‘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
END GAME
In the final months, events unfolded with shocking rapidity. The great spherical fleet of Cracker vessels sailed inwards, 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 kilometres 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, monk-like, 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 upwards.
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 further 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 kilometres 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 travelling 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 towards the sun by tacking into the light: they lose a little orbital velocity, and then simply fall inwards. But sailing ships that size are slow to manoeuvre. 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 fibre 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 Eetie 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 Eetie 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 travellers, 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 towards 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 which is quite different from our biochemistry. Well. I removed some unnecessary featur
es.’
‘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. She said, ‘I wonder how they started. 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, multi-generation 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 time to 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,’ said Carl ap Przibram.
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 which 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 on energy, 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 travellers, 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 defences: 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.’
More gently, she said, ‘I know that.’
‘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, none of it 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. And: 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 Eeties 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 Eeties 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 histor
y, 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 said 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 which, of course, 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 G, even exotic atmospheres, in environment tanks, wheel chairs and other supportive apparatus.
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