Inspector Jean Genette, longtime senior investigating officer for Interplanetary Police, liked to get up in the morning and go for a walk to some corner coffee bar with a terrace or sidewalk, and there sip a big unsweetened Turkish coffee and read Passepartout as it displayed the latest news from around the system. After that Genette liked to continue walking in whatever city that morning happened to bring, eventually getting to work at the local Interplan office, invariably a small set of rooms near the government house. Interplan was unfortunately not a universally acknowledged police agency but rather something in the nature of a semiautonomous quasi-governmental treaty monitor, so their work was often compromised, and Genette could sometimes feel like a private agent or an NGO gadfly; but they had good data.
Genette liked to walk around in that data. The office was fine, colleagues stalwart, data important, but the walking itself was crucial. It was while walking that the inspector experienced the little visions and epiphanies that, when they came, constituted both the solution to the problem and the best moments in life.
This could sometimes happen at the office, while looking at new stuff, or at things in the archives, to check a hypothesis that might have occurred over coffee. Their graphics rooms were always very powerful spaces of representation, with three-dimensional and time-lapsed virtual flows of real interest and beauty. Of course it was true that standing in clouds of colored dots and lines sometimes only added to one’s confusion. But other times Genette would see things in the representations and then go back out in the world and notice things no one had noticed before, and that was very pleasing. That was the best part.
Getting some consequent action out of the insights achieved was never quite as much fun. More often than the inspector would ever confess to any single person, it had been necessary to make deals in some poorly defined space—anarchy, one might call it in a bad mood—to bring certain findings to any kind of action in the world. But so far no crushing blame had rebounded on Interplan’s head, and in a business like theirs that was all one could ask for.
As senior investigator, Genette could usually choose what cases to pursue, but of course the destruction of Terminator trumped all that kind of thing, commanding immediate attention from everywhere in the solar system. Also, since Terminator was part of the Mondragon, and Interplan was more closely associated with the Accord than with any other political entity, it was natural to get involved. Besides, there had never been a case quite like it. To have Mercury’s only city torched (but there was a Phosphor being built, its tracks in the Mercurial north; have to look at that, wouldn’t be the first time that real estate conflicts led to arson): naturally the whole solar system was transfixed. It was not clear what had happened, or how, or why, or by whom, and people loved this kind of thing, and were demanding answers. There would in fact be competing investigations into the incident. But the Lion of Mercury had been a good friend of the inspector’s, and when the lion cubs had managed to regather after the evacuation, and assert Mercurial authority over the investigation, they had asked Genette to take charge. There was no question of declining such a request, which, it seemed, could also serve as a way to further the projects one had been pursuing with Alex and Wahram. Indeed the inspector felt that the destruction of Terminator so soon after the attack on Io, and the death of Alex, might be part of a pattern. The autopsy had confirmed that Alex’s death had been the result of natural causes, but there remained a nagging ambiguity in Genette’s mind—for some natural causes could be pushed to happen.
It was while beginning the trip to Mercury, walking across the concourse of the spaceport to the gate for the ferry, enjoying the sight of people making their way to their gates with their usual unconscious skill, that the solution to the problem of the attack on Terminator all at once came to the inspector. The vivid image was like the single thing that remains caught from a dream, and it created any number of useful research lines to follow on the flight downsystem, but most of all a feeling of certainty that was very nice. It relieved what could have been quite a worry.
By the time the inspector got to Mercury, the refugees from Terminator had either taken refuge in shelters or been dunkirked off-planet. The death toll was at eighty-three, most from health events or accidents with suits and locks, the usual emergency collection of mistakes and equipment failure and panic. Evacuations were notoriously one of the most dangerous of human activities, worse even than childbirth.
Given that, and the fact that Terminator itself was still out there broiling on the brightside, the investigation was only just getting under way. It had been determined that the cameras for that stretch of track had been destroyed by the impact, along with a platform called Hammersmith, where it was feared a concert party had perished. On the other hand, Terminator’s orbital meteor defense system had provided its records for the relevant time, and neither radar, visual, nor infrared records showed any meteor prior to the hit. Satellite visuals of the impact showed no remains of an impactor. Attack from the fifth dimension!—as people were saying.
Genette, having seen the solution to this aspect of things, decided it was possible that pretending ignorance might allow time for the perpetrator to slip, and would also suppress copycat crimes. So the inspector said nothing about that, and remained in a room in the Rilke spaceport, interviewing witnesses. A big flash of light. Ah, thank you. Time to put in a heads-up to Wang, perhaps, to run some feasibility studies on Genette’s solution to the mystery.
News came that two more refugees had been plucked off the brightside, and one of them turned out to be Alex’s granddaughter, the artist Swan Er Hong. To be rescued out in the middle of the brightside seemed odd, and the inspector went to see them at the hospital in Schubert.
Swan lay in a bed hooked up to a couple of IVs; very pale; apparently recovering from radiation sickness, caused by a coronal flare that had struck just before she and her companions had gotten underground.
Genette climbed onto the chair next to her bed. Dark rings around red-rimmed brown eyes. Wahram, having accompanied her in her trek in the utilidor system, was sitting on the other side of the bed. Apparently he had not gotten as sick. He did look quite weary.
Swan registered Genette’s presence beside her. “You again,” she said. “What the fuck.” She glared at Wahram, who blanched a little to see it, even raised a hand to ward off her gaze. “What are you two up to?” she demanded.
Genette turned on Passepartout, a qube like an old wristwatch, and said, “Please don’t be upset. I am inspector general of the Interplanetary Police, as I told you when we met before. I was worried to learn of Alex’s unexpected death, and although that appears to have been a natural event, I have been continuing to look into a number of untoward events that may be connected. You were close to Alex, and you were there to witness the assault on Io, and now you were here again when Terminator was attacked. It may be a coincidence, but you can see why we continue to run into each other.”
Swan nodded unhappily.
Wahram said, “Did you ever find out anything out about the remains of the figure that fell into the lava on Io?”
“Let’s discuss that later,” Genette said with a warning look at Wahram. “For now we need to focus on the destruction of Terminator. Do you two mind telling me what you saw?”
Swan sat up and described the strike, then their return to the city, and their realization that they had missed the evacuation; then their run east to the nearest track platform, and their descent into the utilidor. Wahram merely nodded in confirmation from time to time. This took a few minutes. After that Swan’s account of their time in the utilidor was very brief, and Wahram did not elaborate or nod at anything. Twenty-four days could be a long time. Genette looked back and forth between them. Neither of them had seen much at the time of the blast, it was clear.
“So… is Terminator still burning?” Swan said.
“Strictly speaking, the burning is done. It is now incandescing.”
She turned away, face
scrunched in a knot. In their final transmissions, the cameras and AIs left behind in Terminator had recorded the city igniting in the sunlight—burning, melting, exploding, and so forth, until the recording instruments had failed. It had not been a general inferno but rather a patchwork of smaller fires, starting at different times. Some heat-resistant AIs were still transmitting data, documenting what happened as everything heated to seven hundred K. A collage of all those images gave a good impression of the incineration, though it seemed pretty clear that Swan would not want to see it.
But in fact she did. When she composed herself, she declared, “I want to see it all. Show me everything. I need to see it. I intend to make a penance somehow, a memorial. For now, tell us what you know! What happened?”
The inspector shrugged. “The city’s tracks were impacted by something. The site itself is still out on the brightside, and until sunset arrives a thorough investigation can’t be made. The impactor was invisible to your meteor defense systems, which should not be possible, as it massed many thousands of kilograms. Some people are saying it must have been a comet strike. I prefer to call it the event. It still isn’t established for sure that it wasn’t an explosion from below.”
“Like a mine planted under it?” Wahram asked.
“Well, some satellite photos do make it look more like an impact event. But then questions arise.”
The inspector’s wristqube spoke in a clear singsong: “You’ve got a visitor named Mqaret.”
“Tell him where we are,” Genette said to it. “Ask him to join us.”
Swan’s cheeks had turned hectic. “I want to see Terminator,” she announced.
“It might be possible to visit briefly in a protected vehicle, but little can be done there now. The crews on-site are mostly taking shelter in the shade of it. Sunset reaches that longitude in about seventeen more days.”
Then Mqaret came into the room, and Swan cried out his name and reached out for a hug.
“We thought you were dead!” Mqaret exclaimed. “That whole concert party disappeared, and we thought you were with them, and then the evacuation was chaos, and we thought you were killed.”
“We got down into the utilidor,” Swan said.
“Well, people checked down there, but they didn’t see anyone.”
“We decided to hike east, to get it over with faster.”
“I can see how you would do that, but you should have left a note.”
“I thought we did.”
“Really? But never mind—you’re so thin! We need to get you to the lab to have a really thorough look at you.” Mqaret circled the bed and gave Wahram a brief hug too. “Thank you for getting my Swan home. We hear you took care of her down there.”
Genette saw that Swan did not look entirely happy at this description.
Wahram said, “We all helped each other. Indeed we look forward to seeing the young sunwalkers we were down there with.”
Mqaret said, “They’re in the process of retrieving them now, and I hope they’ll be fine. A fair number of sunwalkers have been picked up.”
“Ours were very helpful,” Wahram said, although Swan snorted to hear it.
Mqaret seemed unaffected by the destruction of the city; as it came on the heels of Alex’s death, he no doubt felt that it didn’t really matter. With Terminator gone, however, the Mercurials were now reduced to staying in underground shelters scattered all over the planet, in a way not that different from how people occupied Io. Which was not the optimal position from which to rebuild. But they could do it, and in fact work had already started, using heat-resistant shelters and robots. Very soon after sunset came to the burned city, they would fix the tracks and have the city’s frame moving again; then they could rebuild in the safety of darkness, as they had the first time.
Meanwhile they were still in emergency mode, and their influence elsewhere in the system correspondingly reduced. So now Mqaret said to Swan, but with a look to Genette and Wahram, “We’ll rebuild and we’ll be all right. The people who talk about our fatal criticality have different criticalities of their own. We’re all vulnerable in space. There isn’t a single off-Earth settlement that couldn’t be destroyed, except for Mars.”
“Which is part of what makes Mars insufferable,” Genette noted.
“I will create a monument to our loss,” Swan declared, struggling as if to leave her bed. Tugging dramatically at her IV lines—“I will perform an abramovic in the ruins, to express the city’s grief. Perhaps a period of crucifixion would be appropriate.”
“Burning at the stake,” Wahram suggested.
Swan shot him a poisonous look. Mqaret objected more tactfully, pointing out that Swan was not yet recovered enough to use her body as a canvas. “It’s always so hard on you, Swan, you can’t.”
“I will! I most certainly will.”
But Swan’s qube spoke from the right side of her neck: “I must inform you that you have given me instructions to oppose any abramovician artworks when your health is not optimal. These are your own instructions to yourself.”
“Ridiculous,” Swan said. “Sometimes circumstances demand a change in plan. This is an overriding life event, a catastrophe. It demands a response in kind.”
“I must inform you that you have given me instructions to oppose doing an abramovic when your health is not optimal.”
“Shut up, Pauline. I don’t want you to speak now.”
Mqaret had moved to block Swan from leaving her bed; now he said, “Dear Swan, your Pauline is right. Meaning that you yourself are right, and speaking from a larger perspective in yourself. Don’t be hasty here. There are better ways for you to exert yourself during our time of troubles. There’s work to be done.”
“It’s work to express Terminator’s fate in art.”
“I know, and for you especially. But you are one of our biome designers, and so you’ll be very much needed in that capacity. We can seize this opportunity to renovate the park and the farm.”
Swan looked alarmed. “Surely we’ll just replace them? No one will want anything changed—I know I won’t.”
“Well, we’ll see about that. But you must be available to the city.”
Swan glowered. “I will be no matter what. Can we at least take a hopper around into the brightside and look at it?”
“I think so. I’ll ask for seats on one of the daytrippers as soon as I can. But you need to finish your recovery first.”
A few days later they all went out in a hopper, following the tracks east into daylight and the wreckage of Terminator. The land below as seen through heavy filtering was the white of paper, marked by black rings and a few wavering lines, resembling all together some alphabet written with compasses. The tracks themselves were a narrow band of glowing white wires.
Then over the horizon reared Terminator. The dome frame glowed as white as the tracks. The interior was a black mass, which as they got closer resolved to smaller masses of clinkers and gunk and ash, black blobs, black powder. Some metal surfaces glowed red. It was reminiscent of old photos of Terran cities destroyed by firestorm.
Mqaret shook his head at the sight. “You can see why we need to stay on the nightside.”
Swan stared down, seeming not to hear. No theatrics this time, Genette noted. Grim desolation in an empty face. Looked like she was somewhere else. Wahram was watching her unobtrusively.
The glowing ruin of the city was dominated by the still-standing Dawn Wall. Its east-facing exterior was as silvery and pure as ever, but its inside was now a mess of curving black terraces. Some of the rooftops made of royal-blue ceramic tiles had remained intact, and even now held their color. The Great Staircase still cut down through black strip after black strip, the imported marble of the steps nacreous in the heat. The glowing white spans of the dome frame curved up at the sky like the framework of the dome in Hiroshima.
“It was so beautiful,” Mqaret said.
“Still is,” said Swan.
Mqaret said, “We’ll import
some mature trees and grow the rest from seed. Although I have to tell you, the arrangements with insurance don’t seem to be working out very well. They’re arguing about the definition of ‘full replacement.’ Also it isn’t clear yet whether it was an act of God or an act of war. The council lawyers think the insurance is there for us either way, but who knows. It’s going to be expensive, that’s the main thing. We’ll need help. Luckily the Accord will have our back. And replacing the animals will be easy, as the terraria are well above capacity.”
He glanced at Wahram, cleared his throat. “I hear the Vulcanoids are also anxious to help. Naturally they’re worried down there.”
“They need us,” Swan said. “That’s why they took Alex up on her proposal to help them in the first place.”
“Well, this will be a test of how much they think they need us.”
Swan shook her head like a dog. Genette saw that she did not want to think about the Vulcanoids right now. She was annoyed perhaps at Mqaret’s move to the next step, even as they were staring down at the glowing ruins.
Wahram was more attentive to her mood. “ ‘Remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.’ ”
Swan scowled at him. “More fortune cookies, oh deep one?”
“Yes.” A tiny smile; he still had the capacity to be amused by her, Genette saw, even after their confinement together. Maybe he had even learned it there. It was striking how little they had said about their time in the tunnel.
Now Swan said, “I want to join Inspector Genette’s investigation, if that’s all right, Inspector? I’d like to be the Mercurial liaison to your investigation.”
“We can always use help,” Genette said diplomatically. “This incident is of grave concern to everyone, but of course for Mercury it goes right to the heart of things. I was assuming you would therefore want someone to join the investigation.”
“Good,” Swan said. “I’ll keep in touch with the design team,” she told Mqaret. There was no more talk of some kind of self-mortifying art performance; although it occurred to the inspector that the investigation itself might eventually be seen as such.
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