by Paul McAuley
‘She isn’t always easy to love,’ Zi’s mother said, with a wistful smile uncannily like her daughter’s.
‘No.’
‘But you came here anyway,’ Zi’s father said. ‘My daughter might not be grateful that you did, but we are.’
Zi’s family promised that they would do all they could to help, but the spy did not entirely trust them and he wasted ten days at their habitat, discreetly searching the gardens and fields under the pleated tent, and the vast fields of vacuum organisms that patched the coal-black plain of the crater’s floor, until he was certain that Zi was not hiding or being hidden there. All right, then. He would look for her everywhere else.
At a little over fifteen hundred kilometres in diameter, Iapetus was the third-largest moon in the Saturn System, but it was sparsely inhabited and had no large centres of population, only widely scattered farms, small garden habitats, and smaller oases. Although most farms and habitats were located in a belt roughly defined by the thirtieth parallels north and south of the equator, with rather more people living in the bright half, Roncevaux Terra, than in the dark half, Cassini Regio, the spy had a lot of territory to cover. Fortunately, the Pacific Community expeditionary force that now controlled the moon allowed its inhabitants free passage everywhere except Othon Crater, north of the equator in the sub-saturnian hemisphere, where they were building a large base, so the spy was able to search for Zi Lei unhindered and unchallenged.
He travelled in the skin of Ken Shintaro. The old identity he’d used while living his double life in Paris before the war; the name by which Zi Lei had known him. If she heard that Ken Shintaro was looking for her, she would surely come looking for him.
In the beginning he travelled alone, hitching rides from place to place and undertaking various spells of unskilled labour to pay for his board. But then he was given a lift by a gypsy prospector, Karyl Mezhidov, and after he heard Ken Shintaro’s story about searching for the woman he had loved and lost Karyl offered to drive him to most of the places he hadn’t yet visited. And so the spy spent more than two hundred days with Karyl, travelling on either side of Iapetus’s equatorial range.
Iapetus’s most famous physical characteristic was its two-tone coloration: one half covered with water-ice, the other with a layer of black or reddish-brown material, mostly carbon-rich dehydrogenated tholins. A dusting of this dark organic material could be found on other moons, including Dione, Hyperion and Epimetheus, as well as in the F Ring of the ring system, but on Iapetus it formed layers many metres thick. The best current theory was that it had been lofted into orbit around Saturn in the aftermath of the violent destruction of the object whose major remnant, after being considerably modified by subsequent impacts, had become the irregularly shaped honeycomb moon Hyperion. Much of it, in the form of fine, electrostatically charged dust, had been swept up by Iapetus, the next moon in from Hyperion, and had flowed into the floors of craters and had been converted into a tarry crust through chemical reactions driven by the ultraviolet component of sunlight, cosmic radiation, and charged particles from Saturn’s magnetosphere. Iapetus’s farmers cultivated more than a hundred types of vacuum organism that grew on this substrate and turned it into every kind of organic compound, from CHON food to the complex strands of artificial DNA used in AI chips.
Even if Iapetus had not been divided into dark and light halves, it would still have been notable for its great equatorial ridge, whose isolated peaks and long crests rose in places to more than twenty kilometres above the surrounding plains, and extended for more than 1300 kilometres through the centre of Iapetus’s dark hemisphere, running almost exactly along the line of the equator. This gigantic mountain range was a remnant of the moon’s early oblate shape. When Iapetus had formed by accretion from the disc of rubble around proto-Saturn, it had been spinning so rapidly that its lithosphere, still plastic because it was warmed by radioactive decay of nucleotides, principally aluminium-26, had been distorted, fattening around the equator. But aluminium-26 has a short halflife and Iapetus was too far from Saturn to be significantly stretched and kneaded by tides, so the moon had stabilised and cooled very quickly after formation, and the bulge at its equator had been preserved like the raised seam at the joint of the two halves of a walnut shell.
The massive weight of the ridge had stressed and compressed the surface to either side. Thrust and high-angle reverse faults had created scarps and ridges, and during thermal expansion of the icy lithosphere early in Iapetus’s history, ammonia-water melt from deep in the interior had risen through faults and flooded parts of the surface, forming smooth plains that had been heavily cratered during the period of heavy bombardment, when large bodies like Iapetus ploughed through leftover debris - there were a good number of large impact basins in Iapetus’s leading hemisphere, including one more than five hundred kilometres across. Then a violent collision had shattered Hyperion’s parent body and spilled dark material across the sky, which had been swept up by Iapetus’s leading hemisphere and like a fall of haematic snow had covered and softened the features on half its globe. This deep blanket hid from satellite surveys intrusions and volcanic deposits rich in minerals along the length of the great equatorial ridge: a century of exploration had not yet exhausted them, and gypsy prospectors like Karyl Mezhidov could still make a good living.
Karyl was only a couple of years older than the spy’s supposed age of twenty-four, a lanky, gentle man whose long blond hair was brushed back from his sharp face and caught up in a braid woven through with thin coloured wires. The braid hung to the small of his back when he was driving, and he coiled and pinned it up before climbing into his pressure suit. He had a partner who lived on her family’s farm, no children as yet. He and his partner planned to start a family soon, Karyl told the spy, and then he’d settle down and build a little dome and grow every kind of fruit bush inside it. But for a little while yet he had to accumulate the credit and kudos he needed to start up his own farm, exploring the badlands either side of the great equatorial ridge, searching out remnants of stony or iron meteorites, and deposits of phosphates, sulphates and nitrates left by ancient cryovolcanic eruptions. Although it was a lonely life and often frustrating, with long dry spells when he sank hole after hole in likely terrain yet uncovered nothing useful, Karyl loved the freedom and the unpredictability. Like every prospector he was a born gambler, and the prospect of finding a rich mother-lode of valuable minerals or metals, reinforced by the occasional small strike, drove him ever onward across the rugged unpeopled moonscapes.
He habitually played music as he drove. Serial compositions from the twentieth century; antiphonal church music of the sixteenth century; the a cappella religious chants, polyphonic heroic songs, and wild dance music of North Caucasia, the homeland of his ancestors. And he was usually floating on one or other of his home-brewed psychotropics, too. He had a small automated laboratory in the cabin of his rolligon, and was continually tinkering with endorphins, attempting to achieve an ideal oceanic state in which world and self melted together. On his best days, he told the spy, he diffused outward into the moonscape and became one with it, and in that state of blissful understanding potential rifts, lodes and reefs shone out with their own particularity as if illuminated from within.
The spy politely refused offers to sample Karyl’s extensive psychotropic library. As it was, the music and the inhuman scale of the moonscapes through which they travelled stirred up strange emotions that threatened his fragile sense of self; he was afraid that if he ingested a tab or slapped on a patch of one of Karyl’s drugs he’d lose control and melt and flow away and disappear completely.
They circumnavigated Iapetus twice, first travelling east, to the north of the great equatorial ridge, and then returning west, to the south of it. Across dark plains, through great rifts and ravines, beneath towering cliffs and bluffs, across heavily cratered slopes that swept up to pillowy peaks, some bitten or truncated by impact craters near or at their summits, giving them the appearance of
volcanic calderas. The terrain here was more than four billion years old, battered by the great bombardment of the Solar System’s violent infancy and by a steady rain of meteorites ever since. The rolligon might spend a day crawling across the floor of a dished crater, climb the steep scarp on the far side, and top out at a broad rim that gave a view across a saddle valley towards the great dome of a peak that stretched from horizon to horizon and rose ten kilometres against the black sky, its flanks pitted by craters of every size and its top dished by some vast impact. And everything was blanketed by dark material that formed smooth crusts, or pavements of giant crazed polygons, or dusty wallows that had to be given a wide berth because they could swallow the rolligon whole.
Mostly, Karyl and the spy kept to the riven and cratered plains that bordered the great ridge, its smooth switchbacks rising beyond the close horizon, isolated peaks floating against the black sky like tethered moons. Guided by a combination of geological expertise and drug-enhanced instincts, Karyl truffled along domes, scarps, and anticlinal folds raised by compressional tectonism, mapped down-dropped blocks flooded by ancient cryovolcanic melts, hunted across ejecta aprons outside craters or probed their centres. He used radar and sonic imaging to map the terrain to a depth of half a kilometre, or deployed small robots that skittered off on three or four pairs of jointed legs, squatting here and there to drill into the frozen tars of the regolith and take samples of the underlying ice. If it was only lightly contaminated with mineral intrusions, Karyl seeded the ground with vacuum-organism packets that budded and grew and sent down pseudohyphae to absorb and concentrate metals. Rare veins and rifts were stripped out there and then and loaded onto one of the trailers hitched in a small train behind the rolligon; fragments of meteorites were retrieved by blasting open the ground or sending down serpentine robots that gnawed at the stony or metallic bolides with diamond teeth and pushed the fragments through peristaltic tubes to the surface. Karyl stopped at vacuum-organism fields he’d planted on previous trips, too, and he and the spy suited up and stripped out by hand scales rich in minerals absorbed from the regolith, hard but satisfying work in the absolute stillness of the dark moonscape.
But they spent more time travelling than mining, camping out in the rolligon for the most part, sometimes stopping at farms or oases for a day or two, where the spy would tell his story and ask everyone if they knew anything about Zi Lei, and Karyl would sit with his hosts and drink tea and nibble at sweet and savoury pastries, olives, and slices of watermelon, and dicker over prices for the phosphates and nitrates and breccias and metals he’d collected, gossip about small scandals and marriages and births and deaths, and speculate about the plans of the Pacific Community. Even when he didn’t sell anything but digested waste from the rolligon’s toilet, the farmers or villagers would give him a surfeit of fresh fruit and vegetables in exchange for hauling goods to one or another of their neighbours, or for a promise for goods or minerals he’d bring the next time he swung by.
The Pacific Community expeditionary force ruled with a lighter hand than either the Brazilians or the Europeans. In all their travels, Karyl and the spy only once met representatives of the occupying force, four polite soldiers in dark green uniforms who were making an inventory of equipment and crops on a farm. PacCom soldiers were confiscating a third of the fresh food grown by farms and oases, so everyone had to supplement their rations with CHON food or dole yeast. Every construction robot had been requisitioned, too - the PacCom base was the size of a small city now, and growing ever larger, a grid of segmented tubes buried under berms of icerock rubble much like the first settlements made on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn a century ago - and there was a regular traffic of ships plying between the Saturn System and Earth, bringing in troops and materiel, and a big factory appeared to be fabricating tugs after the pattern of those built by Outers.
Apart from the confiscation of crops and equipment, and the closure of the moon’s net and other communication systems, the occupation had little effect on the daily lives of the Iapetans. And yet everything had changed, and nothing would ever again be the same. The long-cherished belief that the Outers had created a utopian bubble that had floated free of the incessant barbarities of human history, and where every kind of art and scientific research could be endlessly explored and a variety of cooperative political and economic systems flourished in a rich and peaceful patchwork, had proven to be a delusion. Like a biome that had evolved in isolation on some remote island, it had been overwhelmed by the intrusion of vigorous and aggressive forces from the larger world. If the Outers ever regained their freedom, it would not be as before. From now on they would have to be ever-vigilant against attack and ready to defend themselves, with everything that entailed.
Everywhere Karyl and the spy went, there was talk of resistance and revolution, rumours of fresh atrocities on other moons, fantasies of escape into the outer dark at the edge of the Solar System. But nowhere was there any sign or news of Zi Lei - except once, when the spy talked to someone who had met her during her brief stay in Xamba, Rhea. It seemed that her parents had been telling the truth about that, so perhaps they’d also been telling the truth when they had said that they had heard nothing of their daughter before or after the war.
The spy’s quest was unfulfilled, yet he was not unhappy. He was convinced that he would find Zi Lei sooner or later, and meanwhile he was becoming comfortable in the skin of Ken Shintaro. Learning to be human, forgetting for days at a time the chill and fretful caution that had set him apart while he’d been at work in Paris, the constant low-level paranoia that anyone might be following or watching him, that he was caught in some great game where he didn’t know the identities of other players, or any of the rules. Then, he’d been constantly alert, checking his every action for deviancy from the norm, observing and judging not only the people around him but his own self. Now, he was at ease with Karyl - although it would have taken a lot of hard work to dislike the good-natured gypsy prospector - and the other Outers and most importantly with his own self.
The spy had been born and trained to fight for God, Gaia and Greater Brazil on the Moon. He had never been to Earth, but he had always dreamed of Earth’s soft green landscapes and trackless oceans, all stretched out under a sheltering sky of exquisite blue. An ideal approximating paradise. Now, during the long double circumnavigation of Iapetus, he learned to appreciate and to love the intrinsic beauty of its stark and empty moonscapes. How to read in its every form the processes that had shaped it; how its violent history had been softened by the blanket of in-fallen material and billions of years of slow sublimation and microscopic meteorite impacts that chipped and rounded every feature. A great work of time, working on scales ungraspable to the human mind.
Despite its bitter and unrelenting inhospitality, the Outers had learned how to live off the land. Ancient ice as hard as granite was mined and melted for water; water was electrolytically split to supply oxygen. Generations of gypsies like Karyl had seeded parts of the dark plains of Cassini Regio with vacuum organisms that used sunlight as energy and the dark material as substrate to grow and produce every kind of fullerene and organic polymer, and stores of simple organic molecules that could be spun into basic foodstuffs by the rolligon’s foodmaker. Other varieties soaked up the weak sunlight and transformed it into electrical energy and stored it in analogues of electric-eel muscle that, when tapped, could supply trickle charges to the rolligon’s batteries.
Miracles of nanotechnology, hives or self-organised swarms of various kinds of self-replicating microscopic machines modifying themselves and their behaviour according to simple rules, the vacuum organisms grew and multiplied in sunlight one-hundredth the strength of sunlight incident on Earth’s surface and temperatures as low as -200° Centigrade, forming structures like flowers or leafless trees, or scabs or filamentous tangles like giant lichens. Starkly simple forms that harmoniously echoed the spare and brutal beauty of the moonscapes in which they flourished. Driving past the ridge of
a thrust fault overgrown with tangles of black wire, or mounting the crest of a slope towards the end of one of Iapetus’s long afternoons and seeing a vast prospect of rounded peaks spread out ahead, the light of the low sun throwing long shadows across the dark ground and picking silvery highlights from ridges and the far rims of craters, and Saturn’s pastel crescent tilted high in the black sky, caught in the luminous and laminated bow of its rings - the plane of Iapetus’s orbit, unlike those of the inner moons, was inclined to Saturn’s equatorial plane - the spy would be filled with a sense of wonder and his heart would lift and turn on a flood of happiness, and Karyl would look over at him and smile his gentle, dopey smile and say, ‘Yeah, ain’t it the shit?’
And so they drove, and so they drove. They stopped for thirty days at the farm owned by the parents of Karyl’s partner, Tamta. Karyl and Tamta, an elegantly thin and dreamy woman, drifted off to a little oasis some twenty kilometres from the main tent of the farm to renew their vows to each other, as Karyl put it. The spy volunteered for general labour in the farm tunnels, planting and pruning and harvesting, and learned how to make bread. Tamta’s parents were second-generation settlers nearing their centenaries; they had three sons and four daughters and a small tribe of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Tamta was a late addition to the family, born after her parents’ youngest child had died in an accident out in the vacuum-organism fields. She was younger than some of her nephews and nieces, in fact, but didn’t seem to find it strange.
At last, Karyl and Tamta emerged from their humid little Eden, and it was time to hit the road again. One day the spy realised that the place where he had left his dropshell was only five or six kilometres away, just beyond the curve of the horizon. When they parked up for the night, he stirred into Karyl’s white tea a hypnotic he’d manufactured with the help of a demon inserted into the foodmaker’s simple mind. Karyl fell asleep before the tea was half-drunk and the spy put him in the recovery position and said goodbye with a deep pang of sorrow - he had spent almost a year in the man’s company, and had grown to know him as well as he knew every one of his brothers.