Malenfant tried to keep from backing away from him. “I’ll bring some. De Bonneville, you got worse. Is this a hospital?”

He made a grisly sound that might have been a laugh. “Malenfant, this is… ah… a dormitory. For the workers, including myself, who service the yellow-cake.”

“Yellow-cake?”

“The substance that fuels the Engine of Kimera…” He coughed, grimacing from the pain of his broken mouth, and shifted his position on his pallet.

“What’s wrong with you? Is it contagious?”

“No. You need not fear for yourself, Malenfant.”

“I don’t,” Malenfant said.

De Bonneville laughed again. “Of course you don’t. Indeed, nor should you. The illness comes from contact with the yellow-cake itself. When new workers arrive here, they are as healthy as you. Like that child over there. But within weeks, or months — it varies by individual, it seems, and not even the strongest constitution is any protection — the symptoms appear.”

“De Bonneville, why did they send you back here?”

“I have a propensity for offending the Kabaka, Malenfant, most efficiently and with the minimum of delay. So here I am again.”

“You’re a prisoner?”

“In a way. The guards ensure that the workers are kept here until such time as the Kimera sickness takes hold of their limbs and complexion. Then one is free to wander about the town without hindrance.” He touched his blackened cheeks; a square centimeter of skin came loose in his fingers, and he looked at this latest horror without shock. “The stigmata of Kimera’s punishment are all too obvious,” he said. “None will approach a yellow-cake worker, and certainly none will feed or succor him. And so there is no alternative, you see, but to return to the Engine, where at least food and shelter is provided, there to serve out one’s remaining fragment of life…”

“Who is Kimera?”

“Ah, Kimera!” he said, and he threw back his ravaged head. Kimera, it turned out, was a mythical figure: a giant of Uganda’s past, so huge that his feet had left impressions in the rocks. “He was the great-grandson of Kintu, the founder of Uganda, who came here from the north; and it was Wanpamba, the great-great-grandson of Kimera, who first hollowed out the hill of Rubaga and entombed the soul of Kimera here…” And so forth: a lot of poetical, mythical stuff, but little in the way of hard fact. “You know, they had to reconstruct these old myths from the last encyclopedias, for the people had forgotten them — but don’t let the Kabaka hear you say it…” De Bonneville’s eyes closed, and he sank back, sighing.

Nemoto, nervous, plucked at Malenfant’s sleeve. Her mime was obvious. Time was up; they should go; this was an unhealthy place.

Malenfant didn’t see what choice he had. All the way out, Malenfant was aware of de Bonneville’s gaze, locked on his back.

Outside the grisly dormitory, Malenfant peered into the deeper blackness of the well. “Nemoto, what’s down there?”

“Danger. Death. Malenfant, we must leave.”

“It is the Engine of Kimera, whatever the hell that is. You know, don’t you? Or you think you know. Rubaga has the only significant radiation-anomaly signature on Earth…”

Her face was as expressionless as her Moon-rock Buddha’s. “If you want to fry your sorry skin, Malenfant, you can do it by yourself.” She turned and walked off, leaving him with the guard.

The guard looked at him quizzically. Malenfant shrugged, and pointed downward.

He walked to the ledge’s rim — a sheer drop into darkness, no protective rail of any kind — and leaned over. There seemed to be a breeze blowing down from above, rustling over the back of his neck, into the pit itself, as if there were a leak in the world down there. Now, he couldn’t figure that out at all. Where was the air going? Was there a tunnel, some kind of big extractor?

The only light came from the flames of rush torches, flickering in that downward breeze, and Malenfant’s impressions built up slowly.

He made out a large heap of ore, crushed to powder, contained within a rough open chamber hollowed out of the stone. Maybe that ore was the yellow-cake de Bonneville had talked about. Long spears of what appeared to be charcoal — like scorched tree trunks — stuck out of the heap from all sides and above. Water was carried in channels in the walls and pipes of clay, and poured into the heart of the heap. He guessed the heap contained a hundred tons of yellow-cake; there were at least forty charred trunks protruding from it.

The chamber was full of people.

There were a lot of tall Uprights, many squat habilines, and some Waganda: men, women, and children who limped doggedly through the darkness, intense heat, and live steam, serving the heap as if it were some ugly god. They hauled at the charcoal trunks, drawing them from the yellow-cake, or thrust them deeper inside. Or else they hauled simple wheelbarrows of the yellow-cake powder to and from the heap, continually replenishing it. Their illness was obvious, even from here. Peering down from far above, it was like looking over some grotesque anthill, alive with motion.

The heap was intensely hot — Malenfant could feel its heat burning his face — and the water emerged from the base of the heap as steam, which roared away through a further series of pipes. There was a lot of leakage, though, and live steam wreathed the heap’s ugly contours.

The principle was obvious. The heap was an energy source. The steam produced by the heap must, by means of simple pumps and other hydraulic devices, power the various gadgets he’d witnessed: Mtesa’s ascending throne, the fountains. Maybe the water that passed through the system was itself pumped up from some deeper water table by the motive power of the steam.

There had to be a lot of surplus energy, though.

And now he made out a different figure, emerging from some deeper chamber at the base of the pit. It was a woman. She looked like a cross between a habiline and an Upright: big frame, thick neck, head thrust forward. She was wearing a suit, of some translucent plastic, that enclosed her body, hands, and head. She was familiar to him, from a hundred TV shows and school-book reconstructions. She was Neandertal: another of humanity’s lost cousins.

Holy shit, he thought.

There was a flash of light from the hidden chamber, from some invisible source.

It was blue, a shade he recognized.

Neandertals, and pressure suits, and electric blue light. Unreasoning fear stabbed him.

He got out of there as fast as he could.

The next day Malenfant visited de Bonneville again. Malenfant brought him a small bottle of pombe; de Bonneville fell on this avidly, jealously hiding it from the other inmates of the ward. Malenfant wanted to ask about the Engine, but de Bonneville had his own tale to tell.

“Listen, Malenfant. Let me tell you how I came to this pass. It started long before you arrived…”

De Bonneville told him that a gift had arrived for Mtesa, the emperor, from Lukongeh, king of the neighboring Ukerewe. There had been five ivory tusks, fine iron wire, six white monkey skins, a canoe large enough for fifty crew — and Mazuri, an Upright girl, a comely virgin of fourteen, a wife suitable for the Kabaka.

“Mtesa’s harem numbers five hundred. Mtesa has the pick of many lands; and many of the harem are, as I can testify, of the most extraordinary beauty. But of them all, Mazuri was the comeliest.”

“I think I saw her in the palace. Mtesa likes her.”

“She has—” De Bonneville waved his damaged hands in a decayed attempt at sensuality. “ — she has that animal quality of the Uprights. That intensity. When she looks you in the eyes, you see direct into her primeval soul. Do you know what I’m talking about, Malenfant?”

“Yes. But I’m a hundred years old,” Malenfant said wistfully.

“Mazuri was young, impetuous, impatient at her betrothal to Mtesa — a much older man, and lacking the vigor of her own kind…”

De Bonneville fell silent, in a diseased reverie.

“Tell me about the Engine.”

“The Waganda say the yellow-cake is suffused with the Breath of Kimera,” de Bonneville said, dismissive. “It is the Breath that supplies the heat. But a given portion of yellow-cake is eventually exhausted of its Breath, and we must extract and replace the cake, continually.”

“What about the tree trunks?”

“We must insert and extract the trunks, according to the instructions of—” He quoted a term Malenfant didn’t know, evidently a sort of foreman. “The Breath is invisible and too rapid to have much effect — except on the human body, apparently, which it ravages! The tree trunks are inserted to slow down the Breath from the heart of the heap. Do you see? Then it gets to work on the rest of the yellow-cake. And that is, in turn, encouraged to produce its own Breath in response. It’s like a cascade, you see. But the Waganda can control this, by withdrawing their charred trunks; this has the effect of allowing the Breath to speed up, and escape the heap harmlessly…”

A cascade, yes, Malenfant thought. A chain reaction.

“And the water? What’s that for?”

“The emission of the Breath is associated with great heat — which is the point of the Engine. Water flows through the hillside, through the engine. The water is a cooling agent, which carries off this heat before any damage is done to the Engine. And the heat, of course, turns the water to steam, which in turn is harnessed to drive Mtesa’s various toy devices and fripperies…” Malenfant heard how de Bonneville’s voice slowed as he said that, as if some new idea was coming to him.

To Malenfant, it all made sense.

Twentieth-century nuclear-fission piles had been simple devices. They were just heaps of a radioactive material, such as uranium, into which reaction-controlling moderators, for example carbon rods, were thrust. Technical complexity only came if you cared about human safety: shields, robot devices to control the moderators, a waste-extraction process, and so forth. If you didn’t care about wasting human life, a reactor could be made much more simply.

With a little instruction, a tribe of Neandertals could operate a nuclear reactor. A bunch of children could. Especially if you didn’t care about safety.

“It’s the Breath that makes you ill,” he said.

“Indeed.”

“Why not others? Why not Mtesa himself?”

“The Breath is contained by the hundreds of meters of rock within which the Engine is housed. But, though it is not spoken of, there is much illness among the general population; and there are elaborate taboos about associating too closely with products of the Engine — you shouldn’t drink the water that has circulated through the yellow-cake, for instance.”

Malenfant remembered how Nemoto had warned him against inserting his hands in Mtesa’s fountains. He felt, now, a renewed itching in his own damaged skin.

Shit, he thought. I must have taken a dose myself.

De Bonneville waved his gnarled hands. “The Engine is clearly very ancient, Malenfant. The Waganda’s legend says it was constructed by an old king, seventeen generations before our own glorious Mtesa. It seems to me the Waganda have learned how to control their crude device, not by proceeding from a body of established knowledge as we might have done, but by trial and error over generations — and expensive trial and error at that. Expensive in human life, I mean!” But he was tiring, and losing interest. “Let me tell you of Mazuri…”

“You screwed the king’s favorite wife. You asshole, de Bonneville.”

“I tried to put her aside, when I left Rubaga to meet you. But when I returned, full of pombe and the excitement of the hunt, there she was… Ah, Malenfant, those eyes, that skin, that mouth…”

He was found out. Mtesa’s fury had been incandescent. De Bonneville was expelled from his position in court — dragged, by a rope around his neck, by Mtesa’s enthusiastic Lords of the Cord, and subjected to fifty blows with a stick, a punishment severe enough to lame him — and then banished to the lowliest position of Rubaga society: to work in the yellow-cake Engines, buried deep within the hillside.

De Bonneville grasped Malenfant’s arm with his ruined, clawlike hands. “It was all a trap, Malenfant. One accumulates enemies so easily in such a place as this! And I… I was always impetuous rather than careful… I was led into a trap, and I have been destroyed! Seeing you now, a traveler, makes me understand anew how much has been robbed from me by these savages of the future. But—”

“Yes?”

His blue eyes gleamed in his blackened ruin of a face. “But de Bonneville shall have his revenge, Malenfant. Oh, yes! His determination is sweet and pure…”

He confronted Nemoto.

“Nemoto, you know what the Engine is, don’t you? It’s a nuclear pile. A fucking nuclear pile.”

Nemoto shrugged. “It’s just a heap. Maybe a hundred tons of ‘yellow-cake’ — which is a uranium ore — with burned tree stumps used as graphite moderators. It was a geological accident: yellow-cake seams inside this hollow mountain, and some natural water stream running over the pile, cooling it…”

Natural nuclear reactors had formed in various places around the planet, where the geological conditions had been right. What was needed was a concentration of uranium ore, and then some kind of moderator. The function of the moderator was to slow down the neutrons, the heavy particles emitted by decaying uranium atoms. A slowed-down neutron would impact with another atomic nucleus and make that decay, and the neutron products of that event would initiate more decays — on and on, in the cascade of collapsing nuclei the physicists called a chain reaction.

Under Rubaga’s mountain, the action of water, over billions of years, had washed uranium ore from the rock and caused it to collect in seams at the bottom of a shallow sea. The uranium had then been overlaid by inert sand, and the rocks compressed and uplifted by tectonic forces, the uranium further concentrated by the slow rusting of surrounding rocks in the air. Thus had been created seams of uranium, great lenticular deposits, two or three meters thick and perhaps ten times as wide, under their feet, right here.

At first there had been no chain reaction. But then water and organic matter, seeping into cracks in the uranium seams, had served as primitive moderators, slowing the neutrons down sufficiently for the reaction process to start.

“The reaction probably started as a series of scattered fires in concentrations of the uranium ore,” Nemoto whispered. “Then it spread to less rich areas nearby. It was self-controlling; as the water was boiled by the reaction’s heat it would be forced out of the rock — and the reaction would be dampened, until more water seeped back from the surface layers above, and the reaction could begin again.” She smiled thinly. “And that is what the Neandertal community here discovered. It took them a couple of centuries, but they learned to tinker with the process, inserting burned wood — graphite — as secondary moderators…”

The workers in the pile maintained it with their bare hands. At times the workers had to haul heaps of yellow-cake from one part of the pile to another; or they mixed the yellow-cake, by hand, with other moderator compounds; or they cleared out the coolant-water pipes — the small fingers of children were well adapted for that particular chore. And as well as the regular operation of the pile, they had to cope with accidents, types of which Nemoto listed in the local language: leakages, spill-outs, crumbles, hot beds, slaps.

“Why did the Neandertals need to do this?”

“Because of us: Homo Sapiens, Malenfant. For a while, after the ice, the Earth was empty. The Gaijin implanted their little pockets of reconstructed prehumans. But then along we came, and it all unraveled as it had before, thirty or forty thousand years ago. You’ve seen how the locals treat the Uprights, the habilines.”

“Yes.”

“So it was with the Neandertals… except here. The Neandertals had their uranium, their radioactivity. They laced water supplies. They tipped their spears… It helped keep back the humans, until a smart human leader — a predecessor of Mtesa — came along and struck a deal.”

“So Mtesa supplies human slaves to the Neandertals. To maintain the pile.”

“Essentially. Makes you think, doesn’t it, Malenfant? If only the true Neandertals, of our own deep past, had discovered such a resource, perhaps they could have kept us at bay, survived into modern times — I mean, our times.”

Malenfant frowned. “It doesn’t sound too stable. A nuclear pile isn’t much of a weapon… You’d think that Mtesa’s soldiers could overwhelm the Neandertals, take what they wanted, drive them out. And the radioactivity — we’re all living on top of a raw nuke pile, here. Even those who don’t have to go work in that hole in the ground are going to suffer contamination.”

Nemoto grimaced. “You are not living in Clear Lake now, Malenfant. These people accept things we wouldn’t have. The Waganda have built a stable social arrangement around their Engine. They keep their bloodlines reasonably pure by stigmatizing any individual showing signs of mutation or radiation sickness. It’s a kind of symbiosis. The Waganda use the Engine’s energy. But the Engine maintains itself by poisoning a proportion of the Waganda population. Mostly they use Uprights and habilines anyhow; among the humans, only Mtesa’s victims finish up in the Engine.”

Malenfant said, “Those toys of Mtesa’s — the fountains and the Caesar’s Palace trick throne — can’t absorb more than a few percent of the pile’s energy… The rest of it runs that Saddle Point gateway. Doesn’t it, Nemoto? And that is the true purpose of this place. This is some huge Gaijin project. ”

“I am no tourist guide, Reid Malenfant. I don’t know anything.” She looked away from him. “Now leave me alone.”

Malenfant had trouble sleeping. He felt ill, and at times he felt overwhelmed by fear.

He’d glimpsed a Saddle Point gateway, buried deep in this African hillside. That was where all the power went. And that downward breeze had been air passing through the gateway, a leak in the fabric of the world.

He felt drawn to the gateway, as if by some gravitational field.

I don’t want this, he thought. I just wanted to run home. But I brought myself here. I chose to come to this place, kept digging until I found this, the center of it all. A way back into the game. Just like Nemoto.

A way to fulfill whatever purpose the Gaijin seemed to have for him.

I can’t do it. Not again. I just want to be left alone. I don’t have to follow this path, to do anything.

But the logic of his life seemed to say otherwise.

Spare me, he thought; and he wished he believed in a god to receive his prayers.

Malenfant was woken, rudely, by a shuddering of his pallet. His eyes snapped open to darkness, and he sucked in hot African air. For a second he thought he was in orbit: a blowout in the shuttle orbiter, a micrometeorite that had smashed through Number Two Window…

He was alone in his villa, and the grass roof was intact. He pushed off his cover and tried to stand.

The ground shook again, and there was a deep, subterranean groaning, a roar of stressed rock. A quake, then?

Through the glassless windows of the villa, a new light broke. He saw a glow, red-white and formless, that erupted in a gout of fire over the rooftops of Rubaga. Grass huts ignited as tongues of glowing earth came licking back to ignite the flimsy constructions. He heard screaming, the patter of bare feet running.

That fount of flame came from the heart of the town, Malenfant saw immediately — from the well of Kimera, from the pit of that monstrous Engine.

De Bonneville. It had to be. In some way, he’d carried out his vague threat.

The shuddering subsided, and Malenfant was able to stand. He pulled on his biocomposite coverall and stepped out of the villa.

All of Rubaga’s populace appeared to be out in the narrow streets: courtiers, peasants, courtesans, and chiefs, all running in terror. The big gates of the capital’s surrounding cane fence had been thrown open, and Malenfant could see how the great avenues were already thronged with people, running off into the countryside’s green darkness.

Malenfant set off through the capital toward the center of the plateau. He had to push his way through the panicking hordes of Waganda, who fled past him like wraiths of smoke.

By the time he’d reached the dead heart of the hilltop, even the great grass palace of Mtesa was alight.

Malenfant hurried into the central plain, away from the scorching huts. He reached the blighted zone with relief; for the first time in many minutes, he could draw a full breath.

The fire of Kimera loomed out of the earth before Malenfant, huge and angry and deadly; and all around the rim of the plain he saw the glow of Rubaga’s burning huts. Christ, he was in the middle of a miniature Chernobyl. And it scared the shit out of him to think that there was nobody here, nobody, who understood what was going on, nobody at the controls.

He walked on, his feet heavy, his chest and face scorching in the growing heat. His hands were burned and tingling, and the light of the fire was brilliant before him. He didn’t see how he could get any closer. He began to circle the blaze. He stumbled frequently, and his eyes were sore and dry.

I am, he thought, too fucking old for this.

Then he saw what looked like a fallen animal, inert on the ground. Malenfant braved the fire, sheltering his head with his arms, and approached.

It was de Bonneville. He lay facedown in the barren earth of Rubaga. Malenfant could see, from scrabbles in the dirt, that he had walked away from the pit until he could walk no more, then crawled, and at last had dragged himself by his broken fingertips across the ground.

Malenfant knelt down and slid his arms beneath the deformed torso. De Bonneville was disconcertingly light, like a child, and Malenfant was able to turn him over and lay that balloonlike head on his lap.

De Bonneville’s blue eyes flickered open. “Good God. Malenfant. Have you any beer?”

“No. I’m sorry, de Bonneville.”

“You must get away from here. Your life is forfeit, Malenfant, if you confront the Breath of Kimera…” His eyes slid closed. “I did it. I… ”

“The Engine?”

“It was the water,” he said dreamily. “Once I made up my mind to act, it was simple, Malenfant… I just blocked the pipes, where they admit the water to the well…”

“You blocked the coolant?”

“All that heat, with nowhere for it to go… You know, it took just minutes. I could hear them crying and screaming, as the burning, popping yellow-cake scorched their bodies and feet, even as they thrust their tree trunks into the heap. It took just minutes, Malenfant…”

De Bonneville, limping on his already damaged legs, had escaped the well minutes before the final ignition and explosion.

“And was it worth it?” Malenfant asked. “You came back from the stars, to do this?”

“Oh, yes,” de Bonneville said, his eyes fluttering closed. “For he had destroyed me. Mtesa. If I die, his empire dies with me… And more than that.” De Bonneville tried to lick his lips, but his mouth was a mass of popping sores. “It was you, Malenfant. You, a heroic figure returned from the deep past! From an age when humans, we Westerners, strove to do more than simply survive, in a world abandoned to the Gaijin. You and I come from an age where people did things, Malenfant. My God, we shaped whole worlds. You reminded me of that. And so I determined to shape mine…”

He subsided, and his body grew more limp.

Dawn light spread from the east, and Malenfant saw a cloud of smoke, a huge black thunderhead, lifting up into the sky.

It was you, de Bonneville had said. My fault, he thought. All my fault. I was probably meant to die, out there, among the stars. It should have been that way. Not this.

He cradled de Bonneville in the dawn light, until the shuddering breaths had ceased to rack him.

The morning after the explosion, Malenfant was arrested.

Malenfant was hauled by two silent guards to Mtesa’s temporary court, in a spacious hut a couple of kilometers from Wanpamba’s Tomb, and he was hurled to the dust before the Kabaka.

His trial was brief, efficient, punctuated with much shouting and stabbing of fingers. He wasn’t granted a translator. But from the fragments of local language he’d picked up he learned he had been accused of causing the explosion, this great epochal crime.

Nemoto stood silently beside the Kabaka while the comic-opera charade ran its course. She did this, he realized. She framed me.

To his credit, Mtesa seemed skeptical of all this, irritated by the proceedings. He seemed to have taken a liking to Malenfant, and was shrewd enough to perceive this as an obscure dispute between Malenfant and the katekiro. Why are you involving me? Can’t you sort it out yourself?

But the verdict was never really in doubt to anyone.

When it was done, the Lords of the Cord came to Malenfant. Rope was looped around his neck, and he was dragged to his feet.

Nemoto walked forward, hunched over, and stood before him. In English, she said, “You’re to be treated leniently, Malenfant. You won’t be working the Engine. You’re to be cast—”

“Into the pit.” And then he saw it. “The gateway. You’re forcing me to the Saddle Point gateway. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”

“You saw the light, Malenfant. If I thought that pressure suit of yours would fit me, I would take it from you. I would walk into the Engine of Kimera and confront the enigma at its heart, following those mysterious others who come and go… But I cannot. It is my fate to remain here, amusing the Kabaka, until the aging treatments fail, and I die.

“I had to do this, Malenfant. I could see your reluctance to go forward — even though you brought yourself here, to the center of things. I could see you could not bring yourself to take the last step.”

“So you pushed me. Why, for God’s sake? Why are you doing this?”

“Not for the sake of God. For history. Look around you, Malenfant. Look at the huge strangeness of this future Earth. Certainly the arrival of ETs deflected our history — and those exploding stars in the sky tell of more deflections yet to come. But no human has ever been in control of the great forces that shaped a world, of history and climate and geology; only a handful of us have even witnessed such changes.”

“If none of us can deflect history, you’re killing me for nothing.”

“Ah.” She smiled. “But individual humans have changed history, Malenfant — not the way I tried to, with plots and schemes and projects, but by walking into the fire, by giving themselves. Do you see? And that is your destiny.”

“You’re a monster, Nemoto. You play with lives. The right hand of this Stone Age despot is the right place for you.”

She raised a bony wrist and brushed blood-flecked spittle from her chin, seeming not to hear him.

He was overwhelmed with fear and anger. “Nemoto. Spare me.”

She leaned forward and kissed his cheek; her lips were dry as autumn leaves, and he could smell blood on her breath. “Good-bye, Malenfant.”

The cords around his neck tightened, and he was hauled away.

The rest of it unfolded with a pitiless logic. As a prisoner, condemned, Malenfant had no choice, no real volition; it was easy to submit to the process, to become detached, let his fear float away.

He was indeed treated with leniency. He was allowed to go back to his hut. He retrieved his EMU, his ancient pressure suit in its sack of rope.

He was taken to the rim of the central desolation.

There was a small party waiting: guards, with two other prisoners, both young women, naked save for loincloths, with their hands tied behind their backs. The prisoners returned his stare dully. Malenfant saw they’d both been beaten severely enough to lay open the skin over their spines.

I’ve come a long way, thought Malenfant, for this: a walk into hell, with two of the damned.

Once more he descended the crude spiral staircase.

Soon they were so deep that the circle of open sky at the top of the shaft was shrunk to a blue disc smaller than a dime, far above him. The only light came from irregularly placed reed torches. The stairs themselves were crudely cut and too far apart to make the descent easy; soon Malenfant was hot, and his legs ached.

The prisoners’ faces shone, taut with fear.

They passed two big exits gouged in the rock wall, one to either side of the cylindrical shaft. The air from these exits was marginally less stale than elsewhere. Perhaps they led to the great avenues from east and west that he’d noticed from outside, tunnels that led into the body of the hillside itself.

A hundred meters down, water spouted from clay founts, elaborately shaped, mounted on the walls. The water, almost every drop of it, was captured by spiral canals that wound around the shaft, in parallel to the stairway. The founts gushed harder as they descended — water pressure, Malenfant thought — and soon the spiral canals were filled with bubbling, frothing liquid, which took away some of the staleness of the still air of the well. But the founts and channels were severely damaged by fire, cracked and crudely repaired; water leaked continually.

Already he was hot and dizzy; a mark of the dose he’d already taken, maybe. He reached toward a canal to get a handful of water. But a dark bony hand shot out of the darkness, pushing him away. It was one of the prisoners, her eyes wide in the gloom.

Malenfant watched the narrow, bleeding shoulders of the prisoner as she descended before him. Here she was, going down into hell, no more than a kid, and yet she’d reached out to keep a foreigner from harm.

Deeper and deeper. There was no trace of natural daylight left now.

They reached a point where the two prisoners were released to a dormitory, hollowed out of the rock, presumably to be put to work later. Before they were pushed inside, they peered down into the pit, with loathing and dread. For here, after all, was the Engine that was to be their executioner.

And Malenfant was going on, deeper. The guards prodded at his back, pushing him forward.

At last the descent became more shallow. Malenfant surmised they were approaching the heart of the hollowed-out mountain. They stopped maybe fifteen meters above the base of the well. From here, Malenfant had to go on alone.

By the light of a smoking torch, with a mime, he asked a favor of the guards. They shrugged, incurious, not unwilling to take a break.

Malenfant pulled his battered old NASA pressure suit from its sack.

He lifted up his lower torso assembly, the bottom half of his EMU, trousers with boots built on, and he squirmed into it. Next he wriggled into the upper torso section. He fixed on his Snoopy flight helmet, and over the top of that he lifted his bubble helmet, starred and scratched with use. He twisted it into place against the seal at his neck.

The guards watched dully.

He looked down at himself. By the light of a different star, Madeleine Meacher had spent time repairing this suit for him. The EMU was a respectable white, with the Stars and Stripes still proudly emblazoned on his sleeve.

…But then the little ritual of donning the suit was over, and events enfolded him in their logic once more.

Was this it? After all his travels, his long life, was he now to die, alone, here?

Somehow he couldn’t believe it. He gathered his courage.

Leaving the staring guards behind, he walked farther down the crude stairwell, deeper toward the fire. The starring of his battered old bubble helmet made the flames dance and sparkle; it was kind of pretty. His own breath was loud in the confines of the helmet, and he felt hot, oxygen-starved already, although that was probably just imagination. His backpack was inert — no hiss of oxygen, no whirr of fans — and it was a heavy mass on his back. But maybe the suit would protect him a little longer.

He’d just keep walking, climbing down these steps in the dark, as long as he could. He didn’t see what else he could do.

It didn’t seem long, though, before the heat and airlessness got to him, and the world turned gray, and he pitched forward. He got his hands up to protect his helmet and rolled on his back, like a turtle.

He couldn’t get up. Maybe he ought to crawl, like de Bonneville, but he couldn’t even seem to manage that.

He was, after all, a hundred years old.

He closed his eyes.

It seemed to him he slept a while. He was kind of surprised to wake up again.

He saw a face above him: a dark, heavy face. Was it de Bonneville? No, de Bonneville was dead.

Thick eye ridges. Deep eyes. An ape’s brow, inside some kind of translucent helmet.

He was being carried. Down, down. Even deeper into the mountain of Kimera. There were strong arms under him.

Not human arms.

But then there was a new light. A blue glow.

He smiled. A glow he recognized.

Cradled in inhuman arms, lifted through the gateway, Reid Malenfant welcomed the pain of transition.

There was a flash of electric blue light.

Chapter 27 The Face of Kintu

Long ago, long long ago.

Kintu giant comes down from north.

Nothing.

No earths, no stars, no people. Kintu sad. Kintu lonely. Very lonely. Nothing nothing nothing.

Kintu breathes in. Breathes in what? Breathes in nothing.

Chest swells, big big big. Round. Mouth of Kintu here. Navel of Kintu there. Breathe in, big big big, blow in, all that nothing.

Skin pops, pop pop pop. Worlds. Stars. People. Popping out of skin, pop pop pop. Still breathes in, in in in, big big big.

Here. Now. The Face of Kintu. Here. See how skin pops, pop pop pop, new baby worlds, new life, things to eat. We live where, on Face of Kintu.

The Staff of Kintu. People die, people don’t die. Inside the Staff of Kintu. Happy happy happy. Live how long, long time, long long time, forever.

In future, long long time. Kintu throw Staff, long long way. Throw Staff where, to Navel of Kintu. People live on belly of Kintu, long long time, long long way, how happy, happy happy happy.

Everyone else what? Dead.

The transition pain dissipated, like frost evaporating. He felt the hard bulge of the arms that carried him, the iron strength of biceps.

His head was tipped back. He saw the white fleshy underside of a tiny beardless chin. Beyond that, all he could see was black sky. Some kind of wispy high cloud, greenish. A rippling aurora.

His weight had changed. He was light as an infant, as a dried-up twig.

Not Earth, then.

He could be anywhere. Encoded as a stream of bits, he could have been sent a thousand light-years from home. And because Saddle Point signals traveled at mere light speed, he could be a thousand years away from a return. Even the enigmatic Earth he’d returned to, the Earth of 3265, might be as remote as the Dark Ages from the year of his birth.

Or not.

Now a face loomed over him, as broad and smooth as the Moon, encased in a crude pressure-suit helmet that was not much more than a translucent sack. The face was obviously hominid, but it had big heavy eye ridges, and a huge flat nose that thrust forward, and a low hairline. Thick black eyebrows, like a Slav, wide dark eyes. Those eye ridges gave her a perpetually surprised look.

Her. It was a female. Young? The skin looked smooth, but he had no reference.

She smiled down at him. She was a Neandertal girl.

There was black around the edge of his vision.

He was running out of air. His suit was a nonfunctioning antique. It was all he had. But now it was going to kill him.

The girl’s face creased with obvious concern. She lifted up her hand — now she was holding him with one arm, for God’s sake — and she started waving her right hand up and down in front of her body. Those thick Russian eyebrows came down, so she looked quizzical.

She was miming, he thought. Pain?

“Yes, it hurts.” His radio wasn’t working, and she didn’t look to have any kind of receiver. She probably couldn’t speak English, of course, which would be a problem for him. He was an American, and in his day, Americans hadn’t needed to learn other languages. Maybe he, too, could mime. “Help me. I can’t breathe.” He kept this up for a few seconds, until her expression dissolved into bafflement.

With big moonwalk strides she began to carry him forward. Inside his bubble helmet his head rattled around, thumping against the glass.

Now, in swaying glimpses, he could see the landscape.

A plain, broken by fresh-looking craters. The ground was red, but overlaid by streaks of yellow, brown, orange, green, deep black. It looked muddy and crusted, like an old pizza. Much of it was frosted. From beyond the close horizon, he could see a plume of gas that turned blue as it rose, sparkling in the flat light of some distant Sun. The plume fell straight back to the ground, like a garden sprinkler.

And there was something in the sky, big and bright. It was a dish of muddy light, down there close to the horizon, a big plateful of cloudy bands, pink and purple and brown. Where the bands met, he could see fine lines of turbulence, swoops and swirls, a crazy watercolor. Maybe it was a moon. But if so it was a hell of a size, thirty or forty times the size of the Moon in Earth’s sky.

His lungs were straining at the fouling air. There was a hot stink, of fear and carbon dioxide and condensation. He tried to control himself, but he couldn’t help but struggle, feebly.

…Jupiter. Think, Malenfant. That big “moon” had to be Jupiter.

And if that was a volcanic plume he’d seen, he was on Io.

He felt a huge, illogical relief, despite the claustrophobic pain. He was still in the Solar System, then. Maybe he was going to die here. But at least he wasn’t so impossibly far from home. It was an obscure comfort.

But… Io, for God’s sake. In the year A.D. 3265, it seemed, there were Neandertals, reconstructed from genetic residue in modern humans, living on Io. Why the hell, he still had to figure.

The blackness closed around his vision, like theater curtains.

He drifted back to consciousness.

He was in a tent of some kind. It stretched above him, cone shaped, like a teepee. He couldn’t see through the walls. The light came from glow lamps — relics of the high-tech past, perhaps.

He was lying there naked. He didn’t even have the simple coverall the Bad Hair Day twins had given him in Earth orbit. Feebly he put his hands over his crotch. He’d come a thousand years and traveled tens of light-years, but he couldn’t shake off that Presbyterian upbringing.

People moved around him. Neandertals. In the tent they shucked off their pressure suits, which they just piled up in a corner, and went naked.

He drifted to sleep.

Later, the girl who’d pulled him through the Saddle Point gateway, pulled him through to Io itself, nursed him. Or anyhow she gave him water and some kind of sludgy food, like hot yogurt, and a thin broth, like very weak chicken soup.

He knew how ill he was.

He’d gotten radiation poisoning at the heart of that radioactive pile. He’d taken punishment in the mucous membranes of his mouth, esophagus, and stomach, where the membrane surfaces were coming off in layers; it was all he could do to eat the yogurt stuff. He got the squits all the time, twenty-five or thirty times a day; his Neandertal nurse patiently cleaned him up, but he could see there was blood in the liquid mess. His right shin swelled up until it was rigid and painful; the skin was bluish-purple, swollen, shiny and smooth to the touch. He got soft blisters on his backside. He could feel that his body hair was falling out, at his eyebrows, his groin, his chest.

He was sensitive to sounds, and if the Neandertals made much noise it set off his diarrhea. Not that they often did; they made occasional high-pitched grunts, but they seemed to talk mostly with mime, pulling their faces and fluttering their fingers at each other.

He drifted through periods of uneasy sleep. Maybe he was delirious. He supposed he was going to die.

His Neandertal nurse’s physique was not huge, but her body gave off an impression of density. Her midsection and chest were large — flat breasts — and the muscles of her forearm looked as thick as Malenfant’s thigh muscles. Her aura of strength was palpable; she was much more physical than any human Malenfant had ever met.

But what immediately stood out was her face.

It was outsized, with her eyes too far apart, nose flattened, and features spread too wide, as if the whole face had been pulled wide. Her jaw was thick, but her chin was shallow and sliced back, as if it had been snipped off. Bulging out of her forehead was an immense brow, a bony swelling like a tumor. It pushed down the face beneath it and made the eyes sunken in their huge hard-boned sockets, giving her the effect of a distorted reflection, like an embryo in a jar. A swelling at the back of her head offset the weight of that huge brow, but it tilted her head downward, so that her chin almost rested on her chest, her massive neck snaking forward.

But those eyes were clear and human.

He christened his nurse Valentina, because of her Russian eyebrows: Valentina after Tereshkova, first woman in space, whom he had met once at an air show in Paris.

Valentina was more human than any ape, and yet she was not human. And it was that closeness-yet-difference that disturbed Malenfant.

He slept, he woke. Days passed, perhaps; he had no way to mark the passage of time.

He got depressed.

He got frightened. He cursed Nemoto for his renewed exile.

He clutched his ruined old space suit to his chest, running his aching hands over his mission patch and the Stars and Stripes, faded by harsh Alpha Centauri light. He stared at his fragment of Emma, the only human face here, and wept like a baby.

Valentina tolerated all this.

And, slowly, to his surprise, he started getting better. After a time he was even able to sit up, to feed himself.

Valentina, a dirt-caked bare-assed Neandertal, was curing him of radiation poisoning. He couldn’t figure it, grateful as he was for the phenomenon. Maybe there was some kind of nanomachinery at work here, repairing the damage he had suffered at the cellular, even molecular level. He’d already seen evidence of how the Earth was suffused by ancient machinery from beyond the Saddle Points, from the stars.

Or maybe it was just the soup.

Soon Malenfant was able to walk, stiffly.

Most of the Neandertals ignored him. They stepped over and around him as if they couldn’t even see him.

For his part, he watched the Neandertals, amazed.

He counted around thirty people crammed into this teepee. There were adults, frail old people, children all the way down to babies in arms. But, he sensed, it would take a long time to get to know them so well that he could distinguish all the individuals. He was the archetype of the foreigner abroad, to whom everybody looked alike.

The women seemed as strong as the men. Even the children, muscled like Olympic shot-putters, joined in the chores. They used their teeth and powerful jaws, together with their stone tools, to cut meat and scrape hides — meat he presumed must have been hauled through from Earth, through the Saddle Point gateway he’d followed himself. They would bake some of the meat in hearths, if you could call them that: just shallow pits scraped in the ground, lined with fire-heated rocks and covered by soil. But the softer meat was given to the infants — and to Malenfant, incidentally, by Valentina. The adults took their meat mostly uncooked; those big jaws would chomp away at the tough flesh, grinding and tearing, muscles working, making it swallowable.

There was one old guy who showed some curiosity in Malenfant, a geezer who walked with a heavy limp, hunched overso that his belly drooped down over his shriveled-up penis. Malenfant decided to call him Esau. The Book of Genesis, if he remembered right: Behold, Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man.

Malenfant looked into Esau’s eyes and wondered what he was thinking. He wondered how he was thinking.

This is my cousin, but far enough removed he represents an alien species, an alien consciousness. The first thing my remote ancestors did, stumbling out of Africa, was to close-encounter the alien, these ETs of the deep past: the true first contact. And when the last of the Neandertals lay dying, in some rocky fastness in France or Spain or China, there must have been a last contact: the last we’d have for thirty thousand years, until the Gaijin showed up in the asteroid belt.

Hell of a thing, to be alone all that time.

The Neandertals had a portable Saddle Point gateway. When they set it up and used it, Malenfant goggled.

It was a big blue hoop maybe three meters high. They were able to step through it, with the characteristic blue flash, thus disappearing from Io; later they would reappear with sacks of material, much of it rock and meat and metal canisters, maybe containing oxygen. This must be their link to Earth, to the Kimera mine — the way he had been brought here.

He toyed with the idea of going back through, trying to get back to Earth. Escape. But it would only lead him to the Kimera Engine, which would kill him; or if he evaded that, back into the clutches of Mtesa.

Maybe that was a last resort. For now he was stuck here.

What did Malenfant know about Neandertals? Diddly-squat. But he did remember they weren’t supposed to have speech. Their palates weren’t formed correctly, or some such. He’d seen them miming, and they were clearly smart. But speech, so went the theories he remembered, had been the key advantage enjoyed by Homo Sap. So here he was, the speaking man in the country of the dumb.

Maybe Reid Malenfant could teach Neandertals to talk. Maybe he could civilize them. He was fired by sudden enthusiasm.

He pointed to Esau. “You.” At himself. “Me. You. Say it. You, you, you. Me. Malenfant. My name. Mal-en-fant. You try.”

Esau studied Malenfant for a while, then slapped him, hard. It knocked him back onto the floor.

Malenfant clambered upright. His cheek stung like hell; Esau was strong.

Esau rattled through gestures: pointing to him, two fingers to his own forehead, then a fist to Malenfant’s forehead. He didn’t seem angry: more like he was trying to teach Malenfant something. Point. Fist to head. Point. Fist.

“Oh.” Malenfant pointed to himself, then made the fist sign. “I get it. This is the name you’re giving me. A sign word.”

Esau slapped him again. There was no malice, but again he was knocked over.

When Malenfant got up this time, he made the signs, point, fist, without speaking.

So it went. If he spoke more than a couple of syllables, Esau would slap him.

His vocabulary of signs started to grow: ten words, a dozen, two dozen.

He observed mothers with children. The kids got the slaps too, if they made too much noise. He started to interpret the complex rattle of fingers and gestures as the adults communicated with each other, fluent and urgent. He’d pick up maybe one sign in a hundred.

So much for the speaking man in the country of the dumb. He was like a child to these people.

It was a long time before he found out that the fist-to-head sign, his name, meant Stupid.

One day, when he woke up, everyone was clambering into their translucent pressure suits: men, women, children, even infants in little sacklike papooses. A couple of the adults were working at the teepee, pulling at the poles that held it up, taking up the groundsheet.

It was, it seemed, time to move on.

Holding his bubble helmet in front of his genitals, Malenfant cowered against the wall of the collapsing teepee, naked, scared, as the smooth dismantling operation continued around him. Malenfant had no pressure suit: only the NASA antique he’d worn to come here in the first place. What if the Neandertals thought it was still functional? If he stepped out on the surface of Io, the suit would kill him, in fifteen minutes.

Valentina came up to him. She was in her suit already, with the soft helmet closed over. She was holding out another suit; it looked like a flayed skin.

He took it gratefully. She showed him how to step inside it, how to seal up the seams with a fingernail. It was too short and wide for him, but it seemed to stretch.

It stank: of urine, feces, an ancient, milklike smell. It smelled like Esau, like an old Neandertal geezer.

Somebody had died in this suit.

When he realized that he almost lost his breakfast and tried to pull the suit off his flesh. But Valentina slapped him, harder than she’d done for a long time. There was no mistaking the commands in her peremptory signs. Put it on. Now.

This, he thought, is not the Manned Spaceflight Operations Building, Cape Canaveral. Things are different here. Accept it, if you want to keep breathing.

He pulled on the suit and sealed it up. Then he stood there trying not to throw up inside the suit’s claustrophobic stink, as the Neandertals dismantled their camp and the light of Jupiter was revealed.

Morning on Io:

Auroras flapped overhead, huge writhing sheets of light.

The Sun was a shrunken disc, low down, brighter than any star in the sky. It cast long, point-source shadows over the burnt-pizza terrain. In the sky, Jupiter hung above the horizon, just where it had before, a fat pink stripy-painted ball. But now the phase was different; Jupiter was a crescent, the terminator blurred by layers of atmosphere, and the dark side was a chunk out of the starry background, a slab of night sparking with the crackles of electrical storms bigger than Earth, like giant flashbulbs exploding inside pink clouds.

In a red-green auroral glow, the Neandertals moved about, packing up their teepee and other gear, loading it all onto big sledlike vehicles, signing to each other busily. Malenfant picked up his only possession, the remnant of his NASA suit, and bundled it up on the back of a sled.

When they were loaded, the adult Neandertals started strapping themselves into traces at the front of the sled, simple harnesses made of the ubiquitous translucent plastic. Soon everybody was saddled up except the smallest children, who would ride on the top of the loaded sleds.

Nobody told Malenfant what to do. He looked for Valentina and made sure he got into a slot alongside her. She helped him fit a harness around his body; it tightened with simple buckles.

And then they started hauling.

The Neandertals just leaned into the traces, like so many squat pack horses. And by the light of Jupiter, they began to drag the sleds across the crusty Io surface. It turned out that Malenfant’s sled was a little harder to move than the others, and his team had to strain harder, snapping signs at each other, until the runners came free of the clinging rock with a jerk.

Valentina’s gait, when walking, was… different. She seemed to lean forward as if her center of gravity was somewhere over her hip joints, instead of farther back like Malenfant’s. And when she walked her whole weight seemed to pound down, with every stride, on her hips. It was clumsy, almost apelike, the least human of her features, as far as Malenfant could see.

Valentina wasn’t built for walking long distances, like Malenfant was. Maybe the Neandertals had evolved to be sedentary.

Malenfant did his best to pull with the rest. It wasn’t clear to him why he was being kept alive, except as some vaguely altruistic impulse of Valentina’s. But he sure wanted to be seen tobe working for his supper. So he added his feeble Homo Sap strength to the Neandertals’.

Thus, hominids from Earth toiled across the face of Io.

The ground was mostly just rock: silicates, big lumps of it under his feet, peppered by bubbles. It was basalt, volcanic rock pumped out of Io’s interior. Sulphur lay in great yellow sheets over the rock, crunching under his feet. Io was a rocky world, not an ice ball like most of the other outer-system moons; sized midway between Earth’s Moon and Mars, Io was a terrestrial planet, lost out here in Jupiter orbit.

Jupiter changed constantly, a compelling, awesome sight.

Io was, he recalled, tidally locked to its giant parent; it kept the same face to Jupiter the whole time. But the moon skated around Jupiter’s waist every forty-two hours, and so the gas giant went through its whole cycle of phases in less than two days. And Jupiter, meanwhile, rotated on its own axis every ten hours or so. He didn’t have to watch that huge face for long to see the cloud decks turning, those turbulent bands and chains of little white globules chasing each other around the stripy bands. But there was no Big Red Spot, he was disappointed to find; evidently that centuries-long storm had blown itself out some time in the millennium he’d been away.

Jupiter had a powerful magnetosphere, a radiation belt of electrons and ions locked to the giant planet, within which Io circled. Jupiter’s fast rotation made that magnetosphere whip over Io like an invisible storm. That was the cause of the huge auroras that flapped constantly over his head, energetic particles battering at the thin air of this forsaken moon, ripping away a ton of atmospheric material every second. Malenfant shivered, naked inside his old man’s suit, as he thought of that thin, fast sleet of energetic particles slamming down from the sky, pounding at his flesh.

But the Neandertals weren’t concerned. They pulled for hours, and the tracks of the three sleds arrowed across the flat landscape, straight toward Jupiter. Malenfant — a hundred years old and still recovering from radiation exposure — could do little but lean into the traces and let the rest carry him along.

He’d built up an impression that the Neandertals worked hard. They used their big gorilla bodies where Homo Sap would have used tools. Their bodies were under intense physical stress, the whole time. Malenfant observed that Esau’s body, for example, bore a lot of old injuries: scars and badly set bones. It was as if they climbed a mountain or ran a marathon every day of their lives.

But the Neandertals accepted this, an occupational hazard.

The compensation was the very physical nature of their lives. They lived immersed in their world. They were vigorous, intensely alive. By comparison, Malenfant, as the only available sample of the species Homo Sap, felt weak, vague, as if he were blundering about in a mist. He found he envied them.

The Neandertals sang as they hauled — sign-sang, that is. It was a song about the Face of Kintu. Kintu was one of the few words they vocalized, and it was, Malenfant recalled, the name of a Ugandan god, the grandfather of Kimera. The song was about Kintu blowing himself up with breath until stars and worlds popped out over his body, like volcanoes on Io. Kintu was God and the universe for the Neandertals, and the Face of Kintu — it took him a while to realize — was their name for Io itself.

The signing was functional for the Neandertals, for their magic suits had no radios. But it was more than that. It was beautiful when you got to follow it a little, a mix of dance and speech.

He had to be shown how to use his magic suit’s sanitary facilities. Basically the trick was just to let go. The suit’s surface absorbed the waste, liquid and solid; it simply disappeared into that translucent wall, as if dissolving. Most of it anyhow. On the move, Malenfant had no chance to open his magic suit, this shell he had to share with the stink of a dead old man and now of his own waste. The Neandertals clearly weren’t hung up on personal hygiene. After a couple of days, however, Malenfant was longing for a shower.

After a time, snow fell around the Neandertals, fine little blue crystals that settled over Malenfant’s head and shoulders, crisping the basaltic ground.

Valentina nudged him and pointed. Over the horizon, a geyser was erupting. It was the source of the snow.

The sparkling plume, tens of kilometers high, was venting into space. The plume was blue, sulphur dioxide. At the top of the plume the ice glittered brightly: Ionized by Jupiter’s magnetic winds, the charged molecular fragments shimmered with energy, a miniature aurora. At the base of the plume, lava was flowing. Perhaps it was liquid sulphur. As it emerged it flowed stickily, slowly, like molasses, but as it cooled it became runnier, until it pooled down the shallow slopes of the vent like machine oil.

A volcanic plume, glowing in the dark. It looked like a giant, twisted fluorescent tube: exotic, strange, spectacular. His heart lifted, the way it had when he first beheld Alpha Centauri. He might not understand everything he saw. But, he felt now, it was worth coming out here — worth exploring, worth suffering all the incomprehensible shit and endless culture shocks and even getting slapped around by Neandertals — worth it for sights like this.

The march was diverted to skirt the plume’s caldera.

Soon the party started to stray into an area where a kind of frost lay over the ground, thick and green-blue, probably sulphur dioxide. The ground started to get significantly colder under Malenfant, and he was shivering.

The party moved away from the frost, seeking warmer ground.

They were walking over hot spots, he realized. But the hot spots must shift. Io, plagued by volcanism, squeezed like a rubber ball in a fist by Jupiter’s tidal pumping, was resurfaced by lava flows all the time.

So the Neandertals had to move on, wandering over Io, in search of warmth from the ground.

It was one hell of a lifestyle. But they seemed to be happy.

About twice every Io day the caravan stopped.

The Neandertals didn’t always set up camp. They would unload scuffed and scarred pieces of equipment, boxes the size of refrigerators or washing machines. They plugged their magic suits into these, at hip and mouth, for a couple of hours at a time. The mouth socket supplied food, edible mush that tasted of nothing.

Malenfant didn’t know how his magic suit kept him supplied with oxygen; he wasn’t carrying a tank. The suit must somehow break down the sulphur dioxide air and scrub out carbon dioxide from his lungs. Maybe the hip socket extracted stored waste, carbon dioxide and urine and fecal matter, for recycling. Anyhow the boxes seemed to recharge the magic suits, making them good for another ten or twelve hours.

The suits just worked, without any fuss. But the Neandertals only had a finite number of magic suits, and seemed to have no way of manufacturing more. If some sad old geezer hadn’t died, there would have been no magic suit for Malenfant. What then? Would they have abandoned him? Well, he hadn’t been invited here.

He had no idea how old all this equipment was. It was clear to him somebody had set up this Neandertal community on Io. Somebody. The Gaijin, of course. Who else?

He had yet to figure out their purpose, however.

Every time the Neandertals stopped they checked over the Staff of Kintu.

This was a metallic rod, about the size of a relay baton. It seemed to be their most precious artifact. It was just a pipe a half meter long, of a metal that looked like aluminum, and it seemed light. Sitting in Io frost, the adults would pass the Staff from hand to gloved hand, checking its weight, fondling it, signing over it. The songs they sang, about the breath of Kintu, concerned the Staff. Maybe it was some kind of religious totem. But it was too easy to assume that anything you didn’t understand must have religious significance. Maybe there was more to it than that.

Malenfant envied them their community. Ignored even by the children, he felt shut out, lonely. He felt eager to learn to talk.

Malenfant observed signs, copied them, and repeated them to Valentina.

At first he had been able to grasp only simple concrete nouns, straightforward adjectives: a hand raised to the mouth for “food,” for instance, or a rubbed stomach for “hungry.” But, more slowly, he learned to recognize representations of more abstract thoughts. Two forefingers brought together harmoniously seemed to mean “same” or “like”; two pointing fingers stabbing each other was “argument” or “fight.” There seemed to be a significance in the hand shapes, their position relative to the body, and accompanying nonmanual features like body language, posture, and facial expression. And there was a grammar, it seemed, in the order of the signs. Get any one of the elements wrong and the sign made no sense, or the wrong sense.

It seemed to him that several signs could be transmitted at once, using fragments of multiple words. The Neandertals were not constrained to speak linearly, a word at a time, as he was. They could send across whole chunks of information simultaneously, at a much higher bit rate than humans. And, it occurred to him, these new reconstructed Neandertals must have devised their rich, complex language from scratch, in just a few generations. After all, there could be no way of retrieving the lost language of their genetic predecessors, the true Neandertals.

It was a wonderful, rich mode of communication.

He tried to avoid getting slapped. But he was punished if he got the signs too badly wrong.

“You don’t know your own strength. I’m an old man, damn it!”

Slap.

When the Neandertals lay down to sleep, out in the open, they did it in their magic suits, out there on the bare surface of Io.

He picked out the constellations — and the pale stripe of another comet, a huge one, its double tail sprawled over the sky. And in the direction of Orion there was something new: bright flares, like distant explosions, scattered over a shield-shaped patch of sky. It was a silent, unending firework show, as if there was a battle going on, out there at the fringe of the Solar System, a defensive fight against some besieging invader.

War in the Oort cloud, perhaps. Were the Gaijin battling Nemoto’s star-cracking aliens out there, on the rim of the system, defending Sol? If so, why? Surely the Gaijin’s motivation had little to do with humanity. If they fought, it was to protect their own interests, their projects.

And, of course, if there really was a comet-scrambling war going on in the Oort cloud, it had one dread implication: that the Crackers were no longer out there, at Procyon or Sirius, but here.

Sleep came with difficulty under such a crowded, dangerous sky. In the end he burrowed under his bulky NASA pressure suit, seeking darkness.

After maybe a week, to Malenfant’s intense relief, they set up camp once more. It was at a site that had evidently been used before: a rough circle of kicked-up soil, scarred by hearths.

Inside the teepee the Neandertals immediately stripped off. After a week locked into the suits the stink of their bodies almost knocked Malenfant out.

There was a great spontaneous festival of the body. The kids wrestled, the adults coupled. Malenfant saw one girl pursuing an older man — literally pursuing him around the cave, her vulva visibly swollen and bright red, until she’d pinned him down and climbed on top of him. Then they slept together, in great heaps of stinking, hairy flesh. There was no lookout; presumably there were no predators on Io, no enemies.

Malenfant hunkered in a corner, generally ignored, though Valentina and Esau brought him food.

Sometimes — when the light was low, when he caught a woman or child out of the corner of his eye — he thought of them as like himself, like people. But they weren’t people. They were no better or worse than humans, just different — a different form of consciousness.

It seemed to him that the Neandertals lived closer to the world than he did. That intense physicality was the key. Their consciousness was dispersed at the periphery of their beings, in their bodies and the things and people that occupied their world. When two of them sat together — signing or working in peaceable silence — they seemed to move as one, in a slow, clumsy choreography, as if their blurred identities had merged into one, in the ultimate intimacy. Malenfant felt he could see the flow of their consciousness like deep streams, untroubled by the turbulence and reflectiveness of his own nature.

Every day was like the first day of their lives, and a vivid delight.

Malenfant wondered how it was possible for such people as these — intelligent, complex, vibrant — to have become extinct.

Extinct: a brutal, uncompromising word. Extinction made death even more of a hard cold wall, because it was the death of the species. It no longer mattered, truthfully, how sophisticated the Neandertals’ sign language had been, whether they had been capable of true humanlike speech, how rich was their deep-embedded consciousness. Because it was all gone.

The Neandertals had been brought back for this short Indian summer to serve the Gaijin’s purposes. But this had not cheated the extinction, because these Neandertals were not those who had gone before; they had no memory of their forebears, no continuity. The extinction of the Neandertals, in the deep past of Earth, had buried hope and memory, disconnected the past from the future.

And now, Malenfant feared, the time was drawing close for an extinction event on a still more massive scale: extinction across multiple star systems, so complete that not even bones and tools would be left behind for some future archaeologist to ponder.

Valentina woke him with a kick. She beckoned him, a universal gesture, and handed him his suit.

He got dressed groggily and followed her out of the teepee.

Out on the surface, he relieved himself and looked around. Io was in eclipse right now, so that the pinpoint Sun was hidden by Jupiter. The ground was darkened by the giant planet’s shadow, illumined only by starlight and by an auroral glow from Jupiter, which was otherwise a hole in the sky.

As the warm fluid trickled uncomfortably down his leg, he stumbled after Valentina, who had already set off across the crusty plain.

There were five Neandertals in the party, plus Malenfant. They were all carrying bags of tools. The Neandertals moved at a loping half-jog that Malenfant found almost impossible to match, despite the gravity.

They kept this up for an hour, maybe more. Then they stopped, abruptly. Malenfant leaned forward and propped himself up against his knees, wheezing.

There was something here. A line on the ground, shining silver in the starlight. It arrowed straight for the swollen face of Jupiter.

Malenfant recognized the texture. It was the same material he’d seen trailing from the roots of Trees, in orbit: material that had been found on the surface of Venus.

It was superconductor cable.

The Neandertals, signing busily, pressed a gadget to the cable. Malenfant couldn’t see what they were doing. Maybe this was some kind of diagnostic tool. After a couple of minutes, they straightened up and moved on.

As they trotted, the eclipse was finishing. The Sun started to poke out from behind Jupiter’s limb, a shrunken disc that rose up through layers of cloud; orange-yellow light fled through the churning cloud decks, casting shadows longer than Earth’s diameter.

The dawn light caught Io’s flux tube. It was like a vast, wispy tornado reaching up over his head. The flux tube was a misty flow of charged particles hurled up from Io’s endless volcanoes’ sweeping in elegant magnetic-field curves into the face of the giant planet. And where the tube hit Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, hundreds of kilometers above the planet’s cloud decks, there was a continuing explosion: gases made hotter than the surface of the Sun, dragged across the face of the giant planet at orbital speed, patches of rippling aurora hundreds of kilometers across.

Io, a planet-sized body shoving its way through Jupiter’s magnetosphere, was like a giant electrical generator. There was a potential difference of hundreds of thousands of volts across the moon’s diameter, currents of millions of amps flowing through the ionosphere.

Standing here, peering up into the flux tube itself, the physical sense of energy was immense; Malenfant wanted to quail, to protect himself from the sleet of high-energy particles that must be gushing down from the sky. But he stood straight, facing this godlike play of energy. Not in front of the Neandertals, he told himself.

Soon they arrived at a place where the cable was buried by a flow of sulphurous lava, now frozen solid. After a flurry of signs, the Neandertals unpacked simple shovels and picks and began to hack away at the lava, exposing the cable.

Malenfant longed to rest. His legs seized up in agonizing cramps; the muscles felt like boulders. But, he felt, he had to earn his corn. He rubbed his legs and joined the others. He used a pick on the lava, and helped haul away the debris.

He couldn’t believe this was the only length of superconductor on Io. He imagined the whole damn moon being swathed by a net of the stuff, wrapping the shifting surface like lines of longitude. Perhaps it had been mined from Venus, scavenged from that ancient, failed project, brought here for some new purpose of the Gaijin.

The Neandertals’ job must be to maintain the superconductor network, to dig it out. Otherwise, such was the resurfacing rate on this ferocious little moon, the net would surely be buried in a couple of centuries or so. The work would be haphazard, as the Neandertals could travel only where the volcanic hot spots allowed them. But, given enough time, they could cover the whole moon.

It was a smart arrangement, he thought. It gave the Neandertals a world of their own, safe from the predations of Homo Sap. And it gave the builders of this net — presumably the Gaijin — a cheap and reliable source of maintenance labor.

Neandertals were patient, and dogged. On Earth, they had persisted with a technology that suited them, all but unchanged, for sixty thousand years. They might already have been here, on Io, for centuries. With Neandertals, the Gaijin had gotten a labor pool as smart as humans, not likely to breed themselves over their resource limits here, and lacking any of the angst and hassle that came with your typical Homo Sap workforce.

Smart deal, for the Gaijin.

All he had to do now was figure out the purpose of the net itself: this immense Gaijin project, evidently intent on tapping the huge natural energy flows of Io. What were they making here?

Without a word to Malenfant the Neandertals jogged off again, along the cable toward Jupiter.

Malenfant, wheezing, followed.

When they got back to the teepee, they found Esau had died.

Valentina was inordinately distressed. She hunkered down in a corner of the tent, her huge body heaving with sobs. Evidently she had had some close relation to Esau; perhaps he was her father, or brother.

Nobody seemed moved to comfort her.

Malenfant squatted down opposite her. He cupped her chinless jaw in his hand, and tried to raise up her huge head.

At first Valentina stayed hunched over. Then — hesitantly, clumsily, without looking at him — she lifted her huge hand and stroked the back of his head.

She looked up in surprise. Her hard, strong fingers had found a bony protrusion. It was called an occipital bun, Malenfant knew, a relic of his distant French ancestry. She grabbed his hand and pulled it to the back of her own scalp. There was a similar knotty bulge there, under her long black hair. Here was one place, anyhow, where they were similar. Maybe his own occipital bun was some relic of Neandertal ancestry, a ghost trace of some interspecies romance buried millennia in the past.

Valentina’s human eyes, buried under that ridge of bone, stared out at him with renewed curiosity. Her breasts were flat, her waist solid, her build as bulky as a man’s. And her face thrust forward with its great projecting nose, her puffed-up cheekbones, her long chinless jaw. But she wasn’t ugly to him. She was even beautiful.

The moment stretched. This close to her, this still, Malenfant was uncomfortably aware of a tightness in his groin.

Damn those Bad Hair Day twins. He hadn’t wanted any of this complication.

He tried to imagine Valentina behaving provocatively: those eyes coyly retreating, perhaps, tilting her chin, glancing over her shoulder, parting her mouth, signals common to women of his own species the world over, in his day.

But that wasn’t the way Neandertal women behaved. They were not coy, he thought.

It may be humans and Neandertals couldn’t interbreed anyhow. And for sure, a few hundred millennia of separate evolution had given them a different set of come-on signals. He began to understand how it might have been back in the deep past: how two equally gifted, resourceful, communicative, curious, emotionally rich human species could have been crammed together into one small space — and yet be as mindless of each other as two types of birds in his old backyard. It was chilling, epochally sad.

He thought of Valentina’s massive hand grabbing his balls, and what was left of his erection drained away.

The Neandertals held a ceremony.

They pulled back the groundsheet of the teepee to reveal the brick-red ground. The teepee filled up with a pungent, bleachlike stink: sulphur dioxide.

Briskly the Neandertals dug out a grave. They used their strong bare hands, working together efficiently and cooperatively. A meter or so down they started hauling out dirt that was stained a more vivid orange and blue.

Malenfant inspected it curiously: This was, after all, the soil of Io. The dirt looked just like crumbled-up rock, but it was laced with orange, yellow, and green: sulphur compounds, he supposed, suffused through the rock. There were a few grains of native sulphur, crumbling yellow crystals.

The deeper dirt looked as if it was polluted by lichen.

Some of this was colorless, a dull gray, and some of it was green and purple. Malenfant had never been a biologist, but he knew there were types of bacteria on Earth that flourished in environments like this: acidic, sulphur-rich, oxygen-free, like the volcanic vents on Earth. Maybe there was actually some photosynthesis going on here. Or maybe it was based on some more exotic kind of chemistry. There could be underground reservoirs where some kind of plants stored energy by binding up sulphur dioxide into a less stable compound, like sulphur trioxide; and maybe there were even simple animals that breathed that in, burning elemental sulphur, for energy…

Scientifically, he supposed, it was interesting. But he was never going to know. And he wasn’t here for the science, anymore than the Neandertals.

And anyhow, Malenfant, life in the universe is commonplace. And so, it seems, is death.

When the grave was dug, they lowered the body of Esau into it. Valentina got down there with him and curled him up into a kind of fetus shape. The girl surrounded the old man with a handful of artifacts, maybe stuff that had been important to him: a flute, for instance, carved out of what looked like a femur.

And Valentina tucked the totem rod, the Staff of Kintu, into Esau’s dead hand.

After that Valentina stayed in the grave with the corpse a long, long time. There was a lot of signing, back and forth; Malenfant couldn’t follow many words, but he could see a rhythmic flow to the signs, as they washed around the grave. They were singing, he suspected.

When at last Valentina clambered out, Malenfant felt his own morbid mood start to lift. The Neandertals started to throw Io dirt back into the grave.

Then, just before the grave was closed over, Esau turned his shrunken head, lifted a sticklike arm.

Opened gummy eyes.

The Neandertals kept right on kicking in Io dirt.

But he was still alive. Malenfant froze, with no idea what to say or do.

Stick to your own business, Malenfant. Be grateful they didn’t do it to you.

After that, he found it difficult to sleep. He kept hearing scrabbling, scratching at the ground beneath him.

He was startled awake.

There was a bright electric blue glow coming from under the groundsheet, leaking into the teepee’s conical space. A glow, coming from the old geezer’s grave.

Malenfant had seen that glow before: a thousand astronomical units from Earth, and by the light of other Suns, and in the heart of an African mountain, and even here, on Io. It was the glow of Saddle Point gateway technology.

He tried to ask Valentina, the others. But he didn’t have the words, and they slapped him away.

A while after that — it might have been a couple of days — the Neandertals lifted the sheet and started to dig out the grave.

To Malenfant’s relief, the stink wasn’t too bad, perhaps masked by the sulphur dioxide. Maybe the wrong bacteria in the soil, he thought.

Valentina reached down into the grave and pulled out the metal Staff. She showed no signs of the distress she had exhibited before.

The Neandertals, with little fuss or ceremony, started to refill the grave.

Malenfant got close enough to look inside the grave. It was empty. He felt his skin prickle, a kid at Halloween.

He tried to get a look at the Staff. Maybe it was the cause of that electric blue Saddle Point glow, the disappearance of the corpse. But the girl hid it away.

A party set out along the cables once more, Valentina and Malenfant included. Malenfant kept to himself, ignoring the fantastic scenery, even ignoring the aches of his own rebuilt body.

His head seemed to be starting to work again, if reluctantly. And slowly, step by step, he was figuring out the setup here.

This arrangement with the Gaijin wasn’t all one-way. There was a reward for the Neandertals, it seemed, beyond the gift of this remote moon.

He thought about the electric blue Saddle Point flash that came out of old Esau’s grave. Saddle Point teleport gateways worked by destroying a body so as to record its quantum-mechanical structure. Every passage into a gateway was like a miniature death anyhow. Maybe the Staff of Kintu, that little metal artifact, stored some kind of recorded pattern, from the dying old geezer.

Maybe Esau — and perhaps all the Neandertals’ ancestors, stretching back centuries — were still, in a sense, alive, their Saddle Point signals stored in the Staff. No wonder the Neandertals took such care of the artifact. Maybe that was their reward, to live on in the Staff, until…

Until what?

Until, he thought, they had gathered enough energy, with the huge engines that encased Io. Until Kintu was ready to throw his Staff, all the way to his Navel. Just like in the songs.

He grinned; he had it. That Staff, rattling around in some Neandertal backpack, was no totem. It was a fucking spaceship.

And that was why they were gathering all this energy, from the natural dynamo that was Io.

Malenfant, excited, grabbed Valentina’s arm. “Listen to me.”

She lifted a hand to slap him.

He backed off and tried to sign. Wait. Tell me, you tell me. Staff of Kintu, Navel. You go Navel, in Staff. Navel what Navel, what what what. “Oh, damn it. What are the Gaijin making here? Antimatter? What is the Navel? Is that where the Gaijin are heading?” She slapped him, knocking him back, but he kept going. Navel. “Kintu has belly, belly, Navel… I’m right, aren’t I?” Speak true know true. “I—”

She prepared to slap him again.

Beneath his feet the ground felt suddenly hot. It was like standing on a griddle. He backed away, instinctively, until he reached a place where the gritty dirt was cooler.

Valentina hadn’t moved. She was looking down, as if baffled. The ground was starting to darken, its shade deepening down from the ubiquitous red. Blue gas erupted around Valentina’s feet, like a stage effect.

It was a volcanic plume, opening up right under Valentina.

When the ground started to crumble, he didn’t even think about it. He just lunged forward, fists outstretched. It seemed to take an age to arc through Io’s feeble gravity.

He hit her on her shoulders as hard as he could. Despite her greater mass and low center of gravity, she toppled backward and fell away from the vent toward harder ground. She was safe.

Malenfant, on the other hand, was helpless.

He was falling in desperate low-gravity slow-motion, spread-eagled, right down into the center of the vent, which had opened up into a bubbling pit of dark molten sulphur. He could feel the skin of his chest and face blistering, bubbling like the sulphurous ground. Evidently his magic suit wasn’t going to protect him from this one.

He laughed. So it ends here. At least he’d gotten to know the answer. Some of it, anyhow.

There were worse deaths.

The sulphur bubbled up over him, and the pain was overwhelming.

But there was a strong hand at his neck—

After that, only fragments:

Lying flat. No feeling anywhere.

Stars overhead. Vision bouncing. One eye still working? Being carried?

Walls around him, lifting up, a circle of thick-browed faces.

…Oh. A grave. He was the old geezer now. He tried to laugh, but nothing seemed to be working.

A rain of blackness over him. Dirt. It spattered on his chest, his face. Pain stung where it hit exposed flesh. There were hands working above him, big powerful hands like spades, scooping up dirt to throw over him. Valentina’s hands, others.

The dirt landed in his eyes, his mouth. It tasted of bleach.

I’m alive. They’re burying me. I’m alive!

He tried to cry out, but his throat was clogged by dirt. He tried to rise, but his limbs had no strength, as if he was swaddled up in bandages.

The dirt rained on his face, a black sulphurous hail. He couldn’t even move.

There was something in the corner of his vision. A metallic glint.

A flash of electric blue light.

Chapter 28 People Came from Earth

A little before Dawn, Xenia Makarova stepped out of her house into silvery light. The air from her nose frosted white, and the deep Moon chill cut through papery flesh to her spindly bones.

The silver-gray light came from Earth and Mirror in the sky: twin spheres, the one milky cloud, the other a hard image of the Sun. But the light was still dim enough to allow her to see the changed, colonized stars, as well as the fainter stripes of the comets that hailed through the inner system, one after another, echoes of the titanic war being waged on the Solar System’s rim.

And beyond the comets the new supernova — the destructive blossoming of the star the astronomers had once labeled Phi Cassiopeiae — was still brilliant, as bright as Venus perhaps, though dimming. When Xenia had been born such a spectacle, a supernova a mere nine thousand light-years away, would have been a source of great scientific and public interest. Not today, of course, not in the year A.D. 3480.

But now the Sun itself was shouldering above the horizon, dimming even the supernova. Beads of light like trapped stars marked the summits of mountains rimming the shores of Tycho, and a deep bloody crimson was working its way high into the tall sky. Almost every scrap of the air in that sky had been drawn from the heart of the Moon by the great Paulis mines. But now the mines were shut down, the Moon’s core exhausted, and she imagined she could see the lid of the sky, the millennial leaking of the Moon’s air into space.

She walked down the path that led to the circular sea. There was frost everywhere, of course, but the path’s lunar dirt, patiently raked in her youth, was friendly and gripped her sandals. The water at the sea’s rim was black and oily, lapping softly. She could see the gray sheen of pack ice farther out, though the close horizon hid the bulk of the sea from her. Fingers of sunlight stretched across the ice, and gray-gold smoke shimmered above open water.

There was a constant tumult of groans and cracks as the ice rose and fell on the sea’s mighty shoulders. The water never froze at Tycho’s rim; conversely, it never thawed at the center, so that there was a fat torus of ice floating out there around the central mountains. It was as if the rim of this artificial ocean were striving to emulate the unfrozen seas of Earth that bore its makers.

She thought she heard a barking, out on the pack ice. Perhaps it was a seal. And a bell clanked: an early fishing boat leaving port. It was a fat, comforting sound that carried easily through the still, dense air. She sought the boat’s lights, but her eyes, rheumy, stinging with cold, failed her.

She paid attention to her creaking body: the aches in her too-thin, too-long, calcium-depleted bones, the obscure spurts of pain in her urethral system, the strange itches that afflicted her liver-spotted flesh. She was already growing too cold. Mirror returned enough heat to the Moon’s long Night to keep the seas from freezing, the air from snowing out. But she would have welcomed a little more comfort.

She turned and began to labor back up her regolith path to her house.

When she got there, Berge, her grandson, was waiting for her. She did not know then, of course, that he would not survive the new Day.

He was eager to talk about Leonardo da Vinci.

Berge had taken off his wings and stacked them up against the concrete wall of her house. She could see how the wings were thick with frost, so dense the paper feathers could surely have had little play. Even long minutes after landing he was still panting, and his smooth, fashionably shaven scalp, so bare it showed the great bubble profile of his lunar-born skull, was dotted with beads of grimy sweat.

She scolded him even as she brought him into the warmth and prepared hot soup and tea for him in her pressure kettles. “You’re a fool as your father was,” she said. His father, of course, had been Xenia’s son. “I was with him when he fell from the sky, leaving you orphaned. You know how dangerous it is in the pre-Dawn turbulence.”

“Ah, but the power of those great thermals, Xenia,” he said, as he accepted the soup. “I can fly kilometers high without the slightest effort…”

Only Berge called her Xenia.

She would have berated him further, which was the prerogative of old age. But she didn’t have the heart. He stood before her, eager, heartbreakingly thin. Berge always had been slender, even compared to other skinny lunar folk; but now he was clearly frail.

And, most ominous of all, a waxy, golden sheen seemed to linger about his skin. She had no desire to comment on that — not here, not now, not until she was sure what it meant, that it wasn’t some trickery of her own age-yellowed eyes.

So she kept her counsel.

They made their ritual obeisance — murmurs about dedicating their bones and flesh to the salvation of the world — and finished up their soup.

And then, with his youthful eagerness, Berge launched into the seminar he was evidently itching to deliver on Leonardo da Vinci, long-dead citizen of a long-dead planet. Brusquely displacing the empty soup bowls to the floor, he produced papers from his jacket and spread them out before her. The sheets, yellowed and stained with age, were covered in a crabby, indecipherable handwriting, broken with sketches of gadgets or flowing water or geometric figures.

She picked out a luminously beautiful sketch of the crescent Earth…

“No, Xenia,” Berge said patiently. “Not Earth. Think about it. It must have been the crescent Moon.” Of course he was right; she’d lived on the Moon too long. “You see, Leonardo understood the phenomenon he called the ashen Moon — like our ashen Earth, the old Earth visible in the arms of the new. He was a hundred years ahead of his time with that one.”

This document had been called many things in its long history, but most familiarly the Codex Leicester. Berge’s copy had been printed off in haste during the Failing, those frantic hours when the Moon’s dying libraries had disgorged great snowfalls of paper, a last desperate download of their stored electronic wisdom before the power failed. It was a treatise centering on what Leonardo called the “body of the Earth,” but with diversions to consider such matters as water engineering, the geometry of Earth and Moon, and the origins of fossils.

The issue of the fossils particularly excited Berge. Leonardo had been much agitated by the presence of the fossils of marine creatures — fish and oysters and corals — high in the mountains of Italy. Lacking any knowledge of tectonic processes, he had struggled to explain how the fossils might have been deposited by a series of great global floods.

It made her remember how, when Berge was small, she had once had to explain to him what a fossil was. There were no fossils on the Moon: no bones in the ground, save those humans had put there. But now, of course, Berge was much more interested in the words of long-dead Leonardo than of grandmother.

“You have to think about the world Leonardo inhabited,” he said. “The ancient paradigms still persisted: the stationary Earth, a sky laden with spheres, crude Aristotelian protophysics. But Leonardo’s instinct was to proceed from observation to theory, and he observed many things in the world that didn’t fit with the prevailing worldview—”

“Like mountaintop fossils.”

“Yes. Working alone, he struggled to come up with explanations. And some of his reasoning was, well, eerie.”

“Eerie?”

“Prescient.” Gold-flecked eyes gleamed. The boy flicked back and forth through the Codex, pointing out spidery pictures of Earth and Moon and Sun, neat circles connected by spidery light-ray traces. “Remember, the Moon was thought to be a crystal sphere. What intrigued Leonardo was why the Moon wasn’t much brighter in Earth’s sky. If the Moon was a crystal sphere, perfectly reflective, it should have been as bright as the Sun.”

“Like Mirror.”

“Yes. So Leonardo argued the Moon must be covered in oceans.” He found a diagram showing a Moon coated with great out-of-scale choppy waves and bathed in spidery sunlight rays. “Leonardo said waves on the Moon’s oceans must deflect much of the reflected sunlight away from Earth. He thought the darker patches visible on the surface must mark great standing waves, or even storms, on the Moon.”

“He was wrong,” she said. “In Leonardo’s time, the Moon was a ball of rock. The dark areas were just lava sheets.”

“Yes, of course. But now,” Berge said eagerly, “the Moon is mostly covered by water. You see? And there are great storms, wave crests hundreds of kilometers long, that are visible from Earth — or would be, if anybody was left to see…”

They talked for hours.

When he left, she went to the door to wave him good-bye.

The Day was little advanced, the rake of sunlight still sparse on the ice, and Mirror still rode bright in the sky. Here was another strange forward echo of Leonardo’s, it struck her, though she preferred not to mention it to her already overexcited grandson: in these remote times, there were crystal spheres in orbit around the Earth. The difference was, people had put them there.

As she closed the door she heard the honking of geese, a great flock of them fleeing the excessive brightness of full Daylight.

Each Morning, as the Sun labored into the sky, there were storms. Thick fat clouds raced across the sky, and water gushed down, carving new rivulets and craters in the ancient soil and turning the ice at the rim of the Tycho pack into a thin, fragile layer of gray slush.

The storms persisted as Noon approached on that last Day, and she traveled with Berge to the phytomine celebration to be held on the lower slopes of Maginus.

They made their way past sprawling fields tilled by human and animal muscle, thin crops straining toward the sky, frost shelters laid open to the muggy heat. And as they traveled they joined streams of battered carts, all heading for Maginus. Xenia felt depressed by the people around her: the spindly adults, their hollow-eyed children — even the cattle and horses and mules were skinny and wheezing. The Moon soil was thin, and the people and animals were all, of course, slowly being poisoned besides.

Most people chose to shelter from the rain. But to Xenia it was a pleasure. Raindrops here were fat glimmering spheres the size of her thumb. They floated from the sky, gently flattened by the resistance of the thick air, and they fell on her head and back with soft, almost caressing impacts, and water clung to her flesh in great sheets and globes she must scrape off with her fingers. So long and slow had been their fall from the high clouds that the drops were often warm, and the air thick and humid and muggy. She liked to think of herself standing in the band of storms that circled the whole of the slow-turning Moon.

It reminded her of the day of Frank Paulis’s final triumph.

She remembered that first hour when it was possible to step outside the domes — the first hour when unprotected people could survive on the Moon, swathed as it was by air drawn up by the great mines that bore Paulis’s name — an hour that had come to pass thanks to Frank’s ingenuity, courage, determination, and downright unscrupulous dishonesty. Frank, doggedly, had lived to see it, and on that day the authorities let him out of house arrest, just briefly. They wouldn’t permit him to be the first to walk out of a dome without a mask — they couldn’t bring themselves to be as generous as that. But he was among the first. And that was, perhaps, enough. She remembered how he had stalked in the fresh air, squat and defiant, sniffing up great lungfuls of the air he had made, and how he had laughed as the rain trickled into his toothless mouth, fat lunar drops of it.

And, soon after that, he had died.

After that Xenia had left, with the Gaijin, for the stars.

When she returned home she found that thirteen hundred years of history had worn away, leaving the Earth a cloud-covered ruin, the Solar System threatened by interstellar war, the last humans struggling to survive on Mercury and the Moon. Nobody remembered her, or much of the past: It was as if this attenuated, unstable present was all there ever had been, all that would ever be. So she had shed her old identity, settled into the community here.

Thanks to her engineered biology, a gift of the futures she had visited, she had remained young, physically. Young enough to bear children, even. But now, despite the invisible engineering in her flesh, she was slowly dying, as was everybody, as was the Moon.

How strange that the inhabited Moon’s life had been as brief as her own: that her birth and death would span this small world’s, that its rocky bones would soon emerge through its skin of air and ocean, just as hers would push through her decaying flesh.

At last they approached Maginus.

Maginus was an old, eroded crater complex to the southeast of Tycho. Its ancient walls glimmered with crescent lakes and glaciers. Sheltered from the winds of Morning and Evening, Maginus was a center of life, and long before they reached the foothills, as the fat rain cleared, she saw the tops of giant trees looming over the horizon. She thought she saw creatures leaping between the tree branches. They may have been lemurs, or even bats; or perhaps they were kites wielded by ambitious children.

Berge showed delight as they crossed the many water courses, pointing out engineering features that had been anticipated by Leonardo: dams and bridges and canal diversions and so forth, some of them even constructed since the Failing. But Xenia took little comfort, oppressed as she was by the evidence of the fall of mankind. For example, they journeyed along a road made of lunar glass, flat as ice and utterly impervious to erosion, carved long ago into the regolith by vast space-borne engines. But they traveled this marvelously engineered highway in a cart that was wooden, and drawn by a spavined, thin-legged mule.

Such contrasts were unendingly startling to a time-stranded traveler like Xenia. But, she thought with a grisly irony, all the technology around them would have been more than familiar to Berge’s hero, Leonardo. There were gadgets of levers and pulleys and gears, their wooden teeth constantly stripped; there were turnbuckles, devices to help erect cathedrals of Moon concrete; there had even been pathetic lunar wars fought with catapults and crossbows, “artillery” capable of throwing lumps of rock a few kilometers.

But once people had dug mines that reached the heart of the Moon. The people today knew this was so, else they could not exist here. She knew it was true, for she remembered it.

As they neared the phytomine, the streams of traffic converged to a great confluence of people and animals. There was a swarm of reunions of friends and family, and a rich human noise carried on the thick air.

When the crowds grew too dense, Xenia and Berge abandoned their wagon and walked. Berge, with unconscious generosity, supported her with a hand clasped about her arm, guiding her through this human maelstrom.

Children darted around her feet, so fast she found it impossible to believe she could ever have been so young, so rapid, so compact, and she felt a mask of old-woman irritability settle on her. But many of the children were, at age seven or eight or nine, already taller than she was, girls with languid eyes and the delicate posture of giraffes. The one constant of human evolution on the Moon was how the children stretched out, ever more languorous, in the gentle gravity. But in later life they paid a heavy price in brittle, calcium-starved bones.

All Berge wanted to talk about was Leonardo da Vinci.

“Leonardo was trying to figure out the cycles of the Earth. For instance, how water could be restored to the mountaintops. Listen to this.” He fumbled, one-handed, with his dog-eared manuscript. “ ‘We may say that the Earth has a spirit of growth, and that its flesh is the soil; its bones are the successive strata of the rocks which form the mountains; its cartilage is the tufa stone; its blood the veins of its waters… And the vital heat of the world is fire which is spread throughout the Earth; and the dwelling place of the spirit of growth is in the fires, which in divers parts of the Earth are breathed out in baths and sulphur mines…’ You understand what he’s saying? He was trying to explain the Earth’s cycles by analogy with the systems of the human body.”

“He was wrong.”

“But he was more right than wrong, Grandmother! Don’t you see? This was centuries before geology was formalized, before matter and energy cycles would be understood. Leonardo had gotten the right idea, from somewhere. He just didn’t have the intellectual infrastructure to express it…”

And so on. None of it was of much interest to Xenia. As they walked it seemed to her that his weight was the heavier, as if she, the foolish old woman, was constrained to support him, the young buck. It was evident his sickliness was advancing fast — and it seemed that others around them noticed it too, and separated around them, a sea of unwilling sympathy.

At last they reached the plantation itself. They had to join queues, more or less orderly. There was noise, chatter, a sense of excitement. For many people, such visits were the peak of each slow lunar Day.

Separated from the people by a row of wooden stakes and a few meters of bare soil was a sea of growing green. The vegetation was predominantly mustard plants. Chosen for their bulk and fast growth, all of these plants had grown from seed or shoots since the last lunar Dawn. The plants themselves grew thick, their feathery leaves bright. But many of the leaves were sickly, already yellowing.

The fence was supervised by an unsmiling attendant, who wore — to show the people their sacrifice had a genuine goal — artifacts of unimaginable value: earrings and brooches and bracelets of pure copper and nickel and bronze.

The attendant told them, in a sullen prepared speech, that the Maginus mine was the most famous and exotic of all the phytomines: for here gold itself was mined, still the most compelling of all metals. These mustard plants grew in soil in which gold, dissolved out of the base rock by ammonium thiocyanate, could be found at a concentration of four parts per million. But when the plants were harvested and burned, their ash contained four hundred parts per million of gold, drawn out of the soil by the plants during their brief lives.

The phytomines, where metals were slowly concentrated by living things, were perhaps the Moon’s most important remaining industry.

As Frank Paulis had understood centuries ago, lunar soil was sparse and ungenerous. And yet, now that Earth was wrecked, now that the spaceships no longer called, the Moon was all the people had.

The people of the Moon had neither the means nor the will to rip up the top hundred meters of their world to find the precious metals they needed. Drained of strength and tools, they had to be more subtle.

Hence the phytomines.

The technology was old — older than the human Moon, older than spaceflight itself. The Vikings, marauders of Earth’s dark age, would mine their iron from “bog ore,” iron-rich stony nodules deposited near the surface of bogs by bacteria that had flourished there: miniature miners, not even visible to the Vikings, who burned their little corpses to make their nails and swords and pans and cauldrons.

And so it went, across this battered, parched little planet, a hierarchy of bacteria and plants and insects and animals and birds collecting gold and silver and nickel and copper and bronze, their evanescent bodies comprising a slow, merging trickle of scattered molecules stored in leaves and flesh and bones, all for the benefit of that future generation who must someday save the Moon.

Berge and Xenia, solemnly, took ritual scraps of mustard-plant leaf on their tongues, swallowed ceremonially. With her age-furred tongue she could barely taste the mustard’s sharpness. There were no drawn-back frost covers here because these poor mustard plants would not survive to the Sunset: They died within a lunar Day, from poisoning by the cyanide.

Berge met friends and melted into the crowds.

Xenia returned home alone, brooding.

She found that her family of seals had lumbered out of the ocean and onto the shore. These were constant visitors. During the warmth of Noon they would bask for hours, males and females and children draped over each other in casual abandon, so long that the patch of regolith they inhabited became sodden and stinking with their droppings. The seals, uniquely among the creatures from Earth, had not adapted in any apparent way to the lunar conditions. In the flimsy gravity they could surely perform somersaults with those flippers of theirs. But they chose not to; instead they basked, as their ancestors had on far-remote Arctic beaches.

Xenia didn’t know why this was so. Perhaps the seals were, simply, wiser than struggling, dreaming humans.

The long Afternoon sank into its mellow warmth. The low sunlight diffused, yellow-red, to the very top of the tall sky.

Earth was clearly visible, wrapped in yellow clouds — clouds of dust and bits of rock and vaporized ocean thrown up there by the great impact a hundred years back. The scientists used to say it would take centuries to disperse the clouds. Now, nobody so much as looked at Earth, as if, now that it could no longer succor its blue satellite, the planet had become unmentionable, its huge wounds somehow impolite. But Xenia could make out a dim cloud of green, swathing the Earth: It was an orbiting forest, Trees that had survived the collision, still drawing their sustenance from the curdled air with superconductor roots.

The comet impact had been relatively minor, on the cosmic scale of such events. But it had been sufficient to silence Earth; nobody on the Moon knew who, or what, had survived on its surface. Xenia wondered if even those Trees could survive the greater and more frequent impacts that many had predicted were the inevitable outcome of the conflict in the Oort cloud, as the Crackers threatened to break through the Gaijin cordon, as warring ETs hurled giant rogue objects into the system’s crowded heart, century after century.

Such musing failed to distract her from thoughts of Berge’s illness, which advanced without pity. She was touched when he chose to come stay with her, to “see it out,” as he put it.

Her fondness for Berge was not hard to understand. Her daughter had died in childbirth. This was not uncommon, as pelvises evolved in heavy Earth gravity struggled to release the great fragile skulls of Moon-born children — and Xenia’s genes, of course, came direct from Earth, from the deep past.

So she had rejoiced when Berge was born, sired by her son of a lunar native; at least her genes, she consoled herself, which had emanated from primeval oceans now lost in the sky, would travel on to the farthest future. But now, it seemed, she would lose even that consolation.

But she was not important, nor the future, nor her complex past. All that mattered was Berge, here in the present, and on him she lavished all her strength, her love.

Berge spent his dwindling energies in feverish activities. Still his obsession with Leonardo clung about him. He showed her pictures of impossible machines, far beyond the technology of Leonardo’s time: shafts and cogwheels for generating enormous heat, a diving apparatus, an “easy-moving wagon” capable of independent locomotion. The famous helicopter intrigued Berge particularly. He built many spiral-shaped models of bamboo and paper; they soared into the thick air, easily defying the Moon’s gravity, catching the reddening light.

She wasn’t sure if he knew he was dying.

In her gloomier hours — when she sat with her grandson as he struggled to sleep, or as she lay listening to the ominous, mysterious rumbles of her own failing body, cumulatively poisoned, racked by the strange distortions of lunar gravity — she wondered how much farther humans must descend.

The heavy molecules of the thick atmosphere were too fast-moving to be contained by the Moon’s gravity. The air would be thinned in a few thousand years: a long time, but not beyond comprehension. Long before then people would have to reconquer this world they had built, or they would die.

So they gathered metals, molecule by molecule.

And, besides that, they would need knowledge.

The Moon had become a world of patient monks, endlessly transcribing the great texts of the past, pounding the eroding wisdom of the millennia into the brains of the wretched young. It seemed essential to Xenia they did not lose their concentration as a people, their memory. But she feared it was impossible. Technologically they had already descended to the level of Neolithic farmers, and the young were broken by toil even as they learned.

She had lived long enough to realize that they were, fragment by fragment, losing what they once knew.

If she had one simple message to transmit to the future generations, one thing they should remember lest they descend into savagery, it would be this: People came from Earth. There: cosmology and the history of the species and the promise of the future, wrapped up in one baffling, enigmatic, heroic sentence. She repeated it to everyone she met. Perhaps those future thinkers would decode its meaning, and would understand what they must do.

Berge’s decline quickened as the Sun slid down the sky, the clockwork of the universe mirroring his condition with a clumsy, if mindless, irony. In the last hours, she sat with him, quietly reading and talking, responding to his near-adolescent philosophizing with her customary brusqueness, which she was careful not to modify in this last hour.

“But have you ever wondered why we are here and now?” He was whispering, the sickly gold of his face picked out by the dwindling Sun. “What are we, a few million, scattered in our towns and farms around the Moon? What do we compare to the billions who swarmed over Earth in the great years? Why do I find myself alive now rather than then? It is so unlikely…” He turned his great lunar head. “Do you ever feel you have been born out of your time, as if you are stranded in the wrong era, an unconscious time traveler?”

She would have confessed she often did, but he whispered on.

“Suppose a modern human — or someone of the great ages of Earth — was stranded in the sixteenth century, Leonardo’s time. Suppose he forgot everything of his culture, all its science and learning—”

“Why? How?”

“I don’t know… But if it were true — and if his unconscious mind retained the slightest trace of the learning he had discarded — wouldn’t he do exactly what Leonardo did? Study obsessively, try to fit awkward facts into the prevailing, unsatisfactory paradigms, grope for the deeper truths he had lost? Don’t you see? Leonardo behaved exactly as a stranded time traveler would.”

“Ah.”

She thought she understood; of course, she didn’t. And in her unthinking way she launched into a long and pompous discourse on feelings of dislocation: on how every adolescent felt stranded in a body, an adult culture, unprepared…

Berge wasn’t listening. He turned away, to look again at the bloated Sun.

“I think,” she said, “you should drink more soup.”

But he had no more need of soup.

It seemed too soon when the Day was done, and the cold started to settle on the land once more, with great pancakes of new ice clustering around the rim of the Tycho sea.

Xenia summoned Berge’s friends, teachers, those who had loved him.

She clung to the greater goal: that the atoms of gold and nickel and zinc that had coursed in Berge’s blood and bones, killing him like the mustard plants of Maginus — killing them all, in fact, at one rate or another — would now gather in even greater concentrations in the bodies of those who would follow. Perhaps the pathetic scrap of gold or nickel that had cost poor Berge his life would at last, mined, close the circuit that would lift the first ceramic-hulled ships beyond the thick, deadening atmosphere of the Moon.

Perhaps. It was cold comfort.

But still they ate the soup, of Berge’s dissolved bones and flesh, in solemn silence. They took his life’s sole gift, further concentrating the metal traces to the far future, shortening their own lives as he had.

She had never been a skillful host. As soon as they could, the young people dispersed. She talked with Berge’s teachers, but they had little to say to each other; she was merely his grandmother, after all. She wasn’t sorry to be left alone.

Before she slept again, even before the Sun’s bloated hull had slid below the toothed horizon, the winds had turned. The warmer air was treacherously fleeing after the sinking Sun. Soon the first flurries of snow came pattering on the black, swelling surface of the Tycho sea.

Her seals slid back into the water, to seek out whatever riches or dangers awaited them under Moon core ice.

Chapter 29 Bad News from the Stars

When Madeleine Meacher arrived back in the Solar System — just moments after passing through the pain of her last Saddle Point transition — she was stunned to find Nemoto materializing in the middle of her small hab module.

“Nemoto. You. What…? How…?”

Nemoto was small, hunched over, her face a mask of sourness. This was a virtual, of course, and a low-quality one; Nemoto floated in the air, not quite lined up with the floor.

Nemoto glanced about, as if surprised to be here. “Meacher. So it’s you. What date is it?”

Madeleine had to look it up: A.D. 3793.

Nemoto laughed hollowly. “How absurd.”

There was no perceptible time delay. That meant the originating transmitter must be close. But, of course, there had been no way Nemoto could have known which Saddle Point gateway Madeleine would arrive from. “Nemoto, what are you?”

Nemoto grunted impatiently. “I am a limited-sentience projection. My function is to wait for the star travelers to return. I dusted the Saddle Point radius, all around the system. Dusted it with monitors, probes, transmitters. Technology has moved on, Meacher. Look it up. It scarcely matters… Listen to what I have to say.”

“Nemoto—”

“Listen, damn you. The Gaijin have been fighting the Crackers. Out on the rim of the system.”

“I know that—”

“The war has lasted five centuries, perhaps more. The Oort cloud is deep, Meacher, a deep trench. But now the war is lost.”

The simple, stunning brutality of the statement shocked Madeleine. “Are you sure?”

Nemoto barked laughter. “The Gaijin are withdrawing from the Solar System. They don’t bother to hide this from us. Just as most people don’t bother to look up, into the sky, and see what is going on… Oh, many of the Gaijin remain: scouts, observers, transit craft like this one. But the bulk of the Gaijin fleet — mostly constructed from stolen Solar System resources, our asteroids — has begun to withdraw to the Saddle Points. The outer system war is over.”

“And the Crackers…”

“Are on the way into the inner system. They are already through the heliopause, the perimeter of the solar wind.” The virtual flickered, became blocky, all but transparent. “The endgame approaches.”

“Nemoto, what must I do?”

“Go to Mercury. Find me.” She looked down at herself, as if remembering. “That is, find Nemoto.”

“And what of you? Nemoto, what is a limited-sentience projection?”

Nemoto raised a hand that was crumbling into bits of light. She seemed puzzled, as if she was finding out for herself as she spoke. “I am autonomous, heuristic, sentient. I was born sixty seconds ago, to give you this message. But my function is fulfilled. I’m dying.” She looked at Madeleine, as if shocked by the realization, and reached out.

Madeleine extended a hand, but her fingers passed through a cloud of light.

With a thin wail, the Nemoto virtual broke up.

Sailing in from the rim of the Solar System, Madeleine used Gaijin technology to study the strange new age into which she had been projected.

There was little Gaijin traffic, just as virtual Nemoto had said.

But she found signatures of unknown ships — solar-sail craft, they appeared to be, great fleets of them, a gigantic shell that surrounded the system. They were still out among the remote orbits of the comets for now, but they were converging, like a fist closing on the fat warmth of the inner system.

Cracker fleets, come to disrupt the Sun.

Earth seemed dead. The Moon was a fading blue, silent. There were knots of human activity in the asteroids, on Mars — and on Triton. And she found signs of refugee fleets, humans fleeing inward to the core of the system, to Mercury. But no ships arrived at or left remote Triton.

When she understood that, she knew where she must go first.

The Gaijin flower-ship sailed around Triton, its fusion light illuminating smooth plains of ice. It was a world covered by a chill ocean, like Earth’s Arctic, with not a scrap of solid land; but the thin ice crust was easily broken by the slow pulsing tides of this small moon, exposing great black leads of water that bubbled and steamed vigorously, trying to evaporate and fill up all of empty space.

There were six human settlements.

The settlements looked like clusters of bubbles on a pond, she thought. They were sprawling, irregular patches of modular construction — not rigid, clearly designed to float over the tides. Five settlements seemed abandoned — no lights, no power output, no sign of an internal temperature significantly above the background. Even the sixth looked largely shut down, with only a handful of lights at the center of the bubble-cluster, the outskirts abandoned to the cold.

She radioed down requests for permission and instructions for landing. Only automated beacons responded. The answers came through in a human voice, but in a language she didn’t recognize. The translation suite embedded in her equipment couldn’t handle it either. She had the Gaijin put her down on what appeared to be a landing site, close to a system of air locks.

Suited up, she stepped out of the conical Gaijin lander.

Frost covered every surface. But it was gritty, hard as sand. Remember, Madeleine, water ice is rock on Triton.

She walked carefully to the edge of the platform and looked out beyond the bounds of the bubble city. A point-source Sun cast wan, colorless light over smooth ice fields. Neptune, a faint, misty-blue ball, was rising over the horizon, making the light on the ice deep, subtle, complex, the shadows softly glowing. Pointlessly beautiful, she thought. She turned away.

She found a door large enough for a suited human. She couldn’t understand the elaborate script instructions beside the control panel. But there was one clear device: a big red button. Press me. She hit it with her fist.

Radio noise screeched. The door slid back, releasing a puff of air that crystallized immediately. She hurried into a small, brightly lit air lock. The door slammed shut, and the air lock immediately repressurized.

She twisted off her helmet. Air sighed out of her suit, and her ears popped. The air was biting cold. It smelled stale.

She palmed a panel that opened the inner door, and found herself looking into a long, unadorned corridor that twisted out of sight.

Wandering through the corridors, carrying her helmet, she was eventually met by a woman. She was evidently a cop: spindly, fragile-looking after fifteen hundred years of adaptation to low gravity, but she carried a mean-looking device that could only be a handgun.

The cop walked Madeleine, luggage pack and all, into the center of town. The cop’s skin was jet black. Madeleine’s translator software couldn’t interpret her language.

Madeleine caught glimpses of abandoned corridors and some kind of complex, gigantic machinery at the heart of everything. In one area she passed over a clear floor, water rippling underneath, black and deep. She saw something swimming there, sleek and fast and white, quickly disappearing into the deeper darkness.

The cop delivered her to a cramped suite of offices. Madeleine sat in an anteroom, waiting for attention. Maybe this was the office of the mayor, she thought, or the town council. There was no sign of the colony’s Aboriginal origins, save for a piece of art on the wall: about a meter square, pointillist dots in shades of cobalt red. A Dreamtime representation, maybe.

Madeleine was starting to get the picture. Triton was a small town, at the fringe of interstellar space. They weren’t used to visitors, and weren’t much interested either.

Eventually a harassed-looking official — another woman, her frizzy hair tied back sharply from her forehead — came into the room. She studied Madeleine with dismay.

Madeleine forced a smile. “Pleased to meet you. Who are you, the mayor?”

The woman frowned and jabbered back impatiently.

But Madeleine smiled and nodded, and tapped her helmet. “That’s it. Keep talking. My name is Madeleine Meacher. I’ve come from the stars…”

Her translator suite was essentially Gaijin. How ironic that seventeen centuries after the Gaijin came wandering unannounced into the asteroid belt, humans should need alien technology to talk to each other.

At last the translator began to whisper.

“At last. Thanks for your patience. I—”

“And I am very busy,” the translator whispered, ghosting the woman’s speech. “We should progress this issue, the issue of your arrival here.”

“My name is Meacher…” Madeleine summarized her CV.

The woman turned out to be called Sheela Dell-Cope. She was an administrative assistant in the office of the headman here — although, as far as Madeleine could make out, the headman was actually a woman.

“I have a mission,” Madeleine said. “I bring bad news. Bad news from the stars.”

The woman silenced her with an upraised hand. “There is the question of your residency, including the appropriate fee…”

Madeleine was forced to sit through a long and elaborate list of rules regarding temporary residency. To Dell-Cope, Madeleine Meacher was strange, incomprehensible, a visitor from another time, another place. Now I am the Gaijin, Madeleine thought.

She was going to have to apply for the equivalent of a visa. And she would have to pay for each day she stayed, or else work for her air. This was a closed, marginal world, where every breath had to be paid for.

“The work is not pleasant,” Dell-Cope said. “Servicing the otec. Or working with the Flips, for instance.”

That meant nothing to Madeleine, but she got the idea. “I’ll pay.” She had a variety of Gaijin high-tech gadgets that she could use for a fee. Anyhow she wasn’t going to be here long, come what may.

As it turned out, the painting on the wall was a representation of an ancient Aboriginal artwork: the Dreaming of a creature of the Australian Outback, the honey ant. But it was a copy of a copy of a copy, done in seaweed dyes. And, she was prepared to bet, nobody on Triton knew what a honey ant was anyhow.

She was given a room in a residential area. There seemed to be no hotels here.

The room was just a cube carved out of concrete. It had a bed, some scattered and unfamiliar furniture — spindly low-gravity chairs — a small galley, and a comms station with an utterly baffling human interface.

Not that the galley was so easy either. She shouted at it and poked it, her favored way of dealing with newfangled technology, until she found a way to make it decant a hot liquid, some kind of tea.

There were no windows. The room was just a concrete box, a sarcophagus, a cave. Here in the emptiness on the edge of interstellar space, humans were hiding from the sky.

What are you doing here, Meacher?

What was she supposed to do? Simply blurt out her news — that an alien invasion fleet had massed on the rim of the Solar System, that it was almost certain to spill into the region of Neptune’s orbit soon, that she was here, with her friendly Gaijin, to help these people evacuate to worlds their ancestors had left behind a thousand years earlier? It seemed absurd, melodramatic.

She worked at the comms equipment, striving to make it do what she wanted. It was a strange irony, she thought, that comms equipment, whose purpose was after all to join people together, always turned out to have the most baffling designs, presenting the worst challenges to the out-of-time traveler.

She tried to make an appointment to meet the headman, but she was stalled. She tried farther down the local hierarchy, as best she could figure it out, but got nowhere there either.

Nobody was interested in her.

Frustrated, on a whim, she decided to hunt for descendants of the colonists she had known. With the help of her translator she asked the comms station to find her people with “Roach” in their surname.

Most of the surnames scrolling before her, phonetically rendered, were unfamiliar. But there were a few families with compound surnames that included the name “Rush.”

Just around the corner, in fact, in the same floating bubble as this room, there was a man — apparently living alone — with the surname Rush-Bayley.

She spent a frustrating hour persuading the comms unit to leave him a message.

She took long walks through the city’s emptiness. Lights turned themselves on, then off again when she passed, so she walked in a moving puddle of illumination.

She walked from bubble to floating bubble over bridges of what seemed to be ceramic; when the bubbles shifted against each other, the interfaces creaked, ominously. She encountered few people. Her footsteps echoed, as if she were walking through immense hangars.

Madeleine imagined this place had been designed for ten, twenty times as many people as it held now. And she thought of those other colonies, abandoned on the waters of Triton.

It saddened her that nothing — save a few sentimental tokens like paintings — survived of the Aboriginal culture that Ben’s generation had brought here. After all, even fifteen hundred years on Triton were dwarfed by maybe sixty thousand years of Australia. But the Dreamtime legends, it seemed, had not survived the translation from the ancient deserts of Australia to these enclosed, high-tech bubbles.

She reached the center of the kilometers-wide colony. Here, a great structure loomed out of the ice-crusted sea, visible through picture windows. It was mounted on a stalk, and it reared up to a great dome-shaped carapace some hundreds of meters above the ice. It was a little like a water tower. She picked out engineering features: evaporators, demisters, generators, turbines, condenser tubing. Madeleine learned that this tower was based on a taproot that descended far into the ocean, kilometers deep, in fact.

This was the otec. The name turned out to be an acronym from old English, for Ocean Thermal Energy Converter. It was a device to extract energy from the heat difference between the deep ocean waters, at just four degrees below freezing, and the surface ice, at more than a hundred below. The otec turned out to be the main power source for the colony. It was fifteen hundred years old, as old as the colony itself, and it was maintained by the colonists with a diligent, monkish devotion. There were other power sources, like fusion plants. But the colonists were short of metal; the nearest body of rock, after all, was the silicate core of Triton, drowned under hundreds of kilometers of water. The colonists were able to fix the otec, clunky machinery through it was, with materials they could extract from the water around them.

After a couple of empty days, she found her comms unit glowing green. She poked at it, trying to figure out why.

It turned out there was a message on it, from Rush-Bayley.

Adamm Rush-Bayley was tall, thin, dark. He wore a loose smocklike affair, his skinny legs bare. The smock was painted with vibrant colors — red, blue, green — a contrast to the drab environment.

He turned out to be seventy years old, though he didn’t look it.

He looked nothing like Ben, of course, or Lena. Had she been hoping that she could retrieve something of Ben, her own vanished past? How could he be like Ben, sixty generations removed?

His family had kept alive Ben’s story, however, his name — and the story of the Nereid impact. And so he looked at her with mild curiosity. “You’re the same Madeleine Meacher who—”

“Yes.”

“How very strange. Of course we have records.” He smiled. “There is a public archive, and my family kept its own mementoes. Perhaps you’d like to see them.”

“I was there for the live show, remember.”

“Yes. You must have fascinating stories.” He didn’t sound all that fascinated, though, to Madeleine; it seemed clear he’d rather show her the records his family had cherished than hear her testimony from history. The past was a thing to own, to lock away in boxes and archives, not to explore.

It wasn’t the first time she had encountered such a reaction.

He made her a meal in his home, which was a multichamber cave. The food was shellfish, with what appeared to be processed seaweed or algae as a side dish. They ate off plates made of a kind of paper. The paper wasn’t based on cellulose, she learned, but on chitin extracted from the shells of lobsters.

Adamm’s clothes were made from seaweed — or more precisely a seaweed extract called algin. Algin could be spun into silklike threads and was the basis of virtually all the colonists’ clothing and other fabric, as well as products like films, gels, polishes, paints. There was even algin additive in her food.

They talked tentatively while they ate.

Adamm made a minor living making pearl artifacts. He showed her a pearl the size of her fist that had been sliced open and hollowed out to make a box for a mildly intoxicating snufflike powder. The pearl was exquisite, the workmanship so-so.

Most of the work he did was for one engineering concern or another; luxury was at a premium here. He could only sell, after all, to his fellow citizens. It seemed to her that nobody was rich here, nobody terribly poor. But this was Adamm’s home, and he was used to its conditions.

Most people, she learned, were probably older than they looked to her. Here in the low-gravity environment of Triton, and with antiaging mechanisms wired centuries earlier into the human genome, life expectancy was around two centuries. And it would have been even higher if not for problems with the colony’s life support. “We have crashes and blooms, diseases, toxicity…”

The biosphere was just too small.

Right now Adamm lived alone. He had one child by a previous marriage. He was considering marrying again, trying for more children. But there was a quota.

He listened, without commenting, to her talk of interstellar war. Madeleine had the impression that Adamm was merely being polite to somebody who might have known his ancestors.

She felt herself losing concentration, overwhelmed by cultural inertia.

After the meal, they took a walk.

He guided her to an area like an atrium. It was walled, roofed, and floored with transparent sheeting, and for once there was no sense of enclosure. Around her, stretching to a close, tightly curving horizon, was a sheet of ice; above her was Neptune’s faint globe, slowly rising as Triton spun through its long artificial day; beneath her feet she could see the Triton ocean, through which pale white forms skimmed.

She said, “I remember when Neptune hung in the sky, unmoving. Seeing it rise like that is… eerie. But I suppose it makes Triton more Earthlike.”

She glimpsed hostility on his face.

“Travelers like you have returned before,” he said, her translator filtering out any emotion from his voice. “What does it matter if Triton is Earthlike or not? Madeleine, I’ve never seen Earth. Why would I want to?”

The little clash depressed her. Of course he’s right, she thought; Earth must sound as alien to Adamm as the accretion-disc home of the Chaera would have to me. Fifteen hundred years; fifty, sixty generations… We humans just can’t maintain cultural concentration, even over such an insignificant span.

While the Gaijin sail on.

As if on cue, there was a flash in the sky, somewhere beyond the blue shoulder of Neptune.

She grabbed Adamm’s hand; he recoiled from her touch. “There. Did you see that?”

Ne. “…No.”

There was nothing to see now, no afterglow, no repeat show. She felt like a kid who had glimpsed a meteor in the desert sky, a flash nobody else had seen. “It’s not just a light in the sky,” she said defensively. “It might have been the destruction of an ice moon, or a comet nucleus—”

“This is your war?” Adamm asked reluctantly.

“Adamm, the war isn’t mine. But it is real…”

A sleek white shape broke the water beneath her feet. She stepped back, startled. She saw a smooth, streamlined head, closed eyes, a small mouth — something like a dolphin, she thought. The creature opened its mouth and uttered a cry that was high-pitched and complex, like a door creaking.

Then it flipped backward and disappeared from view, leaving Madeleine stunned, disturbed.

“War,” Adamm said sourly. Then he sighed. “I suppose you mean well. But it seems so… remote.”

“Believe me, it isn’t. Adamm, I’m going to need your help. The headman won’t see me. You have to help me convince people.”

He laughed, not unkindly. He pointed down to the black water. “Start with them.”

“Who?”

“The Flips. Try convincing them. They’re people too.”

She peered into the water, stunned.

He walked away. She had no choice but to follow.

The headman’s office loaned her a hard-shelled suit, full of smart stuff and heating elements. She descended into the water, from a bay on the outskirts of the bubble city, through a hole neatly cut in the ice.

She fell slowly, in deepening darkness. She moved around experimentally. She couldn’t feel the cold, and the water pressure here on this low-gravity moon was pretty low, but the water resisted her movements. When the hole in the ice was just a pinpoint of blue light above her, she turned on her helmet lamps. The beams penetrated only a few meters into the murk. She ran a quick visual check of her systems and glanced upward to see her tether coiling reassuringly up through the water, her physical link to the world of air and light above.

Deep-sea diving on Triton. She’d never liked swimming, even on a real planet.

She was alone. The colonists didn’t take to the water much. Their deep ocean was just a resource, a mine, not a place to explore, much less play.

Something wriggled past her faceplate.

She recoiled. Her chin jammed against her air inlet, and there was a sudden decrease in pressure; her ears popped alarmingly.

She calmed herself down. It had only been a fish. She didn’t recognize the species — a native Earth type, or gen-enged for this peculiar environment?

She fell faster.

The murky dust grew thicker. It was probably organic debris, she had been warned: decomposed body parts, drifting down to the deep ocean floor. More critters and plants drifted up past her. There were strands of seaweed, what looked like tiny shrimp, more fish of a variety of shapes and sizes, even what appeared to be a sea horse.

There was a whole biosphere down here, gen-enged from Earth life. There was little photosynthesis: not enough sunlight for that. Most of the energy for life here came from the heat of Triton’s interior. So the food chain was anchored in communities of exotic bugs clustered around smoking, mineral-laden vents, cracks in the ocean floor hundreds of kilometers from the light.

…She felt it before she could see it, as there was a sudden and unexpected nuzzling at her legs, soft, warm, curious. She twisted around in the water, tether looping.

It was like a dolphin, yes: a small dolphin, sleek body a couple of meters long, streamlined fur pure white, powerful flukesand stubby fins. But he — there was a fully operational penis down there, beneath the sleek belly — had a face that had littlein common with a dolphin’s: a blunt rounded shape; a wide, stretched mouth; a nose squashed flat and the nostrils extended into two slits. Bubbles streamed from a blowhole at the top of his head. And the eyes were closed; she could make out no brows, no lids.

No eyes, she realized. But what use were eyes, in this deep darkness?

This was a human, of course: or rather, a posthuman, gen-enged for this environment, the true, deep heart of Triton, far beneath the cold, attenuated huddles of the surface.

He swum around her smoothly, brushing her legs, feet, arms, chest. She heard a pulsing click, perhaps some form of echo sounding…

He rolled on his back.

Enough analysis, Madeleine.

Without thinking, she reached out with her gloved hand and scratched his corrugated, gunmetal-gray belly. She could feel nothing of the texture of his fur. But the clicks and pops he made deepened, seeming to denote satisfaction.

“Can you hear me? Can you understand?” Are you a Roach too, she thought, some remote, metamorphosed child of Ben and Lena?

For reply he wriggled away and floated there, just out of her reach.

She had to let herself drift a little deeper to touch him again. He let her stroke him a couple more minutes, then wriggled away again. And she had to descend farther, reach out again.

And again, and again.

He’s testing me, she realized slowly. Playing some game with me. Psychology. Still human enough for that.

And, she saw by the swelling of his impressive penis, it was giving him a kick.

She rose up a little, folded her arms.

When he saw she wasn’t playing anymore, he rolled on his front and his fins beat at the water, as if in frustration. But then he quickly forgave her and began rolling around her legs, nuzzling and butting.

More shadows in the water, she saw now: two, three, four Flips. They clustered around her curiously. She wondered if her first companion had called to them, in some manner she couldn’t detect. She tried not to flinch as their powerful bodies brushed the equipment that kept her alive; they showed no malevolence, only a kind of affectionate curiosity, and her gear was surely designed to survive encounters like this.

Now one of them — her first friend maybe, impossible to say — began to emit a new kind of sound. It was a kind of whistle, much purer than the echo clicks or the squeaky-door groans she had heard before.

Another joined in, making a whistle that wavered a bit but soon settled on the same pitch as the first. And now she heard a pulsing, overlaid on their simple pure-tone singing. Beats, she thought, the interference of one tone with another.

The other Flips joined in, singing their own notes, producing more beats. As a piece of music it was simple, just a cluster of pure tones in straightforward harmony with each other. But the beats were more complex, an elusive pattern of pulses that shifted, hopping from one frequency to another, sometimes too rapidly for her to follow.

On a whim she activated a feed to her concrete cave room, up in the surface colony, and let the translator suite record the singing. Then she closed her eyes and let herself drift, immersed in song, oblivious even to the gentle touch of the Flips as they swam around her.

The Flips scattered, suddenly, as if in panic, disappearing into the gloom, leaving her alone. She felt shocked, oddly bereft; without the song, the world seemed empty.

But now she heard a new noise: a deep regular thrumming. Something was approaching through the water ahead of her, something massive, a texture that spanned the ocean.

It was a net.

She paced back and forth in Adamm’s lounge. “What kind of people are you? Those Flips are your—”

“Children?” He smiled, languid, sipping a kind of wine whose principal ingredient was seaweed. “Cousins? Brothers, sisters? Don’t be absurd. They are a different species. They became that way by choice. When they first went into the sea, they took tools, ways of extracting metal. They discarded it all, bit by bit. They even discarded their hands, and their eyes, everything that makes us human. They chose to go back, you see, back to… mindlessness. It was ideological.”

She wondered how much, if any, of that was true. “But to hunt them down—”

He studied her curiously. “Do you imagine we eat them? You don’t think much of us, do you? The Flips are just a pest. They disrupt the ecology. They interfere with the city’s systems, the filter valves for instance…”

Perhaps, she thought.

The translator had analyzed the Flips’ singing.

With no referents, it was impossible to provide a one-to-one translation. But it was obvious the song was full of structure. The suite identified patterns in the choice of frequencies, in the way the beats were manipulated, in their spacing and timing and intonation and pitch… The suite estimated that an hour of such singing could encode a million bits, which was, for comparison, about the information content of Homer’s Odyssey.

The Flips couldn’t match the richness of the whale song of Earth. Not yet. A few more centuries, she thought, and they’d have it.

So the Song went on after all, here in this watery desert, a place even more elemental than the Outback.

Adamm was still talking. “…And you needn’t imagine they are some kind of cute pet. Some of them have turned predatory, you know. Ecological niches tend to be filled… They consume each other. Look, they’re just Flips. They don’t matter.”

“And nor did your ancestors, in white Australia.”

His face hardened. “You created this world, I suppose, with your stunts, firing moons back and forth. And now you want to destroy it, evacuate thousands of people.” He smiled. “History remembers you as a meddler. Grandiose. Ideas above your capabilities.” But even as he spoke he seemed distant, as if unable to believe he was challenging this historical figure — as if he were facing down Columbus, or Julius Caesar. He gazed out at interstellar darkness, the edge of the system. “If these aliens are as powerful as you claim, maybe we should just accept what’s going to happen. Like death. You can’t fight that.”

She growled. “No, but you can put it off.” She stood. “I’m not interested in your opinion of me, or your analysis. I’m going to see the headman, whether she likes it or not. I’ll do what I can to arrange evacuation to the inner system for everybody who wants it. Even the Flips.”

He eyed her, saying nothing; somehow she sensed this remote grandson of long-dead Ben and Lena wasn’t going anywhere, with or without her.

“Good-bye, Adamm.”

Good-bye, good-bye.

Chapter 30 Refuge

The Gaijin flower-ship soared on a fast, efficient, powered trajectory into the crowded heart of the Solar System. The Sun grew brighter, swamping the subtleties of the star-laden sky, its glaring light more and more the dominant presence in the universe.

Madeleine felt an unreasonable, illogical sense of claustrophobia. There were no walls here, and there was room for whole planets to swim through the dark; and yet this place felt oppressive, closed in, like the heart of a city. She spent much time with the lander’s windows opaqued against the yellow-white glare, drifting beneath a cool, austere virtual Neptune.

The Gaijin refused to carry Madeleine any closer to the Sun than the orbit of Earth. She was going to have to proceed on to Mercury in the cramped confines of a lander designed primarily for orbit-to-ground hops.

The few hundred refugees from Triton who had followed her back into the heart of the system would have to endure the same rigors. The transfer into the landers was ill-tempered, chaotic.

It had proved impossible to communicate to the deep-ocean aquatics the need to evacuate. So she had been forced to leave them behind, those dolphinlike posthumans, abandoning them to whatever mysterious fate awaited them, without ever even knowing if they understood what was happening to them.

Just as, perhaps, the retreating Gaijin wondered of her.

As she watched the flower-ship sail away back into the outer darkness, she felt an entirely unexpected pang of loneliness, of abandonment.

She’d always suspected that Malenfant’s habit of giving his Gaijin companion a name — of treating Cassiopeia as some analog of a human individual — was just anthropomorphism, sloppy sentimentality. But the fact was she actually liked these aloof, stately, rational Gaijin a lot more than she liked some humans — notably the racist-type surface colonists she had encountered on Triton. The Gaijin were ancient, much-traveled, had endured experiences unimaginable to most humans; to them, a single, short-lived human and her concerns must seem as evanescent, as meaningless — and yet perhaps as beautiful — as the curl of a thread of smoke, the splash of a single raindrop.

At last, ten days after the Gaijin had left her, planet Mercury sailed into view. She was approaching at an angle from the night side, so to her it was a bony crescent against the black, slowly opening up, its cratering apparent even from a great distance.

She slid into orbit and was held there while an electronic bureaucracy — run by a governing body called the Coalition — processed her requests to land, machines separated by centuries of technical and social development seeking a way to speak to each other.

Mercury, turning beneath her, was like the Moon’s elder brother, just a ball of rock with a pale, thickly cratered surface. But there was no Mercury equivalent of the Moon’s great maria; whatever process had formed those great lunar seas of frozen lava hadn’t operated here. And there were features unlike anything on the Moon: zones of crumpling, ridges and folds and cracks like the wrinkled skin of a dried tomato, as if the planet had shrunk after its formation.

The stand-out feature was one immense impact basin, maybe thirty degrees north of the equator. She sailed over a ragged ring of mountains — not a simple rim, but a structure, with the tallest mountains innermost, and lower foothills farther out. Inside the ring there was a relatively smooth floor scarred by ridges, folds, and rifts that followed roughly concentric patterns, like the glaze on an old dinner plate. It was a fantastic sight, a basin that took her lander long minutes to skim over on its first approach pass, circles of mountains big enough to neatly encompass the Great Lakes.

And, in the deep shadows right at the huge crater’s heart, she saw lights, a hint of order, buildings and tracks. It was a human settlement, here in the deepest scar on the most inhospitable planet in the Solar System. She ought to have been uplifted by the spectacle. But that tiny spark in the midst of such ferocious desolation seemed merely absurd.

There was a lot of traffic in the sky.

They were human ships. Most of them were driven by solar sails, filmy and beautiful, wispy shapes that tacked against Mercury’s impassive rocky face, the slow evolution of their forms betraying the intelligent control that guided them. The ships rode the hail of photons that came from the huge nearby Sun, a much more effective means of transportation here than at Earth’s orbit and beyond.

It was immediately obvious that there were more ships arriving than leaving. But then there was no other place for humans to go, here in the Solar System of the year A.D. 3793; Mercury was a sink of people, not a source.

On the far side of Mercury she saw a type of landscape she’d never seen before: broken up, chaotic, almost shattered. She worked out that it was at the exact antipode of that giant impact structure, the target of converging spherical shock waves that must have traveled around the world; rock-smashing energies had focused here and made the land flex and crumble and boil.

Once Madeleine had hurled moons around the outer Solar System. Now she felt awed, humbled, by the evidence of such huge forces. Overwhelmed by a sense of impotence.

She was brought to land near the main human settlement. This was in a wide crater called Chao Meng-Fu, another giant impact structure, this one almost covering the south pole.

The gravity startled her with its strength, around twice that on the Moon. Strange for such a small planet, really little larger than the Moon; Mercury was very dense, another Cannonball.

Madeleine suited up. It was straightforward; through the centuries, in contrast to comms units and coffee machines, she’d found that life-critical equipment like pressure suits and air locks remained easy to operate, its operation obvious.

She stepped out of the tractor. Once again I set foot on a new world, she thought. Do I hold the record?

Within Chao Meng-Fu there were power plants and automated strip-mining robots. The surface structures cowered in rim mountain shadows, avoiding the Sun, which glared down for 176 Earth days at a time — an unexpected number; Mercury’s “day” was fixed, by tidal effects, as two-thirds of the little planet’s 88-day year, and so its calendar was a complex clockwork.

She looked up, toward the Sun, which was low on the horizon. Filters in her helmet blocked out the disc of the Sun itself, but that disc was three times as large as Earth’s Sun, a bloated monster.

She saw no humans above ground, none at all.

Her arrival at Chao City was processed by crude virtuals. These software robots had been designed to handle the arrival of speakers of incomprehensible languages from all over the Solar System. Their humanity smoothed out, they guided her wordlessly with simple mime and gesture. Chao City was a warren of corridors and tunnels hastily cut out of the bedrock. It was crowded with a dozen diverse races, a place full of suspicion and territoriality.

She was assigned a poky room, another cave like the one she’d endured on Triton — though this time, at least, carved from familiar silicate rock rather than water ice. How strange it was that humans, on whatever world they settled from one end of the Solar System to the other, were driven to burrow into the ground like moles.

The room contained a comms interface unit, inevitably of a very different design from those on Triton, with which, wearily, she battled. At last she found a way to instruct a contemporary analog of a data miner to find Nemoto — if she was indeed here on Mercury.

The comms unit began to ping softly. After no more than thirty minutes’ probing she found out that the sound meant the unit contained a message, waiting for her. Come see me. Nowadays I live in a crater called Bernini, not so far away from Chao. You’ll enjoy the view. It named a place and time.

It was from Dorothy Chaum.

She was kept waiting another twenty-four hours. Then she was taken to see somebody called an immigration officer. More bureaucracy, she thought with a sinking heart. Just like Triton; a universal human trait.

The immigration officer actually tried to speak to her in Latin. “Quo vadis? Quo animo?” — Where are you going? With what intention? She had brought her pressure-suit helmet with its embedded translator suite, and the office had similar facilities, so she waited patiently for the equipment to work.

The officer’s name was Carl ap Przibram. He was a native of an asteroid: tall, spindly, with a great eggshell of a skull under thick hair, and long bony fingers, a cliché pianist’s. His skin was pale, his features smoothed out, as if his skin was stretched; perhaps there were folds at his eyes, traces of an Asian ancestry, but any ethnic antecedents from Earth were long mixed and blurred. He seemed profoundly uncomfortable — as well he might, Madeleine thought, as he was effectively operating in multiples of the gravity he was used to.

When they were able to communicate he took her name, requested various identification numbers she didn’t have, then asked for a summary of her background. She listed her voyages beyond the stars. Using a workstation built into his desk, he brought up, from some deep database, a record on her, maintained over centuries. Ap Przibram seemed immersed in his job, all the documentation and procedure, utterly uninterested in the reality of the exotic fossil before him. It was a reaction she’d encountered on Triton, and many times before.

He requested that she make a donation of DNA samples. It was logical — a scheme to keep mankind’s small, isolated gene pools refreshed — though she’d heard of travelers who had patronized a flourishing black market in traveler genetic samples, notably sperm; the latter-day legend, happily encouraged by some travelers, was that the good stuff from these crude near-barbarians from a thousand years ago was more vigorous, more potent than the etiolated modern vintage.

At last he handed her a piece of plastic embedded with temporary ident codes, preliminary to a full implant; she took it gravely. “You are welcome here,” he told her.

“Thank you.” She raised the issue of her companions from Triton.

“Their applications will be processed as speedily as possible.” He fell silent, his drawn face impassive.

She tapped the desk with a fingernail. She found it hard to read his posture, the language of his face. “They’ve flown across the system, across thirty astronomical units, in landers designed for hundred-kilometer orbital hops. Those things are flying toilets. We have children, old people, disabled, ill…”

“We are processing their applications. Until that is concluded there’s nothing I can do.”

His eyes were hollow. The man is exhausted, she thought. He is overwhelmed, as Mercury is; and here I am with more refugees, boatloads of resentful ice dwellers from Triton. In such circumstances, bureaucracy is a medium of civilized discourse; at least he isn’t throwing me out.

She resolved to be patient.

At the appointed time she set off to meet Dorothy. There was a monorail link from Chao City to Bernini — slow, bumpy, uncomfortable, real pioneer stuff — and then she had to take a ride in an automated tractor, a thing of giant wire-mesh wheels, over lightly occupied Mercury.

She arrived at what Dorothy had referred to as a solarsail farm.

Outside the tractor she studied the sky.

She could see few stars. Solar-sail ships swam, dimly visible, like sparks from a fire, swarming around Mercury’s equator, bringing more refugees. But there was a haze across the sky, a mistiness surrounding that too-large Sun disc, and a pale wash farther out, like a starless Milky Way. She was seeing the Sun’s tenuous atmosphere, made visible by the artificial occulting of the central star. And the flat belt of light farther out was the zodiacal light, the shining of dust particles and meteorites and asteroids in the plane of the ecliptic. Once Gaijin cities had shone there; now the asteroid belt was deserted once more.

When she cupped her hands around her faceplate she could see the tail of yet another giant comet, smeared milkily over the black dome of the sky. She couldn’t see any Cracker ships, of course — not yet — even though, it was said, they had broken through the orbit of Neptune.

As the Oort war had turned sour, Mercury had been annexed by a coalition of nations from the asteroid colonies: the near-Earths, the main belt, even a few from the Trojans in Jupiter’s orbit. It was hardly an occupation; nobody but a few hermit types had been living here anyhow. The setup here was barely democratic — a situation which, to their credit, appeared to disturb the emergency government, the Coalition. But it was functioning.

The colonists had adapted technologies that had once been used in the initial colonization of the Moon: Once more, humans were forced to bake their air out of unyielding rock. But there were plans for the longer term — such as a Paulis mine at Caloris Planitia, the giant impact crater she’d observed from orbit. But this was not the Moon. Mercury was all iron core, with a little rocky rind. A different world, different challenges.

Now she picked out a double star, a bright double pinpoint, one partner strikingly blue, the other a pale gray-white…

“Earth, of course.” Here was Dorothy standing close by her side, in a suit so coated with black Mercury dust it was all but invisible, despite the brightness of the Sun. Her helmet was heavily shielded, just a golden bubble; Madeleine couldn’t see her face.

They exchanged meaningless pleasantries, awkward; there were no obvious protocols for a relationship such as theirs.

Then Dorothy loped heavily across the dusty plain. Madeleine, reluctantly, followed.

The regolith crunched under her feet, the noise clearly audible, carried through her suit. In the virgin dust she left footprints, clear and sharp as on the Moon, and the dust she threw up clung to the fabric of her suit. But her footing was heavy, in this double-Moon gravity. No bunny-hop moonwalking here.

It was like the Moon, yes — the same undulating surface, heavily eroded, crater on crater, so the surface was like a sea of dusty waves. But if anything the erosion was more complete here. There were hills — she was close to the rim wall of crater Bernini — but they were stoop-shouldered, coated in regolith. The smaller craters were little more than shadows of themselves, palimpsests, their features worn away.

She hadn’t met Dorothy since they had been with Malenfant on the Gaijin’s home world and the three of them had set off to return to the Solar System by their different routes. Dorothy seemed different to Madeleine: more closed-in, secretive, perhaps obsessive. Somehow older.

Dorothy paused and pointed to a hole in the ground. “Here’s where I live. Subsurface shelter. It isn’t so bad. Not if you’ve already spent subjective years in spacecraft hab modules.”

At Madeleine’s feet was a flattened boulder, its exposed top worn smooth, like a lens. She bent stiffly, scuffed at the soil, and prised the rock out of the dirt. Most of the rock had been hidden in the dirt, like an iceberg. Underneath, it was sharp, a jagged boulder.

“It probably dropped here a billion years ago,” Dorothy said, “thrown halfway around the planet by some impact. And since then any bits of it that stuck out have just been eroded flat, right here where it landed, layer by layer.”

Madeleine frowned. “Micrometeorite impacts?”

“Not primarily. At noon it gets hot enough to melt lead. And in the night, which lasts nearly six months, it’s cold enough to liquefy oxygen.”

“Thermal stress, then.”

“Yes. Shaped the landscape. Bane of the engineer’s life, here on this hot little world. Come on. Let me show you what I do for a living.”

They walked briskly through a shallow crater littered with bits of glass.

That, anyhow, was how it seemed to Madeleine at first glance. She was surrounded by delicate glass leaves that rested against the regolith, spiky needles protruding. There was, too, another type of structure: short, stubby cylinders, pointing at the sky, projecting in all directions, like miniature cannon muzzles. It was like a sculpture park.

Dorothy stalked on without pausing. Some of the petal-shaped glass plates were crushed under Dorothy’s careless feet; Madeleine walked more carefully. “We can just grow sail panels right out of the rock,” Dorothy said. “These things are gen-enged descendants of vacuum flowers from the Moon. I’ve made myself something of an expert at this technology. Good to have a profession, on a world where you have to pay for the air you breathe, don’t you think?” She tilted back her head, her face obscured. “Next time you see a solar sailing ship, think of this place, how those gauzy ships are born, morphing right out of the rocks at your feet. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

They walked on. Madeleine asked about Malenfant.

Dorothy shrugged. “I got back twenty years before you did. If he came directly back to the system after we parted, as he said he would, he might have arrived here centuries earlier yet. I don’t know what’s become of him.”

Madeleine studied her. “You’re troubled. The time we had on the Cannonball—”

“Not troubled, exactly. Guilty, perhaps.” She laughed. “Guilt: the Catholic church’s first patent.”

“And that’s why you work so hard here.”

“Analysis now, Madeleine?” Dorothy asked dryly. “I also work to live, as must we all… But still, yes, I failed Malenfant, there on the Cannonball. I used to be a priest. If ever there was a soul in torment, in his own silent, lonely way, it was Reid Malenfant. And I couldn’t find a way to help him.”

Madeleine scowled, irritated. “What happened on the Cannonball was about Malenfant, Dorothy, not about you and your guilt. Malenfant was a victim. A tool of the Gaijin, dragged across the Galaxy, part of plans we still know nothing about. Why should he put up with that?”

“Because he knew, or suspected, that it was the right thing to do, if the Gaijin had any hope—” She waved a gloved hand at the damaged sky. “ — of changing this. The rapacious colonization waves, the wars, the trashing of worlds, the extinctions. If there was even a chance of making a difference, it might have been right for Malenfant to sacrifice himself.”

“But he’s just a man, a human. Why should he give himself up? Would you?”

Dorothy sighed. “I’m not the right person to ask anymore. Would you?”

“I don’t know.” Madeleine was chilled. “Poor Malenfant.”

“Wherever he is, whatever becomes of him, I hope he isn’t alone. Even Christ had the comfort of His family, at the foot of the cross. You brought refugees here, didn’t you?”

Madeleine grunted. “I’m told that everybody here is a refugee. But here we are as safe as anywhere.”

Dorothy barked laughter. “You don’t get it yet, do you? Obviously you haven’t spoken to Nemoto… She’s still alive. Did you know that? Centuries old… Of all the places to come — this, Mercury, as the last refuge of mankind? Wrong. ”

“Mercury is deep in the inner system. So close to the Sun the Gaijin don’t want to come here.”

“But the Gaijin are not the enemy,” Dorothy hissed. “You have to think things through, Madeleine. We think we know how the Crackers work. They manipulate the target star, causing it to nova…” A nova: a stellar explosion, releasing as much energy in a few days as a star would have expended in ten thousand years. “The Crackers feed on the light pulse, you see,” Dorothy said. “They ride their solar-sail craft out to more stars, scattering like seeds from a burst fungus, sailing past planets scorched and ruined. We used to think novae were natural, a question of a glitch in a star’s fusion processes, perhaps caused by an infall of material from a binary companion. Now we wonder if any nova we have observed historically has been natural. Perhaps all of them, all over the sky, have been the responsibility of the Crackers — or foul species like them.”

And Madeleine started to see it. “How do you make a star nova?”

“Simple. In principle. You set a chain of powerful particle accelerators in orbit around your target star. They create currents of charged particles, which set up a powerful magnetic field, caging the star — which can then be manipulated.”

“…Ah. But you need a resource base to manufacture those thousands, millions of machines. And a place to make your new generation of solar sailing boats.”

“Yes. Madeleine, here in the Solar System, what would be the ideal location for such a mine?”

A rocky world orbiting conveniently close to the central star itself. A big fat core of iron and nickel just begging to be dug out and broken up and exploited, without even an awkward rocky shell to cut through…

“Mercury,” Madeleine whispered. “What do we do? Do we have to evacuate?”

“Where to?” Dorothy said, comparatively gently. “Meacher, remember where you are. We’ve already lost the Solar System. This is the last bolthole. All we can do is dig deep, deep down, as deep as possible.”

Something about her emphasis on those words made Madeleine look hard at Dorothy, but her face remained obscured.

“What are you doing here, Dorothy? You’re planning something, aren’t you?” Her mind raced. “Some way of striking back at the Crackers — is that what this is about? Are you working with Nemoto?”

But Dorothy evaded the question. “What can we do? The Crackers have already driven off the Gaijin, a species much older and wiser and more powerful than us. We’re just vermin infesting a piece of prime real estate.”

“If you believe we’re vermin, you really have lost your faith,” Madeleine said coldly.

Dorothy laughed. “Compared to the Gaijin, even the Crackers, what other word would you use?” She peered up at the sky, her face obscured by scuffed glass. “Remember, Madeleine. Tell them to dig deep. That’s vital. As deep as they can…”

She went back to Carl ap Przibram to discuss the issue of the Aborigines. Interstellar war or not, they still had no other place to go.

“Please be straightforward with me. I appreciate you’re trying to help. I don’t want to offend you, or imply—”

“ — that I’m some kind of immoral bastard,” he said tightly.

The archaic term surprised her. She wondered what thirty-eighth-century oath lay on the other side of the chattering translators.

“This isn’t an easy job,” he said. “People always find it hard to accept what I have to tell them.”

“I sympathize. But I need you to help me. I’m a long way from home — from my time. It’s hard for me to understand what’s happening here, to progress the issue.” She pointed to the ceiling. “There are two hundred people up there. They’ve come all the way in from Triton, the edge of the Solar System. They have absolutely no place to go. They are completely dependent, refugees.”

“We are all refugees.”

She grunted. “That’s the standard mantra here, isn’t it?”

He frowned at her. “But it’s true. And I don’t know if you understand how significant that is. I haven’t met a traveler before, Madeleine Meacher. But I’ve read about your kind.”

“My kind?”

“You were born on Earth, weren’t you? At a time when there were no colonies beyond the home planet.”

“Not quite true—”

“You are accustomed to think of us, the space dwellers, as exotic beings, somehow beyond the humanity you grew up with. But it isn’t like that. My home society, on Vesta, was fifteen centuries old. My ancestors spent all that time making the asteroid habitable. Centuries living in tunnels and lava tubes and caves, cowering from radiation, knowing that a single mistake could kill everything they cared about… We are a deeply conservative people, Madeleine Meacher. We are not used to travel. We are not world builders. We, too, are a long way from home.”

“You got here first,” Madeleine said. “And now you’re driving everybody else off.”

He shook his head. “It isn’t like that. If not for us, this — a habitable corner of Mercury — wouldn’t be here at all.”

She stood up. “I know you’ll do your job, Carl ap Przibram.”

He nodded. “I appreciate your courtesy. But you understand that doesn’t guarantee I will be able to let your party land here. If we cannot feed them…” He steepled his long fingers. “In the long run,” he said, “it may make no difference anyhow. Do you see that?”

If the Crackers win, if they come here. That’s what he means.

He studied her face, as if pleading for help, for understanding.

Everybody does his best, she thought bleakly. How little it all means.

Chapter 31 Endgame

In the final months, events unfolded with shocking rapidity. The great spherical fleet of Cracker vessels sailed inward — through the huge empty orbits of the outer planets, past abandoned asteroids, at last into the hot deep heart of the system.

One by one, all over the system, beacons were extinguished: on Triton, the asteroids, Mars, human stories concluded without witness, in the cold and dark.

The data miners found Nemoto — or, Madeleine thought, perhaps she consented to be found.

It turned out Nemoto had shunned the underground colonies. She was working on the surface, in an abandoned science base in a big, smooth-floored crater called Bach, some thousand kilometers north of Chao City.

Madeleine used the monorail to get to Bach. The rail was still functioning, for now; the encroaching Cracker ships had yet to interfere materially with Mercury in any way. Nevertheless there were no humans operating on the surface of Mercury, nobody amid the blindly toiling robots, diggers, and scrapers. And everywhere, tended by the robots or not, Madeleine saw the gleam of solar-sail flowers.

In the shade of an eroded-smooth crater wall, Nemoto was toiling at a plain of tilled regolith. Here, one of the glass-leafed arrays had spread out over the heat-shattered soil. Nemoto was hunched over, monklike, a slow patient figure redolent of age, tending her plants of glass and light.

The Sun was higher in the sky at this more northerly latitude, a ferocious ball, and Madeleine’s suit, gleaming silver, warned her frequently of excessive temperatures.

“Nemoto—”

Nemoto straightened up stiffly. She silenced Madeleine with a gesture, beckoned for her to come deeper into the shade, and pointed upward.

Madeleine lifted her visor. Gradually, as her eyes adapted, the stars came out. The sky’s geography was swamped, in one corner, by the extensive glare of the Sun’s corona.

But the stars were just a backdrop to a crowd of ships.

They were all around Mercury now, spread out through three-dimensional space like a great receding cloud of dragonflies frozen in flight. Loose clusters of them already orbited the planet, looping east and west, north and south, cupping the light. And farther out there was a ragged swarm still on the way, reaching back to the hidden Sun, around which these misty invaders had sailed.

Their filmy, silvery wings were caught folded or twisted, in the act of shifting better to catch the Sun’s light. The spread of those gauzy wings was huge, some of them thousands of kilometers across. These were no trivial inner-system skimmers, as humans had built, made to sail in the dense light winds close to the Sun; these were giant interstellar schooners, capable of traveling across light-years, through spaces where the brightest, largest star was reduced to a point.

Not dragonflies, she thought. Locusts. For not one of those ships was human, Madeleine knew, or even Gaijin. Nothing but Crackers.

“It’s remarkable to watch them,” Nemoto breathed. “I mean, over hours or days. Simply to stand here and watch. You can see them deploying their sails, you know. The sunlight pushes outward from the Sun, of course. But they sail in toward the Sun by tacking into the light: they lose a little orbital velocity, and then simply fall inward. But sailing ships that size are slow to maneuver. They must have been plotting their courses, here to Mercury, all the way in from the Oort cloud.”

“I wonder what the sails are made of,” Madeleine said.

Nemoto grunted. “Nothing we have ever been capable of. Maybe the Gaijin would know. Only diamond fiber would be strong enough for the rigging. And as for the sails, the best we can do is aluminized spider silk. Much too thick and heavy for ships of that size. Perhaps they grow the sails by some kind of vacuum deposition, molecule by molecule. Or perhaps they are masters of nanotech.”

“They really are coming, aren’t they, Nemoto?”

Nemoto turned, face hidden. “Of course they are. We are both too old for illusion, Meacher. They are wasps around a honey pot, which is Mercury’s fat iron core.”

Together, they walked around the spreading array, glass flowers that sparkled with the light of stars and ET ships.

Madeleine tried to talk to Nemoto, to draw her out. After all, their acquaintance — never friendship — went back across sixteen hundred years, to that steamy office in Kourou, a tank of spinning Chaera on the pre-Paulis Moon. But Nemoto wouldn’t talk of her life, her past: she would talk of nothing but the great issues of the day, Mercury and the Crackers and the great ET colonization pulse all around them, the huge and impersonal.

Madeleine wondered if that was normal.

But there was nothing normal about a woman who had lived through seventeen centuries, for God’s sake. Nemoto was probably the oldest human being who had ever lived; to survive, Nemoto must have put herself through endless reengineering, of both body and mind. And, unlike the lonely star travelers, she had lived through all those years on worlds full of people: Earth, the Moon, Mercury. Her biography must run like an unbroken thread through the tangled tapestry of a millennium and a half of human history.

But Madeleine truthfully knew little of this ancient, enigmatic woman. Had she ever married, ever fallen in love? Had she ever had children? And if so, were they alive — or had she outlived generation after generation of descendants? Perhaps nobody knew, nobody but Nemoto herself. And Nemoto would talk of none of this, refused to be drawn as she tended her plants of glass.

But in her slow-moving, aged way, she seemed focused, Madeleine thought. Determined, vigorous. Almost happy. As if she had a mission.

Madeleine decided to challenge her.

She walked among the glassy leaves. She bent, awkwardly, and picked up a glimmering leaf; it broke away easily. It was very fine, fragile. When she crushed it carelessly, it crumbled.

Nemoto made a small move toward her, a silent admonition.

Madeleine dropped the leaf carefully. “I’ve been reading up,” she said.

“You have?”

“On you. On your, umm, career.” She waved a hand at the leaves. “I think I know what you’re doing here.”

“Tell me.”

“Moon flowers. You brought them here, to Mercury. This isn’t just about growing solar sails. There are Moon flowers all over this damn planet. You’ve been seeding them, haven’t you?”

Nemoto hunkered down and studied the plant before her. “They grow well here. The sunlight, you see. I gen-enged them — if you can call it that; the genetic material of these flowers is stored in a crystalline substrate that is quite different from our biochemistry. Well. I removed some unnecessary features.”

“Unnecessary?”

“The rudimentary nervous system. The traces of consciousness.”

“Nemoto — why? Will dying Mercury become a garden?”

“What do you think, Meacher?”

“That you’re planning to fight back. Against the Crackers.You are remarkable, Nemoto. Even now, even here, you continue the struggle… And these flowers have something to do with it.”

Nemoto was as immobile as her flowers, the delicate glass petals reflected in her visor. “I wonder how they started,” she said. “The Crackers. How they began this immense, destructive odyssey. Have you ever thought about that? Surely no species intends to become a breed of rapacious interstellar locusts. Perhaps they were colonists on some giant starship, a low-tech, multigeneration ark. But when they got to their destination they’d gotten too used to spaceflight. So they built more ships, and just kept going… Perhaps the gimmick — blowing up the target Sun for an extra push — came later. And once they’d worked out how to do it, reaped the benefits, they couldn’t resist using it. Over and over.”

“Not a strategy designed to make them popular.”

“But all that matters, in this Darwinian Galaxy of ours,is short-term effectiveness. No matter how many Suns you destroy, how many worlds you trash, there simply isn’t the timeto have qualms about such things. And so it goes, as the Galaxy turns, oblivious to the tiny beings warring and dying on its surface…”

She walked on, tending her garden, and Madeleine followed.

“You must help us,” Carl ap Przibram said.

Madeleine sat uncomfortably, wondering how to respond. She felt claustrophobic in this bureaucrat’s office, crushed by the layers of Mercury rock over her head, the looming nearness of the Sun: as if she could somehow sense its huge weight, its warp of space.

He leaned forward. “For fifteen centuries my people lived like this.” He held up his hands, indicating the close rocky walls. “In environments that were enclosed. Fragile. Shared.” His face clouded with anger, hostility. “We didn’t have the luxury for… aggression. Warfare.”

Now she understood. “As we did, on ‘primitive Earth.’ Is that what you think? But my world was small too. We could have unleashed a war that might have made the planet uninhabitable.”

“That’s true.” He jabbed a Chopin finger at her. “But you didn’t think that way, did you? You, Madeleine Meacher, used to ship weapons, from one war zone to another. That was your job, how you made a living.

“You come from a unique time. We remember it even now;we are taught about it. Uniquely wasteful. You were still fat onenergy, from Earth’s ancient reserves. You managed to get a toehold on other worlds, the Moon. But you squandered your legacy — turned it into poisons, in fact, that trashed your planet’s climate.”

She stood up. “I’ve heard this before.” It was true; the bitterness at the well-recorded profligacy of her own “fat age” had scarcely faded in the centuries since, and the travelers, time-stranded refugees from that era, made easy targets for bile and prejudice. But it scarcely mattered now. “Carl ap Przibram, tell me what you want of me.”

“I’ve been authorized to deal with you. To offer you what we can…”

It turned out to be simple, unexpected. Impossible. The Coalition wanted to put her in charge of Mercury’s defenses: assembling weapons and a fighting force of some kind, training them up, devising tactics. Waging war on the Crackers.

She laughed; ap Przibram looked offended. She said, “You think I’m some kind of warrior barbarian, come from the past to save you with my primitive instincts.”

He glared. “You’re more of a warrior — and a barbarian — than I will ever be.”

“This is absurd. I know nothing of your resources, your technology, your culture. How could I lead you?” She eyed him, suspicious. “Or is there another game being played here? Are you looking for a fall guy? Is that it?”

He puzzled over the translation of that. Then his frown deepened. “You are facetious, or foolish. If we fail to defend ourselves, there will be no ‘fall guys.’ In the worst case there will be nobody left at all, blameworthy or otherwise. We are asking you because…”

Because they are desperate, she thought, these gentle, spindly, asteroid-born people. Desperate, and terrified, in the face of this Darwinian onslaught from the stars.

“I’ll help any way I can,” she said. “But I can’t be your general. I’m sorry,” she added.

He closed his eyes and steepled his fingers. “Your friends, the refugees from Triton, are still in orbit.”

“I know that,” she snapped.

He said nothing.

“Oh,” she said, understanding. “You’re trying to bargain with me.” She leaned on the desk. “I’m calling your bluff. You haven’t let them starve up there so far. You won’t let them die. You’ll bring them down when you can; you aren’t serious in your threats.”

His thin face twisted with embarrassment. “This wasn’t my idea, Madeleine Meacher.”

“I know that,” she said more gently.

“In the end,” he said, “none of this may matter. The Crackers have little interest in our history and our disputes and our intrigues with each other.”

“It’s true. We’re vermin to them.” Anger flared in her at that thought, the word Dorothy had used.

But it’s true, she thought.

This, here on Mercury, may be the largest concentration of humans left anywhere. And if the Crackers succeed in their project, it will be the end of mankind. None of our art or history, our lives and hopes and loves, will matter. We’ll be just another forgotten, defeated race, just another layer of organic debris in the long, grisly history of a mined-out Solar System.

I can’t let that happen, she thought. I must see Nemoto again.

On the surface of Mercury, Nemoto sighed. “You know, the Crackers’ strategy — making Suns nova — isn’t really all that smart. When you’re more than a few diameters away from your disrupted star it starts dwindling into a point source, and the light wind’s intensity falls off rapidly. But if you have a giant star — say a red giant — you are sailing with a wall of light behind you, and you get a runaway effect; it takes much longer for the wind to dwindle. You see?”

“So—”

“So the best strategy for the Crackers would be to tamper with the Sun’s evolution. To make it old before its time, to balloon it to a red giant that would reach out to Earth’s orbit, and ride out that fat crimson wind. But the Crackers aren’t smart enough for that. None of the ETs out there are really smart, you know.”

“Maybe the Crackers are working on an upgrade,” Madeleine suggested dryly.

“Oh, no doubt,” Nemoto said, matter-of-fact. “The question is, will they have time to figure out how to do it before their race is run?”

“Why haven’t you told the refugees what you are up to, Nemoto?”

“Meacher, the people on this ball of iron are conservative — and split. There are many factions here. Some believe the Crackers may be placated. That these ETs will just leave of their own accord.”

“That’s ridiculous. The Crackers can’t leave. They must dismantle the Sun to continue their expansion.”

“Nevertheless, such views are held. And such factions would, if they knew of my project, seek to shut me down.”

“So what do we do?”

“The settlers here must go as deep as they can, deep into the interior.”

Just as Dorothy Chaum had said. “When?”

“When the Cracker ships are here. When all the wasps have swarmed to the honey pot.”

“I’ll try. But what of you, Nemoto?”

Nemoto just laughed.

Madeleine leaned forward. “Tell me what happened to Malenfant.”

Nemoto would not meet her eyes.

She told Madeleine something of what sounded like a long and complicated story, embedded in Earth’s tortured latter history, of a Saddle Point gateway in the heart of a mountain in Africa. Her account was cool, logical, without feeling.

“So he went back,” Madeleine said. “Back through the Saddle Points, back to the Gaijin, after all.”

“You don’t understand,” Nemoto said without emotion. “He had no choice. I sent him back. I manipulated the situation to achieve that…”

Madeleine covered Nemoto’s cold hand.

“…Just as I have manipulated half of mankind, it seems. I exiled Malenfant, against his will.” Nemoto continued sharply. “I believe I have sent him to his death, Meacher. But if it is a crime, it will be justified — if the Gaijin can make use of that death.”

“I guess you have to believe that,” Madeleine murmured.

“Yes. Yes, I have to.”

Her manner was odd — even for Nemoto — too cool, logical; too bright, Madeleine thought.

Madeleine knew that no human could survive more than a thousand years without emptying a clutter of memory from her overloaded head. Nemoto must have found a way to edit her memories, to reorder, even delete them — a process, of course, that meant the editing of her personality too.

Perhaps she has attempted to cleanse her memories of Malenfant, her guilt over her betrayal of him. That is how she has been able to achieve such distance from it.

But if so, she was only partially successful. For this action against the Crackers, whatever it is, will kill her, Madeleine realized.

And Nemoto is embracing the prospect.

Madeleine worked hard on Carl ap Przibram, trying to get him to take Nemoto’s advice seriously. It wasn’t easy, given her lack of any detailed understanding of what Nemoto might be trying to attempt. But at last he yielded and got her a slot before the Coalition’s top council.

It was an uneasy session. It took place in a steamy cave crammed with a hundred delegates from different factions, none of them natives, jammed in here against their will in the bowels of Mercury. There was a range of body types, she observed, mostly variants on the tall, stick-thin, low-gravity template; but there were a number of delegates adapted for zero gravity, even exotic atmospheres, in environment tanks, wheelchairs, and other supportive apparatus.

She faced rows of faces glaring with suspicion, fear, self-interest, even contempt. This wasn’t going to be easy. But she recognized, here in the main governing council, one of the women from the Triton transports, which had at last been allowed to land. These people were prickly, awkward, superstitious, fearful. But even in this dire strait, they welcomed refugees, and even gave them a place at the top table.

It made her obscurely proud. This is what the Gaijin should have studied, she thought. Not wrinkles in our genome. This: even in this last refuge, we refuse to give up, and we still welcome strangers.

She launched into her presentation. She stayed on her feeta good hour as speaker after speaker assailed her. She didn’t always have answers, but she weathered the storm, trying to persuade by her steady faith, her unwavering determination.

Not everybody was convinced. That was never going to be possible. But in the end, factions representing a good 60 percent of the planet’s population agreed to concur with Nemoto’s advice.

Immensely relieved, Madeleine went back to her room and slept twelve hours.

The final evacuation was swift.

The remnants of humanity had fled inward, to Mercury. And now they were converging even more tightly, flowing over the surface of Mercury in monorails or tractors or short-hop suborbit shuttles, gathering in the great basin of Caloris Planitia: the shattered ground where, under a high and unforgiving Sun, humans had burrowed in search of water.

And, meanwhile, the last of the giant interstellar fleet of Cracker sailing craft were settling into dense, complex orbits around Mercury: wasps around honey, just as Nemoto had said. Data flowed between the Cracker craft, easily visible, even tapped by the cowering humans. These ETs clearly had no fear of interference, now the Gaijin had withdrawn.

Maybe it would take the Crackers a thousand years to make ready for their great star-bursting project. Maybe it would take a thousand days, a thousand hours. Nobody knew.

Madeleine spent some time with Carl ap Przibram, the nearest thing to a friend she had here.

They had a very stiff dinner, in his apartment. The recycling loops were tight; illogical as it might be, she found it difficult to eat food that must have been through Carl’s body several times at least. On the way, she’d decided to invite him to have sex. But it was an offer made more in politeness than lust; and his refusal was entirely polite, too, leaving them both — she suspected — secretly relieved.

Madeleine spent her last day on Mercury inside the Paulis mine in Caloris. This was a tube half a kilometer wide, the walls clear, the rocks beyond glowing orange-hot. It was the big brother of Frank Paulis’s first ancient well on the Moon. This mine had never been completed, and perhaps never would be; but now it served a new purpose as a deep shelter for the remnants of humanity.

Giant temporary floors of spider silk and aluminum had been spun out over the shaft, cut through by supply ducts and cabling and a giant firefighter’s pole of open elevators. Here — safe from radiation and the Sun’s heat and the shadow’s cold — half of Mercury’s population, a million strong, was being housed in flimsy bubbles of spider silk and aluminum. The Paulis tunnel wasn’t pressurized, of course, and so big flexible walkways ran between the bubbles. The floors were misty and translucent, as were the hab bubbles; and, looking down into the glowing pit of humanity, Madeleine could see people scattered over floor after floor, moving around their habs like microbes in droplets of water, receding into a misty, light-filled infinity.

It was well known she was planning to leave today. In the upper levels many faces were turned up to her — she could see them, just pale dots. She had always been isolated, especially in this latest of her parachute drops back into human history. Perhaps she was getting too old, too detached from the times. In fact she suspected the displaced Triton colonists rather resented her — as if she, who had guided them here, had somehow been responsible for the disaster that had befallen their home.

Anyhow, it was done. She turned her back on the glimmering interior of the Paulis mine, its cache of humans, and returned to the surface.

She flew up from Mercury, up through a cloud of Cracker ships.

Great sails were all around her. Even partly furled, theywere huge, spanning tens of kilometers, like pieces of filmy landscapes torn loose and thrown into the sky. Some of themhad been made transparent rather than furled, so that the bright light of the Sun shone through skeletal structures of shining threads. And the wings had a complex morphology, each warping and twisting and curling, presumably in response to the density of the light falling on it, and the thin shadows cast by its neighbors.

The Cracker ships sailed close to each other: in great layers, one over the other, sometimes barely half a kilometer apart, a tiny separation compared to the huge expanse of the wings. Sometimes they were so close that a curl in one wing would cause a rippling response in others, great stacks of the wings turning like the pages of an immense book. But Madeleine never once saw those great wings touch; the coordination was stunning.

Madeleine rose up through all this, just bulling her way through in her squat little Gaijin lander. The wonderful wings just curled out of her way.

At ten Mercury diameters, she looked back.

Mercury was a ball of rock, maybe the size of her palmheld at arm’s length. It looked as if it were wrapped in silverypaper, shifting layers of it, as if it were some huge Christmaspresent — or perhaps as if immense silvery wasps were crawling all over it. Quite remarkably beautiful, she thought. But, shereflected bitterly, if there was one thing she had learned in her long and dubious career, it was that beauty clung as closely to objects of killing and pain and horror as to the good; and so itwas here.

She stretched, weightless. She felt deeply — if shamefully — relieved to be alone once more, in control of her own destiny, without the complication of other people around her.

Nemoto called her from the surface.

“I’m surprised they let you through like that. The Crackers. You’re in a Gaijin ship, after all.”

“But the Gaijin are gone. The Crackers clearly don’t believe the Gaijin are a threat anymore. And they don’t even seem to have noticed us humans.” The Crackers are just kicking over the anthill, she thought, without even looking to see what was there, what we were.

“Meacher, how far out are you?”

“Ten diameters.”

“That should be sufficient,” Nemoto hissed.

“Sufficient for what?… Never mind. Nemoto, how can you choose death? You’ve lived so long, seen so much.”

“I’ve seen enough.”

“And now you want to rest?”

“No. What rest is there in death? I only want to act.”

“To save the species one more time?”

“Perhaps. But the battle is never over, Meacher. The longer we live, the deeper we look, the more layers of deception and manipulation and destruction we will find… Consider Mercury, for example, which may be doomed to become a resource mine for the Sun-breaking Crackers. Why, if I was a suspicious type, a conspiracy theorist, I might think it was a little odd that there should be a giant ball of crust-free nickel-iron placed so conveniently right here where the Crackers need it. What do you think? Could some predecessors of the Crackers — even their ancestors — have arranged the giant impact that stripped off Mercury’s crust and mantle, left behind this rust ball?”

Madeleine was stunned by this deepening of the great violation of the Solar System. But, deliberately, she shook her head. “Even if that’s true, what difference does it make?”

Nemoto barked laughter. “None at all. You’re right. One thing at a time. You always were practical, Meacher. And what next for you? Will you stay with the others, huddled in the caves of Mercury?”

Madeleine frowned. “I’m not a good huddler, Nemoto. And besides, these are not my people.”

“The likes of us have no ‘people’—”

“Malenfant,” Madeleine said. “Wherever he is, whatever he faces, he is alone. I’m going to try to find him.”

“Ah,” Nemoto whispered. “Malenfant, yes. He may be the most important of us all. Good-bye, Meacher.”

“Nemoto?—”

Mercury exploded.

She had to go over it again, rerun the recordings, over and over, before she understood.

It had happened in an instant. It was as if the top couple of meters of Mercury’s surface had just lifted off and hailed into the sky.

All over Mercury — from the depths of Caloris Planitia to the crumpled lands at the antipode, from Chao City at the south pole to the abandoned settlements of the north — miniature cannon snouts had poked their way out of the regolith and fired into the sky. The bullets weren’t smart: just bits of rock and dust dug out of the deeper regolith. But they were moving fast, far faster than Mercury’s escape velocity.

The Crackers didn’t stand a chance. Mercury rocks tore through filmy wings, overwhelming self-repair facilities. The Cracker ships, like butterflies in a reverse hailstorm, were shredded. Ships collided, or plunged to Mercury’s surface, or drifted into space, powerless, beyond the reach of help.

The Moon flowers, of course, were the key — or rather their dumb, gen-enged descendants were, transplanted to Mercury by Nemoto, a wizened, interplanetary Johnny Appleseed. The Moon flowers could make a serviceable chemical-rocket propellant for their seed pores from aluminum and oxygen extracted from Moon rock — or Mercury rock. Nemoto had engineered the flowers’ descendants to make weapons.

The Crackers had nobody even to fire back at, no way to avoid the rising storm of rock and dust. Even one survivor might have been sufficient to resume the Crackers’ mission, for all anybody knew. But there were no survivors. The Crackers had taken a thousand years to reach Mercury, to fly from Procyon and battle through a shell of Gaijin ships. It had taken humans — rock-world vermin, contemptuously ignored — a thousand seconds to destroy them.

As she watched that cloud of peppery rock rise from the ground and rip through the gauzy ships — overwhelming them one by one, at last erupting into clear space — Madeleine whooped and howled.

The debris cloud continued to expand, now beginning to tail after Mercury in its slow orbit around the Sun. It caught the brilliant light, like rain in sunshine. Maybe Mercury is going to have rings, she thought, rings that will shine like roadways in the sky. Nice memorial. The major features of the surface beneath had survived, of course; no backyard rocket was going to obliterate Caloris Planitia. But every square meter of the surface had been raked over.

She contacted the Coalition.

Every human on Mercury had survived — even those who hadn’t taken Nemoto’s advice about deep shelter. Already they were emerging, blinking, under a dusty, starry sky.

Every human but Nemoto, of course.

At least we have breathing space: time to rebuild, maybe breed a little, spread out, before the next bunch of ET assholes come chomping their way through the Solar System. Good for you, Nemoto. You did the best you could. Good job.

As for me — story’s over here, Madeleine. Time to face the universe again.

And so Madeleine fled before the hail of rubble from Mercury — still expanding, a dark and looming cloud that glittered with fragments of Cracker craft. Fled in search of Gaijin, and Reid Malenfant.