‘It’s technically feasible. Nemoto’s numbers prove that a deflection of Nereid by the thruster systems from the orbiting transports would –’
‘I’m not talking about feasibility. Many things are feasible. That doesn’t make them right. Once Triton is changed, it is changed forever. Who knows what future, wiser generations might have made of these resources we expend so carelessly?’
‘But the Gaijin are on their way now.’
‘We wreck this world, or they do. Is that the choice you offer?’
‘Triton is ours to wreck, not theirs!’
He considered. He said at length, ‘I will concede your plan has one positive outcome.’
‘What?’
‘We are barely surviving here. The Yolgnu. That much is obvious. Perhaps with what you intend –’
She nodded. ‘It will work, Ben.’
‘There will be a lot of opposition. People have been living here for generations. This is their home. As it is.’
‘I know. It’s going to be hard for all of us.’
‘What will you do now?’
She considered. She hadn’t thought it through that far. ‘We can send probes to Nereid,’ she said. ‘Survey the emplacements of the thrust units, perhaps even initiate the work. Ben, those Gaijin are on their way, whatever we do. If we leave this too long we might not be able to do anything anyhow.’ She squinted up at the ice roof, imagining the abandoned ships circling overhead. ‘We could even begin the deflection, start the thrusters. It will take a year of steady burning to set up the collision. But I’ll initiate nothing irrevocable until you get agreement from your people.’
He said sadly, ‘You started out your career as a transporter of weapons. And you are still transporting weapons.’
That irritated her. ‘Look, Triton is a lifeless planet. There is nothing here but humans, and what we brought.’
He eyed her. ‘Are you sure?’
After a couple of months, to Madeleine’s surprise, Lena Roach had invited her to ‘go walkabout’, as she called it, to go see something more of Triton.
Madeleine was a little suspicious. She remained the focus of the colony’s intense debate about its future; few people were so open with her that such offers didn’t come with strings.
She spoke to Ben.
He laughed. ‘Well, you’re right. Everybody’s got a point of view. Lena has her opinion. But what harm can it do to go out and see some ice?’
Madeleine thought it over for a day.
The Nereid project had begun. Ben had loaned her Kasyapa engineers to detach the engine units from the transport hulks in orbit around Triton, reconfigure them for operation on Nereid, improvise systems to extract fuel from the substance of the moon. She had a small monitoring station set up in her ice cell, which showed her, by telemetry and a visual feed, that sparse array of engines burning, twenty-four hours a day, consuming Nereid’s own material as fuel and reaction propellant, slowly, slowly pushing the battered moon out of its looping ellipse. It was good to have a project, to be able to immerse herself in engineering detail.
But she would have a year to wait, even if Kasyapa’s great debate concluded in an acceptance of her program. Ben, torn between his lost family and the endless work of the colony, had little time to spend with her. There were few people here, nowhere to escape, little to do. She still spent much of her time alone, in her ice cell, immersed in virtuals, reading up on the dismal history she had skipped over.
Getting out of here would be a good thing. She agreed to go along with Lena.
So they climbed aboard a surface tractor, a big balloon-tyre bubble.
At first they drove in silence, the tractor bouncing gently. Madeleine felt as if she was floating, all but naked, above Triton’s ice ground. The sky was a velvet dome crowded with stars, and with that subtle, misty hull of Neptune riding at the zenith above their heads.
Lena was a small, compact woman, her movements patient and precise. She had been just twenty when Ben had departed for the Saddle Point. Her age was over a hundred and twenty years old, but, thanks to rejuvenation treatments, she might have been forty. But she didn’t act forty, Madeleine thought; she acted old.
The ground was complex. The tractor’s lights showed how the ice was stained pink, as if by traces of blood, and there were streaks of darker material laid over the surface. But here and there the dirty water-ice rock was overlaid by splashes of white, brilliant in the lights; this was nitrogen snow, fresh-fallen.
The land became more uneven. The tractor climbed a shallow ridge, and Madeleine found herself tipped precariously back in her seat. From the summit of the ridge she caught a glimpse of a landscape pocked by huge craters, each some thirty kilometres wide or more. But they weren’t like impact craters; many of them were oval in shape.
The tractor plunged into the nearest crater. The ground broke up into pits and flows, like frozen mud, and the tractor bounced and floated in great leaps.
Lena said, ‘This is the oldest surface on Triton. It covers perhaps a third of the surface. From orbit, the land looks like the surface of a cantaloupe melon, and that gave it its name. But this is difficult and dangerous terrain.’ Her accent was odd, shaped by time, sounding strangulated to Madeleine. ‘These “craters” are actually collapsed bubbles in the ice. They formed when the world froze … You know that Triton was once liquid?’
‘After its capture.’
‘Yes.’
‘Neptune raised great tides in Triton. There was an ocean hundreds of kilometres deep – crusted over by a thin ice layer at its contact with the vacuum – that stayed liquid and warm, for half a billion years, as the orbit became a circle.’
Madeleine eyed her suspiciously. ‘Life. That’s what you’re getting at. Native life, here in the tidal melt of Triton.’ Just as Ben had hinted. She wasn’t surprised, or much interested. Life emerged wherever it could; everybody knew that. Life was a commonplace.
Lena said, ‘You know, when we first came here we spread out from Kasyapa, around this little world.’
‘You sang Triton.’
‘Yes.’ Lena smiled. ‘We made our roads with orbiting lasers, and we named the cantaloupe hollows and the snow fields and the craters. We were exhilarated, on this empty world. We were the Ancestors! But we grew – discouraged. Nothing moves here, save bits of ice and snow and gas. Nothing lives, save us. There aren’t even bones in the ground. Soon we found we had to ration food, energy, air. We mapped from orbit, sent out robots.’
‘Robots don’t sing.’
‘No. But there is nothing to sing here …’
Madeleine, with a sudden impulse, covered Lena’s hand with her own. ‘Perhaps one day. And perhaps there was life in the deep past.’
‘You don’t yet understand,’ Lena said, frowning. She tapped a control pad and the motor gunned.
The tractor followed complex ridge pathways, heading steadily away from Kasyapa.
They talked desultorily, about planetary formation, Lena’s long life on Triton, Madeleine’s strange experiences among the stars. They were exploring each other, Madeleine thought; and perhaps that was the purpose of this jaunt.
Lena knew, of course, about Ben’s relationship with Madeleine. At length they talked about that, tentatively.
Lena had known about it long before Ben had left for the stars. She knew such things were inevitable, even necessary, in a separation that crossed generations. She herself had taken lovers, even an informal second husband, with whom she’d raised children. The ties of galay and dhuway were, she said, too strong to be broken by mere time and space.
Madeleine found she liked Lena. She still wasn’t sure if she envied Lena the ties she shared with Ben. To be bound by such powerful bonds, for a lifetime of indefinite duration, seemed claustrophobic to her. Perhaps I’ve been isolated too long, she thought.
After some hours they reached a polar cap. It turned out to be a region of cantaloupe terrain, where every depression was filled with nitrogen sn
ow. They camped here, near the pole, on the fringe of interstellar space. Overhead, Madeleine saw cirrus clouds of nitrogen ice crystals.
The pole was a dangerous place to walk. She saw evidence of geysers: huge pits blasted clean of snow, and dark streaks across the land, tens of kilometres long, like the remnants of gigantic roads. All of this under Neptune’s smoky light, and a rich dazzle of stars.
This was an enchanting world. Madeleine found herself, reluctantly, falling in love with Triton.
Reluctantly, because, she was coming to realize, she would have to destroy this place.
Lena brought her, on foot, to a small unmanned science station, painted bright yellow so it stood out from the pinkish snow.
‘We are running a seismic survey,’ she said. ‘There are stations like this all over Triton. Every time we shake the surface, by so much as a footstep, waves travel through this world’s frozen interior, and we can deduce what lies there.’
‘… And?’
‘You understand that Triton is a ball of rock, overlaid by an ocean – a frozen ocean. But ice is not simple.’ Lena picked up a loose fragment of ice, and cupped it in her gloved hands. ‘This form is called ice I. It is the familiar form of ice, just as on Earth’s surface.’ She squeezed tighter. ‘But if I were to crush it, eventually the crystal structure would collapse to an alternative, more closely packed, arrangement of molecules.’
‘Ice II.’
‘Yes. But that is not the end. There is a whole series of stable forms, reached with increasing pressure, the crystal structure more and more distorted from the pure tetrahedral form of ice I. And so, inside Triton, there are a series of layers: ice I at the surface, where we walk, all the way to a shell of ice VIII, which overlays the rocky core …’
Madeleine nodded, not very interested.
The snows seemed to be layered. The deeper she dug with her booted toe, the richer the purple-brown colours of the sediment strata she uncovered. This hemisphere was entering its forty-year spring, and the polar cap was evaporating; thin winds of nitrogen would eventually carry all this cap material to the other pole, where it would snow out. And later, when it was autumn here, the flow was reversed. Triton’s atmosphere was not permanent: it was only the polar caps in transit, from one axis to another.
But Lena was still talking. ‘… large scale rebuilding of the planet is the same as –’
Madeleine held up her hands. ‘You left me behind. What are you telling me, Lena?’
‘That there is evidence of tampering, planetary tampering, from the deepest past, here on Triton.’
Madeleine felt chilled. ‘Even here?’
‘Just like Venus. Just like Earth. Nothing is primordial. Everything has been shaped.’
That inner layer of ice VIII was no crude seam of compressed mush. It was very pure. And it seemed to have been sculpted.
When they got back to the tractor Lena showed Madeleine diagrams, seismic maps. The core had facets – triangles, hexagons – each kilometres wide. ‘It’s as if somebody encased the core in a huge jewel,’ she said. ‘And it must have been done before the general freezing.’
‘Somebody came here,’ Madeleine said slowly, ‘and – somehow, manipulating temperature and pressure in that deep ocean – froze out this cage around the sea bed.’
‘Yes.’
‘And the life forms there –’
‘Immediately destroyed, of course, their nutrient supply blocked, their very cells broken open by the freezing. We can see them, their relics, in the deep samples we have taken.’
Madeleine felt a deep, unreasoning anger well up in her. ‘Why would anybody do such a thing?’
Lena shrugged. ‘Perhaps it was not malice. They may have had a mission – insane, but a mission. Perhaps they thought they were helping these primitive Triton bugs. Perhaps they wished to spare the bugs the pain of growth, change, evolution, death. This great crystal structure encodes very little information. You need only a few bits to characterize its composition – pure ice VIII – and its regular, repeating structure. It is static, perfect – even incorruptible. Life, on the other hand, requires a deep complexity. It is this complexity which gives us our potential, and our pain. Perhaps, you see, they felt pity.’
Madeleine frowned. ‘Lena, did Ben encourage you to show me this? Are you trying to persuade me to back off the Nereid project?’
Lena said, ‘Ben and I have different experiences. He travelled to the stars, and saw many things. I worked here. Helping to uncover this strange, ancient tragedy.’
Yes. There was no need to go to the stars, Madeleine saw now. It was here, all the time, on Venus and Triton and God-knows-where, and even Earth. The central paradoxical mystery of the universe. Everywhere, life emergent. Everywhere, life crushed. And no explanation why it had to be this way. Over and over.
She felt her anger burn brighter. She had made her own decision. This wasn’t simply what Nemoto wanted. It had become what she wanted. And that burning desire felt good.
Lena smiled, gnomic, wise.
By the time they got back to Kasyapa, the flower-ships had grown in Triton’s sky, until at last their delicate filigree structure was visible, just, with the naked eye. The same fucking Gaijin who had watched as Earth had gone to hell.
She sailed up to orbit, boarded Gurrutu, and headed for Nereid.
Madeleine first sighted Nereid ten days out. It grew rapidly, day by day, finally hour by hour, until its battered grey hide filled the viewing windows.
Rendezvous with the hurtling rock was difficult. The Gurrutu couldn’t muster the velocity change required to match Nereid’s crashing orbit. So Madeleine had to burn her engines and use tethers, harpooning this great rock whale as it hurtled past, letting her ship be dragged along with it. Gurrutu suffered considerable damage, but nothing significant enough to make Madeleine abort.
She entered a loose, slow orbit, inspecting the moon’s surface. Nereid was uninteresting: just a misshapen ball of dirty ice, pocked by craters; it was so small it had never melted, never differentiated into layers of rock and ice like Triton, never had any genuine geology. Nereid was a relic of the past, a ruin of the more orderly moon system that had been wrecked when Triton was captured.
But, despite its small size, it massed as much of five per cent of Triton’s own bulk. And where Triton’s orbit, though retrograde, was neatly circular, Nereid followed a wide, swooping ellipse, taking almost an Earth year to complete a single one of its ‘months’ around Neptune.
Nereid could be driven head-on into Triton. It would be a useful bullet.
She navigated with automatic star trackers, with radio Doppler fixes on Kasyapa, and by eye, using a sextant. Her purpose was to check the trajectory of the little moon, backing up the automated systems with this on-the-spot eyeballing, which, even now, was one of the most precise navigation systems known.
Nereid was right on the button. But this game of interplanetary pool was played on a gigantic table, and Triton was a small target. Even now, even so close, Nereid could be deflected from its impact.
At times the cold magnitude of the project – sending one world to impact another – awed her. This is too big for us. This is a project for the arrogant ones: the Gaijin, the others who strangled Venus and Triton.
But, when she was close enough, she could see the glow of engines on Nereid’s far side: engines built by humans, placed by humans. Placed by her. She clung to her anger, seeking confidence.
Even now Ben debated the ethics of the situation with his people. Most people here had been born long after the emigration: born in the caverns of Kasyapa, now with children of their own. To them, Madeleine and Ben Roach were intruders from the muddy pool at the heart of the solar system, invaders from another time who proposed to smash their world. The shortness of human lives, she thought; our curse. Every generation thinks it is immortal, that it has been born into a world that has never changed, and will never change.
She slept in her sleeping compartment, a
box little larger than she was. Inside, however, tucked into her sleeping bag with the folding door drawn to, she felt comfortable and secure. She would track Nereid as long as she could, guiding it to its destination, unless she was ordered to stand down.
She got a number of direct calls from Nemoto which she did not accept. Nemoto was irrelevant now.
At the very last minute Ben came through.
Somewhat to her surprise, the colonists had agreed to let the project go ahead. Ben would arrange for the temporary evacuation of the colonists from Kasyapa, to the hulks of the old transport ships still in orbit, now drifting without their engines.
‘Lena is pleased,’ he told her.
‘Pleased?’
‘By your reaction to the crystal shell around the core. The ice VIII. She wanted to make you angry. If the project succeeds then the crystal shell will be destroyed. And the last trace of the native life will surely be destroyed with it.’
Madeleine growled, ‘I know, Ben. I always knew. The Triton bugs lost their war a long time ago, before they even had a chance to voice an opinion. Their memory should motivate us, not stop us. The crystal builders have gone, but the Gaijin are on their way, here, now. Well, the hell with them. This is the trench we’ve dug, and we aren’t going to quit it.’
‘If,’ he said, ‘the Gaijin are the true enemy.’
‘They will do for now.’
He smiled sadly. ‘You sound like Nemoto.’
‘None of us age gracefully. Why didn’t you tell me about the native life, Ben?’
His virtual image shrugged. ‘Not everybody who’s grown up here knows about it. Life is hard enough here without people learning that there is an alien artefact of unknown antiquity buried at the heart of the world.’
She nodded. And yet he hadn’t answered her question. Despite all we’ve been through – even though we’re both refugees from another age, and we travelled to the stars together – I’m not close enough for you to share your secrets.
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